Custom in St Thomas's Political Thought

Extract

In the introduction which he wrote to the proceedings of the Malvern Conference the late Dr Temple compared the works of Maritain and Niebuhr upon political subjects, and suggested that despite the skill and rigorous reasoning of the former his scholasticism prevented him from attacking the real, everyday difficulties of our present situation in the way which Niebuhr does. A similar complaint was made by Mr Lewis in a recent number of Philosophy where he spoke of the new scholasticism as having ‘missed the vital creative forces of our age’. If this deficiency is characteristic of the new scholasticism, if it be true that our modern schoolmen are really spinning webs of ratiocination in order to deceive, then the accusation is indeed a serious one; we hope to be able to show by a consideration of a somewhat, neglected aspect of St Thomas that the accusation, if proved, would convict modern schoolmen of treason towards their master.

Professor d’Entreves was expressing the conventional view, and the views which Dr Temple and Mr Lewis put into the dock, when he spoke of St Thomas’s theory of law as ‘the highest expression of an “intellectualist” as against a “voluntaristic” theory of law. It is the key to a proper understanding of that “rationalistic” bent which is one of the distinctive features of Thomistic philosophy’.