Justice in the Social Thought of Medieval Christian Philosophers

Justice is known to be the virtue of social structures and institutions in modern social thought. In classical thought, justice was the sum of all virtues or the highest of them, and at the same time it was a virtue for society and a virtue for man. Evaluating the conceptual and functional evolution of justice can be a criterion for measuring the impact of various factors such as religion, culture, politics and economics in comparison with justice. The aim of the present study is to examine the concept of justice in the social thought of medieval Christian philosophers and seeks to restore the concept and function of justice in medieval philosophy in relation to social institutions. Accordingly, by emphasizing the social thought of five famous philosophers of this period, aspects of the importance of the concept of justice have been explored. Among Christian philosophers, Augustine was regarded as the initiator of Neoplatonic philosophy and Thomas Aquinas as the culmination of Aristotelian Peripatetic school. In addition, Anselm of Canterbury was regarded as a prominent Christian theologian, Meister Eckhart as a leading figure in Christian mysticism, and finally Marsilius of Padua as a revisionist political philosopher of ecclesiastical world domination. In this study, using descriptive-analytical method, it is concluded that the thinkers influenced by Neoplatonic thought, namely Augustine, Anselm and Eckhart, mainly considered justice from an individual perspective and Aristotelian thinkers, namely Aquinas and Marcellus, considered justice from a social perspective. In order to achieve that, they have considered the formation of the government and the centrality of the law necessary.