On the Cause and Integrity of Goodness According to Thomas Aquinas, Albert the Great, and Pseudo-Dionysius (original) (raw)
“Goodness comes from a single and whole cause, while evil comes from numerous partial deficiencies.” This brief saying from Pseudo-Dionysius is one of the crowning principles of chapter 4 “on good and evil” in his work On The Divine Names. It is a crown because it is the final conclusion that follows logically from all that comes before in the chapter on the nature of goodness, but it is likewise a principle for two of his faithful commentators, St. Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas, who use it in their moral theology to manifest why all the elements of an act must be good in order for the act itself to be good. In this paper I will seek to clarify how Dionysius arrives at this principle of the integrity of goodness, showing that it flows from his understanding of the nature of good and evil, then, I will examine how this principle was interpreted and developed by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas and used by them as a source for the rest of their moral theology.