Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 6, No. 3 (2008): 483–490

483

A “Truer” History: Reflections on
Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses:
The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony
S AMUEL B YRSKOG
University of Lund
Sweden

I N HIS BOOK Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness
Testimony, Richard Bauckham presents the most recent, comprehensive
account of the origins and development of the Jesus tradition.1 Focusing
on eyewitness testimony as the decisive key-category, he has convincingly
demonstrated the one-sidedness of the old form-critical approach to
tradition and transmission and confirmed the view that history was not
mediated and censored by the collective forces of the early Church but
communicated by eyewitnesses who had been deeply involved in the
decisive Jesus event. Instead of arguing about details of Bauckham’s use of
the sources, it might be of more interest here to ask about the broader
ramifications and implications of his investigation. I have elsewhere
discussed some aspects of his book that relate to the eyewitnesses as interpreters of the past.2 Here I take the opportunity to reflect somewhat
further on the notions of historical truth that arise from his proposal that
history and theology meet in the Jesus of testimony.
Oral History as Truer
Testimony is a slippery category when it comes to questions of historical truth. Paul Thompson, a leading expert on modern oral history,
discusses the reliability of the evidence of oral history. “Oral evidence,”
1 Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses:The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony

(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006).
2 See my review essay in Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus (forthcoming).

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he says,“by transforming the ‘objects’ of study into ‘subjects’, makes for a
history which is not just richer, more vivid, and heart-rending, but truer.”
In what way is it truer? Thompson is not so much concerned about
the brute facts of history as the social contexts of those who convey the
past to the present, and he thinks of historical truth more in terms of the
thoughts and emotions of the eyewitness in her or his present social
setting than in terms of what actually happened. Oral evidence from
eyewitnesses is truer because it represents better than the distanced historian how history was experienced by those who were involved. Eyewitness testimony is thus an intriguing category for history and theology,
being located between the past and the present, and mediating between
them in a way which shapes the facts of history into something that
connects the past to the present.3
The “Truth” of Ancient Historians
In antiquity, no one was more concerned about eyewitness testimony and
historical truth than the historians. An adequate appreciation of the role
of eyewitness testimony in early Christianity therefore requires a full
picture of its role among the historians, in particular its relation to the old
debate concerning historical truth and falsehood. A historian such as
Polybius emphasized historical truth but was keenly aware that there
were several other historians who performed their task differently. In
polemical fashion he stressed the importance of truth.“For when one or
two lies are found in the writings, and these prove to be deliberate ones,
it is evident that nothing of the things said by such an author is any
longer certain or reliable” (The Histories, 12.25.2). He wants others to
apply the same strict criteria when they evaluate his own work (ibid.,
16.20.8; 29.12.12).
Bauckham is aware that not all historians lived up to the ideals of, for
instance, Thucydides, Polybius, Josephus, and Tacitus (pp. 8–9). But the
debate was more intense than merely a failure among some historians to
do what other good historians did. They were accused of being liars. A
few decades after Polybius’s emphatic words about the truth of history,
Cicero calls Herodotus the father of history, but not without a sarcastic
nuance (De legibus, 1.1.5). About a century later, in an odd writing,
Plutarch expresses his disgust against Herodotus’s “fictions and fabrications” (De malignitate Herodoti, 854f). Tertullian, another century later, is
upset about Tacitus’s aspirations on Christians and Jews and calls him
3 The Voice of the Past: Oral History, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000),

117.

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“that most articulate of liars” (Apologia, 16.3).This critique was not always
merely a sporadic mistrust towards separate statements. Seneca, the stoic
philosopher, expresses at some length his skepticism towards all historians.“It is no great effort to destroy the authority of Ephorus,” he claims.
The reason is simple:“he is a historian” (Quaestiones naturales, 7.16.1). He
confronts the practice of history as mere entertainment and accuses all
historians of lying:
Some [historians] win approval by relating the incredible, and a reader,
who would go and do something else if he were led through ordinary
things, they excite by means of the marvelous. Some are credulous,
some are negligent. On some falsehood creeps unawares, some it
pleases; the former do not avoid it, the latter desire it.What the whole
tribe has in common is this: it does not think its own work can achieve
approval and popularity unless it sprinkles that work with falsehood.
(Ibid., 7.16.1–2)

As it appears, at the time of Seneca several popular and sensational
historians made extensive use of rhetorically beautiful and persuasive
strategies, to the extent that the reporting of what had happened became
secondary.The stories about the past were entertaining configurations of
what was seen as rhetorically plausible. To some this was good history,
even true history; to some it was a lie.
Speaking the Truth and Speaking Persuasively
Where should we, according to Bauckham, locate the Gospels and the
eyewitnesses of early Christianity in this spectrum of discussion? In what
sense is the history they depict true? It is not unlikely that the Gospel
writers were aware of the debate indicated by Seneca and purposely
composed their writings in relation to it.The old tension between speaking the truth and speaking persuasively was not only a matter of debate
between philosophers and sophists, as in Plato’s Gorgias and Phaidros and
other writings, but had to do also with how to relate to and communicate the past. The development towards the rhetorization of history is
intensified when we approach the skeptical Seneca and the Gospel writers.There are fragments which indicate that two well-known rhetoricians
of the first century B.C., Caecilius of Calacre and Theodorus of Gadara,
composed handbooks in how to write history.4 In Livy’s account of
Roman history the rhetorization of history reached a climax. It is not by
accident that Quintilian praised him for the eloquence of the speeches
4 Felix Jacoby, ed., Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (Berlin: Weidmann, and

Leiden: Brill, 1923–58), §§183 F 2 and 850 T 1.

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and the representation of the emotions (Institutio oratoria, 10.1.101). Livy
regarded history writing as a rhetorical pursuit, aiming to make the story
of Rome more readable and persuasive than anyone else had yet done. A
true story was a story with a convincing narrative. Livy was extreme, but
he was not alone. Quintilian advised aged lawyers who were trained and
experienced in the art of oratory to spend their time with, for instance,
writing history (ibid., 12.11.4). For Quintilian history writing was a
subsection of rhetoric (ibid., 10.1.31).
Cicero had set the tone. Things that concerned history should be
expressed in the manner of Isocrates and Theopompus (Orat., 61.207).
Only the voice of a skilled orator will bring immortality to history (De
oratore, 2.9.36). He returns to the issue several times in De oratore: “What
kind of an orator, how great a master of speech, do you think should
write history?” (De oratore, 2.12.51) “[D]o you see how great a task
history is for an orator?” (De oratore, 2.15.62) In De legibus, 1.2.5, he tries
to convince Atticus to write history:“[N]ow, you are certainly able to do
this, since, as you have at least usually believed, this kind of work is closest to oratory.”A good story becomes truly interesting when it is presented
in the form of a persuasive narrative.
The rhetoricians have recommendations which could easily be misunderstood. In De oratore, 2.7.30, Cicero claims, with the voice of Antonius,
that rhetoric depends on falsehood. The activity of an orator has to do
with opinion, he says. Speakers discuss matters of which they might be
ignorant and maintain different opinions on identical issues in order to
argue their case. It is permitted, he says in Brutus, 11.42, to lie in order to
say something clever. In De inventione, 1.21.30, he expresses his view as to
how the orator should employ the material to his own benefit:
Therefore, to avoid this fault [viz., to help the opponent], the speaker
must twist everything to the advantage of his case, by passing over those
things that contradict it which can be passed over, by touching lightly on
what must be mentioned, by telling his own story carefully and clearly.

Even for Quintilian the goal of narration was to convince the audience rather than to inform them accurately about the matter at hand. In
front of the judge the lawyer should not narrate like a witness but like an
advocate (Institutio oratoria, 4.2.109). Depending on one’s point of view,
it might be necessary to make a murder appear impetuous or the opposite (ibid., 4.2.52). Points can be denied, added, altered, or omitted
according to what is considered most persuasive (ibid., 4.2.67). Entire
fabrications can, if necessary, be employed,“for it is sometimes permitted

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also for a philosopher to tell even a lie” (ibid., 2.17.27). If this does not
help, he continues, if there is no other way the judge will be led to justice,
the orator should try to excite his passions. All that is said should be
presented in such a manner that it wins belief.
The influence of rhetoric on history writing had aroused the old
tension between speaking the truth and speaking persuasively. There is
also another side to it. The rhetoricians sometimes indicate how to
balance the intricate relation between speaking the truth and speaking
persuasively.The orator, says Quintilian, should build his speech on a kind
of learning which is similar to the one of the historians, because they
have the advantage “derived from knowledge of fact and precedent”
(ibid., 10.1.34). Quintilian therefore gives detailed recommendations
concerning how one should interrogate witnesses and evaluate their
testimony according to their character, motives, and sources (ibid.,
5.7.9–32). Cicero reflects an awareness of special rules for history writing. In Ad familiares, 5.12.3, he asks Lucceius to write favorably of him
and enhance his merits even to exaggeration and bestow on them love a
little more than truth permits. Since Lucceius is involved in the work of
history, Cicero feels obliged to ask him in that respect to disregard the
laws of history. A few months later, in De oratore, 2.15.62, he praises the
art of history and explains that although it does not have a separate treatment in the rhetorical handbooks, everyone knows about its rules:
For who does not know that the first law of history is not daring to say
anything false, next, not daring to refrain from saying anything true, that
as you write there should be no suspicion of prejudice, nor bias?

This interplay between impartial reports and rhetorically embellished
accounts surfaced among the historians. Already Thucydides’s criteria of
reporting speeches according to what seemed appropriate or necessary or
what was actually or truly (aletheo
˜ s)˜ said added the criterion of truth as a
participial clause that expresses a concessional circumstance of conforming the speeches to the situation (History of the Peloponnesian War, 1.22.1).
Much later we find an interesting example of how this might have
looked. Tacitus gives his version of Claudius’s oration in favor of the
admission of Gallic nobles into the Senate (Annals, 11.24). In comparison with the account of the same speech on the bronze table from
Lyons,5 it is evident that he strongly rearranges and condenses the speech
in order to sharpen its rhetorical argumentation, but a kernel of material
5 Hermann Dessau, ed., Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae, 3 vols (Berlin: Weidmann,

1892–1916), §212.

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remains the same.The pastness of the speech was not insignificant to the
rhetorical concern of Tacitus.
Eyewitness Testimony between the Past and the Present
In what way, then, is history truer when we approach it through the stories
of the eyewitnesses? I have repeated and somewhat expanded what I have
said elsewhere about historians and eyewitness testimony in order to
show the complexity of the ways in which we can envision the way from
a historian and his writing back to the historical event itself. Eyewitness
testimony stands in between the present writing and the past event as a
category that needs to be evaluated in relation to what is past and what
is present.The question arises where do the eyewitnesses of early Christianity belong within this broad range of different ways of negotiating
between the past and the present? Bauckham has focused on one aspect
of this spectrum—mostly, in my reading, that which is concerned with
the pastness of the testimony—and convincingly shown that eyewitnesses
played a significant role. But considering the existence of other prominent ways of relating to the past among the historians, including those
who claimed to use eyewitnesses, and the debate of these practices and
the notions of historical truth outlined above, a few questions that need
further reflection might be mentioned.
1. Granted the Gospels belong within the flexible biographical genre of
antiquity, which was often more encomiastic than history writing,
how do we conceive precisely the generic conjunction between biography
and history in the Gospels? The two overlap, to be sure, but would our
appreciation of oral history and eyewitness testimony change significantly if we made the generic similarity between the Gospels and the
Greek bioi decisive for the choice of comparative material? In my
view the Gospels are historicizing bioi. I have compared them to
historians of various kinds, because they were most out-spoken
concerning how to relate to the past. I have also tried to take seriously
the influence or rhetoric. This influence becomes even more
pronounced in the biographical literature. How would Bauckham
cope with the criticism that he looks more towards the historians, and
then only to certain historians, than to the biographical literature? I
am uncertain to what extent Bauckham takes seriously the biographical aspect of the Gospels, with its strongly encomiastic character.
2. This leads to the next question. To what extent, and why, are we to
compare the Gospels and the pre-Gospel tradition with historians

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who were critical of rhetoric rather than the perhaps more common,
rhetorical branches of history writing during the first century A.D.?
After all, it is possible to argue that the overlap between biography
and history writing was more significant among authors who had a
strong rhetorical ambition than those who adhered to the—in fact
unrealistic—ideal of only reporting the past.
3. What is historical truth in all this? If we take seriously the oral history
approach, and the importance of eyewitness testimony, we might wish
to reconsider history as a reality “out there” and approach it from the
perspective of a dialogue between ourselves and the testimony about
the past, and look at its connection to theology from a pronounced
hermeneutical approach to history. Is not Bauckham’s attention to the
Jesus of testimony a call to abandon the optimistic search for the brute
facts of history—at least when it comes to theology?
4. What is then the connection between testimony and theology? If
testimony relates to history only to the extent that it remembers and
integrates the past into the present of the eyewitnesses, we might
wish to argue that theology should be equally concerned with the
various testimonies of the same historical event during several
centuries of interpretation and soften the heavy emphasis on the first
eyewitnesses. Is the first always the best historically? And more
importantly, is it the best theologically? What is truer historically and
theologically? Is it time, generally speaking, to move away from
history as re-construction and pay more explicit attention to history as
(narrative and rhetorical) re-configuration in dialogue with the past and
N&V
the present?

Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 6, No. 3 (2008): 491–500

491

The Jesus of Testimony: A Convergence
of History and Theology
F RANK J. M ATERA
The Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C.

O NE OF THE most intractable problems of modern Gospel research
is the relationship between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith.
Does Jesus as the Gospels portray him correspond to the historical
person, Jesus of Nazareth? Or, has the faith of the Church so informed
the Gospel portrait of Jesus that there is no longer any continuity
between Jesus of Nazareth (the historical Jesus) and the Jesus whom the
Gospels proclaim (the Christ of faith)?
Those who reflect on this question understand its theological and
historical ramifications. If there is no continuity between Jesus as he is
portrayed in the Gospels and the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth,
then Christian faith is empty and in vain. Such a faith is no longer
grounded in a historical person but in a mythic figure who never existed,
a figure of religious imagination.
Given the importance of this problem, it is not surprising that modern
biblical scholarship has invested so much time and effort in trying to
determine the relationship between the person of Jesus as portrayed in
the Gospels and the person whom history calls Jesus of Nazareth. The
attempt to resolve this problem has led to a quest for this historical Jesus
that continues to this day.1
1 There have, in fact, been three periods in the quest for the historical Jesus: the

quest that was undertaken primarily among German Protestant scholars in the
nineteenth century; the quest that was initiated by the students of Rudolph Bultmann in the 1950s and 1960s; and the present quest, begun toward the end of
the twentieth century, which has been led by American scholars. For an overview

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Despite the time and talent that scholars have invested in this quest,
New Testament scholarship has not been able to solve this most intractable
problem.While some scholars insist that their analysis of the data essentially confirms the portrait of Jesus found in the Gospels, others have
called into question the Gospels’ portrait of Jesus and argued that the
Jesus of history can only be reconstructed from the data of the Gospels
by stripping away their theological interpretation of Jesus that purportedly distorts their portrait of him.
It is with this background that I present my reflections on Richard
Bauckham’s book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses:The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony.2 Deeply aware of the cul-de-sac in which contemporary New
Testament scholarship finds itself in regard to the problem described
above, Bauckham has proposed a fresh approach that will be—somewhat
ironically—familiar to the believer in the pew but new and surprising to
some scholars. Maintaining that “the Gospel texts are much closer to the
form in which the eyewitnesses told their stories or passed on their traditions than is commonly envisaged in current scholarship” (6), Bauckham
argues that New Testament scholarship needs “to recover the sense in
which the Gospels are testimony” (5), by which he means the testimony
of eyewitnesses who saw and heard Jesus. It is this testimony, deeply
embedded in the Gospels, that provides us with the proper and “appropriate means of access to the historical reality of Jesus” (5).
For me, the most significant aspect of Bauckham’s project is the potential it holds for overcoming the gap between history and theology that
plagues so much of contemporary biblical scholarship.3 For if the testimony of eyewitnesses is the proper category for approaching the Gospels,
as Bauckham maintains, then the theological manner in which the
Gospels interpret the person of Jesus is not “an arbitrary imposition on
the objective facts,” but “the way the witnesses perceived the history” (5).
Thus Bauckham concludes his book with this sentence:“It is in the Jesus
of testimony that history and theology meet” (508).To explain the signifof this third quest, see Mark Allan Powell, Jesus as a Figure of History: How Modern
Historians View the Man from Galilee (Louisville:Westminster John Knox, 1998).
2 Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses:The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006).
3 This gap between history and theology, to which I am referring, appears when
scholars insist that the biblical text must be approached either historically or
theologically, without allowing for the possibility that the text may be interpreted both historically and theologically. In the first instance, scholars approach
biblical studies as merely an historical discipline whose purpose is to reconstruct
what happened; in the second, they approach it merely as a dogmatic discipline
that has little or no relation to what actually happened.

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icance of this sentence and of Bauckham’s project, I arrange my reflections under the following headings: (1) The Community and Its Eyewitnesses, (2) Tradition and Scripture, (3) John and the Synoptics, and (4)
History and Theology.
The Community and Its Eyewitnesses
The first phase of the quest for the historical Jesus ended at the close of
the nineteenth century. Although scholars had written hundreds of lives
of Jesus during the nineteenth century, Albert Schweitzer’s magisterial
work, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, showed that these works tended to
reveal more about the values of the authors who composed them than
they did about Jesus.4 At the beginning of the twentieth century, then,
with the quest for this historical Jesus at an impasse, New Testament
scholars turned their attention to a different project. Instead of trying to
recover the Jesus of history, they sought to uncover how the traditions
about Jesus had been transmitted in the early Church.Thus Rudolf Bultmann, Martin Dibelius, and Karl Ludwig Schmidt, working independently of each other, developed the methodology of “form criticism.”5
The purpose of this new methodology was to study and classify the
various literary forms present in the Gospels in order to understand how
the Gospel tradition grew and developed in the early Church. By doing
this, the form critics hoped to gain a deeper insight to the ways in which
the early Church used its traditions about Jesus and eventually incorporated them into the Gospels we possess today. In focusing their attention
on how the traditions about Jesus were transmitted in the early Church,
the form critics shifted the attention of New Testament scholarship from
the quest for the historical Jesus to an investigation of the earliest
communities that produced the Gospels about Jesus.
The work of the form critics, however, drew a wedge between history
and theology.As Bauckham notes,“It was a short step to assuming that the
traditions were not only adapted to their functions in the Church but in
many cases actually created for those functions” (244). In other words,
4 Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress

from Reimarus to Wrede (New York: MacMillan, 1968).The German original, Von
Reimarus zu Wrede, was published in 1906. Its incisive critique of the nineteenthcentury quest for the historical Jesus effectively ended the first quest.
5 Rudolf Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition (New York: Harper & Row,
1963).The German original, Die Geschichte der synoptichen Tradition, was published
in 1921. Martin Dibelius, From Tradition to Gospel (New York: Scribners, n.d.).The
German original, Die Formgeschichte des Evangeliums, was published in 1919. Karl
Ludwig Schmidt, Der Rahmen der Geschichte Jesu: Literarkritische Untersuchungen
zur ältesten Jesusübelieferuung (Berlin:Trowitzsch, 1919).

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having correctly understood that the community played an important role
in the transmission of the traditions about Jesus, some form critics attributed a creative role to the community, arguing that the community
composed many of the Jesus traditions in order to satisfy the missionary,
cultic, and catechetical needs of the early Church. Thus the form critics
tended to view the Gospels as folk literature that grew out of the community’s various missionary, cultic, and catechetical needs. This, however,
raised a new problem. If the Gospels arose from the theological and religious needs of the community rather than from traditions that could be
traced to the testimony of eyewitnesses, the nexus between the historical
Jesus and the Gospel portrait of Jesus becomes all the more problematical.
Bauckham, however, argues that the Gospels are not the creations of a
community or of anonymous tradents who were more interested in
responding to the needs of the early Church than in transmitting authentic traditions about Jesus. Focusing on his central category of testimony,
he maintains that eyewitnesses “may have had an important role in the
control of the traditions of the words and deeds of Jesus” (259). In the
period between the death of Jesus and the appearance of the first Gospel
(approximately A.D. 30–70), there were still a significant number of
people (apart from the Apostles) who had been in personal contact with
Jesus, for example, Bartimaeus, Zacchaeus, and Cleophas. If such eyewitnesses became members of the early Church, it is not unreasonable to
assume that they would have exercised a certain control over the traditions about Jesus.
If Bauckham’s suggestion is correct, the gap between Jesus and the
Gospel portrait of Jesus is not as great as some suppose it to be. Not only
would the continuing testimony of eyewitnesses have exerted a significant
control over the earliest traditions about Jesus, it would have provided the
Church with the theological interpretation of people who had seen,
heard, and, presumably, benefited from Jesus’ ministry.
Tradition and Scripture
If, as Bauckham argues, there were eyewitnesses in the early Church who
guaranteed and controlled the traditions about Jesus that were eventually
incorporated into the Gospels, then the handing on of these traditions
played an important role in the early Church and in the development of
the Gospels.
In order to exemplify the central role that tradition played in the early
Church, Bauckham turns to Paul.Writing at a time when the Gospels did
not yet exist, Paul was dependent upon the Church’s traditions about
Jesus for his knowledge of Jesus.That he knew such traditions and handed

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them on to his churches is evident from 1 Corinthians 7:10–11;
11:23–26; 15:1–5, texts in which Paul speaks about Jesus’ teaching on
divorce, the Last Supper, and the Lord’s death, resurrection, and appearances, respectively. That Paul would have had ample time to speak with
those who had been Jesus’ disciples is clear from Galatians 1:18, where he
states that he spent fifteen days in Jerusalem with Peter. Moreover, since
some of Paul’s missionary companions (Barnabas, Mark, Silvanus) had
been members of the church at Jerusalem, it would be surprising if the
Apostle did not seek out traditions about Jesus from them. Bauckham
correctly notes:“We should rather presume that Paul was becoming thoroughly informed of the Jesus traditions as formulated by the Twelve,
learning them from the leader of the Twelve, Peter” (266).
Paul, however, was not merely the recipient of such traditions; he was
also the transmitter of these traditions. In Bauckham’s words, “He [Paul]
therefore envisages a chain of transmission that begins from Jesus himself
and passes through intermediaries to Paul himself, who has already passed
it on to the Corinthians when he first established the church” (268). But
in addition to his handing on these traditions to his community, it is not
unreasonable to suppose that Paul entrusted the care of these traditions
to certain persons within the Church who, as teachers within the
community, had the responsibility of preserving and remembering the
traditions about Jesus.6 Thus Bauckham notes that there would have been
designated persons in each Pauline community who “knew the Jesus
traditions through a chain of only two links between themselves and Jesus
himself, namely Paul and the Jerusalem apostles” (270).
Before there was a Gospel then, there was a reliable chain of tradition
about Jesus. It is this chain of tradition that preserved the Church’s traditions about Jesus and eventually entered the Gospels.The Gospels, then,
are not the arbitrary creation of a community, nor is there an unbridgeable chasm between the person of Jesus and the portrait of Jesus that the
Gospels present.
This interplay between Gospel and tradition should be familiar to
Roman Catholics who acknowledge the importance of both Scripture
and Tradition in the communication of Revelation. And even though it
is not Bauckham’s purpose or intention to support this doctrine, what he
6 This concern for handing on tradition is especially apparent in the Pastoral

Letters, in which Paul reminds his delegates,Timothy and Titus, of the gospel he
has handed on to them, and then instructs them to hand on to others what he
has handed on to them. Even if one calls into question the Pauline authorship of
these letters, they still witness to the early Church’s concern to hand on to future
generations the teaching of the first generation of apostolic witnesses.

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says about the role of tradition in the early Church is helpful for understanding what the Second Vatican Council affirms about Scripture and
Tradition in its Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum.7 The
apostolic tradition about Jesus precedes the New Testament, and it is this
tradition that eventually gives birth to the New Testament, assuring
believers that the Gospel portrait of Jesus stands in continuity with the
person of Jesus of Nazareth. Roman Catholics believe that this living,
apostolic tradition and Scripture “form a single deposit of the Word of
God, which is entrusted to the Church” (Dei Verbum, §10). Scripture and
Tradition, then, witness to the Word of God that became incarnate in
Jesus of Nazareth.
John and the Synoptics
In their quest for the historical Jesus, most New Testament scholars have
focused their attention on the Synoptic Gospels, making use of the Two
Source Theory, which states that the Gospel of Mark was the earliest
Gospel to be written (about A.D. 70), with the Gospels of Matthew and
Luke (about A.D. 85) dependent upon the Gospel of Mark and other oral
and written sources.8 In contrast to the Synoptic Gospels, the Gospel of
John has often been relegated to the sidelines of research into the historical Jesus, being viewed by some as too overlaid with theological interpretation to be of any historical value.
The Fourth Gospel is, in fact, quite different in tone and structure
from the Synoptic Gospels. And there is little doubt that it presents a
more theologically charged account than do the Synoptics. Indeed, the
problem of the relationship between John and the Synoptics is somewhat
analogous to the problem noted above about the relationship between
the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. Is there continuity between
John and the Synoptics? Or, is the Fourth Gospel and its portrait of Jesus
alien to what is found in the Synoptic Gospels?
Here again, Bauckham offers a new way to approach an old and seemingly intractable problem. Approaching the Fourth Gospel from the
perspective of testimony, he makes a forceful argument that the author of
7 “Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture, then, are linked closely together and

communicate with each other. For both of them, flowing out from the same
divine wellspring, in a certain way come together into a single current and tend
toward the same end.” Dei Verbum, §9, in The Scripture Documents:An Anthology of
Official Catholic Teaching, ed. and trans. Dean P. Béchard (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2002).
8 These other sources are usually understood to be a collection of Jesus’ sayings,
designated Q to which Matthew and Luke, but not Mark, had access, and special
traditions designated M and L, on which Matthew and Luke drew, respectively.

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the Gospel was an eyewitness: John the Elder, of whom Papias speaks.
Papias, a man of the third Christian generation, sought out witnesses from
the first generation in order to learn what he could about Jesus. Among
the witnesses he sought out was John the Elder, whom Bauckham identifies as one of the Lord’s disciples. Bauckham argues that this John was
the Beloved Disciple, the author of the Gospel.9
If, however, the Fourth Gospel was written by an eyewitness, why is it
so different from the Synoptic Gospels? For Bauckham the answer has to
do with the different testimonies that stand behind John and the Synoptics.Whereas the Synoptic tradition is based upon the official witness of
the Twelve, especially the testimony of Peter, who stands behind the
Gospel of Mark, according to Papias, it is the testimony of the Beloved
Disciple ( John the Elder) and the particular circle of disciples in which
he moved that stands behind the Fourth Gospel: “The circle includes a
few of the Twelve, especially Philip and Thomas, but not the inner circle
so prominent in Mark” (414). Other members of this circle would have
included Nicodemus, Lazarus, Martha, and Mary, all of whom lived in or
near Jerusalem, suggesting “that the Beloved Disciple himself was a
Jerusalem resident” (414).
One reason, then, that explains the difference between John and the
Synoptics is the diverse testimonies that underlie these two great traditions. But according to Bauckham there is another reason, which is especially important for this essay, that is, examining the relationship between
theology and history in the Gospels.The Fourth Evangelist’s presentation
of Jesus manifests a greater and more sophisticated theological interpretation than that of the Synoptics because this Evangelist was an eyewitness of what he recounts.10 Present at the cross when Jesus died, he
witnessed “the key salvific event of the whole Gospel story, the hour of
Jesus’ exaltation, toward which the whole story from John the Baptist’s
testimony onward has pointed” (397). Thus the Beloved Disciple is not
merely recounting the ministry of Jesus, he is interpreting it theologically
in light of what he himself witnessed. But is such a theological interpretation legitimate, or does it distort what the Evangelist purports to be
9 Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 420–21. Eusebius discusses John the Elder in his Histo-

ria ecclesiastica, 3.39.
10 While the witness of Peter stands behind the Gospel of Mark, according to the

testimony of Papias, Mark was not an eyewitness of Jesus’ ministry, nor was Luke.
While the Gospel of Matthew claims the authorship of Matthew, one of the
Twelve Apostles, Bauckham and most modern scholars question the Matthean
authorship of this Gospel because of its dependence on the Gospel of Mark.This
means, if Bauckham is correct, that only the Fourth Gospel can claim the authorship of an eyewitness.

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498

reporting? This question brings us to our final point, the goal toward
which this essay has been moving.
History and Theology
The subtext of what I have been recounting based on Bauckham’s book
has to do with the relationship between history and theology. Can history
and theology exist together, or is theology always and inevitably a distortion of history? Some of those who seek to uncover the historical Jesus
would argue that the only access to the real Jesus is through the critical
study of history.11 To know what Jesus was really about, to know who he
was, it is necessary to strip away the theological interpretation of the
Gospels.This is why so many scholars focus their attention on the Synoptics rather than on the Fourth Gospel in their quest for this historical
Jesus. For whereas the Fourth Gospel tends to present its Christology
from above, beginning with the Incarnation, the Synoptic Gospels begin
their Christology from below by beginning with the humanity of Jesus.
But if the Gospels contain authentic eyewitness testimonies to Jesus, as
Bauckham contends, then the relationship between history and theology
is more subtle than many suppose. Were the Gospels merely objective,
historical reports of what happened during Jesus’ ministry, we would
know what happened but we would have little understanding of its
significance. For example, suppose we knew exactly what occurred at
Jesus’ birth, or at his death. Would this historically accurate information
provide us with a deeper understanding of what God was doing in and
through Jesus Christ? There were, in fact, many people who came into
contact with Jesus of Nazareth. They heard his teaching, they saw his
mighty deeds, and they even witnessed his death. But not all of them
understood or comprehended what took place.
History needs interpretation; and this, it seems to me, is the insight
Bauckham brings to his discussion about Jesus. Those eyewitnesses who
believed that God was at work in Jesus’ ministry understood that it was not
enough to simply recount what had happened. If they were to explain the
significance of what they had witnessed, they needed to interpret the events
they had experienced. No one understood this better and interpreted his
experience of Jesus more insightfully than the Fourth Evangelist.
To be sure, one could object that these eyewitnesses got it wrong, that
they were deluded, that they were mistaken.And so one might argue that
it is necessary to start all over again and reconstruct the Gospels’ witness
to Jesus in order to get back to the Jesus of history. Historical events are,
11 An example of this is the project undertaken by the late Robert Funk and the

members of his Jesus Seminar.

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499

and will always be, in need of interpretation. But what guarantee is there
that such an historical reconstruction of purportedly distorted writings
will itself get it right? And even if the reconstruction gets it right, will this
reconstruction have understood the significance of what took place? Just
as historians repeatedly write and rewrite history because they seek to
understand the significance of what has taken place, so, in an analogous
manner, the Evangelists interpreted the traditions about Jesus they
received in order to communicate what took place.
Bauckham has shown us that the theological interpretation of the Gospel
portraits of Jesus is not necessarily at odds with the person of Jesus of
Nazareth. In the Gospel portraits of Jesus, history and theology meet because
those who testified to Jesus sought to explain the significance of the one to
whom they testified.Without their theological interpretation, we would not
understand God’s action in Christ.With their theological interpretation of
what happened, we begin to comprehend the transcendent mystery they
encountered, a mystery they needed to communicate through a theological
N&V
interpretation of the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth.

Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 6, No. 3 (2008): 501–512

501

The Early Church and
the Jesus of Testimony
RODRIGO J. M ORALES
Marquette University
Milwaukee,Wisconsin

O NCE AGAIN Richard Bauckham has provided the scholarly
community with a stimulating and provocative thesis that challenges
long-received ideas about how to read and interpret the Gospels. In a
breathtaking argument that ranges from the testimony of Papias on the
origins of the Gospels, to onomastics (the study of names), to modern
scholarship on oral history and memory, to the nature of “testimony” as
a fundamental and indispensable historical category, Bauckham sets forth
a twofold historical and theological thesis with respect to the Gospels:
historically, the Gospels depend upon eyewitness testimony; theologically,
“testimony” is the appropriate category both for interpreting these texts
and for bridging the gap between history and theology—indeed, testimony “is where history and theology meet.”1
Perhaps somewhat ironically, what makes Jesus and the Eyewitnesses so
provocative is that Bauckham seeks to achieve his task by reassessing the
traditional reading of the Gospels that held sway throughout much of
Church history up until the birth of modern biblical scholarship, namely
that the stories in the Gospels derive from eyewitness testimony rather
than from a lengthy process of oral tradition shaped and re-shaped by the
early Christian communities.This reopening of the question of the traditional understanding of Gospel origins should not, however, be characterized as a reactionary rejection of modern scholarship. On the contrary,
the argument of Jesus and the Eyewitnesses depends as much upon the
1 Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses:The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony

(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 6. Unless otherwise noted, subsequent parenthetical page numbers in this essay refer to Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.

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internal evidence of the Gospels and interaction with contemporary
scholarship in biblical studies and related fields as it does on a reevaluation of the second-century external evidence. It is this combination of
patristics and biblical studies, of old and new, that makes Bauckham’s
latest work both an impressive piece of scholarship in its own right and
an important stimulus to further research into how the two fields might
be fruitfully brought together.
Evidence External and Internal
The amount of attention Bauckham devotes to the testimony of Papias,
as well as to that of other second-century figures, is striking and, one
hopes, a sign of a growing trend in New Testament scholarship to pay
more attention to reception history, especially in the formative years of
Christianity.2 Jesus and the Eyewitnesses provides a fascinating model of
how scholars might go about integrating detailed historical work on the
testimony of second-century figures with innovative arguments about
the handing on of early Christian stories based on contemporary scholarship on the New Testament, memory, and testimony. In particular,
Bauckham demonstrates that much material from this early period has
been either misinterpreted or overlooked—or both.Two examples make
the point clearly.
First, in his chapter on Papias and the eyewitnesses, Bauckham makes
a crucial observation about this second-century writer’s account of his
reliance on “the Lord’s disciples.” Although many scholars have dismissed
Papias’s information since he most likely wrote no earlier than the beginning of the second century, Bauckham notes that the period Papias
describes actually occurred much earlier, perhaps around the time that at
least some of the canonical Gospels were being composed (14). It is not
only the time period to which Papias refers that has been misinterpreted,
however. Perhaps more importantly, Bauckham sees Papias’s statement
about preferring a “living voice” as in need of reevaluation. Again,
whereas most scholars have interpreted the statement to refer to oral
tradition, which according to classical form criticism shaped and reshaped stories about Jesus in the early Church, Bauckham points out that
Papias speaks not of some vague “oral tradition,” but rather of specific
named sources that he considers to be reliable eyewitnesses to the events
in Jesus’ lifetime:
2 Representative in this respect is the chapter “Papias on the Eyewitnesses,” in

ibid., 12–38. Along similar lines, see Markus Bockmuehl, Seeing the Word: Refocusing New Testament Study (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), esp. 161–88.

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And if by chance anyone who had been in attendance on the elders
should come my way, I inquired about the words of the elders—[that
is,] what [according to the elders] Andrew or Peter said, or Philip, or
Thomas or James, or John or Matthew or any other of the Lord’s disciples, and whatever Aristion and the elder John, the Lord’s disciples, were
saying. For I did not think that information from books would profit
me as much as information from a living and surviving voice.3

Describing the period during which most modern scholars believe the
Gospels were taking shape and by which time the eyewitnesses are
thought to have disappeared and been replaced by communal oral tradition, Papias seems to indicate that, on the contrary, eyewitnesses still
played a vital role in handing on stories about Jesus. Bauckham does not
focus on the external evidence in isolation, however. Rather, he points
out similarities between Papias’s preference for a “living voice” and Luke’s
reliance on “eyewitnesses from the beginning” (Lk 1:2). If Luke was writing at around the time that Papias describes, then his preference for
eyewitnesses most likely should be taken at face value, rather than as a
reference to a nebulous community tradition. This is particularly true if
some of these eyewitnesses were still alive, as is likely.4
Bauckham also draws on a second, more often overlooked figure, the
second-century Christian apologist Quadratus.As is the case with Papias,
although Quadratus wrote in the early second century, his writings most
likely describe an earlier time, perhaps contemporaneous with the period
of the eyewitnesses mentioned by Papias. More importantly, Quadratus’s
address to the emperor Hadrian provides independent support for the
idea that the eyewitnesses, rather than quickly dropping out of the tradition process as many form critics have maintained for some time, continued to play a role well into the period during which the canonical
Gospels were composed:
[T]he works of our Savior were always present, for they were true:
those who were healed, those who rose from the dead, those who were
not only seen in the act of being healed or raised, but were also always
present, not merely when the Savior was living on earth, but also for a
3 Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica, 3.39.3–4.The translation is Bauckham’s own (Jesus

and the Eyewitnesses, 15–6); I have removed the Greek words in parentheses in his
text. See also Bauckham’s lengthy discussion of the passage in the chapter cited
in note 2 above.
4 Earlier in the book, Bauckham cites Vincent Taylor’s well-known quip that “[i]f the
Form-Critics are right, the disciples must have been translated to heaven immediately after the Resurrection.”Vincent Taylor, The Formation of the Gospel Tradition,
2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1935), 41, cited in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 7.

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considerable time after his departure, so that some of them survived
even to our own times.5

According to Quadratus the recipients of healing miracles continued to
serve as the tradents of their own stories. Again, though, Bauckham does
not settle for letting the external evidence stand on its own. Rather, he
combines it with a hypothesis about the named recipients of Jesus’ healing
miracles in the Gospels. Bauckham first notes that based on the standard
source-critical assumption of Markan priority, Matthew and Luke tend to
drop the names of individuals rather than to add them for narrative effect
(42). Given this tendency, he then suggests that the names of those who
were healed by Jesus survived in Mark because they most likely remained
active in the early Christian movement and served as guarantors of those
traditions, but dropped out of the other Gospels as they passed away or no
longer were well-known (46–55). This hypothesis explaining the internal
evidence dovetails with the external evidence: their function as guarantors
of the tradition is precisely what Quadratus emphasizes in his description
of those recipients of healing miracles who remained until his own day.
I have focused on these two examples from Papias and Quadratus
because they exemplify one of the most innovative and promising methodological aspects of Bauckham’s approach. For some time now, most standard
commentaries on the Gospels have more or less ignored or dismissed the
testimony of Papias and other external evidence with regard to the origins
of the Gospels, drawing conclusions based solely on internal evidence.6 Jesus
and the Eyewitnesses proposes a better way, one that takes both internal and
external evidence seriously but critically. Bauckham’s work should serve as
a starting point for further investigation into the earliest post-New Testament testimony about the origins of the Gospels. Indeed, one could argue
that Bauckham does not follow his principles through enough, particularly
with respect to Papias and the Gospel of Matthew, and this is one issue that
should be revisited.7
5 Eusebius, Hist. eccl., 4.3.2. The translation comes from Bauckham, Jesus and the

Eyewitnesses, 53. As Bauckham notes, the reference to “our own times” most
likely refers not to the time at which Quadratus wrote to Hadrian, but rather to
an earlier period in his life.
6 With the exception of his discussion of the Gospel of John, even Bauckham for
the most part limits his attention to Papias. One could well expand his methodology to reconsider the evidence of Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, and
Origen, just to name a few. For a rare discussion of these figures and others with
respect to the Gospel of Matthew, see R.T. France, Matthew: Evangelist and Teacher
(Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1989), 50–62 et passim.
7 I am grateful to Brant Pitre for emphasizing this point to me.

The Early Church and the Jesus of Testimony

505

On the question of Matthean authorship, Bauckham’s various criteria
point in different directions. On the one hand, the Gospel of Matthew
lacks the “inclusio of eyewitness testimony” that Bauckham finds in Mark,
Luke, and John.8 On the other hand, both internal and external evidence
suggest some connection between Matthew and the Gospel attributed to
him. Bauckham rightly agrees with G. D. Kilpatrick that the addition of
Matthew’s name in two verses in the Gospel (Mt 9:9; 10:3) most likely
did not lead to the attribution of the Gospel to Matthew.9 Is it possible,
though, that the opposite is the case? In other words, is it possible that
Matthew’s name appears somewhat more prominently in order to indicate one of the sources of the material in the Gospel?10 Two external
factors would support this suggestion. First, there is the testimony of
Papias, who attributes the Gospel to an eyewitness and who was active in
the Church at the time the Gospels most likely took shape. Given the
closeness in time of Papias to the origins of the Gospels, should we take
his testimony more seriously with respect to questions of authorship and
seek other explanations for the apparent anomalies based on Bauckham’s
other criteria?11 Second, there is the point that Bauckham himself notes:
based on the manuscript evidence we have, as far as we know the Gospels
8 See Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 114–54. The “inclusio of eyewitness

testimony” refers to a literary device whereby an author of a historical work
indicates the source of his or her information by mentioning this figure at or
toward the beginning and the end of the work, thus showing that this source was
reliable for the whole story he or she relates. Bauckham argues for the presence
of this device in three of the four Gospels (Mark, Luke, and John). I must admit,
though, that I am not yet completely convinced of the inclusio argument, especially with respect to the testimony of the women in Luke’s Gospel. Bauckham
would have to provide examples of other works that use an inclusio within a
smaller segment of the text in order to make the case more persuasive. Moreover, more methodological precision would be helpful on the broader phenomenon of inclusio. Did an ancient work have to use the device in order to present
itself as based on eyewitnesses? If so, then how does one explain Papias’s claim
that the Gospel of Matthew—which does not have such an inclusio—was based
on eyewitness testimony?
9 Ibid., 111, citing G. D. Kilpatrick, The Origins of the Gospel According to St. Matthew
(Oxford: Oxford University, 1946), 138.
10 As noted below, Bauckham does consider this possibility briefly (Jesus and the
Eyewitnesses, 301–02).
11 It is striking that Bauckham devotes so much space to Papias’s discussion of Mark
and John (see ibid., 202–39 and 412–37) and so little to his discussion of
Matthew. Indeed, the chapter “Papias on Mark and Matthew” might be more
accurately titled “Papias on Mark,” as Bauckham refers to Matthew only briefly
and primarily in relation to Mark.

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at no point circulated anonymously.12 Rather, from very early on (from
the very beginning, if we are to trust Papias!), the Gospels were attached
to the names of figures, at least three of whom did not play central roles
in the early Christian movement.
Bauckham acknowledges that there must have been some connection
between this Gospel and the apostle Matthew, but suggests that either the
author made a pseudepigraphical claim or Matthew played an indirect
role in the genesis of the text (302). The first explanation, however, is
unlikely given the insignificant role Matthew otherwise plays in the
Gospels. As we know from second-century Gospels attributed to Thomas
and Peter, pseudonymous writers were more likely to choose figures with
a higher profile in the early Christian movement. With respect to the
second explanation, one would need to clarify the difference between
Matthew as indirect source and Matthean authorship before such a
theory could be affirmed or denied—would it be something like the role
Peter is meant to have played to Mark in the formation of that Gospel?
If so, how does this fit with the clear distinction Papias makes between
the roles of Mark and Matthew in the writing of their Gospels?
The Gospel of Matthew is just one example of an area in which
Bauckham’s methodology could be pushed further and applied in different ways, perhaps leading to different conclusions. Nevertheless, Bauckham has wisely shown why the question of the external evidence should
be reopened.
Form Criticism Reconsidered
The clearest target of Bauckham’s argument in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses
is form criticism as classically formulated by Karl Ludwig Schmidt,
Martin Dibelius, and Rudolph Bultmann.13 Indeed, Bauckham does not
mince words in his assessment of the method: “It is a curious fact that
nearly all the contentions of the early form critics have by now been
convincingly refuted, but the general picture of the process of oral transmission that the form critics pioneered still governs the way most New
Testament scholars think” (242). Bauckham’s work calls for nothing short
of a complete overhaul of the form critical enterprise, retaining its
advances but abandoning some of its inappropriate comparisons with
12 Bauckham’s treatment of the alleged anonymity of the Gospels (ibid., 300–05)

bears close reading and builds upon the work of Martin Hengel. See Hengel,
Studies in the Gospel of Mark, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM, 1985), 64–84;
idem, The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ, trans. John Bowden
(London: SCM, 2000).
13 For the full discussion, see Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 241–9.

The Early Church and the Jesus of Testimony

507

folklore and questionable correlations between form and Sitz im Leben.
Like the question of external and internal evidence, this reevaluation of
form criticism could be pushed forward in several ways.
As Bauckham himself notes several times in the work, his hypothesis
needs to be tested against the data of the Gospels (287, 351). Jesus and the
Eyewitnesses offers a paradigm-shifting proposal with respect to reading the
Gospels, but because so much space is devoted to the theoretical arguments
surrounding the external evidence and different modes of transmission, the
book does not offer much by way of concrete examples from the Gospels.
One of the most pressing tasks in light of Bauckham’s argument will be to
sort through the data in order to see how the thesis holds up. In this regard,
his work suggests a number of avenues for further research.
First, if a revised form criticism is to play a role in Gospels research, then
one desideratum is the discovery of more appropriate parallels to the Gospels
than folklore.14 Bauckham rightly notes that one of the lasting contributions of form criticism is the observation that the Gospels are made up of
smaller self-contained units that most likely resemble the form in which
they were transmitted orally. In order to come to a better understanding of
the function of these forms, it will be necessary to conduct further research
on texts that more closely resemble the Gospels in genre. In addition, as
Bauckham himself notes, more work on the process of storytelling and the
formation of smaller narrative units would shed light on the purpose of
these smaller stories within the broader narratives of the Gospels (351).
A second intriguing aspect of Bauckham’s proposal worth further study
is his suggestion that the stories in the Gospels fit under the category of
“isolated” tradition.15 Bauckham provides good prima facie evidence for
this thesis in the writings of Paul, who clearly distinguishes between the
Jesus tradition he received and his own parenetic instructions. It is surprising, then, that Bauckham leaves out one of the strongest pieces of
evidence in the New Testament to support his point, namely the Johannine literature. As many have noted, the Johannine epistles, though similar in style and theology to the fourth Gospel, never cite or allude to Jesus
14 A good starting point on this question is found in Richard A. Burridge, What Are

the Gospels?: A Comparison With Graeco-Roman Biography, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2004).
15 Bauckham (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 278) borrows this term from Birger
Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript: Oral Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early
Christianity (Lund:Gleerup, 1961), 335, who in turn received it from his teacher
Harald Riesenfeld,“The Gospel Tradition and Its Beginnings,” in The Gospel Tradition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), 1–29. Bauckham also notes that it seems to have
first appeared in the work of Gerhard Kittel in 1926, though he does not give the
full reference.

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tradition, either sayings or narratives. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt
that whoever was responsible for the letters knew of these traditions and
yet chose not to use them. Bauckham’s hypothesis that stories about Jesus
circulated as “isolated” tradition seems to be the simplest and most likely
explanation of this phenomenon, though more work could also be done
on the significance of these smaller stories in early Christianity. It is no
doubt true, as Bauckham suggests, that the broad outline of the Jesus story
(or stories) was preserved because the early Christians believed that the
salvation mediated through the Christ event “was fulfillment [sic] of the
promises made by the God of Israel to his people Israel in the past” (277).
Nevertheless, why the individual stories circulated in smaller units remains
a problem worth further exploration.
As with the issue of authorship, the questions that Bauckham raises
with respect to form criticism could also be developed by paying closer
attention to early reception history. To begin with the question of
“isolated” tradition, a number of early Christian texts outside the New
Testament (e.g., 1 Clement; the letters of Ignatius) present parenetic
material that occasionally cites what might fall under the category of
“isolated” tradition. Further investigation of these texts with the questions of this revised form criticism in mind would provide another
opportunity to test the accuracy of Bauckham’s hypothesis. Moreover,
these texts may also speak to the matter of narrative forms. As is wellknown, the “citations” of Gospel material in many of these early texts
(one thinks, for example, of the writings of Justin Martyr) are far from
exact and so provide specific examples of the extent to which the forms
developed and the uses to which they were put. At the very least a
consideration of these early texts would provide a more concrete and
reliable set of data than the speculative tradition histories upon which so
much classical form criticism was built.
The Historical Jesus and the Church’s Fourfold Gospel
If form criticism as classically conceived is the primary object of critique
in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, the positive goal of the work is to rethink the
question of the relationship between history and theology by means of
the category of “testimony.” Both in the introduction and in the conclusion, Bauckham proposes “testimony” as the category that properly
captures the nature of the Gospels both historiographically and theologically. Indeed, testimony “is where history and theology meet” (6), and
“[i]t is in the Jesus of testimony that history and theology meet” (508;
one cannot help but notice the neat inclusio that bookends the argument!).To those who find Bauckham’s case persuasive, at least two ques-

The Early Church and the Jesus of Testimony

509

tions arise, one unique to the modern period and one that has puzzled
readers of the New Testament from the beginning.
In the introduction to Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Bauckham discusses
the ambiguity of the phrase the “historical Jesus,” an ambiguity that is as
old as the quest that owes its name to the phrase. Does it refer to Jesus as
he really was during his earthly life? Or does it refer to Jesus “insofar as
his historical reality is accessible to us” (2)? Or, finally, does it refer to the
Jesus who can be historically reconstructed, the real Jesus, as it were, lying
behind the Gospels and awaiting to be (re)discovered by New Testament
scholars? More often than not those who pursue the quest for the historical Jesus have operated with this third definition. Indeed, many have
noted that the quest originated on the basis of skepticism toward the
Gospel accounts and out of a desire to recover this “real Jesus.” Those
who hold to this methodological skepticism are unlikely to find Bauckham’s argument convincing for a variety of reasons and will no doubt
continue about their business as before, seeking to rescue Jesus from the
“distortions” of the Gospels.
Despite its origins in skepticism, however, the quest has also witnessed
numerous scholars who put more faith in the Gospels take up the task,
whether as an apologetic endeavor or as an attempt to combat Docetism.16
It is these scholars who will be challenged by Bauckham’s thesis to rethink
the nature of their enterprise:
From the perspective of Christian faith and theology, we must ask
whether the enterprise of reconstructing a historical Jesus behind the
Gospels, as it has been pursued through all phases of the quest, can ever
substitute for the Gospels themselves as a way of access to the reality of
Jesus the man who lived in first-century Palestine. (4)

Regardless of how much credibility one grants to the Gospels as historical
sources, historical Jesus research as it has been practiced by the majority of
16 The danger of Docetism is perhaps the argument most often invoked by Christ-

ian scholars in defense of historical criticism broadly and the quest for the historical Jesus in particular. One wonders, though, if by this reasoning all Christians
were Docetists until the rise of modern biblical scholarship.This is not to devalue
historical criticism or the many gains that it has produced—it is simply to suggest
that Christian scholars may need to rethink the arguments for its practice. For an
excellent critique of the various anti-docetic arguments in favor of historical criticism, see A. K. M. Adam, “Docetism, Käsemann, and Christology:Why Historical Criticism Can’t Protect Christological Orthodoxy,” Scottish Journal of Theology
49 (1996): 391–410. Adam raises many important points about the conceptual
confusion surrounding the category of “docetism” in both the ancient Church
and contemporary scholarship.

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scholars inevitably results in another narrative about Jesus, one that by its
very nature rivals the narratives of the Gospels because it cannot replicate
them. For those who take the Gospels seriously as Christian Scripture, as
that which nourishes the Church, then, the purpose and indeed the desirability of historical Jesus research will need to be reassessed. If the discipline
can be reshaped in such a way as to respect the narrative shape and witness
of the Gospels, then it may still have a role to play in Christian theology.
Regardless of the conclusions one draws about historical Jesus research,
Bauckham’s work still leaves another serious question open for further
exploration: what is the relationship between these four witnesses and the
one Jesus of the Christian faith? The question goes as far back as the second
century, with Tatian’s Diatessaron and Irenaeus’s defense of the fourfold
Gospel, and has continued to the present day.17 Assuming that we accept
Bauckham’s argument that all four Gospels rely in one way or another on
eyewitness testimony, what are we to do with these four accounts? Bauckham is surely correct to say that the Church’s Jesus has always been the Jesus
of testimony, but how might the Jesus of testimony relate to the various
testimonies that we have in the New Testament? One of the pressing questions that remain for Christian theology is how to maintain the integrity
and distinctness of each of the Gospels while at the same time affirming
their witness to the one Jesus of Christian faith. Bauckham’s category of
testimony certainly helps to move the discussion forward in that it provides
a model in which history and interpretation belong inextricably together.
Nevertheless, it still leaves open the question of how these different interpretations relate to one another and to the one historical figure to whom
they bear witness.
History, Theology, and the Jesus of Testimony
The relationship of external and internal evidence, the reassessment of
the form critical enterprise, and the relationship between the Jesus of
testimony and the fourfold Gospel of the Church are just a few of the
questions raised by Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. No doubt scholars will
disagree with this or that aspect of Bauckham’s argument. Nevertheless,
it is to be hoped that the book will receive the serious engagement that
it deserves from biblical scholars and Christian theologians alike. Indeed,
it is the fundamental questions the book asks about the relationship
17 Among the many contemporary works that address the question, see Hengel,

The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ ; Burridge, Four Gospels, One
Jesus? A Symbolic Reading, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005); and most
recently Mark L. Strauss, Four Portraits, One Jesus: An Introduction to Jesus and the
Gospels (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007).

The Early Church and the Jesus of Testimony

511

between history and theology—and the thoughtful answers it proposes—
that will be its most lasting contribution. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses offers
an understanding of the Gospels that takes them seriously as both history
and theology. May it serve as a much needed reminder that Christian
faith has always treated them as such and may it stimulate further research
on the Gospels, their early reception, and the Jesus of testimony to whom
N&V
they bear witness.

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513

Accordance: The Scriptures
of Israel as Eyewitness
C HRISTOPHER S EITZ
University of Toronto
Wycliffe College
Toronto, Ontario

Quests for Jesus and Testimony
AT PRESENT several large-scale conceptual models exist to explain
the relationship of the New Testament to Jesus. Aspects of these models
must deal with the literary genesis of the Gospel accounts, the relationship of the Gospels to one another, the synoptic problem and the separate status of John, the way the Old Testament is a factor in the
composition of the Gospels and also in the appraisal by Jesus and his
disciples as to his mission and purpose—this appraisal then imprinted in
the literary witness in a variety of ways. And finally, there is the question
of the relationship of the Gospel accounts to the earliest reception of
them in the Church Fathers, as well as the accounts they themselves may
offer as to how we have testimony to Jesus Christ. I leave to the side the
matter of the canonical texts and their relationship to the various ancient
sources which have not circulated as centrally with them (the noncanonical writings and Jesus).
Richard Bauckham’s new work is such a large-scale conceptual model,
and as such it too addresses these various aspects to greater and lesser
degrees.1 Bauckham had already, in a previous work, offered a fresh
perspective on the fourfold Gospel account by raising the question of John
and a readership that he argued was to assume Mark as a related witness,
thus raising afresh both the character of the synoptic problem and also John
1 Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses:The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony

(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006).

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in relationship to it.2 In this work Bauckham also questioned the idea that
gospels were written for specific communities, and therefore that the task
of interpretation and exegesis of necessity obliged one to reconstruct them
and thus stipulate the horizons toward which the intention of the author
was constrained in the nature of the case.
In this work, sustained attention is paid to areas of interest not traditionally fore-grounded in Gospel research, most especially, the earliest
reception history of the Jesus tradition and the way it may usefully be
tested and appropriated so as to give account of the testimony to Jesus.
This leads to the major thesis of the work, and the subject matter of the
title: the way living witnesses, after the death of Jesus, testified to his activity and passed on the traditions about him, until they were consolidated
and retold by key apostolic figures, and then put into literary form.The
alternative reconstruction of form-criticism is thereby rejected, whereby
traditions emerged in oral traditions and are shaped anonymously in various situations-in-life after the death of Jesus. It will not be my purpose
to rehearse the details of this kind of criticism, as reviews can be
consulted that do this in comprehensive and effective ways.
Another large-scale conceptual model has been proposed by N. T.
Wright. It sits far more easily to the details of literary reconstruction, than
the model undertaken in this new work by Bauckham, or in the model
that tends to dominate academic research, that is, the positing of an original sayings source, which finds its way into Mark, and then is reshaped
by Luke and Matthew due to material special to them. This textbook
account is readily available and the defenders of it have seen much in
Bauckham’s new work which cannot be accepted, accommodated, or
defended—a matter that Bauckham foresees and accepts in turn.
By contrast N. T. Wright’s model understands the Old Testament as
providing a kind of narrative story line, which in turn directs the mental
life of Jesus and gives rise to his self-understanding, as well as the traditions that will arise to give account of that. On Wright’s model the significance of the Old Testament in the testimony to Jesus is central, though
controversially so for other scholars because of the particular story line
selected by him, and the ability of this narrative line (among other things)
to account for the widely varied and substantively divergent appearances
of this “accordance with the scriptures” factor, as the New Testament
unreservedly displays it. But the relevant point is that Wright does not try
to relate his large-scale intuitive approach—a critically realistic posi2 Richard Bauckham,“John for Readers of Mark,” in The Gospels for All Christians:

Rethinking the Gospel Audiences, ed. Richard Bauckham (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 147–71.

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515

tivism—to the details of the traditional synoptic problem and its literary
and form-critical adventures.This has brought critique from people like
Luke Johnson, who in his turn accepts the necessity of giving account of
this genetic dimension in classical form, but who then asserts that what
is crucial in the end is the Christ of the Church’s present believing.3 The
details are not important here. What is significant is the relationship of
these various proposals to the traditional business of form and literary
criticism of the New Testament, and the way any new large-scale model
must handle these problems by picking up a different end of the stick,
and not throwing the stick entirely away.Wright picks the stick up at the
middle, and Bauckham at a different end entirely.
Wright’s interest in Jesus and the New Testament tends to focus on the
New Testament as a subject matter unto itself, over against its subsequent
reception history (and most decidedly against the later reception-history,
about which he often registers very negative judgments). Bauckham sees
not only continuity between the New Testament and the earliest reception history: the latter proves decisive for his conceptual model and for
his understanding of eyewitnessing as a very specific kind of historical
accounting. On this understanding, Bauckham is very much the consummate historian, weighing and probing the antique records with thoroughness and care, believing that this kind of history telling, in the period
at question, deserves to be assessed as its own specific contribution. Critics have argued that he has not played by the rules of the historical-critical quest, but it remains unclear whether that is its own form of
anachronistic tyranny, or whether, and how, one defines history and
historical reporting as such. My own view is that it is fair to judge the
literary and exegetical conclusions on their own merits, and to keep separate the question of “rules of the game” (historical quest), or the character of history as a philosophical question. I have registered my own views
on the character of history in several works, most recently in Prophecy and
Hermeneutics,4 and will not rehearse that here. Suffice it to say, I agree
with the questions about history and history writing Bauckham raises,
independently of the success of his literary and hermeneutical conclusions about the canonical Gospels collection in its present material form.
Wright’s model posits a narrative line that becomes the chief explanatory tool for a critical realist account of Jesus, and here the centrality of
the Old Testament is crucial, as has been noted. Like Bauckham, he does
3 See his essay “A Historiographical Response to Wright’s Jesus,” in Jesus and the

Restoration of Israel: A Critical Assessment of N .T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of
God, ed. Carey C. Newman (Grand Rapids: InterVarsity, 1999), 206–24.
4 Christopher Seitz, Prophecy and Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007).

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not believe the details of form-critical and literary-critical research have
been altogether useful, though his reasons differ from Bauckham.This is
primarily because of Bauckham’s belief that the earliest reception history
is in continuity in important ways with the canonical record itself, and
this means that Bauckham assesses the Church historical record with a
different kind of thoroughness and toward a different end than does
Wright.Wright has a strong intuition, based upon his reading of the New
Testament, about the central kinds of motives that exist and are applying
their pressure to give rise to the New Testament in its present form.
In Accordance With the Scriptures
I rehearse this to pick up on one aspect of Bauckham’s work I would like
to focus on, which is otherwise intuitively, if highly selectively or even altogether wrongly, deployed in the conceptual model of N.T.Wright: that is
the “accordance with the scriptures” aspect of the New Testament record
and so, on Bauckham’s account, with testimony to Jesus himself.The formcritical model could retain this aspect on a variety of accounts. So, it would
be in the context of Church life, after the death and resurrection of Christ,
that the scriptures of Israel would come to influence the oral and literary
formation of traditions about him. These scriptures were the main testimony to the work of Christ insofar as they described God’s work within
Israel with which Jesus was in accordance, and this in a variety of ways:
prophecy and fulfillment; figural anticipation; the moral life, in Christ; and
so forth. In helpful essays on Acts 15, Markus Bockmuehl and Bauckham
himself have shown clearly how the Old Testament was used not just to
“preach Christ” but to provide moral categories for new Gentile believers,
templates for the apostolic office, sacraments, and so forth.The rich variety
of usage in the Gospel record would testify to just such a scriptural
imprinting from the side of the Old Testament. (Of course, this aspect
could be taken as crucial in order to question the historicity of the events
respecting Jesus, in the hands of someone like Crossan; and Frei rightly
identified some time ago that proof from prophecy and the use of the Old
Testament in the New were the twin neuralgic points leading to what he
would call the eclipse of biblical narrative.)
As the New Testament would only gradually come into being, and
later still, find its canonical status by analogy with this single scriptural
inheritance (so a New Testament together with a now-Old Testament),
these scriptures of Israel were the texts heard in early Christian assembly.
In its present form, the New Testament gives indication of this role of the
scriptures of Israel (Rom 15:4; 2 Tim 3:15), and Luke’s account of Jesus’
opening the scriptures of Israel to indicate the things about him is para-

The Scriptures of Israel as Eyewitness

517

digmatic of the practice of the Church, we may assume, from its earliest
moment (Lk 24:27, 32).
The question raised by the eyewitness model as the chief stimulus for
the testimony to Jesus is how one is to understand the “accordance with
the scriptures” that so thoroughly affects the presentation of the Gospel
record in its present form. One thinks of the birth narratives of Luke and
Matthew, for example, with their rich figural atmosphere (the moving star
that stops, the gentiles and their gifts, descent into Egypt, Herod and
Balak) or explicit scriptural linkages (the Song of Hannah and the Magnificat).5 Or what of the stories of healings which draw on Old Testament
analogies, or the role of Moses or the Suffering Servant, which many see
as ingredients in the Gospel accounts at the most integral level of their
literary unfolding? And one considers as well the passion narratives, with
their rich allusions to the Psalms, down to the minutest details; or the
parables which derive their logic from scriptural precursors; feeding stories
and the wilderness accounts of Exodus and Numbers; the Twelve themselves, as representatives of Israel, or the collective of “minor prophets.”
Bauckham does not deny that this accordance with the Old Testament
is a factor; rather, he does not deal with it as a topic unto itself in any
chapter of his account of testimony. He discusses the passion narrative (in
its pre-Markan form) strictly from the standpoint of establishing the
possibility or likelihood of its being traced to the young man who fled
naked from the scene (with reference to Theissen’s discussion). Did the
young man (was it Simon Peter?) amplify the references to the Psalms,
and was this pattern extended by individual witnesses in the other passion
accounts? Is that a pattern one can trace elsewhere—eyewitness supplies
the accordance dimension—in the variety of literary forms in the Gospels?
Because the scriptural aspect is so pervasive, it is hard to see so much
attention to establishing historicity and reliability (of a particular kind)
without any account of this dimension.The index provided for scriptural
citations shows how little this aspect of Gospel formation forms a part of
his reconstruction.
Moreover, with the emphasis on eyewitness testimony, and especially a
concern with memory (which has to do with temporal distance and
recollection), where do we locate this aspect—accordance with the scriptures—of the Gospel narrative? Was it supplied by those testifying to what
they remembered, and if so, how, and why? Where does this aspect belong
in a model which wants to fore-ground the reliability of testimony due to
5 Christopher Seitz,“The Lectionary as Theological Construction,” in Word With-

out End:The Old Testament as Abiding Theological Witness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1998), 300–18.

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Christopher Seitz

the eyewitness factor? With the focus on reliability and personal witness,
a byproduct is the loss of this larger social dimension: the eye-witnessing
to Jesus provided by the scriptures, said to promise his appearing, confirm
his mission, and open our eyes through the vehicle of their plain sense, to
the mystery of Christ’s earthly work.
It might be helpful to think about this aspect in the Synoptics by
considering other accounts, in John and in the early Church.This might
help us get a purchase on the accordance factor in the Gospel presentation in its four-Gospel form.
John’s Gospel: Location and Accordance
Bauckham’s treatment of John is at points very illuminating. It may be
that the testimony model really gains momentum within the fourth
Gospel, whatever one may say about its persuasiveness elsewhere.This is
true not least at the level of explicit reference. The author tells us with
energy that he is an eyewitness. I have also argued, following Trobisch’s
evaluation of the final verses of John (21:24–25), that the editorial function of the Gospel is not restricted to its own single witness, but to the
fourfold Gospel collection itself. Moreover, at issue are the hermeneutical and theological implications of eye-witnessing and of providing for
future generations an account that is both reliable. Such an account obviates the need to believe that one requires a personal encounter with the
earthly Christ for the sufficiency of testimony to him, through a written
account, to find its force. One could multiply stories, testimonies, about
Christ, endlessly, beyond what John and the Synoptics have written, but
as with the ending of Ecclesiastes (12:12–14), the danger would be in
believing that wisdom consists of having more information, rather than a
will conformed by the Holy Spirit to hear what God says and to obey.
The Gospel presentation is sufficient and does not require eye-witnessing for corroboration of further evidence.6 Bauckham in his own way
underscores that the difference is not between live or oral accounts as
“the real thing” and written accounts as derivative, but embraces in
complementary ways reliability through both media.
In John’s Gospel one is made aware that the Holy Spirit’s work entails
the opening of the scriptures of Israel as their own kind of empowering
testimony.This is seen at the death of Jesus: the author (as Bauckham has
it, and I agree), having witnessed the living water of the Holy Spirit and
the blood of sacramental new birth pour from the side of the Paschal
6 Christopher Seitz,“Booked Up: Ending John and Ending Jesus,” in Figured Out:

Typology and Providence in Christian Scripture (Louisville:Westminster John Knox,
2001), 91–101.

The Scriptures of Israel as Eyewitness

519

Lamb, lifts his voice, as it were, with a particular energy. He it is who bears
witness to these things, and he knows that what he says is true. What
follows then is not an eyewitness account of the death of Jesus, important
because of its reliability and its details in confirming what the apostolic
circle, which fled, cannot. Rather, the eyewitness testifier wants us to
know that the Holy Spirit has opened his eyes to see the truth of this death
from the standpoint of God’s eternity, that is, from the perspective of
God’s work, in type and in promise, in the scriptures of Israel. This
happened that the scriptures might be fulfilled.
That this theme is central to John is made clear when, at various points
in his account, he explicitly tells the reader that the scriptures should have
made this or that episode in the life of the earthly Jesus open up its
deeper significance (2:22; 5:39; 12:16ff.; 14:8ff.; 16:12ff.; 16:31). Scriptural testimony did not fail to do this because it lacked the capacity.
Rather, there was a veiling consistent with the purposes of God. This
allows the author of the fourth Gospel to go his own specific direction
with the accordance factor when it comes to the testifying which now
consists in his unique narrative form, over against the Synoptics, and in
relation to them in crucial ways as well. The theme of accordance is
handled in direct ways, as a theme unto itself. In the Synoptics, the material accounts of the activities of Jesus make reference of course to fulfillment and the “it is written” dimension, but they also show clear signs at
the point of composition of having been imprinted with this scriptural
effect. It remains unclear whether Bauckham’s emphasis on eye-witnessing and reliability can do justice to this aspect in the material witness.
This also has significance for the question provoking the discussion, on
the matter of reliability and on closing the gap on witness and event
through the vehicle of memory and personal testimony. I have argued that
John’s Gospel sees this question explicitly, and introduces its resolution by
means of the hermeneutical effect of the present location at the close of the
fourfold Gospel account. Reliability of testimony is assumed by the author
of John’s gospel in the nature of the case, and that holds true as well for his
understanding of antecedent testimony such as now exists in the Synoptic
accounts. John knows that many other accounts have been written and that
the world could not contain everything that might be written down. (With
Calvin, I take this in an admonishing and exhortatory sense.) Elsewhere
Bauckham has carefully described the way in which John can adjust,
update, fill out details given in the account of Mark’s Gospel, for example,
without in any strong way implying its inaccuracy or unreliability.7 But
7 Richard Bauckham, “John for Readers of Mark,” 147–71.

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Christopher Seitz

what is crucial to note is that for John the greater problem is not reliability or falsity, but how the claims of the Gospel make their force felt, what
closes the circuit, as it were.
In my judgment what John is concerned about is precisely the kind of
empiricism and evidentialism that animates so much of the Gospel questing. The material form of the Gospel presentation, in its awkward and
complex, interpenetrating fourfold form, is completely and utterly competent to give rise to faith, on just those terms.There is, in other words, no
surer way to know Jesus Christ, to understand and accept his significance
in God’s time and purposes, than through the material testimony to him
in its present and given form. Indeed that is precisely what it means for
John to be a testifier, and not an apostle like the Twelve.The full hermeneutical significance of this must be grasped. Here Bauckham’s point is sound.
The canonical implications have, however, not been adequately assessed.
And of course for John, the scriptures of Israel always had this deep
capacity for witnessing, and they would go on doing this in their own unique
form as soon as the Holy Spirit had made their point of focus clear. I take this
to be the significance of Luke’s final Easter scene with Jesus opening the
scriptures: modeling the Church’s work of interpretation yet to come.
Indeed, it would be the work of scriptural exegesis and interpretation
in the Church’s lived life of preaching and teaching that would continue
to uncover and yield forth riches well beyond what might be said of these
scriptures and the use of them within the limits of the New Testament’s
plain sense ( pace Hans Hübner and some other modern accounts).There
is a Vetus Testamentum per se that speaks of Christ in its own idiom, beyond
a Vetus Testamentum in Novo Receptum—that is, the New Testament as
circumscribing or delimiting in its material form what the Old Testament
as Christian Scripture indeed is. It points rather than delimits.
On this account, then, it is hard to know whether the deep concern
for reliability in Bauckham’s account is consistent with the formal question of how Jesus is known within the Gospel’s own present form, the
character of which cannot be established by means of corroboration and
the multiplying of evidence alone—crucial though that may be. I take
that to be part of the concern registered by Stephen Evans in his monograph account of the issue, and in response to N.T.Wright and others.8
In the course of his discussion, Bauckham helpfully provides an assessment of Irenaeus’s report concerning the aged Polycarp. Importantly,
here and in the case of Papias as well, Bauckham is keen to demonstrate
8 Stephen Evans, “Methodological Naturalism in Historical Biblical Scholarship,”

in Newman, Jesus and the Restoration of Israel, 180–205.

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521

that at issue is precisely not the preference for oral reports over against
textual transmission of the same, but rather the kind of account this form
of oral truth-telling takes. I was struck, in the account Irenaeus gives of
Polycarp, by his mentioning one particular detail. Even in the second
century, and even in possession of this kind of direct testimony to Jesus,
Polycarp, it is recorded, gave his reports in public in accordance with the
scriptures.9 Leaving aside the implications of this for Bauckham’s own
reconstruction of the material form of the New Testament (that is,
consistent with, for example, Von Campenhausen’s reconstruction, the
New Testament is here not yet scripture in the same sense as the received
“oracles of God,” the scriptures of Israel), what is striking is that possession of the memory of living testimony to Jesus Christ still is brokered in
relationship to the scriptures of Israel. This I take to be consistent with
John’s point, or with the Emmaus Road story of Luke and the first Bible
study of the Risen Lord himself. “Beginning with Moses and all the
prophets, he interpreted to them the things concerning himself ” (Lk
24:27). Not only is the accordance dimension critical from the very
inception of speech about Jesus Christ; not only is this true when ironically unseen or unacknowledged, not only true of the earthly and the
Risen Jesus, but true at the earliest moments of the Church’s life and in
its interpretative practices ever since.
Richard Bauckham has reconnected, through a critical and very detailed
assessment, the New Testament and the earliest reception history of the
Jesus tradition in the records of the early Church, and elsewhere. He has
sought to explain, in a creative but also in a carefully argued manner, the
role of the living witnesses to Jesus who, as he so clearly states, must have
been many in number and certainly would have been concerned to see
that the testimony to Jesus was accurately preserved. It has not been my
intention to assess the success with which he has done this, and the wider
implications for the investigation into the genesis of Jesus traditions and
their final literary stabilization in an amazing and sui generis literary form:
the fourfold Gospel collection, a collection which would soon achieve the
kind of stabilization of form that took centuries in the case of the Pentateuch, and after which resisted any further alteration.
My concern here has been to raise the question of reliability and testimony from the standpoint of the Gospel’s own form and its own attention precisely to this question. But this was not a question faced on its
9 Polycarp “would declare in accordance with the scriptures what the things were

which he had heard from [the elders] concerning the Lord, his mighty works and
his teaching, . . . as having received them from the eyewitnesses . . . of the life of
the Logos.” Bauckham’s rendering in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, emphasis added.

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Christopher Seitz

own, for its own sake, but because of the significance of the dimension
of accordance—the Old Testament as eyewitness to Jesus, in the manner
of its own capacities and eventual fulfillments—as this makes its force felt
in the compositional history of the New Testament and with explicit
theological reflection in John’s Gospel and elsewhere. Testimony does
indeed involve reliability and a sensitive portrayal of just what history is
and means to be, when the subject of its accounting is Jesus Christ. But
this Jesus Christ is testified to by a word which preceded the New Testament’s formation, and which the New Testament saw as absolutely critical to a full appreciation of who Jesus was and is and will be, a testifying
that continues as the Old Testament opens up its riches, the Holy Spirit
and the witness of Jesus himself pointing the way. That remains true for
us on different terms, but in exactly the same spirit as an aging Church
Father, treasuring and retelling the stories of Jesus as these had been
passed on to him, in accordance with the scriptures.The New Testament
ably and providentially occupies the space of that aging bishop, and the
Old Testament speaks of accordance and of figures in the providentially
N&V
given character of its own deep witnessing.

Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 6, No. 3 (2008): 523–528

523

The Limits of Reliability
G REGORY TATUM , O. P.
Ecole Biblique
Jerusalem, Israel

I N Jesus and the Eyewitnesses:The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, Richard
Bauckham argues
that the Gospel texts are much closer to the form in which the eyewitnesses told their stories or passed on their traditions than is commonly
envisaged in current scholarship.This is what gives the Gospels their character as testimony.They embody the testimony of the eyewitnesses, not of
course without editing and interpretation, but in a way that is substantially
faithful to how the eyewitnesses themselves told it, since the Evangelists
were in more or less direct contact with eyewitnesses, not removed from
them by a long process of anonymous transmission of the traditions.1

As in God Crucified, where Bauckham wishes to bridge the gap between
functional and ontological Christology with his category of identity,2 so
here he wishes to bridge the gap between the Jesus of History and the
Christ of Faith with his category of eyewitness testimony.Thus, Bauckham
proposes to answer a theological question (the Jesus of History-Christ of
1 Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses:The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony

(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 6.
2 Richard Bauckham, God Crucified: Monotheism & Christology in the New Testament

(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), viii. Bauckham correctly criticizes the
dichotomy between functional Christology (in which Jesus has divine functions
but is not himself divine) and ontological Christology (in which Jesus is by
nature divine). He proposes that Jesus shares the identity of the God of Israel,
which means that non-monotheist analogies are rejected and Jesus shares in the
historical actions of the Lord God. Bauckham’s conception of second-Temple
Jewish monotheism is oddly Muslim, and his category of identity sounds
perilously Modalist.

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Gregory Tatum, O.P.

Faith dichotomy) with a historical answer (eyewitness testimony).3 This
problem arises, according to Bauckham,“when historians suspect that these
texts may be hiding the real Jesus from us.”4 Thus, the root problem that
eyewitness testimony is meant to solve is that of the historical unreliability
of the Gospels.While Bauckham provides an acute critique of form criticism in its traditional form, he has an awkward emphasis on historical reliability. I propose to discuss what is meant by the historical reliability of the
Gospels and to praise their unreliability.
An Acute Critique of “Form Criticism”
Bauckham does succeed in attacking the historical use of “form criticism” à la Rudolf Bultmann, Martin Dibelius, and Vincent Taylor, and in
constructing a Protestant form of apostolic succession.The earliest proponents of form criticism held that a long period of unregulated oral tradition separated the editors of the Gospels from the eyewitnesses of Jesus’
career. They further claimed to be able to identify the life-situation and
relative date of individual instances of oral tradition. Few today would
allow these latter claims,5 and Bauckham does not bother to argue extensively against them. He does, however, argue that the period of oral tradition was not unregulated. Bauckham proposes that Christian communities
recognized the authority of eyewitnesses and their successors as bearers/
regulators of the oral tradition.This eyewitness authority bears a remarkable resemblance to what a Catholic would call apostolic succession.The
dissimilarity lies in the limitation of the authority to providing memories
of Jesus to the human authors of the Gospels.This model as far as it goes
is highly plausible. It is more likely that eyewitnesses and their successors
formed some kind of magisterium in the life of the Church than that they
disappeared and the tradition was free-form.
An Awkward Emphasis on “Historical Reliability”
Bauckham’s argument falters on his hypothesis of the “inclusio of eyewitness testimony.” Papias, Luke, and John emphasize the category of eyewitness testimony; Matthew and Mark make no such claims for themselves.
No such literary device exists. The deeper problem lies in Bauckham’s
3 Personally, I have never understood this dichotomy as problematic. My histori-

cal studies aid and enrich my Christian faith. Since I believe in the unity of truth,
I have no difficulty recognizing that if history and theology are at loggerheads,
one is most likely doing bad history and bad theology.
4 Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 2.
5 For example, s.v., “Form Criticism (NT),” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary (New
York: Doubleday, 1992).

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525

awkward emphasis on historical reliability. What is meant when we say
that the Gospels are historically reliable? And why is it a problem when
they are historically unreliable?
The New Testament accounts of the life, death, and resurrection of
Jesus are historically reliable. After all, if we did not recognize some kind
of historical reliability in our sources of information, we would need to
abandon all attempts to answer historical questions.6 Indeed, it is of the
nature of any historical investigation to have sources that differ.The judicious weighing of evidence is essential to the historical enterprise, and
multiple judgments concerning sources are inevitable. The goal of any
historical research is to provide as plausible, economical, comprehensive,
and fertile readings as possible of a set of incomplete and complex data.
Uncertainty is built into the process, and attempts to hone methodology
in order to avoid uncertainty are hopeless and give rise to the sort of
naïve positivism that is so common and so dangerous for faith.
Further, if we look at the Gospels we see that the range of authorial
creativity is not particularly great. For example, Jesus is not portrayed as
bringing rain as Elijah did. If the authors of the Gospels or their traditions
were simply using biblical stories to generate incidents in the life of Jesus,
why was he not portrayed as a rain-maker?7 And Jesus heals Gentiles and
raises the dead only twice. If the authors creatively made up stories that
were useful for the community, Jesus would have healed Gentiles and raised
the dead frequently in their narratives! It is the later, non-canonical gospels
that have wholesale creation of incidents ranging from anachronistic secret
teachings to killing and resurrecting childhood playmates. A simple glance
at a synopsis of the Gospels will show that the general range of creativity
is not particularly great.We could not organize the vast majority of the text
into parallel columns if the authors were as creative and unreliable as is
sometimes asserted. Thus, there is no reason to suppose that the tradition
embedded in the four Gospels as a whole is historically unreliable.
The Gospels are grosso modo historically reliable. Nevertheless, it is
worthwhile to investigate the kind and degree of the Gospels’ historical
6 This point needs to be made with respect to the work of the Jesus Seminar. If

the sources are as tainted with unhistorical data as they contend, no amount of
manipulation can salvage bits and pieces of historical information.The methodological problem is insoluble, so that their work is a form of science fiction—
that is, novelistic treatment of an idea making use of imaginary science.
7 For example, Geza Vermes identifies Jesus as a Northern Jewish charismatic similar to noted rain-makers Elijah, Honi the Circle-drawer, and Hanina ben Dosa.
Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew:A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels (Philadelphia: Fortress,
1973).

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reliability. E. P. Sanders, in the conclusion to his revolutionary Jesus and
Judaism, writes:
This study has been based on the view that knowledge about Jesus can
be stratified, according to its degree of certainty, along the following
scale: beyond reasonable doubt (“certain”), highly probable, probable,
possible, conceivable, unprovable, incredible. The things best known
about Jesus are certain facts about him, his career and its aftermath. . . .
These facts yield certain knowledge about Jesus of a general character.8

This view of degrees of certainty and doubt is far more nuanced and useful
than simply asserting or denying the historical reliability of the Gospels. In
particular, it is useful to recognize that the general character of the life of
Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels is certain.The sorts of actions and sayings
that are generally attributed to him are beyond a reasonable doubt. For
example, Jesus cast out unclean spirits.There is no historical reason to doubt
this activity because it is so well attested.9 The narrative details of this or that
exorcism are naturally far less certain, because we have multiple accounts
that differ precisely in their narrative details. In general, the Gospels are in
substantial agreement as to the historical facts of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection; God dwells in the details.
God dwells in the historically unreliable details because the diversity of
portraits of Jesus in the texts safeguards us from historical reductionism. For
example, on what day of the month was Jesus crucified? In John’s Gospel,
Jesus is crucified at the hour of the Passover sacrifice: Jesus died on the fourteenth day of Nisan. In the Synoptic Gospels, the Last Supper is the Passover
meal: Jesus died on the fifteenth day of Nisan. Since denying the historical
irreconcilability of these details would be dishonest, the truth of these dates
must lie elsewhere. Both accounts shed light on the ways in which Jesus is
our Passover (1 Corinthians). He is the ultimate Passover sacrifice of endtime divine worship ( John, Hebrews, Ephesians), and he is the ultimate
Passover meal partaken by Christians in the Eucharist (Matthew, Mark, 1
Corinthians).Thus, the historical unreliability of the narratives embodies a
richer, deeper theological unity by means of the divergent portraits of Jesus
in the Gospels.
Another example of historical unreliability is even more extreme: the
infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke. The two accounts are simply
8 E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), 321.
9 Of course, if one is a nineteenth-century rationalist, miracles are impossible and

these things did not happen. Rejecting the miraculous a priori in analyzing firstcentury Mediterranean cultures can only lead to substantial misunderstanding of
those cultures.This is a philosophical rather than a historical problem.

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527

irreconcilable.And yet, they agree on certain important points: the virgin
birth of Jesus, the date of his birth in the last years of the reign of Herod
the Great, the place of his birth in Bethlehem.The theological and narrative differences of these two accounts underscore their agreement on
these historical points. And yet Luke’s sophisticated Septuagintal pastiche
and Matthew’s multilayered midrash embed Jesus’ personal story in the
story of the Israel of God.Although the infancy narratives are historically
unreliable (apart from their points of agreement), they provide Spiritinspired portraits of who Jesus is.Thus, God dwells in the details.Where
the Gospels are historically reliable, God teaches us through events and
narratives.Where the Gospels are historically irreconcilable, God teaches
us deeper and more important truths.The Spirit inspired four Gospels to
be written and subsequently to be recognized by the Church as canonical. This fourfold diversity is not a problem to be solved but a spiritual
resource enriching the prayer, proclamation, and praxis of the Church.
Conclusion
The point of the Gospels is not simply to provide the reader with historical information about Jesus (nor to provide a textbook for doctrine
and/or ethics).The Scriptures are a privileged means of communion with
the Trinity. By hearing and doing the Word, the Church grows in grace.
Wisdom is the interior, contemplative dimension of this communion
where love and knowledge are united. Holiness is the exterior, active
dimension of this communion where human actions manifest their
divine origin. Although the Scriptures are useful for instruction, they are
not reducible to any one component—history, doctrine, ethics, philosophy, poetry, literature. The attempt to straitjacket the Gospel to the
notions of historical truth inherited from the French Enlightenment does
not advance the Gospel.10 In other words, the Scriptures are not univocal, but have a plurality of meanings limited only by the analogy of faith.11
The Gospel is not in chains, but rather comes alive in the Church’s prayer,
proclamation, praise, growth in virtue, acts of mercy, and the celebration

10 Critical historical study is a primary tool for the contemporary engagement of

the sacred page, rather than a monopolistic one.
11 The analogy of faith recognizes that the reading community (the Church) has

the freedom to use the Scriptures in any way that helps growth in wisdom and
holiness. Readings that lead to communal damage or even self-destruction are
excluded. The reading community’s experience over time (Tradition) provides
the norms for adjudication to those empowered to adjudicate (the Magisterium).
The process is guided by the author of the Scriptures himself—God.

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of the sacraments. For Christians to grow in wisdom and holiness, the
Scriptures must be open to multiple meanings. Otherwise we would have
merely historical information about an ancient book rather than the
Word of God.
N&V

Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 6, No. 3 (2008): 529–542

529

Response to the Respondents
R ICHARD B AUCKHAM
University of St. Andrews
St. Andrews, Scotland

Response to Samuel Byrskog
S AMUEL B YRSKOG makes several important points. I will try to
respond to those that seem to me especially to require my comment.
In Jesus and the Eyewitnesses I did not provide an adequate discussion of
the relationship between ancient historiography and biography or of the
implications of that relationship for the Gospels. I hope to remedy that
omission in a forthcoming book. Meantime, I have published an essay
arguing that the Gospel of John in particular has characteristics readers
would have regarded as features of historiography, making this Gospel an
example of the kind of bios that was quite close to historiography.1
Unfortunately we still lack an accurate typology of ancient biographies, but one way of classifying them is by proxima genera, that is, by their
relationship to any other of the literary genres with which the flexible
genre of biography overlaps. I would argue that the Gospels are biographies quite close to historiography. One reason for that judgment is
Luke’s preface. If it is an indication of the genre of Luke, as I think it is,
then it must also be an indication of the genre of Matthew and Mark,
which can hardly be said to differ generically from Luke.
Another important aspect is that the Gospels are contemporary biography, written (even if only just) within living memory of their subject.
There are quite a number of such contemporary biographies, including
Lucian’s biography of the philosopher Demonax, with whom he had
1 Richard Bauckham,“Historiographical Characteristics of the Gospel of John,” in

The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple: Narrative, History, and Theology in the Gospel of
John (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007); originally published in New
Testament Studies 53 (2007): 17–36.

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Richard Bauckham

studied; the same writer’s biography of the “false prophet” Alexander of
Abonoteichus (Lucian had had some personal contact with him, but also
knew some of his devotees); Xenophon’s Life of Agesilaus, the Spartan
king and general (Xenophon had served under him); Tacitus’s life of
Agricola, the Roman politician and general who was Tacitus’s father-inlaw; the life of Plotinus the Neo-Platonic philosopher by his disciple
Porphyry; Cornelius Nepos’s life of his friend and patron Atticus (mostly
written in Atticus’s lifetime); and Josephus’s autobiography. The Gospels
should primarily be compared with these biographies, rather than with
such patently legendary or fictional biographies as those of Homer and
Aesop, who were figures of the distant past, or even with Plutarch’s quite
well researched biographies of people who lived long before his time.
That the Gospels are contemporary lives itself brings them close to
historiography, which ancient historians thought could only properly be
written within living memory of the events.The reason for this restriction
was largely methodological: it made possible firsthand acquaintance with
the places and firsthand contact with eyewitness sources. I think that this
aspect of historiography (stressed and expounded in Byrskog’s own book,
Story as History, History as Story) means that the Gospels, as contemporary
biographies, would have been expected to have eyewitness sources.
Pretending to eyewitness testimony they did not really have would, if
discovered, have been regarded as a breach of faith with their readers.
This brings me to the issue of truth in ancient historiography. I think
we should probably distinguish three aspects of this issue. First, ancient
historians were, like most historians before modern times, storytellers
who needed to interest and entertain their readers. Licence to tell the
story in an effective way—adding vivid detail, simplifying the plot, and
so forth—was taken for granted and not generally regarded as untruthful, if the substance was based on good evidence. Because speeches were
seen as essential to history and accounts of them often not available,
licence to create speeches that were in character and appropriate to the
occasion was also widely accepted. It may be these widely accepted historiographical conventions that led Seneca to dismiss all history as lies, but
this was not a common attitude.
Secondly, historians and biographers often wrote to persuade their
readers, and this is where rhetoric comes in. No doubt, this could open
the door to deliberate falsehood, but not necessarily. As Byrskog himself
puts it, “persuasion was of course most effective when it could be shown
to relate as closely as possible to the factual truth of the past.”2 He also
2 Samuel Byrskog, Story as History, History as Story (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,

2000; Leiden: Brill, 2002), 210.

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531

comments:“Persuasion and factual credibility were supplementary rhetorical virtues, not contradictory.”3 Another important consideration is that,
whereas in a court of law persuasion was the entire purpose of a speech,
this was not necessarily the case with history and biography. The Greek
lives of the poets, for example, were not written to persuade so much as
simply to satisfy the curiosity of readers who wanted to know about the
lives of famous literary figures. So we should be a little cautious about
supposing that, when Quintilian says that “it is sometimes permitted also
for a philosopher to tell even a lie” (2.17.27), the concession also applies
to historical writing.
Thirdly, some historians made false claims to have visited sites or to
have been present at events or to have had access to the testimony of
particular eyewitnesses. Lucian severely mocks them. There is no reason
to suppose that some people thought such practices by historians justifiable.The claims are simply fraudulent.They actually constitute evidence
that historians were expected to have eyewitness sources. So I am not
entirely convinced that there were two recognized ways of writing
history or biography (accurate or rhetorical) or that we must decide in
which category the Gospels belong.
The authors of the Gospels were not trained orators (though they may
have been experienced popular storytellers) and their works are, in literary respects, unsophisticated.We have only to study Matthew’s and Luke’s
redactions of Markan material to see that their elaboration of their
sources is quite minimal. There seems to me no reason to suppose that
the Synoptic evangelists handled any of their sources much differently.
This means that, by contrast with the much more sophisticated way in
which Polybius and Tacitus absorbed sources into their own literary
compositions, in the Gospels the eyewitness sources still show through.
Byrskog’s last point is really a theological one.A strong emphasis in my
book is on the co-inherence of fact and meaning in the eyewitness testimonies. Even as they experienced the events that they witnessed and even
as they first remembered them, the eyewitnesses were interpreting what
they saw and heard.There is no way back to uninterpreted occurrences of
any real interest. The reports about Jesus came with interpretation from
the start. Later reflection by the eyewitnesses themselves, for example in
the light of the resurrection, might expand the significance of events, as
might the use of the traditions by the writers of the Gospels. But such
further interpretation would normally be continuous with the significance the events originally had for those who were involved in them
3 Byrskog, Story, 223.

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Richard Bauckham

when they occurred. (I would say the same, for example, of Holocaust
testimonies.) This gives the testimonies of the eyewitnesses a kind of
normative priority for interpretation. Since there is no way back to the
uninterpreted event, all further interpretation is dependent on them.This
was the significance, in part, of the canonizing process. The apostolic
eyewitnesses were understood to be the authoritative sources of normative knowledge of Jesus in his history, able both to report reliably and to
interpret faithfully. Such an understanding corresponds to the fact that, for
faith in the real incarnation of God in the human historical life of Jesus,
the history really mattered, and that it was not readily prised apart from
the interpretation that was given it from the beginning. Only if it were
possible to reconstruct a purely historical Jesus and set out afresh to interpret him would it be possible to argue, as Byrskog suggests,“that theology
should be equally concerned with the various testimonies of the same
historical event during several centuries of interpretation and so soften the
heavy emphasis on the eyewitnesses.” I do think, quite strongly, that Jesus
needs to be interpreted contextually in each new context in which the
Gospel is preached and lived, but the Church has always understood that
such interpretation must be deeply rooted in the Gospels.
Response to Frank Matera
Frank Matera gives a sympathetic and accurate account of the main lines
and results of my arguments. I value his positive assessment of my work.
I do not need to dispute or correct anything he says! Perhaps I can add
something I think is of great importance for the issue of history and
interpretation that he covers in his last section. Cognitive psychology
shows that as early as when we commit an event or an experience to
memory we are already interpreting it. In the case of an event that was
of great significance to us, this is especially the case. If it then becomes an
event that we frequently recount to others, two things can happen. One
is that the way we tell the story quickly acquires a fairly fixed form.We
might vary it to an extent for different audiences in different contexts,
but substantially we repeat what we have been saying all along. It would
be different with an event we hardly ever recalled, even to ourselves. In
that case, asked to remember the event long afterwards, our memory
would be much less trustworthy. Frequent recall is a key feature of
memory that makes for stability. That is true when modern people like
ourselves repeat a story in purely informal ways, but it is even more likely
to be the case in an oral society when an eyewitness, in a formal setting,
is repeating a story highly prized by the community. But the other thing
that can happen is what cognitive psychology calls “deferred meaning”:

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533

where the significance of the event dawns on us in retrospect, often in
the light of later events or circumstances. The Gospel of John actually
describes this process (e.g. 2:22; 12:14–16), showing that early Christians
were fully self-conscious about it.
After form criticism, we need to think more about how these two
factors—fixed form and deferred meaning—relate.The developing interpretation may affect the way the story is told (or the saying of Jesus
recalled), but then again it may not. Repetition can make the repeated
form of the story sturdy enough to survive, while the additional interpretation remains external to the story itself. A nice illustration is Mark
7:19b. Probably the saying of Jesus in 7:18–19a would not originally have
been understood as revoking the Torah’s distinction between clean and
unclean foods. Mark’s comment (“thus he declared all foods clean”)
draws a conclusion that would not have been drawn until later. But this
further interpretation has not altered the form of the saying. It is
conveyed only by Mark’s editorial comment, which remains external to
the saying. Form criticism has led us to assume too easily that later interpretation shaped the way the traditions were recalled, and redaction criticism has made us attend in a perhaps one-sided way to how the
evangelists’ own interpretation shaped their material. We need a more
careful study of the relationship between stable memory and added interpretation. John’s Gospel, because it is by general consensus the Gospel
that engages most in reflective interpretation, is a special case, but also
needs to be studied with a sensitivity to both sides of this dialectic, especially as there are clear indications that even this evangelist—or, perhaps,
especially this evangelist—was well aware of the difference between
immediate and deferred meaning.
Response to Rodrigo J. Morales
Rodrigo Morales’s response to my book features a number of constructive suggestions and questions that point to the further work that is
needed if my arguments are broadly acceptable. I hope that he may be
one of those who can carry forward this work of further assessment and
consequent issues.About the possibility of re-assessing more of the patristic material about the origins of the Gospels, the need for testing my
hypothesis against detailed exegesis of the Gospels, and the need to
explore further parallels to the Gospels that might have been composed
in a similar way (historical biographies from the Greco-Roman world
especially), I can only agree.
Also important are the two questions he raises in the penultimate
section of his response. One is about the role of historical Jesus research

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Richard Bauckham

if my general thesis about the Gospels is accepted. I would suggest we
need far more work that makes use of all that we now know about the
world of Jewish Palestine in the early first century in order both to assess
the accuracy of the way the Gospels depict that Jewish context of Jesus’
life and work (which for the Gospel writers was already a historical
context) and also to illuminate the figure of Jesus in the Gospels by filling out the picture of his historical context that the Gospels provide.
Some historical Jesus scholars (especially those now often classified as part
of the Third Quest) have done important work in this respect, but far too
much scholarly energy has been deflected from these tasks by two
features of Gospels scholarship. One is the form-critical view that the
Sitz im Leben of the traditions in the Christian communities must be the
prime historical interest and the other is the emphasis laid by redaction
criticism and the “Gospel communities” hypothesis (supposing that each
Gospel was addressed to a specific Christian community) on the orientation of the Gospels to specific needs of a specific group of readers or
hearers who need to be historically reconstructed from the evidence of
the Gospels. Some critics of my book have accused me of uncritical
acceptance of everything in the Gospels as historical. My response is that,
if the sources are as I argue in the book, then certainly we need to assess
their reliability, but that the ways this has been done within the form critical tradition—such as by the reconstruction of tradition history and the
application of the famous criteria of authenticity applied to individual
stories and sayings—are not appropriate ways of assessing such sources. I
would lay far more emphasis on the match between the sources (each
source as a whole) and the world of first-century Jewish Palestine to
which they purport to refer.
The second question Morales asks in his penultimate section is about
the relationship between the four witnesses to Jesus that we have in the
four Gospels and the one Jesus of Christian faith. I have long thought this
is an important question that modern scholarship, even when sceptical of
the quest for the historical Jesus, has conspicuously failed to address. We
have been urged to appreciate each Gospel’s portrayal of Jesus in its own
right, and this is an important task, which we should not neglect in favour
of going straight to a harmonized or composite portrait. But the role of
Jesus in Christian faith does require some kind of unified image of him.
How to move from the four Gospels to the one Jesus in a theologically
disciplined way I do not know! I do think it is relevant to remember that
the existence of our four Gospels suggests the inadequacy both of each of
them and of all of them to pin down a definitive single portrait of Jesus
that we can grasp and hold. Not that they are misleading, but that the real

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Jesus must always be more than any account of him. In practice, the images
Christians form of Jesus, often influenced by the cultural context in which
they live their faith, are never more than partial.What matters is that they
are well rooted in the Gospel testimonies and that they do not replace the
Gospel testimonies. Our images of Jesus will always need correction,
extension, and deepening from our continued reading of the Gospels.4
I will devote the rest of this response to addressing Morales’ comments
on my treatment of the Gospel of Matthew. He is not the only reader to
have found this treatment unsatisfactory. My method in working on the
book was to take the arguments as far as they led me, and in Matthew’s
case they did not seem to lead very far. I do think that the Gospel makes
some sort of eyewitness claim. I don’t think the lack of an inclusio of
eyewitness testimony, such as I find in the other Gospels, contradicts that
assessment. A biography based on eyewitness testimony did not have to
employ such an inclusio. If the author of Matthew’s Gospel knew Mark,
as I think he did, then his reproduction of Mark’s list of the Twelve probably indicates that he saw Mark’s Gospel as preserving the traditions of
the Twelve. (I think the function of the list in Mark and Luke is to indicate that the Twelve were the source of many of the traditions they
preserve, and there is no reason to think otherwise in the case of
Matthew.) Like Luke, Matthew reproduced much of Mark’s material for
this reason, although, unlike Luke, he gives no indication that the Markan
material was connected specifically with Peter. Furthermore, his addition
of “tax collector” to Mark’s mention of Matthew and his transference of
Mark’s story of Jesus’ call of a tax collector to Matthew cohere with the
attribution of the Gospel to Matthew (which must be very early) to indicate some kind of dependence on the eyewitness testimony of another
member of the Twelve, Matthew. In the light of these indications, we
could see the list of the Twelve as functioning in Matthew to authenticate not just the Markan material but also whatever material derived
specifically from the apostle Matthew.
But there seems to me no more specific indication in the Gospel itself
as to what form this dependence on the apostle Matthew took.While we
might conjecture that the Q material or some of the special Matthean
material came from Matthew, there seem to me to be no textual indications of this. I intentionally restricted my discussion of Gospel sources to
the indications the Gospels themselves give as to their eyewitness sources,
4 Gerald O’Collins, Jesus: A Portrait (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2008),

xiii–xv, has some brief but helpful comments on the way that knowing any other
person, and especially knowing Jesus, is a matter of “grappling with an elusive
mystery.”

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Richard Bauckham

because I think the first readers/hearers would have expected the Gospels
to have eyewitness sources and would be alert to indications of what
those sources were. But they would not, for example, have examined the
texts of Matthew and Luke and identified the non-Markan material that
those two Gospels share.There is nothing wrong with doing that kind of
source criticism ourselves, but it is a different exercise from arguments
about the way the Gospels themselves indicate their sources. I thought it
important not to confuse the two.That is also why I said hardly anything
about the Q hypothesis.
I do not think it likely that the attribution to Matthew is pseudepigraphal. I included that possibility on page 302 of my book, because
there I was arguing that none of the four Gospels was ever anonymous.
My point was that, even if the attribution of Matthew’s Gospel to
Matthew was fictitious, the Gospel would still not have been anonymous.
Morales makes the point that a pseudepigraphal use of the name
Matthew is unlikely because “pseudonymous writers were more likely to
choose figures with a higher profile in the early Christian movement.”
This seems to me a broadly plausible, though not conclusive argument.
One would have to take account of logion 13 of the Gospel of Thomas,
which treats Matthew as a prominent disciple, alongside Peter and
Thomas. I think this alludes to our Gospel of Matthew (see pp. 236–37
of my book), but others might treat it as evidence that Matthew was a
prominent disciple in extra-canonical traditions. The Gospel of the
Ebionites was probably attributed to Matthew, but this was doubtless
because it was largely based on our Gospel of Matthew. However, there
are several apocryphal texts associated with the apostle Bartholomew,
who is otherwise a very obscure member of the Twelve.
Although quite a lot of my readers would have liked me to derive
more information about Matthew’s Gospel from Papias, I have to say I
think I said enough to show that Papias has nothing reliable to tell us
about this Gospel, apart from its association with the apostle Matthew.
This conclusion follows from my argument about Papias’s reasons for
saying what he did about Matthew. I argued that Papias’s statements
about both Mark and Matthew are best understood if we suppose that he
was comparing them with John and was therefore dealing with the
differences in the chronological order of the events in these Gospels. By
comparison with John, he judged both Mark and Matthew to be lacking
in order. If they derive, as he supposed, from apostolic testimony, this lack
of order needs explaining. (He assumes that an apostolic eyewitness
would have known the actual order of events and would have set them
down in that order if he wrote a Gospel. This is not an assumption we

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need to share, but I think it was Papias’s assumption.) In Mark’s case, the
explanation is that Mark knew Peter’s traditions as individual units, and
so was not in a position to know in what order they occurred historically. As a non-eyewitness himself, he did his best. Matthew, on the other
hand, was an eyewitness, and so Papias offers a different explanation for
that Gospel’s lack of order. He ascribes it to the translators, who (like
many “translators” in the ancient world) adapted the material they translated from Matthew’s original Hebrew or Aramaic, creating the nonchronological order of the Greek Gospel Papias knew. This is a clever
hypothesis, which Papias thought up to account for a problem he had
with Matthew’s Gospel (not one that we need have), but it cannot be
true. Papias does not say that Matthew wrote one of the sources of
Matthew’s Gospel; if he knew that, he would have said so. It would have
explained what, in Papias’s view, was the lack of order in Matthew’s
Gospel just as well as his actual statement does. Papias must mean that
Matthew wrote a Hebrew or Aramaic Gospel that contained, at any rate
to a large extent, the substance of the Greek Gospel of Matthew, but in
a different order. No one who supposes that our Gospel of Matthew is
dependent on the Greek Gospel of Mark, as I do, can agree with Papias
about that.
Part of my concern in examining the fragments of Papias in detail was
that we must give priority to determining what Papias meant, whether
or not it is historically plausible. Too many interpretations of Papias
proceed by supposing that Papias must have said what the scholar in
question thinks was the historical fact of the matter, and this has been
especially true of the statement about Matthew. This practice is just as
much to be avoided as the opposite practice of assuming that Papias
could only have been freely inventing everything he says on the topic.
So, if my argument, in the book, as to what Papias meant and intended
by his statement about Matthew is correct, there is no more to be said on
the subject. Sadly, I do not think any of the later patristic testimonies
about the origin of Matthew’s Gospel can help us either. None of them
show evidence of knowing anything they did not learn from Papias.
Jerome, it is true, knew a Gospel in Hebrew or Aramaic that some people
regarded as the original of the Greek Matthew. (He himself seems to have
changed his mind and become dubious of this.) To judge from his quotations, it was certainly related to the Greek Gospel of Matthew, but it
looks more like a secondary development of our Matthew than a more
original form of it. Nevertheless, there may be something to be learned
from fresh study of the tantalizingly little evidence we have of the early
Jewish Christian Gospels.Whether the Coptic version of Matthew in the

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Schøyen collection, recently published by Schenke,5 which has many
variants from the text of the Greek Matthew, can help us at all in the
quest for the origins of Matthew’s Gospel, it is too early to say.
I wish we could go further in trying to identify Matthew’s contribution to the Gospel that bears his name, but I do not see how it can be
done. Until someone can demonstrate otherwise, it seems to me that I
took my own methodology as far as it can go in that direction.
Response to Christopher Seitz
Christopher Seitz is quite right to point out that I do not, in this book,
address the question of the role of the Old Testament in the formation of
the Gospel traditions and of the Gospels. I do just touch on its role when
I discuss Mark’s story of Jesus stilling the storm (p. 504). There my
concern is to show that literary allusion need not compromise the
authenticity of an eyewitness account as genuinely recollected. In this
respect, I compare it with Elie Wiesel’s allusions to Dostoevsky in his
account of his experience of Auschwitz. I argue that the Old Testament
allusions in Mark’s story of the stilling of the storm enhance the significance of the story, placing it in “a wider symbolic field of resonance,” but
that “the interpretation does not come in between us and the realistic
character of the story, as interpretation can.” Since the disciples, given
their Jewish cultural context, likely would have experienced a dangerous
storm at sea as an instance of the always-threatening waters of chaos, the
interpretation of the story given by the Old Testament allusions has real
continuity with the event as originally experienced.
This may point in the direction that I would take in bringing the Old
Testament into my overall thesis about the origins of the Gospels. Seitz,
when he depicts me as rather exclusively concerned with historical reliability, has perhaps (like some other readers) missed the extent to which
I stress the coinherence of fact and significance in any history that is more
than a pointless collection of bare facts. This coinherence was the case,
with the Gospel traditions, all the way back to their origins. The events
were already significant for the participants when they occurred and
would have been already fraught with significance when the participants
remembered them. Of course, further interpretation developed later, and
this would have included both relating the events to the whole story of
Jesus, including his resurrection, but also relating them to the Old Testament, through which the first Christians understood what had happened
as the climax of the whole scriptural story of Israel. There is so much
5 Hans-Martin Schenke, Das Mattäus-Evangelium im mittelägyptischen Dialekt des

Koptischen (Codex Schøyen) (Oslo: Hermes, 2001).

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539

precise exegesis of Old Testament texts within the New Testament that
we have to envisage, I think, a great deal of serious exegetical work taking
place within the earliest Christian community in Jerusalem.
Take, for example, the pervasive allusions to the Psalms in the Gospel
passion narratives (from Gethsemane onwards). The connexion of these
events with the Psalms certainly did not originate with the Gospel writers (though they were aware of it and may sometimes have enhanced it)
but must go far back in the traditions. Some scholars conclude that much
of the story was simply constructed out of the prophecies of the suffering Messiah that early Christians found in the Psalms, but the way the
Gospels actually stress the eyewitness character of their accounts of the
crucifixion of Jesus rules that out, in my view. The connexion with the
Psalms of lament may go back to Jesus’ own use of the words of Psalm
22 in his dying cry, and we can easily imagine the first Christians already
following up that scriptural clue in their earliest attempts to understand
the cross in the light of the Scriptures. In that case, again, there is continuity between what the events already meant to those who witnessed
them and the scriptural interpretation that developed later. Probably the
allusions to the Psalms were woven into the earliest Passion narrative
forged by the apostles at an early stage of the Jerusalem church’s history.
John’s Gospel is especially interesting in relation to this topic (see my
brief account on pp. 352–53) because it is quite explicit about the differences between pre- and post-resurrection perceptions of pre-resurrection
events and about the role of Scripture in this. In the case to which Seitz
refers, John 19:32–37, I think the probable meaning is that the witness
(the Beloved Disciple) simply observed, at the time, that blood and water
flowed from Jesus’ side and that his bones were not broken.The Beloved
Disciple’s scriptural enlightenment as to the meaning of these things
came later. But his witness, I think, encompasses both.The empirical facts
mean little in themselves, but it is important to the author that he had
observed them, and his witness to their meaning would not be witness
had he not seen them. Another very interesting, and somewhat different
case, is John 12:12–16. John cannot mean that the disciples at the time
did not recognize that Jesus, riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, was acting
out the scriptural role of the Davidic Messiah.After all, the crowds recognized this.What dawned on the disciples only later, when they reflected
on the texts and the event, was that he was acting out the unexpected
role of a Messiah who comes in humility to suffer death. In this case,
therefore, there was a degree of scriptural meaning attached to the event
when it happened, which was then available, in the memories of the
eyewitnesses, to be developed further after the resurrection.

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Richard Bauckham

In some cases, therefore, we can observe the way in which scriptural
meaning entered the eyewitnesses’ memories of the events at an early
stage, even at the very beginning of their memories. But we must also
note that a large number of narrative traditions in the Gospels lack scriptural interpretation within themselves (as I point out on p. 323), gaining
it only in the larger context of the Gospels. In these cases we may have a
rather straightforward recollection of an eyewitness with little, if any,
subsequent reflection added. Here we see evidence that, in the process by
which the Gospel traditions reached the Gospel writers, eyewitness
recollection maintained its own integrity and was not simply overwhelmed by scriptural interpretation.
Response to Gregory Tatum, O.P.
Gregory Tatum seems largely to agree with my model of how the Gospel
traditions reached the Gospel writers. I am encouraged by that agreement. But he thinks I have “an awkward emphasis on historical reliability.” By contrast, he himself has no problem at all with the difference
between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith. But it is very clear
that this is not because there cannot in principle be such a problem, but
because he is confident that the Gospels (even John) do have a large
measure of historical reliability: “the general character of the life of Jesus
as portrayed in the Gospels is certain.” What I say in the passage he quotes
is that a problem arises “when historians suspect that these texts [the
Gospels] may be hiding the real Jesus from us, at best because they give
us the historical Jesus filtered through the spectacles of early Christian
faith, at worst because much of what they tell us is a Jesus constructed by
the needs and interests of various groups in the early church” (p. 2).This
kind of thorough-going suspicion of the historical value of the Gospels
has undoubtedly fuelled a large part of the quest for the historical Jesus
in its various phases. Both the nineteenth-century liberal Protestants and
the prominent members of the Jesus Seminar today self-consciously
portray the historical Jesus, the Jesus they as historians can reconstruct, as
incompatible with the Jesus of the Gospels.
I think Tatum would agree with me that if such historical conclusions
were plausible, then there would be a problem. But he brushes this problem aside with a few reasons for believing that “the general character of
the life of Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels is certain.” He seems to think
the historical issue is merely a matter of how much of the Gospels can
be treated as factually reliable and to what degree.What he entirely misses
is the issue of meaning and interpretation in history, with which I am
very much concerned, from that initial statement of the problem through

Response to the Respondents

541

to my final chapter in which I return to the theological issue.The quest
for the historical Jesus has not been just a matter of weighing evidence
and classifying what we may know about Jesus as certain, highly probable, less probable, and so forth. It has been an attempt to extricate mere
history from the highly tendentious interpretations of Jesus that are
deeply ingrained in the traditions as a whole. But historical work, if it
goes beyond verifying a few bare facts, is always interpretative.What the
quest produces is a series of Jesuses that are just as much constructed by
the historians as the Jesuses of the Gospels are by the Gospel writers. It is
essential to get to grips with the fact that both the Gospels and modern
reconstructions of the historical Jesus are inseparable blends of fact and
significance.Tatum seems to be telling me, as though I had missed it, that
this is the case in the Gospels, while ignoring the extent to which it is
true of historical Jesus research. My book, on the other hand, is pervasively concerned with the coinherence of fact and meaning in history. I
am surprised that Tatum seems not to have noticed this.
I cannot but wonder whether Tatum has actually read my last chapter,
in which I develop at length the sense in which I see testimony as a category in which history and theology can come together. I cannot understand how anyone who has read that chapter can possibly suppose that I
am working with “the notions of historical truth inherited from the
French Enlightenment.” In the first place, I think the kind of historical
reliability that can be expected of the Gospels is that of ancient historiography when it was based on good sources. One has only to read
Lucian’s How to Write History to see that people in the ancient world were
not uninterested in historical reliability. But the historical conventions
were considerably different from ours, allowing, for example, the historian to vary the details of a story for reasons of literary effect, and to invent
whole speeches for characters when there was no evidence to follow,
provided the speeches were in character and appropriate to the occasion.
But what is especially important (and therefore I stress it already in my
first chapter) is that ancient historians valued the insider testimony of
people who had been close to the events, not only because they might
be more likely to get the facts right but also because they could speak out
of a perception of the significance of what had happened. Eyewitness
testimony was rooted in the coinherence of fact and meaning, and this
was regarded not as a disadvantage, but as an advantage.
Secondly, my notion of testimony in history, as I develop it in the last
chapter, is not in the least “inherited from the French Enlightenment,” but
depends on recent philosophical study of testimony as a legitimate and
indispensable feature of knowledge (against the individualistic epistemology

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Richard Bauckham

of the Enlightenment), and on Paul Ricoeur’s study of the nature of historiography, which combines a strong affirmation of the indispensability of
testimony in history with recognition that the historian’s critical questioning of the sources is also essential.What matters to me about the category
of eyewitness testimony is that the Gospels are based on good sources, as
ancient historians reckoned good sources, but also that these sources are
none the worse for embodying the witness’s perception of meaning and
significance. I am not trying to establish the factual historicity of every
detail in the Gospels (let alone with “certainty”), which no historical
method could possibly establish, but to argue for the general credibility of
the sources and to legitimate the faith perspective with which the eyewitnesses already told their stories. It is the coinherence of fact and meaning
in testimony of this kind, rather than simply a quantitative measure of
facticity, that makes testimony an appropriate category from both a historiographical and a theological point of view. This is why it takes us beyond
the dichotomy of the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith.
It seems to me that Tatum has failed to understand what the “problem”
from which the book sets out is, and therefore he has also failed to understand the solution. He seems to be engaged in a different discussion.
Finally, of course I don’t think that the point of the Gospels is “simply
to provide the reader with historical information about Jesus.” It is to
enable us to know, to worship, and to follow the Jesus Christ who lived
and died and rose from the dead in first century Jewish Palestine and who
is our living Lord today. That the Gospels are historical matters because
the living Christ retains his historical identity as Jesus of Nazareth. It has
always mattered to Christians in a way that has nothing to do with “the
notions of historical truth inherited from the French Enlightenment.” Of
course, the Gospel “comes alive in the Church’s prayer, proclamation,
praise, growth in virtue, acts of mercy, and holiness.” My concern in this
book was to show that we do not have to substitute for the Jesus of the
Gospels a historically reconstructed Jesus of history who will be at odds
with the Jesus of the Gospels and who must therefore undermine the role
N&V
of the Gospels in the life of the Church.

Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 6, No. 3 (2008): 543–590

543

The Debate Between Henri de Lubac
and His Critics
DAVID B RAINE
Aberdeen, Scotland

T HE ARTICLES in the recent symposium in Nova et Vetera 5:1 (2007)
on Lawrence Feingold’s The Natural Desire to See God According to St.
Thomas Aquinas and His Interpreters 1 all seem exceedingly tantalizing.Those
that seem most exact in their apparent refutation of Henri de Lubac all
appear to be open to reply out of the texts of de Lubac himself, especially
when fortified by considerations drawn from Etienne Gilson’s Being and
Some Philosophers.2 Yet the work of Feingold himself, a work of such quality that it ought to be made more readily accessible, is open to no such
easy reply. However, neither de Lubac nor his critics, not even Feingold,
show awareness of some of the key background problems underlying their
debate; and it is with a consideration of these problems that I shall begin.
Not every question was dealt with by St. Thomas, but he provides a
structure within which we can deal with other questions in a way which
accords with the principles of faith. Feingold demonstrates, at least to my
satisfaction, that, at least in the areas under discussion, Cajetan remained
scrupulously careful in the micro-exegesis of the aspects of St. Thomas’s
analysis which he chose to explore. However, in more than one area, while
respectful of detail, he seems to have lacked a sense of St.Thomas’s general
perspective.3 In particular in the area of present concern, he showed a grave
1 Lawrence Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God According to St.Thomas Aquinas

and His Interpreters (Rome: Apollinare Studi, 2001).
2 Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute

of Mediaeval Studies, 1952).
3 Cajetan’s capacity to combine accuracy in detail with a lack of a sense of what

is most important for general perspective is something which appears elsewhere,
as in his treatment of St. Thomas on analogy, as Hampus Lyttkens in 1953 and

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weakness in macro-exegesis in failing to register any adequate sense of
St. Thomas’s faithfulness to his Augustinian background. It is this which
provoked de Lubac to write Surnaturel, which reached publication in 1946
and was followed by his more considered 1965 works Augustinisme et théologie moderne and Le mystère du surnaturel (to which I will refer in their English
translations, Augustinianism and Modern Theology [1969] and The Mystery of
the Supernatural [1967]), as well as his earlier article “Le Mystère du
Surnaturel.”4 As to the questions raised by de Lubac, it was not amongst
de Lubac’s gifts to attempt the analytic task of situating what he calls the
“supernatural finality” of man within the structure Thomas has so accurately set up.Yet “supernatural finality” is a key element in what it meant
for Jesus to be called Son of Man, and, as Luke makes clear, descended
from Adam, and so must be of central importance within any Christian
theology.The principal regret I would have about Feingold’s distinguished
work is he did not look beyond the logical defects of de Lubac’s presentation, including his evidently irregular use of the term “nature,” to what
he intended to convey.
De Lubac and his rehabilitation within the Church since the 1960s is
seen by some as a key mark of an advance in the Church’s approach to
theology since the 1960s, while for others he is seen as symbol of the
revival of the essence of the modernism against which Pius X fought.
With attitudes so polarized, it is crucial to do each of the disputing parties
the justice of seeking out their exact meanings and intentions in their
often-differing handling of some of the vocabulary used, and to seek out
the truth. It is especially important to avoid the vitriol which underlays
much of the debate of the period, and which survives today, a vitriol
which does harm to the Church and hinders the pursuit of truth.

George Klubertanz, S.J., in 1960, amply demonstrated.The ill-effects of Cajetan’s
approach in this area are something I hope to have opportunity to explain elsewhere. It meant, for instance, that at a formative stage in his development,
because of a misunderstanding of the significance of the distinction between res
significata and modus significandi, Edward Schillebeeckx had nothing better to fall
back upon in his account of how we use language in theology than the notion
of “disclosure,” used later in his Christology; cf.“The Non-Conceptual Intellectual Dimension in Our Knowledge of God According to Aquinas,” in Revelation
and Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1958), 157–206, originally published
in Tidschrift voor Philosophie (Louvain) 14 (1952): 411–53.
4 Henri de Lubac, “Le Mystère du Surnaturel,” Revue des sciences religieuses 35
(1949): 80–121.

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545

The Background Problem Underlying the Present Debate
A Common But Misconceived Understanding
of the Doctrine of Original Sin
According to traditional Christian understanding, the original state of man
was one in which he was in a state of having sanctifying grace, of actual
charity towards God, and with the emotions so subject to reason as not to
weaken his use of reason or his attachment in charity to God—the state of
“original justice.” Man’s first sin was one of pride—which appeared in the
form of presuming to try and take, by human action and initiative, a greater
wisdom above human nature, rather than be led to it or taught it by God—
a sin of the devil, not of the world or the flesh.5
In God’s desire or antecedent will, no human being would have sinned,
and the human race would have remained one stock, one family. And so
long as man continued faithful then it would be congruous that children
be conceived and born likewise in a state of grace ordering them to
growth in charity towards God, with the emotions still subject to reason,
and by grace ordered towards glory in the vision of God. This was the
future antecedently desired for the whole human race, a free gift from
God’s liberality, not only to man in his original state, but to the whole of
his genetic inheritance—not that grace would have been passed on by the
genes, but that the original free gift was not only for the first human individuals created but for the whole human race thereby constituted.
In the same traditional Christian understanding, the result of sin by man
in his original state was not just to affect the individuals concerned but
to bring the whole of mankind into our present situation whereby inheritance leaves each person in a state of deprivation, without sanctifying
grace, and without the emotions being subject to reason.6

5 It has been suggested that Adam’s sin was excessive love of his wife, giving his

relation to his wife priority over his relation to God, since it was not Adam who
was “seduced” by the serpent. However, considering Adam and Eve as representing the original human community, the underlying temptation was, as it
were, to grab equality with God by force, something Jesus did not do, consenting to be born in a condition of human humiliation, not of the glory ultimately
revealed as fitting for him (Phil 2:6).
6 Indeed, the fact that the emotions are no longer subject to reason makes it more
difficult or impossible for a person to become fixed in evil, and so makes the path
to repentance more open, although, when grace and charity are restored, the
emotions still remain disordered, and grace is required for man to grow in fortitude and temperance to remain in charity and grace.

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546

Therefore, if it is true that the human race is subject to original sin in
this way, then this must mean that their not having sanctifying grace
simply by inheritance constitutes a privation—it is, as it were, not like a
whale’s not having legs, but like a horse’s not having legs, not just the
non-presence of something, but the non-presence of something which
ought to be present. In this situation, if a person remains free from actual
sin, then he or she will reach the state described by Aquinas in II Sent.,
d. 33, q. 2, a. 2, ad 5, as a participation in natural goods including joy in
the fullest possible natural knowledge and love of God.7 However, this
will remain a state of deprivation, although in Aquinas’s late view not
pain (dolor) of any kind, not even mental affliction.8 Such a person is
unfortunate, not fortunate, and not in a state of eudaimonia, or beatitude,
in any unqualified sense. Aquinas never describes these persons as in a
state of beatitude or as having attained their ultimate end.
Feingold tells us that one has to distinguish between God’s [antecedent]
intention from all eternity to elevate men and angels to the supernatural
end of grace and glory (which Feingold, like Francisco Suarez, regards as
extrinsic to man), by contrast with man’s being actually ordered towards
this supernatural end by having sanctifying grace as intrinsic to him.9 But
the matter is not so simple.True, men in general are not conceived in grace
and do not have their emotions subject to their reason, but this might seem
just a matter of each man’s being a distinct individual related only externally by genetic descent to the sinful ancestors who had lost their original
grace, but this constituting a deprivation to no one beyond them. Why
should this ancestry affect the extrinsically distinct descendants so as to give
rise to a deprivation of the congruity of being conceived and born in a
state of sanctifying grace so that, by perseverance and with the continued
help of God, they might come to glory? Why should such a deprivation
become something intrinsic to any human being who has this ancestry?
If it is a matter of extrinsic relations only, then to speak of man as born
in sin as if he were damaged goods is a matter of words only, and it would
seem that the traditional doctrine of original sin is empty—or a legal
fiction, God’s deeming man to be in sin, as if to justify “taking it out” on
Adam’s descendents in punishment of Adam, an altogether repugnant
way of thinking!
Man, we are told, came into existence on earth in a state of “original
justice,” in a state of grace and of supernatural charity towards God, and
7 Cf. Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God, 411.
8 It is said “To a sin contracted without pleasure there corresponds a penalty

undergone without pain.”
9 Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God, 418.

Henri de Lubac and His Critics

547

with the passions subject to reason and not blunting his singleness of
heart towards God.The blunting of this singleness of heart would come,
not from the passions, but from the desire for autonomy, his will free of
God’s direction, so as to be directed as he chose, not necessarily to the
natural happiness proportionate to his natural powers, nor to a vision of
God dependent upon God’s gift.
But why, when man fell, and turned aside in pride, should this affect
his descendants? Indeed his descendants might then lack this original
justice, not to be conceived and born in a state of grace and of supernatural charity towards God, and not have their passions subject to reason—
but why should they feel this as a privation? These were not things to
which they had any right, so why should not the way to a natural happiness proportionate to their natural powers have still been open to them,
without their being disturbed by a sense of the lack of these things to
which they had no right? Yet according to the doctrine of original sin,
we and all such descendants are deprived, and empirically do experience
a sense of deprivation, a sense of lack of direction as if we had no ultimate end, or a sense that only some further providence of God for us,
going beyond merely creating us, could give us a real meaning or direction—despite a natural happiness proportionate to our powers that is still
open to us.Why should we be dissatisfied with a lot which is quite natural to us?
We need some better explanation than Suarez and his followers can offer.
The Better Way of Conceiving the Doctrine of Original Sin:
Original Sin Is Only a Privation Because It Persists
Within the Context of a Continuing Will of God
for the Communal Salvation of Mankind
In the plan of creation, just as the persons of the Trinity are differentiated
in some way, so those created persons, angels and men, who are to be
brought into a share of the divine life are each to be unique in some way.
In the case of angels, there was therefore no point10 in creating two
angels each identical in nature to one another (with the consequence that
they do not need to be individuated by matter), but the case of human
beings is different. Of their biological nature as language-speaking animals,
human beings are communal, social beings, sharing the same nature, and
differentiated by the different ways in which this nature flowers in different roles and relations, one human being to another. Accordingly, the
original plan of God in relation to man was a plan not just in regard to
10 ST I, q. 47, a. 2.

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David Braine

one individual, but in regard to the whole human race. So we should say
that the situation of every human person is to live in the context of a
general plan on God’s part for the whole human race, not just of a plan
for each human being as an individual whereby God has the antecedent
desire that, if the human being concerned be willing, this human being
should be in or come into a state of sanctifying grace ordering him
towards glory in the vision of God. That is, each human person lives in
the situation that the wider plan has been already put into effect in God’s
first creation of the human race, with the result that so long as man
continued faithful then it would be congruous that children be
conceived and born likewise in a state of grace ordering them to glory
in the vision of God.
Accordingly, although man has not continued faithful, God is not to
be frustrated in this wider original plan that the whole human race
should come as one spiritual community into a sharing of his divine life,
but this end has to be achieved in a different way. Now each person is
conceived and born into a situation in which it is no longer congruous
that this be in a state of grace ordering him to glory in the vision of God,
that is, with the means whereby, if willing, then with the continued help
of God’s grace, he will come to the vision of God. Rather, each person
is conceived and born into a situation in which he still belongs to a
human race called and invited to supernatural friendship with God, but
is in a state of deprivation, lacking the grace he would have had by
congruity if man had not sinned.
Therefore, sin did not lead God to alter his antecedent will that human
beings should constitute one family coming in grace as a community to
God. Accordingly, he did not change his general plan and start to treat
each human being separately, as if the spiritual association between different human beings were now to be accidental. In that latter case, the
human beings arising from each new conception and birth would either
be conceived in a state of sanctifying grace, with their emotions subject
to reason, each human being receiving grace individually so as to be, for
so long as he were willing, separately taught by God and separately led
into the way of supernatural charity to the vision of God, or else left to
attain a natural happiness by his natural powers, a happiness proportionate to these natural powers, perhaps assisted preternaturally so that reason
was not undermined by the passions, but not called and given the means
to a supernatural life. In either case the human race would have been
robbed of the character of being a spiritual community.
Rather, God did not alter how he had constituted man in creating
him, and so he left the human family with the character of being a spir-

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itual community.This had the twin effects: firstly that the sin of the first
affected all, so that none would now be conceived in grace by inheritance
simply in virtue of belonging to the human family, and there would need
to be a different way for them to come to grace and glory in the vision
of God and this to be in spiritual community; and secondly that the love
and obedience of one, Jesus by his Godhead in a unique relationship as
man to the rest of the human race, might later avail for all.
Thus, within this background, the situation is not the one commonly
portrayed and given precision by Suarez, as I outlined it earlier. Rather,
as Emil Mersch perceived, the idea that human beings inherit a condition of sin is not a matter of some injustice on God’s part but an expression of God’s keeping mankind intrinsically communal at the spiritual as
well as the biological level. By maintaining human beings, each in their
personal being, as members of a mankind intrinsically communal, so that
there is a personal community between those in grace and those in sin,
God made it possible not only for us to pray for one another, but also for
the perfect love and obedience of Jesus, even to die on the cross out of
love for man, to avail for the rest of humanity to bring them, so far as
they are willing, to salvation—rather than a matter of the virtue of one
individual to which other individuals can only remain external. As,
because of our solidarity with one another as persons, the sin of one
affected all, so also it became possible for the obedience and love of one
to avail for all—otherwise, the obedience and love to death of Jesus
would remain external to us. The point of the doctrine of original sin,
the sin of one in virtue of man’s solidarity affecting all, is seen in the fact
that, in virtue of the same solidarity, the love of one can re-open the
possibility of salvation to all.11
As Aquinas expresses it, the sin of the first man was not just the sin of
one or two individuals, but the sin of the human community (collegium) as
constituted in the creation of man,12 and it is only because of this that the
first human beings’ descendants are affected.Therefore, when he speaks of
human nature as thereby penalized, corrupted (depravatus), debilitated (the
word for “debility” is langor), infirm, or vitiated, he does not mean that the
nature has been changed, but that persons are affected as members of the
community with that nature, not in virtue of that nature.
Our actual situation is one in which the whole human race is positioned within the context of a general plan, an order of providence, within
11 Emile Mersch, The Theology of the Mystical Body, trans. Cyril Vollert from French

2nd ed., 1946: (St. Louis: Herder, 1951), 147–68, 172, 174–77, 296–322, 605,
447f., cf. 104–25.
12 De malo, q. 4, a. 1.

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which God does have the antecedent desire that human beings, if they be
willing, should be in or come to a state of sanctifying grace ordering them
to glory in the vision of God. Indeed, according to the teaching of St.
Paul, it is not only the human race but the whole of creation which was
made subject to futility in the hope the creation as a whole should be set
free from bondage to decay,13 having groaned in labor pains until now, all
in hope and preparation for the freedom of the glory of the children of
God completed through the Spirit in our adoption and the redemption
of our bodies (Rom 8:19–23).
Not all questions are to be answered at once. Since man is no longer
conceived and born in grace, there are questions as to how his possibility
of coming to salvation may be affected by his inability to give deliberate
response to Revelation before the age of reason, or by the continued
possibility of sin, either by pride or through disorders consequent on the
emotions, refusing the grace offered. But the main structure of the situation and its logic require to be established first, before these questions can
properly be considered at all.
I turn now to the logical problems which arise in describing man’s
situation as I have sketched it.
The Problem of How to Describe the Logic
of Man’s Actual Situation
Person and Nature
In the first place, we should note that some of the key predicates involved
in the discussion—“subsists,”“is a person,”“has a nature,” etc.—are such as
to apply to God and to creatures, and even to different kinds of creature,
according to no one definition or set of criteria of application. They are,
like “is living,” “knows,” “understands,” “is wise,” “exercises active power,”
and so forth, predicated by “intrinsic analogy”—that is, predicated in virtue
of likeness to God, in whom all these perfections pre-exist in a more
eminent and excellent way, in such a way as to apply primarily to God, even
though we first learn the terms concerned in applying them to creatures.14
To subsist or be a subsistentia (hypostasis), in St.Thomas’s use of the term, is
to be a subject of true propositions and to be neither predicated of a subject
13 Although it is not part of our present topic to take the matter further, it is in

these terms that we are to understand how it is that the origin and context of
human life should be one in which the brute animals also suffer, something man
is allowed to take advantage of only faute de mieux (Gen 9), but which is foreign
to the Messianic kingdom (Is 11).
14 ST I, q. 4, a. 2; q. 13, a. 6. Cf. Francesca Aran Murphy, Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Etienne Gilson (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri, 2004), 201.

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nor present in a subject (being present in a subject here means being present in a subject as courage is said to be in courageous persons, and humanity is sometimes said to be in human beings). When he uses the terms
“concrete” and “abstract” to make a logical distinction, “to be concrete”
means to subsist or be a first substance in Aristotle’s sense. Now, when we
are told that a “person is an individual of an intellectual nature,” we should
understand this as meaning a hypostasis of a nature able to understand and
think. Accordingly, the term “person” can be applied to angels and to
human beings by similitude, as well as to the persons of the Godhead. (It
has to be remembered that when Boethius used the term “person” of individual human beings and angels, he was using it in the way pioneered by
the Cappadocian Fathers and the First Council of Constantinople in 381
and the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and thus in a way in use over the
whole preceding some hundred and forty years before he wrote.)
In the second place, in Aristotle’s list of “categories,” that is, modes of
predication (praedicamenta), the category of relation occupies a peculiar
situation in that it can be applied without any implications as to the
nature of what it is being applied to. Thus, in discussing the Trinity, St.
Thomas remarks that “there are said to be only two predicaments in God,
since other predicaments imply dispositions in that of which they are
predicated”15—so the divine Persons differ in their relations to each
other but this does not imply any difference of nature, the persons being
all the same in nature.
Accordingly it was God’s plan both that in virtue of inheritance, that is,
in virtue of a relation, the whole human race should come as a spiritual
community into a sharing of his divine life and that in virtue of the same
relation of inheritance, if man sins, all mankind should suffer a loss of the
congruity whereby all would be conceived and born in grace, which we
experience as the deprivation referred to as original sin. Each person inherits a part both in God’s whole gracious plan and in this loss, without either
making any difference to his or her nature.When Mary was conceived in
grace, this was not in virtue of any congruity, but in virtue of the sheer grace
of God at a strategic point, a point of no turning back, in the development
of God’s plan for man’s salvation, a point prepared for but not determined
beforehand by salvation history as it had unfolded up to that point.
What belongs to nature, intellect and will, and what arises naturally from
them, and belongs to every intellectual creature, even the least,16 constitutes
only an aptitude for grace (which, according to de Lubac, is not in the least
15 Here I paraphrase ST I, q. 28, a. 2, ad 1.
16 Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles III, c. 57.

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part a seed, germ, or any kind of inchoative possession of grace,17 but only
a passive aptitude,18 or specific obediential potency19), the same as what
Feingold refers to as an openness to grace, and in no way a mark of the
existence of any supernatural finality.This finality arises out of something
further, the overarching plan of divine providence.
This supernatural finality consists not in a “form” as something “real”
in the nature of human beings (contrary to Feingold’s presumption20), but is
a finality belonging to them as persons arising in virtue of a relation.
Therefore, contrary to Feingold’s argument,21 to speak of God’s giving a
human being a supernatural finality in the sense de Lubac’s argument
requires is not to make any change in human nature. Regrettably, de
Lubac spoke of a different nature, but his argument and reasoning do not
involve this. (Nor is it a “form,” as something “real,” in the person, for
even if grace is promised to a person, or appointed as an end, it is not
something real in the person when promised, or appointed as an end, but
only at the time when actually given.) Properly speaking, all predication
is primarily of the person, not of a person’s nature.
As I remarked at the start, de Lubac did not have the gift of using
analytical philosophy in the service of theology in the way exemplified
in St. Thomas. He therefore makes the mistake of regarding human
nature, if realized in an order of providence distinct from the actual order
of providence within which we actually come into existence and live, as
a specific difference between two natures which are only generically the
same. Instead, maintaining the use of the term “nature,” or phusis, exemplified in Aristotelian and most later philosophical usage, he should have
said that supernatural finality is something given to persons in virtue of
a relation, rather than that it gives them a distinct nature.
In The Mystery of the Supernatural, de Lubac tells us that the desire for
the vision of God is not some “accident” in me, for example, resulting
from some contingent peculiarity or some historical event with merely
transitory effects, but independently of my deliberate will. He says:
It is in me as a result of: my belonging to humanity as it is, that is humanity which is, as we say, ‘called’. For God’s call is constitutive. My finality,
which is expressed by this desire, is inscribed upon my very being as it
has been put into this universe by God. And, by God’s will, I now have
17 De Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York:

Herder and Herder, 1967), 109, 111.
18 Ibid., 110.
19 Ibid., 78.
20 See Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God, 526–28.
21 Ibid., 521–28.

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no other genuine end no end really assigned to my nature or presented
for my free acceptance under any guise except that of ‘seeing God’22

Feingold establishes that St.Thomas did indeed hold that by our nature
as human beings we do have a natural end in the sense of an end proportionate to our nature and natural powers, that is, a natural end quodammodo,
not simpliciter.Therefore by the statement I quoted, de Lubac makes it clear
that, even if there is a natural end quodammodo in this way, this end is not
the ultimate end to which God destined us as persons. Rather, our true
ultimate end, our ultimate end simpliciter, is supernatural; and this supernatural destiny or finality is inscribed, he says, upon our “being.” Unfortunately he does not explain this as meaning “inscribed upon us as persons,”
but as “now really inscribed in the depth of my nature,”23 our natures being
conceived of as instances of our nature as realized in “all those who make
up mankind as it is”24 as opposed to any non-historical, never actualized,
human nature, such as might have arisen in a different order of providence.
The relations under consideration are conditions or attributes which
are real in creatures but not in God.Thus, firstly, where efficient causation
is concerned, the condition of being created and upheld in being by God
is real in the creature but not in God, and logically it does not belong to
the nature just as, for example, the relation of being a son of parents is
real in the son, but not part of his nature. But God does not give being
without a purpose, and this purpose is not a matter only of what can be
attained by the use of the powers which belong to the nature of the thing
created, but more broadly it includes God’s general purpose for the creature within his overall plan for creation.The final cause sets the context
of the exercise of efficient causality, God’s creating of a being with limited
nature and powers of its own—in this case including the power to cooperate in the generation of children—being set within this broader context.
Accordingly, secondly, in the case of human beings, just as the causal rooting of human beings is something real in the human beings, but not
belonging to human nature, so also being called to the vision of God as
their ultimate end is something real in human beings as persons, in the
sense of setting real conditions for good or ill on human life. In the same
sense, membership of the spiritual community of the human race is real in
human beings, arising by inheritance. Both the causal rooting and the
supernatural finality arise in virtue of relations and belong to the person,
not to the nature. Indeed, this seems the only consistent way in which we
22 De Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, 70.
23 Ibid., 72.
24 Ibid., 71,

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can interpret Christian tradition, a way of interpreting this tradition
witnessed to by Scripture and by the many different theologians from
Augustine onwards cited by de Lubac.
True, the efficient causality is directed to the giving of being to the
person as an individual, whereas the finality is directed towards the person
in whatever relations to God and his fellow creatures God intends, but this
does not prevent the effects of the relations concerned from being any less
real or “ontological.”True, the efficient causality involved in createdness is
naturally knowable,25 whereas the finality concerned involves a knowledge of God’s actual order of providence which can only be known by
God’s revealing it; but again this does not make the effects of the relations
concerned any less real or “ontological.”
But neither condition, unlike nature and grace, is a principle of acts,
powers, or virtues. In particular, the supernatural finality concerned is not
a matter of a “form” operative within human beings, but of the finality
given to human persons within God’s providential order for the whole
of creation.
In the Christian conception, suggested by the book of Revelation,
each person has a unique, personal individuality, an individual character,
or “name” known only to God; this is a personal individuality, which in
Christian thought is something he grows into, God’s providence for him
becoming known in stages as it unfolds.This conception of each human
being as being necessarily unique in thathe is given this uniqueness by
this providence of God for individuals (as de Lubac, in a natural enough
way of speaking in modern parlance, would say, an “essential uniqueness,”
using the word “essential” in no connection with the notion of nature or
essence, but to express this special kind of necessity) is quite foreign to
Aristotelian thought. For Aristotelian thought, the uniqueness of any
individual is an accident arising from his situation in history and his
development, the latter conditioned by the accidents of external factors
as well as his own choices. Indeed, the modern way of thinking whereby
each person has a unique personality or individuality, with conspicuous
25 Man’s intellect as exercised in regard to natural things is able to judge that, since

the natural powers of the natural things he has experience of do not extend to
the perpetuation of the whole natural order of which they are part, and the natural powers of things like them could not be the cause of the existence of this
order, so that what the working together of these natures leads us to expect in
the future, though as we say “naturally necessary,” is not absolutely necessary.
Further reflection yields a demonstration within the reach of natural reason that
God exists as cause of the existence of the whole order of natural things.Therefore, the relation, real in creatures, of being created and sustained in being by God
is in principle naturally knowable.

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effects on educational theory, on attitudes to the disadvantaged, and in
heightening our sense of the evil in the taking of life, is an inheritance
from Christian thought unsupported by natural reason.
The supernatural finality de Lubac has in view can therefore be
thought of as the key underlying feature in the general character of the
personal individuality of the first man and of each of his descendants, that
is, in the actual order of providence to every human being in his coming
into existence.
When it is said that “the soul is naturally capable of grace,” we should say
that it is the person as made with intellect and will, and thereby in the image
of God, who is being said to be thus capable. Hence, to say that man has a
“natural appetitus,” or, in the manner at least of Duns Scotus and de Lubac,
a natural desiderium for the vision of God, is just to speak of one aspect of the
destiny towards which it is God’s antecedent purpose that all men should
come. For, here as elsewhere, it must be kept as an absolute principle that
the very nature of will as intellectual appetite requires that anything in the
will should be founded upon something in the intellect, since otherwise
will is not distinguished from sensual appetite, or even the tendencies intrinsic to the natures of inanimate things.26 However, it is only by beginning
26 Thus, in Christian teaching, by sanctifying grace in baptism infants receive

implicit faith, and in the same act are given implicit hope and implicit charity
founded on this implicit faith.
When the act of faith is described as an act of intellect commanded by the
will, this formulation can misleadingly suggest that we choose to believe as if, in
the act of living faith which gives salvation, the act of love moving the intellect
and the act of intellect were two distinct existences in a Humean sense. On the
contrary, in God’s governing all things suaviter, our loving and trusting God (the
trust including hope and reliance on his word) are not two separate acts, but the
trust is formed by the love, both at the movement of God. This allows for the
role of signs of the truth of what is believed so that, in believing, man does not
violate his intellect. The intellect, seeing God at work in the signs, is not
violated—as if the voluntariness of faith were a matter of arbitrary choice. If a
man says, “I choose to believe her,” referring to his wife, it suggests uncertainty
and lack of trust, rather than trust. If I trust my wife’s fidelity, although the
circumstances suggest to others that this trust is misplaced, then I am certain of
her fidelity and her word on the matter despite the circumstances.
Neither intellect nor will can function without the other, since a velleity or
accord with will is intrinsic to the natural inclination of the intellect to truth,
just as to be in some way moved by the intellect is integral to the will as intellectual appetite. (The generation of the Son and spiration of the Spirit within the
life of God are not the work of God’s will or free-will; nonetheless these processions are willing in so far as they are natural, not by natural necessity as if by
violence, God’s will being concomitant [De potentia, q. 2, a. 3, ad 1, 2, 8, 9, 11,
and 12, in accord with the last parts of the corpus of the article].)

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from the recognition of the person as the primary subject of predication
where human beings are concerned, and then by thinking of the soul as the
human intellectual principle in the person, and by thinking of intellect and
will as aspects of this principle, rather than as powers predicated of it,27 that
we can avoid the idea of the natural desiderium for the vision of God as an
exercise of the power called the will, elicited by some logically prior exercise of the power called the intellect.
And Aquinas sometimes speaks in this way, as when he refers to the
soul as the principle of intellectual operation,28 and says “the intellect
which is the principle of intellectual operation is the form of the body.”29
Therefore, in referring to the supernatural destiny or supernatural finality spoken of, the reality of being members of a community sharing a
certain end, an end which is “natural” in relation to the overarching plan
of divine providence for the whole of creation, the end concerned has to
be understood as having more than one aspect. In God’s antecedent will,
the destiny of each person is towards a vision attained through love
formed by knowledge, a knowledge and love whose chief cause is grace.
Likewise, the privation suffered in original sin involves a privation of
knowledge of this destiny and its possibility, not just a loss of orientation
towards it.The person has therefore been injured as a person, intellect and
will both involved, not only in will.
Thus, if we think of the expression “natural appetitus,” natural in relation to the underlying supernatural end within God’s overarching plan,
as referring to this supernatural destiny or supernatural finality, we should
think of it as an appetitus of the whole person, embracing intellect as well
as will. And it is in regard to a natural desire (desiderium) for the vision of
God in this sense that it is valid to say that it has God as its sole object.
And in respect of this appetitus of the whole person, it is unproblematic
that it should have God as its sole object (rather than being a desire for
27 In Duns Scotus’s terms as properties, or in his word passions, of the soul, which

he understands to be not ‘really’ distinct from the soul, but only ‘formally’ distinct
from it, to use his technical terms. For Duns Scotus, the formal distinction, that
is, strictly speaking, the ‘distinctio formalis a parte rei’ is not just a ‘logical distinction’,
but a distinction rooted in reality, one might almost say grounded in some real
distinction. In recent writings, this concept of formal distinction is most fully and
exactly explained by Allan B. Wolter, in pp. 16–24, The Transcendentals and their
Function in the Metaphysics of Duns Scotus (New York: Franciscan Institute, 1946),
and in relation to the intellect and the will by Efrem Bettoni, in pp. 78–81, Duns
Scotus: the basic principles of his philosophy, translated and edited Bernardine
Bonansea (Washington DC: CUA, 1961).
28 ST, I, q. 75, a. 2; for the term “intellectual principle,” see a. 2, etc.; for “intellective principle,” see a. 6, etc.
29 ST, I, q. 75, a. 1.

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the good in general, or for happiness antecedent to any knowledge of
what this happiness might consist in) as de Lubac’s argument requires.30
The Underlying Agreements Between de Lubac and His Critics
The real agreements between de Lubac and Feingold, underlying different terminologies, should not be lost sight of, where they exist. Both
Gilson and de Lubac insist on the inadequacy of the conception of
obediential potency to capture St.Thomas’s understanding of the openness and aptitude for grace which result from man’s possession of intellect and will, the first things which make man to be in the image of God.
St. Thomas calls this openness and aptitude for grace an “obediential
potency” to distinguish it from “natural” potencies, and in this he was
preceded by St. Albert and followed by Bernard of Auvergne, working
between 1294 and 1307, and Capreolus, between 1407 and 1444, long
before Cajetan, all using it to make the same contrast.
However, the term “sea-animals” includes seals, the sea-cows, and the
cetaceans, as well as a multiplicity of different kinds of invertebrates.
Neither “sea-animal” nor “land-animal” are proper classificatory terms, and
the same is true with “obediential potency” and “natural potency,” which
explains why it is relatively rarely that St.Thomas uses the term in connection with our aptitude for grace.The passage from De virtutibus, q. 1, a. 10,
ad 13, quoted by both Feingold and Steven Long,31 is an accurate statement of an element in St.Thomas’s view, but it does not include what is
central to this view.The expression “specific obediential potency” is thoroughly unspecific since it does not make it clear whether one species
might have one specific obediential potency and another species another,
that is, by itself it says nothing as to why the specific obediential potency
of man should be more significant than that of water.
For it is only when the obediential potency is specific to intellectual
beings that specificity makes a difference. For the point is exactly as
Aquinas states it, namely that the possession of intellect and will, which
makes man to be in the image of God, makes man apt for grace, so that,
as de Lubac notes, for man to receive grace is not as such a miracle,
because, unlike miracles, to receive grace is in accord with the ordo naturalis.32 In this regard Aquinas quotes Augustine who says “to be capable of
having faith and to be capable of having charity belongs to man’s nature;
30 See, for example, de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, 70–74, 254–57.
31 See Steven A. Long, “On the Loss, and the Recovery, of Nature as a Theonomic

Principle: Reflections on the Nature/Grace Controversy,” Nova et Vetera 5 (2007):
162, n. 40; 166, n. 44.
32 De Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, 183.

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but to have faith and charity belongs to the grace of the faithful,”33 and
St.Thomas goes on to say “the justification of the ungodly is not miraculous, because the soul is naturally capable of grace; since from its having
been made to the likeness of God, it is fit to receive God by grace.”34
Moreover, as M.-M. Labourdette was quite correct to explain,35
although the use of the term “obediential potency” defined as a pure nonrepugnance would have been familiar to St.Thomas from Albert the Great
and is clearly found in De virtutibus, q. 1, a. 10, ad 13, nonetheless ordinarily St.Thomas does not utilize this, in his eyes, insufficient notion. Labourdette cites his use of capacitas,36 aptitudo,37 habilitas,38 and ordo naturalis.39
In identifying this underlying reluctance of St.Thomas to content himself
with the notion of “obediential potency,” Labourdette evidences the
rightness of the instincts of Gilson and de Lubac, of which I shall speak
below. However, I note that even here in a place where St. Thomas uses
the word “natural” to mean in accord with the overarching divine order,
as in De potentia, q. 1, a. 3, ad 1, explaining that “all creatures have it as if
through nature what is done in them by God,” he goes on to say that
“accordingly a twofold potentiality is distinguished in creatures: one natural to their proper operations or motions, and the other which is called
obediential, to those which they receive from God”—his Augustinian
perspective in no way excludes the use of the term “obediential.”
St. Thomas Conceived the Possibility of Other Orders of Nature
Containing Beings with a Human Nature Without Any
Supernatural Finality, But Without this Playing Any Part
in his Consideration of the Gratuitousness of Grace
Because the supernatural finality of which de Lubac speaks does not consist
in a “form” as something “real” in the nature of a human being but arises
33 Augustine, de Praedestinatione Sanctorum, Chapter V, Migne PL 44, 968 (see The

Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series,V, On the Predestination of the Saints,
chap. 10, p. 503).
34 ST I–II, q. 113, a. 10:“iustificatio impii non est miraculosa, quia naturaliter anima
est gratiae capax; eo enim ipso quod facta est ad imaginem Dei, capax est Dei
per gratiam, ut Augustinus dicit.”
35 I rely here on the reference in note 122 of Feingold, The Natural Desire to See
God, 264, to Labourdette’s review of Laporta’s La Destiné in Revue Thomiste 1966
(288–89), a book many of whose ideas appeared in a 1928 article “Les notions
d’appétit naturel et de puissance obédientielle chez saint Thomas d’Aquin,” ETL
5(1928) 257–77; see also footnote 73.
36 ST I–II, q. 113, a. 10; III, q. 9, a. 2.
37 De malo, q. 2, a. 11; and De virtutibus, q. 1, a. 10, ad 2.
38 De malo, q. 2, a. 11.
39 IV Sent., d. 17, a. 5, qua 1; De malo, q. 2, a. 11, ad 14.

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only in him or her as a person, arising in virtue of a relation, what man
has by nature is only an aptitude for grace, not in the least part a seed,
germ, or any kind of inchoative possession of grace, nor any kind of natural potency or power. Accordingly, the deprivation we are concerned
with is not a deprivation in anything which belongs to human beings by
their nature. Because of this, in principle, a natural or proportionate
happiness after this life is still possible, such as to bring to rest all proportionate, innate, and unconditional natural desires that flow from human
nature.40 Logically, there is no privation in what relates to the nature. Rather,
it is the person who still inherits the call and the invitation, and who is
subject to deprivation.
This nature would have real existence in any human beings who were
to exist in a state of pure nature in an order of providence in which God
had no antecedent desire that these human beings should be in or come
to a state of sanctifying grace ordering them to glory in the vision of God.
And St.Thomas does envisage this as a possibility in some few passages,41
and even judges it profitable to consider this possibility in order better to
understand our actual situation. And De malo, q. 16, a. 2, ad 17, its argument simplified in ST I–II, q. 81, a. 4, also envisages yet another order of
providence quite different from our own, in which again God might have
no antecedent will extending to the salvation of all human creatures.
Feingold, contrary to de Lubac, effectively shows that, in St.Thomas’s
view, such beings would still have had the aptitude for grace associated
with having intellect and will and with being in that limited way made
in the image of God, and would not have been analogous to the brute
animals. Further, if one accepts the logic of Sylvester of Ferrara’s arguments, they would still have had the velleity for knowledge of the hidden
essence of the cause of all things, though not knowing whether such
knowledge is even possible, but without being unhappy through not
having it, having no disorder leading them to desire things inordinately
which are not proportionate to their nature, any more than in mediaeval
society a peasant might have reasonably envied a king.
Yet, in God’s actual order of providence for the creation within which
we actually live, St. Thomas envisages no such beings. All angels and
demons, as well as all human beings, exist within an order of providence
governed by God’s antecedent will that they should be in or come to a
state of sanctifying grace ordering them to glory in the vision of God. If
40 Cf. de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, 625.
41 Quodlibet I, q. 4, a. 3; De malo, q. 4, a. 1, ad 14; De malo, q. 5, a. 1, ad 15, together

with the odd argument in II Sent., d. 31, q. 1, a. 2, ad 3, which reappears in a
simplified form in ST I–II, q. 81, a. 4; and De malo, q. 4, a. 7.

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any fail in this, it is due to sin either directly or, in so far as the sins of
one can affect others, indirectly.
However, it remains that, within this, our actual, order of providence,
each angel and each human being has, as St.Thomas frequently expresses
it, one ultimate end (simpliciter), but this is a finis duplex, comprising (1) an
ultimate end proportionate to man’s powers, therefore only ultimate in a
certain respect, a natural beatitude within the reach of man exercising his
natural powers, referred to as an imperfect beatitude and as a beatitude in
a certain way (quodammodo) or in a certain respect (secundum quid), in the
setting of (2) man’s ultimate beatitude in the vision of God, perfect beatitude, which is alone beatitude in an unqualified sense (simpliciter), but which
depends on grace and our receiving the supernatural virtues. Feingold
establishes these theses as independent of the more disputed elements of
Suarez’s thought.42 But these very passages, in the very act of establishing
that one can speak of such a thing as a natural end for man, show that man’s
perfect ultimate end, beatitude simpliciter, lies only in the vision of God.
One could say that in attaining this beatitude and in this beatitude being
in a state of complete virtue, all virtues connected by charity, man incidentally is in perfect possession of all the virtues whose satisfaction could
be attained by the right use of his natural powers, the end proportionate to
his nature being in this way attained as it were incidentally. But the words
“end” and “beatitude” are not used univocally of man’s ultimate end in the
vision of God, which is beatitude simpliciter, and of the end proportionate
to his nature, which is only an end and a beatitude in a certain way
(quodammodo).Therefore, Gilson is right to observe,“St.Thomas repeatedly
said that the end of man is twofold (finis duplex); Dante repeatedly said that
man has two ends (fines duo).This is not the same thing. . . .”43 The importance of this distinction for the understanding of the relation of temporal
and spiritual authorities in society will appear later.
Thus, as St. Thomas conceives the matter, he is quite consistent in
holding that every intellectual being is called to the supernatural end of
the vision of God, and therefore in saying with Augustine “naturaliter
anima est gratiae capax,”44 making this statement in regard to the order
of providence God has actually instituted, and not saying it in regard to
any possible order of providence, since these were not the subject of what
he had to say about man’s actual end and the way to it, which are the
concern of Parts II and III of the Summa.
42 See Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God, 393–95, 398–404, and 625–26.
43 Etienne Gilson, Les metamorphoses de la cite de Dieu (Louvain: Publications Univer-

sitaires de Louvain, 1952), 152.
44 ST I–II, q. 113, a. 10.

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It is in accord with this that the only beatitude which St.Thomas ever
describes as beatitude simpliciter is the supernatural beatitude of the vision
of God.Thus, when asking whether the angels are created in beatitude, St.
Thomas answers with a qualified negative because to be created blessed
without any turning of the will to God, that is, without any part being
played by creaturely cooperation in consent or choice, is very far from
being created in beatitude simpliciter. And, although in St. Thomas’s later
view the souls in Limbo suffer no dolor or pain of any kind, and enjoy a
full unblemished joy in goods proportionate to human nature, nonetheless this freedom even from wishes for a supernatural happiness, which
they know they could not enjoy, depends on ignorance of even the possibility of such a state for any human being.To be in a state which depends
on such ignorance is to be in an unfortunate state and again so far from
beatitude simpliciter that unsurprisingly St. Thomas never describes it as
beatitude at all.
True then, St.Thomas does accept that God could have instituted some
different general order of providence within which he created intellectual
beings, and indeed beings human in nature, not called and ordered towards
grace and glory, but with solely a natural end, as a corollary of his more
general views.
However, this corollary plays no part in any argument in St. Thomas
that in the actual order of providence man and angel alike depend upon
grace, that is upon something as such gratuitous and outside the powers
of nature, in order to obtain his unqualifiedly ultimate end, ultimate
simpliciter. And the two examples which he considers of states lacking
what this requires—the state of limbo discussed above and the imperfect
happiness of this life, happiness in the sense that it satisfies Aristotle’s definition of “activity in accord with virtue,” which St. Thomas eloquently
describes by quoting “man born of a woman, living for a short time is
filled with many miseries” from the book of Job45—both arise within
this order of providence, man’s actual historical situation in the actual
history of creation as God has ordered it.
In regard to this, the actual order of providence, that is in regard to
creation as it actually is and to what is in accord with nature (in the
Thomistic sense explained below) within it, there is a valid saying omnis
intellectus naturaliter desiderat divinae substantiae visionem46 every intellect
naturally desires the vision of the divine substance.
45 ST I–II, q. 5, a. 3.
46 The Mystery of the Supernatural, p. 73, found by de Lubac in Commentaria Theo-

logica, vol. 2 ( third ed., Lyon, 1963), col. 99 B, and occurring in Dr. Sestili’s
summary of St.Thomas’s view quoted in MS, 246–47.

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Therefore, de Lubac is right in holding that St. Thomas at no time
relied upon the possibility that God could have instituted a different
order of providence and within this could have created intellectual beings
with a natural end in any argument to justify asserting the gratuity of
grace within our actual order of providence.
St. Thomas’s Underlying Theological Perspective
That What Is According to God’s Actual Order
of Providence for Nature Can Be Properly
Described as According to Nature
St.Thomas has a conception of an overarching divine order according to
which “whatever God does in things is not contrary to nature, but is
nature in them, for as much as he is the author and controller of nature,”
somewhat as in the case of the tides the sun and moon over-ride the natural motions of water to go to the lowest place, so that “in this way all creatures do, as if on account of nature, what is done in them by God.”47 And
this conception is part of the underlying perspective he draws from faith,
alluding to St.Augustine, in the passage already quoted whereby “the soul
is naturally capable of grace.” And this is recognised by Feingold when he
concedes that “there is some truth in the accusation with regard to Cajetan’s inability to make analogical distinctions with regard to the principle
that ‘natural desire cannot extend above the faculties of nature.’ ”48
(Feingold suggests that de Lubac thought he recognised a parallel
neglect in Duns Scotus in his use of the expression pondus naturae, Scotus
neglecting to take notice of the difference between the way a weight is
drawn by gravity and the way an intellectual being is drawn to the good.
In fact it appears that there was no such neglect on the part of Duns
Scotus, since he explicitly says,
Even if love only remained it would not be merely a necessary tendency
like gravitation but an operation worthy of intellectual nature. In fact, to
be an operation, and to be such an operation [is something that] love
does not derive from the intellect; rather it is something it is in conjunction with the intellect.49
47 De potentia, q. 1, a. 3, ad 1.
48 Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God, 280.
49 In B. Bonansea’s rendering of Efrem Bettoni’s translation of Op. Oxon., IV, d. 49,

q. ex latere, n. 17 in Bettoni, op. cit., p. 85. In Bettoni’s exposition, this is Duns
Scotus’s reply to the objection that without intellect, man would lose his dignity
of rational being and the will would be nothing but an inclination similar to the
tendency whereby heavy bodies fall towards their center of gravity.This immediately follows Bettoni’s explanation of how, although for Duns Scotus the volitional

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An earlier part of the same quaestio also shows that Duns Scotus is in
accord with Aquinas in viewing a volitional act as necessarily depending
on a previous intellective act, and so, as will be relevant to our discussion
later, he is in the same position as Aquinas in regard to the problems of
describing the psychological aspects of man’s advance to grace.)
A recognition of this more Augustinian use of the word “natural” by
Robert Bellarmine is found by de Lubac in Bellarmine’s saying “Visio
Dei, naturalis quoad appetitum, non autem quoad assecutionem.”50 In
the same chapter, Bellarmine also says,51 in reply to an objection drawn
from Baius, that
although this highest beatitude [the vision of God] is man’s natural end,
nevertheless it is an end that is disproportionate. In addition man has
another natural end that is proportionate to him, which is to see the
truth through reasoning. For this reason God could lead man through
natural means to a proportionate end, not elevate him higher.

Bellarmine is thus absolutely representative of an approach which, like
that of St. Thomas, combines acceptance of an underlying Augustinian
perspective and intent with a capacity to draw on analytical distinctions
of a more Aristotelian kind. And this is characteristic of St. Thomas’s
Summa as an ordered presentation of theology, that it is a work within
which philosophical arguments and ideas are brought in to support and
clarify faith, rather than for their own sake.52
The way in which St.Thomas’s perspective differs from that of Cajetan is explicitly highlighted when, in his exegesis of ST I–II, q. 1, a. 8,
Cajetan offers the remark cited by Feingold that “thus although
absolutely speaking there is not a natural desire of this kind for man, it is
natural for man, in so far as he is ordered by divine providence to a heavenly mansion, . . .”53 However, in St. Thomas’s way of thought and
act depends on and comes after the intellective act in the order of generation, this
is only because the intellective act is naturally ordered towards the volitional act,
which is the more perfect.
50 De gratia primi hominis, c. 7, Opera, vol. 5 (Paris:Vives, 1873), quoted in de Lubac,
The Mystery of the Supernatural, 151.
51 Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God, 463, n. 11.
52 Here one should see the Summa theologiae as set in contrast with the commentaries on Aristotle and the subsections of the Summa contra gentiles specifically
directed to commenting on Aristotle, such as SCG, II, cc. 61 etc.
53 Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God, 294–95. Feingold explains this statement
by reference to Cajetan’s commentary on ST I, q. 12, a. 1, in respect of which Cajetan says the desire for the vision of God, although not natural to the intellectual
creature absolutely speaking, is “natural to him presupposing the revelation of such

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speech, it is the way man is ordered by divine providence which makes
the desire natural absolute, or simpliciter, and it is only in a certain way that
the desire is not natural. In other words, for St.Thomas, it is what Cajetan speaks of as the theologian’s way of speaking,54 which takes pride of
place in judging what is absolute, or simpliciter, while our natural knowledge distinguishes what is natural in desires, or ultimate in ends, only in
a certain way (quodammodo) or in some particular respect (secundum quid).
If I understand Feingold correctly,55 Suarez seems to have taken Cajetan’s blindness to the importance of a natural appetitus in man for the vision
of God (in Cajetan’s words “natural for man in so far as he is ordered by
divine providence”) to the extreme of repudiating the propriety of this use
of the word “natural” altogether—regarding the ways of speaking of other
theologians, conspicuously Robert Bellarmine, as involving mere equivocation.56 Such blindness in respect of the possibility of using the word
“natural” in two senses makes Suarez impotent to communicate a true
Thomism to later thinkers. The primary sense refers to what is natural
according to the whole order of the universe in the actual order of providence, that is, the order according to which God created it, something
which the theologian and the faithful know by Revelation and of which
others may have some God-given intimation in preparation for the receiving of Revelation and grace, and the secondary sense refers to what is natural in the sense of what belongs to particular species of individuals within
such order, which is how philosophers mainly use the word.
Strengths and Weaknesses in de Lubac’s Exposition
Some Mistakes in de Lubac’s Exposition or Argumentation
From what I have said already, it is clear that there are some mistakes in
de Lubac’s exposition and some of his arguments.
Firstly, when St. Thomas or Cajetan speculates about a non-existent but
possible human being in a state of pure nature, in an order of providence
effects,” even though the passage concerned refers only to our knowledge of God’s
natural effects, and not to the supernatural effects known to us through revelation.
But Feingold adverts to the possibility that Cajetan might have changed his
perspective on this ST I, q. 12, a. 1 passage at a later date.
54 Cajetan recognises the existence of this use of the word “natural” to mean “natural for man in so far as he is ordered by divine providence to his supernatural
end” in other passages noted by Feingold in The Natural Desire to See God,
272–75, one of them noted earlier by de Lubac.
55 Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God, 667, n. 106, cf. n. 107.
56 Ibid., 668, n. 108.

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quite different from what God actually chose, a being without any supernatural destiny or calling, they are still speaking of a being which would
have been made in the image of God in the first of the three senses
distinguished by St.Thomas, a being in the image of God in having intellect and will, and not something to be grouped with the brute animals.
In St. Thomas’s understanding, if such beings made the full use of
reason within their natural power, they would still have some knowledge
of the existence of God, carrying with it the duty of reverence and some
customary social expression of reverence for God (duties belonging to
the virtue of religion). However, although God could have chosen to
institute a creation according to such an order, nonetheless their natural
knowledge would not suffice to make them able to settle on any plan of
life directed to any determinate end, or to have the connected virtue
appropriate to such a determinate end, unless they had preternatural
knowledge that in fact they had no end surpassing nature.
These conjectured beings are ones without the vision of the divine
essence as their end. It is quite wrong to describe the ever-deepening
knowledge possible to them, with the love it elicits, as asymptotically
approaching the vision of God and kind of love which could have such
vision as its fruit. However deep it reached, it would be as far and as
different from the vision of God at the end of the deepening as at the
beginning, quite contrary to the mathematical notion of an asymptotic
approach such as Balthasar speaks of57 and as de Lubac disparages.58
On the other hand, from the standpoint of modern ways of thinking
and speaking, de Lubac has the valid point in view of the fact that such a
human being in a state of pure nature would have its life, as some would
put it, solely “within the circles of this world” or, as it would have been
put in earlier times, nothing beyond a mundane kind of existence—so
that, even if a preternaturally given Paradise after death were conceived of,
it would be conceived only according to earthly models, reminiscent of a
world in which every vine would have seventy thousand branches, and
every branch carry seventy thousand grapes, to use an image of early
milleniarists. From a certain point of view, to think in this way is from a
modern perspective to place man back amongst the brutes. Whether or
not such a human being would by nature be mortal would be a matter of
further hypothesis, and what preternatural gifts God might give him to
assist his continuance in natural virtue a matter of yet further hypothesis.
Non-actual worlds are not objects of knowledge, and speculation about
57 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Henri de Lubac:An Overview, trans. Joseph

Fessio, S.J. et al. (German 1976; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 70.
58 De Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, 263.

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them is of very limited use—instead leaving the imagination enormous
freedom to construct fictional narratives, the imaginable not needing to
be conceptually coherent. (I can tell a story in which a mathematician
trisects an angle without needing to tell how he does it, and H. G.Wells’s
time traveller does not have to describe the state of his body at the time
of his conception.)
Secondly, one might form the further hypothesis, following the logic of
Sylvester of Ferrara, that such beings would still have had a desire for
knowledge of the hidden essence of the cause of all things, but only as
nothing more than what St. Thomas would call a velleitas, a wish for
something if it were possible, even perhaps knowing it to be impossible.
If this further hypothesis is viable, involving no conceptual incoherence
and therefore compatible with some possible order of providence different from what God chose, then this hypothesis might also have included
preternatural gifts preserving natural virtue in a way unimaginable to us,
so that there would be no torture in not attaining knowledge not proportionate to their nature. In this way, they would not be unhappy through
not having it, because they would suffer no disorder leading them to
desire things inordinately which are not proportionate to their nature, as
the mediaeval peasant would not be reasonable envying a king his possessions. However, the imagination is impotent to judge such questions of
conceptual coherence.
De Lubac reasonably suggests that, for any being which had the vision
of the divine essence as its end, to be aware of being eternally deprived
of it would be to suffer the pain of damnation (poena damni), making the
pain conditional upon knowledge that an end has been missed, in this
like St.Thomas having in view the possibility of unbaptised infants being
in ignorance of even the possibility of the vision of God, but leaving no
place for a permanent limbo of virtuous pagans.
However, the impracticality of imagining such states as would arise in
orders of providence quite different from the one within which we are
set makes it unsurprising that de Lubac should allow himself to be led
into some very tortuous discussion.59 Thus he argues,60 followed by von
59 De Lubac suggests that the finality or calling of which he speaks is one which

could not be permanently frustrated without “essential suffering” which would
seem to “fit the definition of the pain of the damned” (de Lubac, The Mystery of
the Supernatural, 70, cf. 73, 261, 263, 265–67, 269). On examination, these pages
may not refer to a state of absolutely pure nature but are of a state in which
nature has been touched by a calling (263), although the presentation leaves this
somewhat obscure.
60 Ibid., 260–71, renewing his discussion of pp. 51–55.

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Balthasar,61 that an intellectual being knowing that he would be evermore frustrated in seeking the vision of God would be evermore unhappy
the deeper he gained insight into the hidden essence of God—whereas
my argument just above suggests that this question should be left to the
realm of the unanswerable.
However, thirdly, in the context of established ways of speaking of the
“nature” of this or that thing, it was a disaster that de Lubac should express
his thought in terms of man’s supernatural finality being imprinted within
his nature. For what he meant was something more like what I expressed
earlier in terms of “the key underlying feature in the general character of
the personal individuality . . . of each and every human being in the actual
order of providence.” And as I remarked, when he spoke of “essential
finality,” he had in view a certain kind of necessity arising from the actual
order of providence, and nothing to do with the essence or nature of
human beings.
I say that this was a disaster because it led directly to the misunderstandings which give force to Feingold’s attack on de Lubac’s account,62
for the criticisms it contains would be perfectly valid if de Lubac had
understood such expressions as “within the nature of a thing” in traditional terms, terms which, besides going back at least to Aristotle, have
long been the established idiom of Western theology.
What one should say is that de Lubac’s actual intention or meaning is
perfectly discernible upon careful reflection on the text of The Mystery of the
Supernatural, but that his exposition is exceedingly confused for lack of any
clear explanation of what he did mean by the “nature” of a human being—
a defect not remedied in his Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace.63
On the other hand, the supernatural finality of which he spoke, constituting the foundation of the spiritual community in which every man
and woman share according to God’s actual order of providence for
creation and for us within it, is an integral feature of the humanity which
Jesus inherited from Adam, implicated in the humanity which concerned
Leo I and the Council of Chalcedon.This spiritual community is something the effects of which we daily suffer through original sin, but in
virtue of which the obedience and death of Jesus can avail for our salvation, if we will consent.Thus, a pearl is set amidst all de Lubac’s defective
exposition, that the humanity Jesus inherited from Adam was not just a
61 Balthasar, The Theology of Henri de Lubac, 70f.
62 Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God, 523–30, 608–17.
63 Henri de Lubac, Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, trans. Richard Arnandez,

F.S.C. (French 1980; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984).

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humanity which might have existed in a different possible world, but one
firmly rooted in our actual human history and involving a share in what
has been referred to as the covenant with Adam—a covenant not a
contract, a commitment freely entered into out of God’s liberality and
upon which God will not go back.
Fourthly, it is true that in posing the idea that it is only through Revelation that we truly know our own natures, de Lubac is not developing the
ideas of St.Thomas, but the conception proposed by Duns Scotus and to
be found in Toletus.This does not mean that it is a false conception.There
is much that is true in Duns Scotus, but such things are not relevant to the
argument in hand as to the exegesis of St. Thomas.Yet one has to make
clear that what Revelation is needed for here is to give knowledge of what
is natural for man in the sense of what is in accord with God’s providence
for him. By contrast, Revelation is not absolutely needed in order to know
human nature as such, although, as with many other things difficult to
know through the powers of natural reason and reflection, in our actual
state Revelation furnishes more certain knowledge than philosophy, even
of what belongs to the merely natural in human nature.
Fifthly, de Lubac’s exegesis of St. Thomas in regard to the natural desire
(desiderium) for the vision of God does not appear to be sustainable.
If we look at St. Thomas, and examine typical texts in which the
“natural desire (desiderium) for the vision of God” is spoken of, such as
SCG III, c. 50, it is evident that St.Thomas is speaking of a natural desire
which is conditional upon knowledge of the existence of God as cause
of all things. Granted such a knowledge, the intellect will not be satisfied
merely by knowledge that God exists but only by knowledge of what
God is, that is, knowledge of his essence, and the only knowledge of his
essence which is so complete as to satisfy the intellect’s desire is the
knowledge received in the vision of God. But, whereas for modern man
the existence of God has ceased to seem evident, from St.Thomas’s standpoint it would be evident from God’s effects to any unclouded intellect,
and in the providence of God made evident by preternatural gift after
death to any infant who died prematurely. However, it is a natural desire
which can in principle be satisfied, though only through supernatural
assistance, and in the actual order of providence under which the whole
of creation exists through the divine gifts of grace and glory will always
be satisfied, unless some obstacle is put to receiving these gifts by the will
of the creature which can only happen with those who have reached the
age of reason. Accordingly, in St. Thomas’s conception, it is a natural

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desire which, thanks to the divine gift, is not given in vain. Moreover, as
is made clear in SCG III, c. 57, the gifts of grace, the light of glory, and
the vision of God are open to any intellectual creature, even the least,64
which we should remark includes children before the age of reason.
If, by “the natural desire (desiderium) for the vision of God,” de Lubac
is speaking of some exercise of the power called the will, this must be
founded upon some natural, inchoate knowledge of God. As we have
seen, there are many texts in St. Thomas in which the natural desire St.
Thomas speaks of is an elicited desire, elicited from the will either by
knowledge of God as being the underlying cause of all things or by the
knowledge of God given by faith.
But there are other texts in which it appears that the natural desire
which precedes deliberation is a natural desire for happiness, antecedent
to any knowledge of what this happiness might consist in, and in most
men antecedent to any realization that it consists in knowledge of God
or of his hidden essence. Understanding this requires speaking in the
earlier mentioned way, thinking of soul, intellect, and will as referring to
one principle of operation under different aspects, but, as we discovered,
this is quite common in St. Thomas as in other mediaeval thinkers.
However, this does not carry us to an unelicited, unconditional, natural
desire (desiderium) for the vision of God in particular.
However, such weaknesses in de Lubac’s exegesis do not bring his
conception of man’s underlying supernatural destiny or supernatural
finality into prejudice. And as I pointed out at the beginning of this
paper, the idea of a “natural appetitus” directed towards the vision of God
in particular, natural in relation to the underlying supernatural end
within God’s overarching plan, thought of as an appetitus of the whole
person, embracing intellect as well as will, if taken as referring to this
supernatural destiny or supernatural finality, is unproblematic. And it is
this conception of man’s underlying supernatural destiny or supernatural
finality which is needed for de Lubac’s main argument.
Discerning de Lubac’s Intent, Sometimes Disguised
by Philosophical Informality in Ways of Speaking
Feingold conveniently gathers the expressions which seem most objectionable to him into a list.65 It is convenient to have this list, slightly
adapted, before us. De Lubac describes the supernatural finality of which
he speaks as “inscribed,” or “imprinted,” on man’s nature, “directing him
64 De Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, 70–72; Feingold, The Natural Desire to

See God, 496.
65 Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God, 491–93.

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from within,” and “a destiny. . . . which he could not ontologically
escape,”66 “something ontological which I cannot change as an object
changes its destination”67 and therefore an “essential finality,”68 which
cannot be changed without changing our nature.69 De Lubac also speaks
of “an essential destiny,”70 and “a destiny which is an ontological thing,”71
and says that “[c]ongenitally, the end of the spiritual creature is something
that surpasses the powers of his nature or any other creative nature.”72
I have suggested that the supernatural finality with which de Lubac is
concerned is the end which man has according to the order of providence
in which the whole of creation is actually set, the plan actually chosen by
God and operative in religion as it actually is.As such, this finality is something to be ascribed to each human person as such, and not to his nature as
a human being, because it is a real attribute of the person but existing in
the person only in virtue of a relation. It is St.Thomas’s discussion of the
Trinity which equips us to make this distinction. However, it is not a
distinction commonly applied to human beings within the scholastic
tradition. For this reason de Lubac lacks any vocabulary adequate to
describe how his supernatural finality can be intrinsic to every individual
human being, so that all he can provide is the unspecific although correct
description “ontological.” His description of this finality as “inscribed,” or
“imprinted,” on the human being, or person, would be thoroughly appropriate, and it is indeed something which the human being, or person,
cannot escape within this order of providence, which means he absolutely
cannot escape it. And de Lubac’s remark that “[c]ongenitally, the end of
the spiritual creature is something that surpasses the powers of his nature
or any other creative nature” is absolutely correct in regard to all actual or
possible spiritual creatures within the actual order of providence according to which God has actually chosen to create and govern the world.
However, lacking any tradition of applying the distinction of person
and nature to human beings in his scholastic training, de Lubac fell into
the pit of going beyond the ambiguous term “ontological.”73 For de
66 De Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, 89.
67 De Lubac, “Le Mystère du Surnaturel,” 94–95.
68 Ibid.; and de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, 81.
69 De Lubac, “Le Mystère du Surnaturel,” 94–98.
70 Ibid., 116.
71 De Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, 81.
72 Ibid., 144.
73 In Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God, 267–68, n. 127, Laporta is said to require

that the natural desire should be an “ontological natural appetite” prior to and
independent of knowledge (La destinee de la nature humaine selon Thomas d’Aquin,
88–89 [1928; Paris: Vrin, 1965]). This term was also used by Laporta in 1928,

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Lubac goes on to call the supernatural finality concerned “an essential
finality,” and to take it to be “inscribed,” or “imprinted,” on the natures of
human beings, rather than solely on human beings as persons. It is this
which leads him into the nonsense of distinguishing a “concrete, historical human nature” from human nature as realised in a different order of
providence—as if historical horses differed from mythical horses by
belonging to different species of the same genus.
Yet de Lubac’s instincts in insisting on a return to what he calls a “far
more ‘personalist’ and far more ‘existential’ (though not existentialist!)” point
of view seem absolutely right. He wishes to get away from the excessive
naturalism and essentialism which he associates with the form the Thomistic
tradition took from Cajetan through Suarez and John of St. Thomas to
Garrigou-Lagrange.74 What he is at war with is what he calls “extrinsicism”
whereby the gift of grace when given comes as something entirely unnecessary to the good life as such—necessary only to give mankind the means
to a higher end, a greater beatitude.75 And indeed we do meet with such an
extrinsicism in Suarez, as Feingold witnesses;76 and as I observed at the start,
it does make the doctrine of original sin seem incoherent or unintelligible.
And de Lubac is not wrong to envisage Cajetan as the one who first gave
this way of thinking of human nature in a way independent of God’s wider
providence for man an established footing in the traditions of interpreting
St.Thomas. And de Lubac is right to agree with Suarez in thinking of this
as, in his time, a novel approach adopted by the moderniores.77
Moreover, it is a recognition that, within creation as God freely chose
to create and order it, the settled finality of man (God’s antecedent
purpose) was and remains to attain to the vision of God, something
beyond man’s natural powers to attain without God’s assistance, which de
Lubac seeks to express when he speaks of man’s having this end as a
matter of a destiny which he cannot ontologically escape, a destiny which
neither he nor any other power could change. For it is ontologically
impossible to jump from a situation in creation under the actual order of
providence into another some quite different, merely possible order of
things. And an order of providence in which the purpose of a human
being’s existence could change radically from being purely natural to
describing the natural desire for the vision of God as an “ontological natural
appetite,” but the only explanation of the meaning of the word “ontological” that
Laporta offers is to say that it is “a metaphysical thing.”
74 De Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, 69–94.
75 Ibid., 89–90.
76 Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God, 418.
77 De Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, 189.

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being supernatural would be quite different from our actual order, and quite
different from any envisaged by St. Thomas or by any of the Fathers of
the Church before him.“Ontological” and “essential” are slippery words,
and we must be careful how we use them.Whatever de Lubac intended
in what he said using the word “ontological” seems correct, but has been
brought into obscurity by mixing up the “ontological” with what is “essential” as opposed to “accidental” (“essential” and “accidental” also being
words with more than one use).
Extrinsicism and Intrinsicism:
(1) The False Modernist Intrinsicism Alien to de Lubac
What Pius X and his collaborators were at war with in what they called
“modernism” was what they called “intrinsicism” or “the principle of
immanence.”To quote the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis of 1905:
Agnosticism is only the negative part of the system of the Modernist:
the positive side of it consists in what they call vital immanence. . . .
[W]hen Natural theology has been destroyed, the road to revelation
closed through the rejection of the arguments of credibility, and all
external revelation absolutely denied, it is clear that this explanation [of
religion] will be sought in vain outside man himself. It must, therefore,
be looked for in man; and since religion is a form of life, the explanation must certainly be found in the life of man. Hence the principle of
religious immanence is formulated.
Moreover, the first actuation of religion [like every other vital
phenomenon] is due to a certain necessity or impulsion; but it has its
origin, speaking more particularly of life, in a movement of the heart,
which movement is called a sentiment. Therefore, since God is the
object of religion, we must conclude that faith, which is the basis and
the foundation of all religion, consists in a sentiment which originates
from a need of the divine.This need of the divine, which is experienced
only in special and favourable circumstances, cannot, of itself, appertain
to the domain of consciousness; it is at first latent within the consciousness, or, to borrow a term from modern philosophy, in the subconscious, where also its roots lie hidden and undetected.
Should anyone ask how it is that this need of the divine which man
experiences within himself grows up into a religion, the Modernists
reply thus. . . . In the presence of this unknowable [the unknowable
beyond the boundaries which the external world and consciousness set
to the progress of science and history], whether it is outside man and
beyond the visible world of nature, or lies hidden within in the subconscious, the need of the divine, according to the principles of Fideism,
excites in a soul with a propensity towards religion a certain special
sentiment, without any previous advertence of the mind: and this senti-

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ment possesses, implied within itself both as its own object and as its
intrinsic cause, the reality of the divine, and in a way unites man with
God. It is this sentiment to which Modernists give the name of faith,
and this it is which they consider the beginning of religion.
Further that religious sentiment which is perceptible in the
consciousness is revelation, or at least the beginning of revelation. . . .
God Himself, as He manifests Himself to the soul, indistinctly it is true,
in this same religious sense, is this revelation.78

Such an “intrinsicism” makes faith the outworking of internal religious
feeling only, and gives religious belief a purely subjective character, and
gives dogma and worship no more status than that of being public expressions of religious sentiment, so that dogma is in no way “objectively” true.
By contrast, Christian understanding requires that faith have some
extrinsic root and that this is primarily in the public revelation of God in
history, through the external signs of faith, such as the teachings of the
prophets and miracles, the teaching and work of Christ, and the testimony of the apostles and the unfolding of this testimony in the preaching of the Church.79 It is not enough to say that faith should arise just
from the internal workings of the human mind and heart, nor even just
from these combined with the working in “grace” of an objectively existing God internal to the mind and heart.
If this is what is meant by extrinsicism, then both de Lubac and, before
him, Maurice Blondel80 were extrinsicists.
However, this has not protected de Lubac from denigration.
Pius X’s Pascendi in effect represents Modernism as holding that the
supernatural virtues stem naturally from roots natural to man, because
man is possessed of a vital religious sense which causes him to know and
desire the “absolute” naturally.
To some, de Lubac’s 1946 book Surnaturel, now almost unobtainable and
difficult to access, was rightly or wrongly held to teach that “God . . .
78 Piux X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, §§7–8.
79 In the absence of these, some other extrinsic means such as some private revela-

tion by an angel (St.Thomas suggests) will be provided, so that nobody who has
attained the age of reason will die lacking some means of knowledge of God’s
dispensation for man. St. Thomas’s discussion suggests that the faith the peasant
requires for salvation must extend to at least this: that God exists, that he extends
to man the possibility of a supernatural end, and that this possibility has required
the work of a Mediator.
80 De Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, 38 ff. (109 f), 245–46; cf. 24, de Lubac,
At the Service of the Church, trans.Anne Elizabeth Englund (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1993).

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cannot create intellectual beings without calling and ordering them to the
beatific vision,” the proposition condemned by Pius XII in Humani Generis
(1950). In fact, Surnaturel appears to teach that, as intellectual beings, they
cannot but be thus called, but still maintains the freedom of God in giving
the grace ordering them to this vision. However, this distinction between
being called and being ordered, whether or not it would help, is ignored
by some critics. And they also ignore that, whether or not in the original
Surnaturel he ever actually intended to teach the doctrine later condemned,
he repudiated any such view as early as 1949. Despite this, they still take
him to be the key person to insert what amounts to a quasi-Hegelian thesis
that grace is an inevitable development of nature and therefore not gratuitous, into the mainstream of the theology which would emerge from the
Second Vatican Council as an influential tendency in modern Catholic
theology despite its heretical character. Indeed it is taken as unimportant
whether he actually held this view, of which more traces can be found in
Karl Rahner than in de Lubac.What is unjust is that they see his rehabilitation as a symbol of the imagined acceptance of such Neo-Modernism
into Catholic theology. However, the Hegelian conception of life in grace
as an inevitable development of nature, and grace therefore not gratuitous,
sometimes expressed in terms of man’s having by his nature an intrinsic
right to participation in the divine nature, and so a right to participate in
the divine nature simply by being man, is an idea totally alien to de Lubac,
as can be seen from the detail of his attack upon Baius.
The Hegelian conception seems to make man essentially divine and
involve some kind of pantheism—or even worse, a combination of
pantheism with process-theology, as if our growth in self-knowledge and
self-realization could be thought of as God himself coming to know
himself, the fragments of himself being drawn into unity.
However, of any such wild developments de Lubac appears totally innocent. He did not question the gratuitousness of grace, and none of his
followers took him to have brought it into doubt. Further, his books show
no trace of the interiorization of Revelation, no trace of the idea of a
possible interior way to God, alternative to the way by means of historical Revelation, such as Jacques Dupuis draws from Rahner, no trace of the
rationalism of Rahner’s Foundations of Faith, and no trace of pantheism.
Extrinsicism and Intrinsicism:
(2) The Kind of Extrinsicism Which de Lubac Attacks
Both intrinsicism and extrinsicism are terms which have carried many
meanings. De Lubac introduces the term “extrinsic” into his discussion

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in The Mystery of the Supernatural on page 89.What he has in view is the
idea of a destiny not inscribed in each human being, as a person, in virtue
of God’s providence for human beings, but a destiny which could have
been given to him from the outside when he was already in
existence81—or if given to him from the first moment of his existence,
something which could be removed from him without him thereby
suffering any deprivation, properly so-called. Supposedly human beings
might have continued with a free will “keeping all its original strength
and the possibility of ‘a certain state of happiness in suo ordine in gradu,’ ”82
or, de Lubac says,“as some express it, a certain ‘natural possession’ of God
as the only end to which they were called by anything actually inscribed
within them.”83 When de Lubac objects to this way of thinking and the
associated notion of the order of grace as something super-added to the
order of nature, he is not objecting to the ideas of grace as perfecting
nature or super-added to nature (ideas often expressed by St.Thomas), a
nature set within an ordo naturalis or order of providence in which man
is intended for salvation, but to the idea of grace as super-added to a
nature already self-sufficient within some more limited order of its own.
To de Lubac, to think of God as establishing an order of nature including human beings within which these human beings have a self-sufficiency in themselves even without grace, and then to think of grace as
an extra gift which God gives to them, is a monstrosity—it suggests a
human being established, as it were, alongside God, as one person might
be alongside another, and in this position capable of giving or refusing
gifts, and capable of entering into a contract which might be binding
upon God. It was, for him, something like a philosophically deistic
conception of man’s nature set within a philosophically theistic framework, but a framework which was theologically deistic in the way it
conceived God’s workings in ordering things towards grace, conceiving
these as if worked from outside intervening—and conceiving the actual
order of nature as an order into which grace might not have entered, into
which it just happened to enter as a kind of extra. Instead, for de Lubac
as for St.Thomas, God is ever present innermost to things in giving being
and this giving of being is part of the same integrated eternal plan or
81 Cf. de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, 81.
82 De Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, 90, citing Suarez, De gratia (Vives ed.,

vol. 7, 206ff., 216–21).
83 De Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, 90; cf. 51–61.Although Suarez rejected

the term “natural possession” later used by Charles Boyer (de Lubac, The Mystery
of the Supernatural, 53), he gave exact expression to the idea, so attractive to
Descoqs, but execrated by St. Bernard and Vasquez (59–60).

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already prescribing a supernatural finality for man. And, if it is true that
it was Blondel who coined the word ‘extrinsicism’ for the view which
made the order of grace in this way extrinsic to the natural creation,84
then, judging from de Lubac’s correspondence with him,85 the roots of
Blondel’s objection to this extrinsicism were similar to those of de Lubac.
Every human being whatsoever, in virtue of the ultimate supernatural
end common to all human beings, that is, the antecedent will of God that
all men be saved, is in the position expressed in Psalm 139:
Lord, you have searched me and you know me,
You know when I sit down and when I rise up,
You discern my thoughts from afar.
You mark when I walk or lie down,
all my ways lie open to you.
Before ever a word is on my tongue,
you know it, Lord, through and through.
Behind and before you besiege me,
your hand is ever laid upon me.
Too wonderful for me, this knowledge,
too high, beyond my reach.
O where can I go from your spirit,
or where can I flee from your face?
If I climb the heavens, you are there.
If I lie in the grave you are there.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
For it was you who formed my inward parts,
knit me together in my mother’s womb.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Already you knew my soul,
My body held no secret from you
When I was being fashioned in secret
And moulded in the depths of the earth.

This, then, is the context of every disposition or movement of will,
voluntary or not voluntary.
The Psychological Aspects of Man’s Advance to Grace for de Lubac:
Life in Our Actual Situation
Modern man in the wake of Feuerbach’s embracing of atheism, in his case
substituting humanity for God, has had a sense of being out of joint in
84 Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God, 491.
85 See pp. 183–88, At the Service of the Church, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, USA,

1993.

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577

some way, expressed in Marx’s writings in the idea of alienation, and elsewhere in a widespread sense of need (exigence) of God, or of some kind of
angst, or more generally of a lack of direction or point in a person’s life.
There exists a self-confident rationalism which would see this as a leftover
of a Christianity thought of as an earlier superstition.Yet in the exigencies
of the extremities of war and natural disaster, in the frequent paling and
boredom with the satisfactions of Western material life and sexual freedom, in the uncertainties and insecurities arising within human relations
and with their absence, and in the West often largely hidden and disguised
fears and distresses associated with the approach of death, it is difficult to
envisage this self-confident rationalism as having a deep hold on the heart
of man and woman.Yet these things present themselves to us, apart from
the suggestions of faith, only as empirical phenomena.
Mankind, I have suggested, is constituted a spiritual community, a
community in respect of sharing a common, ultimate, supernatural end,
a community in which each has membership in virtue of the relation of
inheritance.And this membership is real in the conditions it sets, belonging to each of them as a person, in virtue of relation, not by nature. But
in virtue of this solidarity, sin at the start deprives all of their orientation
to this end, putting them in a state of alienation from the end for the sake
of which they had been given existence. There is, as it were, a void to be
filled, a privation, ontologically a condition of need. However, as I
remarked earlier, whereas the efficient causality whereby the truth that
God is the underlying cause of the existence of the world, giving being
to everything in it, is in a real way naturally knowable,86 God’s purpose
86 This natural knowledge of God as efficient cause must not be envisaged as if

even for the common man it was a matter depending upon complex reasoning.
It arises simply from our experience of things and changes in things as dependent upon causes, and our realization (in an “intuitive induction” to use the useful
term explained by William Kneale in Probability and Induction [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949]) that any such series or system of things, each showing dependence in various respects upon other things, must itself as a whole and in the
action of its parts depend on something which is not thus dependent upon
anything but exists and acts of itself. Such inchoate movement of thought is
direct, involving no use of negation and therefore no application of the laws of
non-contradiction or the excluded middle, and no application of any supposed
“principle of sufficient reason.” Such experience and such realization can be
brought into question when an attempt is made to give them exact formulation.
However, one must not confuse the genuineness of the initial insights with the
edifices of debate concerning such formulations, mistakenly supposing that the
natural knowledge referred to requires the common man to enter into such
debate. Cf. David Braine, The Reality of Time and the Existence of God (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1988), 24, cf. vi–vii, and 187–88.

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in creating and upholding the natural order and natural things and his
overarching plan or providence for the whole can only be known by
God’s revealing them.
Man’s intellect as exercised in judgements as to what to do, and
considering the ends to which he is inclined of the general types with
which he is familiar, realizes that there is no rest to be found in the attainment of these ends which leave desire unsatisfied, and cannot exclude
that there be some end which surpasses such lesser ends in such a way as
to satisfy desire.And man finds himself, as it were, inexplicably restless for
lack of knowledge of such an end or, if he realizes that it lies in knowledge of the hidden essence of God as the cause of all things and of all
good, restless for the lack of the means to attain a knowledge of this
essence of a sort which would give rest. However, by natural reason, he
knows neither the possibility of such knowledge nor of the existence of
any means to it. The question of possibility is relatively academic. By
contrast, that it is part of the actual order of providence that a man should
be brought, not just to some knowledge proportioned to his natural
powers, but to the vision of God’s essence, that is, to the vision of God,
coming to this only by God’s help-giving grace and the light of glory, is
something man can know only by Revelation, or teaching by God.
St.Thomas would have us understand87 that, where supernatural knowledge by faith in God’s teaching is concerned, God has to reveal or
propose a truth to be believed, and man has to assent, and for this assent
there has to be a twofold cause, the one external, as in the inducement
produced by seeing a miracle or through being persuaded, for example,
by a sermon, and the other (the chief one) the inward cause of being
moved by God to an assent beyond natural power (at least in that in this
field the same miracle, sermon, or argument might leave another
unmoved, and in any case the certainty of faith cannot arise by persuasion alone). Further, in being taught by God, man acquires a share of this
In much Western society, since towards the end of the twentieth century, we have
entered a situation in which children are brought up at home and at school
within the ambience in which the idea of taking God into account or the possibility that he might exist is simply absent from their living and thinking or that
of their parents, and the idea that his existence might be evident from creation
is regarded as the preserve of religious minorities and perhaps, strangely, some
physicists. All this is the result of the way in which matters in themselves relatively evident were culturally obscured in the eighteenth century by intellectual
fashions of thought which became increasingly accepted as providing the criteria of what is rational despite their surprising lack of support for reason.
87 ST II–II, q. 6. a. 1.

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learning, not all at once but little by little, according to his mode of
nature, and everyone who learns needs to believe in order that he may
acquire science to a perfect degree.88
Adapting this presentation to the circumstances of later intellectual
debate, from the time of Pascal onwards, but more especially since the
time of the Enlightenment and the Romantics, we should perhaps envisage the world as loaded with signs and persuasive arguments suggestive
of the truth of faith, albeit all in the midst of apparent counter-signs and
counter-arguments. In this setting, we should envisage grace as active
both in encouraging faith directly, and in the context of the beginnings
of faith in making men more alert to hope and more desiring of the
special intimacy with God, the perfect good, which these beginnings of
faith make them aware as something to which they are invited.
The doctrinal perspective of Genesis is that the cosmos is set within a
divinely ordered history. In considering the Old Testament, while recognizing the key importance of certain historical reference points and the
general shape of the history presented, we can say that in many matters
it makes no difference whether the human author intended a particular
part of his account as an actual history or as merely representative of the
shape of God’s providence—just as the teaching of both the human and
divine authors of Scripture is likewise the same, whether the book of Job
about the temptation of a Gentile, or the book of Jonah about the
conversion of the Ninevites, be conceived as histories or as moral tales.
In Genesis, man is portrayed as being within the continuing embrace
of God’s goodwill after the Fall from the very beginning, first in God
making garments to protect mankind from the effects of incontinence,
then in his promise to the woman in respect of her seed. Then we find
that Eve announces the birth of Cain by saying “I have gotten a man with
the help of the Lord,” that Cain and Abel make sacrifice to God, and,
while he accepts Abel’s sacrifice, he does not condemn Cain but only
explains that virtue is more vital than sacrifice. Later God protects Cain
from the punishment due to his murder, and blesses his progeny with
success. The Priestly account in Genesis 5 is particularly clear that it is
Adam as Adam created in the likeness of God (v. 1) who ‘in his own likeness, after his image’, begets Seth (v. 3), doing this under the original blessing on Man, male or female, as created (v. 2).89 The blessing continues in
the long life and care given to Seth’s descendants, and in the particular
88 ST II–II, q. 2, a. 3.
89 Cf. 147, Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology I, trans. D. M. G. Stalker (Edin-

burgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1961).

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closeness of God to Enoch and Noah. In this way, Genesis gives us to
understand that from the beginning, even after the fall, God continued to
have a supernatural destiny for man in view, and man always continued
and continues to live in a context fertile with occasions for God to offer
grace. This is a picture borne out by the studies of Jean Daniélou, in his
emphasis on Scripture’s showing us God as giving grace to men outside
the covenant with Abraham—the supernatural finality of which de Lubac
speaks being described in terms of God’s covenant with Adam, a covenant
of which we know only through Revelation.
Irenaeus regards it as a heresy to deny the salvation of Adam, while
Abel, Enoch, Melchizedek, and Noah figure amongst the just in every
ancient Jewish and Christian conception. All such just of the Old Testament period, including the Gentile Rahab, listed in Hebrews, each as
justified by faith, are represented as in waiting, to be made perfect only
with us (Heb 11:40).
Therefore, within the context of the antecedent will of God that all men
should be saved, although men do not always notice or recognize the signs
and roots of persuasive argument suggestive of the truth of faith, we should
not see this as the result of a reluctance on the part of God to give grace.
Rather, the significance of man’s supernatural destiny, or, which is the same
thing, this antecedent will of God that all men should be saved, is that God
is ever ready to give grace.And when God gives grace, at one and the same
time man realizes himself to be in the state of privation or lack of orientation spoken of as the effect of original sin and realizes the remedy. But
according to St.Thomas’s presentation, we should expect man to learn, to
be led forward in faith by grace,“not all at once but little by little.”90
The Key Theses of de Lubac About St. Thomas Which Remain Valid
Firstly, St.Thomas did not rest his reasons for holding grace to be necessary for salvation, and for holding that this grace was gratuitous and not
something owed to creaturely human beings (whether as intrinsic to
their nature, as to have four legs is part of the nature of a horse, or as
something merited because of virtue and good behavior), upon any
considerations about purely natural states of human beings in possible but
non-existent orders of providence different from that which God actually chose to make actual.
Secondly, in all his thinking about man in the Summa, St. Thomas’s
concern was with man as he exists in the actual order of providence insti90 ST II–II, q. 2, a. 3.

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tuted by God, and not with generalizations about other conceivable but
non-existent orders of providence. In this, he wrote as a theologian using
his natural powers of reason and philosophy where they lent support or
clarification for the things of faith. He was not concerned—and one may
generalize and say that most men, unless perhaps in some works of science
fiction or fantasy are not concerned—with any such imaginary human
beings.And it is with real human beings in our actual order of providence
that, in various different ways, Fyodor Dostoevsky and most Russian
authors, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, and Emmanuel Lévinas, are
concerned, to take but the beginnings of a sample—human beings subject
to a sense of Angst, alienation, or some global lack of direction.
Thirdly, within our actual order of providence, it is not possible for actual
human beings to organize their lives successfully as if God did not exist or
was an optional object of man’s concern.Yet de Lubac suggests that the
conception of a possible state of pure nature and of man as having two ends
has fostered the contrary view. And we can see dramatic examples of this.
Of course, to St. Thomas the existence, power, and divinity of God
would be things clearly evident from the things God has made (Rom
1:19–20) in any order of providence; and for human society in any order
of providence, happiness would lie in a life of virtue orientated to the
possibility of contemplating God as much as is possible to man, and
reverencing him with proper worship according to the virtue of religion.
But within the actual order of providence, it is impossible for human
beings to organize their lives successfully without taking account of the
divine in a much more radical way. Loss of orientation to God has put
human society into a situation in which it is prey to in-built tendencies
to corruption through preoccupation with riches, the satisfaction of
sensual pleasure, and ambition for power, rendering it subject to much
more cruel and harmful forms of domestic and civil strife and making it
the individual prey to in-built tendencies to lack of direction or of joy in
anything, emotional extremes, a sense of emptiness and despair.And each
person, as he or she grows up and as he or she approaches and reaches
the age of reason, is at the same time set within a culture encouraging
neglect or blindness to the graces offered to him, and making it difficult
to hear suggestions inviting more openness.
A preoccupation with this worldly life, for some very successful in some
material and emotional ways (even though made insecure by disease and
death, violence and war, and lack of control of the environment), combined
with enormous advances in understanding within physical science and in
things pertinent to medical advance, has made the centering of man’s

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interest upon man himself seem more reasonable and has promoted an
ill-supported rationalism.These have provided a context encouraging the
relegation of the evaluation of arguments concerning the ultimate cause
of the existence and order of the cosmos and judgements about what
things are worthwhile and right to the area of subjective judgement,
rather than of rational determination.This tendency has been fortified by
the rationalist anticipation that it would turn out to be possible to give a
physicalist account of everything physical in man, including all the physical aspects of his behavior—despite the inadequacy of the dualistic treatment of man which the empiricists took from Descartes and the
inadequacy of the accounts of causation developed on this basis.
Yet this is where the conception of two ends for man has fostered an
application of St.Thomas’s conception of natural law quite foreign to St.
Thomas’s thought.
For man’s successes intellectually, materially, and emotionally, though
localized to the West and the westernized, have given a selection of principles taken from what St. Thomas drew from Stoic, Aristotelian, and
Christian sources a function in offering an attractive approach to the
theory of law and the organization of a secular society—a function quite
alien to St.Thomas’s original purpose. For, as I noted earlier from Gilson,
for St.Thomas man has only one ultimate end, although this is twofold in
aspect, a finis duplex, by contrast with Dante’s conception of man as having
two ends (fines duo).The significance of this for Dante was that the temporal power had care over the natural good of society, whereas the spiritual
power had care in respect of the spiritual good of its citizens. Dante’s
conception suggests the possibility of a self-contained moral and political
account of man’s rights and duties of a kind never intended by St.Thomas.
St.Thomas’s conception of our knowledge of natural law as that participation in understanding of God’s eternal law (his providence for the
whole of nature) which is possible to us according to our natural powers
is far from the conception of the erecting by reason of a system of law
adequate for man to organize his life without respect to any supernatural
providence of God for man.Yet approaches along these lines, in thinking
about the theory of the state and community life, have been prominent
amongst some North American Catholic and Jewish neo-conservatives.
Yet a more correct reading of St. Thomas and of Christian principles
should make us realise that we have to guard ourselves against too close
an identification of the Christian conceptions of human right and ideals
of community with those now prevalent in secular society.91 Church and
91 Whereas it appears that Robert Schumann and some others involved in the foun-

dation of what would become the European Union laid out the schema they did

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State now appear to have largely returned to a situation of uneasy coexistence; even so, this has to bring the situation of the Christian in Western
society in some respects into greater approximation to his situation under
the conditions of former Soviet society and even of the Third Reich.
Fourthly, de Lubac seems to have got it right that, if we consider (1) the
creation of a spiritual being, (2) the imprinting of a supernatural finality
on this being, and (3) the free offer of grace, the first does not at all entail
the second, nor does the second entail the third.
Feingold is worried about de Lubac’s notion of man’s supernatural
finality, and in particular92 the relationship of (2) and (3), and argues that
if (2) is a free gift it is difficult to see how (3) is a separate free gift, rather
than something owed to man as a debt—or, as it might be better argued,
something which belongs to God’s wisdom to offer us as the means
suited to the end for which he has created us. By contrast, von Balthasar
seems to occupy the more embarrassing situation of suggesting that (1)
and (2) are distinct only conceptually,93 and in this, unlike de Lubac, von
Balthasar does seem to come into direct conflict with Humani generis. In
fact, the situation is that God can will (1) without willing (2), although
that involves his creating a different world, a different world which would
not include any of the same individuals as our actual world. (Obviously,
he cannot will [2] without willing [1].)

for the general structure of the European Union, with its special emphasis on
subsidiarity within the context of a greater loss of sovereignty to individual nation
states, greater than mere cooperation would require, they did this only on the
premise that it would be not just tolerant of, but a ground favourable to the freedom and development of faith. (I derive this insight from the 2007 doctoral thesis
at the University of Aberdeen of Alan Fimister, “Neo-Scholastic Humanism and
the Re-Unification of Europe, 1878–1958.”) In a certain way, they aimed at
something resembling a revival of Christendom in a democratic form, a conception whose lack of realism has become steadily more evident.
By contrast, in a more pragmatic spirit, Jacques Maritain, who had earlier
thought of using the state as a tool to prop up Christian principles in Action
Francaise, now later in Integral Humanism (1936) and Man and the State (1951)
formed the same idea in respect of more extended society. But again the just
principles declared in U.N. and Geneva declarations of 1948 can be seen to be
beginning to be changed (e.g., with new conceptions of “reproductive health”
and of gender, and a weakening of protection of the family) in such a way as to
be subversive of things which in 1948 had seemed secure.
92 Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God, 608–17.
93 Balthasar, The Theology of Henri de Lubac, 72–73, n. 36.

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Feingold’s worry as to how (3) can be genuinely gratuitous granted
that (1) is given its ultimate context by (2) arises partly from the misconceptions generated by the way de Lubac speaks of “human nature.”
De Lubac suggests that the supernatural is always gratuitous because
we desire it as a free and personal gift. Feingold argues that this could
only be true if this gift were in fact not owed to our nature. And he
argues that “[o]ur nature does not require it, only if we could attain a
proportionate final end without it.”94 And this, he argues, is something
that de Lubac’s position, whether expressed in terms of the imprinting of
a supernatural finality on our nature or in terms of an innate and absolute
desire for the vision of God, makes impossible. However, de Lubac would
utterly reject the idea that our nature requires grace in Feingold’s sense
of the word “nature,” and so there is no real disagreement here.
Furthermore, one may remark that Feingold’s view that in the actual
order of providence we could attain a proportionate final end without
grace is not unproblematic. It presupposes that it is due to us that we
should be assisted by preternatural gifts. For without such gifts our
passions are not subject to reason, our education is not preserved from
distortion, and our perception of what virtue requires in situations of
apparent moral dilemma is deeply obscured.As to what might be the case
in some other order of providence, de Lubac has sufficiently shown this
to be irrelevant, since Feingold’s counter-argument95 depends on misconstruing de Lubac in ways I have already made clear.
Yet it may be asked how God’s gift of grace can be gratuitous since it is
known beforehand that his antecedent will is that all human beings should
be saved (1 Tim 2:4). But this argument does not hold since the exercise of
free will is concerned, in this case both the free choice of God and the free
choice of man.A person does not lack beneficence if he shows more beneficence to one person than to another, and he cannot show maximum
beneficence to all since there is no maximum in beneficence in all respects.
Nor does he lack beneficence if he shows beneficence in one way to one
person and in another way to another when the two gifts are not of comparable kinds. More generally, if in his wisdom God never exercises liberality
arbitrarily, this does not make him less free in each exercise of liberality.
(As to the argument that, if there were a genuine possibility of a
human being not being saved, this would be realized in an infinite time,
as Cajetan might have argued, using an Aristotelian form of argument
used by St. Thomas in his tertia via: even if this argument were valid, it
94 Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God, 620.
95 Ibid., 620–29.

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would not hold since an infinite time is not available. In any case, it
would not hold, because will is involved.)
However, it is said that the Niagara Falls wear away one foot of rock
every year, and some people seem to think that human resistance to the
love of God may be like this, so that even if human resistance is not worn
away in a short time, it will be worn away in the end.Yet, besides the fact
that human history will not last an infinite time, to think of human freedom in this physical way is effectively to deny to man or woman the
possibility of ever saying “No.”The suggestion that it requires an angelic
will actually to make a choice which will be decisive like that of the devil
seems mistaken. For, to think like this about human beings is to make a
farce of the idea of human free will, and a farce of the idea of God’s
respecting man’s free will.Therefore, true though it is that God offers us
grace again and again, in one way or another, and comes back to us when
our circumstances have changed for worse or for better, still seeking to
give us the opportunity of turning to him, and, true as the poem The
Hound of Heaven may be to God’s mercy as we experience it, it must
remain that God will not exercise his power to move the will in such a
way as to make nonsense of the idea of human freedom.
For this reason, de Lubac always recognizes that man has it in him by
sin to be able to frustrate God’s will that he be saved. And there is no
automatism in God’s giving grace in such a way as to remove this freedom or make nonsense of it.
Therefore, de Lubac never opens himself to the charge that his position implies universalism, and never expresses universalist views, and so is
not open to the accusations made against von Balthasar.
The Roots of Gilson’s Antipathy to Suarez’s Approach
Suarez considered St. Thomas’s view of our actual human situation and
of the gratuity of grace precisely to depend upon God’s capacity to create
intellectual beings with a natural end—that is, in a state of “pure nature.”
And to be charitable we should perhaps envisage the possibility that in
regarding Cajetan, Conrad Koellin, Chrysostom Javelli, Bartholomew
Medina, and Dominic Bañez as accepting the possibility of intellectual
beings in a state of “pure nature” as having the same importance for them
as it did for him, and reckoning such an approach as placing them
amongst the moderniores, he was wrongly supposing them to have given
the same importance to this idea as he did—and perhaps even also to
have espoused the same metaphysics of being as he did.
For it is this metaphysics to which Gilson has such rooted opposition,
and it is a metaphysics indeed foreign to St.Thomas, as it was also foreign

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to Bañez. Thus, in considering the controversy with which we are
concerned, we have to take into account the much broader concerns of
Gilson which go far beyond the micro-exegesis of St. Thomas with
which Feingold concerns himself.
The nature “human being,” according to St.Thomas, has real existence
in only two ways, the first as an idea in the mind of God, that is, as God’s
essence under the aspect according to which human beings are like God
in an imperfect way, and the second as existing in actual human individuals, the way to which Aristotle refers. Otherwise the universal “human
nature” has no real existence at all. And for Gilson it is of capital importance that “natures” should not be considered as having any kind of real
existence in themselves. In this sense, he has been appropriately described
as being “as close to nominalism in respect to beings as a Thomist could
properly be,”96 rejecting the idea of “being” as something of which we
might have a univocal concept, let alone an intuition.
In Being and Some Philosophers, Gilson traces a strand in the history of
philosophy from Avicenna onwards, through Scotus to Suarez and from
him to Leibniz and Wolff, a strand distinguished by its tendency to treat
essences and to treat possible things as each having some kind of existence which put actualized and non-actualized essences, and likewise
actualized and non-actualized possibilities, in some kind of parity—a
strand opposed to the one represented in Aristotle,Averroes, and Cajetan.
The first of these strands, as he traces it from Scotus to Suarez, proceeds
as if essences were “possibles” to which actuality may or may not be
given, or as if one could treat possible things and actual things as in some
respect “things” in the same sense to be generalised about together. In his
sketch, Gilson portrays Scotus as conceiving of a multiplicity of possible
beings, completely determinate in their properties, which, taken together
with the “this-ness” required of anything in actual existence, require only
to be caused to come to be in order to have real existence. At the juncture when knowledge of mediaeval philosophy in general and of St.
Thomas in particular had to be passed on to theologians and philosophers after 1600, Suarez constituted the key channel through which this
was done, thereby having a vital influence on the philosophers Descartes,
Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff, and later even on Josef Kleutgen, who
collaborated with Leo XIII in preparing the encyclical Aeterni Patris
securing the revival of Thomistic studies, although fortunately Tommaso
Maria Cardinal Zigliara probably played a larger role. In this way, Suarez
had become the means by which a mistaken essentialism was passed on
96 Cf. Murphy, Art and Intellect, 262.

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to yet later philosophers,97 along with a voluntarism equally foreign to
St.Thomas. In effect, for all these thinkers from Avicenna to Suarez, existence comes to be envisaged as an accidental predicate of an essence.98
The upshot of this whole development is seen in Molina’s conception
of scientia media, whereby God is conceived as having foreknowledge
through having knowledge of all possible worlds, each complete in its
own whole history.Within each such world all free decisions have already
been made, with the result that the reality of time, the possession of active
power by creaturely agents so that by their causal action they cause future
effects, and therefore freedom of choice no longer have any necessary
role; and we are within one of Leibniz’s possible worlds. All that remains
is for God to decide which of these possible worlds to make actual as if
to make it true that the role of angels and men is just to act out the parts
in a play which God has written for them, everything thereby foreknown
by him.99 (It is paradoxical that this should have been the context in
which Molina was arguing for the conception that the free choices of
human and higher intellectual beings are exceptions to the principle that
every event falls under the causality of God, as it were, putting human
beings as persons exercising will in parallel with God.)
According to this way of thinking, real existence is the property of actual
things, the first amongst properties, pre-supposed by all others; and these
properties are in each case predicated of some particularized essence which
had possible existence, complete determinateness, and perhaps individuality or “this-ness” (haeccitas) as well. In this way of thinking, the same particular subject of existence might have the same identity, even if God had
chosen to make it actual in some quite different possible world, giving this
different possible world actuality, and not giving actuality to our world.
Now, the importance of this way of thinking for the present discussion
is nicely shown by Reinhard Hütter’s discussion in Nova et Vetera. He says:
[A]ccording to Aquinas . . . humanity was originally created immediately in a state of grace. However, another order of providence seems
97 Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, 105–14.
98 How Suarez came to this is something Gilson attempts to explain in Being and

Some Philosophers, 96–105, and how St.Thomas had avoided this he explains with
more difficulty in 169–79f.
99 Such was the origin of the theodicy satirized by Voltaire whereby we are
supposed to live in the best of all possible worlds. But without the reality of time
and the reality of creaturely causal power, there can be no significant difference
between what is intended (whether means or ends) and anticipated consequences, and no distinction between what God antecedently wills and what he
permits, so that all explanation of the origin of evil becomes impossible.

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for St. Thomas hypothetically entertainable in a perfectly legitimate
way, and under such an order the non-attainability of the Divine Vision
seems also to be perfectly thinkable.What seems, by entailment, also to
be perfectly conceivable in his answer to the objection is the continuity of the self-same human nature under the different orders of providence. Consequently, the state of graced nature presupposes an anterior
created nature, the latter never de facto obtaining without the former,
however, being an ontological principle with its own integrity, the two
being related to each other by way of supreme fittingness, but without
any intrinsic continuity between each other. For different orders of
providence do not entail an ontological transformation of the human
being, nor is the rational soul—while capax Dei—becoming something
less in a hypothetical order in which the human being is ordered to a
lesser felicity than the vision of God.100

The ideas of a “continuity of the self-same human nature under the
different orders of providence,” or of “an anterior, created nature” which
is “an ontological principle with its own integrity,” or that “different
orders of providence do not entail an ontological transformation of the
human being” are very strange.They appear to involve two conceptions,
both considered to be of real and actually existing entities, the one of a
universal called “human nature” shared by different human beings, and
the other of “a human nature” considered as particularized in a particular individual and imagined to be capable of persisting through changes
in the order of providence within which it is exemplified. Here I am
trying to explain what Hütter may be referring to as “an ontological
principle with its own integrity.”
This whole way of thinking and whole argument seems to depend on
treating “human nature” or particular “human natures” as things real and
actually existing, one and the same, in each of many of “the different orders
of providence,” each of which also, it seems, has some reality.This Suarezian way of thinking seems to be utterly alien to St. Thomas. The idea of
“human nature” in the mind of God is conceived as God himself and, as
such, is the cause of the being of each actual human being, but not an
element in that human being’s constitution. Human nature exists in each
human being, but only in the sense that each human being is human in
nature.And in St.Thomas’s conception “human nature” has no other kind
of reality or existence beyond these.The order of providence within which
we ourselves exist and live is the only order of providence which exists, is
100 Reinhard Hütter,“Desiderium Naturale Visionis Dei—Est autem duplex hominis beat-

itudo sive felicitas: Some Observations about Lawrence Feingold's and John
Milbank's Recent Interventions in the Debate over the Natural Desire to See
God,” Nova et Vetera 5 (2007): 100–1.

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actual, or has any kind of reality except as the object of God’s thought.
Other orders of providence have not been given actuality by God, and have
no existence except as objects of God’s thought.And human beings in such
non-actual orders of providence do not exist, and human nature does not
exist in them. There is no created human nature in existence anterior to
particular actual human beings. The muddling together of the actual and
the possible which one finds in such arguments as the one instanced above
belongs to the tradition of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rationalism, and has no place in the interpretation of St.Thomas.
Conclusion
The chief lessons to be learnt from this study are theological.
Firstly, God creates according to some particular providence, plan, or
eternal law. The universe which he has actually created was created
according to a plan which provided for no other true ultimate fulfilment
of intellectual creatures than their coming by grace and glory to the
beatific vision; and the antecedent will of God in creating them, and in
particular in creating man, was that all, and in particular all men, should
be saved (in what de Lubac refers to as man’s supernatural finality); and
this constitutes the setting of every movement of the human will.
However, secondly, this same actual providence is such that the action
of giving grace is never automatic.The absolute gratuitousness of the gifts
of grace and the light of glory, and the absolute dependence of man on
these gifts if he is to attain his true end of beatitude in the vision of God,
and the reality of the freedom of each man and of the injury he can do
both to himself and to others by sin remain. The working out of God’s
plan for each intellectual creature always lies within the freedom of God,
and this provides also for freedom in the response and cooperation of the
intellectual creature concerned, in a manner never arbitrary but nonetheless worked out in a manifold way for each individual. God’s providence
for each individual is, we must add, modulated according to the individual’s situation within the unfolding of God’s giving of Revelation within
history as well as to the desire of man and its expression in prayer in the
synergism between God’s grace and man’s willingness to respond.
As a separate matter, there is a further set of lessons to be learnt
concerning the use of authority, and the proper response to exercises of
authority. But to discuss these in a way relevant to the topic of this paper
would take another paper—one which would have to give an interpretation of the whole history of twentieth-century Catholic theology, a
history itself influenced by the course taken by theology in the preceding
N&V
seven centuries.

Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 6, No. 3 (2008): 591–614

591

Recollections of a Survivor*
J ONATHAN ROBINSON
The Oratory
Toronto, Canada

M ANY OF YOU will be familiar with the words of a French aristocrat who, being asked in the early years of the nineteenth century what
he had done during the revolution, replied that he had survived: quant à
moi, j’ai survécu.
My talk tonight is entitled “Reflections of a Survivor”: a survivor who
was ordained to the priesthood in 1962 and has lived through the last
forty-five years of the Church’s history. It does not matter very much what
value judgment you bring to bear on these years, whether you think, that
is, that this period represents a tragic tale of high hopes, great learning, and
noble aspirations gone sour; or a story of an unholy cabal of malevolent and
destructive liturgists, theologians, and curial officials bent on the dismemberment of Catholicism; or, indeed, any number of permutations and
combinations of these extreme positions; for no matter what your take on
these years since Vatican Council II may be, it is undeniable that they have
* This paper was written for a colloquium, sponsored by the Lumen Christi Insti-

tute of Chicago, on my book The Mass and Modernity (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 2005). The colloquium was held in April 2007, several months before the
publication of Pope Benedict’s moto proprio Summorum Pontificum. If properly
implemented the Pope’s document could go a long way to make, what we must
now learn to call the extraordinary form, or the usus antiquior, of the one Roman
Rite an integral part of Catholic worship.
In view of the publication of the moto proprio it would seem that the last few
pages of what I wrote in the early months of 2007 in this essay will prove to have
been unduly pessimistic; and I sincerely hope this is the case.Well, we will have
to wait and see how things work out. In the meantime, though, we should render
our heartfelt thanks for the lucidity and courage of the Holy Father who has
given us a light shining in the darkness.We should all pray for a measure of his
courage and lucidity in trying to follow that light.

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been tumultuous and very hard on priests.They have been hard on many
other people as well, but I am writing this paper to give expression to my
own experience, and my own experience is the experience of a priest.
When John Henry Newman came to write his Apologia pro Vita Sua,
he realized that it was not enough to refute false arguments and untrue
allegations; he had, somehow, to win his hearers over.“False ideas,” he said,
“may be refuted by argument, but by true ideas alone are they expelled.”1
That, however, was easier said than done; and after a certain amount of
agonizing over the best way of making his case, he decided that a sort of
autobiography would be the most effective way of winning a fair hearing.
“I will vanquish, not my Accuser, but my judges. I will indeed answer his
charges . . . but such a work shall not be the scope nor the substance of
my reply. I will draw out, as far as may be, the history of my mind. . . .”2
His arguments did not become true because he clothed them in an
account of his experience. It is rather the case that the faithful recounting
of his experience gave both weight and accessibility to what he wanted to
say; and the continuing power and fascination of Newman’s arguments
stem from this unflinching witness to his lived experience.
In a somewhat similar way, si parva licet componere magnis, I want to say
that the introduction of a personal dimension into my discussion will add
an element of authenticity to what I have to say. My stance on the liturgy
is not only consonant with what I have understood to be the dogmatic
teaching of the Church, as well as its directives concerning worship, but
it is also the fruit of my own experience in trying to put this teaching
and these directives into practice.3
Aristotle said that it is the mark of an educated person to expect the
sort of proof which the subject is capable of providing. In Book Six of
1 John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua (New York: Image Books, 1956), 122.
2 Ibid.
3 C. N. Cochrane, in Christianity and Classical Culture (London: Oxford University

Press, 1944), contrasts the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius with the Confessions of
St. Augustine. “The former,” Cochrane writes, “is concerned never to expose a
weakness, remembering that it is his business to exemplify so far as possible the
conventional type of excellence enshrined in the heroic ideal. The latter is
content to defy every canon of Classicism in order merely to bear witness to the
truth” (387). St. Augustine’s Confessions shows us “the picture of a concrete
human being in whose presence the barriers of time and space drop away to
reveal him as one in all respects akin to ourselves; a being so far unique in history,
yet clothed with the common graces and disgraces of mankind” (387). It was the
description of experience as “continuous and cumulative” (to use Cochrane’s
words) that was Augustine’s gateway to the truth—without what was his own,
he would have produced another version of Aurelius’s Meditations; but to repeat
the point, the truth was more than Augustine’s experiences.

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the Nicomachean Ethics, he says that the soul arrives at truth through a
variety of activities, and he lists five of these.4 We have to understand, he
teaches, something about the kind of subject we are dealing with, and the
sort of results that enquiries into the subject are capable of furnishing.
It strikes me that we need to remember this wisdom of Aristotle in our
discussions of the liturgy. Liturgy is something done (like art), and not
merely thought about, like scientia. Furthermore, things that are done
have a contingent, or a historical, element about them. Morality may
proceed from the fixed principles of the natural law, but these principles
need to be applied to the here and now; we may think this application is
by an exercise of the virtue of prudence, or perhaps the application
should be based on some system of casuistry, but the point is that merely
to study principles is not really to study morality. In a similar way, it is
possible to have a deep knowledge of the law from a theoretical point of
view, and yet not be able to use it to any great effect in the courtroom.
I would contend that liturgy, like morality or the practice of law, cannot
really be understood in a merely theoretical way. Knowledge is essential,
but without the experience of worship within the context of contemporary society and of what an eighteenth-century philosopher called the
climate of opinion, the specialist is in danger of leading us astray. He will do
this not because what he says is false in itself, but because what he does
say will be abstract—abstract, that is, because it is based on an inadequate
awareness of the complexity of the reality with which he is dealing.
At the heart of the post-conciliar turmoil in the Church were the
changes in the way the Mass was celebrated; and it is concerning the Mass,
and the situation in which it is celebrated, of which I wish to speak. I do
not imagine for a moment that my description of how we have arrived at
where we are today is exhaustive or particularly new, nor do I maintain that
what I have said in my book, or I am going to say in this paper, for rectifying the situation is totally adequate or particularly innovative. I can say,
though, that both the description and the suggestions are the fruit of my
own intellectual and first-hand ecclesial experience. Furthermore, if I am
correct in thinking that we cannot understand liturgy without some awareness that it is a practical activity, more like what Aristotle called an art than
anything else, then the value of what I write about liturgy depends in part
on the effort to make sense of the variety of perspectives my own life has
given me. I am not, of course, maintaining that the experiences are relevant
merely by the fact of their being my own. I do want to contend, however,
4 We arrive at truth by art (techne), by science (episteme), by practical wisdom (phrone-

sis), by intuition (nous), and by speculative genius (sophia) (Nicomachean Ethics,
1139b15).

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that if some activities require that they be done before they can be understood, then the experience of those performing those activities is relevant
to ascertaining the truth about those experiences.5
I was educated as a philosopher in Montreal and Edinburgh, and I
have been a full time member of various secular departments of philosophy, including Edinburgh and McGill. I was trained for the priesthood
in Rome; and, after my ordination, I was Cardinal Léger’s English-speaking secretary for four and a half years, until he retired. I founded the
Oratory of St. Philip Neri in Montreal (which was subsequently moved
to Toronto); and for the last thirty years, as superior of the Oratory, I have
had the overall charge of first one and then two adjacent parishes in
downtown Toronto. During this period the Oratory in Toronto founded
a seminary of philosophy which is affiliated with the Lateran in Rome.
Nothing in my experience has led me to question the traditionalist
motto that it is the Mass that matters. Furthermore, the traditionalists are
quite right in maintaining that the Mass, both for priests and for people
at the parish level, no longer matters in the way that it used to. It is true,
of course, that a great deal of attention is often paid to what is variously
termed “liturgies,” or “Eucharistic celebrations,” or, perhaps somewhat
more rarely now, “happenings,” but the ideal of the Mass as what shapes,
or should shape, a priest’s identity has all but disappeared.The Mass from
having been an end in itself has become a means to help bring about
other purposes. These purposes, often enough, are those of the priest
himself, and there are those in the laity who complain that the Mass has
now become the occasion for the worst sort of clerical dictatorship.
In my book The Mass and Modernity 6 I argued that cultural and intellectual history has had a profound influence on this de facto re-evaluation
of the importance of the Christian Sacrifice as well as on the way the Mass
is celebrated today. For many this is a point so obvious that it is not worth
making; nonetheless, while it may not be directly denied, its importance
5 One of the most attractive aspects of the early phenomenologists was their clear

conviction, a conviction which they derived from their master, Husserl, that
philosophy was a cooperative enterprise.They thought this not only because of
the true conviction that there was so much to do that no one person could hope
to pursue all that must be pursued, but also from a philosophical conviction that
the experience of other people is required before we can understand even our
own. I would also want to argue that the self itself is partially constituted by these
experiences. As we are concerned with liturgical experience, I would maintain,
as a consequence, that to alter drastically the worship of the Church does more
than merely affect the worshipper’s reactions; rather, it is the case that these
changes radically alter the character of the worshipper himself.
6 Jonathan Robinson, The Mass and Modernity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005).

Recollections of a Survivor

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is not really understood. And in my book I outlined some of the main
currents of the intellectual history of Europe and argued that much of the
malaise of the present liturgical situation could be traced to an uncritical
acceptance of many of the ideas which had gone into the fashioning of
the modern world.
I tried to show that large numbers in the Church after the Council
opted in practice for a policy of assimilating many of the fundamental
principles which helped to create the modern world, and, furthermore,
that this assimilation was carried on without sufficient awareness of the
source and development of those principles. It is in the post-conciliar
liturgical changes that the noxious effect of this osmosis is most clearly to
be seen. I contended that
[t]he present state of the liturgy reflects the alienation of modern
Catholic thought and practice from the tradition of the Church, but
now it also contributes to it. Modern liturgical practices are defective,
and they are in place, and they reinforce people’s understanding both
of their faith and of how the faith should relate to the modern world.
This means that the “reform of the reform” will be a long, hard business. How the reform will happen is at best opaque.7

Because I am a philosopher by training, I wrote the book from a
philosopher’s point of view. It may be, as the French would put it, that
my déformation professionnelle obscured my vision; I do not think, however,
that it totally blinded me. Nonetheless, I have been criticized for having
produced a book which is abstract, and one of the arguments adduced in
favour of this view is that those in charge of the disciplinary reforms of
the liturgy after the Council had not read Hegel and Marx and were
innocent of first-hand knowledge of Enlightenment thinkers. (Of course,
my critics all knew the Enlightenment was a good thing, and from this it
followed that I was being obscurantist in failing to recognize that the
Enlightenment was a blessing which should be immune from criticism.)
It is difficult to know how to respond to this as the critics seem to
want to have it both ways: on the one hand, they say we must be open
to the modern world, yet, on the other hand, when one shows oneself to
be open, at least in the sense of being in possession of some of the ideas
that went to make up modernity, one is then criticized for pointing out
that these ideas have not proved an unmixed blessing.
If the liturgical reforms had resulted in higher attendance at Mass, an
increase in vocations, and a redoubled missionary effort, no one would
7 Ibid., 342–43.

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have hesitated to associate this happy situation with the changes in the
liturgy. No doubt, attention would have been drawn to other factors, but
(cannot one hear it being said?) the proof of the pudding is in its eating:
here are the changes, and here are the happy results. However, things did
not turn out that way, but now we are told that the ideas of modernity
had nothing to do with the present parlous situation, and that it is to argue
post hoc propter hoc to assert any connection between the principles that
fashioned the world we live in and the present condition of the liturgy.
I want now to pursue some of these criticisms a bit more deeply. The
Mass and Modernity has been out for over three years, and one way or
another I have had occasion to try to sharpen up, although not as yet to
retract, some of the things I wrote in my book. First of all, I want to say
something about secularization, and here I will argue that because there
are no laws of history, it follows that the future is still open and that therefore there is no need either for despair or for taking refuge in an apocalyptic interpretation of Christianity.8 On the other hand, the prevalence,
perhaps I should say dominance, of a postmodern attitude in intellectual
life and in society makes it difficult to see how in practice the modernist
mind-set is to be countered. Next I want to say something more about
external worship and true religion. The liturgy is the public worship of
the Church and so, obviously, has an aspect of externality about it; but
what relation does this externality have to purity of heart or authentic
Christianity? Finally, I will say a few words about the role of the Old Rite
of Mass in the present situation as well as make a remark or two about
the attitudes that must be brought to bear on the liturgy if there is to be
any improvement in the current situation. In the course of my discussion
of this third point, I want to emphasize that present-day discussions of the
liturgy do not pay enough attention to the difference between the need
to preserve, or guard, the Faith in contrast to the responsibility of evangelization, or of spreading the Faith.
Secularization
When the word secularization is mentioned, something like the following is usually intended. We live in a world, so it is often said, for which
the language of traditional Christianity is a dead letter. The intellectual
framework, the images, and the moral teaching of the faith no longer
colour the ordinary consciousness as they once did. We inhabit, as Iris
Murdoch put it, “a scientific and anti-metaphysical age in which the
8 All I mean by this term here is that strand of apocalypticism that centered on

hopes for the coming purification of the Church at the end of the ages.

Recollections of a Survivor

597

dogmas, images, and precepts of religion have lost much of their power.”9
It is this weakening of the religious aspect of the modern consciousness
that we intend when we use the word secularization; modern society has
been secularized. Sometimes the word is used to describe the cause of
this condition: people seem to be convinced that secularization is a kind
of force, or irresistible current, which is sweeping away faith. At other
times the word describes what this force or current has brought about,
that is, a secularized society.
We have to distinguish, then, between the fact of secularization and the
process of secularization. In this section I want to argue that however it
may be that we have arrived at the present situation (which can certainly
be called secularized), it has not come about because of a development
from primitive societies that are believing and unsecularized to our own
situation, which is unbelieving and secularized. The anthropological
evidence is against this. If there is no anthropological evidence that all
primitive societies are composed of believers, then the secularist is forced
to substitute some sort of metaphysical law in the place of the non-existent historical basis. Comte’s law of the three stages, or classical Marxism’s
belief that the real force of the dialectic are the material forces of production, would be examples of what I mean. But there are no such laws, and
so I would deny the existence of a law which determines a movement
away from belief to unbelief. Finally, I shall make a few remarks on the
role of postmodernism in our present culture of postmodernism.
Charles Taylor says, and here he is surely correct, that the term secularization “is more a locus of questions than a source of explanations.”
It describes a process which is undeniable: the regression of belief in
God, and even more, the decline in the practice of religion, to the point
where from being central to the whole life of Western societies, public
and private, this has become sub-cultural, one of many private forms of
involvement which some people indulge in.10

Taylor’s description is not entirely free of ambiguities, but it is an essentially
fair-minded and accurate description of at least the climate of opinion, or
intellectual atmosphere, in which we all find ourselves. I think, though, that
if we are not to be petrified by this situation, like a rabbit in front of a
cobra—the metaphor is Charles Taylor’s—then we should hold onto the
following propositions. First of all there is no necessary connection between
9 Iris Murdoch,“Against Dryness,” in Existentialists and Mystics (London: Chatto &

Windus, 1997), 287.
10 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 309.

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unbelief and the modern world; and, secondly, there is no necessity which
dictates the movement from belief to unbelief.
One of the frightening aspects of Charles Taylor’s cobra is the conviction, or at least the suspicion, it instills in us that belief is somehow fit
only for primitive and uneducated societies and that you cannot be a
modern man without being an atheist, or, if not an atheist, then someone
who regards religious belief with a certain high-minded tolerance as, of
course, probably not being true, but as being useful to some people in
situations of great stress.
On this view secularism is thought to be a necessary concomitant of
modern industrial life, and marks the end of a development from superstition to a rational, scientific, and democratic view of existence. This
argument depends on the belief that primitive society is somehow of its
very nature a society of believers, and that unbelief is a peculiarly modern
phenomenon.Yet, in fact, there are serious anthropologists who maintain
that it is totally false to say that primitive man is by nature religious and
that unbelief is to be found only in modern society. For example,
consider the following passage from the distinguished English anthropologist Mary Douglas:
Secularization is . . . an age-old cosmological type, a product of a definable social experience, which need have nothing to do with urban life
or modern science. . . .The contrast of secular with religious has nothing whatever to do with the contrast with traditional or primitive.The
idea that primitive man is by nature deeply religious is nonsense.11

She goes on to say that all the modern attitudes towards religion are to be
found in tribal societies, and, furthermore, to think otherwise is to falsify
our understanding of early societies and therefore of our own as well.
The truth is that all the varieties of skepticism, materialism, and spiritual
fervour are to be found in the range of tribal societies.They vary as much
from one another on these lines as any chosen segments of London life.
The illusion that all primitives are pious, credulous and subject to the
teaching of priests or magicians has probably done even more to impede
our understanding of our own civilization than it has confused the interpretations of archaeologists dealing with the dead past.12

Our determined secularist might admit the anthropological evidence
for the existence of primitive unbelief and of unreligious tribal societies,
11 Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols (London: Routledge, 1996), 18.
12 Ibid.

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but go on to argue that such primitive and unbelieving societies were
heralds of the dawn of reason and enlightenment; early unbelieving societies mark the beginning of a development from belief and superstition
to the bright morning of enlightenment.This move, while it may not be
the mark of desperation, is at least the abandonment of the historical basis
of the secularist argument. It is the giving up of the claim that all primitive societies are believing to maintaining that those unbelieving societies are in the van of progress. But that is to base the argument on the
value judgement that secularism is true and not on the historical premise that all primitive societies are believing.
There is, however, a more serious fault in the secularists’ way of arguing. The study of history is about the past and is not the pseudo-discipline of discovering laws which have governed the development of
mankind in the past, and, being laws, will govern this development in the
future. History is about the past; it is not about the future. I take the view
that, in the words of Michael Oakeshott, the historian’s concern is not
with causes, but with occasions:
In the historian’s understanding of events, just as none is ‘accidental’, so
none is ‘necessary’ or ‘inevitable’.What we can observe him doing in his
characteristic inquiries and utterances is, not extricating general causes
and sufficient conditions, but setting before us the events (in so far as
they can be ascertained) which mediate one circumstance to another.13
. . . [T]he historian’s concern is not with causes but with occasions.14

Oakeshott adduces the example of de Tocqueville’s method to illustrate
what he means:
[The historian] knows only a set of happenings which, when fully set
out, makes the outbreak of this war seem neither an ‘accident’, nor a
‘miracle’, nor a necessary event.This, for example, is what de Tocqueville
does in L’Ancien Régime: the French Revolution is come upon, and its
character is exhibited, not as the necessary and inevitable consequence
of preceding events, but as an intelligible convergence of human choices
and actions.15

We should, then, take courage from the fact that believers are not up
against any sort of iron law towards godlessness, a law that predetermines
all our efforts to vindicate the truth of Catholicism to failure before we
13 Michael Oakeshott, “The Activity of being an Historian,” in Rationalism in Poli-

tics and Other Essays, new ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991), 172.
14 Ibid., 182.
15 Ibid., 172.

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even begin to try. With this assurance there is no just cause either for
despair or for taking refuge in an apocalyptic withdrawal from the world.
The Church is not predetermined to failure because of an iron law of
progress, nor is her only hope in an apocalyptic view that we have to wait
for either the second coming or an angelic pastor before things can be
set right. The patient, often tedious, effort to evangelize society is not
doomed to failure before we begin.
It must be said, though, that one of the great difficulties in accepting
what I have just said is the growth of an attitude we have all learned to
call neo-modernism, or postmodernism.16 The writings of the postmodernists have been variously understood and written about. There is,
however, one theme that usually surfaces, and that is the refusal to accept
even the possibility of master or overall accounts of reality, what are also
called grands discours or meta-narratives. Plato’s view that metaphysics is
the effort to see things steadily and to see them whole is thus held to be
totally wrongheaded.This is held to be the case because Plato was looking for a comprehensive statement about the nature of reality; and even
to begin looking for such an account, so the postmodernists claim, is to
embark on an enterprise that is not only futile but actually harmful. It is
futile because there is no reality as such to be described, and it is harmful because a metaphysical view of the nature of reality always goes hand
in hand with oppression of various sorts.
The malice of this intellectual stance for Christianity is twofold. In the
first place: Christianity is a “master” or “overall” narrative, it is a grand
discours par excellence, and believers think this master narrative is the key to
understanding their existence. If in fact such an account is an impossibility, then any sort of understanding of Catholicism as being true falls by
the board.
Yet, this is not all, because, secondly, one of the effects of postmodernism in the real world of society is to place a powerful tool in the hands
of those who are in control of governments and courts. Post-modernism
is usually presented in a way that assumes that all really educated people
accept the attack of the Enlightenment on the particularity of the Christian revelation.This does not mean, however, that either governments or
courts are willing to accept the absence of grands discours when it comes
16 “This is an expression,” as I wrote in The Mass and Modernity, “that has become

so common that we find it in the daily papers and hear it on the radio and television. What it seems to mean at this level is that everything is in flux, and this
includes the person who experiences a world in which there are no stable
centers or fixed meanings. Everything has been shaken up, and nothing much has
been put together again” (171).

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to their own activities, that is, either in the making or in the application
of the laws of the State.The solvent of postmodernism is applied to any
and every form of belief and practice except those of the law, and how
the judges interpret it.
In the place of this powerful and pervasive current of postmodernism,
a current that is, I think, another metaphysics or worldview, we have at
least to remind ourselves of an older and a saner view of the world. It may
be difficult to establish this view in the modern world of the postmodernists, but we must try to keep some sort of a sense of objectivity
and truth alive in the wilderness of modern intellectual life.
Liturgy and Inwardness
The principle that mere formalism in religion is displeasing to God and
destructive of genuine morality is as old as the Prophets, and it has been
an integral aspect of Catholic thought from the beginning. Furthermore,
subjectivity in the sense of the soul’s ascent to God is a perennial note in
Catholic experience.The first question before us is to determine why the
element of interiority seems to have taken precedence over every other
sort of consideration and has now become the touchstone of genuine
religion. Then, secondly, I want to at least point out that the sacramentality of Catholicism carries with it the necessity of taking seriously what
is visible and external.
We can elaborate the first question by considering the question of
importance; that is, why do some people think some things are important while to others they appear to be of no consequence? For example,
the Catechism cites a well-known text in the conciliar document Lumen
Gentium that the Eucharist is “the source and summit of the Christian
life.”17 Why is it that this centrality of the Mass does not seem to be, in
practice, the dominant principle of action among many Catholic people?
Part of the answer may be found in false teaching, ignorance, and infidelity.There are many books in which those sorts of reasons are discussed.
I am trying to ask a more fundamental question as to why attitudes in
fact hostile to Catholicism seem so acceptable to many in the Church
who nonetheless are of apparently good will.The answer must surely be
that other things appear more important in the here and now, and this
perceived importance becomes the focus of attention.Then, gradually, as
a consequence of this focus, a mind-set develops in which the Mass and
the other Sacraments are viewed as mere tools, or means, toward helping
the realization of extrinsic purposes which may even be laudable and
17 Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1324;Vatican Council II, Lumen Gentium, §11.

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Christian in themselves. It must also be said that the harshness of the
rhetoric of some of those who are justifiably outraged by many aspects
of the contemporary situation has been counter-productive. In fact, it
seems to be the case that this strident polemic has had the contrary effect
of frightening many in the direction of a complacent liberalism.18
Now if, as Catholics, we believe that the Eucharist is something more
than a commemorative rite designed to manifest the unity of the Church
and to provide Holy Communion for the People of God, then how is it
that the Mass seems so often to be regarded as nothing more than the
Christian Synaxis,19 or else as the Most Blessed Sacrament ?20 I emphasize
nothing more, because as the Catechism teaches, the Mass is in fact a visible expression of the Church, and clearly the community aspect is important; furthermore, we are also taught that the providing of Holy
Communion is also an integral part of the Mass.21 Yet, why does it seem
self-evident to many Catholics that other understandings of the Mass are
irrelevant and even harmful? Specifically I want to ask about the origin
of the automatic response that the notion of sacrifice belongs to the
past—and that it should remain in the past. What is the source of the
superior attitude that sacrifice and expiation are relics of primitive and
superstitious ways of thinking?
I suggest there are two reasons for these often half-formulated
responses: one is the modern view that real religion has to do with the
heart, or with interior dispositions; the second is that history is thought
to be the story of progress and freedom and that whatever can be identified as primordial can only belong to the intellectual and moral child18 “La masse cléricale préférait écouter les sirens sympathiques du progressisme bon

enfant plutôt que de trembler sous la férule des maîtres de la Sapinière ou de
leurs descendants.” Interview with Jean Borella,“Intelligence spirituelle et surnaturel,” in Eric Vatré, La droit du Père: enquête sur la tradition catholique aujourd’hui
(Paris:Trédaniel, 1994), jean.borella.neuf.fr/intelligencesets.htm.
19 The Catechism says that one way of referring to the “inexhaustible richness” of
the Eucharist is “the Eucharistic assembly (synaxis), because the Eucharist is celebrated amid the assembly of the faithful, the visible expression of the Church”
(§1329).
20 The next section of the Catechism says that another way of referring to this
“inexhaustible richness” is to “speak of the Most Blessed Sacrament because it is
the Sacrament of sacraments. The Eucharistic species reserved in the tabernacle
are designated by the same name” (§1330).
21 One unintended response to the seemingly unending series of liturgical initiatives has led to viewing the Mass as a focus for purely Eucharistic devotion.The
celebration of Mass provides the hosts to be consumed; the celebration of Mass
provides the host to be adored in the monstrance or the tabernacle. In this
perspective the Mass itself seems to have become solely an act of adoration.

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hood of mankind which it is not only our prerogative but our duty to
supersede. So, the belief that all true religion is only interior, coupled
with the view that the ideas of expiation and sacrifice are primitive, leads
to the denigration in practice of the symbols and ritual of the Mass, and
then, inevitably, to the importance of the Mass itself.
There are many tributaries that have contributed to this undervaluing,
when it is not the active distrust, of rites and ceremonies. In the history
of Western Christendom, it would be possible to trace a stream that flows
from the German Reformation through Pietism, ending with the
conviction that religion is “the reaction of human nature in its search for
God.”22 But I think that the fons et origo of the attitude is the dissemination, through the universities and learned opinion in society and finally
from the pulpit, of the work of Hegel. It was Hegel who took the idea
of justification by faith and reworked it into a powerful amalgam of
subjectivity and anti-Catholicism; and it was this amalgam which entered
into the consciousness of the West. Luther may be more important than
Hegel in strictly religious circles, but my contention is that the popularizing of Luther’s justification by faith, even amongst those who have no
knowledge of German Protestantism, is due more to Hegel’s role in
forming popular culture than any other factor.
Hegel’s thought has been enormously influential in forming the way
we think about ourselves and our world. His views on philosophy, politics, history, art, community, and religion are still a vital aspect of contemporary writing on who we are and how we fit into the scheme of things.
A good deal of this writing has influenced thinkers in the Church.23
Hegel maintained in his analysis of the Reformation that the corruption
of the Church was not due to the moral turpitude of the clergy, but was
rather the result of what he termed a “native growth.”24 “[T]he principle
of that corruption is to be looked for in the fact that the specific and
definite embodiment of the Deity which it recognizes, is sensuous—that
the external in a coarse form, is enshrined in its inmost being.”25
It was owing, says Hegel, to “the time-honoured and cherished sincerity
of the German people,” that there came about a revolution “out of the honest
22 This is A. N.Whitehead’s expression in Science and the Modern World (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1946), 237.
23 John Milbank writes, “In recent Catholic theology, the Hegelian and Marxist

traditions have acquired an unprecedented degree of influence.” Theology and
Social Theory Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1990), 206.
24 G.W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 412.
25 Ibid., 412–13.

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truth and simplicity of its heart.”26 This revolution was Luther’s conviction
that salvation is brought about essentially by an inner experience:
This, then, is the Lutheran faith, in accordance with which man stands
in a relation to God which involves his personal existence; that is his
piety and the hope of his salvation and the like all demand that his
heart, his subjectivity, should be present in them.27

So, what Hegel takes Luther to be saying is that when a man has an
inner awareness of his personal relationship to God, then he is liberated
from anything external which might interfere with his freedom.
Luther’s simple doctrine is that the specific embodiment of Deity—
infinite subjectivity, that is true spirituality, Christ—is in no way present and actual in an outward form, but as essentially spiritual is obtained
only in being reconciled to God in faith and spiritual enjoyment.28

With this inner certainty real freedom is finally achieved, and it has been
achieved in the depths of man’s inmost nature; in “faith and spiritual
enjoyment” man is finally at home with himself and at home with
God.29 This paean of praise on behalf of subjectivity is then contrasted
explicitly with Catholic worship: “All externality in relation to me is
thereby banished, just as in the externality of the Host; it is only in
communion and faith that I stand in relation to God.”30
Hegel had many sensible things to say about the effort to construct a
morality on a purely subjective basis,31 but when it came to the actual
practice of religion, he clearly taught that subjectivity, or as we might
now say, authenticity, is what counts for real religion. If the sacraments
help with this cultivation, then well and good, but if not, then we should
not worry too much about that. However, unlike Kant, who never went
to Church, Hegel was concerned with the religion practiced by the citi26 Ibid., 414.
27 G. W. F. Hegel, The History of Philosophy, vol. 3, trans. E. S. Haldane (New York:

Humanities Press, 1973), 149. It has been pointed out to me that Hegel’s description is radically distorted. This does not, however, touch my point that it is
Hegel’s description of Lutheranism that has been the source of the view that
Protestantism is really about inwardness, and that this version of Protestantism is
what real Christianity is about.
28 Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 415.
29 Hegel, History of Philosophy, vol. 3, 148.
30 Ibid., 149.
31 I have dealt with some of these questions in Duty and Hypocrisy in Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Mind (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977).

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zens of the state, and he would never have counseled a good German to
give up on the practice of the Sacraments. This seems to be so because
the practice of Lutheranism, at least for a German, was an element in
what it meant to be a good citizen. Such a ratio is not explicitly religious,
and it is not all that clear as to what Hegel himself really thought about
these matters; but it does not matter for our purposes as it is his exoteric
teaching with which we are concerned.
This perception that pure religion is essentially subjective receives
powerful support from the view that taking external religion seriously is
primitive and morally stultifying. I have already discussed Mary Douglas’s
view that secularism is not particularly modern, but even if she is correct
in maintaining that there have always been non-believers and secularists,
might it not still be the case that external religion, or at least very much
external religion, is irrelevant, useless, or even harmful for modern man?
In answer to this I would first of all like to construct a very simple argument from authority.The Church, as we have already noted, teaches that
the Eucharist is the “source and summit of the Christian life,” and you
cannot have the Eucharist without at least some symbolic and ritualistic
elements. The Eucharist is a sacrifice that re-presents (makes present) the
sacrifice of the cross, because it is a memorial, and because it applies its
fruit.32 Whatever is thought to follow from this teaching, it is clear that
the sort of sacrifice referred to here is symbolic and ritualistic and is not
a memorial designed merely to arouse subjective experiences. Of course,
nothing follows directly from this as to the question of what symbols and
what rites should be employed for this purpose, but if we think about the
centrality of symbols and rites in themselves, a centrality which flows from
the centrality of the Mass, we will be strengthened in our conviction that
such questions really are important and central to the practice of our religion.We will be fortified when we might be tempted to give in to those
good souls who assure us that we are quarreling over inessentials, and the
half-voiced judgement that our attitudes are pharisaical.
But what about the people who say that while some external appearances are necessary, nonetheless the whole perspective, the whole “feel” of,
say, the Old Rite, is primitive and superstitious? Mary Douglas, commenting on Pope Paul VI’s Mysterium Fidei, remarks that the doctrine of the
Eucharist is indeed primitive in what it teaches.33 It is worth pondering
32 CCC, §1366. The section continues with a citation in the text to the teaching

of the Council of Trent.
33 Douglas, Natural Symbols, 49.The first edition of her book was written before the

publication of the Catechism, but her words apply just as accurately to one document as to the other.

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what she says, because we believe that the Christian sacrifice is a sacrifice, and if so, it must be recognizably the same sort of activity as that
which at least some of mankind has always practiced. Furthermore, what
she says ought to furnish us with material for meditation on what is really
going on at Mass. If we believe in the Mass, we ought not to be ashamed
to be thought fools for Christ’s sake,34 nor embarrassed that we share attitudes towards worship that would have been recognized by Abraham, our
father in Faith.
Mary Douglas reminds us that what we are involved in is inextricably
linked to the here and now that characterized the Incarnation of our
Redeemer, and still characterizes the Sacrifice of the Mass.This is not to
say that the Mass reveals itself as true because it shares the here and now
of more primitive forms of worship, but that, in the spirit of St. Clement
of Alexandria, the true Mystery is not alien to our human nature.35
Here is a doctrine as uncompromising as any West African fetishist’s that
the deity is located in a specific object, place and time and under
control of a specific formula. To make the deity inhabit a material
object, whether shrine, mask, juju or piece of bread, is ritualism at its
starkest. The condensation of symbols is staggering in its range and
depth.The white circle of bread encompasses symbolically the cosmos,
the whole history of the Church and more, since it goes from the bread
offering of Melchisedech, to Calvary and the Mass. In this compass it
expresses themes of atonement, nourishment and renewal.36

The Mass, however, is not merely a symbolic representation in the here
and now of the sacrifice of Calvary; it is also symbolism in action, and
symbolism in action is what we call ritual. The Mass is a representation
through ritual of the mystery of our redemption. Mary Douglas goes on
to say:
But this is not all. Symbolizing does not exhaust the meaning of the
Eucharist. Its full meaning involves magical or sacramental efficacy. . . .
The crux of the doctrine is that a real, invisible transformation has
taken place at the priest’s saying of the sacred words and that the eating
of the consecrated host has saving efficacy for those who take it and for
34 1 Cor 3:18: “If any one among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him

become a fool that he may become wise.”
35 Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus, XII, 119, 1:“Come I will show you the Word

and the mysteries of the Word, and I will give you understanding of them by
means of images familiar to you.” Cited in Hugo Rahner, S.J., Greek Myths and
Christian Mystery, trans. Brian Battershaw (New York: Biblo & Tannen, 1971), 3.
36 Douglas, Natural Symbols, 50.

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others. It is based on a fundamental assumption about the human role
in religion.37

Catholicism knows nothing of a religion of pure inwardness. It is not
only false to hold that only the heart matters, it is also counter-productive when it comes to maintaining and to spreading the Faith.38 I say this
because, as I tried to say in The Mass and Modernity, it is the Mass itself
which is our most precious instrument in any evangelization that is to
result in anything recognizably Catholic. Our best hope in restoring all
things in Christ is through the symbolism and ritual of the Mass, and
what I have said in this paper is an unrepentant re-affirmation of my
thesis that, humanly speaking, it is difficult to see our way out of the present situation until we return in practice to the traditional doctrine of the
Church in the celebration of the Mass.
Where Do We Go From Here?
In his foreword to Martin Mosebach’s book The Heresy of Formlessness,
Father Joseph Fessio, S.J. writes that even “a rubrically correct and reverently celebrated Novus Ordo Mass appears and is experienced by those with
a deep understanding and appreciation for the Church’s liturgical tradition as a ‘rupture’ or ‘break’ with tradition.”39 Both the word “rupture”
and “break,” Father Fessio reminds us, are words used in this context by
the then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
Father Fessio’s statement seems to me indisputably true. I want to add,
though, that it is not only those who possess “a deep understanding and
appreciation of the Church’s liturgical tradition” who experience the
new ways of celebrating Mass as a rupture or break. I say this because
anyone, and you do not even have to be a Catholic, who has experienced
the old way of doing things, and what goes on now, can sense the rupture
or the break. The difference between those who are pleased with the
changes and those who are not does not consist in what is perceived but
37 Ibid.
38 The experience of Edith Stein’s Jewish family is relevant here: “It was central to

Auguste Stein’s life that she was a devout and observant Jew, herself brought up
in one of those small Jewish communities that had flourished on both sides of
the Silesian border, communities that had been able to provide their members
with only the bare elements of instruction in their religion, but that had been
sustained by their observances of the Sabbath and the High Holy Days.”Alasdair
MacIntyre, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913–1922 (Lanham, MD:
Rowan & Littlefield, Inc., 2006), 10.
39 Joseph Fessio, S.J., foreword to The Heresy of Formlessness, by Martin Mosebach,
trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 9.

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in the value judgment that is brought to bear on the changes. I mean by
this that even those who approve of the changes do not have any difficulty in admitting the changes; it is rather the case that, recognizing the
breaks and the ruptures, they glory in them.
Mosebach describes his experience of the changes in the Church:
I was no longer going to Mass. But I heard people say that the priests
had taken off their black suits and soutanes and went about dressed like
petty-bourgeois students or petty-bourgeois postmen; there was no
more Latin in the Mass; the priest no longer stood facing the altar but
stood behind it, as if he were behind a counter, and he looked at them
and happily bawled the hymns at them; at Communion he put the
Host into their hands, not on the tongue as formerly.40

Perhaps some of you might dislike the tone of the above passage, but it does
describe how the changes were perceived. Now for the value judgment:
The people I knew welcomed these innovations as something long
overdue, but even my mother was quite definite that no one had to
attend that kind of thing. I recall similar conversations with older
Catholics who were clearly pleased with the reforms while at the same
time being quite determined that “they would not be going”.41

Once again, this is an accurate description of an apparently contradictory,
but nevertheless true, phenomenon: on the one hand, people maintained
that the changes were a good thing, but, on the other, did not want to
have anything to do with them. Mosebach’s description is surely verified
by the fact that there was relatively little outcry from the laity when the
changes first came out, but at the same time in spite of this, they voted
with their feet and left off practicing their religion.
The usual response to this reaction on the part of those who wish to
defend the principles behind the changes, if not the way they were carried
out, is to say with Father Fessio that “from a strictly theological view, there
is a continuity in the underlying doctrine and structure of the celebration
of the Mass in its pre-conciliar and post-conciliar forms.” I have used this
argument myself time and time again in trying to dissuade people from
joining the Society of St. Pius X or just giving up practicing. I have used
the argument because it was the best I could think of, but I have never
found it watertight and find it even less so today, even though I believe that
trying to persuade people to stay with the ship is an obligation for a priest.
40 Mosebach, The Heresy of Formlessness, 14.
41 Ibid., 14–15.

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The difficulty with the argument is that liturgy is more than a theology lesson, or a purely intellectual grasp of dogma; liturgy is, as I said
earlier, something that is done. Andrew Louth, writing about Basil the
Great, puts this in a compelling way:
[D]ogma . . . is the experience of the mystery of Christ within the
bosom of the Church, which is to be kept secret from those outside,
from those who do not have faith—it is growing understanding of the
faith mediated through the experience of the liturgy of the Church and
a deeper grasp of the hidden significance of the Scriptures.42

Liturgy, then, is one of the ways the truths of faith are grasped in a
manner that is more than, and I would say deeper than, what is merely
propositional. It is in and through the celebration of Mass that we should
be helped towards a deeper grasp of the Faith. Although this is a statement of what liturgy should be about, I hardly think that any version of
this view of St. Basil’s about the role of dogma and liturgy would be the
first thing to spring to the mind of contemporary Catholics, much less
seem self-evident, or even comprehensible.
How could this situation be rectified? The first practical necessity
would be a determined effort on the part of the clergy to allow the
liturgy to do its own work without the constant intrusion of their own
personality and concerns. Indeed, I want to go further than that and
contend that priests should have very little to do with determining the
form and content of public worship. I say this because I think that the
main purpose of the liturgy is to render present on the altar the sacrifice
of Christ, and the recognition of the presence of this sacrifice is accomplished by loving, non-personalized repetition. The whole concept of
liturgical commissions and committees, not to say of creative liturgy, is
inimical to Catholic worship. Priests should not have to think, Sunday
after Sunday, about what they are to do to brighten things up or make
them more acceptable to their people. They should only have to think
about how to do what is prescribed for them to do in a better way.
It is true, however, that in the present situation, both because of
prevailing liturgical trends and because of the facultative nature of the
Novus Ordo,43 we are forced to think about liturgy more than is really
42 Andrew Louth, Denys the Areopagite (New York: Continuum, 1989), 27.
43 A friendly critic has accused me (in a private letter) of speaking of the Novus Ordo

as if it were actually a rite whereas “it is just a set of options which positively
require that a priest make his own decisions about all sorts of things, and, since
there is so much up for grabs, he is to be forgiven if he thinks that everything is
up for grabs.” I suppose the question turns on what we understand by a rite; and I

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desirable; but, still, I do believe that there is nothing worse for the good
of the People of God than constant, semi-public musing at the parish
level about what to do next.
In the last chapter of The Mass and Modernity, I gave some indications
as to how I thought the celebration of Mass could be improved. Although
I am convinced that some version of “a reform of the reform” is the best
way to deal with the present malaise, my discussion was based on the
conviction that the Old Rite Mass should be used as a standard or ideal
against which to measure more modern celebrations of Mass. I organized
these indications around three themes, those of order, knowledge, and beingat-work, taken from Dionysius the Areopagite (or the Pseudo-Dionysius,
as he is sometimes rather unhappily called). I have been impressed that by
far the most serious reviews of The Mass and Modernity have been by
those who accept my analysis of how the present situation came about
but disagree with my reform-of-the-reform stance. I do admit that the
last part of my book is mild for some tastes; but I was obliged to celebrate
the Novus Ordo for over thirty-five years if I wanted to stay in the
Church, and am not now going to say that somehow or other I was not
saying Mass, nor that I was being cowardly. Some younger priests today
are critical of my generation of priests, but we had no choice. It is also
worth pointing out that those of us who, over the years, have tried to
keep as traditional an approach as possible while using the new rites have
often been accused by those of a more progressive stance, or by those
who imagine that they are in the middle of the road, of being unfaithful
to the spirit of Vatican II. It has been difficult to keep one’s balance so as
not to overreact during the post-conciliar years, but here are some practical convictions based on my own experience.
First of all, I continue to believe that the Old Rite must be the standard for our worship.The Old Rite by its nature taught the centrality of
God, the need for a contemplative attitude, the vital importance of ritual
and symbols and of the helplessness and sinfulness of mankind before the
majesty and purity of God. As a result of this conviction, that is, of the
superior capacity of the Old Rite to teach unspoken but true lessons, I
think that the use of the Old Rite Mass should be extended. And we are
led to believe this will be the case.
I do not think the idea of using one rite as a standard for another one
is a fanciful or unrealistic one. When we took over our first parish in
Toronto in 1979, we instituted a Novus Ordo sung Latin Mass at 11:00 on
Sundays. It took us years, often very discouraging years, to establish this
think by using the phrase “facultative nature” I have pointed to an agreement with
what my critic is saying without going all the way down the road with him.

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611

both in terms of the numbers attending as well as of financial support.
We persevered, and now the Church is comfortably full, although not
packed, and the Mass is well supported financially. However, that is not
the point I want to make. During the difficult years, we used to say that
the 11:00 Mass was our flagship and set the standard for our other five
Sunday Masses, as well as those celebrated during the week. In a similar
way, I believe that the presence of even low Masses in the Old Rite
would help to set the standard for other celebrations not excluding Novus
Ordo Masses. I think the rubrics of the Novus Ordo are too susceptible to
diverse interpretations to allow the New Rite to be generally used as
such a standard.
If the Old Rite is to serve as a standard for other celebrations of Mass,
then it must be integrated into the regular timetable of other parish
Masses. If this is not done, it will continue to be regarded as somehow
licit, but very suspect, and therefore having nothing to teach most
Church-goers.What in fact militates against the success of my suggestion
is the impression amongst those few Catholics who have even heard
about what they probably call “Tridentinists” that they are involved in a
sectarian activity.44
What is a sect? Well, the word is easier to use, especially as a term of
opprobrium, than it is to define. The New Catholic Encyclopedia suggests
that “[u]nlike the Church, the sect considers itself a fellowship of the
saved rather than a mixture of saints and sinners; sinners are excommunicated and even shunned.”The article goes on to note:“Other positions
characteristic of the sect include an emphasis on some minor theological
doctrine such as perfection, spiritual healing, speaking in tongues, or
Adventism.”45 I do not suppose any of us think questions about the rite
of Mass are minor, but the harping on one theme to the exclusion of all
others is a possibility even when the theme is of great importance.
Old Rite Catholics would be less likely to act in a sectarian way, or be
treated by the majority of Catholics as though they really did belong to
a sect, if the Old Rite Mass were integrated into the timetable of other
Sunday celebrations. I have seen this work. One reason is that many
Catholics go to a particular Mass because the time is convenient; and if,
for example, the 8:00 Mass on Sunday morning were said in the old way
in Latin, a large number of those attending because the time is convenient would get used to it, and it would become no big deal. In this way,
44 See Thaddeus Kozinski, “The Gnostic Traditionalist,” New Oxford Review 74

( June 2007): 24–34.
45 New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1967), s.v.

“Sects and Cults, American,” 31.

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Jonathan Robinson

if I may express something very important in a homely way, the Old Rite
Mass would become domesticated and no longer be in danger of appearing sectarian.
I want to conclude by drawing your attention to a distinction so obvious that we overlook its importance. It is one thing to try to preserve the
faith in a parish, and another thing to try to go out and attract new
people to the parish or recover some of those who have left off practicing their faith. It is probably true that the priest who is not interested in
building up his parish will not be much good in keeping what he has
together; nonetheless, the two activities are distinct in more than a merely
formal way.
With all the talk of making the Mass more accessible, there seems to
have been precious little consideration given to the regular church-goers,
and especially those who go to daily Mass. I think the Old Rite nourished and sustained such people. It is not true that they did not understand what was going on; they understood very well. Their level of
culture may have varied a good deal, but people did not get up early in
the mornings to attend something that meant nothing to them. Or, to
take another example from my own experience, when I was first
ordained and was stationed at the cathedral in Montreal, the Church was
full every weekday for the noonday Mass by workers from the surrounding office buildings. Most of those who attended were taking time off
their lunch hour and carried missals with them.Weekday worship should
have been left untouched. The weekday Masses were attended by the
fervent, and the hungry were filled with good things.
On the other hand, I accept, as I accepted then, that Sunday worship
certainly needed to be thought about, and Sacrosanctum Concilium was the
Church’s effort to improve Sunday worship. There is no use going on
once again about how the document was implemented, but if we are
interested in trying to restore Catholic worship, then we should at least
consider re-instituting daily Mass in the Old Rite. The presence of this
authentic, traditional worship of the Church would then affect the way
the Sunday Mass is said.
Why would there be a change for the better? There would be a change
for the better because the priests who would say the Old Rite Mass all
week would import something of the order, reverence, and awe that the
traditional Mass instills to the Sunday celebration of the Eucharist.They
would begin to behave differently on Sundays.
I do not suppose for a moment that this is going to happen, because
the hatred of the Old Mass is not hatred of a Rite as such; it is a rejection of the Catholic past. Henry Ford said that history was bunk; and that

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seems to be the de facto attitude of a great many of those who call the
shots in today’s Church.
On the other hand, I do not think that Sunday celebrations of the Old
Rite are going to fulfill the Church’s obligation to preach Christ Jesus
and Him Crucified to the lapsed and the unbelieving. The reasons for
saying this are manifold, but the most important is that after forty years
of the New Rite the Old has lost its unequivocal character as the Mass
of the Church. To become an Old Rite Catholic is now a matter of
choice and is no longer the necessary mark of being a Catholic.You may
think that is a sad state of affairs, but it is the way things are; and, as, Joseph
Butler, an eighteenth-century British philosopher wrote, “everything is
N&V
what it is, and not another thing.”

Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 6, No. 3 (2008): 615–644

615

The Sting of Death:
The Unavoidable Question
and the Response of Faith
G EOFFREY WAINWRIGHT
Duke University Divinity School
Durham, North Carolina

I N A 1984 essay of Joseph Ratzinger entitled “Faith,Theology and Philosophy” occur these striking lines:
Both faith and philosophy confront the primordial question which
death addresses to man. Now the question of death is only the radical
form of the question about how to live rightly. It asks whence man
comes and whither he is going. It seeks an origin and a destination.
Death, the one question which it is impossible to ignore for ever, is thus
a metaphysical thorn lodged in man’s being. Man has no choice but to
ask what might be the meaning of this final limit.1

The general purpose of the 1984 essay is to stake out a proper relationship between theology and philosophy. In the earliest centuries of our era,
Christian apologetics and iconography could present Jesus—the Logos
incarnate—as “the Philosopher.” At its best, secular philosophy provided
categories that—subject to transformation—could aid the confession of
Christ and the proclamation of the Gospel. In modern times, the relationship, both from the philosophical and from the theological side, has
become more adversarial. Ratzinger wants to see philosophy as helping to
1 Joseph Ratzinger,“Faith, Philosophy and Theology,” in The Nature and Mission of

Theology: Essays to Orient Theology in Today’s Debates, trans. Adrian Walker (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 13–29, here p. 23; originally included as “Glaube,
Philosophie und Theologie,” in Wesen und Auftrag der Theologie: Versuche zu ihrer
Ortsbestimmung im Disput der Gegenwart (Freiburg: Johannes Verlag, 1993), 11–25,
here pp. 19–20.

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frame the provocative questions, to which theology, on the basis of the
Gospel and the Christian faith, seeks to offer answers, which in turn will
stimulate philosophy in its search for truth. Death raises questions that can
be philosophically formulated and that require a theological response.
Ratzinger sees faith and reason—in their respective and related ways—as
serving the one Truth; and in this he matches Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio (1998), issued while Cardinal Ratzinger was prefect of
the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Returning, then, to the primordial and unavoidable problem of death:
death sharply poses a complex set of questions concerning both the very
being of man and also humankind’s concrete existence—as particular
persons and as a race with a social constitution and a history. In the words
of a Lenten antiphon that can be traced back to Notker of St. Gall and
has found its way into traditional English and German liturgical use:
“Media vita in morte sumus” (“In the midst of life we are in death”;
“Mitten wir im Leben sind mit dem Tod umfangen”). Pope Benedict
XVI’s programmatic first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, can be seen as offering, at least in outline, this pontificate’s answer to the question of death;
and the very title of the encyclical—its opening phrase,“God is Love”—
will prove to be of the greatest significance.2 In the present essay, a cluster of six themes in Deus Caritas Est will be noted, and a series of
flashbacks will show how these components in the Pope’s most recent
answer to the question of death were presaged in the earlier writings—
both scholarly and pastoral—of the theologian Joseph Ratzinger (professor at the Universities of Bonn, Münster, Tübingen, and Regensburg,
1959–1977; archbishop of Munich and Freising, 1977–1981; and prefect
of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 1981–2005). Besides
showing the consistency in Joseph Ratzinger’s thinking, recourse to the
previous texts will provide richer materials from which the necessarily
brief hints in the encyclical can be filled out. Quotations will permit
readers to catch the flavor of Ratzinger’s style in various modes, and
references will then permit the more substantive pursuit of his thoughts.
With each of the six sub-topics, we shall at least mention some of the
contemporary ways in which the question of death comes to expression
and the (inadequate) answers that are advanced from outside the Christian faith (and sometimes from within theology).The six themes may be
2 Pope Benedict’s first encyclical was “given in Rome, at Saint Peter’s, on 25

December, the Solemnity of the Nativity of the Lord, in the year 2005, the first
of [his] Pontificate.” For a brief initial comment of mine on Deus Caritas Est, see
G. Wainwright, “Reflections on Pope Benedict’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas
Est,” Pro Ecclesia 15 (2006): 263–66.

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provisionally formulated as follows: first, the essential constitution of the
human being; second, the existential vocation of humankind; third, and
crucially, the human need for redemption and its divine provision; fourth,
the ethical challenge of faith; fifth, the quality and direction of society
and culture; sixth, the final prospect of the human person and the race.
The emphasis in this exposition will fall on Pope Benedict’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, but towards the end of the article we shall note how
some, at least, of these themes have been amplified in his second encyclical, Spe Salvi.
The Being of Man
In an initial comment on the semantic range of the word “love” at the
human level, Pope Benedict singles out “love between man and woman,
where body and soul are inseparably joined and human beings glimpse
an apparently irresistible promise of happiness” (Deus Caritas Est, §2).The
phrase “body and soul” might almost appear off-hand in this context,
although it is interesting that the writer seems confident that this nearcolloquialism will be immediately understood by the readers he is seeking to captivate. By the time of paragraph 5, he is ready to bring out the
theological import of “body and soul”: Christian faith “has always considered man a unity in duality, a reality in which spirit and matter compenetrate, and in which each is brought to a new nobility”:
Man is a being made up of body and soul. Man is truly himself when
his body and soul are intimately united. . . . Should he aspire to be pure
spirit and to reject the flesh as pertaining to his animal nature alone,
then spirit and body would both lose their dignity. On the other hand,
should he deny the spirit and consider matter, the body, as the only
reality, he would likewise lose his greatness. . . . Only when both dimensions are truly united . . . is love—eros—able to mature and attain its
authentic grandeur.

In his reading of contemporary society, Pope Benedict finds “the erotic”
assuming what amounts to a character of morbidity:
[T]he contemporary way of exalting the body is deceptive. Eros, reduced
to pure“sex,” has become a commodity, a mere “thing” to be bought
and sold, or rather, man himself becomes a commodity. This is hardly
man’s great “yes” to the body. On the contrary, he now considers his
body and his sexuality as the purely material part of himself, to be used
and exploited at will. Nor does he see it as an arena for the exercise of
his freedom, but as a mere object that he attempts, as he pleases, to make
both enjoyable and harmless. Here we are actually dealing with a

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Geoffrey Wainwright
debasement of the human body: no longer is it integrated into our
overall existential freedom; no longer is it a vital expression of our
whole being, but it is more or less relegated to the purely biological
sphere. The apparent exaltation of the body can quickly turn into a
hatred of bodiliness. (Ibid.)

In reference to our main question of death, it seems that contemporary
people may indeed be quite close to confirming Sigmund Freud’s theory
of the “death-wish” (Todeswunsch) as a universal instinct—where eros and
thanatos finally coincide. For the Christian faith, the two remain polar
opposites—until resolved in and through the divine agape.
The constitution of the human being as “a unity in duality,”“a unified
creature composed of body and soul” (Deus Caritas Est, §5) was insistently
expounded by the theologian Ratzinger in his Eschatologie—the one
volume that he himself contributed to the Kleine Katholische Dogmatik,
undertaken with his Regensburg colleague Johann Auer.3 The vital
importance of an ontology in any Christian answer to the inescapable
question posed by death is clear. That Joseph Ratzinger, now as Pope
Benedict, still believes that to be the case is shown by his allowing Eschatologie to be reprinted—and indeed with a confirmatory new preface,
signed “Joseph Ratzinger—Benedikt XVI” and significantly dated on the
Feast of All Saints 2006.4
In his Eschatology, Ratzinger refutes the view of some twentiethcentury exponents of an allegedly “biblical theology” that saw an irreducible dichotomy between “Hebrew” and “Greek” understandings of
man, in which the “corporeality” and “total death” of the former are set
against the “dualism” and “the soul’s release” in the latter.5 Exegetically,
historically, and systematically, Ratzinger shows that both the Old Testament and Plato are more complex than that, while both find their correction, completion and transformation in the life, teaching, passion, death
3 Eschatologie:Tod und ewiges Leben (Regensburg:Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 1977); the

sixth, expanded edition of 1990 will be used here.An intermediate English translation was Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, trans. M.Waldstein and A. Nichols
(Washington, DC:The Catholic University of America Press, 1988).
4 Joseph Ratzinger/Benedikt XVI, Eschatologie (Regensburg:Verlag Friedrich Pustet,
2007). The American publisher also reissued Eschatology, with the author’s new
preface now included. Both in the German and in the English-language versions
of 2007, the pagination in the body of the book remains the same as in the editions
cited in note 3.
5 On the “Greek” side in particular, “the frequently encountered notion of a
Hellenic-Platonic dualism of soul and body, with its corollary in the idea of the
soul’s immortality, is something of a theologian’s fantasy” (Eschatologie, 123; Eschatology, 145)

The Sting of Death

619

and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It was the presence of the crucified and
now risen Christ to faith—coupled with the availability of eternal life and
yet the persistence of earthly death on this side of the Parousia—that
constituted the real foundation on which Christian theological thinking
could gradually develop a corresponding anthropology. Needed was “an
anthropology which in the first instance recognized that man is, in his
unified totality, the creature of God, conceived and willed by him. But at
the same time, this anthropology was also obliged to distinguish between
an element that perishes and an element that abides—though in such a
way that the path towards the resurrection, the definitive reunification of
man and creation remained open.”6 It took until Thomas Aquinas to
formulate precisely that “the soul belongs to the body as ‘form,’ but that
which is the form of the body is still spirit. It makes man a person and
opens him to immortality.”7 This “strictly Christian” idea of the soul—“as
found in Catholic liturgy and theology up to the Second Vatican Council”8—is not “substantialistic” but rather “the vehicle of a ‘dialogical’
concept of humanity: man is defined by his intercourse with God.”9 That
capacity for relatedness to God implies no “escape” from the concrete
reality of creation but rather the very opposite:
[I]t is the man who makes himself open to all being, in its wholeness
and in its ground, and becomes thereby a “self,” who is truly a person.
Such openness is not a product of human achievement. It is given to
man; man depends for it on Another. But it is given to man to be his
very own possession.That is what is meant by creation. . . .
[F]rom belief in creation there follows the integral character of
Christian hope.What is saved is the one creature, man, in the wholeness
6 Eschatologie, 125; Eschatology, 147–48.
7 Eschatologie, 126; Eschatology, 149.
8 Eschatologie, 126; Eschatology, 150. Ratzinger may here be hinting at a lamentable

feature of postconciliar liturgical revision: “Even the Missal of Paul VI dared to
speak of the soul only here and there, and that in timorous fashion, otherwise
avoiding all mention of it where possible.As for the German rite of burial, it has,
so far as I can see, obliterated it altogether” (Eschatologie, 216; Eschatology, 246).
Ratzinger notes (Eschatologie, 209) that at least one Methodist theologian
“begründet in präziser Gedankenführung die Notwendigkeit von ‘Seele’ und
‘Zwischenzustand’ vom biblischen Zeugnis her”—referring to my chapter “The
Last Things” in Keeping the Faith, ed. Geoffrey Wainwright (Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1988), 341–70, in particular pp. 356–58.
9 Eschatologie, 127–29; Eschatology, 150–53. “Soul is nothing other than man’s
capacity for relatedness with truth, with love eternal” (Eschatologie, 233; Eschatology, 259). “And that truth and eternal love reside, of course, in the God who is
‘not a God of the dead but the God of the living (cf. Mk 12:26–27)’ ” (Eschatologie, 99–100; Eschatology, 113–14).

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Geoffrey Wainwright
and unity of his personhood as that appears in embodied life. . . . This
does not mean that nothing in man is transient. But it does mean that
in the transfiguration of the transient, what takes shape is the abiding.
Matter as such cannot provide the underpinning for man’s continuing
identity. Even during our life on earth it is changing constantly. . . .
Hence the indispensability of the body-soul distinction. Nevertheless,
the Christian tradition . . . has conceived this duality in such a way that
it is not dualistic but rather brings to light the worth and unity of the
human being as a whole. Even in the continuous “wasting away” of the
body, it is the whole man in his unity who moves towards eternity. It is
in the life of the body that God’s creature grows in maturity in expectation of seeing God’s face.10

As to the resurrection at the end of earthly history: the biblical witness—
itself grounded in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ—is encapsulated in
the phrase “pneumatic realism”; in the doctrinal tradition, help was
afforded by the Thomistic insight into “the unity of body and soul, a
unity founded on the creative act and implying at once the abiding ordination of the soul to matter and the derivation of the identity of the body
not from matter but from the person, the soul”; systematically, Ratzinger
declines to speculate much beyond “the certainty that the dynamism of
the cosmos leads towards a goal, a situation in which matter and spirit
will belong to each other in a new and definitive fashion.”11 The Incarnation and continuing bodiliness of Christ mean that history in all its
concreteness retains its eternal seriousness for each and every person
amid the complex network of human relationships in time and the
purposes of God for creation.12
10 Eschatologie, 130, 133; Eschatology, 155, 158–59.
11 Eschatologie, 137–60; Eschatology, 165–94.
12 Eschatologie, 152–57; Eschatology, 184–90. On the question of immortality and the

possibility of eternal separation from God, Ratzinger writes:“As a created being
[man] is made for a relationship [with God] which entails indestructibility”
(Eschatologie, 130; Eschatology, 154). “Man as we know him wants to generate his
own immortality. He would like to fabricate it out of his own stuff. . . . But in
this attempt to manufacture eternity, the vessel of man must, at the last, founder.
What endures after one is not oneself. Man falls headlong into the unreal, yielding up his life to unreality, to death.The intimate connection of sin and death is
the content of the curse we read of in the book of Genesis [Gen 3:3]. An existence in which man tries to divinize himself, to become ‘like a god’ in his autonomy, independence and self-sufficiency, turns into a Sheol-existence, a being in
nothingness, a shadow-life on the fringe of real living. This does not mean,
however, that man can cancel God’s creative act or put it into reverse.The result
of his sin is not pure nothingness. Like every other creature, man can only move
within the ambit of creation. Just as he cannot bring forth being of himself, so

The Sting of Death

621

In contemporary secular philosophy, the basic anthropological question
is posed, for example, in terms of consciousness or even cybernetics.
According to the American sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, “All tangible
phenomena, from the birth of stars to the working of social institutions, are
based on material processes that are ultimately reducible, however long and
tortuous the sequences, to the laws of physics,” and the arts are described
by Wilson as embracing “not only all physically possible worlds but also all
conceivable worlds innately interesting and congenial to the nervous system.”13
Those who, like Wilson, wish totally to remove any residue of metaphysics
will see human judgment as the spurious exercise of an illusory self within
a consciousness that is merely epiphenomenal. In old-fashioned philosophical terms, that is materialism, which remains alive and well despite the
difficulties inherent in the notion of matter understanding itself as material.
The questions currently take form in these ways: Is the brain a computer?
Can machines think? A recent two-volume “history of cognitive science”
by Margaret A. Boden bears the title Mind as Machine.14 Much is at stake
in the Christian ontology of man as body and soul, Ratzinger recognizes,
in the face of “a modern anthropology, worked out on the basis of natural
neither can he hurl it back into sheer nothingness. What he can achieve in this
regard is not the annulment of being, but lived self-contradiction, a self-negating
possibility, namely ‘Sheol.’The natural ordination towards the truth, towards God,
which of itself excludes nothingness, still endures, even when it is denied or
forgotten” (Eschatologie, 131; Eschatology, 156).“And this,” says Ratzinger further,
“is where the affirmations of christology come into their own.What happened
in Christ was that God overcame this self-contradiction from within—as distinct
from destroying human freedom by an arbitrary act from without.The living and
dying of Christ tell us that God himself descends into the pit of Sheol, that in
the land of absolute loneliness he makes relationship possible, healing the blind
[John 9] and so giving life in the midst of death.The Christian teaching on eternal life takes on, once more, a thoroughly practical character at this point.
Immortality is not something we achieve.Though it is a gift inherent in creation
it is not something which just happens to occur in nature. . . . Immortality rests
upon a relationship in which we are given a share, but by which, in sharing it,
we are claimed in turn. It points to a praxis of receiving, to that model for living
which is the self-emptying of Jesus, as opposed to the vain promise of salvation
contained in the words ‘Ye shall be as gods,’ the sham of total emancipation. If
the human capacity for truth and for love is the place where eternal life can
break forth, then eternal life can be consciously experienced in the present”
(Eschatologie, 131–32; Eschatology, 156–57). See further Eschatologie, 176–79;
Eschatology, 215–18.
13 Edward O.Wilson, Consilience:The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998),
266 and 268 (emphasis added).
14 Margaret A. Boden, Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science, 2 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006).

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science, and identifying the human being with his or her body, without any
remainder that might admit a soul distinct from that body.”15
The Human Vocation
According to our opening quotation from the essay of 1984, death raises
the questions of “whence man comes, whither he is going”; it is looking
for “an origin and a destination.” Where the English translation reads
“Man has no choice but to ask what might be the meaning of this final
limit,” the German original makes a clearer echo to Martin Heidegger:
“Der Mensch muss danach fragen, was es mit diesem Ende auf sich habe.”
For Heidegger, human existence is an “existence unto death” (“Dasein
zum Tode”). According to Pope Benedict’s encyclical, the Christian
faith—through its “image of God and the resulting image of mankind and
its destiny”—offers for human existence a different possibility: “[T]he
encounter with an event, a person,” namely Jesus Christ,“gives life a new
horizon and a decisive direction” (Deus Caritas Est, §1).
In four sermons delivered as adult catechesis in the Liebfrauendom in
Munich in Lent of 1981,Archbishop Ratzinger makes clear that “the story
of creation and the fall” is not to be “demythologized”—even in a benevolent sense—and thus reduced to an “existentialist” interpretation.16
Rather, human existence is to be grounded in creation realistically understood.The Genesis stories—when read in light of the Torah and the New
Testament, to which they were leading—teach that “only if [and because]
it is true that the universe comes from [divine] freedom, love, and reason,
15 Eschatologie, 94; Eschatology, 106. In the preface to the edition of 2007, Ratzinger

recommends an article by Tobias Kläden, “Die aktuelle Debatte um das LeibSeele-Problem,” in Theologische Revue 102 (2006), cols. 183–202, and a review by
F. A. Peters, in the same issue (2006, no. 3, cols. 201–204), of a book by Ewald
Richter, Wohin führt uns die moderne Hirnforschung? Ein Beitrag aus phänomenologischer und erkenntniskritischer Sicht (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2005).
16 Joseph Ratzinger, Im Anfang schuf Gott (Munich: Erich Wewel Verlag, 1986); In the
Beginning:The Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall, trans. Boniface Ramsey, with an appendix (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995). In the preface
to the published version of the Munich sermons, dated from Rome on the Feast
of St. Augustine 1985, Cardinal Ratzinger declared that his new responsibility as
prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had further persuaded
him of the urgency of bringing the doctrine of creation to the fore in Christian
proclamation.The point against demythologization is made in a note to the preface (pp. 60–61 in the German; pp. x–xii in the English). In the next couple of
paragraphs I cite page references in parentheses (first the German, then the
English edition). Into my brief quotations I have sometimes introduced—within
brackets—phrases from the context for the sake of clarity; and in further citing
this work I have occasionally adapted the published translation in other ways also.

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and that these are the real underlying powers, can we trust one another, go
forward into the future, and live as human beings” (p. 22; p. 18): “God
created the universe in order to enter into a history of love with
humankind, . . . to be able to become a human being and pour out his love
upon us and to invite us to love him in return” (pp. 29–30; p. 30).
Temporality belongs to creation, and speaks to us of “the passage from a
beginning to an end” (p. 25; p. 22). To be formed from the dust of the
ground [Gen2:7a] means being, like all earthly creatures, “destined for
death” (p. 37; p. 43). But to “bear God’s breath” [Gen 2:7b] is to be “God’s
image” [Gen 1:26f.], to be “addressed by him” (p. 38; pp. 44–45) and to be,
in turn, “capable of addressing God” (p. 40; p. 47f.). In Jesus Christ, the
“definitive Adam” (p. 40f.; p. 48), “we can discern what the human being,
God’s project, is, and thereby our own status” (p. 46; p. 57). But Christ’s entry
into the world needed to occur in redemptive mode on account of the Fall.
According to Ratzinger’s interpretation of Genesis 3 in the fourth of
the Munich sermons of Lent 1981, the story of Adam reveals the nature
of human guilt and thus concerns the existence of us all.The Fall consists
in the refusal to recognize “the boundary of good and evil,” the moral
order that the God of the covenant has built into creation as its “inner
standard or norm (das innere Mass).”The Fall is thus a denial both of the
proximity of God and of our own creaturehood. Whatever death might
have been, had Adam not sinned, death now holds negative sway:
[S]in is, in its essence, a renunciation of the truth. Now we can also
understand the mysterious meaning of the words:“If you eat of it [that
is, if you deny the boundary, if you deny your creatureliness], then you
will die” (cf. Gen. 2:16f.; 3:1–5). This means that human beings who
deny the boundary of good and evil, which is the inner standard of
creation, deny the truth. They are living in untruth and in unreality.
Their lives are mere appearance; they stand under the sway of death.We
who are largely surrounded by a world of untruths, of unlife, know
how strong this sway of death is, which even negates life itself and
makes it a kind of death. (pp. 54–55; p. 71)17
17 The

contemporary Orthodox theologian and hierarch John Zizioulas, in
Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (London
and New York: T. & T. Clark/Continuum, 2006), also views death as the ontological and existential problem (see, for example, pp. 40–41, 226–29, 257–58).
Zizioulas locates the fallenness of humankind in its perversion of the particularity of “personhood” (which resides in being made “in the image of God”; cf.
Genesis 1:26–27) in favor of an “individualism” that is in fact absorbed into an
undifferentiated “nature” (which, as creatureliness, is inherently mortal). According to Zizioulas, there is no “natural immortality” for the creature, and certainly
not for fallen humankind; but eternal life can be freely and graciously given by

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The story of God’s “project” for humanity, its frustration, its retrieval,
and its promised triumph, is the comprehensive content of the Scriptures.
The biblical structure is what grounds Ratzinger the systematic theologian’s exposition of the origin and destination of human existence—of
human history and of each person—as a movement of exitus and reditus,
beginning in God’s free and loving act of creation and ending in a free and
loving response of the finally perfected creatures to God the consummator. Within the great “arc from exitus to reditus,” the “great historical
process by which the world moves towards the fulfillment of God being
‘all in all,’ ” the smaller units “carry within themselves the great rhythm of
the whole, give it concrete forms that are ever new, and so provide it with
the force of its movement”; these smaller units include not only “the lives
of the different cultures and communities of human history, in which the
drama of beginning, development, and end is played out,” but also “the
many small circles of the lives of individuals.”18 Because of the Fall—
humankind’s self-assertive refusal of God’s gracious offer in creation—the
“return” can take place only by the way of the Cross, a “death to self.” In
The Spirit of the Liturgy, Ratzinger puts this in staurological and sacramental terms that anticipate what he will say in Deus Caritas Est:
The great gesture of embrace emanating from the Crucified has not yet
reached its goal; it has only just begun. Christian liturgy is liturgy on
the way, a liturgy of pilgrimage toward the transfiguration of the world,
which will only take place when God is “all in all.”19
the Father of the risen Christ (pp. 265–69).A negative outcome also is allowed by
the freedom that properly goes with personhood:“A man remains eternally free to
aspire after the destruction of himself and others. However, being unable to attain
it, . . . he will be eternally tormented by the non-accomplishment of his freedom.
. . . Hell is the existential space where all those who desire the loss of others—and
cannot obtain it, because of the Resurrection [of Christ]—are held. Hatred is, par
excellence, the foretaste of hell” (p. 268). Thus Zizioulas holds in check the quasiuniversalism fashionable among other admirers of Gregory of Nyssa: “Hell is the
place of the dead precisely because what is absent is the personal identity which
personhood gives, the positive relationship with God, our being recognized as
beings by God. It is the condition of ‘I do not know you’ (Mt 25:12)” (p. 281).
18 Der Geist der Liturgie: Eine Einführung (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2000), 25–29,
cf. 52, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
2000), 29–34, cf. 59. I have drawn heavily on this book in my essay “A Remedy
for Relativism: The Cosmic, Historical, and Eschatological Dimensions of the
Liturgy according to the Theologian Joseph Ratzinger,” in Nova et Vetera 5 (2007):
403–30; also to be found in Geoffrey Wainwright, Embracing Purpose: Essays on
God, the World and the Church (Peterborough: Epworth, 2007), 265–90, 351–52.
19 Der Geist der Liturgie, 43; The Spirit of the Liturgy, 50. For the exitus-reditus theme,
Ratzinger himself directs his readers (Der Geist der Liturgie, 195; The Spirit of the

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In sum, death belongs to our concrete human existence both as historical creatures and as sinners. The Gospel proclaims the possibility of
death’s transformation under both those aspects by the redeeming and
renewing work of God.We thereby return to the “encounter” that “gives
life a new horizon and a decisive direction” (Deus Caritas Est, §1).
Redemption, or the Retrieval of the Lost
Invoking Hosea 11:8–9 and God’s refusal to abandon adulterous Israel,
Pope Benedict notes that “God’s passionate love for his people—for
humanity—is at the same time a forgiving love. It is so great that it turns
God against himself, his love against his justice. Here Christians can see a
dim prefigurement of the mystery of the Cross: so great is God’s love for
man that by becoming man he follows him even into death, and so reconciles justice and love” (Deus Caritas Est, §10).With the Incarnation, God’s
engagement with the world “now takes on dramatic form when, in Jesus
Christ, it is God himself who goes in search of the ‘stray sheep,’ a suffering and lost humanity. . . . His death on the Cross is the culmination of
that turning of God against himself in which he gives himself in order to
raise man up and save him. This is love in its most radical form. By
contemplating the pierced side of Christ (cf. John 19:37), we can understand the starting-point of this Encyclical Letter: ‘God is love’ (1 John
4:8)” (Deus Caritas Est, §12).
In the strongly trinitarian paragraph 19, Pope Benedict summarizes the
first half of the encyclical through a configuration of images that
frequently recur in his theological writings as Joseph Ratzinger:
In the foregoing reflections, we have been able to focus our attention
on the Pierced one (cf. John 19:37; Zechariah 12:10), recognizing the
plan of the Father who, moved by love (cf. John 3:16), sent his onlybegotten Son into the world to redeem man. By dying on the Cross—
as Saint John tells us—Jesus “gave up his Spirit” ( John 19:30),
anticipating the gift of the Holy Spirit that he would make after his
Resurrection (cf. John 20:22).This was to fulfill the promise of “rivers
of living water” that would flow out of the hearts of believers, through
the outpouring of the Spirit (cf. John 7:38–39). The Spirit, in fact, is
that interior power which harmonizes their hearts with Christ’s heart
and moves them to love their brethren as Christ loved them, when he
Liturgy, 227) to his own habilitation-thesis Die Geschichtstheologie des heiligen
Bonaventura (Munich and Zurich: Verlag Schnell & Steiner, 1959; 2nd ed., St.
Ottilien: Eos, 1992); The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure, trans. Zachary Hayes
(Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1971). See especially pages 140–48 in the
German (1st ed.), pages 138–48 in the English.

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bent down to wash the feet of the disciples (cf. John 13:1–13) and
above all when he gave his life for us (cf. John 13:1; 15:13).

At least four elements figure in this sketch, and they are all characteristic
of Ratzinger the theologian. The first element is the strictly redemptive
and unique character of Christ’s death: it was “the death of death,” or, as
the Orthodox liturgy puts it,“by death he trampled down death, and gave
life to those in the tomb,” and the anaphoral acclamation in the Missal of
Paul VI says: “Dying, you destroyed our death. Rising, you restored our
life. Lord Jesus, come in glory.” Joseph Ratzinger finds “the origin of the
Eucharist in the paschal mystery,” that is, in “the turning point of the
Cross and the Resurrection, . . . the basis for Christianity in all its novelty,
. . . the very center of the mystery of Christ.”20 The fundamental christological and soteriological themes of Pope John Paul II’s first encyclical
Redemptor Hominis (1979) and his later Redemptoris Missio (1990) were, of
course, taken up in the declaration Dominus Iesus from the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2000. That last-named document bears
the matching imprint of the then Cardinal Prefect Joseph Ratzinger in
these crucial matters.
Second, we find in paragraph 19 of Deus Caritas Est the “attractive”
power of Christ’s saving death: we are drawn to him by the contemplation of his wounded side. In The Spirit of the Liturgy we find it said that
“[i]n the pierced heart of the Crucified, God’s own heart is opened up—
here we see who God is and what he is like.”21 Already in an address to
the Congress on the Sacred Heart of Jesus held at Toulouse in 1981,
Joseph Ratzinger had invoked Hosea 11:8–9 and found in “the pierced
Heart of the Crucified . . . the literal fulfilment of the prophecy of the
Heart of God, which overturns its righteousness by mercy and by that
very action remains righteous.” In contrast with the Stoic view, where
“the task of the heart is self-preservation, holding together what is its
own,” Ratzinger finds that “[t]he pierced Heart of Jesus has truly ‘overturned’ this definition”:
20 From Archbishop Ratzinger’s four Lenten sermons delivered at the Michaels-

kirche in Munich in 1978, first published in Eucharistie: Mitte der Kirche (Munich:
Erich Wewel Verlag, 1978). These sermons were later republished, together with
other pieces, in Joseph Ratzinger, Gott ist uns nahe: Eucharistie, Mitte des Lebens, ed.
S. O. Horn and V. Pfnür (Augsburg: Sankt Ulrich Verlag, 2001); God Is Near Us:
The Eucharist, the Heart of Life, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
2003). Here Gott ist uns nahe, 25–39, 64 ; God Is Near Us, 27–41, 65.
21 Der Geist der Liturgie, 40; The Spirit of the Liturgy, 48.The theme of “the pierced
heart of Jesus” returns in Deus Caritas Est, §39.

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This Heart is not concerned with self-preservation but with selfsurrender. It saves the world by opening itself. The revolution of the
opened Heart is the content of the Easter mystery. The heart saves,
indeed, but it saves by giving itself away.Thus, in the Heart of Jesus, the
center of Christianity is set before us. It expresses everything, all that is
genuinely new and revolutionary in the New Covenant. This Heart
calls to our heart. It invites us to step forth out of the futile attempt of
self-preservation and, by joining in the task of love, by handing
ourselves over to him and with him, to discover the fullness of love
which alone is eternity and which alone sustains the world.22

In another of Ratzinger’s favorite images, the outstretched arms of the
crucified Christ are ready to embrace us and all men (cf. Jn 12:32).23 In
the Munich catecheses of 1981, he said this:
Christ is the new Adam, with whom humankind begins anew.The Son,
who is by nature relationship and relatedness, reestablishes relationships.
His arms, spread out on the Cross, are an open invitation to relationship, which is continually offered to us. The Cross, the place of his
obedience, is the true tree of life. . . . From this tree there comes not the
word of temptation but that of redeeming love, the word of obedience,
which an obedient God himself used, thus offering us his obedience as
a context for freedom. The Cross is the tree of life, now become
approachable. By his passion Christ, as it were, removed the fiery sword,
passed through the fire, and erected the Cross as the true pole of the
earth, by which it is itself once more set aright.Therefore the Eucharist,
as the presence of the Cross, is the abiding tree of life, which is ever in
our midst and ever invites us to take the fruit of true life . . . .To receive
it, to eat of the tree of life, thus means to receive the crucified Lord and
consequently to accept the parameters of his life, his obedience, his
“yes,” the measure of our creatureliness. It means to accept the love of
God, which is our truth—that dependence on God which is no more
an imposition from without than is the Son’s sonship. It is precisely this
“dependence” that is freedom, because it is truth and love.24
22 See Joseph Ratzinger, “The Mystery of Easter: Substance and Foundation of

Devotion to the Sacred Heart,” in Behold the Pierced One: An Approach to a Spiritual Christology, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986),
47–69, here pp. 64 and 69 (slightly altered);“Das Ostergeheimnis: tiefster Gehalt
und Grund der Herz-Jesu-Verehrung” in Schauen auf den Durchbohrten: Versuche
zu einer spirituellen Christologie (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1984; 2nd ed. 1990),
41–59, here pp. 54–55 and 58–59.
23 He quotes Lactantius from the fourth century:“In his Passion God spread out his
arms and thus embraced the globe as a sign that a future people, from the rising
of the sun to its setting, would gather under his wings”(Div. Inst. IV, 26, CSEL 19,
383 quoted in Der Geist der Liturgie, 157; The Spirit of the Liturgy, 182–83).
24 Im Anfang schuf Gott (as in note 16 above), 58–59; In the Beginning, 76.

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Third, Christ’s death and resurrection released the Spirit, whose special
work is to join and conform us to Christ. Elsewhere—and without, of
course, any contradiction—Ratzinger will again highlight the role of the
sacraments in this regard:
In this connection, the Fathers always had at the back of their minds
the conclusion of the Passion narrative according to St. John: blood and
water flow from the opened side of Christ; Baptism and Eucharist
spring from the pierced heart of Jesus.25
Jesus is the New Adam, who goes down into the darkness of death’s
sleep and opens within it the beginning of a new humanity. From his
side, that side which has been opened up in loving sacrifice, comes
forth a spring that brings to fruition the whole of history. From the
self-sacrifice of Jesus in death stream blood and water, Eucharist and
baptism, as the source of a new community.26

Fourth, the benefits of Christ’s saving death take shape among believers as an imitative participation. Another favorite image of Ratzinger’s is
that of the grain that must die in order to produce fruit. In paragraph 6
of Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict writes:
Love is indeed “ecstasy” [ek-stasis], not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed
inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus
towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God:
“Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will
preserve it” (Luke 17:33), as Jesus says throughout the Gospels (cf.
Matthew 10:39; 16:25; Mark 8:35; Luke 9:24; John 12:25). In these
words, Jesus portrays his own path, which leads through the Cross to the
Resurrection: the path of the grain of wheat that falls to the ground and
dies, and in this way bears much fruit. Starting from the depths of his own
sacrifice and of the love that reaches fulfillment therein, he also portrays
in these words the essence of love and indeed of human life itself.

In a Munich sermon of 1978, Archbishop Ratzinger had preached this:
It was alone that [Christ] died, as the grain of wheat, but he does not
rise alone, but as a whole ear of corn, taking with him the communion
25 Der Geist der Liturgie, 191, cf. 73; The Spirit of the Liturgy, 222, cf. 84.
26 Joseph Ratzinger,“The Wellspring of Life from the Side of the Lord, Opened in

Loving Sacrifice,” in God Is Near Us (as in note 20 above), 42–55, here pp. 42–43
(slightly altered); Gott ist uns nahe, 41–54, here pp. 41–42. Ratzinger notes that
“for the side of Jesus, when it is pierced, John has chosen exactly the same word
as is used in the creation story to tell of the creation of Eve, where we normally
translate it as Adam’s ‘rib’ ” (ibid.).

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of the saints. Since the Resurrection, Christ no longer stands alone but
is—as the Church Fathers say—always caput et corpus: head and body,
open to us all.Thus he makes his word come true:“I, when I am lifted
up from the earth, will draw all men to myself ” ( John 12:32). . . .The
magnitude of Christ’s achievement consists precisely in his not remaining separate, over and against us, which might thus relegate us once
more to a merely passive rôle; he does not merely bear with us; rather,
he bears us up; he identifies himself with us to such an extent that our
sins belong to him and his being to us: he truly accepts us and takes us
up, so that we ourselves cooperate and join in the sacrifice with him,
participating in the mystery ourselves.Thus our own life and suffering,
our own hoping and loving, can also become fruitful, in the new center
(Mitte) he has given us to our existence.27

In his firm insistence on the saving death of Christ, the Pope in his
encyclical is offering no facile theodicy. Recalling Job’s “complain[t]
before God about the incomprehensible and apparently unjustified
suffering in the world” ( Job 23:3, 5–6, 15–16), Benedict confesses:
Often we cannot understand why God refrains from interfering.Yet he
does not prevent us from crying out, like Jesus on the Cross:“My God,
my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). We should
continue asking this question in prayerful dialogue before his face:
“Lord, holy and true, how long will it be?” (Revelation 6:10). It is Saint
Augustine who gives us faith’s answer to our sufferings: “Si comprehendis, non est Deus”—“if you understand him, he is not God.” Our
protest is not meant to challenge God, or to suggest that error, weakness or indifference can be found in him. For the believer, it is impossible to imagine that God is powerless or that “perhaps he is asleep” (cf.
1 Kings 18:27). Instead, our crying out is, as it was for Jesus on the
Cross, the deepest and most radical way of affirming our faith in his
sovereign power. Even in their bewilderment and failure to understand
the world around them, Christians continue to believe in the “goodness and loving kindness of God” (Titus 3:4). Immersed like everyone
else in the dramatic complexity of historical events, they remain
unshakably certain that God is our Father and loves us, even when his
silence remains incomprehensible. (Deus Caritas Est, §38)

The Ethical Challenge
According to Pope Benedict, “the command of love of neighbor is
inscribed by the Creator in man’s very nature”; and Christians engaged
in charitable work—and, by implication, all Christians—“need to be led
27 “The Wellspring of Life” (as in note 26 above), 50 (slightly altered); Gott ist uns

nahe, 49.

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to that encounter with God in Christ which awakens their love and
opens their spirits to others. As a result, love of neighbor will no longer
be for them a commandment imposed, so to speak, from without, but a
consequence deriving from their faith, a faith which becomes active
through love (cf. Gal. 5:6)” (Deus Caritas Est, §31). As “the typical biblical expression for the biblical notion of love,” agape “expresses the experience of a love which involves a real discovery of the other, moving
beyond the selfish character that prevailed earlier. Love now becomes
concern and care for the other. No longer is it self-seeking, a sinking in
the intoxication of happiness; instead it seeks the good of the beloved: it
becomes renunciation and it is ready, and even willing, for sacrifice”
(ibid., §6).The divine love manifested and enacted in Jesus Christ is the
inspiration and example: “The consciousness that, in Christ, God has
given himself for us, even unto death, must inspire us to live no longer
for ourselves but for him, and, with him, for others” (ibid., §33). And
again:“Faith, which sees the love of God revealed in the pierced heart of
Jesus on the Cross, gives rise to love. . . . Love is possible, and we are able
to practice it because we are created in the image of God.To experience
love and in this way to cause the light of God to enter into the world—
this is the invitation I would like to extend with the present Encyclical”
(ibid., §39).28
In the line of Joseph Ratzinger’s sacramental faith and liturgical theology, the encyclical presents the Eucharist as the paradigm and power for
the exercise of love through death to self:
Jesus gave [his] act of oblation an enduring presence through his institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper. He anticipated his death and
resurrection by giving his disciples, in the bread and wine, his very self,
his body and blood as the new manna. . . .The Eucharist draws us into
Jesus’ act of self-oblation. More than just statically receiving the incarnate Logos, we enter into the very dynamic of his self-giving. (Deus
Caritas Est, §13)
28 Joseph Ratzinger would likely endorse Eberhard Jüngel’s definition of love as

“die sich ereignende Einheit von Leben und Tod zugunsten des Lebens”: love
can be understood as “the occurrence of unity between life and death for the
sake of life” because “[o]n the Cross of Jesus God defined himself as love.” See
E. Jüngel, Gott als Geheimnis der Welt (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1977), 298, 434;
cf. God as the Mystery of the World, trans. D. L. Guder (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1983), 220, 317. Agreement on this definition is probable despite Ratzinger’s
rejection (Eschatologie, 68–70, 201; Eschatology, 72–75, 266) of the Lutheran
theologian’s version of the theory of “total death” (i.e., with no intermediate
state of “the soul” before the general resurrection), found in E. Jüngel, Tod
(Stuttgart: Kreuz-Verlag, 1971).

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[I]n sacramental communion I become one with the Lord, like all
the other communicants. . . . Union with Christ is also union with all
those to whom he gives himself. . . . Communion draws me out of
myself towards him, and thus also towards unity with all Christians.We
become “one body,” completely joined in a single existence. Love of
God and love of neighbor are now truly united: God incarnate draws
us all to himself. . . . [T]here God’s own agape comes to us bodily, in
order to continue his work in us and through us. . . . Faith, worship and
ethos are interwoven as a single reality which takes shape in our
encounter with God’s agape. (Ibid., §14)
The saints—consider the example of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta—
constantly renewed their capacity for love of neighbor from their
encounter with the Eucharistic Lord, and conversely this encounter
acquired its realism and depth in their service to others. (Ibid., §18)

In writing on “charity as a responsibility of the Church,” Pope Benedict recalls that “Justin Martyr († c. 155), in speaking of the Christians’
celebration of Sunday, also mentions their charitable activity, linked with
the Eucharist as such. ‘Those who are able make offerings in accordance
with their means, each as he or she wishes; the Bishop in turn makes use
of these to support orphans, widows, the sick and those who for other
reasons find themselves in need, such as prisoners and foreigners’ [First
Apology, 67]” (Deus Caritas Est, §22).And of Lawrence the Roman deacon
and martyr († 258) Pope Benedict says: “As the one responsible for the
care of the poor in Rome, Lawrence had been given a period of time, after
the capture of the Pope and of Lawrence’s fellow deacons, to collect the
treasures of the Church and hand them over to the civil authorities. He
distributed to the poor whatever funds were available and then presented
to the authorities the poor themselves as the real treasure of the Church”
(Deus Caritas Est, §23). Martyrdom itself, of course, is the supreme instance
of the triumph of life through death. In his Eschatology, Joseph Ratzinger
already speaks of it as “a new assurance of life, and a new way of enduring death”; and martyrdom is a soteriological pattern that casts its light
forward on the whole of Christian existence: “[T]hat justification is by
faith and not by works means that justification happens through sharing
in the death of Christ, that is, by walking in the way of martyrdom, the
daily drama by which we prefer what is right and true to the claims of
sheer existence, through the spirit of love which faith makes possible.”29
The paradigm and power can be expounded through “the eucharistic
words of Jesus,” as in two other Munich sermons from 1978:
29 Eschatologie, 81, 87–89; Eschatology, 90, 98–100.

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In these words Jesus transforms death into the spiritual act of affirmation, into the act of self-sharing love; into the act of adoration, which
is offered to God, then from God is made available to men. . . . [T]he
two together constitute this new event, in which the senselessness of
death is given meaning; in which what is irrational is transformed and
made rational and articulate; in which the destruction of love, which is
what death means in itself, becomes in fact the means of verifying and
establishing it, of its enduring constancy. If, then, we want to know how
Jesus himself intended his death to be understood, how he accepted it,
what it means, then we must reflect on these words; and, contrariwise,
we must regard them as being constantly guaranteed by the pledge of
the blood that was his witness.30
“This is my Body” means:This is my whole person, existent in bodily
form.What the nature of this person is, however, we learn from what is
said next:“which is given up for you”.That means:This person is: existing-for-others. It is in its most intimate being a sharing with others. But
that is why, since it is a matter of this person and because it is from its
heart an opening up, a self-giving person, it can then be shared out.31

Reverting to the encyclical, we could therefore define the human love
that corresponds to the divine love embodied in Christ as “being there
for the other” (cf. Deus Caritas Est, §7).That would give us a view of true
human existence as “Dasein für Andere.”
The Quality of Culture
In the second half of Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict ventures more
concretely into “the social context of the present day.”Thus in paragraph
30(b) of the encyclical, for instance, he says:“For young people, this widespread involvement [in voluntary works of charity] constitutes a school
of life which offers them a formation in solidarity and in readiness to
offer others not simply material aid but their very selves.The anti-culture
of death, which finds expression for example in drug use, is thus countered by an unselfish love which shows itself to be a culture of life by the
very willingness to ‘lose itself ’ (cf. Lk. 17:33 et passim) for others.”
The contrast between a “culture of life” and a “culture of death” runs
as a leitmotif throughout John Paul II’s encyclical of 1995 on “The
Gospel of Life” (Evangelium Vitae), issued while Cardinal Ratzinger was
prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the theological confidant of the Pope.Thus in paragraph 21 of Evangelium Vitae:
30 Joseph Ratzinger, “God’s Yes and His Love Are Maintained Even in Death,” in

God Is Near Us, 27–41, here pp. 29–30; Gott ist uns nahe, 25–39, here p. 28.
31 Joseph Ratzinger, “The Presence of the Lord in the Sacrament,” in God Is Near

Us, 74–93, here p. 79; Gott ist uns nahe, 75–95, here p. 80.

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In seeking the deepest roots of the struggle between the “culture of
life” and the “culture of death,” . . . we have to go to the heart of the
tragedy being experienced by modern man: the eclipse of the sense of
God and of man, typical of a social and cultural climate dominated by
secularism, which, with its ubiquitous tentacles, succeeds at times in
putting Christian communities themselves to the test.Those who allow
themselves to be influenced by this climate easily fall into a sad vicious
circle: when the sense of God is lost, there is also a tendency to lose the
sense of man, of his dignity and his life; in turn, the systematic violation of the moral law, especially in the serious matter of respect for
human life and its dignity, produces a kind of progressive darkening of
the capacity to discern God’s living and saving presence.

A “culture of death” can include a willful blindness to death itself. In
his Eschatology Joseph Ratzinger analyzes the various ways—only superficially contradictory—in which contemporary North Atlantic society
refuses to face the metaphysical questions posed by death.32 On the one
hand, death is “hidden away,” both in medical and in funerary practice as
well as in the loss of “the family home” as a “sheltering space which brings
human beings together in birth and living, in sickness and dying.”33 On
the other hand, there is “the materialistic trivialization of death”: “On
television, death is presented as a thrilling spectacle tailor-made for alleviating the general boredom of life.”The price is high:“When human sickness and dying are reduced to the level of technological activity, so is man
himself. . . . Repression and trivialization can only ‘solve’ the riddle by
dissolving humanity itself.” As a side-thought, Ratzinger mentions the
“nihilist defiance of death”:“Such an attitude is for the chosen few who,
refusing to play the game of hide-the-slipper with death, attempt to bear
the meaningless by looking straight into its eyes.”
This latter, more sophisticated attitude has come increasingly to attract
Ratzinger’s philosophical and theological attention, whether in its starkest
end-form as nihilism or in its ideological preparation by way of relativism.
It shows itself “esthetically”; all that matters is “artistic competence”:
“There are no such things as good and bad books but only well-written
or poorly written books, only well-produced or poorly produced films,
32 For the phrases cited in this paragraph, see Eschatologie, 66–68; Eschatology, 69–72.
33 In this connection, one might think of Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of

Death (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963) and The American Way of Death Revisited (New York: Knopf, 1998). She begins:“O death, where is thy sting? O grave,
where is thy victory? Where indeed. Many a badly stung survivor, faced with the
aftermath of some relative’s funeral, has ruefully concluded that the victory has
been won hands down by a funeral establishment—in a disastrously unequal
battle” ( The American Way of Death, 15; Revisited, 14).

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and so on. The good and the moral no longer count, it seems, but only
what one can do. . . .Whatever is feasible is permitted.”34 Even more drastically, technology is governed by “the desire to do and the actual doing
of what it is possible to do”; but, as Ratzinger explains,
We should see that human beings can never retreat into the mere realm
of “art” or “skill.” In everything that they do, they are themselves agents.
Therefore they themselves, and creation with its boundary of good and
evil, are always present as their moral standard (Mass), and when they
reject this standard they deceive themselves. They do not free themselves, but place themselves in opposition to the truth. And that means
that they are destroying themselves and the world.35

Or again:
The immense growth in man’s mastery of the material world has left
him blind to the questions of life’s meaning that transcend the material
world.We might almost call it a blindness of the spirit.The questions of
how we ought to live, how we can overcome death, whether existence
has a purpose and what it is—to all these questions there is no longer
a common answer.36

In the document Dominus Iesus issued from the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith in 2000 under the name of Cardinal Ratzinger, the
catalogue of “propositions of both a philosophical and theological nature
which hinder the understanding and acceptance of the revealed truth” is
headed by “relativistic attitudes toward truth itself, according to which
what is true for some would not be true for others.”37 By the time of his
address to the college of cardinals on the eve of his election as pope,
Joseph Ratzinger could speak of “la dittatura del relativismo.”
“People today know of no standard [coming from the inner goodness
of creation],” says Archbishop Ratzinger in his Munich catecheses of
1981;“to be sure, they do not want to know of any because they see standards as threats to their freedom.” He points to the “aggressiveness” in
society, which might also be labeled egotism.38 There is, in fact, a sting in
the tail of the hedonistic proverb, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die.”“Mit dem Tod ist alles aus,” they say— “When you’re dead,
34 Im Anfang schuf Gott, 52–53; In the Beginning, 68 (slightly altered).
35 Im Anfang schuf Gott, 54; In the Beginning, 69 (slightly altered).
36 Der Geist der Liturgie, 112; The Spirit of the Liturgy, 130–31.
37 Dominus Iesus, §4.
38 Im Anfang schuf Gott, 49–50; In the Beginning, 62–63.

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you’re dead.” Well, perhaps—unless the soul remains liable (cf. Lk
12:19–20; Mt 10:28). Solemnly put:
The crisis of the Western world turns not least on a philosophy and
program of education which try to redeem man by bypassing the cross
. . . . The only sufficient answer to the question of man is a response
which discharges the infinite claims of love. Only eternal life corresponds to the question raised by human living and dying on this earth.39

The Future and Final Prospect
In paragraph 31(b) of Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict notes that “the
modern age, particularly from the nineteenth century on, has been dominated by various versions of a philosophy of progress whose most radical
form is Marxism.”This amounts to “an inhuman philosophy”:“People of
the present are sacrificed to the moloch of the future—a future whose
effective realization is at best doubtful.”To the charge that Christian charity diverts attention from “the struggle for a better world,” the Pope
retorts that “one does not make the world more human by refusing to act
humanely now.We contribute to a better world only by personally doing
good now, with full commitment and wherever we have the opportunity,
independently of partisan strategies and programs.”40
Already in his Eschatology, Ratzinger had pointed to the inadequacies—
even the sheer falsity—of Marxism; and, as prefect of the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith, it was for his correction of Marxist incidences in “theologies of liberation” that he most attracted journalistic
attention. In introducing “the current state of the eschatology question,”
Professor Ratzinger characterized Marxism as an “anti-theistic messianism”—“demanding an unconditional commitment through its claim that
here at last all reality has become scientifically knowable, the past, present
and future of humankind receiving their exact interpretation.”Yet “[t]he
very attack on God and the historical religions fosters a religious pathos
which attracts the often deracinated religious energies of numerous
39 Eschatologie, 91; Eschatology, 103.
40 This refutation of Marxism—and indeed of other forms of utopianism—in favor

of a much more modest view of the path towards God’s goal for humanity was
a constant theme of Lesslie Newbigin, British theologian and bishop in the
Church of South India, beginning with his Bangalore lectures of 1941, “The
Kingdom of God and the Idea of Progress.” See Lesslie Newbigin, Signs amid the
Rubble: The Purposes of God in Human History, ed. Geoffrey Wainwright (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003); and, for instance, The Open Secret:An Introduction to the
Theology of Mission, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 102–20, where
Newbigin writes that “[d]eath is the dark mystery that mocks any hope for a
total liberation of humans in history” (p. 103).

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contemporary men and women to itself, as a magnet draws ore. This
pathos also affects theology, which detects in it the opportunity to fill the
eschatological message with a tangible, realistic content.”True, “the question of the future and its relation to the present, and with that the whole
theme of hope and its attendant ‘praxis,’ rightly belongs to the subject
matter of eschatology”—but not divorced from “what is specific in the
Christian view of the age-to-come and its presence here and now,” which
includes “the classical themes of the doctrine of the last things—heaven
and hell, purgatory and judgment, death and the immortality of the soul.”41
To account for the historical development of those traditional doctrines
and continuing theological reflection on them, Ratzinger emphasizes that
“[t]he question of the meaning of one’s own dying cannot be suppressed.
To attempt to obliterate or to shelve the progressive deepening of that
question in Christian reflection would not be a return to the source but
a barbarianization that would quickly recoil on its perpetrators. We have
only to look at the complete impotence of Marxist thought when it
comes to the topic of death to see how little chance there is of sidestepping that particular question.”42 (It may perhaps be observed that “liberation theologies” scarcely outlasted the end of “real-existing socialism”
with the collapse of the Soviet empire.)
It is the teaching of Pope Benedict in Deus Caritas Est that love looks
to eternity. After the hint in paragraph 2 at that “love between man and
woman, where body and soul are inseparably joined and human beings
glimpse an apparently irresistible promise of happiness,” we find this
observation in paragraph 6:
It is part of love’s growth towards higher levels and inward purification
that it now seeks to become definitive, . . . in the sense of being “for
ever.” Love embraces the whole of existence, including the dimension
of time. It could hardly be otherwise, since its promise looks towards its
definitive goal: love looks to the eternal.

In Ratzinger’s Eschatology this is stated in more formal,“dogmatic” terms:
41 Eschatologie, 19–20; Eschatology, 3–4. Elsewhere, Ratzinger formulates his critique

of Marxism in terms of the rejection of creation: “Creation is the total contradiction of Marxism and the point at which Marxist ‘redemption’ shows itself to
be damnation, resistance to the truth. The decisive option underlying all the
thought of Karl Marx is ultimately a protest against the dependence that creation
signifies: the hatred of life as we encounter it.” See “The Consequences of Faith
in Creation,” in an appendix to In the Beginning, 79–100, here p. 91.
42 Eschatologie, 25; Eschatology, 12.

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In all human love there is an implicit appeal to eternity, even though
love between two human beings can never satisfy that appeal. In Christ,
God enters our search for love and its ultimate meaning, and does so in
a human way. God’s dialogue with us becomes truly human, since God
conducts his part as a man. Conversely, the dialogue of human beings
with each other now becomes a vehicle for the life everlasting, since in
the communion of saints it is drawn up into the dialogue of the Trinity itself.This is why the communion of saints is the locus where eternity becomes accessible for us. Eternal life does not isolate a person, but
leads him out of isolation into true unity with his brothers and sisters
and the whole of God’s creation.43

The Munich catecheses of 1981 put the orientation towards the future
and eternity in more pastoral terms, setting it also explicitly in relation to
the initial question put by death concerning “origin and destination”:
Human beings are the creatures that can become one with Christ and
thereby become one with God himself. Hence this orientation of the
creation to Christ, of the first to the second Adam, signifies that human
persons are beings en route, beings characterized by transition.They are
not yet themselves; they must ultimately become themselves. Here in the
midst of our thoughts on creation there suddenly appears the Easter
mystery, the mystery of the grain of wheat that has died. Human beings
must die with Christ like a grain of wheat in order truly to rise, to stand
erect, to be themselves (cf. John 12:24). Human persons are not to be
understood merely from the perspective of their past histories or from
that isolated moment that we refer to as the present. They are oriented
toward their future, and only it permits who they really are to appear
completely (cf. 1 John 3:2). We must always see in other human beings
persons with whom we shall one day share God’s joy.We must look upon
them as persons who are called, together with us, to be members of the
Body of Christ, with whom we shall one day sit at the table of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, at the table of Jesus Christ himself, as their brothers and
sisters, as the brothers and sisters of Christ, and as the children of God.44

As to “the content of eternal life, its Was as distinct from its Dass,” the
theologian Ratzinger says that divine revelation offers only “hints,” and the
tradition of faith is but “a helpful signpost for those in the here and now.”45
In his Eschatology he lights on Psalm 73—“one of Augustine’s favorites”—
as “one of those texts where the Old Testament stretches forth to touch the
New and most fully possesses its own deepest implications”:
43 Eschatologie, 134; Eschatology, 159–60.
44 Im Anfang schuf Gott, 41; In the Beginning, 49 (slightly altered).
45 Eschatologie, 135; Eschatology, 161.

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638

Thou dost guide me with thy counsel,
and afterward thou wilt receive me to glory.
Whom have I in heaven but thee?
And there is nothing upon earth that I desire besides thee.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.46

Certainly, “[h]eaven must first and foremost be determined christologically”:“Jesus Christ, as God, is man, and makes space for human existence
in the existence of God himself. One is in heaven when, and to the
degree, that one is in Christ. . . . Heaven is thus primarily a personal reality, and one that remains forever shaped by its historical origin in the
paschal mystery of death and resurrection”; and christology bears an
ecclesiological aspect:
If heaven depends on being in Christ, then it must involve a co-being
with all those who, together, constitute the body of Christ. . . . It is the
open society of the communion of saints, and in this way the fulfillment of all human communion. . . . It is because the Church knows this
that there is such a thing as the Christian cult of the saints. That cult
does not presuppose some mythical omniscience on the part of the
saints, but simply the unruptured self-communion of the whole body
of Christ—and the closeness of a love which knows no limit and is sure
of attaining God in the neighbor, and the neighbor in God.47

So, then, we may take up again from Pope Benedict’s encyclical the
theme of the communion of the saints:
46 Eschatologie,

80–81; Eschatology, 88–90. Ratzinger’s doctoral dissertation is
devoted to Augustine: Volk und Haus Gottes in Augustins Lehre von der Kirche
(Munich: Karl Zink Verlag, 1954). Almost inevitably, the young German theologian’s work thus has an eschatological orientation built into it from the start: the
populus Dei—the Church as the eucharistic body of Christ—appears in Augustine as the earthly “pilgrim colony” of the civitas Dei; and Ratzinger concludes
with Augustine’s vision of the endless Kingdom which has been the end of all
our living (see pp. 324–328). In terms of the problem of sin and death, the
concluding chapter of Augustine’s City of God has this to say: “Because our
nature, when it was free to sin, did sin, it took a greater grace to lead us to that
larger liberty which frees us from the very power to sin. For just as the first
immortality, which Adam lost by sinning, was a mere possibility of avoiding
death but the last immortality will be the impossibility of dying, so the first free
will was a mere possibility of avoiding sin but the last becomes an utter inability
to sin”; sins will be forgotten, but not the love that redeemed them (De civitate
Dei 22.30.3; PL 41:802).
47 Eschatologie, 190–91; Eschatology, 234–35

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The lives of the saints are not limited to their earthly biographies but
also include their being and working in God after death. In the saints
one thing becomes clear: those who draw near to God do not withdraw
from men, but rather become truly close to them. (Deus Caritas Est, §42)

Joseph Ratzinger has written movingly of the singing of the Litany of the
Saints by the entire congregation at his own priestly and episcopal ordinations:
The fact that the praying Church was calling upon all the saints, that
the prayer of the Church really was enveloping and embracing me, was
a wonderful consolation. In my incapacity, which had to be expressed
in the bodily gesture of prostration, this prayer, this presence of all the
saints, of the living and the dead, was a wonderful strength—it was the
only thing that could, as it were, lift me up. Only the presence of the
saints with me made possible the path that lay before me.48

And in terms of liturgical history, which has its own doctrinal and
pastoral importance, Ratzinger writes this in his Eschatology:
The immediate stuff of the prayer life of the Christian people in its
corporate anxiety and hope is perhaps best grasped in the Litany of the
Saints. By a development not all of whose phases are as yet clearly seen,
this litany grew up by degrees from the Late Antique period onwards.
It absorbed into itself all those concerns with which time harries us,
while counterposing to them the pledge of hope through whose
agency we may endure them.The first thing to strike us here is that the
person who is thus set about by dangers in time and eternity finds a
shelter in the communion of the saints. He gathers the redeemed of all
ages around him and finds safety under their mantle.This signifies that
the walls separating heaven and earth, and past, present and future, are
now as glass.The Christian lives in the presence of the saints as his own
proper ambience, and so lives “eschatologically.”49

The Drawing of the Sting
We may end this exposition where we began, with death as what Joseph
Ratzinger calls “the metaphysical thorn lodged in man’s being.” According to the Apostle Paul (and we have seen Ratzinger fully recognizing the
point), the “metaphysischer Stachel” is sharpened by sin (1 Cor. 15:56; cf.
Rom. 6:20–21, 23a).50 But now, with the death and resurrection of Christ,
48 Der Geist der Liturgie, 161–62; The Spirit of the Liturgy, 188.
49 Eschatologie, 23; Eschatology, 89.
50 The one German word “Stachel” covers both Ratzinger’s metaphysical “thorn”

and what the Apostle calls the “sting” of death.

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“death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave,
where is thy victory?” (1 Cor. 15:55; cf. Rom. 6:22, 23b). And Joseph
Ratzinger can write for us:
The sting of death is extinguished in Christ, in whom the victory was
gained through the plenary power of love unlimited. Death is
vanquished where people die with Christ and into him.This is why the
Christian attitude must be opposed to the modern wish for instantaneous death, a wish that would turn death into an extensionless
moment and banish from life the claims of the metaphysical.Yet it is in
the transforming acceptance of death, present time and again to us in
this life, that we mature for the real, the eternal, life.51

As Christians, we may celebrate the paschal mystery. And Methodists in
particular may join in with the words of Charles Wesley,“Love’s redeeming work is done”:
Lives again our glorious King;
Where, O death, is now thy sting?
Once he died our souls to save;
Where’s thy victory, boasting grave?
Soar we now where Christ hath led,
Following our exalted Head;
Made like Him, like Him we rise;
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies:
King of glory! Soul of bliss!
Everlasting life is this,
Thee to know,Thy power to prove,
Thus to sing, and thus to love: Alleluia!52

“Saved in Hope”
Pope Benedict’s second encyclical letter appeared on November 29,
2007, under the headline of a phrase from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans
(8:24): Spe Salvi, “Saved in Hope.” There the ultimate and unavoidable
question posed by death for the meaning and conduct of life re-emerges
at three (interconnected) levels: that of each and every human being, that
51 Eschatologie, 87; Eschatology, 97–98. “The sting is extinguished . . .”: on this occa-

sion, the word “sting” is actually an importation of the English translator, who is
perhaps making a word-play; the German reads “Der Tod als Tod ist besiegt in
Christus. . . .”
52 The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley, ed. G. Osborn (London: WesleyanMethodist Conference Office, 1868–1872), vol. 1, pp. 185–86.

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of the social constitution of humankind, and that of the human race as a
whole and its history.
As individuals, we appreciate and desire life, and yet we do not wish
for its endless extension in our present state.“There is a contradiction in
our attitude,” says Pope Benedict, “which points to an inner contradiction in our very existence. On the one hand, we do not want to die;
above all, those who love us do not want us to die.Yet on the other hand,
neither do we want to continue living indefinitely, nor was the earth
created with that in view” (Spe Salvi, §11). Thus a paradox marks our
condition, certainly as sinners if not already as creatures.The Pope quotes
an admittedly delicate passage from the funeral discourse of St. Ambrose
for his deceased brother:“Death was not part of nature; it became part of
nature. God did not decree death from the beginning; he prescribed it as
a remedy. Human life, because of sin . . . began to experience the burden
of wretchedness in unremitting labor and unbearable sorrow. There had
to be a limit to its evils; death had to restore what life had forfeited.Without the assistance of grace, immortality is more of a burden than a blessing”.53 Ambrose had already said:“Death is, then, no cause for mourning,
for it is the cause of mankind’s salvation.”That, clearly, is a confession of
the Christian faith and of the hope that is founded on Christ’s death and
resurrection.The “blessed life,”“eternal life,” says Benedict in dependence
on St. Augustine and St. Paul, is something we can as yet know only in
“a certain learned ignorance (docta ignorantia)”:
To imagine ourselves outside the temporality that imprisons us and in
some way to sense that eternity is not an unending succession of days in
the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality—this we can
only attempt. It would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a
moment in which time—the before and after—no longer exists.We can
only attempt to grasp the idea that such a moment is life in the full sense,
a plunging ever anew into the vastness of being, in which we are simply
overwhelmed with joy.This is how Jesus expresses it in St. John’s Gospel:
“I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take
your joy from you” (16:22).We must think along these lines if we want
to understand the object of Christian hope, to understand what it is that
our faith, our being with Christ, leads us to expect. (Spe Salvi, §12)

While salvation is a personal reality, begun now and perfected beyond
death, it must not be conceived individualistically. Following Christ entails
53 Spe Salvi, §10; citing St. Ambrose, De excessu fratris sui Satyri, II, 47, found in

CSEL 73, 274.

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the giving of one’s life for the sake of others, and that is the way of present and final salvation for all parties in the particular relationship. From his
earliest theological days Joseph Ratzinger has been inspired by St. Augustine, and it is the City of God according to that Church Father which
stands behind what Pope Benedict says in his second encyclical also about
the implications of life and death for social relations and for the entire
human community and its history. Here come again into play what in my
earlier exposition of Ratzinger’s thought on life and death I called “the
ethical challenge” and, more broadly,“the quality of culture.” Invoking the
“communal salvation” implied in the “city” of the Letter to the Hebrews
(11:10, 16; 12:22; 13:14), Benedict notes that “sin is understood by the
Fathers as the destruction of the unity of the human race, as fragmentation and division”:“Hence ‘redemption’ appears as the re-establishment of
unity, in which we come together once more in a union that begins to
take shape in the world community of believers” (Spe Salvi, §14). St.
Augustine, himself quoting St. Paul, is immediately quoted: “In order to
be numbered among this people and to attain to everlasting life with God,
‘the end of the commandment is charity that issues from a pure heart and
a good conscience and sincere faith’ (1 Tim 1:5).”54 Pope Benedict
concludes that “this real life, towards which we try to reach out again and
again, is linked to a lived union with a ‘people’, and for each individual it
can only be attained with this ‘we’. . . . It presupposes that we escape from
the prison of our ‘I’, because only in the openness of this universal subject
does our gaze open out to the source of joy, to love itself—to God” (Spe
Salvi, §14; cf. §§28–29, again with appeal to St. Augustine).
As to the future prospect for humanity and the world, Pope Benedict
says:“While this community-oriented vision of ‘the blessed life’ is certainly
oriented beyond the present world, as such it also has to do with the building up of this world—in very different ways, according to the historical
context and the possibilities offered or excluded thereby” (Spe Salvi, §15).
In reference to humankind as a whole and its history, earthly hope is not
wrong, but modesty befits it, even in what can be achieved through the
inspiration of the Christian faith and the practice of Christian love, let
alone through reliance on unaided reason and technical prowess (material
and technical “progress” remains insignificant without moral, and indeed
metaphysical, standards). As death brings the passage of the generations,
inherited social structures—morally grounded—can help and guide, but
each new generation has to engage in freedom with the challenges of its

54 Spe Salvi, §14; citing St. Augustine, Ep. 130 Ad Probam 13, 24 (CSEL 44, 67).

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time (Spe Salvi, §§22–27). For a pilgrim people on its way to the homeland, the “firm basis” of hope (thus Benedict, in paragraphs 7–9 of Spe Salvi,
interprets the hypo-stasis/sub-stantia of Hebrews 11:1) remains Jesus Christ
N&V
himself, crucified and risen, in whom faith is placed.

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645

Abortion and Catholic Social Teaching1
T HOMAS D. W ILLIAMS, L.C.
Regina Apostolorum University
Rome, Italy

Introduction
W HEN THE 2004 Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church first
fell into my hands some months before its promulgation, one of the
pleasant “surprises” was the text’s specific treatment and forthright
condemnation of abortion, both in the context of human rights and in
that of the family as the sanctuary of life. Pleasant though it was, it was
still a surprise. In a letter dated March 2006, Cardinal Renato Martino,
president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, stated bluntly:
“The social doctrine of the Church, to date, has not placed due emphasis on the defense of life from conception to its natural end.”This unusually frank admission is actually an understatement. Social doctrine
textbooks are virtually silent on the topic of abortion, and rarely do seminary or university courses on social doctrine deal with this issue in any
way. The disconcerting fact is that for all intents and purposes the topic
of abortion falls outside of Catholic social doctrine as it is presently
taught and understood.
The absence of abortion in academic discussions of Catholic social
doctrine may come as a shock to some, as it is certainly counter-intuitive.
For many in the pro-life movement, for instance, the abortion question
stands out as the foremost social-justice issue of our time. Moreover, in his
groundbreaking 1995 encyclical on life issues, Evangelium Vitae, Pope John
Paul II practically declared that Catholic social doctrine should shift its
attention toward life issues. On beginning his discussion of the gravity of
1 An earlier version of this paper was delivered on September 15, 2006 in Rome

at the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace at a symposium entitled “The
Defense of Life, the Task of the Social Doctrine of the Church.”

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646

attacks against life in our day, particularly abortion, he explicitly invoked
the memory of Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum and compared the
life issues of today with the worker question of Leo’s time:
Just as a century ago it was the working classes which were oppressed
in their fundamental rights, and the Church very courageously came to
their defense by proclaiming the sacrosanct rights of the worker as a
person, so now, when another category of persons is being oppressed in
the fundamental right to life, the Church feels in duty bound to speak
out with the same courage on behalf of those who have no voice. Hers
is always the evangelical cry in defense of the world’s poor, those who
are threatened and despised and whose human rights are violated.2

This text, drawn from the beginning of the encyclical letter Evangelium
Vitae, frames the entire question of abortion specifically in terms of the
Church’s social teaching. If Leo’s 1891 encyclical concentrated its attention on the plight of the working class as the social group most in need
of courageous defense at the time, the attention of the social Magisterium
should now swing toward the new class of oppressed. John Paul II went
on to say: “Today there exists a great multitude of weak and defenseless
human beings, unborn children in particular, whose fundamental right to
life is being trampled upon.”3 If, John Paul reasoned, at the end of the last
century the Church could not be silent about the injustices of those
times, still less can she be silent today.Yet despite John Paul’s appeal, abortion is no more present in Catholic social doctrine today than it was
twelve years ago.Why is this, and what can be done about it?
In this paper I mean to address four closely related questions. First, I
will briefly establish my assertion that de facto abortion is excluded
presently from the realm of Catholic social teaching. Second, I wish to
briefly examine the reasons behind this absence. Third, I will consider
why abortion and its related problems fall within the proper competence
of Catholic social thought and should be accorded greater attention
within this discipline. Fourth, I will explore the singular contribution that
Catholic social thought is called to make to the abortion problem and
other related life issues.
The Neglect of Abortion in Catholic Social Teaching
Before all else, we must establish that abortion is indeed left out of Catholic
social doctrine.To do so, we must first recognize the peculiar nature of this
discipline. Unlike other areas of theological study, such as sexual ethics or
2 Pope John Paul II, encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae (1995), §5.
3 Ibid.

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Christology, Catholic social teaching is circumscribed by a corpus of
magisterial teaching.4 Though it makes use of auxiliary texts and materials,
the proper matter of the discipline and therefore its content are determined
principally by the content of these papal texts. Being first a “doctrine,”
rather than a field of study, it makes sense that these papal documents have
a defining character. Thus, university and seminary courses of Catholic
social doctrine usually explain and discuss the development and content of
this growing corpus of doctrine, often making use of collections of the
social encyclicals as their point of reference or textbook.
It was Pope Pius XII who coined the expression “social encyclical” in
his radio message of June 1, 1941, referring to Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum.5
Pope John XXIII, in his 1961 encyclical Mater et Magistra, again employed
the term in reference to the same encyclical;6 and from there the term
found its way into the common vocabulary of the Church’s Magisterium.
Later Pope John Paul II would refer to Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio as a
social encyclical as well in his 1987 commemorative encyclical Sollicitudo
Rei Socialis.7
Though the Magisterium offers no definition of “social encyclical,”
one understands that the expression refers to those encyclicals (and
related documents, like Paul VI’s apostolic letter Octogesima Adveniens) that
deal specifically and often exclusively with the just organization of society. Roughly speaking, the collection of social encyclicals makes up the
corpus of the social Magisterium of the Church, with the notable exception of Pope Pius XII’s radio message of Pentecost 1941 commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Rerum Novarum. While obviously not an
encyclical at all, the text of his address is usually considered part of the
4 In 1987 Pope John Paul II wrote that Catholic social doctrine, “beginning with

the outstanding contribution of Leo XIII and enriched by the successive contributions of the Magisterium, has now become an updated doctrinal ‘corpus.’ ”
Pope John Paul II, encyclical letter Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), §1.
5 Pius broadcast his message “to call to the attention of the Catholic world a
memory worthy of being written in letters of gold on the Church’s Calendar:
the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the epoch-making social encyclical
of Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum.” AAS 33 (1941): 196.
6 “It was at such a time and under pressure of such circumstances as these that Leo
XIII wrote his social encyclical, Rerum Novarum, based on the needs of human
nature itself and animated by the principles and spirit of the Gospel.” Pope John
XXIII, encyclical letter Mater et Magistra (1961), §15.
7 “But first I wish to say a few words about the date of publication; the year 1967.
The very fact that Pope Paul VI chose to publish a social Encyclical in that year
invites us to consider the document in relationship to the Second Vatican
Ecumenical Council, which had ended on December 8, 1965.” Pope John Paul
II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, §5.

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body of Catholic social doctrine as well.While elements of social teaching found in other papal texts could also be considered part of Catholic
social doctrine, they are rarely included in courses on the subject.
Nearly all the social encyclicals begin by retracing the legacy of social
encyclicals that have come before them.These ever longer lists furnish us
with an informal “canon” of social encyclicals, though one finds slight
discrepancies from list to list, which could also suggest some flexibility.8
Most recently Pope Benedict XVI set forth his own catalog of such
encyclicals in his first teaching document, Deus Caritas Est. There, after
enumerating the milestones in the development of the Catholic social
Magisterium, Benedict writes:“My great predecessor John Paul II left us a
trilogy of social Encyclicals: Laborem Exercens (1981), Sollicitudo Rei Socialis
(1987) and finally Centesimus Annus (1991).”9 Conspicuous by its absence,
of course, is any mention of Evangelium Vitae as a social encyclical.
A quick review of the content of the social encyclicals reveals a great
silence surrounding the topic of abortion. Of all nine recognized social
encyclicals,10 the word “abortion” appears a scant four times, and none
treats it in any depth. Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, Mater et Magistra,
Pacem in Terris, Populorum Progressio, and Laborem Exercens never cite abortion
at all, though in Mater et Magistra, John XXIII opposes solutions to population growth that “attack human life at its very source” (§189) and reminds
us that “[h]uman life is sacred. . . . From its very inception it reveals the
creating hand of God” (§194). In Octogesima Adveniens Paul VI mentions
abortion in the context of Malthusian solutions to the unemployment
problem (§18). Pope John Paul mentions abortion in passing in Sollicitudo
Rei Socialis as a counterexample to a growing appreciation for life and
human dignity (§26), as well as speaking against “systematic campaigns
against birth” as a “new form of oppression” (§25). In Centesimus Annus he
directly adverts to abortion twice, first in reference to widespread antichildbearing campaigns employed to stem the supposed demographic
problem (§39), and second in the context of human rights as the necessary
8 For example, in his recent encyclical Deus Caritas Est (2005), Pope Benedict offers

his own catalog of social encyclicals, omitting both Pius XII’s radio message of
1941 and John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris, while including Mater et Magistra (§27). In Populorum Progressio, on the other hand, Paul VI includes both Pius’s
radio message and Pacem in Terris in his list of social encyclicals (§2). In Laborem
Exercens, Pope John Paul II includes Pacem in Terris, and mentions the conciliar
document Gaudium et Spes as well, but omits Pius’s radio message (§2). In Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, John Paul once again includes Pius’s radio message (note 2).
9 Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, §27.
10 For simplicity’s sake, I am including Paul VI’s Octogesima Adveniens in the list of social
encyclicals, though technically it is an apostolic letter rather than an encyclical.

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foundation for the democratic system (§47). Further on, the same encyclical mentions “respect for life from the moment of conception until death”
amongst the concerns of the Church’s social teaching (§54).
I must hasten to add that the omission of abortion from the social
Magisterium in no way implies that the popes have been silent on the
topic. On numerous occasions Pope John Paul II spoke out forcefully on
the question, and his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae addresses the
matter of abortion in great length. Yet according to current thinking
Evangelium Vitae is not a social encyclical. Thus, while the popes have
indeed vigorously condemned abortion, they have not chosen to do so
in the context of Catholic social doctrine.Why is this? What factors have
contributed to the neglect of abortion in the social Magisterium?
Causes for the Silence of Catholic
Social Teaching on Abortion
In part, this silence stems from the relatively recent advent of abortion as
a large-scale ethical problem.With the development of medicine’s ability
to kill as well as to heal, the number of abortions has multiplied exponentially in the past four decades.Therefore the first mention of abortion
in the social writings of the Magisterium appears only in 1971, in Paul VI’s
apostolic letter Octogesima Adveniens (§18).Yet this fact only partly explains
the separation of life issues from social doctrine.While it certainly justifies
the absence of abortion from early texts, it does not account for the
continued exclusion of abortion from the discipline of Catholic social
doctrine. By my reckoning, the silence reflects the widespread understanding of social doctrine as primarily economic in character, and of abortion as a bioethical problem rather than an issue of social justice.
This question can be addressed from different angles. I propose to do so
first from a historical perspective, and second from a taxonomic perspective.
The Prototypical Function of Rerum Novarum
in Catholic Social Doctrine
Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum is the touchstone for all
Catholic social doctrine.The vast majority of the social encyclicals make
direct reference to Rerum Novarum and its content, and have often been
promulgated to commemorate important anniversaries of the encyclical.11
11 In his encyclical letter Centesimus Annus (1991), Pope John Paul II specifically ties

the Church’s social doctrine with Leo’s text and the papal documents that
comment on it. “Although the commemoration at hand is meant to honor
Rerum Novarum, it also honours those Encyclicals and other documents of my
Predecessors which have helped to make Pope Leo’s Encyclical present and alive

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Taking Rerum Novarum as their point of departure, these letters update the
ethical analysis of the social question in the light of new realities while
generally following the categories set out by Leo’s text. Therefore the
initial focus on the worker question has endured, and economics have
never relinquished center stage in Catholic social thought.12 Though
slowly the Church’s understanding of what constitutes her social teaching
has broadened, it still remains strongly wedded to Rerum Novarum.
The papal Magisterium has referred more than once to Rerum Novarum
as the “Magna Charta” of Catholic social thought. On the fortieth anniversary of this document, Pope Pius XI wrote that “Leo’s Encyclical has
proved itself the Magna Charta upon which all Christian activity in the
social field ought to be based, as on a foundation.”13 More recently, Pope
John Paul II wrote: “In this way, Pope Leo XIII, in the footsteps of his
Predecessors, created a lasting paradigm for the Church.”14
While the importance and originality of Rerum Novarum cannot be
gainsaid, the conferral of a normative character to a text of this nature
could not but have a limiting effect on subsequent expositions of Catholic
social ethics.Whereas Rerum Novarum ably addressed the worker problem,
analyzing the Socialist solution and reaffirming the Catholic belief in a
natural right to private property, it did not deal with a host of other essential questions of social justice. Leo had no intention of penning a comprehensive treatise on Christian social ethics. Rerum Novarum was a thoughtful
response to a pressing pastoral concern, but to expect to find in it the
pattern for Church teaching on every social issue is to ask more from the
document than it can possibly give.
A case could be made that the ecclesial document truly deserving the
title of Magna Charta of Catholic social thought would be the 1965
Conciliar Constitution of the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et
Spes. The text is probably the single most important development of
Catholic social doctrine in the twentieth century. Whereas Rerum Novarum
offered a perceptive analysis of the worker problem, Gaudium et Spes tackin history, thus constituting what would come to be called the Church’s ‘social
doctrine’, ‘social teaching’ or even ‘social magisterium’ ” (§2).
12 Thus in his 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens, Pope John Paul II wrote: “It is
certainly true that work, as a human issue, is at the very center of the ‘social question’ to which, for almost a hundred years, since the publication of the abovementioned Encyclical, the Church’s teaching and the many undertakings
connected with her apostolic mission have been especially directed.” Pope John
Paul II, Laborem Exercens, §2.
13 Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (1931), §39. This title was reiterated by John
XXIII (Mater et Magistra, §26).
14 Pope John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, §5.

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les the whole gamut of social justice issues. In systematic fashion it lays out
first the foundations of Catholic social ethics in the dignity and vocation
of the human person, and then proceeds to explore the interdependence
of person and society, the meaning of man’s activity in the world, the social
nature of marriage, the importance of culture, economic development, the
political community, international relations and the project of peace.
The Taxonomy of Moral Theology
A second cause of the absence of abortion from Catholic social teaching
can be found in the taxonomy of moral theology, of which Catholic
social doctrine is a branch.15 Moral theology is traditionally broken down
into fundamental and special, with the latter being further subdivided
into three subcategories: (a) sexual-marital ethics, (b) life ethics, and (c)
social ethics—the area of Catholic social thought. As we saw earlier,
Catholic social doctrine is more limited than social ethics in that it refers
specifically to the content of the corpus of magisterial teaching contained
in the social encyclicals.
These categories determine the structure of theological studies in the
moral field, and the differentiation carries out an important pedagogical
function. Specific moral questions generally fall into one or another of
these categories and, to avoid useless repetition, are not treated over and
over in different disciplines. Since at its heart abortion is a sin against the
fifth commandment and consists essentially in the taking of an innocent,
unborn human life, it pertains in its moral species to the realm of bioethics.
To avoid redundancy, since abortion is treated in-depth in courses of life
ethics, it is generally excluded from courses on social doctrine.
In What Sense Abortion Properly Falls Within
the Realm of Catholic Social Teaching
Does the discipline of Catholic social teaching properly include abortion
and other life-related moral issues? More fundamentally perhaps, what
are the breadth, proper scope, and limits of Catholic social teaching? It
obviously does not intend to embrace the whole of Christian morality
and has a specificity all its own. Does this specificity extend to abortion?
The Necessary Overlap among the Areas of Moral Theology
The academic distinctions that articulate moral theology into diverse
branches, while very useful for focusing our attention and delineating
15 In his 1987 encyclical letter Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, Pope John Paul II wrote that

the Church’s social doctrine belongs to the field “of theology and particularly of
moral theology” (§41).

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disciplines, may also contribute to an unhealthy, modular approach to
learning. In his 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio, Pope John Paul II warned
against an overspecialization that threatens the unity of knowledge.“The
segmentation of knowledge,” he wrote, “with its splintered approach to
truth and consequent fragmentation of meaning, keeps people today
from coming to an interior unity.”16 The fact is that the lines drawn
between the different branches of moral theology are not nearly as clear
and neat as they may first appear. Both sexual ethics and life ethics intersect and overlap with social ethics in significant ways.
In the proper sense, sexual ethics examines the correct use of human
freedom in the area of sexual activity, with special emphasis on the virtue
of chastity as the right ordering and integration of human sexuality.The
nature of the human person as a sexual being, the purpose of the reproductive faculty, the morality of sexual conduct between spouses, between
unmarried persons, between persons of the same sex, and with oneself all
constitute the proper matter of this area of study.
At the same time, however, sexual and marital ethics also enter into the
realm of Catholic social thought. Intrinsic to sexual morality is its public,
social dimension. The family as the primordial human community and
basic cell of society, the place of the institution of marriage in the social
fabric, marriage and divorce laws, the recognition of civil unions between
persons of the same sex, and the adoption of children constitute several
of the many questions of sexual and marital ethics that properly fall
within the competence of Catholic social thought.
A similar analysis can be applied to the second sector of special moral
theology, that of life morality or bioethics. While this area specifically
explores (1) the morality of human activity touching on the beginning
of human life, (2) medical and biological activity aimed at the preservation and betterment of human health, and (3) end-of-life ethics, it also
has an important social dimension.
Properly bioethical issues become social questions when they are
addressed in a legal or juridical context and insofar as they impinge on
the common good and social justice. Healthcare systems with their sociopolitical dynamics, medical malpractice, publicly funded experimentation
on embryos, laws regarding euthanasia, cloning and assisted suicide—to
name but a few—all enter into this sphere. Abortion is no exception.
Abortion refers to the deliberate termination of an unborn human
being, and therefore by its moral species it belongs to the field of
bioethics.Yet in the matter of abortion the job of the bioethicist is rela16 Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio (1998), §85.

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tively simple. For those who accept the status of an unborn child as a
human being, the moral judgment involved is eminently straightforward
and requires little discussion. Direct abortion is morally repugnant and
merits universal condemnation.
The numerous moral issues surrounding abortion at the social and
political level, however, are far-ranging and complex, and demand attentive study and careful exposition. The place of the right to life in a
broader theory of human rights, the role of natural law in jurisprudence,
the moral admissibility of supporting imperfect laws as part of a longterm pro-life strategy, the question of conscientious objection for medical
personnel—these questions form but the tip of the iceberg requiring
answers from Catholic social thought. Given the nature of the social,
juridical, economic, and political debates that swirl around abortion in
the world today, I would venture to say that it pertains more to the area
of social ethics than to bioethics.
Analysis from the Perspective of Social Justice
and the Common Good
Social justice is the central and specific virtue of Catholic social thought
and determines the proper scope of this discipline. It extends to a number
of areas, generally grouped around the socio-cultural, political, familial,
and economic spheres.Whereas the interpersonal nature of justice means
that all justice is, in a sense, social, the papal Magisterium has consistently
employed the terminology of “social justice” and “social charity” to refer
to the right ordering of those structures and institutions that most directly
affect the common good. Pope Pius XI, for his part, treated “social justice”
and the common good as virtual synonyms.17 The Catechism of the Catholic
Church likewise says that “society ensures social justice by providing the
conditions that allow associations and individuals to obtain their due”
(§1943), a description very similar to that of the common good.
From this perspective, the question becomes, to what degree and in
what manner is abortion a question of social justice? Abortion is, in fact,
an emblematic and singular socio-ethical problem. To illustrate the
uniqueness of abortion, it suffices to exhibit six characteristics that distinguish it from related social phenomena:
1. Abortion deals specifically with the destruction of innocent life. This
differentiates discussion of abortion from many other related socialjustice issues.We are not discussing the killing of enemies, as in war,
17 See Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, §§58, 110.

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or “guilty life,” as in capital punishment, with all the moral considerations that must be brought to bear on these cases.This is why thenCardinal Joseph Ratzinger in June 2004 wrote: “There may be a
legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging
war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to
abortion and euthanasia.”18 Though all life is precious, moral theology has always differentiated the destruction of “innocent life” as
particularly heinous and always and everywhere worthy of condemnation.19 No one can “in any circumstance, claim for himself the
right to destroy directly an innocent human being.”20 No one is
more innocent and defenseless than an unborn child.
2. A further distinguishing factor of abortion as a social phenomenon is
the sheer magnitude of the problem. Though completely reliable statistics are unavailable, conservative estimates place the number of legal
abortions performed worldwide each year at 25–30 million, a figure
that alone makes abortion a social problem of staggering proportions.
“Humanity today offers us a truly alarming spectacle,” wrote Pope
John Paul, “if we consider not only how extensively attacks on life
are spreading but also their unheard-of numerical proportion.”21 An
isolated murder would be a social problem, but one of reduced
proportions. A serial killer would pose a more serious social problem
still. But yearly killings in the millions cry out for immediate and
decisive action. The volume of abortions underscores the social
nature of the problem, and makes abortion one of the most serious
social-justice issues not only of the present day, but of all time.
3. Unlike other instances of massive killing of human life, like terrorism
or serial killing, which stand clearly outside of the law, abortion
enjoys legal sanction. Abortion involves the systematic, hygienic, legal
18 This memorandum was sent in June 2004 by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger

to Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and made public on July 3, 2004. The
memo bears the title “Worthiness to Receive Communion: General Principles.”
See www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0403830.htm and chiesa.espresso.
repubblica.it/articolo/7055?eng=y.
19 The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992) maintains this distinction, carefully
including the adjective “innocent” in its sweeping prohibition: “The deliberate
murder of an innocent person is gravely contrary to the dignity of the human being,
to the golden rule, and to the holiness of the Creator” (§2261, emphasis added).
20 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Respect for Human
Life in its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation, Donum Vitae (1987), intro.,
§5: AAS 80 (1988): 76–77 (emphasis added).
21 Pope John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, §17 (emphasis in the original).

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elimination of human life. Pope John Paul II wrote of the novelty of
this menace, due to its internal nature. “They are not only threats
coming from the outside,” he wrote,“from the forces of nature or the
‘Cains’ who kill the ‘Abels’; no, they are scientifically and systematically
programmed threats.”22
Later, he remarked on the peculiarity of abortion as a legal right.
After listing a series of terrible threats to human life, such as poverty,
malnutrition, war, and the arms trade, he then contrasted them with
a new class of threats on life. Not only are these attacks on life no
longer considered as crimes, he wrote,“paradoxically they assume the
nature of ‘rights,’ to the point that the State is called upon to give
them legal recognition and to make them available through the free services
of health-care personnel.”23
4. A fourth distinguishing aspect of abortion is its arbitrary division of
human beings into those worthy of life and those unworthy.Abortion
deals not with the random killing of unrelated individuals, but the
circumscription of an entire class of human beings (the unborn) as noncitizens and non-persons, excluded from the basic rights and protections accorded to all other human beings. In this way abortion mimics
the great historical tragedies of all time, which always began with the
denigration of an entire class of people as unworthy of life or freedom.
Historically the greatest social evils perpetrated on humanity—
genocide, racism, abortion, anti-Semitism, sexism, slavery—have
always violated the principle of equality, relegating an entire sector of
the human family to an inferior status, with a dignity lower than the
rest. Since human rights flow from human dignity, once dignity is
called into question, equal rights cannot but share in the same fate. If
human dignity depends on anything other than simple membership
in the human race—be it intelligence, athletic ability, social status,
race, age, or health—we immediately find ourselves in the situation
of having to distinguish between persons.
5. Abortion even distinguishes itself from related bioethical questions
such as euthanasia and assisted suicide because of the absence of the
possibility of informed consent. The status of the unborn as voiceless
and most vulnerable adds a further dimension to the discussion of the
morality and gravity of abortion. Here the bioethical category of
“autonomy” cannot be applied, since unborn children have no way
of speaking for themselves.
22 Ibid., (emphasis in the original).
23 Ibid., §11, (emphasis in the original).

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6. Finally, abortion differs from other major social ills such as unemployment and divorce because of its relative invisibility. Not only are
the victims themselves voiceless, those who perpetrate abortion have
no interest in speaking publicly about it, and neither do the women
and girls who abort. It takes place behind closed doors and relies on
persons and institutions uninvolved in the process to speak out. Yet
even legislators are squeamish about frank discussions of the phenomenon of abortion, and pro-life advertising is banned from most
network television. Abortion takes place behind closed doors, and is
hushed in public.As in the case of slavery, the social injustice of abortion relies on the courage of persons and institutions uninvolved in
the process to speak out.
Catholic Social Teaching’s Specific Contribution
to the Abortion Question
The fourth and final question to be treated could read like this: If the
scope of Catholic social teaching ought indeed to embrace the abortion
problem, what is its distinct contribution to the debate? What does it
bring to the table that was not there already?
Catholic social thought furnishes two distinctive elements to the abortion debate. First, it lays a bridge between moral theology and public
discourse. In its long experience dealing with social questions, the Church
has sought not only to set forth the Christian truth in all its richness, but
to influence Christians and all people of good will in building a civilization of justice and love.To this end, Catholic social teaching often employs
a natural-law vocabulary friendly to all persons of good will, and frames
its arguments using accessible concepts and constructions that can be
brought to bear on moral discourse in a non-confessional environment.
Second, perhaps more than any institution in the world, the Church in
its social teaching has developed a series of principles to address the
complex moral questions in the social order.As new situations have arisen
as a result of the rapidly changing socio-political landscape, the Church
has shown admirable elasticity in accommodating new states of affairs
while ever defending the essential dignity of the person and the family.
It is this second contribution—at the level of content—that I would
like briefly to comment on now.
The Common Good
A key element of the patrimony of Catholic social doctrine is the concept
of the common good, not only as a general principle, but also in its specific
content. Gaudium et Spes defined the common good as “the sum of those

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conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual
members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment.”24
The Catechism separates these “conditions of social life” into three
groups, the first of which comprises respect for the human person, and
consequently respect for his “fundamental and inalienable rights.”25
Pope John Paul developed this point still further by stating: “It is
impossible to further the common good without acknowledging and
defending the right to life, upon which all the other inalienable rights of
individuals are founded and from which they develop.”26 In other words,
not only is the right to life included in the notion of the common
good—which is the finality of the social order—it constitutes a foundational pillar of that order.Therefore John Paul could add: “Disregard for
the right to life, precisely because it leads to the killing of the person
whom society exists to serve, is what most directly conflicts with the
possibility of achieving the common good.”27
The Principle of Equality
The democratic system as it is understood today is based on the principle
of equality—the radical ontological and civic equality of all citizens. The
doctrine of universal human equality comes down to our generation as a
specifically Christian contribution to political science.The idea that every
human being is a child of God, created in his image, called to divine sonship
and eternal beatitude grounds the understanding that all human beings are
brothers and sisters and share an equal human dignity. Even those who
reject the Church and Christianity itself—such as the architects of the
French Revolution—owe an enormous debt to Christianity, without
which the motto Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité would have never materialized.
In a democratic system, even non-citizens merit the same human treatment
and possess the same human rights, even if they do not enjoy all the civil
rights (work, vote, participation in the public life, etc.) of citizenship.
Historically the greatest social evils perpetrated on humanity—genocide, racism, abortion, anti-Semitism, sexism, slavery—have always violated
the principle of equality, relegating an entire sector of the human family to
an inferior status, with a dignity lower than the rest. Since human rights
flow from human dignity, once the latter is called into question equal rights
cannot but share in the same fate. If dignity depends on anything other
24 Second Vatican Council, “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern

World,” Gaudium et Spes (1965), §26.
25 Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1907.
26 Pope John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, §101.
27 Ibid., §72.

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than simple membership in the human race—be it intelligence, athletic
ability, social status, race, age, or health—we immediately find ourselves in
the situation of having to distinguish between persons. Each person would
possess a slightly lower or higher dignity, and thus different rights.
Equality of persons corresponds to the impartiality of justice. Portrayals
of the goddess Justice as of the sixteenth century depict her blindfolded,
with a balance in her left hand and a sword in her right.The blindfold represents impartiality, the indistinct and equitable treatment given to all, without
discrimination of persons.What is important is not who I have before me,
but the simple fact that I have someone before me. As John Paul wrote:
“How is it still possible to speak of the dignity of every human person when
the killing of the weakest and most innocent is permitted? In the name of
what justice is the most unjust of discriminations practised: some individuals are held to be deserving of defence and others are denied that dignity?”28
The Preferential Option for the Poor
The Church’s preferential option for the poor, an evangelical principle,
refers to a deliberate emphasis on and attention to those most in need.
Pope John Paul II called it “a special form of primacy in the exercise of
Christian charity” that should affect the life of every Christian.29 On
numerous occasions the Magisterium has clarified that the “poor” in
question does not refer to a social class, or merely to those who suffer
material need, but to the entire sphere of human misery and indigence.
“This misery,” we read in the Catechism, “elicited the compassion of
Christ the Savior, who willingly took it upon himself and identified
himself with the least of his brethren.”30
Just as a mother or father dedicates a disproportionate amount of time
and energy to a child who is sick, without for that reason loving the other
children any less, Christians are called to focus their efforts preferentially
toward the most defenseless among us. Applying this principle to contemporary society, the social injustice that most cries out to Christian
conscience, for the reasons we saw earlier, is the deliberate and massive
attack on the most vulnerable members of society, the unborn.
The Church’s Teaching on the Rule of Law
Catholic social doctrine reaffirms the Pauline doctrine of respect for and
obedience to civil law.31 Yet it also insists that to be legitimate, human law
28 Ibid., §20.
29 Pope John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, §42.
30 Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2448.
31 See Rom 13:1–3;Tit 3:1.

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must mirror God’s eternal law. Citing Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Catechism states: “A human law has the character of law to the extent that it
accords with right reason, and thus derives from the eternal law. Insofar
as it falls short of right reason it is said to be an unjust law, and thus has
not so much the nature of law as of a kind of violence.”32
The Church’s understanding of the scope and limits of human law
sheds light on the contemporary situation where abortion is given legal
protection in most countries. It also leads to a series of questions, to
which it furnishes the necessary principles to derive answers:
• What does it mean for society to grant legal approval to the systematic elimination of unborn children?
• What is the proper response to an unjust law in a democratic polity?
• Since law has a pedagogical function in forming the moral consciences
of citizenry, especially given the modern tendency to conflate the legal
and moral spheres, how can the deforming influence of unjust abortion laws be deflected and redressed?
• What is the proper role of civil law in the protection of life?
• When are civil disobedience and conscientious objection permitted
or even required and what form should they take?
• If a given law permits evil without imposing it, how does the moral
obligation of citizens change as a result?
• What is the essential difference between imposing religious doctrine
and defending the common good that coincides with religiously
informed moral judgment?
These questions—just a selection from the many possibilities—reveal the
importance of Catholic social doctrine in dealing with the immense
social fallout of abortion in the legal realm.
Church Teaching on Politics in General and
the Role of Catholic Legislators in Particular
As in the case of human laws, the Church has amassed a body of social
teaching regarding the nature and role of public authority. Central to this
teaching is the understanding that public authority exists for the sole
32 Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1902, citing St.Thomas Aquinas, ST I–II, q. 93,

a. 3, ad 2.

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Thomas D.Williams, L.C.

purpose of achieving and protecting the common good.33 When politicians
fail in their duty to the common good, they lose their reason for being.
As in the closely related case of abortion as unjust law, the situation of
politicians who support abortion legislation gives rise to numerous questions for Catholic social teaching. Given the number of such questions, I
will limit myself to offering a representative sample, rather than attempting
to be exhaustive or to expound the corresponding teaching to answer
each query.
• In what way does a pro-abortion politician “formally cooperate” with
evil?
• Since a legislator has the power to make something licit or illicit, at
least in a conventional sense, is this worse than actually performing
abortions?
• In what cases is so-called “single-issue politics” legitimate or obligatory? Can and should one issue trump the rest, and under what
conditions? Does abortion constitute one of those cases?
• How is a Catholic politician’s relationship with the Church affected
by his promotion of abortion legislation? Are there circumstances
under which he should be refused Holy Communion?
• What moral legitimacy does the “seamless garment” approach to life
issues hold?
• Is it morally permissible to be “personally opposed but publicly
favorable” to abortion, as Catholic Governor Mario Cuomo articulated his position?
• In what way do the distinct and complementary roles of the legislature
and the judiciary effect a proper response to the abortion problem?
• What are the conditions and limits of the democratic process? Is
everything up for debate and subject to the fluid will of the majority?
Once again, while not exhaustive, this brief list of questions effectively
illustrates the complexity of the socio-ethical problems engendered by
the abortion issue and the importance of the contribution of Catholic
social teaching in providing guidance for their resolution.

33 “The attainment of the common good is the sole reason for the existence of civil

authorities.” Pope John XXIII, encyclical letter Pacem in Terris (1963), §54.

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Conclusions: Paths to a Solution
If, as has been argued, the teaching furnished by the Catholic social Magisterium is essential for a thoroughgoing response to the abortion problem,
and ought to be formally included in our understanding of its scope, what
can be done to bring this about? I see two possible courses of action.
The first would be to induct Evangelium Vitae into the club of social
encyclicals. As we have seen, Pope John Paul, in that same encyclical,
offered a good justification for doing just that. Evangelium Vitae expounds
a series of principles undergirding the just society, which are not treated
with equal depth elsewhere in the Church’s social Magisterium. In Evangelium Vitae John Paul examined the role and purpose of the rule of law,
as well as its limitations. He spoke about cooperation in evil, elucidating
the moral nuances relating to life issues. He analyzed the democratic
system and the importance of moral truth as an enduring point of reference for the attainment of the common good. Much more of the
encyclical, in fact, deals with the social and juridical ramifications of life
issues than with the straightforward moral principles at their base.
A second approach would be to extend our understanding of what
constitutes the corpus of Catholic social teaching beyond the monographic social encyclicals, to include all magisterial teaching on social
matters.This would require much more work on the part of those who
teach this discipline, since it involves parsing magisterial texts and gleaning the teachings offered on issues of social justice.
Thankfully, an important step has already been taken in this direction
with the promulgation of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the
Church.This important text has advanced the development of the discipline
of Catholic social doctrine in two significant ways. First, it draws not only
from the canon of social encyclicals but also from other magisterial texts
that touch on social justice issues. In citing everything from Leo XIII’s
Immortale Dei (1885) to Pius XI’s Casti Connubii (1930) to John Paul II’s
Dives in Misericordia (1980), the Compendium underscores the breadth of the
Catholic social Magisterium far beyond the confines of the so-called social
encyclicals. It should be noted that the Compendium also references Evangelium Vitae in numerous instances. Second, in adopting an organic structure more similar to Gaudium et Spes than to Rerum Novarum, the
Compendium systematically lays out the foundational principles of Catholic
social thought and draws from them their practical applications in the
social, political, cultural, and economic realms.This methodological option
encourages thinking of Catholic social doctrine in a more thematic way,
relativizing the place of the economy in the whole of social ethics, and
making room for other central social-justice issues—such as life issues.

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These changes will take place gradually and are already in motion. At
a minimum, teachers and students of Catholic social doctrine should
begin by taking Pope John Paul’s words at face value and treating abortion as the social problem that it is.“Just as a century ago it was the working classes which were oppressed in their fundamental rights . . . so now
. . . another category of persons is being oppressed in the fundamental
right to life.”34 For those truly concerned with justice and peace in the
N&V
world, there is no better place to start.

34 Pope John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, §5.

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663

The Analogy of “Homo” and “Deus” in
St. Thomas Aquinas’s Lectura romana
J OHN F. B OYLE
University of St.Thomas
St. Paul, Minnesota

D ISTINCTION four of Peter Lombard’s Liber sententiarum is principally concerned with understanding the proposition “Deus genuit
Deum” (God begat God). Peter is particularly concerned with how the
term “Deus” is to be understood in relation to the Trinity of persons.
“Deus genuit Deum” becomes the focus of his attention, but other
propositions are also mentioned, among them, “Deus est Trinitas” (God
is Trinity) and “Deus est tres personae” (God is three persons).
The articles of distinction four of St.Thomas Aquinas’s Lectura romana
on Peter Lombard’s Liber sententiarum are wholly dedicated to understanding Trinitarian propositions.1 The first two articles specifically
address the use of the term “Deus” in such propositions.The first article
considers the central proposition of the distinction: “Deus genuit
Deum”; the second article considers two of the additional propositions
found in distinction four:“Deus est Trinitas” and “Deus est tres personae.”
In explaining how these propositions are to be understood,Thomas articulates with particular clarity the analogical use of “homo” in understanding “Deus.”
The problem with the proposition “Deus genuit Deum,” the subject
of 4.1, is a neat one. As each of the initial arguments states, “Deus” is an
1 The Lectura romana is the reportatio of Thomas’s teaching on the first book of the

Liber sententiarum in Rome in 1255–1256. The text can be found in Thomas
Aquinas, Lectura romana in primum Sententiarum Petri Lombardi, ed. Leonard E.
Boyle and John F. Boyle (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2006).
References will be to the internal divisions as established in the edition, with page
and line numbers to the edition in parentheses.

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John F. Boyle

essential term, not a notional one; that is, it refers to the divine essence,
not to divine persons. The verb “genuit,” however, refers to a notional
operation of the Trinity, that is to say an operation of persons; thus, one
can say, “the Father begat the Son,” but not “the essence begat the
essence.” Can one then simply reject “Deus genuit Deum” as false with
its essential subject and object and its notional verb? No; for as the sed
contra states, the creed describes the begetting of the Son from the Father
as “God from God.”
In his response, St.Thomas says that while all concede the truth of the
proposition, they differ in how to account for its truth. He then considers two opinions.
According to the first opinion, both the signification and supposition
of “Deus” are, by the very nature of the term, the same, that is, the divine
essence.2 Signification considers what a word signifies taken by itself,
whereas supposition considers what the word stands for when used in a
sentence. If according to the first opinion “Deus” naturally both signifies
and stands for the divine essence, how is the notional aspect of the proposition to be understood? Although both signification and supposition are
of the divine essence, when “Deus” is joined to a notional verb it is drawn
to standing for a person.Thus with the notional verb “genuit,” “Deus” is
drawn to personal supposition.3 Such is the first opinion.
According to the second opinion, “Deus” signifies essence. When,
however, “Deus” is considered with regard to the mode of signifying, it
can stand for a person.Thus, the second opinion agrees with the first in
the essential signification of “Deus” but disagrees with the first in positing notional supposition. Thomas finds this second opinion the better
one. In explaining this opinion,Thomas appeals by way of analogy to the
use of the term “homo.” In what seems at first blush unilluminating, he
says that “homo” simply signifies “homo.” How this is to be understood
becomes clear when he then considers “homo” with regard to the mode
of signification. In this regard, “homo” can be taken as standing for a
particular man, that is, for one who has human nature. Thus the simple
signification is “man signifies man” without any specification to an indi2 “Quidam enim, attendentes in Deo idem esse essentiam et suppositum, dicunt

quod hoc nomen ‘Deus’ de natura sua et significat essentiam et supponit pro
essentia. . . .” Lectura romana 4.1.resp. (p. 122, lines 22–23).
3 “[S]ed tamen ex aliquo notionali adiuncto trahitur ad supponendum pro
persona, et sive illud notionale sit verbum sive participium. Et ideo dicunt quod
haec ‘Deus genuit Deum’ est vera, quia licet hoc nomen ‘Deus’ significet essentiam, tamen per hoc verbum ‘generat’ trahitur ad supponendum pro persona.”
Lectura romana 4.1.resp. (p. 122, lines 23–27).

The Analogy of “Homo” and “Deus”

665

vidual; but the use of the term in a sentence may be such as to specify an
individual in so far as that individual is one that has human nature.4
Thomas then applies this distinction to the term “Deus.”“Deus” in its
signification is essential. But one can nonetheless say, “Deus genuit
Deum,” when “Deus” is considered with regard to the mode of signification by which it stands for that which has divine nature. In this case it
means, “That which has divine nature begat that which has divine
nature.”“Deus” does indeed stand for a person but does so indistinctly, as
that which has divine nature. As such it can stand for both singular and
plural persons; thus, not only the proposition “Deus generat” is true, but
so is “Deus est Trinitas.”5 Here ends the response to 4.1.
Given the ending of this response, the question of 4.2 is a bit of a
puzzle: “Utrum haec sit vera, ‘Deus est Trinitas’ vel ‘Deus est tres
personae.’ ” Has not Thomas just answered this question?
Thomas poses the problem in this way in the response.The following
two propositions are clearly false:“homo est omnis homo” (man is every
man) and “homo est tres personae” (man is three persons). Given the
analogy developed between “homo” and “Deus” in the previous article,
would it not follow that the two parallel propositions are also false:“Deus
est Trinitas” and “Deus est tres personae”?6 The analogy between the use
of “homo” and the use of “Deus” that had proven helpful in the previous
article in explaining “Deus genuit Deum” seems to work mischief in
considering “Deus est Trinitas” and “Deus est tres personae.” At the end
of the response of 4.1,Thomas said that “Deus” can stand for both singular and plural persons; the analogy with “homo” suggests the contrary.
Having shown in 4.1 how the use of “homo” and “Deus” is the same,
Thomas now shows in 4.2 how that use is different. The difference is
twofold based on two differences between God and man.
4 “Alii autem, attendentes quod in huiusmodi significationibus non minus debet

attendi modus significandi quam natura rei, dicunt et melius quod hoc nomen
‘Deus’ de natura sua significat essentiam; tamen ex modo significandi supponit
pro persona, sicut hoc nomen ‘homo’ de natura sua significat hominem
simpliciter, et ex modo significandi potest poni ad supponendum pro quolibet
homine singulari ut pro habente humanitatem.” Lectura romana 4.1.resp. (p. 123,
lines 28–33).
5 “Et ideo dicunt ex modo significandi haec est vera scilicet ‘Deus genuit Deum,’
id est habentem divinitatem, cum ex modo significandi hoc nomen ‘Deus’
supponit pro persona tamen indistincte, quia aliquando supponit unam sicut cum
dicitur ‘Deus generat,’ aliquando plures sicut cum dicitur ‘Deus est Trinitas.’ ”
Lectura romana 4.1.resp. (p. 123, lines 33–37).
6 “[S]icut haec falsa est ‘homo est omnis homo’ vel ‘homo est tres personae,’ ita
etiam haec esset falsa ‘Deus est Trinitas’ et ‘Deus est tres personae.’ ” Lectura romana
4.2.resp. (p. 124, lines 8–10).

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First, the form that is signified by the term “homo,” namely “humanitas,” is not numerically one; that is, the humanity of one man is numerically other than the humanity of another man. God is different: the form
signified by the term “Deus,” namely “divinitas,” is numerically one; that
is, divinity is numerically one in the three divine persons.7
This brings us to the second difference. In the case of man, the form
signified and the supposit are not the same; as Thomas says, in man the “quo
est” and the “quod est” are different. In God, however, the form signified
and the supposit are the same because God’s essence is his “quod est.”8
From these two differences, Thomas concludes that in the case of
“Deus” the term in fact does stand for the essence.9 He is not taking back
what he said about the supposition of “Deus” in 4.1; rather, he is noting
the implications of the uniqueness of God. Thus he can say that this
supposition is “ex natura rei” in the case of God. It is not so, of course, for
man, and thus we have the precise point at which the analogy between
“homo” and “Deus” fails. Since the essence is common to the three divine
persons, we are able to say,“Deus est Trinitas,” and “Deus est Pater et Filius
et Spiritus Sanctus,” and “Deus est tres personae,” even though we cannot
say,“homo est omnis homo,” or “homo est tres personae.”
In so considering 4.1 and 4.2 together, a puzzle in the text of 4.2 is
solved.The article has only one initial argument, but the response begins
in this way:
Dicendum quod opinio Porretani fuit quod haec locutio scilicet “Deus
est Trinitas” sive “Deus est tres personae” sit falsa. Et hoc dicebat propter
rationes inductas, et etiam quia loquebatur de hoc nomine “Deus” sicut
de hoc nomine “homo.”10
7 “Nam in hoc nomine ‘homo’ forma significata per ipsum nomen non est una

numero, alia est enim humanitas in hoc et in illo homine. Forma vero significata
per hoc nomen ‘Deus’ est una numero, scilicet divinitas, quae est una numero in
tribus personis.” Lectura romana 4.2.resp. (p. 124, lines 11–14).
8 “Item, in homine non est idem suppositum re cum forma significata, quia aliud
est in homine quo est et quod est. In Deo vero forma significata et suppositum
idem re sunt, quia idem est in Deo essentia et quod est; . . . .” Lectura romana
4.2.resp. (p. 124, lines 14–16).
9 “[E]t ideo ex natura rei hoc nomen ‘Deus’ supponit pro essentia. Unde cum
essentia sit communis tribus personis, possumus dicere quod Deus est Trinitas et
quod Deus est Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus, et quod Deus est tres personae.”
Lectura romana 4.2.resp. (p. 124, lines 16–19).
10 Lectura romana 4.2.resp. (pp. 123–24, lines 5–8): “It is to be said that it was the
opinion of Gilbert of Poitiers that this sentence ‘God is Trinity,’ or ‘God is three
persons,’ is false. He said this for the reasons already given and also because he
spoke of this word ‘man.’ ”

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667

As 4.2 has only one initial argument, the question arises, to what do
“rationes inductae” refer? The “rationes inductae” are, I think, best understood as the initial arguments of 4.1 which work as much against “Deus
est Trinitas” as against “Deus genuit Deum.” Those initial arguments are
all addressed in 4.1 with the introduction of the analogy with “homo.”
But, as we have seen, it is precisely that analogy that opens the door to a
new argument against “Deus est Trinitas” and “Deus est tres personae”
that needs to be addressed here in 4.2, that is, the “et etiam quia loquebatur de hoc nomine ‘Deus’ sicut de hoc nomine ‘homo.’ ”
While we do not find anything substantially new to Thomas’s thought
in these two articles of distinction 4, we do find a fine example of his care
in the articulation of analogies. He is perhaps especially cautious here
because he is teaching beginners.This may account for why it is only in
the Lectura romana that the proposition “Deus est Trinitas” gets an article
of its own. As it is, Thomas first shows what the points of analogical
agreement permit (4.1), and then, having articulated the possible mischief
arising from such agreement, he articulates the points of analogical difference (4.2). The result is that long-standing propositions of the faith are
not only defended, but his students are guided in how to understand
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them properly.

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669

The Quarry Workers1
ROMANUS C ESSARIO, O. P.
St. John’s Seminary
Brighton, Massachusetts

T HE GRAVE of Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963)—dead forty-three
years this year—occupies a plot in the churchyard of Holy Trinity
Church, Headington Quarry. This Gothic Revival structure dates from
the mid-nineteenth century, and was built to accommodate the quarry
workers and others living in Quarry Field. From the start of the nineteenth century, this section of ancient Headington had become separated
both physically and socially from “old” Headington.The original Headington parish dates to the reigns of the later Anglo-Saxon kings. Ethelred
the Unready (968–1016) is said to have been baptized there. . . .2 In any
event, St. Andrew’s, Headington, enjoys a more prestigious history than
does its nineteenth-century neighbor, Holy Trinity.
Earlier this year I visited Lewis’s grave as part of a spiritual preparation
for delivering this homily. By a timely coincidence, I had the opportunity to speak with an assistant curate of the parish church, the Reverend
Linda Greene. She explained that Holy Trinity Parish was established so
that the working-class quarrymen would not find it necessary to join the
congregants at the principal Church of England parish in Headington. In
fact, by the mid-nineteenth century, the people dwelling around the
Quarry were not attending church services, and so it is suspected that
even mere Christianity no longer informed their daily lives.
1 Sermon preached at the Sunday worship service, C. S. Lewis Summer Institute, in

Thompson Memorial Chapel,Williams College,Williamstown, MA, July 9, 2006.
2 According to William of Malmesbury, Ethelred defecated in the baptismal font as

a child, which led St. Dunstan to prophesy that the English monarchy would be
overthrown during his reign.This story is, however, almost certainly a fabrication.

Romanus Cessario, O.P.

670

From 1930 until his death, C. S. Lewis found himself living in what, at
a certain point in time, had been the unfashionable section of town. His
beloved parish church was intended to serve the ordinary man, the
manual laborer and his family. I consider this circumstance providential.
The great apologist wrote from within the boundaries of a Church of
England parish that was established to stave off the de-Christianization of
a region where the sacraments of Christian initiation had been administered for more than a thousand years.
I find that Headington Quarry provides the ideal spiritual setting from
which to read what St. Paul says today in the Second Letter to the
Corinthians: “I will rather boast most gladly of my weaknesses, in order
that the power of Christ may dwell with me” (2 Cor 12: 9).
• • • • •
A Jesuit friend of mine likes to observe that the Christian Gospel places
us under the sign of the diminutive. We find ourselves confronted with
mustard seeds, widows’ mites, small boats, a few loaves and fishes, the tiny
pearl of great price. . . . Little things.All of them.These diminutive Gospel
images prepare us to embrace the grace of the Incarnation. We discover
that God uses little things to draw us into the mystery of his Son.
Another great Christian apologist, the second-century Church Father
St. Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130–c. 200), explains the divine purpose behind
the Incarnation, when God uses the little thing we call human nature to
achieve the huge results that the Incarnation of the Son of God brings to
this world: “For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God
became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with
the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of
God.”3 Divinization holds out a huge promise. This Sunday St. Paul
teaches us that God grants this big grace to those who accept their littleness—“a thorn in the flesh was given to me, an angel of Satan, to beat
me, to keep me from being too elated” (2 Cor 12: 7).The identity of the
thorn matters not; all save tainted nature’s solitary boast experience one
or another.
“Love Among the Ruins. On the Renewal of Character & Culture.”
How do we achieve the objective that the theme of this summer institute sets before us, not only for our reflection but also for our accomplishment? Allow me to introduce a Roman Catholic figure.
The year before C. S. Lewis was born in November 1898, a young
French woman died in a Norman Carmelite convent. She was Thérèse
3 Adversus haereses, 3, 19, 1 (PG 7/1, 939) cited in Catechism of the Catholic Church,

§460.

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Martin, who succumbed to tuberculosis on September 30, 1897. Thérèse
had embraced the austere life of Carmel with the purpose of saving souls,
especially those of Roman Catholic priests.When I was a seminarian in the
late 1960s, a holy priest first introduced me to the spiritual doctrine of
Thérèse of the Child Jesus. Since that moment, I have observed that those
who follow her Little Way discover the full significance of the Gospel’s
preference for the diminutive. It seems to me that C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity and Thérèse Martin’s Story of a Soul complement each other.
Thérèse of Lisieux provides the instruction required by our contemporaries to live the Christian Gospel that C. S. Lewis holds up in so many
different ways as indispensable for human flourishing. Thérèse has been
named a Doctor of the Church. She is called the Doctor of Love. Her
instruction serves as a prolonged commentary on the phrase that St. Paul
sets before us today: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made
perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12: 9). Consider three graces that Thérèse
teaches us about with—what the late Pope John Paul II has called—
“feminine genius.”They are as follows: first, the grace of confidence: we
learn that God loves us not because we are good but because he is.The
modern afflictions of guilt, alienation, and loneliness dissolve before the
God whose only demand is love. Secondly, the grace of humility, or spiritual childhood: we discover that submission to divine authority makes us
strong, not weak.The modern penchant to grasp power through bureaucratic domination gives way to the charity of ecclesial communion.
Thirdly, the grace of littleness: we see that heroic love can flow from the
accomplishment of even little things. The modern preoccupation with
gigantism is replaced with an appreciation for the concrete and everyday.
These Theresian graces place us squarely under the New Testament sign
of the diminutive.
I take C. S. Lewis of Headington Quarry and Thérèse of Lisieux to be
companions of a sort. For one thing, their writings continue to attract
Christians and others. Of course, C. S. Lewis embodies a man of learning
and style. But why should a late nineteenth-century French provincial
girl, who was neither learned nor a woman of letters—her French grammar required correction—still capture the attention of the Christian
Church? What explains Thérèse’s powerful draw on so many persons
throughout the world? How can someone who found study burdensome
exemplify the excellence in the bestowal of divine truth that is characteristic of both an apologist and, as Pope John Paul II declared, a Doctor
of the Church? The answers to these questions will not be found in books
about Thérèse. To discover the answers to these questions, one needs to
become acquainted with the person of Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus

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and of the Holy Face. In terms familiar to end-of-the-twentieth-century
Roman Catholics, it is the mission of Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus—
the Little Flower, as she is known in English devotional parlance—to
announce the universal call to holiness.
The sixteenth-century reform of Carmel had made loving God a
matter of great seriousness. Saints Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross
remain household names for students of Christian spirituality. Thérèse
entered the monastery when the fashions of spiritual theology imposed
what she called the practices of the “big souls.” These included prayer,
mortification, including using instruments of penance, and other ascetical practices, especially the observance of strict enclosure and of a
detailed, even minuscule, obedience. Such proportions hardly suited the
temperament of a young French girl who had lost her mother when she
was very young and whose sensitivity frequently got the best of her. But
Thérèse knew that God had a way for her, and she waited patiently for
the moment when it pleased divine providence to reveal it to her.
Thérèse’s way, of course, has become known as the “Little Way,” the way
of divine love. “My grace is sufficient for you.”
Thérèse’s little way of spiritual childhood is really quite simple to grasp.
Her basic conviction is that of the basic New Testament message: God loves
us.And because God loves us, we can trust that he will make it possible for
us to love him in return.Thérèse’s way, then, is a road built on confidence
in the divine goodness. If we trust that God wants to make us saints, he
will.Thérèse’s own life affords a parable of how the divine love works: her
autobiography—her Story of a Soul—instructs us that nothing can block, in
those who have confidence in God, the fulfillment of his plan for their
divinization. Not even one’s sins. Does this mean that Thérèse encourages
a nonchalant attitude toward character formation? By no means. She
believes in sanctification, in personal holiness.What she does not trust are
her own energies to achieve it. “The thought nourishes me,” she once said,
“that Sister X finds me without virtue, and I am happy that I seem so to
myself also.”4 For a person to grow spiritually,Thérèse encourages a continual turning back to the source of all forgiveness and grace.
Thérèse makes it plain that her Little Way serves everybody.The analogy is simple, and makes her spiritual doctrine appealing, especially to
believers of our generation. Just as little children can always find refuge in
the arms of their fathers or mothers, so little souls can always run to the
Heavenly Father in order to receive consolation and strength. They can
4 L’Esprit de la Bienheureuse Thérèse de L’Enfant Jésus. D’après ses écrits et les témoins

oculaires de sa vie (Lisieux: n.d.; before 1913), 135.

The Quarry Workers

673

also turn to him for forgiveness. According to the practice of the day,
Thérèse manifested her conscience to her confessor, and he declared that
she had never committed a mortal sin.What was her response? Even if I
had committed many mortal sins, I would still run to the arms of the
Heavenly Father. Her theological argument is simple: where else would
one go? This act of abandonment to the divine Goodness is not just for
those already on the high road to ethical or spiritual advancement. It
applies also to the quarrymen. They represent all of us. Thérèse’s own
blood sister, whom she helped as a novice in Carmel, once complained
that she did not experience the great aspirations to holiness that Thérèse
expressed frequently. The Little Flower explained gently that Marie (her
blood sister) had missed the whole point of the Little Way: not even desires
are important, just confidence and love.“My grace is sufficient for you.”
Thérèse’s vocation was to embrace and to proclaim God’s love.
Though she never left the confines of her cloister in Normandy,Thérèse
still united herself to the work of the worldwide Church. It is significant
that when the French Carmelite nuns were considering making foundations in Viet Nam,Thérèse was ready to offer herself for the monasteries
to be constructed in Hanoi and Saigon.5 Thérèse’s missionary zeal is not
to be distinguished from her Little Way: both express her utter abandonment to the unfolding of the divine Goodness.
• • • • •
“Love among the ruins. How to build character?”The answer is simple.
We are all spiritual quarrymen. C. S. Lewis recognized the fragility of his
generation. He warned against the wiles of the devil and wrote about the
uniqueness of divine charity.The 1942 Screwtape Letters and the 1960 The
Four Loves express Lewis’s profound insights into the divinization that
Christ alone brings and the need of every human creature to discover it.
Divinization brings with it charity. With charity, all the other virtues
flourish; without charity, the other virtues, as St. Paul elsewhere reminds
us, “gain nothing” (1 Cor 13: 3). “My grace is sufficient for you.” There
is no other way to renew moral character than by living in Jesus Christ.
Thérèse Martin, with the flair of feminine genius, addressed the same
spiritual themes that Lewis would later expound. Shortly before her
death, Saint Thérèse accepted the orphan seminarian Maurice
Barthélemy-Bellière as a spiritual brother. In one of his last letters to the
saint, Maurice expressed embarrassment about the fact that in heaven
5 So the city was then known and, so I recently learned, is today by inhabitants of

Viet Nam; for example, airlines still mark baggage destined for Ho Chi Minh
City “SGN.”

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Romanus Cessario, O.P.

Thérèse would know his sins and so be drawn away from him. From her
deathbed, the Doctor of Love taught this young priest an important
lesson about spiritual things that applies to every Christian believer:
Little Brother, we do not understand heaven in the same way. It seems
to you that sharing in the justice, in the holiness of God, I would be
unable as on earth to excuse your faults. Are you forgetting, then, that
I shall be sharing also in the infinite mercy of the Lord? I believe the
Blessed have great compassion on our miseries, they remember, being
weak and mortal like us, [that] they committed the same faults,
sustained the same combats, and [so] their fraternal tenderness becomes
greater than it was when they were on earth, and for this reason, they
never cease protecting us and praying for us.6

This is the blessed communion that C. S. Lewis, we pray, and Thérèse
Martin now share. It is the goal to which every human person is called,
and a point of rest that is reached only by those who discover the secret
that St. Paul confides to all Christians: “I am content with weaknesses,
insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for
when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor 12: 10). One would like to
believe that the men of Headington Quarry discovered this saving
Gospel truth once Holy Trinity Church restored the proclamation of the
Christian Gospel and the administration of Baptism to ancient Catholic
Headington.There can be no doubt, however, that C. S. Lewis of Headington Quarry has made this message known to those who read his
books and essays. He speaks with special effect to those who, like those
present in Thompson Memorial Chapel this sunny New England Sunday
N&V
morning, cherish his memory and spirit.

6 Letters of St.Therese of Lisieux, vol. 2, trans. John Clarke, O.C.D. (Washington, DC:

Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1988), 1133.

Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 6, No. 3 (2008): 675–680

675

Why Does the Pope Matter to Protestants?
R EINHARD H ÜTTER
Duke University Divinity School
Durham, North Carolina

T HIS IS NOT my question. Rather, it was given to me in this precise
form with the request to address it in front of a large body of Protestant
students in a Protestant divinity school.1 Having been received into the full
communion of the Catholic Church only nine months before, I would not
have had the audacity to confront a predominantly Protestant audience with
this question as a private intervention of my own. But since it was, rather
audaciously, given to me to tackle, I might as well take up the challenge.
As I address the question at hand, I will not occupy myself with the
particular teachings and the personal witness of the most recent or the
present holder of the Petrine office, nor with the dogma of papal infallibility, nor with the history of the development of Petrine primacy, nor
with the personal characteristics of individual popes of recent or distant
history, from the widely admired and beloved John Paul II the Great, to
some of the far less admirable, to say the least, Renaissance popes who
have left an indelible mark on the consciousness of Protestantism.These
issues will all have to remain in the background, because the question
posed is “Why does the pope matter to Protestants?”
Rather, I would like to submit the thesis that the pope matters to
Protestants because it is the Petrine ministry which forces them to recognize what kind of Protestants they are. Something analogous obtains, by
the way, also for Catholics. What do I mean? Let me adduce an ad-hoc
distinction—for purely heuristic reasons—between essential Protestantism
and accidental Protestantism.
1 This text represents the opening lecture for a colloquy with the whole student

body at Duke University Divinity School on the given topic “Why does the
pope matter to Protestants?”The original event took place on October 19, 2005.

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Reinhard Hütter

Essential Protestantism requires for its identity Catholicism as the “other,”
over against which it constitutes and identifies itself: anti-Catholicism and
the pope as Anti-Christ are identity-markers of essential Protestantism.
Much of essential Protestantism assumes that at the time of the Reformation the true Gospel—lost or at least significantly distorted shortly
after the apostle Paul 2 —was rediscovered and the Church in the true
sense reconstituted.Virtually everything in-between, the few exceptions
only affirming the rule, pertains to the aberration of Roman Catholicism. Essential Protestantism, therefore, in a large measure needs Roman
Catholicism and especially the papacy to know itself, to have a hold of its
identity as Protestantism.
Accidental Protestantism, on the other hand, sees itself as the result of a
particular, specific protestation. For Martin Luther it was the gospel of
justification by faith alone. Hence, in 1531, Luther could say “I could kiss
the pope’s feet, if he would permit the gospel.” The full quote from his
Large Commentary on Galatians reads:
All we aim for is that the glory of God be preserved and that the righteousness of faith remain pure and sound. Once this has been established, namely that God alone justifies us solely by His grace through
Christ, we are willing not only to bear the pope aloft on our hands but
to kiss his feet.3

And pretty much exactly five hundred years later, in August 1932, Karl
Barth could state in the preface to the first volume of his rightly
renowned Church Dogmatics: “I regard the analogia entis as the invention
of Antichrist, and I believe that because of it it is impossible ever to
become a Roman Catholic, all other reasons for not doing so being to
my mind short-sighted and trivial.”4
2 I am referring here to the a quasi-historical, but de facto ideological construal of

notorious longevity among Protestants, originally fathered by the nineteenthcentury Protestant historian of dogma F.C. Baur, of early Christianity’s “fall” from
the pure heights of Paulinism into the murky depths of Frühkatholizismus, a fall
that, alas, occurred even before the Christian canon of Scripture was established.
3 Martin Luther, In epistolam S. Pauli ad Galatas Commentarius in D. Martin Luthers
Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. J. F. K. Knaake et al. (Weimar: Böhlau, 1883),
vol. 40/1, 181. (The translation is Jaroslav Pelikan’s from Martin Luther, Luther’s
Works, vol. 26: Lectures on Galatians 1535, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan [St. Louis: Concordia, 1963], 99.)
4 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, trans. G.W. Bromiley, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.
F.Torrance, 2nd ed. (1936; Edinburgh:T&T Clark, 1975), xiii. Barth understood
the analogy of being (analogia entis) to be an analogy within being, with God
being conceptually reached within the concept of being such that it would be

The Pope and Protestantism

677

For accidental Protestants there tends to be one fundamental difference—and it can be the Petrine office itself—that prevents them from
being Catholic.This difference cannot be just any, but must be one without which the truth of the Gospel is decisively distorted or even abandoned. Being Protestant in this vein amounts to an emergency position
necessary for the sake of the Gospel’s truth and the Church’s faithfulness;
in short, accidental Protestantism does not understand itself as ecclesial
normalcy. So, if the pope were indeed to permit the gospel—a point indeed
very hard to deny after the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification 5—
Luther presumably would, or better, should be ready to kiss his feet, that is,
more prosaically, to acknowledge the supreme teaching authority with
which the Petrine ministry is endowed.And if Karl Barth were to discover
that in the mistaken sense he thought about it, the analogia entis was never
officially entertained as a Catholic doctrinal position nor ever subscribed to
by eminent Catholic theologians, he would presumably have to rethink his
position—“all other reasons . . . being . . . short-sighted and trivial.”
This rather ad-hoc distinction between essential and accidental Protestantism becomes immediately concrete when we turn to the function that
a decisive marker of Protestantism, namely private judgment, tends to play
in either kind of Protestantism. What do I mean here by “private judgment”? Let me explain by way of a quote from John Henry Newman:
We [Protestants] uphold the pure unmutilated Scripture; the Bible, and
the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants; the Bible and our own
sense of the Bible.We claim a sort of parliamentary privilege to interpret laws in our own way, and not to suffer an appeal to any court
beyond ourselves.We know, and we view it with consternation, that all
Antiquity runs counter to our interpretation, and therefore, alas, the
Church was corrupt from very early times indeed. But mind, we hold
all this in a truly Catholic spirit, not in bigotry.We allow in others the
right of private judgment, and confess that we, as others, are fallible
men. We confess facts are against us; we do but claim the liberty of
theorizing in spite of them. Far be it from us to say that we are certainly
right; we only say that the whole early Church was certainly wrong.We
do not impose our belief on any one; we only say that those who take
the contrary side are Papists, firebrands, persecutors, madmen, zealots,
bigots, and an insult to the nineteenth century.6
possible to lay claim to a comprehensive conceptual knowledge of God outside
Revelation.
5 The Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church, Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000).
6 John Henry Newman,“Primitive Christianity,” in idem, Historical Sketches, vol. 1
(London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 420–21.

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678

Now, as attentive readers, you ask yourselves immediately how I could
have ended up where I did that is, in full communion with the Catholic
Church, without private judgment on my own—and that I hence contradict myself most blatantly. I completely agree, but let me add another short
line from John Henry Newman: to the objection that converts must use
their own “private judgment,” Newman responds that
they use it in order ultimately to supersede it; as a man out of doors
uses a lamp in a dark night, and puts it out when he gets home.What
would be thought of his bringing it into his drawing room? . . . if he
came in with a great-coat on his back, a hat on his head, an umbrella
under his arm, and a large stable-lantern in his hand?7

In this latter case, private judgment is a last resort, either to hold on to
the truth of the Gospel in a particular situation of crisis or precisely to
leave private judgment behind. Now, different from accidental Protestantism, which has seen itself to a large degree as a reform movement in
the Church catholic, essential Protestantism internally divides over the
matter of private judgment: where private judgment continues to rule as
the foundational principle, we encounter liberal Protestantism in its manifold appearances; and where private judgment is seen as the one necessary
act of protest over against Roman Catholicism, we encounter confessional Protestantism with its entailed assumption that a certain set of
judgments, made by the Reformers and enshrined in various doctrinal
documents, are practically and functionally infallible.
So why does the Petrine ministry matter to Protestants? To find out
what kind of Protestants they are. Are they essential Protestants in that
they need the Petrine ministry and its occupants as the negated “other”
that helps constitute the Protestant identity in that it is first of all not
Roman Catholicism, and that it entails the constant exercise of private
judgment or that it regards a set of judgments as functionally infallible?
Are they accidental Protestants who might want to regard the Petrine
ministry as an invitation to question the dead end of private judgment,
as an invitation to ask which ministries in their respective ecclesial bodies
personally represent and guard over the Church’s unity, the orthodoxy of
its teaching, and its living connectedness to the communion of churches
synchronically and diachronically? Are there valid, authoritative, effective,
and broadly acknowledged alternatives to the Petrine ministry? What,

7 John Henry Newman, Loss and Gain:The Story of a Convert (London: Longmans,

Green, and Co., 1906), 203.

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679

finally, does it tell accidental Protestants if they come to realize that most
Protestant ecclesial communions are much more interested in reconciled
indifference of denominational schisms than in that kind of visible unity
of the Catholic Church to which belongs inherently the visible office of
a universal minister?
It is in order to provoke these kinds of questions by its ongoing existence, function, and efficacy, I would like to submit, that the Petrine
office matters to Protestants. The Petrine office functions as a concrete
thorn in the flesh of the ongoing practice of private judgment in matters
of doctrine and morals among Protestants, and for that matter, also
among Catholics. The very existence of the Petrine ministry and the
authority it carries in matters of doctrine regarding faith and morals as
well as in matters of jurisdiction painfully remind us all that the first
human sin was the result of private judgment and that letting private
judgment become the principle of Christian existence and reign in
matters of Christian faith and morals means letting the flesh reign.
Now, what I just stated, is the more provocative way to put the matter
why the pope matters to Protestants. A less provocative way to put the
matter might be to ask in which way Protestants could acknowledge
aspects of the Petrine ministry as integral, if not to the being of their
communions themselves (which would indeed bring them into
communion with the See of Peter and thus the Catholic Church), so at
least to the well being of their communions ad intra as well as ad extra,
and hence contribute to the growing communal bonds between these
communions and the Catholic Church:
1. Ad intra: The Petrine ministry could be seen increasingly as that
ministry that is most and irreversibly dedicated to visible Christian
unity—without a facile capitulation to the truth, as most clearly
formulated in the encyclical Ut Unum Sint by the late Pope John
Paul II. Could there be a personal universal ministry to ecumenism
and church unity? In other words, could there be a way forward for
accidental Protestants—after the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of
Justification—in the direction of Philip Melanchthon’s famous
reserve from the Smalkald Articles (Melanchthon being the most
important and influential voice of the Lutheran Reformation,
second only to Luther):
“I, P HILIP M ELANCHTHON , regard the above articles as right
and Christian. However, concerning the pope I hold that, if he
would allow the Gospel, we, too, may concede to him that
superiority over the bishops which he possesses by human
right, making this concession for the sake of peace and general

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680

unity among the Christians who are now under him and who
may be in the future.8
2. Ad extra: The Petrine ministry could function as the most effective
office of a spokesperson for all Christians (including indeed essential Protestants) in matters that concern all Christians to various
governments on a global scale and before the UN. Could there be a
personal universal office of a Christian spokesperson to the UN and
to all governments, defending persecuted Christians, Christian
minority rights, and the freedom to practice the Christian faith?

Could, in short, the pope matter to Protestants, essential as well as accidental, because the Petrine ministry might develop in ways that could be
of genuine service also to Protestant Christians?
N&V

8 Philip

Melanchthon, The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical
Lutheran Church, trans. and ed.Theodore G.Tappert et al. (Philadelphia: Fortress,
1959), 316f.“Ego Philippus Melanthon suprapositos articulos approbo ut pios et
christianos. De pontifice autem statuo, si evangelium admitteret, posse ei propter
pacem et communem tranquillitatem christianorum, qui jam sub ipso sunt et in
posterum sub ipso erunt, superioritatem in episcopos, quam alioqui habet jure
humano, etiam a nobis permitti.” Die Bekenntnisschriften der evangelisch-lutherischen
Kirche. Herausgegeben im Gedenkjahr der Augsburgischen Konfession 1930, 8th
ed. (Göttingen:Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1979), 464f.

Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 6, No. 3 (2008): 681–688

681

A Note on Jean Porter’s Nature as Reason
S TEVEN A. L ONG
Ave Maria University
Ave Maria, Florida

I N HER WORK Nature as Reason,1 Jean Porter commendably affirms
several strategic yet controverted premises of sound theology and philosophy. Amongst these are the ethical significance of “pre-rational nature”;
a non-dualist treatment of human nature; a posteriori reasoning; dependence on sensible experience and (arguably too greatly) upon social
context in cognition; the priority of the speculative to the practical; and,
crucially, the reality of an ethically significant hierarchy of ends prior to
choice. In all this, Jean Porter is an author to cause an unreconstructed
Thomistic realist to sing to the angels. Moreover, so that full disclosure
may be observed, I am personally grateful to the author for her appreciation of my own work, both regarding the relation of nature and grace,
and regarding the character of the object of the moral act. With all this
to appreciate, it is perhaps perverse to turn in a critical review.Yet there
are three significant considerations in her recent work whose problematic implications seem to cut back against the grain of Thomistic moral
realism. Because they are dispositive with respect to many important
discussions in moral philosophy, political philosophy, and moral theology,
it is upon these points that I wish briefly to focus.They are as follows:
1. her reluctance to cede that any initial ethically significant knowledge
may unproblematically follow upon the “close in” teleologies of
nature, even in precision from the more complete contemplation of
the unified hierarchy of ends and as a condition for the discovery of
this unified hierarchy;
1 Jean Porter, Nature as Reason:A Thomistic Theory of the Natural Law (Grand Rapids,

MI: Eerdmans, 2005).

Steven A. Long

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2. her account of the social embeddedness of our knowledge of the
natural law and the epistemic elements of her account of the extension of natural law reasoning to diverse social matter;
3. her sanguine view of secular subjective right.
With respect to the third, she shares something in common with a great
Thomist mind of an earlier generation, Jacques Maritain; the second
consideration is something that she shares with many critics of natural
law thought for whom social context may seem to obscure rather than
prudentially specify natural law norms; and the first she shares with some
of those who would be critical of her own position about nature on the
ground that it is unduly “physicalistic.”
With respect to the first listed issue, Porter correctly insists that it is the
whole hierarchy of ends as defining the nature of the good that enters
into our particular natural law judgments. Yet one might wonder
whether, epistemically, the knowledge of this hierarchy is not achieved
through experience, over time, and in such a manner that the “close in”
teleologies of nature provide a partial account—in need of further interpretation and analysis, but nonetheless, true—which itself has moral
implications. Speaking about these issues in relation to the general analysis of sexual morality, she writes:
The scholastics do not argue from the observed effects of sexual intercourse, or from the structure and function of the sexual organs, to the
place of sexuality in human life. Rather, they argue from judgments
about the proper place of sexuality in human life to a set of conclusions
about the purpose of the sex act and the proper uses of one’s sexual
organs. Their analysis is teleological, in the sense that it presupposes
some account of what human life considered as a whole should look
like and what purposes the different inclinations and functions of
human life serve within that context. But nothing in their analysis
requires them to argue from the purposes of human functions or
organs, considered in isolation from a context set by the overall wellbeing of the organism, or by a broader account of the proper shape of
human life.2

It is certainly true regarding the scholastics that “nothing in their analysis
requires them to argue from the purposes of human functions or organs,
considered in isolation from a context set by the overall well-being of the
organism, or by a broader account of the proper shape of human life” (my
emphasis).This statement is especially true if by “considered in isolation”
2 Nature as Reason, 76–77.

On Jean Porter’s Nature as Reason

683

one means “considered outside of the narrative of unified normative teleology” or “apart from the whole hierarchy of morally significant human
ends.” Certainly whatever we may say of natural teleology forms a
constituent of the broader account of the unified and (prior to choice)
ethically significant order of ends. However, if by “considered in isolation”
one means that no knowledge of ethical significance may be implied by the
natural ordering of our sexual functions in precision from comprehensive
wisdom regarding the integration of this ordering with the wider goods
of human life, this seems to be false. For how do we know the whole, apart
from reference to the parts as parts? And the parts are not, as it were, lacking all ethical significance until the moment we fully understand their role
in a good life, any more than the understanding that the hand is part of
the body is incorrect prior to achieving a completely comprehensive
knowledge of anatomy. Granted that the part is only a part because of its
order toward the whole, our knowledge of the whole is indeed mediated
through the parts.Thus, as true as it is that all genuinely human action is
constituted as such in relation to the finis ultimus, our understanding of
how some actions are ordered to the finis ultimus progresses through experience and inference.Why, then, should it be impossible to draw any proximate knowledge of ethical significance whatsoever from the “close in”
teleologies of nature, including the close in teleologies of sexual nature?
After all, simply to know that sexual functions are indeed ordered to the
comprehensive well-being of the human person, and to know this ordering prior to possessing a complete account of that comprehensive wellbeing, is ethically significant knowledge. Put differently: what is not in the
premises cannot validly make a novel appearance in the conclusion. But
our conclusions regarding the hierarchy of ends presuppose ethically
significant premises which constitute our early knowledge of this hierarchy of ends.
The danger to be avoided is the affirmation of the teleological whole
of the good life whilst denying the reality and ethical significance of the
knowledge of its teleologically commensurated parts, i.e., the hierarchically unified ends themselves. Simply to identify something as an end is
already to some degree to place it in reference to the finis ultimus, and so
that which makes it to be a part (a constituent of the good life) is already
discerned as that which makes it to be further ordered (toward the final
end). Hence in principle one might think that there is no reason why the
knowledge of sexual teleologies should not already and as such imply
certain ethical judgments even prior to the full development of normative wisdom regarding the role of sexual activity with respect to the hierarchy of ends in a virtuous life.

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In sum: any knowledge of an end as such already carries with it an
inceptive judgment of its good in relation to happiness. As this good of
order vis-a-vis happiness, owing to which we call a thing an end and a
good, cannot both be good and not-be good, so the actions ordered to
bringing about such ends and goods cannot both do so and fail to do so.
And those acts that are deliberately undertaken in such a manner as to
directly impede their order to the end are defective. It is simply implausible that the relation to happiness, owing to which something is an end,
should not provide the basis for criticism for deprivations with respect to
that end. And howsoever much the larger context of the order of ends
adds to the inceptive understanding of the subordinated end in question,
it does not seem plausible to say that it can subtract from that understanding without denying its status as a good tout court, which is precisely
what is contrary to fact.This line of reflection raises not merely the issue
of sexual ethics, but the broader issue of the way in which the natural
inclinational order passively participates and mediates the eternal law. Of
course, if an inclination is plausibly argued to be trivial in nature, then
there is less weight to the consideration. But with respect to “metaphysical biology” and sexual ethics, it is difficult to avoid the speculative judgment that here one faces not something trivial, but one of the essential
structuring dynamisms of the human person. On this ground, one would
think that the inceptive knowledge of procreative teleology would be
extremely important and laden with ethical implications.
Similarly crucial is one’s epistemic confidence, or lack thereof, in the
prudential intelligibility of the social mediation of natural law judgments.
It is impossible, within the confines of a brief review, adequately to
address this question. But one notes that, for Porter,
[b]ecause we are complex creatures, there can be a variety of adequate
expressions of our nature—as the scholastics knew—and correlatively,
these expressions will inevitably take the form of social conventions
developed through some form of communal reflection—as they also
knew.There is thus ample room for cultural and historical variation in
socially particular expressions of the natural law, and this is why we can
legitimately speak in terms of natural moralities, rather than in terms of
one determinate set of natural law precepts.3

She continues to develop this theme further on in her exposition:
At the end of the last chapter, we noted that moral concepts are always
necessarily indeterminate to some degree, and this indeterminacy
3 Nature as Reason, 333.

On Jean Porter’s Nature as Reason

685

places limits on the degree of certainty that we can attain in particular
instances of choice. What is more, this indeterminacy of particular
choices inevitably introduces elements of contingency at the social
level, where moralities emerge and develop out of the intelligibilities
informing human nature.This does not mean that the development of
particular moralities is an arational process, any more than moral judgment at the individual level is irrational. Nonetheless, the kind of
rationality in question cannot be analyzed in such a way as to imply
that the social processes of moral discernment can or should (even “in
principle”) yield a rationally compelling set of moral norms purged of
all contingent elements.
This brings us to a crucial point. The intelligibilities of human
nature inform social norms, and for that reason we can analyze and
evaluate particular moralities in terms of their natural origins. In that
sense, the Thomistic theory of the natural law is a realistic theory, and
implies a version of moral cognitivism.Yet the intelligibilities of human
nature underdetermine their forms of expression, and that is why this
theory does not yield a comprehensive set of determinate moral norms,
compelling to all rational persons. In order to move from our best
accounts of human nature to moral judgments, we must first of all take
account of the diverse social forms through which our shared nature is
expressed, and secondly, we must appraise these in terms of criteria that
will inevitably becontingent to some degree.4

Yet nature abstracted as a whole is formal and yet includes the common matter
of the definition. Similarly, one might think that the social investiture of
moral reason is—even when essential to the particular moral informing
in question—distinguishable from the animating moral ratio of a given
society’s practice, or, put differently, resoluble into form and matter. As
regards the material element, even where this is a matter of a stark determinatio—e.g., to drive on the left rather than on the right side of the
road, or the other way ’round—it shares something in common with the
natural law that it determines (in the illustration, for example, the avoidance of unnecessary fatalities is achieved through the legal specification
of which side of the road to drive on).Whether the social matter mediating natural law judgment represents something strongly ex natura in the
development of peoples through which most successful societies may be
expected eventually to pass (e.g., the development of procedural rules of
justice—here one thinks fondly of Lon Fuller’s old classic The Morality of
Law ) or something more starkly accidental to time and place, it does not
seem to constitute some species of enlightenment moral foundationalism
to see the unified natural hierarchy of ends principiating all such social
4 Nature as Reason, 338.

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Steven A. Long

enfleshment of moral certitudes. And hence it would seem that there are
not so much multiple natural law moralities, as implications of one natural law morality according to the social circumstances.This goes back to
the first point as well: since even to know an end is implicitly to know it
in relation to the finis ultimus, the minimal inceptive knowledge of any
good as such carries with it real ethical implications knowable at an early
stage in the development of ethical wisdom.
The third conspicuously controversial point, from which Porter does
not flinch, consists in her optimism regarding the application of the secular notion of “right.” Here, an even minimally adequate consideration
could not avoid comparison with the optimism of Jacques Maritain in his
view of a pure practical consensus somehow abstracted from speculative
differences, which he hoped might mediate truths of the natural law in
political order and canonize a certain understanding of “rights.”Yet, without taking up this theme in detail at present, one must note: times have
changed.While in Maritain’s day the sociopolitical and moral consensus
in North America was decidedly influenced both by the material legacy
and the formal inspiration of Christian thought, it is this very phenomenon of American “exceptionalism” that has been melting away over the
intervening decades. It is no longer clear that American public order is
quite so immune from the enlightenment anti-Christian prejudices that
are so well-entrenched within European society. Porter is persuaded that
talk of “rights” is largely of Christian provenance, being a function of the
transcendent vocation and dignity of the person. She is also well content
that something that initially is of Christian origin should become of
world-wide import with its secularization. On both these counts,
however, there is pause for concern.
There is a Christian notion of “rights.” But this notion is always
contextualized both from “above”—by principled reflection on the hierarchy of ends all the way to the beatific vision—and from “beneath”—by
prudential discernment of circumstance. Hence rights are a derived rather
than a foundational notion.The modern use of “rights” forgets both these
points, and so instigates perpetual conflict in society by encouraging the
endless fomenting of claims and resentment toward the necessary natural
and prudential limits of political order as such.The result—which the late
Richard Weaver used to call the psychology of the “spoiled child”—is a
perpetual divagation from reason in behalf of various extremely abstract
claims that can be entertained at all only thanks to news media and an
entertainment industry happy to gratify the politically correct imagination. Both over-abstraction from (or outright denial of) revelation and the
rejection of classically Aristotelian ethical wisdom entail the rejection of

On Jean Porter’s Nature as Reason

687

any unified hierarchy of natural ends. Since secularist rights-based regimes
seem to be typified by both these errors, Porter’s confidence in the salutary character of contemporary dependence upon the category of subjective “rights” is difficult to emulate—although, since it is a category that
can be made sense of only on the basis of some strong natural law account,
perhaps in the long run that itself is a reason for hope.
Porter’s work is theoretically rich and supple, and her appreciation of
the role of the speculative knowledge of nature for ethics is both instructive and all too rare. Readers will learn from her exposition even where
they may find themselves disposed to object. Far from being merely
historical, her effort is thoroughly systematic and attempts to exhibit both
the character and limits, and the applicability, of natural law reasoning for
contemporary theological, moral, and political thought.While this present
review essay is critically preoccupied with certain controversial aspects of
the book that catch the eye of a more classically formed Thomist reader,
no serious interest in the natural law should deprive itself of the benefit
N&V
of a careful reading of Jean Porter’s Nature as Reason.

Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 6, No. 3 (2008): 689–710

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Book Reviews
Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective by David Burrell, C.S.C
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), xxii + 266 pp.
DAVID B URRELL has brought together sixteen of his essays published
over the past twenty years in diverse journals and Festschrifts with the
single explicit aim of supplanting today’s dominant notion of freedom as
autonomy with the more classical understanding of freedom as a response
to the gift of being. He goes about this task by retrieving the metaphysical foundations of this richer notion of freedom in the creation theologies of Thomas Aquinas and his medieval Islamic and Jewish predecessors.
Readers familiar with the Notre Dame professor’s previous Freedom and
Creation in Three Traditions will find a welcome continuation of that study
in this new collection of essays.
The first chapter tackles the problems of divine eternity and simplicity. He shows how Aquinas used Avicenna to go beyond him, appropriating the latter’s esse/essentia distinction while making the simplicity that
proceeds from their identity in God the source of divine necessity, infinity, and eternity. Once present existence replaces timeless entities as the
key analogue, God’s eternity escapes the misconception of a static divine
life.Turning to the problem of multiple acts of knowing and willing, the
author proposes that the model of practical knowing allowed Aquinas to
find a solution that remained beyond the grasp of his Jewish and Islamic
predecessors. No distinct act of choosing one of several possible scenarios in the divine mind needs to be posited, for the object made is the
term of God’s creative knowledge.The essay concludes by suggesting that
process theology’s concerns about the unresponsiveness of a God who is
infinite act are unfounded. Aquinas’s God relates to creation “with an
understanding love which is the quintessence of responsiveness” (18).
While Aquinas’s understanding of God is in some ways far from Aristotle’s First Mover, the author does not show how Aquinas has a notion of
divine responsiveness.

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Chapter two introduces us to al-Ghazali’s rejection of philosophy in
the religious search for God and his subordination of the intellect to the
heart, leading to comparisons with Augustine and Kierkegaard. Chapter
three traces Maimonides’s conclusion that we cannot go beyond equivocal divine names to the Avicennian reduction of divine knowledge to
speculative knowing, which would make all events in creation necessary
(as necessary conclusions in God’s speculative intellect). Maimonides
rejected such a model for the divine intellect, but since he failed to introduce the (biblical) artisan metaphor (as Aquinas did), he could not escape
the equivocity of divine names.
Chapter four considers how Maimonides, Gersonides, and Aquinas
approach the themes of providence and evil, especially in the Book of
Job.The extent to which both Jewish philosophers appropriated Islamic
thought to interpret Job is striking. Aquinas was able to overcome their
struggles to synthesize providence and human freedom by his careful
attentiveness to language and grammar. This fascinating chapter gives us
a foretaste of the author’s forthcoming theological commentary on the
Book of Job (Brazos Press).
Chapter five proposes three key lasting contributions by Aquinas to
philosophical theology regarding: 1) analogous language, 2) practical knowing and creation, and 3) the compatibility of providence and human freedom. For the second area, Burrell identifies esse in the sense of act as a key
doctrine in the elaboration of divine transcendence and the creator-creature relationship.
The sixth chapter seeks to demonstrate how Aquinas’s “actualism” and
its relation to the doctrine of God’s free creation exemplify the dialectic
of faith and reason, especially how the faith horizon exercises a normative role over the believer’s appropriation of an ontology. Burrell critiques
the theology of possible worlds from which God freely chooses as rooted
in a metaphysics that privileges possibility over actuality.The author identifies Aquinas’s solution to the problem of possible worlds in the distinction between the exemplars used in divine practical knowing to create
beings and God’s simple understanding of non-existents. He then
proceeds to show how the primacy of existence itself entails the creature’s
relation to its creator and overcomes a false dilemma between transcendence and immanence, thus providing the key to God’s distinction from
the world. Burrell’s synthetic ability on this point is impressive.Yet it is
not clear how this essay demonstrates the normative role of faith in the
appropriation of an ontology. Finally, the author follows Norman Kretzmann in posing the dilemma between Aquinas’s appropriation of the
Neoplatonic axiom bonum diffusivum sui and God’s free creation, suggest-

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ing that Thomas offers no clear solution except for a Trinitarian one. But
this assumes that the axiom’s meaning in Plotinus and Aquinas is essentially the same, without recognizing Thomas’s transformation of the
axiom by its subordination to the finality of the good. (See Bernhard
Blankenhorn,“The Good as Self-Diffusive in Thomas Aquinas,” Angelicum
79 [2002]: 803–37.)
The seventh chapter again invokes the faith/reason dialectic, but now
looks to demonstrate how one kind of philosophical approach, that of
Aquinas, provides a “grammar” that is more amenable for the lived
language of faith than another, that of Scotus. Burrell considers the
themes of the understanding’s proper object, the notion of existence, the
mind’s act of judgment, and human freedom in both medieval thinkers
to carry out this task. He masterfully demonstrates how utterly intertwined these issues are for both thinkers.
Chapter eight takes up Ralph McInerny’s work on analogy.The Notre
Dame philosopher did not so much seek a restriction of the doctrine to
the realm of logic, as he wanted to point to the need to pay careful attention to the analogous use of language. Such hard work bears metaphysical fruit, since the fact of creation assures a certain parallel between logic
and “reality,” an insight often missed by mind/world dualisms that create
false epistemological problems. Burrell then turns to McInerny’s treatment of participation. Participated perfections provide the bridge that
makes analogous discourse about God possible, yet participation itself
presumes creation, the proper conception of which is a faith-doctrine
(ST I, q. 32, a. 1, ad 3). Such a faith-based discourse does not demand a
firm conceptual grasp of the realities signified by the terms we use analogously, but simply an awareness of their status as perfections. Its ultimate
justification is creation itself.
One wonders whether Burrell has considered the possibility of analogous discourse about God that does not already depend on revealed
truths such as the Trinity.The very same Summa article that Burrell mines
in this chapter includes the insistence that “those things which pertain to
the unity of God’s essence can be known through natural reason” (ST I,
q. 32, a. 1). For Aquinas, such knowledge entails the possibility of true,
analogous discourse about the first cause of the universe and its finite
perfections, even if the free nature of God’s creative act may be hard to
reach through reason alone.
Chapter nine considers how Aquinas seeks metaphysical expressions of
the revealed truth that God freely creates the universe as a response to
Neoplatonic emanation schemes. Burrell identifies Thomas’s transformation
of Avicenna’s esse/essentia distinction through the Aristotelian category of act

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as a crucial accomplishment in this task, one that in turn leads to recognizing the immense ineffable nature of both the divinity and creatures, since
act is not so much conceptualized as it is manifested through examples.
Aquinas’s doctrine of esse is thus inseparable from negative theology. The
author proposes that emanation and artistic making are complementary
models for creation, an insight exemplified by Thomas’s own theological
synthesis. Thomas attained this original synthesis through an inherent
faith/reason dialectic whose traces remain difficult to discover.
Chapter ten argues that we may be on the verge of losing our trust in
freedom, a situation which calls us to the urgent task of retrieving alternative notions of freedom and their underlying metaphysics from the
three Abrahamic traditions.
Chapter eleven introduces us to al-Ghazali’s understanding of created
freedom, where God is the primary analogue for agency. In some ways,
his notion of freedom seems closer to Aquinas’s conception than to
Scotus’s voluntarism.
Chapter twelve proposes that the major divergence between Aquinas
and Scotus on the themes of creation’s contingency is rooted in their
opposite approaches to language.Aquinas sought to root logic in language,
while Scotus refined language to serve logic.Thus,Aquinas placed the life
of faith (and its language) at the service of theology, while Scotus sought
conceptual clarity well separated from a life of piety. The author offers a
subtle demonstration of this thesis amidst an impressive array of insights
on the inner logic of the Angelic and Subtle Doctors’ metaphysics.
Chapter thirteen introduces the book’s third section, “Interfaith
Encounter.”The author’s main aim is to show how a dialogue among the
monotheistic traditions on God and creation can illumine each tradition’s
blind spots. With John Milbank, the author insists that reason is always
bound by tradition, and thus faith. The essay takes us on a somewhat
disorganized tour that highlights the ways in which Aquinas,
Maimonides, and medieval Islamic philosophers related to ancient philosophy and their religious contemporaries as they articulated the distinction of God from the world and his free creation thereof.
Chapter fourteen continues the discussion on the ways in which alGhazali and Maimonides related to their philosophical predecessors around
the theme of creation as a free divine act. Chapter fifteen proposes ways
in which the doctrines of creation and redemption are closely intertwined and, it seems for Burrell, interdependent.The end of the Sabbath
rest in Christianity and Philip the Chancellor’s distinction between grace
and nature helped lead to the assumption that creation (unlike grace) is
not a gift.The doctrine of creation continues to suffer from an oblivion

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693

in contemporary theology, from liberal Christianity, to process thought,
to recent theologies of the Cross ( Jüngel, Moltmann). Instead, creation’s
profound ordering towards divinization and creation’s place as a hermeneutical key for the Incarnation need to be recovered.
Chapter sixteen explores the function and purpose of faith statements in
Augustine and the Auschwitz victim Etty Hillesum. Burrell rightfully warns
against the danger of detaching religious affirmations from their traditions,
against a de-contextualized comparison of doctrines from different faiths.
He also integrates George Lindbeck’s linguistic turn by proposing that
doctrines primarily have a grammatical, and not a theoretical function, so
that the authentic transformation of lives becomes a higher standard of
judgment for doctrinal truth.This seems somewhat far from classical understandings of the nature of infused faith and the function of Christian dogma.
Burrell has convincingly demonstrated that a return to a more classical understanding of freedom is only possible through a doctrine of
creation. He has also shown that, among the medievals,Aquinas’s synthesis of creation and freedom was in fact the best of his era, yet only because
he engaged in a rich dialogue with his Islamic and Jewish predecessors.
Many of today’s theological impasses stem from an inadequate understanding of creation, and the clearest solution seems to be a much more
generous appropriation of classical (especially Thomistic) metaphysics
than most contemporary theologians are ready to undertake. Burrell
shows that contemporary theology desperately needs Aquinas, a considerable accomplishment.The author has also shown that medieval philosophy was profoundly enriched by a kind of inter-religious dialogue whose
openness to the other offers a model for us today.
At times, the essays lack unity and clarity, yet the author’s impressive
grasp of the medieval sources and his considerable synthetic abilities make
this somewhat laborious reading well worth the effort. My major concern
remains what appears to be the author’s consistently Bonaventurian
understanding of the faith-reason relationship, one that he attributes to
Thomas himself. While Aquinas probably underestimated the extent to
which tradition and culture shape much of our thought, including philosophical inquiry, his own assertions about the capacity of pagan philosophy without the help of revelation cannot be reconciled with the Radical
Orthodoxy position that the author seems to espouse, that all philosophy
is always-already theological. In fact, philosophy’s thorough dependence
on theology seems to be more of a working assumption on the part of
the author, for which he gives only occasional and incomplete arguments. One also wonders to what extent he has considered Aquinas’s
rather elaborate development of the grace/nature distinction.

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Nevertheless, the present collection demonstrates that Burrell has
made a significant contribution to the metaphysics and theology of
creation in the past twenty years, while offering considerable stimulus to
the dialogues with Judaism and Islam that may have paid far too little
attention to the doctrine of creation and its profound relation to the
entirety of the three great monotheistic faiths.
N&V
Bernhard Blankenhorn, O.P.
University of Fribourg
Fribourg, Switzerland

The Trinitarian Theology of Basil of Caesarea: A Synthesis of
Greek Thought and Biblical Truth by Stephen M. Hildebrand (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), xiv + 254 pp.
W ITH THE publication of The Trinitarian Theology of Basil of Caesarea,
Stephen Hildebrand, who teaches theology at the Franciscan University
of Stuebenville, has done students of the Church Fathers, and in particular of St. Basil of Caesarea, a wonderful service, both in furthering our
understanding of the alleged “Hellenization” of Christian thought and in
grappling with questions surrounding scriptural interpretation in the
fourth century. Hildebrand’s study, which is a revised version of his
doctoral dissertation, written under Joseph Lienhard at Fordham University, is a wide-ranging and at the same time careful technical, analytical
study of St. Basil’s methodology in defending his Trinitarian theology.
The study is wide-ranging. It begins with an introductory chapter that
outlines the various approaches to the relationship between Greek paideia
and biblical truth, which Hildebrand classifies as “corruption theory,”
“displacement theory,” and “hybrid theory.” Drawing on Basil’s Ad adolescentes, Hildebrand shows the importance of Greek learning for Basil’s
theology, while at the same time insisting that this “in no way compromises the centrality of the Bible” (9). Thus, speaking in defence of a
“hybrid model” of both Greek and biblical thought in Basil’s approach,
Hildebrand insists that neither “holds a simple precedence over the other
in Basil’s theology” (12), though the Bible does have “a certain priority”
in his thought (14). The author concludes chapter one, in which he
provides an overview of Basil’s life, along with its mixed accomplishments, with the suggestion that Basil’s career did not end in failure, but
that instead the Cappadocian’s success lay “in his construction of a
synthesis of Greek paideia and Christian truth” (29).
These first two chapters thus set the stage for the remainder of the book,
which has two main foci: the development of Basil’s Trinitarian thought

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(chapters two and three) and his scriptural exegesis in defence of Trinitarian doctrine (chapters four through six).Thus, in relatively quick pace (the
discussion spans around 160 pages) we encounter discussions surrounding
Basil’s move away from a homoian position to a more strictly homoousian
viewpoint, we learn of Basil’s views about divine plurality and kinship (his
use of the terms prosop̃˜ on and hypostasis), and we find out that up until the
end, Basil retained a certain flexibility in his use of the various terms that
one could use to speak of the Trinity:“Understanding the historical development of Basil’s thought makes it evident that, although he clearly comes
to judge some Trinitarian words better than others, his Trinitarian terms are
not enshrined in formulae” (99). Moreover, Hildebrand provides the reader
with discussions surrounding ancient rhetoric as reflected in Basil’s writings, deals with the tension between allegorical reading in Basil’s homilies
vis-à-vis its disparagement in the Hexaemeron, discusses issues such as divine
inspiration and the role of tradition, and demonstrates that Basil regards
certain scriptural texts as particularly foundational to demonstrate the
consubstantiality of the Son and the Spirit with the Father ( John 14:9 in
the case of the Son and 1 Corinthians 12:3 in the case of the Holy Spirit).
Hildebrand’s study is not just wide-ranging; in various ways, its often
careful analysis bears the marks of an in-depth doctoral study and sheds
significant light on the development of Basil’s thought and the structure of
some of his works. Most notable, perhaps, is the intricate and helpful
discussion of the four stages of the development of Basil’s Trinitarian
thought. The first phase constitutes St. Basil’s “homoiousian years” (c.
360–65) (31). His correspondence with Apollinaris shows Basil’s aversion
to the term homoousios. While certainly opposing Arianism during this
period—witness his Contra Eunomium—Basil “is still uncomfortable with
the term” homoousios (45). The second phase dates from c. 365–72, years
during which Basil undergoes his “conversion” to homoousious (76–82).
Having “witnessed firsthand the abuses suffered by the word homoios” (79),
Basil largely, though not totally, shifts away from using the latter term.
Finally, in the third and fourth phases of his development, Basil begins to
use the term prosop̃˜ on for divine plurality (c. 372), while the term hypostasis gets removed from divine oneness, being linked solely with the threeness of God instead (c. 375–79). In these latter phases, it is Sabellian
modalism rather than Eunomian Arianism that is responsible for the development of Basil’s theology. Again, however, Hildebrand concludes that
“although he [Basil] clearly comes to judge some Trinitarian words better
than others, his Trinitarian terms are not enshrined in formulae” (99).
The care that Hildebrand takes in his reading of St. Basil also shows in his
discussion of allegorical versus historical interpretation, or, put differently,

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Book Reviews

the tension between the Alexandrian and Antiochian approaches to
Scripture.Also here, the author resists simplification, rejecting a common
understanding of Basil as Antiochian in his interpretation of Scripture
(126, 133), refusing to classify it as either Alexandrian or Antiochian
(170). Hildebrand presents a plea to move away from questions of allegory as such to Basil’s use of spiritual interpretation and his view of the
unity of the Old and New Testaments instead (127). Such an approach
yields interesting results: clearly, Basil’s reading of the Psalms is Christological, and despite the anti-allegorical comments in his Hexaemeron, also
here Basil continues to make use of spiritual interpretation (138–39).
Further, the overall theme of the relationship between Greek thought
and Christian doctrine, the main theme of the book, is traced with careful nuance, demonstrating, throughout, the interactive nature of the two
in Basil’s thought. Hildebrand’s approach allows him to reject the still all
too common “corruption theory” of Harnack and others.With regard to
the term ousia, Hildebrand insists that while it is of course a borrowed
term, it does not derive clearly from any of the philosophies of the day:
Basil “does not appropriate any particular metaphysical system in toto”
(46).Again, while it is certainly possible to trace Stoic categories in Basil’s
thought, the Cappadocian Father differs from Stoic philosophy in his
rejection of materialism and in his insistence that the ousia of God transcends the world (50–51). Furthermore, the impact of his debates with
opponents means that the naïve assumption of a capitulation to Greek
philosophy ignores Basil’s interest in maintaining scriptural integrity:
“Thus, Basil’s encounters with his contemporaries shaped his choice of
Trinitarian words just as much or more than his eclectic borrowing from
Greek philosophy” (100; cf. 188).
At the same time, the important strengths of the book—its broad
range and its in-depth analysis—perhaps render it somewhat vulnerable
as well.Within a relatively brief space, the author wants to do a great deal,
on occasion perhaps too much. I am wondering, for example, about the
need for the two appendices, particularly the second one, on the dating
of Ep. 9 and of Contra Eunomium (193–222). The technical detail
provided here, while interesting to some specialists, does take away from
discussions on which the author could perhaps have been more forthcoming, such as Basil’s methodology of spiritual interpretation and his
use of allegory.Another point of interest, not really discussed in this book,
is the role of spiritual interpretation as an important factor stimulating
doctrinal development. The result is that the connection between the
chapters on the development of Basil’s Trinitarian thought and those on
his exegesis of Scripture is not as tight as perhaps it could be. Further,

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considering the technical detail of some of the Trinitarian discussions, a
more relaxed or drawn-out description of Basil’s thought would likely
have been welcomed by many a reader.
All in all, Hildebrand’s study is important in that it recognizes the
intricate link between Greek philosophical thought and scriptural exegesis, while providing a helpful way into many of the contemporary discusN&V
sions surrounding Basil’s Trinitarian theology.
Hans Boersma
Regent College
Vancouver, Canada

From Holiness to Wisdom:The Nature of Theology According to
St. Bonaventure by Gregory LaNave (Rome: Istituto Storico dei Cappuccini, 2005), 244 pp.
T HIS VOLUME by Gregory LaNave concerns itself with a contemporary
question, the solution of which is provided by Bonaventure of Bagnoreggio. LaNave, citing several authors in the introductory chapter, and especially Hans Urs von Balthasar, believes that one of the problems of
contemporary theology is its disjunction from holiness. Although one of
LaNave’s contentions is that all saints, because of their intimate union with
God, can be sources of theology in one sense, he extracts Bonaventure
from the “cloud of witnesses” as a unique source because of his scientific
understanding of the nature of theology and because of his own dependence on a saint (Francis) for his theology. In his exploration of Bonaventure’s theology, LaNave is interested primarily in the Seraphic Doctor’s
treatment of three topics: theology as science, holiness, and wisdom.
Chapter two addresses Bonaventure’s treatment of theology as a science.
Focusing primarily on Bonaventure’s early Sentences commentary, LaNave
discusses Bonaventure’s views about the material cause, the formal cause,
the final cause, and the efficient cause of theology. Theologians from the
middle of the thirteenth century used these Aristotelian categories to
discuss theology as a science, but LaNave wants to emphasize that for
Bonaventure, theology is an affective science, based on the articles of faith,
whose purpose is the beatitude of the theologian.A theologian can demonstrate further conclusions from the articles of faith so long as his or her
orientation is towards the light of revelation and the faith which that revelation elicits.The beatitude of the theologian occurs principally through a
consideration of Christ’s humanity rooted in revelation and grace.
In chapter three, LaNave discusses Bonaventure’s understanding of the
relationship between holiness and theology. Holiness refers to the quality

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of the soul informed by the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and LaNave examines Bonaventure’s distinctive approach to how the gifts of the Holy Spirit
relate to the virtues and the beatitudes.Turning to Bonaventure’s Itinerarium mentis in Deum, LaNave discusses how the theologian, transformed by
grace, learns to know God through and in things outside, inside, and above
the soul, a cognitive and affective process which leads to a loving perception of the Trinity through conformity to the crucified Christ.
Bonaventure’s emphasis on the crucified Christ as the expression of
Trinitarian love leads LaNave in chapter four to consider the theological
significance of Saint Francis. LaNave argues that Francis, because of his
holiness (or better, because of the holiness manifested by his stigmata), is
a theological source for Bonaventure, who turned from Peter Lombard
to Francis to find the ideal theologian. Francis’s own knowledge of God
is expressed in the stigmata, and this knowledge, which is sapiential in
nature, is what the theologian should be seeking, an intimate knowledge
of God that involves one’s whole being. The wisdom that perfects the
intellect of the theologian and unites the will to God is the same wisdom
that is expressed in the figure of the saint.
Chapter five discusses Bonaventure’s doctrine of wisdom.This chapter
is important because it clarifies the distinction between knowledge (scientia) and wisdom and how they relate to theology, and it discusses how
knowledge, holiness, and wisdom relate to one another. In this chapter,
LaNave draws from several sources, including the sermon “Christus unus
omnium magister,” the De scientia Christi, the Sentences commentary, and
the Collationes in Hexaëmeron, and LaNave is sensitive to the differences
among Bonaventure’s discussion of wisdom in these works. LaNave’s
discussion of wisdom involves looking primarily at three things in
Bonaventure’s theology: the kinds of wisdom, the forms of wisdom, and
the causes of wisdom.
Focusing primarily on the Sentences commentary, LaNave describes
the four kinds of wisdom.The first kind is the general cognition of things
either divine or human.When knowledge pertains to what is divine, it is
wisdom (in some sense), and when it pertains to what is human, it is
knowledge.There is nothing supernatural about this kind of knowledge,
and it does not require any likeness of the soul to God produced by grace
(deiformitas). In some sense, this knowledge is not wisdom properly speaking, but only by equivocation.The second kind of wisdom is philosophical wisdom, and this wisdom involves the knowledge of eternal things
(as opposed to human things), but it still does not require the presence of
grace.The third kind of wisdom is theological wisdom, and this wisdom
involves knowing God “according to piety.” This wisdom, which is

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produced by grace, is the act by which the soul unveils the meaning of
God’s revelation.The fourth kind of wisdom is mystical wisdom, and this
is the act by which the soul experiences God directly. This wisdom is
both cognitive and affective, and it is the highest form of wisdom.
In addition to these kinds of knowledge there are also four forms of
knowledge, which Bonaventure outlines in the Collationes in Hexaëmeron
(see Collation 2).The first form is uniform wisdom, which consists of the
rules by which the mind knows things with certitude.The second form
is multiform wisdom, which consists of the many signs and figures
contained in Scripture.This form most properly corresponds to theological wisdom. The third form of wisdom is omniform wisdom, which
consists of seeing the “vestiges” of God in all creatures.This form corresponds closely to philosophical wisdom. The fourth form of wisdom is
nulliform wisdom. In this wisdom love effects a union between the soul
and God.The union between the soul and God occurs because the soul
abandons itself to God, who is incomprehensibly transcendent. Although
this wisdom is not mediated by any creature, Bonaventure connects the
cruciformity of Christ’s wounds and Francis’s stigmata with this form of
wisdom, since Christ’s crucifixion symbolizes the soul’s abandonment to
God (see Itinerarium mentis in Deum 7, 2).
Bonaventure also lists four causes of wisdom: the material cause (all
things), the formal cause (the conformity between the expressive revelation in Christ and the action of grace in the soul), the final cause (nulliform wisdom), and the efficient cause (the saint). LaNave argues
persuasively that the key cause here for understanding theology as
wisdom is the formal cause, the conformity between the revelation in
Christ and the soul’s grace.
In the concluding sixth chapter, LaNave argues that for Bonaventure,
theology as a science becomes wisdom only through holiness. Grace
transforms how reason operates in theology, so that there is not merely
knowledge of God as an object, but there is a sort of connatural knowledge of God effected by the likeness of the soul to God when filled with
sanctifying grace. LaNave also revisits the concerns he described about
contemporary theology in the opening chapter. In what seems almost like
an appendix, LaNave considers the role of holiness in three modern
theologians: William Thompson, François-Marie Léthel, and Hans Urs
von Balthasar. He compares the importance of saints in their theology and
concludes that, compared to Bonaventure,Thompson neglects the object
of theology, Léthel rejects the scientific nature of theology, and Balthasar
focuses so much on the self-abandonment of the saint that the reciprocal
relationship of self-giving love is overlooked. Despite pointing out these

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differences, LaNave shows several similarities between these authors and
Bonaventure, but in the end LaNave offers Bonaventure as an exemplary
model for how the contemporary theologian can learn to write theology.
For the most part, this study stays close to Bonaventure’s texts. LaNave
has studied the relevant texts carefully, sometimes even pointing out
mistranslations in English editions of Bonaventure’s works. He is keenly
aware of the development in Bonaventure’s thought, but because of his
effort to treat theology as science, holiness, and wisdom individually by
drawing from much of Bonaventure’s thought (although biblical
commentaries and many sermons are omitted from the study), this development is sometimes neglected in favor of an appropriation of the most
relevant texts, regardless of their chronological placement. Also, the
culling of texts from various sources sometimes omits the significance of
their literary contexts. Regarding any of the three main topics, thorough
engagement with even a majority of relevant passages would have been
impossible simply because there are so many; still, although LaNave does
a good job highlighting the most important passages, he could have filled
out the discussion, especially of wisdom, by drawing from a greater variety of texts from the Sentences commentary.
LaNave engages a broad swath of the vast secondary literature on
Bonaventure, and he also discusses how Bonaventure’s theology compares
with that of modern theologians, such as Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von
Balthasar, and Joseph Ratzinger, who also interpreted central dimensions
of Bonaventure’s theology. The engagement with contemporary theologians at times diminishes the engagement with the historical and literary
contexts of Bonaventure’s writings, but it does serve the larger effort to
argue for a union of theology and holiness in contemporary theology.
Overall, this work is an excellent study of Bonaventure’s understanding of theology. LaNave writes clearly, even when explaining technical
scholastic vocabulary, and the structure of the book is simple and clear.
Grounding his study in Bonaventure’s work and bringing it into conversation with contemporary interpreters, LaNave offers both a penetrating
study of Bonaventure’s thought and a retrieval of this scholastic theologian, whose theology and spirituality manifest great profundity and
together constitute an exemplar of what it means for theology to be transformed by holiness.
N&V
Aaron Canty
Saint Xavier University
Chicago, Illinois

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Introduction to the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas by John
of St. Thomas, translated and introduced by Ralph McInerny (South
Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2004), x + 182 pp.
J OHN OF S T. T HOMAS (1589–1644) died just short of his fifty-fifth
birthday. He had caught a fever while accompanying the Spanish King
Philip IV, whom he served as priest-confessor, on a military campaign in
Catalonia. For the important dates in the life of the man born John
Poinsot, see the well-annotated chronology established by John N. Deely
in his interpretative arrangement of Poinsot’s Tractatus de Signis, The Semiotic of John Poinsot (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985). It
was Professor Deeley who persuaded the Library of Congress to catalogue
this seventeenth-century Dominican’s works under his family name,
Poinsot, instead of the religious name that John Poinsot received when, in
1612 at Madrid, he took the black and white habit of St. Dominic. Ralph
McInerny follows the customary usage to present the Isagogue of John of
St.Thomas to the Summa theologiae of St.Thomas Aquinas.
Throughout the centuries, the Thomist commentatorial tradition has
produced a rich variety of approaches to the thought of the Common
Doctor. This tradition also exhibits historical periods of waxing and
waning. One revival that produced a spate of scholastic wunderkinds
occurred in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain. Thomists waxed
strong then.We even refer to an Iberian school (in part, because John of
St.Thomas, whose mother came from the Portuguese nobility, was born
in Lisbon). This group includes representatives of the major religious
orders: Dominican, Franciscan, Carmelite, and Jesuit. To cite only the
Dominicans of the Iberian school, we find among their number Francisco de Vitoria (1492–1546), Domingo de Soto (1495–1460), Melchior
Cano (1509–1560), and Domingo Báñez (1528–1604).These men taught
philosophy and theology.Their text books were principally the works of
Aquinas, although McInerny notes that certain of these scholastics, especially the Jesuit authors, enacted “a progressive movement away from
close exegetical readings of the texts of Thomas toward a looser and more
commodious disputation in which contemporary issues could be more
easily included” (ix). McInerny especially points to the Jesuit thinker
Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), whose scholarly work epitomizes these
heady intellectual disputations.
John of St. Thomas deemed Suárez an eclectic Thomist. By contrast,
John himself, affirms McInerny,“sought to return philosophy and theology
to a primary allegiance to the thought of Thomas Aquinas” (ix). This
purpose helps us to understand the full title that John of St.Thomas gave

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to this treatise, which now for the first time is published in English: Isagoge
ad D.Thomae theologiae. Explicatio connexionis et ordinis totius Summae Theologiae D.Thomae, per omnes ejus materias.
Connections and ordering. John of St.Thomas describes best what he
accomplishes in this short introduction when he writes,“[T]he chief and
most efficacious way of entering into and grasping the mind of the
Angelic Doctor in this wonderful edifice of theology is by first diligently
seeking the order he followed in the disposition and treatment of his
Summa, proceeding from one question to the next, from one matter to
another, as if joined by golden links” (2).The Summa is not an encyclopedia. It is not a book to consult for the answers to specific questions in
divinity.The Summa is not a socio-political tractate.Although the Summa
has been at various times endorsed by ecclesiastical authorities, and while
even today its author receives special recognition as the “master” of
Catholic thought,Aquinas’s celebrated introduction to theology is meant
to be accepted freely on its own internal merits.The Summa liberates. It
is not a collection of mind-numbing propositions that, when needed, can
be imposed by officialdom to stifle opposition to Catholic orthodoxy.
The Summa presents a scientia, a sure knowledge through causes.“In order
to establish a scientific procedure for theology, Saint Thomas,” writes this
commentator, “was always careful to proceed from the more to the less
common, from causes to the caused, and from the more known to the
less known” (9). This methodology has been lost by some modern
theologians who favor the use of metaphorical and literary approaches
when expounding Catholic doctrine, as well as by those purveyors of
transcendental philosophical methods whose less common starting point
is other than the more common physical reality.
The Isagogue begins with a short prologue. The work is then divided
into two books.The first examines the three parts of the Summa and the
general theme handled in each: God as Efficient Cause, God as Final
Cause, God as Savior. John of St. Thomas moves from the more known,
creation, to the less known, the mysteries of Christ. The second book
offers a detailed analysis of the three parts of the Summa: the first part
(prima pars), the second part (secunda pars), which is subdivided into the first
part of the second part (prima secundae) and the second part of the second
part (secunda secundae), and the third part (tertia pars). The Latin titles for
each section of the Summa have become traditional among practicing
Thomists, as in the phrase,“This past year, I taught the prima pars.”
Book Two supplies more than a table of contents for the major divisions of the Summa. John of St. Thomas remains faithful to his purpose.
He wants to show the connections and the ordering. The student of

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Aquinas who wonders why the Angelic Doctor treats this topic in one
part of the Summa instead of in another part will learn the answer from
the great Iberian commentator’s careful annotations of the Summa.
Here is one example.Why does Aquinas leave the sacraments until after
his treatment of God as Savior? John of St. Thomas gives us an answer:
“Having explained the Incarnation of the Divine Word, he [Aquinas]
begins to treat of the means he left us to share in the efficacy of his blood”
(168). That is, the sacraments share in the effective causality of Christ’s
human nature. We discover, in short, a unity in Catholic theology that
escapes those modern authors who prefer to scatter rather than to unite. In
The Degrees of Knowledge, Jacques Maritain writes:“To scatter and to confuse
are both equally inimical to the nature of the mind. ‘No one,’ says [the
Dominican, John] Tauler,‘understands true distinction better than they who
have entered into unity’ ” (“Preface to the Original French Edition,” in
Distinguish to Unite or The Degrees of Knowledge, trans. Gerald B. Phelan [New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959], ix). Thus, Maritain’s axiom: “distinguish to unite.” No surprise that Maritain often quotes John of St.Thomas.
McInerny says that he first saw this little gem of Thomist learning in
French translation more than half a century ago and he thought that it
would be useful to have an English translation. He was right. Students
coming fresh to the Summa will benefit from this translation of John of
St.Thomas’s Isagogue, and those who have been reading the Summa for a
long time will also find that their glimpse of the internal ordering and
connections of the parts grows into an understanding of the whole. John
of St.Thomas shows us what his patron was about.
N&V
Romanus Cessario, O.P.
St. John’s Seminary
Boston, Massachussetts

Apologetics as Meant by Newman by Stanley L. Jaki, O.S.B. (Port
Huron, MI: Real View Books, 2005), xv + 419 pp.
F R . S TANLEY J AKI is perhaps most famous in this country for his contributions to the study of the relationship of science and religion, which
resulted in the winning of the Templeton Prize in 1987. In recent years,
however, Fr. Jaki has turned his attention to the thought of John Henry
Cardinal Newman. Apologetics as Meant by Newman is Stanley Jaki’s fourth
full-length treatment of Newman, if one does not include his republication
of four of Newman’s works with scholarly introductions exceeding over
one hundred pages of text. In this work, Fr. Jaki sets out to demonstrate that
for Newman the central element in his apologetics is the enormity of sin.

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Fr. Jaki’s work begins with a survey of the last century of research on
Newman’s apologetics, noting various lacunae in the contemporary scholarship which he seeks to fill.The remainder of the work is then divided into
three parts. The first part is an extended discussion of perhaps Newman’s
greatest apologetic work, Essay in the Aid of the Grammar of Assent. Fr. Jaki
argues that the “sense of sin” is critical to understanding Newman’s apologetic. Most scholars have focused to a great extent on the philosophical
underpinnings of the work, such as the illative sense or probabilities. Indeed
the treatments by Sheridan Gilley and Ian Ker do just that. Fr. Jaki, on the
other hand, emphasizes that the culmination of the text is really Newman’s
proof for religion based on “the great teacher of religion”: conscience,
which provides man with a sense of sin and guilt. This is why Newman
refers to any apologetics that do not take into consideration man’s sin as
simply “counterfeit and hollow” (53), and he feels that the apologetics in
Giovanni Perrone’s Praelectiones is virtually absurd since the work “knew
nothing of the reality of heretics as realities” (10). After all, men are more
“inclined to sit at home” than to stir themselves to inquire about whether
revelation has been given at all (100).
The second part is concerned with Newman’s treatment of the four notes
of the Church in the Anglican Difficulties.After his previous discussion of sin,
Fr. Jaki, with a flair for the dramatic, begins with the note of holiness, noting
that Newman devoted two lectures to the note of holiness and one to each
of the other notes. For Newman the note of holiness is concerned more
with a principle than with the behavior of Catholics. Newman argues that
it would be better “for all the many millions” on earth “to die of starvation
in extremist agony . . . than that one soul . . . should commit one single venial
sin” (182), and in this way the Church takes her stand against sin and ultimately conquers sin by lifting them “out of the mire,” by providing a supernatural solution to sin, forgiveness. The citations offered by Fr. Jaki are so
powerful and plentiful that they cannot be dismissed. One can only wonder
how the vast cadre of Newman scholars could have failed to address the
matter. For each of the three other notes—catholicity, apostolicity, and
unity—Fr. Jaki emphasizes that Newman begins with sinful human nature.
The third part of Fr. Jaki’s work concerns itself with various topics: the
development of doctrine, Christian culture, and Catholic universities.
Here Fr. Jaki reminds the reader that Newman’s Essay on Development is
apologetic in nature. Fr. Jaki notes that the function of Newman’s seven
tests is to discern a true development from a corruption, and in this way
the reader is brought back to the sense of sin.
Fr. Jaki has shown how Newman’s seemingly disparate apologetic works
are centered around a common theological theme of sin. Many of the recent

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treatments have neglected this apologetic perspective of Newman’s thought,
which is unfortunate; for as Fr. Jaki demonstrates, often with evident delight,
Newman identified himself not as a theologian, but rather as an apologist.
The strict historian will find Fr. Jaki’s frequent references to contemporary
theologians needless digressions; but for those who are concerned not only
with Newman as a historical figure but with Newman’s contemporary relevance will find these “digressions” thought-provoking. One criticism might
be offered. Fr. Jaki fails to discuss whether Newman saw a fundamental
distinction between apologetics and controversial theology. It may be that
Newman himself never made this distinction, since he was simply engaged
in a practical apologia rather than in making fine distinctions about the nature
N&V
of related fields. Fr. Jaki’s work is a welcome addition to the field.
Christian D.Washburn
The Saint Paul Seminary School of Divinity
The University of Saint Thomas
St. Paul, MN

Deification and Grace by Daniel A. Keating (Naples, FL: Sapientia Press,
2007), ix + 142 pp.
AMONG CHRISTIAN scholars and even among the wider Christian public
there is a renewed interest in the topic of “deification,” also referred to as
“divinization.” Not surprisingly this interest is evident among Eastern
Orthodox theologians, where theosis (the Greek term employed within
Eastern Orthodox theology) was and continues to be at the heart of the
Orthodox notion of grace.What may be surprising is that many Catholic
theologians, Dr. Daniel A. Keating of Sacred Heart Major Seminary in
Detroit being one of them, have also shown a marked and enthusiastic
interest in this topic. These Catholic theologians do not wish simply to
revive and so import into Western theology a renewed understanding of
and appreciation for the Eastern Orthodox view of grace as found within
the Greek Fathers, though they certainly do want to do that. Rather, what
is significant here is that they also wish to demonstrate, Keating himself
being a foremost example, that deification is very much a part of the Western understanding of grace, as found, for example, in the writings of
Ambrose,Augustine, and Aquinas.Thus, the notion of deification is shared
by the universal church and so is not a concept that exclusively belongs to
the Greek Fathers and Eastern theological tradition, as is often assumed,
especially among the Orthodox themselves.
While deification may have caught the imagination of many, yet, as
Keating points out at the outset of his book, there is often a great lack of

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clarity as to its biblical foundation and its exact theological meaning, both
of which hinder a full appreciation of its salvific import. Within this
context Keating aims, in his short but exceptionally well researched and
skillfully written book, Deification and Grace, to examine the biblical basis
for the notion of deification as well as provide a clear theological exposition founded upon the Fathers of the Church as well as the Church’s
doctrinal and later theological tradition.
The first topic Keating covers is what is commonly called the “formula
of exchange,” for it concisely expresses the theological principle upon
which the mystery of human deification is established.While there is no
one set formula, many of the Fathers articulate the same truth in various
manners. Irenaeus was the first to articulate it: the Son of God became
“what we are, that he might bring us to be even what he is Himself ” (12).
Athanasius succinctly stated: “For he [the Son] was made man that we
might be made God” (12). In the West,Augustine wrote:“God wanted to
be the Son of Man and he wanted men to be the sons of God” (13–14).
Keating finds such expressions even in our own day, for example, in the
person of then Cardinal Ratzinger: “This exchange consists of God
taking our human existence on himself in order to bestow his divine
existence on us” (16). Keating recognizes that such formulae were not
arbitrary theological constructs, but arose out of the New Testament
proclamation. For example, in 2 Corinthians 8:9 Paul proclaims that
Christ became poor that we might share in his riches, or in Galatians
4:4–6 he states that God sent forth his Son “so that we might receive
adoption as sons.” The “formula of exchange” gave rise to the more
specific theological concept of deification primarily under the influence
of Psalm 82:6 (“You are gods”). Surprisingly, however, 2 Peter 1:4 (“You
. . . become partakers of the divine nature”) only played a marginal role
in the early development and exposition of the theology of deification,
though it did become more prominent within the later theological tradition of both the East and the West (cf. 29–37).
Keating also notes that, in the past, many scholars often interpreted this
“formula of exchange” as though the Fathers who championed it held
that the mere act itself of the Son of God assuming our human nature
brought about its divinizing effect within our own individual humanities,
and so criticized it for making redundant the cross and resurrection.
Keating rightly points out that this is a false interpretation. “For them
[the Fathers], the Incarnation is the inauguration of one united work,
which encompasses the whole of Christ’s life, passion, death, resurrection,
ascension as Lord to the right hand of the Father” (23). Moreover, having
demonstrated the biblical origin for the concept of deification, Keating

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also easily fends off the false accusation of hellenization, exemplified in
Harnack, that is, that the Fathers derived their understanding from Greek
philosophy and the mystery religions prevalent at the time.
In chapter two, Keating addresses the issues of how “we receive divine
life and become deified in Christ” (39).We can only share in God’s divine
life through his agency.“No creature can accomplish this. It is only through
the effective indwelling of the Son and the Spirit that human beings are
regenerated, sanctified, adopted as children of God, and deified” (40). But
what means does God employ for our deification? Drawing upon many
Fathers, Keating wonderfully shows that “[t]he consistent position adopted
by the Fathers, both East and West, is that God comes to dwell effectively
in us especially through baptism and the Eucharist” (41). It is through
baptism that we become children of the Father, having become conformed
to the likeness of Jesus, the Son, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit,
and so are deified.The Eucharist, in turn, becomes “the primary means for
ongoing participation in the life and power of God” (44). As Keating
summarily states:“The appeal to the sacraments in the Fathers, then, reflects
an emphasis on God and what he does for our sake in the redemption of
the whole of our nature” (47). Having presented the patristic teaching on
how we enter into the divine life through baptism and continue to be
divinely nourished through the Eucharist, Keating returns to scripture to
corroborate what the Fathers taught. In doing so Keating, once again, illustrates how the Fathers’ teaching, both of the East and of the West, is imbued
with biblical thought and so how their notion of deification is itself an
expression of the authentic Gospel.
Having focused on the divine actions by which God deifies us
through the sacraments, in chapter three, Keating takes up the topic of
how we humanly respond to God’s deifying actions so as to conform
ourselves more and more to the image of Christ himself.
First, all progress in deification—in its various manifestations—is
grounded in divine grace and the prior indwelling of God. Second, the
New Testament presents us with—and beckons us to—transformation
into full maturity in the image of Christ, expressed especially by faith,
hope, and love. Third, our progress in deification has a baptismal and
Eucharistic shape.We are called to share progressively in the communion
of Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection. These aspects of our deification have been selected because they help us to see the continuity in
our path to deification from its beginnings to maturity of this life. (63)

Again, calling upon a wealth of patristic, medieval, and contemporary
sources, Keating fleshes out each of these three aspects. He, for example,

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provides a brief but masterly account of the biblical notions of “image”
and “likeness” and proceeds to develop what it means to grow in the
divine image and likeness of Christ.“The Incarnation of the Son of God
presents us with a double disclosure. Not only is the glory of God revealed
in the face of Christ (2 Cor 4:6; Jn 14:9), but the true glory of the human
race is also revealed. . . .We are to become what we behold, and we are to
make progress in Christ, the image of God, into whom we have already
been baptized” (76). This assuming of the image of Christ is fostered
through the living out of a virtuous life.Virtuous actions are the fruit of
the divine life within us, so they are, by their very nature, divine-like
actions.Thus, by performing virtuous acts—acts of generosity, forgiveness,
courage—we conform ourselves to the divine likeness of Christ.
While Keating, in the previous chapters, presented a biblical, historical,
theological, and doctrinal account of deification, he rightly recognizes that
there is one crucial question yet to be addressed. “Does the doctrine of
deification, by means of its elevated and potentially exaggerated rhetoric,
effectively compromise the fundamental distinction between God and the
created order, and so lead explicitly or implicitly to a form of pantheism?”
(91) Again, subpoenaing a courtroom full of patristic, medieval, and contemporary witnesses, Keating proves beyond reasonable doubt that such an allegation is false. Athanasius leads off the testimony:“Wherefore [the Word] is
very God, existing one in essence with the very Father; while other beings,
to whom he said ‘I said you are gods’ (Ps 82:6), had this grace from the
Father, only by participation of the Word, through the Spirit” (92). On
behalf of the Latin tradition, Augustine states: “It is evident, then, as he has
called men gods, that they are deified by his grace, not born of his substance.
. . . If we have been made sons of God, we have also been made gods: but
this is the effect of grace adopting, not of nature generating’ (95). Keating
shows that while the Fathers and subsequent tradition of both the East and
West speak of the Son and Holy Spirit participating in the very same divine
nature as the Father and so are God as he is God, they consistently speak of
human beings participating in the divine nature by the grace of adoption.
Human beings are adopted into the Trinitarian relationships in that the
Spirit conforms them into the likeness of the Son and so, in union with the
Son, become children of the Father.This understanding, Keating also highlights, is consistent with the New Testament proclamation.
While both the East and West speak of deification as participating in
the divine, Keating notes that they express this differently.
The Western tradition, following Thomas Aquinas (thirteenth century),
speaks about the goal of deification as participation in the divine

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essence, and as culminating in the Beatific vision (the vision of God as
he is).The Eastern tradition, following Gregory of Palamas (fourteenth
century), claims that we participate not in the very essence of God
himself, but in the divine energies of God. (104–5)

The West wishes to emphasize that human beings are divinized in that
they relate to God as God is in himself—as a Trinity of persons.The East,
wishing to ensure the transcendent nature of God which is always
beyond human reach and comprehension, emphasizes that it is through
the divine energies, that is, the manner in which God manifests himself
in the world, that human beings participate in the divine life.While Keating sees the difference here to be one of emphasis, I think he is too kind
to the East. The very notion of divine energies, which has no biblical
foundation, means that human beings are not related to God as God is,
but are related to God through the mediating, and so through the
medium, of divine actions other than the very acts by which God is a
Trinity of persons. What Gregory of Palamas did not grasp is that the
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are able to relate human beings to themselves as they are in themselves without the loss of their transcendence,
for they are not “lowered” by such a relationship, but rather human
beings are “elevated” by such a relationship, a relationship which ensures
that the mystery of the Trinity is fully revealed but never fully comprehended.The irony is that while deification has always been recognized as
the heart of the Eastern Orthodox understanding of grace, yet it is the
West that actually possesses a more robust theological conception of it.
Keating concludes his study by once more summarizing the biblical,
patristic, and doctrinal warrant for the theological notion of deification.
In so doing he once more emphasizes that it lies at the heart of the
Gospel message.
In concluding this review, I would like to underscore a number of
specific points. First, while this is a brief study, concisely and clearly written, it treats, nonetheless, all of the relevant issues in a scholarly and
informed manner. Secondly, Keating employs all of the primary
sources—the patristic, medieval, reformation, and contemporary—in a
creative and imaginative manner. It is the masterful use of these sources
that gives theological depth and spiritual gusto to this book. Thirdly,
Keating is well acquainted with all of the contemporary literature on the
topic, which allows the reader to obtain a broad knowledge of the
subject. Fourthly, while Keating quotes many sources, yet his own explanations and insights add freshness, originality, and character to this study.
Fifthly, while this book cannot be criticized for its lack of scholarship, it

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is, nonetheless, thoroughly readable and so accessible to a large audience. It
would make an excellent text for seminary, undergraduate, and graduate
courses on grace. Lastly, above all, this is an exceptional book, for the reader
not only obtains theological knowledge and scholarly insight concerning
the Christian understanding of deification, but the book also lifts up the
heart and mind to the glory of what God has done for us as human
beings—raising us up into the very life of the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Spirit so that we share in their very own divine life of love and joy. N&V
Thomas G.Weinandy, O.F.M., Cap.
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
Washington, DC