Aquinas on Limits to Political Responsibility for Virtue: A Comparison to Al-Farabi

I ARISTOTLE, AL-FARABI, Machiavelli, and Strauss: the charge against Aquinas. In a 2007 Review of Metaphysics article, I argued that al-Farabi saw himself as inheriting from Aristotle the problem of limits to political responsibility for virtue. (1) The purpose of political life for Aristotle is not simply peace and prosperity but virtue. According to Aristotle, an external force or authority is necessary to habituate someone to the noble good because it does not initially appear useful or pleasant. Through the reason and force of the authority, the agent is moved to perform habitually the noble act until it becomes excellent and appears as pleasant and useful. At that point, the reason and passions of the agent no longer require external authority; for Aristotle, moral autonomy is acquired through habituation by an external authority. If the state possesses the authority to habituate citizens to virtue, what are the limits to that responsibility? Aristotle places two principal limits on the responsibility of the state for moral habituation: the family and the size of the state. Ideally responsibility for moral habituation resides in the family rather than in the legislator. Childhood is the appropriate time for moral habituation, and the parents are the most effective moral authority. To the extent that familial moral habituation falls, the laws of the state become an external authority. The other limit to state responsibility for virtue is the city, which is the only political entity that combines a sufficiently diverse division of labor and a capacity of citizens to know each other's moral character; in particular, Aristotle rejects the nation as unnaturally large. Although al-Farabi accepts virtue as the ultimate purpose of political life, he rejects both of the limits that Aristotle had placed on political responsibility for virtue. Al-Farabi considers the nation a more natural limit than the city because it is based on what he calls "natural make-up" and "natural character" that produce a physical, linguistic, and imaginative unity greater than that of the city, although it is less than that of human nature. (2) Al-Farabi goes further to consider the possibility of a supranational political entity that would approximate the universality of human nature. An empire made up of multiple nations is as realistically close as we can come to the utopian kingdom of the philosophers. Thus, in comparison to Aristotle, al-Farabi expands political responsibility for moral virtue beyond the limit of the city. He does not share Aristotle's preference for private over public authority; that is, he does not repeat Aristotle's predilection for familial authority. Instead, the natural limit that Al-Farabi imposes on political responsibility for virtue is religion. Essences, for al-Farabi, are the object of philosophy; images are the object of religion. While essence is one, images are necessarily many, and hence philosophy is one, but religions are many. Particular, changing, and contingent images can be like but never be the universal, unchanging, and necessary essence. Religion will always be below philosophy, imitating philosophy without ever attaining it. The majority of human beings cannot be philosophers because they cannot rise above their imagination to think demonstratively with intellect. So, prophets--philosophers with the capacity to translate essence into image--must create religion. Political rule and religion are inseparable because the many cannot grasp the good as noble apart from religious authority; virtue must be enforced through religion. Religion, like the nation, is rooted in imagination (the brain), which has a natural make-up and character formed, for example, by geography, diet, and language. Not all religions are equal, since an image can be more or less like the essence it imitates. Nevertheless, it is not always possible to force a superior religion. …