On the Philosopher Thomas Aquinas

On the Philosopher Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas considers all the major questions of philosophy and theology and makes some significant contributions to political thought. Although his concerns are always in the first place theological, he attends to questions of political philosophy in his Aristotelian commentaries, at appropriate points in his systematic works, and in occasional works composed in response to requests from political leaders. It can be argued that, with Aquinas, political philosophy emerges as a distinct discipline, a development stimulated by his application of Aristotle's criteria for properly scientific thought.

The Importance of Aristotle

In the 1240s, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics was first fully translated into Latin. Aquinas attended Albert the Great's lectures on the Ethics at Cologne between 1248 and 1252 and returned to his notes from these lectures when preparing his own full commentary on the Ethics between 1270 and 1272. Although known in part from the beginning of the twelfth century, the Politics also was first fully translated in the 1240s. Aquinas began a commentary on this work in 1268, but it was unfinished when he died in 1274.

Through his commentaries on the Ethics and the Politics, many key political ideas are either reaffirmed or introduced into the discourse of Western political thought. The human being, says Aristotle, is by nature a political animal, animal civil, which Aquinas glosses as a social and political animal, animal sociale et politicum. Two of the most important ways in which this social and political nature is expressed are communication and friendship.

Communication

For Aquinas, communicatio facit civitatem, communication establishes the city. Communication has, in the first place, it's obvious meaning. The human being is the linguistic animal, Aquinas says, the one capable of speech and therefore of handling issues of justice and injustice. Communication also refers to the sharing of life and goods, a sharing found in the family (domus), which already entails diverse communications between people in the village (vicinia domorum), which involves a higher level of complexity in relationships, and supremely in the state (civitas). The state represents the highest level of communication and community toward which both individuals and other forms of community naturally tend.

Friendship

Friendship is treated at length in the later books of the Ethics. The common welfare with which communities and their leaders are concerned is not just the sum of the welfares of individual members. It is, says Aquinas, formally different, the welfare of a whole that is qualitatively and not just quantitatively greater than the sum of its parts. The function of government and law is to promote this common welfare, and yet, everyone is involved in it because human beings living together share virtue and not just material goods. This is why friendship is central to Aquinas's political philosophy, the best kind of friendship, founded on a shared desire for the good and not just on utilitarian or individualistic concerns.

The Aristotelian provenance of this politics of friendship is obvious. What is original with Aquinas is the use to which he puts it in his ...