Three of the five treatises that comprise the Opuscula sacra contain interesting philosophical material. All three treatises attempt to make aspects of God intelligible using Greek philosophical concepts. The treatise Quomodo substantiae (OS III) discusses how something can be essentially predicated of both God and His creatures. On the Trinity (OS I) and Against Eutyches and Nestorius (OS V) are concerned with the individuality and unity of, respectively, God and Christ. Along the way to formulating his solution to his chosen puzzles, Boethius presents some of the elements of a general theory of individuals.

In this chapter we will concentrate on the general theory of individuals that can be reconstructed from Boethius' Opuscula. The theological treatises are not the only places that he discusses individuals, and at times we will make use of Boethius' commentaries on Aristotle and Porphyry to flesh out some of his remarks. Nonetheless, we will focus on the account of individuals that can be reconstructed from the theological treatises for two reasons. First, this account has exerted a tremendous influence on subsequent generations. Second, Boethius admits that his main role in the logical commentaries is to present a sympathetic elucidation of Aristotle's or Porphyry's views. The doctrines in the Opuscula presumably are Boethius' own.

In Part III, I argued that in elaborating his own accounts of two critical Aristotelian moral virtues, magnanimity and legal justice, Aquinas places an increased and more explicit emphasis on the “common” aspect of ethical virtue, with a view to personal internal disposition as well as external conduct. He thus effectively situates moral virtue at the nexus point between personal and common goods and presents moral virtue itself as a common or sharable good, further moderating the classical emphasis on self-sufficiency and superiority. With regard to legal justice, Aquinas lays greater stress than did Aristotle on the common good as the end “informing” this virtue, as he does also in his explication of magnanimity. Moreover, I argued that Aquinas's theory of natural law provides a higher measure, simultaneously divine and human, whereby legal or general justice can be considered both properly legal and universally virtuous, responding to a critical problem in Aristotle's ethics and politics.

For all its universality, Aquinas's theory of legal justice nonetheless holds an important place for politics ordinarily understood, and for participation and practices guided in some respects by civil law and issuing in new ordinances deemed useful for the community. If law and virtue are so closely intertwined in Aquinas's politics of the common good, we might then wonder whether he is not uncomfortably close in theory to the “clear and present danger” posed in practice by the Vice and Virtue Ministry mentioned in Chapter 1.

For most contemporary political theory, the preeminent or focal meaning of justice is on the macro level: its primary subject is the political community and its regime or basic structure. Justice is above all, in Rawls's famous phrase, “the first virtue of social institutions” (Rawls 1971, 3; 1999, 3), and as such he later specifies it as “free-standing” and “political, not metaphysical” (Rawls 1985, 1993). In recent years, scholars have challenged this reigning paradigm from various vantage points, arguing for a renewed appreciation of the links among political science, ethics, and philosophic anthropology, and hence for the importance to political theory of also investigating personal virtue (cf. inter alia Bartlett 1994; Berkowitz 1999; Budziszewski 1988; Collins 2004; Galston 1991, 2002; Macedo 1990; Manent 1998; Sandel 1998). Aristotle's works have appropriately loomed large in the revival of the political study of personal virtue, while by comparison the contribution of Thomas Aquinas has been largely overlooked. Susan Collins has recently observed that justice itself has been given short shrift among the virtues, even in neo-Aristotelian scholarship (Collins 2004, 53; cf. O'Connor 1988, 417).

This chapter seeks to continue the reconsideration in political theory of justice as a personal virtue, focusing on Aquinas's dialectical account of justice as a preeminent ethical virtue and a character trait of persons who care about and work for the well-being of their political communities.

In his preface to Dependent Rational Animals, Alasdair MacIntyre quotes a prayer composed by Thomas Aquinas “in which he asks God to grant that he may happily share with those in need what he has, while humbly asking for what he needs from those who have.” It is a prayer of a magnanimous person in humility, highlighting the two qualities that when fused together seem to distinguish, morally and politically, the Christian world from the classical world. Yet, as Aquinas himself notes elsewhere, it is far from clear how humility can be compatible with magnanimity, a virtue conducing to outstanding statesmanship: “humility is apparently opposed to the virtue of magnanimity, which aims at great things, whereas humility shuns them” (ST II–II 161, 1, obj. 3). Even if humility is vindicated as an ethical excellence, can it be politically salutary? Should politics, understood as humans' own government, be suffused with pride in human virtue, or should it be humbled by the realization of human dependence on God and interdependence with others?

In this chapter I revisit the theories of magnanimity advanced by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, endeavoring especially to develop a more detailed analysis and comparison of Aquinas's Commentary on the “NE” and the relevant texts of the ST than those offered by other recent commentators. In particular, I consider Aquinas's discussions in the ST of two of what MacIntyre (1999) terms “virtues of acknowledged dependence”: gratitude and humility.

Aristotelianism and Political-Philosophic Foundations, Old and New

In this chapter I begin to investigate Aquinas's social and civic foundations, probing their philosophic origins in Aristotle's texts. As several statements in On Kingship and especially in the ST make clear, Aquinas understands politics to be rooted in our common human nature, which in turn encompasses an inherent rational inclination toward participation in the common good of a just and beneficial social order. It is easy to see in this position shades of Aristotle's position in the Politics, “that the city belongs among the things that exist by nature, and that man is by nature a political animal” (Pol. I.2, 1253a2–4). To probe more deeply the meaning and resonance of this Aristotelian foundation for Aquinas's theories of virtue, law, and the common good, we need to return to the relevant passages of Aquinas's Commentary on the “Politics” of Aristotle, too often neglected in studies of Aquinas's thought. There we learn how Aquinas interprets the anthropological and ethical arguments with which the Politics commences and that appear to ground Aquinas's theory of political life and the common good. For Aquinas, I will argue, political community is natural to human beings in a real yet relative and qualified way. The analogy Aquinas draws between this social and civic naturalness, and the naturalness to human beings of moral virtue, is critical for apprehending the purposes as well as the problematic of politics as Aquinas sees them.

If Aquinas's case for a moderate yet ennobling legal pedagogy of ethical virtue is judged persuasive, we may nonetheless be troubled by the case Aquinas appears to mount in the ST for the political enforcement of the religious, supernatural, or specifically Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity. These three theological virtues are linked in Aquinas's schema to a number of infused moral virtues, which unlike their natural counterparts are not acquired by dint of moral training and habituation, but are rather gratuitous gifts from God allowing a person to orient all of his or her actions and attitudes toward friendship and union with God, towards membership in God's household and good citizenship in the heavenly City (cf. ST I–II 63, 4).

This book began, appropriately enough in view of its topic, in the form of a “disputed question”: what benefit can contemporary political theory gain from engaging Aquinas's ethical and political thought, most specifically his concept of the common good (bonum commune)? From this “focal question,” again appropriately enough, a number of related queries arose, sometimes from the author herself and sometimes from her colleagues: Why should a book on the political common good focus more centrally on Aquinas than on Aristotle, Aquinas's mentor after all, and the founder in Politics III of common good–centered political theory? How does Aquinas navigate a key problem that seems intrinsic to the very concept of the common good, namely, how to give priority to the common good in social and civic life without undercutting or alienating the goods of individual persons? What for Aquinas is the nexus point of personal and civic flourishing, and how can locating and understanding that link alleviate the tension between personal and communal happiness? Finally, what about the religious or theological nature of most of Aquinas's works? Doesn't that limit their theoretical significance and restrict their credibility for most scholars today? Doesn't Aquinas's theological emphasis imply that only a closed community of Christian or even Catholic believers can identify with his thought, especially when it deviates from Aristotle's hard-headed philosophic reasoning? And if this is so, aren't we better off accepting a potentially less complete but nonetheless more tenable account of personal and common goods?

In the previous chapter we saw Aquinas unearth in his Commentary and appropriate in his ST Aristotle's first political-philosophic foundation in Politics I: the relative yet real naturalness of civic life for human beings, and the close link between this naturalness and that proper to the virtues, about which more will be said in the last part of this chapter. In this chapter I explore another political-philosophic foundation common to both Aristotle and Aquinas, and from that vantage point begin to question the absolute affinity between Aquinas's and Aristotle's foundations for political theory. My analysis focuses first on Aquinas's more ambivalent response to Aristotle's second civic foundation in the distinct natures and requisites of political regimes and their corresponding versions of political virtue. I argue that as a consequence of finding faults in Aristotle's second foundation, Aquinas defers or declines to comment on Aristotle's science of the absolutely best regime – the Philosopher's third political-philosophic foundation in Politics VII and VIII. Instead, Aquinas sets out to reinforce an Aristotelian grounding for politics with a new ethical foundation of his own: his theory of natural law and the human inclination toward moral virtue.

The argument of this chapter commences with what I have termed Aristotle's second foundation: the centrality of regime particularity, citizenship, and civic virtue to politics and political science, as elaborated in Book III of the Politics and the corresponding sections of Aquinas's Commentary.

Contemporary political philosophy has not overlooked the problem of the common good; indeed, scholars of political thought and normative theory have recently reviewed the question of the common good from a variety of vantage points. Anglo-American (or broadly “analytic”) political thought is no exception. Not surprisingly, given the contours of the current Anglo-American world, some prominent representatives of this tradition of inquiry are sensitive to the desirability of balancing (or completing, or replacing) rights-based theoretical and civic discourse with a deeper appreciation of shared goals and goods, including goods of character. Against the backdrop of the previous chapter's explication of the promise and problem of the common good, this chapter surveys the approaches to the common good found in seminal works by three prominent Anglo-American theorists: John Rawls, Michael Sandel, and William Galston.

I will argue that Rawls's academic blockbuster A Theory of Justice (TJ: 1971; rev. ed. 1999), philosophically more important and engaging, in my view, than Rawls's later writings postdating his pragmatic or “political” turn (see Rawls 1985, 1993), accords an unusually significant place for a liberal theory to the concept of the common good. I paint in broad strokes Rawls's deontological contractarian theory of the common good, one paradoxically built on a strong recognition of the radical separateness of desires and ends pursued by diverse human beings, as Rawls presents it in Part Three of TJ.

Thus far in Part II we have seen Aquinas follow or rather precede the three Anglo-American theorists of Part I, in learning from Aristotle's ethics and political theory and especially from the Philosopher's political-philosophic foundations. In Chapter 3 we observed Aquinas unearthing and appropriating Aristotle's argument for the naturalness of social and political life for human beings, an argument that seems in turn to entail the conclusion that humans by nature seek to participate in the common good of a just social order and a flourishing civic community, although any particular political community has only a relatively natural status vis-à-vis its members. In Chapter 4 we saw Aquinas comment on Aristotle's second foundation, the argument in Book III of the Politics supporting the centrality to political theory of regimes, citizenship, and civic virtue.

The fate of an oeuvre

The legacy of Duns Scotus' works is a complicated affair due to a number of different causes. His life was short. He studied and taught in all the theological faculties the universities of the thirteenth century possessed. He spent the last year of his life in the important academic center that Cologne had already become. The extraordinary brevity of his life is combined with a unique range of work. The specific nature of university education in these times, the stature of the University of Paris, the policy of the Franciscan Order and the academic legislation of the University of Paris transformed Duns Scotus' life. Unexpected events in his life led to the unique fact that he even acted as sententiarius in all the theological faculties he studied at. The period of Duns Scotus' theological productivity and his baccalaureate years (1297–1306) almost coincided. He died suddenly at Cologne, forty-two years of age. The world of the Franciscans was desolate. The early death of brother John in 1308 was felt in the whole of academic Europe. One of the brightest stars of the thought of mankind had gone dim.

The death of Duns Scotus was the end of an improbable individual history of thinking. His personal fate was an institutional disaster. The individual thinker John Duns managed to absorb the whole of the philosophia christiana and systematic theology but managed also to reconstruct it from a new semantic, logical and ontological perspective.