La dignidad humana en Tomás de Aquino

Abstract

2472

The notion of personal dignity was widely developed in the late Middle Ages. The labour of the authors of the Modern Age consisted in making this legacy more operative. Dignity came with the notion of person who is a being of a rational nature characterized by its incommunicability and dignity. The nominalists (Duns, Ockham, Gerson, Conrado or Biel) made, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a rather abusive use of the person in law and in comparison with them, Aquino appears to be less 'personalistic'. It turns out that Thomas Aquinas had a superior jurisprudential training to those of these other authors and did not consider it appropriate to solve a problem by claiming the qualitas personalis when that subject could be decided with the instruments of the law. In addition (and this would be a valuable clarification) he does not regard the person -with his consciousness and awareness- as an isolated being, but rather describes both realities as Cum alio scientia: man is formed in his own being and there is cum Aliis. In any case, the notion of the human being with the equal dignity inherent to every rational being is already fully present in Aquino. But it is present in the way that we could call 'jurisprudential', in the way of the most classic jurists. Surely D. Alvaro d'Ors would agree very much with this way of presenting personality in law.

Keywords

dignity, person, rationality, incommunicability, sociability