He denounced the ambiguity of the positive law, of human regulations and traditions, easily transformed into instruments of money, violence against the weak, and individualistic utilitarianism, with a sort of short circuit.

Anthony concentrated, instead, all of his thought on the law of God, on the new justice of the Kingdom which consists in the sanctity of a life renewed by baptism, reinvigorated by the gifts of the Holy Spirit, brightened by the practice of the evangelical beatitudes on the example of the life of Christ and of the "forma vivendi" of the saints.

Saint Anthony does not mean by this to bypass human laws and institutions. Rather, he wants to render their intimate essence and ends true, with an opening and obedience to the divine law: that law not written, but sealed in the conscience of each man with the light of reason, and that one revealed by God in the Bible. Human law, therefore, is in this way surpassed, not suspended.

From this point of view, he seems, therefore, an "imprudent" man. Certainly, he was very well aware of the mechanisms of the society of his day, the tortuous paths of power, the political and military forces in play on the European chessboard, the dynamism of the new middle classes in the cities in incipient economic-financial transactions.

With the "imprudence" typical of saints, as in our day the world has been able to admire the humble servant of the poor, Theresa of Calcutta, Anthony wants people to understand that the laws of man are not enough to safeguard people or states from their downfall. What is needed, above all, is for the heart to make a profound conversion to God, to reconcile with its love of the Father, from which the force of love and peace with one's neighbour and all of creation is derived.

Beyond the duress of law and positive laws, it is necessary to rely on a moral reform that touches the intimacy of the conscience, that lights up the intuition of new values and that sustains the joy of virtuous practices. Our Saint could not deceive himself about the capacity of the external orders, which were purely legal. Then, as today, a practice based on a pure procedural justice did not guarantee correct and fraternal human relationships if not accompanied and sustained by a profound transformation of the heart, for which acting virtuously originates spontaneously from friendship and benevolence toward others.

This new model of moral and spiritual life can be acquired only through the exercise of reason and with the gift of divine grace, which give us the strength to observe God's commandments, resisting temptation, which wants to make us fall from the "superior waters" of divine communion down into the "inferior waters" of sensuality and sin. Before sin, as a matter of fact, human nature was beautiful in its natural qualities, fertile like an olive tree for its gift of grace, splendid in its joy and heavenly purity;
but fooled by the diabolical suggestion promising an illusory equality with God, it became as sterile as a desert, incurring the triple self-destructive curse of arrogance, avarice and lasciviousness.

In this job of healing a wounded nature, inclined to do evil, the first Franciscan theologian asked, with great balance, for the intervention and the decision of the single will to cooperate with the aid of inspiration and divine grace.

God, in fact, aids us, but he does not want to substitute himself for our free will. Our justification is always the result of two joint causes: from our voluntary assent and from divine cooperation.

Anthony's ethic does not have the Kantian stamp of the law, the obsession of duty for duty's sake. Rather, it aims at the birth and the development of virtues, pivoting on the profound desire for happiness and self-perfection that is at the heart of every man, aspiring to a good and complete life, as stated in classic and Medieval ethics, from Aristotle to Augustine and Thomas.

The scope of our lives is not subjugation to the laws, but acquisition of that joy that wells up from the full realisation of being free and in the communion with the highest good which is given to us by God himself. In this sense, Anthony, even though he was neither a jurist nor a philosopher, is in line with the most recent rediscovery and rehabilitation of the ethics of virtue, breaking off from and going beyond the moral thought of modernity, both of relative subjectivism and Kantian austerity.