Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal Law & Liberty and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening.
James M. Patterson
Hello and welcome to Liberty Law Talk, a podcast presented by Law & Liberty and supported by The Liberty Fund. My name is James M. Patterson, and I’m an associate professor and chair of the politics department at Ave Maria University, a research fellow at The Center for Religion Culture and Democracy, President of the Ciceronian Society, and faculty affiliate of The Jack Miller Center. Today, our guest is William McCormick. He is a contributing editor at America Magazine, a visiting assistant professor at St. Louis University in the departments of political science and philosophy.
He is a Jesuit scholastic or seminarian of the Central and Southern Province of the United States. He studied politics at Chicago and Texas, and has published in History of Political Thought, The European Journal of Political Theory, and the American Journal of Political Science. We will be discussing his recently published book on Catholic University of America Press, The Christian Structure of Politics: On the De Regno of Thomas Aquinas. Bill, welcome to Liberty Law Talk.
William McCormick
Thank you so much for having me. I’m looking forward to this conversation.
James M. Patterson
Outstanding. Well, you know this is quite an impressive book. I was very fortunate to have read it, and I want to start off by asking you to tell us a little bit about who Thomas Aquinas was. From what I remember, he was described as corpulent, but there may have been a few other things about him that may be worth discussing besides the polite way of saying that he maybe had a little too much cheesecake.
William McCormick
I certainly hope so, or else my book wouldn’t have much to offer. Thomas Aquinas was a 13th Century Italian priest and theologian and Dominican, and he was one of the greatest theological lights of his time. And for centuries thereafter, he was regarded as an important name and influence in theology and philosophy in the Catholic church. But certainly, often more in spirit than letter. Often he was invoked as an authority and not studied very seriously.
So, the 19th and 20th, and now 21st Century, it’s been a really great pleasure to see a renewal of interest in his work, and especially the actual texts of his work as opposed to through the manuals and commentaries. Lot of wonderful commentaries written about him, a lot of wonderful manuals written about him, but to get back to the primary sources, this has been, yeah, just one of the fantastic intellectual achievements of Catholicism since the mid 19th Century, and Aquinas still has a lot to teach us today.
James M. Patterson
So, one of the interpretive devices you bring to thinking about Aquinas is the Augustinian, the Aristotelian and the Ciceronian. And I really like these three, but explain what they have to do in particular with De Regno, which is a bit of a curious work in Aquinas’ repertoire.
William McCormick
Well, I’m in the presence of someone who knows a great deal more about Cicero than do I, so I tread lightly, but I think one of the central puzzles of political philosophy, and one certainly to which Catholics have attended carefully is what does it mean for the human person to be naturally political? And in what sense does political community fulfill critical ends of the human person, in what way are human beings made whole, excellent, good, through political community? And some of the greatest thinkers in politics have addressed themselves to that question in one way or another.
And of course, we, I think, probably most familiar with the idea from Aristotle that human beings are naturally political, and that to be most fully human, they need to live in human community. And that’s how you develop the virtues, the different facets of human excellence that make us so good. And that Aristotelian idea is indeed in, I was going to say in my own book, it’s indeed in Aquinas’ texts, more importantly.
And I think that from a Christian perspective, the challenge, of course, is that… or, one challenge, is that because of the fall and the tendency of human beings to sin, it sometimes can seem that actually political community exists more as a corrective to fallen human nature. It might be even a punishment for fallen human nature, and that’s one interpretation often offered of the great thinker, theologian, and bishop Saint Augustine of Hippo that he was proposing politics as primarily a remedy against political community, primarily as a corrective to sin.
It’s hard to pin him down on that, and I’m not so inclined to think that he’s so… Augustine was an Augustinian, but it’s certainly there. It’s certainly there to be had, and there’s no question. And Aristotle…
source