A surprising claim by Aquinas

Some of the precepts of the natural law that Aquinas affirms will be surprising to some. For example, Aquinas holds, as we might expect, that theft is a sin, and in fact a mortal sin. However, he claims that, when a person in great need takes from someone who has more than he needs, it is not a case of theft.—Evans, A History of Western Philosophy, 202

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For some reason I just can't see the Silicon Valley billionaires embracing that line of thinking. Or the members of the US Congress.

Truth be told, I suspect they would reverse it and say that it isn't theft to take from those who have little to enlarge their own fortune. Well, that's the way they act anyway, and by their fruit you know them. James 5 comes to mind:

5 Pay attention, you wealthy people! Weep and moan over the miseries coming upon you. 2 Your riches have rotted. Moths have destroyed your clothes. 3 Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you. It will eat your flesh like fire. Consider the treasure you have hoarded in the last days. 4 Listen! Hear the cries of the wages of your field hands. These are the wages you stole from those who harvested your fields. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of heavenly forces. 5 You have lived a self-satisfying life on this earth, a life of luxury. You have stuffed your hearts in preparation for the day of slaughter. 6 You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who doesn’t oppose you. (CEB)

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Thomas Aquinas still matters?!

Indeed! This post follows up on one from last week about the collapsing of virtue into passion. Good thoughts; be sure to read the whole post for more context.

Turning now to the modern world, we can see that the concept of love which is extolled as a virtue is in reality almost exclusively that of love as passion. Every time soap operas and sitcoms present love as constituted by physical sex (do they ever do anything else?), love as virtue is reduced to love as passion. Every time daytime talk show hosts make some declaration about morality based upon what they feel in their heart, then passion, not virtue, becomes the criterion of what is good and true. And every time an academic denies that there is an objective telos to human nature, passion masquerades as virtue and ethics is turned into aesthetics.

Perhaps this is the real issue in current debates about marriage. Robert George has pointed out that no fault divorce was the real watershed in the recent legal history of the institution. That changed marriage from a relationship of lifelong commitment to that of a temporary, dispensable, sentimental bond. Yet if we look at this through the lens of Thomas's distinctions, we can see that no fault divorce presupposes a prior definition of love as primarily passion, not virtue. Thus, it is arguably not the redefinition of marriage but the redefinition of love which is the real problem underlying society’s current moral malaise. And that redefinition has much wider and more sinister implications. Indeed, as Thomas’s taxonomy helps us to see, it strikes at the very heart of what we consider virtue to be.

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As I said, Indeed! And that's why the Evangelical church will lose this fight. Until Christian marriages become commitments for life instead of commitments of feel-good, there isn't a leg to stand on. Of course, with my Anabaptist leanings, I wonder about the wisdom of the fight in the first place—but that's another story for another time.
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