Single Question. Whether a Created Will is Morally Good whenever it Conforms to the Uncreated Will

1. About the forty eighth distinction I ask whether the human will - or more generally - whether a created will is morally good whenever it conforms to the uncreated will.

That it is:

The truth of a created intellect is when it is conformed to the uncreated intellect;     therefore by similarity about a created will, that it is then good when it is conformed to the uncreated will.

2. On the contrary:

The Jews wanted Christ to suffer and to die, which Christ also wanted - and yet they sinned (“Forgive them, Father,” he says, “because they know not what they do,” Luke 23.34); therefore etc   .

I. To the Question

3. I reply:

According to [Ps.-]Dionysius On the Divine Names ch.4 n.30, good is from a complete cause, and according to the Philosopher Ethics 2.2.1104b24-28 all the circumstances must come together in any moral act in order for the act to be morally good; yet the lack of a single or of any circumstance suffices for the act to be morally bad.

4. A created will, therefore, conform to the divine will in the substance of the act, whether conform in the substance as possessed of any one circumstance, or conform in all circumstances pertaining to moral goodness (and perhaps if it were conform in all circumstances, namely that it is willed for the same reason and in the same way, and so in the case of all other circumstances), - yet such a will need not be good in the way the uncreated will is good, because the same circumstances do not agree with the act as it is from diverse agents. For it does not agree with a created will to will some good with the same intensity as agrees with the uncreated will, - and the intensity of an act as regard the object in the created and uncreated agent differs greatly in these agents; and at any rate, however it may be with the conformity of the created and uncreated will in all circumstances, - conformity in goodness of act and object is not enough, because there can be lack of conformity in other circumstances that are necessarily required for the goodness of an act of will.

II. To the Principal Argument

5. To the argument for the opposite [n.1] I say that the case is not the same, because the truth of the intellect depends only on the object by itself, because if the object is disposed in the way it is understood then the intellect is true; but the goodness of the will does not depend on the object by itself, but on all the other circumstances, and most especially on the end; for which reason one must note that our whole volition is most especially ordered to the ultimate end, who is “the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end,” - to whom “be honor and glory for ages of ages” [Revelation 1.8, Romans 16.27]. Amen.