The Foundations of Thomism

Chapter 6 The Foundations of Thomism The very text of the Summa Theologiae bears witness to the powerful hold Ar- istotelian thought held over Aquinas. References to ‘The Philosopher’ abound, and often in a context wherein the invocation of Aristotle is deemed to be con- clusive on a disputed point. Indeed, for centuries scholars have been comfort- able labelling theories as ‘Aristotelico-Thomistic’.1 Despite this longstanding association, recent scholars have been more reluctant to read correspondence where Aristotle and Aquinas appear to refer to the same ideas, preferring in- stead to probe precisely how far Aquinas deviated from his inspiration.2 This reluctance is readily understandable. The rediscovery of Aristotle’s written corpus provided a direct challenge to many longstanding doctrines of the Church.3 Aquinas’ project was in no small part to reconcile Aristotelianism and Chris- tianity, a task that inevitably entailed reinterpreting strands of Aristotelian thought to fit Christian doctrine. Thus when reading Aquinas it is important to bear in mind that no matter how Aristotelian his account of a problem might appear, he always wrote as a Christian Aristotelian. Nevertheless it is difficult to deny the profound influence the Corpus Aristotelicum had over Aquinas, both methodologically and substantively. And for this reason there is value in briefly considering the way in which Aristotle approached questions of law and wrongdoing. Praise, Blame and Responsibility The law’s treatment of wrongdoing stands at the intersection of Aristotle’s accounts of ethics and justice. To get a complete view of how such matters are resolved within Aristotelian thought, it is necessary to consider both strands. As will be seen in due course, a complete picture is in fact unattainable. Although 1 Joseph Owens, ‘Aristotle and Aquinas’ in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, eds Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 38. 2 Ibid., 2. 3 Consequently, it was not unknown for Aristotle’s writings to be banned. See, for example, the Condemnation of 1210 issued by the synod of Sens proclaiming that no work by Aristotle on natural philosophy could be taught or read in Paris: Edward Grant (ed.), A Source Book in Medieval Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 42. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004344372_007 114 chapter 6 both strands deal with matters of central concern to wrongdoing, Aristotle him- self failed to draw the two together, leaving unanswered fundamental questions as to how the two interact. Within ethics, the relevant concept is responsibility, the key to determining under what circumstances a person can be praised or blamed for their actions. This is a topic of central importance to Aristotle’s ethics, feeding directly into his conception of moral agency that acts as the gateway to both virtue and vice.4 This is dealt with in two locations in the Nicomachean Ethics, although as might be expected the two accounts bear many similarities. Aristotle’s first account of responsibility begins with the basic proposition that praise and blame are only bestowed on actions that are ‘voluntary’.5 The word translated here as voluntary is hekousion, a word without a direct an- alogue in English. Although it certainly connotes actions performed without coercion, of one’s own free will, there is an element of purpose to it that is not necessarily implicit in the idea of voluntariness.6 As ‘voluntariness’ is the translation of choice in works both on ancient philosophy and legal philosophy, it will be maintained here.7 Nevertheless, its ambiguity should be noted, especially when comparisons are drawn with the Latin variations on ‘voluntas’ which, for simple reasons of etymology, are also translated as ‘voluntariness’. Actions are involuntary when compelled by an external force or performed through ignorance. External compulsion comes in many forms, and some are easier to justify as being irrelevant to ethical judgments than others. For example, it is straightforward to argue that a person whose ship is carried into dangerous waters by an overwhelmingly strong wind is not to blame for the damage done to the ship and its cargo. The reason given by Aristotle is simple: the actor contributed nothing to the harm.8 He was simply carried into the path of harm by a force entirely external to him, and so there can be no question of blameworthiness. Matters are complicated when the actor is compelled to act by an external force, but the decision to act is his own. Within legal taxonomies the obvious example is duress, but Aristotle considers also actions motivated by noble purposes.9 In both cases the simple fact that there is an underlying choice, even if that choice is constrained by the circumstances in which it is 4 See generally Susan S. Meyer, Aristotle on Moral Responsibility: Cause and Character (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 17–19. 5 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 3.1. 6 Ibbetson, ‘How the Romans’, n.91. 7 E.g. Ibbetson, ‘How the Romans’, 492; Gordley, ‘Tort law in the Aristotelian tradition’, 131, 138. 8 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 3.1. 9 Ibid., 3.1..

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