The Difficulties of Mercy: Reading Thomas Aquinas on Misericordia

1. A Strange Omission

In the Prologues of Question 34, Question 37 and Question 39, Thomas gives different and inconsistent descriptions of the plan that he intends to follow in the treatment of the opposed vices. Noting these inconsistencies, Thomas Heath reports on a conclusion drawn by the Belgian Dominican Peter Gils after a prolonged study of his manuscripts: ‘Thomas was a man in a hurry.’ ² Would haste explain why Thomas omits a Question on the vice opposed to mercy? It might, but no such explanation is likely to convince. As the aforementioned Prologues show, Thomas’s first plan is to consider only two vices opposed to peace – discord and schism. As he proceeds, the plan changes and the number of vices opposed to peace increases from two to five, and ultimately to six. If haste were controlling the authorship of the 2a2ae, Thomas would simply have addressed discord and schism, and been done with it. The text shows his willingness to give the opposed vices as much time as they need, even if doing so requires him to revise his plan and enlarge the number of Questions. ‘Many vices are opposed to one virtue, according to its diverse acts,’ as he says at 29.4 ad 3. ³ Thomas’s tendency is to expand the number of opposed vices, not to contract them.

A different explanation for the omission of a Question on the vice opposed to mercy would propose that the most significant effects of charity are joy and peace (Questions 27-29). Thomas knows this view. At 23.3 he puts its premise in the mouth of the second objector, who claims that joy and peace are ultimate, even more than charity itself. Joy and peace, it seems, bulk so large that Thomas could not possibly have neglected to treat their opposed vices. Misericordia, by contrast, appears as something of an afterthought; its opposed vices do not demand treatment in the same way. ⁴ This proposal is problematic because it proceeds from a false assumption. To see why the assumption is false, observe that Thomas divides the twenty-two Questions on ‘charity itself’ into five parts:

The central section is (iii), the acts and effects of charity. Within this central section, the following order appears:

In the middle of the central section is misericordia. Mercy lies at the very center of Thomas’s treatment of charity. This is no exaggeration. It is a precise truth about the structure of the Questions on ipsa caritas.

The treatment of mercy is no afterthought. It is the culmination of the sequence of Questions that begins with love and moves through joy and peace. Misericordia is the only inward effect of charity that Thomas expressly describes as a virtue (30.3). It is not just any virtue, but the greatest of the virtues ‘in itself’ (30.4 co). Thomas inscribes misericordia at the heart of the Questions on charity. That Thomas would have judged mercy as less important than joy and peace, and therefore not worth bothering about in the section on the vices opposed to charity, is even less plausible than the notion that, being in a hurry, he simply forgot to include a Question on the vice contrary to mercy.

Why did Thomas fail to devote a Question, or a series of Questions, to the vice or vices that are opposed to the virtue of mercy? One might interpret the omission as a clue that Thomas disbelieves in the existence of any vice that is directly opposed to mercy. While intriguing, the suggestion runs aground on a textual reef. At 30.3 ad 2, Thomas alludes briefly to the Aristotelian opposition of mercy to nemesis, but concludes that ‘properly, envy is opposed to mercy, as will be said below,’ referring to 36.3 ad 3. There he holds that envy

is directly opposed to mercy, according to the contrariety of its principal object, since envy sorrows over our neighbor’s good, whereas mercy sorrows over our neighbor’s evil. So the envious are not merciful, as is said in the same place [Aristotle, Rhetoric 2], and the merciful are not envious (36.3 ad 3).

Envy is formally opposed to mercy, by ‘contrariety of object’. It is not, however, the chief obstacle to mercy in practice. This is partly because its scope is limited. ‘Since envy concerns the glory of another, so far as it lessens the glory that a person seeks, it follows that he envies only those whom he wants to equal or surpass in glory’ (36.1 ad 2). A person can envy the small group of his rivals, while feeling compassion for the many who are not his rivals. Envy does not kill a person’s capacity for compassion; it is not sufficiently general to do that. Moreover, to envy a particular person does not even preclude the possibility of compassion toward that same person. An athlete may envy a rival athlete, rejoicing when he loses a competition and bitterly sorrowing when he wins, and yet feel genuine compassion if his hometown is destroyed or he is deserted by his family. Despite its formal opposition to mercy, envy’s rank among the forces that pose a serious threat to compassion is quite low.

Thomas omits a Question on the vice directly and formally opposed to mercy, but not because he judges such a vice not to exist. What, then, is the omission’s meaning? It is unlikely to be accidental. Thomas is a master architect who builds wisely; he knows what he is doing. What does his decision not to build a contrary vice into the account’s structure reveal about misericordia? What does it show about the forces that oppose it?

2. Misericordia and Impediments to Compassion

As a preliminary to facing these questions directly, we must clarify the relation of mercy to compassion. A recent interpreter claims that ‘Aquinas uses the word misericordia (mercy) as a synonym of compassio (compassion)’. ⁵ Does the text bear this out? In the first Article of Question 30, Thomas begins with the etymology of misericordia. ‘For misericordia is named from the fact that someone has a wretched heart (miserum cor) over the wretchedness of another’ (30.1 co). If one has a ‘wretched heart’, caused by another’s wretchedness, one ‘suffers with’ the other; one has compassion for her, in the literal sense of compassio. In the next Article, he writes:

Since mercy is compassion (compassio) for another’s distress, as was said, it therefore happens that a person is merciful when it happens that he grieves over the wretchedness of another (30.2 co).

This text appears to justify the claim that compassio and misericordia are synonyms. Certainly Thomas is capable of using the terms synonymously – much as English speakers since the eighteenth century (at least) have tended to use ‘compassion’, ‘mercy’ and ‘pity’ as synonyms. But Thomas does not in fact simply identify compassio and misericordia, for at least two reasons. First, he shares the view of Anselm, expressed with maximum concision in Proslogion 8, that God is misericors et impassibilis. Though God displays mercy, he is ‘not merciful except on account of love, so far as he loves us as something that belongs to him’ (30.2 ad 1). God is not distressed over the distress of another; he does not apprehend another’s wretchedness as his own. ⁶ Second, even in the human case, compassio and misericordia are not precisely the same. ‘In relation to his neighbor’s defects’, Thomas says at 45.6 ad 3, ‘a person should be compassionate in affect (compatiatur in affectu) and provide help in effect (subveniat in effectu)’. There are two things here, not one. To be ‘compassionate in affect’ is not by itself to provide ‘help in effect’, just as in any particular case, helpful action may or may not proceed from a feeling of compassion. ⁷ Compassion is a necessary condition of mercy for human beings; it is not sufficient. The virtue of misericordia requires both compassion and action. At best, the synonymy of compassio and misericordia extends to misericordia taken as a passion. It cannot be said of mercy in its full sense.

Since compassio is not sufficient for misericordia, one might wonder why Thomas takes it to be necessary. The necessity is not self-evident; it should not be taken for granted. In Encheiridion §16, Epictetus holds that while one should express pity at times, one should not feel it: ‘Be careful not to moan inwardly’. In the self-portrait found near the beginning of the Maxims, La Rochefoucauld says that while he would do anything to comfort others in distress, he feels very little pity, and wishes that he felt none at all. We should be content to show pity, he says, and be careful not to harbor it ourselves. It is a passion that should be left to the common people, ‘who never do anything by reason and therefore need the help of the passions to prompt them to action’. ⁸ Whatever might be said in favor of these aspirations, they would ultimately strike Thomas as vain attempts of the human being to resemble God. God can be merciful out of pure love, with no admixture of wretched feeling or other defect. Humans cannot – at least, not reliably or consistently. If we are to be merciful, we cannot simply calculate; we must feel the other’s pain; we must apprehend her state as wretched. ⁹ While compassion is not enough for mercy, it is an indispensable prerequisite for (human) misericordia.

For Thomas, if not for the Stoics or La Rochefoucauld, impediments to compassion are obstacles to mercy itself. What are these impediments? As we have seen, Thomas places no great emphasis on envy as a force that opposes compassion. To discover the more formidable obstacles to compassion, we should abandon the search for a discrete vice opposed to mercy and attend more closely to Question 30. ‘Since sorrow or grief regards one’s own evil, a person sorrows or grieves for another’s wretchedness, to the extent that he apprehends another’s wretchedness as his own’ (30.2 co). There are two conditions under which a person apprehends another person’s wretchedness as his own. The first is connection to the other by a ‘union of affection, which arises by love’ (30.2 co). The second is perception of the ‘real union’ (unio realis) that obtains between him and another. When neither of these conditions are satisfied, a person will fail to apprehend another’s suffering as his own. Typically, the first condition is not met, since we can genuinely enter into the union of affection only with a few. These are the very small number of human beings to whom we are able to relate as other selves – our friends, in Aristotle’s sense. Their pain is our pain; we suffer with them. ‘For since the lover regards his friend as himself, he regards the friend’s evil as his own evil. And so he grieves over the evil of his friend as his own’ (30.2 co). But toward the many whom we do not naturally perceive as other selves, compassion is not the default option. On the contrary, we are likely to apprehend their pain as ‘someone else’s pain’. The other person appears as a disconnected atom; her feelings bear no relation to ours. While friendship naturally produces compassion toward friends, it is a powerful cause of indifference toward those outside the circle, as C. S. Lewis observes. ¹⁰ To the extent that it promotes such indifference, the unio affectus that binds us to close friends will hinder compassion for those with whom we have no such union.

When there is no union of affection, a person will not perceive the other’s wretchedness as his own, unless the second condition – the apprehension of unio realis – is met. When I perceive my real commonality with others who are suffering, I am able to have some version of the sentiment ‘that could be me’, and thereby apprehend her wretchedness as my own. But when is this condition satisfied? In Article 2, Thomas reflects on the difference between those apt to perceive themselves as capable of sharing the distress of others and those who are unlikely to regard themselves under this aspect.

So it is that the old and the wise, who consider themselves able to fall upon evil things, are more merciful – as are the weak and the fearful. On the other hand, those who regard themselves as happy and so powerful that they suppose themselves able to suffer nothing evil, are not so merciful (30.2 co).

The thought of vulnerability is readily available to members of four classes – the old, the wise, the weak, and the fearful. Those who are young, foolish, happy or strong, by contrast, are prone to imagine themselves as invulnerable. If I am such a person, the thought ‘this could be me’ – that I too might suffer similar evils – is practically unavailable, even if I can entertain such thoughts abstractly. If the young, the strong, and the fearless take notice of the distress of others at all, they are unlikely to apprehend it as their own. Instead, they tend to live as though they were indestructible, with scarcely a thought for the weakness of their future selves. ¹¹ Those in this condition are not likely to feel the pain of others as their own, excepting their close friends. The very qualities that cause them to thrive (in some sense) tend to insulate them from compassion. Those who have been wounded, by contrast, are more likely to feel compassion than those who regard themselves as invulnerable.

Age and wisdom dispose a person toward the apprehension of unio realis. The passion of fear, Thomas says, can have the same effect. As a person suffers unpleasant shocks and trials, his fear of future evils grows, since he no longer thinks of himself as immune to them. Accordingly, the fear that comes with experience can promote compassion. It does so by weakening our tendency to regard ourselves as the exception, and thereby enlarging our sense of real union with others. But to say that fear can have this effect is not to imply that it necessarily does. As Thomas observes, it can also have the opposite effect. Those who fear ‘greatly’, he says – those in whom healthy fear has turned into debilitating anxiety – ‘are so focused on their own passion’ that ‘they do not focus on the wretchedness of another’ (30.2 ad 2). When fear becomes anxiety, it generates an obsessive self-focus that renders a person unable to feel another’s distress as her own. This is also true, he says, of those whose suffering is so intense that it drives out fear of future evils. ‘Those who are already amidst terrible evils do not fear to suffer further, and so are not merciful.’ Both states – anxiety about future evils, no fear of future evils at all – produce a kind of self-absorption that makes genuine compassion difficult, if not impossible.

Fear is one passion that can promote self-focus, and thus oppose the apprehension of real union with another. Beyond fear, Thomas notices two other passions in Article 2 that similarly tend to promote self-absorption. These are the passions of anger (ira) and daring (audacia), which ‘raise the spirit of a man toward what is arduous’. Under the influence of either passion, a person becomes so intent on achieving a difficult goal that she effectively banishes thoughts of suffering to a future state; she deprives them of the power to distract her from her goal. In itself, this is not a bad thing. To overcome the obstacles, her energies cannot be diluted; she cannot be distracted by pity for others.

Thus far, Question 30 has identified psychological obstacles to the perception of unio realis. The obstacles that I have discussed are either states of life or passions. None of them are vices. Thomas treats the illusion of invulnerability less as a sign of bad character, and more as a symptom of youth and inexperience. While he regards debilitating anxiety and the self-focus it generates as far from desirable, he understands it not as a vice deserving censure, but as a condition that needs to be sympathetically understood and remedied. The other psychological forces that promote self-focus – anger and daring – are not vices as such. They are irascible passions, useful when the attainment of a difficult good requires putting the needs of others to one side, at least temporarily. Like the other passions, anger and daring can in some circumstances be vicious. Thomas observes that both passions arise with particular frequency in those who are ‘disposed to contumely, either because they have suffered from contumely, or because they wish to inflict contumely’ (30.2 ad 3). The term contumelia derives from con + tumere, ‘to swell’. The swelling of the ego that makes a person unable to perceive another’s suffering as his own is most clearly connected to pride, superbia.

The proud are not merciful, because they despise others and think them evil. So that they think that they deservedly suffer whatever they suffer. So Gregory says that ‘false righteousness, namely that of the proud, has no compassion, but rather disdain’ (30.2 ad 3).

Those in the grip of ‘false righteousness’ tend to blame others for their condition, as if they freely chose it. This is occasionally expressed in such sentiments as ‘If you are poor, you must be lazy’ or ‘If you are suffering, you deserve to suffer’. Of the obstacles to compassion discussed by Question 30, only falsa iustitia appears unambiguously as a vice. It stands apart from the other impediments to compassion described in Question 30, none of which Thomas judges to be vicious in themselves. They are bad for compassion, and thereby contrary to the practice of mercy, when they blind us to the reality that we are our brother’s keeper.

That Thomas chooses not to oppose a single discrete vice, or set of discrete vices, to misericordia, is a mark of his insight, and not his carelessness. He recognises the complexity of the phenomenon. Failure to feel compassion is not caused by some obvious, easily identified vice. It is generated by a range of factors that render a person unable to recognise her real union with other human beings.

3. Obstacles to Merciful Action

To feel compassion, to undergo misericordia as a passion, is a necessary condition of acting mercifully. It is not, however, sufficient for exercising the virtue bearing the same name. Someone who practices the virtue of misericordia not only feels compassion, but also acts in a way that she can reasonably expect to give real help to her neighbor. ¹² One ‘full of mercy and good fruits’ is both ‘compassionate in affect’ and ‘provides help in effect (subveniat in effectu)’ (45.6 ad 2). Satisfying this latter condition is not always easy. ‘Sentiment, unguided by reason, becomes sentimentality and sentimentality is a sign of moral failure’, writes Alasdair MacIntyre. ¹³ Perhaps the most conspicuous manifestation of sentimentality is the sort of compassion that never gets translated into meaningful action. Such a person may be genuinely distressed by another’s suffering; he wants to help. But when he realises how much effort is required to act in a way that would effectively address the situation, he gets discouraged and does nothing. This compassion, even if it does involve suffering with others to some extent, is mere sentimentality. It bears no fruit.

Discerning fruitless compassion, in one’s own person or that of others, is easy enough. But it is not the only, or even the most characteristic, way in which someone distressed by the suffering of others fails to ‘provide help in effect’. If actions are to instantiate the virtue of misericordia, they must be directed by some habit of distinguishing between what will genuinely help the person in need and what appears to help but is likely to make things worse, or has no discernible effect (apart perhaps from assuaging our own feelings of guilt). This habit is the acquired virtue of prudentia. ¹⁴

Action that springs from compassion, but is unguided by reason and lacks prudence, is not merciful. It is better understood as ‘would-be merciful action’, bound to bear bad fruit when it fits any of the following descriptions.

It would seem that we have wandered far from the thought of Thomas Aquinas. But we have done so only apparently. Mercy as a passion, Thomas holds in Question 30, arises from a defect or evil (malum). This defect or evil exists not only in the neighbor, he argues in Article 2, but in the very person who shows mercy. What is defective in a person does not suddenly become virtuous. Actions arising from our own distress are unlikely to be good, unless they are directed by the virtue of prudence and conform to the ‘order of charity’ (ordo caritatis) as described in Question 26. This order demands that a person love God first, as the principle of blessedness; love himself second, as a participator in blessedness; and love his neighbor third, as a fellow participator. Would-be merciful acts of the type described by (4) above seek to help a neighbor at the expense of love of self, thereby violating the precondition of genuine neighbor-love. ¹⁹ These attempts are bound to fail, in part because they disregard the order of charity. Thomas writes:

A person should, out of charity, love himself more than his neighbor. A sign of this is that a person should not lower himself to some evil that belongs to sin – which is opposed to his participation in blessedness – so that he may free his neighbor from sin (26.4 co).

One can (and at times must) sacrifice one’s own bodily good for the sake of aiding his neighbor, as Thomas makes clear in the Article that follows. But even here, the reason for loving’s one’s own neighbor is tied to one’s own well-being, which involves ‘association in the full participation of blessedness’. If a putative act of mercy is not done propter Deum, conforming to the ordo caritatis, it does not instantiate the virtue that Thomas treats in Question 30. This must be said, if we are to take seriously Thomas’s decision to treat misericordia as an inward effect of the theological virtue of charity. In light of this point, we must qualify MacIntyre’s claim that an ‘incautious reader might suppose that Aquinas does not recognize it as a secular virtue’ and that misericordia ‘has its place in the catalogue of the virtues, independently of its theological grounding’. ²⁰ Cut off from divinely infused charity, misericordia is no virtue; it is only a passion, and a questionable one at that. Any satisfying reading of Thomas must observe the dependence of misericordia on caritas, noting that without the latter, the former stands as the matter for virtue, awaiting full formation by caritas. Nonetheless, the substance of MacIntyre’s point can be preserved, since Thomas does not restrict caritas to the set of self-described Christian believers. The notion that a person must possess ‘grace’ or ‘infused virtue’ or ‘charity’ as concepts or categories in order to have the things themselves and act in accordance with them, is an error. It presumes that the operation of divine grace within a person is determined or otherwise limited by her conceptual apparatus. But Thomas would not make this presumption. He knows that membership in the church and residence in the civitas Dei never coincide perfectly. The spirit blows where it will.

Despite these cautions, the impression that Thomas’s notion of charity is essentially factional may die hard. Perhaps Thomas himself is partly responsible for this. On occasion he seems to imply that if a person does not love God before loving herself and her neighbor, she cannot perform a virtuous act of mercy. Such a conclusion seems distasteful; it apparently renders anyone who does not ‘put God first’ incapable of true virtue. It has the unwelcome effect of limiting virtue to the self-consciously sectarian or the ‘holier than thou’. But is this what Thomas really has in mind? Here a line of argument from Herbert McCabe is helpful. McCabe proposes that genuine love – that is, adult grown-up love – must be rigorously distinguished from affection between slaves and masters, superiors and inferiors, parents and children, or any relation in which the essential notes are inequality and hierarchy. If love is possible only between equals, then God cannot love the creature as such, and conversely. The revolutionary effect of caritas is to undo this inequality. Caritas, Thomas says, is ‘a certain friendship of man with God’ (amicitia quaedam hominis ad Deum: 23.1 co). Because of their familiarity, these words may seem merely conventional. But they ought to shock us. As a participation in the divine life, caritas raises us above mere creaturehood. It alters our fundamental relationship to God, so this relationship becomes, as McCabe puts it,

not that of creature to creator – a relationship which cannot but be one of servant to master. For the gospel, our fundamental relationship is that of lovers, of lovers in equality. We have this equality to the Father because we are given a share in the life of Christ. ²¹

To love God in caritas means to discover something of ‘adult love between equals’, between friends and not servants. ²² A person sufficiently fortunate to have an adult relation to God in this sense will be disposed to regard himself and his neighbors in the same light, treating himself and his neighbors as images of God – that is, as co-equal adults who can be genuinely loved, rather than merely recipients of kindly treatment, or inferiors to lord over.

By drawing out this implication of caritas, we more nearly capture the dependence of love of neighbor on the love of God than do conceptions that make love of neighbor depend on explicit (and typically sanctimonious) declarations of ‘loving God first’. The same applies to other instances of churchy language whose usual effect is to reinforce structures that, while useful in some respects, are not generally conducive to adult love between equals. So when Thomas says that any act of misericordia, taken as a virtue, is done ‘on account of God’ (propter Deum), he does not mean a beneficent action accompanied by a little speech to oneself: ‘here I am, giving money to poor Jarvis, but I’m doing this not for Jarvis, but on account of God’. ²³ This is condescension, not mercy. To treat another person with misercordia, when misericordia names the virtue and not merely the passion, is to love the other, in the sense in which one mature person loves another, as equals. Perhaps the only complete instance of this love is that between the Father and Son, expressed in the Holy Spirit. But if caritas enables any real participation in the life of the Spirit, it should lead to acts of mercy, the essential notes of which are not pity and condescension, but love and respect. ²⁴ If we notice someone characteristically engaging in acts of this sort, but not known to worship, we should not infer that such a person is a counter-example to Thomas’s conception. Instead, we should hazard that she has been divinely infused with the virtue of caritas, however she chooses to speak (or not speak) of the matter. ²⁵

4. Misericordia, Suffering and Wisdom

I have emphasised the difficult character of misericordia as a virtue. Its acts require both the cardinal virtue of prudentia and the theological virtue of caritas. But no adequate interpretation of Thomas can stop here. However formidable the obstacles to virtuous misericordia, his intention is not to make it all but impossible to carry out the Scriptural commands ‘Bear one another’s burdens’ (Gal. 6:2) and ‘Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep’ (Rom. 12:15). He may take the imitatio Christi to be difficult. He cannot make it impossible. To read Thomas well, we must account for both the difficulties of practicing mercy as a virtue and the sense in which it lies within our reach. ‘No virtue has so great an inclination to its own act as charity, nor does any virtue work so pleasurably’ (23.2 co). We must show how the ease that Thomas associates with the virtue of caritas extends to the effect of misercordia.

As we have seen, the origin of human misericordia is a defect, a malum. In comparison to God, human vulnerability cannot but appear as a defect. It is a symptom of our weakness; it marks our distance from the divine impassibilitas. We lie ever exposed, open to suffering; we are vulnerable. But our very vulnerability, in itself a defect, is also a guarantee of our capacity for mercy. As long as we are human, we can suffer, and suffer with another. Since compassion is so tightly bound up with our humanity, it is nearly impossible to eliminate the precondition of misericordia as a virtue. Even if we are in the grip of any number of vices, we remain capable of experiencing another’s distress as our own. There is no single vice that destroys the possibility for compassion as such. The appropriate term for a person whose capacity for compassion has been utterly destroyed is not ‘vicious’, but ‘inhuman’. Inhumanity is not the name of a vice. It indicates something that (for members of the species homo sapiens) is much worse than a vice; it names a condition in which neither human vices nor human virtues are possible. As Pascal observes, a tree is not wretched, but a human being is. ²⁶ With respect to compassion, human wretchedness is both obstacle and opportunity. Knowing our own wretchedness – not the proposition ‘human beings are wretched’, but our own personal wretchedness – is a powerful generator of compassion. As we saw in the first section, the thought ‘that could be me’ at times suffices to arouse sympathy for another; certainly it is a first step beyond youthful illusions of invulnerability and presumptions of judgment. Still more potent is reflection upon difficult personal experience. Such reflection deepens our compassion for another’s wretchedness. It does so by producing thoughts of the form ‘that was once me’ or ‘that could be me again’ or ‘in some ways, that is still me’. The experience of suffering – a category that includes both having suffered and causing others to suffer – can make us deeper and more compassionate. To refuse this deepening is one way of turning away from caritas and toward vice. It may even be the way, if Oscar Wilde was correct to hold that ‘the supreme vice is shallowness’. ²⁷

To eliminate the passion of misericordia from human beings, so long as they remain human, is either difficult or impossible. Though the psychological obstacles to misericordia described in section two should not be underestimated, they are not decisive. What of the problems considered in the previous section? The experience of suffering can help. Those who have suffered and reflected on their suffering will be more apt to recognise the complexities of particular situations, and so avoid the quackdoctoring described by Nietzsche. Nonetheless, we should not be too complacent on this point. The obstacles to ‘providing help in effect’ are sufficiently formidable as to require a particular gift, if they are to be overcome. What is this gift?

Thomas identifies the gift near the end of the Questions on charity, turning in Question 45 to the gift of wisdom (sapientia). Without the gift of wisdom, the discernment required for the constant practice of virtuous misericordia is unlikely. Were there no such gift, the only remedy for the problems mentioned in the previous section would be the long and arduous cultivation of the virtue of prudence. The practice of mercy as a virtue would be restricted to the few who manage to acquire the virtue. In concluding the treatment of caritas with a consideration of the gift of sapientia, Thomas blocks this implication. Anyone who asks for and receives the gift of wisdom can practice the misericordia that flows from caritas.

That the gift of wisdom ‘descends from above’ and should not be confused with the acquired intellectual virtue, Thomas makes clear (see 45.1 ad 1). Such wisdom enables one to judge well of things both divine and human. It is not the fruit of study or rational inquiry; it arises ‘by a certain natural affinity’ with divine things. As a compassio sive connaturalitas that ‘comes to be through charity’, it is both ‘natural’ and ‘a gift of the Holy Spirit’ (45.2 co). The use of compassio in this context is significant. It connects the gift of wisdom to the experience of suffering. As Thomas understands it, the gift of wisdom, as a gift, is not acquired by human zeal (see 45.1 ad 1). But this does not imply that it is disconnected from experience. Rather, it comes through experience – and particularly the experience of suffering. Thomas emphasises just this point, invoking the authority of Dionysius. ‘As Dionysius says, Divine Names, chapter 2, Hierotheus is made complete in divine things “not only by learning (discens) divine things, but also by suffering (patiens) them”’ (45.2 co). ²⁸

Since the gift is not the result of our own effort, it is uniquely powerful. It is the divine working in us. Its judgments arise per divinas regulas and secundum rationes divinas. Recipients of such an extraordinary gift will not be hindered by the obstacles identified by section 3. In them, compassion and discernment work together, so that misericordia operates as a virtue. When the gift is lacking, the vices and other psychological obstacles that block, distort or otherwise frustrate the virtue of mercy are formidable. If the gift is present, these vices are powerless. But how can we know when the gift is authentically present? Thomas is not a naïve. He recognises that some who claim to possess the gift are frauds, motivated by the desire to burnish their image. The discernment enabled by wisdom is ‘judging without dissimulation’ (James 3, cited by Thomas). To perceive this is crucial, he adds, ‘lest while pretending to correct others, a person fill up his hatred’ (45.6 ad 3). One sign that a person authentically possesses the gift is her manifest freedom from ressentiment. Another sign is her unwillingness to claim wisdom for herself. Those who are holy tend to say, with Prov. 30:2, that ‘the wisdom of men is not with me’. If they do glory in divine wisdom, they emphasise that their own attainments have little to do with their participation in it. Instead, they recognise that ‘wisdom has been made for us by God’, quoting 1 Cor. 1:30 (also cited by Thomas). In his commentary on the Sentences, Thomas notes that even when a person knows himself to possess love (dilectio), he does not know in any particular case whether this is caritas, any more than he can presume himself to be the recipient of grace. ²⁹

The gift of wisdom ‘causes rightness of judgment about divine things, or about other things by divine standards, out of a certain natural affinity or union with divine things’ (45.4 co). This rightness of judgment clears the obstacles to our practice of virtuous mercy. To be sure, one should not presume the presence of the gift in oneself. One should not cavalierly disregard the obstacles. Instead, one should be ever vigilant, taking care to respect the difference between helping others and quackdoctoring, enabling, condescending, enfeebling etc. The tendency to confuse genuine mercy with these simulacra is real enough. But if the gift is available in the way that Thomas says it is, we should not be overwhelmed by anxiety about our power to practice mercy as a virtue. Of this assurance, we may understand Thomas’s decision not to include a Question on the vice opposed to misericordia as a quiet but firm reminder.