Fulfillment in Christ: A Summary of Christian Moral Principles

It's about a dozen years since I read Dr. Germain Grisez and Russel Shaw's class on fundamental moral theology. God wants our true happiness, the flourishing of the human community. Through the use of right reason, we can understand the moral law which will lead to this integral human fulfillment. Christ has given us His Church to guide us, and He protects His Church from error in Faith and Morals. God's Grace enables us in responding to our universal call to holiness. I've subsequently read volumes 2 & 3 of what's expected to be Grisez's four volumes on moral theology. Since 2004, I've been waiting for Volume 4 (Hint, hint, Dr. G!).

In the early 1960s, the Second Vatican Council called for a renewal of moral theology, integrating the fundamental principles of Catholic ethics with modern knowledge and applying them to contemporary issues. Perhaps the ablest thinker to answer the call was Germain Grisez (1929-), a modern Aquinas who responded with a three-volume, three-thousand-page treatise entitled « The Way of the Lord Jesus » (1983, 1993, 1997). This massive and brilliant work became the standard textbook in many Catholic seminaries in the USA, but its fine print and daunting scholarly apparatus severely restricted its potential audience. To make Grisez's thought accessible to the general public, therefore, Russell Shaw, a long-time associate of Grisez's, decided to publish « Fulfillment in Christ », which condenses the first volume of Grisez's trilogy into a much more digestible 430-page book.Grisez's ethics starts by inductively identifying a certain number of basic human goods- « the goods which fulfill persons » or « components of human full being »- such as life (bodily well-being), knowledge, skillful performance, interpersonal harmony, self-integration, etc. These goods enable him to flesh out the first principle of morality, which states that « In voluntarily acting for human goods and avoiding what is opposed to them, one ought to choose and otherwise will those and only those possibilities whose willing is compatible with a will toward integral human fulfillment ». From this highly abstract principle, Grisez derives a set of eight « modes of responsibility », which are an intermediate step toward the development of concrete, applicable moral norms.The first half of the book is devoted to the presentation of this theory of morality, brilliantly showing how the incommensurability of the basic human goods makes free-will possible and utilitarianism unworkable. It includes very cogent discussions of the Christian concept of sin (including original sin, which Grisez tries to integrate with evolution theory !), the distinction between venial and mortal sins and the concept of conscience, which is given a valid definition.The second half, of much less relevance to non-Christians, deals with such issues as prayer, faith or the moral import of Catholic rituals, transforming the modes of responsibility into eight « modes of Christian responses » of a thoroughly theological and altruistic character.Outside of Objectivism, I consider very few modern philosophers as actually worth reading, but Grisez is definitely one of them. If he failed to convert me to Catholicism (or, for that matter, Christianity), I will forever be grateful to him for enriching and fine-tuning my moral thinking, and for introducing me to the thought of one of mankind's most brilliant philosophers, Thomas Aquinas.