THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA

Is to Love the Whole More Than to Love Its Members? The Primacy of the Inclination to

Love the Common Good in Aquinas

A THESIS

Submitted to the Faculty of the

School of Philosophy

Of The Catholic University of America

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree

Master of Philosophy

By

Francis Emmanuel Feingold

Washington, D. C.

2012

ii

This thesis by Francis Emmanuel Feingold fulfills the thesis requirement for the masters degree in Philosophy approved by Dr. Tobias Hoffmann, Ph.D., as Director, and by Dr. Kevin White, Ph.D. as Reader. ____________________________________ Dr. Tobias Hoffmann, Ph.D., Director ____________________________________ Dr. Kevin White, Ph.D., Reader

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. THE CLASSICAL THOMISTIC THESIS ......................................................................... 1

1. Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 1 2. The formal difference between good of the whole and good of the part ........................... 9 3. Bonum commune in causando: extrinsic vs. intrinsic .................................................................. 16 4. The political common good ............................................................................................................. 24 5. The common good of the universe, and God .............................................................................. 33

CHAPTER II. THE COMMON GOOD: PRIMARY BENEFICIARY OR PRIMARY BENEFIT? A CRITIQUE OF THE CLASSICAL THOMISTIC THESIS ........................................ 48

1. The Thomistic Theory of Friendship-Love................................................................................... 49 2. The specter of totalitarianism: Rejection of transcendent-love-grounding commonness

on the finis cui level .......................................................................................................................... 58 3. Is the Vision an assecutio communis? Rejection of transcendent-love-grounding

commonness on the finis quo level ................................................................................................ 63 4. The problem of exclusivity: transcendent love as grounded in diffusive commonness ......... 76

A) Common vs. proper goods, and the equating of Bonum summum with Bonum commune .................................................................................................................................... 77

B) Ut permaneat et diffundatur: Transcendent-love-grounding commonness on the root-of-lovability level ................................................................................................................. 84

5. The fallacy of subordinating beneficiary-good to benefit-good in love of neighbor .............. 87 6. Key background assumptions behind De Konincks position ................................................... 96

A) The good as perfectivum ............................................................................................................ 96 B) God as finis cui ......................................................................................................................... 100 C) Self-love ...................................................................................................................................... 105

7. Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 110

1

CHAPTER I. THE CLASSICAL THOMISTIC THESIS

1. Introduction

It is a well-known fundamental tenet of Thomism that there is in man a natural

inclination to love the common good, and to love it with an intensity surpassing the intensity of

his love for his friends and even of his love for himself. Indeed, for St. Thomas the common

good is the only kind of good which we are at all capable of loving (let alone naturally inclined to

love) more intensely than our own.1 It is not easy to determine, however, precisely what the

term common good refers to, and specifically what it is that sets the common good apart in

kind from the good of ordinary friendship.2 Certainly Thomas Aquinas is no Thomas Hobbes:

the difference in intensity cannot be due simply to the fact that a common good will always

directly benefit us individually in a way in which a friends good does not. After all, St. Thomas

regards citizens as inclined by natural virtue to go so far as to lay down their life for their country

(in which there is certainly no personal benefit, at least in the temporal order), and, crucially, to

do so simply for love of itnot, like for Hobbes, merely because they think a universal

commitment to such service is a necessary means to secure a better chance of their own

individual flourishing, i.e., because that commitment is a risk calculatively worth taking.3

1 For the priority of self-love over friendship-love in terms of intensity, see ST I-II.27.3, Editio Leonina 6:194; ST II-II.44.8 ad 2, Editio Leonina 8:337; ST II-II.25.4, Editio Leonina 8:200; and ST II-II.26.4 and 68, Editio Leonina 8:21218; for the intensive priority of common-good love over self-love, see I.60.5, Editio Leonina 5:1045, and II-II.26.23, Editio Leonina 8:21012.

2 See Gregory Froelichs seminal article on the notorious multitude of analogical meanings attached to this term: The Equivocal Status of Bonum Commune, New Scholasticism 63 (1989): 3857.

3 Hobbes, Leviathan (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), II.17, p. 102: The finall Cause, End, or Designe of men, (who naturally love Liberty, and Dominion over others,) in the introduction of that restraint upon themselves, (in which wee see them live in Common-wealths,) is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more

2

Yet even though for St. Thomas the love for the common good does not spring from

such Hobbesian utilitarian considerations, it is equally certain that, in his eyes, it does not spring

from the other, Bentham-type utilitarianism either: the belief that happiness can be in a sense

quantified, and that therefore one should love the community above self simply because there is

more happiness at stake in the community than in oneself.4 In none of St. Thomass

discussions of the common good does he ground our love for it in our (logically prior) love for

the individuals that constitute that society; instead, rather than making love for the whole

depend on love for the parts, he makes love for the parts (at least in the relevant way) depend on

love for the whole. The constantly invoked principle is that the part will naturally love the whole,

and will naturally act for the good of that whole over its ownand if the good of the whole

requires another part to be privileged over oneself, well and good; but that privileging of the

other part is merely an instantiation, so to speak, of ones love for the whole. It is not primarily for

the sake of the President as man, as a noble individual, that I should throw myself in the way of

his would-be assassin; rather, I will be inclined to do so because he is the repository, so to speak,

of the good of the whole, and in his death the principle of the social order would be lost. (If one

leaves the common good out of the picture, e.g. in the case of a personal friend or simply of

contented life thereby; that is to say, of getting themselves out from that miserable condition of Warre, which is necessarily consequent (as hath been shewn) to the naturall Passions of men, when there is no visible Power to keep them in awe, and tye them by feare of punishment to the performance of their Covenants, and observation of [the] Lawes of Nature (emphasis mine).

4 See Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1948), I.5, p. 3: The interest of the community is one of the most general expressions that can occur in the phraseology of morals: no wonder that the meaning of it is often lost. When it has a meaning, it is this. The community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were its members. The interest of the community then is, what?the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.

3

someone who happens to need help, then, following Aristotle,5 St. Thomas thinks that any self-

sacrifice would be performed primarily for the sake of my own nobility, and so would not be

really altruistic, at least not primarily.6)

But why should one love the whole? And what, exactly, does it mean to love its good

when one is dealing with wholes of a decidedly non-standard variety, such as society, the

universe, and God? It is easy to see why substantial parts would naturally love the good of their

substantial whole more than their own; after all, the whole is the only thing there to be loved in

the first place. But it is tempting to think of society, and its good, as being simply

nominalistic convenience-terms for a large number of mutually interacting people and their own

individual goods, or at least for those of their individual goods that happen to coincide; and even

if one resists this temptation, it is certainly not easy to understand why society would be a nobler

thing than its members, who, after all, are living beings capable of knowledge and love, while

society is not.

To answer this, a Thomist must walk a difficult tightrope. On the one hand, he has to

agree that there is no such thing as society, but rather a great number of persons arranged society-

wise,7 for unities of order are strictly accidental beings that inhere in their bearers. Yet on the

5 Aristotle Ethica Nicomachea IX.8.1169s2526: .

6 See St. Thomass commentary on the above Aristotelian passage at Sententia libri ethicorum IX.9, Editio Leonina 47/2:532b533a, and also ST II-II.26.4 ad 2, Editio Leonina 8:213b. The idea would seem to be that generosity (the diffusion of goodness to others) is something intrinsically good even apart from the worthiness of that generositys recipients: the giving of the gift is for its own sake on a more primary, foundational level than is the recipient of that gift. We will examine this idea in more detail in the second chapter.

7 To borrow Peter van Inwagens phrase. See his book Material Beings (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990) for an insightful analysis of what constitutes a composite substance. I think his conclusions there (that the only genuine substances are elementary particles and living beings) are too narrow, because he does not take perfective teleology into account as a possible criterion for substantial unity; but it is nonetheless a thought-provoking analysis of an important subject.

4

other hand he has to argue that the common good is really numerically one rather than many;

for if it were simply a nominalistic shorthand for individual goods of the sort that everyone

finds beneficial, like virtue or health (as opposed to, say, something of limited interest like

graduate studies in engineering), then we would be back to the Bentham position that to work

for the common good means simply to work for the greatest possible number of what in fact are

private goods. But the main numerically single goods of public interest are useful goods (armies,

schools, justice systems); and useful goods are of no use to us here, since these goods are loved

only for the sake of the (individual) goods that they provide. How is the Thomist to do this?

The way that St. Thomas seems to deal with the societal problem is to tackle its two

components in reverse order. Rather than proving first that society is nobler than the individual,

and then deriving from that fact the further claim that goods which benefit society are more to

be desired than goods which benefit the individual, he instead establishes first that the good

which men attain specifically as members of the social ordernamely, as I will argue, the social

order itself, with all its interlocking individual relations of mutual support and

complementarityis higher than any good that they can attain on their own; and it is only from

this that it follows that man is primarily defined by his nature as part. In other words, mans own

selfhood, his own perfection, is more bound up with his being a member of society than in

being an individual in his own right; and this is all that it means to say that society is nobler than

the individual (and that the individual is a part of society). But it is enough (so goes the

argument), because, in order to preserve the beautiful social order and harmony he loves, he

must constantly subordinate what would otherwise have been his own greater good to the

(individual) good of his fellow sharers in that order. In order for the beauty of the whole to

shine forth, all its members must be cared for. It is as though a paint-fleck were aware of the

5

greater beauty to which it was contributing, and had the ability to dim its own brilliance and add

luster to others if that would serve the paintings purpose: a paint-fleck that embraced its nature

as a paint-fleck would do so gladly, but for the sake of the whole, not of its fellow parts. From

here on I will use the term transcendent love to refer to this kind of non-self-interested love

for individuals (where I love X qua contributor to a common good which I love more than

myself, rather than loving X as a mere individual).

Perhaps surprisingly, St. Thomas also takes this same apparently reversed approach with

respect to the supremacy of our love for God. Rather than simply saying that it is His infinite

goodness that inclines us to love Him above everything else, St. Thomas begins with the same

starting point as before, namely the goodness of a unity of order (in this case not the order of

society but rather the order of the universe, whose beauty would likewise consist in its reflection

of God through its manifold of complementary ranks, each aiding and supporting the others),

and proceeds to argue that if one loves the handiwork, it is impossible not to love it as the

artists: it is in the artists mind that the handiworks beauty exists primarily, and, because of its

inherent integrity, one can only will that handiworks completion according to its artists will. To

put the matter another way, because God Himself is the beauty of which the universes order is

the pale reflection, and because their share in that reflection is the basis of our friendship-love

for the universes (personal) members as parts, it follows that we will have friendship-love for

God as wellbut, unlike our friendship-love for the parts, whom we love as merely contributing

to the whole and hence less than ourselves,8 we love God more than ourselves because His share

in it is total, indeed supereminent. We will our fellow paint-flecks to shine because it is through

them that the glory of the painting is made manifest; but we want God to shine because it is

8 Since our own contribution to the whole is closer to us, more intensely tangible, as it were, than theirs.

6

His light that shines through the painting itself. We are His parts, and love Him as our

whole, precisely insofar as we are parts of His plan.

There are, however, some difficulties with this approach, beautiful as it is, at least some

of which may be traced to confusions between different kinds of finality. Hence, after spending

the first chapter laying out St. Thomass vision of the common good as just described, the

second will be devoted to unpacking these difficulties. To this end I will make extensive use of a

debate that took place between Charles De Koninck9 on the one hand, and Fr. Ignatius

Eschmann, O.P.,10 and Jacques Maritain11 on the other. De Koninck is a firm proponent of the

absolute primacy of the common good as described above, and his position is, I think, the more

faithful of the two to what St. Thomas has to say directly about the subject (hence I will draw

chiefly on his interpretation for support in my first chapter).12 Fr. Eschmann and Maritain,

however, draw on other areas of St. Thomass thought (and, I think, on common sense) to argue

for a relative rather than an absolute primacy for the common good; and, though the arguments

they adduced were not always the soundest,13 I think they saw some things that De Koninck did

9 La primaut du bien commun (Quebec: ditions de lUniversit Laval; Montreal: ditions Fides, 1943); In Defence of Saint Thomas, Laval thologique et philosophique 1 (1945): 8109.

10 In Defense of Jacques Maritain, The Modern Schoolman 22 (1945): 183208.

11 La personne et le bien commun, Revue Thomiste 46 (1946): 23778.

12 Fr. Stephen L. Brock, in his article The Primacy of the Common Good and the Foundations of Natural Law in St. Thomas, in Ressourcement Thomism: Sacred Doctrine, the Sacraments, and the Moral Life, ed. Reinhard Htter and Matthew Levering, 23455 (Washington, D.C: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 235, gives strong support to De Konincks interpretation of the common good. Fr. Lawrence Dewan, O.P., in St. Thomas,

John Finnis, and the Political Good, The Thomist 64 (2000): 33774, at 338, and Thomas Osborne in Love of Self and Love of God in Thirteenth-Century Ethics (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 89, to name two others, likewise give strong encomiums. Hence I think I am justified to take De Koninck as representing an important strand of Thomist thought on this topic.

13 I am thinking especially of (1) the Maritainian division of the human being into a personal, spiritually based, generous aspect and an individual, materially based, egotistic aspect (see especially La personne et le bien

commun, 24552); (2) a distortion of a Thomistic text (Super Sent. 3.5.3.2) that both of them lean on to make the claim that human beings cannot be regarded as parts insofar as they are considered as persons (Maritain, La

7

not. The following two objections, I think, present the main substance of their insight (which,

following De Konincks nomenclature, we will refer to as personalism).

First, there is a problem with the Thomistic premise that the greatest good of man lies in

his contribution to the good of the whole. On the contrary, it seems that at least his very highest

actsthe Vision and charitable love of Godare strictly individual acts that are not themselves

enhanced or elevated in any way by being put in combination. The chief end to be attained, in

other words, is not emergent: it does not require a cooperative attainment. But if this is the case,

then mans greatest nobility will not lie in his parthood, but rather in what he is as an individual;

and if this in turn is the case, then the argument given above for mans love of the social (though

not the divine) common good above self falls flat. The confusion here would be regarding what,

exactly, the conditions are for counting a parts perfection as belonging primarily to it qua part; a

clear analysis is needed of which ends belong to which modes of attainment, and which modes

of attainment would belong to a part as such. De Koninck, however, tries to defend himself by

arguing that he did not mean that it is our end to attain God as emergently common (i.e., as

attainable only via a team effort), but rather as what I will call diffusively common (i.e., with

the desire that His ability to be received by many without diminishment should be actualized

that His goodness be diffused for His sake). First of all, this seems to negate his argument that

the intrinsic, as well as the extrinsic, common good provides a supra-individual ratio for loving

ones neighbor. Also, however, in shifting his argument I think he makes two additional

personne et le bien commun, 56; Fr. Eschmann, In Defense of Jacques Maritain, 205); (3) a general tendency to oversimplify their opponents reading of St. Thomas; (4) a failure, like De Konincks, to distinguish explicitly

between the different kinds of finality; and (5), as a result, apparently failing to see that his argument for even a relative primacy of the common good, i.e., in the practical order but not in the speculative, would fall for the same reason that he attacks an absolute primacy: benefit-goods (which include all non-personal goods, including the good of societal order) are always for the sake of their beneficiaries, never for their own sake. (Mary Keys makes this last point well in her dissertation The Problem of the Common Good and the Contemporary Relevance of Thomas Aquinas [PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1998], 6165.)

8

mistakes: 1) he formally equates supreme, universal goodness with self-diffusive commonness

on the level of what we find lovable about God (the abstract level of finality); and 2) he then

equates commonness on that level with commonness on the level of attainment. This allows him

to make the claim (which I think is false) that to love God not as common in the Vision means

to love Him in a deliberately exclusive way.

With regard to the social common good there is also a second, perhaps more important

problem: it seems that, by St. Thomass picture, the benefit-good is made primary over the

beneficiary-good. Human beings are loved, we said, insofar as they contribute to the good of

societys (and the universes) overarching, mutually supporting order, which is a thing of beauty.

But why do we love beautiful things? Surely it is for the sake of those who view themand only

individual persons are viewers. It seems, then, a mistake to say that we love our fellow man for

the sake of the common beauty, the common benefit-good (whether that common good be the

order of the universe or God Himself). Rather, it would appear, we must love the common

good, on the most fundamental level, for the sake of our fellow man.

An analogous difficulty applies to the case of love for God. Is it not problematic to

ground our love for Him in our love for the universe He has made? To be sure, the beauty of

what He has made is indeed our best epistemic route to grasping His own beauty, at least here

below; but if we take his generalship of the universe as simply being our epistemic way of

grasping something of His own hidden grandeur, it would be wrong, I think, to call this love of

Him as common good. It would not be love of Him as common because (a) the aspect under

which we love Him would be the supreme universality, not the diffusive commonness, of His

goodness, and because (b) we do not love Him as emergently attained either (which is the other

meaning of loving something as common). The only way to love Him as common would be to

9

do so simply inasmuch as, without the animating vision of His plan, there would be no integrity

and order here below is; but this, I think, would be to get things backwards.

I will then briefly sketch three underlying reasons that might pressure a Thomist into

arguing for the common goods absolute primacy anyway despite the above difficulties: 1) the

thesis (firmly upheld by De Koninck, rather less firmly by St. Thomas) that the proper meaning

of the good is perfective of another rather than perfect in itself, and that hence it is only

benefit-goods, not beneficiary-goods, that genuinely have the note of finality; 2) the difficulties

for divine simplicity attendant upon loving God as a beneficiary, and how one would need to

accept this kind of love in order to secure a non-De Koninckian charity-love for neighbor that

was still genuinely God-centric; and 3) the thesis that one must necessarily love oneself above

any other individual. Finally, I will conclude by explaining to what extent unity with others can

serve as the root of lovability for loving them with friendship-love, and how this still allows a

Thomist to avoid being reduced back to a Bentham-type position on the common good.

2. The formal difference between good of the whole and good of the part

Bonum gentis divinius est quam bonum unius hominis. This axiom, taken from the opening of

Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics,14 is the key foundational principle that forms the backbone of St.

Thomass thought on the common good. It is ubiquitous in his writings; it appears in discussions

whose topics range from mans love for God to the fittingness of a hierarchical universe to the

distinction of the active from the contemplative life, as well, of course, as mans societal relation

14 Aristotle Eth. Nic. I.2.1094b810:

, .

10

to his fellow man.15 Thus for example in De veritate 5.3, where St. Thomas is speaking of the

universality of divine providence, we are told:

Providentia Dei, qua res gubernat, ut dictum est, est similis providentiae qua paterfamilias gubernat domum, aut rex civitatem aut regnum: in quibus gubernationibus hoc est commune, quod bonum commune est eminentius quam bonum singulare; sicut bonum gentis est divinius quam bonum civitatis vel familiae vel personae, ut habetur, in principio Ethicorum; unde quilibet provisor plus attendit quid communitati conveniat, si sapienter gubernat, quam quid conveniat uni tantum. (Editio Leonina 22:146; emphasis mine) Moreover, whenever the principle of the common goods primacy appears, it is almost

invariably cast in terms of the priority of the whole over the part. A classic example can be found

in ST II-II.58.5, where Aquinas is describing the virtue of general justice (an important notion

which we will discuss again below):

Manifestum est autem quod omnes qui sub communitate aliqua continentur comparantur ad communitatem sicut partes ad totum. Pars autem id quod est totius est: unde et quodlibet bonum partis est ordinabile in bonum totius. (Editio Leonina 9:13)

Or again, even more strongly:

Cum enim unus homo sit pars multitudinis, quilibet homo hoc ipsum quod est et quod habet, est multitudinis: sicut et quaelibet pars id quod est, est totius. Unde et natura aliquod detrimentum infert parti, ut salvet totum.16

Other passages of this sort abound throughout the corpus.17

15 Besides the direct commentary in Sent. Eth. 1.2 n. 12 and the De veritate text I just cited, this Aristotelian passage is also explicitly referenced in SCG II.42 n. 3 (in the context of discussing the order of the universe), III.17 n. 6 (discussing Gods finality with respect to creation in terms of the latters dependence on Hima key point we will return to later), III.69 n. 16 (arguing for the superiority of commonness on the basis of the goods inherent self-diffusiveness), and III.125 n. 10; ST I.108.6, II-II.31.3 ad 2, II-II.141.8, and III.1.4; Super Sent. 2.11.1.2 s.c. 1, 2.29.1.3 ad 4, 2.32.2.2, 3.35.1.3.1 c. and ad 1, 4.15.2.4.1, and 4.24.3.2.3; De perfectione 14; De regno 1.9; and Sent. lib. Politic. 1.1 n. 3, among others (I have left out the considerable number of places where St. Thomas invokes this principle in an objection).

16 ST I-II.96.4, Editio Leonina 7:183. The principle of the part naturally exposing itself to protect the whole is a crucial element of St. Thomass theory of love of others above self; we will discuss it further below.

17 This axiom of the priority of whole-over-part is the complement to the Aristotelian divinius passage: whenever St. Thomas says something about the common good, if he does not directly cite Aristotles words as his

11

As we said in the introduction, however, we must be careful about the application of this

principle to society, since society is only a unity of order, not a substance.18 Perhaps the text in

which Aquinas most clearly rejects Benthams thesis (namely, that the common good is primary

by way of the sheer quantity of its recipients) is at ST II-II.58.7 ad 2, Editio Leonina 9:15b:

Bonum commune civitatis et bonum singulare unius personae non differunt solum secundum multum et paucum, sed secundum formalem differentiam: alia enim est ratio boni communis et boni singularis, sicut et alia est ratio totius et partis.

Between the common good and the private good St. Thomas sees a difference not only of

degree but of kind, a formal difference that transcends the mere material comparison of things

on the part-level to each other. This is why St. Thomas can claim that general justicethe

general virtue which, for St. Thomas, is very clearly the noblest of all the moral virtues,19

authority he will almost invariably cite this axiom instead. Of the innumerable places where he does so, the following are some of the more salient ones. In the same Treatise on Justice we have ST II-II.58.9 ad 3, Editio Leonina 9:17b (a text about general justice and whether it includes the passions, which, as we will see, De Koninck will lean on heavily); II-II.64.2, Editio Leonina 9:68; and II-II.65.1, Editio Leonina 9:7980. In the Treatise on Law there are the justly famous passages in I-II.90.2, Editio Leonina 7:150 (where law is defined as serving common good, which is equated with universal happiness) and in 96.4 (cited above), as well as 92.1 ad 3, Editio Leonina 7:159b60a. Most importantly, we find the same theme in the famous treatment of the natural love of the angels at I.60.5, Editio Leonina 5:1045, mirrored by the parallel passages in the Treatise on Charity at II-II.26.3 (c. and ad 2, Editio Leonina 8:211) and 26.4 ad 3 (Editio Leonina 8:213b) and in the Treatise on Grace at I-II.109.3, Editio Leonina 7:295all of which we will return to at greater length. Outside the Summa, there is the lengthy treatment in QD de car. 4 ad 2 (Quaestiones disputatae, vol. 2, ed. P. Bazzi, Mannes Calcaterra, Tito S. Centi, E. Odetto, P. M. Pession [Turin and Rome: Marietti, 1965], 764a), and in De perfectione 13, Editio Leonina 41B:81a84b.

18 Perhaps the best Thomistic text on the unitas ordinis (a concept which he uses frequently enough but generally without pausing to identify its metaphysical properties, at least other than its obvious connection with final causality) is in his commentary on the Ethics, Sent. lib. Ethic. I.1, Editio Leonina 47/1:4b: Hoc totum quod est civilis multitudo vel domestica familia habet solam ordinis unitatem, secundum quam non est aliquid simpliciter unum; et ideo pars huius totius potest habere operationem, quae non est operatio totius, sicut miles in exercitu habet operationem quae non est totius exercitus; habet nihilominus et ipsum totum aliquam operationem quae non est propria alicuius partium sed totius, puta conflictus totius exercitus; et tractus navis est operatio multitudinis trahentium navem. Est autem aliud totum quod habet unitatem non solum ordine sed compositione aut colligatione vel etiam continuitate, secundum quam unitatem est aliquid unum simpliciter; et ideo nulla est operatio partis quae non sit totius (emphasis mine).

This passage is especially interesting for two reasons: (1) the emphasis it places on emergent operation as a key characteristic of unities of order (which, as we will see, is central to discussions of the common good); and (2) it clearly states that a unity of order, as such, need not possess all the perfections of its parts, whereas a substance does; this point will be very relevant in the second chapter, in discussing the commonness of beatitude. See also ST I.39.3, Editio Leonina 4:400a.

19 Si loquamur de iustitia legali, manifestum est quod ipsa est praeclarior inter omnes virtutes morales: inquantum bonum commune praeeminet bono singulari unius personae (ST II-II.58.12, Editio Leonina 9:19a).

12

inasmuch as it directs all the other virtues to its own proper end and hence constitutes no less

than the natural counterpart of charity20is a virtue distinct from particular justice, which

governs our (natural) dealings with other individuals. If there were no difference between

many and the whole, as the objector had argued, then general justice would collapse simply

into an extension of particular justice, losing its supreme pride of place in the moral sphere; and

as a result the political philosophy of St. Thomas would lose its distinctively anti-utilitarian

quality. The same principle is at work, I think, behind the De regnos sharp (and entirely

Aristotelian21) division between democracy and the polity: where the latter works for the good of

the whole as whole, the former works for the private goods of the individuals that happen to

make up the majority.22 For St. Thomas there is a formal difference between many and the

whole, and it is in light of this distinction that we should take all the countless passages that

argue to the primacy of the common good from the relation of part to whole. But what is it

exactly that establishes this formal difference?

At least within the school of Thomism championed by De Koninck, this formal

difference is established by the kind of good which is being willed for the members. Common

good, for him, means chiefly and properly the bonum commune in causando or secundum rem.23 In

20 ST II-II.58.6, Editio Leonina 9:14b.

21 See Aristotle Politica III.7.1279b410; cf. Aquinass commentary in Sent. lib. Pol. III.6, Editio Leonina 48:204a205b.

22 See De regno I.3, Editio Leonina 42:452. An objector might reply, however, that St. Thomas does not specify here that the distinction in question is a formal one; after all, he does say that the good safeguarded by democracy does come closer to being the good of the whole than in the case of oligarchy or tyranny, which would seem to indicate that the whole-vs.-part distinction here is a matter of degree or percentages rather than a formal difference in kind.

23 Charles De Koninck, In Defence of Saint Thomas, 44: I will ask the reader to recall that throughout my own essay I most unambiguously use the expression common good for a bonum commune in causando; let us note, moreover, that all my quotations from St. Thomas concern this good and that I maintain God is most formally a

13

other words, it is a good which is common not by mere predication or mental abstraction, as

humanity is common to all men, or happiness to all happy men, or money to everyone

with something in their bank account, but rather by way of the far-reaching causal efficacy that

pertains to a numerically singular, really existent thing, which is simultaneously a good for many

beneficiaries (e.g., a work of art, or a speech given by a wise man) Only goods of the latter sort

have their commonness in their own concrete existence; goods common merely in praedicando are

strictly individual when taken as actually existing in reality (as opposed to in the mind).

Moreover, part of what it means for a good to be common in causando is that (like the work of

art, or the speech) it benefits its recipients without first being divided up and apportioned; it is

received by each recipient whole and entire. Hence we can also use Michael Waldsteins

definition: A common good is a good in which many persons can share at the same time

without in any way lessening or splitting it.24

It is in connection to goods of this sort that we can speak of a whole formally distinct

from the many: a whole is a group considered insofar as all of its members benefit from the

same real indivisible good (bonum commune in causando). Insofar as its members benefit only from

good in this sense. In support of this claim he invokes John of St. Thomas (Cursus theologicus, ed. Vivs [Paris, 1884], 7.8.3 n. 12, p. 423, cited in In Defence of Saint Thomas, 66).

De Konincks emphasis on the distinction has left a lasting mark on the traditionally-minded Thomists who came after him. Besides Michael Waldsteins article cited below, see, e.g., Froelich, The Equivocal Status of Bonum Commune, 4253, esp. 43 n. 15; Benjamin L. Smith, Thomas Aquinas on Politics and the Common Good (PhD diss., The Center for Thomistic Studies of the University of St. Thomas, 2007), 7693; Michael Smith, Human Dignity and the Common Good in the Aristotelian-Thomistic Tradition (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen University Press, 1995), 7481 and 113119, and Common Advantage and Common Good, Laval thologique et philosophique 51 (1995): 11125, at 124. (Cf. Ronald McArthur, Universal in praedicando, Universal in causando, Laval thologique et philosophique 18 (1962): 5995, for a careful treatment of this same distinction in a rather different context, namely a discussion of universal efficient and formal causality rather than of the universal final causality that is the common good.) Surprisingly, Mary M. Keys does not seem to reference this distinction in her dissertation The Problem of the Common Good and the Contemporary Relevance of Thomas Aquinas, even though a whole chapter of her work is dedicated to analyzing the De Koninck/Maritain/Eschmann controversy (chapter 2, pp. 3968); she does mention it briefly, however, in her later book Aquinas, Aristotle, and the Promise of the Common Good (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 193.

24 Michael Waldstein, The Common Good in St. Thomas and John Paul II, Nova et Vetera, English Edition, 3 (2005): 569578, at 569. Cf. Osborne, 89 for a similar definition.

14

the same kind of good (e.g., from a common stock of food), they are merely a many, la

Bentham.25 Or as Benjamin Smith puts it, it is precisely this numerical (as opposed to merely

generic) unity of this kind of common good that gives society its cohesiveness and animates its

activity as a whole.26 Picture, if you will, a team that, instead of aiming at victory, merely

practiced together for the sake of each individual athletes excellence (a sort of fitness club): here

indeed there would be nothing to define the pseudo-team as a whole, no way to love its other

members and desire their excellence as contributing to some overarching goal. To desire them

all to excel together is simply to desire the sum of their individual excellences, and one will do so

only insofar as one cares about them individually. If they constitute a genuine team aimed at a

specific victory, however, then one cares about each ones athletic excellence not only insofar as

it is his good, but also and above all because one loves the single thing being jointly pursued.

Before proceeding further, one should ask: is this distinction between in causando and in

praedicando commonness, and its application, genuinely Thomistic? One text that seems to lend

strong support to this view may be found in Aquinass Sentences commentary:

Dupliciter aliquid dicitur esse commune. Uno modo per praedicationem; hujusmodi autem commune non est idem numero in diversis repertum; et hoc modo habet bonum corporis, communitatem. Alio modo est aliquid commune secundum participationem unius et ejusdem rei secundum numerum; et haec communitas maxime potest in his quae ad animam pertinent, inveniri; quia per ipsam attingitur ad id quod est commune bonum omnibus rebus, scilicet Deum; et ideo ratio non procedit.27

25 One could consider such a group as a whole, however, insofar as they might share something else, such as an agreement to work together to stockpile (predicationally) common food, which could count as common in causando.

26 Benjamin Smith, 81.

27 Super Sent. 4.49.1.1 ql.. 4ad 3, ed. Parmae 7/2:1183b. De Koninck cites this text as the chief Thomistic locus for this distinction at In Defence of Saint Thomas, 42; Benjamin Smith does likewise at p. 77.

15

St. Thomas is responding here to an objection which had claimed that, since corporeality was a

more common good than spiritual being, it followed that it was the more noble of the two. His

answer is to appeal to the distinction between numerical and predicational commonness, and to

insist that it is only the former kind that is a sign of nobility; for the whole reason that

commonness indicates nobility is because it indicates a good which is diffusive of itself, raising

those who seek it up to itself and, in the process, binding them to each other as well. The same

point is made again in De ver. 7.6 ad 7, Editio Leonina 22:207b:

Dupliciter enim dicitur aliquid commune: uno modo per consecutionem vel praedicationem; quando scilicet aliquid unum invenitur in multis secundum rationem unam; et sic illud quod est communius non est nobilius sed imperfectius, sicut animal homine. . . . Alio modo per modum causae, sicut causa quae una numero manens ad plures effectus se extendit; et sic id quod est communius est nobilius, ut conservatio civitatis quam conservatio familiae.28

Here the idea is even clearer: the more common a good is in praedicatione, i.e., the lower of a

common denominator it is, the less formal perfection it contains (the upper limit here would

be the goodness of the real individual goods of which they can be predicatedwhich also have

the considerable advantage of enjoying real existence); but the more common a good is in

causando, the nobler it is, for (besides enjoying real existence) the greater commonness indicates a

greater self-diffusiveness and a greater power to raise up many to itself. Finally, we should take

note of ST I-II.90.2 ad 2 (Editio Leonina 7:150b).29 In the main article St. Thomas maintains that

the end of law is the felicitas communis, which surely seems like a good which is common

only in praedicando (i.e., a mere common name to describe your attainment of your end and my

attainment of mine); but in his reply to the second objection (which had argued that law cannot

28 De Koninck does not cite this text in support of this distinction, but Benjamin Smith (p. 80), Froelich (p. 48), and Michael Smith (Common Advantage and Common Good, 124) all do.

29 Benjamin Smith (7981) and Froelich (The Equivocal Status of bonum commune, 4344) both make use of this this text as an important Thomistic source of the in praedicando/in causando distinction.

16

be directed to the common good, because it deals with actions that are particular, and hence

common at best in praedicando), St. Thomas says that the actions commanded by law serve a good

which is common not communitate generis vel speciei, but rather communitate causae finalis, i.e.,

common in the way in which a concrete final cause is common.

This last passage is especially relevant, because it deals directly with the social level and

explicitly denies the utilitarian-esque claim that the common good is simply the sum of the

nobility of its members, in that it insists that the common good aimed at by law is not the

good of individual virtuous particular actions (which is common only in praedicando) but rather of

some numerically single thing to which those actions are ordered. All three of these texts,

however (and there are others as well30), seem to indicate that, for St. Thomas, the kind of

commonness that sets love for the common good apart from love for a mere crowd of

individuals is commonness of the in causando variety; only this kind is something above the

individual goods that flow from it. It is only if there is a felicitas communis that is a concrete object

or event, a society-wide equivalent to the team victory, that we can love our fellow citizens for its

sake, desiring that they should flourish so that this common happiness might be made

manifest in them. But what exactly is this common happiness?

3. Bonum commune in causando: extrinsic vs. intrinsic

Before we answer that question, let us step back and establish an important distinction

within the notion of the bonum commune in causando: the venerable distinction between the intrinsic

30 Froelich, in The Equivocal Status of bonum commune, 43, n. 15, mentions three others: ST I.13.9, Editio Leonina 4:15859; ST I.39.4 ad 3, Editio Leonina 4:402a; and In duodecim libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis expositio (hereafter In Met.) VII.13, ed. M.-R. Cathala and Raymond M. Spiazzi (Turin and Rome: Marietti, 1950), 378b n. 1571.

17

and the extrinsic common good. The former refers to a good which is rooted in the multitudes

own members, which inheres in them and informs them, so to speak; the latter is a good

which benefits the multitude as a whole without inhering in it. This distinction, and indeed much

of what the Scholastics have to say about the common good in general, can be traced back to a

famous passage of Aristotles Metaphysics:

We must consider also in which of two ways the nature of the universe contains the good, and the highest good, whether as something separate and by itself, or as the order of the parts. Probably in both ways, as an army does; for its good is found both in its order and in its leader, and more in the latter; for he does not depend on the order but it depends on him.31

Curiously, though Aristotle uses the example of an army, he does not even mention the most

obvious candidate to be the armys extrinsic good, namely its victory, but rather cuts straight to

the general.32 As St. Thomas makes clear in his commentary on this passage,33 however, the

whole reason the general is relevant is precisely because he has the more immediate external

good of victory in his charge: Finis potior est in bonitate his quae sunt ad finem: ordo autem

exercitus est propter bonum ducis adimplendum, scilicet ducis voluntatem in victoriae consecutionem; non

autem e converso. This is why the general is loved. We will return to the key role of the general

presently; for now, however, let us focus on the relationship of the army to victory.

On this level, there are two main things to notice. First, there is the assertion that not

only the armys victory but also its order itself is a good; and second, there is the claim that

31 Aristotle Metaphysics XII.10.1075a1015, trans. W. D. Ross. Here is the Greek: , , . ; ,

.

32 In the context this makes sense, since Aristotle is here in the midst of his discussion of the First Mover of the universe (the parallel to the general), and the universebeing a unity of beauty rather than an outward-directed machineproduces no obvious parallel to victory.

33 In Met. XII.12, ed. Marietti 612 nn. 262731.

18

nonetheless the order is a subordinate good, one ordered to victory (and, only hence, ordered

also to the one who has charge of it), not vice versa. Beginning with the former, St. Thomas

starts by claiming that the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic common good is simply a

special case of a broader distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goods in general.34 As a good

Aristotelian, St. Thomas is not a functionalist: for him, there is genuine nobility and for-its-own-

sakeness not only in the operation by which a thing attains its end, but also in the form which is

the principle of that operation. A form is not just an empty potency to act; it is also actuality in its

own right, what the Scholastics called first actuality.35 As St. Thomas points out in ST I.6.3,

the perfection of a thing consists not only in its attainment of the end, but also in its having the

accidents (and nature) proportionate to that attainment. And in the case of a unity of order, that

intrinsic form is its order itself.

On the other hand, however, it would seem obvious that the order (or the intrinsic form)

can never be for its own sake; for, noble as they may be, first actualities are essentially defined by

the exterior-oriented operation of which they are the principle, and for the exercise of which

they were made. Ratio eorum quae sunt ad finem, sumitur ex fine. The normal way for an

operation to attain its end is by unio secundum rem, as in the case of St. Thomass example

here of arriving at a journeys destination (and also in the attainment that constitutes knowledge);

but it might also be by way of imitation,36 or even by way of affection.37 In the specific case of a

34 Ibid., 612a n. 2627.

35 The Aristotelian locus classicus for this is De anima II.1, esp. 411a1012, 411a2229, and 412b25413a3; see Aquinass commentary at Sent. lib. De anima II.1, Editio Leonina 45.1:69ab lines 96129, 71b lines 289319, and II.2, Editio Leonina 45.1:75b76a lines 105138..

36 Though attainment-by-imitation is not immediately obvious in the passage of the Metaphysics commentary from which we are drawing, nonetheless, as St. Thomas will make clear, the whole reason the general counts as the armys chief extrinsic good is because the armys perfection lies in imitating and obeying the generals plan. Benjamin Smith emphasizes the role of imitation at 5153, but his source is instead ST I.103.2 ad 1 and especially

19

unity of order, however, it is important to reiterate that not only must there be an extrinsic good

in order for the order to have meaning, but it must be a numerically single good. Unless it is the

same concrete extrinsic good that all the members are striving for, there would be no order at all:

as Froelich puts it, The common goal which the Greeks had in facing the Persians at

Thermopylae was victory. Each had as his end one and the same thinga victory against this

enemy, here and nownot a general notion, which could never by itself direct the particular

actions of any army.38 If each soldier had as his goal simply personally taking down as many

enemies as possible, all military discipline, specialization, and strategy would disappear, and

instead of an army one would have a mob. In other words, not only is an extrinsic bonum commune

in causando necessary in order to love its seekers as more than mere individuals; it is necessary to

constitute its seekers into an order in the first place.

At least two problems arise when we try to investigate this idea further, however. (1)

First, how is this structure supposed to apply to a non-utilitarian order? It seems clear enough

that armies, corporations, construction crews, etc. are all unified and given team spirit (i.e.,

love for each other as contributing to a greater whole) by the extrinsic goal toward which they

are working; but what is the victory for the paint-flecks in a painting, or the members of a

dance-troupe? More directly to the point, what is the extrinsic good of a friendship? To be sure,

all friendships are about something, a shared activity which presumably would have its own

ad 2 (Editio Leonina 5:454b455b), where St. Thomas does explicitly emphasize the role of imitation in discussing the division of intrinsic and extrinsic goods. (Indeed the whole article, whose subject is whether the primary end of the universe is intrinsic or extrinsic to it, is an important text for this side of the question.)

37 See esp. ST I-II.28.1, Editio Leonina 6:187198; ST II-II.23.6 c. and ad 1, Editio Leonina 8:170; and ST II-II.27.6 c. and ad 3, Editio Leonina 8:229.

38 Froelich, The Equivocal Status of bonum commune, 48. Cf. Benjamin Smith, 7879.

20

external good to be attained;39 but it would seem clear that we do not love the friend because we

want the external good to be better attained thereby. Moreover, that external good is in any case

almost always common only in praedicando; thus, fellow sculptors bond not primarily because they

love working on (or contemplating) the self-same good, but rather because they love the way

beauty is expressed in their medium (which is, obviously, an abstract feature of many individual

sculptures). As we will see in the next section, this same difficulty applies, with perhaps even

greater force, to political society: there seems to be no proper extrinsic common good that could

unify it and stamp it with its unique character.

(2) On the other hand, in the cases when we actually are dealing with a utilitarian order

(e.g., the army/construction crew/etc.), why do we say that its order even counts as a genuine

unityand hence as something that can be genuinely loved at all? In other words, why would we

say that we love the armys discipline rather than the individual soldiers skill sets that make it up?

It makes at least arguable sense to speak of an objective, real emergent unity when that unity is

honestum, something genuinely noble in itself; but if the unity is strictly subjective, rooted only in

the fact that all the different parts happen to serve a need or desire that we have, it seems that to

love it as a unity would be to love it merely as an ens rationis. But it if it seems strange to say that

we can love others more qua contributors to a merely useful good than as (intrinsically noble)

individuals, it seems downright absurd if that good is not only merely utile but, in fact, a mere

figment of our imagination, a convenience-term.

One might think, then, that the army/victory analogy is fundamentally flawed: it seems

that either (a) we can transcendently love our fellow man as contributing to an extrinsic common

39 For one of the locus classici on this subject, see Aristotle Eth. Nic. VIII.3.1156b724. We will return briefly to the role of a shared good in friendship at the very end.

21

good (victory), in which case we cannot transcendently love him as contributing to an intrinsic

common good (the bonum utile of the disciplined army), or (b) we can transcendently love him as

a contributor to an intrinsic common good (e.g., the beauty of the dance-troupe), in which case

there is simply no extrinsic common good to be loved at all. It seems impossible for man to be

ordered to be both, at least not in the same line of goodness, as St. Thomas seems to want

(and as seems to be required by the claimwhich objection #1 above, regarding apparently

self-contained unities of order like works of art, conteststhat every intrinsic common good

is given unity by an extrinsic common good40).

To reply to this, I think the basic Aristotelian/Thomistic picture needs to be tweaked

and expanded a little. It seems clear that an intrinsically noble order and a utilitarian order

have at least this much in common: they are both founded on an aggregate of individual

relations connecting the accidents of the different parts (the relation of each paint-flecks

position, color, intensity, etc. with respect to that of all the other flecks, or the relation of each

soldiers specialization and skills to that of the others). It seems clear that this aggregate is being

used for a purpose, that the individual relations it comprises are not random, and that hence

these relations seem to deserve to be called an order. Let us, then, give the name aggregate-

order to this collection of relations which are ordered to the achievement of this purpose.

Now, what is this purpose that these relations are being ordered to? In the case of a

utilitarian order, clearly, it will be something like victory or some other efficiently caused

product. In the case of an intrinsically noble order, on the other hand, it is the beautiful form

itself that is the goal of the arrangement of all the individual relations, of the aggregate-order;

40 For this claim see especially De ver. 5.3 (Editio Leonina 22:146b lines 8284), where St. Thomas says that quamcumque ergo multitudinem invenimus ordinatam ad invicem, oportet eam ordinari ad exterius principium. More importantly, though, this claim seems to be rooted in the nature of the word order itself: order implies order to. There has to be an end outside the ordered parts in order for it to be an ordering at all.

22

unlike in the case of the army or the assembly line, there is something genuinely emergent that

this aggregate-order grounds. Yet we also call this emergent thingthis beautiful, integral form,

this intelligible essence, or however one wishes to describe itan order, precisely because the

ground of its unity is the intrinsic arrangements that make up the aggregate-order. Let us call it,

then, a transcendent order, and define it as the intrinsically noble, numerically single relational

accident which emerges from, and is the telos of, all the individual relations that constitute the

aggregate order in a non-utilitarian multitude (one which is not aimed at an extrinsic product).

As a result of this analysis, we have something like the following picture: in a utilitarian

order, we have the metaphysical progression of {intrinsic non-emergent aggregate-order [ens

rationis of subjectively perceived intrinsic transcendent order] extrinsic unified product}; but

in an honest or intrinsically noble order the progression instead goes simply {intrinsic non-

emergent aggregate-order still intrinsic,41 objectively transcendent order}. But this leaves us

with the further question of how to distinguish transcendent orders from composite substances;

after all, are not composite substances too often thought of in terms of emergence from lower-

level arrangements? I would argue that the difference is that the composite substance (e.g. a dog)

can itself qualify as the recipient of its emergent features, for the reason that those features

(sensation, instinct, etc.) are immanent to it: its emergent perfections are not only in itself but

also for itself. By contrast, a paintings emergent perfections are visible perfections, which the

painting itself has no faculty to receive: hence those perfections, while still in itself, are for

another, namely rational viewers equipped with eyes. Finally, by contrast to both of these, a

tools seemingly emergent perfection is not only for another (its user) but also in another

41 It is, of course, intrinsic to the multitude, not to the individual constituents. The individual relations of an aggregate-order would be both rooted in and limited to those individual constituents; but the emergent relation of a transcendent order would not be limited to those individual constituents, though it would still be rooted in them.

23

(namely, in its product); and this in another is purely accidental except in our own eyes.

Whereas, a beautiful composition is in itself precisely because of the feature of objective

integrity that is so central to the Thomistic notion of beauty:42 there is an inherent proportion

among its accidents (unlike in an airplane) that allows it to qualify as something over and above

the manifold that makes it up. Its intelligible essence, though enshrined in that manifold in esse

spirituale,43 remains distinct therefrom. In a sense, we could say that it is externalexternal to

each of the individual parts, but not to the collective.44

We can now turn back to answer the two difficulties we raised. Beginning with #2 (the

worry concerning the unity of a utilitarian aggregate order, e.g. an army), I would say simply that

the example of the army is not intended to be a metaphysically exact roadmap, but rather a

manuductio which, for the sake of simplicity, treats an aggregate-order as a transcendent order for

the plain reason that, while his chief target is the honest transcendent order of society and the

universe and their dependence upon their directors (the ruler and God, respectively), the

aggregate-order of an army presents an easy and intuitive stepping-stone to that targets

properties. For our purposes, however, I think it is important to be clear, however, that the fact

of belonging to a construction team cannot possibly ground a transcendent love for a fellow

worker the way either the fact of belonging to a dance troupe or sharing a common external

42 See ST I.39.8, Editio Leonina 4:409a.

43 By this I mean that the represented essence is present in the individual accidents of the paint-flecks in much the same way that St. Thomas understood sensible forms to reside in the medium and in the brain, i.e., in matter which is not proper to that sensible form. See esp. Sent. lib. De anima 2.24, Editio Leonina 45/1:168a69b, and also 2.14, Editio Leonina 47/1:127a128b, 2.20, Editio Leonina 47/1:452a53a, 2.21, Editio Leonina 47/1:156ab, and 2.26, Editio Leonina 47/1:179a 589. Cf. Super Sent. 4.44.2.1 ql. 3, ed. Parmae 7/2:1086, and 2.13.1.3, ed. Pierre Mandonnet (Paris: Lethielleux, 1929) 2:33235; De ver. 26.3 ad 11, Editio Leonina 22:758b; and ST I.78.3, Editio Leonina 5:254a.

44 For more discussion of intrinsic and extrinsic goods in general, and of how the common good must necessarily be an extrinsic good vis--vis the individual (although intrinsic vis--vis society), see Benjamin Smith, 6470 and 8789.

24

project can. Instrumentality, as such, cannot ground transcendence. As for #1 (the worry that

things like works of art and friendships are not for the sake of any extrinsic common good at

all), I think what we have said makes clear that the telos, the stand-in for the extrinsic victory in

the case of a non-utilitarian unity of order is precisely its transcendent order, and that no other is

needed.45

4. The political common good

Why is this second point important? It is important because, I think, it provides the key

to understanding how there can be a genuine political common good; for if it were necessary for

there to be a proportionate, fully extrinsic bonum commune in causando in order for society to be a

true unity that could ground transcendent love, there would, I think, be no such society.

Consider the possibilities. First of all, I think it is clear that political society cannot have God as

its proper extrinsic good. Benjamin Smith disagrees with me here, claiming that Chapter 3 [of

De regno bk. 2] states that the political common good is twofold: (1) intrinsically it is the

communal bene vivere; (2) extrinsically it is ordination to God. This is the due end of political life,

and as such, it is the governing political truth for understanding what Thomas has to say about

the practice of kingship.46 I fail, however, to see how this claim holds water, given that St.

Thomass whole purpose in this chapter is to show precisely that the kings responsibilities do

not extend to guiding the multitude to the attainment of beatitudeeven though, of course, that

45 To be sure, it does still need the other kind of extrinsic good, the kind that St. Thomas is after all mainly interested in, namely a director; we will return to this at the end of this chapter.

46 Thomas Aquinas on Politics and the Common Good, 106.

25

attainment is indeed the most truly ultimate end of the multitude.47 Rather, the kings goal is

simply to dispose toward an end which is not properly his own; and, for St. Thomas, the goal of

the king is of course the same as the highest end of the properly political sphere.

But if political societys proper extrinsic good is not God, what would it be? As Michael

Smith notes, it is one of the weaknesses of De Konincks exposition that he makes too quick a

jump from the political common good to the order of the universe, and then to Gods final

causality. One wonders whether there is room, on this view, for a healthy autonomy of the

political order . . . in the sense of politics having its own level of competence within its own

order.48 But what are the alternative candidates for this role of that for the sake of which the

aggregate-order of society exists? First of all, a supporter of the primacy of the common good

in the socio-political sphere must rule out instrumental goodsthings like codes of law, penal

systems, education, and other public works that are conducive to the (numerically plural) virtue

and happiness of the citizens, but that do not themselves constitute the object of love (i.e., that do

not qualify as bona honesta).49 (This would also comprise at least the thinner sense of peace, i.e.,

the prevention of the disruptive forces that would keep citizens from their individual

flourishing.50) In ruling them out he will part ways from John Finnis, who defines the specifically

political common good as consisting of

47 Though one could, of course, claim, as Maritain and Fr. Eschmann do, that even this attainment is common only in praedicando, not in reality.

48 Human Dignity and the Common Good, 121.

49 Thus, Bradley Lewis, in The Common Good in Classical Political Philosophy, Current Issues in Catholic Higher Education 25 (2006): 2541, at 25, opens his article with the claim that the common good we are seeking must be a bonum honestum.

50 Character-based justice and peace is, of course, Finniss proposed candidate for a political common good; see Public Good: The Specifically Political Common Good in Aquinas, in Natural Law and Moral Inquiry: Ethics, Metaphysics, and Politics in the Work of Germain Grisez, ed. Robert George (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University

26

(i) the good of using government and law to assist individuals and families do [sic] well what they should be doing, together with (ii) the good(s) that sound action by and on behalf of the political community can add to the good attainable by individuals and families as such. . . . This specifically political common good is limited and in a sense instrumental.51

He will also part ways from Fr. Eschmann: The common good has a relative and limited pre-

eminence in via utilitatis, because it is essentially a bonum utile, the highest bonum utile, but nothing

Press, 1998), 174-209, at 186. (Lewis, 28, supports a very similar candidateeven despite his initial firm insistence that the common good must be honestum rather than merely instrumental.) It is likely, however, that Finniss understanding is actually rather thicker than this; see below, n. 61.

Also, it should be noted that while Gregory Froelich in his first article (The Equivocal Status of bonum commune, 5253) seems to support an almost identical candidate, namely the tranquility of order, it is also the case that (a) he seems to be meaning this in a rich sense of the term, i.e., as encompassing the whole network of social interaction that binds society together, and that (b) he in a later article discards this candidate and adopts political friendship instead. We will have more to say about this in a moment.

51 Finnis, Public Good, 187 (emphasis in original). Cf. Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 239 (esp. n. 89) and 247, and Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 155.

Though this is tangential to our main interests, in fairness to Finnis it might be worthwhile to qualify this statement a little. First, on the same page we just cited Finnis also posits an unlimited common good; and though it would appear to be common only in praedicatione, one could argue that it is actually in causando inasmuch as it appeals to the stratified, mutually supporting hierarchy of society, which can certainly be construed as an emergent good. Thus, Mary Keys condemnation of Finnis (Personal Dignity and the Common Good, 186190) might still be too harsh, despite the redeeming value she finds in Finnis. Also, Michael Pakaluk, who in general opposes Finnis fairly strongly, notes that Finnis sees law as at least conducive to general justice, even in its non-directly-relational aspects (Is the Common Good of Political Society Limited and Instrumental? The Review of Metaphysics 55 [2001]: 5794, at 58), which would connect even Finniss instrumental political good to this broader, honest common good more closely than it might at first appear.

Second, Finnis does seem to ascribe a genuine primacy to even the political common good on the practical order. Thus, he can maintain the intermediate, instrumental nature of the political common good and still ascribe a primacy to political science as the chief of the practical sciences, on account of its unique ability to establish the public means for the (individual-level) good of the whole; see, for example, Aquinas, 11415 (where his argument is based, incidentally, on Sent. lib. Ethic. I.2, Editio Leonina 47.1:9ab, the same Thomistic expounding of the divinius principle on which the De Koninck school relies so heavily). This thesis of the common goods supremacy being restricted to the practical order is also, famously, a key principle in Maritains La personne et le bien commun, esp. 24445 and 25963, where he contrasts the public nature of the practical means that are the proper domain of the active life with the private nature of the speculative attainment of the end that is the heart of the contemplative life. I think, however, that this appeal to the primacy of the contemplative life, while not without its merits, is ultimately misleading, in that it gives the impression that society somehow can be a genuine beneficiary-good on the level of practical action (which, of course, was not Maritains intent).

27

more. It has no absolute pre-eminence, i.e. no primacy in ratione dignitatis.52 (It should be noted,

though, that Maritain himself will not go this far.53)

Indeed, a supporter of the political common goods primacy must part ways with them

for several reasons. First, and most obviously, because only the fact that his neighbour shares in

something higher than his own individual (noble) good can possibly ground a mans transcendent

love: to love another qua contributor to the same tool seems like a distinctively unattractive

proposition. Second, at least some of these useful goods (like social tranquillity) have the same

problem that any tool (including the utilitarian aggregate-orders we discussed above) does: their

only unity is in our minds, since their telos is unified only with respect to our own desires and

purposes, and to love people on the basis of a unity which is only an ens rationis seems at least

foolish. Third, it seems like none of these goods (with the possible exception of social

tranquillity) is all-embracing, that none of them can lay claim to being the good of society, but

rather that a conjunction of all of them is needed; and if intrinsic orders were defined by their

(numerically single) extrinsic ends, then it seems that rather than one society we would be faced

with several (one defined by the educational system, one defined by the justice system, etc.).54

52 Fr. Eschmann, ibid., 202.

53 La personne et le bien commun, 255: Le bien commun nest pas seulement un ensemble davantages et dutilits, mais droiture de vie, fin bonne en soice que les anciens appelaient bonum honestum, bien honnte; car dune part cest une chose moralement bonne en elle-mme que dassurer lexistence de la multitude; et dautre part cest une existence juste et moralement bonne de la communaut qui doit tre ainsi assure. Rather, Maritain

merely thinks the common good is a lower kind of honest good than the highest individual goods, inasmuch as it is practical rather than speculative (see n. 51 above). Note, however, that Maritains understanding of the honestas of the social common good is one that is common only in praedicando: it is strictly the good of the virtue of the multitude. We will turn to this point in a moment.

54 One could, however, contest this objection and claim that the whole system that serves human flourishing should count as the extrinsic good of society. In saying this one would come suspiciously close to the position I will in fact support, which is that the systemic ordering of society is itself the only defining good of that order. Insofar as it is distinct, however (merely referring to the collectivity of all public institutions), I do not see a good way to individuate it, since this alleged institutional machine would not have a single unified product. There is no institution, after all, that can produce human flourishing; an institution can only produce various necessities, and

28

Finally and most importantly, even if one ignores the preceding two problems, it remains the

case that to order oneself to a bonum utile is to order oneself, even more fundamentally, to the

bona honesta that that bonum utile serves; and at least in all the cases I can think of, these bona

honesta would be individual noble goods, or at least goods which cannot serve the whole

community. (Otherwise there would have been no reason to appeal to the institutional bonum

utile in the first place, since its main virtue seems to be its apparent commonness.) But if one

accepts this, then, of course, one has abandoned the idea of a transcendent neighbour-love

founded upon a deeper love for a common good.

An important consequence of this last point is thatcontrary, I think, to the opinion of

a number of Thomiststhe intrinsic common good cannot be virtue, human flourishing, or

bene vivere (or whatever one wishes to call it) either.55 This is a bold claim to make, because

St. Thomas himself seems to say in the De regno that the whole reason society exists is so that

individuals might flourish in a way in which they could not on their own;56 and likewise in the

Treatise on Law he seems to claim that a) the end of law is the common good (I-II.90.2), and

that b) the proper effect of good law is the virtue of the citizens, that they might become boni

simpliciter (I-II.92.1). Nonetheless, if the individual flourishing of the multitude is the intrinsic

common good, then all we have is a bonum commune in praedicando, to love which is neither more

each would be individuated by the particular kind of good it provides. A sum total of publicly producible things that men need does not sound to me like a species-name; it sounds to me like the paradigm of a nominalistic convenience-term.

55 Indeed, even Benjamin Smith, despite his firm insistence that no attribute that inheres in the agent can possibly constitute a common good, does not hesitate to say at 97ff that, for Thomas, the political common good consists precisely in the multitudes virtue, in its bene vivere (citing De Regno 2.3 among other Thomistic texts). Others have argued the same; see, e.g., Michael Smith, Common Advantage and Common Good, 113 and 116,

Pakaluk, 68, and Fr. Lawrence Dewan, St. Thomas, John Finnis, and the Political Good, 35761.

56 De regno 1.4, Editio Leonina 42:466a: Videtur autem finis esse multitudinis congregate uiuere secundum uirtutem: ad hoc enim homines congregantur ut simul bene uiuant, quod consequi non posset unusquisque singulariter uiuens; bona autem uita est secundum uirtutem, uirtuosa igitur uita est congregationis humane finis. See also Aristotle Pol. I.2.1252b30 and III.9.1280a251281a10.

29

nor less than to love the sum of its members individual goods; the elusive formal difference that

we are seeking for the social whole would disappear. Benjamin Smith, aware of this difficulty,

tries instead to argue that the shared life itself is numerically one, not reducible to the virtuous

life of the individual citizens, and indeed puts bene vivere explicitly in the context of the

causando/praedicando distinction.57 But what would this mean? If it means simply that individual

virtuous flourishing depends on the existence of a societal structure, then at best we would have a

bonum utile that was common in causando; and this would leave us facing the four severe

difficulties with a bonum utile candidacy that we just mentioned.58 But what then are we to make

of the Thomistic texts just mentioned? Though they do not make the point explicitly, a De

Koninckian could argue fairly easily that law (and the ruler) strive to perfect the individual

citizens not in order to let their action rest on that level, but rather in order that thereby the

whole society might be perfected in that good which constitutes it as a whole.59 But what would

this aspect be?

It seems to me that the only remaining option, now that we have specified that our

candidate for the intrinsic political common good must be (a) properly proportionate to society,

(b) a bonum honestum, and (c) common in causando, is to identify this good not as an extrinsic good

at all, but rather as a transcendent order that, itself, requires no further extrinsic good to unify it;

and specifically, I agree with Froelich that this transcendent order is best described as political

57 Benjamin Smith, 237 n. 2; cf. 239.

58 For evidence that Benjamin Smith really does make the argument that the in causando commonness of societal bene vivere can be justified simply by individuals dependence on unitary societal structures, see, e.g., ibid., 232.

59 The passage cited earlier from ST I-II.90.2 ad 2 might tend to support this reading, since it argues that while yes, laws do have the governance of particular actions as their proper effect, those particular actions are in turn referred back to the common gooda good which is common not by the commonality of genus and species, but rather by the commonality of final causality.

30

friendship,60 taken as the state of common goodwill, complementary role-filling, and common

pursuit of (non-political) goods that reigns over a healthy, peaceful society.61 Unlike God, it is of

a properly political nature; unlike laws, police forces, and gas pipelines, it is a bonum honestum; and

unlike ordinary virtue, I would argue that it is truly something emergent, a transcendent order

that is genuinely common in causando. The key reason I think this state of common goodwill is

60 See Froelich, Ultimate End and Common Good, The Thomist 58 (1994): 60919, esp. 611 and 613614, where he says that Among Finnis's seven basic values or goods, Thomas would admit only one that is truly common in the way a good is properly common, that is, as a common end or goal (communitate causae finalis, ST I-II.90.2 ad 2). That good is friendship. Life, knowledge, and the others, since realized (or instantiated) in the individual as such, are common only in definition (communitate generis vel speciei). Although we both may be

knowing one and the same truth, my act of knowing is not yours. . . . Friendship, on the other hand, is in its very particularity as common to the friends as the room they may be sharing. By friendship here I do not simply mean benevolence, for that is an interior and therefore incommunicable state of the soul; benevolence can be common only in predication. Rather I am referring to the fulfillment of mutual benevolence in cooperative action and a common life, which Aristotle argues is the most distinctive mark of friendship (Nicomachean Ethics, 1157b624, 1171b33) (emphasis mine).

Mary Keys endorses Froelich on this point in her dissertation The Problem of the Common Good and the

Contemporary Relevance of Thomas Aquinas, 6768. She also attributes this point to Michael Smith; but Smith (Human Dignity and the Common Good, 128) makes it quite clear that for him, unlike for Froelich, friendship is not the end of the political community; the end is the sharing in common of good actions, while friendship simply provides the societal glue which he considers the sine qua non requisite of this sharing in common of good actions (cf. p. 123). As I said, however, I simply do not see, however, how this sharing in common can possibly have a commonness other than in praedicando; I would argue, then, that only Froelich presents a plausible concretization of De Konincks principles on the societal level.

61 It should be noted that this is perhaps not all that different from the character-based state of justice and peace that Finnis advocates as the properly political common good; see Finnis, Public Good, 186. It is true that, while Froelich sees political friendship as being primarily something honestum in its own right, Finnis regards this societal state of mutual good-will as being a common good in its own right primarily as a bonum utile, i.e., on account of its ability to facilitate the work of Church and family in fostering further individual virtue (see ibid., 192), and in this respect I obviously think Froelich is right.

Still, however, it may be worth making two points in Finniss defense. (1) Finniss position implies that the ratio that defines the political common good is precisely its orientation to the (individual) bene vivere of full-fledged virtue and union with God, which might allay at least some Thomists distrust of him. (2) While Finnis does insist that the strict sense of peace is simply the peaceful condition needed to get the benefit(s) (utilitas) of social life and avoid the burdens of contention (Public Good, 179, citing De regno 1.2 and 1.6), he also insists that its elements are precisely the inter-personal virtues; and moreover, he maintains that there is an even fuller sense of peace which, rather than stopping short at the absence-of-inequality that constitutes strict commutative justice, comprises even the positive mutual goodwill and friendship which, in the end, must always constitute the foundation of the thinner sense of peace. His point is not that this fuller peace is not a properly political common good, but

rather that it is not the states duty to secure it (unlike the thin peace of strict justice). Hence I would argue that really the main fundamental difference between Finniss position and Froelichs is

that, not being concerned with the in praedicando/in causando distinction, Finnis he makes no effort to distinguish the individual acts of uni-directional neighborly love (which are singular goods) from the overarching state of reciprocal neighborly love (which is at least arguably a common good). Pakaluks claim that, for Finnis, peace is simply a

framework within which families can flourish ( Is The Common Good of Society Limited and Instrumental? 58ff)for which, incidentally, he does not provide a footnoteis, I think, an exaggerated accusation.

31

importantly different from the simple collection of individual persons love for others is, as I see

it, that the proper honestas of this state lies precisely in its very reciprocity62something which, by

its very notion, cannot lie on the level of the individual inhering accident.

One might object, however: are not friendships more akin to institutions than to the

artwork type of transcendent order,63 being specified and given their character by the shared

activity on which the friendship is founded? If this were true, then political friendship itself

could not possibly be the final answer to the question of what binds political society together,

and grounds transcendent love for its members as such: we would have to seek for an answer in

a shared activity (or good) which would be the proper ground of that friendship. Now, it is

certainly true that without such a shared activity, or activities, there will be no genuine

friendship.64 Nonetheless, as we mentioned earlier, it is already clear that this activity is usually

only common in praedicando, since fellow sculptors do not sculpt the same statues and fellow

62 See ST II-II.23.1, Editio Leonina 8:163, for a sharp distinction of one-way benevolence from the state of mutual friendship; cf. Aristotle Eth. Nic. VIII.2.1155b331156a5 for a similar underlining of the important difference between a state of mutually recognized love and mere unidirectional goodwill. For commentary, see David Gallagher, Person and Ethics in Thomas Aquinas, Acta Philosophica 4 (1995): 5171, at 66; cf. John Monagle, Friendship in Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas: Its Relation to the Common Good (PhD diss., Saint Louis University, 1973),

6365.

63 Indeed, if one accepts the representational theory of art (which I do), one could argue that even the artwork type of transcendent order must also be unified by an external object, inasmuch as it owes its integrity to the unity of the (extrinsic) real nature which it represents. Nonetheless, though cogent, I think this argument is a little weak for two reasons. (1) It does not seem to account for the more abstract types of art such as music, architecture, or the dance troupe we have been using as an example; even if these forms of art are in a sense representational, the essence being represented is certainly not one to be found in any single concrete thing. (2) Even in the case of the more directly representational arts, it seems that we can and often do have cases of fictional or mythical representations which are unified not by any one essence existing in reality but only by the idea in the mind of the author. Hence, while I would be the last to deny that it is the business of art to reflect and shine a light on reality, and that it is structured thereby, I think it is fundamentally structured not by numerically single real objects but rather by abstract features of the world that are common in praedicando.

64 See above all Aristotle Eth. Nic. VIII.3.1156b724. In Aquinas, see De regno