Thomas Aquinas — "The natural order of things requires that women be subject to men."
The natural order of things requires that women be subject to men.
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"Good can exist without evil, whereas evil cannot exist without good."
"The perfection of human life consists in the knowledge of God."
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"It is impossible for any created intellect to comprehend God."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
This quote asserts that a natural, rational hierarchy places men in authority over women. Drawing on Aristotelian biology—which classified women as less fully rational—and medieval Christian theology, it argues male dominance is not merely cultural but embedded in the structure of creation itself. The claim is that proper order, not arbitrary custom or force, makes female subordination appropriate and necessary for a well-functioning society and household.
Relevance to Thomas Aquinas
Aquinas spent his life reconciling Aristotelian philosophy with Catholic doctrine in works like the Summa Theologica. Aristotle had classified women as biologically deficient, and Aquinas absorbed this into his natural law framework. As a Dominican friar teaching at Paris and Naples, he constructed hierarchical frameworks for all reality—God over creation, reason over appetite, man over woman—treating ordered subordination as divinely rational, not unjust, consistent with his broader synthesis of faith and reason.
The era
In 13th-century Europe, rigid hierarchy structured everything—serfs beneath lords, laity beneath clergy, women beneath men. Women were barred from universities, legal personhood, and Church office. Canon law and civil codes codified female subordination as both natural and scriptural. Aquinas was formalizing philosophically what society already practiced legally, embedding existing gender arrangements into systematic theology that would influence Catholic doctrine and Western legal thinking for centuries afterward.
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