What is the meaning of the term "good"?
For St. Thomas Aquinas, this idea is absolutely central.
And the first thing to note about it is that it is an analogical term.
That is, there's not just one definition of the term "good."
We use it in different ways that are analogous to each other.
According to St. Thomas Aquinas, goodness is analogical.
That is, there's not only one definition of the good.
Rather, we use the word in different but analogous ways.
So, I can say that a chocolate bar is good, and a football game is good, and a summer
day is good.
Are they good in the same way?
Obviously not.
The goodness of a chocolate bar and the goodness of a football game, they're not simply the
same.
When I say this, I'm saying something that refers to the desirability and to the perfection
of chocolate, football, a summer day.
So, the good is what we desire, or even what causes or arouses our desire or our love.
Or, you could even say, it's what we desire in all our willing.
St. Thomas Aquinas did not define the good, because he saw it as a primary notion, so
he only describes it by its effects.
He writes, for example, "Since the good moves the appetite, we describe it in this way
as what all desire."
In other words, every act of our freedom actually arises from our original thirst or desire
for the good.
If we didn't desire a good, we would never choose or will anything.
So, this idea of the good is extremely important.
It's at the origin of our freedom.
Freedom, then, has to do with how we as intellectual, rational creatures seek the good.
We seek it with a higher kind of spontaneity and creativity than animals do, because we
understand our goal, and therefore order and choose our activity.
Now, there's a second way of describing the good that Aquinas uses.
It's equally important.
The good is what perfects something.
A living thing seeks its perfection, and so it seeks its good.
Now, of course, perfections will vary, just as things differ.
The perfection of a plant or an animal is one thing; the perfection of a person is another
matter, though, in fact, there are some obvious similarities on the biological level, for
example.
A human person has a certain physical perfection that is like the perfection of a plant or
an animal which we would call health.
But a person also has a perfection proper to a higher nature, human nature, which is
connected to our capacity to know and to love.
We are able to know the good as such, and we are able to choose it and to love it with
our will.
So, we could define the human person in a certain way as a being aspiring to perfection
not only on the physical or biological level, but also on the spiritual level, because a
human person seeks love and friendship.
He seeks justice.
He seeks truth.
He seeks in all of these things what is good.
When we frame the good in this way, as a perfection, then we're able to see how the good is an
end.
It's a final cause.
It's what we are seeking by our action.
So, the distinctive thing about human beings, then, is that we are able to know the good
with our minds, and so direct our actions to it.
Of course, this comes with a danger, which we don't see so clearly in animals, that we
also have the capacity to misunderstand the good or to seek after things that are only
apparent goods.
This, actually, is how we sin.
When we sin, our intellects become clouded and our appetites become distorted, and this
makes our search for the good much more difficult.
Once you start down the path of disorder, your judgments will start to go wrong very
easily, and you'll have a much harder time correcting yourself.
That's why it is so important for us as flourishing human beings to know the good and to seek
it with our whole heart.
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