Church

Popular sovereignty and the oath theory

In October 2021, Judge William Pryor of the Eleventh Circuit (not the Fifth) gave a speech to the Heritage Foundation. Judge Pryor is a prominent conservative judge, and he is perpetually on the list of candidates for elevation to the Supreme Court in a Republican administration. His speech, “Politics and the Rule of Law,” is a long argument in favor of originalism. In this speech, in an attempt at Scaliaesque wit, he inveighed against “Living Common Goodism.” Among his assertions was that the oath imposed by Article VI of the Constitution—the oath to “support this Constitution”—creates a binding moral duty in favor of originalism.

Professors Evan Bernick and Christopher Green have conducted a lengthy analysis of the object of the constitutional oath, arguing that, while there might be exceptions, the oath prescribed by Article VI of the Constitution requires originalism in some way. Professor Joel Alicea, author of a recent essay attempting to find another basis to make originalism morally obligatory, recognizes that even Bernick and Green’s argument requires moral evaluation of the Constitution. However, others have found Professors Bernick and Green’s claims about the oath to be just the ticket, including John Ehrett and C’zar Bernstein. (Judge Pryor’s talk cited Bernstein in particular on this point.)

There is, I think, a very understandable desire on the part of originalists to find some binding moral basis for their jurisprudential preferences. The oath seems to be, for some, including Judge Pryor, a mechanism to moralize a certain interpretation of the Constitution. Most stop here, apparently revolting from the consequences of this when applied to judges and federal officers. But for rhetorical-forensic purposes, simply asserting that originalism is a moral duty is sufficient. But to move into a more obvious moral dimension (I would not suggest that law and morality are ever actually distinct) means just that: moving into a moral dimension. And there are of course consequences to this.

For Catholics—and those interested in an Aristotelian-Thomistic moral philosophy—the oath is well understood. Indeed, going back to St. Ambrose and St. Jerome, one can find nuanced understandings of oaths and their consequences. One important theme is that superiors can commute or dispense oaths sworn by their inferiors. This has always included the pope (or the delegates of the pope exercising his power). But the pope is not the only person, in my view, who can commute or dispense an oath. I believe that, on Aquinas’s account of popular sovereignty, the people, legislating through custom, can commute or dispense an oath.

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In the discussions of the Article VI requirement of an “Oath or Affirmation” to support “this Constitution,” the emphasis is often on “this Constitution.” There is not as much emphasis on “Oath or Affirmation.” Professors Bernick and Green recognize that there are situations in which oath-breaking might be not only justifiable but even necessary. But on the whole, the proponents of an originalism required by the oath want to talk about language and the nature of the Constitution. It is assumed, particularly by popularizers like Ehrett and Bernstein, that that oath is generally morally binding except in emergency circumstances. This is enough for their purposes: originalism is morally obligatory because oaths are morally binding.

I want to be clear that I do not share this view, nor do I think a Catholic can safely hold it. Some of the proponents of the view express clearly that they believe that an oath required by Article VI could conceivably bind someone to immoral acts. For example, C’zar Bernstein, writing in National Review, suggests that judges are bound by the Article VI oath to “support and faithfully interpret a written instrument that may or may not conform with the moral law or any particular conception of the ‘common good.’” The problems for a Catholic with this view are too numerous to discuss. (A brief review of the propositions concerning civil society and ethics more generally infallibly condemned by Bl. Pius IX in Quanta cura and Syllabus would highlight at least some of them.) Nevertheless, I will assume for our present purposes that the Article VI oath is not a moral suicide pact, and that the content of the Constitution is at least arguably conformable to the eternal and natural law. Moreover, I will assume that a Catholic can safely hold the oath theory.

It is certainly true that an oath is not binding in emergency circumstances—that is to say, when an oath would require an unjust result in given circumstances—but are there other circumstances when an oath might not bind? The answer Thomas Aquinas gives in the course of his detailed examination of both oaths and vows is yes. Certainly an oath to do something evil must not be sworn or carried out. But that is not every oath. Some oaths might be contrary to greater goods, and Aquinas tells us that we should not swear them, though we may or may not carry them out. A doubtful oath may be dispensed by one in authority, preeminently the bishop.

But there is a fourth category of oath identified by Aquinas: the oath that is manifestly lawful and useful. This oath, Aquinas tells us, does not admit of a dispensation, but a commutation. Aquinas analogizes it to a change in the law: circumstances may transpire that mean something better for the common good might be done. In these circumstances, an oath may be commuted to do that something better. The Pope, having in Aquinas’s account supreme jurisdiction in the Church (and, at least when he wrote his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, everywhere else), has the authority to commute oaths. But, Aquinas adds, so too does anyone who has authority over someone else.

And here we reach an interesting point, which I discussed previously. As Professor Alicea has demonstrated—incompletely, in my view—there is a theory of popular sovereignty in Aquinas. The Constitution, according to Professor Alicea and indeed Professors Bernick and Green, is the means by which the People of the United States transfer, under certain conditions, to various public persons their sovereignty, just as the Lex Regia was how the Roman people transferred to various public persons their sovereignty. But according to Aquinas, as I demonstrated a little while ago, the people retain a couple of important rights: the right to withdraw from a tyrant their transfer of power and the right to legislate through custom.

The People of the United States have authority over the public persons to whom they have transferred their sovereignty, retaining (crudely) the right to revolt and the right to legislate through custom. On Aquinas’s account, the people, as the superiors of all the Executive Branch officials and federal judges, have the retained jurisdiction to legislate through custom in such a manner as to dispense or commute the oaths of federal officers. This is, I believe, a significant problem for the oath theory on a Thomistic account.

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An oath is fundamentally an invocation of God to witness a statement (ST II-II q.89 a.1 co.). If it is a statement about past or present events, it is a declaratory oath (ibid.). If it is a statement about future events, it is a promissory oath (ibid.). There are limits to what one can swear about in Aquinas’s account. One swears to confirm contingent facts regarding man, and one invokes God, Who sees all and knows all, as a witness because man lies, forgets, and does not have access to distant places (ibid.). There is no need, therefore, to swear regarding speculative propositions, which receive natural and infallible confirmation by reason, and matters subject to scientific investigation (ibid.).

Aquinas tells us that an oath is fundamentally an act of faith—indeed, of religion—insofar as calling God to witness something is an implicit testimony to His omniscience (ST II-II q.89 a.2 co.; II-II q.89 a.4). But the Gospels, St. Paul, and the Fathers warn against swearing frivolous or wicked oaths (ST II-II q.89 a.2 co. & ad 1). An oath therefore must have three components to be lawful: truth, judgment, and justice (e.g., St. Jerome, In Jeremiam Prophetam lib. I, c. IV, PL 24, 706). Aquinas expounds upon these components: “Iudicio autem caret iuramentum incautum; veritate autem iuramentum mendax; iustitia autem iuramentum iniquum sive illicitum.”—“A rash oath lacks judgment, a false oath lacks truth, and a wicked or unlawful oath lacks justice” (ST II-II q.89 a.3 co.).

A declaratory oath—a statement about the past or present—has to be true. But the Article VI oath is manifestly a promissory oath: the officers “shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution” (U.S. Const. art. VI, cl. 3). Luckily, Aquinas explains when promissory oaths are binding, too: “in iuramento quod praestatur de his quae sunt fienda a nobis, obligatio cadit e converso super rem quam aliquis iuramento firmavit. Tenetur enim aliquis ut faciat verum esse id quod iuravit, alioquin deest veritas iuramento”—“in the oath that is made about something to be done by us, the obligation falls on the thing guaranteed by oath. For a man is bound to make true what he has sworn, else his oath lacks truth” (ST II-II q.89 a.7 co.).

But remember truth is only one of the three requirements for a lawful oath: it still must have judgment and justice (ST II-II q.89 a.3 co.). These remain the conditions for a valid oath under the 1983 Code of Canon Law (c. 1199 § 1). Aquinas explains first “Si autem est talis res quae in eius potestate non fuit, deest iuramento discretionis iudicium”—“if this thing be such as not to be in his power, his oath is lacking in judgment of discretion” (ST II-II q.89 a.7 co.). We turn then to judgment: “Si vero sit quidem possibile fieri, sed fieri non debeat, vel quia est per se malum, vel quia est boni impeditivum, tunc iuramento deest iustitia”—“If, on the other hand, it be something that he can do, but ought not to, either because it is essentially evil, or because it is a hindrance to a good, then his oath is lacking in justice” (ibid.). Here, Aquinas is emphatic. An oath that is essentially evil or a hindrance to justice must not be kept (ibid.).

There are a couple of ways that an oath can produce an evil result. First, the oath can be for something intrinsically wicked or something that hinders a greater good (ST II-II q.89 a.7 ad 2). Oaths for intrinsically wicked things are always immoral, both in the swearing and in the doing: “Huiusmodi enim iuramentum a principio est illicitum, differenter tamen. Quia si quis iuret se facturum aliquod peccatum, et peccat iurando, et peccat iuramentum servando”—“For oaths of this kind are unlawful from the outset: yet with a difference: because if a man swear to commit a sin, he sinned in swearing, and sins in keeping his oath” (ibid.). Oaths that hinder a greater good are immoral in the swearing but not the doing (ibid.).

The other way is fundamentally more interesting and perhaps more relevant: “Alio modo vergit in deteriorem exitum propter aliquid quod de novo emerserat, quod fuit impraemeditatum”—“Secondly, an oath leads to an evil result through some new and unforeseen emergency” (ST II-II q.89 a.7 ad 2). Aquinas here cites the example of King Herod. When he promised Salome to give her anything she wanted for her dancing, that was not in and of itself a wicked oath, provided that Salome asked for something Herod could lawfully give her. But when she asked for the head of St. John Baptist and Herod felt constrained to give it to her, that was certainly evil (ST II-II q.89 a.7 ad 2). Here he follows St. Ambrose—who cites not only the case of Herod but also of Jephthah (De officiis lib. I, c.50, no. 255).

A lawful oath that remains lawful—that is, a promise that still has truth, judgment, and justice—has to be followed, right? Maybe. In Aquinas’s treatment of vows, we learn about the concept of dispensation (ST II-II q.88 a.10). In the Treatise on Law, Aquinas explains how laws may be dispensed from (ST I-II q.96 a.6; I-II q.97 a.4). And the reason for dispensations from the law is pretty clear on Aquinas’s account: “lex ponitur respiciendo ad id quod est ut in pluribus bonum, sed quia contingit huiusmodi in aliquo casu non esse bonum, oportuit per aliquem determinari in illo particulari casu legem non esse servandam”—“a law is made with an eye to that which is good in the majority of instances. But since, in certain cases this is not good, there is need for someone to decide that in that particular case the law is not to be observed” (ST II-II q.88 a.10 co.). A person who makes a vow—that is a promise to God to do something (ST II-II q.88 a.1 co.)—becomes a law unto himself (ST II-II q.88 a.10 co.). In most cases, the matter of the vow is good, but in some cases it is evil, useless, or impedes a greater good; therefore, the Church has the power to dispense (or commute) a vow (ibid.).

As with vows, so with oaths: “Quod autem aliquid sit inhonestum vel noxium, repugnat his quae debent attendi in iuramento, nam si sit inhonestum, repugnat iustitiae; si sit noxium, repugnat iudicio. Et ideo, pari ratione, etiam in iuramento dispensari potest”—“Now anything morally evil or hurtful is incompatible with the matter of an oath: for if it be morally evil it is opposed to justice, and if it be hurtful it is contrary to judgment. Therefore an oath likewise admits of dispensation” (ST II-II q.89 a.9 co.).

Dispensations necessarily apply only to promissory oaths (ST II-II q.89 a.9 ad 1). The reason for this is clear: “Sed ad hoc se extendit dispensatio iuramenti ut id quod sub iuramento cadebat, sub iuramento non cadat, quasi non existens debita materia iuramenti, sicut et de voto supra diximus”—a dispensation “implies that what hitherto came under an oath no longer comes under it, as not being due matter for an oath” (ibid.). A declaratory oath covers something past or present, which is to say something that has “a certain necessity,” and therefore a dispensation would cover not merely the matter of the oath but also the act (ibid.). A promissory oath, on the other hand, covers something about the future, which can change (ibid.). A dispensation therefore covers the matter, not the act.

Aquinas considers three conditions for a dispensation (ST II-II q.89 a.9 ad 3). First, when an oath is manifestly contrary to justice; second, when it impedes a greater good; and third, when the matter is doubtfully right or wrong (ibid.). In the first case, such as when a man swears to commit murder, he must not carry out the oath (ibid.). In the second case, while it is immoral to swear an oath impeding a greater good (ST II-II q.89 a.7 ad 2), the man who swears it can carry it out or not (ST II-II q.89 a.9 co.). In the case of a doubtful oath, the authority of a prelate—that is, a bishop—is necessary (ibid.).

Aquinas considers a fourth case: “quandoque vero sub iuramento promittitur aliquid quod est manifeste licitum et utile”—“Sometimes, however, that which is promised under oath is manifestly lawful and beneficial” (ibid.). Here he distinguishes between a dispensation and a commutation. “Et in tali iuramento non videtur habere locum dispensatio, sed commutatio, si aliquid melius faciendum occurrat ad communem utilitatem”—“An oath of this kind seemingly admits not of dispensation but of commutation, when there occurs something better to be done for the common good” (ibid.). Aquinas makes two points following this. First, the power to commute an oath belongs preeminently to the pope, having the chief authority in the Church (see also In II Sent d.44 q.2 a.3 exp. text.). Second, “sicut et ad unumquemque pertinet irritare iuramentum quod a sibi subditis factum est circa ea quae eius potestati subduntur”—“Thus it is competent to any man to cancel an oath made by one of his subjects in matters that come under his authority” (ST II-II q.89 a.9 ad 3).

Here, the analogy to law is pretty clear. Aquinas, discussing the change of human laws, tells us: “Ex parte vero hominum, quorum actus lege regulantur, lex recte mutari potest propter mutationem conditionum hominum, quibus secundum diversas eorum conditiones diversa expediunt”—“On the part of man, whose acts are regulated by law, the law can be rightly changed on account of the changed condition of man, to whom different things are expedient according to the difference of his condition” (ST I-II q.97 a.1 co.). An oath might once been manifeste licitum et utile just like a law might have served the common good. But something that serves the common good better might come along.

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The trivial case for a dispensation or commutation is that the pope (or someone on whom the pope has conferred his own authority) dispenses or commutes it. Remember that the Church holds that all validly baptized Christians are part of the Church (c. 204). Historically the Church has claimed jurisdiction over all validly baptized Christians, though in recent years the Church has not emphasized that claim. The pope, as head of the Church, has preeminent power to dispense or commute an oath.

Under the 1983 Code of Canon Law, the pope has conferred this power in many cases to bishops and pastors (cc. 1203; 1196, 1º). As a rule, the power of prelates and pastors is limited to cases where no one is prejudiced by the commutation or dispensation. But even in such cases, the pope retains jurisdiction to commute or dispense the vow or oath. But the Code identifies, particularly with respect to oaths, situations in which by the law itself the oath is not binding (cc. 1201 § 2; 1202, 2º).

And Professor Green, writing at his blog, has characterized this as a “bad conception” of fidelity, pointing toward St. Pius V’s bull, Regnans in excelsis, which, among other things, dispensed Elizabeth Tudor’s subjects from any oaths they had sworn to her. This was not the only dispensation in the context of the English schism (and later heresy). Paul III, when he excommunicated Henry Tudor in the bull, Eius qui, dispensed the oaths of Christian princes to assist Henry (Mag. Bull. Rom. lib. I, sec. 15, pp. 706–07). But it is impossible to see that this is a “bad conception” of fidelity for a Catholic. It is simply the conception of fidelity on the Catholic account: the pope—to this very second—claims the power to dispense oaths, which he has conferred in some cases on bishops and pastors. One might say that this means that Catholics cannot hold the oath theory, and I fully agree: no Catholic can safely hold the oath theory. But I said at the outset that I would make assumptions in favor of the theory, including the assumption that it is not erroneous

But is the pope the only person who can commute or dispense from an oath? Recall that “ad unumquemque pertinet irritare iuramentum quod a sibi subditis factum est circa ea quae eius potestati subduntur”—“it is competent to any man to cancel an oath made by one of his subjects in matters that come under his authority” (ST II-II q.89 a.9 ad 3).

Aquinas articulates a theory of popular sovereignty (cf. ST I-II q.90 a.3). Siding with Azo and the minority opinion in a debate about the Lex Regia and the retained sovereignty of the Roman people, Aquinas holds more or less that the people, having entrusted the care of the commonwealth to a public person, retain some jurisdiction. First, they can throw off the rule of that public person if he becomes tyrannical: “Primo quidem, si ad ius multitudinis alicuius pertineat sibi providere de rege, non iniuste ab eadem rex institutus potest destitui vel refrenari eius potestas, si potestate regia tyrannice abutatur”—“If to provide itself with a king belongs to the right of a given multitude, it is not unjust that the king be deposed or have his power restricted by that same multitude if, becoming a tyrant, he abuses the royal power” (De regno lib. 1 c.7).

Second, the people retain the authority to legislate through custom: “Si enim sit libera multitudo, quae possit sibi legem facere, plus est consensus totius multitudinis ad aliquid observandum, quem consuetudo manifestat, quam auctoritas principis, qui non habet potestatem condendi legem, nisi inquantum gerit personam multitudinis. Unde licet singulae personae non possint condere legem, tamen totus populus legem condere potest”—“For if they are free, and able to make their own laws, the consent of the whole people expressed by a custom counts far more in favor of a particular observance, than does the authority of the sovereign, who has not the power to frame laws, except as representing the people. Wherefore although each individual cannot make laws, yet the whole people can” (ST I-II q.97 a.3 ad 3).

The people, therefore, retain a right to revolt against a tyrant and the right to legislate through custom. Other than that, the public persons to whom they have transferred their sovereignty exercise the public authority: “Ordinare autem aliquid in bonum commune est vel totius multitudinis, vel alicuius gerentis vicem totius multitudinis. Et ideo condere legem vel pertinet ad totam multitudinem, vel pertinet ad personam publicam quae totius multitudinis curam habet”—“Now to order anything to the common good, belongs either to the whole people, or to someone who is the viceregent of the whole people. And therefore the making of a law belongs either to the whole people or to a public personage who has care of the whole people” (ST I-II q.90 a.3 co.). And the reason is clear: you need coercive power to enforce the laws, and only the whole people or their chosen delegate has coercive power (ST I-II q.90 a.3 ad 2).

More than this, the delegate of the people has the power to dispense from the law: “ille qui habet regere multitudinem, habet potestatem dispensandi in lege humana quae suae auctoritati innititur, ut scilicet in personis vel casibus in quibus lex deficit, licentiam tribuat ut praeceptum legis non servetur”—“he who is placed over a community is empowered to dispense in a human law that rests upon his authority, so that, when the law fails in its application to persons or circumstances, he may allow the precept of the law not to be observed” (ST I-II q.97 a.4 co.). And Aquinas later explains reinforces this point (ST II-II q.89 a.9 co. & ad 3). But this is simply because the public person has the care of the whole community and is responsible for ordering the community to the common good. (ST I-II q.90 a.3 co.). Remember, though: the public authority has authority to order the commonwealth to the common good only as vice gerens of the totus multitudinis (ibid.). And that authority is subject to some important limitations, as we have seen, including the power to legislate (and nullify and interpret law) through custom (ST I-II q.97 a.3 ad 3).

Remember, too: as the law goes, so go oaths (ST II-II q.89 a.9 co.). The whole people, therefore, has the authority to commute or dispense oaths. But this must be squared with the two retained powers that the people have: the power to revolt and the power to legislate through custom. Revolution does not seem too compatible with oaths. Certainly a revolt would nullify the oath simply because the matter of the oath would have changed (ST II-II q.89 a.9 ad 1). The matter of the oath “I promise to apply the Constitution a certain way” changes when the people revoke the Constitution through a revolution.

But what about legislation through custom—that is, when the whole people through their actions legislate a certain way? Aquinas tells us: “Sicut autem ratio et voluntas hominis manifestantur verbo in rebus agendis, ita etiam manifestantur facto, hoc enim unusquisque eligere videtur ut bonum, quod opere implet”—“Now just as human reason and will, in practical matters, may be made manifest by speech, so may they be made known by deeds: since seemingly a man chooses as good that which he carries into execution” (ST I-II q.97 a.3 co.). Human speech can change the law because it expresses the judgment of reason, and because deeds can do the same thing, deeds can change the law per exteriores actus multiplicatos (ibid.).

This option seems entirely compatible with oaths. Just as the pope and the public person entrusted with the leadership of the commonwealth can dispense oaths through speech (or writing), the pope and the public person entrusted with the leadership of the commonwealth can dispense oaths through repeated exterior acts that declare their reason or will (ibid.). The whole people can dispense oaths, pursuant to what I might call its reserved jurisdiction, with respect to subordinates of the whole people (cf. ST I-II q.97 a.3 ad 3; II-II q.89 a.9 ad 3). How do they express this? Through custom (ST I-II q.97 a.3 co.).

What does this look like? Custom is nothing more than repeated acts expressing reason and will. (ST I-II q.97 a.3 co.). Acquiescence in a practice over a lengthy period is custom of a kind, just as behavior in a certain way over a similar period is custom. If the people permit a certain practice by their representatives or judges over a lengthy period, this would become a law—or interpret or abolish law—on Aquinas’s account of custom. Nothing in this process seems to exclude the acts that a sovereign may take regarding the oaths of his subordinates. And when the people tolerate again and again certain acts by its subordinates—let us say what we mean: when the people tolerate non-originalist decisions or actions by government employees in the various branches of government—it may be said that the people have commuted or dispensed the oath of their subordinates to “this Constitution.”

In my view, this account of popular sovereignty poses a significant problem for the oath theory. The people give most of their authority to the government through a document like the Constitution, but not all. And they retain the authority to legislate corporately through custom. This means that, even if the oath theory were correct and morally safe, the people can still dispense or commute the oath. The power to dispense or commute the oath throws the whole theory, in my view, into turmoil. The oath theory only works if “this Constitution” means the original public meaning of a given Constitutional provision. If the people can change that through custom, then the edifice falls apart.

If one wants to hold—against Azo and Aquinas—that the people have transferred all their authority to the government, retaining none for themselves, not even revolution or custom, then the oath theory may well be plausible given the assumptions I have made here. (Objectively, it is not plausible on the moral grounds I mentioned above, insofar as it purports to deny perennial teachings of the Church.) One may even reject the idea that the Constitution implicates popular sovereignty at all. But that argument would need to be worked out in some detail, not least since I think Professor Alicea is correct when he connects fundamentally the idea of popular sovereignty and the Constitution.

One could also reject custom as a means of making, interpreting, or abolish law. But here we depart so thoroughly from the Thomistic concept of law—indeed, from the entire understanding of law in the classical tradition—that one is forced to accept such a rejection as a parting of the ways more than a response. The differences are simply too large to be overcome and it must be acknowledged, cheerfully and charitably, that there is nothing really to be said.

Alasdair MacIntyre goes to the Laval School

It is an annual ritual for Alasdair MacIntyre to give a talk at the fall conference hosted by the Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame. This year was no different. The theme of the conference was “human dignity in a secular age.” Despite MacIntyre’s advanced age and the ongoing situation with COVID-19, MacIntyre gave his yearly talk on Friday, November 12. The talk, held in the ballroom at Notre Dame’s Morris Inn, was standing room only. For those who were not in South Bend—or who were driven from the ballroom by the crowd and the stifling heat—the talk was live-streamed and can be viewed at your leisure under circumstances more comfortable than those available at the Morris Inn.

And you should view it. The early reviews have been nothing less than glowing. At The Postliberal Order, a new and exciting Substack run by Patrick Deneen, Gladden Pappin, Chad Pecknold, and Adrian Vermeule, Deneen has an excellent summary of the talk. For Deneen, MacIntyre rejected “dignity,” the comfortable concept that liberalism usually resorts to in its justifications for any number of fundamentally liberal ideas, and instead held up the “more demanding standard of Thomistic justice.” Deneen observed that MacIntyre “laid bare the contradiction involved in defending human dignity while neglecting the political, economic, and social conditions that make possible human flourishing.”

At Ius & Iustitium, to which I contribute regularly, Rafael de Arizaga notes that MacIntyre’s talk is a turn toward jurisprudence. He argues that, if, as MacIntyre argues, we are to turn away from liberalism’s emphasis on dignity, which is often as not a content-free term that is little more than a justification for liberalism, toward what Deneen characterized as the “more demanding standard of Thomistic justice,” then we need a science of justice. Jurisprudence is that science. (Cf. Isidore, Etym. 5.3.1.)

I might disagree, however, with Arizaga’s sharp distinction between moral philosophy and jurisprudence. Aquinas tells us that habit and power is the intrinsic principle of human acts and law and grace are the extrinsic principles of good human acts (ST I-II q.49 prol.; q.90 prol.). But this is perhaps a narrow argument for specialists. Certainly Arizaga is right that, if our relations with one another—especially our social, which is to say, political, relations with one another—are to be governed not by (mostly content-free) ideas like dignity but by justice, then we certainly need to know what justice is and what it requires.

In his introduction to MacIntyre’s talk, Professor David Solomon likened MacIntyre to a junkyard dog. Perhaps, given MacIntyre’s age, it might be kinder to say that he is an old master, still capable of provoking his audience after all these years, with insights drawn from a long and serious consideration of these questions. One imagines that MacIntyre did provoke his audience, made up as it was of some of the most prominent conservative liberal voices in the country. Indeed, I had the sense while I was at the conference that this year’s Center for Ethics and Culture conference was a retrenchment of the conservative liberal voice. There were some very notable absences from the program, I thought. MacIntyre’s provocation, therefore, was welcome indeed.

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What struck me most was MacIntyre’s reliance on Charles de Koninck’s The Primacy of the Common Good Against the Personalists to make his argument. Longtime readers of Semiduplex—and who isn’t a longtime reader of Semiduplex, honestly—will be familiar with De Koninck’s seminal work. Indeed, anyone who has followed the integralism argument over the past five years will have heard of De Koninck and his little book about the common good. MacIntyre asked the audience at Notre Dame how many of them had heard of De Koninck. About half. A friend, a longtime veteran of MacIntyre talks, noted that MacIntyre does such audience participation for authors like De Koninck and Albert Murray.

MacIntyre’s argument follows, for the most part, De Koninck’s first objection and response in Primacy of the Common Good. There, De Koninck, following St. Thomas, argues that rational creatures are invested with dignity on account of their end, which is to know and love God, the ultimate end of the universe. This has consequences. The most important of which is that man can lose his dignity just as he can lose the attainment of his end. A rational creature keeps his dignity only as long as he remains in the order of the whole and acts according to the order of the whole. To achieve his dignity, man must order his private good to the common good.

This is an extraordinary argument. For De Koninck, dignity is not some inviolable condition that can be invoked against the common good, against order, but it arises from the common good and from submitting to order. Indeed, at the very end of his argument, De Koninck takes the objection head on: a man may be ordered to God, one might say, but he may not be ordered to any subordinate good. His dignity is inviolable with respect to these subordinate goods, and the rational creature can choose among them. De Koninck rejects this, too, arguing that if a superior remains in the order prescribed, then the inferior must submit to the superior, too. (De Koninck draws out another very startling conclusion from this, but I won’t spoil everything.)

In his influential manual, Thomistic Philosophy, Henri Grenier, another Laval School Thomist, describes personalism as the idea that man considered as a person has a dignity such that his end in the natural order is not subordinate to the end of civil society. (Considered as an individual, man is part of civil society and related to it as a part to the whole.) Grenier describes several issues with this view, of which I will mention two. First, the end of civil society, temporal happiness, is the greatest of all natural goods. Second, subordinating the common good to the private good of an individual is individualism.

Grenier observes that there is nothing inconsistent with subordinating an individual’s good to the end of civil society—temporal felicity. De Koninck, however, takes this farther and attacks the very core of the personalist argument. The dignity that they use to dissolve the person’s subordination to the common good, De Koninck argues, comes precisely from the rational creature’s subordination to that common good (and any subordinate goods superior to his own that are themselves subordinated to the common good). One loses this dignity as soon as one attempts to assert it against order.

A word should be said, too, about the distinction between objective and subjective right that Grenier outlines elsewhere in Thomistic Philosophy, which seems to have some bearing on this argument. Right is the object of justice, but it may be taken in one of two ways: objective right and subjective right. Subjective right—that is to say, right as inviolable power of doing something—taken as right in the strict sense, as most moderns do, leads the juridical order to being ordered to liberty, not the common good. However, if objective right—that is, that which is due to another—is taken as right in the strict sense and the foundation, therefore, of subjective right, the whole juridical order is ordered to the common good. There is, therefore, a connection, it seems to me, between the disordered concept of dignity of the personalists and the modern error that defines subjective right as right in the strict sense.

MacIntyre’s emphasis on the Thomistic account of justice in opposition to the modern concept of dignity is, therefore, a call to reject subjective right as right strictu sensu and return to the concept of objective right. The idea of rights as inviolable powers is corrosive to the common good, as Grenier demonstrates. One might say that the liberal claim is to assert that dignity serves as the title for an inviolable subjective right, which may be set against the common good. Objective right, with its focus on what one is owed from another or owes to another, resists this claim.

* * *

One can see why liberals are so fond of dignity as a concept, particularly in the personalist formulation that, as MacIntyre notes, was so popular after the Second World War. Claims of human dignity in the personalist conception dissolve man’s subordination to the common good. This is precisely what liberals want, especially in economics, but, as we have seen in recent years, scarcely less in other dimensions. De Koninck argues that this is not dignity. It is the loss of dignity. The society of frustrated tyrants this results in is, in fact, bestial.

MacIntyre’s invocation of De Koninck’s argument represents, as Patrick Deneen argued, a serious challenge to conservative liberals. To the extent that they rely on dignity to do basically what the personalists did, to set the good of the individual man above the common good of civil society, De Koninck demonstrates that their arguments in fact strip man of his dignity. It is only subordinated to the common good that man achieves his dignity. This is why it is essential to adopt instead claims about justice and duty.

One hopes that MacIntyre’s speech encourages at least some of those who were there at Notre Dame or watched it on the internet to go and read Charles de Koninck’s Primacy of the Common Good. While the integralism debates of the last five or six years are scarcely intelligible without De Koninck, the average conservative liberal may or may not have much interest in those debates. However, MacIntyre’s hearty endorsement of De Koninck may well spark such an interest.

The Quartodeciman Controversy

One reads St. John Henry Newman’s writings or the writings of Fr. Adrian Fortescue and one finds profound knowledge of and interest in the history of the Church, especially the Apostolic and Patristic periods. And this knowledge was not merely quaint antiquarian diversion, the way someone might know about small-gauge railroads in a given county at the turn of the century. These figures brought Church history to bear on questions of doctrine and practice that were live controversies in their days. Of course, their historical works are hugely entertaining and erudite as literary monuments, too.

By contrast—and let me say at the outset that I am as guilty of it as the next fellow—today we seem not to have the same interest in the history of the Church or the precedents of the Apostolic or Patristic eras. To be sure, their theology is often referred to. But one hardly sees discussions of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History with the same frequency one sees discussions of Augustine’s Confessions or City of God. This is too bad. In a 2007 general audience, Pope Benedict XVI praised Eusebius’s history as a source of “fundamental importance.” Benedict went on to make a startling statement, considering the lack of interest one sees in Eusebius, even among educated Christians:

Thus, Eusebius strongly challenges believers of all times on their approach to the events of history and of the Church in particular. He also challenges us: what is our attitude with regard to the Church’s experiences? Is it the attitude of those who are interested in it merely out of curiosity, or even in search of something sensational or shocking at all costs? Or is it an attitude full of love and open to the mystery of those who know – through faith – that they can trace in the history of the Church those signs of God’s love and the great works of salvation wrought by him?

Given the weight that a theologian and churchman like Benedict gave to the Ecclesiastical History, one feels compelled to crack open the dusty old Loeb (or Penguin) and cast around for scenes of interest. One such scene comes at the very end of Book 5 (5.23-5.25), where Eusebius recounts the Quartodeciman Controversy. One of the reasons why Benedict considered the Ecclesiastical History of such importance is because Eusebius preserved primary sources in his history for which he is the sole source. A particularly good example of this is found in his treatment of the Quartodeciman Controversy.

The dioceses of Asia held that Easter should be celebrated on the 14th of Nisan, following the definition of Passover and the preparation for Passover given in Leviticus 23. Naturally this may or may not be a Sunday, but regardless of whether or not it was a Sunday, that’s when the Lenten fast ended and Easter began. The opinion elsewhere was that one should not end the fast except on a Sunday—the day of the Lord’s Resurrection. The latter opinion, Eusebius tells us, was universal and was handed down by the Apostles themselves.

This matter became a live controversy toward the end of the Second Century. Synods were held in Rome, Palestine, Pontus, Gaul, and Osrhoene. Pope St. Victor presided over the Roman synod and St. Irenaeus presided over the synod in Gaul. (This will be relevant in a little while.) All of these councils reached the unanimous conclusion based upon the apostolic tradition: Easter is celebrated and the fast ends on a Sunday, not the 14th of Nisan.

The Quartodeciman bishops were, needless to say, unhappy that the judgment of Christendom had gone against them. Bishop Polycrates of Ephesus wrote to Victor, arguing in favor of their tradition. Eusebius quotes his letter at some length. In sum, he argues that the churches of Asia are decorated by saints asleep in the Lord, like St. John and St. Polycarp, all of whom maintained that Easter began on the 14th of Nisan, regardless of the day. Polycrates’s letter concluded in a manner perhaps not unfamiliar even today: he was not scared of threats and it is better to obey God rather than men.

Pope Victor was not altogether amused by Polycrates’s response, nor, insofar as we can tell, was he impressed by Polycrates’s stand on principle. He either excommunicated all the churches of Asia or threatened to do so on the ground of heterodoxy. Fortescue suggests that either he never actually published his decree excommunicating all the Christians in Asia or he withdrew the decree very quickly. We’ll come to that in a moment. What matters is that Victor’s initial reaction to Polycrates’s stand on tradition was to excommunicate not merely Polycrates but all the Christians in Asia.

Word got around. One doubts that this is something that happened all that often in those days. And other bishops offered Victor their views on the matter. By and large they did not think Victor was doing the right thing. Indeed, Eusebius says that they thought Victor ought not to do what he had in mind. In fact, the bishops asked Victor to turn his mind toward peace and unity and love, suggesting that they thought his plan to excommunicate the churches of Asia was contrary to peace and unity and love. Among the bishops who suggested that Victor had perhaps gone a little too far was St. Irenaeus.

Irenaeus was in a unique position in the controversy. Born in Smyrna to a Christian family, Irenaeus grew up around Polycarp, who had been cited by Polycrates as an authority in support of the Quartodecimans. And of course Polycarp himself was a disciple of St. John. By the time of the controversy, Irenaeus was bishop of Lyon in Gaul. However, one would be surprised if he did not have some insight into the Asian practice and the controversy. For his part, he reached the conclusion that Easter had to be celebrated on a Sunday notwithstanding the timing of Passover given in Leviticus.

Nevertheless, Irenaeus wrote Victor, urging him not to excommunicate all Asia. Irenaeus’s claim was that Victor ought not to excommunicate all these Christians merely for following their fathers’ tradition, which was, after all, itself unbroken. He observed that the dating was not the sole controversy, the fast was part of it. And there was much variation about the fast. But even if dating were the sole controversy, there was still insufficient ground to excommunicate them. Victor’s predecessors Anicetus, Pius, Hyginus, Telesphorus, and Xystus had all rejected the Quartodeciman position and kept the Roman Church free from error. But they had lived in peace with the Quartodecimans. Indeed, it was never suggested that this difference in calculation was a matter of heterodoxy rising to the level of severing communion.

Irenaeus made a particularly interesting point about the fast. It is worth dwelling on for a moment. Some kept the fast for a day, some for two days, others for forty hours. It appears—from Irenaeus and Tertullian—that the Lenten fast observed in those days was not universally the forty-day fast we know today. Within a couple of hundred years, the Lenten fast we know had emerged. At any rate, Irenaeus claimed that the variation in how the fast was kept demonstrated the unity of the Church, because all the people who kept the fast in various ways lived in peace with one another. In other words, diversity in practice among people who are at peace with one another is testimony to the essential unanimity of the faith.

Turning back to the date question, Irenaeus was particularly interested in Pope Anicetus’s conduct, which had a significant bearing on this question. Polycarp came to Rome during Anicetus’s reign. The matter of the dating of Easter came up. Anicetus and Polycarp simply could not agree on it. Anicetus could not get Polycarp to budge an inch: Polycarp stood on the tradition he received from St. John and other apostles. Polycarp could not get Anicetus to budge an inch, either: Anicetus had received a tradition from his fathers in the faith just like Polycarp did. However, this dispute did not result in a breach of communion between Anicetus and Polycarp, much less the sort of excommunication Victor had in mind. In fact, Anicetus made way for Polycarp to celebrate the Eucharist according to his tradition.

Victor seems to have changed his mind: either he never issued the excommunication he threatened or he withdrew it at once. And as is the case of so many heresies in the history of the Church, the Quartodeciman position died out. Two bishops, Narcissus of Jerusalem and Theophilus of Caesarea, prepared a brief for the apostolic tradition of celebrating Easter on a Sunday and observed that the Church of Alexandria had maintained the same practice, with an exchange of letters annually to ensure that everyone kept the same date. In the way of this, Eusebius tells us, the Quartodecimans were rebutted and unanimity achieved.

The Quartodeciman Controversy is an interesting moment in the life of the Church. Two practices existed side by side for a period of time. Suddenly, it becomes a doctrinal controversy. Eusebius does not quite explain what set off the explosion. Something had to, but it is not clear what it was. The various churches held councils and arrived at an opinion founded upon the teaching of the Apostles. Except for some holdouts. The holdouts informed Pope Victor that they stood on the tradition of the Apostles and saints and martyrs of Asia and were ultimately responsible to God, threats or no threats.

Pope Victor responded by declaring the practice of the Quartodecimans heterodox and threatening to excommunicate all the Christians of Asia. A drastic measure, to say the least. Such a peremptory action even today would be a sweeping exercise of papal jurisdiction. It’s rare enough for the pope to excommunicate anyone, much less everyone in a province, even on grounds much more certain than the grounds offered by the Quartodecimans. Victor’s brothers in the episcopate urged him to reconsider, to abandon the course of excommunication in favor of other means of preserving the unity and peace of the Church. Irenaeus in particular wrote him about the practice of the Church of Rome, which had been to tolerate the diversity in this discipline, even as it held, from apostolic origin, another discipline, in which the other churches of the world concurred. And in the end Victor reconsidered his approach.

There is perhaps a lesson here. Indeed, there must be. Benedict, in his 2007 address of Eusebius says, “Historical analysis is never an end in itself; it is not made solely with a view to knowing the past; rather, it focuses decisively on conversion and on an authentic witness of Christian life on the part of the faithful. It is a guide for us, too.” The Quartodeciman Controversy as presented by Eusebius is not merely an interesting historical highlight, made notable because the players in it are important for other reasons. His analysis of the situation serves therefore as a guide for us and ought to be approached as such.

One lesson is a lesson, as I said, that one finds written in the histories of many heresies that have afflicted the Church. Patient argument and the passage of time often resolve controversies more effectively than peremptory action. Narcissus and Theophilus analyzed the question relying on the apostolic traditions of their churches and came up with the case for the practice approved by the councils of the other churches, including Rome. Victor’s excommunication of Asia was ultimately not necessary. Once Narcissus and Theophilus had made their case, the Quartodecimans’ days were numbered. And today no one is a Quartodeciman.

Of course, the Quartodeciman Controversy has featured in various polemics between the protestants and the Church of Rome. In his splendid little book The Early Papacy, Fr. Adrian Fortescue makes some observations about this affair. Notably, no one suggests that Victor had not jurisdiction over the Quartodecimans. Second, Irenaeus does not say that Victor had not the power to excommunicate the Quartodecimans. Fortescue notes that Irenaeus (and the other bishops who wrote to Victor) merely holds that Victor should not excommunicate the Quartodecimans.

The question of the pope’s jurisdiction had been settled much earlier, when Pope St. Clement wrote to the Corinthians and commanded them to submit once again to their bishops. No one suggested then that Clement, who, as Fortescue drolly observes, was early enough that his name appears in the New Testament, had not the authority to command the Corinthians to do or not to do something. And no one, least of all Irenaeus, suggested that Victor had not the authority to declare the Quartodeciman opinion wrong. Irenaeus in fact thought it was wrong.

Nevertheless Irenaeus took Polycrates’s point and urged Victor to do likewise. The churches of Asia stood on a tradition no less venerable than the tradition of Rome. Victor’s predecessors, most notably Anicetus, had disagreed with the tradition, but had maintained peace with Polycarp, who held the position firmly and claimed to have received it from St. John himself. Ultimately the Quartodecimans were defeated not by a peremptory excommunication of the Christians of Asia but by the careful argument of Narcissus and Theophilus (and some others).

Fortescue points out that Irenaeus’s point is merely that Victor had better not excommunicate the Quartodecimans. It was not how this matter had been handled by his predecessors, who had, in fact, had occasion to consider it. However, Fortescue does not dwell on Irenaeus’s point about diversity in practice revealing unity in faith. Pope Victor was not wrong about the merits of the case nor was he acting ultra vires. Irenaeus simply pointed out that he was looking at it wrong. It was not a sign of heterodoxy for the churches of Asia to follow the practice of their fathers, a practice that stretched back through Polycarp to St. John. That Anicetus and Polycarp could be at peace was instead a testimony to the unity of the faith.

One finds in a few short chapters of one book of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History matter for much thought. Indeed, the passage throws some light on many modern controversies. How ought the pope to exercise his unquestionable jurisdiction? How ought one to relate to the pope when one thinks he’s making a mistake? What is the connection between doctrine and practice? Is there room in the Church for more than one practice? Obviously the answers these questions require more than one source, but, as Benedict says, Eusebius’s history is a source (and contains itself sources) of fundamental importance to begin to answer those questions.

A notable new book: Sohrab Ahmari’s “The Unbroken Thread”

I was delighted to receive a copy of Sohrab Ahmari’s new book, The Unbroken Thread. I begin with a confession: I knew people liked his conversion memoir, From Fire, By Water, but I did not read it. I am not a convert or a potential convert to the Faith and, to my great shame, have not cultivated much of an interest in proselytizing or evangelizing or whatever the correct term is these days. Luckily I avoided any social settings where I would be expected to know conversion literature generally or Ahmari’s book specifically, so I was spared the consequences for ignoring the book. One of the benefits, I suppose, of living in southern Indiana.

The Unbroken Thread, however, was immediately more compelling for me, not merely because I got a copy in the mail. It is in short Ahmari’s brief for tradition against the modern age. As a Catholic and occasional participant in debates over Catholic political and legal thought, this is a topic about which I am indeed interested. Everyone is interested in tradition these days, either for or against. One has only to check a trusted (or not) source of news to see that tradition is one of the burning topics of the age.

Ahmari tells us that The Unbroken Thread began its life as an idea to do a book of reporting about traditionalism among the young. This is a popular subject. Matthew Schmitz and Tara Isabella Burton, to take two examples, have drawn a lot of water from the well of upwardly mobile young people who like the traditional Latin Mass or anarchocommunists who own copies of the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Ahmari’s agent kiboshed the idea, suggesting that Ahmari really wanted to write the case for traditionalism, which is precisely what Ahmari has done. Thank goodness for Ahmari’s agent. A book about Ivy Leaguers in New York City who own well-thumbed copies of the Liber Usualis or the Antiphonale Monasticum and Das Kapital would have been too much to bear.

And, really, Ahmari has written a much more interesting book than the one he initially wanted to write. He begins by reproaching his youthful exaltation in self-definition and remaking himself. He has found in the west today the same obsession with autonomy and reinvention. With this, Ahmari has gone straight to the heart of the problem with modernity. The French-Canadian theologian Charles de Koninck explained it in his Principle of the New Order. The project of the so-called enlightenment has been to reject the primacy of the speculative and exalt in man’s practical reason. Man turns away from what is best in himself—indeed what may be called superhuman (cf. Metaphysics A, ch. 2; Nicomachean Ethics 10.7)—and finds emancipation through the organs of practical reason: his hands and his tongue.

De Koninck notes that the exaltation of practical reason results in saying and writing things one cannot think. So long as one follows the rules of grammar, one can write or say anything, even if it is deeply irrational. He finds a connected phenomenon: the disconnection of history from prudence. Historical events can be judged “objectively,” in the light of “cold facts,” without the historian needing to make right judgments about human behavior. In this particularly pointed passage, De Koninck notes that this phenomenon allows “the adulterous man to cry out on the public place: this woman was taken in adultery!”

Of course, all this is nonsense. Our Lord tells us, as De Koninck reminds us, that we shall be accountable for all our idle words on the day of judgment (Matt. 12:36). We must, we are told, take the beam out of our eye before we can hunt specks in our brother’s eye (Luke 6:42). Ahmari understands, like De Koninck, that the project is nonsense. It has promised freedom and endless self-invention, but a quick look at cable news or social media suggests that no one feels particularly free. We have made man the measure of all things only to find that humanity is concept harder and harder to comprehend. Ahmari is right to be dissatisfied. Instead, Ahmari finds in the sacrifice of St. Maximilian Kolbe, the Franciscan friar who established a monastery in Nagasaki and died in Auschwitz, true freedom and true humanity.

It is against this backdrop—and Ahmari’s understandable anxiety for his young son, Maximilian—that Ahmari sets out to find in tradition the answer to the failed promise of the so-called enlightenment. In tradition, he argues, one finds true freedom and true happiness, as opposed to the shabby substitutes on offer today. To make the case, Ahmari structures his book around twelve questions, such as “Is God Reasonable?” and “How Must You Serve Your Parents?” and “What’s Good About Death?” Each chapter takes a look at the question through the lens of a thinker in the traditions of the world, setting them in their historical context. Ahmari deftly blends history, biography, and philosophy to propose answers to the questions he sets himself. I am reminded of Clive James’s excellent Cultural Amnesia. Both men make serious points about tradition and our culture without becoming pedantic or leaden. In and of itself, this is an accomplishment.

Ahmari is the opinion editor of the New York Post and a regular contributor to First Things among other publications. But The Unbroken Thread suggests that he has a real talent for biography and popular intellectual history. In an age of monumental biographies like Julian Jackson’s De Gaulle, Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin, or John Röhl’s Wilhelm II, there is much to be said for Ahmari’s sketches. Not everything needs to be a spiritual heir to Henri-Louis de la Grange’s Gustav Mahler or Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson. It is altogether possible to give a sense of a man and his thought—and his influence on the most important questions of the age—in less than five thousand pages and a forest of footnotes and endnotes and bibliographies. (Though Ahmari does cite his sources.)

It is worth noting as well that Ahmari does not limit himself to any one tradition. The rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, born in Czarist Poland and working in the United States, sits alongside Seneca, the Stoic philosopher who was Nero’s favorite—for a time. Certainly some of his choices recommend themselves by the sheer extent and force of their influence: St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Confucius. But he also draws upon figures who probably are not household names, like the theologian and civil rights leader Howard Thurman and the philosopher Hans Jonas. And he looks across the political spectrum. One does not necessarily expect to see Andrea Dworkin marshaled in a case for traditionalism, but here she is.

This is important, not least in the context of ongoing political debates in the United States and elsewhere. Tradition, Ahmari reminds us, is not the sole property of the west or of Christians or of the right. There are valuable insights in other traditions. One runs a risk, of course, of turning this into the liberal arts ideology. That is, by exploring all these traditions, you get a set of intellectual skills that allows you to solve modern, meaningful problems. That is to say, these traditions serve mostly to produce a neutral technology that has market value. I do not think Ahmari falls into that trap, since he emphasizes the ultimate ends toward which man is ordered. But I think The Unbroken Thread would have benefitted from a direct response to the liberal arts ideology.

The breadth of Ahmari’s book will appeal first and foremost to a general audience—by design, I imagine. However, aspects of the book cannot help but touch upon narrower debates. For example, Ahmari’s chapter “Does God Need Politics?” goes to the very heart of the ongoing debate in the Catholic (and more broadly Christian) right about the common good. Ahmari is himself in some large part responsible for sparking the debate, along with the Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule. In a First Things essay and a series of debates with David French in 2019, Ahmari called for a reorientation of what is broadly called the culture war.

An aside first, though. While Ahmari has certainly done much to reinvigorate a debate about the goals and means of political Catholicism, The Unbroken Thread is not really a polemic in that debate, except secondarily. While Ahmari sets for himself questions about politics, his scope is not narrowly political. A reader who wants a barn-burning political tract—a rehearsal of the arguments against David French, for example—is probably going to be a little disappointed by Ahmari. To put it another way: it is not a Twitter thread against the libertarians expanded into book form. But a book that argues that one finds happiness and freedom through tradition is going to have political dimensions.

Ahmari called for a renewed focus on the common good, even if it requires state power to establish and promote, in opposition to the broadly libertarian approach taken by French. Vermeule put the case in more concrete legal terms in an early 2020 essay in The Atlantic, calling for a common-good constitutionalism to replace the worn-out judicial philosophy of originalism. This debate has consumed Catholic political thought for the last eighteen months or so. A very recent conference arranged by Ryan T. Anderson at the University of Dallas shows that there is still a lot of energy in this debate.

One of the key issues in the debate is the question of the common good. Liberals, for whatever reason, usually begin by mystifying the concept. What is the common good? What is peace? What is happiness? Who decides? So on and so forth. They hope, I think, that by making the common good an impossibly difficult concept, they can take some of the rhetorical force out of the concept and make it as vague as the concepts they rely on, such as freedom and democracy. In “Does God Need Politics?” Ahmari offers a solution to the problems the liberals raise.

The chapter is a reading of St. Augustine’s life and De civitate Dei. Ahmari turns to Pater Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., and his brilliant reading of Augustine several times throughout the chapter. Though, having played some small part in these debates and being familiar with Waldstein’s work on Augustine, I was less struck by that aspect on my first reading. Instead, I was struck by how vivid Ahmari’s portrait of Augustine was. Certainly everyone knows the broad strokes of Augustine’s life, especially if, as most educated people have, they have read the Confessions. But Ahmari, perhaps finding some special kinship with Augustine (though that is mere speculation), draws a remarkably engaging picture of Augustine and the circumstances under which he wrote De civitate Dei.

At any rate, Ahmari presents Augustine’s vision of Christian politics in this chapter. In Augustine’s critique of Roman politics and society, Christians find for themselves an approach to politics in accordance with reason and the divine law. This is especially true for questions like the common good or peace. Book XIX of De civitate Dei has extended treatments of these questions, which have informed the tradition of Christian political thought for fifteen hundred years. As I have insisted on several occasions here (and elsewhere) these concepts have content that we are not altogether free to provide. When we talk about peace, for example, we are not totally free to redefine it for ourselves: we follow, for example, Augustine’s treatment of peace and those who have followed Augustine.

Ahmari does not provide a definitive, scholarly study on this question—or any of the questions he discusses—and I do not have the sense he is especially interested in doing so. Neither, of course, did Clive James in Cultural Amnesia. What he does do, especially if one is not familiar with the figures he discusses, is urge one to seek the figures out for oneself. Someone who might be familiar with the debate over the common good from Twitter or the various web and print articles at various outlets but who might not have read De civitate Dei may well be inspired to seek out a copy and read Augustine for himself. On this basis, The Unbroken Thread succeeds at its task.

A little more on law, happiness, and reason

It is no trick to review Thomas Aquinas’s famous definition of law from the Quaestio de Essentia Legis (ST I-II q.90). One can go through the various attributes of law before coming to Aquinas’s summation: “nihil est aliud quam quaedam rationis ordinatio ad bonum commune, ab eo qui curam communitatis habet, promulgata”—“it is nothing else than an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated” (ST I-II q.90 a.4 co.). However, if one hastens toward that definition, one may well miss important aspects of Aquinas’s argument in support of it. In particular, one overlook what it means for a law to be an ordinance of reason.

Aquinas begins by saying that law is a rule and measure of human actions (ST I-II q.90 a.1 co.). Here he follows earlier writers like Isidore of Seville (cf. Etym. 5.10, 5.19–20). But the rule and measure of human actions is reason, the first principle of human actions (ST I-II q.90 a.1 co.). Indeed, one may say that actions are properly human only insofar as they are rational (ST I-II q.1 a.1). Aquinas tells us that “In unoquoque autem genere id quod est principium, est mensura et regula illius generis”—“Now that which is the principle in any genus, is the rule and measure of that genus” (ST I-II q.90 a.1 co.).

Here one must attend carefully to definitions (cf. In I Post. An. L.5). Henri Grenier, author of the influential manual, Thomistic Philosophy, tells us that “[a] principle is that from which a thing in any way proceeds” (Vol. 1, no. 217). Aquinas, commenting on Aristotle’s Physics, tells us that, when Aristotle talks about “principles”: “per principia videtur intelligere causas moventes et agentes, in quibus maxime attenditur ordo processus cuiusdam”—“by principle he seems to mean moving causes and agents in which, more than in others, there is found an order of some progression” (In I Phys. L.1). Elsewhere he says “Tria videntur de ratione principiorum esse: primum quod non sint ex aliis; secundum quod non sint ex alterutris; tertium quod omnia alia sint ex eis”—“Three things seem to belong to the very nature of principles. First, they are not from other things. Secondly, they are not from each other. Thirdly, all other things are from them” (In I Phys. L.10).

Aquinas goes on to tell us that “Sicut autem ratio est principium humanorum actuum, ita etiam in ipsa ratione est aliquid quod est principium respectu omnium aliorum”—“Now as reason is a principle of human acts, so in reason itself there is something which is the principle in respect of all the rest: wherefore to this principle chiefly and mainly law must needs be referred” (ST I-II q.90 a.2 co.). Aquinas shows that the first principle is the last end, which for human life is happiness (ibid.). Indeed, Aquinas, following Augustine, argues that happiness is the last end proper to man as a rational creature (ST I-II q.1 a.8 s.c. & co.; e.g., Augustine, De Trinitate lib. XIII, c.5). Aquinas demonstrates at length that perfect happiness cannot consist in wealth, honor, glory, power, or any other bodily good (ST I-II q.2 a.1–5). Neither can happiness consist of delight, even delight in the supreme good (ST I-II q.2 a.6). Happiness must be therefore a good of the soul (but not in the soul) and indeed the universal good, the object of all men’s desires—God (ST I-II q.2 a.7–8).

We understand better, therefore, Aristotle when he says that just laws are those that produce and preserve happiness for the political community (NE 5.1, 1129b19; In V Ethic. L.2). One can draw all manner of other conclusions from this. For example, “cum beatitudo consistat in consecutione ultimi finis, ea quae requiruntur ad beatitudinem sunt consideranda ex ipso ordine hominis ad finem”—“Since happiness consists in gaining the last end, those things that are required for happiness must be gathered from the way in which man is ordered to an end” (ST I-II q.4 a.3 co.). And we know that in this life only imperfect happiness, which requires all sorts of external goods, is possible (ST I-II q.4 a.7 co.).

But we do not need to get too far into those weeds. The important thing is to recognize the connections between happiness, reason, and law. More than this, as before, one must recognize that these connections are not merely accidental. Law is an ordinance of reason, which means that it is necessarily ordered to happiness. And happiness itself is not a meaningless concept, dissolved for the most part into relativism—each person defines it for him- or herself. We know what the most perfect happiness is (cf. ST I-II q.3 a.8 co.). We know, too, that “Quod autem dicitur maxime tale in aliquo genere, est causa omnium quae sunt illius generis”—“Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus” (ST I q.2 a.3 co.). And so on and so forth.

Robert Grosseteste’s integralism

Over the past few years, there have been numerous attempts to mark out a course for postliberal political thought by looking to preliberal regimes. Much attention has been devoted to St. Louis IX’s France. One could devote similar attention to St. Louis’s contemporary, Frederick II, and his rule in Sicily and the Holy Roman Empire. Though perhaps one would find somewhat less to admire in Frederick’s conduct than St. Louis’s. And underpinning all of this is reliance on St. Thomas Aquinas and his successors, all writing in the milieu of St. Louis, Frederick II, and the popes.

The distinctions between these various sources is not irrelevant. While papal pronouncements, such as Boniface VIII’s Unam sanctam, represent a definitive source of political theology, the approaches taken by this or that kingdom are not in and of themselves definitive. Political prudence necessarily admits of different solutions in different contexts (e.g., ST II-II q.47 a.3; II-II q.50 a.2). In a given context, the example of Frederick II or, indeed, St. Louis might be unavailing while the example of some other ruler might provide clearer guidance. The development of postliberal thought through preliberal thought requires more, not less, information about the various realms of Christendom.

For a variety of reasons, one finds less attention, at least in postliberal or Catholic circles, devoted to questions of English history. I have written previously on some questions, however, both seriously and satirically. The reason, I think, why English sources have been neglected and why those sources are important is the same. The precedents of England before the so-called reformation have been drawn into post-reformation polemics, particularly liberal and protestant polemics.

It is common to see this or that pre-Tudor practice or person framed as a precursor to protestant or liberal practices. This is certainly true in the legal context, where the English common law has been stripped, unjustifiably, of its important civil and canonical antecedents and presented as the bulwark of liberalism and protestantism. This makes it essential to recover those civil and canonical precedents, however. Heightening the civil and canonical roots of the common law offers an important perspective on the common law and its modern interpretation.

I.

In and of itself, especially in the legal context, this would be a praiseworthy goal. But, since preliberal regimes are considered an important source of guidance for postliberal thought, it is doubly important to have an accurate picture of Christendom before liberalism. St. Louis IX is not Frederick II, for example, and one may draw different conclusions from the reigns of either ruler. And England under the Plantagenets and Tudors represents still another source of preliberal political thought.

One leading figure of England under the Plantagenets was Robert Grosseteste. Born in humble circumstances around 1175, Grosseteste became eventually one of the most prominent churchmen in England—and, indeed, the whole of Europe. He lectured on theology at Oxford, teaching Franciscans such as Roger Bacon, and wrote a number of very influential theological and scientific treatises. He was no less successful in his administration at Oxford, serving, by some accounts, as the first chancellor of the University. In 1235, he was elected bishop of Lincoln, a suffragan diocese of Canterbury. In Francis Stevenson’s magisterial biography, Robert Grosseteste, one reads that Grosseteste’s predecessor, Hugh de Wells, probably had commended Grosseteste to the chapter (and conferred on him archdeaconries and other tokens of favor).

While perhaps not as well known generally today as Albertus Magnus or Thomas Aquinas, Grosseteste contributed significantly to the revival of Aristotelian philosophy in the Church, translating into Latin and commenting upon some of Aristotle’s texts. He also helped introduce the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite to the west, translating and commenting upon them. In other words, Grosseteste was one of the leading minds of the Church when he was elected bishop of Lincoln. His diocese was geographically huge in addition to being politically and culturally important, containing, as it did, the University of Oxford.

Some have attempted to find in Grosseteste a forerunner of the so-called reformation, though this overstates the matter. Like other bishops of great learning and moral clarity, Grosseteste struggled against abuses in the Church wherever he found them. Much of Grosseteste’s fame as a proto-reformation figure comes from a letter he wrote in early 1253 (Ep. 127, Luard pp. 432–37) refusing to accept one of Innocent IV’s nephews as a canon (with a rich prebend, no doubt) of Lincoln. Part of the fame of this letter stems from a confusion: it was addressed to a papal official named Innocent present in England, not Pope Innocent himself. Grosseteste’s letter, at any rate, does not deny the pope’s authority in any way; instead, it protests, in sharp language, against a perceived misuse of that authority. Grosseteste’s refusal had some effect, since Innocent later that year restored the rights of the English Church regarding election and presentation.

It is important, as I said, to emphasize Grosseteste’s Catholic beliefs and attitude toward the Holy See. He was not a proto-reformer; instead he was one of many Catholic priests and bishops who sought over the centuries to purge abuses from the Church. It would make just as much sense to call St. Charles Borromeo or St. Jean Marie Vianney a protestant for their zeal to restore the portions of the Church in their care to holiness and virtue. There is little reason, then, to hide Grosseteste’s example away.

II.

One could go on and on about interesting and picturesque scenes from Grosseteste’s life, to say nothing of his writings, but I will here confine my scope to just a few of Grosseteste’s letters. In some of these letters we see the interaction of Church and secular authorities worked out by one of the leading minds in the Church at the time. In addition to the evidence from St. Louis’s France and Frederick’s Sicily, the thought of Robert Grosseteste on some of these problems is an important source as we begin to recover the idea of Christendom.

It is probably a little misleading, I admit, perhaps a little too late, to speak in terms of Grosseteste’s “integralism.” Even in Frederick II’s endless struggles with Gregory IX and Innocent IV, no one would have seriously denied that Church and temporal society were closely connected and interrelated. The suggestion that the two ought to be separated in a definite way, that the Church ought not to play a central role in the life of a Christian polity, would have been met with some combination of horror and amusement.

Some time in the fall of 1243—no earlier than the end of October—Grosseteste wrote to King Henry III with evident concern about Henry’s interference in an ecclesiastical dispute (Ep. 192, Luard pp. 308–09). Word reached Grosseteste that Henry had seized the property of the Benedictine abbey of Bardney and ordered his official, William de Compton, to provide not only support for Walter de Beningworth and his monks but also to grant them access to the church at Bardney. In Grosseteste’s letter, we find clear evidence of Grosseteste’s notions of the limits of the civil power.

Stevenson explains the convoluted dispute between Grosseteste, the monks of Bardney, and ultimately the cathedral chapter of Canterbury and Pope Innocent IV (pp. 155–60). What happened was this. Grosseteste’s supporter, Thomas Wallensis, archdeacon of Lincoln, seized upon a dispute over a debt to diminish some of the privileges claimed by the monks at Bardney, an important abbey in the diocese. The dispute—Wallensis angling to quash Bardney’s privilege and Walter standing on claims of that same privilege—soon spiraled out of control. The Bardney monks appealed to the chapter at Canterbury, which excommunicated Grosseteste, claiming the right to assert the powers of the archbishop sede vacante. On the other hand, Grosseteste deposed Walter with the assistance of the Benedictine abbots of Warden, Ramsey, and Peterborough. Finally, Pope Innocent IV intervened and ordered the sentence against Grosseteste (but notably not Walter) rescinded.

Grosseteste’s primary concern in writing to Henry, however, was the report that Henry had seized the temporalities of the abbey and directed William de Compton to assist Walter de Beningworth and his monks. Grosseteste began by noting that the royal power extends only so far as doing right. The monks of Bardney were in rebellion against their spiritual father, which is far worse than rebellion against one’s natural father. Henry’s order to William de Compton therefore exceeded royal authority insofar as it favored the unjust rebels. In other words, Henry’s royal power did not extend far enough favor injustice.

Grosseteste anticipated an objection: what if the sentence against Walter de Beningworth was unjust? First of all, Grosseteste responds, it should not be presumed that the monks of Bardney justly rebelled against their ecclesiastical superiors until the Church has declared it. Unless the Church found justice in their cause, it should be presumed unjust. Second, Grosseteste outlines a general limitation the royal power. Whether the decision against the monks of Bardney was just or unjust, the royal power cannot restore them to their possessions against the judgment of the ecclesiastical power. He compares this to Uzzah, struck dead by the Lord for presuming to touch the ark of the covenant. Perhaps Henry was interfering out of zeal: Uzzah touched the Ark to steady it when it tottered.

From Grosseteste’s letter to Henry III regarding the dispute at Bardney, we can see that Grosseteste believed that it was simply beyond the royal power to interfere with ecclesiastical affairs. Whether Henry believed the deposition of Walter de Beningworth was just or not was irrelevant; likewise, it did not matter whether Henry was motivated by an excess of zeal or not. The royal power cannot interfere with the judgments of the ecclesiastical power. To do so was to cross a line that ought not to be crossed.

III.

The dispute between Grosseteste and the monks of Bardney was not the only complicated ecclesiastical dispute he found himself embroiled in. Indeed, one dispute in particular attracted considerable attention in England and elsewhere, not least because of the precedent it would set, one way or the other. In 1238 or so, Grosseteste found himself at odds with his own cathedral chapter at Lincoln. Grosseteste, expressing his view of the authority and duty of a bishop in his own diocese, undertook to conduct a visitation of the prebendal churches held by the priests of the chapter of Lincoln. This was received exceedingly poorly by those priests and touched off a dispute that would last until 1245.

The twists and turns of the dispute are outside my scope here. Stevenson explains the matter at great length in Robert Grosseteste. Suffice it to say that Grosseteste adduced numerous arguments, including arguments from scripture and the teachings of the Church, to support his claim to conduct a visitation of the dean and chapter. For their part, the dean and chapter asserted that it was entirely unprecedented for a bishop to conduct such a visitation and they commanded the priests subordinate to them in the prebendal churches to disobey Grosseteste. Grosseteste responded by suspending the dean, precentor, and sub-dean of Lincoln from the cathedral. At length, Pope Innocent IV resolved the case at the Council of Lyons, for the most part in Grosseteste’s favor. At the very least, Innocent confirmed Grosseteste’s right to conduct a visitation of the dean and chapter.

At one point, early in the dispute, the dean and chapter obtained a prohibition from Henry III, forbidding the dispute between Grosseteste and the chapter from being tried before ecclesiastical judges. Grosseteste wrote two letters to the chapter around 1240 concerning the royal prohibition (Epp. 91, 92, Luard pp. 285–87). Grosseteste was quick to remind the chapter that a canon of the Council of Oxford held in 1222 excommunicated anyone who interfered with the liberties of the Church. In Grosseteste’s view, the liberty of the Church required this dispute, between the bishop and the chapter of his cathedral, to be tried by ecclesiastical judges.

Grosseteste unleashed stinging rebukes on the chapter for presuming to obtain a prohibition from Henry. If the chapter took this step, it certainly imperiled the liberty of the Church. They were excommunicated by the canon of the Council of Oxford. More than that, the chapter was faithless, turning away from God and the courts of God’s Church toward Egypt and Pharaoh for help. And they were perjurers, having previously sworn oaths with Grosseteste regarding the resolution of dispute. Strong medicine, indeed.

In a sense, this is a counterpart to Grosseteste’s admonition to Henry III in the Bardney case. Ecclesiastical disputes were, for Grosseteste, ecclesiastical disputes. Just as Henry III could not involve himself in the dispute between Grosseteste and Bardney, the dean and chapter of Lincoln could not seek to remove their dispute with Grosseteste from the ecclesiastical courts by the connivance of the king’s court.

As the coronavirus pandemic has recently heightened disputes between the Church and various secular authorities, Grosseteste’s notion of the liberty of the Church takes on new importance. Involving the secular authorities in the Church’s business infringes upon the liberty of the Church. Ecclesiastical disputes must be tried in ecclesiastical courts. Certainly the Church avails itself of tools that it would not permit to be used against the Church and has for a long time. That is to say, there is nothing especially troublesome about the Church seeking to vindicate its rights in secular courts, even if it would be a significant violation of those rights to permit someone to press a claim arising from ecclesiastical matters against the Church in those same courts.

IV.

A few years later, Grosseteste set forth a more positive vision of the relationship between the Church and secular rulers. Shortly after Innocent IV’s resolution of the dispute with the chapter of Lincoln, probably in early 1246, Grosseteste wrote a letter to Henry III (Ep. 124, Luard pp. 348–51). There, he identified the priesthood and the kingship as the two foundations of human government. The priesthood is concerned with eternal peace and the kingship with temporal peace. But temporal peace is ordered to eternal peace: temporal peace makes the transition to eternal peace easier (“ut per eam quae temporis est, facilius sit transitus ad eam quae aeternitatis est”).

An aside. Here we find a precursor of Jean Cardinal Daniélou’s Prayer as a Political Problem, recently reissued in a handsome paperback edition by Cluny Press. Temporal concerns are not irrelevant to spiritual concerns. And it is all too possible to erect temporal barriers to focus on spiritual matters. By the same token, like Daniélou, Grosseteste recognized that temporal peace—that is, the well-ordered concord of citizens—makes easier the transition to eternal peace.

And Grosseteste recognized that the relationship between the priesthood and the royal power will necessarily have to be close. They must help and promote one another. This does not mean that there will be undue interference, to say nothing of hindrance: the Church has, according to Grosseteste, no interest in managing the defense of the realm, the establishment of just laws, or the conduct of the nobility. By the same token, the royal power, meant to assist the Church, has no business interfering with the Church’s spiritual work, which is to say the work of sacraments and prayer. Grosseteste’s vision of concord and harmony between the ecclesiastical power and the royal power required that spiritual matters be addressed by spiritual men and secular matters by secular men.

It follows, then, that the royal power ought not to attempt to embroil clerics in secular business. And this seems to be broadly what was on Grosseteste’s mind. Grosseteste was responding to an (apparently) lost letter of Henry’s, which appears to have expressed the king’s views on Grosseteste’s refusal to admit a clerk presented by the king to a benefice. Apparently word had reached Henry of Grosseteste’s refusal, who wrote to clear matters up. It seems that the clerk in question was a forest judge (justitiarius forestae, a justice in eyre), and Grosseteste did not wish to bestow a cure of souls upon someone with such secular duties. No doubt this was the entanglement he wished to avoid.

We see that Grosseteste did not advocate a separation of Church and secular power by any stretch of the imagination. Quite the opposite. Temporal peace is necessary for an easier transition to eternal peace. And the two powers must support each other, helping and promoting each other. But there is a distinction: secular matters ought to be handled by secular men and spiritual matters by spiritual men. The Church does not seek to interfere unduly in the business of the secular authorities, but the secular authorities must defer to the Church in the Church’s sphere of activities.

Certainly this echoes Pope St. Gelasius’s Famuli vestrae pietatis (also known as Duo sunt), which set forth the doctrine of the two powers, ecclesiastical and royal, to the Emperor Anastasius. St. Gelasius implies what Grosseteste later stated: the Church does not seek to interfere unnecessarily in the temporal authorities’ administration of temporal matters. But in ecclesiastical matters, even the Roman emperor bows to the ecclesiastical authorities. Grosseteste echoed both of these teachings in clear terms over two letters to Henry. Certainly popes after St. Gelasius, notably Gregory VII and Boniface VIII, would deepen and clarify the teaching regarding the relationship between the spiritual and temporal powers.

Yet the importance of Grosseteste’s views should not be understated. In the 1240s, one of the most prominent churchmen in England—both with respect to his standing as a theologian and his importance as bishop of Lincoln—set forth a vision of a truly integral society, with the Church and the royal authorities supporting and promoting one another. But the roles for each in Grosseteste’s vision were clearly delineated. Secular men handle secular business. Spiritual men handle spiritual business. Secular men should not attempt to interfere in ecclesiastical business, and churchmen should not attempt to take ecclesiastical disputes outside the Church. The concord of order does not require separation so much as it requires clarity and distinction.

Frederick, Aquinas, and sacrilege

Frederick II’s Constitutions of Melfi present an extremely expansive view of royal power. Among the most famous—or infamous—provisions is the law that no one was permitted to dispute the judgments, laws, deeds, and counsels of the king (I.4). Indeed, to do so was, under the law, similar to sacrilege (ibid.). It has been argued that Aquinas’s approach to the law represents a rejection of Frederick’s centralizing, totalizing approach. One would assume, therefore, that Aquinas would reject Frederick’s decree that questioning his official acts was similar to sacrilege. But this is not quite what happens. In his treatment on sacrilege, Aquinas adopts a position very similar to Frederick’s (especially as it was interpreted)—and, we shall see, other sources in the classical legal tradition.

It is worth noting, of course, that Frederick did not invent this law. It was initially a constitution of King Roger II, dating to the middle of the twelfth century, which Frederick then took up into his great code for Sicily in 1231. But a closer examination of the law reveals even more interesting dimensions. Kenneth Pennington has observed that this provision of Roger’s was drawn from an even older source: Justinian’s Codex (9.29.2). But Roger edited it in interesting ways. Justinian stated that it was only forbidden to dispute the judgments (Disputari de principali iudicio non oportet) of the emperor. This was the likeness (instar) of sacrilege for Justinian. Roger expanded to prohibition to all the official acts of the king, not merely his judgments, but declared that it was only similar (par, from pars) to sacrilege (Est enim par sacrilegio disputare). Pennington notes that Andreas de Isernia, the commentator on Frederick’s Constitutions, picked up on the change from instar to par by Roger and Frederick and suggested that the change meant that it was permissible to petition the king to amend something he had done if it was against the common good.

In other words, while Justinian’s provision in the Codex was narrower than Roger’s, covering only the judgments of the emperor, it was understood as an absolute prohibition: it was the likeness of sacrilege to question the emperor’s judgments. Roger expanded it to cover all the official transactions of the king, but commentators like Andreas de Isernia understood another slight variation in the language of Roger’s law (later Frederick’s) to relax (slightly) the rigor of Justinian’s law. If the king’s decision was contrary to the common good, a subject did not commit sacrilege by questioning it and petitioning the king to amend it.

Just a brief look, therefore, changes the complexion of Frederick’s expansive provision. For one thing, it was not an innovation by a centralizing, totalizing dictator. Frederick was merely restating a century-old law of Roger II. Ernst Kantorowicz, in his wonderful Frederick the Second, describes the conditions of lawlessness that preceded Frederick’s accession to the throne. Restating Roger’s laws, therefore, was a necessary part of restoring order in Sicily. More than that, Roger was simply adapting the much older law of Justinian for Norman Sicily. And far from signifying the expansion of royal power, a subtle—but, Pennington argues, obvious—linguistic change was understood to moderate the force of the law. But whether questioning the acts of the king is the likeness of sacrilege or merely similar to sacrilege, and whether there is an exception to the prohibition, it is still strange to modern sensibilities to describe it in those terms.

One point, raised by Alasdair MacIntyre and others, is that Thomas Aquinas implicitly rejected the expansive legislation of Frederick II and Louis IX in favor a decentralized, natural law approach. I have previously questioned this claim: I think MacIntyre is wrong about some of the historical contingencies, including Frederick’s imperial legislation (as opposed to his Sicilian legislation), and wrong about Aquinas. In fact, one finds some support for the seemingly very expansive statute of Frederick (and Roger and Justinian) in Aquinas’s treatment on sacrilege (ST II-II q.99).

The first objection in Aquinas’s treatment of sacrilege is that sacrilege seems not to be the violation of a sacred thing, since Gratian (C.17 q.4 d.p.c. 29, added in the second recension) notes that sacrilege includes questioning the ruler’s decisions and appointments (ST II-II q.99 a.1 obj. 1). The claim is that the ruler’s decisions and appointments seem to have nothing to do with sacred things. Thus, if questioning the ruler’s decisions and appointments is sacrilege, sacrilege has nothing to do with sacred things. Obviously, for Aquinas, sacrilege is irreverence for sacred things (ST II-II q.99 a.1 co.). How, then, to answer the objection?

It would be easy, perhaps, to say simply that there is nothing sacred about the ruler’s decisions and appointments and therefore questioning them is not sacrilege. But this is not what Aquinas does (cf. ST II-II q.99 a.1 ad 1). He observes that Aristotle holds that the common good of the nation is a sacred thing (Ethic. I.2, 1094b10). Aquinas explains this elsewhere, noting that care for the common good has a likeness to God’s rule over the universe (In I Ethic. L.2). Therefore, irreverence for the sovereign and his decisions is called sacrilege by a kind of likeness (ST II-II q.99 a.1 ad 1). In other words, Aquinas answers the objection not by holding that the ruler and the ruler’s acts are not sacred, but by holding they are—through their connection to the common good.

Now, obviously, one may say that the common good exception is a significant exception, but that itself requires some examination. To escalate all questions to questions of the common good is itself opposed to the virtue of prudence. For one thing, the ruler and the subject do not have the virtue of prudence in precisely the same way in all cases (cf. ST II-II q.47 a.12). Indeed, Aquinas notes that we ought to defer to the undemonstrated conclusions of prudent men to the same extent as the demonstrated conclusions (ST I-II q.95 a.2 ad 4). But the natural law does not require the same law for all: the conclusions of practical reason are not the same for everyone (ST I-II q.94 a.4 co.). In other words, a question of the natural law is more serious and more obvious than a mere case of disagreement with the conclusions of the ruler. The exception does not seem then so large.

In this regard, Aquinas follows his contemporary Andreas de Isernia’s commentary on Frederick’s statute (I.4). While Aquinas avoids the question of instar and par, preferring the formulation secundum quandam similitudinem sacrilegium dicitur, set up by Roger’s variation on Justinian’s Codex, he ultimately lands in the same place: questioning the decisions of the ruler is called sacrilege by a kind of similitude, except (implicitly for Aquinas) where they do not serve the common good. Indeed, it is because the ruler’s acts are connected the common good that they assume a sacred character for Aquinas—following Aristotle.

And Aquinas’s argument shows how widespread the claim was, really. We have seen that Frederick merely restates Roger’s law, which was an adaptation of Justinian’s Codex. Aquinas notes that Gratian’s dictum following the canon Si quis suadente (C.17 q.4 c.29) sets forth the same rule, but more absolutely: it is sacrilege to dispute with the judgments or appointments of the ruler. This is an interesting observation, since Si quis suadente, a famous decree of Innocent II at the Second Lateran Council, establishes the privilegium canonis—the personal inviolability of clerics and religious, violations of which were reserved specially to the Apostolic See, except in cases of penitents in articulo mortis. Gratian’s dictum notes that there are more components to sacrilege than merely laying violent hands on a clerk or monk (C.17 q.4 d.p.c. 29).

In other words, the entire legal tradition from Justinian to Roger to Frederick, passing through Gratian, Aquinas, and Andreas de Isernia, holds that it is akin to sacrilege—and sometimes sacrilege simpliciter—to question the official acts of the ruler. This goes back to Aristotle and is founded upon the ruler’s responsibility to pursue the common good in his official acts.

Private property and the common good

On October 3, Pope Francis handed down his second social encyclical, On Fraternity and Social Friendship, already known by its incipit, Fratelli tutti. It is, like Laudato si’ before it, a document of penetrating insight and uncommon clarity. Francis astutely diagnoses most of the problems afflicting neoliberal society and points to potential solutions to these problems. Fratelli tutti is a long document and I am suspicious of anyone who claims to have digested the whole thing in a week. It is, I think, a document that will require time to consider and process adequately, especially in the light of Laudato si’ and his other pronouncements on the social question. However, some of his points have already caused a lot of discussion. One such point, which has attracted a lot of attention, particularly from leftists with more or less Catholic sympathies, is that the right to private property is a “secondary right” (n. 120).

In a sense, Francis says nothing new when he calls property a “secondary right.” Pius XI, in Quadragesimo anno, recognized that, like everything else, private property must be ordered to the common good (n. 49). Francis says essentially the same thing, when he writes that “private property can only be considered a secondary natural right, derived from the principle of the universal destination of created goods. This has concrete consequences that ought to be reflected in the workings of society. Yet it often happens that secondary rights displace primary and overriding rights, in practice making them irrelevant” (n. 120).

It is clear that Francis, unlike most of his readers on the left, understands Pius’s point: a secondary right is a right, but it cannot be allowed to “displace primary and overriding rights, in practice making them irrelevant.” In this regard, Francis remains squarely in the tradition of Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II. The leftists who take up Francis’s statement as a new charter depart from that tradition. And not merely in the context of property. To say that a secondary right is no right, of course, would be to sweep away, for example, most legal and political procedures, since they are, after all, for the most part only secondary rights. Certainly one does not imagine Francis’s loudest interpreters saying, for example, that a trial by jury may be dispensed with simply because it is a secondary right.

Of course, given the strident criticism in some circles of Ius & Iustitium and the project to recover the classical legal tradition, nothing would give me greater pleasure than seeing the recognition, especially in leftist circles, that legal procedures, whether judicial or administrative or penal, are not absolute mandates and ought to be harmonized always with the common good. Indeed, if the misreading of Fratelli tutti leads people to realize that the common good occasionally requires dispensing with norms in favor of substantive action, I cannot complain too much about the misreading. Certainly, on Twitter and elsewhere, there has long been a rejection of private property. It has only been a vestigial liberalism that insists upon positivistic norms even as it demands the abolition of private property.

Setting all of that to one side, there is another dimension to this question, which has not been adequately considered. That is, it is a commonplace to say, with Pius XI and Francis, that private property must be ordered by the political power to the common good. But there is not nearly as much consideration of whether private property is in some meaningful way connected with the common good. In an October 17, 1946 letter to Charles McCoy, Charles de Koninck observes that Aristotle and Aquinas held that communism—even Socratic communism—is perverse and may be resisted by force. That is, for De Koninck, a communistic people does not seek a common good even per accidens and may be resisted by the ruler who always and everywhere must seek the common good. But De Koninck’s analysis in the letter is a little sketchy.

In an interesting dictum, about which I have written briefly previously, Aquinas connects private property with the ability to resist the despotic power (ST Ia q.81 a.3 ad 2). Aquinas distinguishes the despotic power from the politic and royal power. The despotic power rules its subjects as slaves since they have nothing of their own (ibid.). On the other hand, subjects of the politic and royal power are free subjects because they have private property and can thereby resist the orders of the ruler (ibid.). Indeed: it is due to their private property that they can resist the ruler (ibid.).

Now, I concede here that this point is a little tricky, not least because of the development of the discourse in Catholic circles. Much of the current, illiberal moment has been inspired by the insipid free marketeer rhetoric of groups like the Acton Institute. Certainly their presentation of Catholic social teaching as more or less coextensive with right-wing, free-market economics is a distortion of the Church’s thought. It is, therefore, greatly cheering to see Francis emphasizing the Church’s perennial teaching: private property has to be ordered to the common good. But questioning, whether based on Thomas, there may be some connection between the common good and private property ought not to be taken as an endorsement of Actonite economics.

In the De regno, Aquinas observes that a ruler is unjust insofar as he departs from the common good (4.24). An oligarchy, seeking the benefit of a few, is more unjust than a democracy, which seeks the good of the many (ibid.). In a tyranny, the ruler seeks his own good; in this sense, then, a tyrant is maximally unjust (ibid.). A ruler must seek the common good—it is in the nature of being a ruler—and when he stops seeking the common good, he becomes unjust. There is, of course, a spectrum with tyranny being at the terminus.

Aquinas draws his comment in ST Ia q.81 a.3 ad 2 from Aristotle’s Politics, notably Aristotle’s discussion of slavery. There, Aristotle makes the same point: the despotic power is the power of a master over his slaves (In I Pol. L.3, n. 64). The despot is free to pursue his own interests without resistance from his subjects; the despot, therefore, is a tyrant. Aquinas’s connection therefore is radical: a slave has nothing of his own to resist his master. But someone who has something of his own can resist another. This transforms the person into a free citizen, who must be ruled politically (ST Ia q.81 a.3 ad 2).

There is no discord in resisting a tyrant, as a general matter (ST IIaIIae q.42 a.2 ad 3). The connection, therefore, becomes clear. In order to resist the tyrant, Aquinas, following Aristotle, holds that one must have something of one’s own (ST Ia q.81 a.3 ad 2). Otherwise, one is in the condition of a slave, precisely because a slave has nothing of his own to resist his master. That is to say, a citizen cannot resist the tyrant if he does not have something of his own with which to resist the tyrant. (Perhaps one might call this the material basis of resistance.) Private property therefore serves as a bulwark against tyranny.

The connection is apparent in other ways. Elsewhere in the Politics, Aristotle discourses on common property. He makes, in the course of that discussion, a couple of interesting points. First, Aquinas observes that Aristotle holds that common property leads to dissensions among the citizens (In II Pol. L.4, nn.198–99). It is worth observing that discord among the citizens is per se opposed to ordered concord (e.g., ST IIaIIae q.37 a.1). By the same token, Aquinas notes, when citizens are united in concord, they will share their property freely (In II Pol. L.4, n. 201). He also notes that community of property destroys both the natural love of self and the virtue of generosity (In II Pol. L.4, nn. 202, 204). There is no generosity in distributing common property (ibid., no. 204).

Aquinas returns to these points in the Summa theologiae. Certainly he acknowledges that the common destination of goods is in the natural law, and that private property is superadded to this by human law (ST IIaIIae q.66 a.2 ad 1). But he observes that private property is fitting for several reasons (ST IIaIIae q.66 a.2 co.). His second and third reasons are directed to the ordered concord of the citizens (ibid.). His first reason approaches the point he makes in the commentary on the Politics regarding private property and natural love of self (cf. In II Pol. L.4, n. 202). Seen in this light, one follows his argument that the addition of private property to the natural law is a matter of reason—as opposed to mere caprice (ST IIaIIae q.66 a.2 ad 1).

Furthermore, Aquinas also holds that a tyrant encourages discord and sedition among his subjects, so that he may rule over them more securely (ST IIaIIae q.42 a.2 ad 3). One sees therefore an equivalent connection: common property, tending as Aristotle and Aquinas believe it does, to dissensions among the citizens (In II Pol. L.4, nn. 198–99) ultimately achieves the goal of the tyrant, to secure his own rule through discord and sedition. To put it another way: the discord and disorder created by common property is exactly what the tyrant wants, since through that discord and disorder, the tyrant will be able to rule over his subjects more easily.

In other words, one sees that, so far from providing a material basis of resistance to tyranny, common property sets up a dangerous configuration of circumstances. First, it leads itself to dissensions among the citizens, which is precisely opposed to ordered concord (i.e., the common good). Second, common property is opposed to natural self-love and the virtue of generosity. Finally, the dissensions among the citizens it causes are entirely congruent with the tyrant’s strategy of encouraging dissensions to secure his own rule. All of that is to say, common property is attended by several serious vices conducive to tyranny.

Now, certainly, all of this was and is known to Pius XI and Francis (or their assistants), so we must understand it carefully in light of Quadragesimo anno and Fratelli tutti—and the many other pronouncements that amount to the same thing. It is clear Francis no less than Pius XI understands that this is not an on-off distinction: the right to private property, even if only secondary, “has concrete consequences that ought to be reflected in the workings of society.” To reduce a secondary right to no right at all is, even on Francis’s terms, a pernicious error (even if I am happy about it in other contexts). To understand the manner in which it “ought to be reflected in the workings of society,” I think, one has to understand, as Thomas did, the connection between private property and the common good.

Another debate over integralist law

A thousand years ago, which is to say in February, shortly before the coronavirus pandemic, I wrote a piece for The Josias about integralist penal law. I characterized the piece as fragmentary, intending to point out topics for further discussion and research rather than to outline a coherent “Penal Statutes of the Empire of Guadalupe” (or whatever else one might have in mind). Fundamentally, there are still questions that have to be answered. Indeed, the ground upon which those questions have to be asked remains, for the most part, uncleared. There must be a project of recovery and clarification. The work at Ius & Iustitium that I am pleased to be able to contribute to is, I think, a necessary first step in such a project. But much remains to be done.

Recently I saw on Twitter a thread inquiring about what an integralist would say to a non-Christian about the juridical status of non-Christians under integralism. Such a thread seems to implicate necessarily some of the points I raised in my Josias “fragments.” Certainly in matters of religion, non-Christians may not be coerced into accepting the Faith (ST IIaIIae q.10 a.8 co.). And in general their rites ought to be tolerated, except insofar as they are contrary to the common good (ST IIaIIae q.10 a.11 co.). The question of political office is a little more complicated in Thomas’s thought (cf. ST IIaIIae q.10 a.10). And, of course, the Church herself has more recently than the 13th century taught on these topics in documents such as Dignitatis humanae, though precisely what the Church has taught in Dignitatis humanae is occasionally disputed.

By the same token, however, the Second Vatican Council teaches, in Gaudium et spes, that “political authority, both in the community as such and in the representative bodies of the state, must always be exercised within the limits of the moral order and directed toward the common good—with a dynamic concept of that good—according to the juridical order legitimately established or due to be established” (#74). More than this, it ought to be remembered also that “the political community and public authority are founded on human nature and hence belong to the order designed by God, even though the choice of a political regime and the appointment of rulers are left to the free will of citizens” (ibid.). Jean Cardinal Danielou emphasized that religion is part of the temporal common good (cf. Gaudium et spes #75). This has unavoidable consequences, especially when the Council teaches that it is for the leadership of the state to order the state to the common good, thereby preventing it from tearing itself apart (Gaudium et spes #74).

None of this is especially obscure information. But, ever since the Mortara affair, over two years ago, despite the fact that Aquinas and the writings of the popes are freely available on the internet, it has been clear that few of integralism’s interlocutors intend on doing the reading. One must therefore return always to the same couple of sources to set forth a few very simple principles. Now, of course, these discussions are not really debates about technical juridical questions or indeed broader questions of jurisprudence. They are, at best, requests to be reassured that integralism and liberalism have no meaningful differences and, at worst, attempts to prove that integralism and liberalism have meaningful differences.

Of course, it ought to be frankly and cheerfully conceded that integralism and liberalism have meaningful differences. As a political theology, liberalism is radically and absolutely opposed to the Church and her teachings, to say nothing of an authentically Catholic politics. There will be unavoidable conflicts. How this cashes out in terms of a specific juridical question is, however, not obvious in every case. Nor can it be. The demand for universal, a priori juridical structures is fundamentally opposed to prudence as Thomas, for example, understands it (cf. ST IIaIIae q.47 a.8 co.; IIaIIae q.50 a.1 co.). Framing laws, after all, requires concrete considerations relating to a given state (ST IaIIae q.96 a.1 co.). One might say, perhaps provocatively, that the compulsive demand for universal, a priori juridical structures is connected in a fundamental way to the political theology of liberalism.

We do not always discuss how serious a problem this is. In De civitate Dei, as I cannot help mentioning, Augustine takes up Cicero’s definition of a commonwealth (De civitate Dei 2.21, 19.21). For Cicero, the commonwealth requires a consensus of right and common utility—“res publica res populi, populus autem non omnis hominum coetus quoquo modo congregatus, sed coetus multitudinis iuris consensu et utilitatis communione sociatus” (De re publica 1.39). Even Augustine’s alternative definition in De civitate Dei 19.24 requires fundamentally some kind of agreement; the citizens of that commonwealth make a commonwealth by agreeing—indeed, agreeing harmoniously—upon the objects of their love. The dissensions that liberalism necessarily engenders cannot be neutralized indefinitely through means of liberalism’s political theology, as we see over and over again.

This is why the project of recovering the classical legal tradition is so important. The perennial jurisprudence of the Church—and of Christendom—avoids the traps posed by liberal concepts and the rotten political theology underpinning those concepts. To put it another way, keeping in mind the Church’s teachings as explained by St. Thomas and the Second Vatican Council, the integralist state, which also follows the classical legal tradition, avoids the totalizing impulses of liberalism to craft a one-size-fits-all approach that may well not serve the common good of a particular state. Prudence forbids that sort of approach, even if it might be rhetorically helpful in the context of a Twitter debate.

There are, for example, in addition to things like the Summa and the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, magisterial pronouncements like Innocent III’s decretal Novit ille and Boniface VIII’s bull Unam sanctam, both of which set forth the power and authority of the Roman pontiffs in temporal matters and the circumstances in which the popes have indicated that they may exercise that authority. More than that, we have the strongly suggestive statement of Thomas in his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard that the pope stands at the summit of both spiritual and temporal powers (In II Sent. d.44 q.2 a.3 exp. text.). To be sure, any question of integralist law is bound up extremely closely with the question of the pope’s temporal authority and how the state interacts with that authority.

This is to say that a serious response would be that, while the liberal may demand an immediate juridical concept that would be applied mechanically and universally, the integralist ought to consider the extend to which offering such a concept would be to give the game away to liberalism. Even setting to one side the question of bad faith rhetoric, the classical legal tradition simply does not trade in jurisprudence unmoored from concrete considerations—that is to say, unmoored from the virtue of prudence.

Lincoln, Aquinas, and the limits of judicial decisions

Lincoln’s First Inaugural, delivered in the gravest circumstances on March 4, 1861, is remembered for Lincoln’s passionate defense of the Union and implacable opposition to secession. It is also remembered for his closing, calling upon true patriotism and republican virtue. It is less remembered, except perhaps by Lincoln specialists and lawyers, for his principled rejection of judicial supremacy. Indeed, for Lincoln, the expansion of the power of the judiciary beyond particular cases was the end of self-government by a free people. For Lincoln, if the power of the Supreme Court were expanded to determine the policy of the entire government, the Supreme Court (or a majority of it) would rule, not the people.

This was not an academic question for Lincoln. In Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), Chief Justice Roger B. Taney had pronounced the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional and declared, going beyond the precise issue in Dred Scott, that Congress had no power to ban slavery in the territories. Lincoln noted that the Constitution was, in fact, silent on that point, notwithstanding Taney’s resolution of the specifics of the Dred Scott case. Given that the expansion of slavery was for Lincoln the entirety of the issue imperiling the Union, the Supreme Court’s decision threatened the most serious consequences.

It is against this background that Lincoln stated, “I do not forget the position assumed by some that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court, nor do I deny that such decisions must be binding in any case upon the parties to a suit as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled to very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other departments of the Government.” For Lincoln, the limitation of judicial decisions to the parties to the case served as an important check on an erroneous decision. An incorrect decision could be reconsidered and overturned before it served as precedent if it were limited to the parties before the court.

But he offers a still more serious reason. Throughout the First Inaugural, Lincoln defends the proposition that in the United States, under the federal constitution, the people are sovereign. He observes, “[t]his country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it.” He articulates his theory of popular sovereignty when he says that, “[a] majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people.” On the other hand, he finds the expansion of the judiciary power beyond the particular cases before the courts—the expansion of the judiciary power, that is, into the policy of the entire government—to be the antithesis of this popular sovereignty. He says as much: “if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers . . . .”

Lincoln himself was true to his principles, refusing to abide by Chief Justice Taney’s May 28, 1861 decision in Ex parte Merryman, 17 F. Cas. 144 (C.C.D. Md. 1861), which held that Lincoln did not have the authority to suspend the writ of habeas corpus unilaterally. Lincoln’s July 4, 1861 message to Congress, the most compelling theoretical argument for the president’s absolute leadership of the state in cases of emergency, is in large part an answer to Taney’s Merryman decision. In other words, Lincoln acted upon the principle he articulated in the First Inaugural: the courts did not and indeed could not set policy, even on constitutional questions, for the whole of the government.

In this view, Lincoln has a surprising antecedent: St. Thomas Aquinas. As we begin the work of recovering the classical legal tradition, it is important to note where the Anglo-American tradition finds support in the classical tradition. Much of the anxiety about the classical legal tradition—and much of the anxiety about common-good conservatism—stems from a thorough ignorance of the classical tradition. In many cases, the Anglo-American tradition represents a borrowing, often inexpert, from the ius commune. Aquinas’s jurisprudence, articulated systematically in the Summa Theologiae, represents an important part of the classical tradition. Finding, therefore, support for a particular position in the Anglo-American tradition, here Lincoln’s view of the limitations on judicial decisions, in Aquinas is a significant result.

Aquinas held that a judge’s judgment is like particular law regarding a particular fact (ST II-II q.67 a.1 co.). For this reason, just as a general law should have coercive power, so too should a judge’s judgment have coercive power between the parties. Indeed, Aquinas notes that the judge ought to be the personification of justice, which requires two parties (ST II-II q.67 a.3 co.). But Aquinas rejects outright the suggestion that the judge’s power is plenary over the commonwealth. Aquinas instead follows Aristotle who holds that it is better for laws to be framed than it is for judges to judge every single case (ST I-II q.95 a.1 ad 2). One may say then that Aquinas’s position is that a judge is empowered to make particular law for particular parties to justice between them, but not to make laws for the entire commonwealth.

This is bolstered by Aquinas’s sense of who rightly interprets laws. Throughout the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas emphasizes that the lawgiver is the interpreter of the law. In his article on the emergency, in fact, he objects that only the lawgiver is competent to interpret the law (ST I-II q.96 a.6 obj. 1). He answers this by observing that a person acting in a true emergency is not interpreting the law, but instead following the intention of the lawgiver who, keeping always the common good in mind, must have intended something than the perilous result that would be obtained by following the letter of the law (ST I-II q.96 a.6 ad 1). Nothing in this suggests that Aquinas holds that anyone other than the legislator properly interprets law. Indeed, his theory of the emergency is predicated on not being able to obtain an authoritative interpretation from the lawgiver (cf. ST I-II q.96 a.6 co.).

The conclusion is further strengthened by Aquinas’s discussion of whether a judge may remit a just punishment. First, the judge, as noted above, declares what is just between two parties, and remission of the punishment would deprive the prevailing party of his due (ST I-II q.67 a.4 co.). Second, the judge exercises public authority when he pronounces judgment, and is the good of the commonwealth that evildoers be punished (ibid.). Nevertheless, the sovereign, who is the supreme judge of the commonwealth, has the authority to remit a just punishment. The judge simply does not have the discretion that the supreme judge of the commonwealth does (ST I-II q.67 a.4 ad 1).

Therefore one may say with considerable authority that Aquinas’s view of the role of the judiciary is limited. The judge pronounces justice between two parties in a given case. He does not have plenary authority over the law, to say nothing of the laws framed by the legislator for the common good of the whole commonwealth (cf. ST I-II q.90 a.2 co.). The authoritative interpretation of the law—and the power to frame laws for the commonwealth—belongs to the legislator, not the judge. The idea that judges deciding particular cases between particular parties would be able to affect all the citizens of the commonwealth is altogether alien to Aquinas’s theory of jurisprudence.

We see then that Lincoln’s notion in the First Inaugural represents, in a definite way, an important conclusion of the classical legal tradition. Lincoln conceded that judicial decisions are binding between the parties. He also held that those decisions are “entitled to very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other departments of the Government.” Aquinas would no doubt agree with this. The lawgiver simply cannot have in mind all possible cases when he frames laws generally (cf. ST I-II q.96 a.6 co.). A judicial decision between two parties may well clarify for the lawgiver, who is the authoritative interpreter of the law, unintended consequences or the need for modification of a given law. Moreover, the lawgiver may be persuaded by the reasoning of the judge and accept the judge’s interpretation.

But Aquinas would also agree with Lincoln’s startling conclusion that “if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers . . . .” Judges do justice in particular cases between particular parties; they are not the sovereigns. Lincoln’s concept of sovereignty, which he articulates elsewhere in the First Inaugural, was ultimately popular sovereignty. His conclusion that the expansion of the Supreme Court’s power beyond particular cases was to the prejudice of the sovereign people follows upon eminently Thomistic principles.

The inherent dispute—whether the courts have the power to set the policy for the whole of the government—is low intensity most of the time. It emerged briefly during the chaotic run up to the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, but the flare ups were quickly resolved and everyone acquiesced in Obergefell. Nevertheless, the resolution is mostly one of rhetoric: there is no definitive juridical resolution. There is no clear statement in the Constitution that resolves the matter against Lincoln and Aquinas. Indeed, the Case or Controversy Clause suggests that Lincoln and Aquinas have a point. As interpretative tools like textualism and stare decisis are employed to achieve substantive results well beyond anything those tools can support on their own terms, the rhetorical resolution of this dispute looks less and less satisfactory.

Of course, judges themselves are entirely free to adopt the classical approach. Just as originalism and textualism are supported with the claim that they reflect judicial humility, so too may the limitation of decisions to the parties to a case be supported with the claim of humility. Indeed, for Thomas Aquinas, the supreme example of judicial humility is to confine judicial decisions to particular cases between particular parties, leaving the declaration of law and policy to the legislator or the chief magistrate of the commonwealth. Certainly, given the support for that view in the American tradition, nothing prevents its adoption.