Aquinas, Feminism, and the Common Good

3. A FEMINIST RETRIEVAL OF THE PRINCIPLE OF THE COMMON GOOD

CHAPTER 3 A Feminist Retrieval of the Principle of the Common Good The feminist hermeneutical method proposed in the first chapter is comprehensive and ethical. It includes a consideration of the text or tradition using appropriate analytical tools, as well as the next and necessary step into praxis. When one engages in a critical assessment of significant aspects of Aquinas’s principle of the common good, such as his anthropology, one must attend to the contributions that Aquinas’s work can make to contemporary scholarship: for example, Aquinas’s conception of the person contributes to a fuller description of the human person suggested by Martha Nussbaum’s functioning capabilities . Without openness to a mutual correlation of elements both from the tradition and from the critiquing sources, the result can again become a self-enclosed set of parameters available to no outside critique. The retrieval of a text or tradition does not result in a collection of phrases or words that are finally judged adequate to convey the truth of the text or tradition. What emerges from the work of critical retrieval is more a set of principles that may be brought forward and placed in conversation with an existing situation. Sandra Schneiders and Rosemary Radford Ruether have alerted us to this in their understanding of the capacity of the text as a whole to critique particular aspects of the text, exposing the elements that cohere with the fundamental orientation of the text as well as judging negatively those that do not. In considering biblical texts, for example, both Schneiders and Ruether suggest that this critiquing principle is the principle of comprehensive 85 86
A Feminist Retrieval of the Principle of the Common Good liberation and salvation of all people, particularly those who are most at risk, marginal, or oppressed. Similarly, in considering Aquinas’s work regarding the principle of the common good, the goal is not a retrieval of particular phrases from his writing; rather, the result of the process of critical retrieval of Aquinas’s text will be the identification of central principles of the common good in his writing—principles that cohere with the fundamental aspects of the Christian tradition and the Scriptures (particularly regarding justice), and very importantly, principles that are faithful to the internal logic and overarching convictions of Aquinas’s own writing. The five presuppositions identified by Schneiders and Ruether are affirmed regarding the retrieval of the common good.1 When these presuppositions are specified in relation to Aquinas’s text and tradition of the common good, the following elements are seen: Aquinas’s biological knowledge and anthropology were flawed both in terms of scientific accuracy and in terms of the metaphysical conclusions that he drew based on this faulty biology. Therefore, the anthropology (or aspects of the anthropology) that is dependent on these elements is similarly flawed. (This will be addressed in greater detail below.) The experience of women is virtually absent from Aquinas’s text. The principle of the common good has historically often been invoked in ways that have been detrimental to women. Social systems that are predicated on women’s corporate inability to name their experiences on their own terms (an inability developed over generations through familial and social relationships) are most often the norm. Social relationships and policies based on such incomplete self-definition or self-expression of a major constituency institutionalize unjust patterns of participation and relationships for women. The faulty anthropology of most traditional theology encouraged women to suppress their own full personhood and flourishing for the sake of the ‘‘common good’’ of a group (whether the community of the family, the church, the village, etc.). The retrieved principle of the common good offers important correctives to any culture based on personal gratification, hierarchy, gender (or other) discrimination, and class stratification. Moreover, there are important principles embedded in Aquinas’s development of the common good that can function on behalf of the full flourishing of women, but only if the text and its underlying presumptions are rigorously critiqued. The distortions that are associated with the principle of the common good do not obliterate the contours of a valuable contribution this principle holds for relational justice and communal as well as individual well-being. Experience, and the Experience of Women
87 In this chapter, the structure of chapter 2 will serve as the template through which to consider a retrieval of Aquinas’s principle of the common...