"To begin to see what the gifts of the Holy Spirit are and something of the way in which Aquinas's ethical theory is meant to work, take, for example, courage. On Aquinas's theory, courage can be considered as [1] an Aristotelian virtue, as [2] an infused virtue, or as [3] a gift of the Holy Spirit. Courage as [1] an Aristotelian virtue is a disposition which an agent acquires for himself and which facilitates reason's governing that agent in such a way as to make him a good citizen of an earthly community. Considered in this way, courage can fail to be a moral disposition; and it can be had even by those who are not moral people. Courage considered as [2] an infused virtue is a disposition which is infused into a person by God and which makes that person suitable for the community of heaven. Considered in this way, courage is a real virtue, but it is not courage in its full form. For courage in its full form, one needs courage as [3] a gift of the Holy Spirit. Considered as a gift, however, courage is very different even from courage as an infused virtue. Taken as a gift, courage manifests itself in a disposition to act on the settled conviction that one is united to God now and will be united to God in heaven when one dies.""For Aquinas, then, the contribution of the fruits of the Holy Spirit to the moral life is not a matter of the passions being governed by reason, any more than it is in the case of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Rather, the fruits of the Holy Spirit are a matter of having emotions, spiritual analogues to the passions, transformed in second-personal connection to God. This is a far cry from Robert George's view of Aquinas as basing the moral life in reason's having the whip hand over emotion."
Eleanor Stump, "The non-Aristotelian character of Aquinas's ethics," in Faith, rationality, and the passions, ed. Sarah Coakley (Malden, MA: Wiley, 2012), 97, 103 (91-106). The phrase "the touchstone of all morality" comes from p. 104. This can also be listened to here.
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