Saint Thomas Aquinas and the World State

Robert M. Hutchins

[Reprinted from The Center Magazine (The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions), September-October 1976]

I propose to show how Saint Thomas Aquinas, beginning with the remark of Aristotle that the state is the perfect community, transmuted that remark into a political theory relevant in every age; and how this theory, together with the teachings of Saint Thomas in the Treatise on Law, leads irresistibly in our day to world law, world government, and a world state.

Aristotle said in the Politics, "But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims and in a greater degree than any other, at the highest good."

He went on: "But when several families are united, and the association aims at something more than daily needs, then comes into existence the village. . .. When several villages are united in a single community, perfect and large enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficing, the state comes into existence originating in the bare needs of life, and continuing in existence for the sake of a good life.... Besides, the final cause and end of a thing is the best, and to be self-sufficing is the end and the best. .. .The proof that the state is a creation of nature and prior to the individual is that the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing."

These observations must be taken, as their author implies, as the statement of an ideal. Herodotus and Thucydides do not portray the Greek city-state as aiming at the highest good; certainly they do not portray it as achieving it. And when Aristotle wrote, the city-state had long passed its prime. Nor can it be said the city-states had been in any sense self-sufficing. The aggrandizement of Athens must have borne some relation to the fact that Athenians did not feel self-sufficient, either with respect to defense or with respect to material goods, within their own borders. Even the conservative Spartans had not confined their hegemony to their own walls.

Aristotle was concerned to show the origin of the state and the aims of the state. In doing so he laid down the attainment of autarchy or self-sufficiency as a measure of what he conceived the state to be.

These hints, for they are nothing more than that, Saint Thomas took to build a political theory comprehensive, coherent, and flexible. In the Treatise on Law he used the language of Aristotle to define the aims of political organization. He said, "As one man is a part of the household, so a household is a part of the state: and the state is a perfect community, according to Politics I, 1. And therefore as the good of one man is not the last end, but is ordained to the common good; so, too, the good of one household is ordained to the good of a single state, which is a perfect community."

In De Regimine Principum he went beyond Aristotle and the city-state. He said, "Now since men must live in a group, because they are not sufficient unto themselves to procure the necessities of life were they to remain solitary, it follows that a society will be the more perfect the more it is sufficient unto itself to procure the necessities of life."

Up to this point Saint Thomas is merely paraphrasing Aristotle. But he goes on: "There is, indeed, to some extent sufficiency for life in one family or one household, namely insofar as pertains to the natural acts of nourishment and the begetting of offspring and other things of this knd; it exists, furthermore, in one village with regard to those things which belong to one trade; but it exists in a city, which is a perfect community with regard to all the necessities of life; but still more in a province because of the need of fighting together and of mutual help against enemies. So, the man who rules a perfect community, that is, a city or a province, is called a king par excellence, ..."

By this time it had become clear that a city might not be a perfect community; without the aid of the surrounding territory it might not be able to protect itself. The meaning of "state" had changed since Aristotle's day, because the state that might have been self-sufficing in his day was now far from it.

In De Regimine Principum Saint Thomas tells us flatly what it means to be self-sufficing. He says, "For the higher a thing is the more self-sufficient it is; since whatever needs another's help is by that fact proven inferior." We must look, then, for a political organization that does not need another's help if we are to discover the perfect community,

In the Commentary on St. Matthew Saint Thomas looks beyond the province. His words are: "The community is threefold: that of the household, of the city, and of the kingdom. The household is a community consisting of those through whom common acts are done; it consists of a triple union, of father and son, of husband and wife, of master and servant. The community of the city contains all things that are necessary to the life of man: therefore it is the perfect community as far those things that are merely necessary. The third community is that of the kingdom, which is the consummate community. For when there is fear of enemies, it is not possible for a city to subsist by itself; hence on account of fear of enemies it is necessary for there to be a community of many cities, which make one kingdom."

It would appear that, however perfect the household may be for certain purposes, and the city for other purposes; there are still other, and more inclusive, purposes that neither can fulfill. The most important of these is peace, which Aristotle, curiously enough, nowhere seems to regard as one of the essential conditions of the perfect community. In the Commentary on St. Matthew, Saint Thomas continues: "As life is in a man, so is peace in a kingdom; and as there can be no health without moderation of the humors, so there is peace when a body retains its proper order. And as when health declines, the man verges toward his death, so when peace declines, the kingdom verges toward its death. So that the ultimate thing that must be sought is peace."

This note of peace as characteristic of the perfect community is struck also in De Regimine Principum, where Saint Thomas says, "Now the welfare and safety of a multitude formed into a society is the preservation of its unity, which is called peace, and which when taken away, the benefit of social life is lost and moreover the multitude in its disagreement becomes a burden to itself."

Later on in the same work the same point is elaborated. Saint Thomas says, "Yet the unity of man is brought about by nature, while the unity of a society, which we call peace, must be procured through the efforts of the ruler. 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 guided to good deeds. For just as a man can do nothing well unless unity within his members be presupposed, so a multitude of men which lacks the unity of peace, is hindered from virtuous action, by the fact that it fights against its very existence as a group. 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."

Saint Thomas then mentions some hindrances to the conservation of the state and adds, "The third hindrance to the preservation of the state comes from without, namely when peace is destroyed through the attacks of enemies, or, as it sometimes happens, the kingdom or city is completely blotted out."

According to Saint Thomas, then, the perfect community is one that does not need the help of another, that is at peace, and that can by its own will and resources remain so. Any other community must be an accidental or inadequate organization of power. It cannot be "self-sufficing."

Nor does the mind of Saint Thomas fail to notice the community of the whole world, to which Saint Augustine had referred in The City of God. Saint Augustine's words were: "After the city follows the whole world, wherein the third kind of human society is resident, the first being in the house, and the second in the city. ..." To Augustine also the aim of the earthly community is peace; for he goes on to say, "And the heavenly city, or rather that part thereof which is as yet a pilgrim on earth and lives by faith, uses this peace also, as it should until it leaves this mortal life wherein such a peace is requisite ... it willingly obeys such laws of the temporal city as order the things pertaining to the sustenance of this mortal life, to the end that both cities might observe a peace in such things as are pertinent hereunto.... This celestial society while it is here on earth, increases itself out of all languages, being unconcerned by the different temporal laws that are made; yet not breaking, but observing their diversity in divers nations, so long as they tend unto the preservation of earthly peace, and do not oppose the adoration of one God alone. .. . This peace is that unto which the pilgrim in faith refers the other peace, which he has here in his pilgrimage; and then lives he according to faith, when all that he does for the obtaining hereof is by himself referred unto God, and his neighbour withal, because being a citizen, he must not be all for himself, but sociable in his life and actions."

He goes on: "Wretched then are they that are strangers to that God, and yet have those a kind of allowable peace, but that they shall not have for ever, because they used it not well when they had it. But that they should have it in this life is for our good also; because during our commixture with Babylon, we ourselves make use of her peace, and though faith does free the people of God at length out of her, yet in the meantime we live as pilgrims in her. And therefore the apostle admonished the Church to pray for the kings and potentates of that earthly city, adding this reason, 'that we may lead a quiet life in all godliness and charity.' And the prophet Jeremiah, foretelling the captivity of God's ancient people, commanding them (from the Lord) to go peaceably and patiently to Babylon, advised them also to pray, saying, 'For in her peace shall be your peace,' meaning that temporal peace which is common both to good and bad."

This recognition of a world community by Saint Augustine, in his intense concern for peace, has a parallel in Saint Thomas. The exigencies of peace brought him to regard the kingdom, a larger political entity than the city, as a more perfect community than the city. In his Commentary on the Sentences, Saint Thomas goes on to the whole world. He says, ".. . and between a single bishop and the Pope there are other grades of dignities corresponding to the grades of unions insofar as one congregation or community includes another one, as the community of a province includes the community of the city, and the community of the kingdom includes the community of the province, and the community of the whole world includes the community of a kingdom."

Saint Thomas does not deal with the possible political organization of the community of the whole world. But we know from the Treatise on Law that any political community requires human law, why it requires it, and what that law is. We know that divine law and natural law are not enough; positive law must be added. This law, hi order to prove an efficacious inducement to virtue, must have coercive power. And sometimes, at least, this law must be written, in order to supply what was wanting to the natural law; or because the natural law was perverted in the hearts of some men, as to certain matters, so that they esteemed those things good which are naturally evil.

Saint Thomas sums up the matter thus: "On the contrary, Isidore says: 'Laws were made that in fear thereof human audacity might be held in check, that innocence might be safeguarded in the midst of wickedness, and that the dread of punishment might prevent the wicked from doing harm.' But these things are most necessary to mankind. Therefore it was necessary that human laws should be made. ... But since some are found to be depraved, and prone to vice, and not easily amenable to words, it was necessary for such to be restrained from evil by force and fear, in order that, at least, they might desist from evildoing, and leave others in peace, and that they themselves, by being habituated in this way, might be brought to do willingly what hitherto they did from fear, and thus become virtuous. Now this kind of training, which compels through fear of punishment, is the discipline of laws."

The positive law, according to Saint Thomas, applies with coercive power to everybody but the sovereign. He says, "The sovereign is said to be exempt from the law, as to its coercive power; since, properly speaking, no man is coerced by himself, and law has no coercive power save from the authority of the sovereign... . But as to the directive force of law, the sovereign is subject to the law by his own will. . . . Again the sovereign is above the law, insofar as, when it is expedient, he can change the law, and rule within it according to time and place."

We see, then, that in the hands of Saint Thomas the Aristotelian conception of the perfect community underwent an important transformation, Saint Thomas did not feel bound to limit himself to the state of Aristotle; he saw that the city might often fail to provide those things which were merely necessary; and he saw that peace was the most necessary thing of all. He was prepared to adopt an evolutionary attitude toward the state and to recognize that changing conditions might make thoroughly unsatisfactory a form of political organization that was once adequate to men's needs. What was a perfect community at one stage of history might be highly imperfect at another stage. He was not unprepared to regard the whole world as a community.

Because of the fallen state of human nature divine law and natural law are not enough to produce the unity of peace. Political organization requires positive law. The political organization of the world community would require positive law on a world scale. It would require legislative, judicial, and executive organs to adopt, declare, and enforce the positive law of the world. This law would be necessary to regulate and control the sovereigns of extant states, who are exempt from the operation of the positive law of their states and who cannot be regulated and controlled by divine and natural law alone. These extant states, in the absence of positive law of the world, may be expected to act toward one another as individuals may be expected to act in the absence of positive law; they may be expected to break the peace.

If we follow the example of Saint Thomas and ask ourselves what is the perfect community today, we see by the light he has given us that not even on the economic level can any extant state be regarded as self-sufficing in the Thomistic or even the Aristotelian view of it. There is no state that does not need the help of another. No one of them has at its disposal all material resources and all the varieties of material goods that men can today reasonably want and use. The industrial changes that have taken place since the time of Aristotle mean that even as to those things which are merely necessary the extant states are not self-sufficing.

When we come to that which Saint Thomas ' thought the real sign of self-sufficiency, namely, peace, we see again that there is no state that does not need the help of another. We observe, too, that the divine law and the natural law alone will not suffice to save us from destruction. War is inevitable among sovereigns who are not controlled by positive law, each of whom wants what the other has, who are close together, and who are equipped with military force. In the world as it is today all sovereigns want what other sovereigns possess, and modern transportation has brought them all close together, and will bring them closer still, The United States and Russia are as close together as Athens and Sparta were in the fifth century before Christ.

The military force available to modern sovereigns exceeds anything of which Aristotle and Saint Thomas could have dreamed. The difference is one of kind; we now have weapons against which there is no defense. Peace cannot be preserved by defenses when there is no defense. Peace cannot be preserved by overwhelming force when a small supply of atomic bombs can inflict irreparable damage on both sides; no force will look overwhelming to a sovereign that has an adequate supply of these bombs. As war is inevitable in a world of sovereigns uncontrolled by positive law, so the destruction of civilization is inevitable if war breaks out after more than one nation has atomic bombs.

Arnold Toynbee has said in Civilization on Trial, "About the year 1875, it looked as though Europe would find equilibrium through being organized into a number of industrialized democratic national states. ... We can now see that this expectation of equilibrium, on the basis of the national unit, was illusory. Industrialism and democracy are elemental forces. . .. What we can now pronounce with certainty is that the Eureopean national state ... is far too small and frail a vessel to contain these forces. The new wines of industrialism and democracy have been poured into old bottles and they have burst the old bottles beyond repair."

Fortunately, new bottles are available to us if we have the courage to use them; for the same forces that have made the destruction of civilization in the absence of positive law enforceable against nations have prepared for us a world that can be united by law, since it is already one world. Upon this point Toynbee insists over and over again. He says: "The main strand of our modern Western history is not the parish-pump politics of our Western society as inscribed on triumphal arches in a half-dozen parochial capitals or recorded in the national and municipal archives of ephemeral 'Great Powers.' The main strand is not even the expansion of the West over the world - so long as we persist in thinking of that expansion as a private enterprise of the Western society's own. The main strand is the progressive erection, by Western hands, of a scaffolding within which all the once separate societies have built themselves into one. From the beginning, mankind has been partitioned; in our day we have at least become united ... as far as we know for certain, the only civilization that has ever become worldwide is ours. ... As a result of these successive expansions of particular civilizations, the whole habitable world has now been unified into a single great society. ... "The historians of A.D. 4047 will say that the impact of the Western civilization on its contemporaries, in the second half of the second millennium of the Christian era, was the epoch-making event of that age because it was the first step toward the unification of mankind into one single society. By their time, the unity of mankind will perhaps have come to seem one of the fundamental conditions of human life - just part of the order of nature - and it may need quite an effort of imagination on their part to recall the parochial outlook of the pioneers of civilization during the first six thousand years or so of its existence. Those Athenians, whose capital city was no more than a day's walk from the farthest frontiers of their country, and those American contemporaries - or virtual contemporaries - of theirs, whose country you could fly across from sea to sea in sixteen hours - how could they behave (as we know they did behave) as if their own little country were the universe? ... In the course of its expansion our modern Western secular civilization has become literally worldwide and has drawn into its net all other surviving civilizations as well as primitive societies." In this capture of the world by Western civilization Toynbee sees a great new opportunity for Christianity. His words are: "At its first appearance, Christianity was provided by the Greco-Roman civilization with a universal state, in the shape of the Roman Empire with its policed roads and shipping routes, as an aid to the spread of the Christianity around the shores of the Mediterranean. Our modern Western secular civilization in its turn may serve its historical purpose by providing Christianity with a completely worldwide repetition of the Roman Empire to spread over."

Don Luigi Sturzo, hi his attack on war, has noticed that history changes the rights and duties of states, as Saint Thomas noticed that the expanding needs of cities, and their increasing dangers, changed the conception of the perfect community. In an article, "The Influence of Social Facts on Ethical Conceptions," in Thought, March, 1945, Don Sturzo says, "To the objection that the wars of the ancient Hebrews were legitimate and that 'God willed' the Crusades, it must be answered that Moses authorized family vengeance (Numbers 3), that polygamy was accepted by Abraham, that slavery was in use among the ancient Hebrews. If the abolition of such practices has done no violence to Holy Scriptures, the same may be said of the abolition of war."

Don Sturzo then goes on to tell us what world government means: "In an organized international community an aggressor state must be defined as one that either has recourse to arms or prepares for a war, even to vindicate a right which was unjustly violated. In such a community, no state will have any more right to take up arms of its own accord than a private citizen in a national community to take the law into his own hands and, without recourse to a tribunal of justice, to vindicate his own right or demand reparation for an injury or restitution for damage that has been done him.. .. The fundamental imperative of the common good imposes new limitations on the heads of national governments; and one of these limitations is the inability to vindicate national rights by any other means than recourse to the established juridico-political system which has taken from individual states the initiative in war."

Don Sturzo insists upon the point that historical change has changed the conception of the perfect community, a point upon which Saint Thomas had insisted before him. Don Sturzo says, "The foot of the matter is that there exists in nature and according to nature an international community, and that such a community, however potentially, imperfectly, and tentatively, has always existed, even though at times it has been clothed in the dress of hegemonic power (as in the case of the Roman Empire) or of theocratic authority (as in the case of the Holy Roman Empire or Christendom or of the Padisha for the Mohammedans, or of the Empires of the Sons of Heavens or of the Sun for the Chinese or Japanese).

"If there have been in the past several centers of international unification rather than a single one, that was a consequence of two simple facts: first, the lack of geographic unification - the human race did not know itself fully because communications between the various continents were few and difficult; second, religious differences at a time when common allegiance depended largely on unity of belief, and when Christians themselves could be divided as they were into Eastern and Western Churches.

"But now that modern ways of thinking have widened the separation between political and religious life while, at the same time, intercontinental communication has become more frequent, less difficult, and, in the air, extremely rapid, the possibility of ecumenical unification has become more and more a reality. Today, under pressure of the tragic events of two world wars, it is becoming a fait accompli."

Don Sturzo answers the argument that taking from individual states the initiative to make war is incompatible with national sovereignty. That argument, he says, "is based on the premise that the state is a perfect society (to use the language of Scholasticism) that can accept none but the self-imposed limitations from which it may, and sometimes must, withdraw according to the dictates of its own best interests without any violation of natural or Christian ethics.

"The error that vitiates the argument is the assumption that the state is the only natural and necessary society; as though the same were not true of the international community, merely because it is supposed to be a purely voluntary society. It must be remembered - what is too often forgotten by those who make this assumption - that there have been periods in the history of our civilization where there were no states (in the modern sense of the word), and that the cities which were the centers of political power were later unified into larger territories by kings or princes who ruled over federations or dynastic kingdoms with little in common beyond the bond of allegiance to the same lord. If one but recalls the patriarchal period, or the periods of family and tribal rule, it becomes obvious that the so-called 'political' power can exist, actually or virtually, in other social groups than the modern state. Or if one thinks of the vast empires in the past which have included many subject but separate kingdoms (or even of modern instances) it should be clear that political power has been vested in various manners and with varying degrees of responsibility."

Don Sturzo states his cardinal position thus: "The concept of the state as a 'perfect society' is not absolute; it is relative to the functions of a society which is supposed to be able, by its own means, to achieve a specific end. But when a particular society is no longer able to attain this specific end, except in collaboration with other societies of the same kind, it becomes a duty to collaborate. And, consequently, there arises a mutual interdependence, and rights and duties are shifted to the new community. This is the case of the individual who can no longer, by himself, achieve his end. It is the same with families, with cities, with nations, with modern states. The society resulting from collaboration realizes the purposes of individual members, but at the same time, transcends them in the name of the common good."

When we say that a state has a natural right to sovereignty, we mean that a people has the natural right to rule itself. A people is a group of human beings, sufficiently numerous and sufficiently prepared by experience and diversity of talent to constitute a state, that is, a perfect society. Its perfection lies in its supposed adequacy with respect to the end of human association - the common good. The fact that a Community is perfect does not mean that it is perfectly closed. It does mean that it is entitled to enter freely into relationships with other communities of a similar kind, and that it cannot rightfully be forced into such relationships.

The origin and meaning of the saying that a state has the natural right to sovereignty, therefore, is that one state may not forcibly impose its will upon another. This saying guarantees existing states the natural right to decide for themselves whether they will join a larger union. The naturalness of the right to self-rule is not contradicted when a given state freely decides to give up its supremacy; the naturalness of the right is preserved in the freedom with which it gives it up.

The motion toward world government is that motion in our time which carries with most purity an appeal to the aspirations of men for peace and justice. It is the best means by which the divinely sanctioned institutions of law and government can be used to improve the temporal lot of mankind. According to the mind of Saint Thomas, only the world state can now be the perfect community.