Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

THE SUBJECT-OBJECT RELATION IN CONTEMPORARY MORAL THEOLOGY 25a point of reference, and the most accessible references availablewere the laws that were being violated when sin tookplace. 6The structure of post-Tridentine moral theology was builtupon the commandments, those of the Old Testament andthose of the Church. It was supplemented with a rational explanationof how one believed things were supposed to be, usuallyreferred to as the natural law inherent in the created world. Sincould be identified as a violation of an obligation or prohibition.It was definable, external and objective. The role of thesubject in the perspective of confessional practice was limitedto that of responsibility and guilt. It had nothing to do with thedetermination of morality which, in that optic, remained completelywithin the act or object of moral behavior.This was the basic theory behind the manuals of moral theology.Curiously, Johnstone cites only one, twentieth centurymanualist in his text, Heribert Jone. All the other referencesgiven in the footnotes are also to twentieth century textbooks.Although he claims to have found a tension in the manual traditionbetween those whom he refers to as the “’naturalists,’who located moral norms in ‘objective’ nature” (108), and thosewho were more subject-oriented, he gives no examples of thissecond “sub-tradition” as he called it earlier (101).Apart from Suarez and the Carmelites, not a single moraltheologian from the seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth centuryis discussed or even named.Contemporary TheoriesThe main thrust of Johnstone’s essay is to single out threetypes of “contemporary moral theories” that he believes exemplifya separation between subject and object in their methodol-6See, Joseph Selling, “Veritatis Splendor and the Sources of Morality”,Louvain Studies 19 (1994) 3-17.