Abstract
St Thomas Aquinas Interest in natural law theory regularly revives but the question of whether Aquinas' classic version is viable depends on whether his doctrine has the resources to respond to the classic early modern critiques that were made of it. It is argued that he does have the resources to so respond, although the response pushes the ultimate philosophic question back to the issue of the validity of his natural theology. St Thomas Aquinas subscribed to the deontological view of morality according to which actions are either intrinsically right or intrinsically wrong. He assumed that there is a necessary connection between law and morality
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
St. Thomas Aquinas was a philosopher. The name given to his philosophy is “Thomism”, a form of Aristotelianism developed within the framework of Christian (Catholic) theology of the 13th century. Aquinas was a natural law theorist. He subscribed to the deontological view of morality according to which actions are either intrinsically right or intrinsically wrong. He assumed that there is a necessary connection between law and morality. This study explains Aquinas‟ conception of law. It emphasizes the natural law and evaluates the thesis of the natural law theorists. It then states the merits of the natural law theory. The paper is divided into five parts beginning with the introductory part. The second part covers Aquinas‟ conception of law. Interpretations and critique of the thesis of natural law theorists are undertaken in the third part. Merits of the natural law theory are presented in the fourth part. Summary and conclusion occupy the fifth part. Mystery of Natural Law always has been as what British poet W.H Auden aptly depicted in above mentioned poem “Law like Love”. The broad scope of natural law and its application had aroused dozens of jurists, thinkers, mystics and even laymen to widen up their gaze to grasp what exactly natural law is. Perhaps the opening statement of Freedman in his “Legal Theory” would be more judicious in starting to explore natural law. Freedman states “The history of natural law is a tale of the search of mankind for absolute justice and its failure”. [1] In jurisprudence the phase “Natural Law” stands as an umbrella term rather than using it for one static purpose, because it has fulfilled lots of functions throughout the antecedents of the history. Throughout the history of natural law, naturalists have concerned the moral quality of “valid law”.[2] It is absolutely an interesting fact to examine how ancients perceived the notion of natural law in their usage. Instead of taking it in a systematic form, the understanding of natural law was assimilated into the myths, spirituality and metaphysics of different cultures. In that case it becomes highly relevant to understand the roots and bends that sharped the saga of natural law in human history. Investigating the origin of natural law might be the hardest task for any historian, because of the fact that natural law is something metaphysical which has been interwoven with the annals of human history
[1] W. Friedmann, Legal Theory (Third Indian Reprint 2003), p95.
[2] R.W.M Dias, Temporal Approach towards a New Natural Law, The Cambridge Law Journal, Vol.28, No1, 1970, p 77.
Statement Of The Problem
Nobody in this world would claim that he/she was born free, because as an infant you never really knew who you were or what you were until later one attains the stage of self-consciousness. We are not born free rather we gain freedom. The struggle for freedom is in essence people’s struggle to be able to satisfy their own needs. Mankind continually advances on the road of the realization of freedom, which leads to the end of man in society.
The stages of evolution of freedom are equally the stages in the evolution of morality. Freedom! everybody pursues it; it makes man a human person. Poets write about freedom, government officials promise or proclaim it; some people nearly loose their precious lives to win this freedom for themselves and for others. But what actually is this freedom?
This work considered in the light of St Thomas Aquinas deals absolutely on freedom per se. It is neither a deterministic nor purely indeterministic solution to the problem of freedom and law; it is a compatibilist solution, arrived by reconciling the positions of freedom and law. As regards Aquinas’ proximate ends, man enjoys freedom of judgment and of choice, that is, of judging freely of the things to be done and not to be done.
Man’s experience of his own behaviors and decisions includes an awareness of his own freedom, of his own ability to decide for himself, to deliberate about what to do in various situations and to come to his own conclusion about what to believe and what to do.
But, turning to the other side of the work (Law) by Thomas, it is quite pertinent to understand fully what freedom is before delving into law. This is because they are almost two sides of the same coin, as we shall see. That is why in this work, I treated freedom first before law. In order for us to act well as human beings, our actions should proceed from knowledge of what we are about to do. According to Mary Clark:
Man, if perfect in virtue is the best of animals, but if he becomes separated from law and morality, he is the worst of animals. For man, unlike other animals, has the weapons of reason with which to exploit his best desire and cruelty!1
Man is by nature a social animal, and every rational being would testify to the fact that a society of whatever level which does not establish and apply freedom and law to its subjects, is comparatively similar to a train full of people, heading towards the Atlantic ocean. Law connotes some sort of regulations that govern our actions and affairs. It involves something more than mere reprobation.
Just as all men see that there are good acts and bad acts so also they acknowledge some kind of compulsion to do the good and avoid the evil. In the same manner, having observed certain development caused by man in many societies, a medieval theologian and philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas, took it upon himself and deemed it necessary to render a good example by stressing the significance of, and as well advocating the existence of freedom and law.
Purpose Of Study
In the face of the contemporary clamour for true freedom, this work could be said to be both necessary and timely. This is corroborated by the fact that the natural law makes it intrinsic for every person to seek after freedom. This work is, therefore, a thought-pattern, which seeks to unravel the authenticity and credibility of this claim that the search for freedom is ontological to man. Taking the Thomistic viewpoint as a case study, this work will criticize every argument for and against the law and freedom, after making a historical survey of the meaning and notion of freedom.
Scope Of Study
In this thesis, we shall unveil the Thomistic notion of law and freedom as outlined in the four chapters. We shall also try to consult other authorities who have written or spoken on this very issue. However, this thesis may not exhaust the whole notion of freedom and law as Aquinas understood it, but can suffice as a mere appraisal of the notion
Method Of Study
Because of the nature and the purpose of this work, its major methodology will be critical analysis. However, I will also employ exposition, history and interpretation in order to give this work a reasonable approach.
Division Of Work
In the first chapter, we shall in detail examine the general and Thomistic notion of freedom. The second chapter deals with the term ‘law’ in general and equally the Thomistic notion of the same. Chapter three deals with the two major sub-headings of this thesis, that is, freedom and law and justifies them with morality. Finally, chapter four deals with the appraisal of the whole work through evaluation and conclusion.
CHAPTER ONE
- THE GENERAL NOTION OF FREEDOM
The concept of freedom is an analogous one, predicated in different ways to beings of very different types. The various forms of attribution depend, to a certain extent, not by defining the same specific content, but by indicating formal relation, which remains the same. This relation can be put negatively or positively. Negatively, freedom means being free from the relation of not being bound to a given being or law, of being independent from something and of not being determined by a given principle of determination. This negative concept is also a relative one because every finite being belongs to a world and is related to the other being in the world. It may be free from this direct relationship to this or that, but only because their place are taken by others.
A being fully free in the negative sense could not be a being in the world, without relationship fully isolated, it would be based on nothing and be nothing.1 Thus in contrast to the negative, relative concept, there is a positive absolute concept of freedom. A being is positively free in so far as it is in possession of itself and possesses in this relationship the sufficient condition for all its being and relations. Here, freedom means self-possession being completely present to oneself, completely self-sufficient.
According to Maslaw
Freedom is the basic acknowledgment
that the individual is more important
than his society.2
However, human freedom is clearly neither merely negative and relative nor fully positive and absolute. Man has dominion over himself and so also over parts of the world. But he is non-the-less inserted into the world and dependent on the beings he finds himself. The basic mode of human freedom may be called transcendental freedom, which is the fundamental propriety of man by which he alone can say he is.
It follows that man can never be deprived of this transcendental freedom, which is part and parcel of his existence. But its emptiness and importance point on to another mode of freedom. Man is not simply there, he does not simply grow, he has to be, he is a task absolutely imposed on himself he has to decide to be himself or what he will be and there is no way in which he can evade this decision.
This mode is called the freedom of decision or existential freedom. This directly implies freedom of choice since an arbitrary freedom would be no freedom, a man free in this sense, will leave his actions at the mercy of mood whim or chance. Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.3
1.1 THE MEANING OF FREEDOM
Freedom! Everybody wants it, it makes a man a human being, poets praise it, and politicians promise or proclaim it. Some people have given their lives to win it for themselves or for others, but what actually is it? St Thomas Aquinas sees it as absence of coercion. Coercion or compulsion bears on the external action and corresponds to the absence of external coercion. This is variously named according to the kind of activity involved.
Thus we have physical freedom, civil freedom, political freedom, freedom of self-realization, freedom of choice, and freedom for self-perfection. Psychological freedom or freedom of choice corresponds to absence of internal coercion, that is the power of the will to will something or not. External is contingent on internal freedom, since the former has no meaning without the latter, but the converse is not necessarily true.
A Survey of Yves R. Simons book ‘Freedom of Choice,’ contrasts to some extent the St Thomas Aquinas notion of freedom. For example he investigated on freedom and voluntariness, and said that “there is unqualified voluntariness without freedom”4
1.2 KINDS OF FREEDOM
Man is full of dynamism, and his activities are equally the same. Hence his conception of freedom differs according to their different activities. Man’s activities are not just determined by external factors like a piece of stone that is moved or a computer game that is moved by the pads. It sometimes comes from his awareness of his own freedom and ability to decide for himself. Among all these, freedom still remain verse to comprehend at each moment, but for better apprehension, I will examine briefly the kinds of freedom in the following sequence.
Human Freedom
This is simply a matter of accepting the Universe because you understand its mathematical necessity. This done, you will gain peace of mind, be free from passions and be able to return good for evil. This human freedom implies that man has the natural ability to act at length without being injurious to others.
Freedom Of Religion
Freedom of religion could be identified as the right of a person to have free exercise of religion without compulsion or coercion. He is allowed to worship anything, anywhere, anytime according to the dictates of his conscience. Murray said on his own part that religious freedom is ‘…an immunity from Coercion in what concerns personal relation with God’5
For the authenticity of religion to be realized, many societies adopt freedom of religion.
Freedom Of Choice
This is the principle of action by which man judges freely. Apart from this, Aquinas maintained that freedom of choice is not a habit but a power since it proceeds from man. He called it an election. He compared ‘man’ and ‘animal’ and stated that man acts out of comparism in the reason, while animals acts from natural instinct. Since man acts out of comparism, he acts by free Judgment and equally retains the power of being inclined to many things. Thus man has free choice.
Freedom of choice refers either to the act of the will, or to the object of the will. In the first instance, there is freedom of exercise, in the second, freedom of specification. Freedom of exercise means that the will is at liberty to choose or not to choose, to operate or not to operate. The point to emphasize here is that one is not compelled to act.
Freedom Of Self-Perfection
Here St. Thomas believed and taught that man ought to tamper and train his Soul, and the dignity of man lies in self-mastery. Now, man’s nature is constituted in such a way that reason and will must always guide and direct his actions. In so doing man has self-control, since that makes him a person. Any man who allows passion, money, power etc to overtake him, is not free, since he feels free outwardly, but inwardly remain enslaved to vice, greed, power, pride, and ambition.
Fulton Sheen in his book ‘On Being Human’ maintained that freedom is not gained at once, but a gradual process, which continues until one reaches the peak. Man is not expected to become an angel, but man, which is his ontological vocation, man cannot be perfect in an imperfect world.
Freedom of Self Realization
Each man is a microcosm, in other words, said to be represented in a small scale. He occupies an important and irreplaceable position in the entire universe. He is a being who has a mission in the world. And the achievement of this mission is the realization of himself. Each man is a bundle of potentialities. These potentialities when realized or actualized become the individual’s contribution to development of the entire human family.
Self-realization, according to Anthony Storr is said to be:
The fullest possible expression in life of the innate potentialities of the individual, the realization of this uniqueness as a personality.6
It consists in productiveness, spontaneous activity as opposed to compulsion, love and active solidarity with human beings. It consists in accepting oneself as the bearer of human potentialities and being ready to grow through creative activity. It is the man who uses his powers that answers the fundamental question of his individual existence. Freedom of self-realization is only possible in and through the facticity, which surround each person, it cannot be more than this. They include, height, colour, strength, intelligence, sex, race etc.
Karl Rahner held that:
Freedom is only freedom in the
concrete sense, when all those
freedoms are combined.7
Aquinas on his own part noted that,
Freedom is seen not as independence
from an absolute but as independence
From the relatives.8
In the history of philosophy and social thought, freedom has a specific use as a moral and social concept to refer either to circumstance which arise in the relations of man to man to specific conditions of social life. Philosophical argument about the meaning or the nature of freedom is concerned with the legitimacy or convenience of particular application of the term. Bertrand Russels often held that freedom in general is that absence of obstacles to the realization of one’s desires.
1.3 AQUINAS NOTION OF FREEDOM
This medieval theologian understood freedom to be the harmony of the will and the act. And the consideration is the divine influence and the will. Implicitly, the relation of harmony, the divine influence and the will is freedom. Hence, a free act is constituted by the assent of the will rather than by the decision of the will. It implies then that this cannot be freedom as self-determination.
The term in Aquinas closest in meaning and usage to the contemporary term freedom, is perhaps liberty9
But for John Locke;
It is to be free from constraint and violence from others, which cannot be, where there are no law10
Freedom may mean absence of constraint and this is what is proper to man. There is no right minded individual who would applaud constraints. Being free from constraint means being free from choice imprisonment.
1.4 LIMITS OF FREEDOM
While we reject the view that man is not free, or that freedom is an illusion, we must not accept the Sartrean exaggerated notion of freedom. According to Sartre in his book ‘Being and Nothingness’, man is absolutely free. Man he said, is condemned to be free and man’s authentic existence is realized to the extent that he makes use of his freedom.
Man is free, yes, but his freedom has to be limited by certain things such as his body, will, environment, desires and passion, pressures from heredity, society etc.
Walter Farrel in his book ‘A Companion to Summa’ vol. iii supported this when he used the analogy of a wild bird beating out its life against the windows of a desolate house into which it has wondered, to awaken pity on us. Also in man, who is confined to a space and who is imperfect and limited, struggling day in and out to be unlimited and free. We find such a situation in the incessant discoveries by science to know if it can give meaning to human life, but what happens, we still experience some sort of imperfection in all these.
Also as a social being, man is limited by his very nature of being forced to be social by nature, he is compulsorily limited to stay where his body permits him to be. The existentialists emphasized this when they said that man as a social being in the world is subjected to the laws of nature.
We should not say that limitation is the essence of human freedom because man’s insatiable tension towards the absolute and good is limitless, rather as an incarnate being, a being in the world, his body which situates him in the world limits his freedom. It then follows that man is not absolutely free, since there are some limitations.
- SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF FREEDOM.
Since freedom is transcendental distance and transcendental spontaneity, it is essentially part of man. But this primordial freedom is still only the basis for existential freedom, the realization of man as person, it is not yet this personal being in actual reality, transcendental and transcendental freedom are actuated only in the decision of the existential freedom for its own essence – as basic form. But R.S. Peters held that:
Freedom means not doing what one wills
without restraints but accepting
the law or the real will of the community.11
It follows that human freedom can never be a simple state of man or a specialized propriety, but neither is it simply the actuation of selfhood, nor pure act without the history like the divine freedom. But on the contrary, human freedom is history by its very nature. Man is wholly claimed by the works to be done and the states to be achieved. He becomes truly a person by going freely out of himself- to throw himself into the work to be done.
Thus human freedom is not a state, as it is in things, freedom from this or that compulsion nor is it as in God a pure act of self-consciousness. Freedom is the history of a person’s coming to himself, which culminates in fully conscious self-possession. In the strict sense, only the individual is with himself, self-possession can be predicted only analogously of a community or a people.
All these principles recur in the principle which regulates the mode of realization of freedom, the freedom of subsidiary. Freedom in act is identical with the personality of the person. It is the person’s mode of being. This mode of being is at once individual and supra individual condition and uncondition. Conscious selfhood, as an act feasible only to the self, makes the individual unique as a person.
These common works are modes of self-realization, of the reality of freedom and the person. But as such modes, there are forms taken by freedom and they retain their meaning and purpose only by being referred back to the person and its reality.
1 Mary T. Clark [ed], An Aquinas Reader {New York: Doubleday and company, 1972,} P. 307
1 K. Rahner, ed., Encyclopedia of Theology. Vol. II (New York: Macmillan Pub. Co. Inc. 1965) P.
534.
2 Maslaw, A.H. New Knowledge in Human Values. (New York: Harper and Row. 1959), P. 60
3 P. Edward, (ed) Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vols 3 & 4 (New York: Macmillan Publishers Company. 1967), P. 222.
4 Yves, R.S, Freedom of Choice (New York; Ford ham University press 1969} pp 12-13
5 Murray J.C, Religious liberty an end & beginning {New York; Macmillan Company, 1996} P.17
6 Storr., A. The Integrity of Personality. (USA Penguin Books. 1960)., P. 27.
7 K. Rahner, op. cit, P. 537.
8 Locke., J. Treatise on Civil Government. Gough, J. (ed) (New York: Oxford Black Wall. 1948). P. 523.
9 Mary T. C., [ed] An Aquinas Reader {New York; Doubleday and company., 1972} P. 207
10 ibid, P. 126
11 R.S. Peters, Ethics and Education. (London, 1966), P. 187.
