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Thomas Aquinas's Political Science: Philosophy or Theology?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2024

Steven Waldorf
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Abstract

This article examines whether Aquinas's political science is philosophy or theology, a question that arises from his understanding of happiness. If the supernatural vision of God constitutes perfect beatitude or the ultimate end, then how can an account of imperfect happiness—political virtue—be given without reference to it and hence without appeal to revealed theology? I argue that Aquinas provides a strictly philosophical account of imperfect happiness by showing that, among temporal goods, virtue most fully instantiates general attributes of beatitude such as self-sufficiency and continuity, even though it does not perfectly instantiate them. This way of demonstrating the superiority of virtue to other temporal goods requires no appeal to supernatural beatitude, and thus political science, which takes this imperfect happiness as its first principle, is philosophy.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , First View , pp. 1 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of University of Notre Dame

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References

1 Aquinas, Thomas, Commentary on Aristotle's “Nicomachean Ethics” (Sententia libri Ethicorum), trans. C. J. Litzinger, OP (Chicago: Regnery, 1964; repr. Notre Dame, IN: Dumb Ox Books, 1993), 1.1.3–6Google Scholar (hereafter SLE). Translations of Aquinas are from the editions cited, with minor modifications based on the Leonine Latin text. See Thomas Aquinas, Opera omnia (Rome: Leonine Commission, 1882–).

2 Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle's “Politics” (Sententia libri Politicorum), trans. Richard Regan (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2007), prol., 2.

3 Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 163–64Google Scholar.

4 Bradley, Denis, Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good: Reason and Human Happiness in Aquinas's Moral Science (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 375Google Scholar.

5 SLE 1.2.30–31; SLE 1.19.225; Aquinas, On Kingship, to the King of Cypress (De regno), trans. Gerald Phelan (Toronto: Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies, 1949), 2.3.106 (hereafter DR).

6 Bradley, Aquinas, 492. See also SLE 1.12.139.

7 Bradley, Aquinas, 528.

8 Feingold, Lawrence, The Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas Aquinas and His Interpreters, 2nd ed. (Naples, FL: Sapientia, 2010), 1–46, 397–428Google Scholar; Long, Steven A., “On the Possibility of a Purely Natural End for Man,” The Thomist 64 (2000): 211–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Long, Steven A., Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 10–51Google Scholar. For a review of the history of this position and critiques of it, see Feingold, Natural Desire, xxv–xxxvii.

9 Cajetan, commentary on Summa theologiae I.12.1, X (Leonine ed., 4:116). See Lubac, Henri de, Augustinisme et théologie moderne (Paris: Cerf, 2008), 183–223Google Scholar, for a history of Cajetan's claim.

10 Porter, Jean, Nature as Reason: A Thomistic Theory of Natural Law (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 158Google Scholar.

11 Ernest Fortin, “St. Thomas Aquinas,” in History of Political Philosophy, 3rd ed., ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 252.

12 Livio Melina, La conoscenza morale: Linee di riflessione sul Commento di san Tommaso all'Etica Nicomachea (Rome: Città Nuova Editrice, 1987), 135–37.

13 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947–1948), I.12.1, I-II.3.8 (hereafter ST); Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, trans. Vernon J. Bourke (Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1956; repr., Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 3.51.1 (hereafter SCG).

14 ST I-II.3.7–8.

15 ST I-II.3.5.

16 ST I.26.2.

17 Francisco de Vitoria, De beatitudine, I-II.5.5, 3–4, ed. Augusto Sarmiento (Navarre: Eunsa, 2012), 167–70. Although Vitoria held that for Aquinas only the vision of God can satisfy the natural desire for beatitude, he does not explain how Thomas can give an account of natural happiness without reference to this ultimate end.

18 For a comprehensive critique of the first solution―which exceeds the scope of this article given the lengthy history of the debate over it―see Bradley, Aquinas, 424–534.

19 Jacques Maritain, Science and Wisdom, trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Scribner's, 1954), 110.

20 Ibid., 102–27, 174–209; Jacques Maritain, An Essay on Christian Philosophy, trans. Edward H. Flannery (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955), 38–43, 61–100.

21 William McCormick, SJ, “Jacques Maritain on Political Theology,” European Journal of Political Theory 12 (2013): 176–90.

22 Vernon Bourke, Ethics: A Textbook in Moral Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1951), 41–43.

23 Ibid., 41.

24 Bradley, Aquinas, 495–506; Santiago Ramírez, OP, review of Distinguer pour unir, ou Les degrés du savoir, by Jacques Maritain, Bulletin thomiste 4 (1934–1936): 423–32, cited in Bradley, Aquinas, 502.

25 Ralph McInerny, The Question of Christian Ethics (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1993), 21–38.

26 James Doig, Aquinas's Philosophical Commentary on the “Ethics”: A Historical Perspective (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 109–93, especially 122–35.

27 Martin Rhonheimer, The Perspective of Morality: Philosophical Foundations of Thomistic Virtue Ethics, trans. Gerald Malsbary (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 78–81.

28 Kevin Staley, “Happiness: The Natural End of Man?,” The Thomist 53 (1989): 229–31.

29 Anthony Celano, “The Concept of Worldly Beatitude in the Writings of Thomas Aquinas,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 25 (1987): 215–26; Jörn Müller, “Duplex beatitudo: Aristotle's Legacy and Aquinas's Conception of Human Happiness,” in Aquinas and the “Nicomachean Ethics,” ed. Tobias Hoffmann, Jörn Müller, and Matthias Perkams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 52–71.

30 “[For Aquinas] ‘penultimate’ ends can only be rightly understood in subordination to the ultimate end.” Bradley, Aquinas, 492.

31 For Aquinas “all ends [i.e., goods] derive their ‘end-likeness’ or very appetibility [and hence their goodness] from being further ordered to the last end.” Long, “Possibility,” 219.

32 ST I-II.3.5. Contemplation in accordance with wisdom is the speculative knowledge of the first cause and its causality in relation to created being, in other words, of God's existence, causality, and naturally knowable attributes. For Aquinas this specific form of contemplation constitutes temporal happiness.

33 ST I-II.3.5. See also SCG 3.34.6; SCG 3.35.5.

34 ST I-II.3.5.

35 ST I-II.3.8.

36 SCG 3.47; SCG 3.48.1.

37 ST I-II.3.2, ad 4.

38 ST I-II.3.3, ad 2.

39 SCG 3.37.4.

40 ST I-II.3.2, ad 4. See also SCG 3.48.7.

41 SLE 1.9.112, 114; SLE 10.10.2093.

42 SLE 10.10.2095. Friends, though a help to contemplation, are not necessary for it, since contemplative operations are internal to the agent. See SLE 10.10.2096.

43 SLE 10.10.2093–94. See also SCG 3.37.6.

44 ST I-II.5.4; ST I-II.4.7.

45 SLE 10.11.2098–99.

46 “The whole of political life seems directed [to contemplative happiness]; as long as the arrangement of political life establishes and preserves peace giving men the opportunity of contemplating truth” (SLE 10.11.2101).

47 SLE 10.11.2098–103.

48 SLE 10.11.2103.

49 ST I-II.4.1–2.

50 SLE 10.10.2090.

51 SLE 7.14.1535.

52 ST I-II.4.2.

53 ST I-II.5.4.

54 The Ethics commentary also repeats the Summa arguments which show that happiness consists in contemplation because of the continuity of contemplatio and because this activity is the act of the highest human power in respect of its highest object. See SLE 10.10.2088–89; SLE 10.10.2087.

55 ST I-II.66.3. He adds that because moral virtues direct the acts of all other powers, they correspond more to the nature of virtue since virtue is an act. Strictly speaking, however, intellectual virtues are better and more desirable.

56 SLE 10.12.2120; SLE 10.11.2101; SCG 3.37.7; and ST I-II.66.5.

57 SLE 1.10.127–28.

58 ST I-II.24.1, ad 2.

59 ST I-II.69.2. For further discussion of the principally contemplative character of this inchoate supernatural beatitude, see ST I-II.68.7; II-II.45.1–2; II-II.45.3, ad 1, 3; II-II.45.6.

60 As Charles De Koninck suggests, the philosophical contemplation that constitutes temporal happiness is the first principle of political science not in that the civic good is merely an instrument to the individual philosopher's contemplation, but rather in that the common good of the community requires for its realization that some devote themselves to contemplating the truth. All aspects of political life, as Aquinas maintains (see note 46), should be arranged so as to make this contemplation―the crowning element of the common good―possible. Charles De Koninck, The Primacy of the Common Good against the Personalists, trans. Ralph McInerny, in The Writings of Charles De Koninck, vol. 2 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 100; Charles De Koninck, In Defence of St. Thomas, trans. Ralph McInerny, in Writings of Charles De Koninck, 2:299–316. For further discussion of the noninstrumental character of the common good, see Lawrence Dewan, OP, “St. Thomas, John Finnis, and the Political Good,” The Thomist 64 (2000): 337–74; Michael Pakaluk, “Is the Common Good of Political Society Limited and Instrumental?,” Review of Metaphysics 55 (2001): 57–94; Gregory Froelich, “Ultimate End and Common Good,” The Thomist 57 (1993): 609–19.

61 On the text's hortatory character, see William McCormick, SJ, The Christian Structure of Politics: On the “De Regno” of Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2022), 18–19; Mark Jordan, “De Regno and the Place of Political Thinking in Thomas Aquinas,” Medioevo 18 (1992): 151–68; Holly Hamilton Bleakley, “The Art of Ruling in Aquinas's De Regimine Principum,” History of Political Thought 20 (1999): 575–602.

62 DR, prol., 1.

63 DR 2.3.106.

64 DR 2.3.107.

65 DR 2.4.115–16.

66 Charles McCoy, “St. Thomas and Political Science,” in On the Intelligibility of Political Philosophy: Essays of Charles N. R. McCoy (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1989), 36.

67 Benjamin Smith, “Political Theology and Thomas Aquinas: A Reading of the De Regno,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 84 (2010): 103–4.

68 Some scholars claim that De regno is in tension with Aquinas's other works on the relation of the political good to the supernatural end. I. T. Eschmann, “St. Thomas Aquinas on the Two Powers,” Mediaeval Studies 20 (1958): 177–205; Paul Sigmund, “Law and Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, ed. Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 219. But as we will see, this is not the case. For critiques of Eschmann, see McCormick, William SJ, “‘A Unity of Order’: Aquinas on the End of Politics,” Nova et Vetera 21 (2023): 1019–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Leonard Boyle, OP, “The De Regno and the Two Powers,” in Facing History: A Different Thomas Aquinas (Louvain-la-Neuve: Collège Cardinal Mercier, 2000), 1–12; Fitzgerald, Laurence OP, “St. Thomas Aquinas and the Two Powers,” Angelicum 56 (1979): 515–56Google Scholar.

69 DR 2.3.108.

70 Aquinas, Scriptum super libros Sententiarum IV, d. 20, q. 1, a. 4, qca. 3, sol. 3, ad 2 (hereafter Sent.); Aquinas, Super Epistolam B. Pauli ad Hebraeos lectura, c. V, l. 1; ST I-II.104.1, ad 1. Cited in Fitzgerald, “Aquinas and the Two Powers,” 545–46.

71 Aquinas, On the Virtues in General, in Disputed Questions on Virtue, trans. Jeffrey Hause and Claudia Murphy (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2010), art. 9, resp., 141–56.

72 Sent. II, d. 44, q. 3, a. 4, in Aquinas: Political Writings, trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 277–78.

73 Sent. II, d. 44, q. 3, a. 4, in Aquinas: Political Writings, 278. Emphasis added.

74 See also ST II-II.60.6, ad 3.

75 ST III supp. 57.2, ad 4. Aquinas holds, however, that since only sacramental marriage involving Christians is ordered to eternal beatitude, the church lacks authority to regulate marriages between non-Christians. These marriages bear solely on the temporal good and thus fall entirely under the state's jurisdiction. ST III supp. 59.2.

76 ST II-II.10.11.

77 ST II-II.11.3.

78 ST II-II.39.4, ad 3.

79 See also Sent. IV, d. 37, q. 2, a. 2, exp. text. For further discussion of Aquinas's view of the church's coercive authority, see Reichberg, Gregory, “Scholastic Arguments for and against Religious Freedom,” The Thomist 84 (2020): 1–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mary Keys, Aquinas, Aristotle, and the Promise of the Common Good (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 226–34; Charles McCoy, The Structure of Political Thought: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 120.

80 DR 2.4.115–16.

81 DR 2.3.110.

82 DR 2.3.111.

83 ST I-II.106.3.

84 Once a person accepts Christianity, it becomes a dictate of right reason and of natural law to abide by it inasmuch as it would be unreasonable to reject divinely revealed truth. This obligation, however, does not belong to the natural law absolutely considered, since only those to whom Christianity has been revealed are bound by it. See ST II-II.81.2, ad 3; ST II-II.85.4; ST II-II.85.1, ad 1.

85 Guerra, Marc, “Beyond Natural Law Talk: Politics and Prudence in St. Thomas Aquinas's On Kingship,” Perspectives on Political Science 31 (2002): 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86 ST II-II.81.1–3, 5; ST II-II.85.1, 4; ST II-II.94.1. On the political implications of natural religion for Aquinas, see McCormick, Christian Structure, 180; Douglas Kries, “The Virtue of Religion in the Political Thought of Thomas Aquinas,” Proceedings of the Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Conference 15 (1990): 103–15; Kries, Douglas, “Thomas Aquinas and the Politics of Moses,” Review of Politics 52 (1990): 98–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87 SLE 1.9.107–17.

88 Henry Veatch, “Natural Law: Dead or Alive?,” in Swimming against the Current in Contemporary Philosophy (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press), 265.

89 Farrell, Walter and Adler, Mortimer, “The Theory of Democracy, Part III: The End of the State―Happiness,” The Thomist 4 (1942): 127–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar, cited in Staley, “Happiness,” 223.