Thomas Aquinas (1235-1274) was born into a minor Italian noble family. He entered the Dominican Order early in life. Aquinas attended the University of Naples, where he first encountered the writings of Aristotle, which had been preserved by the Muslims and recently rediscovered in the West. In 1245, Aquinas traveled to the University of Paris where he studied under Albert the Great, who attempted to reconcile Aristotle’s view of the world with that of Christianity. Following Albert, Aquinas spent a good bit of his life working on his master work, The Summa Theologica, in which he created a powerful unification of Aristotle and Christian thought. Eventually, Aquinas became a Dominican teacher at the University of Paris and in Italy. He continued to study the works of Aristotle and the Muslim commentaries on them. Aquinas wrote his own commentaries on Aristotle, including one on Aristotle’s Politics.

Root of Human Government

Like Aristotle and ancient writers generally, Aquinas believed that human beings are by nature social animals and created to live in society with one another as a matter of their innate nature. Human beings also by nature seek both their own good and a common good, both of which require social interaction and some kind of public order. Thus, Aquinas believes that “there can be no good of one’s own apart from the common good, whether the common good of a household or a city or a kingdom.” [1]

Aquinas, like Aristotle, believes human society has an organic or natural origin in human nature in the family and in small villages and communities, not a contractual origin. Human families, communities, kingdoms and empires represent the gradual development of human society and polity over the course of time. Thus, contractual agreements between persons and governments are not a primary but a secondary, emergent phenomenon as regards government.

Given the diversity of human societies, it is not surprising that there are varieties of ways in which human sociality organizes itself. Aquinas, as a student of Aristotle, adopts the same typology has Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero in developing his theory of human government. Aquinas holds that are three basic types of human government, rule by the many, rule by the few, and rule by a single individual. Each of these three typologies have manifestations that reflect human goodness and potential and human sin and failure. Democracy can become mob rule, rule by the wise can become rule by the wealthy or the powerful. Rule by one wise ruler can become a government of tyranny. Although there is some dispute over which form Aquinas prefers, it seems that he, like many ancients, felt that the rule of one with a degree of mixture of the forms is the best and most stable form of government. Thus, Aquinas supports kingship, but with an element of checks and balances.

Nature of Law

The basic institution of society is the rule of law. Without law, it is impossible to organize a peaceful society. Without law, violence would be the only arbiter of disputes. Aquinas outlines four basic categories of law:

1. Eternal lawis God’s divine order, not fully knowable to humans (ST I-II, Q 92, Third Article). This eternal law determines creation, the way things such as animals and planets behave, and how people should The Word of God expresses the Eternal Word (ST I-II, Q 93, First Article). “And so, eternal law is simply the plan of divine wisdom that directs the actions and movement of created things” (ST I-II, Q 93, First Article).
2. Divine law is that divine law promulgated by the Bible, which orders the way in which individuals seek and find a relationship with God and orders their search for ultimate ends (ST I-II, Q 91, Fourth Article). The Divine Law also gives guidance to human beings as to moral matters which human limitations find difficult to observe (ST I-II, Q 91, Fourth Article).
3. Natural law is that law that is implanted in human nature and guides human beings in their day to day activities as they exercise their reason and conscience (ST I-II, Q 94, First Article). This law is related to practical reason, which I will deal with later in this essay.
4. Human lawis very much like what we would call “positive law.”  It is a law promulgated by a lawful authority and varies with time, place, and circumstance. Aquinas defined this last type of law as “an ordinance of reason for the common good” made and enforced by a ruler or government (ST I-II, Q 95, First Article).

The modern world tends to ignore the first three categories and focus only on the final category of law—positive law. What Aquinas calls “eternal law” survives in secular culture only in the form of what we would term “physical law,” and even that category of law has come under attack by post-modern absolute relativists. [2] Divine law no longer has relevance in most secular discourse. For example, the fact that the Bible condemns certain sexual or other actions is not deemed to be relevant for most political discourse. The relevance of natural law is often questioned in the modern world and will be dealt with in an entire section below.

This leaves human or positive law as the only category of law remaining to impact government in its activities, except insofar as physical law might make some laws simply impossible. In addition, “human law” has come increasingly to mean “the preferences of the majority or those powerful enough to impose their will on society.” Once again, in this turn we see the power focus of modernity at work.

Aristotle would not have thought that human or positive law as simply what the majority desired to enact at any particular point in history. Again, a law promulgated by a majority that did not seek the common good, but only the good of a bare majority for the benefit only of the majority would not be a desirable law, for the law was enacted by the action of a mob not of a majority of people seeking the common good. This idea that what legislators do or should do is seek the common good is a good bridge to the idea of natural law.

Natural Law

Natural law as a moral and natural foundation for law is not widely supported by legal theorists or political philosophers. However, there is no element of Aquinas’s system more important than his theory of natural law, which is an important foundation of natural law thinking even today. Understanding Aquinas is foundational to understanding any other proposal for natural law thinking. Therefore, this week’s blog focuses on this aspect of Aquinas’ thought.

As previously indicated, the mere sociability of human beings causes human beings to create governments (ST I-II, Question 95). Human nature inclines human beings to certain kinds of actions and disinclines them from other actions, and the things to which human beings are inclined constitute the natural law (ST I-II, Q 94). Just as human beings seek their own personal good, the sociability of human beings leads human societies to seek some kind of common good, and that common good allows human society to be naturally ordered towards what is best for society as a whole (ST I-II, Q 94). This natural law is a matter of human reason, for human reason properly used seeks a common good that will properly order society towards a common good.

Natural law is not a matter of specific legislation found either in nature or divine revelation. It is a set of general principles that order a society, i.e. general ideas that most human beings would agree upon as natural to organize their society (ST I-II, Q 94, 50). Aquinas realized that not all human beings could or would agree upon these principles, for among other matters, people can simply close their hearts and minds to the natural law, which I would argue our own society has done. By habit, twisted persons do not seek the common good but only their own good or the good only of their particular group. These people have lost the ability to discern the natural law, which requires one be able to seek a common good for everyone. Finally, human beings are finite and can make mistakes and misunderstand what is best for the common good. Thus, what any given human thinks at any given time is not determinative of whether natural law exists or what its precise content might include.

Basic Principle of Natural Law

Aquinas fundamentally sees the natural law as habits of human reason that reflect the rational nature of human beings to seek virtue and goodness (ST I-II, Q 94, First Article). C. S. Lewis describes the ultimate moral and spiritual content of the natural law as follows:

It is Nature, the Way, and the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the way in which things everlasting emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every human being should tread in imitation of that cosmic and super-cosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar.” [3]

What Lewis describes in mystical terms as the “Tao” is very much like what in Christian terms we might call “the ultimate content of Natural Law”.

According to Aquinas, the basic principle of natural law is “…that we should do and seek good and shun evil. All the other precepts of that natural law are based on that precept….” (ST I-II, Q 94, Second Article). Thus, Aquinas believes that the basic idea of the natural law is that human beings should seek the common good as well as their own good and avoid those things that impair individual and common good. The kinds of things that can be incorporated into the idea of natural law are (i) actions resulting from the human natural inclination to do good, (ii) natural inclinations leading to actions that humans share with animals, and (iii) inclinations to the good that are part of our reasonable nature (ST I-II, Q 94, Second Article).

Before looking at objections to natural law theory, it is important to ponder its strengths. Most human beings do not think that cold blooded murder, stealing, violence, deceit, failure to pay debts, and a variety of other actions are conducive to their own or the common good. Looking at the categories of governmental types listed earlier, most people do not think that tyranny, rule of the few for their private benefit, or mob rule are conducive to their private or the public good. In some sense it is “natural” for human beings to reject such things as a part of their social order.

In Western societies, we tend to look at the areas of disagreement about natural law and forget that there are a great many matters about which almost everyone does agree. This indicates that there are some things that most people think are right and wrong—a strong indication that there are certain notions of the public good that are universal (or nearly so) among human beings.

Modern thinkers have not been inclined to see the idea of natural law mentioned above to be self-evident. For example, many thinkers, including some Christian thinkers, do not think that there is a “natural good” that humans seek by nature. Our natural inclinations, for example sexual relations between men and women are no longer viewed as “natural” by many people. Finally, while our reason does incline human beings to ordered society, as indicated above, there are vast differences in what people think that rational order might be.

There are no easy answers to these objections. One place to begin is the notion that the fact that a particular aspect of law fails to command universal consent does not mean that it is not something that might well violate natural law. For example, I have many friends that do not think that the activities of some investment banking firms in the mortgage backed bond crisis acted in an improper manner, even when they sold their clients securities that they knew were highly dangerous and unlikely to be paid in full. Under the impact of a kind of radical free market ideal, they see nothing wrong with this kind of behavior. On the other hand, no society can really hold together when investors cannot trust their own financial intermediaries. It is my view that there is something wrong with the views of my friends, something they cannot see because of an ideological prejudice.

For Christians, the notion that all persons are blinded by sin to see the perfect content of truth and some people are blinded by persistent sin explains both the difficulty all people find in perceiving what might be the natural common good for their society and their own personal good as human beings. Finally, the fact that we human beings are finite and often err in what we believe and do, sometimes for long periods of time warns that error can and often does persist for long periods of time until human experience reveals the best content of law.

Conclusion

This is not the end of my time examining Thomas Aquinas. Next week, we are going to look at the role practical reason in this thought and some specific issues, such as his just war theory. This week, we have just covered the surface of his work on politics, the nature of political communities, the nature of law, and the potential of natural law theory to provide a way for human societies to seek the common good.

I want to leave readers with one aspect of Aquinas that we have lost in our society—the idea that human beings are naturally rational and sociable, and therefore are able to discern a good for themselves and a common good for their society. The notion of the common good as something we must seek to the exclusion of power is important to recover in our society.

Copyright 2020, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] Thomas Aquinas, On Law, Morality and Politics Translated by Richard J. Regan, Edited by William P. Baumgarth and Richard J. Regan, Second Edition (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2002), 198. The quote is from the Summa Theologica (hereafter “ST”), ST: Q 47 Tenth Article.

[2] I may return to the potential relevance of this notion of eternal law in a future blog. One interesting proposal in modern physics is the idea of David Bohm that the order we see in the universe (the explicate order) is the “unfolded form” of an “implicate order” that is beyond human perception until and unless it is unfolded” into physical reality. Similarly, one might consider that the eternal order of God, physical, moral, and spiritual, including natural law, is enfolded and implicate in the undivided wholeness of the universe and the transcendent being of God until unfolded by the progress of human society and disciplined philosophical, moral and legal inquiry in response to human contact with an emerging social and intellectual reality. See, David Bohm, Wholeness and Implicate Order (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1980).

[3] C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York, Collier Books, a division of Macmillan, 1955): 28.