Spiritual Investments or Spiritual Life?
Why we want to live morally in the present
Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
on your own intelligence do not rely;
In all your ways be mindful of him,
and he will make straight your paths.
Proverbs 3: 5-6
I recently discussed Christian ethics with a friend, who asked me a rather thoughtful and insightful question. When discussing the nature of theology and how it can tie into virtue ethics, he wondered whether many of the Christians doing good only for a spiritual reward and good place in Heaven are truly living out the Gospel. To him, it seems as if many Christians do good things only because they believe it will bring about some sort of spiritual reward—people rarely live virtuous lives for the sake of living virtuously now. But this, he told me, seems like a perversion of the Gospel and Christian belief. I agreed. Too often do we see people living their lives attempting at the good not for the sake of that good, but as some sort of spiritual investment. Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft, from whom I got the term “spiritual investment”, summed up the problem as such:
In a capitalist society we tend to think of giving as an investment, as a means to receiving. We even think of giving to God in this way. Some evangelists ask for “seed money”. This is appealing to avarice. They turn a gift into a spiritual investment. But Plato and Aristotle as well as Jesus taught that getting is a means of giving, not vice versa; that the best thing about getting riches is that this enables one to practice the virtue of magnanimity by giving it away.1
I do highly agree with Professor Kreeft here. Christians can get carried away with good for the sake of some reward, rejecting good for its own sake.
If all of this is so, however, why is it the case that I said to look not to the world for satisfaction or validation in my previous post?2 These two positions, I believe, are not contradictory because I had not disavowed the world, but rather pointed to God for our ultimate happiness. Yes, we do await our eternal union with God in Heaven, but we wish to live out a good life now, not just for “investment” reasons. What we as Christians should strive for is not the constant placement of spiritual investments but for a spiritual life. This is what I hope to show here.
We must all live virtuous, good lives now because it is our goal in action—all things desire what they deem to be good (whether or not it actually is) and pursues it. This requires a type of living-in-the-now that spiritual investors fail to do. In order to understand this, we look to the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, a medieval Catholic theologian.
In order to understand St. Thomas’ ethics, we must first understand his metaphysics, as the former rely on the latter. St. Thomas, building upon and furthering Aristotle’s philosophy, distinguished between different metaphysical co-principles that can be found in all beings. For the sake of simplicity, I won’t dive into the rich implications or defenses of the Scholastic (Aristotelian-Thomistic) viewpoint, but will only remain brief.
A being, to St. Thomas, is that which is.3 In any real (as opposed to imaginary) being, there is an essence which has an act of existence. To split up the definition, the essence of a being is “that which” while its existence is the recognition that it “is”. Existence is fundamentally an act within the rest of the acting world; essence is the certain mode of that existence. These beings also can be both in actuality or potentiality. The actuality of a being is the existing state in which it resides; the potentiality of a being is the underlying possible states of actuality not yet existing that can arise from the essential being. All of this might be hard to grasp, so I will try to summarize. Something’s essence is what it is; its existence is that it is, or it’s act of existing; its actuality is the state of being is exists in; and its potentiality is what it could be (at least while still being the same essential thing, e.g. as a person could be athletic or smart while still being a person, but could not be a pencil while still being a person). These are the basic metaphysical distinctions of essence-existence and actuality-potentiality. Hopefully, this basic explanation provides you with a glimpse into the rich philosophical and theological ideas of Scholastic philosophy.
Now, you might have noticed a relationship between these two sets of co-principles: Actuality is the active existence of a being, and potentiality is the set of latent possibilities of the being’s essence. St. Thomas, of course, pointed this out as well:
[E]xistence is that which makes every form or nature actual; for goodness and humanity are spoken of as actual, only because they are spoken of as existing. Therefore, existence must be compared to essence, if the latter is a distinct reality, as actuality to potentiality.4
It is important not to identify existence with actuality or essence with potentiality—the two are indeed different. The point to be made here, however, is that something is only actual insofar as it is existent. This is significant for St. Thomas’s theory of goodness, as is hinted at in the quote above. To St. Thomas, existence is the highest perfection of being because it brings into actuality the potentialities of some essential thing.
[A] thing is perfect in proportion to its state of actuality, because we call that perfect with lacks nothing of the mode of its perfection.5
This perfection, of course, entails that it is good. Therefore, insofar as something exists in actuality, it can be called good. In a biblical sense, this idea hearkens back to God’s creation: “God looked at everything he had made, and found it very good.”6 In a philosophical sense, St. Thomas continues the above line of thought as follows:
Every being, as being, is good. For all being, as being, has actuality and is in some way perfect; since every act implies some sort of perfection; and perfection implies desirability and goodness…7
The actualities of a being are what make that being good, and the potentialities of a being is what is yet to be made goodness. Insofar as we exist according to our nature, we are good. To actualize our potentials as human beings, then, is the seek out and do the good. We can only live the good life if we try to do this. Virtue ties into this because it is the means by which we pursue different goods. Thus, to live a moral life, one must work toward their perfection in the now, living virtuously for its own sake.
So then why should we not look to this world but the next? This is simple: Because we can only live a truly good life with help from God’s grace. We face temptations and choices to do evil, and often these temptations are so strong that we cannot face them on our own. Instead, we need His grace.
Though we hope for the coming of Christ and eternal life in Heaven with God, we do so by living out our lives, grateful that God has given them to us, living them as best as we possibly can. In fact, the theological virtue of hope is not the uncertain wishing that Christ will come or that what we believe is true, but is instead the certainty that it will happen and patient waiting for it. As the Church defines it:
Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ's promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.8
In this way, we live out our lives by doing the good now in order to perfect ourselves while putting our trust in God and leaning on him (recall the epigraph at the beginning of the article). Thus, living for God is living-in-the-now. God’s grace helps us actualize our potentialities—He made us to be who we are, and, desiring the good for us, offers us the grace to become good and righteous. We cannot do this unless we act for the present; however, we must guide our action in the present by our hope in Christ, looking to eternal life for our ultimate happiness. It is true that we can never achieve ultimate and complete happiness here in this world—we must wait to be in the presence of God’s unveiled face for that—but we must continue to strive for perfection in the now. If we focus on the good of the present, we will find it easier to keep our eyes on the happiness of eternity. To live well is to live virtuously now; to live holy is to do that while keeping your eyes on Christ.
Therefore, when we think of doing good, we should not think of spiritual investments for some great reward. Yes, great rewards come from doing good, but such a view of doing good as only an instrumental means to happiness is mistaken. Instead, we should think of good as constitutive of happiness. An investment necessarily looks to be an instrument for some future reward; a life is something that is lived in the present. We are not looking for spiritual investments, but for a spiritual life.
Peter Kreeft, Back to Virtue (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1992), p. 111.
Nicolas C. Gonzalez, “To Come and Go from Rome,” Fides Quaerens Intellectum (April 2022).
See W. Norris Clarke, The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), pp. 25-26. In St. Thomas’s own words, see his On Being and Essence, 2d ed., trans. Armand Maurer (Toronto, CA: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1968), ch. 1.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Notre Dame, Indiana: Christian Classics, 1981), I, Q. 3, A. 4. Cited as ST.
ST I, Q. 4, A. 1.
Genesis 1:31. Throughout the creation story in Genesis 1, it is noted that God recognizes His creation as good six times in verses 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, and 31.
ST I, Q. 5, A. 3.