# The active will can also receive healing

Commentary on Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.

On [CH08.P023](https://glosses.org/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH08.P023/#char=1646,1709): "All moral reform must start in the active not the passive will."

The demand for personal rejection of sin has a close theological parallel in Thomas Aquinas: justification requires the rational adult's free will both to turn toward God and to turn away from sin (*Summa theologiae*, I–II, question 113, articles 3 and 5). But Aquinas makes that willing movement itself an effect of God's grace. Receiving and acting are therefore compatible; the sinner's activity need not mean self-salvation. The inspected English text is the Fathers of the English Dominican Province translation, online at New Advent; the *Summa* was composed in the thirteenth century. [Question 113](https://www.newadvent.org/summa/2113.htm).

Nor does this tradition reject medical imagery. Aquinas describes ignorance, malice, weakness and disordered desire as wounds of human nature (I–II, question 85, article 3). [Question 85](https://www.newadvent.org/summa/2085.htm). Chesterton's patient/sinner contrast is thus most useful as a protest against eliminating repentance from reform, rather than as a complete account of Christian moral healing. His deliberately comic grammar makes dependence and action appear mutually exclusive where Aquinas's account joins them.

## Sources

- [Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I–II, question 113](https://www.newadvent.org/summa/2113.htm), Articles 3 and 5, I answer that; English Dominican translation
- [Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I–II, question 85](https://www.newadvent.org/summa/2085.htm), Article 3, I answer that; English Dominican translation

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