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Aquinas and King: A Discourse on Civil Disobedience
During the tumult of the 1960s, the American character was tested in extraordinary ways―none more pressing than the rightful clamor for civil rights in Black community. Existing laws institutionalized the second class citizenry in many quarters and courts were very unsympathetic to the obvious injustices coursing through the American experience. Laws were aplenty ― most of which served to maintain the unjust status quo. Those seeking reform had a variety of options open when challenging these wrongs. Consider the life and times of Martin Luther King, Jr. How did Dr. King arrive at a philosophy of nonviolent civil disobedience to the inequalities of his day? Why did he choose this method of structural challenge over the other options? Dr. King could have gone in very different directions. Why did he passionately urge his followers to lay down the sword, to accept suffering and humiliation rather than strike his errant and hateful neighbor, and to willingly and very humbly experience the jail cell for his alleged crimes? As King "I've seen too much hate to want to hate, myself, and I've seen hate on the faces of too many sheriffs, too many white citizens' councilors, and too many Klansmen of the South to want to hate, myself; and every time I see it, I say to myself, hate is too great a burden to bear." By examining the man, his life and his work, both written and oratorical, the author concludes that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was in fact a Thomist through and through. Not a Thomist on all things, but as to his understanding of law and its corresponding obligation or lack thereof, King is the ultimate Thomist. In his letters and writings, texts and speeches, King is a regular advocate of the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. A reader can feel the respect that King has for Thomist principles, and in a sense, Thomism is the "antidote" against the ravages of modernity. King's theory of civil disobedience classically adheres to the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. Amazingly, he even tells us about his allegiance to the philosophy of St. Thomas. That is what this work is all about ― a discourse on and a discernment into the compatibility of both men and a revelation that once again, St. Thomas had the answers long before the problem ever emerged. "Summing Recommended. Upper-division undergraduate, graduate, research, and professional collections." ― CHOICE Magazine
142 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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August 5, 2025
Preparing lesson plans on "Letter to Birmingham Jail" for AP Gov. Here are my notes
Aquinas and King: A Discourse on Civil Disobedience (Nemeth)
Moral, Civil Disobedience seeks to educate the collective and bring about change in an open setting. Finally, particularly in the case of Dr King, the role of suffering receives significant attention. Suffering rests firmly in the ethos of civil disobedience. Suffering is a predictable effect for those engaged in public resistance. As Christ suffered on the cross for the sins and errors of humanity, so to the resistor, who witnesses injustice and stands for him against it, fully expects to suffer a wide array of consequences.
For king and aquinas, it is the truth of Christ and his philosophy often drives the enterprise and it is the commandment, to love one's neighbor as I have loved you, that shapes the form and methodology of resistance. civil disobedience lacks legitimacy and less rooted in the divine, the higher jurisprudence of an all-powerful and loving god. Civil Disobedience sleeps beyond the simple Affairs unraveling on the streets but finds it's anchor in the Perfection of the creative god. in the world of Aquinas and king, non-violence in the display of civil disobedience is fully compatible with the Christian life. violence assaults the Christian ethics since it is “an immoral means to attain moral ends.”
[The Necessity of Human Law]
Necessity of human law As Saint Thomas poses refers to the removal of evils from the world we inhabit. law, in the human sense, is the purifier, The Fortress against the onslaught of moral barbarism. from another perspective, the necessity of human law is Manifest in human activity of every sort, especially in the communal setting. positive law involves both the law of Nations and civil law.
Neither in anarchy nor in isolation the human person carries out a social and political existence reliant upon law. The law is not inherently coercive, but it's consistent with all its other purposes, directive of what ought to be done. to be sure, law has the power to coerce and mold, but since law is a pure exercise of reason, the human actor should be comfortable with its content. Those exercising behavior in accordance with reason are willing properly and thus not in need of course if power of the law. In this sense the good are not subject to the law, but only the wicked.
Human law depends upon and looks to the eternal, Natural and divine laws. human law, in order to be a sensible human exercise, cannot be expected to eradicate and suppress Every Act of Vice or sin, since men are bound to err. overzealously enforcing human laws will only produce social resistance and tumult. Thomas is completely opposed to a nation that enslaves its citizens by laws. too much regulation and control will trigger evolution of vice and even greater evils will appear. Therefore it does not lay upon the magnitude of imperfect men the burdens of those who are already virtuous, that they should abstain from all evil. Otherwise these imperfect ones, being unable to bear such precepts, would break out into yet greater evils.
King was acutely suspicious of any ideology resting in the exclusivity of man, even arguing that modern liberalism has presented two shallow views of man. In positivism, the law has many faces, some good and many ugly. Surely, neither Aquinas nor king would ever claim that human law is not essential to an order society. In the domestic view, human law plays a central role in the habituation of the citizen. Any short reading of St Thomas makes plain that laws and essential characteristic of the rational player.
At its base, King appreciates the inadequacy of human law when dealing with the soul and heart of the human person. No law can force a willing goodness nor change the hard-hearted person into the loving player.
Both King and Aquinas Pine for a morality with certitude. In short some things are right and some things are not. How this attitude impacts law and legislation is something utterly lost on Modern legislators and jurists although King never forgets the interplay. King is thoroughly indebted to Aquinas regarding the fatality of civil disobedience. King realizes that moral relativity is what erected the Injustice of racial inequality. Law must depend on a fixed series of first principles and propositions. It cannot be right simply because its proponent states that it is or isn't. Law and morality are symbiotically tied together with a caveat that the morality Has meaning, Not Mere terminology. Part of the landscape can contend which arises from a contemporary immorality or a morality that severs laws from these types of perennial questions. Is this right? Is it defensible in a moral sense? What conclusions are self-evident and universally applicable? Modern society is awash in decision making devoid of moral reasoning.
First, Justice is a rational exercise while its counterpart, Injustice is contrary to reason. Second, justice is a virtuous disposition, a habituation, in which the human actor gives both Citizen and Community what is due. Third, justice is generally a measure of the mean in human conduct that balance of behavior and results that keeps into relationships and political and communal entities and balance. Finally, St Thomas categorizes Justice by its forms distributive and commutative. Justice cannot exist, in the human sphere, without others, and is about external actions and things about operations not passions and unlike charity which supremely envelops all the virtues, it is especially concerned with relational interaction. Justice is about external operations and activities whether person or governmental entity. giving each his or her do according to equality of proportion is the proper act of justice.
Viewing the Aristotelian conception of virtue, Thomas sees justice, as well as other virtues, immeasurable terms, particularly the mean that balance of intellect, appetites and passions reasons and will that behavioral modicum representing the human agent doing what is an accord with nature and reason. the mean and most cases, is neither mathematical nor political. Justice is a mean between having too much and too little. compromise is not the mean as if the moral agent could choose conduct if only in reasonable amounts. nor is the mean and avoidance of extremes. Thomistic psychology is more multi-dimensional. the mean is only discoverable when evaluated in light of human reason and rationality.
Justice is about Commerce, crime and punishment, political Authority and citizenry, property and ownership, distribution of money and usury. Justice is also conformity, balance and equilibrium, in stark contrast to Injustice, deformity, discordance and inequality. Thomas calls in Justice a special form of Vice because it negatively influences both the individual actor and society. Individual acts of Injustice that ain't the sanctity of the multitude are repugnant to the common good, and such contempt of the common good may lead to all kinds of sins. Wisely, Thomas suggested individual injustice negatively affects an entire community.
Civil disobedience demands much from its advocates. civil disobedience is a visible, public and open activity rather than the clandestine or secret in design. the party choosing to disobey is fully aware that the disobedience is carried out to raise awareness and a collective sense. Civil Disobedience seeks to educate the public about Injustice and awaken the conscience of society by showing society that the law is unjust. In the most extreme sense, the actor must be willing to not only act, but also suffer the consequences of the action. for a person engaged in Civil Disobedience recognizes the higher legitimacy of their action while simultaneously realizing that their conduct may result in arrest, fine or imprisonment. put another way, the actor knows the legitimacy of their resistance and is readily willing to accept the consequence. As a result the actor acts with a confidence natural to moral certainty. the actor carries out the disobedience in an open public and highly visible manner.
For the Christian moral agent, choice in moral action, whether it be related to civil rights or equality, human dignity in the preservation of life, appears one-dimensional. the rigidity of choice in matters of the natural law, by way of illustration, comes about because the questions are unchangeable, perennial tenants. that the natural law desires us to seek the good, to preserve our life and those of our neighbor, to believe in God, marry and procreate children, are the Commandments of the natural law in a nutshell. anything which assaults the self-evident principles, any law which acts contrarily to the purpose of these propositions, should not be obeyed. Because of these Bedrock principles, the resistors are bound to suffer, to be alienated, marginalized, mocked and humiliated. the price one pays to be faithful to Justice and law and its true sense is always high.
Those who act out of hate rather than charity can neither get along with soft nor reside peacefully in a community. the racist hates; the racist holds tightly on to the passions at the expense of reason and the racist, in the final analysis hates oneself. it is assessment of Aristotelian friendship, Aquinas discerns how a life without Christian charity leads to an immeasurable void. Aquinas fully appreciates the corrosive impact of hate over love for hate is a spiritual darkness.
[King]
“We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles, we don't need any Molotov cocktails, we just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive Industries in our country and say God sent us by here, to say that you're not treating his children right. and we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment where God's children are concerned.”
St Thomas systematizes the arguments regarding lawn civil disobedience. he gives Clarity to a complex Theory step by step, argument by argument. while he relies on past figures, like Aristotle and Augustine, he develops a comprehensive body of text which foretells the arguments King will make during the Civil Rights era. It is prophetic beyond words with King posing his advocacy of Civil Disobedience as if he were the ghost of St Thomas. However King approaches a subject with a more humanistic and psychological feel. While Thomas indicates that law leads men to the good or that law must habituate the citizenry toward virtue, King will speak of the human personality or how a law must uplift and develop a person holistically. is a very complimentary tact though it's pedagogy starkly different. and Thomas we witness the human person as being or essence, each and everyone tending to their proper ends, yearning and searching for God and living in accordance with fundamental natures. Thomas speaks of the citizen as if a philosophical entity while King personalizes them.
for King speaks of a person who becomes degraded by unjust laws, suffering immensely not only due to the Injustice itself but what the Injustice does to the mind, or even more tellingly how the party inflicting the Injustice fails to think too. In all of these senses, we see the intellectual nature of law, that reason discovers and applies law prudentially. King frequently applies this approach when he assesses the heart and mind of the segregationist for the man or woman who hates based on race, Creed or color, is not a thinking man in the least and surely not lawful in approach.
Injustice must be countered with justice; Injustice must be removed from the heart and mind of man and replace with a love based on human dignity. Civil disobedience is the means to correcting Injustice and unjust laws and it is consistent with an overall ethic that insists that harm come to no one and injury be avoided at all costs. civil disobedience, King argues, mirrors the greatness of Christianity and the philosophy of Jesus Christ. Jesus is a model for action and an inspiration to action. As Christ has suffered on the cross, so does the party engage in civil disobedience whose suffering portrays a passionate righteousness about the cause at hand and should be considered the model for human life and an inspiration for life.
For contemporary moralists, most of the dialogue and debate concerning these Troublesome questions usually invites a right stripped of traditional ethical reasoning. Surely arguments about rights have become almost dreary. In a word, there is a right to everything. Individualism has replaced all sensibility regarding the common good. There are no universals; no certitude and moral propositions; no moral code fixed and perennial. All of this has been replaced with the immediacy of any need and the winning of the moment. Today's rights are replaced with tomorrow's method of control. Wright's last as long as the next plea from a crying advocate. Of course, this approach is what gave us slavery. Instead of evaluating the practice of slavery and Universal moral terms, based upon a perennial notion of truth, History generates all the excuses of why we need slavery.
Aquinas and King: A Discourse on Civil Disobedience (Nemeth)
Moral, Civil Disobedience seeks to educate the collective and bring about change in an open setting. Finally, particularly in the case of Dr King, the role of suffering receives significant attention. Suffering rests firmly in the ethos of civil disobedience. Suffering is a predictable effect for those engaged in public resistance. As Christ suffered on the cross for the sins and errors of humanity, so to the resistor, who witnesses injustice and stands for him against it, fully expects to suffer a wide array of consequences.
For king and aquinas, it is the truth of Christ and his philosophy often drives the enterprise and it is the commandment, to love one's neighbor as I have loved you, that shapes the form and methodology of resistance. civil disobedience lacks legitimacy and less rooted in the divine, the higher jurisprudence of an all-powerful and loving god. Civil Disobedience sleeps beyond the simple Affairs unraveling on the streets but finds it's anchor in the Perfection of the creative god. in the world of Aquinas and king, non-violence in the display of civil disobedience is fully compatible with the Christian life. violence assaults the Christian ethics since it is “an immoral means to attain moral ends.”
[The Necessity of Human Law]
Necessity of human law As Saint Thomas poses refers to the removal of evils from the world we inhabit. law, in the human sense, is the purifier, The Fortress against the onslaught of moral barbarism. from another perspective, the necessity of human law is Manifest in human activity of every sort, especially in the communal setting. positive law involves both the law of Nations and civil law.
Neither in anarchy nor in isolation the human person carries out a social and political existence reliant upon law. The law is not inherently coercive, but it's consistent with all its other purposes, directive of what ought to be done. to be sure, law has the power to coerce and mold, but since law is a pure exercise of reason, the human actor should be comfortable with its content. Those exercising behavior in accordance with reason are willing properly and thus not in need of course if power of the law. In this sense the good are not subject to the law, but only the wicked.
Human law depends upon and looks to the eternal, Natural and divine laws. human law, in order to be a sensible human exercise, cannot be expected to eradicate and suppress Every Act of Vice or sin, since men are bound to err. overzealously enforcing human laws will only produce social resistance and tumult. Thomas is completely opposed to a nation that enslaves its citizens by laws. too much regulation and control will trigger evolution of vice and even greater evils will appear. Therefore it does not lay upon the magnitude of imperfect men the burdens of those who are already virtuous, that they should abstain from all evil. Otherwise these imperfect ones, being unable to bear such precepts, would break out into yet greater evils.
King was acutely suspicious of any ideology resting in the exclusivity of man, even arguing that modern liberalism has presented two shallow views of man. In positivism, the law has many faces, some good and many ugly. Surely, neither Aquinas nor king would ever claim that human law is not essential to an order society. In the domestic view, human law plays a central role in the habituation of the citizen. Any short reading of St Thomas makes plain that laws and essential characteristic of the rational player.
At its base, King appreciates the inadequacy of human law when dealing with the soul and heart of the human person. No law can force a willing goodness nor change the hard-hearted person into the loving player.
Both King and Aquinas Pine for a morality with certitude. In short some things are right and some things are not. How this attitude impacts law and legislation is something utterly lost on Modern legislators and jurists although King never forgets the interplay. King is thoroughly indebted to Aquinas regarding the fatality of civil disobedience. King realizes that moral relativity is what erected the Injustice of racial inequality. Law must depend on a fixed series of first principles and propositions. It cannot be right simply because its proponent states that it is or isn't. Law and morality are symbiotically tied together with a caveat that the morality Has meaning, Not Mere terminology. Part of the landscape can contend which arises from a contemporary immorality or a morality that severs laws from these types of perennial questions. Is this right? Is it defensible in a moral sense? What conclusions are self-evident and universally applicable? Modern society is awash in decision making devoid of moral reasoning.
First, Justice is a rational exercise while its counterpart, Injustice is contrary to reason. Second, justice is a virtuous disposition, a habituation, in which the human actor gives both Citizen and Community what is due. Third, justice is generally a measure of the mean in human conduct that balance of behavior and results that keeps into relationships and political and communal entities and balance. Finally, St Thomas categorizes Justice by its forms distributive and commutative. Justice cannot exist, in the human sphere, without others, and is about external actions and things about operations not passions and unlike charity which supremely envelops all the virtues, it is especially concerned with relational interaction. Justice is about external operations and activities whether person or governmental entity. giving each his or her do according to equality of proportion is the proper act of justice.
Viewing the Aristotelian conception of virtue, Thomas sees justice, as well as other virtues, immeasurable terms, particularly the mean that balance of intellect, appetites and passions reasons and will that behavioral modicum representing the human agent doing what is an accord with nature and reason. the mean and most cases, is neither mathematical nor political. Justice is a mean between having too much and too little. compromise is not the mean as if the moral agent could choose conduct if only in reasonable amounts. nor is the mean and avoidance of extremes. Thomistic psychology is more multi-dimensional. the mean is only discoverable when evaluated in light of human reason and rationality.
Justice is about Commerce, crime and punishment, political Authority and citizenry, property and ownership, distribution of money and usury. Justice is also conformity, balance and equilibrium, in stark contrast to Injustice, deformity, discordance and inequality. Thomas calls in Justice a special form of Vice because it negatively influences both the individual actor and society. Individual acts of Injustice that ain't the sanctity of the multitude are repugnant to the common good, and such contempt of the common good may lead to all kinds of sins. Wisely, Thomas suggested individual injustice negatively affects an entire community.
Civil disobedience demands much from its advocates. civil disobedience is a visible, public and open activity rather than the clandestine or secret in design. the party choosing to disobey is fully aware that the disobedience is carried out to raise awareness and a collective sense. Civil Disobedience seeks to educate the public about Injustice and awaken the conscience of society by showing society that the law is unjust. In the most extreme sense, the actor must be willing to not only act, but also suffer the consequences of the action. for a person engaged in Civil Disobedience recognizes the higher legitimacy of their action while simultaneously realizing that their conduct may result in arrest, fine or imprisonment. put another way, the actor knows the legitimacy of their resistance and is readily willing to accept the consequence. As a result the actor acts with a confidence natural to moral certainty. the actor carries out the disobedience in an open public and highly visible manner.
For the Christian moral agent, choice in moral action, whether it be related to civil rights or equality, human dignity in the preservation of life, appears one-dimensional. the rigidity of choice in matters of the natural law, by way of illustration, comes about because the questions are unchangeable, perennial tenants. that the natural law desires us to seek the good, to preserve our life and those of our neighbor, to believe in God, marry and procreate children, are the Commandments of the natural law in a nutshell. anything which assaults the self-evident principles, any law which acts contrarily to the purpose of these propositions, should not be obeyed. Because of these Bedrock principles, the resistors are bound to suffer, to be alienated, marginalized, mocked and humiliated. the price one pays to be faithful to Justice and law and its true sense is always high.
Those who act out of hate rather than charity can neither get along with soft nor reside peacefully in a community. the racist hates; the racist holds tightly on to the passions at the expense of reason and the racist, in the final analysis hates oneself. it is assessment of Aristotelian friendship, Aquinas discerns how a life without Christian charity leads to an immeasurable void. Aquinas fully appreciates the corrosive impact of hate over love for hate is a spiritual darkness.
[King]
“We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles, we don't need any Molotov cocktails, we just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive Industries in our country and say God sent us by here, to say that you're not treating his children right. and we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment where God's children are concerned.”
St Thomas systematizes the arguments regarding lawn civil disobedience. he gives Clarity to a complex Theory step by step, argument by argument. while he relies on past figures, like Aristotle and Augustine, he develops a comprehensive body of text which foretells the arguments King will make during the Civil Rights era. It is prophetic beyond words with King posing his advocacy of Civil Disobedience as if he were the ghost of St Thomas. However King approaches a subject with a more humanistic and psychological feel. While Thomas indicates that law leads men to the good or that law must habituate the citizenry toward virtue, King will speak of the human personality or how a law must uplift and develop a person holistically. is a very complimentary tact though it's pedagogy starkly different. and Thomas we witness the human person as being or essence, each and everyone tending to their proper ends, yearning and searching for God and living in accordance with fundamental natures. Thomas speaks of the citizen as if a philosophical entity while King personalizes them.
for King speaks of a person who becomes degraded by unjust laws, suffering immensely not only due to the Injustice itself but what the Injustice does to the mind, or even more tellingly how the party inflicting the Injustice fails to think too. In all of these senses, we see the intellectual nature of law, that reason discovers and applies law prudentially. King frequently applies this approach when he assesses the heart and mind of the segregationist for the man or woman who hates based on race, Creed or color, is not a thinking man in the least and surely not lawful in approach.
Injustice must be countered with justice; Injustice must be removed from the heart and mind of man and replace with a love based on human dignity. Civil disobedience is the means to correcting Injustice and unjust laws and it is consistent with an overall ethic that insists that harm come to no one and injury be avoided at all costs. civil disobedience, King argues, mirrors the greatness of Christianity and the philosophy of Jesus Christ. Jesus is a model for action and an inspiration to action. As Christ has suffered on the cross, so does the party engage in civil disobedience whose suffering portrays a passionate righteousness about the cause at hand and should be considered the model for human life and an inspiration for life.
For contemporary moralists, most of the dialogue and debate concerning these Troublesome questions usually invites a right stripped of traditional ethical reasoning. Surely arguments about rights have become almost dreary. In a word, there is a right to everything. Individualism has replaced all sensibility regarding the common good. There are no universals; no certitude and moral propositions; no moral code fixed and perennial. All of this has been replaced with the immediacy of any need and the winning of the moment. Today's rights are replaced with tomorrow's method of control. Wright's last as long as the next plea from a crying advocate. Of course, this approach is what gave us slavery. Instead of evaluating the practice of slavery and Universal moral terms, based upon a perennial notion of truth, History generates all the excuses of why we need slavery.
May 17, 2023
Highly helpful and very easy to read. Bless Charles Nemeth- wouldn’t have gotten through my final paper without him
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