St. Thomas Aquinas

Ernest Fortin’s second entry in History of Political Philosophy focuses on St. Thomas Aquinas, who is perhaps the most famous philosopher of the Middle Ages, and certainly it’s most famous Aristotelian, as he was able to brilliantly synthesize Aristotelian philosophy with the already existing paradigm of Western thought, which combined the Bible, Platonic-Stoic philosophy and Roman law into a new system which would serve as the dominate strain of thought in Western Christendom for several centuries.

Despite the massive influence Aristotle would later play in the development of Western thought, the West was actually late to the Aristotle game due to the fact Aristotle was not translated into Western languages until later, which lead initially to Muslims and Jews making more use of Aristotle’s works. Despite this late start, St. Thomas Aquinas had a major advantage over his Muslim and Jewish counterparts, as unlike the other Abrahamic religions, which held philosophy at arm’s length with few notable exceptions, Christianity had no such bias and in fact, the study of philosophy was even required. Due to this, Christianity became more Aristotelian while Judaism and Islam were more Platonic, and even then, they were more skeptical of the influence of Greek philosophy than their Christian counterparts were. According to Fortin, this may because Judaism and Islam saw themselves as a set of divine laws while Christianity was more focused on faith. It is for this reason that while both Islam and Judaism saw jurisprudence as the highest science while Christians saw that to be theology. The move away from jurisprudence to theology of the highest science, for Fortin, was also a major factor in the traditional Christian distinction between spiritual and temporal power. The focus on both theology and philosophy, and the separation of law with God lead to Aquinas’s view of reason and revelation operating by two different functions, though both remained highly important.   

Aquinas had a bigger impact on Western thought than just theology as he also made significant insights into political philosophy. As with one of his chief mentors, Aristotle, Aquinas starts out by seeing man as a political animal that must have civil society. In Aquinas’s thought though, there are differing levels to this civil society. The first level and the basic building block of society is the family, which provides basic protection and satisfies needs. The second level is the city which gives the protection the family cannot provide as well as bring man into fullness. As with Plato and Aristotle, the city is of central importance, and thus the common good is to take precedent over the private good. Still, not all cities are created equal, for as with it was for the Greeks, there are just cities and unjust cities. For Aquinas, governance is what distinguishes cities from one another. Aquinas takes the importance of governance to an extreme conclusion as he sees a just absolute monarch as the best form of government, but an unjust absolute monarch as the most dangerous form of government. Still, ultimately Aquinas realizes that it is unlikely the non-virtuous masses would chose a virtuous king to rule over them, thus the rule of the virtuous must be balance with the rule of consent. Still, the making of the law is not seen as a democratic process as Aquinas sees lawmaking as something that should be done by the moral few. Aquinas’s reason for doing this is because he sees morality as something that arises though practice, and is thus something few can attain. Though he has an undemocratic view on the making of laws, Aquinas is far more optimistic on the nature of reason as he sees it is something all in society have. Despite his seeing the family and the city as two differing levels of society, Aquinas is still careful not to entirely equate them as the unity of the family and the unity of the city are seen as two different things, thus maintaining the public/ private distinction.

Drawing from Aristotle, Aquinas sees morality as a practice. For this reason it is not enough that a moral man merely studies natural law, but also must come into contact with it and acted with it as well. Furthermore, Aquinas sees all moral virtue as ultimately being based in what he calls the four cardinal virtues. They are as follows: 1) Moderation, which introduces reason to man’s appetitive part, 2) Courage, which rectifies man’s spirited part, 3) Justice, which is seen as being found in the will and regulates man’s dealings with other men, and finally 4) Prudence, which regulates the proper exercise of all other virtues. All other virtues are seen as part of these virtues and are also grouped into three parts. The parts are as follows: the subjective parts, the potential parts, and the integral parts. The subjective parts are the various species into which a given virtue can be divided according to the matter with which it dwells. The potential parts are those virtues that deal with a secondary act or matter of a principle virtue and do not contain in themselves the full essence or power of that virtue. Integral parts are not complete virtues in and of themselves, but represent the various elements that are needed for the formation of a complete virtue.

Drawing once again from Aristotle, Aquinas sees morality as also being connected to the “Golden Mean,” but Aquinas does offer some modifications to Aristotle’s original theory, for while Aristotle’s original scheme required complete knowledge of a situation in order to act morally, Aquinas ultimately sees this as impossible. Therefore, Aquinas attempts to solve this by making man a greater part of the moral order and more greatly involved in direct participation, which is done though natural law, thereby giving all people an idea of morals. On the subject of natural law, it is important to remember that while it is of great importance, it is still only a first step in the formation of a moral person as it can only establish basic morality. After that point, divine law is needed. It is also important to remember that for Aquinas, moral principles must be reasonable in order for them to be useful, thus avoiding schemes of morality that no one can really follow. But while moral theory for Aquinas has a definite ceiling, it also has a definite floor as no one can act against natural law out of ignorance. Aquinas also differs from Aristotle in that for Aquinas, morality is completely centered in God.

Natural law has a greater use for Aquinas that just to create a base foundation for morality, as it also helps synthesize Biblical faith and Abrahamic philosophy. This synthesis is due to natural law’s ability to bridge both reason and revelation. Tying into this synthesis is the distinction Aquinas makes between God’s intellect and God’s will, which enables a far more robust conception of God’s free will, and as a result, human free will to be created. The synthesis Aquinas created also caused a major shift in the Aristotelian conception of happiness. For Aristotle, happiness is this world based. For Aquinas however, happiness is based in the next world as he must take into account the Christian conception of the afterlife.

Though Aquinas has commonly been accused of “baptizing Aristotle,” in reality, Aquinas was quite aware of the limitations involved in his project. Ultimately, this assured the survival of Aristotelian philosophy in Christendom during the Middle Ages as by recognizing the limits of his project, Aquinas was sure to place Aristotle under the Church, due to this, it was much easier for Christians to accept Aristotle in a way the Muslims and the Jews were more weary of, thus preventing any major move to kick Aristotelian philosophy out of Christianity as there was in Islam.

Along with St. Augustine, whom Ernest Fortin also contributed the essay for in History of Political Philosophy, St. Thomas Aquinas is the best known Christian outside of the New Testament that lived before 1500. Along with St. Augustine, Aquinas also helped formulate the modern West as Western culture has often been described as the marriage between Athens (Greek philosophy), Rome (the Roman legal tradition), and Jerusalem (the Christian religion via Judaism), a marriage which Aquinas helped to formulate. He was also a major player in Scholasticism, which dominated Western thought for several hundred years. Though Scholasticism eventually fell out of favor, Aquinas is still more than of simple historical importance and still has much to offer the philosophical debate today, which Fortin shows in his essay. The essay, to be sure, does not go over the limitations of Aquinas’s philosophy, but as an introduction to his political thought, which is what it was intended to do, it works very well.