Thomas and Dante on the Duo Ultima Hominis

* The author extends his gratitude to the Thomas Jefferson Center of the University of Texas at Austin for a postdoctoral fellowship supporting research for this paper; to Rob Koons, Kody Cooper, and other faculty and students at UT for incisive comments on an early version; to Angela McKay Knobel for the provision of prepublication drafts of two of her articles; and to Sr. Elinor Gardner and an anonymous reviewer at the The Thomist for invaluable suggestions on the penultimate draft. 1 Jacques Maritain, Man and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 14850 ; see also idem, The Person and the Common Good, trans. John J. Fitzgerald (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947). Maritain’s views on this matter were embroiled in a debate also relevant for the present essay; see Charles De Koninck, De la primauté du bien commun contre les personnalistes (Quebec: Éditions de l’Université Laval, 1943); the review of De la primauté by Yves Simon, “On the Common Good,” The Review of Politics 6 (1944): 530-33; the critique of the same by I. T. Eschmann, “In Defense of Jacques Maritain,” The Modern Schoolman 22 (1945): 183-208; and De Koninck’s response, In Defense of St. Thomas: A Reply to Father Eschmann’s Attack on the Primacy of the Common Good (Quebec: Éditions de l’Université Laval, 1945). The present essay is intended to extend Maritain’s claim of a political end “worthy in itself yet of lesser dignity,” while nonetheless being in agreement with De Koninck’s main theses. Needless to say, any error herein should be attributed neither to Maritain’s theory nor De Koninck’s, but to the present author alone. 415 The Thomist 75 (2011): 415-59 THOMAS AND DANTE ON THE DUO ULTIMA HOMINIS* PATRICK M. GARDNER The University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas The human person is both part of the body politic and superior to it through what is supra-temporal, or eternal, in him, in his spiritual interests and his final destination. . . . Thus the indirect subordination of the body politic,—not as a mere means, but as an end worthy in itself yet of lesser dignity—to the supratemporal values to which human life is appendent, refers first and foremost, as a matter of fact, to the supernatural end to which the human person is directly ordained.1 J ACQUES MARITAIN’S precision of the “indirect subordination ” of the polis to the human person’s supernatural PATRICK M. GARDNER 416 2 The present status quaestionis has been shaped especially by reaction to Henri de Lubac’s thesis in Surnaturel: Études historiques (Paris: Aubier, 1946). See Denis J. M. Bradley, Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good: Reason and Human Happiness in Aquinas’s Moral Science (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997); Steven A. Long, “On the Possibility of a Natural End for Man,” The Thomist 64 (2000): 211-37; idem, Natura pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010); Peter A. Pagan-Aguiar, “St. Thomas Aquinas and Human Finality: Paradox or Mysterium Fidei?,” The Thomist 64 (2000): 375-99; Reinhard Hütter, “Aquinas on the Natural Desire for the Vision of God: A Relecture of Summa contra Gentiles III, c. 25 après Henri de Lubac,” The Thomist 73: (2009): 523-91; Lawrence Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God according to St. Thomas and His Interpreters, 2d ed. (Ave Maria, Fla.: Sapientia Press, 2010); and the symposium on the first edition of Feingold’s work in Nova et Vetera 5:1 (2007). 3 E.g., Bradley, Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good, esp. 514-34, at 520: “Human nature, so Aquinas reasons, has no satisfying and, in that sense, no ultimate end; it is, in other words, naturally ‘endless’.” 4 E.g., Long, Natura pura, 225 n. 5: “Obviously there cannot be at once two ultimate finalities, but God need not have elevated man to the supernatural finis ultimus, but could have ordered man exclusively to his natural end whence the species of human nature is derived.” end is relevant for two closely related questions that have been actively debated in recent...