Commentary on Thomas Aquinas's "Treatise on Law" by J. Budziszewski (review)

The title of this volume indicates precisely what it is: Budziszewski has produced a very detailed commentary on questions 90-97 of the Prima secundae of Thomas Aquinas's Summa theologiae. After a 24-page introduction that gives background on Thomas, the Summa and its structure, and some basic issues in reading the "treatise on law," the author discusses each article in chunks that derive from the parts of the article, that is, the question (which is mistakenly referred to as the "ultrum" throughout), objections, sed contra, respondeo, and replies. For each of these he reprints the well-known translation by the English Dominican Fathers, accompanied by his own paraphrase, and follows this with his detailed comments, which sometimes run to several pages.

While the intended audience for the commentary is broad, Budziszewski emphasizes accessibility to "students, general readers, and other serious amateurs" (xxiii), and for this audience especially the book will be quite valuable. Among its strengths is the attention devoted to the objections given in each article—often passed over by students, but often crucial in understanding why Thomas gives the answer he does. Another strength is the serious attention given to Thomas's chosen authorities, especially patristic authors and Roman and canon lawyers, who are not only identified, but often quoted at greater length to show the context of the passages cited. The author also devotes sustained attention to scriptural references and quotations, providing a salutary reminder to anyone inclined to forget that Thomas was first and foremost a Christian theologian. The writing is clear, jargon-free, and often incorporates helpful images and analogies as well as schematic representations of arguments designed to make them maximally accessible to the uninitiated. All of this could also have the happy consequence of opening up the treatise especially to lawyers and law students.

The book to which this volume is probably most immediately comparable is the late Robert Henle's The Treatise on Law (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), which incorporated the Latin text, along with Fr. Henle's own translation and commentary. That book included a much lengthier introduction discussing various aspects and themes of the treatise, also intended to acclimate beginning students. One can, however, find discussions of most of those themes distributed throughout Budziszewski's commentary. The main difference is that the commentary proper is much shorter in Henle, and Thomas's text takes up a lot more space on the page, so Budziszewski offers considerably more, and more detailed, commentary. While he opts to reprint an existing (still generally quite good) translation, his paraphrases give him the opportunity to correct some slips and to update by means of less literal representation some formulations that now seem less clear than they would have a century ago.

Because of the main audience for the commentary, interpretive debates among scholars are largely ignored. The effects of this policy choice are mixed. In some cases, large controversies about moral or legal theory are alluded to, but dispatched far too peremptorily (e.g., the relationship between morality and law [3-4]). This is also the case with the discussion of what seems an important ambiguity in Thomas's treatments of St. Paul's views about the Gentiles' knowledge of natural law in Romans 2:14 (78-79, 292), the vexed question of the derivation of normative conclusions from empirical premises (248-49), and the interchangeability of ius naturale and lex naturalis (267, 422). The issue is less Budziszewski's own conclusions about these matters (I find myself, at any rate, in agreement with him more often than not) than the helpfulness of these clipped treatments to his intended audience. In one case I think the problem is more serious, namely, on the issue of the character of the most basic precepts of the natural law (246-53). Here...