An angelic answer to the cost of living crisis: Thomas Aquinas

The cost of living crisis calls for remedial intervention. On that much there is agreement. But what those measures should look like and who should benefit from them is up in the air. Party political considerations will colour recommendations and possibly compromise them. To tap an advisor unaffiliated with any particular political faction makes sense.

One could do worse than turn to St Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century theologian. He came to be known as doctor angelicus, “the angelic doctor”, a reputation that chimes with the popular legend that peak medieval theology consisted in counting the number of angels that would fit on a pinhead. Aquinas’ main work, the Summa theologiae, debunks that urban myth. One of its chapters is focused on welfare: why to pay it, to what end, how much, and for how long.

His starting point is an examination of why welfare is an issue in the first place.

Agreed, anyone who is rich has a right to enjoy their wealth because “it is lawful for everyone to use and to keep what is his own”. But “giving alms is a generous gesture (actus liberalitatis)” that gives satisfaction to donors too. And besides, welfare payments are a corrective of a certain market failure, namely when wealth is concentrated in few hands and does not trickle down. The blame for this market failure falls squarely on the rich, because they have to answer for “the money of the needy that you have buried underground”. Welfare transfers are a market corrective in a society where riches are hoarded.

How should welfare work?

Welfare may take many forms. Food and housing are only two. But welfare should supply needs (necessitates), not riches (divitiae), and should be capped in two ways.

First, hand-outs should be restricted to cases of acute emergency and relieve only dire need (extrema necessitas). Aquinas did not hold with doling out open-ended welfare: “Nor need he consider every case that may possibly occur in the future, for this would be to think about the morrow, which Our Lord forbade us to do (Matthew 6:34).” Second, welfare should not reduce a donor’s long term assets and jeopardise their duties to their family or even their right “to live in keeping with one’s station and the ordinary occurrences of life: for no man ought to live unbecomingly.”

Thomas Aquinas warned against turning welfare into social engineering. Such attempts may end in another market failure, since welfare that goes over and beyond bare needs (superexcedit necessitatem) may overindulge a beneficiary. Aquinas described this state with a term, luxuriare, that in contemporary jargon would come close to “welfare queen”.

Thomas Aquinas’ approach to welfare was not misty-eyed.

He liked to cite Aristotle (“the philosopher”) when setting out verities that transcended doctrinal disputes and did so too in this connection. He quoted the Greek pagan’s adage that to a person out of pocket, “money is better than philosophy”. But he was clear that market failures on the supply as well as the demand side could obstruct the provision of welfare — when the rich hoard their wealth or when the poor rely on hand-outs to fund a way of life.

Anyone wishing to engage with particulars of Aquinian good sense (recta ratio) may be referred to the relevant chapter on welfare (aka alms-deeds) here in the Summa theologiae.

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