Verbal Injuries, Honor, and Custom: Towards a Thomistic Sociological Synthesis

Abstract: Thomas Aquinas teaches that custom ( consuetudo ) is remarkably powerful: custom can blot out secondary precepts of the natural law, can condition the quality and effectiveness of positive law, and can have the force of law itself. And yet, for all the power admitted to it, custom is remarkably undertheorized by Thomas, pointing to the need for a Thomistic sociological synthesis. Considering the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu as a candidate for such a synthesis, this article identifies promising conceptual “grafting points” in the rootstock of Thomistic moral theory and the branches of Bourdieu’s sociological theory especially by considering Thomas’s account of the goods of recognition harmed by verbal injuries. For Thomas, reviling, detraction, gossip, and derision are verbal injuries that harm a person’s goods of honor, reputation, friendship, and the glory of a good conscience. These goods are socially constituted and in turn constitute social structure in a manner like Bourdieu’s forms of capital. This conceptual similarity is explored to sketch the outlines of a Thomistic sociological synthesis along Bourdieusian lines, arguing that the power of custom can be explained in part by how customary acts of honoring and shaming establish the conditions according to which goods of recognition can be obtained.