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Whether you have read them or not, your instincts about the role of law in society and its relationship to the Christian faith has probably been shaped by one of four theologians: St. Augustine, St. Aquinas, Martin Luther or John Calvin. Our series this autumn — Theologians and the Law — will look at their most important ideas about law and may even encourage you to be brave enough to read them for yourself.
Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) was supposed to grow up and take over the family business or at least rise to become Abbot of the wealthy monastery Monte Casino. Instead, he chose to become a Dominican friar. His family kidnapped him and tried to force him to see sense but he refused. Once they released him, he went to study in the Universities of Paris. His colleagues called him ‘the Dumb Ox’, because he was fat and slow in speech. However, Aquinas had a brilliant mind.
The intellectual atmosphere at the University of Paris was one of turmoil. Islamic writers in North Africa and Spain had discovered the works of Aristotle and Muslim thinkers like Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) had been trying to work out how the great insights they found in Aristotle matched up with the teachings of Mohammed. Averroes had come up with the boldest and most popular solution. He claimed that there were two entirely different sorts of truth: philosophical truth and theological truth, and that the two could contradict one another. This meant that you could accept as philosophical truth Aristotle’s belief that the world did not have a beginning and, at the same time, affirm as theological truth that God created the world out of nothing.
Aquinas saw the great danger for Christian faith – follow the path of Averroism and you would end up with faith without reason and reason without faith. He determined to stand against Averroism. He set out in his works, the Summa contra Gentiles (written to respond to Islamic and Jewish ideas) and the Summa Theologiae (written to help Christians to understand the Bible), to show that Christian faith was reasonable, and that far from faith and reason contradicting one another, Christian faith was the best way to think reasonably.
Aquinas’s solution was not perfect, and it has been frequently misunderstood as opening the way for saying that you reason first and that what you believe must be compatible with what you have arrived at rationally, without faith. Nonetheless, Aquinas’s intellectual work ought to be appreciated for what it is, a brave and conscientious effort to think Christianly at a serious level.
Aquinas’s greatest, but unfinished, work, was his Summa Theologiae (also known as the Summa Theologica). It is written in a particular, structured style, which takes some getting used to. Each of the articles of Summa Theologiae is focused on answering a specific question and goes through the following process:
Step 1: Ask the question (the issue to be considered)
Step 2: State the antithesis and give the best arguments for it.
The antithesis is the position on the question opposite to the one that Aquinas is out to prove. These are called the objections.
Step 3: State the thesis and give the best arguments for it. The thesis is the position on the question that Aquinas is out to prove.
Step 4: Refute each of the arguments for the antithesis by a strong counter argument. These are called replies to the objections.
The Summa Theologiae was designed by Aquinas as a companion volume to his commentaries on the Bible. Aquinas wrote commentaries on the Gospels of Matthew and John, all of Paul’s letters (including, in his view, Hebrews), the Psalms, Job, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Lamentations.
Aquinas wrote the Summa Theologiae as an attempt to explore the nature of the Triune God and to show how the cross of Jesus Christ is the key to all things. He wrote in 1265: “The Christian faith consists above all in the confession of the Holy Trinity, and it glories especially in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
A significant part of the Summa Theologiae at the end of the first half of the Second Part (ST I-II) is Aquinas’s treatise on “law” and “grace”. I have put both “law” and “grace” in scare quotes because they both have particular meanings for Aquinas. “Grace” is the action of the Holy Spirit, who Aquinas describes as uncreated Grace. In the Old Testament, “law” primarily means God’s guidance and direction, which is why the Psalmist can delight in God’s law. Aquinas uses the term “law” in the same way in the Summa Theologiae.
Aquinas divides law into four types:
Commenting on these four types of law, Nicholas Sagovsky says: the eternal law is the thoughts of God, natural law is the reflection of God’s decrees in creation, divine law is the will of God revealed through Scripture, and human law is the laws which people enact, hopefully in accordance with what they can discern of the law of God.
Unpacking these different kinds of law in a little more detail, the eternal law is the way in which God is at work through all things, despite human sinfulness, to achieve his purposes of showing human beings how to live and of bringing human beings back to God. The eternal law is therefore to be equated with God’s providence, understood in the broadest terms as the entirety of God’s good purposes for this world that God has created (ST I-II.91.1).
For human beings, the primary role of the natural law is to point out to those who know nothing of Christ, what God requires of them. Aquinas argued that all people know something of the natural law because “God puts it into men’s minds to be known naturally” (ST I.II.90.4 ad.1). Although some of his interpreters miss this point, for Aquinas, the self-evidence of natural law does not establish that we do not need God in order to discern right and wrong, rather it establishes our guilt for failing to order our lives according to the revelation of right and wrong, and of God, which the triune God has given us through the world God has made.
For Aquinas, there are three fundamental problems with natural law. First, our knowledge of the natural goods towards which it directs us is obscured by sin. Second, our natural ability to pursue those natural goods which we do discern is impaired by sin (ST I-II.93.6; I.113.1 ad.1). Third, these natural goods are not the end for which we are ultimately ordered. In order to direct us towards the end of eternal happiness with God (what Aquinas calls ‘eternal beatitude’), it was therefore necessary for a divine law to be given (ST I-II.91.4).
The “Old Law” operates at three levels. It contains a revelation of the moral precepts of the natural law. It is given in the context of a covenant by which God wishes to restore human beings to communion with God. Finally, it points towards God’s will to enter into closer communion than would have been naturally possible. Nonetheless, for all that this is the role of the Old Law, it remains, like any human law, concerned with exterior acts and is not “an inner law which guides and perfects the movements of the soul.”
For Aquinas, the moral precepts contained in the Old Law are binding for all, because they reiterate the natural law (ST I-II.98.5). These moral precepts can be reduced to the Decalogue (ST I-II.100.3), which can itself be reduced to the Two Great Commandments identified by Jesus. The Old Law is therefore ordered to and around the love of God and the love of neighbour.
The fundamental problem with the Old Law was, however, that the Jews were unable to keep it. As it looks forward to Christ, the Old Law demonstrates that sinful human beings are incapable of perfectly following even a God-given law, which is acknowledged to be righteous (ST I-II.91.5).
Christ is the giver of the New Law, which is the grace of the Holy Spirit who writes God’s law on our hearts. The New Law is “[t]he law of the Holy Spirit [which] is superior to every human law” (ST I-II.96.5 ad.2). Through the Holy Spirit, Christians not only know God’s law but also receive God’s help to try to obey it. It is impossible to stress the importance of this in Aquinas’s thought. Human beings can mistake the natural law and the Old Law for being mere commands, commands which we have to attempt to fulfil by our own efforts. The “New Law” is entirely different. The New Law is the Holy Spirit who shows us what the right thing is to do and who empowers us to do it. The Ten Commandments and the other moral teaching in Scripture remains important but it is secondary to the work of the Holy Spirit.
Aquinas’s understanding of salvation and of the New Law relegates human law to no more than the antechamber of God’s purposes at best. For Aquinas human law is only concerned with enforcing those matters of morality which belong to justice, i.e. those which relate to right relations between persons (ST I-II.99.5 ad.1). We might talk of ‘outward justice’ in distinction from the inner justice, that is justice-righteousness, which is the virtue which the Holy Spirit nurtures in the Christian.
Human law is necessary because of the effects of the Fall on humans’ ability to discern and obey the natural law. It is because of human beings’ ability to misunderstand the natural law, that human law is necessary to make it effective on the political level. It is because human selfishness means that we fail to give to others what is due to them, that human rulers must direct us to the common good (ST I.105.4). In addition, the general principles of the natural law need to be spelt out for particular communities, and specific rules need to be devised to take account of the geography, temperament, manner and customs of the particular society which has to be governed.
Aquinas argued that precisely because “human law is established for the collectivity of human beings, most of whom have imperfect virtue … human law does not prohibit every kind of vice, from which the virtuous abstain. Rather, human law prohibits only the more serious kinds of vice, from which most persons can abstain, and especially those vices that inflict harm on others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be preserved” (ST I-II.96.2; II-II.69.2 ad.1; 77.1 ad.1).
Human law is powerless to effect true virtue. Unlike the natural law and the Mosaic law, human law is not directly fulfilled in Christ. It is not of eternal value in the same way. It is a temporal ordinance, ordered providentially by God, during the time of humanity’s rebellion against him.
In Aquinas draws the following contrasts (ST I-II.98.1):
Human Law Divine Law
End: the temporal tranquillity of the state everlasting happiness
Means: direction of external actions the grace of the Holy Ghost spread abroad in our hearts
Perfection: prohibition and punishment of sin charity
Nonetheless, where Augustine stresses the coercive nature of positive law, accepts that it must be practical in what it permits and what it prohibits, but holds rulers accountable to God’s justice, Aquinas, by contrast, emphasises that good laws are directed toward the common good, thus granting positive law a more constructive role.
You’ll receive a monthly email with new resources, updates, event information and other curated content to help you live a life where the faith you profess and the law you practise are integrally connected. (Do note: We too hate spam and take your privacy extremely seriously. Please see our Privacy Policy to understand how we use and protect your data).
