Traditional Conservatism (Part 1): Thomas Aquinas

^{FOR THE RECORD, THE AUTHOR OF THIS POST IS NOT A CONSERVATIVE. I AM AN ATHEIST, A DARWINIST, A GEORGIST, AND A LEFT-LIBERTARIAN LEANING SOCIAL DEMOCRAT. THE PURPOSE OF THIS POST IS EDUCATIONAL. I DO NOT NECESSARILY AGREE WITH ANY OF THE IDEAS ESPOUSED BY THE PHILOSOPHER(S) MENTIONED IN THIS POST.}

Thomas Aquinas

Traditional conservatism began with Edmund Burke, but it represented a desire to conserve the tradition of the Late Middle Ages. As far as the traditional conservatives were concerned, the ideal society was the society of the Late Middle Ages, when Christianity reigned supreme. The Roman Catholic Church provided all of the Western world with a unified vision, a shared worldview. Roman Catholicism was, and still is, basically identical to Thomism. Thus, to understand the worldview and political ideology of the Late Middle Ages—that time period that traditional conservatives idealize—it is important to understand the ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Thomas Aquinas espoused a Catholic worldview in which everything is grounded in the concrete and definite existence of God. The philosophical problem of epistemology is solved by a theological fact, the fact of the existence of God. To put it simply, we have the ability to think because God created us and endowed us with that ability, and He moves us to do so.

"And hence no matter how perfect a corporeal or spiritual nature is supposed to be, it cannot proceed to its act unless it be moved by God; but this motion is according to the plan of His providence, and not by necessity of nature, as the motion of the heavenly body. Now not only is every motion from God as from the First Mover, but all formal perfection is from Him as from the First Act. And thus the act of the intellect or of any created being whatsoever depends upon God in two ways: first, inasmuch as it is from Him that it has the form whereby it acts; secondly, inasmuch as it is moved by Him to act.

"Now every form bestowed on created things by God has power for a determined act, which it can bring about in proportion to its own proper endowment; and beyond which it is powerless, except by a superadded form, as water can only heat when heated by the fire. And thus the human understanding has a form, viz. intelligible light, which of itself is sufficient for knowing certain intelligible things, viz. those we can come to know through the senses. Higher intelligible things of the human intellect cannot know, unless it be perfected by a stronger light, viz. the light of faith or prophecy which is called the "light of grace," inasmuch as it is added to nature.

"Hence we must say that for the knowledge of any truth whatsoever man needs Divine help, that the intellect may be moved by God to its act. But he does not need a new light added to his natural light, in order to know the truth in all things, but only in some that surpass his natural knowledge. And yet at times God miraculously instructs some by His grace in things that can be known by natural reason, even as He sometimes brings about miraculously what nature can do."—Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica, 1st Part of the 2nd Part, Q. 109)

Just as the existence of God solves the problems of epistemology, it also solves the philosophical problems of meta-ethics. Thomas Aquinas's view of ethics is called natural law theory. Aquinas held that humans all share in a common human nature, just as dogs all have the nature of dogs. Humans are created in the image of God, with certain moral precepts inscribed into their hearts. These moral precepts are part of our shared human nature, which we have in common with all other humans. Everyone who is at all familiar with the Bible will quickly see where Aquinas is coming from.

"I answer that, As stated above (Article 2, Article 3), to the natural law belongs those things to which a man is inclined naturally: and among these it is proper to man to be inclined to act according to reason....

"It is therefore evident that, as regards the general principles whether of speculative or of practical reason, truth or rectitude is the same for all, and is equally known by all. As to the proper conclusions of the speculative reason, the truth is the same for all, but is not equally known to all: thus it is true for all that the three angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles, although it is not known to all. But as to the proper conclusions of the practical reason, neither is the truth or rectitude the same for all, nor, where it is the same, is it equally known by all. Thus it is right and true for all to act according to reason: and from this principle it follows as a proper conclusion, that goods entrusted to another should be restored to their owner. Now this is true for the majority of cases: but it may happen in a particular case that it would be injurious, and therefore unreasonable, to restore goods held in trust; for instance, if they are claimed for the purpose of fighting against one's country. And this principle will be found to fail the more, according as we descend further into detail, e.g. if one were to say that goods held in trust should be restored with such and such a guarantee, or in such and such a way; because the greater the number of conditions added, the greater the number of ways in which the principle may fail, so that it be not right to restore or not to restore.

"Consequently we must say that the natural law, as to general principles, is the same for all, both as to rectitude and as to knowledge. But as to certain matters of detail, which are conclusions, as it were, of those general principles, it is the same for all in the majority of cases, both as to rectitude and as to knowledge; and yet in some few cases it may fail, both as to rectitude, by reason of certain obstacles (just as natures subject to generation and corruption fail in some few cases on account of some obstacle), and as to knowledge, since in some the reason is perverted by passion, or evil habit, or an evil disposition of nature; thus formerly, theft, although it is expressly contrary to the natural law, was not considered wrong among the Germans, as Julius Caesar relates (De Bello Gall. vi)....

"I answer that, As stated above (Article 4, Article 5), there belong to the natural law, first, certain most general precepts, that are known to all; and secondly, certain secondary and more detailed precepts, which are, as it were, conclusions following closely from first principles. As to those general principles, the natural law, in the abstract, can nowise be blotted out from men's hearts. But it is blotted out in the case of a particular action, in so far as reason is hindered from applying the general principle to a particular point of practice, on account of concupiscence or some other passion, as stated above (I-II:77:2). But as to the other, i.e. the secondary precepts, the natural law can be blotted out from the human heart, either by evil persuasions, just as in speculative matters errors occur in respect of necessary conclusions; or by vicious customs and corrupt habits, as among some men, theft, and even unnatural vices, as the Apostle states (Romans 1), were not esteemed sinful."—Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica, 1st Part of the 2nd Part, Q. 94, Article 4/6)

One thing you may have noticed from the passage above is that epistemology and ethics run together in Aquinas' thought. To Aquinas, it is an ethical precept to "act according to reason." Ethics and epistemology are both ultimately grounded in the concrete fact of the existence of God.

The best expositor of Thomism was C. S. Lewis:

"Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: "How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?"—"That's my seat, I was there first"—"Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm"— "Why should you shove in first?"—"Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine"—"Come on, you promised." People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.

"Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: "To hell with your standard." Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise.

"It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.

"Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the "laws of nature" we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong "the Law of Nature," they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law—with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it....

"This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised? If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair....

"People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table....

"[W]e know that men find themselves under a moral law, which they did not make, and cannot quite forget even when they try, and which they know they ought to obey. Notice the following point. Anyone studying Man from the outside as we study electricity or cabbages, not knowing our language and consequently not able to get any inside knowledge from us, but merely observing what we did, would never get the slightest evidence that we had this moral law. How could he? for his observations would only show what we did, and the moral law is about what we ought to do. In the same way, if there were anything above or behind the observed facts in the case of stones or the weather, we, by studying them from outside, could never hope to discover it….

"I find that I do not exist on my own, that I am under a law; that somebody or something wants me to behave in a certain way. I do not, of course, think that if I could get inside a stone or a tree I should find exactly the same thing…

"...in the Moral Law somebody or something from beyond the material universe [is] actually getting at us.”—C. S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

But Aquinas also holds that God's natural law ought to be the metric by which we judge human law. He believes positive law ought to be formulated so as to promote virtuous behavior, virtue being defined as habitual obedience to natural law. The laws of civil society should be grounded in natural law as logical applications of the principles of natural law. The ethical principles (of natural law) that hold society together are actually grounded in theological facts. That is the position of Thomas Aquinas. And that is also the position of traditional conservatives.

"Objection 1. It would seem that it was not useful for laws to be framed by men. Because the purpose of every law is that man be made good thereby, as stated above (I-II:92:1). But men are more to be induced to be good willingly by means of admonitions, than against their will, by means of laws. Therefore there was no need to frame laws....

"On the contrary, Isidore says (Etym. v, 20): "Laws were made that in fear thereof human audacity might be held in check, that innocence might be safeguarded in the midst of wickedness, and that the dread of punishment might prevent the wicked from doing harm." But these things are most necessary to mankind. Therefore it was necessary that human laws should be made.

"I answer that, As stated above (I-II:63:1; I-II:94:3), man has a natural aptitude for virtue; but the perfection of virtue must be acquired by man by means of some kind of training. Thus we observe that man is helped by industry in his necessities, for instance, in food and clothing. Certain beginnings of these he has from nature, viz. his reason and his hands; but he has not the full complement, as other animals have, to whom nature has given sufficiency of clothing and food. Now it is difficult to see how man could suffice for himself in the matter of this training: since the perfection of virtue consists chiefly in withdrawing man from undue pleasures, to which above all man is inclined, and especially the young, who are more capable of being trained. Consequently a man needs to receive this training from another, whereby to arrive at the perfection of virtue. And as to those young people who are inclined to acts of virtue, by their good natural disposition, or by custom, or rather by the gift of God, paternal training suffices, which is by admonitions. But since some are found to be depraved, and prone to vice, and not easily amenable to words, it was necessary for such to be restrained from evil by force and fear, in order that, at least, they might desist from evil-doing, and leave others in peace, and that they themselves, by being habituated in this way, might be brought to do willingly what hitherto they did from fear, and thus become virtuous. Now this kind of training, which compels through fear of punishment, is the discipline of laws."

The purpose of positive law, as far as Aquinas is concerned, ought to be to induce people to behave ethically. Thus, all human laws ought to have a basis in natural law. Humans have a natural law—a set of moral precepts inscribed directly on their hearts by the hand of God—but some men are inclined to disobey these laws. Consequently, positive laws needed to be created in order to encourage men to behave ethically out of fear of punishment.

Laws governing property and possession are important aspects of positive law, and Aquinas supports private property. Thomas Aquinas approaches the issue of property by asking whether men ought to possess external things. He answers that dominion over created things is naturally proper to God, but also proper to humans insofar as God had given certain things to man for human benefit. Dominion (property) belongs to God, but God has created man in His image and graciously shared his dominion (possession) with mankind.

“Article 1. Whether it is natural for man to possess external things?

“Objection 1. It would seem that it is not natural for man to possess external things. For no man should ascribe to himself that which is God's. Now the dominion over all creatures is proper to God, according to Psalm 23:1, "The earth is the Lord's," etc….

"On the contrary, It is written (Psalm 8:8): "Thou hast subjected all things under his feet."

"I answer that, External things can be considered in two ways. First, as regards their nature, and this is not subject to the power of man, but only to the power of God Whose mere will all things obey. Secondly, as regards their use, and in this way, man has a natural dominion over external things, because, by his reason and will, he is able to use them for his own profit, as they were made on his account.... Moreover, this natural dominion of man over other creatures, which is competent to man in respect of his reason wherein God's image resides, is shown forth in man's creation (Genesis 1:26) by the words: "Let us make man to our image and likeness: and let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea," etc....

"Therefore it is erroneous to maintain that it is unlawful for a man to possess property.

"I answer that, Two things are competent to man in respect of exterior things. One is the power to procure and dispense them, and in this regard it is lawful for man to possess property. Moreover this is necessary to human life for three reasons. First because every man is more careful to procure what is for himself alone than that which is common to many or to all: since each one would shirk the labor and leave to another that which concerns the community, as happens where there is a great number of servants. Secondly, because human affairs are conducted in more orderly fashion if each man is charged with taking care of some particular thing himself, whereas there would be confusion if everyone had to look after any one thing indeterminately. Thirdly, because a more peaceful state is ensured to man if each one is contented with his own. Hence it is to be observed that quarrels arise more frequently where there is no division of the things possessed...."—Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica, 2nd Part of the 2nd Part, Q. 66)

Thomism represents the Christianity of the Late Middle Ages, and the Christian worldview of the Late Middle Ages is at the heart of traditional conservatism. Russell Kirk lists "six canons of conservative thought" and they are all contained in Thomism. These canons are (1) belief in "transcendental order" and natural law, (2) opposition to egalitarianism, (3) belief that civil society needs hierarchy and class distinctions, (4) connecting freedom and property, and believing that abolition or alteration of property rules would lead to despotism or chaos, (5) faith in customs, conventions, and traditions, and (6) recognition that change is not necessarily a good thing and could actually be a "conflagration." (Cf. Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, Ch. 1) All of this logically follows from the traditional conservatives' medieval Christian worldview. This is why I thought it appropriate to start this series on traditional conservatism not with Burke, the first conservative, but with St. Thomas Aquinas.