The Treatise on Justice represents one of
the largest sections of the Summa Theologiae.
It contains sixty-six questions.
By comparison, the Treatise on Faith contains sixteen questions.
The Treatise on Hope, six questions and the Treatise on Charity, twenty-four questions.
Three times the length of the Treatise on Charity, the Treatise on Justice also remains
one of the most read sections of the Summa.
Because it contains Aquinas's teachings on political and legal matters,
The Treatise on Justice attracts attention from moral and political philosophers as well
as from social and legal theorists.
If college undergraduates today are assigned
anything from Aquinas to read, nine times out of ten it will be something from the Treatise
on Justice.
In order to do justice to the treatise here, Aquinas 101 will devote two videos to exploring it.
The first video, this one, will cover Aquinas's treatment of the subject, the object and the
act of justice.
And the second will cover Aquinas's review of the many virtues associated with justice.
Before we begin, it is important to note that
the casual reader of Aquinas's doctrine of justice will miss its most important details
and insights unless he or she shares or at least is familiar with Aquinas's anthropology
or his doctrine of the human person.
For Aquinas, the human person is by nature a social and political animal.
This means that the human person always and everywhere finds himself as a part of some
society.
Some of these societies are natural like the family and the political community.
Others, persons create for practical reasons like trade unions, political parties, and
academic societies.
Still, another is created by God, the Church.
The important point here is that there is no moment in a person's life when he appears
as an isolated or mere individual.
As a person he is at every moment a member of some society.
He is always a part of some greater whole.
As a result, Aquinas recognizes that human
life is inherently relational.
He sees that there is no act that we commit even those done in private or in secret that
does not affect someone either directly or at least in our relation to him because every
act that we commit is relational.
That every act requires guidance and perfection by the moral virtues, justice, fortitude,
and temperance.
Aquinas explains that fortitude and temperance guide and perfect one's actions in relation
to oneself while justice guys and perfects one's actions in relation to others, particularly,
to strangers.
For Aquinas, therefore, justice is the virtue we employ to establish ourselves in right
relation with others.
As a result, Aquinas defines justice as "The perpetual and constant will to render each one his due."
Notice right away that the concern of justice is not with the self but with the other.
The just person is concerned primarily not with seeking his own due but with providing
the other his due.
The path to establishing right relations with others is securing justice for them.
A question naturally arises here.
What is the due?
The "iustum", as Aquinas calls it, that is owed to another.
In other words, what is the object of justice?
Aquinas responds simply to the question.
"The due is that to which someone has a legitimate right or claim."
Some claims are established by nature like the right to life, the right to bodily integrity,
and the right to marry and have a family.
Other claims are established by law like the right to vote, the right to a jury trial,
and the right to access public goods.
The complex network of natural and positive rights that exists leads to there being a
variety of expressions or species, as Aquinas calls them, of justice.
First, there is general or legal justice,
which is an individual's rendering what is owed to the political community.
For Aquinas, this is justice and its most proper sense.
The parts rendering what is due to the whole.
There was also distributive justice, which is the political communities rendering what
it owes to the individual or the whole rendering what is due to the part.
Finally, there was commutative justice, which is an individual's rendering what is owed
to another individual as occurs, for example, in commercial exchanges.
This involves a part rendering what is due to another part within the overall good of
the whole.
Aquinas notes that while the subject or seat
of justice is the will, which results in the just one's perpetual and constant intention
to render the other his due, the primary effect of the virtue lies outside of the will.
The virtue was accomplished not simply in bending the will to justice, but in the actual
commission of justice.
The concrete rendering the other his due, which results in the other's concrete enjoyment
of that to which he has a just claim.
The just one doesn't always have to agree with what law rightly establishes is just.
He simply has to do it.
When Aquinas treats failures in justice, or
the sins against justice, he groups them according to the particular species of justice that
they offend.
For example, Aquinas lists respective persons as a sin against distributive justice.
This occurs when the political authority distributes some communal good to individuals, not according
to right but according to some other unjust or irrelevant criteria like personal preference
or family relation.
Against commutative justice, Aquinas lists murder, bodily injury, theft and robbery as
injustices committed in deed and reviling, backbiting, tailed bearing, derision, and
cursing as injustices committed in speech.
For Aquinas reviling and the like are all
ways of speaking ill of another, but each for a different purpose.
Reviling involves unjustly dishonoring someone publicly.
Backbiting unjustly dishonoring someone secretly.
Tail bearing seeks to destroy unjustly another's friendships.
And derision seeks to shame another unjustly.
Whatever its type, every sin against justice requires that restitution be made to the one injured.
With compensation also required in cases where strict restitution cannot be paid or fails
to restore what has been unjustly taken.
Also, even in the cases of sins against commutative justice, the political authority justly steps
in to punish the malefactor.
It does so in the name of the common good to satisfy the injury suffered by the political
community when one of its members unjustly injures another member.
Aquinas concludes his examination of justice
by reviewing the gift of the Holy Spirit that elevates and perfects its work in the Christian.
This gift is piety, which is a Spirit-taught reverence for God the Father.
This reverence inclines the Christian to offer easily and joyfully the worship and obedience
due to the Father.
Aquinas observes that this piety perfects the whole of justice, for the one ordered justly
toward God and piety, then orients himself to lesser authorities and all others, in fact,
in view of their relation to God.
Aquinas concludes by observing that justice
perfected by piety manifests itself in the meekness spoken of by Christ in the beatitudes.
And this is Aquinas's last word in the Summa on justice.
"The Spirit renders a man meek by removing from him all possible obstacles to justice
and piety.
The meek one remains ever ready to act in the pursuit of justice.
Meekness is the mark of a man who has been justified by God."
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