The Christological Prudence of the Natural Slave

Abstract

AbstractThe account of prudence found in Aquinas's Summa Theologiae and the Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics is bound up with his endorsement of Aristotle's notion of the Natural Slave in his Commentary on Aristotle's Politics. This connection not only hobbles his account of the virtue of prudence, but also weakens other areas of his theology, including his account of providence. A creative rereading of Aquinas's biblical commentaries, however, affords Aquinas the opportunity to correct himself. Aquinas's commentaries on Paul, especially the Commentary on Philippians, provide ample resources for doing so. The Christ hymn of Philippians 2:5-11 forms the cornerstone of a thoroughly Christological, even Apocalyptic, account of prudence, which overcomes the tensions in Aquinas's account of prudence resulting from his endorsement of natural slavery. This scriptural reformulation of prudence heightens the stress on exemplification even further and in so doing makes its exercise more conducive to peaceableness. Due to the political dimensions of prudence, these shifts have an ecclesiological dimension that reveals Aquinas's affinity with Giorgio Agamben's philosophical account of mendicant life.