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Thomas Aquinas’ Natural Law Theory: A Standard For Human Positive Law
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It is in the light of the above that this excursus will examine the
nature and properties of Aquinas Natural Law as well as the nature of
human positive law. This will lead us into seeing the natural law as the
standard with which human positive law is measured. This is because, as
has been mentioned earlier that there are some human positive laws that
deviate from the principles of the natural law at the expense of
morality. In presenting the natural law as the standard for human
positive law, I shall discuss such issues as just and unjust human
positive laws, the justification of civil disobedience, distinction
between morality and legality of law. This is to know to what extent the
natural law in Aquinas is the standard of all human positive laws.
1.1 A Brief Profile of Thomas Aquinas
Thomas
Aquinas was born in the castle of Roccasecca near Naples at the end of
1224 or the beginning of 1225, his father being the count of Aquino.
When he was five, he was placed by his parents in the Benedictine Abbey
of Monte Cassino as an oblate. He stayed in the monastery from 1230 to
1239 when the Emperor Frederick II expelled the monks. Thomas returned
to his family and stayed for some months and later went to the
University of Naples in the autumn of the same year. Later Thomas was
attracted to the life of Dominican friars that made him enter the Order
in the course of 1244. His joining the Dominican friar was not
acceptable to his family, instead they wished him to enter the abbey of
Monte Cassino, as a step to ecclesiastical preferment, and it may be as a
result of this family opposition that the Dominican General decided to
take Thomas with him to Bologna, where he himself was going for a
General Chapter from where he would send him to the University of Paris.
Thomas was however kidnapped by his brothers and was put in prison at
Aquino for about a year. Due to his determination to remain steadfast to
his Order he later made his way to Paris in the autumn of 1245.
Thomas
was probably at Paris from 1245 until the summer of 1248, when he
accompanied St Albert the Great to Cologne, where the later was to find a
house of studies (Studium generale) for the Dominican Order, remaining
there until 1252. In 1252 Thomas returned from Cologne to Paris and went
on with his studies, lecturing in Scriptures as Baccalaureus Biblicus
(1252-4) and in Sentences of Peter Lombard as Baccalaurus Sententiarius
(1254-6), at the conclusion of which he received his Licentiate, the
license or permission to teach in the faculty of theology.
In 1268
Thomas returned to Paris and taught there until 1272, engaging in
controversy with the Averroists, and also those who renewed the attack
on the religious Orders. In 1272 he was sent to Naples to erect a
Dominican studium generale, and he continued his professional activity
there until 1274, when Pope Gregory X invited him to Lyons to
participate in the council. Unfortunately Thomas could not complete the
journey he started as he died on the way on March 7th, 1274 at the
Cistercian monastery of Fossanuova, between Naples and Rome. He was
forty years old when he died. His life was devoted to study and
teaching.
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