SOURCE: "The Concept of Social Hierarchy in the Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas," The Historian, Vol. XII, No. 1, Autumn, 1950, pp. 28-54.

[In the following essay, Archibald examines Aquinas's theories concerning the proper structure of society and the importance of hierarchy, status, and privilege.]

I

St. Thomas Aquinas, who since the century of his birth has been a major influence in the world of theology, philosophy, and social theory, has acquired a new importance in recent decades. The Church, within which he labored, has long honored him as one of its few supreme philosophers. Less than fifty years after his death he was canonized. At the Council of Trent his Summa Theologica lay open on the altar beside the Scriptures, and Pope has vied with Pope in pointing to his writings as guideposts of Christian thought and action. Innocent VI (1352-1362) declared of St. Thomas:

His doctrine above all other doctrine, with the one exception of the Holy Scriptures, has such a propriety of words, such a method of explanation, such a truth of opinions that no one who holds it will ever be found to have strayed from the path of truth, whereas anyone who has attacked it has always been suspected as to the truth.¹

Pius X (1903-1914) reaffirmed this judgment for the twentieth century when he wrote:

We therefore desired that all teachers of philosophy and sacred theology should be warned that if they deviated so much as a step, in metaphysics especially, from Aquinas, they exposed themselves to grave risk.—We now go further and solemnly declare that those who in their interpretations misrepresent or affect to despise the principles and major theses of his philosophy are not only not following St. Thomas but are even far astray from the saintly Doctor. If the doctrine of any writer or Saint has ever been approved by Us or Our Predecessors with such singular commendation and in such a way that to the commendation were added an invitation and order to propagate and defend it, it may easily be understood that it was commended to the extent that it agreed with the principles of Aquinas or was in no way opposed to them.²

Radiating out from the center of Catholic orthodoxy, the power of the Angelic Doctor's thought has extended far afield. Since the time of Leo XIII (1878-1903), a growing movement of Neo-Thomism has been evident. A flood of literature has accompanied and signified this movement.³ The names of Etienne Gilson and Martin Grabmann are sufficient proof that this literature has not been lacking in profound scholarship. It has been, however, with few and minor exceptions, a literature of apology and interpretation in terms of further unfoldment of an established truth. The bulk of the literature is concerned with problems of metaphysics and theology—as, indeed, is the bulk of St. Thomas' own writings—but there is also a large amount of commentary on Thomistic social theory.

It can be argued that the primary impulse behind the recently renewed examination of St. Thomas and his philosophy was not and is not an abstract interest in metaphysical subtleties, but an effort to find secure and valid guidance in a period of disturbed social relationships and shifting institutions. The importance which Thomistic social theory has come to assume for the contemporary student of the great Scholastic is indicated by the numerous doctoral dissertations at the Catholic University of America—a center of Neo-Thomism in the United States—which are devoted to analysis of St. Thomas and his thought. The majority of these studies deal with St. Thomas, either directly or tangentially, as a social theorist. St. Thomas possessed great significance as a social theorist in his own time; his followers have revived and confirmed this significance for the present age. It is consequently desirable to scrutinize carefully what pronouncements he made concerning society and its proper structure.

II

The thirteenth century, within which are contained the scant five decades of St. Thomas' life, is widely viewed as the crown or culmination of the medieval epoch. This was the century of Innocent III, of Frederick II, of Dante, a century of full bloom for institutions and attitudes which had been in process of development for almost a thousand years. The thirteenth century was characterized by as much stability as history ever exhibits. But it was a century, too, of the gnawing sound of change. There was the Albigensian difficulty, for instance, and the consequent need for establishment of inquisitorial procedures. There was the rise of a new and disturbing class, the commercial class, whose power increased as the cities burgeoned in the countryside. There was the threat of new philosophies, stemming from Greece and Rome and conveyed through the alien hands of Saracens, philosophies which challenged faith with reason and dogma with doubts.

St. Thomas Aquinas, however, was singularly at peace with the century of his birth. Child of a noble family whose lineage was ancient and exalted, he had reason from the beginning to cast his eyes about and find the world a satisfactory fabric of divine handiwork. He was also happy in the choice of his career, for he entered into religion at a time when institutionalized Christianity was at the height of its dignity and power. It is not surprising, then, that his work, when simply viewed, is seen to comprise a wholesale justifying and glorifying of the pattern of life and thought which predominated in his thirteenth century world. Far more fortunate than a Plato or an Augustine, who must needs watch while familiar ways and institutions tumbled down in chaos, he found it possible to admire the present and to await the future with complacency. His conservatism could be and was both confident and aggressive.

He was aware of the threat of change, to be sure, and wherever he observed disturbance, he combatted it. His most notable contribution to the maintenance of thirteenth century stability was his effort to neutralize one source of change, at least, by enmeshing Aristotelian rationalism in the web of orthodox theology. Or, to use another more appropriate and consistent metaphor, he converted reason from a potential weapon to a building stone by giving it a subordinate place in the pyramid of orthodoxy.

The pyramid, with its hierarchy of place, its order and solidity, is a conceptual structure eminently suited to a philosopher whose purpose was to fix in eternity the lineaments of his own time. Thus in the Thomistic view the entire universe is such a pyramid—a pyramid which finds its ultimate point in God. Descending from God, the expanse of creation stretches out in an ordered hierarchy of superior and inferior being. Since the Deity is assumed to be complete and perfect in Himself, there arises the question of the purpose of creation and creatures. The Angelic Doctor discovers the answer to this question in the will of God to express His perfection in as many diverse ways as possible. Consequent to the fact of diversity is the necessity of order. St. Thomas conceives this order as accomplished through the direction of diversity in an ascending series toward its source, which is One.⁴

To organize in proper sequence the diversity of the universe, St. Thomas turns to a number of traditional capacities and characteristics presumed to exist in totality and perfection in the Deity and to be more and more partially and imperfectly present in the descending order of creatures. God is pure spirit, pure act, the unmoved mover, the uncaused cause. Hence the more adulterated with matter, the more weakened with potency a creature is, the less it moves itself and the more it is moved by others, the less it causes and the more it is caused, the lower in the scale the creature stands. Laboring thus with metaphysical justifications, St. Thomas emerges finally with the traditional order of creatures and creation: inanimate nature at the base, plants following, animals next (divided in turn into those that are capable of self-motion and those that are not), and spiritual or intellectual substances at the crown.⁵ The basic dichotomy in this series is the again traditional metaphysical division of the universe into the realm of mind, spirit, soul, and the realm of matter or the animal.

Man, in this universe, is placed halfway between the realms of spirit and matter. He is a composite of animal and soul and contains within his own nature an hierarchy of powers. Rightly organized, this hierarchy is capped by reason. The soul must rule the body, and within the soul, with its nutritive, sensitive, and rational levels, reason must dominate. When man is thus composed within himself, he is ordered in accordance with Divine reason; he is virtuous.⁶ Man's infinite sins have therefore a common source, which is the rebellion of man's lower faculties against the rightful rule of reason.⁷ Rebelling against reason, man rebels against God. Reason, moreover, is that capacity which most particularly links him to the realm of spirit and ultimately to the Pure Intelligence which is the Deity.⁸ In designating man as a rational animal, St. Thomas defines the human species. But to assert that all men are rational is for St. Thomas merely to delimit the human from the subhuman level and not to establish the unvarying equality of humanity within itself. Diversity exists within the human species; individualism exists. Permeated as he is with the viewpoint of hierarchy, St. Thomas conceives difference and inequality as virtually synonymous. Expanding fully the implications of this concept, he develops an hierarchical structure which from one viewpoint may be compared, not so much to a pyramid, as to a totem pole of status, whose length is exactly equivalent to the extent of human differences.

Since the human soul constitutes the form of man and is single and specific in its nature,⁹ St. Thomas seeks the source of human diversity in the matter which enters into the construction of the human composite. Every human organism is conceived and develops in the womb with its own peculiar complement of fleshly skills and sensory equipment. And each soul, while retaining the specific character and the basic style of all human souls, is nonetheless tailored to fit, at the point of its introduction into the embyronic organism, the particular shape of a particular body.¹⁰ Even when the body dies and the soul survives alone for a period while awaiting reunion with a spiritualized body on the Day of Judgment, even then each soul is individual and different since it retains the fit and the proportion which marked it in its life of union with the flesh.¹¹ All these differences, furthermore, between body and body, soul and soul, and one human composite and another, are differences, not of simple variety, but of value, of better and worse, of more or less perfect. For differences, wherever they exist in the Thomistic universe, are vertically, and not horizontally, ordered; differences aretypically inequalities, and inequalities, in the long run, are matters of greater or less goodness. St. Thomas writes:

Perfect goodness would not be found in things unless there were degrees of goodness, so that, to wit, there be some things better than others: else all the possible degrees of goodness would not be fulfilled nor would any creature be found like to God to the point of being better than others. More-over this would do away with the chief beauty in things if the order resulting from distinction and disparity were abolished; and what is more, the absence of inequality in goodness would involve the absence of multitude, since it is by reason of things differing from one another that one is better than another: for instance, the animate than the inanimate, and the rational than the irrational. Consequently, if there were absolute equality among things, there would be but one created good, which is clearly derogatory to the goodness of the creature.¹²

In accordance with his emphasis on reason and intelligence as chief among human abilities, St. Thomas tends to point to intellectual capacity as the hallmark of a human being's excellence.¹³ Since he also tends to connect reason and morality, the more intelligent man becomes the more virtuous man as well. "Now," St. Thomas asserts, "the virtues are nothing but those perfections whereby reason is directed to God, and the inferior powers regulated according to the dictate of reason.…¹⁴ The Angelic Doctor continues a further tradition common among philosophers in pursuit of an intellectual elite in that he joins excellence of mind and soul with an excellence of body compatible with a life of physical ease and leisure rather than with a life of manual toil. The fine mind, he declares, is found, not in the strong-muscled and broad-shouldered body, but in the body with soft flesh and delicate sensitivities.¹⁵

The differences which make an almost infinite hierarchy of human individuals are solidified and organized in human society into differences of authority and status. Man is by nature social; only the man who is in some sense either beyond or beneath the human level can live in solitude.¹⁶ And society is by nature hierarchical. The multitude of individuals in any given society, St. Thomas writes, would be hopelessly confused if that society were not divided into different orders which are ranked hierarchically.¹⁷ Society, in being hierarchical, not only reflects the fact of human differences, but also, as part of a pyramidal universe, contains its own rationale of status. God's universe is ordered. Society is ordered. And inequality is the essence of order. "It belongs to divine providence that order be preserved in the world;" St. Thomas observes, "and suitable order consists in a proportionate descent from the highest to the lowest.…¹⁸

So germane to society is inequality that even in the society of the State of Innocence, which St. Thomas pictures as very numerous, since the processes of reproduction were normally active while the hand of death was stayed, even in the society of Eden, there was inequality of status, as between husband and wife, father and child, ruler and ruled. "It is written (Rom. xiii. 1)," St. Thomas remarks, "The things which are of God, are well ordered. But order chiefly consists in inequality; for Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xix): Order disposes things equal and unequal in their proper place. Therefore in the primitive state, which was most proper and orderly, inequality would have existed."¹⁹ The only level of fallen society lacking in the society of perfection was the lowest level of all, the level of the unfree, of the serf and the slave.²⁰ In this matter St. Thomas departs both from early Christian teachings and from the traditions of Roman law, which maintained the society of the Stateof Innocence or the state of nature to be completely equalitarian and free.²¹

III

St. Thomas' effort to reproduce in the society of fallen man the hierarchical pattern of the universe is clearly seen in his prescription for the good political society or state. Although he speaks without negativism of Aristotle's aristocracy and polity (the latter of which is, after all, little more than a broadened aristocracy), his unequivocal preference, as he shows in his De Regimine Principum, is for monarchy. As God, by being One, brings the diversity of the universe to a single point, so the ruler, by being one, brings to a point of unity the diversity of society and thus assures peace for all its members.²² Again the structure of the pyramid emerges, and beneath the capstone of the monarch the orders of the secular world are ranged in layers of status, the bulk of which increases the farther from the top they lie.

The Angelic Doctor apparently assumes that under the guidance of Divine Providence the position of ruler will be for the most part occupied by a man whose intelligence and virtue are such that he is fit to rule. This assumption forms a necessary basis for his support of monarchy as the most desirable type of government and forms the basis, too, for his acceptance of absolutism as the pattern of control. A virtuous king is the best guarantee of popular welfare. He reigns as God's emissary on earth. "Therefore let the king recognize," St. Thomas writes, "that such is the office which he undertakes, namely, that he is to be in the kingdom what the soul is in the body, and what God is in the world… he has been appointed to this position in place of God, to exercise judgment in his kingdom.…"²³

Although it is the welfare of the community which is the proper goal of government—and hence there is a positive correlation between the consent of the community to be ruled for its own good and monarchial authority—St. Thomas nowhere provides a firm foundation for the idea of the "natural" or "original" right of the people as against the power of the king. He follows closely the Aristotelian concept that, since political relationship is grounded in nature, the real foundation of the order of dominance and subordination must be sought in the natural inequality of men. On the whole, then, he who leads is wiser and better than he who follows, and rebellion on the part of the follower is treason and sin.

St. Thomas does, indeed, admit the occasional possibility that vice may usurp the power which rightfully belongs to virtue. He deals at some length in De Regimine Principum with the classical problem of the tyrant. But social status, as such, possesses for St. Thomas a dignity and permanence entirely apart from the worthiness of the individual occupying it, and only after much demurring and with many qualifications does he justify the overthrow, by human intervention, of open tyranny. "For Peter admonishes us," St. Thomas observes, "to be reverently subject to our masters, not only to the good and gentle but also to the froward (I. Petr. II. 18): 'For if one who suffers unjustly bear his trouble for conscience sake, this is a grace."'²⁴ In yet another passage he elaborates this dictum:

Now it is to be observed that a person may be honored not only for his own virtue, but also for another's: thus princes and prelates, although they be wicked, are honoured as standing in God's place and as representing the community over which they are placed.… a fool is honoured if he stand in God's place or represent the whole community.…²⁵

At one point in his writings St. Thomas makes the traditional tripartite division of society into three classes: an upper class, a middle class, and a lower class.

"So in every city," he writes, "a threefold order of men is to be seen, some of whom are supreme, as the nobles; others are the last, as the common people, while others hold a place between these, as the middle class."²⁶ In this passage, it appears that he follows the lead of Aristotle and divides into three merely a segment of the population of a given area, which itself constitutes an elite: the elite of the citizenry for Aristotle, the elite of the free for St. Thomas. Here in this passage is one of St. Thomas' few direct references to a nobility as such. Yet the whole tenor of his social attitudes clearly exhibits his acceptance of a class whose status of superiority is hereditary and is displayed in various perquisites of privilege and presumed superior capacity, such as the acquisition of important governmental offices and the performance of the principal tasks of guidance and responsibility in the state.

The middle class of which he speaks (he applies the term populus honorabilis to this group) is not defined with exactitude. It apparently shades imperceptibly through grades of gentry and lesser nobility into the class above it, but it is clearly demarcated from the lower class at least by the absence of the stain of manual toil. It may be assumed to include in St. Thomas' time the rising mercantile group. St. Thomas, however, is by no means ready to grant a status of dignity to the trader. He admits the need for commerce in the well-regulated commonwealth and hence he gives a place to the commercial figure, but he would have that trade and that trader carefully hedged round by numerous limitations on business enterprise., "Trading," he declares, "considered in itself, has a certain debasement attaching thereto, insofar as, by its very nature, it does not imply a virtuous or necessary end."²⁷

St. Thomas, who was himself a member of the landed aristocracy, clearly sees agriculture, and not trade, as the essential economic basis of the good state.²⁸ Agriculture, in the medieval pattern, with its steady line of inheritance of land holding and the isolation of its workers on scattered estates away from possible contamination by city questionings and discontents (and incapable, it might be added, of easy combination in large groups for purposes of protest)—medieval agriculture spelled economic and social stability for St. Thomas.²⁹ Trade, on the other hand, spelled instability, mobility, and change. St. Thomas preferred stability.

Manual labor, in the literal sense of work with the hands, is, in St. Thomas' view, the mark par excellence of servile or semi-servile status. Though St. Thomas concedes that all useful human labor has dignity, he constructs an elaborate scale of greater or lesser dignity for various kinds of labor, a scale which reaches up to the life of contemplation at its peak and down through grades of less involvement of the intellect and more involvement of the body to manual labor at the base. The division which St. Thomas makes between the liberal and the servile arts is in keeping with this scale and the concepts it embodies. The liberal arts, which are declared to be nobler than the arts necessary to the sustenance of the body, derive their name, St. Thomas states, from the fact that they pertain chiefly to the soul, which in man is free.³⁰ But in St. Thomas' society these arts were also chiefly restricted in their practice to free men. The servile arts are so called because they pertain primarily to the body, and the body is in a certain sense in servitude to the soul.³¹ But they were also linked in thirteenth century Europe to a class whose status was servile.

Manual labor, in the Thomistic synthesis, has gained somewhat in honor over its place in Aristotelian attitudes. It has assumed, as one of its possible functions, the subjugation of the body, through punishing and exhausting it, to the rightful rule of reason, and a well-born man may obtain favor in God's eyes by humbling himself to the extent of working with his hands.³² But this is a voluntary abasement equivalent to King Louis IX's washing the feet of beggars as a token of humility. To work with one's hands of necessity is to find oneself, in the Christian world of St. Thomas, either in the lowest stratum of the free or, more generally, in the vast anonymity of the servile mass.

The servile status in which, without effort at distinction, St. Thomas groups both serf and slave, is asserted to have come into existence at the time of the Fall.³³ It is in some sense punitive, as, indeed, manual labor, which is the particular burden appertaining to servility, is also punitive.³⁴ Servility is further associated with positive rather than with natural law.³⁵ The very fact, however, that St. Thomas assumes the serf to be not a serf by nature but by way of punishment for original sin and/or by way of social convenience makes all the more astonishing his complacent approval of servility as the status of what was in his time by far the majority of the population of Europe.

Why are the many to be punished in this fashion for original sin while a minority escapes? The answer is in part to be found perhaps in St. Thomas' view of the rarity of grace, either in this world or the next, and the generality of damnation. St. Thomas further rationalizes the situation by making the traditional linkage between servility and inferior mental ability and moral stamina. He maintains that it is to the slave's advantage to be a slave, since typically the slave is one who would become debauched by the heady wine of freedom.³⁶ His argumentation moves even closer to that of Aristotle, who accepted slavery as altogether in congruence with natural law, when he writes, "For those who excel in intelligence are naturally rulers; whereas those who are less intelligent, but stronger in body, seem made by nature for service, as Aristotle says in his Politics. The statement of Solomon (Prov. xi. 24) is in agreement with this: The fool shall serve the wise."³⁷ Again the echo of Aristotle is heard when St. Thomas writes: "The proper end of a group of free men is different from that of a group of serfs; the free man is one who is for his own sake (causa sui), the serf is one whose whole being belongs to another.""³⁸

St. Thomas preserves certain minimal rights to the slave or serf: the right to self-preservation in terms of the animal necessities of food and rest and the right to reproduce, with the implied right of marriage.³⁹ The strength of the marriage bond on the servile level is considerably weakened, however, by the prescription that concealment of servile status by one of the parties to the marriage contract, the other being free, is grounds for annulment of the marriage.⁴⁰ The man of servile status cannot enter Orders unless and until his freedom be obtained.⁴¹ This mass of the unfree, this great majority of the populace, are, of course, to be excluded from participation and even apparently from consideration in the political life of the state. "For if men assembled merely to live, then animals and serfs would form a part of the civil body," St. Thomas writes in his De Regimine Principum⁴² (borrowing almost word for word a phrase from Aristotle's Politics).⁴³ But the end of the state is not mere animal livelihood; it is the enjoyment of God to be achieved through virtuous living.⁴⁴ Serfs, therefore, along with animals, are not part of the political body.

IV

When St. Thomas' social theory is viewed from one standpoint, it appears that he sees society—and, in particular, political society or the state—as composed, not of disparate individuals, but of groups of varying types and dimensions, each of which stands in its own right as a little principality, a little hierarchy. Thus for him the typical subject of a state, a free man or, more precisely, since the free man with whom St. Thomas is primarily concerned owns unfree men, a man of means or even noble status, is himself, as head of a family, a ruler in his own domain. It is to the unit of the family that St. Thomas most directly attaches the serf, and the head of the family thus maintains a variety of rule over a variety of subjects in his small territory: the rule of a despot over his slaves or serfs, the rule of a monarch over his children, and the rule of a republican representative (with an area of consent for the subject) over his wife.⁴⁵

The woman's society, like that of the serf, is in St. Thomas' view essentially the society of the family. By the very fact of this limitation of realm St. Thomas reinforces his rigid doctrine of the unqualified inferiority of woman to man. From the elaborate Thomistic analysis, woman, as a group and generality, emerges inferior to man in every aspect of her being. Physiologically she is inferior, since St. Thomas perpetuates the Aristotelian concept of woman as a misshapen or half-formed man.⁴⁶ The relative weakness of her reason is emphasized,⁴⁷ and from this weakness follows the greater susceptibility of her soul to the disorder of sin.⁴⁸ God is asserted to have created her as a helpmate for man in only one essential function, the process of reproduction. Another man, St. Thomas asserts, would have been more suitable as a helpmate in all other regards.⁴⁹ And even in the process of generation her role is that of the inferior; man is the active principle of generation, woman the passive; man provides the form of the newly created being, woman only the matter.⁵⁰

Woman's status is in accord with her asserted incapacities. As a child she is subject to her father. As an adult, she is subject to her husband, whose power over her is limited only by the absence of the power of life and death. The husband is specifically permitted to correct his wife with corporal punishment in case of need.⁵¹ He is assigned control over the financial affairs of the household, and the wife is cautioned, along with children and serfs, not to give alms without her husband's permission.⁵² The woman's authority over her children, which is at the start a secondary authority in the line of family command, is further weakened by St. Thomas' contention that, absolutely speaking, the father is to be loved by his children more than is the mother. "For father and mother," he asserts, "are loved as principles of our natural origin. Now the father is principle in a more excellent way than the mother, because he is the active principle, while the mother is a passive and material principle."⁵³

Although the subjection of the wife is modified by the assurance that she is not a slave in the home of her husband,⁵⁴ woman, in a different instance, is compared with slave to her own limitation and the slave's advantage. Whereas the slave, it is stated, is not necessarily a slave by nature, the woman, in whatever circumstance she may find herself, is always by her nature a subject.⁵⁵ For the slave there is the possibility of escape from dependence and tutelage to freedom; for the woman, there is none.

Another of the societies within society with which St. Thomas is concerned is the society of the Church. The existent structure of hierarchy is conceived as the natural and necessary form of this society, especially in view of the intimate relationship which holds between the Church and the designs of God. The supremacy of the Pope becomes an earthly symbol of the supreme headship of Christ, and bishops and priests fill out the lower levels of the pyramid of holiness.⁵⁶ The hierarchy of the Church is not to be equated with the total hierarchy of society, however, for, although the Church exists within society, it is also a structure apart from and above society. The sacrament of Orders may not be validly assumed by those of servile status,⁵⁷ by women,⁵⁸ by men of illegitimate birth (although it is open to fathers of illegitimate children who repent of their indiscretions),⁵⁹ and by any who suffer from physical deficiency or blemish.⁶⁰

The Church, then, will draw its functionaries typically from the elite of the whole society. Between the functionaries of the Church and the lay members, St. Thomas establishes a sufficiently large gulf to assure superiority of the former over the latter, in spiritual affairs at least. Although St. Thomas does not concern himself in any detail with the great problems of relationship between Church and State which troubled his period, the weight of his opinion seems to lie in the area of preference for papal above kingly authority. The good king is, in the eyes of St. Thomas, the king who rules in strict accordance with the truths of God, and the Church is the appointed vessel for conveyance of the truths of God to men. The king, therefore, must turn to the Church and to the Pope, who is its head, to find the guidance which assures righteous dominion. St. Thomas writes in De Regimine Principum:

Consequently, in order that spiritual things might be distinguished from earthly things, the ministry of this kingdom [the kingdom of Christ] has been entrusted not to earthly kings, but to priests, and in the highest degree to the chief priest, the successor of St. Peter, the Vicar of Christ, the Roman Pontiff, to whom all the kings of Christian peoples are to be subject as to our Lord Jesus Christ Himself. For those to whom pertains the care of intermediate ends should be subject to him to whom pertains the care of the ultimate end, and be directed by his rule.… in the law of Christ, kings must be subject to priests."⁶¹

In considering the highest possible life for man on earth, St. Thomas provides a certain escape from pyramids of family, Church, and state, an escape, in a sense, for the rarest of the chosen, from all society. In choosing the life on earth which is most like the life of eternity, in selecting the labor which lifts man farthest from the level of the animal and nearest to the level of the divine, he turns to the life and labor of contemplation. "Now the contemplative life," he declares, "pertains directly and immediately to the love of God.… On the other hand, the active life is more directly concerned with the love of our neighbor, because it is busy about serving.… Wherefore the contemplative life is generally of greater merit than the active life."⁶² He is careful to make the contemplative life, however, no universal prescription for all men. Only those may turn to it, he states, whose physical requirements are provided for by other means than the need for personal labor and who have no family responsibilities. "It is better to be wise than to be rich," he quotes in counsel, "yet for one who is in need, it is better to be rich."⁶³

Even more than the princes and judges and bishops of the world, the contemplators of eternity are to comprise a highly select elite, whose peculiar leisure is provided and secured by the physical toil of many others. The simplicity of this picture is somewhat disturbed by the fact that in one passage St. Thomas grants a status of greater honor to the teacher and preacher than to the contemplative recluse—he comments that it is better to enlighten than to shine-—⁶⁴ and in another passage he states that the activity of the bishop is potentially worthy of greater reward in eternity than is the quietude of the religious.⁶⁵ Nonetheless, the major weight of his opinion establishes contemplation at the summit of earthly endeavor, and, in the manner of Plato and Aristotle before him, St. Thomas asserts the best of all possible human enterprises to be the enterprise which was his own.

Merely to state the fact of differences of status is not to realize the full impact of St. Thomas' concept of social hierarchy. For he interweaves a variety of perquisities of privilege into the pattern of superior position. Higher status involves greater power and authority over the lives of others. Pope and king and head of family (the extended family of wife, children, and serfs) are manipulators of many destinies; the serf's area of control is small and partial. Justice is also cognizant of privilege and position. It is a greater crime to commit an injury against a king or other public official or a priest than to commit an injury against a man of lesser status.⁶⁶ And the Golden Rule—at least in its negative statement as a natural law—its absolutism likewise shakes before the even greater absolutism of hierarchy. "This precept of the natural law," it is stated in the Summa, "Do not to another what thou wouldst not were done to thyself should be understood with the provision that there be equal proportion. For if a superior is unwilling to be withstood by his subject, he is not therefore bound not to withstand his subject."⁶⁷

An entire body of justice, distributive justice, is evoked to deal with proportional distribution of social goods to the many levels of status within society. This justice is distinguished from commutative justice, for which the basis is the equality in value of the things exchanged. St. Thomas maintains that those of higher status, by virtue simply of their status, rightfully receive more of the goods which society has to offer, whether or not they perform the greater services which are the obligations of position. According to St. Thomas,

When a man who has served the community is paid for his services, this is to be referred to as commutative, not distributive, justice. Because distributive justice considers the equality, not between the thing received and the thing done, but between the thing received by one person and the thing received by another according to the respective conditions of those persons.⁶⁸

The propriety of inequality of reward in proportion to inequality of status is even more definitely affirmed in the following statement:

Consequently in distributive justice a person receives all the more of the common goods, according as he holds a more prominent position in the community.… Hence in distributive justice the mean is observed, not according to equality between thing and thing, but according to proportion between thing and persons: in such a way that even as one person surpasses another, so that which is given to one person surpasses that which is allotted to another.⁶⁹

Insofar as these rewards consist of property and wealth, some rightfully possess more of them than others. "The rich," St. Thomas writes, "ought to be honoured by reason of their occupying a higher position in the community.…"⁷⁰

Poverty, to be sure, is asserted to be a desirable aspect of the life of virtue and a necessary aspect of the life of cloistered and mendicant faith. On the Day of Judgment, it is stated in the Summa, the judicial power will be granted to poverty, and "those who left all things and followed God" will be the judges, while "those who made right use of what they had lawfully" will be judged. The passage continues:

Now, in the advancement to perfection, the first thing that occurs to be renounced is externalwealth, because this is the last thing of all to be acquired. And that which is last in the order of generation is the first in the order of destruction: wherefore among the beatitudes whereby we advance to perfection, the first place is given to poverty. Thus judicial power corresponds to poverty in so far as this is the first disposition to the aforesaid perfection. Hence also it is that this same power is not promised to all who are voluntarily [sic] poor, but to those who leave all and follow Christ in accordance with the perfection of life.⁷¹

Poverty, like manual labor, then, acquires this quality of virtue and sanctity, not in necessity, but in a situation of voluntary sacrifice of wealth. The man who is poor by necessity is a man of low social status and underserving of honor, and a man of low social status is rightfully poor.

In summing up the structure of society, as St. Thomas presents it, it is easy to observe that he has in part simply outlined the pattern of living of thirteenth century Europe and has then ptoceeded to defend that pattern as proper for all societies and times. There is, however, a deeper stream of argument as well. For St. Thomas is defending not just his own specific society nor societies like his own in other places and eras but the structure of hierarchy, status, and privilege as such. This structure is developed, furthermore, in terms of a specially gifted, divinely sponsored, and leisured elite ruling with stable power over a dull-witted and sodden-souled mass of manual workers—ruling in this fashion, finally, because the mass is presumably incapable of managing itself.

V

To the sight of the Christian eye, the status of man on earth is traditionally a thing of little moment in comparison with the vast sweep of his status in the world to come. What has St. Thomas to say on the subject of the society of eternity? In the first place, that society is hierarchical, another pyramid, indeed, which, like the pyramid of the universe, finds its peak in God. There is an elite, ranged in gradations of merit, who are the saved; there is a majority, ranged in gradations of shame, who are the damned.⁷² The everlasting joy of the former is to be equalled in intensity only by the everlasting torment of the latter. An interesting question hereupon arises: To what extent will the hierarchy of eternity match the hierarchy of earth in terms of the status of particular individuals? Although St. Thomas provides no direct discussion on the subject of this question, the logic of contingent arguments leads to the unavoidable conclusion that, on the whole, the matching will be close.

The line of logic may be developed in this fashion. Whether from the standpoint of predestination or of the earning of merit through good works, those of superior virtue are certainly most likely to find themselves among the saved. But those of superior virtue are also those of superior reason and intellect. And those of superior reason and intellect are likely to occupy superior status in the society of this world. Therefore, those occupying superior status in the world's society are likewise those most likely to be saved.

A number of arguments buttress this position. Among them is the assumption that those of superior social status are in a better position to practice virtue than those of humble condition. The giving of alms, for instance, a potent method of acquiring merit or displaying the fact that one, through predestination, possesses merit, is a virtue within the reach only of those who have alms to give. Those of servile status and women and minors, as has before been noted, are specifically enjoinedfrom giving alms without permission from the head of the household, and by giving permission, the head of the household acquires some at least of the merit from the almsgiving of all his dependents. And it is voluntary poverty and the voluntary abasement of oneself in the performance of manual labor by which merit is acquired. Who may follow these preachments of voluntarism except the man of previous wealth and leisure?

There is, in addition, St. Thomas' preoccupation with the process of gathering merit through the guidance of others in the paths of virtue. The bishop, he states, is in a better position to acquire such merit than the monk or the priest.⁷³ And reignative prudence, the prudence which guides a ruler in his functions of authority, is, in all of its varieties, a higher order of virtue than the prudence which leads the subject to follow and obey. An unequivocal declaration of this notion is to be found in De Regimine Principum where it is asserted that for the virtuous monarch there waits in heaven a crown that shines beyond the brilliance of almost any other. The passage which is climaxed by this observation deserves full statement because in it is contained much else of the spirit of St. Thomas' hierarchical thinking:

Now it remains further to consider that they who discharge the kingly office worthily and laudably will receive a high degree of heavenly happiness. For if happiness is the reward of virtue, it follows that a higher degree of happiness is due to greater virtue. Now, that indeed is signal virtue by which a man can guide not himself alone, but others: and the more persons he rules the greater is his virtue.… Thus greater virtue is required to rule a household than to rule one's self, and much greater to rule a state and a kingdom. To discharge well the office of a king is thus a work of excelling virtue. To it, therefore, is due a reward of excelling happiness.

Again, in all arts and positions of authority they are more worthy of praise who rule others well than those who live well under others' direction. In speculative matters, for instance, it is greater to impart truth to others by teaching than to be able to grasp what is taught by others. So, too, among the crafts an architect who plans a building is more highly esteemed and paid a higher wage than the builder who does the manual labour under his di-rection: also in warfare the strategy of the general wins greater glory from victory than the bravery of the soldier. It is the same for the ruler of a multitude, in regard to the things which each individual, accor-ding to his power, has to do.… Consequently a king is worthy of a greater reward if he governs his subjects well than any of his subjects who lives well under his king.⁷⁴

High office, to be sure, embraces the threat of peril as well as the promise of reward. The king who sinks into the role of tyrant, the rich man who feeds only his own covetousness upon his wealth, the priest who breaks his vows are all marked out for a level of damnation, whose depth is deeper by the very height from which they fell.⁷⁵ This warning, however, does not seriously disrupt the aspect of St. Thomas' system of hierarchy which appears to offer to good kings, prudent nobles, beneficent bishops, and the almsgiving rich more chance of salvation than it offers to serfs whose opportunities for virtuous action are circumscribed by limitations of mind and environment.

VI

The writings of St. Thomas Aquinas are enormous in quantity and scope and extend through more than twenty years of the life of an extremely active intellect. Complete consistency is not to be expected from such a mass of commentary and speculation. Within these thousands of pages there are statements which conflict one with another. The very position which the Angelic Doctor has occupied as the beacon light of Catholic orthodoxy has made all the more probable quarrels among his disciples as to what he really said and really meant. Recent students of St. Thomas, moreover, have sought to find in his philosophy solutions to contemporary problems, and, by injecting attitudes and prejudices never known in the thirteenth century, have further confused a picture which, to begin with, was not of crystal clarity.⁷⁶

The effort of the scholar must be, first of all, to see St. Thomas and his philosophy, not in terms of the nineteenth or the twentieth century, but in terms of the thirteenth. The endeavor then must be, when due weight has been given to contradictions and exceptions,⁷⁷ to find the central theme of argument. This central theme, in the area of social theory, has appeared to me to be the concept of hierarchy and order. The society in which St. Thomas lived was hierarchically organized. On the whole, he approved of that society; he was a conservative; he resisted change. His philosophy, even in its metaphysical aspects, reflects and embodies this initial judgment in favor of his thirteenth century world and its inequalitarian structure. In Thomistic doctrine, Etienne Gilson remarks, "l'univers est essentielle-ment une hierarchie. Le problème philosophique consistera donc à en marquer l'ordonnance exacte en situant chaque classe d'êtres à son véritable degré."⁷⁸ In Thomistic doctrine, likewise, society is essentially a hierarchy, and the problem for the social theorist is to place each social class and ultimately each individual member of society in the exact status which is due.

The writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, in brief recapitulation, provide the following picture of human origin and destiny. Each human individual is an especially created composite of soul and body, a composite in which the capacities and incapacities of the particular body shape and determine certain proportional characteristics of the soul. This particular human individual comes forth to occupy a particular status in the society of the world. In accordance with his performance in that status (which performance may be assumed to be determined by the capacities with which he was born and by the opportunities for virtue which his status affords him), he occupies a particular niche in eternity. Sinking with the majority, he finds a depth among the damned; rising with the minority, he finds a height among the saved. Once fixed in this hierarchy, he never moves again. It may be wondered, however, whether in this Thomistic scheme of life, the individual, from the first moment of God's thought of him, has ever been otherwise than frozen in his place.

Notes

Dr. Archibald is an instructor in history at Stanford University. This paper is a revision of one read at the annual meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association at Seattle, Washington, December 29, 1948.

¹ Quoted in Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter on the Restoration of Christian Philosophy, August 4, 1879.

² Pius X, Moto Proprio Doctoris Angelici, June 29, 1914.

³ Vernon J. Bourke, Thomistic Bibliography, 1920-1940 (Supplement to Volume 21, The Modern Schoolman, St. Louis, 1945).

⁴ St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (English Dominican translation, London, 1923-1929, 4 vols.), Bk. III, ch. 97. Listed hereafter as Cont. Gent., III, 97.

⁵Cont. Gent., II, 95.

⁶Cont. Gent., III, 121.

⁷ St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (English Dominican translation, London, 1912-1925, 21 vols.), prima secundae, question 71, article 2, corpus. Listed hereafter as Sum. Theol., I-II, q. 71, a. 2, c.

⁸Sum. Theol., II-II (secunda secundae), q. 2, a. 3, c.

⁹Sum. Theol., I-II, q. 63, a. 1, c.

¹⁰ St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentarium In Libros IV Sentiarum (Vives ed., Paris, 1880), Bk. II, d. 32, q. 2, a. 3. Listed hereafter as Sent., II, d. 32, q. 2, a. 3.

¹¹Cont. Gent., II, 81.

¹²Cont. Gent, III, 71.

¹³Sum. Theol., I (prima pars), q. 85, a. 7, c.

¹⁴Sum. Theol., I, q. 95, a. 3, c.

¹⁵Sum. Theol., I, q. 85, a. 7, c.

¹⁶Sum. Theol., II-II, q. 188, a. 8, ad 5.

¹⁷Sum. Theol., I, q. 108, a. 2, c.

¹⁸Cont. Gent., III, 78.

¹⁹Sum. Theol., I, q. 96, a. 3, sed contra. (Italics in the translation).

²⁰Sum. Theol., I, q. 96, a. 4, c.

²¹ Alexander D'Entreves, The Medieval Contribution to Political Thought (Oxford University Press, 1939), 31.

²² St. Thomas Aquinas, De Regimine Principum (English translation, On the Governance of Rulers, by Gerald B. Phelan, Toronto, 1935), Bk. I, ch. 2. Listed hereafter as De Reg., I, 2.

²³De Reg., 1, 12.

²⁴De Reg., I, 6.

²⁵Sum. Theol., II-II, q. 63, a. 3, c.

²⁶Sum. Theol., 1, q. 108, a. 2, c.

²⁷Sum. Theol., II-II, q. 77, a. 4, c. The Angelic Doctor's repudiation of usury and his championing of the principle of "just price" are well known aspects of his economic doctrine. When these pronouncements are viewed, however, not from the standpoint of recent agitation against the abuses of capitalism, but rather in the context of their author's own time, it is apparent that they represent, at least in part, the effort of an established aristocracy, whose power was grounded in the land, to combat and confine an upstart group.

²⁸De Reg., II, 3.

²⁹Ibid.

³⁰Sum. Theol., II-II, q. 57, a. 3, ad 3.

³¹Ibid.

³²Sum. Theol., I-II, q. 30, a. 3, c.

³³Sent., II, d. 44, q. 1, a. 3, c.

³⁴Sum. Theol., II-II, q. 164, a. 2, ad 3.

³⁵Sum. Theol., III (Supple.), (tertia pars, Supplementum), q. 52, a. 1, ad 2. The third part of the Summa Theologica remained unfinished at the death of St. Thomas. Its completion, presumably from notes and instructions left by the master, was accomplished by a disciple, Reginald of Piperno, and is known as the Supplementum. In accordance with the practice of other students of the subject, I have treated the Supplementum as an integral part of the Summa and of St. Thomas' thought.

³⁶Sum. Theol., II-II, q. 57, a. 3, c.

³⁷Cont. Gent., III, 81. (Italics in translation).

³⁸De Reg., 1, 1.

³⁹Sent., IV, d. 36, q. 1, a. 2, c.

⁴⁰Sum. Theol., III (Supple.), q. 52, a. 1, c.

⁴¹Sum. Theol., III (Supple.), q. 39, a. 3, c.

⁴²De Reg., 1, 14. (Italics in translation).

⁴³ Aristotle, The Politics (English translation by H. Rackham, London, 1932), Bk. III, ch. v.

⁴⁴De Reg., I, 14.

⁴⁵ St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentarium In Libros Politicorum (Vives ed., Paris, 1880), Bk. I, ch. 10.

⁴⁶Sum. Theol., I, q. 99, a. 2, ad 1.

⁴⁷Cont. Gent., III, 123.

⁴⁸Sum. Theol., III (Supple.), q. 62, a. 5, ad 5.

⁴⁹Sum. Theol., 1, q. 92, a. 1, c.

⁵⁰Cont. Gent., IV, 11, Sum. Theol., Il-II, q. 26, a. 10, ad 1.

⁵¹Sum. Theol., III (Supple.), q. 62, a. 2, ad 1.

⁵²Sum. Theol., II-II, q. 32, a. 8, c.

⁵³Sum. Theol., II-II, q. 26, a. 10, c.

⁵⁴Sum. Theol., I, q. 92, a. 1, ad 2.

⁵⁵Sum. Theol., III (Supple.), q. 39, a. 3, ad 4.

⁵⁶Cont. Gent., IV, 76.

⁵⁷Sum. Theol., III (Supple.), q. 39, a. 3, c.

⁵⁸Sum. Theol., III (Supple.), q. 39, a. 1, ad 1.

⁵⁹Sum. Theol., III (Supple.), q. 39, a. 5, c.

⁶⁰Sum. Theol., III (Supple.), q. 39, a. 6, c.

⁶¹De Reg., 1, 14.

⁶²Sum. Theol., II-II, q. 182, a. 2, c. (Italics in translation).

⁶³Sum. Theol., II-II, q. 182, a. 1, c. (Italics in translation).

⁶⁴Sum. Theol., II-TI, q. 188, a. 6, c.

⁶⁵Sum. Theol., II-II, q. 184, a. 7, c.

⁶⁶Sum. Theol., I-II, q. 73, a. 9, c.

⁶⁷Sum. Theol., III (Supple.), q. 65, a. 1, ad 8. (Italics in translation).

⁶⁸Sum. Theol., II-II, q. 61, a. 4, c.

⁶⁹Sum Theol., TI-IT, q. 62, a. 2, c.

⁷⁰ Sum. Theol., TI-II, q. 63, a. 3, c.

⁷¹Sum. Theol., III (Supple.), q. 89, a. 2, c.

⁷² SUM. Theol., I, q. 23, a. 7, c.

⁷³ SUM. Theol., II-TI, q. 184, a. 7, c.

⁷⁴De Reg., I, 9.

⁷⁵De Reg., I, 11.

⁷⁶ The extent to which the effort to modernize St. Thomas can distort both the significance of contemporary concepts and the significance of Thomistic viewpoints is illustrated in the following quotation from a twentieth century Thomist who writes on the relationship between the political doctrine of St. Thomas and democracy: "He [St. Thomas] manages to view the subject of slavery democratically. He teaches that, absolutely, there is no natural cause why one should be a slave more than another. The strongest justification he offers for it is the one, which, if observed in this era of freedom, might have prevented the present social upheavals. He finds rationality in the system insofar as, by it, he who needs a guide gets one." Edward F. Murphy, St. Thomas' Political Doctrine and Democracy (Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., 1921), 78.

⁷⁷ One of a small number of instances where St. Thomas relaxes the rigidity of an hierarchical structure to allow for individual variation and escape is exhibited in the following quotation: "The ecclesiastical hierarchy imitates the heavenly in some degree, but not by a perfect likeness. For in the heavenly hierarchy … the superiors are never enlightened by the inferiors, whereas in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, sometimes those who are nearer God in sanctity, are in the lowest grade, and are not conspicuous for science; and some also are eminent in one kind of science, and fail in another; and on that account superiors may be taught by inferiors." Sum. Theol., I, q. 106, a. 3, ad 1.

⁷⁸ Etienne Gilson, Le Thomisme (Strasbourg, 1919), 170.