O. RanumTyranny from Ancient Greece to Renaissance Francehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43185-3_8

8. Aquinas on Tyranny in the Regime of Princes and in the Summa Theologica

Orest Ranum¹

(1)

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

Orest Ranum

Abstract

Aquinas on Tyranny in the Regime of Princes and in the Summa Theologica. Tyranny is a matter of degree; if it is not excessive, it should be tolerated. The tyrant who usurps power and fails to govern for the benefit of all, may be killed, and his killer will be honored.

Keywords

Thomas Aquinas on tyrannyTyranny as usurpationTraits of a tyrant

Aquino is a town in southern Italy, south of Rome and north of Naples, near the great Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino. Thomas’s father was count of Aquino. His mother was countess of Teano; her relatives would include Emperors Henry VI and Frederick II. Thomas (1225–1274) refused to follow in his parents’ footsteps, enjoying high rank and wielding power in a local setting.¹ Instead, he joined the Dominican order and set off for Paris, where he began studies under Albertus Magnus, one of the major translators of Aristotle, working from Greek to Latin. With his teaching credentials, he spent eighteen years in Paris, Naples, Orvieto, Viterbo, and Rome, all the time addressing the principal questions of scholastic theology, ethics, and politics. His greatest work, the Summa Theologica, would not be finished at the time of his death in 1274, at forty-nine. (He would be canonized in 1323.)

At the request of the Dominican order, in the mid-1260s Thomas undertook to write a mirror of princes addressed to the crusading king of Cyprus, a member of the noble Lusignan family from western France. His De Regimine principum is Aristotelian in its framework, but Thomas integrates a Christian perspective: for example, the tyrant “betrays God’s purpose,” and tyrannical acts are “wicked.”² If a tyrant’s actions are not excessive, they should be tolerated, but in any event they are sins and will result in “eternal damnation” for the person who commits them.³

If, however, the tyrant is not excessive, it is more advantageous to tolerate a degree of tyranny for the time being than to take action against the tyrant and so incur many perils more grievous than the tyranny itself. For it may happen that those who take such action prove unable to prevail against the tyrant, and succeed in provoking the tyrant to greater savagery. Even when those who take action against the tyrant are able to overthrow him, this fact in itself gives rise to many grave dissensions in the populace, either during the rebellion against the tyrant or because, after the tyrant has been removed the community is divided into factions.⁴

Christians are required to obey secular powers, including tyrants.⁵ Living under secular power instead of spiritual power does not release or otherwise change the need for obedience. The justice that is meted out is, if not divine in origin, divinely sanctioned. Thus, if a tyrant has unjustly taken over lands that previously did not belong to him, he need not be obeyed.⁶ These examples of the secular (and temporal) differences, and the right that comes with previous possession of land, were both significant commentaries in an age of quarrels over spiritual versus temporal powers, and the conqueror’s (usurper’s) lack of rights to take possession of another’s property. Thomas concludes this section on obedience by two more general points: “Those who receive ruling power by violence are not truly rulers; hence, nor are their subjects bound to obey them.” And:

Cicero was speaking of a case where someone had seized dominion for himself by violence, either against the wishes of his subjects or by coercing them into consenting, and where they had no recourse to a superior by whom judgment might be passed on the invader. In such a case he who delivers his country by slaying a tyrant is to be praised and rewarded. There would seem to be no need to have some constituted authority decide in the murder of the usurper. It can be done by anyone, and he will be honored for his act.⁷

After a lengthy commentary on the advantages and disadvantages of the various forms of government, Thomas opts for the “mixed” government that Aristotle likewise chose; but as with the philosopher, the difficulty of actually establishing such a government, and then maintaining it, leads Thomas to a long comment on monarchy, and a preference for that form of governance.⁸ If governance ceases being done on behalf of the subjects, the monarch is deemed corrupt. A king may cease being just toward his subjects. When a king rules justly, his subjects provide him with what is needed; but unjust kings are “puffed up with pride, forsaken by God as the due reward of their sins, and spoiled by the adulation of men.”⁹