As good and noble as political life is, it is not ultimate; it points beyond itself.
As good and noble as political life is, it is not ultimate; it points beyond itself.
H aving just completed voting in midterm elections, Americans in 2023 will begin the now customary two-year process of choosing a president and thereby choosing a kind of political future. Amid this seemingly ceaseless campaigning, it is important for us to step back and remind ourselves just what politics can and cannot accomplish. Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas can help.
When we think about the purpose of politics, about how politics ought to be done, it is helpful to think about the opposite. There are two classic ways to go wrong in politics. One mistake is to take politics too seriously; the other, to treat it frivolously.
There are also distinctively Catholic versions of these two mistakes. There have always been people who think that politics is a kind of deductive science, one that yields the invariably right answers so long as one begins with the right first (usually metaphysical) principles. But neither Aristotle nor Aquinas were among them. Nor were the founders of our republic.
But neither did they subscribe to the opposite erroneous Christian counterpart to cynicism, the view that one ought have nothing to do with politics because it is hopelessly corrupt and corrupting. Both of these mistakes are departures from the main line of the classical and Christian understanding of politics.
For the classics and for Christianity, political life is necessary and important, but also limited and subsidiary to the highest goods toward which human actions are directed, goods that are, in some sense, the ends of politics but not achievable by politics (in which I include law). Virtue in politics is like virtue in everything else: It is a mean lying between two vicious extremes, one of which absolutizes the political good, thereby making it bad, and the other of which denies it altogether.
For Aristotle, the term “politics” really names a class of deliberate choices that human beings can and are sometimes forced to make. It is first and foremost practical. The expert in politics for Aristotle is not an academic political scientist equipped with sophisticated models and hypotheses about political things; the real political expert is the statesman. And the most important and characteristic function of the true statesman is legislation. Politics determines what sciences are studied in a city, as well as what kinds of science and how much must be learned by citizens; politics oversees all of the other most honored capacities and makes use of them for its own ends; finally, the political community determines through legislation what citizens must and must not do. As Aristotle concludes, the end of the science or capacity of politics is the end that encompasses the ends of all the other sciences or capacities, and so that end must be the human good.
The political community, therefore, has as its end a good that encompasses all the others and that, as a whole, is a good for all of its members because it contains within it, and enables, everything necessary for the flourishing of its members. This is why its good is greater than that of any individual.
It is good because it has the unique capacity to make available to human persons their good — that is, the human good, the good common to human persons. So the end of the political community more than any other community is the common good, and this common good is the work of the statesman.
There remain complications. The first stems from a fact that Aristotle knew well: People disagree about the good, about just what the content of happiness is. Some people think it is pleasure, others think it is honor, and others still think it is wisdom. For Aristotle it was virtuous life. He knew, however, those who held that the aim of the city is limited to preventing crime, defending the citizens against external threats, and facilitating commerce. But for Aristotle, a true city must be conceived on the model of friendship, and friends care about one another’s character; they share in a conception of the good life and hold one another to account. This kind of city aims very much at inculcating virtue through law.
In order for this to work, the city must have certain attributes. The most important is that it be small. The sort of city that Aristotle imagines here is a community that modern anthropologists have called a “face-to-face” community, in which, at least with respect to full citizens, everyone knows everyone else. Aristotle’s community of virtue is small and homogeneous, and this allows it to be directed singularly to the moral perfection of citizens. A large and diverse society such as ours could not work this way.
Like Aristotle, Thomas holds that man is by nature a social and political animal and that the end of the political community is the common good. There is a subtle difference, however, that one can see in Thomas’s relatively greater emphasis (in his little treatise on kingship, De regno) on peace as what the ruler can actually accomplish. Certainly, that peace should be understood as a condition for and therefore for the sake of virtuous life, but it is the peace that is emphasized as the product of political rule.
The political common good is considered here as an intermediate end, subordinated to the ultimate, final end of human beings in the beatific vision. But the ordering of the community toward that greater end, the supernatural common good, is the business of the church, in which realm kings are subject to priests. When describing the work of a king in detail, Thomas focuses on things we can well imagine a ruler able to accomplish, but those things must themselves be understood relative to happiness as a life of virtuous deliberate choices. The good life for man, the common good, is a combination of virtue and the material means of virtuous life: This is what individual persons should want. When describing what a ruler can provide, however, Thomas again emphasizes the peace that allows those individuals to pursue such a life.
The nuanced difference in Thomas’s account is a function of two differences from Aristotle. First, the kinds of political communities Thomas knew were different from Aristotle’s polis: Medieval kingdoms, empires, and even free commercial cities were bigger and certainly more populous. But second, and more important, the earthly city is subordinate to and transcended by the Heavenly City that Thomas understood in largely Augustinian terms.
Most immediately this meant that the, as it were, stakes of the political were lower than for Aristotle. Thomas frequently contrasts life in via from life in patria. The redemptive act of Jesus opens up citizenship in the City of God to all human persons who accept the gift of grace. There is then an aspect of every human person that transcends the temporal political order, which can never again have the value that it did in the pagan world.
These limitations in no way imply any denigration of the political common good. Thomas frequently quotes Aristotle to the effect that it is better and more divine than the good of individuals, and that it is the greatest good and source of good in temporal life. But it is subordinate to the still-better and genuinely divine common good that is God.
As good and noble as political life is, it is not ultimate; it points beyond itself. That life is beyond politics points both to the nobility of politics, relative to other human enterprises, and to its humility before the ultimate end of human life. This perspective, ancient though it is, remains enormously relevant and helpful as we begin the quadrennial process of determining our political future.