Saint Thomas Aquinas

On Law, Morality, and Politics (ed. Baumgarth and Regan)

Reading Guide

1st Level

Background

This anthology primarily provides key sections from Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae(though a couple of other texts are briefly excerpted). The Summa Theologiaeis Aquinas’ best known and most revered text, even though it was left unfinished. Given the interest here in law, morality, and politics, the first two sections of ST, which deal with human action and virtue, both generally and in particular detail, are the focus.

Aquinas’ method might strike a reader new to him as unusual and it can be potentially confusing. In brief, Aquinas organizes his work into a number of Questions, which are in turn divided into Articles. The Articles develop the lines of investigation into the Questions being considered. This dialogic style reflects the way in which academic discussions and debates proceeded in the 13th Century. Once the question is posed, Aquinas will begin with the positions he will ultimately argue against. In other words, the first positions are offered are not ones Aquinas endorses. They are those he will reject. He thought it was important to understand differing positions as well as one’s own, since all labor toward the truth and aid in understanding.

For example, the first question this guide will examine is that which appears first in the Hackett text (p. 1): Question 79: Of the Intellectual Powers. The specific Article is the Twelfth, “Is Synderesis a Special Power of the Soul?” Aquinas first lays out objections to the position he will take (Obj. 1, 2, and 3). He then offers his own position following the phrase “On the contrary.” “On the contrary” will always serve as a marker that we are now entering into the terrain of Aquinas’ position. After giving his own thoughts on the article, and sometimes citing “the Philosopher,” which is Aristotle (no other philosopher deserves that definite article for Aquinas) he replies to each specific Objection (Reply Obj. 1, 2, and 3).

Chapter 1: Conscience

  1. Aquinas begins by considering whether synderesis, a Greek term that often is rendered as a spark of conscience, is a special power of the soul.[1]
  • Question: Aquinas disagrees that synderesisis a power and argues that it is instead a habit. What is the difference between a power and a habit? Why does he consider it a special, natural habit? Toward what does it incline us?
  1. Aquinas wonders next whether conscience is a power.
  • Question: What is the difference between a power, a habit, and an act?
  • Question: How should we understand ‘conscience’? Origen claims that it is “a correcting and guiding spirit accompanying the soul, by which it is led away from evil and made to cling to good” (pp. 2-3). Why is conscience specifically attached to a movement away from evil and toward good? Does this help us to understand Aquinas’ claim that conscience is an act?
  • Question: Aquinas resolves conscience into cum alioscientia or “knowledge applied to an individual case” (p. 3). How is conscience related to the application of knowledge? What do we know when our conscience is active?
  • Question: What is the relation between conscience and synderesis and how does this connect to the relation between act and habit?
  1. Question 19 takes up goodness and malice in relation to the will. Here Aquinas will investigate both the good and evil will. The Fifth Article asks: “Is the Will Evil When It Is at Variance with Erring Reason?” (p.4)
  • Question:What is the relation between reason and the will being assumed in the objections? How does reason govern the will?
  • Question: Aquinas’ claim that willing against reason is sinful depends in large part on his notion that conscience is a dictate of reason. What are the three kinds of action which conscience or reason can direct us toward? How can conscience or reason err when it comes to matters that are morally indifferent?
  • Question: How is it possible for something that is of its nature good to receive the character of something evil, and for something which is of its nature evil to receive the character of something good? How does answering this question help Aquinas resolve the question of whether willing at variance to reason, even erring reason, is evil?
  1. The Sixth Article follows naturally from the Fifth and asks if the will is good when it abides by erring reason. In the previous article Aquinas views the question as asking whether an erring conscience binds; here he sees the question as asking whether an erring conscience excuses (p. 8).
  • Question: How does the reason for the error pertain to excusing the will? What is the difference between an error because of negligence and one that arises from ignorance?
  • Question: Can eternal law err? Can human reason? Is it possible for human reason to always be in accord with eternal law?
  • Question: Does all ignorance excuse the evil that results in the will? What does Aquinas mean by ignorance that is “vincible and voluntary” (p. 9)?

Chapter 2: Law

Aquinas’ understanding of law is among his most influential contributions to the history of ideas as well as to jurisprudence. Question 90 importantly wonders about the nature or essence of law. After having considered intrinsic or internal principles of acts, namely synderesis, the conscience, and the will, Aquinas turns to extrinsic or external principles of acts. As a Christian thinker, Aquinas views the devil as the extrinsic principle inciting one toward evil and God as the extrinsic principle moving one toward the good. God’s law serves as a means of instruction and must be examined.

Essence of Law

  1. The First Article questions whether la is something pertaining to reason. Aquinas is again drawing on relations between willing and the reason. “It belongs to the law to command and forbid. But it belongs to reason to command, as above. Therefore, law is something pertaining to reason” (p. 12).
  • Question: What is Law? Why is it binding? What, ultimately, is the first principle as well as the rule and measure of human acts?
  • Question:In his Reply Obj. 2 Aquinas invokes a distinction between speculative reason and practical reason. How is this distinction helpful here? How does it connect to the way in which practical reason holds with regard to operations? Finally, how does Aquinas characterize universal propositions of the practical intellect?
  • Question:Can there be law that is not in accord with reason? How does this resolve the quandary over the claim that “Whatever pleases the ruler has the force of law” (p.12)?
  1. The Second Article inquires if the law is always directed toward the common good.
  • Question: What is the difference between the common good and individual or private good? What does law direct?Is it possible for a law directed toward a private good to deserve the name law?
  • Question: What is the first principle of all human actions in practical matters? What is the relation of the single individual to the community? How are particular actions and matters referred to the common good?
  1. The next article, the Third Article, asks if any person has reason competent to make laws.
  • Question:Who is competent to make laws? What might it mean to be a person who has the care of the whole people?
  • Question: Why does Aquinas argue that a private person cannot effectively lead another person to virtue? Why do the commands or ordinances made within a family lack the nature of law?
  1. The Fourth Article asks if promulgation, or explicit proclamation, is essential to law. In short, it wonders whether one can make a law in secret or if this conflicts with the very nature of law.
  • Question: Can a law that is not promulgated have any binding force? How are lawas promulgated?
  • Question: What is Aquinas’ definition of law as concluded in this section?

Kinds of Law

  1. Question 91shifts directions from the essence and nature of law the different kinds of law. The first four articles will detail the four kinds of law: eternal, natural, human, and divine. The First Article asks if there is an eternal law.
  • Question: What is the relation between ‘supreme reason’ and the unchangeable and eternal nature of law? Who is the ruler making eternal law?
  • Question: What is the end of divine government?
  1. The Second Article examines whether there is law natural within us.
  • Question: Toward what end doe natural law guide human beings? What is the relation between natural law and eternal law? What is the relation between reason and the natural law?
  1. The Third Article addresses human law.
  • Question: How does reason provide the ground of human laws? Why does Aquinas call human laws “particular determinations” of the laws? In other words, why are these laws particular rather than general or universal? Does this help us to understand the relation between human law and natural law?
  1. The Fourth Article asks if there is a need for divine law.
  • Question: If there is already an eternal, natural, and human law, why is there a need for a divine law? What is the end toward which divine law, in conjunction with the other types, guides human beings? How does it aid human judgment, which is by its nature fallible and uncertain? What kinds of deeds might it forbid which would not be properly forbidden by human law?
  1. The Fifth Article examines whether there is only one divine law.
  • Question: Why does Aquinas argue that there is more than one divine law? Aquinas claims “divine law directs man also in certain particular matters” (p. 26). How does this help us to understand the argument that divine law must be twofold?
  1. The Sixth Article asks if there is a law of concupiscence, a term that means ‘desire’ but tends to refer to bodily or worldly desires within a theological context.
  • Question: Why does an inclination toward sensuality have the nature of law in creatures lacking reason, i.e. non-human animals, but not in humans? Further, why does Aquinas argue that “in man it has not the nature of law in this way; rather is it a deviation from the law of reason” (p. 28)? What is the difference between sensuality, which is subject to reason, and concupiscence, which strays from reason?

Effects of Law

  1. Question 92 inquires into the effects of law. The First Article asks whether it is an effect of law to make men good.
  • Question: What is the ‘proper effect’ of law? What is necessary for a community to flourish? How does Aquinas treat tyrannical law? What is its relation to the effect of making its citizens good?
  1. The Second Article asks if the acts of law are suitably assigned.
  • Question: Aquinas is wondering whether it is fitting that law: command, prohibit, permit, and punish. The worry, here, is regarding law’s activity and consequences. Why does Aquinas think that all four of these activities are proper to law? How does an activity such as punishing lead one toward one’s own good?

Eternal Law

  1. Question 93 begins Aquinas’ consideration of each of the four types of law: eternal, natural, human, and divine, which is further divided into the Old Law and the New Law or the Law of the Gospel. Aquinas first takes up the eternal law and elaborates its essence and extent.
  • Question: Aquinas draws an analogy between an artificer and the pre-existing idea of the artifice he creates (e.g., a pen maker has first the idea of a pen before bringing the particular pen into being) and a governor in whom there pre-exists the type of order which his government is to bring into being (p. 34). How does this analogy help Aquinas argue that eternal law exists within God?
  • Question: If law must be promulgated, how can eternal law still be law?
  1. The Second Article asks if all know the eternal law and Aquinas begins his own argument with a quote from Augustine: “knowledge of the eternal law is imprinted on us” (p. 35).
  • Question: in what way do all human beings know the eternal law? What does Aquinas suggest by his metaphor of the sun and its rays? How doe we know eternal law as a reflection? How should we understand his claim that we can know eternal law without comprehending it? Can a human being judge the eternal law?
  1. The Third Article asks if every law derives from eternal law.
  • Question: The problem being elucidated here is whether such things as the law of concupiscence or unjust laws can stem from eternal law. How does Aquinas handle this problem?
  • Question: Aquinas claims that “all laws, insofar as they partake of right reason, are derived from eternal law” (p.37). If law does not partake in right reason, is it unjust? Are unjust laws deserving of the name law? What is the relation between an unjust law and violence? Does an unjust law have any law-like characteristics?
  1. The Fourth Article turns to the scope of eternal law by asking whether necessary and eternal things are subject to eternal law.
  • Question: A theological worry is lurking here: is God’s will subject to eternal law? If God’s will is, then it would seem that God is not autonomous. Aquinas will argue that God’s will is not subject to the eternal law, but the same thing as it (p. 39). How does this reply to the first objection exclude God from being governed by eternal law? Are necessary things governed by eternal law?
  1. The Fifth Article asks whether natural contingents are subject to eternal law.
  • Question: The natural world is not imbued with reason, as are human beings. The question is, then, whether it is subject to the law. Aquinas makes his answer clear: “...God imprints on the whole of nature the principles of its proper actions. And so, in this way, God is said to command the whole of nature...” (p. 41). Irrational creatures (think here of non-human animals) are likewise directed by divine providence, though not in the way humans are. How, then, might this law be promulgated? In what way are irrational creatures moved by God? What of seeming defects in natural contingents?
  1. The Sixth Article concludes Aquinas’ examination of the scope of eternal law by asking whether all human affairs are subject to eternal law.
  • Question: Whereas irrational creatures are motivated by eternal law via an inward principle, rational creatures are subject to the eternal law by way of knowledge as well as by an inward principle. How so? In what ways can one know the eternal law? What occurs if one is imperfectly subject to the eternal law?

Natural Law

  1. Question 94 continues Aquinas’ consideration of each of the four types of law, here examining natural law, beginning with whether it is a habit.
  • Question: The First Article determines that the natural law not properly or essentially a habit, especially since it is that by which we act and is to be found in individuals who cannot act in accord with it (viz. infants and the damned). Is the natural law, though held habitually? How so?
  1. The Second Article wonders whether the natural law contains one or many precepts.
  • Question: Aquinas uses here, as elsewhere, an analogy between the precepts of natural law and their relation to practical reason and the self-evident principles (such as, the principle of non-contradiction) and their relation to speculative reason. Both, he claims, are self-evident. Aquinas claims that in speculative reason, or in metaphysics, “being” falls first under the apprehension. What is it in practical reason? What does Aquinas mean when he claims that “good has the nature of an end” (p. 47)?
  • Question:What are the three inclinations proper to natural law (in his answer on p. 48)? How do these all flow from one first precept?
  1. The Third Article asks if all acts of virtue are prescribed, or ordained, by the natural law.The sphere of natural law includes “everything to which a man is inclined according to his nature” (p. 49). Since man has the natural inclination to act in accord with reason, man also has the natural inclination to act in accord with virtue. In this sense, Aquinas argues, all acts of virtue are dictated via the natural law.
  • Question: What is the link between reason and virtue? In what sense does natural law not prescribe all acts of virtue? Why is it important that this argument considers act in themselves?
  1. The Fourth Article inquires into whether the natural law is the same in all men.
  • Question: A problem of relativism emerges in the objections. First, not all men obey the Gospel. Second, standards of justice vary and nothing deemed just is exempt from change. Finally, different men have different inclinations. Aquinas counters this by claiming that natural law is the same to all not in terms of detail but only as to the general principles, principles which are determined via reason. Is his reply satisfactory? Is reason foundational to his understanding of universal, natural law?
  1. The Fifth Article wonders if natural law can be changed.
  • Question: In what way can natural law be changed? Is this a fundamental change? In what way is natural law immutable (unable to be changed)? What is the relation between human laws and natural law here?
  1. The Sixth Article asks if the law of nature can be abolished from the heart of man.
  • Question: The natural law contains both universally known precepts, such as to preserve one’s own self, and more detailed ones. Which is the kind of precept which can be effaced and which cannot?
  • Question: Aquinas claims that reason can fail to apply the general principle properly to a particular point. Is this error vicious?

Human Law