Augustine and Aquinas on Original Sin and the Function of Political Authority

Abstract

Augustine and Aquinas on Original Sin and the Function of Political Authorit,Y PAULJ. WEITHMAN THE REDISCOVERY OF Aristotelian moral thought in the thirteenth century influenced medieval political theory profoundly. Recovery of Aristotle's Politics ,' for example, made available to political theorists of the period analyses of political institutions that differed significantly from those they found in Patristic sources. Differences between Aristotle's views and those of Augustine were especially striking. Thomas Aquinas was one of the first and most influential of the thirteenth-century Aristotelians. Charting the medieval assimilation of Aristotelian political ideas and the rejection of Augustinian politics therefore requires an adequate account of Aquinas's own political thought and of his departures from political Augustinianism." A number of friends, colleagues, and advisors have commented on various drafts of this essay. Special thanks go to Sharon Lloyd, Alasdair Maclntyre, R. A. Markus, A. S. McGrade, Michael Pakaluk, John Rawis, Theresa Rice, and Judith Shklar. Thanks are also due to the editors of theJournal oftht Histo~ of Philosophyfor helpful comments. ' On the reception and interpretation of the Politics in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries , see F. Edward Cranz, Aristotelianism in Medieval Political Theory(unpublished Ph.D. dissertation , Harvard University, 1938); Conor Martin, "Some Medieval Commentaries on Aristotle's Politics," History 36 0955): 29-44; Jean Dunbabin, "The Reception and Interpretation of Aristotle 's Politics,"in Kretzmann et al., eds., CambridgeHistoryofLaterMedievalPhilosophy(Cambridge University Press, 1982), 723-38. On Aquinas's interpretation and reinterpretation of Aristotle, see Harry Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianisra (University of Chicago Press, 1952); also Anthony Celano "The Concept of Worldly Beatitude in the Writings of Thomas Aquinas," Journal of the HistoryofPhilosophy25 (1987): 215-26. 9 The recovery of Thomistic politics may be of more than historical interest, as recent attempts to bring versions of it into contact with contemporary political philosophy suggest. For such attempts, see John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Right (Oxford University Press, 198o); also Alasdair Maclntyre, WhoseJustice? Which Rationality? (University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). These attempts obviously raise a number of very important questions, but questions which lie beyond the scope of this paper. 354 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 30:3 JULY ~99 ~ According to most standard works on medieval political theory, Augustine and Aquinas offer very different explanations of political authority and subjection .s Augustine, it is said, thought political authority essentially coercive. He considered subjection to a coercive political authority necessary because he thought that without restraint human beings acting on their lust, avarice, and desire for power would make society intolerable if not impossible. Aquinas, by contrast, found in Aristode a more positive political theory according to which life in a well-functioning polls conduces to human flourishing. Political authority , on Aquinas's view, does not exist only to restrain the vicious and aggressive ; it also has the positive function of leading human beings to virtue. Scholars have long adduced passages in which Augustine and Aquinas discuss prelapsarian authority in support of this general and generally held account.4 Augustine's treatment of authority in the state of innocence is confined to a brief passage in The City of God. There he seems to assert that there would be no political authority had original sin not been committed. This is the view he would be expected to endorse if he thought that political authority is exercised only to coerce and restrain the vicious, since there would be no vice if there were no sin. Aquinas, like other Scholastics, treated the question of prelapsarian rule at somewhat greater length than did Augustine. He first took it up in his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard; he returned to it years later in the Prima Pars of his Summa Theologiae. Because he thought that political authority makes a positive contribution to a life of virtue, he argued that it would have been found had the Fall not occurred. These passages on prelapsarian authority are often employed only as proof-texts to establish that the two thinkers differ. But their analysis can also be expected to show exactly how Augustine and Aquinas differ by showing exactly what functions each deems essential to political authority. After the Fall it is...

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