On Kingship
A teaser
I have been a bit under the weather - I thought I just had my usual confluence of allergies as the spring pollen rains down on us - but I seem to have contracted some sort of upper respiratory infection that has been making it difficult for me to sleep, amongst other things. This week I am going to share with you what I think is a pivotal passage from St. Thomas Aquinas’s essay, De Regno (on Kingship; it dates to around 1266 AD). I will be doing a podcast about this essay later this month with my colleague from UNH Political Science, Dr. Susan “Sig” Siggelakis.
I was telling Sig about my FITW podcast and I asked her what she would want to talk about if I had her on as a guest. Now I know she teaches about the American Revolution and so I thought she would say the Federalist Papers or something along those lines, but she immediately said, Aquinas’s De Regno. Now you, dear readers, know I close my RWL each week with an Aristotle reference that I found through Aquinas (“As usual, willing good for all of you!”), so I immediately jumped and said,” Perfect!” I said this in part because, although I love that quote, and the fact that I know Aquinas is central to modern Catholic thought, and frequently cited as a proponent of natural law (and natural rights) - thus an early precursor to what we think of as human rights - I do not actually know that much about him or his works. I, of course, am aware of Summa Theologiae, but given it is approximately 1.8 million words long, I have not gotten around to reading the whole thing just yet. De Regno, Sig assured me, was about 100 pages. Even better.
I finished reading De Regno earlier today and I want to share this passage that I think Sig and I will spend some time unpacking. It has a lovely, Aristotelean style. It basically summarizes the functions of government in two paragraphs.
Now there are three things which prevent the permanence of the public good. One of these arises from nature. The good of the multitude should not be established for one time only; it should be in a sense perpetual. Men, on the other hand, cannot abide forever, because they are mortal. Even while they are alive they do not always preserve the same vigour, for the life of man is subject to many changes, and thus a man is not equally suited to the performance of the same duties throughout the whole span of his life. A second impediment to the preservation of the public good, which comes from within, consists in the perversity of the wills of men, inasmuch as they are either too lazy to perform what the commonweal demands, or, still further, they are harmful to the peace of the multitude because, by transgressing justice, they disturb the peace of others. The third hindrance to the preservation of the commonweal comes from without, namely, when peace is destroyed through the attacks of enemies and, as it sometimes happens, the kingdom or city is completely blotted out.
In regard to these three dangers, a triple charge is laid upon the king. First of all, he must take care of the appointment of men to succeed or replace others in charge of the various offices. Just as in regard to corruptible things (which cannot remain the same forever) the government of God made provision that through generation one would take the place of another in order that, in this way, the integrity of the universe might be maintained, so too the good of the multitude subject to the king will be preserved through his care when he sets himself to attend to the appointment of new men to fill the place of those who drop out. In the second place, by his laws and orders, punishments and rewards, he should restrain the men subject to him from wickedness and induce them to virtuous deeds, following the example of God, Who gave His law to man and requites those who observe it with rewards, and those who transgress it with punishments. The king’s third charge is to keep the multitude entrusted to him safe from the enemy, for it would be useless to prevent internal dangers if the multitude could not be defended against external dangers.
So there you go. I am looking forward to the conversations with Sig. I hope you are, too.
And I leave you with the quote from the Summa that led me back to Aristotle: “I answer that, As the Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 4), ‘to love is to will good to someone.’”