Aquinas’s proto-liberal concerns

The pleasant discovery of a series of posts by Professor Jonathan McIntosh on the site of the Libertarian Christian Institute (LCI) has occasioned my republishing today part of Chapter 10 of Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic (CCL). As that chapter originated as a post written about ten years ago, I’ve edited it, airbrushing references to the polemic. (Those interested in the latter should consult the book. I’ve modified the chapter in other ways.)

With erudition and nuance, Dr. McIntosh locates Thomas Aquinas on the political spectrum as a proto-liberal (my term, not McIntosh’s).

These anti-libertarian sentiments [of Thomas’s, just enumerated by McIntosh] notwithstanding, there are yet many other respects in which Aquinas’s political thought is not only consistent with libertarianism, but arguably provide the latter with an ideal and even necessary, moral and metaphysical framework.

McIntosh’s aim is

to sketch at least the outlines of a distinctly Thomistic, natural law libertarianism, one that coherently combines Aquinas’s account of law’s place within the social and moral dimension of human nature, with libertarianism’s more considered and consistent ethic of law’s inherently coercive nature.

McIntosh is a kindred spirit whose work I’m happy to advertise. (Visit his blogs The Natural Law Libertarian and The Flame Imperishable.) His admiration for Thomas is great, but does not inhibit his criticism. Aquinas’s thought on the subject of liberty is, as I shall show in my own way, a mixed bag, but one whose contents every lover of liberty and reason is better off for having explored.

McIntosh’s series is entitled “The Libertarian Aquinas: Aquinas and Libertarianism,” and here are links to Part I, Part II, and Part III. (At least another installment is on the way.) I welcome any criticism of my effort he may see fit to give.

I’m taking this opportunity to thank again LCI’s Chief Executive Officer Doug Stuart for interviewing me about Christ, Capital & Liberty in late 2019 and making our discussion available on their site since last March.

Note: The “Austrians” referred to in today’s post are writers who subscribe to the Austrian School of Economics (ASE), whose “dean” was Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995). “Anarcho-Catholics” are Roman Catholics who find a “profound philosophical commonality” between the ASE and Catholic teaching (but not “Catholic Social Teaching”). I would include among them James A. Sadowsky, S.J. (1923-2012), Joseph Sobran (1946-2010), Thomas E. Woods, and Gerard N. Casey, although none of them uses (or used) that term to describe his political philosophy. I have defended that compatibility; as a dispensationalist, however, I no longer use the descriptor for myself.

Aquinas’s proto-liberal concerns

Austrians as economists distinguish themselves by their unpopular and constant admonition to politicians—be they professional or amateur, secular or religious—that a coercive (e.g., statist) means to a good end may cost more than they, upon reflection, would be willing to pay by their own standard of moral accounting.

Austrians as ethicists might condemn a statist means to a good end on purely moral, non-utilitarian grounds. That is, they may hold that the principled commitment to voluntary exchange and peaceful cooperation, that is, the principled repudiation of the initiation of force expresses rather than establishes one’s ethical obligation to his or her fellows.

If these Austrians ethicists are natural law theorists, they may formulate that ethical obligation in ontological terms: that persons are self-respecters and mutual respecters pertains to the substance, not the accidents, of being human. (Universal interpersonal disrespect leads to the negation of the disrespecters, i.e., to human annihilation.) That is to say, for them, the dignity of the person “fixes moral limits” of the authority exercising responsibility for the framework of liberty (which is a common good). This is then a case of one’s ethical insights inspiring the formulation of a market principle, not the reverse.

If the Austrian natural law ethicists are Christians, then their ontological reasoning goes much deeper: the person is a created image-bearer of the God whose eikon or image is the man Christ Jesus (Colossians 1:15) whose eikon we will bear after being transformed in and conformed to Him (1 Corinthians 15:49). Our quotidian “getting along with each other” has an wider context, namely, “getting along” with God. The latter “vertical” relationship anchors the “horizontal,” without which the latter can be reinforced only by syllogisms, rather than also by our experience of divine love. To define persons as self-respecters and mutual respecters is merely to express analytically the second great commandment (Matthew 22:29). The so-called “golden rule” sums up the law and the prophets (Matthew 7:12).

Anarcho-Catholics don’t insist that all Catholics draw the inference they draw about the State, but they do insist on their right to draw it and to defend that inference as sound. We interpret the market in terms of persons, that is, mutually respecting divine image-bearers, the living sources or “principles” of all social phenomena.

Consider this scenario: both (a) the dominant (not exclusive) ethos of a given territory (as large or as small as you please) is Christian and (b) its several classes of guardians of peaceful cooperation understand economics more or less as Austrians do and, in accordance with that understanding, deal with the violent non-cooperators in their midst.[1]

Expanding our hypothetical scenario: occurring with unwelcome regularity on that territory are instances of non-violent moral evil (as a Christian ethos defines moral evil). What are Christian guardians of the framework of peaceful cooperation to do?

One answer is obvious: one ought to use every means at one’s disposal to suppress the immoral behavior by imposing penal sanctions on the miscreants. To tolerate the evil is to give one’s sanction to it, which God forbid.

According to Saint Thomas Aquinas, some evils tear at the fabric of the common good, which in this case is the framework of peaceful cooperation, which tearing is an absolutely impermissible evil and therefore must not be tolerated; other evils do not rend it and therefore ought to be tolerated. Why?

Because active suppression, would rend it. A policy of non-toleration would benignly intend the common good while unintentionally harming it. A socially intolerable evil: murder; a socially tolerable evil: prostitution. Prostitution is not any less evil for being socially tolerable, but it does not fall to the public authority to suppress it, for it does not have a virtue-instilling function. Its office is solely directed to protecting the framework within which persons peacefully, cooperatively pursue their diverse ends (including virtue). As Thomas put it:

Human laws leave certain things unpunished, on account of the condition of those who are imperfect, and who would be deprived of many advantages, if all sins were strictly forbidden and punishments appointed for them.[2]

Or:

. . . it suffices for it [human law] to prohibit whatever is destructive of human intercourse, while it treats other matters as though they were lawful, not by approving them, but by not punishing them.[3]

Professor Richard Symanski summarized Thomas on this point as follows:

The aim of the criminal justice system is not to impose public standards of morality upon the private acts of consenting adults, immoral though they may be by widely held social standards, but rather to protect people and property from the harmful effects of others.[4]

It would be anachronistic to describe the Angelic Doctor as a liberal. He was no libertarian. I am sensitive to Kevin Craycraft’s concerns about aligning the thought of Saint Thomas with the liberal tradition. His paper “Was Aquinas a Whig? St. Thomas on Regime” documents the dangers to which loose talk can lead.[5]

I cannot follow Craycraft, however, in his suggestion that the modern liberal ideal is a lost cause, incapable of assimilation into the Catholic worldview with its realist epistemology just because the first thinkers to articulate that ideal were nominalists or skeptics.

By one contingency of history Locke and other Protestant empiricists retrieved and formulated an ideal consonant with a truth about the dignity of persons as divine image-bearers. They did so in a world extricating itself from the nightmare of royal absolutism, which was, by another contingency of history, all too Catholic.

Liberty is the political expression of that Biblical insight.[6] That is, liberty is not merely logically consistent with the insight into the dignity of persons, but it also illuminates that insight: person A may not initiate force against person B, regardless of the identities of A and B, and regardless of the fact that many Christians have initiated, or rationalized the initiation of, force against others. The anarcho-Catholic claims that that insight ought to govern.[7]

On the basis of passages cited in the Dever paper (or which may be found directly in Thomas’s Summa Theologica, I-II, Question 96), however, we would argue that Thomas Aquinas was a proto-liberal.

Aquinas was proto-liberal in that he maintained that the scope of human law is not total. His was a political liberty-honoring stance that presaged more robust limitations of the State to be articulated in a later century.

He was only proto-liberal, however, in that he argued for a much larger role for the force-monopolizing public authority than can sensibly be called “liberal” (let alone “libertarian”) without fatal qualification.

Significantly, by “proto-liberalism” I do not mean merely the insistence, which unites all Christians, that the State’s reach stops at the Church’s door. No, I mean the further restriction upon the State (or whatever functions as the “public authority”) that it may not penalize a behavior merely because one’s theology condemns it as immoral. That is, that what is immoral ought not ipso facto be illegal.

The class of behaviors Aquinas deems morally illicit is not identical to the class of behaviors he says should be prohibited by law; and neither is the morally licit identical with the legally permissible. His interests in (a) demarcating what is destructive of interpersonal cooperation (“human intercourse”) from what is not and (b) confining the scope of the public authority to the former are arguably liberal interests, even though there were no liberals in his day.

This dual interest is not any less liberal (or “proto-liberal”) because the framework of Thomas’ political thought was a Catholic cosmology (in which human cooperation is a divine intention as well as a human project). Aquinas’ restricted proto-liberal point may be a conclusion that he draws from his cosmology, but it is not to be regarded as trivial: it is common ground with those who reach that conclusion by another worldview. The conceit of liberalism (and its further elaboration, libertarianism) is, after all, that disagreement over cosmology might be regrettable, even remediable, without also being an obstacle to social peace.

Is that to be despised? Or celebrated? Do Catholics not want the Muslim, the Jew, the Buddhist, et al., to conclude, each integrally from his or her own worldview, that cooperation is the sound option? Or, until all are hearts trun to Christ, are we to be embroiled in a bellum omnia contra omnes, a war to the knife, in saecula saeculorum?

The anarcho-Catholic argues that the State per se (properly defined) is destructive of human intercourse and that only institutions that honor human dignity ought to administer justice. The State per se offends human dignity. Error may have no rights, but erring persons have dignity.

I agree with Aquinas that there is no coherence to the idea of having “a right to be wrong.” That truth, however, does not offer the slightest warrant to individuals calling themselves “the public authority” to rob, kidnap, imprison, enslave, or kill the one who is wrong.[8]

The anarcho-Catholic and the Thomist would, I argue, agree about the terms of the discussion—“Where does one draw the line between what furthers and what impedes human cooperation?”—while disagreeing about where to draw that line (or about what institutional forms the line-drawing takes).

There may be a liberal disjunction between the private and the public, and it may be false, but merely calling it false does not make it so. There is no important difference that I can see between the public and the common or shared. Common to whom? Shared by whom? Why, individuals, the only agents there are.

The private therefore pertains to the individual as individual. It rests on a logical contrast between the specific, concrete individual who one is and the generalized, abstract “others” with whom one interacts. There are goods that, irrespective of who each of us is as an individual, we value at least implicitly and ought to explicitly. One common good is liberty, the framework of peaceful cooperation, a necessary condition of our pursuits of diverse ends and worthy object of attention, evaluation, and protection.

Notes

[1] Even anarchist territories must have guardians of the consensus of the non-initiation of force, the framework of peaceful cooperation. They include the parents of a nuclear family, the elders of an extended one, and property owners who contract for the services of private suppliers of defense and courts. It does not follow from this “must” that the persons who carry out these guardianship functions devolve into criminals, macro-parasites who live off of the wealth they systematically confiscate by force or the threat thereof. Anarcho-Catholics will be in the vanguard of efforts to demystify, and keep demystified, that function by withholding from those who perform it the symbolic trappings and incantations that communicate and reinforce the suggestion of permanent monopoly and divine right.

[2] Summa Theologiae, 2-2, q. 78, reply to Obj. 3. Thomas is arguing against the moral licitness of charging interest on a loan. In this instance we are agreeing with him only on the narrow point of the office of human law.

[3] Summa Theologiae, 2-2, q. 77, reply to Obj. 1. (Emphasis added: A.F.)

[4] Richard Symanski, The Immoral Landscape: Female Prostitution in Western Societies. Toronto, 1981, 228; as quoted in Vincent M. Dever, rich with citations from Aquinas’ writings, “Aquinas on the Practice of Prostitution.” Essays in Medieval Studies, Vol. 13, 1996. After documenting the condemnation, Professor Dever writes:

Given this strong condemnation of fornication and prostitution, it would seem obvious that Aquinas would want to engage every force against them, especially civil law. Oddly enough he does not. Instead he notes that the state should allow fornication and prostitution to exist for the sake of the common good. Relying on the well-known passage from Augustine’s De ordine, Aquinas advocates tolerance of prostitution by noting: “Accordingly in human government also, those who are in authority rightly tolerate certain evils, lest certain goods be lost, or certain evils be incurred: thus Augustine says [De ordine 2.4]: ‘If you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust.’” If these social practices were to be suppressed, the public reaction might be such as to threaten the peace of society. Remember, Aquinas already maintains (1) that prostitution is a species of lust that is one of the capital vices that wreak the greatest havoc on the human soul and leads to other sins; (2) that it is a mortal sin that threatens the proper rearing of children and by extension threatens the common good of society; and (3) that it violates the natural law and matrimonial union. How then could one tolerate such an evil, particularly a natural law thinker such as Aquinas? Is Aquinas compromising on his principles or playing utilitarian?”

Readers who find the suspense intolerable should read Professor Dever’s paper.

[5] Kevin Craycraft, “Was Aquinas a Whig? St. Thomas on Regime” Faith and Reason, Fall 1994.

[6] Unless otherwise noted, I use “liberty” in the political sense, that is, with regard to the morally licit use of interpersonal force, without prejudice to the traditional theological context of spiritual slavery to sin and liberation therefrom (eleutheria, e.g., Galatians 5:1, 5:13). The two senses are related.

[7] It governs my reading of Aquinas, whom I read with great admiration and reverence, but not uncritically. I cite Aquinas, not because I believe that whatever Aquinas wrote is ipso facto true, but because he cared whether a given morally inspired state repression might harm the common good. I have no problem with critically determining my proximity to and distance from the Angelic Doctor.

[8] Michael Novak faced the limits of the Angelic Doctor’s proto-liberalism at this point in “Aquinas and the Heretics,” First Things, December 1995, 33-38. Christendom’s fatal embrace of the State underlay Thomas’s willingness to have that public authority engage in those offenses against human dignity: a heretic’s error struck at what he thought was indispensable to human cooperation, namely, the medieval monistic State: “Once the integrity of the social fabric had been made to rest on key Christian beliefs (and the power of legitimate rulers on ecclesiastical approbation),” Novak writes, “criticisms of Christian practice that spilled over into criticism of underlying interpretations of the gospels were easily taken as acts of treason against the state. In short, by allowing Christian faith to be the consensual foundation of the political and social order, as it were the form of political life, Christendom confounded the things of Caesar with the things of God.”

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