Category: Articles

by John Francis Nieto

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The following paper was read at the conference “The Idea of a Village,” May 2016. A video of the lecture can be found here.

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We of the twenty-first century look for the village in legend and folk tale, to some extent in history and there, much more as we look back, less and less as we come forward.  This is no accident, for reasons I will go on to point out.  This fact and a few others make much of what I am about to say seem ‘abstract’ and ‘ideal’.  Yet what I say here about the village is utterly ‘practical’ and ‘realistic’.  Man cannot—I propose—have healthy familial life and just political order unless these take root and find support in village life. Continue reading “Nature and Art in the Village”

by John Francis Nieto

1.  The following remarks propose to explain why I have no expectation of political gains from either right or left and why rather I distrust both movements, at least in so far as they are political movements arising within modern political theory.  Nonetheless, several things I am not claiming should be made clear in the beginning.

2.  First, I am not claiming that either the left or the right is simply speaking one movement.  Each has many elements and I have no intention of speaking to what is proper to these elements.  Rather my comments concern groups or individuals only insofar as they assent to the political principles that have formed right and left as distinct ‘sides’ or ‘factions’ in the modern political system.

3.  Second, I am not claiming there is no difference between right and left.  I shall argue that both sides work to advance things they hold in common more than those things proper to them.  These common principles (in my opinion) are or should be reprehensible to the most earnest partisans of either side.  And I do think each side has some who work with the intention of bringing about a greater good, however much I may disagree with them.

4.  Third, I therefore am not denying the need to work with one side rather than another in particular political battles.  I note however that in doing so the political battle becomes distorted insofar as the principles at hand must be conformed to those commonly accepted.  Hence, the fight against abortion becomes for the right a question of a personal right to life, since ‘rights’ are the commonly received political principle.  More fundamental in abortion is the destruction of the common good attained in sexual union.  But our political culture is too corrupt to recognize the horror of such destruction.  Again, concern for the land we live on and encouragement of small-scale farming have their champions on the left.  But this must be pursued within the exploitative, industrial conception of man’s relation to the earth that defines our political debates.  We have lost any sense that the earth provides for our needs.  Rather, we seek from it satisfaction of desires.

5.  Fourth, I do not propose these remarks with any suggestion of demonstrative certainty insofar as they contain judgments of particular political movements.  I am not surprised that I, when young, or that other young people maintain political positions with great certainty and vehemence.  I was so determined that I was willing to incite revolution, if given a chance.  But it does surprise me that many who have the air of political wisdom pronounce in the same fashion as the young.

6.  Political matters involve all the complexity of any moral judgment.  Hence, questions of motives and circumstance, concerns about consequences, dangers of misstatement and misapprehension crowd about political acts.  Further, political judgments involve the assumption of wisdom not demanded by the moral life.  Everyone must live the moral life and attempt to attain to some measure of happiness.  To go beyond the most general political truths and begin to judge in this realm is to suggest that one possesses the good attained in morality and politics in a manner sufficient to help others do so.  Even the wise must fear such a step.  (Of course, in saying this I have already opposed some principles common to both right and left.)

7.  Hence, although, in the following remarks, I will propose some things which I believe to be of complete certainty, though difficult to articulate, such things are of a general and fundamental character.  What I say against particular factions assumes that they reject, most often implicitly, these foundations of political order.  They may well assume the same things at one time or another, insofar as they lack the consistency of well conceived political opinions.  But nowhere do I claim more that a probable, reasonable certitude in judging particular political opinions or actions.  Only God can grasp these things with perfect clarity and determination.  Any partisan who claims to understand these matters without any admixture of error fools himself; as likely, he is a liar, most likely a petit-demagogue.

8.  What I propose therefore in the following remarks about particulars is incomplete, overstated somewhere, poorly substantiated elsewhere.  I would have no one agree with me by the fact that I have said it.  Rather, I urge each to reflect upon his moral and political experience, to confirm his understanding of true political principles, to judge political opinions and actions to the extent that true principles make them intelligible, and to refrain from opinions and judgments beyond these.  To the young I particularly recommend moderation.  To form political judgments is as much a burden as it is a privilege.

9.  Now to take up this burden myself.  I will first make clear in a schematic way my own associations with right and left. (10-12)  Next I will state my distrust of these movements in a general manner.  (13) Then, I will propose the political principles most necessary to true political order.  (14-26)  Finally, I will state in a specific manner how right and left reject these principles in common. (27-52)

10.  For several years, from sixteen to twenty-two, I consciously considered myself a member of the political left.  I first identified myself as a communist and a Marxist, then distinctly a Maoist—to my shame a deceived admirer of the Chinese cultural revolution—, and finally, for nearly four years, an anarchist.  As an anarchist I would have allowed myself to be called socialist or communist, so long as these terms were not taken in a particular, narrow sense.

11.  Near my twenty-second birthday I began to question various of my political principles and after several months I recognized that several were wrong, though I did not claim to know the correct principles.  Several things I never questioned: my distrust of the political influence of wealth, my sympathy with workers, my contempt for the ugliness and inhumanity of technology, my sense that man has been estranged from nature, and thus from his own nature, and so on.  This re-haul of my political thought led to a moral reevaluation and thus to my return to the Catholic faith.  But the political reevaluation came first.

12.  Returning to Catholicism, I was determined to hold to the faith in its purity.  I believed, for a short while, that this demanded I align myself with the right.  Yet I could never champion capitalism, at least insofar as the word refers to industrial or high-finance capitalism.  While I rejected the near-pacifist position central to my anarchism, I could not find enthusiasm for any of the military engagements so readily supported by the right.  And thus, for many years, since my early thirties, I failed to feel any deep sympathy with left or right.  Further, I have come to reject the distinction of right and left as an appropriate approach to political order.

13.  My sense that the distinction and opposition of left and right do not arise from the principles proper to political order coincided with the sense that left and right agree on much that each side takes for granted.  More and more it became clear to me that they take for granted an opposition to the principles that make real political order possible.  Some of these principles are found explicitly in traditional teachings about politics, especially in traditional Catholic social teaching, although others are found there only implicitly.  In effect, left and right, to my mind, are in general agreement with modern political and economic thought and disagree with how that thought should play out.

14.  To make the principles where left and right agree more clear, I shall first discuss some of the principles I understand to be central to traditional political thought.  None is more fundamental than the notion that according the very nature of man the common good gives rise to the political order.

15.  The common good insofar as it is good is a final cause.  Thus, victory is the purpose and cause of an army, and polyphonic music is the purpose and cause of a choir.  Insofar as it is common, the common good brings many into a community and orders the members of the community to it and to one another.  The nature of polyphonic music, for example, brings those capable of singing it together and makes a soprano of one, an alto of another, and so on.

16.  By means of this order to the good and to one another a society becomes one agent pursuing the good common to them.  This is to say that the common good makes the many members of the community a single agent in pursuing that good.  The common good as final cause brings into being a city as an agent cause that pursues that good.

17.  This common good must be some one thing belonging to all the members of the community.  Nonetheless it belongs to the various members in distinct ways and some share more in this good and others share less.  In the political order, the common good is nothing other than the common life lived by citizens.  This life has many elements and is conceived in many ways.  It is called ‘peace’, ‘prosperity’, ‘justice’, insofar as we pay attention to one or another of its various aspects or elements.

18.  To be a citizen, not in name alone but in reality, is nothing other than to pursue and possess this good by loving it and by sharing the power to bring it about and maintain it.  Some make laws, some enforce them, some judge those who are subject to laws, some elect those who make laws, and so on.  Each pursues and maintains the common good according to his share in political power.  But every citizen as such must love the good not merely as it belongs to himself but also as it is a whole belonging to the entire community.  Thus, he loves the common good as his own good, yet as a good greater than any private good belonging to him as an individual.  So the soldier offers his own share in the common good from love for this good as it belongs to the whole.  Likewise, Saint Paul says,

I am speaking the truth, in Christ, I am not lying, and my conscience in the Holy Spirit bears me witness: there is great sorrow and incessant pain in my heart.  I could have wished to be outcast from the Christ myself for the sake of my brothers, who are my blood kindred.

19.  While the common good belongs to the entire community of citizens, some part of the community must be dedicated to pursue and maintain this good for the whole.  This is the government, which in its very nature is ordered to the good of the whole community.  Though the government rules the community and thus some men are subject to any government, many, if not most, of those subject to government are themselves citizens.  Thus government must rule citizens not for the good of the government, but for the good of the whole citizen body insofar as they form a community possessed of a common life.

20.  Now there are many aspects of political life that must be found in all political communities: murder and stealing, for example, are wrong everywhere.  Nevertheless, since the common good is nothing other than the community’s common life, it must be determined in time and place.  Where a people lives determines many aspects of its common life: the balance of agriculture and commerce in its economy, the kinds of food cultivated, and so on.  Again, the particular history of a people influences that life.  For example, the experience of a regime particularly good or evil affects the future attitude toward that kind of regime.

21.  Two attributes of the common good demand particular attention.  The common good must be attained in a manner that is stable and self-sufficient.  These are rooted in the relation of the common good to the community that pursues it.  If it is not stable, retaining more or less the same character over time, it will not really be common to the members of the community over time.  Grandparents will not share political life with their grandchildren, or even parents with their children, but mere biological life.  If the common life is not self-sufficient, the members will depend upon other communities with which they will form a larger community.  This larger political community will possess its own life, less distinct and less in the control of the original community.

22.  Above I claimed that by his nature man is inclined to the common good.  This can be seen in many ways, but most obviously insofar as man is inclined to happiness, which cannot in fact be attained by oneself.  Man cannot be born or grow up without others.  Nor can he attain to language, knowledge, or virtue in a sufficient way without the help of others.

23.  But man cannot attain happiness, taken as perfecting himself alone or as perfecting the community, merely by means of his natural powers.  The principal cause of this lies in his passions.  Man’s sensitive desires, arising from the concupiscible and irascible appetites, respond immediately to the sensible objects that appear by the exterior senses and the imagination.  Nor are they wholly subject to reason.

24.  Hence, man needs habits in these appetites and in his will, by which he will follow the good perceived by reason, even when the sensible appetites incline toward another good.  Again, by these habits the sensible appetites will themselves incline in a manner appropriate to them toward the good perceived by reason.  Traditional political thought therefore proposes the necessity of virtue for sound political order: temperance in the concupiscible appetite, bravery in the irascible appetite, justice in the will, and prudence (which knows the good for man) in the intellect.

25.  For this reason, because the cardinal virtues are necessary in pursuing and maintaining the common good, traditional political thought suggests that good government is something rare, not to be expected everywhere, not likely to last a long time.  This is not to say that men should not aim at good government.  But they should not be surprised that good government is so difficult to bring about and they should cherish the institutions that do so, if such institutions should be hit upon.

26.  Let me underscore one point here.  No loss in political thought is greater than the loss of the understanding that happiness, whether for one man or for a community, depends upon possession of the cardinal virtues.  However bad society became in ancient and medieval times, anyone influenced by the great civilizations, such as the Greek or the Chinese, would have heard that these virtues are necessary for happiness.  A bad man might scoff at such a position, but at least he was aware of it.  And if this position is true, it is in some way a principle of action to anyone who becomes happy.  In our day few come to know of this truth and, of course, even fewer have any share in happiness.

27.  In describing the opposition to these principles common to the political right and left (at least insofar as they are movements), I shall first discuss the notion of social contract, which is at the heart of modern political theory. (28-41)  Next, I shall propose that the political thought of right and left is founded on the social contract. (42-45)  Then, I shall propose the manner in which right and left are themselves opposed while agreeing in the notion of a social contract. (46-48)  Finally, I shall make some remarks about the United States in particular: where it stands regarding this theory. (49-52)

28.  As stated above, modern political theory in common establishes political order on what is called the social contract.  These thinkers do recognize that any society works toward some kind of good.  They display various defects in their understanding of the common good.  But all these thinkers reject the natural inclination to the common good.  The common good is not a final cause by nature.  Rather, it must be established as the good of the community by some community or some part of a community, as by an agent cause.  But, as stated, these thinker hold that that agent cause cannot come into existence through the natural inclination to the common good.

29.  Instead, the modern political theorists propose that the community comes into existence through the inclination of its members to their own private good.  Each man about to enter into community recognizes that he will attain to some private good through association with others.  This agreement constitutes a contract, generally implicit, by which the city or state is constituted.[1]  So constituted the community determines some part to serve as a government and this government pursues the good of the city or state.

30.  The relation between the good of the community to the individual citizen is not described in the same way by the various philosophers.  Nonetheless, the manner of establishing the community implies that this good belongs to the government more or less as the private good of the member, the good that prompted him to enter into society, belongs to that member.  The government becomes more or less another individual pursuing its own private good, as is said most clearly by Hobbes.

31.  There results an opposition between the good of the state and the good of the citizen.  For the citizen enters into society for the sake of his own private good.  But his participation in the state and consequent enjoyment of this private good demand subordination to the good of the state.  The state will only work so as to bring about his private good insofar as citizens work toward the good of the state.  But the good of the state is not properly the citizen’s good.  Rather it is a good proper to the government.

32.  Insofar as modern governments are totalitarian, they assume supremacy to the good of the state, mistakenly understood to be a common good.  Insofar as these governments partake in ‘Western liberalism’ (which has nothing to do with ‘liberal vs. conservative’) they recognize a citizen’s ‘rights’.  Such rights are here understood to constitute a reservation of some private good against the claims of other citizens, but more profoundly, against the claims of the state.

33.  Citizens do not live in such a social order for a common life, but each lives for his own sake a life he conceives as properly his own.  He orders his action to his own success and prosperity, to his own pleasure, perhaps a bit beyond this to his family.  He sees the political order as useful to these purposes of his own.  He does not find in it an opportunity to participate in government, whether by legislating, ruling, counseling, judging, or even electing.  If he shares in any of these, he looks to his own ends.

34.  The government likewise looks to its existence and flourishing as an institution.  Those who belong to it work to maintain themselves in power and see individual citizens either as an instrument or as a threat to that power.  The citizen is promised his private good in exchange for the maintaining the government.

35.  There is nonetheless a kind of balance that can be found, at least for a time.  The exchange of private goods allows the government to pursue its power as a private good and the citizen to pursue whatever life pleases him as his private good.  They may recognize the other’s intentions; they may flatter and deceive each other.  In either way such a system can last for some time.

36.  But this is not government or politics in the ancient sense, which demands that a people organize themselves so as to pursue a common life.  Rather, the social contract introduces a system of management by which the government offers the various elements of a satisfactory private life to citizens in exchange for its own power.

37.  Those who developed the theory of social contract were certainly proponents of virtue.  Nonetheless such a system has no need of virtue.  The citizens support the government through their inclination to their own private good.  No one needs virtue to desire this in a stable and vehement manner.  The passions incline us sufficiently to what is in one way or another our own.  In a system of ‘human management’ the passions can be counted on by a government to keep citizens satisfied with various pleasures and excitements, while it strengthens its own place in the world.

38.  Virtue may, however, be necessary to distinguish and desire what is truly good from what appears to be good.  For this reason, virtue may be an impediment to such a system.  If virtue allows someone to recognize that a truly common life, a stable and self-sufficient life shared with others in one place and through time, is more desirable than the satisfaction of passions, he becomes an impediment to such government as management.

39.  Let me briefly point out some reasons such a conception of government is incompatible with the stability and self-sufficiency that are attributes of the common good.  Since what is provided to citizens is not a common life but the satisfaction of passions, which each works out in his own way, a system of human management must provide new and various satisfactions to its citizens.  Food, sex, violence, wealth become central to any system like this.  But they must have the increase and variety that keeps the senses and the passions alert and excited.  Hence the life of citizens demands constant changes and this can be supplied at least in part by import.  This alone is reason against stability and self-sufficiency.

40.  But the government also seeks to augment its own power and security.  This will always suggest further control and regulation of the citizen’s life, which will demand change of one sort or another.  But it also tempts a government to interest itself in the doings of other governments.  Greater interdependence among such governments means greater power and security, at least for the government that does the most successful meddling.

41.  Now, when government is viewed as mere management of individual satisfactions, a system that does not demand the attainment of any virtue, good government will not seem to be something rare and difficult to maintain.  Rather, it will be thought to flow according to some kind of formula from mere power and will.  Good government will bring about ‘happiness’ by managing men and goods as they already are, by ingeniously shifting them about, while traditional political theory assumed that men must become good to become happy, especially insofar as they are in community.

42.  Now I do not think it difficult to see that the political right and left, at least in our times, both accept the conception of government as a social contract.  We see both pandering to the citizen’s desires for his private good.  More and more each conceives of the political order as arising from and serving individuals and not families, neighborhoods and towns.

43.  Generally speaking, both right and left conceive or propose themselves as the true defenders of the citizen’s rights.  Both conceive the opposite side as more or less totalitarian.  And each side has some justice, since totalitarian governments have at times been on the right and at times been on the left.  In fact the opposition of totalitarianism and Western liberalism is woven into the principles of government accepted by both sides.

44.  Hence, whatever their long-term dreams and utopias, each side proposes that good government is synonymous with its own establishment in power.  Right and left each propose to solve society’s problems on the condition that it becomes the government, while the other side is destroyed or fades away into ignominy and then obscurity.  For me this makes clear that neither side can ever be successful.  Even granted that each of them changes, perhaps even to become more and more like each other, neither side can bring about what they aim at, because they cannot get rid of one another.

45.  For this reason, I believe that right and left are both proceeding ‘forward’ toward a more and more perfect system of human management.  This demands global government, a fluid worldwide economy, a thorough-going leveling of individuals through society, so that no one can remain outside the reaches of this management and thus a danger to its integrity.  Everyone can enjoy his pri­vate satisfaction so long as he submits to the system, so long as he is ‘with the program’, as it is vulgarly put.

46.  Where then do right and left differ, if they are in fundamental agreement about the social contract?  I think there are many illusions lurking here and do not have time to consider them.  Let me merely propose for the moment that the fundamental difference is this: the left holds that the original formation of society is a system of oppression and must be superseded by a true social contract, while the right accepts this original formation as a binding contract.

47.  The position of the left, described in the Second Discourse of Rousseau, holds that the conditions of man when he first ‘found’ himself in nature encouraged him to establish a system of property, racism, sexism, and so on, by which he used others for his private good.  This system must be replaced by a true social contract that orders men and wealth to bring about the private good of all society’s members.  For example, the left holds that American slavery was part of the American system at its founding.  The undoing of that slavery introduced a new element of a true social contract.

48.  The right claims that the systems in place at the time the doctrine of social contract arose were more or less sufficient to bring about that good.  They may hold at one time or another that the contract has been insufficiently fulfilled, as, for example, in American slavery, but that the principles in the American social contract are sound and capable.

49.  This leads me to speak a moment about the United States.  I speak as someone who has always looked at his own country from within and from without.  From my childhood I recognized the good that I have received and share in through the American system of government.  But I have also seen this system as belonging, at least temperamentally, to the Anglo-American race, more than to my own.  I say this merely to avoid any dissembling.

50.  I believe that any true government must be founded on true political thought.  I think that there is evidence in American history of such a foundation.  In fact, one part of this is the claim in the Federalist papers, that the members of the proposed union have the same language, culture, and political institutions.  At the same time the founders used the language of the times to explain their foundation.  Some believed it fervently; others may not have.  The people themselves, I expect, conceived the political order more or less as they had when they began to live in this country.

51.  Over time, however, we have come to live more and more by the principles enunciated in our foundation.  One of the most impressive facts about American political life, one paid only the slightest attention, is that it has in fact proceeded more or less according to the words and formulas used in its institution.  I do not deny that these have been used with more and less precision and with changes in meaning.  Nonetheless, our government has in fact gone forward more or less according to these ‘instructions’.  This is something very rare.

52.  As we have stuck to these principles, we are therefore living more and more according to the contract theory embedded by the founder’s in their account of the foundation.  Hence, we have lived more and more for the rights of individuals and we have established the government more and more as an entity that serves its own ends in opposition to our own.  As we continue forward, however much we imagine that we go right or left, we will be furthering a system of government that consists in human management.  The only true direction is back, not back in time, but back to the true principles of human political order.

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[1] Editor’s note: The author is somewhat simplifying matters. There are certainly modern political theorists who do not conceive of the state as being constituted by a contract. Hegel, for example, rejects the idea of a social contract (for example in Philosophy of Right, § 75). But all modern political theorists propose something other than a natural inclination to the common good as the foundation politics. Thus, Hegel replaces the natural inclination to the common good with history. The dialectic of history brings about the political community, and this dialectic is certainly driven by “desire” for private goods, but the coming into being of the community is not based on an implicit agreement between already existing individuals (contract)— rather it is only in the community that desire becomes self-conscious and individual subjectivity comes into being. Nevertheless, the result is similar to that of social contract theory; natural inclination to the common good is excluded. — Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist.

by Peter Kwasniewski

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“There is no doubt that Bonaventure thought of himself as a theologian, and was, moreover, seen by his contemporaries as a theologus. But, keeping in mind the whole history of philosophy, we should not neglect the fact that the model of philosophy which celebrates the so-called “autonomy of philosophical thought” is itself an historically contingent model. Can one credibly speak of “pure philosophical thought” in Aristotle, Averroes, or Albert the Great?” [1]

It takes little effort to draw out the moral of Andreas Speer’s observations. If scholastic philosophy had not allowed itself in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to become detached from the fullness of Christian life, from speculative theology as well as the communal liturgical life of the believer, if it had not over time sequestered itself in a strange nook situated between empirical science and daily life, it would not have suffered the fate of being overshadowed and eventually disregarded by its more impressive, or at least more insistent, rivals. The recovery of philosophy’s rightful place will require the undoing of many false steps, not the least of which was the divorce of philosophical exploration from theological discourse and the concomitant divorce of systematic theology from liturgical worship and a valid and comprehensive aesthetic sense. If these diverse areas are one day to be synthesized again, they stand in need of philosophy, with the inestimable services it provides in dialectic and demonstration, method and vocabulary; they stand even more in need of sacred liturgy, the solemn worship of God, the end to which they should all be ordained on our earthly pilgrimage.[2]

It seems to me that the Christian thinker must detect and root out a lingering intellectualism, an exaggerated and therefore distorted elevation of one aspect of man. Indeed, one must recognize that such an elevation distorts the larger and more fully human framework in which Aristotle places the very nobility of intellectual activities. Aristotle had seen a part—the most important part, it is true, but not the whole—of what it means to say that man bears within him a divine spark. Book X of the Ethics marks both an advance and a regression for the theory of human perfection and the imago Dei. Compared with Presocratic panpsychism and pantheism, it is an advance; compared with Plato’s insight into the cosmic and psychic eros that urges man and even, in a way, the whole of creation, toward assimilation to God, it is arguably a step backwards. However, as Josef Pieper (and Bonaventure long before him) recognized, the Aristotelian and Platonic accounts are not rivals but halves in need of reunification. And I think Pieper is right to see St. Thomas as having effected the theoretical reunification, which took place by means of fusing Augustine, Dionysius, and Aristotle in the furnace of the Christian mystery.

These considerations coalesce around the mystery of the human body, a subject concerning which Gabriel Marcel and, more famously, Pope John Paul II have carried out incisive metaphysical and theological investigations. I say “mystery” because, though it is the soul that is enslaved to sin and cries out for the freedom of grace, it is nevertheless the body—the body of the Word Incarnate making contact with our bodies in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist—through which this salvation comes to us, with all its spiritual perfections originating in God and destined for our souls.

*          *          *

There is a still deeper problem, and I confess I do not see that it permits of an easy solution. The Church teaches us authoritatively that we are to study the works of the Angelic Doctor—there can be no doubt about her counsel, so often and so forcefully has it been repeated. Therefore we set about doing so in full confidence that Holy Mother Church is guiding us along the right path. But the question immediately arises: Exactly how are we to study St. Thomas? At our place in history, occupying a certain position with regard to all the upheavals and developments, good and bad, that have taken place in the last seven hundred years, how are we to carry out this study? It seems to me that there are two basically different ways of going about it.

First, there is the historically sensitive approach, what one might (in a generous mood) call the hermeneutics of incarnation, which attempts to place Thomas in all the right factual contexts—social, cultural, psychological, spiritual—in an effort to recover something of the immediacy of environment, subtlety of contemporaneous influence, and depth of intellectual background within and behind Thomas’s teaching. For example, one would insist on reading Thomas as a theologian first and foremost; one would understand him as not only an Aristotelian but also an Augustinian and a Neoplatonist of sorts; one would see him as a moment, albeit an exceedingly bright moment, in the larger and very complex development of medieval theology; one would make an effort to view his works steadily in the light of the Fathers, in the light of Boethius, Dionysius, John Damascene, the Victorines, Peter Lombard, and so forth, recognizing that Thomas is above all a Patristic and Scriptural author; one would take into account the extraordinary history of the Hellenistic, Jewish, and Islamic interpretations of Aristotle and other ancient authors that reached Thomas after being handled by numerous philosophical merchants and middlemen down through the centuries.

A very different approach, found in Great Books or liberal arts programs, may be styled “letting the text speak for itself.” Students and teacher grapple with a text from St. Thomas, without in most cases having done the background work that the historically sensitive method would consider absolutely necessary. Partisans of the hands-on approach tend to argue that the historical method collapses into historicism and that sometimes the worst way to read an author is to submerge him, or his individuality and his works, in a network of infinitesimally charted associations. To open up a book written by a great author and simply read its contents, doing the best one can: this is taken to be not only possible but desirable, since it clears away distractions, prevents disproportionate attention to details at the expense of a general but decisive grasp of the whole, and relieves to a large extent the philosophically paralyzing pressure exerted by the demands of cultural history. The person who advocates “just reading the text” really means to say that the text is important only insofar as it raises and answers, or makes an attempt at answering, the “perennial questions”; the text as an artifact (and in a certain sense, even the author as a writer) ceases to be central, giving way to the thing itself which is being discussed. We use the text in order to find out, or come closer to apprehending, the truth about things; as Thomas himself says, we are not interested in knowing what men’s opinions happen to be, but rather what the truth of the matter is.

These two methods are compatible to some extent, as any good scholar knows. But it is obvious that they are on a collision course with one another if one considers strictly their inner trajectory, their foundational assumptions, their systematic claims. And each method, by itself, is defective. If the goal of our studies is not to know just what Thomas says, then at the same time our goal cannot be just to know the truth of a certain matter; for why, then, should we study St. Thomas’s works—why not a scholastic manual, or a catechism, or a thick book written by a German scholar who summarizes the entire history of Catholic thinking on x, y, and z? Why would the Church recommend Thomas? It cannot be simply that he has a logical mind or shows an extensive familiarity with the great sources. There are many such thinkers in our tradition. It must be something about Thomas’s personally achieved synthesis; the spirit that breathes in his works; the peculiar gifts of mind and expression that belonged to him; the insights he had, which others have not surpassed.

We do, then, want to study Thomas, both to know the truth about things and because of the special quality of Thomas’s works, or rather, the theological genius responsible for them. We are interested in the saint as well as the subject matter; we cannot divide the person who probed reality from the reality he probed. This relationship is a corollary of our belief in the living communion of saints. When we study Thomas properly, we are communicating with him in a manner difficult to put into words. That is why many Thomists I know preface their study of St. Thomas with a prayer to him. It may be no more than a silent “pray for me,” a prayer that places the thinker in the presence of the teacher who lives in eternal life. In this way, studying and teaching Thomas or any great Christian thinker can be a form of prayer, a dialogue that rises above the historical contingencies binding the student to his place and time. When we place ourselves into communion with Thomas, we are necessarily linked to his and our common Teacher, the Word “who enlightens every man that comes into the world.” In a similar vein, Gabriel Marcel writes that “to pray to God is without any question the only way to think of God, or more accurately, a sort of equivalent, raised to a higher power, of the action which would, on a lower plane, be thinking of someone.”[3]

It is difficult for me to find exact words for the notion I have in mind, but it would go something like this: we commit a fundamental act of betrayal when we treat a man or his works as a mere springboard, a set of exercises, a bag of ideas, a toolshed of mental rakes and trowels. There is an inseparable link between a person and his works (a point well developed by Wojtyła in Person and Act), but even more so between the saint and his sanctity, his theology, his life in God.

Thus the second method described above seems to prescind from Thomas the thinker, from all the ideas, books, influences, surroundings, agitations, assignments, and devotions that made him who he was—and thus made his works what they are. The first method, on the other hand, never seems to ask a question or pursue a train of thought for its own sake; in fact, it appears to have a problem exactly contrary to that of the other method, namely, the problem of not being ahistorical and disinterested enough to become wholly absorbed in the matter at stake just because of what it is. And would it not be strange to claim to be studying the “real” Thomas if one did not enter wholeheartedly and passionately into the substance of what he discusses, exactly as he did? In other words, to the extent that Thomas himself was thoroughly transhistorical in his thinking, the most historically accurate appropriation of his legacy is to enter into the transhistorical domain of truth alongside him. A pure historicist could never be a good interpreter of Thomas the truth-lover, just as a pure theorist could never grasp what is contingent about Thomas the 13th-century Dominican.

The first, or historical method, is artificial and, at worst, servile, whereas the second, or theoretical method, can be naive and, when exaggerated, incapable of coming to grips with its materials. The historical attitude risks becoming a lifeless catalog of data, whereas the philosophical stance may shrink into empty disputation, pointless repetition, stony insensibility, and ultimate irrelevance. The historian may degenerate into an historicist, the philosopher into a philosophist.[4] That such degeneration frequently occurs is obvious to all; its prevention, or better, the surmounting of any reductionism, must be among the ends actively willed and worked towards by a Catholic thinker.

We are living in an age acutely conscious of history, which is as much as to say, acutely self-conscious. As thinkers, we have become convinced that our judgments are steeped in temporality and contingency. Marcel expresses this point vividly, if hyperbolically:

Our appreciations of a work of art are always, say what we will to the contrary, affected by the “climate of the age,” they reflect the unconscious general assumptions which we share with our contemporaries during some given period in history; the historically conditioned attitude is something which, for all of us, is quite inescapable; and perhaps we cannot even imagine, without tangling ourselves in contradictions, a dehistoricized attitude in the name of which completely objective judgments, judgments quite untainted by the local, the temporal, the personal, and, in a word, quite free from relativity, could be made about works of art, literature, and philosophy.[5]

We cannot shirk off this consciousness as though it were a stifling garment, not only because it is a powerful and ubiquitous force but, more importantly, because it contains some truth.

How, then, should we bring together history, that is, historical consciousness with all that it implies (for example, with basic honesty and humility, an awareness of the severe limitations of any period or thinker—one cannot expect even the greatest mind or school to have asked all the questions that need to be asked or to have given answers incapable of improvement or development) and the unhistoried act of philosophy which wells up in a soul animated by wonder and the longing for truth? Evidently, we have to aim at a difficult reconciliation: one and the same person needs to be a philosopher (who qua philosopher has no concern with history) and a person attentive to historical context and its lessons, or, to look at it from the other side, a historian (who qua historian is not competent to resolve questions of meaning) awake to philosophical implications and unafraid of drawing them out.

These and other problems are evoked the moment one is told to “study St. Thomas” or “follow St. Thomas as a guide.”[6] One must sort them out and arrive at an intelligent practical solution; one has to choose a line right down the middle and try to hold a steady course against the winds of either extreme. But before all else, one has to be aware of the difficulty. If, for example, a Thomist dismisses secondary scholarship, historical research, and textual criticism, he betrays the very truth he claims to be serving by failing to take advantage of ways in which he could come to understand it more deeply.[7] If a Thomist fails to realize that Thomas can be fully appreciated and thus kept within a living tradition only to the extent that he is consciously read in light of—or better, kept in constant companionship with—the Fathers of the Church and his own medieval contemporaries,[8] then such a one will perpetuate (and unless God intervenes, will even add to) the simplistic positions, peremptory dismissals, shallow appraisals, inadequate categorizations, unintelligible formulations, and unappealing lumps of detached and dessicated scholasticism with which our heritage is loaded, and in so doing will, by an exquisite contradiction, continue to undermine the tradition to which he has dedicated his efforts. St. Thomas only lives to the extent that he is placed into dialogue with the best thinkers of our own time—or at least, to the extent that the study of his work, even when done for the sake of understanding it on its own terms, does not terminate in a kind of literary fetishism which has as its end the preservation of a secret initiatic knowledge. What is needed are men like Josef Pieper and Charles De Koninck, who having become familiar with its fertile richness, can apply Thomas’s thought to contemporary problems and, at the same time, take modern insights and incorporate them positively into the investigation of the perennial questions with which philosophy must be chiefly occupied. As Maritain observes:

Thomism is not a museum piece. No doubt, like other systems of medieval philosophy, indeed, philosophic systems of all ages, it must be studied historically. All the great philosophies, whether of the Middle Ages or any other period, have that in their substance which to an extent triumphs over time. But Thomism does so more completely than any other since it harmonizes and exceeds them all, in a synthesis which transcends all its components. It is relevant to every epoch. It answers modern problems, both theoretical and practical. In the face of contemporary aspirations and perplexities, it displays a power to fashion and emancipate the mind. We therefore look to Thomism at the present day to save: in the speculative order, intellectual values; in the practical order, so far as they can be saved by philosophy, human values. In short, we are concerned not with an archaeological but with a living Thomism. It is our duty to grasp the reality and the requirements of such a philosophy.

This duty gives rise to a double obligation. We must defend the traditional wisdom and the continuity of the philosophia perennis against the prejudices of modern individualism, insofar as it values, seeks, and delights in novelty for its own sake and is interested in a system of thought only insofar as it is a creation of a novel conception of the world. But equally, we must show that this wisdom is eternally young, always inventive, and involves a fundamental need, inherent in its very being, to grow and renew itself. And in so doing we must combat the prejudices of those who would fix it at a particular stage of its development and fail to understand its essentially progressive nature.[9]

Thomism has its timeless side and its time-bound side, just as Thomas has his unparalleled stretches of genius and his occasional weaknesses. Theology neither began nor ended with St. Thomas; even more is this true of philosophy. Too much scholastic learning leads, moreover, to “canned” or “instant” answers, where a person behaves as if, when faced with a given question, he need only select the right package and unwrap the ready-made answer. One is reminded of the way that the Cartesian or Baconian experimenter confronts nature with his calibrated instruments, ready to inject intelligibility furnished by hypothetical ideas, already anticipating the answer to whatever questions he may pose. There is another problem with the type of philosopher at hand: he has far too great a confidence in his own education and reasoning powers, as evidenced by a strong habit of answering quickly without (one is tempted to say) really thinking. He will propose the swift and exhaustive answer, which, in one stroke, destroys not only the question as an opportunity for dialectic wherein the nature of the difficulty as well as different pathways into its resolution are glimpsed, but also all of its wonder and complexity as a question that will always recur.

Anything that is not won with labor, any fruit we taste without having earned a right to its savor, can be a cause of frustration or weariness, whereas that which is purchased with labor is used with greater enjoyment. Attractiveness, whether physical or intellectual, seems to result chiefly from the possibility of disclosing a hidden beauty whose outward contours prepossess us to want to see it naked. That is to say, we have to know that what we see is not all there is, that our sight has only glanced upon the surface; and this awareness of limitation in our knowledge of a thing impels us onward to know it in full, “to penetrate its very core,” as Thomas says when treating of the effects of love.

The origin of philosophy is wonder, and wonder naturally expresses itself in the form of questions, the most important being the “why” or “for what purpose.” Philosophy, then, expresses its origin in the question, it takes its point of departure from questioning and formulating questions. To remain true to its origins, it must never lose sight of the wonder which initially inspired the questions, the restless search for better formulation, the deeper wonder arising from the always partial answers that outline a path to fullness of truth. For philosophy to remain alive, then, it must never “settle” a question in such a way that it becomes impossible to raise the question any longer. The moment that an answer is prepackaged, provided in a bottle, or given as an instant mix, it ceases to respond to the living question and detaches itself both from the activity of philosophizing and from its goal, which is the truth seen through the medium of the question.

The “technique” or treatment of a problem begins with its first expression as a question. The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it—right or wrong—may be given. If we are asked: “Who made the world?” we may answer: “God made it,” “Chance made it,” “Love and hate made it,” or what you will. But if we reply: “Nobody made it,” we will be accused of trying to be cryptic, smart, or unsympathetic. For in this last instance, we have only seemingly given an answer; in reality we have rejected the question. The questioner feels called upon to repeat his problem. . . . A question is really an ambiguous proposition; the answer is its determination. There can be only a certain number of alternatives that will complete its sense. In this way the intellectual treatment of any datum, any experience, any subject, is determined by the nature of our questions, and only carried out in the answers.[10]

A question must be invested with personal meaning before an answer can acquire its due importance or significance. The questions make possible the answers; they are the condition for the truth’s appearing. If the questions as real questions are lost, the truth contained in traditional answers is lost as well, replaced with a simulacrum that one can only idolize or ignore—perilous to thought, in either case. The philosophical question is like a good wine in that it must breathe before its full flavor can be tasted. The materials from which the question arises are like the grapes that must be crushed to yield their sweet liquid; and just as this liquid must be allowed to sit and ferment before the wine can be produced, so too the question must have time to ferment, to develop its own potencies, and to work upon itself, before it can acquire the flavor that invites the palate to savor it. The same is true when it comes to proposed answers. An approach to philosophy that makes it consist in a correspondence of formulaic questions and catechetical answers threatens to suffocate the motivating eros of philosophy, the loving exploration that sustains thoughtful inquiry. “Just as the imagination of a form without estimation of fittingness or harmfulness does not move the sensitive appetite, so neither does the apprehension of the true without the aspect of goodness and desirability.” (Ia-IIae qu. 9, art. 1). The wise man tastes what he knows and rejoices in the feast.

Clarity of thought, or getting a purchase on the truth about something, often requires not only distance from the object but removal from the place where one thinks one will find the answers. Instead of reading a treatise on poetry, for example, one will understand its essence better by relishing a large number of good poems and, moreover, listening to a lot of music and taking many walks in the fields and mountains. If one has not explored the thing and its cousins first, one will get nowhere with formal considerations. In like manner, one can understand St. Thomas much better by making forays into Augustine, Gregory, Dionysius, and Bonaventure, and by living (with necessary adjustments) the kind of life he lived; one will return to Thomas with brighter and keener eyes, and discover more riches there than if one had a strictly Thomistic diet. It is in the same spirit that I once recommended to an overly rationalistic friend that he take a “vacation from thinking”; why not spend some time listening to Gregorian chant and Beethoven’s string quartets, or visit museums where you can gaze for hours at Rembrandt portraits?

System-building is among the greatest evils of modern philosophy. It is contrary to the genuine nature of philosophy as one sees it, for example, in Plato, Bonaventure, or Marcel. Thomas himself is not a system-builder because he does not pretend to deduce everything from a handful of first principles. He leans on Scripture; he leans on his predecessors; he leans on natural reason and experience; he leans on dialectic with others. He is not unfolding a predetermined pattern which he finds wrapped up in his own mind, à la Spinoza. The synthesis he produced is designed to be a beginning and admits of perfecting by others, even as it perfected what preceded it. Thomas is a dialogical thinker; anyone who ponders the format of most of his works will appreciate this fact. It is a decisive fact, for it means that we must use Thomas dialogically, as a guide to the truth who wishes to apprentice us in a way of life, as did the desert fathers when young aspiring monks came out eagerly to hear their apothegms. Thomas’s most characteristic activity as a member of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris was to engage in quaestiones disputatae et quodlibetales, the redactions of which give us a keener appreciation for the role of living speech, dialectical encounter, in Thomas’s thinking; one sees in the format of an actually disputed question, the open-ended nature of scholastic discourse.

That Thomas’s greatest work looked to him like so much straw in comparison with the vision he had been granted on December 6, 1273, does not mean that we should dispense with this masterful “summary of theology,” but rather, that we should study it in such a way as to be straining ever closer to the realities it evokes, realities which infinitely transcend the letter of the text. How absurd it would be to give any student the impression that sacra doctrina begins with the confusion of Scripture but culminates in the clarity of the Summa theologiæ! St. Thomas himself, the magister sacrae paginae, would be shocked to see his own “straw”—useful though it is as a bed on which to lay the Christ-child—taken as the centermost principle of Catholic formation, when in reality this principle is, and shall always be, the Word of God in his written tokens and Eucharistic presence. We are all familiar with Thomas’s admission that he learned more from his crucifix than from all the books he had read; we have heard that he rested his head upon the tabernacle and sought divine help whenever he encountered a difficulty; we know that he celebrated a Mass in the morning and immediately served a second Mass afterwards. Can we say the same—are we imitators of him as he was of Paul, and Paul of Christ? The Church proposes him to us as a model of the holy theologian, and holiness counts a great deal more than knowledge; or rather, knowledge is worthwhile when it is a cause and effect of deification.

In the Summa’s structure of part, treatise, question, article, objections, sed contra, corpus, and responses, I see not a rigid systematization or ossification of inquiry but a Socratic model of amicable confrontation distilled into polished notes, seminae conversationis, condensed dialogues for the student and teacher to consult in common when they wish to open up a problem anew and come to grips with what is at stake in it. Every article is a locus meditationis, which can therefore also function as a principle of true dialogue, since all dialogue presupposes an awareness of participating in truths common to all the speakers or, put differently, speech can become philosophical only to the extent that it evokes and invokes what is truly common to many. The writings of St. Thomas, organized according to scholastic custom, should be considered loci meditationis, readily assimilable and abundantly nourishing, capable of fostering the contemplative act whereby the student rises above the text—rises, in a certain sense, outside his contingent place in the material conversation—into the heart of the problem or mystery being considered; and as this act becomes habitual to him, the student can rise past the problem, can go through the mystery, into the very Heart of Christ, towards whom everything in St. Thomas is ultimately directed.

Philosophy (a fortiori, theology) are endeavors wherein a stable depositum of questions, ranging from the highest universality to the lowest particularity, must be posed again and again, not only to make progress, but more importantly, to return to the sources of thought and life—sources to which man is always in danger of growing numb, of which he can lose sight, from which he often wanders in forgetfulness. “This perpetual beginning again, which may seem scandalous to the scientist or the technician, is an inevitable part of all genuinely philosophical work; and perhaps it reflects in its own order the fresh start of every new awakening and of every birth.”[11]

The need always to “begin anew”—which has nothing to do with the Cartesian artifice of razing the foundations and starting from scratch—stems from the inescapable task of self-criticism, the task of purging dross, reassessing terminology, weighing antitheses, pursuing new insights, and incorporating new givens. The commitment to clarity and precision forces the philosopher to question his own questions and retain an inward distance from his answers. “Let us remember that for the philosopher everything is in some way a trial; how can he fail to be almost overwhelmed by the disconcerting multiplicity of the empiric data which he has to take into account, by the fear of falling into arbitrary simplifications?”[12] In the continual striving for greater breadth and height and depth, he preserves the attitude of beginning anew even when he has gone far into the truth.

For this reason, stubborn attachment to a favored terminology or network of distinctions might actually undermine the meaning of the terms and the legitimacy of the system in use. In one of his unforgettable metaphors, Marcel says that when we adhere to certain expressions or formulae too fixedly, “what I am tempted to call a mental clot is formed, which interrupts the circulation of thought; and it is precisely this circulation of thought which we have to re-establish. I mean that the words, so to say, interpose themselves between me and the thought I am driving at; they get a bogey-like and unwelcome reality of their own; they become an obstacle instead of remaining an instrument.”[13]

Keeping in view St. Thomas’s manner of doing theology and the proper way to approach his indispensable textbook, it is evident why Marcel errs in saying, evidently with Thomists in mind, that

the very structure of duration and of life show[s] that philosophical thought is unfaithful to reality whenever it attempts to proceed from conclusion to conclusion towards a Summa which, in the end, needs only to be expounded and memorised paragraph by paragraph.[14]

If my analysis is correct, St. Thomas, the most famous Summa author of the Church, is not touched at all by Marcel’s complaint. Thomas never attempted to capture the whole of natural reality—much less the infinity of God and the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ—by “proceeding from conclusion to conclusion” so as to “sum up” everything that can be known. The fact that he has been presented in this way is a great misfortune whose evil effects we can never too diligently combat. If one bears in mind the kind of students for whom Thomas was writing—young men steeped in the fruits of lectio divina, beneficiaries of a constant encounter with the word of God in prayer, in the divine office, in the sacred liturgy, in the reception of the Blessed Sacrament where the Word escapes its textual prison and comes to us in the flesh—if one bears in mind the life of these young men and is careful to cultivate among modern pupils of St. Thomas a comparable discipline, it will not be difficult to see how much more subtle is the true relationship between a Summa of theology and the life of oratio et labor to which the Christian is called.

In St. Thomas’s mind, there is always something preceding and something succeeding the use of a theology textbook or attendance at a series of lectures; the theologian provides no more than an evanescent middle term between life and thought, experience and reflection. Beforehand there must be the praeparatio of prayer and penance; afterwards, there must be action and contemplation, transcendence and incarnation, a continual circulation from earth to heaven, self to neighbor to God. If there is no prayer and no active charity, the study of theology is perfectly useless, as St. Bonaventure stressed over and over to his Franciscan brethren.

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NOTES

[1] Andreas Speer, “Bonaventure and the Question of a Medieval Philosophy” in Medieval Philosophy and Theology 6 (1997): 43.

[2] From a different angle, John Inglis, in his article “Does Aquinas Do Epistemology?” (Journal of Neoplatonic Studies 5.2 [1997]: 29–57), joins a larger movement critical of the once-common effort to separate out independent disciplines, e.g., ontology, epistemology, psychology, from the writings of St. Thomas. The modern university’s division of the sciences has well-nigh destroyed the unity of ancient-medieval thought by failing to apprehend its root cause, the integral vision of “the Catholica,” which resists atomization and automation, the splitting apart and separating off of internally connected goals, methods, and activities.

[3] Being and Having, trans. Katherine Farrer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 31. The words of Balthasar are even more pointed: “There is no truth except in prayer.” From the letter he sent to his Jesuit confreres in 1950, quoted in de Lubac, Service of the Church, 375.

[4] The historicist also tends to revel in a Walpurgisnacht of scholarly references and cross-references, infinite rounds of commentary and counter-commentary, tome-thick textual apparatuses, much like the brainy deconstructionists who delight to exhibit their linguistic and hermeneutical dexterity. Yet I have always felt suspicious of such pyrotechnical displays. I notice at any rate the great distance that separates a supreme genius like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, or Thomas from the flock of contemporary scholars with their flamboyant academic phylacteries. There is a different feel, having everything to do with the presence or absence of eros for truth and for God. There is something irredeemably empty about any act of analysis or synthesis, however brilliant it may be, when this eros is absent. “Dilettantism treated seriously, and knowledge pursued mechanically, end by becoming pedantry” (Goethe, Maxims, n. 132).

[5] The Mystery of Being, vol. I, 197.

[6] Any attempts to downplay the Magisterium’s clear and oft-repeated recommendations of St. Thomas as the foremost guide in Catholic philosophy and theology are short-sighted, harmful, and in many cases dishonest. Of course, a Catholic thinker need not style himself a Thomist. But someone who is not a Thomist, or who does not wish to be placed into a certain school, does not thereby acquire the right to attack or dismiss St. Thomas. A deep respect for Thomas’s teaching, as well as a consistent and sustained effort to consult his works, is mandated by the Church, even in the period of the Council and the post-Council.

[7] Even the simplest text has a history; and the weightier or older or lengthier the text, the deeper and more complex its history. Take the example of Thomas’s “Treatise on Law.” If you hand it to a beginning philosophy student, he will learn much from it; one can go a long way in the classroom with so rich a segment of the Summa. But consider how we excerpt that treatise and read it in isolation, from a later vantage in history, when tremendous philosophical transformations in law, society, government, nature, have long since occurred. Consider then how, owing to our tendency to isolate passages, the true context of this particular treatise, along with its presuppositions and implications—its bearing on the whole of Thomas’s theology and theory of law—have been forgotten, if not undermined. Much recent scholarship has shown how grievously the fabric of Thomas’s thought has been rent by false divisions and lack of balance, by neoscholastic assumptions and agendas, by undetected modern suppositions. What I have illustrated using the Treatise on Law could be illustrated with any commonly used (and commonly alienated) portion of Thomas’s work. Inglis gives a fine example, the attempt to carve out a formal “epistemology” from the Summa theologiae or the De veritate. To be aware of the historicity of a text also involves an awareness of its “negative history,” the story of its misinterpretations or mishandlings and the way these mistakes have given rise to the wrong questions, the wrong critiques, the wrong appropriations. Reading an old and venerable text is no simple matter after all!

[8] The writings of Josef Pieper exemplify of the kind of approach I have in mind: one thinks especially of his introduction to St. Thomas, his trilogy on the theological virtues, his work on the cardinal virtues, his little book on eschatology, and his remarkable book The Silence of St. Thomas.

[9] From A Preface to Metaphysics.

[10] Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key.

[11] Gabriel Marcel, “An Essay in Autobiography,” in The Philosophy of Existentialism, trans. Manya Harari (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 125.

[12] Marcel, Mystery of Being, vol. II, Faith & Reality, trans. René Hague (Chicago: Regnery, 1960), 160.

[13] Mystery of Being, vol. 2, 12-13.

[14] Ibid.

by Jeffrey Bond

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If we wish to investigate the heart of Thomas Hobbes’ political teaching in the Leviathan, there is no better place to look than Hobbes’ conception of war.  After all, although Hobbes denies that there is any summum bonum, a greatest good toward which all our pursuits and actions are hierarchically ordered by nature (p. 70),[1] he does posit a greatest evil, namely, the war of all against all which characterizes the state of nature (p. 231).[2]  Thus Hobbes justifies the need for an absolute sovereign because the solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short life in the state of nature is the one thing above all else to be avoided:  “And though of so unlimited a Power, men may fancy many evill consequences, yet the consequences of the want of it, which is perpetuall warre of every man against his neighbor, are much worse” (pp. 144-145).  For Hobbes, the peace established by the political art is not, as it was for the ancients and the medievals, the end toward which men are directed by nature which is necessary for the fulfillment and perfection of their being; rather, peace is to be sought because it is the absence of war,[3] which absence allows men to pursue their relentless quest for gratification of one desire after another (p. 70).

Continue reading “War in the Hobbesian State – Sovereignty’s Justification and Limit”