For Joel Feil
1 What is Commonly Thought About the Common Good
1.1 Honor and the Common Good
Honor is a concept that is closely related to the common good, especially the political common good. Honor, Aristotle, notes, seems to be the end, the telos, of the political life. In truth however, he goes on to argue, the end of political life is virtue; we seek honor to convince ourselves that we are good, since honor is the recognition that others give to our virtue.[2] We human beings long to contribute to something greater than ourselves, and to have our contribution confirmed by the recognition of others, by honor. Jan Eyre, in Charlotte Brontë’s novel, after turning up destitute at the doorstep of Moor House, ends up as a schoolteacher in a small village. The usefulness of her work as a schoolteacher to the community, and the recognition, the honor, that she receives from the villagers for that contribution, make her feel that she is “sitting in sunshine, calm and sweet” and that her feelings are budding and blooming under its rays.[3] What is true of honor in a small village is even more true in a greater, properly political society that can achieve a greater common good.
In atomized mass societies, however, we are familiar with the phenomenon of people becoming estranged from the common good. To lack the recognition of others, and to feel that one is not contributing to the common good at all, can lead to seeing one’s own life as worthless—this can lead to depression, rage, and despair.[4]
Honor is given especially to those who chose the common good above their own private advantage. “History,” writes George Washington’s first biographer, Mason Weems, “has lavished its choicest praises on those magnanimous patriots, who, in their wars for liberty and their country, have cheerfully sacrificed their own wealth to defeat the common enemy.”[5] Washington is admired, above all, for the primacy that he gave to the common good over his own private advantage. Whether Washington himself could have given the right philosophical account his actions is another question.
To prefer the common good to one’s own advantage is an honorable and desirable, but it is also arduous. It requires self-transcendence, a stepping out of the confines of the private goods most immediately known to us through our sense powers to a more universal good, known by reason. We associate love of the common good with heroic past ages. Our own age, we tend to think, is pusillanimous and individualistic. In better times, however, there were noble and magnanimous men who were devoted to the common good. This contrast is made in a remarkable discussion of the common good in David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King. The novel is set in the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois in the 1980s. A group of bureaucrats at the center have gotten stuck in an elevator. One of them, DeWitt Glendenning, opines that Americans in the year 1980 “Have gone crazy. Regressed somehow.”[6]The craziness amounts to a denial of the common good: “We don’t think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities.”[7] And again, “We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights and privileges, but not our responsibilities.”[8] Glendenning thinks that the mentality of for-profit business corporations of America’s capitalist economy has seeped into the mentality of the people themselves:
Corporations aren’t citizens or neighbors or parents. They can’t vote or serve in combat. They don’t learn the Pledge of Allegiance. They don’t have souls. They’re revenue machines. … It seems that we as individual citizens have adopted a corporate attitude. That our ultimate obligation is to ourselves. That unless it’s illegal or there are direct practical consequences for ourselves, any activity is OK.[9]
By contrast, Glendenning points to the Founding Fathers of the United States as men who loved and cared for the common good more than their own advantage:
And—and now I’m speaking of Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin, the real church Fathers—what raised the American experiment beyond great imagination and made it very nearly work was not just these men’s intelligence but their profound moral enlightenment—their sense of civics. The fact is that they cared more about the nation and the citizens than about themselves. They could have just set America up as an oligarchy where powerful eastern industrialists and southern landowners controlled all the power and ruled with an iron hand in a glove of liberal rhetoric. … These Founding Fathers were geniuses of civic virtue. They were heroes.[10]
Glendenning’s praise here is certainly excessive, when he calls the Founding Fathers the real Church fathers, but it points to how great a good the common good is that it leads to such excessive honors.
Glendenning is aware that a laudator temporis acti, who contrasts “the good old days” when people were civic minded with the way things are now, is considered a ridiculous figure.[11] But I think that such an attitude is reasonable and good. No one can think well about the common good who does not have piety towards the past. It ought, of course, to be an honest piety that recognizes the flaws of one’s political forebears. And Glendenning does acknowledge such flaws. The founders of the American Republic, Glendenning says, “assumed their descendants would be like them—rational, honorable, civic-minded. Men with at least as much concern for the common good as for personal advantage.”[12] The problem with this assumption, was that the polity that they had set up—a commercial republic in which the democratic element predominated—had an inevitable tendency to erode concern for the common good:
[De Tocqueville] says somewhere that one thing about democracies and their individualism is that they by their very nature corrode the citizen’s sense of true community, of having real true fellow citizens whose interests and concerns were the same as his. This is a kind of ghastly irony, if you think about it, since a form of government engineered to produce equality makes its citizens so individualistic and self-absorbed they end up as solipsists, navel-gazers.[13]
Another one of the bureaucrats remarks, “De Tocqueville’s thrust is that it’s in the democratic citizen’s nature to be like a leaf that doesn’t believe in the tree it’s part of.”[14]
This initial look at the connection between honor and the common good indicates that we commonly think of the common good as of something that gives life purpose and worth; something more important than private advantage, to which we relate as parts to a whole; something that requires heroism to love properly; and finally as something the love of which has a quasi-religious character, such that the founders of a polity can be compared to the Church Fathers.
1.2 The Horror of Totalitarianism
There is, however, another way of thinking about the common good, a way of thinking that arises from our experience of totalitarian regimes. Such regimes tried to absorb everything into the state. Human beings were treated as mere parts of the state the way a branch is a part of a tree; they could be killed with no more compunction than a gardener prunes a tree. Thus Benito Mussolini argues that the state should be seen as “an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State.”[15] He conceives of the state as a substantial being, having its own consciousness and will: “The Fascist State is itself conscious, and has itself a will and a personality.”[16] Mussolini’s contemporary, the Austrian theorist Othmar Spann, developed an elaborate theory along those lines which he called “universalism,” but which could with more accuracy be called “totalitarianism.”[17]
We see something similar in the ideology of the Nationalist Socialist Party in Germany. One of their slogans was “Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz,” “the general interest before self-interest.”[18] For Adolf Hitler, this meant that the state had to serve the common interest of the race and was justified in trampling on individual interest for its sake. Thus, he argues that the state has to carry out a program of eugenics that would deny medically unsound persons the right to marriage and procreation:
The State has to appear as the guardian of a thousand years’ future, in the face of which the wish and the egoism of the individual appears as nothing and has to submit. It has to put the most modern medical means at the service of this knowledge. It has to declare unfit for propagation everybody who is visibly ill and has inherited a disease and it has to carry this out in practice.[19]
Such “right-wing” totalitarianism, with its organicist conception of the state, has its roots in the Romantic reaction against Enlightenment rationalism. One might think, therefore, that Marxist communism, with its root in Enlightenment ideals of freedom, equality, and fraternity, and its prediction of the “withering away of the state,” would be quite different. In reality, however, totalitarianism showed itself remarkably similar in its “right-wing” and “left-wing” variants. Thus, for example, Vladimir Lenin argues that the “withering away of the state” can only take place in the final phase of communism. During the transition from capitalism to communism a “dictatorship of the proletariat” is necessary in which the state, far from being weakened, is strengthened. As Lenin puts it:
The overthrow of the bourgeoisie can be achieved only by the proletariat becoming the ruling class, capable of crushing the inevitable and desperate resistance of the bourgeoisie, and of organizing all the working and exploited people for the new economic system. The proletariat needs state power, a centralized organization of force, an organization of violence, both to crush the resistance of the exploiters and to lead the enormous mass of the population—the peasants, the petit-bourgeoisie, and semi-proletarians—in the work of organizing a socialist economy. By educating the workers’ party, Marxism educates the vanguard of the proletariat, capable of assuming power and leading the whole people to socialism, of directing and organizing the new system, of being the teacher, the guide, the leader of all the working and exploited people in organizing their social life without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie.[20]
This powerful state as an organization of violence against the bourgeoisie ends up closely resembling the Fascist state. It is willing to sacrifice human beings in the present for some supposed collective good in the future.
Clearly, such totalitarian understandings of the “common good” (in inverted commas) are wrong. Human beings are not merely parts of the state, nor can they be treated merely as means to some future utopia. The bitter experience of totalitarian regimes has, therefore, commonly led to the thought that the state is for the sake of human beings, whose good it must serve. It seems that the personal good of human beings has primacy over the common good of the state.
1.3 Personalism, Maritain, and De Koninck
Our consideration of honor and the common good on the one hand, and of the experience of totalitarianism on the other, shows a certain tension in the way we commonly think of the common good. The honor we give to those who sacrifice their private good for the common good seems to show it is excellent to give the common good primacy, and to relate to it as a part to a whole. But the horror of totalitarianism seems to show that we ought to give primacy to the good of the individual over the common good. How can the tension between these two elements in our thinking about the common good be resolved?
One attempt to resolve the tension was made by the philosopher Jacques Maritain. Maritain solved this difficulty by a distinction between man as an individual and man as a person, which he had taken from certain Thomist writers. As an individual, Maritain argues, man is “a fragment of matter,” he is a part of greater wholes, including the state, and as a part he is ordered to the goods of those wholes.[21] As a person, however, man is a spiritual whole, who transcends the entire created universe, and thus he is not subordinated to the common good of society, but rather that common good is subordinated to him: “It is to the perfect achievement of the person and of its supra-temporal aspirations, that society itself and its common good are subordinated, as to the end of another order, which transcends them. … Society exists for each person and is subordinated to it.”[22] In the 1930s and 40s Maritain’s solution became very popular and was commonly referred to as “personalism.”
In 1942 Maritain joined a number of other European Catholics who had fled the from the War to America—including Sigrid Undset, Frank Sheed, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Yves Simon—in publishing a manifesto entitled “In the Face of the World’s Crisis,” condemning Fascism, National Socialism, and Bolshevism, and proposing principles for the reconstruction of Europe after the defeat of such ideologies.[23] The Manifesto did not explicitly mention Maritain’s distinction between individual and person. It did, however, strongly condemn totalitarian ideologies, which reduced the person to a mere part of society, as a leaf is a part of a tree. It quotes a Japanese nationalist slogan according to which, “The individual is not an entity, but depends upon the whole, born of the State and maintained by the State.”[24] It called instead for a political order based on the primacy of the person, and of personal rights and liberties.
The great Thomist Charles De Koninck, a Belgian philosopher who taught at the University of Laval in Quebec, was initially involved in the drafting of “In the Face of the World’s Crisis,” but at the last minute he pulled out of the project and refused to sign.[25] In a letter to another member of the drafting committee, De Koninck explained the main reason why he was refusing to sign: “If we do not add anything about the primacy of the common good, the document will appear purely personalist.”[26] The next year De Koninck published an explosively brilliant book entitled On the Primacy of the Common Good: Against the Personalists. De Koninck certainly sympathized with Maritain’s opposition to totalitarianism. In the Foreword to On the Primacy he writes: “Human society is made for man. Any political doctrine that ignores man’s rational nature, and consequently denies his dignity and liberty, is vitiated at its root and subjects man to inhuman conditions. That is why one rightly opposes totalitarian doctrines in the name of the dignity of man.”[27]However, he argued that this legitimate reaction against totalitarianism had led in “the personalists” to a misunderstanding of human dignity as something absolute, not dependent on a more universal good than the person. In this, De Koninck argued, the personalists had unwittingly adopted some of the anthropocentric premises of modern philosophy, which had ultimately led to Marxism. Thus, De Koninck argued, the personalists actually shared some of the same errors as the totalitarians whom they wanted to oppose. De Koninck did not explicitly mention Maritain in his book, but most readers thought that Maritain’s personalism was the target.
My aim in this essay is to expound De Koninck’s account of the common good and to show how it does justice to both of the elements in our common thinking about it.
2 The Good as Perfection and Final Cause
De Koninck begins his discussion of the common good with a summary of St Thomas’s teaching on what “the good” is: “The good is that which all things desire insofar as they desire their perfection. Thus, the good has the note [raison] of final cause. Thus, it is the first of causes and consequently diffusive of itself” (Primacy 74). To define the good as that which all desire is to define it as that which attracts and fulfills our desire. The things that attract our desire are first of all the objects of our natural abilities. The objects of our sense faculties—tasty food, fragrant perfume, beautiful sounds, light and color, and “the limbs that carnal love embraces,”[28] as St Augustine puts it, attract our sensual desire. All of these objects, and in addition to them, the objects of our spiritual faculties—such as truth, justice, and spiritual friendship—attract our will, our spiritual desire.
What leads to those objects, or follows on their attainment, is also desirable for us. We desire the activities whereby our abilities attain their objects. I can call the activity of tasting a cookie or knowing the truth good. I can also call the habit that enables my faculty to act well good. Science is good, because it enables me to know well. What is useful for attaining a good object is good. Studying can be called good, insofar as it is useful for coming to the knowledge of the truth. And the delight or joy that results from obtaining a good object can also be called good. Hence the joy that I feel when I know the truth can be called good. What is most good, however, is the good object that I desire, since the activity of obtaining it and the things useful for obtaining it are for its sake, and the delight that follows on obtaining it is clearly secondary to it. One would not choose to have the delight of knowledge, without actually knowing something true.
Our natural abilities are potencies of our nature that are actualized by attaining their objects. And we ourselves are completed or perfected by such actualization. Desire in the strict sense follows on knowledge—the good attracts us when we know it. But in an extended sense we can call any intrinsic inclination to actualization desire. Thus, all natural things, since they have an intrinsic principle of motion, “desire” their actualization, their good.
As we ascend from inanimate, to animate, to sensitive, to rational beings, we see that the higher beings are inclined to more distinct objects, which at the same time they take more deeply into their interior. A rock has a certain inclination to other heavy objects, but these remain outside the rock. A plant is able to take nutrients into itself and transform them into its substance. An animal can sense the qualities of another thing as other. Finally, human beings can take in all of reality, through universal knowledge. We can know things quite distinct and distant from ourselves, but by knowing them we take them deep into our interior life.[29]
“What a piece of work is man!” says Hamlet: “How noble in reason? How infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable? In action how like an angel? In apprehension, how like a god?”[30] And again: “What is a man / If his chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.”[31]
Man cannot be perfected merely by living the life of nutrition and growth or of sensual pleasure; rather man is perfected by actualizing the faculties most specific to his nature. In a way what is most specific to man, as a rational animal, is moral action, in which the passions and activities of the sensual part of the soul are guided and ennobled by reason. We eat and drink, and so do the beasts, but when a man is perfected by the virtue of temperance, his eating and drinking takes on a spiritual character. Therefore, moral action can be called the purpose of man, his “happiness.” And yet man is even nobler in the activity of reason itself: in understanding, and science, and (above all) wisdom he becomes like a god, doing an activity that is more than human. Thus, the end of man is twofold: a lower, more human happiness, the end of the active life; and a higher, more divine happiness, the end of the contemplative life. The active life is good in itself, but it is also useful for the contemplative life. As long as our sensual passions are in turmoil we are distracted and cannot contemplate the truth. Only when our passions have been ordered by moral virtue do we have the calm we need to contemplate.
The good that we attain in happiness brings us to completion, it perfects us, it is our end. But this good has a twofold character: primarily it is the object attained by our activity (the truth)—we can call this “objective happiness”—but secondarily it is the activity whereby we attain our object (knowledge), which we can call “subjective happiness.” The two are linked—the object is perfective of us insofar as we attain to it by our activity. Nevertheless, we can distinguish the object as having priority.
As our end, the good is the final cause. The final cause is the cause of causes. It causes the causality of the other causes. The matter can only cause insofar as it is actualized by the form, and the form cannot come into the matter unless some agent draws it out or pours it in. But an agent cannot act unless there is some reason for action, and this reason is the end. Therefore, the final, the last cause, is also the first cause. “Consequently,” De Koninck writes, it is “diffusive of itself.” The good pours out and spreads its goodness to the things inclined towards it. In reaching the good, the things that are inclined to it become themselves good, perfected.
3 The Common Good as a Universal Cause
I now turn to the commonality of the common good. The common good is common or universal precisely as a cause. A higher cause extends its causality to more effects. A higher and more perfect good diffuses its goodness to more beings. It is more communicable to many. The goodness of a private good—say, a cookie—can only really be diffused to a single person. (Hence it is called a “singular good.”) Its goodness is divided when it is shared. But a higher good—peace or truth, for example—can be communicated in its entirety to many without being diminished or divided. My knowledge of the truth does not diminish your knowledge. My sharing in the peace does not reduce the supply of peace. The more elevated good is more diffusive and communicable because it is more good, its goodness is superabundant. Hence, De Koninck argues that “it is the better good of the singular” (Primacy 75). That is, the more elevated good, although in a way more distant from me (higher than me), is really more perfective of me—it communicates its goodness more deeply to my interior.
The common good is not common by being a collection of private goods. It is a single good shared by many. To attain a common good is to attain it as a common good, as the good of a community which is formed by communion in that good. De Koninck illustrates this with the example of a household: “The good of the family is better than the singular good, not because all the members of the family find in it their singular good: the good of the family is better because, for each of its individual members, it is also the good of the others” (Primacy 75). That is, the common good of the family is not loved merely as a useful good that helps the family members attain private goods such as food and warmth. Rather, it is loved precisely as a common good. In fact, the common good is what makes the domestic society (the family) to be a society. Formally speaking, De Koninck argues, I love the other members of my family because they are sharers with me in the common good.
The common good is not the good of the collective taken as a sort of super-individual, a Leviathan. In that case, the common good would not really be common; it would be the private good of the collective, or its leaders. This is how De Koninck distinguishes himself from the totalitarians. Individual members of society are not like organic parts of a body, who have no good of their own. Rather, the common good is the good of each of the members of society. The error of the personalists is that they assume a totalitarian notion of the common good as a collective good and see the best goods of persons as purely personal, singular goods—merely reversing the order of goods established by totalitarians.
On the contrary, De Koninck argues, a thing’s own perfection, its own good, most perfective of itself, is found in the common good as common. A person is not a part of a society the way a branch is part of a vine. The good of the vine belongs to the vine as a single, substantial whole—the branch is not a full substance, it has being and goodness only as a part. Nevertheless, the relation of the singular to the common good does have an analogical similarity to the relation of part to whole. This becomes clearer when De Koninck moves to a consideration of our love of the common good.
4 Loving the Common Good
De Koninck begins his discussion of the love of the common good with natural love, the love that is not elicited by knowledge, but is rather an inclination put into things by the divine intelligence.[32] De Koninck distinguishes between four different senses of a thing’s own perfection, toward which it tends by natural love.
The first level is the good of the individual as individual. This is the good that an animal seeks when it seeks nourishment for the conservation of its singular being (Primacy 76).
The second level is the good of a thing that belongs to it on account of its species. This is the good, for example, that animals seek in reproduction. Is this really a thing’s “own perfection”? Is it not the perfection of another? No, says De Koninck:
The animal prefers ‘naturally’, that is to say in virtue of the inclination which is in it by nature (ratio indita rebus ab arte divina), the good of the species to its singular good. ‘Every singular naturally loves the good of its species more than its singular good.’ That is because the good of the species is a greater good for the singular than its singular good. Therefore, this is not a species which abstracts from individuals and desires its proper good against the natural desire of the individual; it is the singular itself which, by nature, desires the good of the species rather than its singular good (Primacy 76).
As Aquinas Guilbeau, O.P. has shown, in his excellent dissertation on De Koninck’s work, it is at this level, the level of the good proper to something on account of its species, that the common goods of human societies are found. The good of the family and the good of the polity are ordered not merely to the survival and perfection of an individual, but to the survival of the human species, and (in the polity) the perfection of all the manifold potentialities of human nature.[33]
The third level of a thing’s own good is the good that belongs to it “on account of its genus” (Primacy 76). This is the good toward which equivocal agents (the angels) act, when they communicate goodness to many species. And it is the good of intellectual substances. As Guilbeau argues, it is at this level, the level of the good that belongs to something on account of its genus, that we human beings seek the good of the contemplative life.[34] The genus in question here is not the univocal genus “animal” at the summit of which man stands, but rather the analogical quasi-genus of intelligent beings (angels and men), at the very bottom of which stands man. Man is able to attain by intelligence to the great common good that is the order of the whole universe.
The fourth level of a thing’s own good is that which it has on account of the likeness (analogy) that exists between an effect and its cause. “It is thus that God, a purely and simply universal good, is the proper good that all things desire naturally as the highest and best good, and which confers on all things their entire being” (Primacy 76-77). Every perfection found in created things is a reflection of the perfection of God, and therefore there is an “analogy” and similitude between God and creatures. The perfection that creatures have is a participation in God’s perfection. To participate is to take part in something without removing a part from it. My reflection in a mirror partakes of my form, without depriving me of any part of my form. God does not have parts, but creatures share in Him in an incomplete, that is, a partial way. Therefore, De Koninck can consider the love of creatures for the Creator as love of parts for a whole. Creatures are ordered to their Creator the way parts are ordered to a whole. The perfection that each creature desires consists in an ever-greater likeness to the Creator. But that means that the perfection that they desire only ever exists in a secondary way in themselves. It exists fully only in God. Therefore, to love one’s “own” perfection means to love God more than oneself.[35]
De Koninck next turns to the love that is elicited by knowledge. Here he sees the greatness of the common good even more clearly. While an animal has a natural inclination to the good of its species, the love elicited by its sense-knowledge cannot reach so far. By elicited love an animal seeks only singular, sensible goods. We, however, by the love elicited by universal knowledge, are able explicitly to desire the universal common good.
5 Virtue, Happiness, and Friendship
To love the common good as a common good is not to order the common good to oneself, as one orders a private good, but rather to order oneself to the common good. The private good of a cookie is ordered to me. I love the cookie for my own sake. In a sense, I am the end of the cookie. But to love a superabundant, diffusive and elevated good, which is thereby common, is to order myself to that good.
De Koninck notes that such love of a more common good requires a more excellent virtue. Virtue is the quality that enables a thing to do its own work or proper activity well. In man there are three different levels of virtue: monastic (or ethical) virtue, domestic (or economic) virtue, and political virtue. This corresponds to the threefold division of moral science made by Aristotle: monastics (or ethics), domestics (or economics), and politics.
“Monastic” in this context has nothing to do with monks and monasteries. It is derived from the Greek μόνος, meaning alone, solitary. Monastic virtues are the qualities that enables a man to do his proper activity as an individual well. For example, monastic courage is what enables a man to defend his own person against dangers well.
Domestic virtues are the virtues that perfect a human being as a member of the household or family. For example, domestic courage enables a man to defend the common good of his household well. The household is the society in which our initial education in virtue takes place. Our parents form us in monastic virtue as well as in domestic virtue. Moreover, this education puts us into proximate potency for political virtue, which is the highest kind of human moral virtue.
Political virtues are the qualities that enable us to participate in the highest common good of the human active life: the common good of the polis, the civitas, the polity. For example, political courage enables a man to defend the common good of the polity as a common good, not merely because his own private good is included in it. As De Koninck writes:
The [courage] of man as man by which he defends the good of his person does not suffice to defend the common good reasonably. That society is very corrupt which cannot appeal to the love of the arduous common good and to the higher [courage] of the citizen as citizen for the defense of this good, but which must present its good under the color of the good of the person (Primacy 81).
The common good of society is twofold: there is the intrinsic common good of the order that unifies the society, making it to be a society, and then there is the extrinsic common good, which is the common good intended by the one who brings about the common good by his governance.[36] The intrinsic common good of the polity is peace, the tranquility of order that results from justice and prudent governance. This peace is a thing of beauty, in which the splendid virtues of citizens are brought into a harmonious unity. It is like a symphony of human life which imitates the beauty of Heaven. As Socrates puts it, “No city can be happy which is not designed by artists who imitate the heavenly pattern.”[37]
The extrinsic common good of the city is found in happiness. As Aristotle teaches, a city is founded for living well, that is, acting according to moral virtue.[38] There is a difficulty here, for virtuous actions seem to be singular and not communicable to many. Lord Nelson’s act of courage is not my act. The key here, as De Koninck’s best friend Jacques de Monléon argues, and as Gregory Froelich has shown in greater detail, is friendship.[39] We enjoy the virtuous activities of our friends as our own goods—above all when we act together with our friends, but even when we simply contemplate our friends’ actions. A friend is another self.
We see this very clearly in military or naval friendship. For example, Lord Nelson’s friendship with his comrades in acts of supremely excellent naval courage made those acts of courage a common good—common first to Lord Nelson and his officers, then to all the sailors of the fleet, and finally even to all those who were inspired by them. Nelson called his officers a “band of brothers”[40]—not because they were united, like literal brothers, in a domestic common good, but rather because the intensity of the friendship in shared actions of naval virtue made them as close as brothers. The intensity of that friendship in naval virtue is shown by the famous scene of Nelson’s death at the Battle of Trafalgar, when, as he lay dying, he said to his flag captain, “Kiss me, Hardy.” Captain Hardy knelt down and kissed him on the cheek.[41]
George Washington’s decision to retire from political life after two terms as president, rather than seizing lifelong power, was seen as an act of political virtue, aimed at preserving the form of government that had been established. That act of Washington was shared by his political friends, such as Alexander Hamilton, who helped him draft his farewell address.[42] But it was shared also to some degree by all his compatriots united to him in civic friendship, not only at his time, but even afterwards in memory. In honoring the great men of a polity, we make their virtuous activities our common goods.
The two preceding examples will, perhaps, be doubted, since there was perhaps something lacking in the virtue of the persons concerned.[43] A more complete example can be seen in the friendship of King St. Louis IX of France and Gui Gui Foucois / Pope Clement IV, as ably described by Andrew Williard Jones.[44]
While friendship can make the virtuous activity of one friend the good of the other, it is also true that love of common goods that is the foundation of the communication between friends.[45] The second point suggests that political friendship is possible with many persons at once. The greater the common good, the more persons to whom it can be communicated. But the first point suggests that a political community must remain small. True friendship requires sharing of life for a long time. As Susan Waldstein put it, friendship is not merely mutual benevolence, in the sense that one wishes all of one’s fellow men to be happy:
But when two men discover that they share the same vision; the same deepest insights and loves, this is not enough. They begin to spend more and more time together and to love each other more and more. When their love has ripened so that they always delight in each other’s company, and desire and do the best things for each other, and rejoice and sorrow with each other, and think about and love and do the same things together—then they are called friends. Such true friends are so closely united that they almost have only one life between them. For they are of one mind and one heart since they always think about and love and do the same things together whenever possible. Hence they identify each other’s happiness with their own, since happiness for each of them consists in their shared life together.[46]
Aristotle argues, it is not possible to have many friends.[47] While this conclusion is not the middle term of his argument in the Politics that a political community cannot be very large,[48] it is not difficult to see the connection.
There is thus a certain tension in the understanding of politics as being ordered to the common good. On the one hand, the greatness of the common good impels toward ever larger community; on the other hand, the need for true political friendship impels toward smaller community. The two impulses can be harmonized through overlapping networks of friendship[49] and through the principle of subsidiarity.[50]
6 Rights and the Common Good
Political life is ordered to the common good of the human active life, to peace and happiness. The purpose of polity cannot, therefore, be reduced to the protection of individual rights. “Note, in passing,” De Koninck writes, “the important distinction to be made between ‘subject of right’ and ‘foundation of right’, that moderns tend to confuse. The right is defined by law and law by the common good” (Primacy 156, note 56). In the tradition of Roman and medieval jurisprudence, the primary sense of “a right” is “an object of justice.” The virtue of justice is the firm will to give to each their due. Thus, an object of justice is what is due, the thing or action due to another. For example, a fair share of the spoils of battle is due to Achilles—it is his right. Now the term right can be analogically extended from these objective rights to rights in a more familiar sense: subjective rights. Subjective rights are the moral powers that persons have over their objective rights. Achilles has a subjective right to the spoils of war. Which is the primary reality? Are subjective rights derived from objective rights or vice-versa? In truth, it is objective rights that are primary. It is not because Achilles has a subjective right to the spoils that they are due to him, rather it is because the spoils are due to him that Achilles has a subjective right to them. Since objective rights are primary, subjective rights are dependent on a prior distribution of things. This distribution is largely a matter of law. Law is the foundation of rights, the reason for rights (ratio juris). Law goes back to rational understanding of what the true common good of human communities is. Thus, the distribution of objective rights, on which subjective rights depends, goes back to a sapiential understanding of the true good. The whole order of rights is directed to the true common good. Rights, therefore, are ultimately justified by the common good, and they ought to be distributed in such a way as to allow everyone in society participation in the common good.[51]
Modern philosophers such as John Locke, however, reverse this order. For them subjective rights are the primary juridical and political reality on which everything else is founded. And these subjective rights are understood as private liberties. They thus deny the primacy of the common good, subordinating it to the private good of subjective rights. A polity founded on the primacy of subjective rights will therefore lead to an erosion of devotion to the common good. This will have, as De Koninck argues, “execrable practical consequences” (Primacy 108). For, when each orders the common good to his own private good, every member of society is a little tyrant (cf. Primacy 80).
7 The Highest Common Good
The activities of the moral virtues, the happiness of the vita activa, are not the ultimate end of human life. The common good of the polity, which belongs to us on account of our species, is subordinated to a higher common good that belongs to us on account of our quasi-genus of intellectual being, the common good of the contemplative life. As Fr. Sebastian Walshe, O.Praem. puts it in his dissertation on the common good:
The good of the perfect political community is a good which brings the members of that community into a state of proximate potency to the contemplation of truth. ‘The active life is a disposition for the contemplative life.’ That is, full participation in the common good of the perfect human community prepares the human person to enter more fully into the common good of the whole universe.[52]
In contemplation we attain to the order of the whole universe. This order is the primary good intended by God in the universe. God creates creatures to manifest his own infinite goodness through the beauty of created things, which each reflect something of the divine beauty. But the greatest reflection of the divine beauty is in the splendid harmony of the whole of creation, in which the manifold perfections of creatures are united by a hierarchical order of priority and governance. “For the goodness which exists in God in a simple and uniform manner exists in a multiple and divided manner in creatures; that is why the entire universe participates more in the divine goodness and manifests it more perfectly than any other creature” (Primacy 85[53]).
But the contemplative life does not rest ultimately in contemplating the order that is the intrinsic common good of the universe. Rather, it reaches beyond it to the universal extrinsic common good, Who is God Himself, the unbounded ocean of actuality, perfection, and goodness; the agent, exemplar, and final cause of all goodness. The highest natural perfection is the philosophical contemplation of God.
But there is an even higher mode of participation in the highest common good. Through supernatural adoption, we are admitted into a share of the innermost life of God, where in the unspeakable happiness of the trinitarian life, God’s infinite perfection is known, expressed, loved, and given between three persons who are each the one God. This sharing in God’s own life is the common good of the heavenly Jerusalem. But this life begins already here below through grace. The Church is the society that is already sharing, to various degrees, in the supernatural common good.
This common good is the absolutely final common good. All other goods are only loved rightly when they are directed to this common good. Sin, in fact, simply is desiring all goods as private goods, directing them to myself, rather than myself to the common good—or loving a less universal common good more than the most universal common good. Hence the common goods of earthly polities must be directed to the most final common good. As De Koninck writes:
Man cannot be subordinated to the good of political society alone; he should order himself to the good of the perfectly universal whole to which every lower common good should be expressly ordered. The common good of political society should be expressly ordered to God, both by the chief citizen and by the citizen who is a part, each in his own way. This common good requires, of itself, this ordination. Without this express and public ordination, society degenerates into the State, [frozen] and enclosed in itself (Primacy 103).
And again:
Is not society corrupted in its very root when those who have charge of the common good do not order it explicitly to God? … If a politician ought truly to possess all the moral virtues as well as prudence, is it not because he is at the head and that he ought to judge and order all things to the common good of political society and that to God? Isn’t it for that reason that, according to Cajetan and John of St. Thomas, the legal justice of the prince is more perfect than the virtue of religion? (Primacy 107)
The proper direction of the political common good to God is accomplished by rulers recognizing the Church as a more universal perfect society than their polities. As St Thomas puts it:
Through virtuous living man is further ordained to a higher end, which consists in the enjoyment of God. … Consequently, since society must have the same end as the individual man, it is not the ultimate end of an assembled multitude to live virtuously, but through virtuous living to attain to the possession of God. If this end could be attained by the power of human nature, then the duty of a king would have to include the direction of men to it. … Now the higher the end to which a government is ordained, the loftier that government is. Indeed, we always find that the one to whom it pertains to achieve the final end commands those who execute the things that are ordained to that end. For example, the captain, whose business it is to regulate navigation, tells the shipbuilder what kind of ship he must construct to be suitable for navigation. … But because a man does not attain his end, which is the possession of God, by human power but by divine, … therefore the task of leading him to that last end does not pertain to human but to divine government. Consequently, government of this kind pertains to that king who is not only a man, but also God, namely, our Lord Jesus Christ. … Hence a royal priesthood is derived from Him, and what is more, all those who believe in Christ, in so far as they are His members, are called kings and priests. Thus, in order that spiritual things might be distinguished from earthly things, the ministry of this kingdom has been entrusted not to earthly kings but to priests, and most of all to the chief priest, the successor of St. Peter, the Vicar of Christ, the Roman Pontiff. To him all the kings of the Christian People are to be subject as to our Lord Jesus Christ Himself. For those to whom pertains the care of intermediate ends should be subject to him to whom pertains the care of the ultimate end, and be directed by his rule.[54]
This teaching on the relation of political authority to ecclesial authority, which follows from the teleological order of common goods, was defined ex cathedra by Pope Boniface VIII in the bull Unam sanctam.
Just as the love of the political common good requires a more excellent virtue than monastic virtue, so love of the supernatural common good demands a greater virtue than political virtue. St Thomas discusses this in a passage of the Disputed Questions on Virtue to which De Koninck refers again and again. It is worth quoting St Thomas at length:
As Aristotle says, in order to be a good citizen, you need to love the good of the city. Now if someone is allowed to share in the good of some city, he becomes its citizen and needs certain virtues for doing what a citizen does, and for loving the good of that city. In a similar way, when someone is, by divine grace, allowed to share in the blessedness of heaven, which consists in seeing and enjoying God, then he becomes a citizen and associate, so to speak, in that blessed society, which is called the heavenly Jerusalem… That is why someone who is in this way admitted to heavenly things is freely granted certain virtues, which are the infused virtues. For these to work as they should, they also require the love of the good of the whole society, that is the divine good; for that is the object of blessedness. Now there are two senses of loving the good of some city: (i’) to possess it; (ii’) to preserve it. (i’) Loving the good of some city in order to possess and to own it does not make a good citizen; that is how a tyrant loves the good of a city, in order to control it. In such a case, in fact, he loves himself more than the city, for he covets this good for himself rather than for the city. (ii’) To love the good of a city in order to preserve and defend it is to love it in a real sense, and this makes someone a good citizen, in that some people are prepared to subject themselves to the risk of death in order to preserve or increase the city’s good, and to ignore their own personal good. Therefore to love for the purpose of possessing or owning that good in which the blessed share does not put someone in the right state for blessedness; indeed even the wicked covet this good. However, to love it in itself, wanting it to remain and spread, and wanting nothing to act against it, does put someone in the right state for the society of the blessed. This, then, is charity, which loves God for himself and which also loves as themselves those neighbours who are capable of blessedness. It also resists everything that hinders this, whether in itself or in others. That is why it cannot coexist with mortal sin, which is an obstacle to blessedness. From all this it is clear that charity is not only a virtue, but the most powerful of the virtues.[55]
Charity is the greatest of all the virtues precisely because it is the love of the greatest, most universal, and most common good.
8 Moral Education and Subsidiarity: Reuben Slife’s Objections
The hierarchical interpretation of De Koninck’s understanding of the different kinds of virtue and friendship that are required by different levels of common good, which I have sketched above, has been criticized by Reuben Slife in essay on the role of conscience in pursuing the common good.[56] Slife’s major concern in the essay is with the necessity of interiority. To truly love the common good is to love it out of the depths of our interior beings, to be called by it from the wellsprings of our vital activity, which are teleologically ordered to it. I very much share this concern of Slife’s. I am not convinced, however, that Slife has found the best way of defending interiority. Slife finds fault with what he sees as my overly schematic and formalistic approach to explicating different levels of common good. Slife contrasts my approach with that of the Communio school, in which he includes himself:
Communio thought is synthetic, not analytic; it tends to discuss not principles but things, and when it discusses principles, it discusses them in light of their existence in things. When those who are exclusively Thomist in method read communio thinkers such as us, they tend to think we are trying to substitute a different sort of theory for their theory. But, generally speaking, we are instead trying to explain things in rem.[57]
Discussing things too formally, Slife argues, dissolves reality:
There is a characteristically modern way of understanding Thomism that thinks speaking formally ipso facto illuminates concrete realities. However, what this way of practicing Thomism actually does, against its intention, is dissolve the concrete reality into the (apparently extrinsic and exclusive) distinguished elements. It treats formalities as though they basically subsist. A formality (a logical element) is something at work in realities, but no formality is the truth, the whole truth, of any real thing.[58]
Now, I agree with Slife that there is a danger in overly schematic thinking, in which the abstract nature of reasoning is projected back onto the things about which one is thinking. Indeed, Charles De Koninck (to whose school I would like to belong) was one of the most lucid expositors of that danger. Philosophy is rooted in the common conceptions which human reason forms “from an inclination of nature that is prior to any deliberate and constructive endeavor to learn.”[59]These common conceptions are the most certain knowledge, but they are vague, indistinct, “confused.” The role of philosophy, then, is to make clear what is already contained in common conceptions. De Koninck was a great enemy of philosophic “systems” in which concepts are rendered intelligible by their function in the system, rather than by their rootedness in pre-scientific logos. In such a system, abstractions lose their connection to the reality from which they are abstracted and replace that reality.[60]
It is a perennial temptation of philosophers to think that the mode of our knowledge must be the same as the mode of existence of the things we know. And yet, this temptation cuts both ways. It can lead on the one hand to thinking that things themselves must have the universal, immaterial character of concepts (as in Platonism), but it can also lead to the equally erroneous position that our thought must have the material and concrete character of things. In reality, however, while our thinking must remain constantly in touch with the first vague and confused notions that arise from our contact with reality, it must proceed on to more distinct and abstract notions in order to unfold what is given. This is the path of Aristotelian epistēmē and Thomistic scientia. The error of the Communio school is to think that thought must remain vague and confused if it is to be faithful to reality. In practice, this means that they give up the scientific character of theology and remain at the level of poetic image, rhetorical allusion, and dialectical probability. Such reasoning concludes not in knowledge, but (at best) in opinion, and more often in aporia or paradox. Dialectic is, of course, a necessary prelude to science. It raises the questions without which apodictic answers are unintelligible. But it cannot fulfill our natural desire for knowledge in the full sense.
Take, for example, Henri de Lubac’s Catholicism: A Study of Dogma in Relation to the Corporate Destiny of Mankind. Catholicism is a beautiful and richly suggestive work. It is an excellent prelude to a scientific study of the common good—in much the same way that Plato’s dialectical treatment of virtue in the Socratic dialogues is a good prelude to Aristotle’s scientific study of virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics. But Catholicism is too vague to give a scientific understanding of community. It lacks a definite account of the common good which would enable it to move beyond opinion to knowledge, scientia.
Slife writes, “The central project of the ressourcement was to reaffirm the interior livingness of things.”[61] Doubtless this was the concern of the eclectic group of theologians who promoted ressourcement in the years before Vatican II. But thinkers are not always able to achieve the goal they set before themselves, nor do they always choose the best method for travelling toward it. As Steven Long has argued, there are good reasons to think that de Lubac’s concern with interiority led him (against his intention) to confuse the orders of nature and grace, and thus to deprive nature of its theonomic interiority, rendering it in effect a “vacuole for grace.”[62] Thus, the horror of schematic formalism leads to a new kind of schematic formalism.
In Slife’s case, the confused nature of his method leads to errors about the relation of more universal common goods to less common goods, and the order among the societies and friendships that arise from those goods. Slife objects to the way in which I explicate universal causality: “Fr. Waldstein does not see the greater orders present in the lesser ones as the lesser ones, does not see them forming the lesser ones in such a way as to make the lesser ones more truly themselves. This is puzzling, since universal causality, which plays a large part in his discussion, is one cause being present in another.”[63] Slife seems to be claiming that a more universal cause works only indirectly, through a more particular cause, and never directly. Thus, he quotes Andrew Willard Jones, “The rule of the prince … is only finally experienced in the rule of the father or the friend, as the universal is only ever encountered in the particular.”[64] Now, it is certainly true that it belongs to the power of universal cause that it is able to work through a more particular cause. But Slife surely cannot truly believe that a universal cause only works through particular causes. Applied to final causality, this would mean that the most universal final cause, God, can only exert His final causality through particular goods. That is, that we can only love Him indirectly, in particular created goods, never directly in Himself. Slife would surely never say that in so many words, but this is what his account of final causality implies.
Applied to friendship, Slife seems to claim that political or ecclesial friendships exist always (or at least mostly) within the friendships found in smaller communities. Thus, it is in the friendship of father and son, husband and wife, etc. that political life takes place.[65] Slife dismisses a friendship based directly on great actions for the common good as “often really much more a partnership than a friendship.”[66] There is a fatal confusion of orders here. Certainly, lower communities are teleologically ordered to higher communities, and what is done for the good of the lower must be done (mediately) for the good of the higher. But the lower is still distinct from the higher. The family is not simply a small city; it is specifically distinct from the city, because has its own proper common good. The fact that the domestic common good is ordered to the political common good does not mean that it simply is that higher common good. To pursue the common good of domestic society immediately and of political society mediately is not the same as pursuing the common good of political society immediately.[67]
A political friendship is based on the immediate pursuit of the more universal common good and is thus specifically different than the domestic friendship based on the immediate pursuit of a less universal common good. This is why I wrote that, in a political friendship, a father relates to his son not as a father, but as a fellow member of a higher society. Slife disagrees: “A father does not ever cease to be a father to his son, and he can hardly ‘no longer relate to his son as a father’; rather, he mediates the greater orders to his son as a father.”[68] That Slife is wrong about this point can be seen by examining examples in which the domestic common good comes, per accidens, to have some opposition to a more universal common good. Because they are teleologically ordered there is no essential opposition between the domestic good and a more universal common good, but nevertheless an accidental opposition can arise, just as an opposition between bodily and spiritual good (which are essentially in harmony) can arise when it is necessary to sacrifice the lower for the higher. I want to consider a number of examples.
A first example of the kind of opposition that I mean can be found in Arjuna’s lament in the Bhagavad Gita. Arjuna is about to begin a battle against his own kinsmen. The battle is just, it is in accordance with the dharma, and yet Arjuna’s heart quails at the thought of slaying his “teachers, fathers, sons, and also grandfathers, maternal uncles, fathers-in-law, grandsons, brothers-in-law, and other kinsmen.”[69] How could it be good for him to kill his own relatives? “How, having killed our own people, could we be happy, Krishna?”[70] He points out that this battle will destroy the common good of his extended family: “In the destruction of the family, / The ancient family laws vanish; / When the law has perished, / Lawlessness overpowers the entire family also.”[71] I have always found Krishna’s initial response to Arjuna’s horror unsatisfactory. Krishna points out that souls are immortal, and that Arjuna is therefore not really harming his relatives. Therefore, he should do his duty as a warrior and fight the good fight: “And, perceiving your own caste duty, / You should not tremble. / Indeed, anything superior to righteous [dharmyād] battle / Does not exist for the kshatriya.”[72] Krishna is clearly right that Arjuna should fight. And yet, his response is unsatisfactory, because he does not concede that Arjuna will thereby be destroying a specific family structure with its intrinsic common good. Nevertheless, what the passage makes clear is that it in this instance Arjuna should not act towards his kinsman as a kinsman, but rather as a warrior (kshatriya) upholding a more universal order.
A second example is the famous story recounted by Livy of the consul Titus Manlius Torquatus putting his son (who was serving under his command) to death for a breach of military discipline. The consul is moved both by family feeling and by admiration at the courage his son showed in disobeying his orders, but because “the authority of the consuls must either be established by your death, or by your impunity be forever abrogated,” he gives orders for his son’s execution.[73]Certainly, the fact that he was the father of his son makes his action admirable. It increases the arduousness of the act. But that very fact shows that it was not as father, but as consul, that he acted.
A third example is found in the relation between Queen Marie Antoinette of France and her brother, the Emperor Leopold II. In her letters to Leopold urging him to intervene in France to quell the incipient Revolution, Marie Antoinette put a great deal of emphasis on their domestic friendship. Thus, she closed her letter of February 27th, 1791 with the following words: “Adieu, my dear brother, you know the tender friendship with which I embrace you with all my heart. A thousand tender things from me to my sister-in-law and the Queen of Naples. I embrace your children.”[74] Leopold is said to have given his advisors the following reason for not intervening: “We have a sister, the Queen of France. But the Holy Empire has no sister and Austria has no sister. I can only act according to the interests of my people and not according to family interests.”[75] It is doubtful how wise Leopold’s decision truly was, but surely he was right that in deciding whether or not to risk war in France, he had to act not as the brother of the French Queen, but as the ruler of his people.
The examples I have raised so far have all been of persons whose care of a universal common good caused them to have to do something proximately damaging to the common good of their families. But my fourth example is almost the opposite. In the context of showing that contrary wills can both be good, St Thomas gives the example of a judge who wills a thief to be put to death, because of the good of justice which would be realized in that punishment, and the thief’s wife, who, at the same time, wants the thief’s life to be spared because death is a natural evil. St Thomas explains how both the judge and the thief’s wife can be willing virtuously at the same time:
Now since the will follows the apprehension of the reason or intellect, the more universal the aspect of the apprehended good, the more universal the good to which the will tends. This is evident in the example given above: because the judge has care of the common good, which is justice, and therefore he wishes the thief’s death, which has the aspect of good in relation to the common estate; whereas the thief’s wife has to consider the private, the good of the family, and from this point of view she wishes her husband, the thief, not to be put to death.[76]
Of course, the thief’s wife’s will, if it is to be good, must be mediately ordered to more universal goods than the good of her family, and ultimately to the most universal common good, the divine good. Clearly, her will would be evil if she wished her husband to continue being a thief, which is entirely incompatible with having God as his last end. Nevertheless, she can continue to will that he be spared the punishment of a thief, since this is not entirely incompatible with the more universal good. But the judge, who has more direct care for the common good, reasonably wills the thief to die. As St Thomas makes clear, the goodness of the will always demands a formal adherence to the last end, but this does not ensure material concord with the will of the one who has care of the last end in every case:
A man’s will is not right in willing a particular good, unless he refer it to the common good as an end: since even the natural appetite of each part is ordained to the common good of the whole. Now it is the end that supplies the formal reason, as it were, of willing whatever is directed to the end. Consequently, in order that a man will some particular good with a right will, he must will that particular good materially, and the Divine and universal good formally. Therefore the human will is bound to be conformed to the Divine will, as to that which is willed formally, for it is bound to will the Divine and universal good; but not as to that which is willed materially, for the reason given above.[77]
Slife would perhaps claim that she was not really acting as the friend of her husband in this case. For him, a friendship that is merely domestic is not truly friendship:
When I speak of ‘friends’ in the essay, I speak of genuine friends, who seek each other’s genuine good. I have nothing to do with ‘friendships based on family ties rather than on the civic common good’ or ‘any other private friendships.’ It is, I hope, obvious that a ‘private friendship’ is not a friendship in the proper sense. I hope it is also obvious that in ceasing to be ‘private’ a friendship doesn’t simply become a ‘political’ relationship, since it retains the close, deeply individual character of a friendship. Indeed, in ceasing to be private it becomes really a friendship for the first time. A friendship is really a friendship only when it is—at least implicitly—lived on a political, cosmic, and ecclesial basis.[78]
What Slife is missing here is the way in which that human virtue is formed slowly. We begin with the formation of monastic virtues, concerned with the personal goods closest to our perception. It is only gradually that we are led to the love of more universal common goods. It is of course true that from the beginning of rational life we must order all our ends to the final end and universal common good who is God. But that ordering is at first something very indirect. It is only by participation in concern for more universal communities that we truly form the virtues concerned with more universal common goods. Charity, the love of the most universal common good, is the highest of the virtues. Of course, God freely infuses charity into the souls of the baptized, but to come to its full flowering, charity has to grow through a friendship with God, in which the soul is slowly led to share God’s concern for the most universal goods. Training in the domestic and political virtue is dispositive toward charity, insofar as it teaches us to love ever more common goods.
Slife mentions the extraordinary case of Franziska Jäggerstätter who supported her husband in his decision not to serve in the military of the third German Reich, judging participation in the unjust wars of that regime to be a mortal sin: “Against her own needs and despite, apparently, that she did not share his judgment, her love for him led her to help him find and do what he thought right—knowing, in love, that that was best for her.”[79] I would respond that, granted that it was because she was Jäggerstätter’s wife that she knew him well enough to see that he was acting virtuously, it was not as a member of his household that she wanted to support him in this, but rather as a fellow member of the most universal of all communities: the City of God. That is, it was out of supernatural charity that she supported his martyrdom.
9 Conclusion: Honor and Dignity
In a famous essay entitled “On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor,” Peter Berger contrasted the concept of honor, as understood in pre-modern societies, with the concept of dignity, as understood in modernity. He argued that while honor is the recognition given to those who fulfill their social role (thus, I would add, contributing to the common good), dignity adheres to human beings apart from their social role: “Dignity, as against honor, always relates to the intrinsic humanity divested of all socially imposed roles or norms. It pertains to the self as such, to the individual regardless of his position in society.”[80] The two ways of thinking about the common good with which I began this essay can be seen as being based on an ethic of honor and an ethic of dignity respectively. But my examination of De Koninck on the common good can show how a synthesis is possible. De Koninck’s account does justice to both elements of our common experience of the common good. The common good is indeed more important than private advantage. To love the common good requires a more excellent virtue than the love of private goods, and therefore such love is rightly honored. And such virtue is desirable for us, since it is in the common good that we find our perfection. In relating to the common good we do indeed relate to it as parts to a whole. And yet, the common good is the good of those who share in it. It can only be rightly pursued if it is pursued as the good in which they share. Human persons cannot be reduced to mere parts like the parts of a tree. Rather, human beings have a great dignity because they are able to share in great common goods, and ultimately the greatest and most common of all goods, to which all other common goods are ordered: the divine good. Dignity can thus be understood not as an anti-social category, adhering to human persons even when all social belonging has been stripped from them, but rather as their worthiness to receive honor as members of the most universal society: the City of God. By pursuing less universal common goods, human persons can be prepared to pursue that most universal good. They can be prepared to hear the words of the divine King: “No longer do I call you slaves, because the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I call you friends, because I made known to you all that I heard from my father” (John 15:15).
[1] Earlier versions of this paper were given as lectures at Thomas Aquinas College, Northfield, MA, February 17th, 2023 (www.thomasaquinas.edu/news/presidents-day-lecture-primacy-common-good), and at the Milk Street Society, Thomas More College, Merrimack, NH, February 19th, 2023 (thomasmorecollege.edu/2023/03/milk-street-society-welcomes-pater-edmund-waldstein-to-tmc/). My thanks to Sean Cunningham of Thomas Aquinas College, and Joshua Lo and Jonathan Wright of Thomas More College, for the invitations.
[2] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I,5, 1095b23-30.
[3] Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001) 312. Cf. the psychological interpretation of this passage given in: Isaac Prilleltensky and Ora Prilleltensky, How People Matter: Why it Affects Health, Happiness, Love, Work, and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021) 11.
[4] See: Prilleltensky and Prilleltensky, How People Matter, 7.
[5] Mason L. Weems, A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1918), 276.
[6] David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (New York: Little, Brown, 2011) 135.
[7] Wallace, The Pale King, 136.
[8] Wallace, The Pale King, 130.
[9] Wallace, The Pale King, 137.
[10] Wallace, The Pale King, 133.
[11] Wallace, The Pale King, 139.
[12] Wallace, The Pale King, 134.
[13] Wallace, The Pale King, 141.
[14] Wallace, The Pale King, 141.
[15] Benito Mussolini, The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, trans Jane Soames (London: Hogarth, 1934), 21.
[16] Mussolini, The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, 21.
[17] See: Othmar Spann, Der wahre Staat (Leipzig: Quelle und Mayer, 1923).
[18] Roderick Stackelberg and Sally A. Winkle (eds.), The Nazi Germany Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 2002), 64.
[19] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Avlin Johnson et al. (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1941), 608.
[20] V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution, trans. Todd Chretien (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), 62.
[21] Jacques Maritain, Three Reformers (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929), 20-21.
[22] Jacques Maritain, Scholasticism and Politics (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund 2011 [orig. 1940]) 72-73. Cf. the interpretation of this passage in: Aquinas Guilbeau, “Charles De Koninck’s Defense of the Primacy of the Common Good,” doctoral dissertation in theology (University of Fribourg, 2016) 46.
[23] The manifesto was published simultaneously in English and French. English: “In the Face of the World’s Crisis : A manifesto by European Catholics sojourning in America,” in: The Commonweal, August 21st, 192 : 415–421; French: Devant la crise mondiale: Manifeste des catholiques européens séjournant en Amérique (New York: Éd. de la Maison française, 1942).
[24] “In the Face of the World’s Crisis” 415.
[25] See: Florian Michel, La pensée catholique en Amérique du Nord (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2010), 226-228.
[26] De Koninck to Ducattillon, quoted in: Sylvain Luquet, “Introduction” to Oeuvres de Charles De Koninck, vol. II-2, 17.
[27] Charles De Koninck, On the Primacy of the Common Good: Against the Personalists, in: The Writings of Charles De Koninck, vol. 2, ed. Ralph McInerny (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 72. Cited henceforward parenthetically as Primacy.
[28] Confessions, X.6.
[29] See: Susan Waldstein, “Hierarchy in a New Natural Science” in Thomas Storck (ed.), The Glory of the Cosmos: A Catholic Approach to the Natural World (Bridgeport: Arouca Press, 2020), 35-52.
[30] William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Scene II.
[31] Act IV, Scene IV.
[32] Cf. Michael Waldstein, “Divisio Textus of On the Primacy of the Common Good,” class handout (ITI Gaming, 2008).
[33] Guilbeau, “Charles De Koninck’s Defense,” 190-191.
[34] Guilbeau, “Charles De Koninck’s Defense,” 201.
[35] This section is partly based on: Edmund Waldstein, “Common Good Eudemonism,” in Dinivitas 62.1, 425-439, at 436-437.
[36] Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, XII.10, 1075a 12-15.
[37] Plato, Republic, 500.
[38] Aristotle, Politics, I.2 1252b 27.
[39] Jacques de Monléon, Personne et Société (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007) 142-145; Gregory Froelich, “Friendship and the Common Good,” The Aquinas Review 12 (2005) 37-58.
[40] See: John Sugden, Nelson: The Sword of Albion (New York: Henry Holt, 2021), 86.
[41] William Beatty, Authentic Narrative of the Death of Lord Nelson (London: Cadell and Davies, 1807), 48.
[42] Washington Irving, The Life of George Washington, vol. 5 (Leipzig: Bernhard Tachnitz, 1859), 227-229
[43] Nelson’s betrayal of his wife with Lady Hamilton shows that he did not have virtue in the fullest sense, which demands the unity of all the virtues. The praiseworthiness of Washington’s action for the preservation of the American regime is doubtful because of the doubtfulness of the principles of that regime.
[44] Andrew Willard Jones, Before Church and State (Steubenville: Emmaus Academic, 2017).
[45] Cf. Aquinas Guilbeau, “Friendship and the Common Good,” Lecture, The Thomistic Institute, www.youtube.com/watch?v=QphjGsVeHzE(accessed May 27th, 2023).
[46] Susan Burnham [Waldstein], “Whether Happiness is the Ultimate End of Every Human Action” (BA Thesis, Thomas Aquinas College, 1978), 34-35.
[47] Aristotle, Ethics, VIII.3, 1156b25-30.
[48] Aristotle, Politics, VII.4, 1326a5-1326b25. The middle term he uses is the nature of law as order.
[49] See the discussion of networks of counsel and aid in: Jones, Before Church and State, chs. 9-12.
[50] See my introduction to Henri Grenier, “World Government is Required by Natural Law,” The Josias, thejosias.com/2015/06/24/world-government-is-required-by-natural-law (accessed May 29th, 2023).
[51] See: Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist. (ed.), Integralism and the Common Good, vol. 2 (Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2022), chs. 1-2, and Conclusion.
[52] Sebastian Walshe, O.Praem., “The Primacy of The Common Good As The Root of Personal Dignity in The Doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas,” doctoral dissertation in philosophy (Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas, Rome, 2006) 231.
[53] Citing St Thomas, Summa theologiae, Ia, q. 47, a.1, c.
[54] De Regno, I.15.
[55] Q. d. de Virtutibus, q. 2, a. 2, c ; Disputed Questions on the Virtues, trans. E.M. Atkins (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2005).
[56] Reuben Slife, “What are We to Do? On Fixing the Immaturity COVID Unmasked and Building a World ‘Worth Living In’,” New Polity 3.3 (2022): 51-92, especially “Appendix” at 84-92.
[57] Slife, “What are We to Do?” 90-91.
[58] Slife, “What are We to Do?” 89-90.
[59] Charles De Koninck, “Three Sources of Philosophy,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 38 (1964): 13–22, at 13.
[60] De Koninck, “Three Sources of Philosophy.”
[61] Slife, “What are We to Do?” 76, footnote 92.
[62] Steven A. Long, Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). Long’s own solution is perhaps not entirely satisfactory either, cf. Kevin Keiser, “The Natural Desire to See God as an Innate Appetite of the Intellect and Its Implications for the Moral Life and the Relationship Between the Natural and Supernatural Orders” (Dissertation, Angelicum, 2017); Jacob Wood, To Stir a Restless Heart Thomas Aquinas and Henri de Lubac on Nature, Grace, and the Desire for God (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2019).
[63] Slife, “What are We to Do?” 88.
[64] Slife, “What are We to Do?” 89, citing Jones “Priority of Peace,” 337.
[65] See: Slife, “What are We to Do?” 61, 87.
[66] Slife, “What are We to Do?” 87.
[67] We have here an error all too typical of modern theology; namely, the error that if A is ordered to B, then A simply is B. An egregious example of this error can be found in David Bentley Hart: “Only the God who is always already human can become human. Only a humanity that is always already divine can become God.” [You are Gods: On Nature and Supernature (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022) xviii]. I note in passing Hart’s use of the strange idiom “always already” which seems to have arisen in English theology as an overly literal translation of the German idiom immer schon. Hart writes much about potency and act in the book, but he has no more understanding of them than Anaxagoras had. For him, potency is concealed act. I certainly do not want to suggest that Slife is as extreme as Hart, but the structure of some of his arguments is worryingly similar.
[68] Slife, “What are We to Do?” 87.
[69] Bhagavad Gita I.34, trans. Winthrop Sargeant (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009).
[70] Bhagavad Gita I.37.
[71] Bhagavad Gita I.40.
[72] Bhagavad Gita II.31.
[73] Ab urbe condita, VIII.7.
[74] “Adieu, mon cher frère, vous connaissez la tendre amitié, avec laquelle je vous embrasse de tout mon cœur. Mille choses tendres pour moi à ma belle-sœur et à la reine de Naples. J ́embrasse vos enfants.” Marie Antoinette, Joseph II, Leopold II, Ihr Briefwechsel, ed. Alfred Ritter von Arneth (Leipzig: Köhler, 1866) 147.
[75] Cited in: Dorothy Gies McGuigan, The Habsburgs (New York: Doubleday, 1966) 273.
[76] Summa theologiæ, Ia-IIae, q. 19, a. 10, c.
[77] Summa theologiæ, Ia-IIae, q. 19, a. 10, c.
[78] Slife, “What are We to Do?” 87.
[79] Slife, “What are We to Do?” 61.
[80] Peter Berger, “On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor,” in: Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre (eds.), Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983) 172-181, at 176.