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POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY - MEDIEVAL |
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Select: Saint Augustine -- Thomas Aquinas Saint Augustine was one of the foremost philosopher-theologians of early Christianity and, while serving as bishop of Hippo Regius from 396 to 430, the leading figure in the church of North Africa. He had a profound influence on the subsequent development of Western thought and culture and, more than any other person, shaped the themes and defined the problems that have characterized the Western tradition of Christian theology. Among his many writings considered classics, the two most celebrated are his semiautobiographical Confessions, which contains elements of mysticism, and City of God, a Christian vision of history. The City of God, written between 413 and 426, was Saint Augustine's answer to the pagan philosopher Volusanius's contention that the adoption of Christianity by Emperor Constantine had led to the Visigoths' sack of Rome in 410. In his lengthy philosophic treatise, Augustine dismisses the pagan position and instead interprets history in terms of Christian revelation. The work's most famous motif is that of the "two cities," the Christian city devoted to God, the earthly pagan city (Babylon) devoted to the devil; Babylon, a prey to moral confusion and strife, was slated ultimately for destruction. Augustine was born at Thagaste, a small town in the Roman province of Numidia. He received a classical education that both schooled him in Latin literature and enabled him to escape from his provincial upbringing. Trained at Carthage in rhetoric, which was a requisite for a legal or political career in the Roman empire, he became a teacher of rhetoric in Carthage, in Rome, and finally in Milan, a seat of imperial government at the time. At Milan, in 386, Augustine underwent religious conversion. He retired from his public position, received baptism from Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, and soon returned to North Africa. In 391, he was ordained to the priesthood in Hippo Regius; five years later he became bishop. The first part of Augustine's life can be seen as a series of attempts to reconcile his Christian faith with his classical culture. His mother, Saint Monica, had reared him as a Christian. Although her religion did not hold an important place in his early life, Christianity never totally lost its grip upon him. As a student in Carthage, he encountered the classical ideal of philosophy's search for truth and was fired with enthusiasm for the philosophic life. Unable to give up Christianity altogether, however, he adopted Manichaeism, a Christian heresy claiming to provide a rational Christianity on the basis of a purified text of Scripture. Nine years later, his association with the Manichees ended in disillusionment; and it was in a religiously detached state that Augustine arrived in Milan. There he discovered, through a chance reading of some books of Neoplatonism, a form of philosophy that seemed compatible with Christian belief. At the same time, he found that he was at last able to give up the ambitions for public success that had previously prevented him from embracing the philosophic life. The result was the dramatic conversion that led Augustine to devote his life to the pursuit of truth, which he now identified with Christianity. With a small group of friends, he returned to North Africa and, in Thagaste, established a religious community dedicated to the intellectual quest for God. Augustine's ordination, unexpectedly forced upon him by popular acclamation during a visit to Hippo in 391, brought about a fundamental change in his life and thought. It redirected his attention from the philosophic Christianity he had discovered in Milan to the turbulent, popular Christianity of North Africa's cities and towns. His subsequent career as priest and bishop was to be dominated by controversy and debate. Especially important were his struggles with the Donatists and with Pelagianism. The Donatists promoted a Christian separatist movement, maintaining that only they were the true church and that, as a result, only their sacraments were valid. Augustine's counterattack emphasized unity, not division, as the mark of true Christianity and insisted that the validity of the sacraments depended on Christ himself, not on any human group or institution. Pelagianism, an early 5th-century Christian reform movement, held that no person could be excused from meeting the full demand of God's law. In doing so, it stressed the freedom of the human will and its ability to control motives and regulate behavior. In contrast, Augustine argued that because of original sin no one can entirely govern his own motivation and that only the help of God's grace makes it possible for persons to will and to do good. In both of these controversies, Augustine opposed forces that set some Christians apart from others on grounds either of religious exclusivism or of moral worth. Augustine must be reckoned as one of the architects of the unified Christianity that survived the barbarian invasions of the 5th century and emerged as the religion of medieval Europe. He succeeded in bringing together the philosophic Christianity of his youth and the popular Christianity of his congregation in Hippo. In doing so, he created a theology that has remained basic to Western Christianity, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, ever since. In The Radical Academy
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Thomas Aquinas (picture), born of a noble family in Rocca Secca, near Aquino in 1225, was to complete the magnificent synthesis of Scholasticism. As a very young boy, he went to Monte Cassino, the celebrated Benedictine monastery which at the time was headed by one of his uncles. He displayed such brilliance that the monks advised his father to send him to the University of Naples, where he could receive a more advanced education. While in Naples, he entered the Dominican Order. His mother, far from favorable to this move, hastened to Naples; but the Dominicans, fearing her opposition, had already send Thomas to Rome in the hope that he would eventually be able to reach Paris or Cologne. His brothers captured him on the road and held him prisoner in the fortress of San Giovanni at Rocca Secca, where he remained almost two years while his family tried to dissuade him from following his vocation. Finally released, he was sent to Rome, then to Paris and Cologne where he studied in the school of Albertus Magnus. There he was introduced to the study of Aristotelianism and completed his theological studies. In 1252, Thomas Aquinas was sent to Paris to further his studies and then to teach, which he continued to do until 1260. In that year he returned to the Roman province of his Order, where he was given various offices of administration and education in the province. In 1269 he was again in Paris, where he carried on the controversy against the Averroism of Siger of Brabant. In 1272 he went to Naples to assume the chair of theology at the university there. At the beginning of 1274 he set out with a companion for the Council of Lyons, but died en route, at the Cistercian monastery of Fossa Nuova near Terracina, on March 7, at the early age of forty-nine. He was proclaimed a saint by the Church, and by posterity has been acclaimed as the Angelic Doctor. In the discussion of the relation between church and empire, the main topic of medieval political philosophy, certain authors foreshadowed modern political theories. Thomas Aquinas stressed the popular origin of royal power and the right of the people to restrict or abolish that power in case of abuse; William of Ockham and Marsiglio of Padua hold similar views. In opposition to Augustinian teaching, which affirmed that society is not natural but is the consequence of original sin, and in conformity with Aristotle, Aquinas discovers the necessity of society by analyzing human nature. Society is necessary for the perfection to which man by his nature has been destined. Man is hence a political animal. The first form of society is the family, an imperfect society because it is destined by nature solely for the propagation of the species. Society has for its end the common good, and man does not exist for society, but society exists for man. The duties of society are of a positive and a negative nature; i.e., the state not only must provide for the defense of its citizens and for their free exercise (negative duties), but must also provide educative and formative measures for the elevation of the members of society. Since the end of the state is the common good of material nature, the state must recognize another society, the Church, to which has been entrusted the spiritual good of the same citizens; and since the material must be coordinated with the spiritual, the state, although complete in itself, must recognize the rights of the Church in matters of morality and religion. Aquinas wrote an important Treatise on Law, which is contained in his masterwork Summa Theologica.Who is entitled to make laws for a society? What gives the laws their authority over us? The answers which Aquinas gives to these questions rest on principles of right and justice and are opposed to answers which stem from the proposition that might makes right. All power and authority ultimately come from God, but they do not pass directly from God to rulers to create kings by divine right. They are vested by God in the people as a whole. The power and authority which the people have from God to make the laws under which they live, they can either exercise directly or delegate to representatives of their own choosing. In either case, they are self-governing. They cannot rightly be subjected to laws laid down for them by one who wields political power without their consent and without duly constituted authority. Here in Aquinas is one of the first clear statements of the doctrine of popular sovereignty. The voice of the people is the voice of God, but only when the people make just laws for the common good. Otherwise, popular sovereignty degenerates into the might of the majority, which is just another form of tyranny. But when, in addition to being made by duly constituted authority, the positive laws of the state are also based on the natural moral law and represent just regulations of human conduct, they speak with the authority of right, not just the force of might. While they exercise the sanction of coercive force over the bad man who obeys them only from fear of punishment, they bind the good man in conscience. In obeying them from the promptings of virtue he obeys them freely and not under coercion. Some of Aquinas' ideas have influenced the development of Classical Liberalism, particularly with regard to the concepts of human nature and natural law. In The Radical Academy
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