An Analysis of Robert C. Miner’s “Non-Aristotelian Prudence in the Prima Secundae”

There are two known views pertaining to the teachings of Thomas Aquinas on prudence in the Summa Theologiae. One is proclaimed by R.-A. Gauthier who argues that while Aquinas uses Aristotelian terminology to formulate his teachings on prudence, he does so by violently misreading Aristotle.¹ The other common view is that Thomas’s doctrine of prudence is essentially Aristotelian with supplements of small pieces of non-Aristotelian influences. The purpose of Robert C. Miner’s article (published in The Thomist 64, 2000, pp. 401-22) is to reject both of these extremes and to show that Thomas’s teachings on prudence are, in fact, fundamentally non-Aristotelian. 

Miner’s article is divided into four parts:

1. the presentation of prudence as an intellectual virtue (which deals with questions 56-57 of STh I-II);
2. the handling of prudence as a moral virtue (which deals with questions 58-61 of STh I-II);
3. the placing of Aristotle’s phronesis in a hierarchy of prudence (STh, I-II, q. 61, a. 4);
4. on infused prudence and its relation to acquired prudence and how both depend on the un-Aristotelian virtue of caritas.

This post will be similarly divided and each section will provide a summary of Miner’s opinions on the matter at hand. At the end of the post additional analyses will be given before the final conclusion is made. Any quotes in this post from the Summa Theologiae are made from the Benzinger Brothers English edition of 1947. 

In this part of the article that is based around questions 56-57 of the Summa Theologiae Aquinas looks at virtue in a compact and tightly organised way. He analyses it under five aspects: essence, subject, inherited divisions, cause, and particular attributes and introduces the first great division of virtue – intellectual and moral. With respect to prudence, he states its definition as recta ratio agibilium (right reason applied to practice; STh, I-II, q. 57, a. 4.) and elaborates on it: prudence is an intellectual virtue that is seated in the reason; but it is unique in that it can also be treated as a moral virtue because of its intimate relation to the will (i.e. without rectitude of the will, prudence cannot operate). 

In the context of intellectual virtues there is also a comparison made between prudentia and ars. In response to an objector Aquinas says that prudence cannot be reduced to a simple definition of being a purveyor of only good counsel:

“Hence some men, in so far as they are good counsellors in matters of warfare or seamanship, are said to be prudent officers or pilots, but not simply prudent: only those are simply prudent who give counsel about all concerns of life.”

(STh, I-II, q. 57, a. 4, sed. 3)

That is, prudence is distinct and superior to ars because it deals with the ultimate end. This comparison between prudentia and ars is an important one and will be returned to in Miner’s article.

Other summaries of Aquinas’s teachings on prudence are also provided² but what needs to be underlined at this point is that everything that Aquinas writes in these questions is in-line with Aristotle – no outside authorities have yet been introduced to this topic. 

This part of Miner’s article ends by saying that Thomas has said everything pertaining to prudence inside the first division of virtue: intellectual-moral. But he is yet to discuss prudence within the other great division of virtue: the cardinal virtues. This division is, of course, not present in Aristotle.

This part of the article deals with questions 58-61 of the Summa Theologiae. Miner begins it be stating a few more points on prudence that are consistent with the teachings of Aristotle. For example that not only does prudence require the moral virtues, but also that the moral virtues require prudence; and also that moral virtues are not better than prudence because “prudence directs moral virtues not only in choice of the means, but also in appointing the end” (STh I-II, q. 66, a. 3, ad 3). 

Things start to get interesting when Miner begins to talk about the other great divisions of virtue, namely cardinal and theological. As was mentioned above, Aristotle only deals with the first division: intellectual-moral. The other two divisions open up a whole new world. Thomas, as Miner argues, gives the intellectual-moral distinction only the first word. He says the latter two are superior to the first by the ascending character of the ordering of the questions on the division.³

Thomas, since prudence is regarded by him as a moral virtue, also treats it as a cardinal virtue. In doing so, when asking the question on whether the four cardinal virtues differ from one another⁴, calls on St Augustine to respond to this question. He quotes from De Moribus Eccl. and says that the virtues are individuated by distinct “emotions of love” (affectus amoris). The first step away from Aristotle has been made. 

The last thought in this section of the article refers back to the prudentia and ars discussion from Section 1. In moving up a rung in the virtue-distinction hierarchy (i.e. up one rung above Aristotle’s intellectual-moral distinction) and treating prudence as a cardinal virtue, Thomas goes beyond Aristotle here by once again quoting Augustine: “virtue is the art of living” (De civitate dei 4.21). Prudence, therefore, can be regarded as the art of human living as such. The implications of this are far-reaching when one considers that there can now be a relationship drawn between prudentia and the divine ars especially in its participatory relation to providentia. For example, prudence can strive to model this divine ars and treat is as an exemplar. 

3. Prudence and Contemplative Wisdom

In this section Robert C. Miner illustrates how Aquinas goes even further away from Aristotle’s phronesis. First, Miner shows that at the end of Aquinas’s deliberations on cardinal virtues and just before starting on theological virtues, Thomas asks whether the cardinal virtues are fittingly divided into the quartet of political virtues, purgative virtues, virtues of the purified soul and exemplary virtues – this quartet is taken from Plotinus as read by Macrobius. Aquinas responds in the positive and begins to explain each of these divisions. Exemplary virtues exist in the divine mind, which itself may be called prudence.⁵ Moving to the most lowly virtues, i.e. the political virtues (which are the virtues that enable human beings to conduct themselves rightly in the city), Thomas utters a crucial sentence: “It is in this sense [as political prudence] that we have been speaking of these virtues until now” (STh I-II, q. 61, a. 5). There must be, therefore, some virtues that exist between political virtues and the exemplary virtues that have not yet been discussed. And according to Aquinas, these are the virtues most essential to the person moving towards his supernatural end. 

As a purgative virtue, then, prudence has qualities that have scarcely been revealed until now: “Thus prudence, by contemplating the things of God, counts as nothing all things of the world, and directs all the thoughts of the soul to God alone” (STh I-II, q. 61, a. 5). The difference between this prudence and Aristotle’s worldly phronesis is significant. It may still be that the principal act of prudence is command (that also involves counsel and judgement) but each of these acts must now be informed by contemplation, if they are to be directed to the ultimate end. This is the only way for prudence to perform its purgative work after which it will assume its next form as a virtue of the purified soul which “sees nothing but the things of God” (STh I-II, q. 61, a. 5). The form of prudence here turns out to be contemplative. Political (i.e. Aristotle’s) prudence is important, too, but civic goods are to be disregarded in relation to the infinite good. 

Miner has, hence, shown so far that what we learn from Aristotelian authorities is a starting point from which we can rise with the help of non-Aristotelian philosophy. The next section will offer the crux of the argument that shows that Thomas’s teachings on prudence are, in fact, fundamentally non-Aristotelian.

4. Infused prudence and its relation to acquired prudence

At the beginning of the article we started with Aristotle. Plotinus opened the doors for us a little with his four-fold division of virtues. Now, in this section of the article, Miner shows us how Aquinas opens the doors completely to the wider expanses of Christian theology by invoking even more Neoplatonic authorities through his entering the world of theological virtues. This part of the article deals with question 62 of the Prima Secundae, which never explicitly mentions prudence but is crucial for understanding the full teaching of Thomas on the subject. Aquinas, after discussing the virtues of faith, hope and charity declares in the question’s final article that “charity is the mother and the root of all the virtues, inasmuch as it is the form of them all” (STh I-II, q. 62, a. 4). According to Miner, Thomas is incorporating both the cardinal and theological virtues in that statement. It follows, then, that prudence depends on charity as its formal cause.

Another distinction for virtues is again given by Aquinas. According to him, there are two sets of virtues: 1) those that direct us to the good as defined by the rule of human reason (called acquired virtues); and 2) those that direct us to the good as defined by divine law (called infused virtues). The former is caused by habituation, the latter comprises the virtues that God works in us without us: Deus in nobis sine nobis operatur⁶ – which is the Augustinian understanding of virtue. The theological virtues constitute these infused virtues. According to Miner, however, the cardinal virtues have an infused property also – cardinal virtues, in fact, have infused counterparts. 

And the crux of the argument for Aquinas having a fundamentally non-Aristotelian teaching of prudence lies in this understanding of infused cardinal virtues. According to Miner, infused prudence is not simply another supplemental species of prudence – it is prudence in its proper sense. One can no longer argue that Aquinas is supplementing an essentially Aristotelian teaching with another type of prudence. The foundation, in fact, has shifted to Augustine because his definition is now the fundamental one. Moreover, with this new understanding of prudence, Aristotle’s old acquired prudence takes on subtle but important changes due to it now being situated in a new intellectual framework.⁷ 

The last few pages of the article discuss the relationship between acquired and infused moral virtue. Notions like the formal object and end of the two are mentioned, as well as whether acquired virtue can exist without infused virtue. All things mentioned in these pages is supplementary material to the core of Miner’s argument and purpose of this post. Details pertaining to these pages will, hence, be omitted here. 

5. Discussion

There have been some criticisms aimed at Miner’s article presented in this post. A well-known criticism was given by Angela McKay in her article entitled “Prudence and Acquired Moral Virtue” (published in The Thomist 69, 2005, pp. 535-555). In it she claims (in the footnote on page 535) that if you compare what Thomas wrote in De virtutibus cardinalibus, a. 2, with what Miner believes Thomas said in relation to prudence and purgative virtue (presented in Section 3 of this post), it is possible to see that Thomas was not actually talking about acquired virtue there. He, in fact, only had infused virtue in mind. Nonetheless, even if this were true, the crux of Miner’s argument based on the notion that prudence has a proper sense as an infused virtue still holds.

It appears as though a lack of thoroughness in Miner’s analysis can also be noted in the last paragraph of his article in which he states that “The interpretation of prudence as presented in the Secunda Secundae poses special challenges of its own. I suspect, however, that [any analysis] would confirm the conclusion proposed by my reading”. Considering how Aquinas can spread his teachings on specific topics out over vast pages of the Summa Theologiae, one cannot rule out, as Miner has done, that new and decisive elements of Thomas’s understanding of prudence are not found in the Secunda Secundae. One could call Miner’s strategy naive. It would have been wiser to read through the Secunda Secundae and definitively state that nothing presented there on prudence contradicts what has been presented in the article, rather than to leave the matter as open as he did.

Finally, a criticism can be aimed at Miner’s portrayal of Aquinas’s presentation of prudence as a moral virtue (discussed in Section 2 of the article and this post). It can be argued that Miner discusses the way Aquinas talks about prudence in such a way as to make it seem as though Aristotle did not treat prudence as a moral virtue.  It is true that Aristotle never talked of prudence as a moral virtue explicitly⁸ but, nonetheless, he classified it as such in the same way that Thomas did. And doing so would for Aristotle still have had its consequences. It cannot be ruled out, therefore, that these consequences would have been similar to Thomas’s. One can argue here that Miner chose to present Section 2 of his article in this way to embellish his argument (of non-Aristotelianism in Aquinas) and, hence, unduly strengthen his paper. 

Regardless of these criticisms, it is still fair to say that Robert C. Miner’s article is a good one and undoubtedly worth reading. He definitely has a strong case that deserves to be researched (even, perhaps, if from a different angle) in even more detail. 

This post presented Robert C. Miner’s article “Non-Aristotelian Prudence in the Prima Secundae”. In his article, Miner attempted to reject two well-known extreme opinions aimed at Thomas’s presentation of prudence: that he uses Aristotelian terminology to formulate his teachings but does so by violently misreading Aristotle; and that his doctrine of prudence is essentially Aristotelian with supplements of small pieces of non-Aristotelian influences. Ultimately, Miner attempted to show that Thomas’s teachings on prudence are, in fact, fundamentally non-Aristotelian. The post presented Miner’s reading of Aquinas and how he saw Thomas working further and further away from Aristotle’s phronesis with notions such as the hierarchy of prudence and infused prudence. The crux of Miner’s argument is based on his understanding that, for Aquinas, infused prudence is prudence in its proper sense. This understanding, based on Augustinian thought, forms the foundation of Thomas’s teachings on prudence and is hence non-Aristotelian. Finally some criticisms of the article were discussed. Despite these criticisms, however, it must still be said that the arguments presented by Miner are strong and worth being noted and regarded.

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1. See R.-A. Gauthier, “Introduction,” in Aristote, L’Ethique a Nicomaque, introduction, translation, commentary by R.-A. Gauthier and J. Y. Jolif, 2d ed., Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1970.
2. For example that judgement and command are also a part of prudence with command being the most important of its elements (see STh I-II, q. 57, a. 6).
3. This ascending character is, in fact, repeated in the STh II-II.
4. STh I-II, q. 61, a. 4.
5. In fact, without exemplars in the divine intellect, no other virtues would exist.
6. cf. Augustine’s De gratia et libero arbitrio, 17, 33.
7. For example, it is now also informed by charity and operates within the horizon now set by infused prudence.
8. or maybe he did but these works have been lost.