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John von Heyking Aquinas’s Mediated Cosmopolitanism and the Impasse of Ancient Political Philosophy While Saint Thomas Aquinas roots his political thinking in the natural law whose community is cosmopolis, with God as its ruler, he provides the basis for affirming the justice of, and citizen attachment to, particular regimes. All human relationships, with one another and with God, are mediated through a dense network of civic, social, and ecclesial ties. Aquinas would agree with the slogan that we should “think global, act local,” though he would further qualify this that in thinking globally we are also thinking locally. Aquinas’s cosmopolitanism arises out of an impasse he saw in Aristotle ’s reflections on the best regime and whether a good citizen can be a good human being. That identity can only occur in the best regime, and, even by Aristotle’s own lights of natural reason, that best regime can only be identified with the Christian city of God, because it is only in that regime where the natural human inclination to live in political society is fulfilled and perfected. Cosmopolis is therefore a symbol that arises out of Aquinas’s thinking through of the natural basis and purpose of politics.1 Aquinas’s Christianity enabled him to see this natural completion. However, while the mystical city of God is said to complete humanity’s natural inclination to live in political society, the city of God is apolitical, because it is not of this world. Even though Aquinas compares the Mosaic regime under the Old Law with Aristotle’s understanding of the best regime, Aquinas provides only an incomplete picture of what the best regime would look like in the time of the New Law, of Christianity. This incomplete picture of a best regime under a Christian dispensation gives special weight to cosmopolitanism as a political ideal within Christianity (symbolized as the sacrum Aquinas’s Mediated Cosmopolitanism 71 imperium during the Middle Ages). Even so, Aquinas’s cosmopolitanism, unlike other cosmopolitanisms, both medieval and modern, provides a way of affirming both cosmopolitanism and attachments to particular regimes. Must a “Perfect Community” Be a World State? A Clarification Pope Benedict XVI surprised some in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate by calling for international organization to serve as a common political authority for all nations.2 In doing so, though, he seems to have been following a line of reasoning in twentieth-century Catholic political thought that lends support to international governmental institutions. Previous examples include Jacques Maritain’s work on the International Declaration of Human Rights and the support Pope Pius XI lent to the League of Nations. Pius argued that Roman Catholic support of international organizations is based on the Christian view of human equality before God, and that whatever our obligations to our individual political community, our obligation to God is paramount. Pius appealed to Aquinas to support this view: “It is therefore to be hoped that the doctrines of Aquinas, concerning the ruling of peoples and the laws which establish their relations with one another, may be better known, since they contain the true foundations of that which is termed the ‘League of Nations.’”3 In his 1949 St. Thomas Aquinas Lecture, former University of Chicago president Robert M. Hutchins took up Pius’s appeal and set forth numerous texts by Aquinas, purporting a basis in his thought for a “world state.” He argues that Aquinas’s apparent argument for a world state derived from his Aristotelianism, whose logic could be fulfilled only by Christianity. Writing in the wake of World War II, Hutchins drew from Aquinas’s apparent argument, from De Regimine Principum, whose authorship has more recently been called into question, that a world state is necessary because the very existence of a plurality of states causes war, which therefore makes peace impossible. War is not only possible, but it is likely, because states, in Hutchins’s view, “are specialized, each in a certain way.”4 In other words, each state takes itself as the carrier of absolute truth. Put in biblical terms, the state is an idol, which makes it warlike in its very nature. A world state, conversely, would solve this problem because it would negate the possibility of war. Aquinas’s political teaching surpasses and fulfills that of Aristotle, whose best regime still has to prepare for war and thus cannot achieve perfection , a condition that must include peace. Hutchins does not explicitly [3.144.212.145] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...

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