by Will Durant
6. Politics
Thomas wrote thrice on political philosophy: in his commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, in the Summa theologica, and in a brief treatise De regimine principum —On the Rule of Princes* A first impression is that Thomas merely repeats Aristotle; as we read on we are astonished at the amount of original and incisive thought contained in his work.
Social organization is a tool that man developed as a substitute for physiological organs of acquisition and defense. Society and the state exist for the individual, not he for them. Sovereignty comes from God, but is vested in the people. The people, however, are too numerous, scattered, fickle, and uninformed to exercise this sovereign power directly or wisely; hence they delegate their sovereignty to a prince or other leader. This grant of power by the people is always revocable, and “the prince holds the power of legislating only so far as he represents the will of the people.”123
The sovereign power of the people may be delegated to many, to a few, or to one. Democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy may all be good if the laws are good and well administered. In general a constitutional monarchy is best, as giving unity, continuity, and stability; “a multitude,” as Homer said, “is better governed by one than by several.”124 The prince or king, however, should be chosen by the people from any free rank of the population.125 If the monarch becomes a tyrant he should be overthrown by the orderly action of the people.126 He must always remain the servant, not the master, of the law.
Law is threefold: natural, as in the “natural laws” of the universe; divine, as revealed in the Bible; human or positive, as in the legislation of states. The third was made necessary by the passions of men and the development of the state. So the Fathers believed that private property was opposed to natural and divine law, and was the result of the sinfulness of man. Thomas does not admit that property is unnatural. He considers the arguments of the communists of his time, and answers like Aristotle that when everybody owns everything nobody takes care of anything.127 But private property is a public trust. “Man ought to possess external things not as his own but as common, so that he is ready to communicate them to others in their need.”128 For a man to desire or pursue wealth beyond his need for maintaining his station in life is sinful covetousness.129 “Whatever some people possess in superabundance is due by natural law to the purpose of succoring the poor”; and “if there is no other remedy it is lawful for a man to succor his own need by means of another’s property, by taking it either openly or secretly.”130
Thomas was not the man to make economics a dismal science by divorcing it from morality. He believed in the right of the community to regulate agriculture, industry, and trade, to control usury, even to establish a “just price” for services and goods. He looked with suspicious eye upon the art of buying cheap and selling dear. He condemned outright all speculative trading, all attempts to make gain by skillful use of market fluctuations.131 He opposed lending at interest, but saw no sin in borrowing “for a good end” from a professional moneylender.132
He did not rise above his time on the question of slavery. Sophists, Stoics, and Roman legists had taught that by “nature” all men are free; the Church Fathers had agreed, and had explained slavery, like property, as a result of the sinfulness acquired by man through Adam’s Fall. Aristotle, friend of the mighty, had justified slavery as produced by the natural inequality of men. Thomas tried to reconcile these views: in the state of innocence there was no slavery; but since the Fall it has been found useful to subject simple men to wise men; those who have strong bodies but weak minds are intended by nature to be bondmen.133 The slave, however, belongs to his master only in body, not in soul; the slave is not obliged to give sexual intercourse to the master; and all the precepts of Christian morality must be applied in the treatment of the slave.
7. Religion
As economic and political problems are ultimately moral, it seems just to Thomas that religion should be ranked above politics and industry, and that the state should submit, in matters of morals, to supervision and guidance by the Church. Authority is nobler, the higher its end; the kings of the earth, guiding men to earthly bliss, should be subject to the pope, who guides men to everlasting happiness. The state should remain supreme in secular affairs; but even in such matters the pope has the right to intervene if rulers violate the rules of morality, or do avoidable injury to their peoples. So the pope may punish a bad king, or absolve subjects from their oath of allegiance. Moreover, the state must protect religion, support the Church, and enforce her decrees.134
The supreme function of the Church is to lead men to salvation. Man is a citizen not alone of this earthly state but of a spiritual kingdom infinitely greater than any state. The supreme facts of history are that man committed an infinite crime by disobeying God, thereby meriting infinite punishment; and that God the Son, by becoming man and suffering ignominy and death, created a redeeming store of grace by which man can be saved despite original sin. God gives of this grace to whom He will; we cannot fathom the reasons of His choice; but “nobody has been so insane as to say that merit is the cause of divine predestination.”135 The terrible doctrine of Paul and Augustine recurs in the gentle Thomas:
It is fitting that God should predestine men. For all things are subject to His Providence…. As men are ordained to eternal life through the Providence of God, it likewise is part of that Providence to permit some to fall away from that end; this is called reprobation…. As predestination includes the will to confer grace and glory, so also reprobation includes the will to permit a person to fall into sin, and to impose the punishment of damnation on account of that sin…. “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world.”136
Thomas struggles to reconcile divine predestination with human freedom, and to explain why a man whose fate is already sealed should strive to virtue, how prayer can move an unchangeable God, or what the function of the Church can be in a society whose individuals have already been sorted out into the saved and the damned. He answers that God has merely foreseen how each man would freely choose. Presumably all pagans are among the damned except possibly a few to whom God vouchsafed a special and personal revelation.*137
The chief happiness of the saved will consist in seeing God. Not that they will understand Him; only infinity can understand infinity; nevertheless, by an infusion of divine grace, the blessed will see the essence of God.139 The whole creation, having proceeded from God, flows back to Him; the human soul, gift of His bounty, never rests until it rejoins its source. Thus the divine cycle of creation and return is completed, and Thomas’ philosophy ends, as it began, with God.
8. The Reception of Thomism
It was received by most of his contemporaries as a monstrous accumulation of pagan reasonings fatal to the Christian faith. The Franciscans, who sought God by Augustine’s mystic road of love, were shocked by Thomas’ “intellectualism,” his exaltation of intellect above will, of understanding above love. Many wondered how so coldly negative and remote a God as the Actus Purus of the Summa could be prayed to, how Jesus could be part of such an abstraction, what St. Francis would have said of—or to—such a God. To make body and soul one unity seemed to put out of court the incorruptible immortality of the soul; to make matter and form one unity was, despite Thomas’ denials, to fall into the Averroistic theory of the eternity of the world; to make matter, not form, the principle of individuation seemed to leave the soul undifferentiated, and to fall into the Averroistic theory of the unity and impersonal immortality of the soul. Worst of all, the triumph of Aristotle over Augustine in the Thomist philosophy seemed to the Franciscans the victory of paganism over Christianity. Were there not already, in the University of Paris, teachers and students who put Aristotle above the Gospels?
Just as orthodox Islam, at the end of the twelfth century, denounced and banished the Aristotelian Averroës, and orthodox Judaism, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, burned the books of the Aristotelian Maimonides, so in the third qua
rter of that century Christian orthodoxy defended itself against the Aristotelian Thomas. In 1277, at the prompting of Pope John XXI, the bishop of Paris issued a decree branding 219 propositions as heresies. Among these were three expressly charged “against Brother Thomas”: that angels have no body, and constitute each of them a separate species; that matter is the principle of individuation; and that God cannot multiply individuals in a species without matter. Anyone holding these doctrines, said the bishop, was ipso facto excommunicated. A few days after this decree Robert Kilwardby, a leading Dominican, persuaded the masters of the University of Oxford to denounce various Thomistic doctrines, including the unity of soul and body in man.
Thomas was now three years dead, and could not defend himself; but his old teacher Albert rushed from Cologne to Paris, and persuaded the Dominicans of France to stand by their fellow friar. A Franciscan, William de la Mare, joined the fray with a tract called Correctorium fratris Thomae, setting Thomas right on 118 points; and another Franciscan, John Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury, officially condemned Thomism, and urged a return to Bonaventura and St. Francis. Dante entered the lists by making a modified Thomism the doctrinal framework of The Divine Comedy, and choosing Thomas to guide him on the stairway to the highest heaven. After half a hundred years’ war the Dominicans convinced Pope John XXII that Thomas had been a saint; and his canonization (1323) gave the victory to Thomism. Thereafter the mystics found in the Summa140 the deepest and clearest exposition of the mystic-contemplative life. At the Council of Trent (1545–63) the Summa theologica was placed upon the altar together with the Bible and the Decretals.141 Ignatius Loyola imposed upon the Jesuit Order the obligation to teach Thomism. In 1879 Pope Leo XIII, and in 1921 Pope Benedict XV, while not pronouncing the works of St. Thomas free from all error, made them the official philosophy of the Catholic Church; and in all Roman Catholic colleges that philosophy is taught today. Thomism, though it has some critics among Catholic theologians, has won new defenders in our time, and now rivals Platonism and Aristotelianism as one of the most enduring and influential bodies of philosophical thought.
It is a simple matter for one who stands on the shoulders of the last 700 years to point out in the work of Aquinas those elements that have ill borne the test of time. It is both a defect and a credit that he relied so much on Aristotle: to that degree he lacked originality, and showed a courage that cleared new paths for the medieval mind. Carefully securing direct and accurate translations, Thomas knew Aristotle’s philosophical (not the scientific) works more thoroughly than any other medieval thinker except Averroës. He was willing to learn from Moslems and Jews, and treated their philosophers with a self-confident respect. There is a heavy ballast of nonsense in his system, as in all philosophies that do not agree with our own; it is strange that so modest a man should have written at such length on how the angels know, and what man was before the Fall, and what the human race would have been except for Eve’s intelligent curiosity. Perhaps we err in thinking of him as a philosopher; he himself honestly called his work theology; he made no pretense to follow reason wherever it should lead him; he confessed to starting with his conclusions; and though most philosophers do this, most denounce it as treason to philosophy. He covered a wider range than any thinker except Spencer has dared to do again; and to every field he brought the light of clarity, and a quiet temper that shunned exaggeration and sought a moderate mean. Sapientis est ordinare, he said—“the wise man creates order.”142 He did not succeed in reconciling Aristotle and Christianity, but in the effort he won an epochal victory for reason. He had led reason as a captive into the citadel of faith; but in his triumph he had brought the Age of Faith to an end.
VII. THE SUCCESSORS
The historian always oversimplifies, and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend. We must not think of Scholasticism as an abstraction purged of a thousand individual peculiarities, but as a lazy name for the hundreds of conflicting philosophical and theological theories taught in the medieval schools from Anselm in the eleventh century to Occam in the fourteenth. The historian is miserably subject to the brevity of time and human patience, and must dishonor with a line men who were immortal for a day, but now lie hidden between the peaks of history.
One of the strangest figures of the many-sided thirteenth century was Ramon Lull—Raymond Lully (1232?—1315). Born in Palma of a wealthy Catalan family, he found his way to the court of James II at Barcelona, enjoyed a riotous youth, and slowly narrowed his amours to monogamy. Suddenly, at the age of thirty, he renounced the world, the flesh, and the Devil to devote his polymorphous energy to mysticism, occultism, philanthropy, evangelism, and the pursuit of martyrdom. He studied Arabic, founded a college of Arabic studies in Majorca, and petitioned the Council of Vienne (1311) to set up schools of Oriental languages and literature to prepare men for missionary work among Saracens and Jews. The Council established five such schools—at Rome, Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and Salamanca—with chairs of Hebrew, Chaldaic, and Arabic. Perhaps Lully learned Hebrew, for he became an intimate student of the Cabala.
His 150 works defy classification. In youth he founded Catalan literature with several volumes of love poetry. He composed in Arabic, and then translated into Catalan, his Libre de contemplado en Deu, or Book of Contemplation on God—no mere mystic revery but a million-word encyclopedia of theology (1272). Two years later, as if with another self, he wrote a manual of chivalric war—Libre del orde de cavalyeria; and almost at the same time a handbook of education—Liber doctrinae puerilis. He tried his hand at philosophical dialogue, and published three such works, presenting Moslem, Jewish, Greek Christian, Roman Christian, and Tatar points of view with astonishing tolerance, fairness, and kindliness. About 1283 he composed a long religious romance, Blanquerna, which patient experts have pronounced “one of the masterpieces of the Christian Middle Ages.”143 At Rome in 1295 he issued another encyclopedia, the Arbre de sciencia, or Tree of Science, stating 4000 questions in sixteen sciences, and giving confident replies. During a stay in Paris (1309–11) he fought the lingering Averroism there with some minor theological works, which he signed, with unwonted accuracy, Phantasticus. Throughout his long life he poured forth so many volumes on science and philosophy that even to list them would empty the pen.
Amid all these interests he was fascinated by an idea that has captured brilliant minds in our own time—that all the formulas and processes of logic could be reduced to mathematical or symbolical form. The ars magna, or “great art” of logic, said Raymond, consists in writing the basic concepts of human thought on movable squares, and then combining these in various positions not only to reduce all the ideas of philosophy to equations and diagrams, but to prove, by mathematical equivalence, the truths of Christianity. Raymond had the gentleness of some lunatics, and hoped to convert Mohammedans to Christianity by the persuasive manipulations of his ars. The Church applauded his confidence, but frowned upon his proposal to reduce all faith to reason, and to put the Trinity and the Incarnation into his logical machine.144
In 1292, resolved to balance the loss of Palestine to the Saracens by peaceably converting Moslem Africa, Raymond crossed to Tunis, and secretly organized there a tiny colony of Christians. In 1307, on one of his missionary trips to Tunisia, he was arrested and brought before the chief judge of Bougie. The judge arranged a public disputation between Raymond and some Moslem divines; Raymond, says his biographer, won the argument, and was thrown into jail. Some Christian merchants contrived his rescue, and brought him back to Europe. But in 1314, apparently longing for martyrdom, he crossed again to Bougie, preached Christianity openly, and was stoned to death by a Moslem mob (1315).
To pass from Raymond Lully to John Duns Scotus is like emerging from Carmen into the Well-Tempered Clavichord. John’s middle and last names came from his birth (1266?) at Duns in Berwickshire (?). He was sent at eleven to a Franciscan
monastery at Dumfries; four years later he entered the Order. He studied at Oxford and Paris, and then taught at Oxford, Paris, and Cologne. Then, still a youth of forty-two, he died (1308), leaving behind him a multiplicity of writings, chiefly on metaphysics, distinguished by such obscurity and subtlety as would hardly appear again in philosophy before the coming of another Scot. And indeed the function of Duns Scotus was very much like that of Kant five centuries later—to argue that the doctrines of religion must be defended by their practical-moral necessity rather than their logical cogency. The Franciscans, willing to jettison philosophy to save Augustine from Dominican Thomas, made their young Doctor Sub-tilis their champion, and followed his lead, alive and dead, through generations of philosophical war.