“Dualism and the New Morality”

In the autumn of 1973, Grisez deliberated about the topic on which to write a short paper as his submission for the international congress that would be held in Rome in the spring of 1974 to celebrate the seven-hundreth anniversary of the death of St. Thomas Aquinas. During the previous decade, old-fashioned Thomism had been widely rejected, and even some former Thomists of the strict observance had resorted to abusing opinions of the Angelic Doctor to support dissenting moral-theological opinions on matters pertaining sex, marriage, and innocent life. Grisez therefore decided to use a sound position in the philosophical anthropology of Aquinas—namely, the essential bodiliness of the human person—to demonstrate the indefensible dualism presupposed by many who had replaced authentic Christian teaching with a supposedly new morality, which, in fact, was mostly recycled, nineteenth-century, secular ethics.

When Grisez arrived at the place in Naples where Section III-A (Liberté, sexualité, moralité) was to meet on the afternoon of 23 April 1974, the large lecture hall was already filling. Before the presentations began, he took chalk and wrote on the blackboard: “Foecunditas biologica in sfaerem humanam assumi debet.” While this paper was warmly welcomed by those who found it illuminating, others, fleeing the light, responded with excessive heat. The paper is copyright © Edizioni Domenicane Italiane 1977, all rights reserved.

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