성 토마스 아퀴나스의 정치사상(2)

Abstract

St. Thomas Aquinas responded to the challenge which was posed to medieval Christianity by the rediscovery of the full corpus of Aristotle’s works including , which had not been available to the West before 13th century. Thomas Aquinas, as a christian aristotelian, believed faith and reason were both valid and divinely legitimated sources for ‘true’ human knowledge and admitted the legitimacy of temporal rule in the sacral age. In addition to re-legitimizing political life, Thomas discussed about the best form of government, and defended the admixture of constitutional and republican elements in the basically monarchic system. “The Treatise on Law”(ST IaIIae 90-97) is probably best known part of . Thomas defined law as an ordination of reason for the common good, and natural law as the participation in the eternal law by rational creatures. Thomas built his theory of natural law by taking a number of Aristotelian concepts such as prudentia, epieikeia and combining them in a unique way. He shared with his mentor Aristotle a belief in human capacity to identify goals, values, and purposes(“teleology”) in the functioning of human person within the structure of society. St. Thomas Aquinas’ social, political, legal theory is important for 3 reasons. (1) It reasserts the value of politics by drawing on Aristotle to argue that politics and political life are morally positive activities that are in accordance with the intention of God for man. (2) It combines traditional hierarchical and feudal views of the structure of society and politics with emerging community-oriented and incipiently egalitarian views of the proper ordering of society. (3) It develops an integrated and logically coherent theory of natural law that continues to be an important source of legal political and moral norms. These accomplishments have become part of the intellectual heritage of the West, and have inspired political, legal theorists and social, religious movements down to the present day. In short, St. Thomas Aquinas’ christian belief in the providence of God and his Aristotelian doctrine of teleology combine to convince him that life has meaning, and that meaning is partially at least comprehensible to the human reason. Still we can share St. Thomas’ central belief, that man should use his intellect critically to resolve human problems of individual and social conduct. This basic assumption is an important reason of the continued attraction to the St Thomas Aquinas’ political thought and to “philosophia perennis”, what his followers like to call.