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An Example of Social Thomism: Thomas Gilby (1902–1975)[1]
Aidan Nichols
The life of Norman Gilby, born in Birmingham, changed direction when his
family became catholics on the eve of the First World War. He entered
the English Dominican Province within a year of the war’s end. Ordained
priest in 1926, the great hopes reposed in him were shown when he was
sent to Louvain to study for the doctorate (academic doctors were
rarae aves in the Province of the period). From 1931 to 1936, he
taught moral theology at Blackfriars Oxford and helped in the
editing of the journal Blackfriars at a difficult period in its history:
difficult, that is, owing to conflicting sympathies in Order, Church and
nation in England with the belligerent parties in the Spanish Civil War.
In 1936 he left Oxford for London, giving university of London
‘extension lectures’ and playing a part in the Chelsea-centred catholic
intelligentsia of the time whose best-known names were the novelists
Greene and Waugh. (Gilby would turn his hand to novel-writing and to
that favoured genre of the 1930s, detective fiction.) The rest of his
life would be bound up with Blackfriars Cambridge, although a
significant interlude is formed by the Second World War, when he served
with sufficient distinction to be offered the post of Principal naval
chaplain. He declined. his great work in the ‘house of writers’ of the
Province was the editing in 60 volumes of a new bilingual edition of the
Summa Theologiae, with substantial introductions, appendices and
notes. Gilby not only edited the series generally, but himself prepared
translations and apparatus for 13 of the volumes. he died suddenly,
shortly after sending the last texts to the printer, on 29 november
1975.
In the inter-war period of more strictly (and professionally) neo-thomist
writing in the Province, Thomas Gilby’s contribution is chiefly to be
found in two works: Between Community and Society and
Principality and Polity.
It may surprise the present-day reader that in the pair of terms –
‘community’ and ‘society’ – crucial to Gilby’s first politological
study, ‘community’ has primitivist, and, to a degree, negative
connotations whereas those of ‘society’ are chiefly eschatological, and
overwhelmingly positive. For Gilby, ‘political science is the study of
civilized styles of living together, which do not emerge until after the
stage, studied by scientia oeconomica, when the human mass is
still a cluster of family and tribal groups’. ‘Community’ is the
group-life investigated by ethnology, social anthropology, and
psychology, cultural history and comparative religion. Vital though it
may be as the material matrix of civilisation, it remains too immured
within the biological, and hence the forced, to be a suitable sobriquet
for the humane city. At the other end of the spectrum of the human
ascent, through ever deepening and widening forms of consciousness and
freedom, there lies ‘society’ – the spiritual association of those
destined, by nature and grace, to be to each other eternal companions.
Such spiritual friendship is realized through the magnum sacramentum
of Christ and the Church, and lies beyond the politological, in the
realm of theology proper.
And yet the metaphor of the ‘spectrum’ misleads, for in Gilby’s
presentation, pure community and pure society are themselves
abstractions. Human beings ‘can never be so consolidated’ (in the
communitarian mass) that they ‘cannot be dispersed’, nor are they ever
so ‘subtilised’ (by spiritual society) that ‘material processes cannot
move them’: The pure community, or city of Force, and the pure
society, or city of Freedom, are not, therefore, separable as complete
human situations; a man is not to be mistaken, from excess of science,
for a specimen of a pure community member, nor, from a deficiency of
science, for a person unique and away on his own. the human community
ascends to the conditions of the human society through political
institutions: the life of the spiritual society flows back into the
depths of the material community.
In the state, neither the appetites issuing from community nor the
aspirations towards spiritual society receive a free rein; rather, they
are yoked together by discipline, both legal and political. Both, then,
are present, and active – ‘just as unconscious knowledge and ecstasy are
latent in rational discourse, even in mathematics’. it behoves the state
not to separate them too drastically, on pain of the common people
ceasing to be at home in the civil order, on the one side, and the elite
feeling no cause for pride on the other. It is, in Gilby’s view, a
strength of Aquinas’ approach to the philosophy of the polis that
it would hold both ends of the chain: for the material cause of the
state is the instinctual group, joined by local loyalties, while its
final cause lies in promoting the life of friendship, and hence in a
communion that adumbrates the City of God.
Liberal humanism between, say, the 1840s and the 1920s, was so
(temporarily) successful that it scarcely needed to speculate about the
prior conditions and further implications of political flourishing; but
now this sort of fuller analysis is needed. and the main reason for the
new urgency – apart from considerations of the defective ideologies
abroad – would seem to be a collapse of social cohesion: The grace of
original righteousness, with which human nature was created, was
bestowed to brace compounds of mind and matter that tended to
disintegrate, not from the weakness and poverty, but from the strength
and richness of their parts. If organisms contain cells that strain to
go pirating away on their own, then clusters formed by human beings
living in communities will be no more compact, for they are larger and
looser, and their elements are dogged centres of self-interest.
Gilby hoped that the application of ‘social conceptions formed from
widely differing traditions in the thirteenth century by a philosophy
distrustful of clumsy alternatives’ would, in mediating between
‘functional duties and personal rights’, hit the mark. Principality
and Polity treats st thomas’ politology as the classical statement
of the developed form of his own sources; and in so doing explains the
genesis of Gilby’s own ideas in Between Community and Society,
for these are a representation of what he considered Aquinas’ most
genial intuitions.
For Gilby, the good state is not so much the just state as the civilised
state; or rather, the concept of justice must be entertained in so
wide-ranging a sense (that which is, in a variety of ways, ‘due’) that
it comes to coincide with the notion of civilisation itself. Like the
well-tempered family, the healthy state will combine respect for
distinct personalities with the ‘warmth of merging and belonging’, thus
producing ‘a mingling of freedom and dependence, of adventure and
security, of private enterprise and common guarantees’.
A number of factors come together in the happy political community.
First, since the best law is custom enforced (rather than governmental
edict), tradition is of vital importance, not least in advanced
societies: Well-established authority will hesitate to displace
ancient and immemorial customs by new-fangled regulations, or to
substitute for old ways a brand-new constitution, tested by frequent
plebiscite, after the fashion of nineteenth-century liberal
revolutionaries. For one reason, nature as manifested in custom is
freer, more flexible, and adaptive to circumstances than are such rigid
artifices of law; for another, in politics, as in music, painting, and
architecture, style possesses little lasting vitality when it offers
pure form. neither civic good sense nor social justice alone can produce
loyal and devoted attachment.
Second, the fortunate state is one in which individuals are readily
disposed to enter into amicitia utilis – agreements with
strangers to the family group by which, despite the lack of kinship
bond, they consider themselves bound. The historian of medieval society
Paul Vinogradoff regarded the history of contract as the greatest
contribution of town life to the development of law. Just so, the
typical political man of St Thomas’ writings is the civis, for
that fuller community of the bourg, with its fairs and markets,
and later the mercantile cities, has, through voluntary association,
special opportunities for practising civility. Aquinas did not regard
the state as an artificial concern, originating in such contract, as
though it were a firm for trading, and yet he considered that a shared
jus implies the distinction and independence of persons – and to
that extent a multiplicity of free associations, generating a certain
pluralism within its unity.
Third, then, a well-organised state will manifest partnership and
cooperation, an over-organised one the abrogation of individual
responsibility. For the state is ‘the entire human commonwealth’ – not
just the legal organ of government, much less (in the modern context)
the ‘party which has captured it’: The political man, the typical
citizen, in whom should meet influences from below through the archaic
symbols of his race, and influences from above through the commands of a
heavenly society, may become fixed in isolation between the two,
rootless and hopeless, neither an animal nor a spirit, but a complex of
conventions, a creature of the State, a man without country on earth or
in heaven, a displaced person, his rights precarious, never loved just
as he stands, but docketed under a number and expended on some scheme.
Cooperation entailed agreed reasonableness in social life; the sanior
pars was more weighty than the mere numerical majority. Gilby found
the colleges of the studium, that new ‘third estate’ of
thirteenth-century christendom, to be its exemplars.
Fourth, the flourishing state requires some form of clerisy, and, linked
with this, the intelligent apprehension of an objective order of things.
A ‘body of clerks’ must attempt to set out fundamental laws, as revealed
by God or discovered by reason, in a consistent system of obligations
and duties: its significance will lie, in good measure, in the setting
of bounds to what government may do. The difference between tyrant and
king turns on the question of respect for law: Positive and purely
political law has its proper independence, yet without operating in an
enclave: all the sciences should mingle together, and so should the
arts; in law, the eternal runs into the provisional, and positive law
applies the lasting natural law in works of the statesman’s art.
Obviously to such a theory law is a more comprehensive concept than it
is to modern specialist legalism, to which law is the command of the
human sovereign and an ‘unjust law’ a contradiction in terms.
To the state, confidence is more necessary than obedience; and rulers
will be trusted if they respect standards not of their devising. Wippo’s
proverb, legem servare, hoc est regnare, expressed the
authentically constitutional spirit of early medieval government,
despite the lack of formal constitutions, measuring all the acts of the
legislative and executive powers. Certainly St Thomas, in his de
regimine principum, was far from admiring paternal absolutism. Gilby,
if asked to choose between country and court party, would opt for the
Whig: Altogether there are good grounds for calling St Thomas the
first Whig, if a Whig is a man who believes that social and political
life should be run according to a reasonable constitution, and who
reserves to himself the right of deciding to break it in cases where the
ordinary rules do not apply.
The influence of Aquinas’ notion of epikeia, prominent in Thomist
moral theology (not least as Gilby presented it), makes here its
surprising entrée into English Dominican social thought. But the use of
the term ‘reasonable’ in Gilby’s praise of the Whig constitution is
question-begging. The nature of the basic context in which difficult
questions of social decisionmaking should be adjudicated, and the
character of the rationality that befits their resolution, was the
fundamental issue at stake in the divided counsels, which the last
section of this essay describes.
NOTE:
[1]
Excerpt of the Chapter: The English Dominican Social Tradition,
in F. Compagnoni – H. Alford (eds.), Preaching Justice, Contributions
to Social Ethics in the Twentieth Century, Dominican Publications,
Dublin 2007.
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