St. Thomas on why hierarchy is good for everyone

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Aug 11, 2025

In a recent article on celibacy and marriage, I wrote:

Satan’s greatest victory in the modern age has been to convince people that hierarchy is oppressive and that what is higher threatens the dignity of what is lower. ... We have to teach people that hierarchy is willed by God, that it is good and loving and generous, that what is higher indeed safeguards, includes, and pours down blessings on what is lower.

After writing that, I came across two passages in St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa contra gentiles which shed light on this point. First, in Book 3, Chapter 71, discussing the ways of divine providence, he explains why perfection in diversity requires inequality among things:

Perfect goodness would not be found in things unless there were degrees of goodness, namely, so that there be some things better than others: else all the possible degrees of goodness would not be fulfilled, nor would any creature be found like to God in the point of being better than others. Moreover, this would do away with the chief beauty in things if the order resulting from distinction and disparity were abolished; and what is more, the absence of inequality in goodness would involve the absence of multitude, since it is by reason of things differing from one another that one is better than another: for instance, the animate than the inanimate, and the rational than the irrational. Consequently, if there were absolute equality among things there would be but one created good, which is clearly derogatory to the goodness of the creature.

But it is in chapter 77 that St. Thomas gets to the essence of hierarchy. For hierarchy does not just mean that some things are better than others, but that there is an ordered relation between higher and lower. If some things were simply better than others, but there were no relation between them, this diversity would produce dissonance rather than harmony. In order for inequality to produce closeness rather than estrangement between unequal things, a particular kind of relationship must be established between higher and lower goods:

Suitable order is a proof of perfect providence, for order is the proper effect of providence. Now suitable order implies that nothing be allowed to be out of order. Consequently, the perfection of divine providence requires that it should reduce the excess of certain things over others to a suitable order. And this is done by allowing those who have less to benefit from the superabundance of others. Since, then, the perfection of the universe requires that some share more abundantly in the divine goodness, as we proved above, the perfection of divine providence demands that the execution of the divine government be fulfilled by those things which have the larger share of divine goodness.

Thus, the truth that authority is meant to benefit what is under it, rather than merely dominate others, is not merely a paradox introduced by Christian revelation, but also a truth of natural law. This is why I like to say that hierarchy is inherently inclusive.