Aristotle and the Christian Account of Household and Politics

Chapter 2 Aristotle and the Christian Account of Household and Politics

1 Introduction

The Jesuit Scholastics appropriated the Aristotelian idea that the household and the political community were both natural. This in turn raised the question of whether the household was constitutive of the political community. In their commentaries, the Jesuits took up the Aristotelian system as mediated through Aquinas. To make sense of the terms in play and the issues that were at stake, this chapter begins with an analysis of what Aristotle and Aquinas had to say about the relationship between household and polis or city and draws on the modern scholarship to distill the main positions. A look into the Aristo- telian and Thomistic source material is indispensable for comprehending the Jesuit scheme because it sets out the terms and vocabulary the Jesuits used. In the course of working its way through the material, this chapter demonstrates that the Jesuit notion of the common good required both well-functioning households and political communities. In contrast to the dominant view in the scholarship that the political community was made up of individuals in Jesuit thought, the present claim is that households (or their heads) constituted the political community in the second Scholastic. According to Aristotle, the family could not achieve its natural purpose on its own, and therefore it formed part of the city or polis, which provided every- thing the household or oikos was unable to offer. However, the oikos remained a distinct community within the polis. Aristotle’s natural account of both asso- ciations and the Scholastic appropriation of this notion have allowed for two contrasting interpretations. Perhaps most notably, Hannah Arendt (1906–75) argued that a gulf separated Aristotle from Aquinas. She held that “Aristotle’s definition of man as zoon politikon was not only unrelated and even opposed to the natural association experienced in household life,” but also that “the profound misunderstanding expressed in the Latin translation of ‘political’ as ‘social’ is perhaps nowhere clearer than in a discussion in which Thomas Aqui- nas compares the nature of household rule with political rule.”1 According

1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 27. Cf. Aquinas 2a2ae, q. 50, a. 3, ad 3: “The father has in his household an authority like that of a

84 Chapter 2 to Arendt’s reading of Aristotle, the political community was distinctly human, in contrast to the household. Philosopher John Finnis has also argued for a rupture between Aristotle and Aquinas, although, as opposed to Arendt, Finnis regards Aquinas in a favorable light.2 Finnis claims that Aquinas’s commentaries on NE and Politics were “Aristotelian,” meaning that the political community was defined as the association capable of achieving the end of happiness, while the Summa theologiae and the drp were not (the political common good as “instrumental”). While disagreeing with Finnis, legal theorist Nicholas Aroney equally identifies a disconnection, centering on Aquinas’s stress on the “social.” He argues for a difference of emphasis in Aquinas’s dis- cussions of Aristotelian philosophy (emphasis: the primacy of politics) and the historical, medieval conditions (emphasis: society, yielding subsidiarity and federalism).3 By contrast, various scholars have argued for the primacy of the political and a consistency in the thought of Aquinas on the common good.4 In the Aquinas scholarship, the affirmation of his Aristotelianism con- cerning the common good broadly relies on the affirmation of terminological consistency across his works. In the final analysis, it appears that Aquinas had a broader view than Aristotle on the places where human beings fulfilled their natural end. Accordingly, he heavily accentuated the space that Aristotle offered to discuss the household in political terms. The Jesuits followed this approach by con- sidering the potential political function of the household community, which leads to the second question the present chapter addresses: How did politics relate to the natural end? As concerns the naturalness of the political community, early modern Scholastic thought occupies an unclear standing in

king, as stated in Ethic. viii, 10, but he has not the full power of a king, wherefore paternal government is not reckoned a distinct species of prudence, like regnative prudence.” 2 Cf. John Finnis, Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), esp. Chapter 7, 222–31, reformulated in Finnis, “Public Good: The Specifically Politi- cal Common Good in Aquinas,” in Natural Law and Moral Inquiry: Ethics, Metaphysics, and Politics in the Thought of Germain Grisez, ed. Robert P. George (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1998), 174–209. See also Finnis’s introductory essay “Aquinas’ Moral, Legal and Political Philosophy,” Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (2011); plato.stanford.edu (accessed May 19, 2018). 3 Nicholas Aroney, “Subsidiarity, Federalism and the Best Constitution: Aquinas on City, Prov- ince and Empire,” Law and Philosophy 26 (2007): 161–228, here 178f. 4 Lawrence Dewan, “St. Thomas, John Finnis, and the Political Good,” Thomist 64 (2000): 337–74. Michael Pakaluk, “Is the Common Good of Political Society Limited and Instrumental?,” Re- view of Metaphysics 55 (2001): 57–94. John Goyette, “On the Transcendence of the Political Common Good: Aquinas versus the New Natural Law Theory,” National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly (2013): 133–55. This is a special issue of the journal, offering critiques of the “new natural law theory.”