2006 Aquinas Convocation
January 26 2006
Aquinas, Feminism and the Common Good
Good morning! It is a great pleasure to be with you this morning to celebrate the legacy of Thomas Aquinas for this University and for the larger influence he continues to have on many people and on many different disciplines. It’s an honor to have the Most Rev. Frederick Francis Campbell with us this morning. I offer special greetings and thanks for the warm hospitality I have received to president Calareso, Dr. Mary Todd and the Most Rev. James Griffin. To the distinguished faculty, the students and the friends of Ohio Dominican, thank you for giving me an opportunity to consider with you some thoughts on Aquinas. My special thanks go to Sr. Catherine Colby who invited me to give this lecture almost a year ago – and I quickly accepted the invitation.
Many years ago, before I studied theology, if you had asked me what I knew about Thomas Aquinas I would have said “he’s dead”. I knew he was a significant figure in the world of Catholic thought, but in my youthful superiority, the most significant thing I knew about him was that he wasn’t alive. When I began to study theology, I discovered the thought of Aquinas, and he became for me one of those special people who – although dead – engaged my thinking in exciting ways. Reading Aquinas frequently left me in the position that perhaps you have had at some point in your studies, of wanting to knock on someone’s door and say, “Listen to this!”, because his perspectives and ways of thinking and shaping his ideas was, for me, illuminating and stimulating. If you haven’t had that type of moment yet, I encourage you to expect it, to look for it and to value it when it occurs.
This morning I’m going to frame my comments through several questions that I’m using, not as rhetorical devices, but as someone who is looking for companions in the process of using the best of our Christian/Catholic tradition to address our realities today, and I believe these questions are important for that.
My first question is: “What are your sources of wisdom?” And the second question is, “How do you use those sources of wisdom?” From these two questions, I will engage the title of this lecture, “Aquinas, Feminism and the Common Good.”
What are your sources of wisdom? No matter what your discipline is, what constitutes the materials that you believe are a source of wisdom, not just knowledge, but wisdom, in your discipline? Why do you consider these particular things sources of wisdom? What are your criteria for that judgment? The question means you have to understand the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Wisdom has a comprehensive quality to it, a synthesizing or unifying quality, it offers not just information, but a perspective on life or a particular aspect of life that gives us a framework for understanding things. To count something as a source of wisdom means that it offers an enduring truth apart from the historical setting in which the text (if we’re talking about a text) was written. Theologian David Tracy, from the University of Chicago, suggests that certain texts deserve to be thought of as “classic texts” precisely because of their ability to present us with a word or insight that speaks a truth long after the time when it was written. The Judeo-Christian scriptures are like that, and the writings of Aquinas are certainly worthy of being understood as classic texts in the Christian tradition.
In our highly post-modern culture, there are many who argue that the idea of classic texts and enduring truths is a quaint notion left over from an earlier age when people believed simplistic things and used their simplistic beliefs as weapons against those who didn’t see things their way. When I was working on my book, I found, to my surprise, that I had to argue about the validity of putting into conversation Aquinas, Aquinas’s principle of the common good and feminism. I had many people tell me that to even be working on Aquinas and feminism was an oxymoron. They felt the effort to put these elements in conversation was a throwback to an earlier time and I might as well be talking about the relationship between hoop skirts and feminism. I also encountered those who said there is no such thing as the common good nor any identifiable human good that is valid cross-culturally (even in a minimal way), and that any presumption of identifying a good is so culturally shaped that what I see as a good in this culture and setting would only be oppressive if it was thought to have any relevance for people in other settings.
One of the most well-expressed arguments for the possibility of identifying some realities as cross-cultural human goods comes from Margaret Farley, an ethicist, a Sister of Mercy who teaches at Yale University. Farley points to the range of experiences human beings do share across cultures and genders.
These convictions presuppose some commonality in human experience -- in the experience of what it means as a person to rejoice and to be sorrowful, to be protected or violated, nurtured or stifled, understood or misjudged, respected or used. Whatever the differences in human lives, however minimal the actuality of world community, however unique the social arrangements of diverse peoples, it is nonetheless possible for human persons to weep over commonly felt tragedies, laugh over commonly perceived incongruities, yearn for common hopes. And across time and place, it is possible to condemn commonly recognized injustices and act for commonly desired goals.
Aquinas is one of my sources of wisdom, yet this doesn’t mean that I use Aquinas’s writing uncritically. This brings up the second question – “How do you use your sources of wisdom?” This sounds like a fairly benign question or at best a technical one, until we recall the significant conflicts that exists in the Catholic Church in the United States and around the world over the issue of how to understand and relate to our sources of wisdom. We have a variety of options. Presuming I identify a source of wisdom, I might argue that I can find in the text whatever I think I find there – or want to find there, and whatever meaning or interpretation I claim to find in this text is there because I say it’s there. In this case, meaning is completely relative. You have your interpretation, I have mine, and we leave each other alone with our differing interpretations, even though we’re both appealing to the same text as a foundation for something important.
Another option in answer to “How do you use your sources of wisdom?” is to choose to use the sources literally. We see this option preferred in many settings today – from those who insist on the literal truthfulness of every word of the Scriptures and who condemn anyone who doesn’t do the same, to the arguments that are now engaged around how Supreme Court justices and other judges should deal with the Constitution to how the religious texts of the Muslim community should shape emerging governments in Iraq and Afghanistan. The stakes are very high in the decision about how we will use our texts.
I believe that to use a classic text such as the work of Aquinas, particularly one that reflects in significant ways the presumptions and givens and the categories of the time in which it was written, requires a process of hermeneutics – of interpretation that is deliberate. The process of using a source of wisdom is a dynamic process of drawing on the thoughtful reflections over time of the community that honors the text, but also engaging the text in the midst of the specific circumstances and new insights available to us today, and that out of that dynamic process of interpretation allowing the text offer a perspective on the current moment. To do this does not mean we avoid the reality that many of our classic texts reflect very much the historical and cultural settings and presumptions in which they occurred. It means we develop rigorous processes for identifying the things that are presumed in the text, such as an anthropological presumptions, that we don’t consider adequate today and amending the flawed presumptions without dismissing the text completely because to do that is to lose the wisdom the text does offer.
How has this worked itself out as I have dealt with Aquinas’s material on the common good? While Aquinas was not a feminist, at least not in the way we use the term today, I suggest that Aquinas’ thought and writings are a significant resource in the Roman Catholic tradition for those who do find the situation of women in the world one that requires a priority of attention and response. I believe Aquinas’ writing on the common good in particular is an underutilized resource for people who locate themselves within the Roman Catholic theological tradition, who are moved by strong convictions about the suffering of particular groups of people and who are convinced or who hope that they don’t have to follow their moral convictions without the best of the moral teachings of that tradition serving them as they respond to that suffering. I believe that Aquinas would be sympathetic to a reinterpretation of his work on the common good given his own willingness to pursue the truth even if it meant using the work of Aristotle, which at his moment in history was a rather radical thing to do. I have to believe that a man who was as willing to push the edges of theological method as Aquinas was in his own time wouldn’t be threatened by the development and use of a liberationist feminist hermeneutic on his own work.
Several things seem obvious to me. First, the suffering of people around the world has not decreased. I can’t say that there is more suffering in the world than ever before, but we certainly are now able to know about suffering in much greater detail and much more quickly than ever before. Another obvious thing is that there are still many, many people who believe with all their soul that their naming of themselves as Christian and Roman Catholic places a moral demand on their lives to respond to the suffering. I don’t believe the Spirit of God has stopped inspiring women and men to find their voices and find ways to embody their passionate insistence that this suffering is an affront to God and is an intolerable crucifixion of people around the world. I believe the Spirit of God is still moving among us – an active, disturbing, not-tame force inspiring people who are committed with their lives to labor for dignity, for justice and for the greater embodiment of the reign of God.
I discovered in the thought of Aquinas on the common good an exquisitely constructed argument for attention to the situation of those who usually are neglected in any society, those who do not share for various reasons in the benefits of the society. And more than just an intellectual awareness of the situation of those who do not participate in the benefits of a society, I am convinced that Aquinas’s writing on the common good is a moral demand for action that requires a change in the balances of power and advantage so that those who are disenfranchised from the goods of a society have a place of priority as the practical choices that guide that society are made. This is a controversial claim to make about the common good in Aquinas, and I believe it is supportable. I also believe that these insights regarding the common good are applicable in local settings as well as nationally and internationally.
We have to be clear that what a retrieval of Aquinas’s principle of the common good will yield will not be specific behavioral norms. What it will yield is an orientation, a trajectory, a sense of what constitutes right relationship of the elements that contribute to justice that must now be concretized in a new and particular situation.
Aquinas understood the common good as including the temporal common good which is a complex or constellation of many things: physical goods necessary to maintain life, i.e., food, shelter, clothing; relational goods such as peace, tranquility and security of the community; and goods of the heart and soul such as love, delight and friendship. The truth is an element of the common good to which people have a right, and which is vitally important for a person to grow in the goodness possible for her in this life. This is an extremely significant facet of the temporal common good in its implication for marginalized groups, and especially for women. Not to perceive the truth of one’s own self, one’s true reality as an existing individual being with dignity, will leave the person’s horizon or imagination so crippled in what it can even understand as good to be pursued that it leaves them potentially unable to use their life energy to pursue authentic good.
One of the most insidious effects of oppression and injustice is what it does to the ability to imagine what the good might be. I am reminded of a friend who was working in a slum in Cuernevaca, Mexico, who went with another aide worker to the home of an extremely elderly woman. The home was worse than a shack, it was a hovel. While they were there, the second aide worker asked the elderly woman what she thought heaven would be like. It’s not a question I would ask someone living in a hovel, it seems like an attempt to avoid or transcend or the misery of her surroundings. But the old woman’s response was very important. She answered that she thought heaven would be a place where she would be filled by one tortilla. She had lived with such deprivation for so long, that the best she could hope for or imagine was that in heaven she would have her one tortilla, but now she would not feel the distress of hunger. She couldn’t imagine two tortillas. “Good” for her simply meant an ability to endure more easily her lot, it didn’t and probably couldn’t mean a life of less deprivation.
The ultimate human good, according to Aquinas, is union with God forever. This is the transcendent destiny and good of all people according to Aquinas, women as well as men. But Aquinas understood the good of a human person as a very complex reality just as his understanding of the human person was a complex reality. Aquinas had an appreciation of the practical circumstances and needs involved in human living and how the fulfillment of these practical needs contributes to the person pursuing her highest good. He did not think of the human good as simply a “someday” thing focused exclusively on the afterlife – he did not think that the human body and its material needs and demands should be rejected as distracting a person from their spiritual destiny. His writing on the human good respects the embodied life of the person and it shapes his vision of a good society and justice within a good society.
Aquinas saw these basic human needs of a person as more likely to be met through association with others in a community. In De Regnum (On Kingship), Aquinas suggests that two things are required for an individual person to lead a good life: “The first and most important is to act in accordance with virtue since virtue is what makes one live well. The second – and it is secondary and a means to the first – is sufficiency of the material goods that are necessary for virtuous action.” Immediately after that, Aquinas suggests that three things are necessary for the good life of the group – peace, unity in acting well and finally, “A third requirement is that the king work to see that there is a sufficient supply of the necessities required to live well.” As I read this section, Aquinas essentially charges the king with the responsibility of guiding the community so that the common good is pursued, which means earthly circumstances are shaped so that citizens are enabled to pursue their ultimate good in this life – contemplation of God – living in a situation of peace and justice, and having the practical necessities that they need. Aquinas knew that desperate, oppressed, brutalized, starving people really cannot contemplate God and pursue virtue or contribute to society in the way they are created to.
I suggest that simply because Aquinas places that responsibility on the king does not mean his conviction is useless for us today. In the United States, for example, that responsibility for protecting the common good of the community falls on elected officials at all level of government and on citizens participating in the government in a variety of ways. Certainly the form and scope of government that we have in the United States is beyond anything Aquinas could have imagined. Yet Aquinas’s judgments about the responsibility for protecting the common good and for special attention for those who have fallen outside sharing in the common good belonging to those who hold valid authority in the community still hold. This doesn’t withdraw from ordinary citizens, however, the responsibility for active participation of various types in civic life. If anything, in the form of government we have, it requires the vigorous participation by its citizens to serve as a shaping influence on the functioning of the government.
Justice is described by Aquinas as “a habit whereby a man renders to each one his due by a constant and perpetual will.”1 So central is this activity of justice that Aquinas notes further in this same point in the Summa that, “the service of God includes rendering to each one his due.” Therefore, a person’s relationship with God is, to a certain degree, measured or gauged by her exercise of justice toward others, which requires giving them their due. Aquinas understands that someone who prevents a person from having the goods they need is not acting in a moral manner. The basic institutions and structures of a society, then, must embody, and are presumed by Aquinas to embody, the principles of justice that are meant to guarantee right relations among individuals, and between individuals and the community. Aquinas advises that under certain circumstances the state may appropriate private property, by force if necessary, for the sake of the common good.2 Aquinas also argued that under situations of dire need, an individual may seize whatever is necessary to maintain her own life or the life of another without being morally culpable of the sin of stealing.3 Justice orients the will of the person and the corporate will of the community to attend to the needs of those who have a valid claim on them, rather than attending only to the needs of the individual herself or the needs of a particular constituency within the larger group.
I argue that because of his understanding of justice and the interrelationship of responsibilities between individuals and between the state and individuals, we find in Aquinas what we have for the last 35 years been calling a preferential or strategic option for the poor. In Aquinas’s thought, special attention is due to those who have failed to receive what they have a just claim to in order to live, to reproduce, to live in community and to seek the truth about God. This priority of attention and action in Aquinas seems analogous and congenial to the ways in which liberation theologians have argued for the preferential option for the poor in any setting – local, national and international.
Now it is no secret that many women have found Aquinas’s anthropology, specifically regarding women, particularly troubling. It is important to note that we do not find in Aquinas an animosity toward women; he accords them full human status, but he judges them to be less able to reflect the fullness of God in the same way men are, due to what he judges to be their different substance. He sees this difference present even in the beginning of life, maintaining that girl fetuses are ensouled later than boy fetuses. As we know, he believed that all fetuses are intended to become male, but because of some unexplained deviation (Aquinas suggests it could be a moist south wind) some fetuses become female which is a deviation from the perfection it was meant to have. He explains that women are in a state of subjection to men and he sees this as part of the proper order of things which actually (in his mind) works for the benefit of the woman. While he believes women have the same destiny as men – to know union with God for all eternity -- and he believed that women had souls and free wills, many women have found his comments offensive. Historically, Aquinas’s comments about the status of women have too often been invoked as the justification for systems, traditions and structures that did not afford women full participation in the range of goods of the community.
It doesn’t do a service to the work of Aquinas, or to any classic text, to behave as though there aren’t aspects of the text or doctrine or tradition that are now problematic and with which we cannot agree. The challenge before the community that has found meaning and value in the text is to develop a rigorous, critical hermeneutic process that will allow the identification of both those aspects of the text that do carry life and challenge for the community and those that are no longer able to serve the community due to the limits reflecting the presumptions available at the time the text and originated. Walking away from the entire tradition or the work of Aquinas in general because of what are seen to be its limits appears to be me to be a foolish waste of a valuable resource. Through a rigorous hermeneutic of retrieval, we draw forward the truth carried in Aquinas’s thought, and allow the historically limited dimensions of it to be what it is. As part of the hermeneutic or interpretive process, Aquinas’s anthropology must be subject to ideology critique and amended to reflect the insights of modern biology, psychology, and the social sciences.
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum, guided by the thought of Aristotle, offers the idea of “human functioning capabilities” as provocative and important markers of minimal realities that allow a life of decent human possibility. We might think of them as similar to what the Dominican theologian Edward Schillebeeckx described as anthropological constants. The functioning capabilities are all framed as human potentialities that a life of minimal human expression should allow, such as: Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length; being able to have good health; being able to avoid unnecessary and non-beneficial pain and to have pleasurable experiences; being able to use the mind and the senses; being able to have attachments to things and persons outside ourselves; being able to participate in planning one’s own life; being able to engage in various forms of social interaction and to live for and with others; being able to laugh and play and enjoy recreational activities; being able to live one’s own life. The way she frames these human functioning capabilities does not require that a person must actively engage them, but that they have the possibility of engaging them. She suggests that to the extent that these capabilities are absent, a fundamental aspect of a good human life is missing. The absence or limitedness of any of these capabilities does not say the person is not human, it offers a comment rather on the breadth of humanity that is available or not available to that person or those persons. These capabilities would be embodied in various ways in various cultures and times, but they point in a minimal way to realities that identify a human life that has the chance to flourish -- the life of a human person that has the opportunity to fulfill the purpose of a human life. Nussbaum allows that the proposed capabilities are available to amendment, but they offer a starting point, particularly for women, for identifying features of human life that exist or occur at the fundamental level and that provide a way to assess whether a person or group’s life reality contains basic human goods to a minimal degree. I suggest that an anthropology drawing on Aquinas’s thought, critically retrieved, is enhanced by the inclusion of anthropological markers such as Nussbaum’s or Schillebeeckx’s.
What can we retrieve from the thought of Aquinas on the common good that will contribute to the effort to respond to the situation of women who suffer systemic injustice? Aquinas’s work is often linked with the concept of natural law, and the very method of natural law depends on an inductive approach that notices patterns of flourishing and destruction, patterns of fulfilling the promise of existence and patterns of harming that fulfillment, patterns where by the dignity of the person and the divine image in the person are called forth and patterns whereby the dignity of the person is eradicated and the divine image in the person is trampled. By observing these patterns and more, Aquinas believed we could come to understand those things that enable the person to become all she was created to be and those things that, on the basis of observation, inhibit it. Those things that contribute to the truest flourishing of the person are judged good and those that harm the flourishing of the person are judged negatively. When through observation and analysis we are able to detect patterns of living that destroy the good of a whole constituency within a society, we are in the presence of something that is harming that constituency by keeping them from full participation in the common good and the common good of the community is harmed by their exclusion as well.
Aquinas’s material on justice is also a rich resource for women to retrieve and with which to argue for a change in the situations that destroy their lives. If justice is the habit of giving persons what is properly theirs, and the anthropology of Aquinas is amended to establish the claim of women for the same participation in the benefits of the community that men have by virtue of their absolutely equal humanity with men, then justice demands that they share in these benefits and be protected from harms that are unique to their lives.
Another resource that women who want to use Aquinas’s concept of the common good for women should attend to is the manner in which Aquinas understands the relationship between the individual good and the common good. How many times in human history has the advantaged constituency argued that it wasn’t possible or realistic to try to change the given social/economic/political/cultural system because it would disrupt the good of the larger community. My argument has always been that the individual good and the common good are not enemies of each other but function in a dialectical relationship to each other.
To discuss the human good is fundamentally an issue of anthropology. Some may find this point akin to walking into a mine field. How can we talk about identifying elements of the human good that will be useful cross-culturally when universal concepts have been used in the past with devastating effects on so many people? However, if we don’t at least try to identify some elements that mark the human good, then we are left with no grounds on which to object to human rights abuses cross-culturally, and that is unacceptable.
A contribution of a feminist theological approach to Aquinas’s work is the use of relationality and embodiment function as principles of critique on ways of conceiving God, the good and the human good that do not include the human capacity and need for relationships and the fact of existing and flourishing in and through material bodies as basic theological and moral categories. As a liberationist ethic, it uses the experience of suffering in the lives of the constituency in question (here women) as a primary lens through which to gain information on the historical situation of the group. What patterns of suffering exist for this group that do not exist for other groups? Why do these patterns of suffering exist? Different questions must be asked at the outset to expose these patterns of suffering, but in all liberationist method, the presumption is not unlike that found in Aquinas’s thought, that when human persons are subjected to realities that produce systemic injustice and patterns of exclusion and suffering, a fundamental right of those persons has been violated. To the extent that we can document that a group of people in a society in fact has less health, higher or premature mortality rates, less nourishment, fewer or no opportunities for choice in sexual matters, less opportunity to express preferences in things that affect them, etc., this group of people, by Aquinas’s own standards, are excluded from a participation in the common good of the society. They exert a moral claim on the rest of the society for response and for a reshaping of the society to provide for that participation. That may be embodied differently in Columbus and Beijing and Port au Prince, Haiti and Kingston, Jamaica, and Darfur, Africa at various times, but it means that serious attention to the moral guidance of Aquinas requires that people ask who in this society experience a diminished range of these functioning capabilities as a pattern of life? And what would have to happen to change that pattern? This means the common good, by Aquinas’s own framing of it, requires us to give priority to asking about those who fall through the cracks, those who do not participate in the benefits of our society. Aquinas would not be persuaded by the argument that a rising tide will raise all the boats – a sort of “trickle down common good” approach. I believe he would insist that we must go out of our way to ask about those who suffer in our midst and make them a moral priority.
The use of classic texts and traditions to benefit some in society and at the same time justify the exclusion of others is not new. What has been different more recently has been the thoughtful, critical interpretation of these same texts and traditions to argue precisely for justice on behalf of those who were excluded and whose exclusion was often justified by invoking the tradition. This is the power of interpretation at its best, when it liberates not only people, but the tradition itself from familiar and long-held interpretations of the tradition that betray the original energy and vision and vocation of the tradition. It may seem unusual to think of a tradition having a vocation, but the roots of the term vocation – vocare -- to call forth, suggests something that occurs through the action of the Spirit of God using every vehicle possible and which is inherently part of all that exists. The vocation of our faith tradition is to reveal always more fully the vision of the reign of God that permeates the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures.
As the Christian community is faithful to that vocation, it participates in one of its fundamental faith convictions -- that God has been revealed in history in Jesus and the community now continues to participate in that incarnation by responding to the Spirit who teaches it how to reinterpret and embody the reign of God in new historical and cultural settings. Without rigorous and on-going hermeneutical retrieval of its most cherished texts and traditions, such as Aquinas, the community will only repeat in an ahistorical and disembodied way its deepest beliefs which in fact have always found their most true expression in concrete human lives not simply as intellectual concepts. So a great deal is riding on the willingness to develop hermeneutical practices through which we may be people of faithful response, people of integrity, and people who are convinced that to the degree that suffering and injustice still exist we have not yet fulfilled our vocation.
Aquinas knew that the human person’s response to God was not accomplished simply by intellectual assent to dogmatic propositions. His writing points inescapably to his conviction that to be a person who responds to the good -- to God -- means that practical decisions for living and making choices are an essential venue for embodying our best attempts at integrity guided by the Spirit. His writings reminds us that our integrity is not just the product of our individual choices but integrity has a collective dimension and is found in the way we make choices together which shape societies and communities into living organisms in which the reign of God is revealed -- or which deface the dignity of the person and obscure the reality of God.
I finish with a quote from Sr. Margaret Farley, asking that the Spirit that guided her will continue to guide us. Her thought runs, “If any among us in the human community are not equally welcomed at the center; if any among us is dying because they have been displaced from the community and denied its good; its any among us has been subjugated by the community, enslaved by it, or exploited with their heritage stolen or their access to it closed off; if any of us has been thought to be less ‘human’ than others, humiliated or ignored, then these are to be given some priority in our commitments to all. These are the ‘poor,’ the disadvantaged or unprotected, theirs are the voices least likely to be heard, theirs is the pain least likely to be seen; theirs is the participation least likely to be allowed. A ‘preferential option for the poor’ is, therefore, a recognition of, and a granting of strategic priority to, the just claims of those whom the community has heretofore excluded, deprived, or unfairly burdened.”
There is a task to be done, an invitation to be responded to, a vocation to be lived out by those of us who are here today. Aquinas lived out this vocation in his time, and now it falls to us. If you listen closely you can hear the voice of God speaking to us as God spoke to the prophet Isaiah asking, “Whom shall I send?” And perhaps we will respond with Isaiah’s words, “Send me.”
On Kingship, Book Two, chapter 4.118.
Summa Theologica, II-II, 58.1.
Summa Theologica, II-II,66.5,8, esp. ad 3.
Summa Theologcia, II-II.66.7.
