Thomas Aquinas

St. Thomas Aquinas



St. Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican monk who believed that law mirrored a natural world order made known to humans by their own process of reasoning and by the divine revelation of Christian prophets. This view, along with the influence of Plato and Aristotle, helped Aquinas to develop his own moral theory and philosophy of life. This allowed him to respond to the relationship between natural law and human law which Aquinas put together as this; ‘every human law has just so much of the character of law as it is derived from the law of nature. But if in any point it differs from the law of nature, it is no longer a law but a corruption of law ’(Aquinas,17).

Aquinas was the most famous exponent of the Natural Law ethic. Aquinas developed Aristotle's ideas and argued that the natural purpose of the world is found in God. Humans are free beings and are capable of choosing to follow the natural law of God which is understood through reason. H...