The following essay was originally published in Communio Vol. 48.2, and is republished here thanks to the kindness of D.C. Schindler et al, and for the purpose of further popularizing a traditional vision of Christian politics.

“As the father guides the son deeper into virtue through the son’s obedience, through his good inclinations, his particular instantiation of the virtues, so the prince serves as a father to the city itself.”

The collapse of liberal moral and political order has led to a welcome revival in Catholic political thought. This revival, however, often seems trapped within the bounds of twentieth-century conservative politics. Some thinkers support a version of libertarianism; others a version of statism. For the statists, our current problems are largely the result of political power either abdicating its responsibility or being used unjustly and thus habituating the population into vice. They propose the reassertion of moral political power: state power must be aimed at man’s true end and so produce virtuous habits in the population. The libertarians oppose this line of reasoning. For them, the solution to our current troubles is precisely for political power to get out of the “private” world of morals, leaving virtue formation to private institutions, such as the Church or family.

Both the statists and the libertarians are drawing the wrong conclusions from liberalism’s demise because they remain concerned with unitary sovereignty, with political power as state power. They remain for the most part in the modern political tradition, trying, unsuccessfully, to adapt this tradition to the current predicament. However, this tradition has already been overthrown. The theorists of so-called postmodernism have already demonstrated that real power exists exactly in the space between the lines of the categories of modern politics. Rather than asserting that the intellectual and the ethical have some relationship to the political, thinkers such as Michel Foucault asserted that the intellectual and the ethical are the political—that the governance of the soul and the governance of the body are always integral.[1] Foucault dissolved the rigid categories of modern politics such as public and private, economics and government, legal and moral, and so on, which perhaps once had a use but are simply no longer capable of describing our world.

Social order, as Foucault described it, emerges from complex webs of overlapping power economies. These dynamic economies take the form of innumerable, highly contingent and shifting hierarchies that structure all aspects of life. They are only incidentally juridical in a positivist sense because they are constituted and maintained not through some central mind extrinsically ordering society toward some end, but through every person strategically wielding power and obeying power: submitting in one place while making a move for domination in another place; obeying law here while undermining it there; resisting legitimacy here while most slavishly submitted to the power of social norms there. And the whole contest takes place within a particular historical-cultural frame that is nothing other than the experience of power. Neither individual liberty nor sovereignty of the old-fashioned variety are anywhere to be found, as men seek to build their own power through strategies of submission and domination that occur within structures of power emerging from the bottom, from the top, from the side, from every which way. Politics as a field of knowledge (like all knowledge) is itself implicated in this dynamic because the discourse that identifies, labels, bounds, and problematizes power is necessarily itself an aspect of building and deploying power. The modern notion that politics is mostly about the state was itself an aspect of the state-builders’ project.

That project has shifted. It is clear that the dominant constellations of power are not built upon policemen or armies or even the administrative state, but on the control of money and information, through which those old power centers take their direction. The current structure’s power comes mostly through the direct production of propaganda-marketing and the indirect manipulation of the population’s spontaneous conversation into propaganda-marketing. This is an economy of power rooted in words, images, and the social norms produced through them, and the formal state is the most inept of the many participants in this scramble. The politicians do what they are told—this, I think, is obvious. It is also disorienting for moderns who are so used to the idea that social power is centralized juridically and so capable of being controlled through formal mechanisms. Of course, the truth is that power has always been decentered, has always been based on alliances and conflicts that penetrate to the heart of a culture. What has changed is that the main players in the current contest no longer playact in liberal categories because the discourse no longer centers on the dichotomy between the state and the individual.

Foucault’s work has become increasingly useful because he described convincingly how positive, juridical structures are not the foundations but more often the window dressing of real, experienced power. As he asserted, “The state is superstructural in relation to a whole series of power networks that invest the body, sexuality, the family, kinship, knowledge, technology, and so forth.” [2] The truth of this observation is on clear display. Consider, for example, that the Covid-19 pandemic has seen the most extensive practical curtailing of individual liberty since the founding of the republic, and nearly all of it has been through quasi-legal “mandates” that lack any serious threat of police action—and yet we, en masse, obey. Power through fear and conformity, as Foucault well knew, has very little to do with the police.

Our reaction to the collapse of liberalism, therefore, cannot be to reassert the independence of the “private” sphere. Such independence never existed. Likewise, our reaction cannot be to reassert the state’s power over souls. That power also never existed. Our proper theoretical reaction to the postmodern world is not to retreat to defunct modern theories of positive state power, but to power through postmodernism. Rather than going on about the state, we should assert that Foucault is wrong not because he sees efficacious power everywhere but because he sees only tyrannical power everywhere. Following Hobbes, Foucault’s world is a world of ubiquitous violence. Rather than being truly postmodern, he is perhaps the last modern political theorist, the theorist who showed modernity how its own politics worked but without disrupting the basic anthropology that underwrote those politics. For Foucault, the postmodern world is a world without sovereignty only because it is a world stuck in the “state of nature,” wherein the primordial war of all against all is relentlessly raging, without the “solution” of sovereignty ever really emerging. Peace, for Foucault, is simply more subtle war.

But this we can simply outright deny because it is nothing but a sad prejudice. We can reject Foucault’s ultimately demonic conclusion by flipping it on its head. It is war that does not finally exist. St. Augustine is right: all wars are fought for peace. [3] In this essay, I attempt to counter the postmodern priority of war by articulating the priority of peace as I believe it existed in the Middle Ages, using the works of St. Thomas Aquinas as my primary source. This theory will accommodate neither an authoritarian nor a libertarian understanding of politics because it will not accommodate the notion that society is constructed from without, while at the same time rejecting the postmodern primacy of violence.

In Before Church and State, I attempted to describe the world of thirteenth-century France as it emerged from the source material, from letters, court cases, laws, decrees, and liturgical texts. What I discovered in these sources was a world in which the peace of communities was not the product of the formal rule of what we would normally consider political powers or governments. Rather, peace existed within these communities as what produced and held them in being. Peace was a word used to describe the act of a just society. This was a world without a sovereign law-making and law-enforcing power. It was a world of extreme diversity and local variation that was united in unbelievably complex and ununiform ways through vast, overlapping webs of personal relationships. The king led and served this order. When conflict erupted, he intervened to try to restore peace. He investigated how the people had been living peacefully, tried to figure out what had gone wrong, and then worked to correct the injustice and restore their particular way of life. Sovereignty had no place here: formal law-making was rare and of little importance, and bureaucracies and other administrative apparatuses more or less did not exist. [4] This was the world that St. Thomas was looking at when he wrote about politics. He was reading the Bible, the Fathers, and the pagan philosophers, of course, but he was explaining his world, which was a world that understood itself through the concept of real, lived peace, and most certainly not through a concept of police powers. [5]

For Thomas, virtue is the end of politics. [6] Law habituates those whom it rules into virtue. There are two ways to approach this understanding. First, we can treat law as a fixed thing, as a dictate of reason for the common good, and then conclude that virtue is the sort of thing that is formed through such commands. This approach is what Fr. Servais Pinckaers took to task in his seminal book The Sources of Christian Ethics as supposing that moral virtue consists primarily in habitual obedience to extrinsic law. [7] The second approach consists in treating virtue formation first and adapting our understanding of law to it. In this way we can ask, if law forms virtue and virtue is formed in certain ways, what, therefore, must we understand about law? In other words, what form does politics take in light of its end, which is virtue formation? What must law be if it leads to virtue? This is a better method. It is the method adopted by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics and his Politics, and followed by St. Thomas in the second part of the Summa, when he moves from his Treatise on Habits to his Treatise on Law and then back to virtue through his Treatise on Grace. [8]

II.

I want to begin with the relationship between a father and a son. I begin here because it is the foundational relationship with regard to virtue formation. As Thomas writes,

Although the benefaction of a king absolutely speaking is greatest insofar as it extends to all the people, nevertheless the benefaction of a father is greater in relation to one person. A father is the cause of the son’s three greatest goods. First, by generation he is the cause of the son’s existence; second, by upbringing, of his rearing; third, of his instruction. These three goods are attributed not only to fathers in regard to their sons but also to the ancestors, namely, the grandfathers and great-grandfathers in regard to their grandsons and great-grandsons.[9]

The relationship between father and son is foundational for politics because it is archetypical of the types of relationships where the end of politics, virtue, is built and so happiness experienced. [10] Indeed, Thomas’s extensive treatment of the law is couched within the meta-image of a boy being led into his manhood. Modern theorists of power likewise appreciate the foundational importance of fatherhood. Hobbes, of course, treats the father as the first and really the most terrible sovereign. Locke is more or less the same: his Second Treatise was written as a response to Filmer’s argument that all legitimacy is paternal. Rousseau, for his part, sees a man’s realization that he is a father as the beginning of the end of his blissful natural existence. We do not even need to mention Freud and the rest of the late moderns with their anxious obsession with the power of fatherhood. Foucault himself argued that the shift to modern governmentality occurred through the subordination of the image of the father and his family to that of the “population.” [11] Therefore, fatherhood is where we begin. How does a father lead his son into virtue?

Virtues are formed through the repetition of moral acts. In order for the moral virtues to be formed, the appetite must be repeatedly led by right reason. Through the agency of right reason, the indeterminate potency of the powers of the soul are increasingly activated into their perfection as powers governed by reason. [12] In these virtuous forms, the powers respond to reason similarly to the way determinate powers are ordered directly by reason—for instance, how I can move my hand with a thought. Only the exercise of right reason in the actor himself can form virtue. [13] This is so because a virtue is not quite the same as a disposition or what we tend to call habits. Every act disposes the relevant powers toward its object, activating its indeterminate potency in a certain direction. If I live in a certain culture where a particular food is commonly eaten, I will come to like that food. This is a disposition. Objects of acts of right reason, however, are variable given the circumstances. [14] We sometimes conclude that it is appropriate to eat that particular food and we sometimes conclude that it is not. The repetition of such variable acts directed by right reason, which is to say the repetition of properly human acts, creates a sort of master disposition, which is the disposition to desire whatever objects are proposed by right reason. Such dispositions, over time, become stabilized in forms that are like nature, and these are virtues. [15] What this means is that virtues govern what we normally call habits or dispositions. Once we are virtuous, we can decide easily not to eat a particular food today, regardless of how intensely we might like it. We become more perfectly human, more perfectly rational and free, through the formation of ever deeper virtues, which coordinate our intellects and wills for efficacious action. [16]

One conclusion to draw immediately is that fear itself cannot create virtue. This is so because precisely to the extent an act is motivated by fear, it is not voluntary. Neither is its object the good as understood by the commander, but is rather some other good that the one being commanded fears he will lose. [17] To the very extent that it is motivated by fear, an act is not a properly human, and thus moral, act at all. [18] If someone obeys an extrinsic command out of fear—even if it is rational and for the common good as understood by the commander—that command is not a principle of proper human action, which is rational, voluntary, and aimed at the common good. Rather, it is a principle of action only as an aspect of the circumstances. Fear as fear cannot lead to virtue.

For example, if a man wants to maximize his physical pleasure and minimize his pain and he obeys a ruler merely because if he does not do as commanded he will suffer pain, the ruler’s command is not a principle of his action as human action. The law of pleasure is the “law” being followed. On the other hand, the ruler’s mandate is simply an obstacle that must be navigated. Such commands, met with disorder in the intellect and will (met with sin) do not change vice into virtue; in fact, they are far more likely to make vice deeper and more sophisticated as the actor develops skills and dispositions with which to navigate better the social setting in which he finds himself in order to maximize his disordered desire’s satisfaction. [19] To perform acts of virtue externally but with a bad will internally is to perform bad actions, which over time solidify vice even more. [20] Virtue is formed through performing good acts, and good acts require a coordination of the intention and the object. [21] As Thomas writes, “Hence, whether the will tend to what is evil in itself, even under the species of good; or to the good under the species of evil, it will be evil in either case. But in order for the will to be good, it must tend to the good under the species of good; in other words, it must will the good for the sake of the good.” [22] Tyranny, rule through fear, leads in itself to vice, not virtue, even if that vice sometimes looks like virtue—this is hypocrisy, the sort of Christian “virtue” that critics such as Nietzsche attacked, which turn men into a sort of “tame” animal. [23] Often, however, enforcement of the law through fear results not even in such outward conformity, but in hatred and outright war. This is a situation easily observed within the father-son relationship, when, for example, a father is overly aggressive in cracking down on a rebellious adolescent, leading him into deeper rebellion.

To lead his son into virtue, the father must truly understand and love his son. Through this knowledge and love, the father can offer goods to the son in precisely the places where the son is looking for them in accordance with right reason; he can apply severity and leniency in the right places and thus coax his son deeper into virtue. [24] This is always possible because we have natural inclinations toward the virtues, natural starting places of right reason and proper desires. [25] According to Thomas, law is an external principle of human action, and human action is rational and voluntary. Only human action leads to virtue. [26] What this means is that for a command to be a law properly speaking the receiver of the law must receive it into his practical reasoning as if it were his own conclusion. He must receive the “imprint” of another’s right reason as if it were his own. [27] This means that it is not transferred in a univocal manner through power and submission, but in an analogical manner through authority and obedience. [28] The reason of the ruler is participated in within the mode of the ruled. This is what obedience is, and it is only possible through the love and knowledge of rational creatures. [29] Through obedience, the son is capable of participation in the prudence of the father, a participation that can only find a place to begin in the son’s own properly ordered reason and will. Through his participation, the father is, in a sense, in the son. [30] This is how power becomes law, which leads to virtue. Because, as Thomas states, “that which is good, can receive the character of evil, or that which is evil can receive the character of goodness, on account of the reason apprehending it as such.” [31] To lead another into virtue requires great commitment, time, and attention. As Fr. Pinckaers states,

Education in virtue is a difficult and complicated task. It calls for the exercise of authority and profound respect for those to be educated to go hand in hand. It demands a great deal of intelligence, sensitivity, and a strong will. It must be careful to avoid equally the abuse of authority which bullies the personality, suffocates it, or causes it to revolt, and the naïve liberality which neglects to give the personality the assistance it requires. It calls for a delicate balance, for which only an intelligent love for the person whom one is educating can find the correct formula. [32]

In this task the father has a great advantage over other would-be rulers because not only does he live with the son, but, Thomas tells us, the son has a natural inclination to love and respect him, to obey him. For Thomas, the benefits of good laws come more through fathers than kings “by reason of relationship and benefits because of which children love their parents and are readily obedient out of natural affection. So then, although the royal decree is more powerful by way of fear, nevertheless the paternal precept is more powerful by way of love—a way that is more efficacious with people not totally depraved.” [33]

If the father works in and through these natural inclinations and the self-evident principles of knowledge, he can lead the son to multiply moral actions, [34] actions that flow from the son’s own right reason and good inclinations and so lead him deeper into virtue, deeper into his perfection as himself and not as a mere external repetition of his father. This sort of intimacy is essential because, again, virtue is not formed through the rote repetition of externally identical actions. [35] This leads to a sort of automatization that actually evacuates moral content from action. Rather, virtue is built through performing many actions that vary widely, are even opposites, in their externals precisely because they are based on the repetition of internal acts of a properly correlated intellect and will. [36] One becomes temperate, for example, through eating more of something in a particular circumstance and less of it in another circumstance. External, fixed rules cannot capture this dynamic. Only an intimate, caring father who knows the son in his complex combination of natural and acquired dispositions, habits, virtues, vices, and circumstances of his actions—only the father whom the son obeys through his coordinated intellect and will—can be the kind of man who can guide his son into perfection. In this way, through love, the father does not impose his own form onto the son but rather makes paths of participation for the son as he is, and so the son comes to be further formed as himself, imaging the father in his own mode, within the development of his own personality and not against it.

This does not mean that the externals of action are unimportant. Virtue is precisely the unity of the internal and the external in goodness. This is why we can say, with Thomas, that virtue makes a man good. The father’s training of his son into virtue always includes a training into the external paths this virtue takes in circumstances in which they find themselves together. Habituation in these paths, the formation of culturally and circumstantially appropriate dispositions, happens simultaneously to and very much helps in the formation of virtue. Such dispositions are closely related to what Thomas and Aristotle call “arts,” which are skills, for example bricklaying, that we learn in order to accomplish certain tasks, but that must be ordered by virtue in order for the performance of those tasks to be good. External rules of behavior that form dispositions and arts must be laid down by the father. One learns bricklaying by being shown directly how to do it and then practicing. These skills are not independent of the virtues because the virtues will be actually lived through the exercise of skilled action. And the desire to learn the skills and the willingness to endure the discipline of learning them are what largely make up the multiplicity of interior, moral acts that eventually form virtue. The bricklayer father teaches his son the virtue of fortitude through the long days of stacking bricks properly; he teaches him the virtue of honesty through teaching him how to bid a job. [37] These skills facilitate both the son’s learning of virtue and his ability to live it in an integral life of excellence. What we need to see, however, is that the moral law always and from the very beginning is instantiated in a social determination or specification. We learn to honor our father and mother internally through learning how we, in fact, externally honor our father and mother within our role in our society. This is why Aristotle and Thomas put so much emphasis on concrete experience and therefore on age. [38]

We can see, then, the importance of external rules, of guidelines, of human “laws” in the everyday use of the term. General rules for proper action in the majority of cases must be laid down by the father. In following these rules willingly, the son both learns skills and develops the virtues. As his skills and virtues develop, however, his acts are steadily less governed by the rules and more governed by himself. Increasingly, he decides how to best deploy his dispositions and skills in order to achieve best the desired end, as the scope of his freedom is expanded. This is his movement from being a boy to being a man, from the imperfect to the perfect, from participation in reason to reason itself. [39] But this man that he becomes is not a generic man, formed in some abstract virtue. Rather, he is formed as an ever more perfect son of a certain father, an ever more perfect bricklayer, an ever more perfect citizen of a particular city. His virtue, his excellence as himself, integrally includes all these complexities, all these involvements. [40] His does not have “prudence,” for example; he has the prudence of a Jones, of a bricklayer, of a citizen of Steubenville.

III.

This question of citizenship is particularly important. One might be tempted to accept everything that I have just claimed, while asserting that it all has little to do with politics. Politics, after all, would seem to be how these little father-son dynamics are integrated into a larger whole. The father might teach his son bricklaying or how to chew with his mouth closed because he is the ruler of the family and these things happen within private life, but citizenship would seem to concern the political society and so be taught by the ruler of that society, the prince. But this, I venture, is mostly mistaken.

The virtue that governs social life is justice. [42] Justice directs all the moral virtues toward the proper end of man, that is, the common good. [43] But this does not mean that the moral virtues are developed first through a certain regime of private training in the pursuit of private goods and then are later assembled through justice in so far as this private life is integrated into the pursuit of some additional good (the common good). Rather, moral private life is ordered by justice from the beginning. [44] The moral virtues are developed in the first instance as integrated into a whole through justice. Justice unites them in a person, making him a good person. [45] So the fortitude of the bricklayer is the fortitude of a bricklayer as ordered to the common good in justice. The notion of vocation already includes this understanding: one is called to serve others in one’s vocation. [46] The moral training that a father gives his son, then, is a training in justice, a training into his vocational place in the ordering of society as a whole. [47] Bricklayers, after all, are only bricklayers as workers on homes, which are only finally homes as lived in by certain people in a certain city. The good bricklayer is not first formed and later extrinsically united to society’s larger project. Rather, the whole is present in the just bricklayer in the mode of a bricklayer from the beginning. He finds himself always already in an actual society. His mode of justice is to render what is due to every other citizen in proportion to his vocational position within society. [48] As Thomas states, “Only those who render mutual assistance to one another in living well form a genuine part of an assembled multitude.” [49] This is what a person’s vocation essentially is. We are used to saying that man is a microcosm, but he is no less a micropolis. The common good, then, is lived in his “private” life, in the ordering of his relationships. As Thomas writes, “In the worthiest state no one is a good citizen who is not a good man.” [50]

The common good in act, the peace of a society, is simply the network of particular, just relationships. The tranquility of order, as St. Augustine calls this peace, is simply the tranquility of these relationships, made possible through their overlapping, vocational “justices.” This order itself is instantiated in each relationship in the mode of that relationship, making the unity of society possible from within through its infinitely variable analogical repetition across the social order. The son’s understanding of a man as his father is analogical to the man’s understanding of himself as a father, which is analogical to the prince’s understanding of the same man’s fatherhood. And yet his vocation as father places him natively in each of these analogical repetitions of the tranquility of order. [51] It is precisely this situation that is his complex integration into the actual peace of the society, its real tranquility of order, which is possible because each “lover is placed outside himself, and made to pass into the object of his love, inasmuch as he wills good to the beloved.” [52] The father’s vocational participation in this peace is his living of justice, the ordering of all the virtues toward the common good. [53] His human potentiality for the common good is activated as his particular mode of fatherly, bricklayerly, Steubenvillianly prudence and justice, which is his internalization of the law in his virtue. It is in this that he finds freedom and happiness in his vocation, a vocation that aims down to his son, up to his prince, and across to his friend in a single living of justice, a single living of the virtues for the common good, which simply is him as “a law unto himself.” [54] The happiness of the common good, of the polity, is in this way had at the smallest level, in a sort of cascading instantiation of peace, or it just does not exist outside of the abstractions of political theorists. The happiness of a just society is the happiness of real persons in their real relationships, and so the guidance of men into happiness, into virtue, is the guidance of particular men by other particular men, who know each other’s names, archetypically a father and a son.

The relationship between father and son is archetypical, not exhaustive of political relationships. All political relationships are analogously related to this clearest and simplest instantiation of virtue formation. As Thomas writes,

Now just as a carnal father partakes of the character of principle in a particular way, which character is found in God in a universal way, so too a person who, in some way, exercises providence in one respect, partakes of the character of father in a particular way, since a father is the principle of generation, of education, of learning and of whatever pertains to the perfection of human life: while a person who is in a position of dignity is as a principle of government with regard to certain things: for instance, the governor of a state in civil matters, the commander of an army in matters of warfare, a professor in matters of learning, and so forth. Hence it is that all such persons are designated as fathers, on account of their being charged with like cares. [55]

As we have seen, the defining characteristics of the father-son relationship are inequality and love, which translates to what we might call “care.” [56]

At this point an objection might be raised: friendship seems to be an essential relational type in the polity, and yet friendship is characterized by equality—well, sort of. Perfect friendship is the enjoyment of each other in each other’s virtue. But, as I have just attempted to describe, virtue, united in justice, is formed exactly as an instantiation of social order in the mode of the individual person. This means that two friends are virtuous differently. Friends have different vocations within the polity and so different skills ordered in different ways through their different modes of the virtues. A friend is not a repetition of the self; he is another self, a different self, an analogical self. [57] This is the only reason why he is not incredibly boring. Friends who are peers are equally unequal. [58] That is to say, all the dynamics of the father-son relationship are present in the friend-friend relationship only in the mode of friendship rather than that of parent and child. Friends shift back and forth, trading the positions of authority and obedience, of teacher and learner, of ruler and ruled, leading each other deeper into ever more perfect virtues, which analogically include the other, producing unity and peace. [59]

Aquinas, following Aristotle, identifies conversation as the greatest joy and characteristic act of friendship. Friends live together and talk to each other. [60] But conversation is nothing else than this shifting of authority and obedience. I listen obediently to my friend, believing him, trusting him, like a son his father. Then, I offer a gift back: I tell my friend something I know and that I believe will make him better, and he listens to me, obediently, believing me. This conversation happens only within the context of a shared world of ordered things and activities, a peace, a tranquility of order. [61] Friendship presupposes, Thomas tells us, a place of communication. [62] We instantiate this peace in each other through continuously shaping each other in our image, into more subtle and so more complete justice. The very possibility of language, it seems to me, flows from such a reality of analogical participations in the peace, even while the use of language in conversation is what builds this peace; friends become more united in their shared project even as they become more perfectly themselves. As Aristotle remarks in the first chapter of the Politics,

Speech indicates what is useful or harmful, so also what is just or unjust. For, strictly speaking, it belongs to human beings alone, in contrast with other animals, to perceive good and evil, just and unjust, and the like. And communicating these perceptions produces households and political communities. [63]

In his commentary on these lines, Aquinas simply confirms Aristotle’s understanding, emphasizing that households and political communities are produced by conversation concerning just and unjust, right and wrong. Such conversations, of course, can only happen within a grouping of real friends that already exists. [64] Talking about who they are and who they ought to be in reference to each other is how men move together deeper into the peace, the tranquility of order, that flows out of mutual virtue, which is the living of justice. A boy learns his city’s language as he establishes his place in its order. Language is a determination of the indeterminate, a certain mode of articulating the truth of the tranquility of cosmic order through the tranquility of social order, which is constituted through the intricate overlapping networks of analogical instantiations of that order in persons. [65] As Thomas explains, “Everything is uncertain when there is a departure from justice. Nobody will be able firmly to state, this thing is such and such, when it depends upon the will of another, not to say his caprice.” [66] Learning to speak about the just and the unjust, the true and the false, the good and the bad, is learning how to be a citizen, because participation in this dialogue is how the city is built and maintained—the conversation is the order. [67] The city is built and maintained as a just city if this conversation is a dialogue of truth and love, authority and obedience, if it is a conversation between men virtuous in their vocations, that is to say, between friends. As Thomas writes, “Among all worldly things there is nothing which seems worthy to be preferred to friendship. Friendship unites good men and preserves and promotes virtue. Friendship is needed by all men in whatsoever occupations they engage.” [68]

Friendship, then, is necessary for happiness because happiness in this world is the social movement deeper into virtue. We need friends to be happy not only so that we can receive from them, but also so that we can give to them. [69] The just society is constituted by overlapping networks of friends in which every man is either a real friend or a potential friend to every other man. Every man is, in Thomas’s sense, a neighbor to every other man. [70] This is possible because every human encounter bears the marks of the archetypical father-son relationship. Every human encounter is marked by inequality, and, as Thomas tells us, every man has a natural inclination to love his fellow men. Every human encounter, even the casual head nods of two men passing on the sidewalk, bears analogically and in its own mode the form of the relationship between father and son. And every human encounter takes place between men who are themselves embedded in overlapping networks of friends. As Thomas explains, when I love my friend, I love all his friends in and through him because they are a real part of who he is. It is out of all these communications, all these instances of various degrees of “care” rooted in various degrees of intimacy, [71] that the tranquility of order is deepened as every man’s particular vocational instantiation of that order is deepened. Every man’s justice comes to include more perfectly an understanding of who his neighbor is and what he ought to do for him, as well as a desire to do so.

The just polity, then, is made up of true citizens in the Aristotelian sense. Every person, in turn, both rules and is ruled. [72] He does so within his particular vocation and his particular network of relationships—which is, in practice, the only way to rule and to be ruled. This is the nature of friendship, and it is the reason why friendships between unequal persons are not just possible but are the archetype of all friendship. [73] Let us return to the father and the son, because here it is difficult to see in what way the son can be said to have care for the father.

IV.

The father is not only physically stronger than the son, but he also has more knowledge and more virtue. He can see deeper into the son than the son can see into himself. And he understands the son’s situation in the world more profoundly than can the son: consider a father who casually covers a table’s sharp corner with his hand as his toddler unknowingly stumbles by. What is more, the son is clearly not capable of understanding his father as his father understands him. When the father gives the son instruction, the son is not capable of understanding fully. He cannot see the father’s reasons as the father sees them. If he could, he would not need the father but merely a mechanism of data transfer. Aquinas goes so far as to say that the son does not love the father as much as the father loves him. [74] Their relationship is profoundly asymmetrical.

This power differential renders the father’s care a real gift because only he knows its true content. The son cannot even give gratitude that is proportionate to this care because he does not fully perceive or understand it. [75] The son is loved from above; more love descends than ascends. Through the reality of love, the father is truly donating his power to his son. Because he loves his son, the father elevates his son’s interests into his own. The father gives more than he gets. He puts his life at the service of his son’s happiness. Through the father’s own power, his son becomes, in a sense, more powerful than he. [76] The father makes himself vulnerable to the drastically inferior power of the son.

This is how the father lives justice in relation to his son. As Aquinas explains, justice produces proportionate equality. [77] In his justice, the father can receive the clearly inadequate return gift of the son as indeed wholly adequate precisely because the father loves the son as his son and not as his peer, his superior, or as someone else’s son. We might say that he makes up the difference between his son and himself from within the surplus of his virtue and thus renders an equality between himself and his child. The father understands his son in his fatherly justice, in his instantiation of the tranquility of order, which includes intrinsically an understanding of the inferiority of his son. [78] The higher, then, can receive the inadequate return of the lower as exactly adequate or even as exceeding justice, as generous—this is the equality that the virtue of justice makes possible. [79] But this means that the son emerges as having care for his father, though in a properly filial manner.

The son’s return is a return of a true friend, and through it he can lead his father into virtue. What father has not been edified when his child brings him one of his little drawings? What father has not been motivated when a child unexpectedly says “thank you” with sincerity and without prompting? Or been gently rebuked when a child meekly asks him for the third or fourth time when he might have time to push the tire swing? These are the kinds of returns that justly come to benefactors, and it is through these returns, these instances of “care” which flow out of his obedience, that the son becomes the ruler and the father becomes the ruled. Conversely, the son, in his inferiority rendered equality by the father, has the ability to take from the father, to hurt him. He has power: the ability to give or to take. The give and take of all friendships are analogues of this dynamic. [80] As Thomas explains, the friendship that a father has for his son “is nearest to the love of a man for himself, from which all friendship is derived. . . . With reason then paternal friendship is considered to be the starting point.” [81] Likewise, “in all such friendships between dissimilar persons, like father and son, king and subject and so on, friendship is equated and preserved by something which is analogous or proportionate to each.” [82] In real human relations, there are no true peers, and so in a regime of justice, everyone is both ruler and ruled in real relation to everyone else through such proportionality. “A just action,” Thomas asserts, “is a mean between doing what is unjust and suffering what is unjust.” [83] Proportionality, of course, assumes some shared hierarchy of values. This is the tranquility of order itself, participated in analogously and asymmetrically in the modes of the actors insofar as they are just. [84]

However, this proportionate equality obviously operates within a real, stable hierarchy of people. The tranquility of order is the tranquility of a hierarchical order. [85] St. Thomas often evokes the example of an architect in order to explicate how a ruler uses authority to direct those below him toward the common good. [86] This analogy, I think, is often misunderstood. The architect’s art is higher than, for example, the bricklayer’s; this is clear. But that does not mean that the craftsman is merely an instrument in the architect’s project, as if he were a tool or robot. This would be tyranny. [87] Rather, he is ordered into the architect’s project as a craftsman, which is to say, as a citizen in his own right.

We might say that such craftsmen learned their art within the architect’s art and not prior to it. The father does not teach the son what a brick is without teaching him what he ought to do with it, that is, without teaching him what it is for and how it interacts with other things and men working on them. To be trained as a craftsman is to be trained in a project in a particular city. An art that is in the abstract neutral toward ends is in reality never neutral toward ends. [88] One city’s bricklayer is not the same as another’s. The architect, the ruler, then, works within a network of men and things already related to each other. But in this medium he is himself a true craftsman, as is the bricklayer in his medium.

Every free man is, therefore, an architect, rationally selecting means toward the fulfillment of the end of the common good from within his mode, within his vocation, which, as we have seen, includes the vocation of everyone else through justice. [89] The bricklayer, then, chooses the plan of the architect as a part of the means (not the end) of his own architectonic pursuit of the common good as a bricklayer. He does this because he ought to, because it is just, and the bricklayer’s perception and living of justice is his vocation [90]. This is his obedience. Every man is obedient “up,” we might say, and architectonic “down,” obedient as ruled and architectonic as a ruler, as a benefactor; [91] but even this misses something of the truth because, in fact, his obedience falls within his architectonic vocation, within his free imaging of God. [92] He not only controls his own crews, his sons and hired hands, leading them to virtue, but he controls his own work, his own art, all of which is aimed through justice at the common good. [93] Here we can better understand Thomas’s assertion that only a rational creature can be given a law. [94] Law is this relationship of the higher to the lower within a regime of justice that they share. Law describes the union of rational creatures within a shared life that is characterized by hierarchical participation. A just regime is made up of free men who, as architects, obediently adopt the reason of their superiors as means toward the achievement of their own “legislative” project, which is the common good as creatively instantiated in their vocation. [95] This is just another way of reasserting that man is a true citizen of the polity, one who both rules and is ruled, one who knows how to work for his superiors precisely because he knows how to command his inferiors. [96] We see once again how the father-son relationship lies at the foundation of politics.

The architect’s art is aimed at the completion of a whole, as the bricklayer’s is aimed at the completion of a whole, but from within a different mode of being just, thus resulting in a different “ordering” of the parts. [97] The architect works through the vocations of other men. The craftsman works with matter to elevate it into the tranquility of order that is this ordering of men. The craftsman finds the world of matter already ordered within a relational hierarchy. In his first encounter, the bricklaying boy finds clay in relation to fire and water. The craftsman finds the world of matter already at peace, and he works in that peace, elevating it to the life of men. As I have asserted, the craftsman learns his trade and so learns about clay, sun, and water as already elevated into the social order. For the bricklayer, clay is never anything other than that out of which bricks are made, and bricks are never anything other than that out of which walls are made, and so on. The bricklayer, then, is not a source of generic “walls” for the architect to assemble. Rather, the bricklayer’s idea, the exemplar, of his wall includes within it its place in the whole, its orientation toward the end as he understands it. The bricklayer builds this wall because he loves the common project in which he is employed and wants to provide an example for his son, as both ruled and ruler. [98] He is not a man who also happens to be a bricklayer whenever he happens to be at work. He is a just bricklayer and citizen in all that he does, always; it is who he is. All this is in the form of the wall that he creatively executes through his art. A society of such men is a polity: a just order of free men. [99]

The architect finds men already ordered, already living in friendships that are not merely extrinsic relations but which flow out of and further form the reality of their unique personalities. He finds men already living together in peace. His vocation, then, is to elevate their work into a greater plan, a higher project. If he works against the form of his matter, of the men, he will fail. In the same sort of way that a father must work always within the existing goodness of his son in order to deepen his virtue, an architect must work always within the existing peace of his city. The building that is the result of this work is built out of men and built through their relationships as they really are with each other and with the world.

The architect speaks his plans into the community of craftsmen who understand it from within themselves and mediate it down in humility through their own rule into the various vocations that constitute a society of friends at work. This is true of a worksite, and it is true of society as a whole. [100] The law, then, as a concept that encapsulates these asymmetrical relationships of justice is, in a free society, architectonic all the way down, and every free man is, in his own way, both a legislator and subject to the law. [101] The single legal order is in fact an order of a multiplicity of legal orders, most clearly of those regulating the relatively stable roles within society. [102] If it were otherwise, the craftsmen would be mere instruments; they would be slaves in relationships of power and submission and not free men in relationships of authority and obedience through which every man is both ruler and ruled, both father and son, a true citizen. [103]

It is perhaps here that we can better understand how law and freedom are not at odds. The freedom of each just man in a just society is real and unequivocal. [104] It is not the freedom of submission, the freedom of merely conforming and habituating one’s will to the will of another, no matter how rational that will may be. Such freedom is really a sleight of hand, the type of freedom Hobbes is capable of understanding. Rather, in the just society, individual freedom is not “conformed” to the common good; it is what constitutes the common good. [105] Every man works freely in his vocation, selecting means toward ends, within and not against the peace of the whole, the tranquility of order that is his world. He is at home in the peace, at peace in the peace, and so free in the peace, motivated by hope in what is possible rather than by fear of what is to be avoided. [106] Growth in his virtue increases his agency as it increases society’s perfection. The horizon of his social, architectonic action expands as his virtue deepens. Rather than imagining law as leading to freedom, I would rather assert that living in the peace, in the law, is what it means to be free—to be at home in the world. [107]

The vocation of the prince rests at the top of the city. His end is the deepening of the virtue of the men whose virtue, whose friendship, brings the polity into existence. The prince’s vocation is to perfect everyone else’s vocation. He is an architect who builds with stones that are real, free men. [108] As each man lives freely his vocation in justice, he reaches up to his superiors for the plans, for the dictates, the determinations of reason (the laws) that he needs, a reaching that extends all the way up to the prince. These plans, which work as relative “universals,” [109] then cascade down through networks of analogical instantiation, growing more particular at each stage through the prudence of men in different vocations, [110] and terminating in the profound diversity of individuals, who image the whole in the unique mode of their operations and personalities. [111] As Thomas writes,

The teaching on matters of morals even in their general aspects is uncertain and variable. But still more uncertainty is found when we come down to the solution of particular cases. This study does not fall under either art or tradition because the causes of individual actions are infinitely diversified. Hence judgment of particular cases is left to the prudence of each individual. [112]

This is why, for Thomas, law emanating from the top of the hierarchy must be the most general. [113] As he writes,

Now the end of law is the common good, . . . but the common good is built up out of many things. And so the law must take into consideration a multiplicity of persons, actions, and times. For a civil community is composed of many persons, and its good is procured through a multiplicity of actions, and it is instituted not just to endure for a brief time, but to last for all time through a succession of citizens. [114]

This general law is increasingly specified as it descends through the social hierarchy. Each man, within the scope of his own vocation, which includes, of course, his relative rule within the social hierarchy, must take counsel with regard to how he should specify or determine the more general law that he receives. While such counsel takes place internally as a man considers options, it likewise occurs socially, in a conversation with friends. [115] This is not because they might offer him disinterested and useful advice. It is because the actions under consideration are properly ordered to the common good. What a man ought to do in justice is intrinsically and not merely extrinsically dependent upon what his real friends think he ought to do. Through counsel, their understanding of right order is made a part of his understanding of right order leading to his consent, command, and so action. [116] Therefore, civil law is implemented only as mediated down through these networks of friends and terminating in the particular action of a particular man. [117] This participation in and mediation of society’s general legal order allows for its constant modification and specification in order to account for the divergent circumstances and the wide diversity in natural or habitual conditions of the men that it must lead to virtue. Through its mediation, the same order is experienced differently by different men in their real relationships of authority and obedience. [118] The rule of the prince, then, is only finally experienced in the rule of the father or the friend, as the universal is only ever encountered in the particular, [119] or as the art of the architect is only ever encountered in the art of the craftsman. [120]

St. Thomas describes God’s creation of the cosmos, stating,

He produced many and diverse creatures, that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another. For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided; and hence the whole universe together participates in the divine goodness more perfectly, and represents it better than any single creature. [121]

Elsewhere he writes,

A thing approaches the more perfectly to God’s likeness, according as it is like Him in more things. Now in God is goodness, and the outpouring of that goodness into other things. Therefore, the creature approaches more perfectly to God’s likeness if it is not only good, but can also act for the goodness of other things, than if it were merely good in itself. . . . Now a creature would be unable to act for the goodness of another creature, unless in creatures there were plurality and inequality: because the agent is distinct from and more noble than the patient. Therefore, it was necessary that there be also different species of things, and consequently different degrees in things. [122]

The tranquility of cosmic order is not a static order but a dynamic movement of potency to act, a never-ending perfecting as everything interacts with everything else, a dynamic that avoids paradox through its openness upward to the divine and God’s continuous architectonic action throughout the whole. The cosmos images God in its dynamic hierarchical diversity; man images him even more perfectly through his hierarchical diversity of ideas and of work, and through his order of vocations in justice by which he elevates the cosmic order into himself and rearticulates it in the city’s complex regime, which opens up to, even as it is sustained by, the divine. [123] After reiterating the diversity and inequality that characterizes the beauty and perfection of the cosmos, St. Thomas states,

In every government the best thing is that provision be made for the things governed, according to their mode: for in this consists the justice of the regime. Consequently even as it would be contrary to the right notion of human rule, if the governor of a state were to forbid men to act according to their various duties—except perhaps for the time being, on account of some particular urgency—so would it be contrary to the notion of God’s government, if He did not allow creatures to act in accordance with their respective natures. [124]

The prince does not create this microcosm ex nihilo, of course. He does not create the peace that holds it together. He does not extrinsically link independent components into a new mechanism that he then operates for the common good. Rather, his vocation is the perfecting of the peace from within the peace. As Thomas explains, peace is the health of a city and the prince is like a doctor. [125] Virtue is qualitative, and the prince’s vocation is the shaping and deepening of the virtue of the men of his city. [126] As Aquinas relates, “Now it belongs to the providence of the governor to preserve and not to diminish perfection in the things governed.” [127] As we have seen, virtue is built through friendship. And so the prince’s vocation is to purify friendship, to extend friendship, to incarnate rules in realized relationships of mutual love. The hierarchy that orders the city needs to be made ever more rooted in unequal friendships; ever more personal; ever less extrinsic; ever more internalized in father-son style relationships; and so ever more diverse in the particularization of the hierarchy’s increasing virtue. As the father guides the son deeper into virtue through the son’s obedience, good inclinations, and his particular instantiation of the virtues, so the prince serves as a father to the city itself. [128]

The prince has care for his city, and, as Thomas tells us, law can only be made by one “who has care of the community.” [129] The care of the prince is yet another instance of the type of authoritative care that runs up and down the social order—which is nothing other than the care of souls. Such care is not an office that is held; care is not de jure. One is not granted or delegated “care of the community,” except incidentally. Neither is it merely de facto power in a Schmittian understanding of sovereignty. “Care” is not a synonym for power. The presence of “care”—love coupled with inequality—is what renders power capable of giving law as true law, and as we have seen, this “care” permeates the society of freemen from top to bottom. It is the very heart of the father-son relationship, the archetype of all just human relationships. The prince, if he is a just prince, has such care for the whole. We identify him, then, through his de facto authority, not his de facto power.

At this point, the political form corresponding to the notion that law causes virtue is becoming clear. It is the form of a peace built out of friendships of hierarchical inequality that result in profound diversity within a true unity. [130] Every level of this hierarchy receives more general or universal laws from above and specifies laws freely in ever more particular and therefore diverse forms to those below, until finally the individual man internalizes the whole in himself as a unique, just citizen. This is the form of just human law, of the specification of the natural law, which is the human participation in the eternal law. [131] It is not a univocal, positivist legal order centered on some ruler. Rather, it is an order of analogical participation, where the law is ultimately lived as justice itself in the lives of real people at the scale of direct interaction, [132] and where the infinitely complex and variable world of particular action is brought together in a unity without homogeneity. [133] This, I think, is the form that the Church calls subsidiarity, and which we can now see is not a policy recommendation but an anthropology of man’s finite and social imaging of the divine. [134] “The order of government, which is the order of a multitude under authority, is derived from its end.” [135]

The prince authoritatively speaks his dictates of reason, his laws, into his city only as himself a citizen of the city, as both ruler and ruled within a customary regime of justice; [136] similar to all other rulers within the city, his vocation is ordered within the tranquility of order as lived by the city. He must speak justly into the tranquility of order, the peace, as the instantiation of justice in his city. [137] This is why the virtue of equity is possible in the citizens. [138]

The prince’s law, as is the case with the smaller laws of all other rulers in the regime, can be unjust and thus no law at all in three ways. First, if it is not ordered to the common good; second, if it exceeds the scope of his authority; third, if it is disproportionate in its treatment of different citizens. In any of these cases, the “law” is actually an act of violence because it undermines the order of the city’s instantiation of justice. [139] Because all the citizens live this justice as their custom, internalized in their various degrees of virtue, they are capable of judging and resisting unjust rulers. [140] However, for the same reason, resistance to unjust rulers is fraught with extreme danger. Of course, it is often the case that resistance to a ruler will cause more disruption to the peace of the city than patient endurance of his error. Nevertheless, it is respect for this customary peace and not for some abstract “legitimacy” of a ruler that restrains rebellion through prudence. In this way custom, if just, and not the prince’s law, is the fundamental law of a polity. [141] This needs to be emphasized. Aquinas writes,

For if [a people] are free, and able to make their own laws, the consent of the whole people expressed by a custom counts far more in favor of a particular observance, than does the authority of the sovereign, who has not the power to frame laws, except as representing the people. Wherefore although each individual cannot make laws, yet the whole people can. [142]

The very life of a just people, Thomas explains, is their definitive articulation of properly formed intellects and wills, their living of the common good. Their tranquility of order could not possibly be a more definitive law because it is reason specified in actual operation. [143] It is the fulfillment of law in virtue, not in theory but in fact. Thomas states,

It is evident that by human speech, law can be both changed and expounded, insofar as it manifests the interior movement and thought of human reason. Wherefore by actions also, especially if they be repeated, so as to make a custom, law can be changed and expounded; and also something can be established which obtains force of law, in so far as by repeated external actions, the inward movement of the will, and concepts of reason are most effectually declared; for when a thing is done again and again, it seems to proceed from a deliberate judgment of reason. Accordingly, custom has the force of a law, abolishes law, and is the interpreter of law. [144]

The prince’s law has authority only to the extent that it is spoken into the conversation of friends that is custom, which is the common good insofar as it is realized in the order of this city. [145] It is only in this way that he can lead them deeper into virtue through the fatherly dynamic of authority and obedience. As Thomas states, “For things that belong to skills get their efficacy from the power of reason, but laws have no power to persuade subjects that obeying the law is good other than custom, which evolves only over much time.” [146] Custom, to put it simply, is what gives positive law its authority because it is through custom that it is obeyed through moral acts. Positive law, as true law, works only in just custom. [147] This does not mean that the prince has no positive law-making office. He does. At the level of the city, new projects must be undertaken; new problems arise and must be overcome; new movements into deeper virtue must be initiated. [148] But these are few in number, extremely general in content, and become actual law only by their mediation down and through the various hierarchies of friends that constitute the customary order. As Thomas writes,

Yet the unity of man is brought about by nature, while the unity of the multitude, which we call peace, must be procured through the efforts of ruling. Therefore, to establish virtuous living in a multitude, three things are necessary. First of all, that the multitude be established in the unity of peace. Second, that the multitude thus united in the bond of peace be directed to acting well. For just as a man can do nothing well unless unity within his members be presupposed, so a multitude of men lacking the unity of peace will be hindered from virtuous action by the fact that it is fighting against itself. In the third place, it is necessary that there be at hand a sufficient supply of the things required for proper living, procured by the ruler’s efforts. [149]

Arguably, the prince’s most important function is not positive legislation at all, but reactive defense. He must protect the peace. When Thomas, following Aristotle, talks about the sort of rule exercised at the civic level, he discusses more than anything else the use of coercion. [150] This is present from the very beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics and Thomas’s commentary on it. After articulating succinctly that virtue is the goal of human life and describing how this requires first the domestic grouping and then the civic, Thomas writes that, beyond bodily needs, to live well the individual needs the city “also in regard to right conduct, inasmuch as public authority restrains with fear of punishment delinquent young men whom paternal admonition is not able to correct.” [151]

I have written very little about the role of coercion so far. The reason is that it is not that important for an understanding of the nature of politics as such. Its significance, of course, enters in because of the effects of sin. Through sin, the natural inclinations of man toward the true and the good are distorted. Because of these distortions, every man finds within himself competing “laws.” As St. Paul describes the situation, “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members” (Rom 7:21–23, RSVCE). The fear that arises from threats of coercion helps to shift the relative balance between these two in favor of justice. It reduces the perceived benefit of disordered actions from within the logic of disordered inclinations, indirectly increasing the relative strength of the inclinations toward the truly human course of action, making way for the formation of virtue. [152] In this way, the threat of force can work through sin and so indirectly facilitate the creation of virtue. It also serves the entirely defensive function of protecting the polity from those who would prey upon it for their own ends. [153] These functions of coercion work up and down the hierarchy, from within the tranquility of order and not from outside of it. For example, the first and probably most powerful instance of coercion within a polity is a father disciplining his son. Coercion must be used very carefully and can only be efficacious and just within the structure of the peace itself—it can never be mistaken for some essential aspect of the politics that constitutes that peace. Coercion does not show us where politics is happening. It shows us where the conversation has stopped or has not yet begun; it shows us where politics is, tragically, not happening. Force is present exactly where voluntary, human action is absent. [154] Nevertheless, the possibility of physical coercion in our fallen state is a necessary aspect of just authority. [155]

Fear of actual coercion is rare and of little importance. Other types of fear are more common and have a more direct relationship to virtue formation. For example, the fear of disappointing an authority is an aspect of obedience to that authority. This sort of fear presupposes the good intentions that can be developed through hope into love and virtue. [156] The contrast between fear of coercion and this sort of fear in its effectiveness is clear in our everyday lives. In which community is the positive law more efficacious even in mere externals: a community that collectively views the law and the police who enforce it as a mere foreign “force” to be avoided, or a community that collectively constructs norms and manners that enforce the law from within its shared way of life? The first become the “delinquents” that Foucault identifies, the population who rotate through the vast prison systems of modern regimes. [157] The people who most directly experience and fear the violent punishments attached to the law are exactly the people who least internalize them as anything other than obstacles to be avoided. This is so exactly because these people are not a part of the same polity, the same “peace,” as those making and enforcing the law against them. They become a sort of “helot” people, living under the occupation of another polity, a polity whose citizens almost never experience even the fear of the law’s violence but rather obey the law because “it’s what people like us do.” Such people live in the regime almost as if the law’s coercion did not exist. This need not be because they are virtuous.

In a disordered polity, relative filial fear can be in truth a type of servile fear. Members of the law-abiding community may, in practice, be acting self-interestedly in response to promises of rewards and threats of punishments. But the point is that what they fear is not coercion but the disapproval of their neighbors, the failure to fulfill the norms of their class, the customary law; they fear disappointing themselves by failing to be “moral” in the socially relative sense of being “normal.” They fear appearing as “delinquents” to their fellow citizens. This is how the enforcement of the law actually works in a political community, even a deeply flawed one. In this community, the line between servile fear and filial fear becomes blurred and the “rewards and punishments” that induce its citizens to obey the law are embedded into the social world itself, in the interplay of ruler and ruled that constitutes their customary, relative “peace.” The community of “delinquents,” of course, is likewise structured internally, through a customary law, and so it, too, is a political community, even if a deeply flawed one. Nevertheless, sustained fear of force is a mark of a deep cleavage and disorder in the polity, and actual, sustained coercion is a mark of two or more polities at war.

Grace is far, far more important than fear. In Thomas’s telling, the New Law was in the first instance the grace of the Holy Spirit that assisted internally so that men could be receptive in true obedience to the authoritative instruction that came externally. [158] Thomas’s assertion that the New Law is the perfection of law, and that it is primarily not law at all but grace, is not an idiosyncratic imprecision. It rather points to the nature of law itself and how it perfects human beings. [159] Through the truth (law) that revelation provides and the obedient response that grace makes possible, power is transformed into authority and submission into obedience: the restoration of human legislation as efficacious virtue formation occurs precisely as the transition from a law of fear to a law of love. [160] The New Law is the law of freedom precisely because it restores our architectonic office: we both rule and are ruled freely. [161] As our Lord himself described this restoration, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (Jn 15:13–15, RSVCE). The New Law, of course, does more than merely restore nature. Its healing of nature is an elevation into the supernatural, where it is most fully itself.

What this means is that we do not have to add the Church to our discussion of politics as if coming from without. Rather, the Church has always been in this discussion. As Thomas prefaces his treatment of law, “The exterior principle that moves us toward the good is God, who both instructs us with law and assists us with grace.” [162] The spiritual power of the Church penetrates into all temporal relationships, from that of father and son all the way to the prince. The teaching and the grace brought through the clergy penetrates into all the complexities of the tranquility of order from the inside; the clergy, as full members of the city, have a vocation within its order, without a gap. Their vocation is to heal the polity, elevating it, and thus making it capable of true peace in charity through the complex networks of free friends that constitute it. [163] The priests, whom the people call “Father,” preach to persons that they know, rendering the teaching of the Church in their idiom and bringing them the sacraments in the profound intimacy of the parish—the spiritual family. The tranquility of the city’s order is the tranquility made possible through its incorporation into the Church, a membership that elevates it out of any sort of self-sufficiency that Aristotle supposed possible and into the unity of all mankind, a unity that, as an analogical extension of the unity of the city, fulfills and does not destroy the city’s particular instantiation of the tranquility of order. The end of the city’s specification of peace becomes, through the catholicity of the Church, the wholly unspecified, unmediated vision of God. [164]

In the social hierarchy of peace I have described, more love flows down than up. The father loves his son more than his son loves him. The ruler speaks to the one ruled from a position that is qualitatively and not just quantitatively higher. [165] He condescends. The human hierarchy, therefore, images and mediates the transcendence of God through these smaller transcendences of friendship, and all authority among men becomes an imaging of, and participation in, the authority of God the Father. [166] As Thomas tells us, the rule of a king, like that of a father, is a divine rule. [167] At the same time all obedience becomes a participation in the obedience of the Son. [168] Thus, the order is essentially gracious; it opens upward, reaching up to, if not passing over into, the “ultimate end” [169] and depends on the grace of God that flows down and through the whole. [170] Grace is what keeps it from collapsing in on itself. Aristotle needed slaves in order to sustain a free society of friends. The pagan polity attained the surplus necessary to sustain itself through taking from the weak, through stealing. Through the excess that grace makes possible, however, a society of true, free citizens becomes possible because surplus emerges from within the relationships themselves. Peace with self, which, as we have already seen, becomes in friendship peace with neighbor, becomes through grace peace with God—love of neighbor and love of God become a single virtue. [171] And every man as a free man can, through obedience, ascend through the peace, through the active life of friendship, through its contemplative upward openness to friendship with God, and so to happiness. [172] Man, who is a microcosm as a micropolis, is finally and more perfectly seen to be a microecclesia, whose model must be Mary. As St. Peter Damian stated, “The whole Church forms, in some sort, but one single person. As she is the same in all, so in each one is she whole and entire; and just as man is called microcosm, so each one of the faithful is, so to say, the Church in miniature.” [173]

VI.

It is important to remember that in all of this I have not been arguing that there ought to be a priority of peace. I have been arguing that there is a priority of peace. Even our most depraved polities hold together, to the extent that they do, because of some lingering participation in the tranquility of order. [174] Tyranny is parasitical on a deeper peace. Tyranny is a violence that preys upon men’s lingering goodness and the order it sustains. Propaganda, and lying in general, for example, only work because of the deeper trust that underwrites all communication. Theories of sovereignty must, therefore, be set aside as incoherent. Nothing could make less sense than Jean Bodin’s assertion: “The principal mark of sovereign majesty and absolute power is the right to impose laws generally on all subjects regardless of their consent. . . . There are therefore in each case two parties, those that rule on the one hand, and those that are ruled on the other.” [175] It is not merely that Bodin is literally describing the way tyrants falsely imagine themselves; it is that he does not understand how tyranny actually works. Tyranny operates through fear, which is always about a good that does not come from the tyrant. [176] That good is the peace, such as it may be. The tyrant gains his power through threatening the peace or through manipulating it or tricking it, more through dissembling conversations and false friendships than through force of arms. The tyrant is a liar more fundamentally than he is a bully. [177] His de facto power exists, of course, not to the extent that he personally coerces people—being in this regard merely a single man—but to the extent that he is obeyed and this obedience rests finally on a love. It is only because man is not fundamentally sorted into two groups, the rulers and the ruled, that false rulers can emerge as warlords by maintaining and manipulating networks of fear that are always parasitic on networks of peace, which is how they manage to twist layers of obedience to which they have no right into submission—and submission is always secondhand. [178]

Tyranny, then, like authority, is not unitary. It, too, works down and through the hierarchies of friends, and now enemies, that constitute the multitude as a society. This brings us back to Foucault. If a perfectly just society is one in which every man is both ruler and ruled, a perfectly unjust society, if such were possible, would be one in which every man was both tyrant and slave, a war of all against all. As Thomas states, “There is the least friendship in the worst regimes, namely, in tyrannies in which no friendship or very little exists.” [179] This is Foucault’s imagined order. But such a condition is not finally possible. No real society can be based on fear all the way down.

Foucault, among other postmodern theorists, has helped us see that power structures are not unitary, that the one claiming to be the ruler is almost never the actual ruler, and that impersonal bureaucratic or administrative mechanisms are only finally powerful through the complex dynamics of hidden hierarchies of violence behind and within them. In order to resist his demonic conclusions, we need not reassert a profoundly modern notion of sovereign rulership. We would do much better, I think, to assert the medieval priority of peace as I have attempted to do here. If we do this, we can directly counter Foucault’s claim that “the history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language.” [180] To the contrary, through the priority of peace we can reframe Foucault’s economies of power away from the endless networks of violence that he imagines and see rather our society’s corruption as parasitic tyranny that preys upon “communities of authority,” which are precisely communities of language, of truthful sharing and obedient receiving. Tyranny, that is, violence, is never absolute and can never be sustained because it destroys the source of its strength, namely, unequal yet real friendship. [181] Tyrants attempt to encircle society with impersonal structures of governance and administration and to redescribe society through abstract categories precisely because they need to mask the real structure of society, which always at some level rests on the good and the true as experienced in the conversation and shared life of real friendships. [182] Tyranny is weak because its power is a lie. [183]

Tyrannical social structures are weak because they operate only through disordered passions and the disordered fear that they produce: slavery to sin always brings with it slavery to other men. [184] This is how tyrants are a just punishment from God. [185] We deserve them because we create and sustain them—we are them. This understanding opens a path to resistance, and so makes possible hope for successful societal reform, because small-scale action is the foundation of order. As Thomas says, “Fear is the beginning of despair even as hope is the beginning of daring.” [186] The cultivation of virtue among friends, the reassertion of the father-son relationship, and a focus on the sacramental life of the parish are not, then, rearguard or retreatist strategies. Rather, such activity is the very front line in the struggle for a just society against Foucault’s society of domination. It is in such small places that grace is operative, where sin is defeated and virtue is built and therefore where valor can come to replace fear—and valor is simply the undoing of tyranny. As Thomas explains,

For tyrants hold the good in greater suspicion than the wicked, and to them the valor of others is always fraught with danger. So, the above-mentioned tyrants strive to prevent those of their subjects who have become virtuous from acquiring valor and high spirits in order that they may not want to cast off their iniquitous domination. They also see to it that there be no friendly relations among these so that they may not enjoy the benefits resulting from being on good terms with one another, for as long as one has no confidence in the other, no plot will be set up against the tyrant’s domination. Wherefore they sow discords among the people, foster any that have arisen, and forbid anything which furthers society and co-operation among men, such as marriages, banquets, and anything of like character, through which familiarity and confidence are engendered among men. [187]

Andrew Willard Jones is director of Catholic Studies at Franciscan University of Steubenville and an editor of New Polity.

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 30: “The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A ‘soul’ inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.”
Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 64.
Augustine, The City of God, bk. 19.
Andrew Willard Jones, Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2017).
St. Thomas’s thought is, of course, profound and subtle. He solved the problems before him with a level of complexity that has allowed elements of his solutions to be profitably applied to new problems that have arisen through the subsequent centuries. Through the early modern and modern periods, Thomas was effectively used to better understand the state. I think, however, that as the form of the state has been superseded by postmodern politics, that use has outworn its value. I propose here, then, a different reading of Thomas’s politics that is more apropos in our current situation, though not necessarily contradictory to those older readings. I am fully aware, however, that this reading is yet another contingent interpretation and adaptation and is not definitive or exhaustive.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I-II, q. 92, a. 1 (hereafter cited as ST).
Servais Pinckaers, OP, The Sources of Christian Ethics (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995).
There is an ambiguity in the way St. Thomas handles law that leads, I think, to some of the apparent disagreements between Catholic political thinkers. The treatise on law itself is prefaced with an expansive understanding of law. Thomas writes, “We next have to consider the exterior principles of acts. Now the exterior principle that inclines us toward evil is the devil. . . . On the other hand, the exterior principle that moves us toward the good is God, who both instructs us with law and assists us with grace. Hence, we must first discuss law and then grace” (ST I-II, q. 90, pr.). This understanding underwrites the argument of the treatise. However, Thomas also often considers law in its more everyday meaning of postlapsarian, civic statute, even to the point of often including characteristics of such statute, such as its written form and coercive nature, in some of his working definitions and practical treatment of law (e.g., ST I-II, q. 96, a. 5 co.). Some writers, such as myself, are inclined to emphasize the first, more expansive meaning and then fit the more limited meaning into this metaphysical picture. In this approach, law is understood to permeate society wherever there are exterior principles of human action toward the good. Other writers are inclined to emphasize the second meaning, which is in no way wrong, but which leads, I think, to the tendency to divide society into overly rigid “private” and “public” spheres and to the division of human action into “ethical” and “political” domains. There is no reason why the second approach cannot accurately capture Thomas’s meaning. I, however, think that it tends toward confusion because the distinctions it introduces lend themselves to overemphasis and so obfuscation of Thomas’s integral understanding in favor of what often look like modern political categories. Politics, in this approach, is in danger, it seems to me, of becoming merely criminology.
Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, trans. C. I. Litzinger, OP (Notre Dame: Dumb Ox Books, 1993), 8.11.1691 (paragraph and line numbers cited as they appear in this edition) (hereafter cited as On Ethics). I compare this translation, along with all other translations used in this essay, to the Latin text available at http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/.
“The precepts concerning the benefits we should give to any of our neighbors are derived from the precept concerning honoring our parents” (Thomas Aquinas, On Fraternal Correction, in Disputed Questions on Virtue, trans. Jeffrey Hause and Claudia Eisen Murphy [Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2010], 2.12 [190]). In his commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, Thomas devotes a whole lecture to show how fatherhood and kingship are two instances of the same sort of superiority, showing how one is an image of the other. As Thomas writes in this lecture, “By nature a father is the ruler of his son and an ancestor of his descendants, just as a king is a ruler of his subjects” (On Ethics 8.11.1692).
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population (New York: Palgrave, 2004), chap. 4 passim.
“We do have a natural aptitude to acquire [virtues] inasmuch as the appetitive potency is naturally adapted to obey reason. But we are perfected in these virtues by use, for when we act repeatedly according to reason, a modification is impressed in the appetite by the power of reason. This impression is nothing else but moral virtue” (On Ethics 2.1.249).
On Ethics 2.4.286.
On Ethics 1.3.33–34.
ST I-II, q. 49, a. 2 ad 3: “And thus a disposition becomes a habit, just as a boy becomes a man.” See also ST I-II, q. 51.
ST I-II, q. 58, a. 2 co. See also Servais Pinckaers, OP, “Virtue Is Not a Habit,” Cross Currents 12, no. 1 (Winter 1962).
ST I-II, q. 42, a. 1 co.
ST I-II, q. 6, a. 6; On Ethics 3.1, 2.4.
ST I, q. 48, a. 6 co.: “For a man who has a bad will can use ill even the good he has, as when a grammarian of his own will speaks incorrectly.”
ST I-II, q. 18, a. 4 ad 3; a. 5; a. 6 co.
ST I-II, q. 18, a. 9 co.; q. 20, a. 3 co.: “The interior act of the will, and the external action, considered morally, are one act.”
ST I-II, q. 19, a. 7 ad 3; q. 29, a. 2 ad 2.
ST I-II, q. 50, a. 3 ad 2.
ST I-II, q. 9, a. 2 co.
Thomas Aquinas, De veritate, q. 11, a. 1, in The Disputed Questions on Truth, trans. James V. McGlynn, SJ (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1953), 82: “Before the habits of virtue are completely formed, they exist in us in certain natural inclinations, which are the beginnings of the virtues.”
On Ethics 2.4.
ST I-II, q. 93, a. 5 co.
Aquinas, De veritate, q. 11, a. 1 ad 6.
ST II-II, q. 104, a. 3 s.c.: “On the contrary, obedience deserves praise because it proceeds from charity: for Gregory says (Moral. xxxv.) that obedience should be practiced, not out of servile fear, but from a sense of charity, not through fear of punishment, but through love of justice.”
In this way, every father is godlike. See ST I, q. 8, a. 3 co.
ST I-II, q. 19, a. 5.
Pinckaers, “Virtue Is Not a Habit,” 81.
On Ethics 10.15.2159.
Aquinas, De veritate, q. 11, a. 1 co.
On Ethics 2.2.258: “We see that things pertaining to moral actions and materials useful to them, like external goods, do not have in themselves anything fixed by way of necessity, but everything is contingent and changeable.”
On Ethics 2.3.268: “The first reason is taken from the inclination of men intent on virtue. It was shown previously that virtue is produced and destroyed by deeds of the same person done in a contrary way.”
On Ethics 2.1.254: “He concludes, therefore, it is not of small moment but it makes a great difference—indeed, everything depends on it—that one becomes accustomed to perform either good or evil actions from earliest youth, for we retain longer the things impressed on us as children.”
On Ethics 1.3.38; 6.7.1208.
On Ethics 1.10.126.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles 1.11: “Now custom, especially if it date from our childhood, acquires the force of nature, the result being that the mind holds those things with which it was imbued from childhood as firmly as though they were self-evident.”
Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, trans. Richard J. Regan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2007), 1.10.8 (73)(hereafter cited as On Politics). The virtue of prudence can be subdivided into individual, domestic, and civic forms or manifestations of prudence. The civic is most important and the individual least. But it has to be remembered that this ordering itself is a part of the virtue of prudence. Prudent men know that the common good is the most important and want to do it. That is what it means to be prudent. See On Ethics 6.7.1201–1207.
On Ethics 5.2–3; Thomas Aquinas, On the Cardinal Virtues, in Disputed Questions on Virtue, article 1 (228).
ST II-II, q. 58, a. 9 ad 3: “The common good is the end of each individual member of a community, just as the good of the whole is the end of each part.”
On Ethics 5.2.910: “So then it is clear that the law-abiding just man is most virtuous and legal justice is the most perfect of virtues.”
ST II-II, q. 58, a. 5–6, and a. 12 co.
Thomas Aquinas, On Kingship, in Opuscula I: Treatises (Green Bay, WI: Aquinas Institute, 2018), 2.4 (392): “Whatever particular goods are procured by man’s agency—whether wealth, profits, health, eloquence, or learning—are ordained to the good life of the multitude.”
ST I-II, q. 21, a. 3.
ST II-II, q. 58, a. 11 co.
Aquinas, On Kingship 2.3 (389).
On Ethics 5.2.925.
Aquinas, On Politics 2.2.3 (89–90).
ST I, q. 20, a. 2 ad 1.
ST I-II, q. 92, a. 1 ad 3: “Therefore, since every man is part of a city, it is impossible that any man should be good without being related in the right way to the common good.”
ST I-II, q. 90, a. 3 ad 1.
ST II-II, q. 102, a. 1 co.
Aquinas, On Politics 1.10.3 (70): “For in this form of rule [paternal], we note two things, namely, that the father who begets rules over his sons because of love, since he by nature loves them, and also because of age, having the natural privilege of age over them, as it were.”
On Ethics 9.4.1811.
Thomas compares this to the relationship between brothers in On Ethics 8.11.1695.
ST II-II, q. 103, a. 2 ad 3: “In every man is to be found something that makes it possible to deem him better than ourselves, according to Philippians 2:3, ‘In humility, let each esteem others better than themselves,’ and thus, too, we should all be on the alert to do honor to one another.” See also On Ethics 9.14.1951.
On Ethics 9.11.1910.
Aquinas, On Kingship 1.10 (381): “Now, all friendship is based upon something common among those who are to be friends, for we see that those are united in friendship who have in common either their natural origin, or some similarity in habits of life, or any kind of social interests.”
ST II-II, q. 23, a. 1 co.; On Ethics 8.12.1702.
Aquinas, On Politics 1.1.21 (17).
Aquinas, On Politics 1.1.21 (17): “But human speech signifies useful and harmful things, and so just and unjust things, since justice and injustice consist of persons being treated justly or unjustly regarding useful and harmful things. And so speech is proper to human beings, since it is proper to them, in contrast with other animals, to have knowledge of good and evil, just and unjust, and the like, which speech can signify. Nature gives speech to human beings, and speech is directed to human beings communicating with one another regarding the useful and the harmful, the just and the unjust, and the like. Therefore, since nature does nothing in vain, human beings by nature communicate with one another about these things. But communication about these things produces the household and the political community. Therefore, human beings are by nature domestic and political animals.”
Aquinas, On Politics 2.4.4 (94).
Aquinas, On Kingship 1.3 (365).
Aquinas, On Politics 1.1.9 (12): “But we call a human being a foreigner in relation to another when the one does not communicate with the other. And nature especially constitutes human beings to communicate with one another by speech.” Thomas argues that because only man has natural knowledge of things necessary to life in a very general fashion and so has to reason from particulars, an intellectual division of labor is necessary for life. Aquinas, On Kingship 1.1 (359–60): “It is therefore necessary for man to live in a multitude so that each one may assist his fellow, and different men may be occupied in seeking to make different discoveries by reason. . . this point is further and most plainly evidenced by the fact that the use of speech is proper to man, through which one man is able to fully express his conception to others.” Man mostly knows about the world because he is told about it.
Aquinas, On Kingship 1.10 (380).
ST I-II, q. 4, a. 8 co.; On Ethics 9.10–11.
Thomas Aquinas, On Charity, in Disputed Questions on Virtue, 7.18 (140).
Aquinas, On Charity 9 (151).
Aquinas, On Politics 1.5.2 (40), 1.10.2 (69–70): “In political rule, people take turns ruling.” See also On Politics 3.1.4–6 (183–84); On Ethics 5.10.1004.
Aquinas, On Politics 1.4.11 (38).
On Ethics 8.12.1707–09.
On Ethics 8.15.1752.
ST I, q. 20, a. 1 ad 3; I-II, q. 28, a. 2 co.
On Ethics 5.4–5; ST II-II, q. 58, a. 10 co.
On Ethics 8.15.1752: “Surely not all benefits can be repaid in adequate honor, as is obvious in honors rendered to God and parents who can never be worthily recompensed. However, if a man serves God and parents according to his ability, he seems to be just or virtuous.”
On Ethics 8.11.1693: “In friendships of this nature [unequal] the same thing is not just on the part of each. The king, therefore, must not do the same for his subject as the subject must do for his king, nor the father the same for his son as the son for his father. But what is just must be judged for both parties according to worth so that each does for the other what is proper, because in this way friendship between them entails one loving the other in a fitting manner.” See On Ethics 8.13.1730 and 14.1748.
On Ethics 8.14.1751.
On Ethics 8.12.1706.
On Ethics 9.1.1758.
On Ethics 5.10.992.
As Thomas writes, “Justice in exchanges includes reciprocation according to proportionality. This can be shown by the fact that the citizens live together amicably because they have a proportionate kindliness towards one another. Accordingly, if one does something for another, the other is anxious to do something in proportion in return. Obviously, all citizens desire that reciprocation be done to them proportionately. By reason of this all men can live together because they do for one another what they themselves seek. . . . But men live together because one makes a return to another for the favors he has received. So it is that virtuous men promptly express gratitude to their benefactors as if it were a sacred duty to make them a return in this way. . . . It is fitting that a man should be of service to one who has done him a favor, i.e., bestowed a gratuitous kindness, and that he be not content to give only as much as he received but that in return he begins to offer more than he got so that he himself may do a favor” (On Ethics 5.8.973–74).
Aquinas, On Politics 2.1.8 (83–84).
For example, ST I-II, q. 93, a. 1 co.; On Ethics 1.2.
On Ethics 8.11.1698.
Aquinas, On Charity 2 (108): “After all, artisans do not work well unless they gain a love of that good that they strive for by plying their craft.” See also On Ethics 6.4.1172.
On Ethics 5.10.1007.
ST I-II, q. 57, a. 3 ad 2: “In order that man may make good use of the art he has, he needs a good will, which is perfected by moral virtue; and for this reason the Philosopher says that there is a virtue of art; namely, a moral virtue, in so far as the good use of art requires a moral virtue. For it is evident that a craftsman is inclined by justice, which rectifies his will, to do his work faithfully.” “He who obeys is moved at the bidding of the person who commands him, by a certain necessity of justice, even as a natural thing is moved through the power of its mover by a natural necessity” (ST II-II, q. 104, a. 5 co.)
On Ethics 1.1.16–17; Aquinas, On Politics 3.3.11 (196). See also his On Charity 10.18 (154); and On Ethics 9.7.1845: “Benefactors feel toward their beneficiaries the same way as artists feel toward their creations. Every craftsman loves his own product more than he would be loved by it were the product living by chance. . . . There is a similarity here to what occurs when benefactors love those whom they have benefited; for a person who is well treated by another is in a way his product. For this reason benefactors love their product, i.e., the beneficiaries, more than the reverse.”
Thomas, of course, offers extended comparisons between God and architects. See ST I, q. 27, a. 1 ad 3; q. 15, a. 2.
On Ethics 6.3.1153.
ST I-II, q. 93, a. 5 co.
Aquinas, On Politics 3.4.5 (202): “Rather, the citizen who is a statesman (i.e., the ruler of a political community) and master, or one capable of being master, of things belonging to the care of the community, whether alone or with others, is the same as a good man. For he has said before that the virtue of a ruler and that of a good man are the same. And so, if we should understand citizen to mean the ruler or one capable of being ruler, the virtue of a citizen is the same as the virtue of a good man.”
Aquinas, On Politics 3.3.10 (196): “[Aristotle] says that it is the kind of rule in which a ruler rules over persons free and equal to himself, and not as a master over slaves. And this is political rule, in which now some, now others, in the political community are constituted rulers. And such a ruler needs to learn as a subject how he ought to rule. . . . For a human being learns how to exercise great office by being a subordinate and carrying out lesser duties.”
ST I, q. 15, a. 2 co.
ST I, q. 45, a. 6 co.: “God is the cause of things by His intellect and will, just as the craftsman is cause of the things made by his craft. Now the craftsman works through the word conceived in his mind, and through the love of his will regarding some object.”
Aquinas, On Politics 3.6.3 (209): “And we call the regime in which the multitude rules and strives for the common benefit a polity.” ST I-II, q. 90. a. 2 ad 3: “Nothing is firmly established through practical reason except by being ordered to the ultimate end, which is the common good. But what is founded upon reason in this way has the character of law.”
On Ethics 6.7.1198.
On Ethics 5.10.1008.
ST I-II, q. 95, a. 4 co.
Thomas argues that every man ought to become a legislator, one who applies universals to particulars in order to lead those over whom he has supervision to virtue. See On Ethics 10.15.
Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles 2.48: “The free is that which is its own cause.” See also ST II-II, q. 19, a. 4 co.
Aquinas, On Politics 2.1.1 (80–81): “And so it is absolutely true that the best disposition of the political community, in everybody’s opinion, is one in which human beings can live as they choose.”
ST I-II, q. 42; II-II, q. 29, a. 2.
Josef Pieper, Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 45: “To exist, not in dependence on anything ‘without’ but by and for reasons entirely ‘within’—this is precisely what human language calls ‘freedom.’”
Aquinas, On Politics 1.5.1 (39): “For political rule is rule over persons free by nature, and despotic rule is rule over slaves.” See also Aquinas, On Kingship 1.9 (378).
On Ethics 5.16.1084: “The legislator necessarily speaks in a universal way on account of the impossibility of comprehending particulars.” See also On Ethics 6.7.1197.
ST I-II, q. 90, a. 1 ad 2; On Ethics 6.7.1212.
Aquinas, On Politics 2.1.8–9 (83–85); On Ethics 5.10.1015, 6.7.1196.
On Ethics 2.2.259.
On Ethics 5.16.1083: “He says first that the reason why legal justice has need of direction is that every law is proposed universally. Since particulars are infinite, our mind cannot embrace them to make a law that applies to every individual case. Therefore, a law must be framed in a universal way, for example, whoever commits murder will be put to death.”
ST I-II, q. 96, a. 1 co.
ST I-II, q. 14, a. 3 co.: “I answer that, Counsel properly implies a conference held between several; the very word (consilium) denotes this, for it means a sitting together (considium), from the fact that many sit together in order to confer with one another. Now we must take note that in contingent particular cases, in order that anything be known for certain, it is necessary to take several conditions or circumstances into consideration, which it is not easy for one to consider, but are considered by several with greater certainty, since what one takes note of, escapes the notice of another; whereas in necessary and universal things, our view is brought to bear on matters much more absolute and simple, so that one man by himself may be sufficient to consider these things. Wherefore the inquiry of counsel is concerned, properly speaking, with contingent singulars.”
ST I-II, q. 15.
ST I-II, q. 93, a. 3 co.; q. 94, a. 4 co.
ST I-II, q. 96, a. 2–3; q. 107, a. 1 co.
ST II-II, q. 102, a. 3 ad 1.
On Ethics 6.7.1198.
ST I, q. 47, a. 1 co.
Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles 2.45. See also ST I, q. 103, a. 4; ST Supplementum, q. 34, a. 1.
Aquinas, On Kingship 2.2 (388–89); ST I-II, q. 93, a. 1 co.; II-II, q. 104, a. 1 co.
Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles 3.71.
Aquinas, On Kingship 1.2 (362). See also De veritate, q. 11, a. 1 co.
Aquinas, On Kingship 1.9 (378): “Now, the ruler of a multitude stands in the same relation to the virtuous deeds performed by each individual as the teacher to matters taught, the architect to the buildings, and the general to the wars.”
Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles 3.71.
On Ethics 10.15.2158: “Therefore it seems to come to the same thing that a father of a family should instruct his son or a few domestics by a verbal or written admonition, and that a prince should make a law in writing to govern all the people of a state. In fact public laws and customs introduced by rulers hold the same place in states as do paternal precepts and customs introduced by parents in families.” See Aquinas, On Kingship 1.2 (362).
ST I-II, q. 90, a. 3 co.
Aquinas, On Politics 1.1.8 (84): “For if the dissimilarity of citizens should be taken away there will no longer be a political community.”
ST I-II, q. 91, a. 2–3. Thomas, following Aristotle, lays great emphasis on the necessity of diversity in a polity. Too much similarity, too much “unity,” begins to reduce the city to a large household, or even beyond that to a large individual. This, however, destroys its harmony, which is rooted in difference united into a whole. See On Politics 2.1.8 (83).
On Ethics 9.12.
Aquinas, On Kingship 1.1 (359).
ST I q. 22 a. 3 co. and ad 1. On Politics 2.1.10 (85): “It is not better that human beings seek to unite a political community too much, since such unity takes away from the adequacy of human life. For a household or entire family is clearly more sufficient for human life than an individual human being. And a political community is more sufficient than a household, since a political community should exist whenever an association of many people is self-sufficient for human life. Therefore, if something less unified is more self-sufficient (e.g., a household than an individual human being, and a political community than a household), then it is clearly more desirable that the political community should be less rather than more unified regarding the diversity of citizens. For the more diversified human beings of the political community are, the more self-sufficient it will be.” See also On Politics 2.5.1 (103); ST I, q. 108, a. 2.
ST I, q. 108, a. 4.
Aquinas, On Politics 1.4 (9). Ends, of course, are prior to reasons and emerge from our moral habits. See ST I-II, q. 58, a. 4 co.
Aquinas, On Politics 1.10.6 (71): “On the other hand, if we should say that one person needs to have virtue, and that another does not, something inappropriate also follows. If the ruler will not be self-controlled and just, he will not be able to rule well. And if the subject should not have those virtues, he will not be able to be a good subject, since he will often fail to do his duty.” On Politics 1.10.7 (72): “Both the ruler and the subject need to share in virtue, since, otherwise, the former would not rule well, and the latter would not be a good subject. But there is a difference between the kinds of virtue in each, and he shows this by things that are by nature subject to other things. . . . And we hold that each part has a virtue but a different kind of virtue, since the virtue of the rational part is prudence, and the virtue of the irrational part includes moderation, courage, and like virtues.”
On Ethics 5.16; ST II-II, q. 147, a. 4 co.; On Ethics 5.16.1086; ST I-II, q. 96, a. 6; II-II, q. 60, a. 5 ad 2.
ST I-II, q. 96, a. 4; II-II, q. 60, a. 2 co.
ST II-II, q. 104, a. 5, and a. 6 ad 3.
Aquinas, On Politics 1.10.1 (69): “The ruler of a political community has power over citizens according to the community’s laws.”
ST I-II, q. 97, a. 3 ad 3.
ST I, q. 18, a. 4 ad 3: “Even so a house has nobler being in the architect’s mind than in matter; yet a material house is called a house more truly than the one which exists in the mind; since the former is actual, the latter only potential.” On Ethics 2.6.315: “Moral virtue operates by inclining in a determined way to one thing as nature does. Indeed, custom becomes nature. But art, which operates according to reason, is indifferent to various objects. Hence like nature [virtue] is more certain than art.”
ST I-II, q. 97, a. 3 co.
ST I-II, q. 90, a. 3 co. This is the core concept behind Thomas’s treatment of “legal justice.” It is the social embeddedness of justice as lived in a city’s order. Real justice is, therefore, always legal justice, and commutative and distributive justice operate always within it. See On Ethics 5.6.955; ST II-II, q. 58, a. 6 co.
Aquinas, On Politics 2.12.7 (143). See also ST I-II, q. 97, a. 2 co.; On Ethics 2.3.268.
ST I-II, q. 58, a. 1 co.; On Ethics 2.1.247.
Aquinas, On Kingship 2.4 (393–94).
Aquinas, On Kingship 2.4 (393).
ST I-II, q. 95, a. 1 co. Aquinas, On Kingship 2.4 (393–94): “Now there are three things which prevent the permanence of the public good. [First, the passing of generations.] A second impediment to the preservation of the public good, which comes from within, consists in the perversity of the wills of men, inasmuch as they are either too lazy to perform what the commonweal demands, or, still further, they are harmful to the peace of the multitude because, by transgressing justice, they disturb the peace of others. The third [peace is destroyed through the attacks of enemies]. . . . By his laws and orders, punishments and rewards, he should restrain the men subject to him from wickedness and induce them to virtuous deeds, following the example of God, Who gave his law to man and requites those who observe it with rewards, and those who transgress it with punishments.” The following list of Thomas’s, in the order of importance that he normally seems to advance, the king “is to be praised by men and rewarded by God who makes a whole province rejoice in peace, who restrains violence, preserves justice, and arranges by his laws and precepts what is to be done by men” (On Kingship 1.9 [378–79]).
On Ethics 1.1.4.
On Ethics 2.3.270–71, 2147: “Generally speaking—when firmly rooted by habituation—passion that masters man does not yield to argument but must be attacked by violence to compel men to good. So, evidently, for exhortation to have an effect on anyone there must necessarily preexist habituation by which man may acquire the proper disposition to virtue so that he can love the honorable good and hate what is dishonorable.”
Aquinas, On Charity 8.10 (146).
ST I-II, q. 6, a. 4–5.
On Ethics 10.14, 2.1.251; ST I-II, q. 101, a. 3 co.
ST I-II, q. 4, a. 1, and q. 3.
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, chap. 3.2: “Illegalities and Delinquency.”
ST I-II, q. 106, a. 1.
ST I-II, q. 106, a. 2 co.: “Hence, even the letter of the Gospel kills unless the healing grace of faith is inwardly present.”
ST I-II, q. 107, a. 1 ad 2; q. 108, a. 1 co.: “On the other hand, there are works which are not necessarily opposed to, or in keeping with faith that work through love. Such works are not prescribed or forbidden in the New Law, by virtue of its primitive institution; but have been left by the Lawgiver, i.e., Christ, to the discretion of each individual. And so to each one it is free to decide what he should do or avoid; and to each superior, to direct his subjects in such matters as regards what they must do or avoid. Wherefore also in this respect the Gospel is called the law of liberty: since the Old Law decided many points and left few to man to decide as he chose.” See also ST I-II, q. 108, a. 2 co.
ST I-II, q. 108, a. 1 ad 2.
ST I-II, q. 90.
ST I-II, q. 108, a. 2; II-II, q. 29, a. 4.
Aquinas, On Kingship 2.3 (391): “It is not the ultimate end of an assembled multitude to live virtuously, but through virtuous living to attain to the possession of God.”
Aquinas, On Politics 1.10.6 (71).
ST I-II q. 93, a. 3 co.; II-II, q. 102, a. 1 co.; I, q. 21, a. 1 co.: “The other . . . is called distributive justice; whereby a ruler or a steward gives to each what his rank deserves. As then the proper order displayed in ruling a family or any kind of multitude evinces justice of this kind in the ruler, so the order of the universe, which is seen both in effects of nature and in effects of will, shows forth the justice of God.” See also On Ethics 1.2.30. On Kingship, 2.1 (387): “Thus, in a proportionate manner, reason is to man what God is to the world.”
Aquinas, On Kingship 1.9 (379). On Ethics 8.12.1715: “Children have friendship for their parents as to a kind of superior good. The reason is that parents are special benefactors—the cause of their children’s existence, upbringing, and training. Man’s friendship with God is also of this nature.” See also On Ethics 9.2.1782; ST I-II, q. 100, a. 7 ad 1.
ST II-II, q. 186, a. 5 s.c., ad 5; III, q. 20, a. 1; q. 47, a. 2–3.
ST I-II, q. 106, a. 4.
ST II-II, q. 29, a. 3 ad 1: “Without sanctifying grace, peace is not real but merely apparent.”
ST II-II, q. 58, a. 1 ad 6; q. 29, a. 3 resp.: “Peace implies a twofold union, as stated above (A. 1). The first is the result of one’s own appetites being directed to one object; while the other results from one’s own appetite being united with the appetite of another: and each of these unions is effected by charity:—the first, insofar as man loves God with his whole heart, by referring all things to Him, so that all his desires tend to one object:—the second, in so far as we love our neighbor as ourselves, the result being that we wish to fulfill our neighbor’s will as though it were ours: for which reason it is reckoned a sign of friendship if people make choice of the same things (Ethic. ix.), and Tully says (De Amicitia) that friends like and dislike the same things.”
Teaching is contemplative up and active down. See De veritate, q. 11, a. 4 (100–01); ST I-II, q. 5, a. 5 ad 1; On Ethics 10.11–12; ST II-II, q. 186, a. 8.
Quoted in Henri de Lubac, Catholicism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 315.
Augustine, The City of God, bk. 19.
Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty: Six Books of the Commonwealth, trans. M. J. Tooley (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955), chap. 8, 72.
ST I-II, q. 43, a. 1 ad 1: “Fear, of itself and in the first place, regards the evil from which it recoils as being contrary to some loved good: and thus fear, of itself, is born of love.” See also ST II-II, q. 125, a. 2 co.
Pieper, Abuse of Language, 22–30.
Aquinas, On Kingship 1.10 (382): “It remains, then, that the government of a tyrant is maintained by fear alone, and consequently they strive with all their might to be feared by their subjects. Fear, however, is weak support. Those who are kept down by fear will rise against their rulers if the opportunity ever occurs when they can hope to do it with impunity, and they will rebel against their rulers all the more furiously the more they have been kept in subjection against their will by fear alone.”
On Ethics 8.11.1697; Aquinas, On Kingship 1.10 (381).
Foucault, The Foucault Reader, 56.
Aquinas, On Kingship 1.3 (366): “It is also natural that men, brought up in fear, should become small-spirited and discouraged in the face of any strenuous and manly task.”
See Andrew Willard Jones, “The End of Sovereignty: An Essay in Christian Postliberalism,” Communio: International Catholic Review 45, no. 3–4, (Fall–Winter 2018): 408–56.
Aquinas, On Kingship 1.10 (381): “The government of tyrants, on the other hand, cannot last long because it is hateful to the multitude, and what is against the wishes of the multitude cannot be long preserved.”
ST I, q. 109, a. 2 ad 2: “The concord of the demons, whereby some obey others, does not arise from mutual friendships, but from their common wickedness, whereby they hate men, and fight against God’s justice. For it belongs to wicked men to be joined to and subject to those whom they see to be stronger, in order to carry out their own wickedness.”
Aquinas, On Kingship 1.10 (382).
ST II-II, q. 125, a. 2 ad 3.
Aquinas, On Kingship 1.3 (365).

The Priority of Peace and the Problem of Power

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