St. Thomas, John Finnis, and the Political Good

The Thomist 64 (2000): 337-74 ST. THOMAS, JOHN FINNIS, AND THE POLITICAL GOOD LAWRENCE DEWAN, 0.P. College Dominicain Ottawa, Ontario, Canada In our observance of the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is worthwhile to recall that the role of the philosopher is to provide, as Jacques Maritain said, the true philosophy of those rights.1 The present paper is focused upon the nature of political society, with the view that this is the best thing there is, at least in the line of practical life, in human affairs.2 Not to be allowed to live the full life of political society is to be gravely deprived, and philosophical teachings that tend to diminish our awareness of the nobility of political or civic life should prompt us to work hard toward their refutation. Thus, I see myself here as defending the universal right to live in a true city (using this word to translate the classical "civitas" or "polis"). While many articles in the Universal Declaration relate to this, I would cite especially article 28: Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.3 1 Jacques Maritain, Man and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 80: "With regard to Human Rights, what matters most to a philosopher is the question of their rational foundations" (d. pp. 76-80). The present paper was originally composed for a symposium on human rights sponsored by the Canadian Maritain Association and held in Ottawa, June, 1998. 2 I limit my consideration to the natural order, as distinguished from the domain altogether proper to revealed religion. 3 "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" (1948), reprinted in The New Encyclopaedia Britannica: Micropaedia (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., 1984). 337 338 LAWRENCE DEWAN, O.P. In the early 1940s there was a rather acrimonious dispute among Thomists in North America, involving principally Charles De Koninck and Ignatius Eschmann, 0.P. De Koninck had published a book on the primacy of the common good "against the personalists."4 Eschmann regarded it as an attack on Jacques Maritain, and also as a conception of the common good at odds with the Christian tradition. His vitriolic attack on De Koninck5 provoked a response much longer than the latter's original essay.6 It has always seemed to me that De Koninck had by far the better of the argument, and that the important point brought forth by the debate was the idea of an intrinsically common good, a type of object of experience that, even if one were the only creature of God, one would have to encounter as a participable or communicable object. Much of the debate turned on the nature of the object of the beatific vision. Eschmann stressed the "personal" and "private" nature of a contemplative experience. De Koninck insisted that, even if there were only one creature capable of having such an experience, that creature would be encountering God as a common good. For De Koninck, the nobility of the human person lay, not his private goods, but in the fact that he is a being meant to participate in the more universal good. It was very much in the line of De Koninck's thinking that if a member of a political community has certain rights that lie in a zone untouchable by the leaders of the body politic, the reason is especially that that member is not only a member of the civii or properly political community, but also and even primarily a member of a more universal and noble community. Thus, there was great insistence on the nobility of the common good as such.7 4 Charles De Koninck, De la primautedu bien commun contre !es personnalistes (Quebec: Editions de l'Universite Laval, 1943). 5 I. Th. Eschmann, "In Defense of Jacques Maritain," The Modern Schoolman 22 (1945): 183-208. 6 Charles De Koninck, "In Defense of Saint Thomas: A Reply to Father Eschmann's Attack on the Primacy of the Common Good," Laval theologique et philosophique 1 (1945) (my offprint runs to 103 pages). 7 Cf. Aquinas, Summa...