A Study of Order:
Lessons for Historiography and Theology
BY JAKUB VOBORIL
The medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas and the Renaissance historian Niccolo
Machiavelli present radically different worldviews in terms of order and design. In his
treatment of the relationship between theology and the concept of law in the Summa Theologiae,
Aquinas paints a picture of the physical and moral universes as marked by divinely endowed
order. Where Aquinas saw natural order, however, Machiavelli saw natural chaos. He presents
a radical alternative to the Thomistic worldview by replacing divine order with the human
order enacted by worldly princes. Aquinas, of course, saw himself as a theologian whereas
Machiavelli viewed the world as a historian does. Taking these two scholars as archetypes of
their disciplines, they present a ready contrast between theology and history. At the same time,
the nuances of this contrast suggest that the “theological” and “historical” perspectives
complement each other with the theologian viewing the world in terms of divine agency and
the historian viewing the world in terms of human agency.
Aquinas gives his worldview clear expression in his treatment of law. 1 Before turning to
the different kinds of law, Aquinas offers a consideration of the nature of law in Question 90 of
the Summa Theologiae. He summarizes his conclusions in article 4: “Law is nothing else than a
certain promulgated ordinance of reason to the common good by one who has charge of the
Though I have chosen to treat the Thomistic conception of order through his discussion of law, Aquinas
also discusses this conception in his delineation of the so-called “four orders.” For a helpful discussion of that topic
see Germain Grisez, Beyond the New Theism (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 230-240.
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community.”2 Of these distinct features, two matter most for the project at hand. First, Aquinas
presents law as an “ordinance of reason.” This fact indicates that law creates a kind of rational
order whether in human actions, the physical world, or reality itself. Second, law comes from
one who has “charge of the community.” If law governs reality itself, as Aquinas will suggest
below, that law could only come from one who has charge of the whole of reality. Aquinas
implies that if reality has legal order, only its governor could give that order. From a Christian
viewpoint, only God could give that order.
These intimations about the nature of order in reality receive confirmation in Question
91 of the Summa on the different kinds of law. Relying on arguments developed earlier in the
Summa, Aquinas remarks, “But it is clear, supposing the world to be governed by divine
providence, as was proved in Part I, that the whole community of the universe is governed by
divine reason.”3 This law Aquinas calls the eternal law. In this explanation, Aquinas reaffirms
the rational and divine characteristics of this law; each of these features matter. The rational
nature of this order means that human beings, as rational creatures, can understand the order in
reality. An order to reality would do little work for Aquinas if human beings could not
somehow grasp that order. The reference to a divine origin makes clear that the universe does
not ultimately derive its order from itself or from the human mind but from God himself.
While the passage from Aquinas above might suggest that humans have no
participation in the ordering of reality, a return to his treatment of law dispels that notion. Just
after the discussion of eternal law, Aquinas turns in article 2 to natural law. In his general
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1–2, 90–94 in Selected Writings, trans. Ralph McInerny (London:
Penguin, 1998), 617.
3 Ibid., 618.
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response to the objections against the notion of natural law, he notes that a “rational creature”
can “participate” in the “eternal law” such that “he has a natural inclination to the fitting act
and end. Such a participation in eternal law in the rational creature is called natural law.”4 Two
helpful points follow from this passage. First, natural law participates in eternal law. In that
case, while humans have a role in the order of reality, they do not create that order
independently of God. Humans help to order reality, but natural law still derives from God as
its ultimate source. Second, natural law directs “to the fitting act and end.” Natural law has an
overtly practical status as a guide to human action. In short, natural law means ethical
guidance of divine origin.5
In summary, the Thomistic worldview has a legal order both in reality and in human
action that derives from God. Humans participate in this order but do not create or originate
the natural law, much less the eternal law. In contrast to this ordered Thomistic world,
Machiavelli paints a radically different picture in The Prince. While Machiavelli will ultimately
allow for a human construction of order in reality, the first move he makes away from the kind
of worldview that Aquinas offers comes through a demolition project. Before erecting human
order, Machiavelli eliminates the concept of knowable divine order.
The concept of fortune provides the engine which drives Machiavelli’s march of
disorder across reality. Translator Leo Paul S. de Alvarez has suggested that fortune plays a
central role in the plot of The Prince. He writes, “One of the great questions, and it is perhaps the
Ibid., 620.
To suggest that a theological viewpoint will see natural law as having divine origin is not to imply that a
person could not have grounds to accept natural law independent of the existence of God. On this point see Robert
P. George, “Natural Law,” Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 31, No. 1 (Winter 2008): 176–184,
http://www.harvard-jlpp.com/archive.
4
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great question, which Machiavelli raises in The Prince, is the extent to which fortune can be
mastered.”6 Rather than attempting to offer an answer, or Machiavelli’s answer, to this
question, I want to use this suggestion as a starting point to examine the extent to which fortune
defines the worldview offered in The Prince. If fortune provides the defining feature of The
Prince—and of its worldview—that fact would indicate the extent to which Machiavelli
repudiates the concept of knowable natural order instituted by God.
Machiavelli first introduces the concept of fortune already in the “Epistle Dedicatory” in
connection with his own station in life. At the end of the letter, he writes about personally
suffering a “malignity of fortune.”7 In this passage, Machiavelli blames his own state on the
machinations of fortune. His statement implies that fortune functions as not merely an abstract
concept, but a reality that he has experienced personally. He tempts his readers to imagine that
some personal experience, rather than history or reason, might have led him to give fortune
such a large place in his worldview. However, the text alone cannot adequately support that
hypothesis. In any case, he certainly attributes his own place in life to fortune, and thereby,
introduces the general idea that fortune can make or break a human being.
The most frequent usage of fortune in Machiavelli appears in his constant contrasting
and pairing of fortune with virtue. He offers this contrast countless times throughout The Prince
as the two ways that a human being can rule.8 In order to use this contrast to explain the
importance Machiavelli places on fortune, the enigmatic concept of virtue needs clarification.
On this concept, Alvarez provides helpful elucidation. Commenting on a particularly confusing
Leo Paul S. de Alvarez, introduction to The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli, trans. Leo Paul S. de Alvarez
(Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 1989), xvii.
7 Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince., trans. Leo Paul S. de Alvarez (Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 1989), 2.
8 See Machiavelli, The Prince, 5, 32, 42, 52, 66, 83, 152, 153.
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usage of virtue in Chapter VIII and contrasting two meanings of virtue as both manliness and
moral rectitude, he suggests, “The simple conclusion is that Machiavelli deliberately wishes to
confuse the two meanings.”9 While I accept this conclusion about the passage in question and
about The Prince as a whole, the context of the contrast between fortune and virtue seems to
make clear that in those passages, Machiavelli only intends the meaning which Alvarez
describes as “the older sense which is connected with manliness, of having strength of body and
mind, and especially of being able to acquire and keep a state.”10 This concept seems to fit prima
facie better with the contrast between fortune and virtue as ways of ruling. In the contrast
between fortune and virtue, virtue refers especially to the ability of a prince to rule through his
own skill.
If virtue, in the relevant passages, means something like rule imposed by human skill,
then fortune must mean rule imposed independent of human skill. By presenting only these
two alternatives, Machiavelli suggests that the only two possibilities for imposing rule on
reality come from human skill or from the randomness of fate. In short, neither the concept of
divine order, nor any notion that God could impose order on reality, enters the picture. Indeed,
the nature of fortune raises questions about whether a person can intelligently speak of fortune
imposing order on reality. Fortune can certainly place princes in positions of power, as
Machiavelli suggests. Whatever method fortune might have to its madness, however, lies
beyond the ability of humans to grasp. Fortune may impose order or rule in some sense, but
certainly not in the sense of rational order. Independent of human action, a world of fortune
9
De Alvarez, introduction to The Prince, xx.
Ibid., xix.
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means a world where no rational order exists. Independent of human action, a world of fortune
means a world marked by chaos.11
Despite the emphasis that Machiavelli places on fortune, he does not contend that reality
has no order at all. Instead, he suggests that order enters reality through human action. He
explicitly affirms the ability of humankind to create order when he writes in Chapter XXV,
“[F]ortune is the arbiter of half our actions, but . . . she lets the other half, or nearly that, be
governed by us.”12 In this way, he introduces the possibility of rational order in nature by
human means after having denied the existence of divine order. As Alvarez aptly notes, “The
need to establish method means that man, through his reason, must impose an order where
there is none.”13 The order reality possesses does not exist ready-made for human beings, but
must enter reality through their actions.
Though de Alvarez seems to share the interpretation of Machiavelli developed above, he
seems to back away from its implications elsewhere. He suggests that some kind of order must
exist independent of humankind. Specifically, he writes, “Nature herself presents men with an
order capable of being understood and followed. But the state is whatever is willed by the
prince—it is whatever he pleases.”14 Insofar as de Alvarez intends to suggest any kind of
cooperation between humankind and nature, he misreads Machiavelli. First, even if
Machiavelli admitted that some kind of divine order exists, to claim that order as knowable by
humankind is an altogether separate claim as argued above. Second, the text would not seem to
For a valuable discussion of fortune in Machiavelli’s works see Oded Balaban, “The Human Origins of
Fortuna in Machiavelli’s Thought,” History of Political Thought 11, No. 1 (Spring 1990): 21–36,
http://philo.haifa.ac.il/staff/balaban.htm. See especially his discussion of the views of Leo Strauss on p. 25, Neal Wood
on p. 26, Hanna Pitkin on p. 27–28, and Balaban’s own view on p. 29–36.
12 Machiavelli, The Prince, 146.
13 De Alvarez, introduction to The Prince, xvi.
14 Ibid., xviii.
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support Alvarez’s claim. In Chapter XXV Machiavelli writes, “[F]ortune is a woman, and if one
wishes to keep her down, it is necessary to beat her and knock her down.”15 Setting aside the
gender-relation implications of this comment, Machiavelli paints a picture of the dominance of
nature rather than cooperation. He presents nature as hostile to humankind and demands an
equally hostile reaction from his readers.
Just as Machiavelli assigns the prince the power to create order in reality, he seems to
suggest that moral order derives, not from an order intrinsic to reality, but from the needs of the
ruler. Two examples make this point clear. First, Machiavelli writes in Chapter XVIII, “A
prudent lord, therefore, cannot, nor ought he, observe faith when such observance turns against
him.”16 In other words, a prince should keep promises when that action will benefit him, but
should break promises when keeping them would harm him. In a similar vein, he writes in
Chapter XVII, “[O]ne would wish to be both [loved] and [feared], but since it is difficult to mix
these qualities together, it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one of the two must be
lacking.”17 In this passage, Machiavelli does not unequivocally endorse love or fear but merely
maintains that the prince should value these traits in accordance with their likely benefit to the
prince as the subsequent diatribe against human nature makes clear. Moral virtues derive their
worth instrumentally from the efforts of the prince to create order in reality. Though human
beings do not directly and spontaneously create moral values, these values are contingent upon
the human actions of the prince. Thus, moral order ultimately derives from a human source
rather than a transcendent divine source.
Machiavelli, The Prince, 149.
Ibid., 108.
17 Ibid., 101.
15
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The contrast between the Thomistic and Machiavellian worldviews could and does
derive from any number of differences between Aquinas and Machiavelli. Aquinas represents
one of the highest achievements of medieval political thought, while Machiavelli finds himself
squarely in the Renaissance. Aquinas lived his life in service to the Church, while Machiavelli
devoted his life to the state. The difference that most readily accounts for their diverse
worldviews, however, stems from the fact that Aquinas studied reality as a theologian, while
Machiavelli studied as a historian. By examining the implications of these distinct ways of
studying reality, Aquinas and Machiavelli provide a compelling case for seeing these methods
as complementary rather than exclusionary and teach a compelling lesson on the respective
limits of theology and history.
The way Aquinas saw the world stemmed directly from the fundamental implications of
theological study. Aquinas views order primarily as the product of divine institution rather
than human creation, though he does not deny the participation of humankind in the order of
reality through natural law. This fact makes sense because theologians must take God as the
starting point of their studies, and an appreciation of God as the origin of reality requires a real
appreciation of the implications of the divine activity of sustaining reality. Philosophertheologian Germain Grisez demonstrates this point clearly in his work on proving the existence
of God. He writes, “Possibly there is something—call it ‘God’ for short—which has what it
takes to make everything which happens happen.”18 For a theologian, divine order need not
rest on some kind of scientific proof that identifies an event as an empirical effect and God as
the empirical first cause of the effect, but God must serve as the source of all reality because of
18
Grisez, Beyond the New Theism, 53.
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his very nature. To study reality theologically and not take God as the ultimate source of order
would require a kind of internal contradiction. In other words, Aquinas could not have done
otherwise than see the world as divinely ordered.19
Machiavelli, of course, studied reality from the perspective of history, and that
commitment too has implications for his view of the world. Historian John Lewis Gaddis has
suggested, “The recognition of human insignificance did not, as one might have expected,
enhance the role of divine agency in explaining human affairs: it had just the opposite effect. It
gave rise to a secular consciousness that, for better or for worse, placed the responsibility for
what happens in history squarely on the people who live through history.”20 While not
claiming to identify the intention of the author, I suggest that readers can take Gaddis’s
statement in two ways. We may take Gaddis to suggest that a historical worldview must deny
the existence of divine providence. This view, however, oversteps the boundaries of proper
historical study. History cannot prove or disprove God, or His providence, because His acts of
providence do not refer to mere historical facts. For example, history cannot claim to disprove
events like the Resurrection of Jesus or the Incarnation because these events do not refer to
purely historical facts. As Roch Kereszty writes, “The virginal conception itself is not a
historically verifiable datum,” and clarifies, “Historical evidence, however, does not contradict
this affirmation of faith.” 21 In the case of the present study, historiography cannot disprove
divine order in reality or in morality because divine providence and natural law do not refer to
Though I speak of God as the “starting point” for theology, I do not mean to suggest that theologians have
to “assume” the existence of God. Theologians have used a variety of arguments to justify those assertions, but I
would suggest that theology proper only begins after that initial step of justifying the existence of God.
20 John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2002), 6–7.
21 Roch Kereszty, Jesus Christ: Fundamentals of Christology (Staten Island: St. Paul, 2002), 76; Ibid., 77.
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historical facts but to philosophical conclusions. To respond to these limitations with the
philosophical claim that all facts must be historical facts leads only to self-contradiction.
These reflections suggest a more fruitful way that the reader can understand Gaddis’s
claim. The reader may take Gaddis to mean that the study of divine existence and causes
belongs to a discipline outside of history. Historians do not study the way God may or may not
cause actions, but instead, the human and natural causes of events. With this view, the reader
could conclude that Machiavelli saw order as a human product because he studied reality in the
historical terms of human action. If historians attempt to explain reality by simply stating that
God ultimately causes everything, they provide no insight that theology could not have
provided. For that reason, historians properly choose to examine the human causes of events.
In this way, the two disciplines complement each other. To imagine otherwise confuses divine
and human causation. As Germain Grisez writes, “Almost inevitably, when one says that the
creator causes x, one imports into the meaning of ‘causes’ some property of some other
causality, for example, of causality through freedom. But there is no justification for doing
this.”22 Just as theologians ought to understand God as fundamentally different from all created
reality, they ought to understand divine causality as fundamentally different from any kind of
created causality like physical or the causality of free human choices. For theologians, or
historians, to confuse the two forms requires a fundamental misconception of God and divine
causality.
The avoidance of such a misconception represents but one of the lessons that comparing
Aquinas and Machiavelli can teach. Their worldviews, of course, differ on many counts.
22
Grisez, Beyond the New Theism, 279.
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Aquinas the theologian saw a world marked by divine order both in the whole of reality and in
the moral sphere. Machiavelli the historian saw a chaotic world “governed” by unknowable
fortune, but orderable by the power of the prince. Insofar as theologians and historians
recognize the limitations of the worldviews these scholars represent, they can fruitfully learn
from each other. To the extent that they refuse to recognize the legitimate autonomy of the
other, they distort the nature of reality.23
I am not necessarily claiming that the worldviews of Aquinas and Machiavelli, as they stand, are already
compatible. Both scholars may or may not have recognized the lesson which we can learn by comparing their
worldviews. I am inclined to think that Aquinas, or at least scholars like Grisez working in the Thomistic tradition,
would have space in their world for the legitimate autonomy of historical study. In contrast, I am skeptical that
Machiavelli merely intended to suggest that divine order lay outside of his competence rather than wholeheartedly
asserting that no divine order knowable by human beings exists. Nonetheless, I will not attempt here a formal
defense of this claim and am open to arguments to the contrary.
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