Does the family have a common good? If so, what is the basis of the family’s common good? I think these questions are particularly useful to inquire into for a few reasons. The family’s common good, as the primordial society without which political society could not exist, may provide lights about the common good of that community which encompasses all communities, the polity (civitas).[1] Indeed, the goods of marital society directly contribute to the wellbeing of civil and political society.[2] The topic, moreover, is worthy of consideration in itself in that we all have emerged from a family, and ideally have been provided with a stable family life. Be that as it may, many of us have been reared in an atomistic culture which idolizes the individual in opposition to the common good, both that of the polity and that of other societies within it. As such, considering the common good of the family may be useful to clarify our thinking as moderns about the dignity of the individual person in relation to the dignity of that particular ‘society’ itself. The aim of this essay is confined to narrowly analyzing the particular common good of marriage and the family within a particular strand of the classical tradition and I make no attempt to consider other views or traditions here, as it would be beyond the scope of this essay. That can wait for another occasion. It should also lay the groundwork for considering the relationship between civil society and the family in a later essay.
I will begin my discussion with the canon law definition of matrimony, with particular attention to the goods of the marital unit. My interest is in the essential nature of marriage as a natural good and therefore I will not discuss those things which pertain in a special way to Christian matrimony.[3] For what could a civil lawyer possibly say about canon law or theology? Well, my object is not so much legal or theological but philosophical analysis about matrimony and the family as natural institutions, so I believe I am within my competence in using the ecclesiastical sources as a springboard to my wider discussion. Now, from the nature of marriage I will deduce certain conclusions about the goods proper to the family. I contend that because matrimony is the building block of the family, and it partakes of a certain givenness, its goods are fundamentally ordered towards familial society. As such, marriage is not properly for the good of the individual spouses simply as individuals, but for the good of the family considered as a distinct community and it is in this way that the highest good of the spouses as spouses, and thus also as individuals, is achieved. But their good as spouses, and (in its fulfilment) as parents, cannot be taken as an aggregation of their individual goods but as a distinct good common to the spousal pair, and the familial unit emerging from it, as such. Properly speaking, the common good of the family does not exist in opposition to the good of its members as individuals but is their higher fulfilment as individual creatures made for community. If man is a social and political animal, it cannot be otherwise. I will further argue that all this indicates the primacy of obligations over rights. Not over and against rights, but first in priority such that rights themselves are properly grounded. In a sense, the moral worth of the individual member of the family is then exhibited and exercised in the common good of the family. That suffices for an introduction. Let me begin the argument by considering the definition of marriage.
1) Marriage: Definition
– The goods of matrimony
Matrimony is a contract between freely consenting persons of the opposite sex to a stable and permanent partnership for their whole life, admitting of carnal union, which therefore of its nature is ordered to procreation and education of children, and the good of the spouses.[4] I use the word contract in relation to its purely natural existence. It is, of course, as the latest code of canon law recognizes, a covenant among Christians,[5] as realizing the inner demands of the nature of marriage in relation to its goods. Christian marriage is called a covenant also because of its sacramental nature as reflecting the indissoluble union of Christ and his Church. This word, covenant, reflects the word b’rith, which in Jewish tradition was an agreement forming a relationship equally binding as a blood relationship and thus indissoluble.[6] Nevertheless, a covenant is a species of contract as a particular type of agreement between two freely consenting persons. That it is a special contract and thus a covenant is granted, but that it is a contract cannot be coherently denied.
The definition of matrimony itself contains the goods for which it is ordained. Indeed, the definition of a thing cannot be considered complete if it does not have reference to its end or telos: its ‘final cause’. It is this final cause which is most interesting here because it is the governing cause, that for which a thing exists and to which it is aimed.[7] There may be reasons, some which, such as infertility, in fact may make the incomplete attainment of the ends of marriage innocent. That said, the central, or focal sense,[8] of the term ‘marriage’ admits of the goods of the begetting and education of children and the good of the spouses proper to conjugal love. It is interesting that the whereas the 1983 code does not expressly provide for a hierarchy of goods, the 1917 code does:
“The primary end of marriage is the procreation and education of children; the secondary [end] is mutual support and a remedy for concupiscence”.[9]
Taking my lead from an eminent canonist, I do not think this omission in the new code suggests that the ends of marriage “are arbitrarily determined” but rather that the “two ends are intimately related”.[10] But what is the relation of the two ends?
In using the phrase “good of the spouses” (bonum coniugum) the new code appears to put under one phrase the goods which were distinctly treated in the 1917 code as mutual support and remedy for concupiscence, the latter which we may take to as referring to incontinence or lack of self-control. Were marriage simply a remedy for incontinence, “for it is better to marry than to burn with passion”,[11] that reason, in itself, would not justify the institution of marriage because in its essence marriage does not require that those who contract it lack self-control. For marriage can endure if there is no incontinence which is itself a privation in the human person. As such, this lack may be considered incidental to marriage insofar as marriage may provide a remedy for it; as a remedy it seeks to end the problem to which it is applied. In that lack of self-control should not be an enduring condition where a remedy is properly applied, it cannot be considered the primary end of marriage. Nor is it entirely distinct from conjugal mutual support but is rather one of the many aspects of it, because the remedy is one which, of its nature, is mutual and partakes of the mutual moral aid the spouses provide one another.
Again, were ordinary mutual support simply the end of matrimony, one wonders why a non-carnal friendship alone, such as monks may have, might not satisfy that end. It is necessary to ask what kind of mutual support this is for while it might admit of deep friendship, as related to a union which admits of carnal union, it appears that this is the sort of mutual support proper to a couple rearing young. True, a couple may perhaps never see children and still be obliged to support one another. Yet given that the focal sense of marriage concerns a partnership which ordinarily, in the sense of there being no physical impediment, results in childbearing, the mutual support seems to refer not only to the individual needs of the spouses but those in the context of a permanently united couple who raise, support and govern a family. (I will parenthetically observe that old age should not be considered to dissolve this familial ordering of the obligation of mutual support in that grandparents do have a role in supporting families,[12] but to discuss this in detail would derail the present inquiry.) Even the function of marriage as a remedy is one which cannot be divorced from childbearing in that the nature of the acts concerned is ordered to it. In every way then, the bearing of children appears to be the primary end of marriage. So far as it is, so is the education of children because the development of a child is not completed in the womb but takes several years after birth. Therefore the goods of procreation and the education of children may be taken to be two temporally extended goods tending towards one end: the raising of upright adults fit for social life. In this sense the goods of marriage are “intimately related”,[13] sure, but their intimate relation is conditioned by the hierarchy of goods.
This hierarchy then is crowned by the procreation and education of children. In other words, the married couple exist, as a married couple, not simply for their own satisfaction but for the sake of some other who flows from their union. The very essence of their union is one which builds a community of persons. Their mutual support matters so far it is the support proper to matrimony in light of their family obligations. Even the remedy for concupiscence would seem to be an individual aid to virtue to better fulfil the personal obligations proper to family life. Matrimonial life, thus, exists for the sake of family life as is intrinsically ordered to it. The definition of marriage requires that it be so ordered. So, the goods of marriage are the foundational goods of the family and are goods directed to the common benefit of the family. In this sense we may say that all ‘uses’ of marriage are inherently destined(destinatus) to giving rise to human life,[14] and therefore to the family.
– Givenness of order
So, we arrive at the family as the end of matrimony and its fulfillment. The discussion leading up to this has implicitly assumed the givenness of the nature of marriage and the family. To understand marriage and the family with greater clarity, then, it is appropriate that we examine what is entailed by the givenness of the conceptual nature of these things. In this context, is perfectly right to say that a man and a woman freely and voluntarily contract a marriage and that the goods of matrimony are “intimately related”.[15] But what stops the hierarchy of goods from being inverted or being turned into the things available to the arbitrary whim of the couple to choose for their marriage? I mean, what makes suspect such questions as, “Should we, being fertile, have children or contracept for our mutual, though individual, satisfaction? Or what priority should we give to the goods of marriage, considering the ruling nature our own preferences?” The hierarchy of goods, rather, must rule because of the givenness of the nature of the object, marriage expressly and family implicitly, being pursued. As part of this givenness is what Crawford calls the “principle of non-exchangeability”.[16]
That a couple freely contract a marriage is certain, but they are not free to contract what within marriage they will be, whether husband or wife,and the duties of those given positions they ought to undertake: that is non-exchangeable. Their liberty is therefore conditioned by a given order. As such, their liberty is not an arbitrary caprice, but a freedom to enter an order as given. And only a male may be the husband as the one who is capable of being father, and the female alone may be the wife, and the one who by nature bears the child and is ordered to motherhood. The human being who comes from their union too has a ‘givenness’ in this context, and can be neither his own father nor mother, but is properly called the child. “Only a mother can bear a child, and only a father can beget one. Only a child can make a woman a mother and a man a father.”[17] The fixed human nature of the members of a family determines their relational position in the familial order. Therefore, the non-exchangeability of their positions is inherent to the family. As part of the givenness of marital and familial order, it is part of the conditions wherein authentic human freedom may be exercised in pursuing those goods proper to matrimony and the family. Liberty, then, not only consists in freely entering an order but also freely undertaking the obligations it entails for you as the kind of human being you are in that order.
The place of a human being one is in this order, as I have said, is determined by nature as expressed in the marital and familial contexts. So, the place a child has in the familial order is determined by the nature of his parents as a male and female who have entered into matrimony. Matrimony and its proper use, as I noted in the discussion of its goods, has implicit in it the child. Now, a married couple have the liberty to enter marriage, and this liberty is the freedom to enter a given order. Part of this given order, in its essential goods, is the child. Therefore, the child is conceptually prior to the act of its parents to choose to marry and to procreate. As such, the child is not simply something that may or may not be had by the married couple depending on their caprice, like confetti, but the openness to the child is a condition of properly making the kind of choice matrimony is. The openness to the child being thus a precondition of a proper choice, the pursuit of familial community as a common enterprise of the couple with their children is an essential element of the choice to marry. So, the given order conditions choice and the non-exchangeable functions within that order give that order its internal structure.
The kind of things marriage and the family are condition the sort of choices that may be exercised within them because the most basic internal structure of the family is fixed and its elements are non-exchangeable. As such, the family in idea is an integral unit and determining its nature, or the nature of its parts, is not subject to the arbitrary whim of those who compose it. As such it is a whole with “an intrinsic or integral order”.[18] And this is necessary to its nature as a common good, a thing shared, and to not simply be an aggregation of individuals with their own arbitrary preferences negotiated with one another. The order of matrimony and the family is built into the kind of thing marriage is, and of family which springs from marriage. That being the case, the kind of choice a couple make when marrying and procreating (this latter being entailed by the choice to marry) contains within it an assent to the order the act requires for it to be properly made. Marriage and the family, in other words, are not created ex nihilo by the will of those who contract matrimony. Rather, they contain within themselves the interior conceptual demand which, when the moral choice to enter marriage is made, includes an entering into the nascent integral order marriage and the family entail. By their temporal procreative acts, the married couple work to the active realization of the integral order common to all its participants, which we call the family, in its fulness. Thus, as all its members have a share in this order, it may be rightly called a good common to all of them as a community: their common good.
I argued just a little earlier that the fixed nature and non-exchangeability of positions within the marital and familial order is part of the conditions for exercising authentic human freedom in pursuing the goods proper to marriage and the family. Liberty, then, consists in freely undertaking the obligations required of one in the position one has in the order. We should now see that this is not simply a question of personal moral obligations, and therefore not a purely individual matter. It is a question of one’s obligations towards the common good of the community that is the family, which has its own internal structure and its own proper good which is common to all its members. In this sense, the liberty which family life entails is a freedom to pursue the common good of the family. The common good of the family seems then to be required for those who are in it, as a requirement of their freedom. The very fact that they are ‘constrained’ by nature is liberating, so that they might pursue the flourishing of their community. It is now necessary to consider what it means for a good to be common to a community and how the goods of matrimony might be said to be common to the family and not simply limited to the married couple. This will help me further develop the insights in this section.
2) Familial Common Good
What is a common good? That is, what does it mean for a good to be common rather than particular? If a good is common, it is shared by all who partake of it precisely as a thing worthy for a human person existing in their social sphere. As such, the good is properly said to be common because it is not to be appropriated by any single person or faction but is, by its nature, a thing meant to be shared as something all concerned have a part in. So far as the persons form the common thing – what in political society we might call the res publica – they are appreciated. From the aspect of the community, we do not appreciate the individual are a mere atom, but as one who partakes of the community with us. In a like manner, the person who participates in the common thing which is a family is not so much loved simply as an individual, but as one who is a member of this family. The particular thing which is loved, so to speak, is a common thing and the individual is appreciated under its aspect. That is not to deny the worthiness of an individual being by himself. It is to say, rather, that when one is considered under the aspect of thing common one loves the other as partaking of it as that which unites us. Here, something Charles de Koninck says is pertinent to take the discussion forward:
“The good of the family is better than the singular good, not because all the members of the family find in it their singular good: the good of the family is better because, for each of its individual members, it is also the good of the others. That does not mean that the others are the reason for the proper lovableness of the common good. On the contrary, under this formal aspect, the others are loveable insofar as they can participate in this good”.[19]
It might look like, through this quotation, I have slipped from discussing the idea of a good being ‘common’ to subtly introducing the ‘good’ itself without analyzing it. They are, however, so closely related that it is difficult to keep the concepts distinct without discussing one while dealing with the other. Regardless, let me complete my discussion of commonness then proceed to considering the good in orderly fashion. Consider now what de Koninck says from the angle of commonness. In essence, he says that which is common about a community is better than the singular good of its constituent members because it is the good in which all others participate. It is, therefore, a more diffuse than those narrower things which are proper to an individual quaindividual. Further, inasmuch as the social nature of man impels him to live in various communities, and, of course, in that community of communities, the civitas, wherein alone he receives the perfection of his social nature, that which is common is better. In that a thing common is diffuse and that it is perfective of the social nature of man, it is better than only narrow purely individual interests. As such, though the individual person may benefit by that which is common, the common thing cannot be considered an aggregation of individual interests. It is, rather, an interest shared by all who are members of the community.
Now we are discussing that community which is called the family. What are its ‘interests’ or ‘goods’? Are these truly common and how so? Human ‘goods’ are called such because they are the appropriate objects for a rational creature to attach his will to. Of its nature, the goods proper to the family are common because the family itself is a community of persons and thus must have goods proper to its nature as a community which are distinct from the merely individual interests of its particular members. Again, what are these goods? In this respect I think it is appropriate to distinguish between two kinds of goods proper to the family. The first and fundamental ones are those of matrimony itself, as the base upon which the family rests. The second, are goods consequent upon them and necessary to their fulfilment. These include those consequent upon the goods of procreation and education, generating the duties in piety owed by a child to its progenitors.
Of the goods proper to marriage, as I have observed, the good of the spouses includes their mutual support and the remedial function. In the section on the definition of marriage I noted that both these are ordered towards the bearing and rearing of children. So the good of the spouses proper to marriage is, unsurprisingly, about their condition as a married couple, that is, a couple ordered to the formation of the familial community. In that the human being is a creature made for community, the family thus reflects the highest good of the married couple qua married couple. In it they obtain the highest good proper to their state which is the coherent familial community, built on their physical and moral union, giving rise to new life. The ‘moral union’ I mention is simply another way to denote their duty of mutual support considered as a moral duty concerning both their supporting one another in pursuing the good life in its aspects concerning both virtue and the appropriate material prosperity they require for their common life. Considered from the aspect of the family, these goods are ordered towards its first formation, its continued sustenance, growth and fulfilment. All things being equal and external circumstances (including what lawyers might call ‘acts of God’) not intervening, the most perfect fruit of matrimony is not merely fulfilled spouses, but adult human beings able, willing and equipped to pursue the good life independently. Seen thus, the fulfilment of the spouses in one another is manifested in their child, the fruit of their procreation, education, and a beneficiary of their mutual support of one another.[20]
As a beneficiary of the great good of life and the necessary supports for its development from his parents, a child becomes a ‘debtor’ to them on that account.[21] Granted that these goods are so great they could never be repaid, nor is it right for a rational being to be a slave, the debt owed is principally one of gratitude. Gratitude, which I take to be an expression of love, in this respect may be exercised by the appropriate reverence, or respect, which one pays his parents in dealing with them. To serve one’s parents may be required of the beneficiary too, as something incidental to the respect he owes them and as such a child should provide, as the circumstances of the case indicate, for his parents’ wellbeing as to their health and material goods if they suffer on either account.[22] To my thinking, the duties linked to piety might be modified by some serious neglect suffered by the child as to the provision his parents made for him in the child’s sharing in the goods of matrimony. That is, by their neglect as to his upbringing, or the necessities of life, or their own acrimonious relationship destructive of mutual support, the demands of piety may be modified. How far they might be is a question for a casuist assessing specific cases. But I cannot see how the requirement of piety could ever be extinguished inasmuch as the Creator is a child’s ultimate source of life and the goods parenthood ought to provide are the means whereby the Deity has deigned to mediate goods to the child, and the neglect of the parents of their mediatory role cannot eliminate the respect owed to the role as such. To say otherwise would appear to militate against the proper natural piety owed to the Creator and, derivatively, also to one’s kin and nation in general. These are difficult questions in practice but not at least insoluble as a matter of demonstrating them in abstract.
From the prior discussion two broad streams might readily appear. As to commonness, remember the analogy I drew between the sharing of the family and the res publica. So, from the aspect of commonness, we see the common good as the community itself. To be well-ordered is to be an integral whole rather than a mere heap of individual things. A whole formed from parts has its own value such that the parts are only called parts by reference to the whole, which has its own value distinct from simple aggregation.[23] Likewise, the good that is common is the community insofar as the goods of matrimony are definitionally built into marriage and the family and make for their flourishing. The well-ordered marriage, in the focal sense of the term, and the family naturally flowing from it partakes of these goods. They partake of these goods such that these goods inhere in the couple and family itself. The individuals, taken as members of the family, are not simply loved as individuals but as the members of the family. So far as the individuals are in the family, they belong to one another as one community and as that community are its good, not simply as mere individuals seeking their private good atomistically.
In that the common good of the family entails a mutual belonging of its members, this belonging implies that obligations takes precedence over rights, in that from the first-person perspective of the members of the community, to ‘belong’ is to exist for someone first, rather than for them to first exist for you. That the commonness of the good of the family implies that the others do exist foryou is simply consequent upon their obligation. For the commonality of the good requires that those who share in it are in some sense bound to one another. Being thus bound, they form obligations in justice to one another. The fulfilment of their obligations is the basis of their rights, but never apart from obligations and always because of obligations. Rights as objects of justice proceed from obligations and are unintelligible without them. It appears, then, that a web of obligations binds the members of a community, including the family, into an integral whole. Considering the goods of matrimony, again, confirms this. The goods of matrimony, especially the primary good concerning children, are primarily of the nature of an obligation and any rights associated with them are grounded in obligation. Second, the rights of the child to life and education, in their fulfilment, tend towards an overarching obligation in piety to his parents.
It is not the rights between the members of the family which first make it an endeavor worthy of a human being but the obligations which are the very basis of these rights. For it is these obligations which make the community, properly speaking, other-facing and concretize the demands of its common good. Indeed, it is these very obligations which provide for the lovableness of the family. In that the goods of conjugal and family life are directed towards the flourishing of the familial community, they are conditioned by obligations. These obligations ensure that the interpersonal relationships within the family, and also the use of matrimony, are within the bounds of justice. Being thus bounded by justice, the married couple in and with their family are able to properly fulfil the goods proper to their flourishing community, which is their common good. So, justice, being the condition of flourishing, makes the pursuit of marriage and family worthwhile. It may be taken to be a constitutive requirement implicit in the nature of a marriage and family.
Ranking even before obligations as a result of belonging to the common good of the family, is love itself. I mentioned earlier that a human good is something properly ordered to the nature of a human being and as such is an object worthy of that rational creature to consent to adhere to. Marriage and family being such goods, it is right for a human being to love them. Their common good is loved, therefore, as a properly human good. Because the family is the reason why those who are its members are appreciated under its aspect, they are loved as part of the family. It might be right, for example, to have a certain love for an ordinary child. However, one’s own son or daughter is loved not as an ordinary child but as one’s son or daughter, which is to say, as members of one’s family and sharing in its common good. Love for the common good takes precedence over obligations and conditions them, just as obligations condition rights. But the proper attitude to a good is love and therefore the first movement in a human person towards the common good should be love and this is the condition for the obedience that obligations require. Thus, so far as one’s act towards members of his family, he acts first with a disposition of will, called ‘love’, even in the execution of his obligations. The relation of love to the common good of the family has definite consequences for the sort of acts it might justify.
Consider the example of a mother who in some dire circumstance heroically incurs mortal danger to save her daughter. Why should the evaluative terms ‘heroic’ be used here? If the goods of family life existed simply for individual satisfaction, it would be irrational, for a woman (or man) to be willing to die for a child (or any other person they are connected to in their community) because that would be contrary to their individual utility, or good. To act against a good that obtains one’s fulfillment is to act against reason, which is irrational and conduct unworthy of a human being. Nevertheless, such an action as I have described, is right to call it heroic; it is worthy of positive evaluation. Why? It is clearly not because it is an act of self-realization. Quite the contrary, as it is self-destructive and therefore cannot be coherently justified under the aspect of the individual good. Rather, because the person shares a tie with the person saved, here that of mother and daughter, within the community. The love for the particular child it is directed to the child as part of the good which both mother and child share, which is their familial relation or community. The love for the particular child is love for one who belongs to the mother, and this is to belong to the family. The child is not loved as a mere individual but as ‘my child’and thus this relation is conditioned by ‘our family’ without which the child cannot be coherently called ‘my child’ but is simply ‘a child’. The sort of love which motivates the mother’s action is at once directed immediately to her child and therefore also, at the very same time, to her familial community. This is an integral love which loves the part for the sake of the whole, as part of the whole. This sort of love also partakes of the nature of an obligation, in that a parent may be obliged to take extraordinary risks to safeguard their vulnerable progeny,[24] but it partakes of love first for it is love which properly characterizes the adherence of a will to its good. This love is at once communal, personal and the individual’s own higher good in so far as it is securing the communion which fulfils the individual person as a communion and not simply a private, individual utility.[25]
In that the mother is a human being, whose very nature as a social creature requires the transcending of a narrow individuality so that the individual may be perfected socially, the common good, even in such heroic acts, represents a higher goal for her. The common good of the family is a higher good though, as the family itself is a society within the comprehensive society of the civitas, its common good, the res publica itself, is the individuals highest good. It accounts for the good of the family as a society but is necessarily distinct from it as more comprehensive and directed at different ends. I do not enter, here, into a discussion of other actions which might be described as heroic in other contexts though I think they too may be justified in some way by reference to some common good, even if it is the civic, political or general common good of all humanity. Further, I will not discuss, in this essay, the relation of the common good of the civitas to that of the family which is an different topic.
The common good of the family is, as I have argued, then the higher good of the individual and the obligations of the family have a certain non-competitive primacy over the rights one has within the community, securing these very rights in a web of obligations. This reality naturally arises because the individual person is a part of the community which is a whole, and the individual person remains incomplete as to the attainment of their human good so long as they are not party to community, of which family is arguably the most primordial as rooted in the rational instinct for communion and the propagation of one’s seed. So, the member of the family is a part, but is the member himself a whole? Well, every member of the community is in their nature a rational moral agent and thus individually responsible for their moral acts. There is, then, a moral wholeness of each member of the familial community distinct from the wholeness of the community itself. Yes, the individual person is a part inasmuch as they are a member of the family. Yet as to their moral worth, they are a whole being because they are an independent moral actor. As such, any human community as a community of rational animals is fundamentally different from that of non-rational animals like a herd of wildebeest which simply acts with a group-mind of the whole community. A member of the community of this sort of non-rational animal that lives in community is helpless without the group and exists only for the group as a locus for its self-perpetuation. This non-rational animal may have worth as a noble creature representing its kind and as a member of its group, but no distinct moral worth of its own. Contrastingly, the human, as a rational animal, lives in community but as a distinct moral actor with personal responsibility. As such, the human being, whether alone or in community, has a moral worth and wholeness.
It is this worth and wholeness which is an integral element of the community. “This is because the idea of community as a whole depends on the free and rational action (the “yes”) of its “parts” in order to remain an integral and well-ordered whole”.[26] A human is a free and rational agent, and if he is a morally balanced one, that is, a well-ordered person, then his good cannot be coerced lest an evil, an act against his flourishing, be committed against him. The child too, so far as the education of progeny is an end of marriage, is to be educated in this rational and moral liberty so that he may yet more and more partake of the common good of family life proper to his rational nature. Seen thus, it is a freedom which arises from givenness and is ordered to the common good, which is the individual person’s own good. As such the person exists for the community and, simultaneously, the community exists for the individual person. Yet the community exists for the person not as a private good, but as a shared good greater than any single narrow, individual utility. The common good of the family is, then, for its members their higher good and strictly non-competitive: my sharing of it does not diminish the good but rather augments it. For, ultimately, it is the community itself which is the common good being shared in temporal circumstances. I am reminded, here, of a verse in Paradiso which, since it applies to the highest one, needs must apply to the common good of the family: “‘Lo! one arrived / To multiply our loves!’”[27]
[1] cf. St Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, Book I, Lecture 1/a
[2] cf. Vatican Council II, Gaudium et spes, no. 48: “[…] For the good of the spouses and their off-springs as well as of society, the existence of the sacred bond no longer depends on human decisions alone. […]” (emphasis added); St John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris consortio, no. 14: “According to the plan of God, marriage is the foundation of the wider community of the family, since the very institution of marriage and conjugal love are ordained to the procreation and education of children, in whom they find their crowning”.
[3] i.e., its sacramental nature and consequent absolute indissolubility.
[4] cf. 1983 CIC c. 1055 § 1; 1917 CIC c. 1012 § 2
[5] 1983 CIC c. 1055 § 1
[6] Thomas P. Doyle, O.P. in James A. Coriden, Thomas J. Green, Donald E. Heintschel (eds.), The Code of Canon Law: A Text and Commentary (Geoffrey Chapman, 1985) 740
[7] cf. Charles de Koninck, ‘The Primacy of the Common Good Against the Personalists’ in Ralph McInerny (ed.), The Writings of Charles de Koninck (vol. 2, Notre Dame University Press 2009/2016) 68: “That is the thesis of this book, the primacy of the common good, in society, in the family, for the soul itself, on condition that the notion of the common good be properly understood: it is the best good of the singular, not insofar as it is a collection of singular goods: it is the best for each of the particulars who participate in it, by reason of its very community.”
[8] cf. John Finnis, Human Rights and Common Good, (Collected Essays Vol. 3, OUP 2011/2013) 317
[9] 1917 CIC c. 1013 § 1 in Edward Peters (trans.), The 1917 or Pio-Benedictine Code of Canon Law in English with Extensive Scholarly Apparatus (Ignatius Press 2001) 352
[10] Thomas P. Doyle O.P., supra n. 7
[11] 1st Corinthians 7:9 (ESV)
[12] See, infra footnote 20 where I discuss the natural basis of the duty of grandparents in their own parenthood as a reasonable inference from the writings of St Thomas. Also see, Pope Francis, ‘Messages for World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly’ (2021-2024)
[13] Thomas P. Doyle O.P., supra n. 9, 352
[14] I have arrived at the same conclusion here as St Paul VI, Humanae vitae no. 11: In Latin, “Verumtamen Ecclesia, dum homines commonet de observandis praeceptis legis naturalis, quam constanti sua doctrina interpretatur, id docet necessarium esse, ut quilibet matrimonii usus ad vitam humanam procreandam per se destinatus permaneat” (italics in original, bold mine).
In English: “The Church, nevertheless, in urging men to the observance of the precepts of the natural law, which it interprets by its constant doctrine, teaches that each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life” (no emphases in official translation).
[15] Thomas P. Doyle O.P., supra n. 9, 352
[16] David S. Crawford, ‘Anthropological Foundations of the Family and the Common Good’ [2017] STEPP: Socialinė Teorija, Empirija, Politika Ir Praktika 36, 42
[17] ibid
[18] ibid
[19] Charles de Koninck, supra n. 7, 75
[20] Again, this directly relates to the ongoing duties a couple as grandparents would incur. See St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II, q. 101, art. 2, ad. 2: There St Thomas says that a father stands in relation to his child as a principal to a beneficiary and thus his duty to provide for his child is perpetual and not momentary, whereas the duty of the child to support his parent is momentary as incidental to a particular need; for the father is not the son’s successor. From this, it is a reasonable inference that so far as the child’s own children are in some sense the initial pair (now grandparents) successors, they owe them some duty through their own child. The many ways grandparents do in fact help their grandchildren by aiding their parents in functional families thus should not be considered a superfluous, if pleasant ‘helping hand’, but rather a continuation of their duty as parents themselves.
[21] cf. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II q. 101, art. 1, co.
[22] Ibid, q. 101, art. 2, co.
[23] cf. David S. Crawford, supra n. 16, 39-40
[24] As, indeed, a child may be obliged to take greatly self-sacrificial measures in fulfilling those obligations incidental to piety such as, for example, foregoing leaving the family home for a distant city where some sparkling opportunity awaits because the ill-health of the parents’ requires the child carefully and closely attend them – even if this should mean that the child will likely exist in poverty for a prolonged period.
[25] See the discussion of a similar example of sacrificial love in David S. Crawford, supra n. 16, 41. My own example was built by analogously thinking about the sacrifice of a soldier for the res publica of his country or civitas. Crawford’s own argument is differently based and moves from discussing the common good, using the example of sacrificial love as a sort of pivot, to discuss the family specifically. I think his paper complements my essay.
[26] David S. Crawford, ibid, 41
[27] H.F. Cary (trans.), Dante, Paradiso Canto V.105 in The Divine Comedy (Wordsworth Editions, 2009) 317
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