St. Louis, the great thirteenth-century king, adapted Roman law to the
needs of France, in his Établissements.)
Once more it is Aquinas who gives the first theoretical recognition of
a basic political reality. The most obvious source of his concept of the
status regiminisis the status regispoliticians attributed to kings. Of
course as a schoolman relying on ancient authorities he does not attach
his ‘state of the regime’ nor his concept of the wider state of the
commonwealth to any thirteenth-century kingdom, but to the kingdom
of the Jews as it developed through biblical history. Yet he joins
commonwealth to king in the way that, as a teacher in Paris and privi-
leged observer of the rule of St. Louis, he must have known a contem-
porary kingdom was joined to its ruler. The context of his references to
the state, it will be remembered, is a discussion of the relationship of the
Old Law to the New. He argues that the moral precepts of Old
Testament law retain their validity for Christians under the New Law of
the Gospel; and that even the ceremonial precepts, of which the literal
or historical purpose had been to keep the Jews from worshipping idols,
still have meaning for us, in that they prefigure the relationship of man
to God through Christ. The judicial precepts, the working laws, were
specific to the Old Testament community, however, and intended only
‘to order the state of the people of the Jews according to justice and
equity’. Thus they have no authority among Christians. Yet even the
judicial precepts may have something to teach later ages, in that they set
out ‘the whole state of that people’, which ‘prefigures’—one might say
‘provides a model for’—subsequent states.^26
For Aquinas the essential nexus between the regime and the people
was legislation. He understands that the legislative function will be
exercised in different ways in different communities, and that this
indeed is how a monarchy, with its ‘constitutions of princes’, is distin-
guished from an aristocracy, in which law is made by the decrees of a
senate and the opinions of an elite of jurists, and from a democracy,
which legislates by plebiscite. Not only the legislative process but also
the content of the law, and therefore the character of the wider state, is
determined by the nature of the sovereign power. ‘If a city comes under
another regime, its laws must change. For the same laws are not suitable
to a democracy, in which power belongs to the people, and in an oli-
garchy, in which power is of the rich... So when the state of a people
changes (mutato statu illius populi), the judicial precepts must change.’^27
For the idea that human societies, Christendom as a whole, changed
their states, Aquinas could have drawn upon both sacred history and
Roman jurisprudence. When he argues that there cannot be a third
State as commonwealth 7(^26) Summa Theologica[ST], Prima Secundae[I–II], q. 104, art. 2.
(^27) STI–II, q. 95, art. 4, conc.