Martin Rhonheimer, the Church’s Swiss Army Knife 

This essay is part of Public Discourse’s Who’s Who series, which introduces and critically engages with important thinkers who are often referenced in political and cultural debates, but whose ideas might not be widely known or understood. The series previously considered the life and work of Hannah Arendt, Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Maritain, Michael Oakeshott, Charles De Koninck, Allan Bloom, and Charles Maurras.

As a seminarian in Rome in 2010, I began a post-graduate program in theology. In my first year in that program, there were several impressive professors, mostly Opus Dei priests with dual doctorates in theology and one other discipline. The fundamental theology professor was an astronomer; the Trinitarian theology professor was a physicist; the moral theology professor was a philosopher; and so on. It was a unique opportunity to study theology from professors with such broad expertise and interests.

The moral theology professor was a Spanish priest named Ángel Rodríguez Luño. Despite his rigorous schedule as an academic dean and a moral consultant for what was then called the Vatican’s Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith, Rodríguez Luño was regularly available to respond to my questions, often sending me articles and book recommendations, and even inviting me on walks in which we would discuss matters. Thus began a mentorship and friendship that continues to this day.

It was under the direction of Don Ángel that I would learn about the philosophical ethics and moral theology of another Opus Dei professor, his longtime colleague and one-time student, Martin Rhonheimer.

What I learned about Rhonheimer contrasted sharply with what I was hearing about him in the American Catholic world, and it was clear to me early on that Rhonheimer’s work was both important and terribly misunderstood. That misunderstanding is unfortunate because, in my judgment, his work represents a faithful development of the tradition of Thomistic virtue ethics and natural law theory in the line of thinkers like Aquinas, Cajetan, and, in some respects, Jacques Maritain. And it is with good reason that he earned the respect of both John Paul II and Benedict XVI. But to appreciate Rhonheimer’s contribution, it is worthwhile to consider his intellectual biography and how he came to make an impact at the highest level of the Church.

From History to Political Philosophy to Ethics

Martin Rhonheimer, though not Jewish according to Judaism’s matrilineal principle, comes from a Jewish family in Switzerland (with three Jewish grandparents). He joined the Catholic Church as a young man, with his parents later following his lead. 

Although he enjoyed studying Thomas Aquinas in a Benedictine high school, Rhonheimer’s initial academic emphases were elsewhere. In the 1970s, he received a master’s degree in history and a PhD in political philosophy at the University of Zurich, the latter under the direction of the political philosopher Hermann Lübbe, a rival of Jürgen Habermas. The fruit of Rhonheimer’s dissertation was a book entitled Politisierung und Legitimitätsentzug (“Politicization and the Loss of Legitimacy”), a work critical of both conservative and neo-Marxist anti-parliamentarianism in Germany in both the interwar and postwar periods. Rhonheimer’s appreciation for modern constitutional democracy in that book remains to this day, with many of his political essays since collected in The Common Good of Constitutional Democracy.

After graduating from the University of Zurich, Rhonheimer, who had been a layman in Opus Dei since 1974, was called to Rome to study theology and would eventually be ordained a priest in 1983 by Pope John Paul II. It was in Rome that he discussed potential avenues of continued study with Ángel Rodríguez Luño. Rhonheimer suggested to Rodríguez Luño that he might continue studying something related to politics. Rodríguez Luño discouraged that idea, thinking it inappropriate for priests to deal with political philosophy, a subject he felt, at the time, was best left to laypeople. He instead suggested that Rhonheimer study ethics. Thus began Rhonheimer’s career as an ethicist, the field in which he is most famous today.

Rhonheimer’s Habilitation Thesis and Its Fruits

In 1982, Rhonheimer received a grant from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation to begin a habilitation project in Bonn under the direction of the highly respected scholar of Thomas Aquinas’s ethics, Wolfgang Kluxen. This habilitation thesis, which he would later publish in 1994 under the title Praktische Vernunft und Vernünftigkeit der Praxis (“Practical Reason and the Reasonableness of Practice”), still represents Rhonheimer’s most important work in ethics. This book opened the way to Rhonheimer’s grasping of Aquinas’s truly Aristotelian understanding of natural law, a doctrine that fills the gap of Aristotle’s missing theory of practical principles. It unfortunately remains untranslated.

Two other books came out of that same research (both translated), Natural Law and Practical Reason (Ger. 1987, Eng. 2000), which Georgetown’s Mark Murphy called “a magisterial treatment of Aquinas’s natural law ethic,” and The Perspective of Morality (It. 1994, Eng. 2011, selected as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Magazine). The first of these books is perhaps the one for which Rhonheimer is most well known, drawing praise from such notable thinkers as John Finnis, Giuseppe Abbà, and even John Paul II, who after seeing Rhonheimer’s name card at a gathering of the Congress for Moral Theology in November 1988 would say in Italian, “Ah, Rhonheimer . . . the natural law! I am reading and will continue to read.” Rhonheimer would later discuss the content of the book at a luncheon in the Apostolic Palace with a small group that included John Paul II.

The extent to which Rhonheimer’s books influenced John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor is a topic for future research. All I can say, from my knowledge of Rhonheimer’s work, and from what I take to have been the common knowledge of informed circles in Rome, is that Rhonheimer had an important impact on that encyclical’s content. Russell Hittinger, for example, rightly sees in the reference to “participated theonomy” in Veritatis Splendor 40 the influence of Rhonheimer’s book on natural law, even if Rhonheimer originally drew that concept from a work of Joseph de Finance.

Informed circles in Rome also recognized that the reference to the “perspective of the acting person” in Veritatis Splendor 78 came right from Rhonheimer’s treatment of the matter, particularly the manuscript of The Perspective of Morality as it was circulated at the time; the analysis of the moral object in that section, moreover, matches Rhonheimer’s own analysis, even if some of his critics and rivals are reluctant to admit it. In my opinion, the general moral framework of the whole work is Rhonheimerian, but given that John Paul II always had a similar orientation, it is difficult to know precisely where Rhonheimer’s contributions were decisive without a deeper study of the encyclical’s composition. Whatever the extent of the influence, it was there, and Rhonheimer deserves some credit for the document’s reasoned and effective response to the consequentialism popular in moral theology at the time.

Rational Virtue Ethics

So what was Rhonheimer’s ethical perspective? Rhonheimer prefers to call it “rational virtue ethics” to highlight its difference from popular, “subjectivistic” strands of virtue ethics in the Anglosphere, usually understood as having little to say about normative ethics as grounded in human reason and, therefore, in practical reason’s principles. With rational virtue ethics, Rhonheimer retrieves and develops what he sees as the best of classical virtue ethics.

Rhonheimer’s perspective is sometimes confused with that of New Natural Law Theory (NNLT), but not without reason; despite important differences, he shares with Grisez, Finnis, and others a first-personal account of practical reason, which these thinkers agree possesses its own principles. Thus, Grisez’s famous article on the first principle of practical reason had, together with Maritain’s Neuf leçons sur les notions premières de la Philosophie morale, a decisive impact on Rhonheimer’s thought. Other influences on his first-personal account of practical reason are Leonard Lehu, OP (namely, his view that according to Aquinas, reason and not nature is the “rule” of morality), John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla), and Wolfgang Kluxen. After setting down this path, he also found confirmation in the contributions of John Finnis.  

In his account of practical reason, moreover, Rhonheimer appeals to a medieval distinction that Cardinal Cajetan applies in his commentary of the Summa: that between the exercised act of practical reason and its reflected act (in actu exercito and in actu signato, in ST I-II, q. 58, a. 5). Cajetan, in fact, argues that all sorts of mistakes are made about practical reason when we confuse the latter with the former. According to this understanding, practical reason is primarily concerned with determining what to do here and now (in actu exercito), and it has its own principles that are operative in daily decision-making—principles that can then be reflected upon philosophically (in actu signato).

One of the areas where Rhonheimer’s perspective differs from New Natural Law Theory (partly substantively, partly semantically) is that while the norms that govern one’s pursuit of the goods grasped by natural reason are partially constructed in NNLT, in Rhonheimer’s account they are implications of the ends of the virtues, most generally the cardinal virtues of justice, temperance, fortitude, and prudence, but also the goals of more action-specific virtues: the individual virtues that Aquinas calls “parts” of the cardinal virtues (e.g., sobriety, humility).

Therefore, the pursuit of the goods grasped by practical reason as the ends of natural inclination in Aquinas’s account (e.g., goods like survival and knowledge) is regulated by the higher-order pursuit of the “fundamental” goods that are the ends of the virtues. Aquinas speaks to these in his Disputed Questions on Virtue:

Every one of [the virtues] produces an inclination in the appetite to some kind of human good. For instance, justice produces an inclination to the good of equality in things relevant to communal life, temperance to the good of restraint from sensual desires, and so on for each virtue.

Like other goods, the goals of more specific virtues (e.g., chastity) are grasped in a deeper way through moral experience, especially the moral experience of good-faith efforts at moral improvement. For NNLT, by contrast, the pursuit of basic goods is regulated by what they sometimes call the “basic requirements of practical reasonableness,” some of which are translatable to the goals of the virtues (e.g., showing no arbitrary preference among persons aligns closely with the goal of justice), with others representing sound maxims of prudence (e.g., the requirement regarding balance between detachment and commitment in our projects).

When applied to normative ethics and moral science, moreover, Rhonheimer’s perspective considers an examined behavior (e.g., lying) from the perspective of its conformity with the goals of the virtues, always understood in relation to the existential context that they regulate. One example that Rhonheimer gives is that of drinking to the point of losing one’s ability to reason. In a moral context of self-control, such behavior is opposed to the virtue of sobriety and thus forbidden. But in the context of an emergency medical procedure, it may be licit for a patient to be given large amounts of alcohol to dull their senses to the pain of the surgery. These physically identical behaviors therefore differ in the order of morality and thus in their moral “species.” This notion of moral context—a concept Rhonheimer borrows from Robert Spaemann, and very different from that defended by Benedict Guevin—allows us to resolve other moral dilemmas in a way that better accords with moral intuitions—e.g., distinguishing between licit deception and the sin of lying.

This kind of precision in explaining moral norms is a major advantage of Rhonheimer’s account. With it, he has had considerable success persuading consequentialists to acknowledge moral absolutes and to embrace the “perspective of morality” as Thomas Aquinas understood it. Don Ángel once told me about a bishop Rhonheimer persuaded to abandon consequentialism—no small feat. Nonetheless, this precision has unfortunately also gotten him into controversy, especially among English-speaking Catholic conservatives. This response has always puzzled me, because in other contexts, Rhonheimer looks like nothing but a dedicated defender of orthodoxy and a loyal servant to the Church. But I suppose many great thinkers throughout Church history have faced backlash from pushing the boundaries of contemporary thought (e.g., Aquinas, Newman, and Maritain). Based on my own research, I am convinced that none of Rhonheimer’s controversial stances are outside the acceptable bounds of debate, and it is clear by now that the Holy See agrees.

Unfortunately, I do not have the space to discuss Rhonheimer’s thoughts on political philosophy, political economy, religious liberty, or any of the various topics his broad curiosity has led him to cover over his career. Let this serve as an attempt at summarizing his contribution to ethics. If Rhonheimer’s work in that field never gets the appreciation it deserves, he has already changed the conversation in subtle ways. Modifying Oliver Wendell Holmes’s definition of a great thinker, I would wager that 100 years after Rhonheimer passes on, whether they know it or not, Catholic philosophers and theologians “will be moving to the measure of his thought.”

Image by  Luciano Mortula-LGM and licensed via Adobe Stock.