St. Thomas Aquinas and Law

Extract

A quotation from the fearless and original thought of Baron Friedrich von Hugel will be our justification with those who may consider our praise of St. Thomas Aquinas unjustly superlative. He writes : . this Norman-Italian Friar Noble, a soul so apparently derivative and abstractive, is more complete and balanced and penetrates to the specific genus of Christianity more deeply than Saints Paul and Augustine, with all their directness and intensity. .... No one has put this point better than Professor Troeltsch : “The decisive point here is the conception peculiar to the Middle Ages of what is Christian as supernatural.”’

Whilst I hesitate to give my master, St. Thomas, the praise of this latest panegyrist, I feel that his words will be a clue to my attempt to deal with St. Thomas and Law. Indeed, the names mentioned in the quotation are more akin to the subject of this paper than, perhaps, the writer thought. In the life of St. Paul the idea of Law had played almost the major part. The seeming opposition between Law and faith, or works and faith, had, for a moment, led him into opposition with a section of the Church; and even with St. Peter. Augustine, too, like St. Paul, had come to an intellectual and practical rejection of Manichean Dualism by the master-vision of a creative Law which was, at the same time, one, good, and all-powerful; indeed so powerful in its goodness as to be able to turn evil to good.