On Kingship

Overview

About a hundred pages, an unfinished treatise Aquinas addressed, according to its full title, to the King of Cyprus, generally identified as Hugh II of Lusignan, written around 1267, during the productive years when Aquinas was also composing large portions of the Summa Theologiae. It belongs to the genre of medieval mirrors for princes, works of practical political and moral advice composed for a specific reigning ruler, but Aquinas’s version is considerably more philosophically ambitious than most examples of the genre, grounding its practical counsel in a systematic argument about human social nature, the purpose of political authority, and the ultimate end toward which a well-governed community should be directed.

Aquinas did not complete the work himself; it breaks off partway through, and later continuations, most notably by Ptolemy of Lucca, extended it considerably further using material of varying fidelity to Aquinas’s original argument and intentions. Modern scholarly editions and translations generally print only the portion, roughly the first book and part of the second, that is confidently attributed to Aquinas’s own hand, which is the section this entry describes.

The treatise draws heavily and explicitly on Aristotle’s Politics, recently available in Latin translation and already the subject of extensive commentary by Aquinas elsewhere in his career, but it goes beyond Aristotle in one crucial respect that reflects its specifically Christian context: where Aristotle’s political philosophy has no occasion to consider any end for human life beyond the flourishing achievable within the political community itself, Aquinas explicitly subordinates that this-worldly political end to a further, supernatural end, and works out what this subordination means for how a Christian king should actually govern.

The argument

Why human beings need a ruler. Aquinas opens from a premise drawn directly from Aristotle: human beings are naturally social and political animals, more so than any other creature, because unlike animals equipped by nature with instinctive knowledge of what serves their survival and with natural weapons or defenses, human beings possess only reason, a general capacity that must be developed through social cooperation, language, and the accumulated knowledge and skill of a community, to provide for the necessities and genuine flourishing of life.

Given this natural sociability, Aquinas argues that wherever a multitude of people is ordered toward some shared end, some directing or ruling principle is required, because individuals left to pursue their own private interests, however reasonable each pursuit taken separately, will not spontaneously coordinate toward the good of the whole community; some agency is needed whose specific concern is the common welfare as such, distinct from any individual’s private welfare. This is the basic argument for the necessity of political authority as such, prior to any question of what particular form that authority should take.

Why rule by one is generally best. Aquinas then takes up the classical question of what form of government best serves this directing function, comparing rule by one, rule by a few, and rule by many. His argument for the superiority of rule by one, properly exercised, proceeds by analogy from natural and artificial examples of directed unity: the body is governed by a single soul, a ship by a single pilot, a well-run household by a single head, and in each case, he argues, unified direction toward a single end is achieved more effectively by a single directing principle than by several acting jointly, since plurality of rulers introduces the risk of division and conflicting judgment about how the common end should be pursued.

Applied to political community, this favors monarchy as the naturally best form of government, when the monarch genuinely governs for the common good rather than for private advantage. Aquinas is careful, though, to pair this argument for monarchy’s potential excellence with an equally clear-eyed account of its corresponding danger.

The double-edged nature of concentrated power. Just as rule by one, when directed to the common good, achieves unity and effectiveness that divided rule cannot match, rule by one, when corrupted into pursuit of private advantage at the community’s expense, becomes tyranny, and Aquinas argues that tyranny is the worst of all corrupted forms of government precisely because it inherits the same concentrated power that made just monarchy so effective, now turned entirely toward private benefit and away from the common good. A tyrant, unrestrained by the need to share power or persuade colleagues, can oppress a community more completely and more variably, Aquinas notes, driven by whatever particular passions, greed, fear, cruelty, happen to dominate him, than a corrupted government of the few or the many typically can.

This comparison is central to the treatise’s practical purpose: Aquinas is not offering abstract political theory for its own sake but specifically warning a young monarch about the particular temptations and dangers that attend the very form of rule Aquinas has just argued is, in principle, the best available.

Guarding against the slide into tyranny. Given this danger, Aquinas devotes considerable attention to how a kingdom should be structured to minimize the risk that legitimate monarchy degenerates into tyranny, and how a community subject to an already tyrannical ruler might respond. He counsels prudence and caution regarding active resistance or rebellion against an established tyrant, worried that attempts at forceful correction often produce worse disorder than the tyranny they are meant to remedy, and he places considerable weight instead on the king’s own moral formation and on structures, including consultation and the rule of law, that make abuse of power harder to sustain in the first place.

The king’s true reward, and the argument for a higher end. The treatise’s most distinctive and theologically freighted section addresses what a good king should actually be seeking as the reward and purpose of ruling well. Aquinas systematically rules out several plausible candidates. Wealth cannot be the proper end of kingship, since wealth is available to bad rulers as readily as good ones and is merely instrumental to further ends rather than an end in itself. Honour and fame are similarly inadequate, being external, dependent on the fickle opinion of others, and, again, obtainable without genuine virtue.

His conclusion is that the true reward proper to good kingship must be understood in relation to the final end of human life as such, which, for Aquinas, is not any achievement or possession available within earthly political life at all, but the beatitude, the perfect happiness, that consists in the direct vision and enjoyment of God, available fully only in the life to come. Political rule, on this account, is not worthless or merely instrumental in a dismissive sense; a king who genuinely leads his people toward peace, justice, and the conditions for virtuous life performs a real and valuable service. But that service finds its ultimate justification and its proper reward only by being situated within a larger picture in which the earthly political community exists, finally, to prepare its members for an end that transcends politics altogether, an end whose proper guardianship, in Aquinas’s view, belongs to the Church rather than to the crown, which is why he argues that kings, in the order that matters most, are themselves subject to the spiritual authority charged with leading humanity toward that higher end.

How to read it

Read the opening chapters on the necessity of political authority and the comparison of rule by one, few and many as a direct engagement with Aristotle’s Politics, and notice both how closely Aquinas follows Aristotle’s arguments and where his own emphases, particularly on the specific dangers of tyranny, sharpen or extend what Aristotle himself provides.

Pay close attention to the argument about the king’s proper reward. This section is where the treatise moves furthest beyond anything in Aristotle’s own political philosophy, and it is the key to understanding how Aquinas integrates Aristotelian political naturalism with a specifically Christian account of the ultimate human end.

Notice that Aquinas counsels caution rather than open endorsement of resistance or rebellion against an established tyrant, and consider why. His concern that attempts at forceful remedy often produce worse disorder than they cure reflects both a realistic assessment of medieval political instability and a broader theological commitment to social order that runs through much of his other writing as well.

Read the treatise as practical advice actually addressed to a specific young ruler, not only as abstract political theory. Much of its argumentative structure, moving from general principles to particular counsel about the dangers a new king in Aquinas’s own time might realistically face, makes more sense when read with this concrete occasion in mind.

Compare it with Machiavelli’s The Prince if you want to see how differently a later, more purely pragmatic approach to advising a ruler handles similar questions about the acquisition, exercise and preservation of power, stripped of the theological framework that gives Aquinas’s treatise its distinctive shape and its ultimate justification for political authority.

Questions it raises

• Is Aquinas’s analogy between political rule and the single directing principle found in a body, a ship or a household a sound basis for preferring monarchy, or does it overlook important disanalogies between these cases and a political community?
• If concentrated power in one ruler is simultaneously the most effective form of good government and the most dangerous form of bad government, does that ambivalence actually favor monarchy, or does it counsel against risking it?
• Does subordinating the ultimate purpose of political rule to a supernatural end diminish the genuine value and dignity of political life itself, or does it give political life a coherent justification it would otherwise lack?
• Aquinas counsels caution about resisting an established tyrant. Is that counsel prudent realism about the risks of rebellion, or does it under-value the claims of an oppressed people?
• What would a modern, secular version of Aquinas’s argument about the proper reward of political leadership look like, if the specifically theological end is removed from the picture?
• Does treating the Church as the proper guardian of humanity’s ultimate end while the crown governs the temporal order provide a workable division of authority, or does it inevitably generate the kind of conflict between spiritual and temporal power that characterized much of medieval history?