Cicero’s Summum Bonum and the Greatest Commandment
Philosophy, ideally, brings our rational inquiry to a proper level of cultivation that allows us to accept the revelation in the Gospels. Praeparatio evangelica is a doctrine of the early Church, which maintains that God, prior to the fullness of revelation in His Son, already cultivated the soil, as it were, for the Incarnation, by developing a philosophical culture that would be open to the revelation of Jesus Christ.[1]
45 years before the birth of Christ, Cicero, a Roman orator, statesman, and philosopher, wrote a book called De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (On the Ends of Good and Evil). The central question of this book is an exploration of the nature of the summum bonum, i.e. the highest good. The highest good is an ultimate value in life, a final telos beyond which there is no further aspiration, which organizes all standards of right conduct. What is right is what conduces to this ultimate end, and what is wrong undermines it. We do not use the highest good as a means to another end, but value it in itself.[2]
The idea of the highest good arises from the recognition that there must be something intrinsically valuable in life, and so not every good we seek is instrumentally valuable. If everything were only instrumentally valuable (as an instrument for the obtaining of another thing), there would be no motivation for our actions. An instrumental value derives its value only from what it can obtain, and so instrumental value without the existence of an intrinsic value is no value at all.
Our lives, moreover, do not consist in a patchwork of discrete goals, isolated from one another. It is not as though we move
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