The Premises of Jesuit Political Thought

Jesuits generally (like their Thomist predecessors and teachers) predicated their political reflection on two fundamental premises. The first was the complementarity of reason and revelation, so that although revelation might transcend what reason alone could attain to, it never contradicted it. ‘‘Reason’’ was a catchall term that meant reasonableness or common sense, the authority of secular philosophers (in ethics and politics Aristotle and Cicero, in particular) and of Roman law, or inference from premises to conclusions, whether these premises were necessary truths, because they were true by definition or self-evident, or contingent and dependent on experience and prudence. Revelation meant not only Scripture, but also ‘‘positive theology’’, which means the teachings of the church fathers, general councils of the church and authoritative theologians, and papal doctrinal pronouncements. These together were described generically as “tradition(s).’’

Jesuits also derived from the ‘‘schools’’ (the medieval universities) the syllogistic ideal: reasoning should be from general principles (as major premises), through minor premises, to conclusions as certain and compelling as the principles from which they were derived. The active life that the Society emphatically embraced, even though many of its members were noted contemplatives, aimed at the practical realization of virtue and pietas. Here the certainty of the demonstrative sciences (including theology, although it took its first principles from revelation) was not always possible, however much moral theology and casuistry tried to narrow down the areas of uncertainty. General and incontrovertible principles of morality (such as that man ought to pursue the good and eschew what is evil; or that the greater evil is to be avoided), or natural right (or law) principles such as to harm no one, to give to each their due and to keep promises, were insufficient to guide conduct. What mattered was clarity about the means to the good, and about which goods to choose and evils to avoid, in particular circumstances. For this, the indispensable requirement was prudence, a virtue Jesuits greatly valued both in their own order and in politics, though not (as Aristotle had done) as the principal virtue: for Jesuits it could not outrank justice among the practical virtues, let alone the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity.