---
title: "Obedience and the Intellect"
date: 2021-07-14T22:42:57Z
tags: []
topics: ["philosophy", "theology"]
image: img/aquinas.jpg
draft: true
---

> "Obedience is first a virtue of the mind, rather than the will" ~Thomas Aquinas

This is the Platonic understanding of virtue. As Socrates often argued, once one knows the truth, one cannot help but move toward it. If you move away from it, you do not know it, but a semblance of it.

But there is a further implication. Truth is only available in dialectic, in which the commander and the commanded share the same knowledge of the truth. Obedience for its own sake (aka "blind obedience" ), therefore, is a similar form of corruption to willful rebellion.
