The Root of Friendship: Self-Love and Self-Governance in Aquinas

3. Persons, Providence, and the Natural Law

3 Per sons, Provide nce , a nd the Natur a l L aw Per sons a nd P rovide nce Aquinas embeds his account of self-governance within the framework of eudaimonism and appropriates many of the notions considered in the previous chapter. Moreover, his account of proper self-love motivates the need for self-governance, since a properly self-loving person seeks what is truly good for him and relating to himself as person mandates acting through himself. I will resume my analysis of Aquinas by picking up where we left off with Augustine—with God’s law. Aquinas identifies the principles that indicate what is truly good for human beings ultimately as a species of God’s eternal law. Thus, a person must submit in some way to the law of God if he is to be good, which is one of the main reasons why Schneewind contends that Aquinas’s account of self-governance does not meet the criteria for contemporary relevance. In this case, Aquinas, so the objection goes, cannot accommodate the authority condition, or a person’s right to self-governance. This chapter treats this objection, while 53 g 54 Persons, Providence, and the Natural Law chapter 5 addresses the additional criticism that Aquinas fails to satisfy the psychological conditions. Aquinas, following Augustine’s lead, makes important distinctions that clarify the relationship between God’s law and human beings, resulting in an account that safeguards the possibility of realizable self-governance. He affirms both that God’s providence and governance extends to everything in creation and that God respects the nature of His creations. In the case of human beings, God governs them in a distinct manner due to their nature as persons—as rational substances. Aquinas’s notion of person is the key to understanding his account of providence. In Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia Dei or On the Power of God, he specifies the signification of the term “person” as follows: Accordingly we reply that the term person signifies nothing else but an individual substance of a rational nature. And since under an individual substance of a rational nature is contained the substance, individual, i.e. incommunicable and distinct from others, whether of God, of man, or of angels , it follows that a divine Person must signify something subsistent and distinct in the divine nature, just as a human person signifies something subsistent and distinct in human nature: and this is the formal signification of a person whether divine or human.1 Person denotes something individual over and above the communicable nature of a thing, and personal incommunicability2 takes on special significance since it individualizes rationality.3 Such subsis1 . Aquinas, On the Power of God, trans. the English Dominican Fathers (Westminster , Md.: Newman Press, 1952), 9, 4. 2. For a good analysis of the notion of personal incommunicability, see John Crosby, The Selfhood of the Human Person (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996), chapter 2. Linda Zagzebski also provides a helpful evaluation of the notion, defending it as the basis of a person’s irreplaceable value, in “The Uniqueness of Persons,” Journal of Religious Ethics 29, no. 3 (2001): 401–23, 414–16. 3. It is probably clear from the context, but Aquinas does specify that he is not using “rationality” in the restricted sense of moving from propositions to a conclusion but in the broad sense of including all powers and operations of our intellectual nature. Commenting on Boethius’s definition of person, which he accepts, he states, “But Boethius takes rational in a broad sense for intellectual, and this is common to man, angels and God”; see On the Power of God, 9, 2, reply 10. Persons, Providence, and the Natural Law 55 tent, incommunicable beings of a rational nature constitute the apex of being itself. Aquinas notes, “Person signifies what is most perfect in all nature—that is, a subsistent individual of a rational nature.”4 He elaborates that such a being possesses a dignity found in nothing else: Thence by some the definition of person is given as hypostasis distinct by reason of dignity. And because subsistence in a rational nature is of high dignity , therefore, every individual of the rational nature is called a person.5 One of the characteristics of personhood that accounts for this dignity is the manner by which a person acts. Recall from the first chapter that Aquinas contends...