Thomas Aquinas Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274) was an Italian Christian philosopher and theologian. Born into wealth and possessing royal connections, he became a Dominican friar after his father died, to the displeasure of his family. After studying in Naples and Paris, he became a respected teacher in Paris. He also taught in Rome and established a Dominican house of studies in Naples. He had an “experience” during a church mass at the end of his life that caused him to believe his work was insignificant, and he ceased to write after completing over sixty works. Aquinas was canonized by Pope John XXII on July 18, 1323. His political thought can be found in his Summa Theologiae (1947), Peter Lombard’s Sentences (1484), commentaries on philosopher Aristotle’s Ethics (2001) and Politics (1962), and a treatise by Giles of Rome titled De Regimine Principum (2008).

Until Aquinas brought Aristotle from Islam back into Western intellectual discourse, Western thought had relied on the Bible, principles put forth by Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo and ancient Greek philosopher Plato, and Neoplatonism. The church had banned Aristotle as contradictory to Christian teaching, but Aquinas synthesized the two and proposed there was no fundamental incompatibility between them. Aquinas assumed a Christian metaphysic and that the world is governed by divine providence and natural law, whereby the rational person participates in the divine purpose by obeying the natural law even when denying God. The role Aquinas gives natural law has attracted great interest in political theory.

A sophisticated analysis of virtue is core to Aquinas’s thinking. Self-preservation and pursuit of God’s knowledge direct human actions, with the goal of life being happiness ultimately found in God in the afterlife. Virtue is the disposition to do the right thing for the right reason, Aquinas contended, and the cultivation of virtue is the primary political end.

The political writings of Aquinas have been variously interpreted as absolutist, monarchist, republican, and mixed constitutionalist. Aquinas argued humanity needs social organization, which in contemporary times means the state. As a complete community in which members are also members of the church, the state must promote the common good. Aquinas portrays political life as natural to humanity, with government as the supreme person or body with power limited by jurisdiction, the common good, and the church. Church leaders have no jurisdiction over secular matters and the state has no right to direct religious affairs, unless the peace and justice of the state is wronged .Aquinas saw kingship as the best form of government, though the people should participate to avoid tyranny. The ruler must promote unity and peace, best achieved by one rather than many. Aquinas thus preserves the participatory nature of the Greek polis and the unity of rule found in the medieval kingdom.

Aquinas believed people are morally obliged to obey just laws and disobey unjust laws. State-authorized morally wrong acts are void and have no effect, suggesting grounds for forcible resistance, including a private right to kill the tyrant as a form of self-defense. An enduring element of Aquinas’s thought is the just war theory. War is a just means to achieving peace, not as a virtue in itself but as an end. A just war must satisfy the three criteria of having the sovereign’s authority, a just cause, and a right intention. Aquinas also examined justice in its distributive and commutative forms and offered thoughts on economic justice, including the just wage.

Aquinas is often passed over in political study, as scholars skip from Aristotle to the Enlightenment; however, he has deeply influenced political thought, especially Catholic social thought, and the Christian Democratic parties of Europe and Latin America. His enduring contribution may be his rejection of an Augustinian tendency to treat government as a result of the fall—the doctrine that humanity became bound by sin through Adam and separated from God, offering a via medea (middle way) between conservative religious suspicion of rationalism and radical suspicion of divinity.

Bibliography:

Baumgarth, William P, and Richard J. Regan. Saint Thomas on Law, Morality, and Politics. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 2003.
Copleston, F. C. Aquinas. London: Penguin Books, 1991.
Kretzman, Norman, and Eleonore Stump. The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Maritan, Jacques. Man and State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.
Thomas Aquinas. St.Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics, edited by Paul E. Sigmund. New York:W.W. Norton, 1987.

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