Jaffa on Aristotle and Aquinas

Last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review contained a review by Harry Jaffa of a new translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and I have some reservations about a couple things Jaffa says about Aquinas (and Aquinas’ appropriation of Aristotle) in the review.

First, Jaffa writes in the review that “Thomas Aquinas, writing in the 13th century, believed that in the ‘Ethics’ Aristotle had said everything needful for happiness in this life. Thus Aquinas did not write his own book on ethics, but instead wrote a commentary on Aristotle.” I’m not sure whether Jaffa means to say here that Aquinas didn’t think that the New Testament and Augustine, for example, said something “needful for happiness in this life,” but I’d submit that Aquinas most certainly did think so and thought that Aristotle’s account of happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics required the addition (replacement, perfection) of an account of supernatural beatitude, grace, and the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. See Denis J.M. Bradley, Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good: Reason and Human Happiness in Aquinas’s Moral Science (CUA Press, 1997), 395-401. Some (especially some Straussians) might say that such an insistent Christian theological element is all the worse for Aquinas, but it’s at least a plausible (indeed likely) view that what Aquinas meant by (perfect) beatitudo isn’t just Aristotelian eudaimonia with some random theological speculation thrown on top of it. Also, I'm not sure what to make of the claim that Aquinas didn’t write “his own book on ethics,” for surely the Secunda Pars of the Summa Theologiae might count as a “book on ethics.” Of course, Jaffa’s earlier book on Thomism argued idiosyncratically for the importance of Aquinas’s Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics over and against the Summa Theologiae, so I understand (but don’t agree with) the marginalization here of the Summa and its much more theologically rich account of ethics and politics.

Second, Jaffa writes that “Aristotle’s greatness of soul (magnanimity) may seem to resemble pride, the greatest of sins described in the biblical canon. But Thomas Aquinas’s interpretation of the ‘Ethics’ offers proof against theological negativism.” Again, I think Jaffa significantly understates here the difference between Aristotle’s virtue of magnanimity (which wouldn’t seem to describe, say, Jesus Christ) and Aquinas’s theologically subversive account of it. See ST II-II, 129 a.3, ad.4 and Mary Keys, Aquinas, Aristotle, and the Promise of the Common Good (Cambridge UP, 2006), 143-172. Indeed, it was precisely by engaging in a clever misinterpretation of Aristotelian magnanimity that Albert the Great and Aquinas were able to reconcile Aristotelian magnanimity and Christian humility. See Tobias Hoffmann, “Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas on Magnanimity,” Virtue Ethics in the Middle Ages: Commentaries on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 1200-1500 (Brill, 2008), 101-29. Jaffa wrote a book on Aquinas and Aristotle almost 60 (!) years ago in which he argued that Aquinas’s theological commitments undermined Aquinas’s “scientific and secular” bona fides, so I suppose this is just the latest installment in a long-running debate between those of us who think Aquinas achieved a genuine synthesis of Aristotelianism and Augustinian Christianity (preeminently in the Summa Theologiae) and those who think all the smart things Aquinas had to say (mostly in his commentaries on Aristotle) were already said earlier and more clearly by Aristotle himself.