The Household Is Not a Lesser City: What Philosophy Missed and What Aquinas Found

A woman at the hearth, and what philosophers missed

There is a painted hydria in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, dated 500–475 BCE, that shows a woman cooking while a young girl watches. No inscription tells us who they are. They are simply there, in the home, doing the work that kept the world alive. Philosophy, for most of its history, walked past them without stopping.

Sandrine Bergès, in her Aeon essay 'A philosophy of home,' makes the case that this was not accidental. The domestic sphere was cordoned off from serious philosophical inquiry not because it lacked complexity, but because the men who did philosophy also controlled the public spaces where philosophy happened — the agora, the academy, the symposium. The home was where their wives were. It was, by that very fact, beneath systematic thought. Bergès traces the long consequence of that decision: a philosophical tradition rich in theories of justice, virtue, and the good city, but nearly silent on the good household.

Her argument is correct as far as it goes. But it stops at the boundary of a tradition she does not examine — one that never had the luxury of ignoring the household because it staked its entire anthropology on what happens there.

What Aristotle got right and still got wrong

Aristotle did treat the household, of course. Politics Book I opens with it: the oikos as the first community, prior to the village, prior to the city. Bergès acknowledges this. But she also notes the severe limitation: for Aristotle, the household matters because it produces and sustains the citizens who will eventually participate in the polis. The wife, the child, the slave — they are economically and biologically necessary to the city, but philosophically interesting only insofar as they feed into it. The household is a vestibule, not a room.

Aquinas inherits the Aristotelian architecture and then does something to it that Aristotle could not have done. He inserts the household into a theological account of the human person, which means it must bear the full weight of what he says about persons. Each member of the household — wife, husband, child — is a being with an intellect directed toward truth and a will directed toward genuine goods. None of them is merely instrumental to anyone else's flourishing. The domus is not a vestibule to the civitas. It is itself an order of persons, and it falls under natural law precisely because natural law is not, in Aquinas, a list of prohibitions. It is the rational creature's participation in the eternal law, the deep structure of human nature as oriented toward goodness.[^1]

This is the move Bergès' essay does not make, and it changes the stakes considerably.

Natural law as the architecture of domestic life

The standard misreading of natural law treats it as a moral code handed down from outside — a set of rules the household must obey or face condemnation. But as Gabriel Zanotti observes in his commentary on the Summa Contra Gentiles, natural law in Aquinas is not primarily a body of norms. It is the orientation of human nature toward the cardinal virtues; the rules derive from the virtues, not the other way around.[^3] This reframes what it means to ask 'what is the household for?'

If the household is the primary site where persons first learn to love, first encounter authority and care, first discover what it means to give and receive — then it is not a lesser city. It is the school of virtue in its most elemental form. The child who grows up in a household ordered by justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude does not need to import those virtues from civic life. She has already begun to inhabit them at the kitchen table.[^2]

Bergès gestures toward something like this when she discusses feminist philosophers who have tried to rehabilitate domestic labor as morally serious work. She quotes Virginia Woolf and Iris Marion Young on the significance of homemaking as a practice. But the Catholic tradition goes further: it does not merely restore dignity to domestic labor; it gives the household an irreducibly personal ontology. The family is not a social institution that happens to be useful for child-rearing. It is, in the language of Familiaris Consortio, a 'domestic church' — a community of persons in which the theological virtues are first received and the natural virtues first practiced.

The heart as the first domestic space

Pope Francis, in Dilexit Nos, returns to the ancient and biblical figure of the heart as the locus of authentic human connection. 'A relationship not shaped by the heart,' he writes, 'is incapable of overcoming the fragmentation caused by individualism.'[^6] Two persons can share a roof, divide labor efficiently, and raise children adequately while remaining, in any deeper sense, strangers. What makes a household more than a logistics arrangement is the ordered interiority of its members — the capacity to receive one another, not merely to use one another.

This is why the Catholic tradition's account of the home is not primarily sociological but anthropological. The question is not 'what social functions does the household perform?' but 'what kind of persons does it form, and what kind of persons does it require?' Those two questions run together: a household cannot form persons in love unless it is already constituted by persons capable of love. The home is both school and proof of the interior life.

Bergès is right that philosophy has neglected this. She is also right that recovering it requires taking seriously the experience of those who actually did the domestic work — the women at the hearth, the mothers teaching children, the daughters watching and learning. But the recovery she calls for is not only a matter of philosophical equity, of granting domestic labor the same theoretical attention as civic virtue. It requires a deeper revision: acknowledging that the human person is not primarily a political animal who happens to be born into a family, but a familial animal whose capacity for political life depends on what first happened at home.

What the household demands of us now

Von Balthasar, writing on the social dimensions of Christian existence, observes that exterior goods — possessions, time, space — are not properly held for oneself alone, but are ordered to the common good, such that the one who holds them is ready to share.[^5] This is not a counsel of poverty but a description of how persons relate to one another when they take seriously the claim that the other is genuinely other — not a reflection of my needs, not an instrument of my projects, but a person with their own orientation toward goods I cannot fully possess for them.

In the household, this claim is inescapable. You cannot, over any sustained period, treat a spouse or child as an instrument without visible damage to both of you. The household is the place where the pretense of pure self-sufficiency breaks down first and most completely. Aristotle knew this; he just thought the philosophically interesting response to it happened later, in the polis. Aquinas knew it too, and thought the philosophically interesting response to it happened inside the home itself, in the slow formation of persons who learn, by practice and by witness, to love well.

Sandrine Bergès has done real work in recovering the household as a subject for philosophy. The tradition she has less access to suggests that the household was never merely a subject. It was, and is, the first form of the city — not because the city absorbs it, but because without it the city has no persons left to govern.

References

[^1]: Moral (René Simon), 'la ley natural... deriva en primer lugar de la ley eterna.'

[^2]: 'A Theologian Teaches Psychology/Therapy Students about Integrating Thomistic Natural Law Philosophy,' Segment 4: Law as Instruction and Guide — 'natural law represents God's hardwiring of human nature toward goodness.'

[^3]: Gabriel Zanotti, Comentario a la Suma Contra Gentiles — 'la ley natural no es en Santo Tomás un conjunto de normas... sino porque Santo Tomás está pensando en las virtudes cardinales.'

[^5]: Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Christian State of Life, p. 75 — 'he ought not to possess exterior objects solely for himself, but for the common good so that he is ready to share them.'

[^6]: Pope Francis, Dilexit Nos — 'A relationship not shaped by the heart is incapable of overcoming the fragmentation caused by individualism.'