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The Order of Presentation and the Order of Understanding in Aquinas's Account of Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Thomas W. Smith
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Extract

It is argued that natural law can be known without the aid of revelation, and so it seems to be a medium through which people of different faiths can live together and talk to each other. However, Leo Strauss argues that Aquinas's understanding of natural law cannot possibly provide such a medium because Thomas relies on Christian revelation to develop his account of natural law. To counter this claim, this article makes a distinction between the way Aquinas presents his natural law teaching to his readers in a discussion of revelation and the way he thinks human beings may come to know natural law independent of special revelation. This distinction leads to a consideration of the deepest issue dividing Strauss and Aquinas: their rival accounts of the relationship of philosophy to theology.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 57 , Issue 4 , Fall 1995 , pp. 607 - 640
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1995

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References

The author wishes to thank Ernest Fortin, V. Bradley Lewis, Steven Grosby, R. Emmit McLaughlin and Walter Thompson for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

1. This is the theme of Kepel, Gilles, The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism in the Modern World, TRANS. Braley, Alan (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994).Google Scholar

2. Kepel, , The Revenge of God, p. 203.Google Scholar For an interesting treatment of this issue in the popular press, see “Not Again, for Heaven's Sake: Islam and the West”, a special survey in the Economist (6 August 1994), pp. 1–18.

3. See, for example, Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 162–63Google Scholar; and Strauss, Leo, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), chap. 6 (“On Natural Law”).Google Scholar

4. For a good discussion of the centrality of the issue of promulgation in the contemporary debates over Thomistic ethics, see Hall, Pamela, Narrative and the Natural Law (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), especially chap. 1.Google Scholar

5. Jaffa, Harry, Thomism and Aristotelianism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), pp. 167–71.Google Scholar

6. See also Fortin, Ernest, “The New Rights Theory and the Natural Law” Review of Politics 44 (1983): 607.Google Scholar

7. See Strauss, , Natural Right and History, p. 164.Google Scholar

8. See Jaffa, , Thomism and Aristotelianism, pp. 176–77ff.Google Scholar

9. See Natural Right and History, pp. 162–63; Thomism and Aristotelianism, pp. 174–84.

10. Perhaps the Straussians are right about this tendency among some of Thomas's interpreters. See, for example, Boyle, Joseph, Finnis, John, Grisez, Germaine, Nuclear Deterrence, Morality, and Realism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).Google Scholar See also Finnis, John, Moral Absolutes (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1991).Google Scholar However, Finnis does attempt to give leeway to actors by distinguishing intention from side-effect (see, for example, Moral Absolutes, chap. 3).

11. For example, Aquinas is discussed in the middle of Strauss's Natural Right and History, a book which in part tells the story of the transition from classic natural right to modernity. Here Strauss states that “Modern natural law was partly a reaction to this absorption of natural law by theology.” In this regard, see also Salkever, StephenFinding the Mean (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).Google Scholar However, Salkever recognizes that Thomas may not subscribe to the positions generally attributed to him (p. 109, note 11).

12. Of course, oftentimes Straussians emphasize that political theology is important to the foundation of a regime. Thus, they sometimes urge political philosophers to inform politics with a theological noble lie both to bolster the state by providing norms of conduct and to assuage the average person who cannot bear to live in the presence of philosophic truths. For them, however, what must be avoided is the kind of “ontotheological” foundationalism of an Aquinas, which would lead to imbuing politics with an ultimacy of meaning. For an example of such an account, see Parens, Joshua, “Multiculturalism and the Problem of Particularism” American Political Science Review 88 (1994): 169–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. All quotes from Aquinas are from the Summa Theologiae (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1985)Google Scholar, unless otherwise noted. I was aided in translation by Fathers of the English Dominican Province (trs.), Summa Theologica (NY: Benziger Brothers, Inc., 1947).Google Scholar

14. “Neighbor” is the usual translation for “proximi.” See, for example, Pegis, Anton (tr.), Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas (NY: Random House, 1945). 2: 849Google Scholar; Fathers of the English Dominican Province (trs). Summa Theologica, 1:1049.Google Scholar However, more generally, it means “nearness,” “near relationship,” or “similarity,” whence our “proximity.”

15. See, for example, Plato Euthyphro 14e; Plato Republic 362c.

16. Plato Republic 332d.

17. The most obvious example of this approach in political science is the penchant to publish and read sections of the Summa Theologiae in the form on an autonomous tract called “The Treatise on Law.”

18. De ente et essentia and De principiis naturae were both written in response to requests from his fellow Dominicans. According to tradition, the Summa Contra Gentiles was requested by Raymond of Penafort as a text for missionaries. Aquinas undertook his continuous commentaries on the four Gospels as well as his Contra errores Graecorum at the request of Urban IV. He was asked to write De regno for the king of Cyprus. He wrote his commentaries on Aristotle in part to try to make Aristotle understood during the controversy with the Latin Averroists. (For this, see Weisheipl, James A. O.P., Friar Thomas D'Aquino [Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1983]. pp. 78,130,163,189, 280.Google Scholar See also Jordan, Mark, Ordering Wisdom [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986], p. 4Google Scholar; and Stump, Eleonore, “Biblical Commentary and Philosophy” in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, ed. Kretzmann, Norman and Stump, Eleonore [NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993], p. 252.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar Of course, Aquinas's reportationes were also for specific audiences and purposes, inasmuch as they were lectures, disputations, or sermons arising out of Thomas's official duties at Paris and elsewhere.

19. The occasion for Paul's first letter to the Corinthians was his concern about the existence of factions in Corinth. Apparently, the community leaders were behaving clannishly and harming the poor and underprivileged. Paul says he want to plant the seed of the spirit among those who are acting “as men of the flesh,” and hopes that God will make it grow. Thus the quotation is particularly poignant when put into the context of the antimendicant controversy raging in Paris at the time.

20. See, for example, S.T. I. 22. 2; 3.

21. This objection could be answered in part by pointing out that Aquinas's account of law does not preclude other modes of providence.

22. Obviously, this is not meant as an exhaustive list of the new set of problems that come into view with the differentiation of transcendence.

23. My understanding of the treatment of creation in the medieval Islamic, Jewish, and Christian traditions, especially my discussion of Maimonides and Aquinas on practical knowing is heavily indebted to the work of David Burrell. In particular, see Burrell, , “Aquinas and Islamic and Jewish Thinkers” in Kretzmann and Stump, Companion to Aquinas, pp. 60–84Google Scholar; Burrell, , “Creation or Emanation: Two Paradigms of Reason” in God and Creation: An Ecumenical Symposium, ed. Burrell, David and Mcginn, Bernard (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), pp. 27–37Google Scholar; Burrell, , Knowing the Unknowable God (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), especially pp. 35–71Google Scholar; Burrell, , “Maimonides, Aquinas, and Gershonides on Providence and Evil” Religious Studies 20 (1984): 335–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. Of course, they were helped in this by their mistaken belief that Aristotle had penned Proclus's Liber de causis and Plotinus's The Theology of Aristotle.

25. Cf. Aristotle Metaphysics 1074b25ff.

26. Burrell, , “Creation or Emanation,” p. 32.Google Scholar

27. “When [thinkers] ascribe to God essential attributes, these so-called essential attributes should not have any similarity to the attributes of other things, and should according to their own opinion not be included in one of the same definition, just as there is no similarity between the essence of God and that of other beings” in Maimonides, Moses, Guide for the Perplexed, trans. Friedlander, M. (NY: Dover Publications, 1956), p. 79 (1. 56).Google Scholar See also Guide 1.53–54Google Scholar and Burrell, , “Aquinas and Islamic and Jewish Thinkers,” pp. 76–77.Google Scholar Aquinas's problem with arguing for the equivocal nature of talk about God is that this is not what religious people mean when they speak about God (I.13. 2). In other words, for Aquinas, the practices arising out of the virtue of religio help control our thought and language about God.

28. Burrell, , “Creation or Emanation,” p. 32.Google Scholar See Guide 3. 21.Google Scholar

29. For a striking example which compares divine practical knowledge to that of a doctor, see Summa Contra Gentiles, III. 75.Google Scholar In De veritate (qu. 5 a. 6) Aquinas compares God's providence to a carpenter's knowledge of his tools and works. Earlier, at 5. 2, God is compared to an archer who gives definite motion to an arrow. That Aquinas sees no reason for the “artisan” model to logically conflict with the “ruler” model is shown by the fact that in the same article, God's providence is compared to the care of a father for his family and a ruler for his kingdom.

30. See Goerner, E. A., “On Thomistic Natural Law: The Bad Man's View of Thomistic Natural Right,” Political Theory 7 (1979): 120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31. This does not rule out other advantages which might have led Aquinas to his unique way of explaining the various kinds of law. For example, Thomas's neat division of law into eternal, divine, natural, and human may have been offered to his beginning theology students as a way to resolve theoretically the problems of how to understand the relationships between the great variety of law in the middle ages, which included: guild law, urban law, canon law, biblical law (which included the laws of Exodus, Deuteronomy, and the Gospel's law oflove), natural law, eternal law, contract law, Roman law, French and English Royal law, secular law, feudal law, manorial law, ius gentium, and tribal law. For an exploration of the meaning of these terms and their confused relationship in the middle ages, see Berman, Harold J., Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

32. In pointing out the advantages of the “ruler model,” I am not addressing the problem as to whether Thomas understands moral norms to be laws in the strictest sense, or whether he thinks that such norms are called laws by an analogical extension of the term. (For the issues, see Hittinger, Russell, “Natural Law as ‘Law'” [Natural Law Lecture, University of Notre Dame Law School, 17 02 1994]).Google Scholar

33. See Goerner, “On Thomistic Natural Law: The Bad Man's View of Thomistic Natural Right.” I am merely recapitulating Goerner's account here. My only addition is my explanation for the lack of an explicit statement of this account in the “Treatise on Law.”

34. In this vein, Ernest Fortin has objected that the moral order cannot be shown to have a lawful character, since human reason alone can never be absolutely certain that crime does not pay (“The New Rights Theory and the Natural Law,” p. 607). Yet, since human law need not punish every wrong to be meaningfully called law, it is not clear that we need to demand that natural law punish every crime, either. (For this point, see Goerner, E. A., “On the Naturalness of the Natural Law: A Few Remarks on Ernest Fortin's Doubts” Review of Politics 45 [1983]: 443–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Further, this process of learning may take several generations, as it did in the case of the Germanic peoples. Aquinas need not have shown that it happened right away for natural law to be effective. He merely had to show that natural law operates through natural sanctions that human beings can know naturally, and that such sanctions prevent human affairs in the wake of the fall from going utterly awry. In this sense, the human community has a crucial role to play in helping individuals learn the natural law. For this point, see Hall, Narrative and the Natural Law, esp. pp. 93–106.Google Scholar

35. Of course, I have put off the question of the ultimate ground of the order of nature. Once this problem of the ground of the natural law arises, the question then become, “Can there be such an order of nature without some divine order that surmounts and guarantees it?” Nietzsche, for one, did not think so. However, we only have to read any of Mircea Eliade's works to know that the experience of nature does not preclude the experience of the divine. So, perhaps we ought to take up the problem of natural theology.

36. It is not clear how general these secondary precepts are, but at one point, Aquinas remarks that although theft is expressly contrary to the natural law, Julius Caesar reported that the Germans did not know this precept (I-II. 94.a 5. resp.).

37. I-II. 100.11. resp.

38. I-II. 100. l. resp.

39. I-II. 100.1. resp.

40. I-II. 100.11. resp.

41. Goerner, E. A., “Response to Hall,” Political Theory 3 (1990): 650.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42. For this point, see Roos, L. John, “Natural Law and Natural Right in Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1971), pp.64–65ff.Google Scholar

43. In this sense, the most radical rebellion possible would be something like that attempted by de Sade. “To possess what one is going to kill, to copulate with suffering those are the moments of freedom toward which the entire organization of Sade's castles is directed. But from the moment when crime destroys the object of desire, it also destroys desire, which exists only at the precise moment of destruction. Then another object must be brought under subjection and killed again, and then another, and so on to an infinity of all possible objects. This leads to that dreary accumulation of erotic and criminal scenes in Sade's novels, which, paradoxically, leaves the reader with the impression of a hideous chastity.” Finally, Sade seems to realize in some inchoate way that the ultimate rebellion, leading to a denial of any positive relationship between desires and the order of the whole, is doomed to failure. See Camus, Albert, The Rebel (NY: Vintage Books, 1956), pp. 44–45.Google Scholar

44. According to Aquinas, all the specifications of the moral precepts of the Old Law, including all the ceremonial and judicial precepts, were given through the wisdom of Moses and Aaron. See I-II. 100. 3. resp.

45. At Exodus 19:21–24, Yahweh explicitly tells Moses to warn the people not to pass beyond their bounds and look upon Him, or they will lose their lives. Then “Moses went down to the people and spoke to them.” Immediately thereafter, God speaks the words of the Decalogue, but it is not clear whether the words are addressed to Moses or to the people, or even whether Moses himself is speaking rather than God. At the end of the discourse, it is not even clear what the people have heard, for the text merely says that they “Shook with fear at the peals of thunder and the lightning flashes, the sound of the trumpet, and the smoking mountain” (my emphasis). That is, they may be merely frightened by a lighting storm which they interpreted as a theophany. In any case, it is clear that they cannot bear to hear God's word. “‘Speak to us yourself,' they said to Moses, ‘but do not let God speak to us, or we will die.'” The second account is much less equivocal. Here, the author takes great pains to emphasize that at first, the words on the two tablets containing the commandments are written in God's own hand, which implies that they are directly from Him. At Exodus 31:18, the author says that the “tablets of stone [were] inscribed by the finger of God.” At Exodus 32: 16, the author states that “Moses made his way back down the mountain with the two tablets of the testimony in his hands, tablets inscribed on both sides, inscribed on the front and the back. These tablets were the work of God, and the writing on them was God's writing engraved upon the tablets.” However, when Moses discovers his people's apostasy, he smashes these tablets without anyone having read them. After this he goes back up to the mountain and God dictates the law to Moses, rather than writing it Himself (Exodus 34:27). That is, after the apostasy, the law was mediated through Moses, not given directly by God.

46. In proof of this, Aquinas refers to Augustine's gloss on Exodus 33, where Moses asks to see God's glory (I-II.98.5.rep. obj. 2). In this passage, Yahweh promises to let all His splendor pass in front of Moses. However, Moses cannot see His face, for man cannot see God's face and live. The splendor of Yahweh is so dangerous that God says “Here is a place beside me. You must stand on the rock, and when my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft of the rock and shield you with my hand while I pass by. Then I will take away my hand and you shall see the back of me; but my face is not to be seen.” In other words, divine law must be given through intermediates because God's holiness will not allow direct contact.

47. See I-II. 105.1. resp. Compare this passage with Exodus 18:13ff.

48. For an exploration of this problem in Aquinas, see Lonergan, Bernard, “St. Thomas' Theory of Operation,” Theological Studies 3 (1942): 375–402.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

49. “How then can he, to whom God hath never revealed his Wil immediately (saving by way of natural reason) know when he is to obey, or not to obey his Word, delivered by him, that sayes he is a Prophet?” Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Macpherson, C.b. (NY: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 412.Google Scholar

50. Leviathan, p. 331, emphasis in original.

51. Ibid., pp. 331–33.

52. So, for example, a miracle can be faked. Holiness can be faked. Evidence of extreme felicity can be faked. Wisdom can be gained not merely through divine help, but on our own. The list could go on.

53. See, for example, Machiavelli's remarks about Moses needing the Israelites to be in slavery before he could give them his law in Chapter 6 of The Prince, which is entitled, “Of New Principalities That Are Acquired through One's Own Arms and Virtue.”

54. Leviathan, p. 410.

55. Ibid.

56. See Strauss, , Natural Right and History, p. 164.Google Scholar

57. See Strauss, Leo, “The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy” in Faith and Political Philosophy, ed. Emberly, Peter and Cooper, Barry (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), pp. 218 and 228.Google Scholar Strauss uses the term “unassisted reason” in this article. One wonders how one who pleads Socratic ignorance could know whether his reason was “unassisted” apart from some revelation informing him of the fact.

58. There is evidence in the Old Testament that certain of the Israelite came to this conclusion. See, for example, Jeremiah's mention of the necessity of “circumcision of the heart” at Jeremiah 9:24–26. For other examples, see Hosea 6:6; Micah 6:8; Habakkuk 2:4; Psalm 18; Psalm 51, especially 16–17. See also Paul's letter to the Romans, chapter 7.

59. This is how he initially introduces the difference. See I-II. 91.4, “Whether there was any need for a divine law?”