March 2, 2024

Aquinas in Alabama

On using and misusing medieval theology to attack reproductive rights

Modern Medieval

by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele

We wanted to draw your attention to the use of Thomas Aquinas within the recent court ruling that banned IVF in Alabama. The ruling, which you can read here, is a deeply theological document, with a long section on the meaning of "sanctity of life" parsed through Christian scripture and theology.

That's not unusual, unfortunately. What's more unusual is that one of the concurrent opinions, by the judge Tom Parker, cited the 13th-century theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas. What's even more unusual is that people are taking him to task for that reference, not relying on stereotypes about the backwards Middle Ages, but rather engaging specifically with what our sources actually say.

Here's an essay from Brian Lyman, a journalist actually in Alabama (this matters), the editor of the non-profit news site The Alabama Reflector, writing about Aquinas.

Parker [the judge] wasn’t writing about essence and existence. He was looking at Aquinas through Parker’s belief (as stated in his opinion) that “human beings bear God’s image from the moment of conception.”

Parker wrote that Aquinas “distinguished human life from other things God made, including nonhuman life, on the ground that man was made in God’s image.” The chief justice also noted Aquinas’ highly original view that murder is bad. All of this factored into Parker’s conclusion that “human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself.”

But the modern Thomas seems to have a more conservative view of what a fertilized human egg is than the medieval one. The theologian, citing Aristotle, wrote that “the fetus is an animal before becoming a man.”

In fact, Aquinas wrote at length in “Summa Contra Gentiles” about how a man couldn’t, uh, transmit a soul during conception.

“The human body, so far as it is in potentiality to the soul, as not yet having one, precedes the soul in time; it is, then, not actually human, but only potentially human,” he wrote.

Lyman then adds, importantly, that this clarity about life after conception from the medieval theologian doesn't mean that we have to view Aquinas outside the lens of his own time, writing, "Conservative Catholics, noting the church does not condone in vitro fertilization, might argue that a friar from the 1200s would not look kindly on abortion. That’s fair, considering that Aquinas, in his “oracular celibacy” (as the historian Barbara Tuchman put it), would not look kindly on a modern woman doing literally anything. (Even Victorian women would be on notice.)"

[Side note: Both medieval and Victorian women had sex and some of them really liked it and Victorians in general talked about sex a lot.]

Medieval attitudes on abortion and contraception, as discussed for example just after the Dobbs ruling (which cited medieval English law as a precedent), were no more simple than our own. A collection of medieval scholars wrote that medieval "laws related to pregnancy termination primarily protected those who were pregnant, allowing them legal recourse for attacks whose main damage was to themselves as well as the fetus."

So more of this kind of journalism, please, interrogating loose and often inaccurate claims of historical support, but taking the history on its own terms, rather than just trying to find our own reflection in medieval faces.

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