are contrary to the higher laws, will produce social
trouble and chaos, and so should be changed. Simi-
larly, the church’s position against homosexuality flows
from that practice’s deviation from divine law (against
sodomy) and natural law (that sex is designed to occur
between male and female and that its goal is reproduc-
tion). Civil laws that violate natural and divine law
will not work in the long run but will create more
problems.
Another example of the interaction of laws is prop-
erty law. Aquinas adheres to Aristotle’s reasons in
favor of private-property ownership (society is more
orderly and prosperous if individuals can own prop-
erty rather than having everything in common), but
the laws that define and protect private property must
be subordinate to natural law and divine law. The ulti-
mate purpose of property is to sustain human life.
God and nature require, therefore, that the wealthy
hold their property in stewardship (not as their own,
but God’s, to be used for his purposes, in charity,
etc.). So, if the human law against theft prevents
starving people from living, St. Thomas says that they
can take what others have in superabundance, obey-
ing a higher law.
The sources of knowledge for St. Thomas Aquinas
are four: (1) Scripture (the Bible); (2) reason; (3) tra-
dition; and (4) experience. These are called the four
legs of the stool of knowledge. The church in St.
Thomas’s time was the source of most of these sources
of knowledge and perpetuated them in the church’s
teachings and universities. Aquinas later was named
the patron saint of all Catholic universities.
Monarchy was the prevalent form of government in
the Middle Ages. Aquinas supported the monarchical
state with this logic: God is one; the common good is
one; the monarch is one ruler.
Because of its emphasis on order and hierarchy,
Thomist theology is often seen as conservative.
Further Readings
Aquinas, Thomas. Summa theologiae,ed. T. Gilby. 60 vols. Gar-
den City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1963–81.
———. The Political Ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas: Representative
Selection.Ed. and introd. by Dino Bigongiari. New York:
Hafner Pub. Co., 1953.
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith). Saint Thomas Aquinas.Gar-
den City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1956.
D’Entreves, A. P., ed. Aquinas: Selected Political Writings.Oxford,
Eng.: Basil Blackwell, 1948.
Donohue, John W. St. Thomas Aquinas & Education.New York:
Random House, 1968.
Kenny, Anthony John Patrick. Aquinas: A Collection of Critical
Essays.Anthony Kenny, ed. New Yirk: Macmillan, 1976.
O’Connor, D. J. Aquinas and Natural Law.London: Macmillan,
1967.
Weisheipl, J. Friar Thomas D’Aquino: His Life, Thought and
Works.Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974.Arendt, Hannah (1906–1975) German-born
U.S. political theorist
Arendt was born in Hanover and raised in Königsberg,
studied philosophy at the University of Marburg,
where she had an affair with Martin HEIDEGGER, and
received her doctorate in 1929 for a study of St.
AUGUSTINE. With the NAZIrise to power, Arendt was
forced to flee to Paris in 1933, had to escape to the
United States in 1941 after the Nazis occupied France,
and became a United States citizen in 1951. Arendt
was a lecturer at Princeton University and the Univer-
sity of Chicago and a professor for many years at the
New School for Social Research in New York City,
where she also held key positions in several Jewish
organizations.
Arendt established her reputation as a keen analyst
of politics and society in the MODERNage on the basis
of her penetrating studies of totalitarianism and the
horror of genocide in the 20th century. In 1963,
Arendt observed the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi
official responsible for the deaths of millions of
Jews during the HOLOCAUST, which provided the mate-
rial for her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt
coined the famous phrase the banality of evil to
describe the unexceptional character of Eichmann,
who employed the most common features of the mo-
dern bureaucratic and technological state for the pur-
pose of systematically and efficiently exterminating
millions of human beings. Some commentators
sought to demonize Eichmann as an inhuman mon-
ster, but Arendt made the more important point that
the Nazi enterprise was horrific precisely because it
was planned and executed by ordinary individuals
with an unquestioning obedience to authority. Arendt
argued that the motive of expediency had become a
central feature of the modern state, at the expense of
moral judgment and the ability to think from the
point of view of others.
Arendt’s effort to demystify the Nazi regime can be
traced back to her monumental The Origins of Totali-
tarianism,published in 1951. After detailing the his-
torical precedents to the TOTALITARIAN political
system, in particular the administrative structure of
imperialism, Arendt focused her analysis on NazismArendt, Hannah 17