SCHOLASTIC MEDIEVALISM AND ETHICS
“As far as you are able, join faith to reason” (Boethius)

    From 500 A.D. to 1500 A.D., in the period known as the Middle or Dark Ages, only a small remnant of Greek civilization survived, mainly the writings of Plato and Aristotle, translated into Latin by Boethius. The barbarian tribes that conquered the Roman empire infused Europe with strange laws, customs, illiteracy, heathenism, and heresy. As a means of survival, feudalism developed, whereby farmers and merchants paid powerful overlords for protection and the right to own land. Against this backdrop, the Roman Catholic Church emerged as the last bastion of literacy and philosophy, but to be sure, they were mostly interested in rooting out heathenism and heresy. First, the Church convinced the royalty in the nation-states to add the position of chancellor to their court. The chancellor was a priest or bishop who advised the king on spiritual matters and usually had the power to override an excessively harsh criminal sentence.

    Next, the Church recognized various missionary orders, which at first were less concerned with converting heathens to Christianity than with rooting out heresy through Inquisition. The Inquisition was a series of highly formalized, legal proceedings whereby religious and lay people (called Inquisitors, or secret police) used interrogation and torture to extract the confessions of heretics (called Confessors) and the names of other suspects from often innocent people or those who just happened to support the wrong priest. Many confessors were executed on the spot in a curious variety of religious punishments (Newman 1985), but by the time of the Spanish Inquisition (circa 1300), prisons were widely used to house the convicted. This was the first known use of prisons for punishment. Prior institutions were nothing more than holding facilities. A widespread fallacy is that prisons developed circa 1800, but the Inquisitorial prisons were fully staffed, secure, and provided basic subsistence while convicts were supposed to reform their heretical ways. Further, the ecclesiastical courts, set up by the Inquisition, and based on secret proceedings, rumor, and gossip, became the basis for the modern grand jury. When England, for example, set out to establish the “King’s peace”, or English common law, it built a foundation around the ecclesiastical courts, providing, of course, adversarial rights to defendents.

    Finally, the Church established medieval universities, the most notable ones being Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, Naples, the Sorbonne, and Bologna. These were the only places where literacy and philosophy thrived. They began the system of higher education we know today. Instructors were called “masters” or “doctors” who administered a liberal arts curriculum: the trivium, consisting of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic; and the quadrivium, consisting of mathematics, geography, astronomy, art or music. In addition, all of Aristotle’s writings were required reading and lectures were delivered in Latin. Beyond these basic studies in arts and sciences, some schools allowed further study in theology, medicine, and law. It is at this point that the “schoolmen”, or university scholars, emerged as the dominant force in ethical philosophy throughout the middle ages. Collectively, their social thought is referred to as scholasticism. The major and minor figures produced the major tenets of scholasticism.

ST. AUGUSTINE: PLATONIZER OF CHRISTIANITY

    Augustine agreed with Plato that God is not a bodily thing, but an expression of all that is universal. In nominalist fashion, he claimed that God is not simply a collection of just qualities, but justice itself. God is universal and exists on a supernatural realm. One should therefore look to faith for supernatural truths and look to reason for truths about nature (Bogardus 1960). This notion that faith should come first followed by reason is somewhat Platonic and essentially Augustinian. Likewise, there is no “natural man”, since nature did not create man, God did. A supernatural element, or soul, exists inside of people. What the Stoics regarded as useless emotions were to Augustine signs of God’s grace inside of people. All emotions, except the need for lust in intercourse which is God’s punishment for original sin, are the means by which faith seeks understanding in intuition and revelation.

    Other than the emotion of faith, hope and love are the most important. Together, these three make up the cardinal virtues. The summum bonum is love of God, and all interpersonal relationships should mirror one’s emotional relationship to God. To love God means practicing the Golden rule: love your neighbor as yourself, or do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is not a teleological ethics, but deontological because love is viewed as good for its own sake. Acts of goodness may not reserve one a spot in heaven since salvation is only possible through the death and Resurrection of Christ, not by human efforts and expectations. What God created was goodness, and evil exists only because people are deficient. Those who choose sin know in their hearts that it displeases God, and further, they have corrupted their own nature which is to seek union with God. In a famous passage from the Confessions, Augustine said that “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” A person avoids corruption (or disordered nature) not by tests of temptation or Golden means, as the Greeks would have it, but by the power of faith alone.

    For Augustine, there was a single source of truth for both the supernatural and natural realm. It is eternal, inviolate, and unchanging. People know it in their hearts as natural law. Whereas the Stoics saw natural law as impersonal, Augustine equated it with knowledge of God’s will. The will of God commands observance of the natural order of things and forbids the disturbance of it. Natural law is the intellectual grasp of eternal principles. It is not conventional; it does not vary with each society. Since natural law is eternal, it logically preceeds the state. In the City of God, Augustine clearly separated church and state. To the latter, he relegated the responsibility of enacting laws which are in accord or harmony with natural law. This means preserving rights and privileges which allow one to contemplate eternal truths, experience shame, and eventually reconcile themselves with God. The penology is one that justifies imprisonment and opposes capital punishment on the grounds that offenders might eventually be reformed through religion. However, he realized in practice that governments are imperfect. In fact, they are permanently saturated with evil by people pursuing debased pleasures and wages. Augustine approaches good and evil with a fresh version of parallelism. All human history is the interplay between two societies: the City of God and the City of Man, perfection and imperfection. The human condition is such that we have one foot already in heaven and the other foot stuck in the muck.
Living in an imperfect world has certain moral implications. One is the penology just mentioned, to always provide for a chance to reform. Two, special care and compassion should be directed toward vulnerable populations; minorities, women, and children (Schaefer 1996). Vulnerable populations are those exposed to different forms of suffering, and even though they may or may not express pain (or morality) differently, special care should be taken to see that compassion is equally distributed The notion of chivalry, or preferential treatment to women, was the one thing barbarians and Christians had in common during the Middle Ages. To Augustine and the Franciscans, this extended to animal rights (for attempts to relate the treatment of animals to the ethical treatment of humans, see Singer 1975; 1979). The argument against sexism and racism is analogous to the argument against speciesism. If possessing a higher intelligence does not entitle one to exploit other human beings, then how can it entitle one to exploit nonhuman beings?

    Another implication is the just war theory developed by Augustine. It was developed specifically for conflicts of loyalty between Church and state, and potentially has a wide range of applications to criminal justice, most discernably with warlike campaigns against crime.  The just war theory resembles the military’s rules of engagement, and requires that aggression ought to be a reaction to unjust aggression, not an initiative, that peaceful methods be tried first, that there is a good chance of succeeding, and that it distinguish between combatants and noncombatants (Carmody & Carmody 1993). With little exception (Malloy 1982), much of the literature on ethics and police use of force makes use of just war theory without acknowledgement and understanding that it is derived from religious ethics. A related doctrine comes from medical ethics (Edge & Groves 1994) and is called the principle of double effect. It states that if a negative side effect is unavoidable, the harm can be tolerated by the good intent if good results outweigh the harm. Medical professionals use this principle whenever they operate or administer drugs, for example, in tolerating the loss of a fetus to save a mother’s life, or in realizing the probability of drug addiction in treating a condition. People with religious ethics obviously do not like war or being involved in doing harm, but they have strict moral guidelines about the necessity of it.

    A final necessity for dealing with evil is lying. Augustine considered that there are circumstances where lying, or deception, was tolerable. This line of thought is consistent with the scholastic emphasis on doing the least worse when you cannot obtain the perfect good. Historically, however, the acceptability of lying has to do with angelology. Just as there are angels who more or less spite God, there are degrees of sinfulness regarding deceit. Catholic orthodoxy makes an important distinction between mortal and venial sins. With regard to lying, it is only a venial sin (least worse) to lie if you are protecting somebody or involved in the risk of bodily harm to somebody. However, the doctrine of veracity assigns a initial negative weight to lying, and always puts the burden of proof or justification on the liar (Souryal 1992). This means that one is always personally responsible for their lying, not automatically excused from it by nature of a specific occupation. While Augustine might have limited police lying, for instance, to protection of informants and hostage situations, Bok (1978) has asserted there are many more situations where lying is morally justifiable.

    It must always be remembered, however, that lying is fundamentally wrong. It seriously erodes public confidence and social stability. In all compromises with evil, as Augustine (1950) called them, one should always be able to explain the truth of their actions to a neutral observer, and use their free will to strive for the least sacrifice of natural law. These notions of accountability and the exercise of good judgment in deviating from natural law are referred to as lex praefectus, a term that implies a streetwise but not situational ethics. There should be clear and consistent values, like faith, hope, and love that praefects, or criminal justice officials act on. Any value is appropriate as long as it is universally common to all people, and compels a desire to participate in its diffusion throughout society (Wild 1952).

ST. THOMAS AQUINAS: CHRISTIANIZER OF ARISTOTLE

    Aquinas, the “subtle doctor”, so named for his skills at rhetoric, took Aristotle’s notion of personal responsibility for the realization of character and applied it to moral responsibility. The need for experience, practice, and habit were as important to him as they were to Aristotle. Unlike Plato and Augustine, however, he did not believe faith alone could lead to good acts. He advocated the use of intellect (or reason) to guide the will (or faith) toward goodness. In this sense, his approach can be characterized as reason guiding faith. Practical choices must be made in this world using reason, and all moral decisions involve hard choices. Freedom to act is only constrained by rewards and punishments, which is to say that people seek pleasure and avoid pain. While the irrational part of personality, the will, is naturally inclined to pursue all kinds of immediate pleasures, the will, guided by intellect can be trained to desire ultimate or eternal pleasures, such as union with God. It follows that God’s will is subordinate to His intellect too, since if the opposite were true, anything God wills (including murder) could be moral. Morality is therefore a matter of intellectual inquiry, of getting inside God’s head, of knowing His supreme intelligence. With this contribution, Aquinas provided ethics with a rational foundation.

    The first thing Aquinas did was prove the existence of God. He rested all five of his proofs upon the common experience that everything must have a cause, that ex nihilo nihil fit, nothing comes from nothing (Stumpf 1993). With this notion of causality which prohibits infinite regress, Aquinas proved that God is: (1) the prime mover, as in a row of dominos; (2) the first efficient cause, prior to all events; (3) the source of all that is necessary, and not just possible; (4) the highest degree of perfection in living things, just as all species owe their origin to a maximum in their genus; and (5) the order and purpose in nature, since even nonliving things appear to behave orderly and achieve certain ends. Now, these proofs of God were not intended for theological use only. They have direct application to an ethics for humans. Since it is unlikely anybody will become as intelligent as God, the practical application is to follow the example of God’s being, and combine existence with essence. Aristotle had taught that defining things expressed their essence (their fixed, formless, and immutable qualities), but Aquinas was now suggesting that intellect could only take you so far. Faith was required to complete reason. Naming and describing things was incomplete without notions of essence and causality. The impact of this on criminal justice was to be enormous. Standards like beyond a reasonable doubt would eventually replace complete proof of guilt and reliance on full confessions. Likewise, with criminal defenses such as insanity and ignorance, Aquinas offered a critique of them on the grounds of causality. Defendants are not undeserving of punishment because they cannot possibly foresee the consequences of their acts. Instead, they are responsible for using their intelligence for what they should have known, by making an extra leap of faith in the direction pointed to by what intelligence they do have. Carelessness is as wrong as bad intent.

    The subject of law was important to Aquinas. In his Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, he distinguished between four types: (1) eternal law, which refers to God’s conceptions of things; (2) natural law, which is that portion of eternal law that can be grasped by people; (3) human law, which represents the statutes of governments; and (4) divine law, or that which governs man’s spiritual end. The first is nothing more than a statement that God’s reason is like a law unto itself, and the fourth is an admission to Augustine’s trilogy of virtues: faith, hope, and love as ways to fulfill one’s supernatural purpose, but Aquinas is quick to point out that eternal happiness is ordained in proportion to one’s natural faculties. Natural and human laws are the essential parts of this fourfold typology. Natural law is imprinted on the hearts of men, and consists of the basic precept “do good and avoid evil.” Also built into man’s nature are other particulars, such as preservation of life, propagation and education of offspring, the pursuit of truth, and living peacefully with fellowmen who are also engaged in this quest. People fulfill their natural end by adhering to the cardinal virtues of justice, temperance, courage, and prudence, of which justice is the summum bonum.

    Human law should be a reflection of natural law. Any law a government enacts that is not in accordance with natural law is a perversion of justice to Aquinas. What gives a law its legality and legitimacy is its moral character, not the fact it has been passed by some legislature. Aquinas distinguishes between civil obedience and civil disobedience in drawing upon Aristotle’s notion of man being a “social animal.” If a human law serves no natural purpose, it should be disobeyed since we ought to obey God rather than men. Aquinas further required that the particulars of human law be scientifically derived from the particulars of natural law. This idea that the substance and sanctions of law can be adequately formulated to prescribe good conduct is known as positive law. It is normally associated with social contract thinking and rule by consent. Aquinas appeared to suggest such ideas in his conception of living peacefully with fellow countrymen who are also engaged in this quest. Under such a social contract, human authority exists primarily for the development of goodness in individuals, a rather paternalistic conception. Natural law, from which human law is derived, then serves as a check to ensure that human authority is never used as an end in itself.

    On matters of justice, Aquinas said that Aristotle had it backwards. Distributive justice ought to be equality-based, and corrective justice ought to be equity-based. Since criminal justice falls under the heading of corrective justice (refer back to Box 3-2), equity (fairness) and not equality (balance) is the moral response to crime for Aquinas. This is because Aquinas, and all the scholastics, regarded crime as a personal issue, involving harm to real, concrete individuals. Punishment ought to fit the criminal, not the crime. They wanted to avoid impersonality at all costs. In two other books written by Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles and Summa Theologiae, capital punishment is justified on the basis of the public good. Romans 13:4 is usually taken by Christians as support for carrying out God’s revenge. Short of executing people in different ways, it is not surprising that the scholastics turned to equity as a solution for the overall crime problem. The role of chancellor, usually being occupied by a churchman, was to dispense equity in the form of an appeal for the king to follow his conscience rather than the dictates of iron-clad procedures. Dispensations of equity allowed for a variety of remedies, from injunctions for someone to stop doing something to injunctions for someone to start doing something. A person stealing might be forced to render free public service for a period of time (if they had a trade) instead of being hanged along with all other thiefs as equality would require. Equity has in personam (over people) jurisdiction rather than over things (in rem). It cannot decide cases on the basis of money, property, or other easily measured things. It can, however, jail a person for refusing to abide by conditions of the injunction order. Equity provides for circumstances that are not easily handled by law and is directly concerned with the gravity of the crime. Given the emphasis that all the scholastics placed on looking out for the interests of the poor, the concept of need-based equity merits consideration. It would justify theft and other crimes under certain circumstances on the basis that extreme deprivation leads to the necessity for self-preservation (Delgado 1995). If poverty forced a person to have no chance of benefiting from obeying the law, under need-based equity, they would be entitled to a fairness other than equality of punishment, or at least absolved of blame, and the morality of law requires that we only punish who we can blame.

NOMINALISM

    William of Ockham was perhaps the leading nominalist of his time, although Abelard was important in fleshing out the practical and ethical implications. Simply put, nominalism is the view that universals (the qualities of all things common to that class of objects) have no real existence separate from the thoughts, terms, and words used to describe them. Redness, for example, is a universal which is thought to exist because of all the red objects in the world. A nominalist would deny the existence of redness, and urge more precise terminology for red objects.

    Nominalism developed as a reaction to Platonic idealism, specifically Plato’s theory of the Forms. The aesthetics or beauty of things are found in the particulars (the things-in-themselves), not the universals. For scholastics, God’s purpose is found in the particulars, and to become more like God, one must learn to admire the particulars. It just so happens that this coincides with the methods of empirical science: define and operationalize your terms, make do with the fewest hypotheticals, and restrict your generalizations to what the data allow. In short, nominalism opened the door for empirical science to emerge. The ethics of nominalism most closely relate to the problems of prejudice and racism.
Prejudice and racism are wrong on the basis on nominalism because they confuse a class of objects with the particular objects. Reducing people to their group identity on the basis of race (or gender) is bigotry. Talking in terms of universals assumes a shared meaning that is not there. In error and without the hard work of using intellect, people assume the shared vocabulary has meaning simply because it captures a whole host of unobservables. There is, in reality, no way to observe a whole class of objects, and there is no such thing as a universal class of people, only individuals. Prejudice and racism result from not seeing the individuals, and involve the use of too many hypotheticals or the multiplication of unobservables.

INTERNET RESOURCES
Augustine and Aquinas on Just War
Augustine and Augustinians Today
Catholic Encyclopedia on St. Aquinas
Catholic Encyclopedia on St. Augustine
Internet Encyclopedia article on Debates in Ethics
Resources on Just War Theory
Scholastic Ethics and Politics
The Ethics of Thomas Aquinas

PRINTED RESOURCES
Augustine, St. (1950). The City of God. New York: Doubleday.
Bogardus, E. (1960). The Development of Social Thought. New York: David McKay.
Carmody, D. & J. (1993). Christian Ethics. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
Delgado, R. (1995). “Rotten Social Background: Should the Criminal Law Recognize a Defense of Severe Environmental Deprivation” in Punishment and Rehabilitation, 3e. edited by J. Murphy, pp. 249-73. Belmont: Wadsworth.
Edge, R. & Groves, J. (1994). The Ethics of Health Care. Albany: Delmar.
Murphy, E. (1982). The Ethics of Law Enforcement and Criminal Punishment. Lanham: University Press of America.
Newman, G. (1985). The Punishment Response. Albany: Harrow & Heston.
Pollock, J. (2004). Ethics in Crime and Justice, 4e. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Schaefer, F. (1996). “Influence of the Church on Civil Law” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, pp. 140-47. Annapolis: New Advent.
Singer, P. (1975). Animal Liberation. New York: Avon Books.
Singer, P. (1979). Practical Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Souryal, S. (1992). Ethics in Criminal Justice. Cincinnati: Anderson.
Stumpf, S. (1993). Socrates to Sartre: A History of Philosophy. 5th edition. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Wild, J. (1952). “Natural Law and Modern Ethical Theory,” Ethics: an International Journal, 63: 1-13.

Last updated: Sept. 30, 2006
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