Restitution in the Catholic Moral Theology Before the Early Modern Times: Main Contexts

Restitution (Latin “restitutio”) in the sense of returning or restoring the original state was taken by Christian theologians and canonists from Roman law. Its semantic meaning was later enriched with the biblical (both Old and New Testament) emphasis of restoring the (so­cial) peace and harmony broken with someone; through the prism of restitution they con­sider not only the settlement of various kinds of conflicts in the Christian community, but also the return of those who had gone astray to the bosom of the Church. By the 13th century, two main understandings of “restitutio” gradually emerged and began to be used in theologi­cal and canonical writings simultaneously: restitution as a key condition for the forgiveness of sins in confession (under the influence of Augustine’s maxim “sin cannot be forgiven un­til what is taken is returned”) and restitution as an act of commutative justice (under the in­fluence of the Aristotelian doctrine of justice in the works of the Summists, primarily in Thomas Aquinas’ “Summa Theologica”). Although both interpretations retained their specificity by the beginning of the Modern period, they increasingly began to combine and influence each other, which led, in particular, to the inclusion of non-material goods (reputa­tion, for example) in the restitution obligation, to the development of a number of legitimate conditions and grounds for postponing restitution, and to an increasing consideration of the rights and interests of the injured party in the restitution procedure.