Earlier this week we celebrated the feast day of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who was only: the foremost Roman Catholic theologian; the author of Summa Theologiae, his lifelong attempt to summarize all of Christian theology; by any (even secular) account, one of the ten most important philosophers in the Western tradition; the person who, as much as anyone, reintroduced Aristotle to the West after the Dark Ages; and the patron saint of universities and students.

Among many other things, Aquinas included in the Summa a lengthy disquisition on jurisprudence and legal theory (commonly referred to today as Aquinas’s “Treatise on Laws”) that attempted to explain the relationships among the mind and reasoning of God, which we might call “divine Wisdom;” fundamental principles of “natural law” that apply everywhere always, and are somehow implanted in all humans; and human law, which, according to Aquinas, should be human – that is, legislative – attempts to create fact and locale specific implementations of natural law, to promote the common good of a particular community. These human laws would of course vary; here in South Texas, we don’t need laws telling homeowners to shovel their sidewalks after a snowstorm. But such laws must both find their basis in both divine Wisdom and human reason, and they must carry out the common good. Human laws that fail those tests, according to Aquinas, are no laws at all.

As important as Aquinas saw the law to be, however, he also saw its limits. So, he built (at least) two important qualifications into his views on law. First is the concept of equity. Aquinas recognized that no law would be perfect, because no general law could justly decide every specific case. Therefore, Aquinas postulated the principle of “epikeia,” or equity, which flows from “the dictates of justice and the common good” rather than the strict imposition of human law. He borrowed the concept, and the term, from Aristotle, although both the Romans and the Hebrews had similar ideas. Equity is, in plain terms, an attempt to avoid using the technical reading of the law to avoid unjust or illogical results. The idea was to elevate the concept of the common good, so that the law neither approved actions technically legal that impaired the common good, nor condemned technically illegal ones that harmed no one.

Second, Aquinas in a separate part of the Summa endorsed a virtue-based view of human flourishing, because, he said, without the proper personal ethics, especially the “cardinal” virtues of prudence, courage, justice, and temperance, and the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, one would lack the necessary reason to make proper decisions about the law and its requirements. Both of those concepts come from Aquinas’s fundamental view that all things have purposes, towards which they are drawn. Laws have purposes and are valid only to the extent that they fulfill those purposes. And human lives have purposes, which should align to God’s purposes for humanity.

Two news topics this week make us wish for a new Aquinas. The first is the impeachment story. The president’s defenders claim, among other things, that he can’t be impeached, because the articles of impeachment don’t allege a crime. Well, perhaps. The house articles do set out the case that the president violated the Impoundment Control Act, which says that, absent special circumstances, the President has to spend the funds authorized by Congress in the budget, and only for specific reasons. Not surprisingly, withholding funds in order to induce a foreign investigation of a political rival is not among the special circumstances. Nevertheless, the argument is that while the President may have violated the Impoundment Control Act, that does not constitute a crime; there are only civil remedies for violation of the Act.

The Constitution authorized impeachment for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Let’s not concern ourselves with asking whether withholding military aid from a regional opponent of an enemy superpower, in order to gain a political advantage, is treasonous. And let’s not ask whether promising financial assistance, and a face to pace meeting in the White House, to a foreign official in exchange for detective services is bribery. Let’s limit ourselves to asking whether violation of the Impoundment Control Act is a “high Crime or Misdemeanor.” Here’s where Aquinas would be so helpful. He tells us that a law must be reasonable; that it has to be designed to achieve its purpose; and that its purpose has to serve the common good. Let’s look at the President’s conduct in that light. Is it reasonable to expect that the President shouldn’t  withhold aid from our allies, thus giving succor to our enemies, to promote his reelection chances? Check. Would removing a president who behaves like that promote the dignity of the Presidency and the efficient operation of government? Check. And which more serves the common good: sending our allies the aid that Congress approved, or withholding it to find out how long they can stand up to its (and our) great rival to the north and east?

The other great story this week is the 75^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, commemorated across the world, especially at the World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem, attended by Presidents Putin and Macron, Vice-President Pence, Prince Charles, Speaker Pelosi, and a host of others. (But not the American president; he was in Davos insulting teenage girls.) Everyone who did attend, and for that matter the American president, in a written statement, vowed never to let anything like the Holocaust happen again. But how do we do that? By enacting laws? In fact, the evidence indicates that Hitler had a sophisticated, if devious, legal strategy to impair human rights and to turn Germany from democracy to dictatorship. The only protection we have is, in fact, virtue. The question societies must ultimately answer when they choose their leaders is not, what kinds of programs might they have or laws might they enact, but what kind of people are we? Do our leaders reflect our own aspirations for ourselves? And, once again, Aquinas beats us to the post. While humans do have reason, and that reason will if used properly lead to right and just decisions, reason can’t be used properly by a person that lacks the qualities (which we call virtues) necessary to distinguish right from wrong. We might think of this as the difference between wisdom and cleverness. Thus, virtue answers one of philosophy’s knottiest problems: how can we say that each of us is obligated to follow his or her conscience, if moral truths are absolute and nonnegotiable? Because, he says, it is the virtues that allow our consciences to make correct conclusions. Thus, the culpability, when we judge wrongly, is not so much in the wrong judgment itself, but in failing to build the character necessary to make right judgments.

Which is why the character of the people whom we elect matters. Aquinas would find the modern distinction between private and public lives phony at best, if not outright unintelligible. We build the capacity for prudence and justice in large things by practicing prudence and justice in small ones. We learn to love humanity by loving individual humans. We tell the truth under oath because we always tell the truth. And those virtues operate together, not independently of each other. Thus, while lying is always wrong, lying to injure someone is more contemptible that a white lie done out of charity. Moreover, it’s not enough to be a virtue specialist – all justice, no mercy, or so forth. We can see why this is so. A soldier that is all prudence and no courage is cowardly. One that is all courage and no prudence is foolhardy. The failure of virtue explains a lot about history. One reason for the Holocaust was the failure in courage of millions of ordinary Germans. They may not have positively wished the Jews exterminated, but they lacked and the prudence to see what Hitler was really up to, and then the fortitude to stand up and protest when it became clear. (Note to my German friends: we Americans can’t claim to have done much better, as Native Americans and descendants of slaves would attest. This is a human, not a national, problem.)

Aquinas doesn’t enjoy the respect he once did. He seems too philosophical for many Christians; he thought he could prove the existence of God through pure reason, which infuriated the sola fides contingent,  notably Luther, who thought that Aquinas was an Aristotelian wolf in monastic sheep’s garb, a sort of semi-Pelagian (even though Aquinas insisted that certain virtues, notably charity, were dependent on grace). And he’s too religious for many philosophers; the Enlightenment didn’t care either for his insistence on placing God, not humans, at the pinnacle of existence, or that human reason, while noble, was imperfect – in other words, that he wasn’t more Pelagian.

On the other hand, a good dose of Thomism, recognizing both the beauty and the limitations of human capacity, may be just what we need. This morning, on BBC’s Daily Service, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Wells talked about how Christians find themselves in the role of actors at the end of a five act play, knowing what has come before, and knowing what the end is, but not having the script of how we get to the end and exactly what our own lines are. (Dr. Wells sets this out in his book Improvisation, which is well worth a look.)[1] It seems to me that if we’re in the dark about what we ought to do, thinking about how to honor the spirit of the law, rather than the letter, and then working on the virtues we need to do that would be a good place to start.

[1] N. T. Wright makes similar, although not exactly the same, claims in his After You Believe.