How to Think Politically

by James Bernard Murphy

  Aquinas developed his view that biblical faith and Greek philosophy are compatible in the form of thousands of arguments, ranging from physics and biology to ethics, psychology and theology. His guiding principle throughout is that ‘faith does not destroy or replace reason but perfects it’.

  Let’s briefly see how Aquinas’s Christian humanism is worked out in the areas of morality and law. From Greek philosophy, he discovered the theory of moral virtues, especially what he called the ‘natural virtues’ of justice, wisdom, courage and moderation. Although the word ‘virtue’ does not appear in the Bible, these basic values are certainly mentioned, as they are in the writings of all human civilizations. Wise men and women from many different cultures have concluded that human society depends upon its members acquiring these virtues. We cannot live together in peace unless enough of us practise these virtues, and our own individual lives will go better if we act with justice, wisdom, courage and moderation.

  Aquinas also discovered some virtues unique to the Bible: faith, hope and love. He called these ‘supernatural virtues’ because they cannot be discovered by reason alone but depend upon faith in biblical revelation. Today, secular humanists argue that we need only the natural virtues for a good human life; religious fundamentalists argue that we need only the supernatural biblical virtues. Aquinas insists that we need all of them: faith, hope and love do not replace but perfect justice, wisdom, courage and moderation. Indeed, a religious fanatic could be well described as someone who thinks that we need only faith, hope and love without justice, wisdom, courage and moderation. The supernatural virtues, without the natural, are blind; the natural virtues, without the supernatural, are austere and harsh.

  In addition to the works of Aristotle, the ancient law of Rome, codified by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, was rediscovered in western Europe at the end of the eleventh century. The first university in Europe, at Bologna, was established precisely in order to study Roman law. (Yes, the first universities in European history were law schools.) Both secular rulers and popes set about developing codes of law inspired by the example of the Roman law. Aquinas treated Roman law as a model of rational human law, and he sought to show how it might be reconciled with the divine law revealed in the Bible. According to Aquinas, both rational human law and divine law stem from God’s eternal law. Since we have no direct access to God’s eternal law, we can understand it only indirectly, by means of the natural law of human conscience and the divine law of the Bible. By nature, every human being, says Aquinas, has a conscience with which he can distinguish good from bad. In addition, God reveals many basic moral truths in the Bible, both in the Old Law of Moses and in the New Law of Jesus. Why do we need biblical law if we have an innate conscience? Aquinas tells us that our conscience is not infallible: it can make mistakes about particular judgements, and our conscience can be partly corrupted by our culture. Hence, biblical law provides a check on conscience. At the same time, our interpretations of divine law are also fallible and require the check of natural conscience. In this way, God provides human beings with two independent guides for morality: natural conscience and biblical law.

  Of course, the complexity of human life requires more specific guidance than we find either in conscience or in the Bible. Our conscience tells us that wrongdoers ought to be punished, but we need human legislators to define crimes and their consequences in detail; our conscience tells us that we should drive safely, but we need precise rules of the road. A similar analysis will show that the human canon law of the Christian Church is derived from the more general principles found in the Bible. For example, the Bible tells us to ‘keep holy the Sabbath’, while human canon law gives us more concrete guidance by telling us to attend Mass on Sundays.

  Aquinas says that the human legislator must use his practical wisdom to specify the general principles of natural law (conscience) into the particular rules of human civil law. Every human law, he says, gets its moral force by being derived from the true principles of morality in the natural law of conscience. Because valid human laws are traceable to basic moral principles, we have a duty in conscience to obey human law. An unjust law, however, is a law that violates a principle of morality – such a law loses its moral force.

  In his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, the Revd Martin Luther King Jr quoted Aquinas to justify his own civil disobedience: ‘To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.’ King argued that positive human laws enforcing racial subordination violate human dignity and are therefore contrary to natural law.

  Dante’s epic poem of the fourteenth century, Divine Comedy, was influenced by the works of Aquinas and can be seen as a dramatic depiction of Christian humanism. In the poem, Dante is led through the terrors of Hell and Purgatory by the ancient Roman poet Virgil, who is a symbol of natural human reason. Virgil leads Dante all the way to the gates of Heaven, but to enter, Dante must be guided by the symbol of Christian virtue, a woman named Beatrice. Natural reason is indispensable and takes us very far in our human journey, but for the final step into eternal life we need faith, hope and love. Beatrice completes what Virgil has accomplished, just as Jerusalem perfects what Athens has achieved.

  Aquinas’s Christian humanism could not be more relevant today, given the strident battle between secular humanists and religious fundamentalists. Many Christians, especially in the US, claim that Darwin’s theory of evolution is not compatible with the account of creation in Genesis. Aquinas points out that the biblical story of God’s creation of the universe in six days makes no sense if read literally, since the sun is not created until the fourth day. So a biblical ‘day’ cannot be what we mean by a day. Scripture does not contradict science, once properly interpreted. At the same time, many secular humanists today claim that modern science has disproved the existence of God. How is this possible, given that science can address only empirical questions, subject to observation or experiment? Clearly, science can also be misinterpreted, even by scientists. Despite many bitter skirmishes over the centuries, Aquinas would remain confident that faith and reason, religion and science, cannot come into conflict, except from human misunderstanding. God does not teach one thing in the book of nature and then contradict it in the Bible.

  Moderns

  8

  Niccolò Machiavelli: The Patriot

  Five centuries ago, at the height of the Italian Renaissance, an unemployed former civil servant sat in the study of his modest country farm in the tiny village of Sant’Andrea, just south of Florence, pouring everything he knew about the art of governing into a long pamphlet. He hoped that by making a gift of it to the city’s new ruler he would win back the job he passionately loved. But it was ungraciously brushed aside by a prince who had little interest in the musings of an obscure, exiled bureaucrat on the principles of statecraft. The pamphlet was eventually published, five years after Niccolò Machiavelli’s death, as Il principe (The Prince). For 14 years he had worked tirelessly and with utter devotion for his native Florence as a diplomat and public official, travelling constantly to the courts and chancelleries of Europe on its behalf where he met popes, princes and potentates. Not that this made any difference to the Medici family, who had overthrown the Florentine republic Machiavelli had so loyally served. He was promptly dismissed, arrested, tortured and exiled. The torture, six drops on the strappado (in which he was raised high above the ground with his arms tied behind his back on a pulley attached to the ceiling, dislocating his joints), he took admirably well, even writing some amusing sonnets about it. He only narrowly escaped execution because of a general amnesty granted when the uncle of Florence’s new ruler was elected pope. Machiavelli appeared to hold few grudges. Being tortured was fair play in Renaissance politics, and he would advocate far worse in The Prince. But being forced out of the active life of politics that enthralled him and banished from the city he loved ‘more than my own soul’ was almost more than he could bea
r. He desperately missed the excitement, risks and constant stimulation of city life, and was bored senseless by the dreary routines of country living. He spent his days reading and writing to fend off the monotony, chasing thrushes and playing backgammon with the local innkeeper to distract himself from the stultifying dullness of provincial life.

  Although only a tantalizingly short distance from the Palazzo Vecchio, the hub of Florentine government, where he had so recently worked, the exiled Machiavelli might as well have been living on the dark side of the moon. He confessed to his nephew that, although physically well, he was ill ‘in every other respect’ because he was separated from his beloved Florence. And he complained to a friend that he was ‘rotting away’ in exile. An intensely patriotic Florentine, Machiavelli spurned an offer to become an adviser to a wealthy and powerful Roman nobleman at the generous salary of 200 gold ducats, because he wanted to serve only his native city. Although he enjoyed a partial rehabilitation near the end of his life, it was in a very limited role. His glory days were over. According to popular legend, Machiavelli dreamt on his deathbed that he had chosen to remain in Hell, discussing politics with the great thinkers and rulers of antiquity, rather than suffer an eternity of tedium in Heaven with the good and the just.

  Machiavelli was not a philosopher in the narrow sense of the word, or even a particularly systematic thinker. The Prince, which was quite hastily written in 1513, is not a rigorous philosophical treatise, which may partly explain its enduring popularity. But it has long enjoyed an exalted place in the canon of the greatest works in the history of political thought for its many penetrating insights into the nature of political life in general and the striking boldness and originality of its author’s views.

  The popular image of Machiavelli, one of the very few writers whose name has been turned into an adjective, is of a brutal realist who counselled rulers to cast aside ethics in the ruthless pursuit of political power. This view is not without some basis in The Prince, which condones murder, deceit and war as legitimate means whereby rulers can retain their grip on power and even attain glory. Machiavelli condemned tyrants who gained power but whose reigns were brutal and short, while praising those very rare statesmen above all who founded lasting states and empires, thereby achieving glory. But, for him, even power without glory is far preferable to the political norm in history: failure. History is littered with failed politicians, statesmen and rulers who either lost power because they did not appreciate the hard facts of political life or were unwilling or unable to act on them when they did.

  Machiavelli tells us that, unlike Plato or Augustine, he will not offer his readers an ‘imaginary republic’ but will tell us the hard truth about politics as it is really practised, having seen it up close. In fact, Plato, Aristotle and Augustine saw politics up close as well, and they too understood its brutal realities. Indeed, in his Politics, Aristotle lists the ways that tyrants preserve power, a list that includes all of Machiavelli’s recommendations. The difference is that the Ancients thought that cruelty and immorality were self-destructive while Machiavelli thought that they could be self-preserving. For Machiavelli, being insufficiently cruel is a sure path to eventual political defeat, which in Renaissance Italy was often the road to an early grave as well. He not only lived during the height of the Italian Renaissance but witnessed its unforgiving political life first-hand. It was an age of very high culture and very low politics, of Michelangelo and Cesare Borgia. What was most shocking about The Prince at the time was the brazen directness with which Machiavelli advocated expedients such as wiping out the entire family of a ruler, rather than the tactics themselves, which were common enough in the politics of the day.

  Despite this, Machiavelli does not simply argue that politics requires that ethics be set aside, however reluctantly, in order to be effective. In the normally brutal world of real politics, rulers are often forced to choose between two evils, rather than between two goods or between a good and an evil. In such tragic circumstances, choosing the lesser evil over the greater evil, however cruel and repugnant in itself, is the ethically right thing to do. This is the classic dilemma of political ethics that is now called ‘the problem of dirty hands’, in which politicians are often confronted with situations in which all of the options available to them are morally reprehensible, although not all equally so. In his Discourses on Livy, written shortly after The Prince, Machiavelli states this problem and his attitude towards it very succinctly: ‘if his deed accuses him, its consequences excuse him’. Indeed, for Machiavelli a hard-nosed ruler who is willing to commit evil acts (for example, deception, torture and murder) in order to prevent an even greater evil may deserve admiration and respect. Machiavelli was an ethical consequentialist, who thought that the end justified the means, rather than an amoral or immoral figure, as is commonly assumed. As opposed to setting ethics aside to gain political ends, he advocated redefining morality in terms of the ends it promotes. In politics, being fastidious about the means usually endangers the ends, which is what really matters for Machiavelli.

  The truth of this was apparent to Machiavelli when he visited the town of Pistoia in Tuscany, which he recounts in The Prince. The town, then a Florentine colony, was torn between two rival families and on the brink of civil war. So the Florentines sent Machiavelli in to broker a settlement. When he reported back that things had gone too far and that the Florentines should step in forcefully, even bloodily if necessary, his advice was ignored for fear that it would lead to a reputation for brutality. Machiavelli’s fears were soon realized when Pistoia degenerated into widespread chaos, causing much more violence and destruction than if the Florentines had taken his advice and intervened harshly earlier, which would have been the lesser evil. And, as the philosopher Kai Nielsen puts it, ‘where the only choice is between evil and evil, it can never be wrong, and it will always be right, to choose the lesser evil’. It is morally right, and even obligatory, sometimes to commit acts that, while repellent in themselves, are nonetheless good in their consequences because they prevent greater evil. That is why Machiavelli calls cruelty ‘well used’ by rulers when it is applied judiciously in order to prevent even greater cruelty. Such preventive cruelty is ‘the compassion of princes’. Machiavellian politics is a kind of economy of violence in which successful princes commit cruel acts at the right time and in the right proportion to preserve their states and control greater evils with the judicious use of lesser ones.

  One of Machiavelli’s most important innovations in The Prince is his redefinition of the concept of virtue, which he equates with the qualities and skills necessary for political success, including ruthlessness, guile, deceit and a willingness to commit acts that would be deemed evil by conventional standards. The classical ideal of virtue that Machiavelli rejected was expressed by the ancient Roman statesman Cicero, whose De officiis (On Duties) was read and copied more frequently in the Renaissance than any other single work of classical Latin prose. Cicero argued that rulers are successful only when they are morally good, by which he meant adhering to the four cardinal virtues of wisdom, justice, restraint and courage, as well as honesty. For Cicero, the belief that self-interest or expediency conflicts with ethical goodness is not only mistaken but is deeply corrosive of public life and morals. In Renaissance Europe this idealistic view of politics was reinforced by the Christian belief in divine retribution in the afterlife for the sins and injustices committed in this life, and the cardinal virtues were supplemented by the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity. Machiavelli believed that the ethical outlooks of both Cicero and Christianity were rigid and unrealistic, and actually caused more harm than they prevented. In the imperfect world of politics populated, as it is, by wolves, a sheepish adherence to this kind of morality would be disastrous. Men are ‘ungrateful, fickle, liars and deceivers, fearful of danger and greedy for gain’, in Machiavelli’s words, and must be treated accordingly. Machiavellian politics is ‘macho’ politics, where the greatest rewards go
to the boldest gamblers, namely, those who introduce new regimes rather than merely hold power for its own sake without creating anything original and enduring. Machiavelli abandons the Christian notion of divine providence in favour of the pagan conception of fate or fortune. Virtue for him is ‘masculine’, just as fortune is ‘feminine’: in The Prince he notoriously depicts fortune as a woman whom the man of true manliness must forcibly ‘subdue’ if he is to impose his will on events. While the conventional representation of fortune was feminine (‘Lady Luck’), she was usually portrayed as a fairly benign trickster. In Machiavelli’s hands, she becomes a fickle and malevolent goddess who delights in upsetting the plans of men and leading them into chaos and misery. Whereas Christianity preached resignation to the will of God, Machiavelli argued that a ‘virtuous’ ruler could impose his will on fate at least to some degree by being bloody, bold and resolute.

  Machiavelli was one of the first writers in the West to state openly that ‘dirty hands’ are an unavoidable part of everyday politics and to accept the troubling ethical implications of this hard truth without flinching. He held that politicians who deny this are not only unrealistic but are likely to lead citizens down a path to greater evil and misery than is really necessary. It is still worth keeping this in mind today when we are tempted to condemn politicians for acts that may be wrong in a perfect world, which the world of politics is not and never will be. Sometimes doing evil is necessary to do good, as in war, and for Machiavelli politics is a kind of war. But what he thought was necessary in the cut-throat world of Italian Renaissance politics does not easily apply to modern democracies and open societies with the rule of law and a free press, by means of which governments can be constantly reviewed, scrutinized, challenged and exposed. Of course, politicians still engage in lying, corruption and wars, and there are lots of opportunities to evade detection, but the risks of doing so have grown enormously since Machiavelli’s time. These changes have made parts of The Prince obsolete today. But that is true of all political books, to some degree, as none is wholly convincing. What is not true of all such books is that they retain important insights and advice that apply whatever the context, and The Prince is surely among the best of those exceptional works.