Punishment as Medicine in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas

A man who is unjust, is thoroughly miserable,the more so if he doesn’t get his due punishmentfor the wrongdoing he commits.

(Plato, Gorgias 472e)

He wounds as he heals.

(Job 5:18)

IN 1953, POPE PIUS XII addressed a gathering of Italian jurists in Rome, observing that “most modern theories of penal law explain punishment and justify it in the last resort as a protective measure.”¹ This deterrent function, along with attempts to reform, he said, fail adequately to explain punishment, the ultimate purpose of which “must be sought on a higher plane,” namely, the restoration of that order which has been upset in the commission of a crime. Only “this more profound understanding of punishment” can get us “to the heart of the matter,” to the sacredness of the law itself, “so that whoever breaks it is punishable and will be punished.”²

Pius XII was responding to a type of humanist thinking about punishment in vogue in the first half of the twentieth century.³ Philosopher Michael Davis notes that in the 1960s, the kind of theories critiqued by Pope Pius, C. S. Lewis,⁴ and others suffered a “long and steep decline.”⁵ In the 1970s, “preventive theories of punishment” gave place to various forms of what came to be called “retributivism.”⁶ In the United States, this revival of interest in the retributive meaning of punishment was legal as well as philosophical, being reflected in debates following the 1972 and 1976 Supreme Court decisions on the punishment of death.⁷ Retributivists maintain that the defining feature of punishment is that it gives to wrongdoers something that they deserve because of a prior wrong.⁸ It is desert that justifies the infliction of harm on another person, which punishment necessarily involves. In response to retributivist arguments, others maintain that retribution does not define or justify punishment, and that harming another by punishing him can only be justified by looking to some good effect or effects to be achieved through the punishment (the “nonretributivist” position). Although, as we will see, twentieth-century retributivism differs in important respects from classical accounts of punishment, its proponents often look to that tradition for support, and some of them find in Thomas Aquinas a compelling defense of just retribution. But is Thomas a retributivist?

Although it would be a mistake to examine Thomas’s thought on punishment exclusively within the bounds of the contemporary categories (retributivist vs. nonretributivist), we begin there in order to highlight the present relevance of this study, and to see exactly where and why Thomas does not “fit in” to the contemporary dialogue, in order that we may better know the contours of his account and at the same time realize what contemporary explanations of punishment tend to omit. Ultimately we want to know what is the right way for a Christian to think about punishments: should we desire them as good, or should we look at them as necessary but unfortunate features of life, to be chosen only as far as is necessary to preserve the good order of society?

In light of this general goal, this paper has three specific aims. It aims to show, first, that Thomas’s account of punishment is better described as “medicinal” than “retributivist,” and, second, that a correct understanding of the medicinal character of human punishments requires reference to the revealed truth of divine retribution. Finally, through these clarifications of the Thomistic account of punishment, the third aim of this paper is to highlight what is lacking in the contemporary debates, and thereby contribute to a more Christian view of the phenomenon of punishment.

We will begin with an analysis of contemporary retributivism to pose the “retribution or medicine” question, after which we will turn to Thomas’s own account of punishment. After considering some difficulties with the use of “punishment” as a translation of poena, we will consider how Thomas defines this phenomenon, and the various ways in which it resembles medicine. This will bring us to the theological perspective, which I will...