15.2 People and Laws: The General Picture (SCG 3,114–116)
15.2 People and Laws: The General Picture (SCG 3,114–116)
How can we be governed by God as free individuals? Aquinas’s answer to this question is “by law.” He writes:
Just as the acts of irrational creatures are directed by God through a rational plan which pertains to their species, so are the acts of people directed by God inasmuch as they pertain to the individual. … But the acts of irrational creatures, as pertaining to the species, are directed to God through natural inclination, which goes along with the nature of the species. Therefore, over and above this, something must be given to people whereby they may be directed in their own personal acts. And this we call law.13
In Aquinas’s view, law is “nothing other but reason and rule” (lex nihil aliud sit quam quaedam ratio et regula operandi). He regards such a plan as goal-directed, as aiming at what is good. Since he takes the end and good for people to lie in God, therefore, he concludes that “it is appropriate for law to be given to people by God.”14
Not surprisingly, Aquinas next claims that God’s law for people chiefly orders them to God. “The end for human creatures,” he says, “is to cling to God, for their felicity consists in this, as we have shown above [see SCG 3,37]. So, the divine law primarily directs people to this end: that they may cling to God.”15 Aquinas takes this conclusion to mean that the end of divine law is the love of God. He thinks that people can cling to God only by intellect and will, and he holds that it is through will that we rest in what our intellect grasps. He notes, however, that we can willingly adhere to something because of love or fear. We will do so because of fear if we take our doing so to be a means of avoiding what we do not like. But we will adhere to something by love “for the sake of that thing.” Furthermore:
What is valued for its own sake is of greater importance than what is for the sake of something else. Therefore, the adherence to God in love is the best possible way of clinging to God. So, this is what is chiefly intended in the divine law.16
But where are we to look so as to discover God’s law for us? Aquinas ends SCG 3,114–116 with biblical quotations, which seems to suggest that, at this point in the SCG, he is going beyond what he takes reason to be able to discover apart from revelation. Indeed, right at the end of SCG 3,116 he says: “The New Law, as the more perfect, is called the law of love, while the Old Law, as less perfect, is the law of fear.”17
In SCG 3,116 Aquinas does not explain his sudden introduction of a distinction between the Old Law and the New Law except to say that the latter is superior to the former. We can, though, understand his thinking at this point by noting some of the things he says in his Summa Theologiae. In this, he makes it clear that he believes the Old Law to consist in commands, precepts, and prohibitions given by God to people in Old Testament times.18 He also makes it clear that he takes the Old Law to be superseded by the New Law, considered as God working in us so as to unite us to God by means of grace and by means of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.19 So, by SCG 3,116, Aquinas is explicitly arguing as a Christian theologian talking to Christians. He cannot primarily be addressing Jews or Muslims. They would not for a moment have bought into talk about there being a New Law, as Aquinas understands it, that is superior to an Old Law.
That said, however, having finished with SCG 3,116, and continuing frequently to cite Scripture, Aquinas appears to proceed to talk about what divine law requires of people as if this could be determined without the benefit of Christian revelation. So let us now follow him as he does so. As I will show, he often appeals to that which is “according to reason” (secundum rationem) as settling what God’s providence intends for us.