'DUN3DVVDJHVRIWKH%LEOH VOL . 11, N O. 4 7+ +( (& &$$7+2/,& 7+2/,&8 81 1,9(56,7< ,9(56,7<2 2) )$ $0 0(5,&$ (5,&$3 355(66 (66 (QJDJLQJ6FULSWXUHZLLWK%HQHGLFW; ;9 9,DQG7KRPDV$TXLQDV 0DWWKHZ-5DPDJH ³$ VLJQL¿FDQW FRQWULEXWLRQ WR H[SODLQLQJ 3RSH %HQHGLFW ;9,¶VLQWHUSUHWLYHDSSURDFKZKLFKUHFRQFLOHVWKHEHVWRI SUHFULWLFDODQGSRVWFULWLFDOH[HJHVLV´ Nova et Vetera Fall 2013 • Volume 11, Number 4 The English Edition of the International Theological Journal :LOOLDP6.XU]6-SURIHVVRURIWKHRORJJ\ 0DUTXHWWH8QLYHUVVLW\ 6HSWHPEHU 3DSHU‡‡ HERRN‡‡ C OMMENTARY The Perennial Relevance of Studiousness C HRISTOPHER O. B LUM 7KRPLVWLF5HÀHFWLRQVRQWKH3UREOHPRI(YLO -RKQ);.QDVDV ³6LPSO\WKHEHVWH[WHQGHG7KRPLVWWUHDWPHQWRIWKH SUREOHPRIHYLORIZKLFK,DPDZDUHH[FHSWLRQDOO\ FOHDUDQGVWUDLJKWIRUZDUG´ -DPHV*+DQLQNSURIHVVRURISKLORVRSK\/R\ROD 0DU\PRXQW8QLYHUVLW\/RV$QJHOHV&$ 1RYHPEHU &ORWK‡‡ HERRN‡‡ /HDUQLQJ&KULVW ,JQDWLXVRI$QWLRFKDQGWKH0\VWHUU\\RI5HGHPSWLRQ Nova et Vetera FALL 2013 $TXLQDVDQGWKH&U\RI5DFKHO The Challenges Facing Catholic Intellectual Life M ATTHEW L. L AMB S YMPOSIUM : B LESSED J OHN H ENRY N EWMAN Mariology and the Scope of Reason PAIGE E. H OCHSCHILD University Education, Unity of Knowledge, and Theology R EINHARD H ÛTTER Conscience according to Newman C HARLES M OREROD, O.P. The Grammar of Assent and Contemporary Skepticism A NSELM R AMELOW, O.P. S YMPOSIUM : V ERITATIS S PLENDOR AT 20 *UHJRU\9DOO Premotion, Holiness, and Pope Benedict XIII ³$QLPSRUWDQWZRUN$ULFKJROGPLQHRILQVLJKKWVLQWR WKHWKLQNLQJRI,JQDWLXVVXSSRUWHGE\DQHDUH[KDXVWLYH SRQGHULQJRIWKHWH[W´ ROMANUS C ESSARIO, O.P. Marriage and Freedom 7KRPDV$5RELQVRQSURIHVVRURIUHHOLJJLRXVVWXGLHV 8QLYHUVVLW\RI/HWKEULGJH$OEHUWD&DQDGD D OUGLAS FARROW The Soul’s Transcendence 1RYH HPEHU &ORWK‡‡ HERRN‡‡ D EREK S. J EFFREYS John Paul II on the Development of Doctrine C HRISTOPHER K ACZOR Person and Work FFR+RSNLQV)XO¿OOPHQW6HUYLFH32%R[%DOWLPRUH0' R+RSNLQV)XO¿OOPHQW6HUYLFH32%R[%DOWLPRUH0' FXDSUHVVFXDHGX FXDSUHVVFXDHGX G ILBERT M EILAENDER The Call to Mercy M IGUEL J. ROMERO Natural Law and the Irreducibility of Personalism J ANET E. S MITH Navigating between Naturalism and Idealism Augustine Institute M ICHELE M. S CHUMACHER B OOK R EVIEWS Nova et Vetera Fall 2013 • Volume 11, Number 4 The English Edition of the International Theological Journal S ENIOR E DITOR Georges Cardinal Cottier, O.P. C O -E DITORS Reinhard Hütter, Duke University Divinity School Matthew Levering, Mundelein Seminary M ANAGING E DITOR R. Jared Staudt, Augustine Institute A SSOCIATE E DITORS Holly Taylor Coolman, Providence College Gilles Emery, O.P., University of Fribourg Paul Gondreau, Providence College Timothy Gray, Augustine Institute Thomas S. Hibbs, Baylor University Christopher Malloy, University of Dallas Bruce D. Marshall, Southern Methodist University Charles Morerod, O.P., Bishop of Lausanne, Geneva, and Fribourg John O’Callaghan, University of Notre Dame Chad Pecknold, Catholic University of America Michael Sherwin, O.P., University of Fribourg Thomas Joseph White, O.P., Dominican House of Studies B OARD OF A DVISORS Anthony Akinwale, O.P., Dominican Institute, Ibadan, Nigeria Khaled Anatolios, Boston College Robert Barron, Mundelein Seminary John Betz, University of Notre Dame Bernhard Blankenhorn, O.P., Angelicum Stephen Brock, Pontifical University of the Holy Cross Peter Casarella, University of Notre Dame Romanus Cessario, O.P., St. John’s Seminary Boyd Taylor Coolman, Boston College Lawrence Dewan, O.P., Dominican University College Archbishop J. Augustine Di Noia, O.P., Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Douglas Farrow, McGill University Anthony Fisher, O.P., Bishop of Parramatta, Australia Paul J. Griffiths, Duke University Divinity School Scott W. Hahn, Franciscan University of Steubenville Russell Hittinger, University of Tulsa Paige Hochschild, Mount St. Mary’s University Andrew Hofer, O.P., Dominican House of Studies Matthew L. Lamb, Ave Maria University Joseph Lienhard, S.J., Fordham University Steven A. Long, Ave Maria University Guy Mansini, O.S.B., Saint Meinrad School of Theology Francesca Aran Murphy, University of Notre Dame Thomas Osborne, University of St. Thomas (Houston) Trent Pomplun, Loyola University Maryland R. R. Reno, First Things Richard Schenk, O.P., University of Eichstätt Michele Schumacher, University of Fribourg Janet Smith, Sacred Heart Major Seminary Christopher Thompson, St. Paul Seminary Thomas Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap., United States Conference of Catholic Bishops William Wright, Duquesne University Instructions for Contributors 1. Address all contributions, books for review, and related correspondence to Matthew Levering, mjlevering@yahoo.com or Reinhard Hütter, rhuetter@div.duke.edu. 2. 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NOVA ET VETERA The English Edition of the International Theological Journal ISSN 1542-7315 Fall 2013 Vol. 11, No. 4 C OMMENTARY A Fruitful Restraint: The Perennial Relevance of the Virtue of Studiousness.......................................................C HRISTOPHER O. B LUM 953 The Millennial Challenges Facing Catholic Intellectual Life...............................................M ATTHEW L. L AMB 969 S YMPOSIUM : B LESSED J OHN H ENRY N EWMAN John Henry Newman: Mariology and the Scope of Reason in the Modern Age .................................PAIGE E. H OCHSCHILD 993 University Education, the Unity of Knowledge—and (Natural) Theology: John Henry Newman’s Provocative Vision...................R EINHARD H ÜTTER 1017 Conscience according to John Henry Newman .....C HARLES M OREROD, O.P. 1057 Knowledge and Normality: Bl. John Henry Newman’s Grammar of Assent and Contemporary Skepticism ................Anselm R AMELOW, O.P. 1081 S YMPOSIUM : V ERITATIS S PLENDOR AT 20 Premotion, Holiness, and Pope Benedict XIII (1724–30): Some Historical Retrospects on Veritatis Splendor...........................ROMANUS C ESSARIO, O.P. 1115 Marriage and Freedom: The Splendor of Truth in a Time of Denial.......................................................D OUGLAS FARROW 1137 The Soul’s Transcendence: Veritatis Splendor and Phenomenology .....................................................D EREK S. J EFFREYS 1155 John Paul II on the Development of Doctrine .......C HRISTOPHER K ACZOR 1173 Person and Work: In Search of Theological Convergence.........................................G ILBERT M EILAENDER 1193 The Call to Mercy: Veritatis Splendor and the Preferential Option for the Poor .................................................................M IGUEL J. ROMERO 1205 The Universality of Natural Law and the Irreducibility of Personalism ...................................................................JANET E. S MITH 1229 A Woman in Stone or in the Heart of Man? Navigating between Naturalism and Idealism in the Spirit of Veritatis Splendor.....M ICHELE M. S CHUMACHER 1249 B OOK R EVIEWS The Ethics of Abortion: Women’s Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice by Christopher Kaczor ...................................................G RATTAN B ROWN 1287 Benedict XVI and the Sacred Liturgy: Proceedings of the First Fota International Liturgy Conference edited by Neil J. Roy and Janet E. Rutherford .............P ETER M C G REGOR 1292 Humanism and Religion: A Call for the Renewal of Western Culture by Jens Zimmermann ................................................A IDAN N ICHOLS, O.P. 1296 A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss, afterword by Richard Dawkins........................... 1298 Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt E DWARD T. OAKES, S.J. ................................................................................ 1298 Romance and System: The Theological Synthesis of Matthias Joseph Scheeben by Aidan Nichols, O.P...................................................T RACEY ROWLAND 1303 Inspiration and Interpretation: A Theological Introduction to Sacred Scripture by Denis Farkasfalvy, O.Cist........................................E RIC VANDEN E YKEL 1310 The English edition of Nova et Vetera is published quarterly and provides an international forum for theological and philosophical studies from a Thomistic perspective. Founded in 1926 by future Cardinal Charles Journet in association with Jacques Maritain, Nova et Vetera is published in related, distinct French and English editions. The English edition of Nova et Vetera welcomes articles and book reviews in theology, philosophy, and biblical studies that address central contemporary debates and discussions. We seek to be “at the heart of the Church,” faithful to the Magisterium and the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, and devoted to the work of true dialogue, both ecumenically and across intellectual disciplines. Nova et Vetera (ISSN 1542-7315) is published by Augustine Institute, 6160 S. Syracuse Way, Suite 310, Greenwood Village, CO 80111. All materials published in Nova et Vetera are copyrighted by Augustine Institute. © Copyright 2013 by Augustine Institute. All rights reserved. This periodical is indexed in the ATLA Catholic Periodical and Literature Index® (CPLI®), a product of the American Theological Library Association, 300 S. Wacker Dr., Suite 2100, Chicago, IL 60606, USA. Email: atla@atla.com, www.atla.com. 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For subscription inquiries, email us at nvjournal@intrepidgroup.com or phone 970-416-6673. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2013): 953–68 953 A Fruitful Restraint: The Perennial Relevance of the Virtue of Studiousness C HRISTOPHER O. B LUM Augustine Institute Denver, CO I N THE half century since the opening of the Second Vatican Council, Catholic colleges and universities in America have been the setting of one long argument about the nature and purpose of education. The discussion has been increasingly poignant in recent years, as it has become difficult to ignore not only the secularization of Catholic higher education but its intellectual and pedagogical poverty as well.1 The latest contribution to this conversation comes from an historian, Brad S. Gregory, who has portrayed the secularization of the Catholic university as the ironic and unintentional result of the papal promotion of Thomism. Gregory does not blame any defect in the thought of Aquinas, but instead points to a concomitant attribute as Thomism’s tragic flaw, the “papal suspicion of scientific and historical knowledge-making.” The cultural revolution that swept through Catholic faculties in the 1960s, on his account, involved the rejection of Thomism as a by-product of the “intellectual catching-up” that Catholic universities had to do. During this transformation, the “neo-Thomist subculture” was swept away at least in part because of its “timidity in the face of knowledge-making by 1 Notably elegiac on both counts is Alasdair MacIntyre’s “The End of Education: The Fragmentation of the American University,” Commonweal (October 20, 2006): 10–14. See also the Symposium on MacIntyre’s God, Philosophy, Universities in the Fall 2011 number of the English edition of Nova et Vetera (volume 9), especially Thomas Hibbs, “The Research University in Crisis (Again): MacIntyre’s God, Philosophy, Universities,” pages 947–66, which includes a helpful retrospective back to John Tracy Ellis and the debates of the 1950s. 954 Christopher Blum secularizing research universities.”2 As an explanation of the wholesale jettisoning of Thomistic philosophy and theology at Catholic colleges and universities, the account is a familiar one and not implausible.3 It is possible to point to bold attempts on the part of leading Thomists to breathe new life into the tradition, such as Charles de Koninck’s 1964 Medalist Address at the annual meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association and Ralph McInerny’s 1966 tract Thomism in an Age of Renewal.4 Yet these do seem to stand as exceptions to a general trend of retreat in the face of a confident and aggressive rival ideal: the Berlin-style research university.5 Gregory’s judgment seems to have been based on two principles: that all knowledge of the truth is good and that to attain it requires fortitude because its pursuit involves arduous work of reflection, investigation, argumentation, and even public debate. Both principles are unquestionably true and their relevance to Catholic intellectual life has been continually reaffirmed in recent years in such authoritative statements as Blessed John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio and Benedict XVI’s celebrated Regensburg Address. The characterization of the development of educational institutions and practices over time, however, seems likely to benefit from an additional weighing of the principles of judgment. In particular, the prominence of the word “timidity” in Gregory’s account invites several questions in reply. May not a charge of timidity at times stem from a failure to recognize prudent restraint? Is courage the only or even the chief virtue governing the search for truth? Is there a role for temperance in the intellectual life, that is, for the wise moderation of the desire to know? Questions such as these not only are relevant to the task of constructing a convincing historical narrative but also point to matters of enduring relevance to the pursuit of truth. Among the many effects of the secularization of the modern university, one has been a growing awareness that its institutional forms and practices and the habits that they inculcate ought not simply to be taken 2 Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secular- ized Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 360–64. 3 Gregory notes his debt to the standard narrative, Philip Gleason, Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Like Gregory, Gleason located the problem in the neighborhood of a defect in fortitude, using the word “malaise” to describe the loss of confidence in Thomism that developed through the 1960s. 4 Charles de Koninck, “Three Sources of Philosophy,” Proceedings of the ACPA 38 (1964):13–22; Ralph M. McInerny, Thomism in an Age of Renewal (1966; reprinted Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968). 5 See George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), especially chapter 5: “American Practicality and Germanic Ideals: Two Visions for Reform.” The Perennial Relevance of Studiousness 955 at face value by Catholics but should be evaluated in light of an understanding of a healthy “intellectual custom.”6 Jan Aertsen, for instance, has affirmed that there is a Thomistic “ethic of knowing,” whereas Thomas Hibbs has suggested that we ought to “conceive of the full range of our activities, including intellectual activities, as practices, involving a host of relevant virtues.”7 It is within just such a general understanding of the virtues of the intellectual life that claims about “timidity” or proper restraint in the face of “knowledge-making” can be usefully considered. It is my purpose to suggest a line of investigation into the topic, by taking note of two contemporary accounts of right intellectual appetite and then reflecting upon Aquinas’s conception of the virtue of studiousness. In the context of an ambitious attempt to understand the virtues of the intellectual life, philosophers R. C. Roberts and W. J.Wood have identified a virtue they call the “love of knowledge,” defining it as a habit of inquiry in which knowledge is desired for its “significance, relevance, and worthiness.”8 With still more focused attention, Paul Griffiths has explored the subject in his study Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar, where he notes that although for many today the “appetite for knowledge is an undifferentiated good,” to the “long Christian tradition” it has been regarded as an appetite that needed to be “catechized and disciplined” like any other. Griffiths’s proposal for how it should be disciplined centers on a distinction between the seeking of knowledge for ownership as a private possession and the seeking of knowledge for the sake of what he calls “reflexive intimacy with the gift.”9 What is initially noteworthy about these accounts is that they agree on two essential starting points: that knowledge, as such, is a good, but that the seeking of it can be either well or poorly integrated into human life as a whole. Like any other appetite, the desire to know needs to be brought under the measure of some rule.10 6 The phrase is Ronald McArthur’s; see his “Saint Thomas and the Formation of the Catholic Mind,” in The Ever-Illuminating Wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999), 123–43. 7 Jan Aertsen, “Aquinas and the Human Desire for Knowledge,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 79 (2005): 411–30, at 415; Thomas Hibbs, Aquinas, Ethics, and Philosophy of Religion: Metaphysics and Practice (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 36. 8 Robert C. Roberts and W. Jay Wood, Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 155. 9 Paul J. Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), see esp. 1–18. 10 Cf. ST I–II, q. 63, a. 2: “Cum autem ratio boni consistat in modo, specie et ordine, ut Augustinus dicit in libro de natura boni; sive in numero, pondere et mensura, ut dicitur Sap. XI, oportet quod bonum hominis secundum aliquam regulam consideretur.” Christopher Blum 956 Might the desire for knowledge, however, be capable of providing that measure for itself, that is, of autonomy? Consider St. Jerome’s counsel: “Love the knowledge of the Scriptures, and you will not love the vices of the flesh.”11 Although St. Jerome’s reference to the particular reading material—Sacred Scripture—was surely not accidental, many others have seen in liberal studies themselves a kind of pleasure that is wholly honorable and even morally beneficial in itself, whatever the object of study. The premise lies just beneath the surface in a recent volume by Stanley Fish, who affirms that “sustained inquiry into the truth of a matter . . . improves you” and, without irony, characterizes the task of undergraduate instruction as “to initiate students into the pleasures of an academic life,” as though this phrase named an unequivocal good.12 Another recent investigation of the intellectual virtues valorizes “inquisitiveness” and a “deep and abiding desire for knowledge” as long as the knowledge is being sought for its own sake rather than for worldly gain; on this view, an appetite for knowledge is virtuous if it is “a positive psychological orientation toward epistemic goods.”13 That such a conception would be prevalent is not surprising; Aquinas, after all, affirmed that “spiritual pleasures, strictly speaking, are in accordance with reason, wherefore they need no control.”Yet his analysis did not stop there; he added this crucial qualification: “save accidentally, in so far as one spiritual pleasure is a hindrance to another.”14 Certainly it is well to recall in this context Newman’s celebrated affirmation that knowledge by itself does not supply virtue: “Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then you may hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man.”15 The real difficulty here lies in establishing that some forms of intellectual satisfaction are more fitting than others and hence more worthy of pursuit. Roberts and Wood admit that “different moral and metaphysical communities will promote 11 St. Jerome as quoted in St. Thomas Aquinas, Contra Impugnantes Dei Cultum et Religionem, III, cap. 4, ad 4. 12 Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 40, 164. 13 Jason Baehr, The Inquiring Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 91, 93, 102. Baehr’s earlier formulation should also be noted (p. 19): “A person with the virtue of curiosity, or whose mental life is characterized by wonder, is quick to notice and be inclined to investigate issues or subject matters of significance.” 14 ST II–II, q. 141, a. 4, ad 4. Dominican Fathers translation. 15 John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, ed. Martin J. Svaglic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 91. For a further development of the point, see his “Tamworth Reading Room.” The Perennial Relevance of Studiousness 957 different versions” of the virtue they call “the love of knowledge” and seemingly regret to think that rival claims can be assessed “only by a sort of metaphysical adjudication which is in all probability unavailable to human beings.”16 Griffiths, for his part, enunciates the principle on the basis of which the value of different kinds of knowledge can be weighed, affirming that “a hierarchy in the order of being has an accompanying difference in the order of knowing,” but he does not employ the principle as the basis for his own theory of the virtue of studiousness.17 Even according to natural reason, an account of the measure of intellectual appetite that does not take our knowledge of God as its ultimate standard cannot be found satisfactory by those who earnestly seek knowledge of the causes of things. For, as Catholic philosophers have recently been reminded by Alasdair MacIntyre, “to be a theist is to understand every particular as . . . pointing towards God” and “to hold that all explanation and understanding that does not refer to God both as first cause and as final end is incomplete.”18 What is needed is an account of the virtue of studiousness that asks the radical question: with respect to what ultimate measure can the different kinds of knowledge be judged?19 We need, therefore, nothing less than Aquinas’s own account. Studiousness, according to Saint Thomas, is a potential part of the virtue of temperance, a secondary virtue, as it were, that enables one to have “a right desire to apply the power of knowing, in this way rather than in another, and to this rather than to that.”20 Although the virtue gains its name, studiousness, from the student’s application to his subject, its nature is clearly on the side of moderation rather than intensification: 16 Roberts and Wood, Intellectual Virtues, 180. 17 Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite, 39. As an example of his subsequent analysis, this passage is characteristic (p. 138): “The cotoneaster adpressus [a shrub], the Messiaen prelude, the face of the human other, the ensemble of desire and institutional form that constitutes the economic order—all these, if approached as the studious do, yield themselves in part to the intimacy-seeking knower’s gaze.” 18 Alasdair MacIntyre, “On Being a Theistic Philosopher in a Secularized Culture,” Proceedings of the ACPA 84 (2011): 23–32, at 23. 19 For an analysis of studiousness proceeding from the same question, see McInerny, Thomism in an Age of Renewal, 124–29; and for an admonition about the importance of asking radical questions about rival conceptions of the virtues, see David Solomon, “Virtue Ethics: Radical or Routine?” in Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology, ed. Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 57–80. 20 ST II–II, q. 166, a. 2, ad 2. For another discussion of the virtue, see Gregory Reichberg, “Studiositas, the Virtue of Attention,” in The Common Things: Essays on Thomism and Education, ed. Daniel McInerny (Washington, DC: Maritain Association, 1999), 143–52. 958 Christopher Blum “studiousness,” Aquinas explains (ad 3), “consists in restraint, and that is why it is located as a part of temperance.” Now, it is helpful to be told that, like temperance itself, studiousness is a kind of restraint, a bridling of appetite by reason’s rule, but the content of that rule is what we are seeking. Augustine’s teaching that “to be curious is prohibited,” provided in the sed contra of the same article, suggests that the kinds of moderation effected by studiousness will be revealed through its opposition to the vice of curiosity. In his discussion of curiosity, Aquinas identifies four ways in which the knowledge of the truth can be immoderately desired (ST II–II, q. 167, a. 1). First, when the study of something “less useful” draws one away from “what one is obliged” to study, as, for instance, in the case of a preacher who prefers the poets to the prophets. Second, when one wishes to learn from an illicit teacher, as by divination. Third, when someone “desires to know the truth about creatures without referring it to its due end, that is, to the knowledge of God.” And fourth, when “someone seeks knowledge of the truth beyond the capacity of his own mind,” which, Aquinas points out, is problematic because to do so is to court error. Let us summarize his teaching as a series of positive injunctions: the studious man desires to learn about those things his state in life obliges him to know, from the right teachers, referring his knowledge of created things to God as their principle and end, and, finally, wants most to study subjects he is actually able to understand. What I would like to do now is to make a fresh start by considering how Aquinas’s prescription speaks to our contemporary needs, indeed to the perennial needs of the search for truth. As studiousness is a part of the virtue of temperance, it will be well to begin by considering the ordination of temperance to other goods. It is, to be sure, essentially ordered to higher spiritual goods, beginning with the virtue of fortitude, but it is also and most evidently productive of the well-being of the body, whose passions it rectifies. The bodily good that we chiefly expect from temperance is health, together with its companions, beauty and strength (making provision, of course, for the different seasons of our lives). Something analogous would seem to obtain for studiousness. The mind whose desire for knowledge is rightly ordered ought, all things being equal, to be strong, beautiful, and healthy. Is it too much to suppose, then, that we might consider the virtue of studiousness to be ordered to the flourishing of those characteristics that make the mind strong, beautiful, and healthy, that is, to the intellectual virtues? I propose in what follows briefly to consider each intellectual virtue in turn from the perspective of its relationship to intellectual appetite, by attempting to say something The Perennial Relevance of Studiousness 959 about the type of restraint it requires, the excellence to which this restraint conduces, and the practices by which it is cultivated. The Path to Wisdom The injunction that the student should most desire to study what he is capable of understanding seems unambiguously to point to Aquinas’s account of the order of learning and thus to the need to acquire the liberal arts and speculative sciences as permanent habits of mind and to acquire them in the proper order.21 The injunction, after all, cannot mean that we are meant to remain in whatever intellectual condition we find ourselves, for, as Newman once memorably said, “it is impossible to stop the growth of a mind.”22 Indeed any desire to study is a desire to improve, as even a desire to gain a better and more enduring hold upon what one already knows is itself a kind of improvement. Our appetite for knowledge, therefore, must be ruled by a standard that permits and directs its growth, which is just what is promised by the order of learning, the “path which leads to wisdom.”23 That order takes its form from its end, an end of which Aquinas offered this plain account: “it seems obvious that the end of any intellectual substance, even the lowest, is to understand God.”24 So, it seems that the restraint we need is not one that keeps us from climbing to the heights of that consideration, but that keeps us from doing so precipitously.25 Just as the hiker ought to prepare to climb 21 The essential texts from Aquinas’s commentaries on the Book of Causes and the Nicomachean Ethics are conveniently printed as an appendix to Thomas Aquinas, The Division and Methods of the Sciences, 4th edition, trans. Armand Maurer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1986), 99–102. For a recent commentary, see Leo Elders, S.V.D., “St. Thomas Aquinas on Education and Instruction,” Nova et Vetera 7 (2009): 107–24, esp. 115–19. 22 John Henry Newman, Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert [1848] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 142. 23 John Paul II, Fides et Ratio (1998), §6. Although John Paul II may not have been intending a reference to the order of learning with this phrase, there are echoes of the doctrine elsewhere in the encyclical. See §§4, 56, 60, and 81–85. For a commentary that connects the encyclical to Aquinas’s account of the intellectual virtues, see Alasdair MacIntyre, “Philosophy recalled to its Tasks: A Thomistic reading of Fides et Ratio,” in his The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 179–96, at 186–87. 24 ScG III, q. 25. For commentary, see Aertsen, “Aquinas and the Human Desire for Knowledge,” 416ff. 25 ST II–II, q. 53, a. 3, on the vice of precipitousness, is suggestive. The essential medieval treatment of the necessity that studies be pursued in proper order is Hugh of St.Victor’s Didascalicon, ed. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). Christopher Blum 960 Mount Adams—the most rugged of the White Mountains—through a course of conditioning on lower peaks, so also the student ought not attempt to ascend to the consideration of God before taking care to strengthen his mind with the appropriate preliminary work.26 The overzealous hiker runs the risk of bodily injury, the presumptuous student of a mental one. The first fruit of a desire to know that has been restrained in this way is a proper docility.27 Just as the teacher’s task is to help the student to follow the natural order of learning by pointing out the right subjects of study in the right order, so the student’s is to gain the ability to distinguish between—in MacIntyre’s formulation—“what is good and best for me with my particular level of training and learning in my particular circumstances to do, and what is good and best unqualifiedly.”28 Another early fruit of keeping oneself to the proper order of studies is the not inconsiderable benefit that is the sort of universal ability to judge learned discourses in terms of their method that Aristotle calls paideia and that Newman so effectively lauds in his Idea of a University.29 But first and more essentially, the kind of moderated desire that is involved in willingly submitting to the order of learning enables one to make good one’s intellectual ground before passing on to a higher one, that is, to know the difference between what one knows and what one does not know about each subject that one is studying. The alternative is not a happy one, and has been aptly captured by Monsignor Robert Sokolowski’s description of the “accidental mind.” “Sheer ignorance,” he writes, “is not a problem; when we are just ignorant of an issue that is raised, we know that we do not know. What is dangerous and misleading is the unselfconscious confusion of accidentals and essentials. Confused persons don’t know that they don’t know, but they use the names and the words associated with the things they are talking about, and so they seem to know or at least think they know what the things are.”30 The way to avoid this kind of 26 For a full discussion of the subject, see Michael Augros, “The Place of Meta- physics in the Order of Learning,” The Aquinas Review 14 (2007): 23–61. 27 Cf. ST II–II, q. 49, a. 3, ad 1: “docilitas utilis sit ad quamlibet virtutem intellec- tualem.” 28 Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame: Univer- sity of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 61–2. 29 On which see Marie I. George, “The Notion of Paideia in Aristotle’s De Partibus Animalium,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 67 (1993): 299–319, and MacIntyre, “The Very Idea of a University: Aristotle, Newman, and Us,” British Journal of Educational Studies 57 (2009): 347–62. 30 Robert Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 104. The Perennial Relevance of Studiousness 961 mental confusion is by the careful training of the mind for the task of knowing, a training that involves all of the liberal arts, but among them, chiefly logic.31 The obstacle to gaining habitual rectitude of intellectual appetite with respect to the order of learning is that to do so seems so unappetizing. What bright university student will take freshman composition and an introductory logic class when given the chance to skip them in favor of more advanced courses, with their flashy names and interesting reading lists? How many professors are eager not only to teach the liberal arts but to help students to see that they bring desirable perfections of mind? But alas, the Pythagorean Theorem, the ablative absolute, and Barbara-Celarent are what they were many centuries ago. And so it has long been known that the tasks of teaching the liberal arts, for practical purposes, stand athwart progress in “knowledge-making.”When the elective system of higher education was first proposed in the 1880s by Harvard’s President Charles William Eliot, he argued that the custom of giving honors and prizes for scholarship was solely for the sake of promoting “specialization of work” and “advanced instruction.” “It is unnecessary to point out,” he said, “how absolutely opposed to such a policy the uniform prescription of a considerable body of elementary studies must be.”32 We are reaping the fruit of the seeds sown by Eliot. It is difficult to disagree with the lament recently penned by Columbia’s Mark Taylor: “too many courses represent what the professor wants to teach rather than what students need to learn.”33 As an initial response to Brad Gregory’s charges of papal suspicion and Thomistic timidity in the face of knowledge-making, we may say, with Aquinas, that it seems reasonable to hold that one manifestation of the virtue of studiousness would be a reluctance to be satisfied with the kind of inadequate preparation of students for higher studies that an emphasis on knowledge-making seems almost always to bring in its train. In the face of the cultural authority of the Berlin-style research university, to argue in favor of the liberal arts and the traditional order of the speculative disciplines may seem Quixotic. No less a committed Thomist than 31 For a recent reaffirmation of this point, see Benedict M. Ashley, O.P., The Way toward Wisdom: An Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 434–39, and especially 437. 32 Charles W. Eliot, “Liberty in Education,” [1885] in American Higher Education: A Documentary History, eds. Richard Hofstadter and Wilson Smith, 2 volumes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 713. 33 Mark C. Taylor, Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (New York: Knopf, 2010), 115. 962 Christopher Blum Alasdair MacIntyre has said that Aquinas’s conception of an ordered education “was and remained a Utopian proposal.”34 In the face of such a challenge, Thomists can take consolation in the continuing influence of Blessed John Henry Newman, who was both the product and an eloquent proponent of just the sort of serious liberal education that the virtue of studiousness would seem to require. Although not a Thomist by training, Newman famously attested that he felt “no temptation at all to break in pieces the great legacy of thought” handed down in “the form of a science, with a method and a phraseology of its own,” explicitly mentioning Aquinas as one who had given the tradition its shape.35 Newman’s own allegiance to Aristotle and his spirited prescriptions of “elementary studies” and “discipline of mind” are well-known, and even if they are more often honored in the breach than in the observance, his status as unofficial patron of higher learning has been affirmed by Pope Benedict XVI, and so one may perhaps be pardoned for hoping that his years of greatest influence may lie in the future.36 Attentiveness It is admittedly something of an intuitive leap to see the virtue of understanding as the fruit of a suitably restrained desire to learn from the right sources and in such a way that one’s learning readily refers to God as first principle and final end. It may, however, help to consider how a certain Promethean attitude coexisted with the denial of finality in the canonical founding texts of the modern mind. This is infamously the case in the works of Descartes, where we find the hope for freedom from “the infirmity of old age”—a Faustian bargain in the making if ever there was one— closely yoked to a round condemnation of the search for final causes.37 34 MacIntyre, “Aquinas’s Critique of Education: Against His Own Age, Against Ours,” in Philosophers on Education: Historical Perspectives, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (London: Routledge, 1998), 95–108, at 103. But for an alternative perspective, see Reinhard Hütter, “God, the University, and the Missing Link—Wisdom: Reflections on Two Untimely Books,” The Thomist 73 (2009): 241–77, at 276–77. 35 John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. Ian Ker (London: Penguin, 1994), 224–25. And for commentary, see Reinhard Hütter, “Catholic Theology in America: Quo Vadis?,” Nova et Vetera, English Edition 9 (2011): 539–47. 36 See Joshua P. Hochschild, “The Re-Imagined Aristotelianism of John Henry Newman,” Modern Age 45 (2003): 333–42; Christopher Blum, “Newman’s Collegiate Ideal,” Pro Ecclesia 17 (2008): 310–25; and Benedict XVI’s Homily at the Mass with the Beatification of Venerable Cardinal John Henry Newman, 19 September 2010. 37 Descartes, Discourse on Method, VI (AT 62), and Principles of Philosophy, I.28 (AT 15–16), in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert The Perennial Relevance of Studiousness 963 And Machiavelli was no less explicit: we are to dismiss inquiry into “what should be done” and turn away from “imagined republics” in order that we might instead learn from the Centaur how to “use the beast and the man.”38 But it was indeed a general trend, as technical advances were eagerly sought from such then-dubious sources as alchemical experimentation, the sketching of live nude models, and the dissection of corpses, while zeal for philosophical contemplation waned. Since it is not in artifacts but in the works of the divine art that we chiefly encounter a goodness and intelligibility that leads us to seek their source in God, it seems unsurprising that the modern tendency to frame the intellectual life in terms of our inquiry into the various human arts would be connected to a loss of attentiveness to being and essence. It is precisely in such an attentiveness that I suggest we can see a second element of the virtue of studiousness, which is the kind of restraint that bears fruit in the disciplining of the interior senses for the task of knowing.39 To consider some differences between the study of nature and the study of artifacts may enable us to appreciate this restraint. In the first place, artifacts are potentially limitless and reliably novel— there is an improved Ford Mustang with every new model year— whereas the works of nature are limited and, for the most part, the same today as they were in the days of Aristotle. This potential limitlessness of artifacts seems to go together with an undirected or promiscuous fascination about them: there is always another new movie, another type of experimental painting or photography, a new direction in nouvelle cuisine. In the study of nature, by contrast, one generally encounters the order of the universe as a limit. There are, to be sure, still thousands of new beetles for us to find in the rainforest. But the number of kinds of birds native to North America has long been well known, and it is a relatively small number. Nature, moreover, loves to hide, whereas it is the characteristic of works of art to declare themselves. Even Rothko’s bland canvasses make a statement. The student of nature, then, finds that his subject matter inculcates a knowledge of and respect for limits, and perhaps even a kind of natural docility and calm. It seems possible to affirm, then, that the task of knowing the being and form of natural Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), I:143, 202. 38 Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Harvey Mansfield, 2d edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 61, 69. 39 Cf. ST I–II, q. 50, a. 3, ad 3: “in ipsis interioribus viribus sensitivis apprehensivis possint poni aliqui habitus, secundum quos homo fit bene memorativus vel cogitativus vel imaginativus.” 964 Christopher Blum things requires a kind of looking into that makes it especially conducive to attentiveness.40 The excellence that attentiveness promises is an ability to say something determinate about the natures of things. Again, Sokolowski can help us appreciate the importance of such an ability by an illustration of its opposite, a mental trait he calls “vagueness.” “It is hard to imagine anyone with any intelligence,” he begins, who could be “entirely devoid of insight into what trees are.” But, he continues, “it is much easier to imagine that people use words like democracy, politics, freedom, and happiness, or even atom or electricity, in a vague way. The phenomenon often occurs when academics pretend to know something about quantum mechanics or Gödel’s Theorem.” In cases such as these, he explains, it is the “content” as well as the “form of our speech” that is “inadequate.” When we are struck dumb with vagueness, he explains, it is an indication that “we do not possess the eidos of the thing in question.”41 But where does this vagueness come from? If the understanding of the first principles is “from nature,” as Aquinas teaches (ST I–II, q. 51, a. 1 sc), how could we come to lose or damage it except by damaging our nature? There is, of course, a partial answer ready to hand in the distinction between principles known to all and those known only to the wise, a distinction that would enable us to address an example such as electricity with relative ease. But what of more universal principles, or, even the first of them all? The majesty of the fourth book of the Metaphysics must not be allowed to confuse us: Aristotle really did encounter sophists who not only denied the principle of contradiction but framed arguments in support of their denial. Theirs was a failure chiefly in the will, but there is also room for an analysis in terms of the loss or occlusion of the habit of understanding that has been provided by Aquinas: “when man ceases to make use of his intellectual habits, strange fancies, sometimes in opposition to them, arise in his imagination, so that unless those fancies be, as it were, cut off or kept back by frequent use of his intellectual habits, man becomes less fit to judge aright, and sometimes is even wholly disposed to the contrary.”42 The obstacles that pull us away from the use of our understanding and insert “strange fancies” into our minds are legion. Consider Cardinal Ratzinger’s contention that the increase in drug abuse in the West was a “warning signal” that revealed a “vacuum in our society,” and an “inte40 For further discussion, see Christopher Blum, “On the Recovery of Experience and the Search for a Christian Environmentalism,” Nova et Vetera 10 (2012): 95–104. 41 Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person, 149–50. 42 ST I–II, q. 53, a. 3. The Perennial Relevance of Studiousness 965 rior longing in man which breaks out in perverted form if it does not find its true satisfaction.”43 Or again, Reinhard Hütter’s observation of the connection between the consumption of pornography and the vice of acedia.44 These examples are the most extraordinary reductiones ad absurdum of the replacement of nature with artifact as the focus of our sensory and mental attention, but examples of lesser severity would be easy enough to multiply. The net result, however, is that it is now possible to speak not only of addictions and social pathologies that most evidently and directly corrupt and distort the mind, but also of a new defect that has been labeled “nature deficit disorder,” a defect that arises when names like “Pickachu, Metapod, and Wigglytuff,” the names of characters from Pokemon, become more familiar to children than otter, beetle, and oak tree.45 What needs to be done to help those who have lost or damaged their native attraction to the understated loveliness and intelligibility of nature, as the Holy Father has counseled in a different but parallel context, is for “the windows [to] be flung open again” so that they can “see the wide world, the sky and the earth once more.”46 And they must be helped to cultivate the practices that keep us from vagueness and that form our interior senses that they might serve rather than obstruct the understanding. These practices involve the use of the senses, but are essentially the work of the mind, for they are practices of looking and listening, of comparing things, of weighing characteristics with careful speech, and, especially, of looking before and after in order to place things in their appropriate genera and species and patiently discussing the natures of things and their definitions with our fellow inquirers. Although initially arduous, these practices not only bear lasting fruit, they also inculcate an habitual attentiveness that is a real perfection of the will and greatly prized by those who have learned to appreciate it. Gilbert Highet’s praise, in his Art of Teaching, for Louis Agassiz’s pedagogical method is one instance, but others can be readily supplied from our own experiences of sound and demanding courses of instruction.47 Among the many contemporary pleas for the cultivation of attentiveness, few have been as 43 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Consumer Materialism and Christian Hope,” in Teach- ers of the Faith: Speeches and Lectures by Catholic Bishops, ed.Tom Horwood (London: Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, 2002), 78–94, at 81. 44 Reinhard Hütter, “Pornography and Acedia,” Nova et Vetera 10 (2012): 901–7. 45 Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (New York: Workman, 2005), 33. 46 Benedict XVI, “The Listening Heart: Reflections on the Foundations of Law,” an address delivered in the Reichstag Building, Berlin, 22 September 2011. 47 See Gilbert Highet, The Art of Teaching (New York: Vintage, 1955), 214–17. Christopher Blum 966 eloquent as the one penned by the late historian of psychology Edward Reed: “Surely it is time,” he observed, to “relearn the homely lesson that all understanding . . . is rooted in ordinary experience. The meaning of our lives will be found only when we make the effort to look for ourselves.”48 Perhaps, in this regard, it may be said that one of the aspects of Aristotle that still awaits recovery by Thomists is the attentiveness to being that is praised in the famous passage (1.5) in the Parts of Animals and embodied throughout his biological corpus.49 Bearers of Wisdom It is in Aquinas’s first cause of restraint in the desire for knowledge that I would locate an important teaching about the intellectual virtue of wisdom, that is, in the injunction that the student attend to the matters his state in life requires him to know. I see two lessons implied by this injunction: first, that we ought to desire to climb to the heights of acquired wisdom just in so far as our state in life affords us a fitting opportunity to do so—no more and no less; second, that to whatever extent we have acquired wisdom, so also ought we to desire to share that wisdom by, as it were, coming back down from the heights, in order to make straight and smooth and as wide as possible the path that leads back to them. This twofold restraint is, on the one hand, a holding back from using our leisure to learn about trivial things and thus be distracted from the pursuit of wisdom, and, on the other, a refraining from a selfish enjoyment of whatever wisdom we have acquired thanks to a willingness—even a positive desire—to return to those elementary studies and lower disciplines that enabled us to climb wisdom’s slopes in the first place.50 For it is a home truth that there will not be wisdom where there is not already considerable science and understanding.The ordering to which the wise are called, on this view, involves a continual climbing up and returning back in order to assist others with their ascent. It is a happy irony to be able to call upon a sophist to argue the point at hand. The late Richard Rorty, although no friend to wisdom, wonder, or truth, was as well acquainted with contemporary academic life as any. He once testified to his hope that “the students can be distracted from their struggle to get into a high-paying profession, and that the professors 48 Edward S. Reed, The Necessity of Experience (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 163. 49 For a parallel suggestion, see Lawrence Dewan, O.P., “Truth and Happiness,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 67 (1993): 1–20, at 14–15. 50 For an analogous discussion of the teacher’s role, see Marcus R. Berquist, “Learn- ing and Discipleship,” The Aquinas Review 6 (1999): 1–51. The Perennial Relevance of Studiousness 967 will not simply try to reproduce themselves by preparing the students to enter graduate study in their own disciplines.”51 His comment accurately points out the habits that are opposed to the studiousness that conduces to wisdom: the bad habit of the student who fails to gird his loins for the ascent (and such a student may very well be a teacher by profession), and the still worse habit of the teacher who has lost sight of his proper task and its true ordination to the common good. The first vice is easy to understand, widespread, and as old as Meno and Thrasymachus; its prevalence explains why some theories of intellectual virtue are content to affirm a strong desire for “epistemic goods” as a sufficient account of a healthy mental life: at least there is a mental life in such a case.The second vice is one that we tradesmen best understand, for we see it in ourselves in our weaker moments. A long life in the cabinetmaker’s shop tends to make the back hunched and the eyes see every tree as only a bed or a dresser waiting to happen, and something similar happens to us scholars. We need not look abroad to understand the force of MacIntyre’s observation that “there has developed since [Hume] a kind of philosophy that sometimes functions for those who engage in it just as dining and backgammon did for Hume.”52 One may be confident that we all enjoy philosophy more than backgammon; the question is whether we enjoy it selfishly or generously. MacIntyre himself has provided a suitable statement of the criterion by which we may judge our own habit of desiring philosophical knowledge. “Being a great philosopher,” he suggests, “is not at all the same thing as leading an exemplary philosophical life, but perhaps the point of doing philosophy is to enable people to lead, so far as it is within their power, philosophical lives.”53 In pursuit of the call to be truly studious by ardently desiring to fulfill the injunction sapientis est ordinare in all of its amplitude, we have been given an exemplar and guide in Benedict XVI. He developed a beautiful teaching about a virtue he calls intellectual charity. By this phrase he did not mean that every text ought to be read with the same sympathy and docility that we give to the works of the Fathers of the Church. Nor did 51 Richard Rorty, “Education as Socialization and as Individualization,” [1989] in his Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin, 1999), 116. Cf. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Catholic Universities: Dangers, Hopes, Choices,” in Higher Learning and Catholic Traditions, ed. Robert E. Sullivan (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 1–21, at 6: “The undergraduate major . . . becomes increasingly no more than a prologue to graduate school, even for those who will never go to graduate school.” 52 MacIntyre, “The Ends of Life, The Ends of Philosophical Writing,” in his The Tasks of Philosophy, 125–42, at 132. 53 Ibid., 132. 968 Christopher Blum he mean that we ought not argue, and strenuously if need be, for the truth of the faith. Quite the contrary. “This aspect of charity,” he explained, “calls the educator to recognize that the profound responsibility to lead the young to truth is nothing less than an act of love.” In practice, he noted, the work of this virtue is to “uphold the essential unity of knowledge against the fragmentation which ensues when reason is detached from the pursuit of truth” and “guide the young towards the deep satisfaction of exercising freedom in relation to truth.”54 Perhaps it is because he stood to the whole world as an elder that he understood his own Petrine ministry as an exercise of intellectual charity, making his own the “task to safeguard sensibility to the truth; to invite reason to set out ever anew in search of what is true and good, in search of God.”55 And he fulfilled that task with a most generous labor of teaching, whose beneficiaries we all are. To the extent to which we are narrowly immersed in a research agenda, have allowed our minds to be shaped by human conventions rather than to be measured by the being of things created by God, and finally, have not labored in the elementary studies that students must master if they are to make genuine progress in knowing and toward wisdom, to that same degree will we be unlikely to perceive in Aquinas’s conception of studiousness a wise restraint by which the desire for knowledge is ordered to the attainment of the intellectual virtues. Instead, the practices that characterize studiousness may well seem to us as so much timidity in the face of knowledge-making. Those “bearers of wisdom” who have tasted something of the fruitfulness of restraint, however, are not likely to agree.56 N&V 54 Benedict XVI, Address to Educators, Washington, DC, 17 April 2008. See also the encyclical Caritas in Veritate, §§1–6 (2009), his Homily for First Vespers with University Students of Rome, 17 December 2009, and “Saint Augustine of Hippo (4),” General Audience Address of 20 February 2008. 55 Benedict XVI, Address at La Sapienza, the University of Rome, 17 January 2008. 56 Benedict XVI, Address to Catholic Educators, Washington, DC, 17 April 2008. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2013): 969–91 969 The Millennial Challenges Facing Catholic Intellectual Life M ATTHEW L. L AMB Ave Maria University Ave Maria, FL I T IS an honor to offer the 2012 Blessed John Paul II theology lecture at the University of Dallas. John Paul the Great had a very long view of history. Centuries were too short a span for him. After all, his beloved Poland had disappeared from the world maps for more than 120 years (1796–1918). It reappeared only to be plunged into the immense sufferings and bloodshed of the Second World War and the tyrannies of Nazism and Communism.Through such underground darkness Catholicism kept alive, for the young Karol Wojtyla and for so many other Polish Catholics, its millennial transcending love of Jesus Christ. Their faith gave them a hope with which to resist despairing of reason and human dignity. Their Catholic faith was a light flickering in the night of nihilism; the reality of the risen Christ enabled them to love responsibly amid the horrors and hatred of warring tyrannies and genocides. Studying great Catholic philosophers and theologians of the past two millennia against the backdrop of two world wars, the Holocaust consuming his Jewish friends, and the rubble of his beloved Poland, Wojtyla knew the challenges facing genuine Catholic intellectual life. Human intelligence was increasingly in need of a vibrant recovery of the wisdom and holiness that had taken up the massive histories of human suffering into the agony of Christ, true God and true man, crucified and risen to lead humankind into the glory of eternal beatitude. The natural and human sciences, the technological, political, cultural, and religious institutions of the modern world needed to be liberated from the destructive ideologies of relativism, nihilism, and totalitarianism. But Wojtyla knew well the long years of prayerful study and scholarly collaboration needed to learn the 970 Matthew L. Lamb natural, human and spiritual realities in the millennial treasuries of philosophical and theological wisdom, in the scientific and scholarly advances, not to mention the glories of artistic genius. The cultivation of intelligence is a cooperative enterprise down the ages. The languages, words, sciences, theories, arts—all we learn from others. There are no Robinson Crusoes or Cartesian universal doubters in the realm of reason. As Cardinal Newman astutely observed, traditions are crucial, not just for religious faithful, but for all human learners. With Flannery O’Connor, we could imagine it as a long, multi-millennial procession of teachers and learners down the generations. We are born into languages and cultures that sweep us along in the procession. Four Major Challenges Humanity Faces Today In his many writings Karol Wojtyla provides guides for a renewal of Catholic intellectual life. He insisted on the fundamental importance of Catholic universities to meet the enormous challenges facing the world at the dawn of Catholicism’s third millennium. Let me list some of the large challenges we all are facing today: 1. Demographic:1 All the advanced European and Western societies, demographers indicate, are dying out. There is a birth derth among native European populations. One needs a total fertility rate (TFR) of 2.1 to maintain a population. Estimates put the TFR of native populations in the European Union as averaging about 1.40; the Muslims in the European Union have about 3.0 TFR average. Meanwhile, China’s one-child policy, thanks to readily available ultrasound and abortion, has led to an imbalance of the sexes, there being some 20 million more boys than girls; demographic projections suggest dire consequences in several decades. Marriage and two-parent families are diminishing, as divorce, cohabitation, single-mother births, and polygyny increase in countries. 2. Cultural: Intellectual fragmentation has turned universities into multiversities, whenever schools abandon a unified integrating core in favor of a hodgepodge of unrelated majors, minors, degrees—as 1 Cf. Country Comparison of Total Fertility Rates in the CIA World Fact Book for 2013 projections. On global aspects of the demographic decline, cf. David P. Goldman, It’s Not the End of the World, It’s Just the End of You (New York: RVP Publishers, 2011) and his How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam Is Dying Too) (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2011). On America cf. Jonathan V. Last, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster (New York: Encounter Books, 2013). The Challenges Facing Catholic Intellectual Life 971 one successful student remarked, she graduated with an acute case of intellectual indigestion. Multiculturalism poses as a guardian of diversity, but so far has been unable to avoid a drab uniformity in art, architecture, media, clothes, fast food, malls, etc. the world over. 3. Political: Violence, war, crime, and all manner of vice are attributed to the human “state of nature” by empiricist human sciences. Political regimes of right and left then devise “social contracts or constitutions” that formulate human rights without recognizing any power above the state. Legality is substituted for morality, as intermediate communities and institutions diminish, isolating individual citizens over against the arbitrary powers of growing federal bureaucracies. Human rights are based not upon genuine human dignity but upon the power of interest groups to get state support in the defense of their “rights,” legal sanctions being imposed against those who disagree. Humanity lives with the specter of nuclear warfare and environmental destruction. Mega-disasters are regular fare on the science, discovery, and history channels. 4. Ethical: Secularism and fundamentalism have severed virtue and the good from intelligence and have placed them solely in the will. Moral truth claims, like religious ones, are relegated to purely voluntaristic, emotional options that cannot be applied to society or humanity as a whole. Love is equated with feelings of sexual attraction that pornography exploits to depersonalize human sexuality and love. These latter are disordered into egocentric pleasure and power. The moral teachings of religious institutions are seen as fundamentalist, arbitrary claims. Members and ministers of those institutions are encouraged to dissent (and to teach others to do so) and also to stay in the institutions in order to change the moral teachings. Opponents of religious institutions use scandals within the institutions to rationalize rejection of the teachings as having any moral authority. I don’t have to remind this audience of the painful illustration of this in Catholic and other sex-abuse scandals. Ex Corde Ecclesiae: Catholic Universities and Intellectual Life Before such challenges, many in the culture remarked on the irony of the Pope’s masterful encyclical Fides et Ratio. Here was a pope indicating how Catholic faith, far from blinding reason, was defending the truth and importance of reason in the face of the skeptical rejection of reasoned judgment and truth that was overshadowing all advanced cultures and societies. Catholic universities have an enormous responsibility to face up 972 Matthew L. Lamb to the challenges confronting genuine intellectual life. So in Ex Corde Ecclesiae John Paul II emphasized the importance of a “free search for the whole truth about nature, man, and God.” He continued: The present age is in urgent need of . . . disinterested service, namely of proclaiming the meaning of truth, that fundamental good without which freedom, justice, and human dignity are extinguished. By means of a kind of universal humanism a Catholic University is completely dedicated to the research of all aspects of truth in their essential connection with the supreme Truth, who is God. It does this without fear but rather with enthusiasm, dedicating itself to every path of knowledge, aware of being preceded by him who is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life”, the Logos, whose Spirit of intelligence and love enables the human person with his or her own intelligence to find the ultimate reality of which He is the source and end and who alone is capable of giving fully that Wisdom without which the future of the world would be in danger.2 The responsibility to explore “the whole truth about nature, man, and God” means that today at the dawn of the third millennium of Catholicism there is a need to draw upon the achievements of the past, but not as if we were constructing a museum for dusty old relics. Rather we study those achievements for the important insights into the wisdom and science of great saints and scholars about “the whole truth” in order to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. Nominalist Origins of the Challenges Learning the sciences requires an intellectual asceticism, a training of the mind to move beyond the descriptive categories of sense to the explanatory categories of mathematical and scientific specializations of intelligence. The empirical natural sciences have transformed the world of nature and of history profoundly. The flourishing of the sciences, both natural and human, is matched by the immense labors of historical scholarship, and the brilliance of the many literary, artistic and architectural achievements. The third millennium of Catholicism demands the development of acquired wisdom and science with the humanities and arts. Blessed John Paul II and Benedict XVI imbue their teachings with the achievements of the first two millennia of Catholicism in order to address the challenges humanity faces in our times. Why? If the second millennium began by differentiating wisdom and science in the European universities, it ended with a complete loss of any notion 2 John Paul II, Ex Corde Ecclesiae §4. The Challenges Facing Catholic Intellectual Life 973 of wisdom as a serious theoretical attunement to the realities of material and spiritual objects. With the loss of wisdom traditions, modern cultures cultivated a fragmented attention to isolated individual particulars. As the environmental crises illustrate, there was no attention to the intelligibility and pattern of wholes; instead attention was focused only on the individual things, and any effort to pattern or order them is taken to be conventional and arbitrary. Wisdom is replaced by raw willpower, and reason is reduced to calculating how to get and keep such power. As George Weigel states, John Paul II’s Veritatis Splendor was “an exercise in retrieval, reclaiming the venerable notion of freedom linked to truth and goodness that had gotten lost in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries under the influence of the philosophy called ‘nominalism’ and its equation of freedom with raw willpower.”3 In confronting the nominalist/voluntarist challenges of the third millennium, John Paul II found a congenial collaborator in a German theologian, Joseph Ratzinger. In 1974, then-Cardinal Wojtyla gave a presentation, “The Personal Structure of Self-Determination,” at a conference honoring the seventh centenary of the death of St. Thomas Aquinas at Fossanova, where the lecture was given. The eminent Thomist Josef Pieper was so impressed that he wrote to his friend Prof. Ratzinger that he should “begin a correspondence and exchange books with Wojtyla.”4 Their friendship grew over the succeeding years. Wojtyla appreciated how Ratzinger saw, thanks to his profound study of St. Augustine, that reason embraces both understanding and truth.5 Wojtyla appreciated how Ratzinger’s studies of Augustine, especially on the De Trinitate, emphasized the ways in which Catholic faith enlightens reason and fosters a keen intellectual life, by insisting on intellectual conversion: Logos and “Die Vernunft des Glaubens.”6 Pope Benedict XVI’s magisterial Regensburg lecture indicated that the divorce of science and scholarship from wisdom was begun in nominalism. Duns Scotus did not understand the theoretical way of living as founded on an intellectual conversion whereby one can know both sensible and spiritual realities, that the intelligible causes the sensible. In Ockham, metaphysics was dominated by a conceptualist logic that replaced potency-form-act 3 See George Weigel, Witness to Hope:The Biography of Pope John Paul II (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 694, on the import of Veritatis Splendor (e.g. §§76–78). 4 George Weigel, The End and the Beginning (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 12. 5 Cardinal Wojtyla used Ratzinger’s Einführung in das Christentum when he gave, at the invitation of Pope Paul VI, the Lenten retreat at the Vatican. in das Christentum, 35–52, on logos and “Die Vernunft des Glaubens,” 103–50. 6 Cf. Einführung 974 Matthew L. Lamb with possibilities to be exploited by power calculations. Against the “intellectualism of Augustine and Aquinas,” Benedict XVI traces nominalist voluntarism to “the image of a capricious God [voluntas ordinata], who is not even bound to truth and goodness.” God’s otherness is “so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are not grounded in God.” So reason is blinded in the depths of dark “endless possibilities that are eternally unattainable and hidden behind His actual decisions.”7 Benedict traces the deepening rejection of the Hellenic discovery of logos and reason in successive nominalist philosophers and theologians through the Reformation and Enlightenment. Reason is bifurcated into sensations and concepts, so that we intuit only sensations or concepts rather than real beings. There was a massive eclipse of judgment as knowing the real. Universals are only “flatus vocis,” empty words used to arbitrarily label fragmented individual entities or, in Leibniz’s terms, monads. Cultures become distorted by relativism, historicism, nihilism, and fundamentalism.8 Nominalism exalted the will over reason—all living continuity with the great philosophical and theological traditions of the past was broken. Doctrinal and theoretical traditions were devalued into purely “textual” and “verbal” matters. Reason as an instrument of the will to power simply slaps labels on objects, and the more powerful do more labeling of objects and laws. Laws were not expressions of practical intelligence aimed at educating citizens in virtue but arbitrary exercises of will enforcing external behavior. How can Catholic intellectual life overcome the dualisms 7 Regensburg Lecture; see also James V. Schall, The Regensburg Lecture (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine Press, 2007), 63–68; and Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999), 61–121. 8 Benedict XVI, Message for the Celebration of the World Day of Peace (1 January 2006) §10. Benedict sees the world of today threatened by those who deny the truth of human nature and reason. Foremost among such denials he singles out, citing Popes Paul VI and John Paul II, are nihilism and fundamentalism that feed upon one another: “Looked at closely, nihilism and the fundamentalism of which we are speaking share an erroneous relationship to truth: the nihilist denies the very existence of truth, while the fundamentalist claims to be able to impose it by force. Despite their different origins and cultural backgrounds, both show a dangerous contempt for human beings and human life, and ultimately for God himself. Indeed, this shared tragic outcome results from a distortion of the full truth about God: nihilism denies God’s existence and his provident presence in history, while fanatical fundamentalism disfigures his loving and merciful countenance, replacing him with idols made in its own image. In analyzing the causes of the contemporary phenomenon of terrorism, consideration should be given, not only to its political and social causes, but also to its deeper cultural, religious and ideological motivations.” The Challenges Facing Catholic Intellectual Life 975 between mind and body,9 between subjects and objects, between empirical science and theoretical wisdom? The Acting Person: Reason as Patterns of Experienced Acts and Objects What is common to Wojtyla and Ratzinger is how they learned from Catholic minds of the past—especially Augustine and Aquinas—how to articulate the universality of human reason across all times and cultures. This is the key to counteracting the distortions of nominalism/voluntarism and to meeting the intellectual challenges we face. Wojtyla realized how St. Thomas Aquinas had provided this key.10 Moreover, this key also applies to the moral and theological tasks as well. The key is that all human beings experience in their conscious living patterns of objects and acts. It was obvious to Wojtyla, Ratzinger, and others that the logos of human reason means that all human beings, as endowed with God-given reason, experience related and recurrent acts that are moved by experienced objects. As Wojtyla wrote: 9 This is the significance of John Paul II’s theology of the body to counteract the depersonalization of love in disordered pornography, which tries to wrench eros from its intrinsic orientation to philia and agape. In his encyclical Deus Caritas Est, Benedict XVI spells out how the infused love of the Triune God, agape or charity, in no way negates or minimizes the human forms of love as eros and philia, married love and the love of friendship. The redemption of creation heals erotic love and friendship from the disorders that sin had introduced. Indeed, agapic love transforms erotic love into the holy mystery of Christ’s love for his Church in the sacrament of marriage. The higher does not negate the lower; so also the light of faith in no way “blinds” or negates the light of reason. These principles of the Holy Father’s teachings were learnt well when as a student and then professor of theology he studied and appropriated the works of St. Augustine. Augustine profoundly explored the intimate bond between knowing and loving, between reason and will, in his reflections upon the human mind as an immaterial image of God in his On the Trinity. There Augustine spells out how we humans do not love the unknown, rather we love to know the unknown (On the Trinity 10, 1). Love always engenders a desire to understand and know the truth. Love always arises from the “logos” or “verbum” of reason that, in very Trinitarian language, spirates the love (ibid. 9, 2–12). This distinction, between loving the unknown and loving to know the unknown, is what separates Nietzschean nihilism (loving the unknown as such) and the dark night of Christian mysticism (longing to know the unknown). 10 Cf. the important volume John Paul II and St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. Michael Dauphinais and Matthew Levering (Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia Press, 2006), especially the essays by Avery Dulles, Michael Sherwin, Reinhard Hütter, Guy Mansini, Thomas Weinandy, and Matthew Levering. 976 Matthew L. Lamb The expression “actus humanus” itself is not only derived from the verb agere —which establishes its direct relationship with action and acting because agere means to act or to do—but it also assumes, as it is traditionally used in Western philosophy, a specified interpretation of the action, namely, the interpretation found in the philosophies of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. This interpretation is realistic and objectivistic as well as metaphysical. It issues from the whole conception of being, and more directly from the conception of potentia-actus, which has been used by Aristotelians to explain the changeable and simultaneously dynamic nature of being.11 Figure 1 Realities Referenced Study of texts from the past State same realities in new contexts What Josef Pieper admired in Wojtyla’s lecture celebrating Aquinas was the realism of his reading of Aquinas. That realism is also present in Ratzinger’s reading of the Fathers and Augustine. Wojtyla knew that Aquinas was not interested in founding Thomism, just as Ratzinger knew that Augustine had no thought to found Augustinianism. The Fathers and Schoolmen knew that all human beings experience acts of sensing, of perceiving, of imagining, as well as acts of inquiring, understanding, conceiving, weighing the evidence, judging the truth of something 11 Cf. Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person, trans. Andrzej Potocki (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing, 1997); this translation is very poor and I am drawing upon the better German translation from the Polish by Herbert Springer, Person und Tat (Herder, 1982), 33. Joseph P. Rice has drawn upon the Polish original, and he emphasizes, as I do, Wojtyla’s transcendental approach that breaks through the dichotomies between subjectivity and objectivity. See his “Consciousness, Conscience, and Persons: A Reflection on Wojtyla’s ‘Trans-Phenomenological’ Approach to Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity” at the 2012 Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Conference. Also Rocco Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyla: The Thought of the Man Who Became Pope John Paul II, trans. Paolo Guitti and Francesca Murphy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997); as Vincent Potter, S.J., points out, it would be futile to oppose Wojtyla to Thomas Aquinas in this regard, since Potter acknowledges that Bernard Lonergan, S.J., adopts a similar way of seeing a key to human experience in Aquinas in his article “Philosophical Correlations among K. Wojtla, C.S. Peirce, and B. Lonergan,” in The Thought of Pope John Paul II, ed. John McDermott, S.J. (Rome: Gregoriana, 1993), 205ff. The Challenges Facing Catholic Intellectual Life 977 understood, along with acts of deliberating what is good, of deciding, of acting, loving, etc. The acts are moved by all the sensible objects in the world around us, as well as by persons and realities that go beyond our senses. The universality of reason is oriented to the universality of being. Thus there is an implicit metaphysics in all human acting. Rendering metaphysics explicit requires a collaborative attuning of mind and heart to the whole of being and its causes down the ages. Karol Wojtyla provides what might be described as a personalist formulation of the metaphysical elements that Aquinas related to the selfknowledge of the soul. As with Aquinas, Wojtyla carefully shows both how human beings experience a conscious awareness of objects around them as well as the many acts by which one is aware of objects. Repeating these acts becomes habitual, and the acts become habits. Aquinas drew upon both Augustine and Aristotle in his articulation of habits. Habits can be either virtues or vices. The powers or faculties of the human soul are intellect and will, which is the intellect’s rational appetite. In his personalist formulation, Wojtyla speaks of “Personal Identity” instead of “Soul with its powers or faculties of intellect and will.” He analyzes “Related and Recurrent Patterns of Acts” instead of “Habits.” And he sees that “Acts and Objects” are “Conscious Experiences,” so that consciousness can also include conscience.12 These personalist formulations might be outlined as in Figure 2. In calling Vatican II, Blessed John XXIII dramatized the twofold challenges of what he termed Ressourcement and Aggiornomento: appropriating the Catholic spiritual and intellectual traditions, and by this to inspire Catholics to reform and renew both church and world.13 Wojtyla, coming from Communist Poland, had an advantage over the other bishops. The mass media in Poland did not report much on the council. So when he returned home he was able to teach what in fact the Council taught in terms of Tradition and reform. His Sources of Renewal is a masterful guide on how to realize the tasks set by the Council; it has extensive quotations from the documents. He uses the key of referring to the related patterns of conscious acts and objects constituting both the formation of reason and the formation of the Church. He situates the 12 For a thorough study of St. Thomas Aquinas on the self-knowledge of the human soul, and how it draws upon St. Augustine and Aristotle, cf.Therese Scarpelli Cory, Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); also Richard Thomas Lambert, Self-Knowledge in Thomas Aquinas:The Angelic Doctor on the Soul’s Knowledge of Itself (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2007). 13 Cf. Matthew Lamb and Matthew Levering, eds., Vatican II: Renewal Within Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) pp. 4–20. Matthew L. Lamb 978 renewal of Vatican II within the historical and eschatological self-realization of the Church in the redeeming Christ.14 Figure 2 Intellect Soul Powers-faculties Habits Will Personal Identity Good (Virtues) Acts Object (Vices) Bad in related recurrent patterns of conscious experiences A Purified Memory Integral to Catholic Intellectual Life Wojtyla explored the key of attending to the acts and objects of human reason and Catholic faith and practices, from his The Acting Person to his magisterial papal encyclicals and apostolic letters and audience presentations. Memory was so important to the renewal of Catholic intellectual life that he called for a “purification of memory”—given all the sins Catholics had committed—in order that the intelligence, wisdom, and holiness of the Church’s memory might be recovered. Veritatis Splendor was, as George Weigel writes, “part of John Paul II’s comprehensive program to implement the Second Vatican Council . . . [it] does so by a 14 Foreign reporters from Western and first world countries from 1962–65 knew there were two places in the world where their stories would be assured top billing: the war in Vietnam and the council in Rome. So Rome was flooded with reporters who had little or no knowledge of Catholicism. It was then that they came up with the template of the council as a struggle between conservative/reactionary versus liberal/progressive forces. Those periti who bought into this template were quoted often and generously in the mass media. No attention was given to the daily Masses and prayers of the assembled bishops. When the constitutions, decrees, and directives of the Council were published, they were misinterpreted as political documents: whenever traditional Catholic principles were expressed, they were seen as “compromises” to get conservative votes for the “liberal” changes. So the dichotomy developed between the “spirit” of the council and the actual texts. Liberals were winning and the progressive Catholics should move beyond the popes and bishops with this disembodied spirit of liberal accommodations. The realities referenced in the texts were ignored as the texts were presented in conceptualist frameworks of ideologies of progress over reactionary forces. The Challenges Facing Catholic Intellectual Life 979 method . . . of Ressourcement, the recovery of foundational theological themes from the Bible, the theology of the first Christian centuries, and medieval scholarship.”15 Fides et Ratio begins with a strong injunction that shows the inextricable link of objects and acts in seeking the truth: Know Yourself. . . . In both East and West, we may trace a journey that has led humanity down the centuries to meet and engage truth more and more deeply. It is a journey that has unfolded—as it must—within the horizon of personal self-consciousness: the more human beings know reality and the world, the more they know themselves in their uniqueness, with the question of the meaning of things and of their very existence becoming ever more pressing. This is why all that is the object of our knowledge becomes a part of our life.”16 Metaphysics for Wojtyla is the theoretical analysis of the really existing causes of the beings known by the related and recurrent patterns of experienced acts and objects. Metaphysics is foundational in the search for truth, and is implicit in all knowing and moral striving aimed at the supreme Good who is God. He insists: Here I do not mean to speak of metaphysics in the sense of a specific school or a particular historical current of thought. I want only to state that reality and truth do transcend the factual and the empirical, and to vindicate the human being’s capacity to know this transcendent and metaphysical dimension in a way that is true and certain, albeit imperfect and analogical.17 Like Aquinas, Wojtyla wants the student acquiring the wisdom of metaphysics not to be joining a school, but knowing being and its causes, material, formal, efficient, and especially potency and act along with the final causes.18 In 1994, at the end of a most bloody twentieth century, John Paul II’s call for the Church to celebrate the Jubilee year of 200019 carried the provocative title Tertio Millennio Adveniente.20 He came back to the millennial theme again in 2001 at the close of the Jubilee year in in Tertio Millennio Ineunte. He first of all reiterated his call for a “purification of memory” 15 George Weigel, Witness to Hope, 694. 16 John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, §1; also §§24, 46, 55, 61, 76. 17 Ibid. §83, also §84. 18 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (henceforth ST ), II–II, q. 1, a. 2, ad 2. 19 Cf. George Weigel, The End and the Beginning (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 197–98. 20 Apostolic Letter of John Paul II, Tertio Millennio Adveniente §7. 980 Matthew L. Lamb in the light of all the evils and sins Catholics have committed down the centuries.21 With the Church’s memory thus purified through repentance, the proper way to prepare for the future is to enliven the Church’s memory with insights from the treasuries of wisdom, intelligence, and holiness in the past millennia: It is not therefore a matter of inventing a ‘new programme’. The programme already exists: it is the plan found in the Gospel and in the living Tradition, it is the same as ever. Ultimately, it has its center in Christ himself, who is to be known, loved and imitated, so that in him we may live the life of the Trinity, and with him transform history until its fulfillment in the heavenly Jerusalem. This is a programme which does not change with shifts of times and cultures, even though it takes account of time and culture for the sake of true dialogue and effective communication.This programme for all times is our programme for the Third Millennium.22 In his 2005 book Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium, he reiterates how the many challenges facing Catholicism in the new millennium should lead us to appropriate, make our own, the great intellectual, moral, and theological achievements of the past two millennia. At the very beginning of his remarks, the Holy Father indicates how there is a dialectic operative in Western cultures. The massive evils of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism at the end of the twentieth century are not the whole story. “The modern history of Europe, shaped—especially in the West—by the influence of the Enlightenment, has yielded many positive fruits. This is actually characteristic of evil, as understood by Saint Thomas, following in the tradition of Saint Augustine. Evil is always the absence of some good which ought to be present in a given being; it is a privation. It is never a total absence of good.” He illustrates 21 Ibid. §6: “The purification of memory: To purify our vision for the contemplation of the mystery, this Jubilee Year has been strongly marked by the request for forgiveness. This is true not only for individuals, who have examined their own lives in order to ask for mercy and gain the special gift of the indulgence, but for the entire Church, which has decided to recall the infidelities of so many of her children in the course of history, infidelities which have cast a shadow over her countenance as the Bride of Christ. For a long time we had been preparing ourselves for this examination of conscience, aware that the Church, embracing sinners in her bosom, ‘is at once holy and always in need of being purified’. Study congresses helped us to identify those aspects in which, during the course of the first two millennia, the Gospel spirit did not always shine forth.” 22 Apostolic Letter Tertio Millennio Ineunte §27. The Challenges Facing Catholic Intellectual Life 981 this with the parable of the wheat and the weeds (Mt. 13:29–30).23 The Pope then illustrates how the positive fruits of the Enlightenment could be harvested from the documents of Vatican II so that the proclamation of human liberty, equality, and fraternity would be based by the Council on the God-created dignity of human beings. The discernment that Catholic theologians and the Council exercised in this dialectical process is due, the Pope states, to the attention paid to the wisdom of the first millennium of Catholicism: These formulations are the fruit of the Church’s profound doctrinal reflection during the first millennium, concerning the correct way to speak of the mystery of the Incarnate God. The question was addressed by almost all the Councils, which continually return to different aspects of this fundamental mystery of faith. The Second Vatican Council bases its teaching on the great wealth of earlier doctrinal reflection on Christ’s divine humanity, so as to draw forth a conclusion that is essential for Christian anthropology. This is where its innovative character lies.24 If the first millennium of Catholicism is important in the dialectical discernment needed for the third as regards a proper understanding of equality and fraternity, John Paul II sees the crucial importance of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas to discern what is human freedom. Against the voluntarism that divorces the will from reason in nominalism, the Pope calls upon Aristotle: What is human freedom? The answer can be traced back to Aristotle. Freedom, for Aristotle, is a property of the will which is realized through truth. It is given to man as a task to be accomplished. There is no freedom without truth. Freedom is an ethical category. Aristotle teaches this principally in his Nicomachean Ethics, constructed on the basis of rational truth. This natural ethic was adopted in its entirety by Saint Thomas in his Summa Theologiae. So it was that the Nicomachean Ethics remained a significant influence in the history of morals, having now taken on the characteristics of a Christian Thomistic ethic.25 23 John Paul II, Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium (New York: Rizzoli, 2005), 3–4. 24 Ibid., 111–12. Christ as the Son of God, the Second Person of the Most Holy Trin- ity, unites in Himself His divine nature and human nature. In this chapter Pope John Paul II shows how Gaudium et Spes §22 links human nature and all of human history to the Mystery of Jesus Christ, so that all of human suffering and sin is redeemed by Christ on the Cross. Christ’s resurrection destroys death, and his dying—into which we are baptized—atones for the sins that crucified Him. 25 Ibid., 39. Matthew L. Lamb 982 He goes on to show how Aquinas was able to order the intellectual, moral, and theological virtues, thanks to the Aristotelian definition of right reason discerning the mean from the extremes, thereby knowing the truly good from merely apparent good. The Pope also briefly relates this Thomistic ethic to the development of the social teachings of the Church.26 Following the lead of Pope John Paul II, the next two sections will highlight some of the dialectical developments in the first two millennia of Catholicism.The difference between historical and dialectical accounts might be illustrated by the difference between color photographs and xrays. Historical accounts are multivalent, open to choose among the many events occuring at places and times. Dialectical accounts are bivalent, seeking out key factors that promote development or cause decline. Fortunately, for more historical details I can refer to two recent works. On the first millennium of Christianity there is the book by Robert L. Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity.27 For the two millennia of Catholicism, there is the recent work by James Hitchock, History of the Catholic Church: From the Apostolic Age to the Third Millennium.28 Memories from the First Millennium of Catholic Intellectual Life If one looks back upon the first millennium of Christianity, one sees that the life of learning and communities of men and women in monastic, cathedral, and convent schools carried teaching forward. Most of the literature, philosophy, science, and theology of antiquity comes to us through these communities. Christian intellectuals in the first millennium knew that the life of the mind, if it was to avoid the darkness of pride and what St. Augustine called “the disordered desire for domination,” had to be cultivated in communities dedicated as well to the quest for both wisdom and holiness.29 The sins, the idolatry and bloody wars of the empires of history (even though these empires have left great monuments of skill and beauty) convinced the first-millennium Christian intellectuals of two things. Firstly, learning and teaching needed to 26 Ibid., 39–50. 27 Robert L. Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 28 James Hitchock, History of the Catholic Church: From the Apostolic Age to the Third Millennium (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012). 29 In this section I draw upon both original sources and the excellent Apostolic Letter of Pope John Paul II “Augustinum Hipponensem—On the 16th Centenary Anniversary of the Conversion of St. Augustine,” 28 August 1986. Most likely the Holy Father discussed this letter with then Cardinal Ratzinger. The Challenges Facing Catholic Intellectual Life 983 occur within a moral life that both ordered human desires toward the truly good and also was inspired by the grace of Christ’s holiness. Secondly, the intellectual life, if it was not to derail into an egocentric love of honor, vanity, and power, had to be formed, through prayer and sacramental worship, into a Christ-like love of wisdom and truth in the service of all humankind. Early in the millennium St. Irenaeus wrote that “those who receive the Spirit are not enslaved to distorted sensual desires but in all things walk according to the light of reason.”30 From the Greek and Roman philosophers, Augustine glimpsed the importance of striving for wisdom, attuning his mind and heart to the whole of reality, and ordering his appetites and emotions intelligently toward the truly good. Yet he also saw how these philosophers were unable to give adequate accounts for why so few—and Augustine knew he had not—attained the life of speculative or contemplative wisdom. The evil and injustice so evident in human history, and in Augustine’s own wayward life, were wrongly attributed to matter or something in human nature.31 Fundamental to Augustine’s conversion is his discovery of an ordered practice of intelligence and reason. The intellectual aspects of Augustine’s conversion are especially present in books five through nine of his Confessions. His ascent to God was accompanied by an awareness of the importance, not only of understanding (intellectus) but also of judging that the understanding is true—of Veritas. For Augustine, the nature of the human mind is given and to be discovered—it is not self-constructed, as for many moderns.32 His intellectual conversion was an experience of his own reason, his mind, as a spiritual self-presence. At the beginning of book seven of the Confessions, Augustine mentions how he was so “gross of mind” (incrassatus corde) that he had not come to the realization of how the mind, while it generates all images, is not itself an image “but altogether different from such images.”33 Augustine uses “cor” or heart to designate the mind with its orienting desire or will.34 His own attentive self-consciousness 30 Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses V, 8, 2. Also Pope John Paul II, “Mary was united to Jesus on the Cross,” General Audience 25 October 1995, §2. 31 See M. Lamb, “Eternity Creates and Redeems Time,” in Divine Creation in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Thought: Essays Presented to the Reverend Dr. Robert D. Crouse, ed. M. Treschow, W. Otten, and W. Hannam (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 116–40. 32 Cf. Ernest L. Fortin, The Birth of Philosophic Christianity: Studies in Early Christian and Medieval Thought, ed. J. Brian Benestad (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 10–11, 21–122. 33 Confessions 7.1. 34 Cf. Edgardo de la Peza, El significado de ‘cor’ en San Agustín (Études Augustiniennes: Paris, 1962). 984 Matthew L. Lamb (intentionem) had been so dulled by his disordered desires and sinful living that he could not grasp that the mind both forms all images and transcends them. This twofold aspect of mind, both forming all images and yet not being itself a material image, is developed in his De Trinitate, where Augustine explores the human mind as an immaterial “imago Dei.”35 In Confessions 7.17 Augustine reflects on the nature of human intelligence as it judges something to be true and another thing false. “So, as I reflected on how it was that I came to make these judgments which I did make, I discovered above my changing mind an unchanging and true eternity of truth.”36 He then recounts how he ascended from sensible and corporeal things to the faculty of reason and the intelligible and intelligent light by which he is led to prefer the true and eternal to the changeable. The realism of this presencing of eternal truth is clear when Augustine narrates that this intellectual conversion to truth is a discovery of Being: “And in the flash of a trembling glance my mind came to That Which Is. I understood the invisible through those things that were created.”37 But he immediately adds that this discovery was not yet habitual. For he could not live the theoretic or contemplative life demanded by the discovery until Christ gave him the strength to do so.38 Stop for a moment and reflect on the fact that truth is infinitely sharable. Also that your intellectual memories (when did you first discover that 2 + 2 = 4) are not intrinsically conditioned by space and time.You do not have to return to where you were when you knew it. So, Augustine says, intellectual memory is our rational self-presence—very different from sensible memories.39 35 Cf. D. J. Merriell, To the Image of the Trinity: A Study in the Development of Aquinas’ Teaching (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990), 13–35, 98–110 on Augustine. Cf. also John M. Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 92–147, on Augustine’s nonPlatonic understanding of body, soul, and mind. 36 Confessions 7.17: “hoc ergo quaerens, unde iudicarem, cum ita iudicarem, inueneram inconmutabilem et ueram uertitatis aeternitatem supra mentem meam conmutabilem.” 37 Ibid.: “et peruenit ad id, quod est in ictu trepidantis aspectus. tunc uero inuisibilia tua per ea quae facta sunt intellecta conspexi.” 38 Cf. the end of Confessions 8, where Augustine converts to Christ. That conversion enables him to live morally and intellectually. This is a classic expression of the ascent to truth as God that Augustine shares with his mother; it illustrates how the light of faith enables souls to enjoy a contemplation of the divine even if they lack formal intellectual training (Cf. Confessions 9.10). 39 Cf. Karol Wojtyla, Person und Tat, 120–300, on how human acts both manifest the transcendence of human nature in the self-conscious acts of intelligence and at the same time manifest the integration of this transcendence by properly ordering human somatic appetites and human psychic emotions. The Challenges Facing Catholic Intellectual Life 985 Memories from the Second Millennium of Catholic Intellectual Life The second millennium began with the growing affluence of cities and the ability they provided for learning and teaching in the monastic, cathedral, and convent contexts. Guilds of teachers and students spread within the towns of Europe during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.Then came the “studia generalia” which by the thirteenth century flowered into universities. Teaching and learning, while remaining in the monasteries, cathedral schools (seminaries), and convents would now also be carried out in colleges and universities dedicated primarily to science and scholarship. At the beginning of this process, St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) in his debates with Peter Abelard worried that the new ways of learning and teaching might end up divorcing science and scholarship from wisdom and holiness.40 The mendicant orders arose to infuse the new universities with teachers and students whose love for science and scholarship would be deepened by their commitment to Christ’s wisdom and the holiness of the Church. One thinks of St.Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) and St. Bonaventure (1217?–74). Cultures informed by Catholic faith were the matrix within which universities were born and flourished. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote: “It is actually natural to man to strive for knowledge of the truth.” Blessed John Paul II writes of the perennial “novitas” of the work of Aquinas.41 The English “originality” does not capture the meaning of “novitas” as newness, surprising unfamiliarity.The Holy Father himself experienced this startling strangeness of Aquinas’s work. Wojtyla realized that Aquinas’s writings illustrate recurrent patterns of acts of knowing that constitute a theoretical way of living, a way that attunes mind and heart to truth and wisdom.This opens us to the universal patterns of knowing and loving acts, which cultivate attitudes open to discovery of patterns in the whole of creation and redemption.42 Indeed, if we are to bring together the quest for wisdom and holiness with the quest for science and scholarship, the Pope stresses the foundational importance of metaphysics.43 40 See St. Bernard’s De Consideratione and his 80th sermon on the Song of Songs. Also John R. Sommerfeldt, Bernard of Clairvaux on the Life of the Mind (New York: Newman Press, 2004). 41 Fides et Ratio §43. 42 Ibid. §44. 43 Ibid. §83: “We face a great challenge at the end of this millennium to move from phenomenon to foundation, a step as necessary as it is urgent. We cannot stop short at experience alone; even if experience does reveal the human being’s interiority and spirituality, speculative reflection must penetrate to the spiritual substance 986 Matthew L. Lamb With Augustine and the Fathers, Aquinas distinguishes between the orientation of the mind toward the sensible and imaginable and the orientation of the mind to know itself and, through understanding its own spiritual nature,44 to reach a true analogical knowledge of angels and God.45 By attending to the rational soul’s operations of knowing and loving, Aquinas grasped the central importance of this immaterial image of God as the highest created analogue to understand the central mystery of the Triune God.46 Since the human mind longs for correct answers, so this desire for truth leads to wisdom. Wisdom is acquired, according to Aquinas, insofar as the human mind moves from knowing sensible objects (e.g., physics), through imaginative objects (e.g., mathematics), to attending to spiritual or immaterial realities (e.g. metaphysics of being).The higher in no way negate the lower. Metaphysics provides a wise understanding of an open and ongoing intelligible order in the whole range of beings, material and spiritual, as well as in the range of sciences and mathematical disciplines.47 To understand what Pope John Paul II in Fides et Ratio calls “the surprising newness” of Aquinas is to grasp how Aquinas links the way of wisdom with judgment. Thinking and concepts are not enough. We know in the act of correctly judging; and true judgments are not limited to sensible and imaginative beings. “There are realities that transcend both the senses and the imagination, namely, those that are entirely independent of matter both with respect to their being (esse) and with respect and the foundation on which it depends. Therefore, a notion of philosophy which denies any room for metaphysics would be radically unsuited to the task of mediation in the understanding of Revelation.” 44 Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I–II, qq. 55–70. Metaphysics is important, not only for serious theology, but as a foundation for the sciences, humanities, and arts, if these are to overcome fragmentation and the isolation that hinders interdisciplinary collaboration. Metaphysical wisdom provides a comprehensive heuristic framework capable of attuning the mind to an intelligibility in the whole of reality—to being as being. Aquinas clearly grasped how wisdom is both a divine gift and a natural aspiration of the human mind that seeks the acquisition of speculative and practical wisdom as intellectual excellence or virtues. Divine gifts neither deny nor denigrate human abilities. For these natural capacities are themselves the gifts of God’s creative love. So the theological virtues call forth and encourage the journey of acquiring the human intellectual and moral virtues. 45 From Augustine Aquinas takes the teaching on “ratio inferior” and “ratio superior”; cf. Robert Mulligan, S.J., “Ratio Superior and Ratio Inferior : The Historical Background,” The New Scholasticism 29, no. 1 (1955): 1–32. 46 Cf. the important book by Matthew Levering, Scripture and Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). 47 Aquinas, In Boethius de Trinitate, 5–6. The Challenges Facing Catholic Intellectual Life 987 to their being understood. So, when we know realities of this kind through judgment, our knowledge must terminate neither in the imagination nor in the senses.”48 While our spiritual minds can know—not just think about—spiritual realities, our minds have as their proper objects material realities. The higher in no way negates the lower. There is here neither a Platonist nor a Cartesian opposition between the spiritual and the material, between mind (res cogitans) and bodies (res extensa). Aquinas analyzes in detail how the light of active intelligence illumines the human imagination, grasping the intelligibility in the phantasm (species qua) and understanding the universal in the particular (species quae), then intelligently formulating the universal common to many in the concept (species in qua). The intelligible is not a kind of “looking” with the senses alone; nor is it an imaginative looking at images alone. All the senses and the imagination provide the mind with givens to be understood. It is the light of active intelligence that grasps the intelligible and so the universal in the particular.49 There is no antinomy between the universal and the particular, no contradiction between the singular and the species and genus to which singular things belong. Aquinas states how by that light of active intelligence we can know truly very changeable and contingent things and events. He states: “For the light of agent intellect is needed by which we can know unchangeable truth in changeable things, and distinguish the things themselves from the likenesses of things.” Aquinas related Augustine’s understanding of divine illumination to Aristotle’s comment on the light of agent intellect. As Aquinas states: “it is a certain participation in every human being of the divine light.” 50 American Contest with Nominalism for the Good of Science and Scholarship Pope John Paul II was particularly attentive to the developments in the United States of America. On his visits he would refer to the importance of truth for genuine freedom. He would also refer to the importance of 48 Ibid., 6, 2c. 49 On this see Bernard Lonergan, Verbum:Word and Idea in Aquinas (Toronto: Univer- sity of Toronto Press, 1997), 1–105. 50 ST I, q. 84, a. 6 ad 1. This indicates how the experience of human consciousness in act is identical with the highest created experience of being (esse). God is Pure Act and Pure Intelligere et Amare. Note also that Wojtyla’s recovery of Aquinas situates personhood with being as esse, and so does not succomb to modern dichotomies between subjectivity and objectivity. This aspect of Wojtyla’s recovery of Aquinas would further develop Joseph P. Rice’s work referenced in note 11 above. Matthew L. Lamb 988 biblical faith, both Jewish and Christian.51 Equivalently to Pope Benedict XVI, John Paul II saw that religious faith properly understood heals and enlightens reason, never blinding it.52 This cooperation of faith and reason was threatened by the influence of Benedict Spinoza’s radical Enlightenment.53 His Political-Theological Treatise fragmented the Bible just as nature had been fragmented, so that all order is arbitrary power imposing order. Spinoza reduced the Bible into discrete sentences; there are no whole books, let alone the Bible as a whole. One text can find meaning only relative to other texts. He provided historicist reductive foundations to an historical-critical method that treated the Bible as any other text. As Newton’s mechanics sought only three-dimensional perceptible motions, so Spinoza’s canons of interpretation recognize only those perceptible textual meanings found in the Scriptures as a perceptible book.The texts are not to be taken as true when they are referring to any realities not perceptible by the human senses. Spinoza makes clear that biblical interpretation does not concern itself with the truth of the texts, but only with perceptible meanings. There can be no spiritual realities revealed in Scripture.54 This development has a special philosophical meaning for American culture. The new Enlightenment culture of the United States was particularly vulnerable to nominalism with its insistence that only isolated individual things exist and that all orders are imposed arbitrarily by will. From late-medieval nominalism through the Reformation and nineteenthcentury romanticism, Americans, along with their modern European counterparts, sought to liberate human life and nature from Logos and what they considered the “cold constraints of reason.” Science was handed over to mathematical hard-headedness, and voluntarism took over the fields of morality and religion. Hobbes and Locke did away with the Hellenic Christian cosmos of an Eternal and Loving Triune God. Humans were orphaned in a cold indifferent nature. Monads without purpose, they had to turn to what Hobbes termed the “prosthetic divinity” of their 51 Cf. The Pope Speaks to the American Church (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 97, 105–8, 144–55, et passim. 52 Cf. Karol Wojtyla, Sources of Renewal: The Implementation of Vatican II (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 13–60; and Richard A. Spinello, The Encyclicals of John Paul II: An Introduction and Commentary (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 135–53 on faith and reason. 53 On the pervasive influence of Spinoza, cf. Jonathan Israel, The Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (New York: Oxford, 2001). 54 Cf. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, ed. Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 97–100. Also, Michael C. Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). The Challenges Facing Catholic Intellectual Life 989 engineering and technology in the war against hostile environments and other men.The so-called wars of religion led Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, and other political philosophers to privatize revealed religion—or to reject it outright, as did Marx. Religion could no longer provide a wisdom for ordering societies, while war was read into the very marrow of nature and humanity. They threw out the baby (religion) and kept the bloody bathwater of wars and violence as intrinsic to nature, both cosmic and human. Two Nobel laureate European scientists, Werner Heisenberg and John Eccles, contested strongly the materialist and empiricist rejection of past wisdom. Heisenberg studied the Greek philosophers as a teenager, his father being a Classics professor. A founder of quantum mechanics, he indicates the importance of recovering Aristotle’s notions of potency-formact as the ontological (metaphysical) framework of emergent probability.55 The neurophysiologist John Eccles has demonstrated that conscious events cannot be in a one-to-one correlation with brain events. Indeed, he sees such reductionism as blocking progress in neurophysiology.56 One of the greatest of American mathematicians and philosophers, Charles S. Peirce, realized the enormity of the threat posed by nominalism. He saw nominalism as pervasive throughout the modern era. Professor Paul Forster has provided a thorough analysis of Peirce’s analysis and critique of nominalism.57 Unfortunately, Peirce saw in Duns Scotus an ally for realism. He sought to disengage Scotus from Ockham’s more radical nominalism. Had he studied more carefully the Augustinian and Thomist attention to the operations of intelligence in act, as the source of both concepts and the true propositions, he would have grasped that true judgments know real things. He would have had thereby a more solid realist alternative to nominalism than his pragmaticism.58 Peirce’s pragmaticism is still caught 55 Cf. Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007, reprint of 1958 edition), 133–40, 154–60; on Kant and Augustine on infinity, 98–99. Also see Patrick Heelan, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity: A Study of the Physical Philosophy of Werner Heisenberg (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1965). In a letter to Fr. Heelan, Heisenberg emphasizes how an ontology grounds his quantum mechanics. 56 John Eccles and Karl Popper, The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism (London: Rutledge, 1984 reprint). Joseph Ratzinger refers to Eccles in his Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, trans. Michael Waldstein (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 255–56, 264. 57 Paul Forster, Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 58 Cf. John F. Boler, Charles Peirce and Scholastic Realism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963); Karl-Otto Apel, Charles Peirce: From Pragmatism to Pragmaticism (New York: Humanities Press, 1995). 990 Matthew L. Lamb in a Scotistic conceptualism, and so is a half-way house between nominalism and a fully verifiable and verified ontological realism.59 Conclusion: John Paul II as a Prophet of a New Humanism A long procession of saints, scholars, scientists, and artists in the last two centuries of the second millennium sought to defend the dignity of human life and to overcome the fragmentation of an instrumentalist degradation of human reason. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI call attention to the saints, martyrs, holy scholars, and artists who have kept alive the intellectual apostolate that proceeds from the heart of the Church. For the twomillennial procession of Catholicism means that its third millennium offers hope.The procession is not, despite all appearances to the contrary, doomed to wander aimlessly amid the rows and hedges of a nominalist-fragmented shadow world that is condemned to death. Whenever Catholics feel lost in a maze of modernity or post-modernity and are tempted to break off participation in the procession, to withdraw into a total rejection of contemporary science, scholarship, and art, we need to recall, with Flannery O’Connor, that a procession is not a march or regimented parade.60 These latter she saw as Pelagian efforts to march mechanically with a false conviction that human progress has replaced Divine Providence: ever forwards, never backwards or sideways. In comparison with such marches, processions tend to meander, depending upon countless interactions of the participants, each moving in answer to a Divine Call of the Teacher, being fascinated by this or that object or person. Like processions coming up against unexpected obstacles, Catholicism has had to improvise and meander around obstacles, oppositions, and delays. Is this not the way that God has created the universe? Do not contemporary scientists and artists confirm the wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas, echoing the Fathers, that creation is a “procession” rather than a mechanistic, clock-like march? The mechanistic rationalism of the recent past does not do justice to reason; the divine order of creation consists in its procession from God and return to Him. 59 Cf.Vincent Potter, “Objective Chance: Lonergan and Peirce on Scientific Gener- alization,” in his Peirce’s Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993); also Michael Forest, “Lonergan and the Classical American Tradition,” in Method: A Journal of Lonergan Studies 23, no. 1 (2005): 17–42. 60 Cf. Arthur Kennedy, “A Hope Embodied in Story: Flannery O’Connor’s Vision,” in Lonergan Workshop (Chestnut Hill, MA: Boston College, 1984), Vol. IV. Also Kennedy’s “The Good under Construction: Flannery O’Connor’s Gift,” published in the College of Saint Thomas Magazine (Autumn, 1989), and his “Processions Are Our Rightful Home,” Commencement address, University of St. Thomas Graduation, December 16, 1994. The Challenges Facing Catholic Intellectual Life 991 Given sin and the massive injustices in human history, the importance of holiness and the theological virtues cannot be overestimated for participation in this Catholic intellectual procession as the Church makes her way at the beginning of her third millennium. The fact that theology has disappeared from the cultural patrimony of our post-nominalist intellectual establishment has meant that the human sciences are bereft of a wisdom they desperately need. Empiricist human sciences study and chart how human beings behave, how they act. They tend to take any behavior—no matter how disordered and sinful it is—as normative. On the basis of such studies social policies are formulated, and so disorder and sin are structured into society and culture—in such laws as those condoning and supporting contraception, abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, all to the detriment of religious liberty. Catholic universities need to recover the roles of philosophy and theology in interdisciplinary collaboration with the natural and human sciences, the liberal arts, humanities, and professional programs. Only the labors of universities over centuries will build up an architectonic wisdom open to, and integrative with, all true advances in science and scholarship. Our graduate programs in philosophy and theology should lead the way in reintegrating science, scholarship, and the humanities with wisdom and holiness. If we cultivate sound scholarly judgment and are intelligent and faithful, we may discover that the Catholic intellectual traditions are, in fact, a vast and complex cathedral of the mind and heart to which each generation of human beings is called to contribute. A cathedral of the mind and heart, far more enduring than those of stone, wherein dwells an attentive reverence for the goodness and holiness of genuine knowing and loving. In such a cathedral of the mind and heart every discovery of truth is ultimately a gift, a finite, created participation in the embracing Mystery of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Infinite Understanding generating Infinite Wisdom spirating Infinite Love. For this cathedral of the mind and heart is the whole Body of Christ in the City of God. Blessed John Paul II was, as his biographer George Weigel reminds us, a prophet of a new humanism calling us in the third millennium of Catholicism to “a new springtime of the human spirit” dedicated in faith and love to the true dignity of human beings created in the image and likeness of God and redeemed by the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. To Father, Son, and Holy Spirit be all honor and glory now and forever. Amen. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2013): 993–1016 993 John Henry Newman: Mariology and the Scope of Reason in the Modern Age PAIGE E. H OCHSCHILD Mount St. Mary’s University Emmitsburg, MD J OHN H ENRY N EWMAN ’ S An Essay in Aid of the Grammar of Assent is rightly read as a reaction to an increasingly narrow conception of human reasoning in nineteenth-century British philosophy. Scholars have noted the complexity of Newman’s relation to Locke and Hume, but his chief ally in the Essay is Aristotle.1 The “illative sense” that is developed in the conclusion of the Essay is a careful and creative appropriation of phronesis; it has received a fair amount of attention from scholars of Newman.2 This essay considers the extent to which Newman’s Essay offers an anthropological foundation for certain modes of argumentation, specifically arguments from fittingness (ex convenientia), which incorporate demonstration as a foundation for probable and dialectical arguments. While the basic use of fittingness arguments is best illustrated from the 1 Fergus Kerr, O.P., “ ‘In an Isolated and Philosophically Uninfluential Way’: Newman and Oxford Philosophy,” in Newman and the Word, ed. Terrence Merrigan and Ian T. Ker (Louvain: Peters Press, 2000), 155–79; Joshua P. Hochschild, “The Re-imagined Aristotelianism of John Henry Newman,” Modern Age 45/4 (2003): 333–42. 2 Frederick D. Aquino, Communities of Informed Judgment: Newman’s Illative Sense and Accounts of Rationality (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004); Martin X. Moleski, Personal Catholicism:The Theological Epistemologies of John Henry Newman and Michael Polanyi (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000); Aidan Nichols, O.P., “John Henry Newman and the Illative Sense: A Re-consideration,” Scottish Journal of Theology 38/3 (1985): 347–68; Gerard Verbeke, “Aristotelian Roots of Newman’s Illative Sense,” in Newman and Gladstone: Centennial Essays, ed. James T. Bastable (Dublin:Veritas Publications, 1978), 177–95. 994 Paige Hochschild theological tradition (in the present case, the third part of the Summa theologiae), examples will be considered from Newman’s Mariological writings. For Newman, belief is reasonable, even in the absence of Lockean propositional certitude. For Newman, this is a properly philosophical matter. With regard to Mariology, Newman is responding to his Anglican friends, for whom the development of Catholic doctrine presents novelties far beyond the range of Scripture or tradition, thus violating some standard of reasonableness. Newman uses arguments ex convenientia to show that newly defined Catholic teachings on the Virgin Mary are not only delightful to the believer, but more than adequate to the demands of rationality. The nineteenth-century in England was a time of unsettling change. The rise of industrialism brought about a dissolution of rural communities and agricultural infrastructures, the migration of the working class— notably of Irish Catholics to England during the Great Famine—and a measured increase in wealth and overall education. Intellectually and professionally, Newman identified a number of challenges to the integrity of theology as a discipline. In particular, the private realm of religious experience was sharply distinguished from the scientific study of biblical texts and the sociology of religious practice.3 A general secularizing pressure from the British Parliament was evident, for example, in the prime minister’s proposal to establish “Queen’s Colleges” in Ireland, in an effort to educate the Catholic population in a “non-sectarian” environment. Of course, a Catholic could not attend any of the great British universities, such as Durham and Oxford, since students had to subscribe to the 39 Articles from the Book of Common Prayer in order to take their degree. The Catholic Church in Europe in general began to suffer from the birth-pangs of modernity—from the promulgation of the Syllabus of Errors (1864) and the loss of the Papal States in 1870, through to the firm but mostly ineffective responses of Pope Pius X in Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907) and Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907). A church newly set adrift from its worldly moorings, in a hostile contemporary context, needed to learn again its genuine nature and mission. 3 Some argue that Newman himself contributes to the privatizing of religious practice with the particular “Athens” model he sets up in The Idea of a University, with the end of education consisting in the cultivation of the intellectual virtues of the “gentleman,” in deliberate opposition to the “Berlin” model of education; see the 1993 convocation address to the Yale Divinity School by David Kelsey. On political interest in pedagogical isolation of Scripture study, see Jeffrey L. Morrow, “Leviathan and the Swallowing of Scripture: The Politics behind Thomas Hobbes’ Early Modern Biblical Criticism,” Christianity and Literature 61/1 (Autumn 2011): 33–54. Mariology and the Scope of Reason 995 Newman and his band of fellow English Catholics were leery of ultramontanism: Britain had always stood somewhat apart from the tides of European history, for obvious geographical reasons. The same held true for Catholics in England, who were accustomed to the small persecutions and prejudices against them. During the French Revolution, the migration of working-class Catholics from France into England quickly swelled the ranks of the faithful and fired up piety, even as it gave rise to new friction with established, more aristocratic Catholic families. These had formerly constituted a close community supported by a local priestly hierarchy, and there was little change until the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1832 and the re-establishment of Catholic dioceses in England, with actual bishops, by Pope Pius IX in 1850. New immigration added to the number of Irish in England, mostly poor, working class Catholics: the ensuing cultural conflict is exemplified in the lifetime of disagreement between Newman and Cardinal Manning, on matters of education, evangelization, social justice, and temporal papal power. More significant for Newman, at this time, was the phenomenon of the Oxford Movement, an Anglo-Catholic attempt to renew the theological and liturgical practices of the established church, in light of its Patristic and Catholic roots. This movement was also a response to the rise of evangelicalism (Methodism and other denominations that emphasized the affective dimension of worship over and against the liturgical and doctrinal tradition) as well as liberalism (which Newman defines primarily as an anthropological-epistemological problem, involving the divorce of human experience from integral reason). The Oxford movement brought to public prominence well-educated Catholics and provided the impetus for several scandalous conversions, not least of all Newman’s own. The movement, finally, produced a great deal of wonderful literature, theology, and music, reviving many of the traditions of seventeenth-century “Caroline” piety. In the end, Newman’s break was over precisely the question of Catholicity: the “high” Anglican claim to Catholicity without actual ecclesial unity became untenable largely because, for an Anglican, one must claim certain periods of history as foundational and authoritative, and judge others as deficient. Newman saw that the appropriate criterion for such a judgment would have to be internal to the same theological tradition. During the years when Newman considered conversion, it was no accident that the book on which he worked was The Development of Doctrine, which is about the unity and organic coherence of the whole of tradition.4 4 In addition to the work of Hans Georg Gadamer, Josef Pieper,Yves Congar, and Josef Cardinal Ratzinger on this topic, see (on Newman), Andrew Meszaros, 996 Paige Hochschild In light of this, it is interesting that Newman is a hero to very different theological communities. There may be some High Church Anglicans who still venerate him, along with Pusey and Keble, as the father of contemporary Anglo-Catholicism. Newman would find this awkward: in his Apologia pro Vita Sua he is at pains to reinterpret his entire spiritual journey as one leading inevitably to Roman Catholicism. Newman is also appropriated by modernist theologians at the end of the nineteenth century, such as George Tyrrell, the Irish Jesuit. To them, Newman is the champion of the development of doctrine, and the importance of the laity in shaping a sense of doctrinal truth and in authentic ecclesiology; this is a fair appropriation of Newman.5 He is widely known to have been concerned about the definition of the Immaculate Conception as infallible dogma. In a time when the Church was subject to attack on many fronts—and was anxious about scientific rationalism, the rise of the modern democratic state, its own loss of political power, rising secularism and the apparent disjunction between dogma and Christian living— Newman seems to advocate a moderate position. George Tyrrell said that reading Newman’s Grammar of Assent effected a revolution in him precisely when he “had begun to feel the limits of scholasticism rather painfully.”6 But many who hoped Newman, in his lifetime (especially from the 1860s on), would champion their cause were disappointed. While he did indeed think that the Church acted at times too quickly,7 over-determining doctrine in a manner that suggested defensiveness and insensitivity to distinctly modern milieus, in the end he advocated submission to the teaching authority of the Church. Newman was a theologian and a true intellectual, who wanted to serve the faith, the English Catholic Church, and the Pope. His advocacy for higher education for lay Catholics was radical, and it anticipates the confident tone of Fides et Ratio concern“Haec traditio proficit: Congar’s Reception of Newman in Dei Verbum, section 8,” New Blackfriars 92 (March 2011): 247–54; Gunter Beimer, Newman on Tradition, trans. Kevin Smyth (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967). 5 See Newman and the Modernists, ed. Mary Jo Weaver (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985); Catholicism Contending with Modernity, ed. Darrell Jodock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Marvin R. O’Connell, Critics on Trial: An Introduction to the Catholic Modernist Crisis (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1994); of particular value, Aidan Nichols, O.P., From Newman to Congar: The Idea of Development from the Victorians to the Second Vatican Council (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1990). 6 M. D. Petre, The Autobiography and Life of George Tyrrell (London: Edward Arnold, 1912), vol. 2, p. 207. 7 See The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Vol. XXVIII, ed. C. S. Dessain and T. Gornall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 71–72. Mariology and the Scope of Reason 997 ing the role of theological reflection in the Church. Pope Leo XIII saw the truth of Newman’s insight, and its implications for modern Catholic universities, and he acted quickly—by making him a cardinal in 1879— to lift the veritable cloud from Newman’s reputation that Pope Pius IX had allowed to linger as a result of the association between Newman and various modernists. To a modern European culture, the solemn definition of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary (in Ineffabilis Deus, 1854), and the definition of papal infallibility (at Vatican I, in 1870), appeared as an assertion of force, of institutional authority over and against the reasonableness of historical and scientific theology. On the other hand, to many Catholics, Ineffabilis Deus was a long overdue affirmation, not only of popular piety, but of theological tradition reaching into the early Church. For Newman, however, the extremes of authority-as-force and a mere affirmation of popular piety were inadequate positions.8 Catholic teachings on Mary were a particular stumbling block for Anglicans, even for Newman initially, and acceptance of these was presented as a test of total unthinking obedience to authority. Part of the solution was the concept of the development of doctrine—so controversial at one time, and so commonplace now, even after the initial reactions to modernism in the 1900s. “Development” means, quite simply, that the Church properly discerns the will and mind of God through history, as incarnated. Thus the Church may at one time know implicitly what it has not yet stated explicitly, because there is not yet an occasion for stating the same: as in the case, for example, of the divinity of Christ against the Arians in the fourth century.This was not a new teaching in any way, and indeed it was implicitly known to be the key to rightly understanding revelation. In this sense, doctrine of God develops as a process of self-knowledge for the Church. The doctrinal burden upon the Church is a matter of demonstrating the internal consistency of any teaching with the whole of revelation. In this vein, Newman must show that Mariology develops throughout history in a way that is totally consistent with Christology and the whole scope of salvation history. It is consistent with Christology; but even more, it must be needful for rightly locating Christ’s divinity and mission. For his fellow Englishmen, in their admirable practicality, 8 See, for example, Newman’s essay “On consulting the faithful in matters of doctrine” in The Rambler ( July 1859), where he argues that the Church has always “consulted” the faithful insofar as their experience and their belief is a testimony of the apostolic tradition and its cogency. It is not a “consultation” in the manner of a poll, nor a soliciting of advice or opinion. This essay is available, edited and with an introduction by John Coulson (Oxford: Sheed & Ward, 1961). Paige Hochschild 998 Newman wanted above all to defend the Catholic Church’s teachings on “St. Mary” as reasonable. He warmly acknowledged the value of popular piety for the formulation of doctrine and the spiritual life of the Church: but this piety, he is clear, is not doctrine.9 The problem that modernity opens up here is, in fact, a problem of philosophical anthropology, the opposition of thought and experience; or in the case of doctrine, the opposition of experience and authority.10 Piety must be put to the test of a certain reasonableness. Belief, on the other hand, must be directly subject to the light of revelation. Here, the argumentation mode of fittingness (or “fitness”) is significant. This terminology will be explained more thoroughly shortly, with reference to St. Thomas’s profound and systematic incorporation of this argumentative mode. Newman wants to avoid the contemporary fault of narrowing of the scope of human reasoning to the point where it wholly excludes evidence that does not meet the standards of demonstrative argumentation and new historical research into the person of Jesus. Arguments from fittingness bring to light the complexity of the intellectual affirmation of truth, in a way that is inclusive of the role of the will in assent, and the role of probability and authority in making judgments. By aligning Mariology with the biblical argument of salvation affirmed by his Anglican peers, Newman both respects their theological reason and offers a way for them to assent with a good conscience. Anthropology in Newman’s Grammar of Assent Several of Newman’s University Sermons address a theme that is given more solid ground in the Grammar of Assent.11 This theme is the nonopposition of faith and reason, and the sermons contain a warning about contemporary natural theology, as it was understood by Paley. “Natural theologians” argued that a study of astronomy or of the natural world would inevitably lead to faith in the creator. Not so, said Newman, observing an uneasy combination of fideism and bad science. The natu9 This distinction is key in his 1865 Letter to Pusey, published as Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans, Vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1900). 10 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 343ff. 11 See particularly Sermons I and II in Oxford University Sermons, 3d ed., (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997). In Sermon II (29) he warns against reducing revealed religion to natural religion, thus destroying the gratuity of grace and the uniqueness of Christ. On the other hand, the fitness that exists between nature and grace is demanded by the structure of creation itself, because “the whole revealed scheme rests on nature for the validity of its evidence” (24). Mariology and the Scope of Reason 999 ral world can lead us to a sense of divine handiwork, but this is not the same thing as faith. It is not the role of reason to give rise, by a kind of necessity, to religious conviction; faith is not an effect of sound reasoning. However, a person is open to God’s transcendence by virtue of what Newman calls “implicit reason,” a kind of disposition prior to evidence that determines how one apprehends the world. The world is not received by a strictly blank slate; rather, rationality has a structure that is de facto open to “assertions that transcend experience.”12 This is not just the will to believe: “reason itself tends to exceed the evidence: if it did not . . . human living would be rendered impossible.”13 In the Grammar, Newman challenges a model of certitude that would exclude assertions such as these, as well as understanding that incorporates authority, tradition, and probable forms of argumentation. The first part of this work is a deeply original consideration of imagination and its role in the apprehension of things. He concludes that apprehension depends on experience, which has an ineluctably subjective dimension even when one assumes a “common measure between mind and mind”: “We cannot (initially) make sure of real apprehension and assent, because we have to secure first the images which are their objects, and these are often peculiar and special. They depend on personal experience; and the experience of one man is not the experience of another.”14 The diversity of the phantasms generated through the imagination is grounded in concrete reality, which in turn assumes a basically reliable form of sense perception. The reliable character of this facticity of experience becomes the foundation for the commonality of tradition and for the fruitful dialectic between piety (as a form of Christian experience) and dogma in the Church. The important role of imagination, according to Newman, is a safeguard against rationalism; at the same time, when the “affection” of worship fails, faith can fall back upon dogma.15 In the second part, Newman considers the reasonableness of faith: or, in Thomistic terms, that it is not foolish to assent to the truths of faith that exceed reason. Here he joins a long tradition of reflection that goes back, at least, to Augustine’s De utilitate credendi. Faith, by definition, might well be a leap of trust that directly violates reason and thus good sense. Should we not assent only to what we can reasonably infer? This is what 12 Aidan Nichols, O.P., A Grammar of Consent (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 25. 13 Ibid. 14 Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 82. 15 Ibid., 121. 1000 Paige Hochschild the “constructive skeptics” argued, the British empiricists Hume and Locke (and Newman engages Locke warmly in the Grammar). But while certain judgment was possible only at the sensory level for the empiricists, because they collapsed knowledge and sensation, they tended to phenomenalism, concluding that things are not knowable in themselves, except as they expose themselves to us as perceivers. In response to the decadent speculation of these thinkers, Newman turns again to the question of how ordinary belief functions: how are we to justify the ordinary assents and certitudes required for living?16 There are many things that we claim to know and might well verify: that there is a world, that it is spherical, that there is a town called x, that we are tired and hungry and that obvious things will appease those sensations. We assent to these things by a “simple assent,” Newman says, as the result of a mass of probabilities that arise both from past experience and from consideration of present experience. The ordinary judgments of everyday life do not require or demand logical inference. We often assent to the truth of premises that are not well understood, or are merely probable, and find our reason satisfied with the best available conclusion. While we might, as Locke proposes, be satisfied with a highly certain form of probable knowledge, this does not necessarily mean that a more complex form of assent is not attainable.17 Newman completes his picture of complex assent with the illative sense, a creative appropriation of Aristotelian prudence which locates the standard for certitude in the knowing subject. This sense is possessed by all, and not only by the wise: it is a way of knowing and living that must be cultivated and is, in sum, the application of first principles in judgment by an organic and common sense process.18 With respect to God, the illative sense describes the reasonableness of faith in the absence of the possibility of strict inference. Just as practical wisdom dictates right action to the virtuous persons, so also the illative sense dictates to the believer the reasonableness of assent to faith as “true.” Scholars debate how truly Aristotelian the illative sense might be, given Newman’s focus on the moral sense as the arbiter of religion, and his appeals to the “voice of mankind,” 16 Nichols, A Grammar of Consent, 31. 17 Newman refers to Locke (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 4.16.6) on this, in Grammar, 137. 18 See Marty Miller Maddox, “Newman: Certain Knowledge and the Problem of the Criterion,” in Newman Studies 4, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 69–86. The use of the term “common sense” is significant (Gadamer identifies the communis sensus as distinctly Stoic), given that in Newman’s day (for example, for Thomas Reid) common sense suggested a flight from reason in its purity. Mariology and the Scope of Reason 1001 presumably the tendency to faith that is evident in history.19 Newman might be secretly Kantian, or a pragmatic, anti-metaphysical Protestant.20 Assuming that the opposition of experience and thought is a consistent concern from the University Sermons through to the Grammar, it is worth noting Newman’s care in incorporating both in the unity of human action. Newman wants to affirm (against bad natural theology) the proper sphere of science, as well as the experiential and affective (and even aesthetic) dimension of practical judgment. Newman wants to restore a sense of integral reason that is inclusive of the complexity of human judgment. The fact that persons give assent to a variety of things without complex evidence demonstrates not that we tend to believe things when we really should not, but that we often determine the truth of a matter by the congruence of a whole host of reasons of varying kinds of certainty. One could charge Newman with granting too much to his skeptic interlocutors: we believe without good reasons, just as we live without good reasons. But Newman never denies the reliable certitude of complex assent. By focusing on assent in general, after the relatively imprecise manner of practical reason, Newman argues for epistemic humility in matters of reason, as well as faith. The cosmological approach might better demonstrate “that no religion is from God which contradicts our sense of right and wrong.”21 While claiming Aristotle as his “master,” Newman is a man of his age, speaking to the discordant extremes (skeptic-Liberal versus skeptic-rationalist) before him.22 The defensibility of theological argumentation, ex convenientia, depends first upon the assent of faith and second upon the plausibility of the philosophical anthropology offered in the Grammar. Arguments from Fittingness (ex convenientia) according to St. Thomas An argument from fittingness is a form of probable argumentation insofar as one premise or another will depend upon the assent of faith, through the authority of revelation. Theological arguments that are valid in their form, because valid in their deduction, can be said to be true insofar as the premises are true. Logic would demand the use of the term “probable” in the broad, descriptive sense, because of the limited certitude of something 19 Newman, Grammar, 303. 20 It has to be acknowledged that Newman’s terminology is often unique to him in usage and content; cf. Eric Steinberg, “Newman’s Distinction between Inference and Assent,” in Religious Studies 23.3 (1987): 351–65. 21 Newman, Grammar, 325. 22 Ibid., 334. 1002 Paige Hochschild assented to through authority. In more modern terminology, fittingness arguments would consist of inductive arguments that support, but do not compel, a certain conclusion, or, demonstrative arguments in which at least one premise is an agreed upon truth of faith.23 There is a further step: an argument that expresses fittingness certainly depends on the prior assent of the believer to the truth of a premise (and thus the truth of the conclusion), but its power to compel assent depends on the coherence of the whole framework in which the premise(s) are located and the reference of particular premises (or concepts, ideas) to that framework. Fittingness arguments cannot stand alone; they presuppose a framework that has a claim upon the intellect precisely because it has a compelling character with respect to the imagination, or the illative sense of the whole. Theological argumentation begins from the accuracy of historical events (somewhat verifiable, although not strongly, through historical study and personal witness) in conjunction with the authority of faith itself, through the tradition of the Church. Divine authority does not make assent reasonable, even if the author is reliable: reasonableness depends on a certain understanding of the nature of God and of the reasons for creation and revelation. Even if one argues well for the existence of God through metaphysics and natural theology, one cannot identify the conclusion of that argument with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; this would violate the faith essential to covenant with God. Upon the foundation of faith, however, this identification can be made, in conjunction with both philosophical and historical argumentation, and genuinely reasonable (or dialectical, ex ratione) arguments can be made. One therefore reasonably assents to the particular arguments that make faith more intelligible, not just because one believes that the premises are true, but because the conclusion is true as matter of good argumentation, based upon premises some of which are held by faith. The quality of the argumentation must reveal (a) logical possibility, and (b) a grounding in 23 Modern authors introduce further distinctions, semantic as well as more substan- tial; for example, Charles Taylor suggests that “transcendental arguments” have a distinctive form that arises from experience generating a “chain of indispensability claims” (in the chapter entitled “The Validity of Transcendental Arguments,” in Philosophical Arguments [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995], 20–33), and Nikolas Kompridis explains a form of fallible argumentation based upon historical disclosure (in “Two Kinds of Fallibilism,” Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future [Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006], 180–83); both of these are relevant, but they fall outside of the scope of this essay. Taylor’s “chain” is generated by experience, through reflection, and this is close to what is meant by “fittingness,” except that indispensability would presuppose the authority of revelation, which in turn is formative of how experience is interpreted. Mariology and the Scope of Reason 1003 the order of creation. Faith seeks to understand, not as providing faith with a whole new foundation, but as grounding faith more deeply in the soil of the rational character of the believer. The Incarnation and the Trinity are not and cannot be demonstrable truths; but they are truths in the sense that they are intelligible, without their losing a sense of their fundamental mysteriousness ever being rejected.24 The intelligible character of dogma incorporates fittingness when it depends upon a sense of the scope of the argument of salvation, the narrative of biblical revelation, and the accepted tradition of theological reflection. Arguments from fitness integrate the authoritative character of revelation and tradition with the natural and rational demands of human assent.25 Such argumentation may presuppose a metaphysical understanding of the world, as well as a knowledge of doctrine; it also speaks to larger considerations of what inclines a person to affirm something as true. This is key, because Newman observes that many people initially object to Marian teachings because (a) they are new; (b) their relation to the whole of faith is not obvious; and (c) they want to find a reason to resist the truth of the Catholic faith. The first and last points are psychologically very significant. The second point, however, is critical for Mariology, because arguments from fittingness must show consistency with Christology; even more, however, to defend the appropriateness of Marian dogma, fittingness must show more effectively the internal coherence of the argument of salvation, and the nature of the Church. Newman was not comfortable with natural theology as St. Thomas Aquinas would understand it, likely because of the form that this took in the writings of theists and deists in his day. Rather than cosmological and metaphysical arguments, Newman preferred to ground his argumentation for the divine nature upon the natural moral sense of man, and the conscience.26 This constitutes an important difference, but it does not 24 A prime example of this is Boethius’s De Trinitate. Josef Pieper addresses the need to restore to both theological and philosophical argumentation a sense of “truth” as fundamentally like a well without bottom, a spring that cannot be exhausted; see “Philosophy and the Sense for Mystery,” in For the Love of Wisdom: Essays on the Nature of Philosophy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006). 25 Gilbert Narcisse, O.P., Les Raisons de Dieu: Argument de Convenance et Esthétique théologique selon saint Thomas d’Aquin et Hans Urs von Balthasar (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires Fribourg Suisse, 1997), 147. 26 This is also grounded in his suspicion of metaphysics, particularly of the “German kind”; here we might applaud his English pragmatism. See Fergus Kerr, “Newman and Oxford Philosophy,” 170; cf. Sermons, Chiefly on the Theory of Religious Belief, 2d ed. (London: Francis & John Rivington, 1844), IX and X. Although these don’t reveal a sense of a Thomistic natural theology in congruence with faith, with 1004 Paige Hochschild amount to a rejection of natural theology in the Thomistic sense. St.Thomas puts the doctrine of creation at the heart of his spiritual theology, his metaphysics, and his ethics. Creation ex nihilo, significantly for St.Thomas, cannot be demonstrated; but it does have a powerful probable character which goes back to his genuinely demonstrative arguments for God as the necessary (necesse est) and causal ground of all being.27 All of creation subsists as a radical dependence upon God as the cause and source of being, just as the contingent depends upon the necessary. Understanding God’s relation to creation in terms of final causality, the diversity of creation is ordered to God’s unity and God’s goodness by a kind of fitness: omnia in esse conveniunt.28 In grounding causality so firmly in God—primary/efficient causality and final/ governmental causality—the exitus-reditus scheme on the macrocosmic level of creation reveals a goodness and intentionality that brings to light the meaning of the particular unfolding of the economy of salvation.29 Fittingness arguments are thus compelling within an accepted scope of meaning: for St. Thomas, the fundamental goodness of the necessary being of God, and the corresponding goodness of the ratio of creation. The parallel but truly distinct scope of meaning is the deposit of revelation; but the harmony that exists between both is most compelling. This harmony is reflected in the distinctness and non-opposition of faith and reason. The Christian mystery is true: first, because of divine authority, and second, because the whole purpose of creation (as per Romans 1:20) is to make the invisible nature and purpose of God to be visible. The reasonableness of revelation lies in its deep ontological possibility. For example, consider the simplicity of the very first question of the third part of the Summa theologiae: utrum conveniens fuerit Deum incarnari, whether it was fitting that God should be incarnate. The key attribute of God that recurs is “goodness.”There is an objection: if God is from all eternity perfectly good, He should remain as He is. Doesn’t the Incarnation lessen his dignity? Or does it imply something added to his essence? Likewise, God is wholly simple, and flesh is composite; two things totally unlike do not belong together. Therefore it is not fitting for God to be incarnate. These are good points: divine simplicity requires creation to be “other” than the divine essence, and to unite God and the creature in some way seems to introduce complexity into the divine at a certain point in time. respect to philosophical anthropology, the profoundly Thomistic relationship between reasoning and faith is remarkable, and anticipates the language of the encyclical Fides et Ratio. 27 Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles 1.13; 1.16; 1.22. 28 Ibid., 1.42. 29 Narcisse, Les Raisons de Dieu, 176. Mariology and the Scope of Reason 1005 Thomas as usual builds on the objections. Quoting Romans 1:20, he challenges a picture of the divine that is lacking in final causality. The purpose of creation, he says, is to make manifest the invisible things of God, most of all his goodness.30 If indeed this is the purpose of the act of creation, it is a purpose that touches upon the very essence of the divine nature. And it seems that the Incarnation of God fulfills this purpose better than the act of creation in itself, and thus more fittingly. The Incarnation makes more evident God’s goodness, God’s wisdom, his justice and his power, since it does so all at once: “by the mystery of Incarnation are made known at once the goodness, the wisdom . . . of God.”Thomas continues, in the same response, in light of the recurring Dionysian argument for the generosity of divine goodness: “the very nature of God is goodness. . . . Hence what belongs to the essence of goodness befits God. But it belongs to the essence of goodness to communicate itself to others. . . . Hence it belongs to the essence of the highest good to communicate itself in the highest manner to the creature”—the “highest manner” being personal union, by reason of no other motivation than infinite goodness.31 The purposes of the Incarnation are coextensive with the purposes of creation: not only causality of being, but the maximal communication of goodness to the creature. In the response to objections 3 and 4, Thomas says that the fitting (conveniens) is what belongs to a thing by nature, in this case, goodness to the Lord. What the initial objection is lacking is not an appreciation of divine goodness, or simplicity, but rather of final causality, and the desire of God to communicate his goodness to the creature in the most generous, effective and radical way. The basic principles appealed to are familiar from Aristotelian-Platonic metaphysics as they are seen at work in Summa contra Gentiles I. Creation ex nihilo as a matter of faith clarifies divine freedom in the act of creation; the Incarnation must likewise proceed from freedom, given that the goodness of the divine nature confers a necessity that is bound by that same goodness, and no constraint of external necessity. Creation and Incarnation are gifts to the reason precisely as perfecting the natural-theological picture of divine causality. The argument is intelligible only by virtue of the language of metaphysical causality. In the second article of q. 1, St. Thomas invokes necessity: was it necessary for God to save mankind in this way? To the extent that the purpose of creation is the communication of goodness to the creature, and to the extent that God wills man’s good— yes, it was necessary. But the particular mode of salvation is not simpliciter necessary (a. 2, resp.), because God’s infinite power is not limited to one course of action. However, the Incarnation is deemed best and most fitting, 30 ST III, q. 1, a. 1, resp. 31 Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (2d ed., 1920). 1006 Paige Hochschild and in this sense it has a necessity—that is, predicated on God’s goodness—and particular reasons follow to support the grounding of necessity in God’s goodness (for establishing faith, for love, for holiness, and so on). Thus demonstrative argumentation of the goodness of God, and the ordering of non-necessary beings to God as their end (good), is the metaphysical framework, demonstratively established, for making a central, revealed mystery intelligible. The purpose or end of creation as not only “the good” but personal union with God, is a matter of revelation. Its reasonableness and clarity, however, and its startling beauty as a theological argument, shine forth within the context of personal faith in the Incarnation, and a richly metaphysical understanding of creation.32 Thomas will use arguments from fittingness in his approach to the person and role of Mary; these are not usually new arguments in that they are based in the whole tradition of Christological language. The role and the privileges of Mary flow from Christ’s mission, which are in turn grounded in the whole purposes of creation. A similar approach holds true for Newman, who frequently heard the charge that honoring Mary meant dishonoring Christ.33 St. Thomas asks why was it fitting that Mary remain a virgin even in giving birth to Christ (q. 28, a. 2). The fittingness arguments excavate more deeply the theological meaning of the Incarnation: for example, concerning the effect of the Incarnation as the good of the creature, it is not fitting that he who takes away corruption should harm, or even reduce, the integrity of his mother. Furthermore, he who gave the commandment to honor one’s father and mother would not fittingly lessen the honor due to his mother. This point is not merely about bodily integrity, nor the singular developmental virtue of the young Jesus, but about the fact that there is a causal link between Christ’s mission (salvation) and her privilege: it is her relationship specifically to Christ that exalts her.34 A second example, on the ecclesial dimension of Mary, is found in the respondeo of Question 30, a. 1, on the Annunciation, and why it was 32 Thomas, in ST III, q. 1, a. 1, refers to Augustine (cf. ep. 137), in that God is pres- ent to the world not primarily as a matter of physical extent, but in “greatness of might,” and is in no way constrained and limited by union. The argument from creation in this first article is compounded by the theological tradition, going back through Irenaeus (cf. On the Apostolic Preaching 1.4–5) to St. John (1:10–11), arguing for the fittingness of God coming “to his own.” 33 For this reason, Newman frequently begins with reflection upon the controversy over the terminology of theotokos, and Protestant discomfort with the same: if Christ is God in his person, then Mary is in some very literal sense the Mother of God. The implications are infinitely more profound than if she is simply a means to His Incarnation. 34 Cf. Narcisse, Les Raisons de Dieu, 386. Mariology and the Scope of Reason 1007 fitting that the conception of Christ be announced to Mary. The fourth reason incorporates the third—that she prove herself ready by the free gift of obedience—stating that a “spiritual wedlock” occurs within her between the Son of God and all of humanity, with the result that we, as the Church, are included in her “yes.” Given Thomas’s theology of nature and grace, it is not just fitting, but necessary that God ask for her free obedience in such a way that respects the integrity of the creature. As uniting humanity within her person, she combines the image of Christ as head of the Church with the image of the Church as the unified body of Christ. Here, again, Mary’s special role flows from her place in relation to Christ as a perfect disciple of Christ, and she unites other persons as subjects, in relation to him as head. In both of these examples, Thomas uses the language of fitness first in order to locate Mary within the original account of the purpose and mode of salvation (i.e., by showing doctrinal and narrative coherence), and second, by showing that Mary opens more profound insight into the same purpose of salvation. The effect, in terms more familiar to Newman, is a sense that the place of Mary in revelation is fitting as pertains to Christ’s mission, and thus reasonable as pertains to the whole economy of salvation. Particular Arguments from Newman There are different kinds of fittingness arguments, and this is a topic worthy of more than one monograph. For example, arguments from likeness of cause and effect (that is, not simply an evident correlation, such as “every action has an equal and opposite reaction,” but rather “what kind of a cause would an effect like this have,” which would constitute a form of analogical argument); arguments from the relation of parts to the whole (expressing a harmony; this is common in parables, e.g., if God cares for the lilies of the field this much . . .); and arguments from diversity with respect to contrast or opposition. Most common to Newman, eager to defend the coherence of Scripture as a whole, is argumentation from the fitness of parts in relation to the whole, whether in a manner comparable to St.Thomas above (with respect to goodness of final causality), or in a more vague relation of harmony, such as when one contemplates the distinct elements of a painting. Newman uses contrast and parallel frequently, as these are common in the theological tradition (e.g., as Christ is the new Adam, so Mary is the new Eve). A homily entitled “The Glories of Mary for the Sake of Her Son” opens with a long, richly evocative passage on the beauty of creation.35 35 Mary: The Virgin Mary in the Life and Writings of John Henry Newman, ed. Philip Boyce (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 129–48. All references to Newman’s 1008 Paige Hochschild We know, my brethren, that in the natural world nothing is superfluous, nothing incomplete, nothing independent; but part answers to part, and all details combine to form one mighty whole. Order and harmony are among the first perfections which we discern in this visible creation; and the more we examine into it, the more widely and minutely they are found to belong to it. “All things are double,” says the Wise Man, “one against another; and He hath made nothing defective.” It is the very character and definition of “the heavens and the earth,” as contrasted with the void or chaos which preceded them, that everything is now subjected to fixed laws; and every motion, and influence, and effect can be accounted for, and, were our knowledge sufficient, could be anticipated. Moreover, it is plain, on the other hand, that it is only in proportion to our observation and our research that this truth becomes apparent; for though a number of things even at first sight are seen to proceed according to an established and beautiful order, yet in other instances the law to which they are conformed is with difficulty discovered; and the words “chance,” and “hazard,” and “fortune,” have come into use as expressions of our ignorance. Accordingly, you may fancy rash and irreligious minds who are engaged day after day in the business of the world, suddenly looking out into the heavens or upon the earth, and criticising the great Architect, arguing that there are creatures in existence which are rude or defective in their constitution, and asking questions which would but evidence their want of scientific education. The case is the same as regards the supernatural world. The great truths of Revelation are all connected together and form a whole. Every one can see this in a measure even at a glance, but to understand the full consistency and harmony of Catholic teaching requires study and meditation. Hence, as philosophers of this world bury themselves in museums and laboratories, descend into mines, or wander among woods or on the seashore, so the inquirer into heavenly truths dwells in the cell and the oratory, pouring forth his heart in prayer, collecting his thoughts in meditation, dwelling on the idea of Jesus, or of Mary, or of grace, or of eternity, and pondering the words of holy men who have gone before him, till before his mental sight arises the hidden wisdom of the perfect, “which God predestined before the world unto our glory,” and which He “reveals unto them by His Spirit.” And, as ignorant men may dispute the beauty and harmony of the visible creation, so men, who for six days in the week are absorbed in worldly toil, who live for wealth, or name, or self-indulgence, or profane knowledge, and do but give their leisure moments to the thought of religion, never raising their souls to God, never asking for His enlightening grace, never chastening their hearts and bodies, never steadily contemplating the objects of faith, but judging hastily and peremptorily according to their private views or the humour of the hour; such men, I say, in like writings in the remainder of this essay are to texts that can be found in this edited volume. Mariology and the Scope of Reason 1009 manner, may easily, or will for certain, be surprised and shocked at portions of revealed truth, as if strange, or harsh, or extreme, or inconsistent, and will in whole or in part reject it. I am going to apply this remark to the subject of the prerogatives with which the Church invests the Blessed Mother of God. They are startling and difficult to those whose imagination is not accustomed to them, and whose reason has not reflected on them; but the more carefully and religiously they are dwelt on, the more, I am sure, will they be found essential to the Catholic faith, and integral to the worship of Christ. This simply is the point which I shall insist on—disputable indeed by aliens from the Church, but most clear to her children—that the glories of Mary are for the sake of Jesus; and that we praise and bless her as the first of creatures, that we may confess duly Him as our sole Creator.36 Most Protestant objections entertained by Newman propose that doctrines such as the Immaculate Conception or the Assumption are not biblical, and are therefore not reasonable because they are not possible.37 Newman begins, in the passage above, with creation as a unity, but a unity that contains within it duality and contrast, light and darkness. But there is a fixed order that is wholly intelligible in itself, though it requires a great deal of work to discern. Those who do not see the place of a particular element in the whole should not jump to the conclusion that it does not belong: the coherence of the whole may not yet be apparent, and the burden is placed squarely on the limitations of the enquirer. Mary’s place in the economy of salvation becomes apparent only in light of the complex meaning of the whole, which in some way points to Jesus. Newman does not begin with creation and its purposes, with the same metaphysical explicitness as St. Thomas. I would argue that he takes the goodness of creation and its ground in the divine goodness for granted, and heads straight for the sacrifice of the Cross. But there are reasons for this: first, his above-mentioned concern about bad natural theology and its theological implications, as well as his general aversion to idealist metaphysics. Second, his interlocutors are simply not thinking in these terms.38 He attacks critics of Catholic doctrine as worldly and above all 36 In Boyce, ed., 129–31. 37 “A Memorandum on the Immaculate Conception,” IV (ed. Boyce, 2001), 303–11; they are not possible because they are not evidently found in Scripture. The question raised by Newman follows: if these ideas are not present explicitly in Scripture, does it follow that they contradict the logic of salvation contained therein? 38 Aidan Nichols (A Grammar of Consent) faults Newman for neglecting creation as a way to God’s existence. On the other hand, Newman may simply wish to speak in the context of the concerns of his hearers (cf. infra). While philosophically sophisticated, he is writing, above all else, as a pastor and a preacher. 1010 Paige Hochschild too hasty to be able to give the matter at hand a patient hearing. “Private views” are given priority over the grandeur of revelation, in the absence of a prayerful spirit. The ignorance is willful, much as philosophers and scientists too quickly judge nature to be imperfect, when they should fault the limits of their own understanding first. Newman is a seasoned controversialist, and he ends the opening paragraphs in the most innocuous place: with Jesus, the sole creator (by contrast to Mary, the creature). This grounds the whole discussion in the early Church, where the willingness to call Mary the theotokos (at the Council of Ephesus, in 431) became the marker of an adequate Christology. Newman goes on to deploy the three modes of fittingness already mentioned, and we shall consider particular examples: first, the fittingness of parallel and opposition; second, analogical likeness of cause and effect; and finally, the specific fitness of intended effect (very close to what St. Thomas means when he speaks of the “effects” of the Incarnation.) The Coherence of Scripture: Parallel and Opposition In arguing for the notion of Mary as the second Eve, Newman quotes Irenaeus: With a fitness, Mary the Virgin is found obedient, saying “Behold Thy handmaid, O Lord; be it to me according to Thy word.” But Eve was disobedient; for she obeyed not, while she was yet a virgin. As she, having indeed Adam for a husband, but as yet being a virgin . . . becoming disobedient, became the cause of death both to herself and to the whole human race, so also Mary, having the predestined man, and being yet a Virgin, being obedient, became both to herself and to the whole human race the cause of salvation. . . . And on account of this the Lord said, that the first should be last and the last first . . . He Himself becoming the beginning of the living, since Adam became the beginning of the dying. . . . And so the knot of Eve’s disobedience received its unloosing through the obedience of Mary; for what Eve, a virgin, bound by incredulity, that Mary, a virgin, unloosed by faith.39 The series of parallels is compelling in itself, because the foundational one (last-first) is easily connected with the next, very familiar from Patristic authors ( Jesus/life-Adam/death), and then we have two virgins, one first and the other last in the order of salvation. The series parallel one another through the narrative relationship of Adam and Jesus, but theologically one side supplants the other by cancelling out the original 39 A reference to Irenaeus’s Adversus Haereses 3.22.34, quoted in the third section of the Letter to Pusey (ed. Boyce), 210. Mariology and the Scope of Reason 1011 privation: obedience overcomes disobedience; life overcomes death; doubt is allayed by faith. The argument is biblical, familiar and certainly typological—typology being necessary for reading Scripture as a doctrinal unity, precisely because it presupposes a single account of the divine purpose in salvation. If the purpose of the Incarnation is to communicate God’s goodness to the creature, the obstacles to that end must be removed (sin, disobedience, and death), by divine power working through the agency of the creature. The appeal to the hearer is one of opposition and resolution, and it has a kind of aesthetic appeal, a sense of drawing together the personages of Scripture into the whole. A theological unity comes to light in the parallelism between Christ and Adam, through which Mary can stand in a similar relation to Eve because she is not only mother (of Jesus), but also spiritual spouse, as the creature, reconciled to God, through the trust in God that overturns fear. This is a familiar argument in support of Mary’s significance, her “yes” contradicting Eve’s “no.” For Newman, the meaning of Eve’s disobedience is coherent only in relation to Adam’s own disobedience; likewise the creatureliness of Mary in contrast to Christ’s divine aspect, does not weaken the parallel, but instead demonstrates the effectiveness of divine power in and through the creature.40 The interpretation of Mary as both a counterbalance to Eve and the creature subject to salvation, corresponding to the grace of Christ in the Incarnation, makes the argument for the economy of salvation more thorough, more complete.41 Fitness of Cause and Effect: Christ’s Mission, and Historical Witness Newman embraces, as a Catholic, the term theotokos: Mary is the Mother of God, the bearer of the Christ.42 He avoided this term as an Anglican, because it implied for him a radical kind of identity between Mary and the 40 For this reason, Newman emphasizes Eve’s integrity in the act of disobedience: “in those primeval events, Eve had an integral share. . . . She listened to the Evil Angel; she offered the fruit to her husband, and he ate of it. She co-operated, not as an irresponsible instrument, but intimately and personally in the sin” (Letter to Pusey 3). Hence she has her own proper share in the punishment, which in turn affirms her distinctive “dignity.” One might carefully contrast Augustine’s more allegorizing approach to Eve’s distinctness (De Civitate Dei 14.11; De Trinitate 12.13.20). 41 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Daughter Zion (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1977), 32. Ratzinger points out that one cannot get a Catholic Mariology from prooftexting Scripture under the rubric of a modern kind of literalism: Patristic typology is essential for inter-testamental unity. 42 “The glories of Mary for the sake of her Son” (ed. Boyce), 137. 1012 Paige Hochschild divinity of Christ, and thus a high Mariology. Newman counters his own reticence with Nicene Christology: she is not the mother of his body, or the mother of his humanity merely, but the mother of the person of the Word Incarnate.43 If we are to take seriously both his divinity and the unity of his person, her relationship to Christ becomes significant in a new light. She truly guarantees and safeguards Christ’s divinity: if she is the theotokos, Christ is “God-with-us” through an effective mediation. Current religious history, Newman argues, proves the truth of this. Among English evangelicals in the nineteenth century who criticize the veneration of Mary, Newman observes a tendency to a vague incarnational theology, and a spiritual reluctance to commit to the full implications of the divinity of Christ. This, he claims somewhat harshly, begins in the Reformation, and has its full fruition in what he calls “humanitarianism,” a kind of veneration of one’s fellow man.44 This seems ironic to Newman, since those who challenge Mary’s role as instrumental cause of Christ’s mediation, in the end are complicit in a general idolatry of the creature. In supporting Christ’s divine nature as a matter of doctrine, Mary’s role reveals “the harmonious consistency of revealed religion.” She must have appropriate qualifications, and so Newman highlights her character as unusually tough: she has courage, fortitude, the ability to suffer, surrender her self, and above all, she possesses heroic purity summed up in the total consent of the heart to God’s will.45 Mary’s particular holiness is therefore greater than her maternity alone. She receives particular grace from Christ as the fruit of his salvation; more than this, in the order of providence, her possession of these graces makes possible her role in relation to Christ’s own work.46 Christ doesn’t pass through Mary’s womb like a station on his way to Calvary: “the child is like the parent . . . and this likeness is manifested by her relationship to Him.” Newman also refers to Romans 11:16: “if the root is holy, the branches grafted in will be holy.” Mary is the earthly root of Christ’s person. A key text for Anglican objectors is Luke 11:28, when Mary is praised in public, and Jesus seems to correct those who praise his mother by checking his mother, saying “rather, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it.” Rather than supposing that Christ hereby excludes his mother qua mother, Newman argues that he reinterprets for the crowd her significance in his own life—namely, as the one who receives the word and 43 “On the fitness of the glories of Mary” (ed. Boyce), 150. 44 “Devotion to the Virgin Mary does not obscure the divine glory of Christ”; quotation from the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (ed. Boyce), 289. 45 “On the fitness of the glories of Mary” (ed. Boyce), 161. 46 Ibid., 158. Mariology and the Scope of Reason 1013 keeps it perfectly. Her glory, again, is greater than her maternity: it is above all her faith and her obedience that are noteworthy, and she is thus included among the crowd of those who are close to Jesus. She stands as a historical witness to the life of faith as the following of Christ and conformity to the word of God, in obedience. Newman, writing his greatest homilies on Mary three years before 1854, the year of the promulgation of Ineffabilis Deus, the solemn declaration of the Immaculate Conception, observes that Jesus Christ teaches something crucial in the manner of Mary’s being honored. In Scripture, she is a quiet model of patient and suffering obedience: like John, she decreases, very quickly. Likewise in the history of the Church, she is quietly present in faithful devotion, waiting patiently for the whole Church to affirm her in her right relation to Christ. Newman’s point is that the very way in which Marian doctrine develops over time is itself an illustration of her character: no trumpets and glory, but a quiet witness in the hearts of believers. The dogmatic declaration of the purity of Mary is thus not a victory of common piety over good sense, but rather one of humility over self-assertion. So, even in the privilege of her holiness, Mary’s glory is ordered to the glory of her Son, and the primacy of grace in creation and salvation. The language in the long quotation above is at first startling if one has never considered the relationship between Mary and Jesus Christ. To his Protestant fellows, Newman observes that Mary is nothing more than the first creature to participate fully in the work of salvation through the Cross. Her submission and her obedience: these are her glory, and the privilege of her maternity presupposes them. Hence Mary is honored with a fittingness appropriate to the significance of the work of salvation, in that she demonstrates the effectiveness of grace in her own, creaturely person. Cause and Effect: Moral-Spiritual Likeness The practical goal of veneration is imitation. Newman works to elicit the co-extensive purposes of creation and salvation. This final point concerns the incorporation of the individual believer into these purposes, through a participation in the holiness of the communion of the saints. Just as Mary is not a mere receptacle for the Word, so also is she not a mere instrument. For this argument to be compelling, Newman must prove her particular holiness from Scripture. God uses many unworthy things for worthy ends. Hence, the worthiness of the priest does not alter the effectiveness of a sacrament. It is fine, Newman says, to go to a bad priest for absolution.47 But should one go to 47 “On the fitness of the glories of Mary,” 158. 1014 Paige Hochschild a bad priest for counsel? Newman contrasts an instrumental cause, for which personal sanctity might not be necessary, to the office of a teacher, or a prophet. St. Augustine and St. Thomas: these men proposed truth as a matter of investigation as well as personal devotion, and they were teachers with appropriate humility.Their effectiveness as teachers depends in great measure on the example of their lives, on their character. The prophets— Abraham, Enoch, Job, Isaiah—had a faith that justified them in God’s eyes.48 Angels, moreover, have a holiness due not only to their metaphysical quality but also to their distinctive office of praising God and serving his will in creation. Newman compares Mary to the angels and saints as a kind of singular teacher of the faith: hence the fitness of the Annunciation (as both St. Augustine and St. Thomas argue) requires that Mary first conceive the Word in her heart, before she can receive him in her body.49 Her own total conversion is necessary as both a condition and an effect. The coincidence of these in Mary implicates all believers. Newman charges his Protestant objectors with the error of understanding the Incarnation in an overly carnal way, with the attendant danger of wrongly understanding the whole life of faith.50 The imitation of Christ in discipleship is not a matter of membership, or even of credal identity. To hear the word and keep it requires the total indwelling of God in the soul. Mary’s distinctive holiness as a disciple of Christ argues for the fittingness of the Immaculate Conception, not as a matter of maternal privilege, but by virtue of her participation in the whole argument of salvation. “She is the type and image of the spiritual life and renovation in grace.”51 If this is the origin of her holiness, Newman says, there are no “limits” to her sanctity except what can be maximally applied to the embodied creature. As an additional argument, he turns to Luke 1:41, where John the Baptist, filled by the Holy Spirit, leaps in the womb at the presence of the Lord; if he was made holy by the presence of the Lord, then surely it is fitting that the holiness of Mary be at least equal to his.52 One might respond to 48 Ibid., 156. 49 Cf. St. Augustine, In Ioh. Evang. 10.3. 50 Ratzinger makes the same point: “[We tend to see these events as not only improb- able, but impossible, both] for the world and also for God [because of our] . . . tacit cartesianism—in that philosophy of emancipation hostile to creation which would repress both body and birth from the human reality by declaring them merely biological; [and] . . . in a concept of God and the world that considers it inappropriate that God should be involved with bios and matter. In reality, precisely when we talk about corporeality . . . we are dualists” (Daughter Zion, 58–59). 51 “On the fitness of the glories of Mary,” 166. 52 Ibid., 159. For Newman the Assumption simply flows from this, with little additional argumentation required: in the absence of the wounds of original sin, Mariology and the Scope of Reason 1015 Newman that “fittingness” does not require conferring such language and honor on Mary. But he demonstrates internal consistency of doctrine and, more significantly, a deeper insight into the nature of discipleship and the possibility of the total effectiveness of the grace of salvation, in the creature, in the earthly pilgrimage. Conclusion In A Grammar of Consent, Aidan Nichols criticizes Newman’s theological argumentation as overly epistemological, depending too heavily upon imagination and experience as integral to both practical reasoning and the nature of the assent that we give to theological truths. A quick look at Newman’s use of arguments from fittingness, all of which are amply present in the early Church, in order to defend a certain theological approach to Mary, might seem to support this. St. Thomas’s arguments (for example) refer so evidently back to the truths of natural theology, which are established through demonstrative argument. Newman, it is true, does not take this approach precisely, but it is evident that his own arguments, traditional as they are, presuppose a genuinely metaphysical anthropology. Nichols misses the mark here. Nothing in Newman’s manner of proceeding excludes seeing the foundation of Christ’s love in the goodness of God and creation. Newman’s concerns are more contemporary, perhaps more epistemological, insofar as he is interested in what might or might not seem reasonable, in light of the Anglican commitment to the primacy of Scripture and the relative authority of the early Church Fathers. His concerns are truly more pedagogical. He avoids the flaws of a rationalist apologetics (as evidenced in contemporary “natural theology”) while addressing the reader’s need for a sense of the whole coherence of dogma. Newman’s arguments are based in Scripture, in the doctrinal tradition of the Church united, but he appeals to a metaphysics of creation which in turn makes the historical work of Christ intelligible. Newman does not appeal to piety as authoritative, and he incorporates the Anglican desire to see Scripture as self-sufficient for doctrine— with the help of Irenaeus, who bases the fittingness of Incarnation in the Johannine identity of creation and salvation in the Word. This approach appeals to the rationality of the average parishioner as much as to the doctor of divinity, and it speaks to the way in which human reason is moved aesthetically, attentive to harmony, parallel, and completeness, in order to consider particularly the loss of immortality and self-mastery, bodily resurrection becomes not only a possibility, but a probability. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger follows precisely this line of argument in Mary the Church at the Source (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005). 1016 Paige Hochschild a doctrine as first possible, and then even—by the complex and admittedly subjective process of assent—reasonable. Seen precisely as a pedagogy, with a practical and holistic anthropological sensibility, rational assent is clearly founded in the will as much as in the reason. Newman indeed writes as a modern man in a modern context, and in his appeal to imagination in religious assent, supposes that the imagination in turn is deeply rooted in human rationality. His appeal to conscience, and even experience, does not set experience at odds with the rationality of doctrine. Rather, the two sustain one another. For this reason, Marian piety and Marian doctrine, while not confused, must be grounded in one another. Newman was not happy with the promulgation of Marian dogma when it was perceived to be an act of ecclesial force over and against modern good sense. Hence his defense of these teachings attempts to excavate and honor a healthier sense of rationality. In seeing this, at a time of such controversy, Newman shows himself to be prophetic of truly modern anthropological concerns. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2013): 1017–56 1017 University Education, the Unity of Knowledge— and (Natural) Theology: John Henry Newman’s Provocative Vision R EINHARD H ÜTTER Duke University Divinity School Durham, NC In memoriam Benedict M. Ashley, O.P. (1915–2013) Such great beauty even creatures have, reason is well able to contemplate the Source from which these perfections came. —Wisdom 13:5; trans. Ronald Knox The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. —G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, Preface Introduction: Newman and the Contemporary University S INCE THE Enlightenment, numerous eminent philosophers, theologians, and scientists have written on the subject of the university, many in the context of the foundation of new universities or of the fundamental reorganization of major extant universities.1 Revisionist programs recast 1 The following reflections were originally delivered in a much briefer and more rudimentary form on February 4, 2013, at New York University as part of the symposium “Newman and the University: What positive contribution can religion make to the ongoing life of the contemporary university?” Earlier and briefer versions of this essay were published in Acta Philosophica: Rivista internationale di filosofia and in First Things. In this essay, I develop a line of thought first articulated in “The University’s Cutting Edge—Source of Its Flatness, Or: Reclaiming the University’s Third Dimension,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 15/4 (Fall 2012): 36–56, and in “ ‘Seeking Truth on Dry Soil and under Thornbushes’—God, the University, and the Missing Link: Wisdom,” 1018 Reinhard Hütter the nature of university education according to the Enlightenment program of the material betterment of the human condition. After the French Revolution, guided by the spirit of various versions of the modern state, these revisionist programs developed ever more rapidly.The post-Revolutionary romantic nation state, the techno-industrial nation state of colonial expansion, or the racist nation state and its will-to-power all played important roles in forming the modern university.2 in Dust Bound for Heaven: Explorations in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 387–419, a chapter inspired to a large degree by the thought of Benedict Ashley, O.P., to whose memory this essay is dedicated. While he would have disagreed with Newman over numerous metaphysical and epistemological issues, his magnum opus, The Way toward Wisdom: An Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006) and especially the last two pages of his autobiographical sketch, “How the Liberal Arts Opened My American Mind,” Nova et Vetera 9/4 [2011]: 883–92, make me confident that he would have supported in unequivocal terms the broad outlines of Newman’s provocative vision. For thoughtful and constructive responses to earlier versions of this essay, my thanks go to the Faculty of the Honors Program at Providence College and to colleagues at Providence College, Duke University, and other institutions of higher learning, especially to Nicanor Austriaco, O.P. (molecular biology), Guiseppe Butera (philosophy), Thomas Pfau (English and German Literature), Philip Rolnick (theology and ethics), Richard Schenk, O.P. (university president), and Thomas Joseph White, O.P. (theology). 2 It is far from accidental that for the late eighteenth century and for the nineteenth, primarily German authors come to mind: Johann David Michaelis, Raisonnement über die protestantischen Universitäten in Deutschland, 4 vols. (Frankfurt/Leipzig, 1768–76) (since there does not exist an English translation, the interested reader might turn for a helpful summary and discussion of major aspects of Michaelis’ opus to Michael Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies [New York: Oxford University Press, 2010], 33–37); Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties [1798], trans. Mary J. Gregory (Lincoln; University of Nebraska Press, 1992); Johann G. Fichte, The Purpose of Higher Education: Also Known as the Vocation of the Scholar [1794], trans. John K. Bramann (Mt. Savage, MD: Nightsun Books, 1988); F. W. J. von Schelling, On University Studies [1803], trans. E. S. Morgan, ed. Norbert Guterman (Athens; Ohio University Press, 1966); Friedrich Schleiermacher, Occasional Thoughts on Universities in the German Sense. With an Appendix Regarding a University Soon to Be Established [1808], trans. Terrence N. Tice and Edwina G. Lawler (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991); Max Weber, “Science as Vocation” [1919], in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans., ed., and with introduction by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129–56; and the infamous inaugural Rectorial Address at the University of Freiburg by Martin Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University” [1933]. English version trans. by Karsten Harries, Review of Metaphysics 38 (1985): 467–502. For a lonely and unheeded voice critical of all these more or less subtle forms of University Education, Unity of Knowledge, and Theology 1019 Among eminent modern thinkers, John Henry Newman is arguably the most astutely contrarian. His is a prescient critique of all the quintessentially modern strategies of functionalizing the university and pressing it into the service of ideological ends foreign to its idea. These pseudo ends have haunted and distorted the modern university, whether those ends were imposed by the modern expansionist nation state, the communist party program, the fascist state organization of the superior race, the late modern national security state, or the desire-driven permissive consumer society. Despite their differences, all of these tacitly share a deep but unwarranted conviction: All problems we encounter are ultimately of a technical or a managerial nature for which the progress in scientific “know-how” will eventually offer a solution. This is the case ever more so today. The late modern research university forms the instrumental link between the problems and their solutions. Its efficiency as a sophisticated problem-solving institution justifies the university’s existence (and its considerable price tag) and simultaneously holds it captive in the iron cage of a comprehensive functionalization. Newman is among the very few modern thinkers whose intellectual vision offers a desperately needed alternative to the comprehensive functionalization of the contemporary university. The power of Newman’s vision rests on his conviction that the unity of truth accounts for the unity of knowledge and hence for the unity of a university education properly speaking. The discipline that inquires into the interrelationship of all sciences and hence into the unity of truth is metaphysics. Its acme is natural theology, the inquiry into the source and perfection of all truth. As the science of sciences, metaphysics is without obvious use. It fails as a candidate for the servile arts and hence remains untouched by all modern strategies of instrumentalizing the knowledge it yields. The purpose of metaphysics is inquiring into and finding truth—comprehensive and ultimate truth. Metaphysics constitutes the capstone of the arch of sciences, advances the unity of knowledge, and thereby facilitates the inner coherence of a university education. subjecting the university to purposes extrinsic to its idea, see Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Future of Our Educational Institutions [1872], trans. J. M. Kennedy (Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1909). By transforming strategically and organizationally the Baconian university of utility into a consistent research university, the German university of the nineteenth century became the paradigm of the modern university. Legaspi puts it well: “In the nineteenth century, there were two kinds of universities: German universities and those that wanted to be German” (The Death of Scripture, 28). For an excellent study of the German university in the nineteenth century, see Thomas Albert Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 1020 Reinhard Hütter John Henry Newman’s life spanned the nineteenth century, a time of tremendous social, political, cultural, scientific, and technological change. He was born in 1801, the age of carriages, front-loaded muskets, and sailboats; he died in 1890, the age of the first transcontinental express trains, machine guns, and ocean steamers. Nevertheless, Newman remains our contemporary in more than one sense, especially in matters pertaining to university education. For even the most superficial perusal of his classic The Idea of a University 3 makes abundantly plain that we, as Newman did, live in the midst of—and in spite of ourselves are heavily influenced by—the ideology of secularism. The ideological premises of secularism were honed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, became politically and socially explicit in the eighteenth century, imperial in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, and global in the second half of the twentieth and the early twenty-first century.4 In American and European consumer societies of the twenty-first century, secularism presents itself typically as “hyperpluralism.”5 In its nascent stage, hyperpluralism was already quite familiar to 3 Invited by Archbishop Cullen, Newman became founding rector of the planned Catholic University of Ireland. In 1852, he delivered nine discourses to the Catholic clergy and intelligentsia of Dublin under the title “Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education addressed to the Catholics of Dublin.” Only the altered and expanded 1873 edition received the well-known title “The Idea of a University.” (On the fascinating details of the historical context, see Colin Barr, Paul Cullen, John Henry Newman, and the Catholic University of Ireland, 1854–1864 [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011].) The edition I peruse, and to which all page numbers in the text refer, is John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, ed. with preface and introduction by Charles Frederick Harrold (New York: Longman, Green, and Co., 1947). In order to facilitate the location of citations in other editions, I shall also list after the page number the section of the discourse in which the quoted passage can be found. 4 For the currently magisterial account and analysis of this development, see Charles Taylor’s magnum opus, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). 5 In his noteworthy study, The Unintended Reformation: How A Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), Brad Gregory employs this term in order to characterize “the overwhelming pluralism of proffered religious and secular answers to [the Life Questions]” (74). Gregory understands as the “Life Questions” “ ‘What should I live for, and why?’ ‘What should I believe, and why should I believe it?’ ‘What is morality, and where does it come from?’ ‘What kind of person should I be?’ ‘What is meaningful in life, and what should I do in order to lead a fulfilling life?’ ” (74). I offer a longer passage from Gregory’s analysis, not only because I think it accurate but also because it forms the very background in which I regard Newman’s prophetic provocation to be of pressing relevance: “In Western society at large, the early twenty-first-century basis for most secular answers to the Life Questions seems to be some combination of personal preferences, inclinations, and desires: in principle truth is whatever is true University Education, Unity of Knowledge, and Theology 1021 Newman. He describes the state of his society as one “in which authority, prescription, tradition, habit, moral instinct, and the divine influence go for nothing, in which patience of thought, and depth and consistency of view, are scorned as subtle and scholastic, in which free discussion and fallible judgment are prized as the birthright of each individual” (Idea, 33; Discourse II, 7). Newman’s nineteenth-century England and our twenty-first-century Western societies are haunted by the pervasive presence of hyperpluralism’s central protagonist—the sovereign self. However, two contemporary conditions separate us from Newman: mass education and the total economization of the late modern research university. Nowadays, university education and university sciences deliver goods that are seen as commodities that can be purchased in order to satisfy individual desires. The commodification and the functionalization of the university are two sides of the same coin, where supply and demand, competition and branding, determine the life of universities and colleges. Commodification and functionalization have become so dominant that an alternative is not even thinkable, blinding us to the reality that all academic disciplines in the late modern research university have become servile arts. The ideal of a liberal education that carries its end in its very practice has been supplanted by an efficiency-driven program of knowledge-making and by the preparation in the communicative, mathematical, and scientific skills of this knowledge-making, so that it can ever more effectively serve as means to achieve ends dictated by individual and collective desires. Furthermore, two seemingly irreversible facts make Newman’s vision look distinctly antiquated and passé. First, the research and knowledge production of the late modern research university is a thoroughly secular affair. As Brad Gregory aptly put it: Regardless of the academic discipline, knowledge in the Western world today is considered secular by definition. Its assumptions, methods, content, and truth claims are and can only be secular, framed not only by the logical demand of rational coherence, but also by the methodological postulate of naturalism and its epistemological correlate, evidentiary empiricism.6 to you, values are whatever you value, priorities are whatever you prioritize, and what you should live for is whatever you decide you should live for. In short: whatever. All human values, meanings, priorities, and morality are contingent, constructed, and subjective. In principle you are your own basis, your own authority, in all these matters, within the boundaries established by the law. . . . You can change the basis for your answers, as well as their content, at any time, any number of times, and for any reason or without any reason. You are free — hence, whatever” (77). 6 Gregory, The Unintended Reformation, 299. 1022 Reinhard Hütter Taking evidentiary empiricism normatively, most contemporary natural scientists will regard metaphysical inquiry as a meaningless form of pseudo science, something akin to parapsychology or Freudian analysis. Second, the knowledge gained in the late modern research university is indeed a production or making, a techne ˜that is a means to an end extrinsic to it. The American Association of Universities (AAU), the exclusive club of the leading research universities in the United States of America, characterizes a research university as an institution that advances a great variety of expertise to be applied to real world problems. Cutting-edge research is combined with undergraduate training for such research, often in highly specialized programs.7 This research university could be called the Baconian university, named after its spiritus rector, Francis Bacon. Newman had this model in mind when he delivered his university lectures: “I cannot deny [Bacon] has abundantly achieved what he proposed. His is simply a Method whereby bodily discomforts and temporal wants are to be most effectually removed from the greatest number” (Idea, 106; Discourse V, 9). Indeed, being able to fulfill a wide range of material and social desires makes the Baconian university almost irresistible. Questioning the Baconian university puts the critic immediately under the suspicion of being an enemy of material and social progress. The late modern research university is the Baconian university in its most advanced stage. It has had a stunning global career, so that “leading scientists and scholars at research universities are the societal and indeed the global arbiters of what counts as knowledge and what does not in the early twenty-first century.”8 The late modern research university is an accidental agglomeration of advanced research competencies, gathered in one facility for the sake of managerial and logistical convenience. If this state of affairs is an evident fact and amounts to a global success, why 7 The AAU’s “White Paper” puts it thus: “The raison d’être of the American research university is to ask questions and solve problems. Together, the nation’s research universities constitute an exceptional national resource, with unique capabilities: • America’s research universities are the forefront of innovation; they perform about half of the nation’s basic research. • The expert knowledge that is generated in our research universities is renowned worldwide; this expertise is being applied to real-world problems every day. • By combining cutting-edge research with graduate and undergraduate education, America’s research universities are also training new generations of leaders in all fields.” (American Association of Universities, “White Paper,” www.aau.edu/research/article.aspx?id=4670) 8 Gregory, The Unintended Reformation, 299. University Education, Unity of Knowledge, and Theology 1023 should we be held captive by the nostalgic image of a university education long gone, if it ever existed? Should we not simply own up to the fact that the university has irreversibly morphed into a polytechnicum beautified with the veneer of a functionalized liberal arts propaedeutic? The problem is, as Newman presciently pointed out, that the very success of the Baconian polytechnicum carries the seed of its own undoing. Imagine the current trend to continue to its logical term. In such a scenario, each of the advanced research competencies of the late modern research university could be relocated without any real loss in closest proximity to the locations of private and state labs for bio-engineering, or to the various branches of the military-industrial and medical-industrial complex. At that point, the university would have disappeared. As a purely accidental and convenient agglomeration of advanced research competencies, the Baconian polytechnicum has unknowingly abolished its claim to be a university. To still call itself a university is undoubtedly useful for reasons of branding and marketing but at the same time profoundly deceptive. With good reasons, the late Benedict Ashley, O.P., educated in the great early years of the University of Chicago’s undergraduate program, states: The very term “university” means many-looking-toward-one, and is related to the term “universe,” the whole of reality. Thus, the name no longer seems appropriate to such a fragmented modern institution whose unity is provided only by a financial administration and perhaps a sports team.9 Ashley presses the crucial question: Is the university a per se unity that carries its end or purpose in its very practices of education and inquiry, or is the university a unity per accidens, a contingent agglomeration of means that serve changing extrinsic ends or purposes? In light of the substantive notion of university as a per se unity, the Baconian polytechnicum can no longer rightfully claim the title “university.” In The Idea of a University, Newman holds up a mirror in front of all late modern research universities. In this mirror the Baconian polytechnicum is seen bowing to social, political, and cultural needs and functions. Diverted by concerns extrinsic to the nature of the university, the late modern research university has betrayed the pursuit of education in universal knowledge as an end meaningful and valuable in itself. The idea of the university has morphed into something else that could better be called “polytechnic utiliversity.” However, few if any of the leading research 9 Benedict M. Ashley, O.P., The Way toward Wisdom, 20. 1024 Reinhard Hütter universities would want to entertain such a renaming. Undoubtedly, their endowment specialists would veto any such attempt. After all, many colleges, for tangible, pragmatic reasons, are still striving to be upgraded to a “university.”10 In spite of the current trend of comprehensive instrumentalization of university education, the hope remains that “university” might reclaim continuity with its past and thus be a normative ideal, a “gold standard,” that could govern some of the expectations, hopes, standards, and norms of current research universities. Newman’s provocative vision is of ongoing relevance. For in it he advances a compelling argument for why theology is indispensable for the university’s integrity: Liberal education carries its end in itself. Liberal education is a potentially universal education. While it is impossible to embrace all or even most fields of contemporary knowledge, liberal education fosters reflection upon one’s knowledge in relation to other fields and to the whole. This interrelatedness makes liberal education a potentially universal education. Such universal education requires a horizon of transcendence, a horizon that affords interconnectedness and coherence. But such a horizon of transcendence can be attained only if theology is central in university education. As Newman states: Religious Truth is not only a portion, but a condition of general knowledge. To blot it out is nothing short . . . of unravelling the web of University Teaching. It is, according to the Greek proverb, to take the Spring from out of the year, it is to imitate the preposterous proceeding of those tragedians who represented a drama with the omission of its principal part. (Idea, 62; Discourse III, 10) According to Newman, the greatest danger to the inner coherence of the university is a self-imposed normative ideological secularism. Such a secularism undermines the inner unity of knowledge and furthermore, by submitting the university to ends extrinsic to the truth it pursues, destroys the very notion of an education in the liberal arts. To the great detriment of the modern university, Newman’s proposal has been mostly ignored. As James Turner put it, “the decidedly nontheistic, secular understanding of knowledge characteristic of modern univer10 In many colleges the Business School’s MBA program is the primary motivation and legitimization for the “upgrade” to the status of university. Quite often, the Business School’s dominance transforms the liberal arts education into a propaedeutic of orthographic, grammatical, literary, and rhetorical skills as a preparatory means for producing and managing exchange value. Thus functionalized by a superior servile art, an art that serves an end extrinsic to itself, the liberal arts themselves turn into inferior servile arts. University Education, Unity of Knowledge, and Theology 1025 sities will not accommodate belief in God as a working principle.”11 And as Alasdair MacIntyre observes, “the irrelevance of theology to the secular disciplines is a taken-for-granted dogma.”12 Newman names and unmasks this pervasive but unexamined prejudice of the secular disciplines. He argues that to the degree that theology has been excluded, the connecting thread of university teaching has been unraveled. On the one side, there is the highly specialized and equally highly insulated graduate training. On the other side, there is the current undergraduate training that subdivides into a functionalized pre-med, pre-law, pre-engineering training on the one hand and, on the other, the “salad bar” consumer curriculum in the humanities, which Clark Kerr characterizes as a “multiversity,” “a city of infinite variety.”13 The only reform in sight seems to be the European Bologna model, a comprehensively stratified bachelor education, which amounts to nothing else than the briefest possible training the Baconian polytechnicum can offer in marketable linguistic, managerial, and technical skills of “know how.” Examining Newman’s thought on the university raises three questions: First, in the context of speaking about university education, what does Newman mean by ‘theology’? Second, why does he think theology is indispensable for university education? And third, what might it mean to take Newman’s proposal seriously? As quaint as Newman’s concrete proposals might appear to be, his prescient provocation seems to drive home the blade.14 11 James Turner, Language, Religion, and Knowledge: Past and Present (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 120. 12 Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 135. 13 Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University, 5th ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 5, 31. 14 These considerations come from a long-term university citizen reflecting for many years on the nature of university education. Since Fall 1979 I have in various ways been involved with a major university. I was a student of theology, philosophy, German philology, literature, and linguistics at a research university in Franconia (now Northern Bavaria), Germany, founded as a typical Enlightenment university in the middle of the eighteenth century by a Lutheran margrave. I continued my studies at a research university in the Catholic Rhineland that was founded by Protestant Prussia in the early nineteenth century to check Catholic dominance in the area. Then I studied at a private university in the US-American South (it has a famous basketball team), founded in the early twentieth century and named after a tobacco billionaire as an imitation of Northern Ivy League universities. In subsequent years, I taught theology and ethics in the “windy city” at a large urban seminary (with its own Ph.D. program) across the street from the most eminent Midwest private research university. Later returning as a Divinity School professor at the private 1026 Reinhard Hütter University Education and Theology as a Science Newman holds it as axiomatic that the idea and therefore also the term “university” is essentially related to “universe.” Consequently, he argues, “[a]s to the range of University teaching, certainly the very name of University is inconsistent with restrictions of any kind. . . . A University should teach universal knowledge” (Idea, 19; Discourse II, 1).“University” is first and foremost an institution for teaching universal knowledge. Hence, no subject matter that conveys knowledge is to be excluded from university teaching. Newman is quite insistent and explicit about this point: [I]f a University be, from the nature of the case, a place of instruction, where universal knowledge is professed, and if in a certain University, so called, the subject of Religion is excluded, one of two conclusions is inevitable,—either, on the one hand, that the province of Religion is very barren of real knowledge, or, on the other hand, that in such University one special and important branch of knowledge is omitted. I say, the advocate of such an institution must say this, or he must say that; he must own, either that little or nothing is known about the Supreme Being, or that his seat of learning calls itself what it is not. (Idea, 20; Discourse II, 1) The secular university by and large—that is, when it is consistent with its self-understanding—insists upon the first alternative: Little or nothing is known, or ever can be, about what Newman has called the “Supreme Being”—if such a Supreme Being exists at all. Hence, ideas and beliefs about such a Supreme Being might be studied, ideas that pertain to the anthropological phenomenon called “religion,” a knowledge-making that Southern university with the famous basketball team, I had a one-semester stint as a guest professor at a German university located in former Communist East Germany and founded soon after the Reformation, a university where Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel taught in the early years of the nineteenth century. During the 2012–13 academic year, I held a guest chair at a Catholic liberal arts college in the American Northeast founded by the Dominican Order in 1917. And several years ago, I was the finalist for the presidency of the only Catholic university in Germany, a university founded only in the 1980s. I have lived longer in the institution of the university than I have lived in the United States. For all of my adult life the academic rhythms and rituals of the university have been the water in which I swim and the air I breathe. But only in recent years, particularly in the course of my preparation to be a candidate for a university presidency, did I turn my attention directly to the idea of the university. I am deeply committed to the idea of the university and very grateful for the moments when extant universities strive to embody aspects of this idea. My commitment is simultaneously the source of my love for John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University and of my criticisms of the late modern research university. University Education, Unity of Knowledge, and Theology 1027 belongs to departments of religion. Newman would not be opposed at all to an empirical, historical, literary, and cultural study of, and university education in, the world’s religions. For he could regard such study and education as integral components of a liberal education. He has, however, something categorically different in mind when he speaks of “theology.” By “theology” he means “the Science of God, or the truths we know about God put into system; just as we have a science of the stars, and call it astronomy, or the crust of the earth, and call it geology” (Idea, 55; Discourse III, 7).15 In short, when he invokes “theology” in the context of his university lectures he has in mind what classical Catholic theology calls the “preambles of faith,”16 a properly scientific knowledge of God that is the intrinsic goal of metaphysics, or first philosophy. Though this knowledge of God does not depend on divine revelation, it is greatly enhanced, deepened, and indeed perfected by divine revelation. If we could ask Newman to point out some recent and contemporary practitioners of this science in the English-speaking world, he would most likely point us to Ashley, Braine, Burrell, Clarke, Davies, Dewan, Farrer, Geach, Haldane, Klima, Kretzmann, Lonergan, Mascall, McCabe, McInerny, Plantinga, Stump, Swinburne, Turner, Wippel, Wolterstorff, and their students.17 15 See the Appendix to this essay for a longer treatment of some complexities entailed in Newman’s understanding of the “Science of God.” 16 Thomas Aquinas puts the matter tersely in Summa theologiae [ST ] I, q. 2, a. 2, ad 1: “The existence of God and other like truths about God, which can be known by natural reason, are not articles of faith, but are preambles to the articles; for faith presupposes natural knowledge, even as grace presupposes nature, and perfection supposes something that can be perfected. Nevertheless, there is nothing to prevent a [person], who cannot grasp a proof, accepting, as a matter of faith, something which in itself is capable of being scientifically known and demonstrated.” Vatican I’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith Dei Filius, in chapter 2, De revelatione, declares authoritatively as being de fide that the natural range of reason encompasses the following capacity: “The same holy mother church holds and teaches that God, the source and end of all things, can be known with certainty from the consideration of created things, by the natural power of human reason.” (“Eadem sancta mater ecclesia tenet et docet, Deum, rerum omnium principium et finem, naturali humanae rationis lumine e rebus creatis certo cognosci posse.”) Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. Vol. II: Trent–Vatican II, ed. Norman P. Tanner, S.J. (London: Sheed & Ward/Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 806. 17 While my tendency of rendering Newman’s argument broadly in the idiom of Aristotelian-Thomist philosophy betrays my own intellectual pedigree and leanings, it would be erroneous to assume that Newman’s argument tacitly presupposes a specific philosophical position to be true, in short, that it presupposes what it pretends to demonstrate. Rather, what Newman’s argument does indeed presuppose is a certain way of understanding philosophy itself as a distinct scientific and 1028 Reinhard Hütter Quite aware that his position was already controversial in the Englishspeaking university world (outside of Oxford and Cambridge) in the 1850s, Newman makes it most explicit that “University Teaching without Theology is simply unphilosophical. Theology has at least as good a right to claim a place there as Astronomy” (Idea, 38; Discourse II, 9).18 In simultaneously meta-scientific inquiry that allows the speculative contemplation of the whole in all its interconnections and in relationship to the transcendent First Cause, God, a coherent inquiry that develops over generations and comprises various schools of thought. This understanding of philosophy has traditionally been called philosophia perennis. It is indeed the case that there do not exist many, if any, coherent traditions of philosophical inquiry other than the philosophia perennis that have the conceptual resources to envision, let alone to sustain, such an inquiry over a long period of time. (Some would want to argue that phenomenology might be such an alternative philosophical tradition, or even, as Husserl would think, the very renewal of the philosphia perennis. See Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie, Vol. 1: Kritische Ideengeschichte [Husserliana, Vol. VII], ed. R. Boehm [The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1956].) I regard Aristotelian-Thomism to be the most compelling instantiation of the philosophia perennis, and moreover an instantiation that is fully compatible with Newman’s prescriptive vision. Alasdair MacIntyre, in his Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990) has offered what I take to be a compelling argument for the superiority of Aristotelian-Thomism as a tradition of inquiry in comparison with Enlightenment philosophy and with postmodern deconstruction. His argument is not only fully compatible with Newman’s, but indeed corroborates and strengthens Newman’s case. Benedict Ashley, in his The Way toward Wisdom, has advanced a compelling vision of the whole—fully conversant with contemporary natural science and with the humanities—a vision funded by the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition. Jacques Maritain’s Distinguish to Unite or The Degrees of Knowledge (trans. from the fourth French edition under the supervision of Gerald B. Phelan [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959]) demonstrates how the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition can offer a coherent account of the whole of human knowing, from the most basic act of intellectual cognition, through scientific knowledge, to infused mystical knowledge. Although Maritain’s account stands in need some updating in regard to the recent developments in the philosophy of mind and in neuroscience, the overall scope remains unsurpassed by any contemporary epistemology. (A continuation of this tradition of inquiry can be found in two recent works of note: Paul A. MacDonald Jr., Knowledge & the Transcendent: An Inquiry into the Mind’s Relationship to God [Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009], and James D. Madden, Mind, Matter, and Nature: A Thomistic Proposal for the Philosophy of Mind [Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013]). 18 Newman is, of course, fully aware of materialism as a competing philosophical position, represented by the names of Epicurus and Hume: “If God is more than Nature, Theology claims a place among the sciences: but, on the other hand, if you are not sure of as much as this, how do you differ from Hume or Epicurus?” (Idea, 37; Discourse II, 8). While this rhetorical question would have had a considerable impact on the original, largely Catholic audience of Newman’s university lectures, in relationship to an audience reflective of the late modern University Education, Unity of Knowledge, and Theology 1029 this telling statement Newman gives us a key for understanding his overall—and I would submit, ever pertinent—understanding of what the proprium of a university education is. If university teaching without theology is simply unphilosophical, what then would it mean for a university education to be philosophical? Does the simple addition of natural theology alone make it philosophical? Newman gives an answer in his sixth discourse, where he states: “[T]he true and adequate end of intellectual training and of a University is not Learning or Acquirement, but rather, is Thought or Reason exercised upon Knowledge, or what may be called Philosophy” (Idea, 123; Discourse VI, 7). What differentiates a proper university education for Newman from the “know-how” training in a polytechnicum is thought exercised upon knowledge and upon the interrelationship of all the sciences. It is not unlike what Aristotle undertakes in his Posterior Analytics. Newman states as much quite explicitly: [T]he comprehension of the bearings of one science on another, and the use of each to each, and the location and limitation and adjustment and due appreciation of them all, one with another, this belongs, I conceive, to a sort of science distinct from all of them, and in some sense a science of sciences, which is my own conception of what is meant by Philosophy, in the true sense of the word, and of a philosophical habit of mind, and which in these Discourses I shall call by that name. (Idea, 46; Discourse III, 4) research university, this question carries no force whatsoever. Hume and Epicurus would be placeholders of materialist beliefs widely shared in the late modern research university. But then, Newman would observe, to the degree that the late modern research university is committed to Epicurean and Humean materialism, it is unable to realize itself as a per se unity pursuing intrinsically meaningful practices of education and inquiry. Such an institution would simply cease to be a university in any meaningful sense of the term. If one wants, however, to move beyond a purely defensive strategy of argumentation of this kind, one would have to revisit Aristotle’s proof in his Physics that the first mover is immaterial (Physics VIII, 10) and the proof in his De Anima that the intellect of the human soul is immaterial (De Anima III, 4 and 5). These proofs demonstrate that “being” extends beyond physical objects and that therefore materialism is untenable as a comprehensive philosophical theory. For a lucid presentation of Aristotle’s arguments, see Benedict Ashley, The Way toward Wisdom, 92–124. For a compelling reformulation of the argument for the immateriality of the human intellect—an argument based on Aristotle but one that also draws on recent analytic philosophy (Kripke, Quine, Goodman)—see James F. Ross, Thought and World: The Hidden Necessities (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 115–27, and for its able defense against recent critics, see Edward Feser, “Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspect of Thought,” in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 87/1 (2013): 1–32. 1030 Reinhard Hütter The science of sciences is metaphysics, first philosophy, and its intrinsic goal and completion is theology. Excluding theology from the university would be unphilosophical in that, for such a decision to be a proper philosophical one, a metaphysical warrant would be required. Such a warrant is, however, made impossible, since first philosophy itself becomes excluded together with natural theology. By establishing secularism as a normative criterion for admittance to the university, Newman observes, the university decapitates itself and becomes unable to reflect philosophically on its secularist commitments. Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and their modern disciples, as well as twentiethcentury scientists like the physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker and the chemist Michael Polanyi knew that any truly philosophical form of critical reflection presupposes a horizon that genuinely transcends and thereby enables such critical reflection.19 Together with all engaged in first philosophy, Newman knew perfectly well that there are significant and even profound disagreements inside this discipline and that it faces challenges and limitations of a kind no other science faces. For first philosophy, after all, deals with a subject matter that transcends all possible genera of academic subject matters. However, why should these circumstances, Newman would ask, disqualify first philosophy as a science? The fact that palaeo-anthropology lives more by hypotheses than by evidences; that neuroscience, instead of investing in the labor of explaining human volition and free choice, is bent upon the strategy of simply dissolving the “explanandum”; that biochemistry so far has provided no cogent ontogenesis for the unique reality of “life”; and that contemporary physics can neither reconcile quantum mechanics with the general theory of relativity nor move from postulating the existence of “dark matter” to an account of it—none of this proves that these inquiries lack the characteristics of a proper science and must therefore be excluded from the secular university’s curriculum and research program. Newman holds that the science of first philosophy is analogous to such sciences with one important difference: its subject 19 See Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Unity of Nature (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981), and idem, Der Garten des Menschlichen: Beiträge zur geschichtlichen Anthropologie (Munich: Hanser, 1984), and Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). For a trenchant critique of central aspects of modern science—the attempt at the comprehensive mathematization of nature, the bankruptcy of Hume’s fictionist epistemology, and the preemptive constriction of what can be known according to the absolutized norm of the scientific method—see Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970). University Education, Unity of Knowledge, and Theology 1031 matter is related to the whole cosmos and the totality of all facts and relations as cause to effect. The speculative labor of first philosophy is arduous and time consuming, and its proper scientific knowledge can be mastered by only a few, after a long time of considerable intellectual effort, and with intermingling of error. This is at least what the Fathers of the First Vatican Council seem to imply at the beginning of chapter two, De revelatione, of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, Dei Filius.20 Their teaching seems to correspond to the facts and simply points out that first philosophy is nothing but a proper science in the way Newman insists it is. For we would rightly expect nothing less from physics or biochemistry—that these sciences are arduous and time consuming, and that their proper scientific knowledge can be mastered by only a few, after a long time of considerable research, and with an intermingling of error, that is, in openness to falsification and to the formation of new hypotheses and explanatory models.21 What makes first philosophy, according to tacitly operative Baconian criteria, radically different from physics and biochemistry, is the following: Even modest competency in physics and biochemistry creates expertise in the order of production and consumption and consequently leads to useful 20 They state the matter explicitly, only the other way around: “It is indeed thanks to this divine revelation, that those matters concerning God which are not of themselves beyond the scope of human reason, can, even in the present state of the human race, be known by everyone without difficulty, with firm certitude and with no intermingling of error.” (“Huic divinae revelationi tribuendum quidem est, ut ea, quae in rebus divinis humanae rationi per se impervia non sunt, in praesenti quoque generis humani conditione ab omnibus expedite, firma certitudine et nullo admixto errore cognosci possint.”) Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. Vol. II, ed. Tanner, 806. The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, in the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum I, 6, explicitly affirm the teaching of Vatican I. In Metaphysics I, 2 (982a23–25), Aristotle observes that the things most difficult to understand are those that are most universal because they are the furthest removed from the senses. And Thomas Aquinas, in his commentary on the Metaphysics, states that the most difficult for human beings to know are those things entirely separate from matter in being, that is, immaterial substances. Consequently, “even though this science which is called wisdom is the first in dignity, it is still the last to be learned” (St.Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, trans. and introduced by John P. Rowan [Notre Dame, IN: Dumb Ox Books, 1995], 16). 21 First philosophy’s unique character as science that is simultaneously meta-science in relation to all other sciences accounts for the fact that, unlike the natural sciences, it does not proceed by empirical falsification and the formulation of new hypotheses and explanatory models. One way to think about development in first philosophy as a discursive tradition can be found in Alasdair MacIntyre’s Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. 1032 Reinhard Hütter employment. According to the same Baconian criteria, not even advanced, let alone modest, competency in first philosophy does create expertise in the order of production and consumption. Consequently, first philosophy is nothing but a waste of time—time lost for production and consumption. Now, with Newmanian criteria in place of the Baconian ones, the concomitant robust and visible presence of first philosophy in the core of the undergraduate curriculum of contemporary universities would at least complicate the rather uncritical reception of the overall remarkably superficial and in many regards ignorant claims advanced by the so-called “new atheism.”22 Furthermore, through the absence of first philosophy, it has been left to medical historians to bring again before modern thought an undeniable fact that modern philosophy since Hume seems to have been largely unable, or better, unwilling, to account for—miracles.23 According to modern intellectual folklore, the case against miracles was made irrefutably by David Hume.24 However, not only do miracles themselves since Hume’s day seem to have been not too impressed with Hume’s argument about 22 See Richard Dawson, The God Delusion (Boston: Mariner Books, 2008); Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Penguin, 2006); and Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007). For a somewhat rhetorically heated, but lucid metaphysical reposte, see Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2008); for a brilliant theological deconstruction, see David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); for the precise clarification at which a logician is best, see Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and for an incisive critique of atheist scientism by a foremost mathematician and philosopher, see David Berlinsky, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009). 23 Jacalyn Duffin, Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints, and Healing in the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 24 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding [1748], ed. Stephen Buckle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), section 10, “Of Miracles,” 96–116. For a brief but lucid meta-critique of Hume’s argument against miracles, see Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation, 60–64: “Hume rightly asserted, in a manner consistent with traditional Christian beliefs, that ‘it is a miracle, that a dead man should come to life,’ but followed this by claiming that ‘that has never been observed in any age or country.’This latter assertion begs the question about whether natural regularities are exceptionless, just as it implicitly begs the question about whether the God of traditional Christianity is real. It implies nothing more than that Hume did not believe the testimony in question. Standing squarely in the univocal metaphysical tradition and yet apparently oblivious of the tendentiousness of his beliefs, Hume did not base his argument against miracles on a careful, case-by-case evaluation of the evidentiary testimony pertaining to discrete, alleged miracles. . . . Hume . . . dogmatically rejected all University Education, Unity of Knowledge, and Theology 1033 their putative impossibility, but also, noteworthily, some contemporary philosophers have begun systematically to question Hume’s case against miracles.25 The discipline of first philosophy would be equipped to advance these initial and incipient discussions from the threshold of metaphysics into a fully fledged metaphysical inquiry. Such an inquiry could demonstrate the compatibility between the methodological naturalism of the natural sciences in regard to the comprehensive order of secondary causality and the possibility, and hence conceivability, of miracles that is entailed in the nature of the First Cause’s genuinely transcendent causality.26 The Indispensability of Theology for University Education With his argument for the indispensability of theology for a proper university education, Newman moves beyond the striking observation that by excluding theology from its curriculum the modern university simply betrays how unphilosophical it is. For, according to Newman, religious truth surpasses the indirect knowledge of the natural theology that is the goal of metaphysics. The reason is the following: A natural theology that rightly considers all of the divine perfections or attributes will also have to consider divine personhood and agency, that is, divine providence and the governance of the universe. While natural theology is able to inquire into the principles of the perfections of divine personhood and alleged miracles based on his own beliefs. His scornful repudiation of Christianity was a premise of his argument against miracles” (61). 25 J. Houston, Reported Miracles: A Critique of Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); David Johnson, Hume, Holism, and Miracles (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); and John Earman, Hume’s Abject Failure: The Argument against Miracles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). For a most comprehensive recent study in two volumes by a New Testament scholar and former atheist who steps into the fray and exposes Hume’s argumentation as operating in a nothing but “deductive circle,” see Craig S. Keener, Miracles:The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011). For Benedict Ashley’s critique of Hume’s dismissal of the principle of causality, see The Way toward Wisdom, chapter 3, and on the testimony of miracles, where he discusses Hume and Newman, see 316–17. 26 It should not go unmentioned that Newman himself argued for most of his career explicitly and implicitly against the epistemological positions held by Locke and Hume on the matter of miracles. He did it less as a metaphysician than as a logician within a broadly realist epistemological framework, thus anticipating argumentative strategies developed much later in somewhat similar ways by Alvin Plantinga and others. For Newman’s early, Anglican work on miracles, see his Two Essays on Biblical and on Ecclesiastical Miracles, 2d ed. (London: Basil Montague Pickering, 1870), and for his later, mature theoretical account of the logic of assent, see his magnum opus, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979). 1034 Reinhard Hütter agency, these perfections become a concrete and living reality only in the theology that the word “God” contains “[w]ith us Catholics, as with the first race of Protestants, as with Mahometans, and all Theists”: [A]ccording to the teaching of Monotheism, God is an Individual, Selfdependent, All-perfect, Unchangeable Being; intelligent, living, personal, and present; almighty, all-seeing, all-remembering; between whom and His creatures there is an infinite gulf; who has no origin, who is all-sufficient for Himself; who created and upholds the universe; who will judge every one of us, sooner or later, according to the Law of right and wrong which He has written on our hearts. He is One who is sovereign over, operative amidst, independent of, the appointments which He has made; One in whose hands are all things, who has a purpose in every event, and a standard for every deed, and thus has relations of His own towards the subject-matter of each particular science which the book of knowledge unfolds; who has with an adorable, never-ceasing energy implicated Himself in all the history of creation, the constitution of nature, the course of the world, the origin of society, the fortunes of nations, the action of the human mind; and who thereby necessarily becomes the subject-matter of a science, far wider and more noble than any of those which are included in the circle of secular Education. (Idea, 32f; Discourse II, 7)27 This doctrine of God is not only corroborated to some extent by natural theology but de facto alive as religious truth in the minds and the lives of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Considered maximally, the divine perfections of personhood and agency give rise to the question of revelation and revealed truth and call for a theology of history.28 In turn, the concrete 27 In this remarkable passage, Newman offers not a digest of natural theology (as it were with the particular accent of Scotism) but rather a living image of the doctrine of God the creator, governor, and judge, all merciful and all just that is at play when Christians, Jews, and Muslims speak of God. Contemporaneously put, Newman summarizes here the religious truth that Christians, Jews, and Muslims hold together over against alternative beliefs, new and old: Epicurean and Humean atheist materialism, Spinozist pantheistic naturalism—and Buddhism. 28 The only form of Christian theology capable of elevating, complementing, and perfecting natural theology is the kind that Pope John Paul II prescribed in his 1998 encyclical letter Fides et Ratio: speculative dogmatic theology. “Dogmatic theology must be able to articulate the universal meaning of the mystery of the One and Triune God and of the economy of salvation, both as a narrative and, above all, in the form of argument. It must do so, in other words, through concepts formulated in a critical and universally communicable way. Without philosophy’s contribution, it would in fact be impossible to discuss theological issues such as, for example, the use of language to speak about God, the personal relations within the Trinity, God’s creative activity in the world, the relationship University Education, Unity of Knowledge, and Theology 1035 facts of divine revelation in history demand the deepest speculative contemplation of divine personhood and agency—the task of speculative dogmatic theology. Even if considered only minimally, this religious truth, alive in the minds of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, must have a significant impact upon any education that claims to be potentially universal: Admit a God, and you introduce among the subjects of your knowledge, a fact encompassing, closing in upon, absorbing, every other fact conceivable. How can we investigate any part of any order of Knowledge, and stop short of that which enters into every order? All true between God and man, or Christ’s identity as true God and true man. This is no less true of the different themes of moral theology, which employ concepts such as the moral law, conscience, freedom, personal responsibility and guilt, which are in part defined by philosophical ethics. . . . Speculative dogmatic theology thus presupposes and implies a philosophy of the human being, the world and, more radically, of being, which has objective truth as its foundation” (§66). Post-metaphysical or anti-metaphysical programs of Christian theology and programs reduced to exegetical and historical positivism, doctrinal traditionalism, pastoral pragmatism, socio-political or eco-political transformationism, or postmodern apocalypticism will be inherently unfit for this task. Such programs will rather intensify the intellectual self-isolation of Christian theology or—in a desperate attempt to break out of the isolation and to gain immediate relevance in a secular age—will end up embracing sundry intellectual trends that happen to be momentarily in vogue. (I pursue this matter in greater detail in the chapter “ ‘A Forgotten Truth?’—Theological Faith, Source and Guarantee of Theology’s Inner Unity,” in Dust Bound for Heaven, 313–47.) Sacred theology (with its acme, speculative dogmatic theology) differs in kind from the theology that is the acme of first philosophy. The difference in the formal character (ratio) of how something is known accounts for the difference between sciences. The “formal object” or “ratio” of sacred theology is whatever is revealable by God (Thomas Aquinas, ST I, q. 1, a. 1, ad 2; a. 3c and a. 7c; see also his Expositio super librum Boethii De trinitate, q. 5, a. 4). In the following, I will distinguish between “natural theology” and “revealed theology” (the latter being a condensation of “theology arising from and relying upon divine revelation”.) Newman has no interest in establishing or defending this distinction in his university discourses. He rather assumes this distinction as a given and as a presupposition he and his audience share. He regards the former, the theology of first philosophy, to be indispensable for the unity of knowledge (a unity per se) characteristic of the university, and he regards (as every Catholic does or should do) the latter, the theology of sacred doctrine (with the exception of the praeambula fidei), as transcending all possible knowledge this side of the beatific vision. Consequently, the theology of sacred doctrine is the gratuitous donum superadditum that presupposes the gift of divine faith and crowns every Catholic university simpliciter. It is of this divine science that Bonaventure rightly says: “All modes of knowledge serve theology” “Omnes cogitationes famulantur theologiae” (De reductione artium ad theologiam, c. 26). It is this divine science that corrects, complements, perfects, and utterly transcends natural theology. 1036 Reinhard Hütter principles run over with it, all phenomena converge to it; it is truly the First and the Last. . . . Granting that divine truth differs in kind from human, so do human truths differ in kind one from another. If the knowledge of the Creator is in a different order from knowledge of the creature, so, in like manner, metaphysical science is in a different order from physical, physics from history, history from ethics. You will soon break up into fragments the whole circle of secular knowledge, if you begin the mutilation with divine. (Idea, 24; Discourse II, 3) But Newman goes further and makes the bold claim that “Religious Truth is not only a portion, but a condition of general knowledge.To blot it out is nothing short . . . of unravelling the web of University Teaching.” (Idea, 62; Discourse III, 10). Bracketing religious truth is suicidal for university teaching. Normative ideological secularism is ultimately nothing but the university’s undertaker. How does Newman make good on this claim? He does so by constructing a reductio ad absurdum argument by way of an a fortiori analogy. First, Newman establishes the fundamental relationship between objective truth and scientific inquiry. He does so by insisting upon a version of epistemological realism that still informs much of contemporary natural science: Truth is the object of Knowledge of whatever kind; and when we inquire what is meant by Truth, I suppose it is right to answer that Truth means facts and their relations, which stand toward each other pretty much as subjects and predicates in logic. All that exists, as contemplated by the human mind, forms one large system or complex fact. (Idea, 40f; Discourse III, 2) Viewed altogether, [the sciences] approximate to a representation or subjective reflection of the objective truth, as nearly as is possible to the human mind. (Idea, 43; Discourse III, 2)29 The subject matter of theology—God—makes it possible to understand the rest of reality as an intentionally and intelligently created whole and hence 29 “[A]ll knowledge forms one whole, because its subject-matter is one; for the university in its length and breadth is so intimately knit together, that we cannot separate off portion from portion, and operation from operation, except by a mental abstraction; and then again, as to its Creator, though He of course in His own Being is infinitely separate from it, and Theology has its departments towards which human knowledge has no relations, yet He has so implicated Himself with it, and taken it into His very bosom, by His presence in it, His providence over it, His impressions upon it, and His influences through it, that we cannot truly or fully contemplate it without in some main aspects contemplating Him” (Idea, 45f.; Discourse III, 4). University Education, Unity of Knowledge, and Theology 1037 as an intelligible universe. Consequently, one can reasonably expect that all knowledge to be gained about the world we live in (including ourselves) is essentially interrelated and an integral part of universal knowledge. In a second step, Newman develops the first part of an analogy that in an uncanny way anticipates powerful current initiatives in contemporary research universities: to recast the curriculum in light of a normative evolutionary naturalism. Reason, volition, freedom, and spirit (Geist) must be studied as at best aspects of the phenomenon of “consciousness” that emerges from (or is a mere epiphenomenon to) physical and biochemical processes in light of which they must ultimately be accountable, and possibly predictable: Physical and mechanical causes are exclusively to be treated of; volition is a forbidden subject. A prospectus is put out, with a list of sciences, we will say Astronomy, Optics, Hydrostatics, Galvanism, Pneumatics, Statics, Dynamics, Pure Mathematics, Geology, Botany, Physiology, Anatomy, and so forth; but not a word about the mind and its powers, except what is said in explanation of the omission. (Idea, 49; Discourse III, 5) History, political science, economics, literary studies and linguistics, art history, musical theory, and last but not least, philosophy (with the exception of logical positivism, formal logic, and the philosophy of mathematics and of the natural sciences) can happily be eliminated from the university curriculum. Henceforth man is to be as if he were not, in the general course of Education; the moral and mental sciences are to have no professional chairs, and the treatment of them is to be simply left as a matter of private judgment, which each individual may carry out as he will. (Idea, 49; Discourse III, 5) Replace the physical-mechanistic framework with a biological-evolutionary one in Newman’s illustration and matters sound only too familiar. At my own university, a noted philosopher of science has repeatedly argued that the humanities are a waste of time and that a future undergraduate training should focus exclusively on the natural sciences and on the methodological reflections of a materialist philosophy of science. Newman anticipates such a proposal in his own example: [O]ur professor . . . after speaking with the highest admiration of the human intellect, limits its independent action to the region of speculation, and denies that it can be a motive principle, or can exercise a special interference, in the material world. He ascribes every work, every external act 1038 Reinhard Hütter of man, to the innate force or soul of the physical universe. . . . Human exploits, human devices, human deeds, human productions, all that comes under the scholastic terms of ‘genius’ and ‘art,’ and the metaphysical ideas of ‘duty,’‘right,’ and ‘heroism,’ it is his office to contemplate all these merely in their place in the eternal system of physical cause and effect. At length he undertakes to show how the whole fabric of material civilization has arisen from the constructive powers of physical elements and physical laws. (Idea, 50f.; Discourse III, 5) Newman’s prescience is impressive. Reductionism, whether that of a mechanistic physicalism or that of an evolutionary materialism, is an all too simplistic principle. In the third part of his reductio ad absurdum argument, Newman completes his analogy with an a fortiori conclusion. Although he does not show this professor’s “definitions, principles, and laws” to be false, he does show that ignoring the reality of human reason and volition as proper motive causes would still issue in “a radically false view of the things which he discussed,” this erroneous view being “his considering his own study to be the key of everything that takes place on the face of the earth.” If this is true, a fortiori, the ignoring and consequent dismissal from university subjects of a reality infinitely superior to human reason and volition as motive causes would have much graver distorting consequences. And finally Newman drives home the blade: If the creature is ever setting in motion an endless series of physical causes and effects, much more is the Creator; and as our excluding volition from our range of ideas is a denial of the soul, so our ignoring Divine Agency is a virtual denial of God. Moreover, supposing man can will and act of himself in spite of physics, to shut up this great truth, though one, is to put our whole encyclopaedia of knowledge out of joint; and supposing God can will and act of Himself in this world which He has made, and we deny or slur it over, then we are throwing the circle of universal science into a like, or a far worse confusion. Worse incomparably, for the idea of God, if there be a God, is infinitely higher than the idea of man, if there be man. If to blot out man’s agency is to deface the book of knowledge, on the supposition of that agency existing, what must it be, supposing it exists, to blot out the agency of God? (Idea, 53; Discourse III, 6) On the supposition that God exists, the exclusion of this all-important fact from the circle of universal science can only result in omission and distortion of truth. The supposition that God does not exist is a philosophical tenet that cannot be proven conclusively—nor is it a self-evident truth—and hence can constitute neither a first principle nor a conclusion University Education, Unity of Knowledge, and Theology 1039 of any of the academic disciplines that belong to the secular university’s circle of sciences. Ideological atheism is as unphilosophical as it is unscientific. How would Newman’s reductio ad absurdum argument fare in the present secular research university? It would hardly find a serious hearing and hence would fail in its rhetorical appeal. The argument nevertheless still carries objective force. For one can make a reasonably strong case that the faculties of the contemporary secular universities are roughly but discernibly divided along the lines of the Kantian antinomy between determinism and freedom. Predictably, the defenders of determinism are by and large at home in the hard sciences, the defenders of freedom in the humanities. The defenders of determinism are typically (though with noteworthy exceptions) embracing a posthumanist outlook (especially in the bio-sciences). They regard the human being as a highly developed animal bent on maximizing the success of its species—of which the natural sciences and their technical application are currently the most decisive factor. The most articulate defenders of a radical notion of human freedom are increasingly (though with noteworthy exceptions) embracing a transhumanist outlook. They epitomize freedom in a new existentialist sense: the freedom of design, that is, the freedom of enhancing, or simply changing properties of, one’s own nature (intelligence, gender, emotions, body features, etc.) with the assistance of bio-technology.30 Thus, human beings become their own designer choices—or, worse, the result of designer choices made by others (parents, governments, lawmakers, silent majorities) who have gained the political power and legal legitimization to do so. And so the extremes meet. For transhumanism is nothing but the most consistent instantiation of posthumanism, especially when the design will eventually be socially or politically enforced and 30 One of the first to point out the transhumanist dynamic as an incipient cultural reality in Western late modern societies was Peter Sloterdijk, Regeln für den Menschenpark: Ein Antwortschreiben zu Heideggers Brief über den Humanismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999). Since then, the transhumanist perspective has become not only explicit but also prescriptive. See, first and foremost, Simon Young, Designer Evolution: A Transhumanist Manifesto (New York: Prometheus, 2006), but also Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002); Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin, 2005); Ramez Naam, More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (New York: Broadway, 2005); Joel Garreau, Radical Evolution:The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—and What It Means to Be Human (New York: Broadway Books, 2005); and Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 1040 Reinhard Hütter collectively applied.31 Welcomed at first as a liberation from the contingency, corruptibility, and fallibility of human nature, as an exercise of radical, promethean freedom, and thus as the final flowering of the Enlightenment project, eugenic bio-engineering will eventually result in a radical subjugation of human nature to techne, ˜ to willful production. The proponents of a liberal eugenics are naïve enough to assume that the ensuing combination of bio-technological and socio-political dynamics can be “managed” by the benign intentions of enlightened individuals and an equally benign and enlightened political process in equally benign and enlightened democratic regimes. Despite their frequent rhetorical gestures to the contrary, they display a deplorable historical amnesia (among other things, about the history of eugenics in the United States and Europe) and a conceited optimism grounded in the utterly unwarranted Enlightenment dogma that unencumbered technological application of scientific knowledge is identical with human progress. Inebriated by the vistas of new frontiers to be conquered and obsessed with the fear of being left behind by the dynamic of bio-technological research, the polytechnic utiliversity rushes along and banishes to the margins of its liberal arts appendix what it most desperately needs—a critical examination of its own unexamined operative beliefs and a vision of the whole.32 But neither hyper-specialized research experts, nor university administrators, nor the board of trustees have the time or the intellectual preparation to engage in critical thought, let alone in the kind of philosophical inquiry that would lead to a vision of the whole. Where is the head that steers the body of the late modern research university? Pointing to the numerous centers of ethics and especially bioethics that have all too quickly been instituted by the leading research universities will hardly be convincing. For the largely utilitarian and consistently postmetaphysical orientation of most of what passes for philosophical ethics offers these centers few if any conceptual tools to resist the powerful pressures to deliver strategies of legitimization for procedures that are individually and collectively willed on grounds that for much of contemporary philosophical ethics are arbitrary, that is, subject to preference. Where would 31 My own university calls no fewer than three genome centers its own, in addi- tion to one institute, and the driving force behind them, including the financing, is not of a Platonic but of a Baconian nature: Duke Center for Humane Genome Variation, Duke Center for Genome Technology, Duke Center for Public Genomics, and Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy. 32 The proponents of a liberal eugenics still have the lesson of the dialectic of the Enlightenment ahead of them spelled out in precise terms in a classic that deserves a careful relecture: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). University Education, Unity of Knowledge, and Theology 1041 such centers of bioethics find the intellectual resources that would offer a yardstick for critical thought and a vision of the whole? How would such centers of bioethics escape the logic of being simply part of managerial strategies meant to create a semblance of legitimacy and the required minimum of legality and to facilitate operative consensus?33 If there is only a grain of truth in this dire picture—a picture that Aldous Huxley painted with great prescience in A Brave New World and C. S. Lewis satirized inimitably in That Hideous Strength, a picture against which Hans Jonas warned in The Imperative of Responsibility,34 as did, more recently, Jürgen Habermas in his The Future of Human Nature35 and Leon R. Kass in his Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity36 (and, of course, we must not forget Pope John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae)—Newman’s analogy is still pertinent. For in the case of the posthumanist program as well as in the case of the transhumanist program, university education loses its character as liberal education and turns into something completely different, into a training in the servile arts; that is, in the kinds of expertise required for technical or managerial collective species optimization or for the optimization of individually desired, technical, operative, or genetic design features. In his very late notebooks, Friedrich Nietzsche seems to have anticipated both the posthumanist and the transhumanist implications of a purely secular utilitarian knowledge production: There exists neither “spirit,” nor reason, nor thinking, nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth: all are fictions that are of no use. There is no question of the “subject and the object,” but of a particular species of animal that can prosper only through a certain relative rightness; above all, regularity of its perceptions (so that it can accumulate experience)— Knowledge works as a tool of power. Hence it is plain that it increases with every increase of power— 33 For an approach to bioethics that escapes this problematic altogether and opens up a vista that transcends the theoretical as well as the political conundrum of contemporary secular bioethics, see Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, O.P., Biomedicine and Beatitude: An Introduction to Catholic Bioethics (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011). 34 Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). See Stephan Kampowski, A Greater Freedom: Biotechnology, Love, and Human Destiny (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2012), for an instructive interpretation of Jonas’s thought and for a helpful application of it to the pressing contemporary questions of bio-engineering. 35 Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003). 36 Leon R. Kass, Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002). 1042 Reinhard Hütter The meaning of “knowledge”: here, as in the case of “good” or “beautiful,” the concept is to be regarded in a strict and narrow anthropocentric and biological sense. In order for a particular species to maintain itself and increase its power, its conception of reality must comprehend enough of the calculable and constant for it to base a scheme of behavior on it. The utility of preservation—not some abstract-theoretical need to be deceived—stands as the motive behind the development of the organs of knowledge—they develop in such a way that their observations suffice for our preservation. In other words: the measure of the desire for knowledge depends upon the measure to which the will to power grows in a species: a species grasps a certain amount of reality in order to become master of it, in order to press it into service.37 If Nietzsche is right, the university as a humanist enterprise of education in universal knowledge is quite passé. What Nietzsche predicts is the species-relevant polytechnicum: “a species grasps a certain amount of reality in order to become master of it, in order to press it into service.” This is the posthumanist program. And when we include human nature itself in the reality to be mastered, we have the transhumanist program. Consequently, Newman’s analogy has lost nothing of its relevance. Rather, with uncanny prescience and precision, Newman perceived the radical implications hidden in the Baconian university that Nietzsche eventually would lay bare. While we are busy ushering Newman, the all too discomfitting visionary, out the front door of our late modern research universities, assuring him in most cordial terms of the indubitable humanistic value of his The Idea of a University, which presently is—most regrettably—utterly unfeasible, Francis Bacon, a long time university tenant, quietly opens the back door and beckons Friedrich Nietzsche to enter. Newman’s analogy does nothing but indicate a fundamental alternative. Either: the university is nothing but a species-relevant polytechnicum, be it as the tool of mastering nature by pressing it more and more into the service of the human species, or be it as the launching pad for mastering human nature itself, the technical and genetic optimization of the human being into some cyborg super- or trans-humanity. Or: university education presupposes the possibility of universal knowledge and aspires to universal education as an end in itself, as a contribution to a more perfect form of existence. 38 In this latter case, theological knowledge 37 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Holling- dale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), Aphorism 480. 38 Might transhumanists not retort that genetic optimization brings about a more perfect form of existence and that the above alternative is therefore spurious? At a first glance, it might seem plausible that transhumanism has a case. However, this case must rest either on an objective hierarchy of goods and an underlying order University Education, Unity of Knowledge, and Theology 1043 unavoidably bears upon other knowledge. Newman’s vision links the question of the nature of the university and of university education to the question of the nature and end of the human being, to the question of the nature of human flourishing, and to the ways of realizing a more perfect form of human existence.There is only one kind of university that can meaningfully inquire into these questions of a fundamentally philosophical and theological nature and regard them as integral to university education itself. This is Newman’s university.The Baconian university in its most advanced state, the polytechnic utiliversity, brushes aside questions of this kind as being unscientific and a waste of time. For an inquiry guided by such philosophical questions does not contribute to any tangible, that is, measurable knowledgemaking. Such an answer will, of course, convict the late modern research university only of its tacit Baconian ideological commitments. Newman would regard such a university as decapitated, as unable to reflect philosophically upon the ideology that drives its judgments and its operations. What Might It Mean to Take Newman’s Provocative Vision Seriously? Newman’s vision of a university education and of the unity of knowledge is as much, or as little, utopian as his The Idea of a University as a whole. His vision might best be received as an ideal that serves as a criterion against which to assess critically—that is, philosophically—the operative beliefs of late modern research universities. If Newman is right, an easy dismissal of of proximate ends subordinated to a final end or it has to rest on subjective judgments antecedent to and consequent upon genetic optimization of those who wish to be themselves or to have their progeny subjected to such genetic optimization. The first alternative does not work, because the very kind of metaphysical inquiry and argumentation that transhumanism rejects would be required for carrying through and ascertaining the necessary objective hierarchy of goods and of proximate ends ordered to a final end. The second alternative does not work either, because antecedent subjective judgments about genetic optimization will be at variance with differing antecedent subjective judgments regarding kinds, scope, and extent of optimization, and might, in addition, be based on transient desires and specious hopes. (In short, the private judgments of individual consumers of genetic optimization will always diverge from each other regarding the kind, scope, and extent of optimization and hence about its nature.) The consequent judgments (post-optimization) might contradict the antecedent judgments in that the recipients of optimization do not experience the optimization they hoped for, or more importantly, do not experience the happiness they hoped was integral to the genetic optimization, let alone the joy that accompanies genuine happiness. Consequently, the concept of “optimization” becomes vacuous. In short, the transhumanist claim that genetic optimization brings about a more perfect form of existence is empty. 1044 Reinhard Hütter the ideal he proposes in The Idea of a University might come with a high price for faculty as well as students in late modern research universities and their feeder institutions, the colleges—to be eventually forced to drink the bitter cup to its last dregs by having to live out the dystopian future of the comprehensive functionalization and commodification of the university and of university education. According to Newman’s vision, the university disciplines form an arch: its capstone stabilizes the whole edifice; remove it and the arch collapses. All stones are still there in their distinct integrity. But the relationship among the individual stones has become completely arbitrary—characteristic of a heap in distinction from an arch. On the undergraduate level, the current “multiversity” absent the capstone resembles such a heap, an ever-growing heap indeed. While each stone has its integrity, the relationships among all of them are utterly unclear—excepting, of course, sub-coherences between mathematics and the natural sciences and among the natural sciences. In this situation of a curricular and disciplinary heterogeneity and even confusion, several disciplines are advancing themselves as capstones or as a multi-disciplinary capstone-configuration for the construction of a new arch. The strongest contender for such a multi-disciplinary capstone-configuration is presently an evolutionary naturalism.This emerging capstone-configuration stretches from astrophysics via biochemistry to neuroscience, extends itself into the humanities, and even affords its own naturalist philosophy of science. With this capstone-configuration, the size of the arch changes considerably. Indeed, many of the stones of the former arch can no longer be integrated, and the ones that are still to be integrated have to change their form in order to accommodate to the reduced scope imposed by evolutionary naturalism. Such a naturalist reconstitution of the remaining university disciplines for the sake of the new unity of knowledge would undoubtedly affect most deeply the remainder of the humanities, but it would leave deep traces also on the other remaining disciplines. In short, the ideological imposition of a naturalist immanence would force the sciences to accommodate themselves in the proverbial Procrustean bed. And that would not be the end of the trouble. Rather, the new naturalist structure of the arch of university disciplines would be haunted by the specter of Nietzsche. For philosophical naturalism remains inherently vulnerable to the destructive acids of genealogical skepticism. Despite the realist intuitions at work in the natural sciences, the superimposed philosophical naturalism invites its own genealogical deconstruction: among tool-making and tool-using animals of the species homo sapiens, “truth” is nothing but a cover for domination. Or, more radically and naturalistically conceived, the will-to-power is the only “truth” there is. Conse- University Education, Unity of Knowledge, and Theology 1045 quently, as Hobbes already understood, “homo homini lupus.”39 There is nothing more threatening than another’s “truth” imposed upon us in order to subdue or crush our own will of self-assertion. Such a genealogical deconstruction of the reigning philosophical naturalism would, of course, issue in the very termination of the university in any, even the remotest and most equivocal, sense. Being historically oblivious, the contenders of philosophical naturalism are all too forgetful of one fact: The specter of Nietzsche has arisen with, and in response to, the ascendancy of modern philosophical naturalism; that specter will erode naturalism from the inside out until it collapses or until it is simply abandoned as just another false image that held us captive for too long. In the meanwhile, however, as the “novus ordo” of a consistently naturalist research university is emerging, an historically unselfconscious but ideologically self-confident philosophical naturalism will increasingly define the scope and consistency of a new arch of university disciplines. In this “novus ordo scientiarum,” the knowledge-making of the toolusing animal homo sapiens will turn out to be nothing but the most advanced form of tool-making and tool-using. And consequently, in light of the newly imposed ideological horizon of naturalism, the most advanced university training will be nothing but a training in the servile arts—in highly advanced “tool knowledge” of a technical or managerial sort—for the purpose of being able to fix those kinds of things that can be fixed with the help of tools. If nothing else, Newman’s vision serves at least as a provocative reminder that the only thing that can save the university from the reductive and, in the end, detrimental distortions of philosophical naturalism— and from its Nietzschean genealogical deconstruction—is the discipline that allows for the widest possible scope of truth. Only with theology as the capstone of the arch of university disciplines will the arch achieve the widest possible scope, will the university remain open to a maximum of interrelated and complementary sciences, will a university education remain in all areas of knowledge essentially philosophical, and will universal knowledge as an end in and of itself be intelligible and desirable.40 39 “The human being is a wolf to [his or her fellow] human being.” Hobbes’s famous saying is to be found in the Epistola dedicatoria of his treatise De cive: On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3. 40 This most extensive scope of the arch is enabled by understanding the universe as creation. The difference between First Being and participated being, and the use of analogy, allow for a surpassingly comprehensive vision of the whole of created reality without suppressing the unique kinds of knowledge to which its different parts give rise. Pope Benedict XVI, in his last address to the members of 1046 Reinhard Hütter Pace Nietzsche, human beings desire to know, not because they desire to master, but because knowledge is the proper perfection of the intellect which is a more perfect form of existence.41 Natural theology and, a the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, put this crucial matter in broadly Thomistic terms: “It is precisely this inbuilt ‘logical’ and ‘analogical’ organization of nature that encourages scientific research and draws the human mind to discover the horizontal co-participation between beings and the transcendental participation by the First Being. The universe is not chaos or the result of chaos, rather, it appears ever more clearly as an ordered complexity which allows us to rise, through comparative analysis and analogy, from specialization towards a more universalizing viewpoint and vice versa.While the very first moments of the cosmos and life still elude scientific observation, science nonetheless finds itself pondering a vast set of processes which reveals an order of evident constants and correspondences and serves as essential components of permanent creation” (“Address of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to Members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on the Occasion of the Plenary Assembly,” November 8, 2012; available on the Vatican website). The scope of the arch envisioned by Pope Benedict allows the full, nonreductive integration of the natural sciences with all of the humanities in a universal horizon of maximum order and complexity. Nothing less than the scope of this arch is what Newman had in mind in The Idea of a University. 41 It remains a simple fact that skepticism is unable to quench genuine philosophical inquiry that is teleologically ordered to the ultimate truth—the Sophists are superseded by Plato and Aristotle; Montaigne is superseded by Descartes; Hume is superseded by Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling; Nietzsche and Dilthey are superseded by Bergson and Husserl. But skepticism always seems to return, someone might rightly observe. Husserl offers a suggestive philosophical reason for the ongoing return of skepticism. According to Husserl, the philosophical inability definitively to overcome skepticism has its roots in a hitherto unacknowledged truth that skepticism again and again attests to—the dependence of all knowledge on the subjective consciousness. Husserl’s theory of transcendental, phenomenological, and apodictic reduction is his attempt to acknowledge this moment of truth in skepticism and thereby once and for all to overcome skepticism and thus definitively to establish a true and lasting first philosophy. (See Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie,Vol. 1: Kritische Ideengeschichte [Husserliana,Vol.VII];Vol. 2: Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion [Husserliana, Vol. VIII].) Alas, despite Husserl’s most rigorous effort at re-establishing first philosophy in the post-skeptical form of a transcendental phenomenology, skepticism returned anyway in form of Richard Rorty’s pragmatism and Jacques Derrida’s “différance.” Pace Husserl, I would want to suggest that what might be conceived as the moment of truth in skepticism (the dependence of knowledge on subjective consciousness) is consequent upon the preceding failure to recognize the principle of non-contradiction as a metaphysical first principle (that is, the principle of non-contradiction is true first and foremost of things themselves, without qualification—in short, of being in general—and therefore is true also of things as they appear to us and as we conceive them). Hence, arguably, since Aristotle’s successful defense of the principle of non-contradiction as a metaphysical principle in book IV of his Metaphysics against the Sophists, the AristotelianThomist instantiation of the philosophia perennis can be understood as the ongoing University Education, Unity of Knowledge, and Theology 1047 fortiori, revealed theology affirm the intimation that the human intellect operates in a horizon of transcendent truth, indeed, of subsistent truth, First Truth, and that the pursuit of knowledge is a created participation in the divine perfection of knowledge.42 Theology, natural and revealed, as capstone allows the university to understand and to appreciate its teaching and inquiry as intrinsically meaningful. Theology, natural and revealed, as capstone guarantees a genuinely liberal education. Newman’s vision reminds us all too moderns that theology, and the speculative contemplation to which it gives rise, is about the only thing that can save the university from its total functionalization and commodification. For theology, natural and revealed, constantly reminds all the other disciplines that the greatest freedom comes with the contemplation and communication of the transcendent truth of God. Theology might in the end also turn out to be about the only reliable guarantor of genuine academic freedom. For academic freedom has its origin in the “uselessness,” the intrinsic value of an education in the artes liberales. Hence, academic freedom, in its core, is nothing but the freedom to inquire into, to contemplate, and to communicate the truth for its own sake—an activity that carries its telos in its very practice.43 In the end, we are faced with having to choose one of two prophets, one proposing an all too unlikely utopia, the other announcing an all too likely dystopia. We may either struggle with Newman upstream toward the “idea” of a university. Or we may drift with Nietzsche downstream, allow ourselves to be carried away by the dominant jet stream, and eventually resign ourselves to the polytechnic utiliversity, that is, to the tacit betrayal of the idea of the university. One thing is clear beyond doubt supersession of all forms of skepticism a radice up to and including the twentieth century. In short, the rock of realism on which all forms of skepticism shatter is the principle of non-contradiction as a metaphysical first principle. Instead of overcoming skepticism, all forms of transcendental idealism ever so subtly enshrine it by making the res cogitans, the transcendental ego, or the reflexive self the starting point of epistemic certitude. Skepticism does return, not because of some hitherto unacknowledged moment of truth it points to, but rather because of the failure to recognize the principle of non-contradiction as a metaphysical first principle. Arguably, this recognition is so exceedingly difficult, not because the principle of non-contradiction as a metaphysical first principle might be so remote, but on the contrary, precisely because this principle obtains with such surpassing obviousness and because it is so utterly fundamental to the constitution of things and hence also to our thinking and speaking about them. 42 See Thomas Aquinas, De veritate, q. 1, a. 7 and a. 8, and ST I, q. 16. 43 See Josef Pieper, Leisure,The Basis of Culture, trans. Gerald Malsbary (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998) for what is still the best account available of this crucial insight. 1048 Reinhard Hütter though—wherever theology, natural and revealed, is permitted to make its distinct contribution to universal education, it will without fail foster a keen awareness of the intrinsic value of the arduous journey upstream so that one may contemplate the source of all things. For, after all, “when God is forgotten the creature itself grows unintelligible.”44 Precisely the uselessness of the contemplation of the whole and its First Cause that constitutes the very center of the education envisioned in Newman’s The Idea of a University, is most vehemently denounced and most desperately needed in our late modern, techno-capitalist societies. Almost singularly among the moderns, Newman articulates the contemporary relevance of the classical wisdom, that “ ‘[i]t is requisite for the good of the human community that there should be persons who devote themselves to the life of contemplation.’ For it is contemplation which preserves in the midst of human society the truth which is at one and the same time useless and the yardstick of every possible use; so it is also contemplation which keeps the true end in sight, gives meaning to every practical act of life.”45 Is There a Way to Escape the Alternative of Newman or Nietzsche? There might be numerous academicians at home in the humanities department of contemporary liberal arts colleges and even research universities who feel keenly the force of Newman’s provocative vision but who find the prescribed medicine at the same time too bitter tasting and the journey upstream too arduous for their students and possibly also for themselves. They might wonder whether there might not be a compromise, a solution that would allow one to stay in place midstream, to gain enough energy to fight the pull downstream but forego the too radical journey upstream.The proposed method for such a limited defense of a “status quo humanism” would most likely consist in an intensified education of the imagination by way of an increased “literacy,” of a literary, cultural, historical, and artistic kind. Such an imagination-focused approach will, however, fail to produce sufficient energy to stem the pull downstream. First and foremost, there exist insurmountable disagreements between the proponents of classical, Enlightenment, and genealogical approaches over the exact scope and content of the canon of texts that is supposed to serve this purpose. But more importantly, even if such disagreements could be over44 Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes §36. 45 Josef Pieper, Happiness & Contemplation, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998). The internal citation is from Thomas Aquinas, In Sent. 4, d. 26, q. 1, a. 2: “[A]d perfectionem humanae multitudinis sit necessarium aliquos contemplativae vitae inservire.” University Education, Unity of Knowledge, and Theology 1049 come, such a halfway solution will ultimately have to fail simply because of its exclusive or at least privileged focus on educating the imagination at the expense of the schooling in metaphysical inquiry and contemplation. In 1946, an Irish contemplative of note, that is, a person without any philosophical or academic agenda of his own, made a keen observation about an emerging intellectual problem that has only escalated since: [T]he source of all the evils and errors in the intellectual life of today— the disease that makes much of its utterances, the mere wanderings of a feverish imagination—is the loss of metaphysics and of the ability for abstract thought. . . .The human intellect draws its food for thought from the working of the senses, and when it represents to itself the idea of any object, that internal sense which is called the imagination, tries to form some corresponding picture or phantasm of the same object in terms of sensation or sense experience. . . . Now, one of the first things one has to learn in metaphysical thought, is to think with ideas and not with phantasms. One can imagine contradictions, but one cannot think them. . . . Obviously failure to abstract completely from the particular accidents of the phantasm may lead to error, and when one argues from phantasms instead of ideas—doing one’s thinking with the imagination instead of with the intellect—confusion and obscurity are inevitable. Metaphysics is the science of being—that is, of anything that exists or can exist—as being, and is, therefore, at the root of all other sciences, which indeed presuppose it. It has been abandoned by the modern mind, which seems to be unable to think otherwise than with its imagination. What cannot be imagined is—according to it—impossible; what can be imagined is, therefore, capable of being and existence. From this disease of the mind, we get sentiment for principle in morals, the particular for the general in argument, metaphor in place of reality, opinion for certainty, prejudice for judgment, quantity for quality, matter for the ultimate reality, and all the whole host of false coins that are current in the intellectual commerce of today. Curiously enough, it is often the trained mind that shows the greatest tendency to errors of this sort.The mathematician tends to think in terms of symbols and graphs, or at least in terms of quantity; the scientist, when he is not a mathematician, tends to be a mechanic.46 The Irish contemplative is right in denouncing the detrimental effects brought about by the loss of metaphysical inquiry and the confinement of thought to the limits of the imagination alone. At the same time, his 46 Dom Eugene Boylan, O.C.S.O., This Tremendous Lover (Allen, TX: Christian Clas- sics, 1987; originally published 1947), 117–18. For a more exacting formal consideration of the same issue as it pertains to the division of sciences, see Thomas Aquinas, Expositio super librum Boethii De trinitate, q. 5, a. 3 and q. 6, a. 2 (Thomas Aquinas, The Divisions and Methods of the Sciences, trans. Armand Maurer, 4th rev. ed. [Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1986], 32–46 and 74–80). 1050 Reinhard Hütter somewhat unnuanced bemoaning of the “mere wanderings of a feverish imagination,” though not inaccurate, makes his critique lopsided. It seems that thought comes completely into its own only as abstract thought, that is, at the very moment when the intellect severs itself once and for all from the imagination.The philosophia perennis, however, has always acknowledged that for the animal rationale, due to our hylomorphic constitution, there obtains an intimate connection between the imagination ( phantasia), the faculty of representation, and the intellect (nous), the faculty of simple and complex thought.47 As faculty of representation, the imagination remains the permanent foundation for the intellect’s operation. Hence, while always depending on the imagination for representational content, the intellect’s proper operation requires it to be essentially different from the imagination. Scientific knowledge, universal intelligibility, depends upon the ability of human thought to abstract degrees of intelligibility (noemata) from the deliveries of the senses and from the particular representations of the imagination (phantasmata).48 To put this complex epistemological matter into the more proximate context of higher education and into the received idiom of the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition of discourse: Many college and university students are trained well to study objects of the first degree of abstraction, a process that abstracts physical, sensible nature from the accidental aspects and conditions of individual matter. The first degree of abstraction characterizes the objects of the natural sciences. Many students are also trained well to study objects of the second degree of abstraction, a process that attends to the intelligible matter of quantities, magnitudes, numbers, figures, and forms in separation from any accidental aspects of individual 47 See Aristotle, De Anima III, 7 and 8; Thomas Aquinas, In Aristotelis Librum de Anima Commentarium, liber III, lectio XII and XIII; and George P. Klubertanz, S.J., The Philosophy of Human Nature (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1953), 191–95. For a helpful elucidation of Aristotle’s subtle and dense discussion in the De anima, see the extensive commentary by Ronald Polansky, Aristotle’s De anima (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 489–93; 497–500. 48 Aristotle establishes this absolutely crucial point in book III, 4 of his De Anima. I will offer only the most pertinent section (430a2–9): “Thought is itself thinkable in exactly the same way as its objects are. For in the case of objects which involve no matter, what thinks and what is thought are identical; for speculative knowledge and its object are identical. . . . In the case of those which contain matter each of the objects of thought is only potentially present. It follows that while they will not have thought in them (for thought is a potentiality of them only in so far as they are capable of being disengaged from matter) thought may yet be thinkable.” (I have cited the translation from J. A. Smith that can be found in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. by Jonathan Barnes, Vol. 1 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984], 683). University Education, Unity of Knowledge, and Theology 1051 matter, from physical, sensible nature, and from essential configurations of things.The second degree of abstraction characterizes the objects of mathematics. Only few students are introduced, however, to study objects of the third degree of abstraction, a process that completely transcends the condition of what is sensible and quantifiable, and therefore characteristic of material objects. The third degree of abstraction characterizes the purely intelligible objects of logic and metaphysics.49 What the Irish contemplative is rightly concerned with, if not alarmed about, is the almost comprehensive eclipse of the third degree of abstraction from higher education.What he does not emphasize sufficiently, however, is the indispensable role the imagination plays in preparing and accompanying intellectual inquiry and learning pertaining to all three degrees of abstraction.The imagination as the representational faculty can never be left behind like a ladder that one can dispense with after having reached the higher level. Furthermore, the productive associations of the imagination are central to narrative and symbolic thinking and hence crucial for the production, reception, and interpretation of poetry, literature, art, and music. The humanities’ halfway solution that proposes a privileged if not exclusive formation of the imagination (at the expense of thought and inquiry pertaining especially to the third degree of abstraction) will undoubtedly increase textual, cultural, and historical literacy, will very likely contribute to aesthetic and possibly also to character formation (Bildung), and if well done, will raise and consider the “Life Questions”: “ ‘What should I live for, and why?’ ‘What should I believe, and why should I believe it?’ ‘What is morality, and where does it come from?’ ‘What kind of person should I be?’ ‘What is meaningful in life, and what should I do in order to lead a fulfilling life?’ ”50 But if students are not introduced simultaneously or subsequently into the kind of philosophical inquiry that might enable them to pursue these questions in a rigorous and sustained metaphysical way, such an education of the imagination stands in danger of producing an incommensurable array of views. Neglecting inquiries into the first principles of the theoretical and practical intellect, inquiries that would entail discriminations between true and false, good and evil, students will find themselves unprepared, if not 49 The three degrees of abstraction are not to be misunderstood as successive rungs of a ladder, one degree leading to the next—one above the other in the same generic line; rather, they answer to essentially different types of intellectual operation. See Benedict Ashley, The Way toward Wisdom, 138, and Thomas Aquinas, Expositio super librum Boethii De trinitate, q. 5, a. 3, and idem, Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, nos. 1156; 1160–61; 1162–65. 50 Gregory, The Unintended Reformation, 74. 1052 Reinhard Hütter unable, to think on the level of principles. They will, consequently, rely on the transient deliveries of their imagination, emotions, and what they regard as personal experiences. The very lack of understanding first principles of thought and action will give rise to a pervasive skepticism, to the embrace of the intellectually lazy and indifferent pluralism of the “kingdom of whatever” (Brad Gregory), and eventually to the joyful or resigned journey downstream into the Nietzschean dystopia. In short, when undertaken without the schooling in metaphysical inquiry and contemplation, the per se laudable education of the imagination will not generate sufficient energy to stem the pull downstream. On the contrary, when prepared and accompanied by a substantive education of the imagination, a rigorous schooling in metaphysical inquiry and contemplation will undoubtedly go much further than without such a preparatory education of the imagination. For a student with such a schooling of intellect and imagination will eventually become, as Newman felicitously put it, a “master of the twofold Logos, the thought and the word, distinct, but inseparable from each other.”51 A Pragmatic Postscript On a very mundane but very concrete level, it is all too obvious that the increasing use of technological tools in the college and university classroom—hailed as “aids of the imagination”—will only intensify the inability and the unwillingness of students to engage in thought and inquiry pertaining to the third degree of abstraction. Instead of liberating students from being tyrannized by the constant titillation of their imagination, and hence from “the wanderings of the feverish imagination,” the use of these tools will only intensify the students’ captivity to the imagination and will consequently make them unable to sustain the rigor of genuinely abstract thought and, therefore, of intellectual contemplation. Within the limits of the imagination alone, thought becomes at best the transient acme of the productive imagination. Because the operation of the imagination depends on being fed (next to sense memory) by the senses, and especially the visual sense, students who think first and fore51 Newman, The Idea of a University, 254; University Subjects II: “Literature,” section 9. The schooling of the imagination does entail another dimension, one largely ignored or repressed in a modernity shaped by Protestant iconoclasm: the contemplation of the image and the central truth to which such contemplation gives rise, the antithesis of immanence and transcendence. For a philosophically and theologically instructive and historically saturated reflection on the centrality of the image/icon for the education of the imagination, see Thomas Pfau, “Rethinking the Image, With Some Reflections on G. M. Hopkins,” The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 57 (2011): 30–60. University Education, Unity of Knowledge, and Theology 1053 most, if not exclusively, within the limits of the imagination alone, depend for their thinking on the ongoing stimulation of their senses, especially of their visual sense. They tend to satisfy this need primarily by way of visual entertainment offered by a multitude of media outlets and electronic gadgets. For students whose thinking is in such a profound way bound to and bounded by the imagination, metaphysical inquiry and contemplation become exceedingly difficult if not outright impossible. It is, furthermore, not surprising at all that college and university students increasingly expect their education to appeal to their imagination and hence to take on the characteristics of the visual entertainment they rely on in order to keep their imagination stimulated in a way that is—fun. On the contemporary market of higher education in the United States, ruled by the consumer and consequently by a stiff competition between colleges and universities, the prospective student is lured with promises of existential excitement, physical comfort, visual entertainment, and comprehensively—fun (not to mention, of course, the promise of social and economic advancement, that is, utility). What chance of success would a program of universal education stand that promised to students—who have been left largely unprepared by most American high schools to read competently texts of a mildly demanding nature or to write coherently structured and compellingly argued papers—neither entertainment nor utility, but rather the arduous inquiry into and contemplation of truth and, indeed, the imperfect albeit profound happiness that is a property of such contemplation and the transient albeit deep joy that is an accompaniment of such contemplation? If heeded today, would not Newman’s vision fall victim to his own famous verdict of being “unreal,” that is, while theoretically compelling, nevertheless being out of touch with the concrete exigencies of real life?—The remedy needed most is often hated most by those who need it most desperately for their cure.52 The remedy needed most entails a transvaluation of values such that the distinct community of teachers and students that originally constituted the Academy of Plato and the Lyceum of Aristotle and much later the medieval university would once again in some future, genuinely renewed or newly constituted university be able to affirm unequivocally the final end of what is truly “academic”: “The least 52 It was only after I had penned it that I became aware that this last sentence echoes a memorable phrase of Livy to be found in his preface to book I of The History of Rome from Its Foundation, where he invites the reader to observe “the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them” (Livy, The Early History of Rome, trans. Aubrey de Sélingcourt [London: Penguin Classics, 2002], 30). 1054 Reinhard Hütter knowledge that one can attain of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge one can attain of the lowest things.”53 Appendix Natural theology faces unique conceptual difficulties, conflicts, and intrinsic limitations. Practitioners of natural theology have to be constantly alert to the danger of ever so subtly turning God conceptually into an instantiation, albeit the most perfect one, of infinite being, or worse, of identifying God and world. The critique of such errors is integral to the metaphysical efforts of the philosophia perennis. According to the principle “abusus non tollit usum,” recurring instantiations of “ontotheology” or, worse, pantheism, do not require the abandonment of natural theology as such. Ironically, Newman’s way of characterizing natural theology seems to make him vulnerable to Heidegger’s famous charge of onto-theology. For in Newman’s way of putting the matter, God as infinite Being seems to fall conceptually under a comprehensive univocal concept of being (hence “onto-theology”), a conceptual move that putatively obscures or even obliterates the absolute difference between God and creature. This view was allegedly held by Scotus, Suárez, and their students. According to Scotus, understood on his own metaphysical terms, however, being as such (ens inquantum ens) is the primary object of the intellect and hence the simplest of all concepts, which consequently cannot be defined. Considered in abstraction from the distinction between infinite and finite being (being now signifying only opposition to nothing), Scotus arrives at a common or univocal concept of being. This logico-semantic concept of being comprises infinite being, which can be conceived in virtue of the common concept of being in its imperfect mode (the finite being of the creature) or in its intrinsic perfect mode (God).The concept of being is univocally applied to God and creature because the utterly diverse realities of infinite being in its intrinsic perfect mode (God) and in its imperfect mode (finite being) are conceived in the common concept of being both in an imperfect way.The difficulty at the core of Scotus’s conception seems to be the following: On the one hand Scotus seems to hold that being is a univocal predicate, but simultaneously he seems to deny its univocal predication of all things. This is indeed a problem, but not the problem of “onto-theology.” Thomas Aquinas’s ontology is fundamentally different. In contrast to the ontology that arises with Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus, who conceive 53 ST I, q. 1, a. 5, ad 1:“[M]inimum quod potest haberi de cognitione rerum altissi- marum, desiderabilius est quam certissima cognitio quae habetur de minimis rebus.” Thomas paraphrases here a thought from Aristotle`s Parts of Animals I, 5 (644b31). University Education, Unity of Knowledge, and Theology 1055 being as a real quiddity, a fixed being or thing (res),Thomas conceives being fundamentally as actuality (esse) and understands God (ipsum esse subsistens) to be the transcendent cause and principle of being in general (ens commune). Consequently, he regards the knowledge of the First Cause as the goal of metaphysical inquiry and not as its proper subject. (See Benedict Ashley, The Way toward Wisdom, 139–44, for a succinct presentation of this complex matter.) In comparison with Scotus, Suárez, and their schools, Thomists are considerably more reserved about the scope and the conceptual precision metaphysical inquiry permits; for, according to the Thomist School, metaphysical reasoning has to proceed by causality, negation, and eminence, and is always expressed in analogical terms. Hence, Thomists are keenly aware that any natural knowledge of God that metaphysical inquiry does attain, is—even at its best—indirect, negative, and imperfect. The intricate issue under dispute (which forms the background for the question of the precise status of natural theology in relation to the proper subject matter of metaphysical inquiry) is the question of the analogy or univocity of being. By offering a pithy summary of the central thesis of Étienne Gilson’s great opus on Duns Scotus (Duns Scot: Introduction à ses positions fondamentales [Paris: Vrin, 1952]), Jean-François Courtine names the central problematic: “Thomist analogy and Scotist univocity do not treat of the same being, and it is therefore impossible, on the part of Scotus, in order to be at variance with or to refute the former, to pretend to retrieve the authentic thought of Aquinas” (Inventio analogiae: Métaphysique et ontothéologie [Paris: Vrin, 2005], 283, fn 3; my translation). For presentations of the Scotist position, see Timotheus A. Barth, “Being, Univocity, and Analogy according to Duns Scotus,” in John Duns Scotus, 1265–1965, ed. J. K. Ryan and B. M. Bonansea (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1965), 210–62, and Ludger Honnefelder, Ens inquantum ens: Der Begriff des Seienden als solchen als Gegenstand der Metaphysik nach der Lehre des Johannes Duns Scotus (Münster: Aschendorff, 1979). For a more accessible defense of Scotus’s semantic (instead of metaphysical) claims about the concept of being as univocal for God and creatures and the misplaced charge of onto-theology against him (and by implication against Newman), see Richard Cross, “ ‘Where Angels Fear to Tread:’ Duns Scotus and Radical Orthodoxy,” Antonianum 76 (2001): 7–41. For a presentation of the Thomist position as represented by John Capreolus and Sylvester of Ferrara, see Lawrence Dewan, O.P., Form and Being: Studies in Thomistic Metaphysics (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 81–95, and Bernard Montagnes, O.P., The Doctrine of the Analogy of Being according to Thomas Aquinas, trans. E. M. Macierowsky (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2004); for a presentation of the Thomist position as represented by Cajetan, see James F. 1056 Reinhard Hütter Anderson, The Bond of Being: An Essay on Analogy and Existence (St. Louis: Herder, 1949), Ralph McInerny, Aquinas and Analogy (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996), and Steven A. Long, Analogia Entis, Metaphysics, and the Act of Faith (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011). For a brilliant reassessement along logical semantic lines of Cajetan’s doctrine of analogy, see Joshua P. Hochschild, The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010). For a recent critical as well as constructive engagement of the Protestant theological dismissal of the analogy of being, see The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Antichrist or the Wisdom of God, ed. Thomas Joseph White, O.P. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010). N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2013): 1057–79 1057 Conscience according to John Henry Newman C HARLES M OREROD, O.P. Bishop of Lausanne, Geneva, and Fribourg Fribourg, Switzerland Introduction T HE IMPORTANCE of conscience is recognized far beyond Catholic circles.This is due in part to the common experience of an interior voice that commands certain good actions and reproves bad actions. It is also commonly admitted that we have a certain duty to follow our conscience, even though it can be sometimes mistaken. Apart from the rather broad agreement just summarized, the understanding of conscience is quite diverse. Since the Catholic Church speaks—officially at least since Pope Pius IX—of the possibility of the salvation of non-Christians in invincible ignorance, some suggest that invincible ignorance is the best warranty of personal freedom. And a view of conscience separated from objective truth and goodness could mean that Hitler and his accomplices acted morally. Confronted with such views,1 the theologian Joseph Ratzinger found in John Henry Newman the master of a view of conscience that is not opposed to the liberating power of truth. I will try to present some aspects of John Henry Newman’s understanding of conscience, which has to be understood within his practical approach to human life and religion. Conscience, being the center of natural religion, is a preparation for faith. It can be perverted, and— perverted or not—it receives some divine help. Newman took his conscience as a guide, which led him to the Catholic Church. 1 See Joseph Ratzinger, On Conscience (Philadelphia: The National Catholic Bioethics Center/San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), 13–17. Charles Morerod, O.P. 1058 Practical Approach One of the reasons why Newman highlights the importance of conscience is his view of the human being as a practical being: It is in human nature to be more affected by the concrete than by the abstract.2 To most men argument makes the point in hand only more doubtful, and considerably less impressive. After all, man is not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal. He is influenced by what is direct and precise.3 If we are, generally speaking, practical beings, this is true above all in the field of religion. And not to be practical in such a field is a radical mistake: When a man does not make the truth of Christianity a practical concern, but a mere matter of philosophical or historical research, he will feel himself at leisure (and reasonably on his own grounds) to find fault with the evidence. . . . If religion be not a practical matter, it is right and philosophical in us to be sceptics.4 Practical does not mean trivial or materialistic. Conscience is interesting to us not only because it is “practical,” but because it is emotional, it introduces us to relations with persons. And from these persons we move towards a higher Person: Conscience . . . is always, what the sense of the beautiful is only in certain cases; it is always emotional. No wonder then that it always implies what that sense only sometimes implies; that it always involves the recognition of a living object, towards which it is directed. Inanimate things cannot stir our affections; these are correlative with persons. If, as is the case, we feel responsibility, are ashamed, are frightened, at transgressing the voice of conscience, this implies that there is One to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear.5 Believers cannot be indifferent to arguments against their faith. And they reply with arguments. But Newman has doubts about the practical 2 An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1903 [1870]), 36. Henceforth, GA. 3 GA 95. 4 Parochial And Plain Sermons, In eight volumes, New impression,(London: Long- mans, Green, and Co., 1907–8 [1834–43]), II.II: 21. Henceforth, PPS (Sermons of the Anglican period of Newman). 5 GA 109. Conscience according to Newman 1059 effect of non-practical arguments, because “[o]ur reasoning powers are very weak in all inquiries into moral and religious truth.”6 Conscience on the other hand provides a practical and efficient argument: Catholics go into the world; they mix with men of all religions; they hear all manner of sophistical objections made to the Church, her doctrines, and her rules. . . . My dear Brethren, this is a day in which much stress is laid upon the arguments producible for believing Religion, Natural and Revealed; and books are written to prove that we ought to believe, and why. These books are called Natural Theology, and Evidences of Christianity; and it is often said by our enemies, that Catholics do not know why they believe. Now I have no intention whatever of denying the beauty and the cogency of the argument which these books contain; but I question much, whether in matter of fact they make or keep men Christians. I have no such doubt about the argument which I have been here recommending to you. Be sure, my Brethren, that the best argument, better than all the books in the world, better than all that astronomy, and geology, and physiology, and all other sciences can supply,—an argument intelligible to those who cannot read as well as to those who can,—an argument which is ‘within us,’— an argument intellectually conclusive, and practically persuasive, whether for proving the Being of a God, or for laying the ground for Christianity,—is that which arises out of a careful attention to the teachings of our heart, and a comparison between the claims of conscience and the announcements of the Gospel.7 We are practical beings, religion is practical, and conscience is at the center of Newman’s practical approach to religion. Preparation for Belief in God Faith comes from God, but it does not mean that it cannot be prepared, as John the Baptist shows; God creates in us certain dispositions to faith.8 We play our role in this preparation for faith, or in our refusal: 6 PPS I.XVII: 218. 7 Sermons Preached in Various Occasions (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908 [1856]), 60–70: Sermon 5, Feast of St. Thomas—4th Sunday after Advent, 1856. Preached in the University Church, Dublin. Henceforth, SPVO. 8 See SPVO 60: “The Holy Baptist was sent before our Lord to prepare His way; that is, to be His instrument in rousing, warning, humbling, and inflaming the hearts of men, so that, when He came, they might believe in Him. He Himself is the Author and Finisher of that Faith, of which He is also the Object; but, ordinarily, He does not implant it in us suddenly, but He first creates certain dispositions, and these He carries on to faith as their reward.” Charles Morerod, O.P. 1060 If I attempt to set before you, my Brethren, as far as time permits, how it is, humanly speaking, that a man comes to believe the revealed word of God, and why one man believes and another does not. And, in describing the state of mind and of thought which leads to faith, I shall not of course be forgetting that faith, as I have already said, is a supernatural work, and the fruit of divine grace; I only shall be calling your attention to what must be your own part in the process.9 As a matter of fact, “few minds in earnest can remain at ease without some sort of rational grounds for their religious belief; to reconcile theory and fact is almost an instinct of the mind.”10 In order to do this, we must start from the sensible world, which is the prime object of our knowledge. But we move beyond the material world towards a moral dimension, where we notice our conscience, which leads us to God: Now certainly the thought of God, as Theists entertain it, is not gained by an instinctive association of His presence with any sensible phenomena; but the office which the senses directly fulfil as regards creation that devolves indirectly on certain of our mental phenomena as regards the Creator. Those phenomena are found in the sense of moral obligation. As from a multitude of instinctive perceptions, acting in particular instances, of something beyond the senses, we generalize the notion of an external world, and then picture that world in and according to those particular phenomena from which we started, so from the perceptive power which identifies the intimations of conscience with the reverberations or echoes (so to say) of an external admonition, we proceed on to the notion of a Supreme Ruler and Judge.11 When Newman looks for a possible proof of the existence of God, conscience is at the center of the argument: I have already said I am not proposing here to prove the Being of a God; yet I have found it impossible to avoid saying where I look for the proof of it. . . . I must start from some first principle;—and that first principle, which I assume and shall not attempt to prove, is . . . that we have by nature a conscience.12 The experience of conscience is for Newman the best indication of God’s existence: 9 SPVO 61. 10 Apologia pro vita sua, The Two Versions of 1864 & 1865, Preceded by Newman’s and Kingsley’s Pamphlets, With an Introduction by Wilfrid Ward, Henry Frowde (London: Oxford University Press, 1913), 351. Henceforth, AP. 11 GA 103–4. 12 GA 104–5. Conscience according to Newman 1061 November 7, 1859. Ward thinks I hold that moral obligation is, because there is a God. But I hold just the reverse, viz. there is a God, because there is a moral obligation. I have a certain feeling on my mind, which I call conscience. When I analyse this, I feel it involves the idea of a Father and a Judge,—of one who sees my heart, etc. . . . All men know what the feeling of a bad or good conscience is, though they may differ most widely from each other as to what conscience injoins . . . This is Conscience, and, from the nature of the case, its very existence carries on our minds to a being exterior to ourselves; for else, whence did it come ? and to a being superior to ourselves; else whence its strange, troublesome peremptoriness? . . . Such is an argument for the being of a God which I should wish, if it were possible, to maintain. It has been my own chosen proof of that fundamental doctrine for thirty years past. . . . I am led to it, not only by its truth, but by its great convenience and appositeness in this day. 1) It is a proof common to all, to high and low, from earliest infancy. It is carried about in a compact form in every soul. It is ever available— it requires no learning—it is possessed by pagans as well as Christians. 2) And next: it is intimately combined with practice. It is not some abstract truth wrought out by the pure intellect . . .13 13 Proof of Theism, in Adrian J. Boekraad and Henry Tristram, The Argument from Conscience to the Existence of God, According to J. H. Newman (Louvain: Editions Nauwelaerts, 1961), 103–25; 1859, 103–22. See also Fifteen Sermons Preached Before The University of Oxford, Between A.D. 1826 and 1843; new impression (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909) (sermons of the Anglican period of Newman, 1826–43), 18–19: “Now, in the first place, it is obvious that Conscience is the essential principle and sanction of Religion in the mind. Conscience implies a relation between the soul and a something exterior, and that, moreover, superior to itself; a relation to an excellence which it does not possess, and to a tribunal over which it has no power. And since the more closely this inward monitor is respected and followed, the clearer, the more exalted, and the more varied its dictates become, and the standard of excellence is ever outstripping, while it guides, our obedience, a moral conviction is thus at length obtained of the unapproachable nature as well as the supreme authority of That, whatever it is, which is the object of the mind’s contemplation. Here, then, at once, we have the elements of a religious system; for what is Religion but the system of relations existing between us and a Supreme Power, claiming our habitual obedience: ‘the blessed and only Potentate, who only hath immortality, dwelling in light unapproachable, whom no man hath seen or can see’?” See also SPVO 65–66: “This is Conscience; and, from the nature of the case, its very existence carries on our minds to a Being exterior to ourselves; for else whence did it come? and to a Being superior to ourselves; else whence its strange, troublesome peremptoriness? I say, without going on to the question what it says, and whether its particular dictates are always as clear and consistent as they might be, its very existence throws us out of ourselves, and beyond ourselves, to go and seek for Him in the height and depth, whose Voice it is. As the sunshine implies that the sun is in the heavens, though we may see it not, as a knocking at our doors at night implies the presence of one outside in the dark who asks for 1062 Charles Morerod, O.P. This argument, which is quite in conjunction with others, is likely to be contested on the basis of the social character of our perception of moral norms.14 But it is unlikely that education could explain the whole admittance, so this Word within us, not only instructs us up to a certain point, but necessarily raises our minds to the idea of a Teacher, an unseen Teacher: and in proportion as we listen to that Word, and use it, not only do we learn more from it, not only do its dictates become clearer, and at its lessons broader, and its principles more consistent, but its very tone is louder and more authoritative and constraining. And thus it is, that to those who use what they have, more is given; for, beginning with obedience, they go on to the intimate perception and belief of one God. His voice within them witnesses to Him, and they believe His own witness about Himself. They believe in His existence, not because others say it, not in the word of man merely, but with a personal apprehension of its truth. This, then, is the first step in those good dispositions which lead to faith in the Gospel.” See also GA 389–91: “Our great internal teacher of religion is, as I have said in an earlier part of this Essay, our Conscience. Conscience is a personal guide, and I use it because I must use myself; I am as little able to think by any mind but my own as to breathe with another’s lungs. Conscience is nearer to me than any other means of knowledge. And as it is given to me, so also is it given to others; and being carried about by every individual in his own breast, and requiring nothing besides itself, it is thus adapted for the communication to each separately of that knowledge which is most momentous to him individually,— adapted for the use of all classes and conditions of men, for high and low, young and old, men and women, independently of books, of educated reasoning, of physical knowledge, or of philosophy. Conscience, too, teaches us, not only that God is, but what He is; it provides for the mind a real image of Him, as a medium of worship; it gives us a rule of right and wrong, as being His rule, and a code of moral duties. Moreover, it is so constituted that, if obeyed, it becomes clearer in its injunctions, and wider in their range, and corrects and completes the accidental feebleness of its initial teachings. Conscience, then, considered as our guide, is fully furnished for its office. I say all this without entering into the question how far external assistances are in all cases necessary to the action of the mind, because in fact man does not live in isolation, but is everywhere found as a member of society; I am not concerned here with abstract questions. Now Conscience suggests to us many things about that Master, whom by means of it we perceive, but its most prominent teaching, and its cardinal and distinguishing truth, is that he is our Judge. In consequence, the special Attribute under which it brings Him before us, to which it subordinates all other Attributes, is that of justice—retributive justice. We learn from its informations to conceive of the Almighty, primarily, not as a God of Wisdom, of Knowledge, of Power, of Benevolence, but as a God of Judgment and Justice; as One, who, not simply for the good of the offender, but as an end good in itself, and as a principle of government, ordains that the offender should suffer for his offence.” 14 See John L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and against the Existence of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 105: “If we do not take conscience at its face value, if we seek critically to understand how conscience has come into existence and has come to work as it does, then we do indeed find Conscience according to Newman 1063 of the great authority of conscience. And one of the key points of the argument is precisely that conscience implies a higher authority. Unlike taste, it is not only about the beauty of our actions; it includes a sanction, which comes from on high,15 and therefore “conscience does not repose on itself, but vaguely reaches forward to something beyond self.”16 Is that enough to constitute a proof? Newman does not look for a proof in the mathematical sense: Inasmuch as He who made us, has so willed that in mathematics indeed we should arrive at certitude by rigid demonstration, but in religious inquiry we should arrive at certitude by accumulated probabilities.17 And in any case, in most of our life we do not ask for impossible proofs: Our dearest interests, our personal welfare, our property, our health, our reputation, we freely hazard, not on proof, but on a simple probability, which is sufficient for our conviction, because prudence dictates to us so to take it. We must be content to follow the law of our being in religious matters as well as in secular.18 Natural Religion and Revelation The argument from conscience is within what Newman calls natural religion, which prepares for Revelation. God put into us a moral sense, which he would not contradict in Revelation: “no religion is from God which contradicts our sense of right and wrong.”19 Still, there are two levels of religion: the interior voice of our conscience, and the external voice of the proclaimed revelation: We are between two, the inward voice speaking one thing within us, and the world speaking another without us; the world tempting, and the Spirit whispering warnings. Hence faith becomes necessary; in persons in the background, but human persons, not a divine one. If we stand back from the experience of conscience and try to understand it, it is overwhelmingly plausible to see it as an introjection into each individual of demands that come from other people; in the first place, perhaps, from his parents and immediate associates, but ultimately from the traditions and institutions of the society in which he has grown up, or of some special part of that society which has had the greatest influence upon him.” 15 See GA 106–7. 16 GA 107. 17 AP 292. 18 An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909[1845]), 115. Henceforth, DD. 19 GA 419. Charles Morerod, O.P. 1064 other words, God has most mercifully succoured us in this contest, by speaking not only in our hearts, but through the sensible world; and this Voice we call revelation. God has overruled this world of sense, and put a word in its mouth, and bid it prophesy of Him.20 We will have to see the relationship between these two voices, and then between them and the alternative interior and exterior voices. The main principle is that the religion of nature, far from being opposed to revelation, leads to it: Obedience to conscience leads to obedience to the Gospel, which, instead of being something different altogether, is but the completion and perfection of that religion which natural conscience teaches. Indeed, it would have been strange if the God of nature had said one thing, and the God of grace another; if the truths which our conscience taught us without the information of Scripture, were contradicted by that information when obtained. But it is not so; there are not two ways of pleasing God; what conscience suggests, Christ has sanctioned and explained; to love God and our neighbour are the great duties of the Gospel as well as of the Law; he who endeavours to fulfil them by the light of nature is in the way towards, is, as our Lord said, “not far from Christ’s kingdom”; for to him that hath more shall be given.21 When one follows his conscience, the reception of the Gospel goes on in the same line: His conscience anticipates the mystery, and convicts him; his mouth is stopped. And when he goes on to read that the Son of God has Himself come into the world in our flesh, and died upon the Cross for us, does he not, amid the awful mysteriousness of the doctrine, find those words fulfilled in him which that gracious Saviour uttered: ‘And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me’? He cannot choose but believe in Him.22 To follow our conscience helps our moral life; to follow the ecclesiastical superiors helps our holiness: The supremacy of conscience is the essence of natural religion; the supremacy of Apostle, or Pope, or Church, or Bishop, is the essence of revealed; and when such external authority is taken away, the mind falls back again of necessity upon that inward guide which it possessed even 20 PPS IV.XXI: 313–14. 21 PPS VIII.XIV: 202. 22 PPS VIII.VIII: 119. Conscience according to Newman 1065 before Revelation was vouchsafed. Thus, what conscience is in the system of nature, such is the voice of Scripture, or of the Church, or of the Holy See, as we may determine it, in the system of Revelation. . . . And as obedience to conscience, even supposing conscience illinformed, tends to the improvement of our moral nature, and ultimately of our knowledge, so obedience to our ecclesiastical superior may subserve our growth in illumination and sanctity, even though he should command what is extreme or inexpedient, or teach what is external to his legitimate province.23 Religious experience is not the only thing that helps our conscience. Culture also does: The image of God, if duly cherished, may expand, deepen, and be completed, with the growth of their powers and in the course of life, under the varied lessons, within and without them, which are brought home to them concerning that same God, One and Personal, by means of education, social intercourse, experience, and literature.24 The fact that conscience can be helped means that it is not sufficient. Therefore natural religion is not of itself sufficient either. In order to see more fully the relationship between natural religion and revelation, we must see how conscience must be educated and can be perverted. Perverted Conscience Conscience is practical and can fail. But this does not happen only because it is practical, since something similar happens at the intellectual level. In neither case does error invalidate the capacity: Both the moral and the intellectual sanction are liable to be biassed by personal inclinations and motives; both require and admit of discipline; and, as it is no disproof of the authority of conscience that false consciences abound, neither does it destroy the importance and the uses of certitude, because even educated minds, who are earnest in their inquiries after the truth, in many cases remain under the power of prejudice or delusion.25 The specific problem of conscience is that in the practical field our desires have a significant weight. If we want to follow them, we might be led astray: 23 DD 86–87. 24 GA 116. 25 GA 234. Charles Morerod, O.P. 1066 At first our conscience tells us, in a plain straightforward way, what is right and what is wrong; but when we trifle with this warning, our reason becomes perverted, and comes in aid of our wishes, and deceives us to our ruin.26 Newman warns us when he describes the process that can lead, step by step, to a perversion of our conscience: This is the path which leads to death. Men first leave off private prayer; then they neglect the due observance of the Lord’s day (which is a stated service of the same kind); then they gradually let slip from their minds the very idea of obedience to a fixed eternal law; then they actually allow themselves in things which their conscience condemns; then they lose the direction of their conscience, which being ill used, at length refuses to direct them. And thus, being left by their true inward guide, they are obliged to take another guide, their reason, which by itself knows little or nothing about religion; then, this their blind reason forms a system of right or wrong for them, as well as it can, flattering to their own desires, and presumptuous where it is not actually corrupt. No wonder such a scheme contradicts Scripture, which it is soon found to do; not that they are certain to perceive this themselves; they often do not know it, and think themselves still believers in the Gospel, while they maintain doctrines which the Gospel condemns. But sometimes they perceive that their system is contrary to Scripture; and then, instead of giving it up, they give up Scripture, and profess themselves unbelievers.27 But our conscience is natural; a sign of this fact is that children can recognize the right from the wrong, if their instinct has not been distorted.28 Of course it does not always happen, but there are at least relevant cases.29 Therefore, when we reject our conscience in order to follow our desires, we reject our very nature: 26 PPS VIII.V, 67. 27 PPS I.XIX: 254–55. 28 See GA 112: “The child keenly understands that there is a difference between right and wrong; and when he has done what he believes to be wrong, he is conscious that he is offending One to whom he is amenable, whom he does not see, who sees him. His mind reaches forward with a strong presentiment to the thought of a Moral Governor, sovereign over him, mindful, and just. It comes to him like an impulse of nature to entertain it. It is my wish to take an ordinary child, but still one who is safe from influences destructive of his religious instincts.” 29 See GA 114: “Such is the apprehension which even a child may have of his Sovereign Lawgiver and Judge; which is possible in the case of children, because, at least, some children possess it, whether others possess it or no.” Conscience according to Newman 1067 Though I lost my sense of the obligation which I lie under to abstain from acts of dishonesty, I should not in consequence lose my sense that such actions were an outrage offered to my moral nature.30 Weak Conscience and Divine Help One might do what is bad in a non-guilty way, because one follows one’s conscience. Newman gives the striking example of St. Paul persecuting the Christians.31 Mistakes in good faith—following an erroneous conscience with the desire to do what is good—are not dead ends. God helps such persons: When men err in ignorance, following closely their own notions of right and wrong, though these notions are mistaken, — great as is their sin, if they might have possessed themselves of truer notions (and very great as was St. Paul’s sin, because he certainly might have learned from the Old Testament far clearer and diviner doctrine than the tradition of the Pharisees), — yet such men are not left by the God of all grace. God leads them on to the light in spite of their errors in faith, if they continue strictly to obey what they believe to be His will.32 Divine help is not only interior. Since the voice of the tempter is in the external world as well as within ourselves, God’s voice is also in the world, through revelation and its proclamation: And thus there are two voices even in the external world; the voice of the tempter calling us to fall down to worship him, and he will give us all; and the voice of God, speaking in aid of the voice in our hearts: and as love is that which hears the voice within us, so faith is that which hears the voice without us; and as love worships God within the shrine, faith discerns Him in the world.33 The specific weakness of our conscience is a reason why an external revelation is necessary: All sciences, except the science of Religion, have their certainty in themselves; as far as they are sciences, they consist of necessary conclusions 30 GA 106. 31 See PPS VIII.XIV: 210: “Great as St. Paul’s sin was in persecuting Christ’s followers, before his conversion, that sin was of a different kind; he was not transgressing, but obeying his conscience (however blinded it was); he was doing what he thought his duty, when he was arrested by the heavenly vision, which, when presented to him, he at once ‘obeyed;’ he was not sinning against light, but in darkness.” 32 PPS II.IX: 105–6. 33 PPS IV.XXI: 314. See also PPS V.XVII: 251–52. 1068 Charles Morerod, O.P. from undeniable premises, or of phenomena manipulated into general truths by an irresistible induction. But the sense of right and wrong, which is the first element in religion, is so delicate, so fitful, so easily puzzled, obscured, perverted, so subtle in its argumentative methods, so impressible by education, so biassed by pride and passion, so unsteady in its course, that, in the struggle for existence amid the various exercises and triumphs of the human intellect, this sense is at once the highest of all teachers, yet the least luminous; and the Church, the Pope, the Hierarchy are, in the Divine purpose, the supply of an urgent demand. Natural Religion, certain as are its grounds and its doctrines as addressed to thoughtful, serious minds, needs, in order that it may speak to mankind with effect and subdue the world, to be sustained and completed by Revelation. In saying all this, of course I must not be supposed to be limiting the Revelation of which the Church is the keeper to a mere republication of the Natural Law; but still it is true, that, though Revelation is so distinct from the teaching of nature and beyond it, yet it is not independent of it, nor without relations towards it, but is its complement, reassertion, issue, embodiment, and interpretation. The Pope, who comes of Revelation, has no jurisdiction over Nature.34 God helps people who follow their conscience—perverted or not perverted. This help can be accepted or not. Who follows his conscience wants more, because of what he has already tasted: A religious man, who has not the blessing of the infallible teaching of revelation, is led to look out for it, for the very reason that he is religious. He has something, but not all; and if he did not desire more, it would be a proof that he had not used, that he had not profited by, what he had. Hence he will be on the look-out. Such is the definition, I may say, of every religious man, who has not the knowledge of Christ; he is on the look-out.35 The contrast is sharp between the one who uses what he already has in order to get more, and the one who does not use what he has, in order not to be disturbed: The one is active, and the other passive, when Christ is preached as the Saviour of the world. The one goes to meet the truth; the other thinks that the Truth ought to come to him. The one examines into the proof 34 Letter Addressed to the Duke of Norfolk, in Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching, Considered in a Letter Addressed to the Rev. E. B. Pusey, D. D., and in a Letter Addressed to the Duke of Norfolk on Occasion of Mr. Gladstone’s Recent Expostulation (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1900 [1875]), 253–54. Henceforth, LDN. 35 SPVO 66. Conscience according to Newman 1069 that God has spoken; the other waits till this is proved to him. He feels no personal interest in it; he thinks it not his own concern, but (if I may so say) God Almighty’s concern. He does not care to make the most of his knowledge. . . . And next, supposing proof is actually offered him, he feels no sort of gratitude or delicacy towards Him who offers it: he says without compunction, “I do not see this”; and “that does not follow”; for he is a critic and a judge, not an inquirer, and he negotiates and bargains, when he ought to be praying for light.36 Nothing dispenses us, whatever the state of our conscience is, from our duty to enquire.37 Newman sees a fault in the Apostle Thomas’s insufficient use of his previous knowledge, which he could have applied to the new situation of meeting with the risen Lord.38 Conscience under Attack Our conscience is threatened by our sins, by our perverted desires. But it is also threatened by its cultural dismissal. Newman mentions the argument that denies the existence of a particular Providence on the basis of the existence of uniform laws in nature.39 Others say, from the chairs of the universities, that guiltiness and the possibility of a choice between good and evil are primitive illusions.40 Next to these rather academic critics of conscience, Newman mentions the popular view that identifies conscience not as a voice of authority within us, but as the basis for a refusal of authority: When men advocate the rights of conscience, they in no sense mean the rights of the Creator, nor the duty to Him, in thought and deed, of the creature; but the right of thinking, speaking, writing, and acting, according to their judgment or their humour, without any thought of God at all. They do not even pretend to go by any moral rule, but they demand, what they think is an Englishman’s prerogative, for each to be his own master in all things, and to profess what he pleases, asking no one’s leave, and accounting priest or preacher, speaker or writer, unutterably impertinent, who dares to say a word against his going to perdition, if he like it, in his own way. Conscience has rights because it has 36 SPVO 69–70. 37 See SPVO 72: “And so, alas! it is now: many is the man who has a drawing towards the Catholic Church, and resists it, on the plea that he has not sufficient proof of her claims. Now he cannot have proof all at once, he cannot be converted all at once, I grant; but he can inquire; he can determine to resolve the doubt, before he puts it aside, though it cost labour and time to do so.” 38 See SPVO 71–72. 39 See GA 116. 40 See LDN 249. Charles Morerod, O.P. 1070 duties; but in this age, with a large portion of the public, it is the very right and freedom of conscience to dispense with conscience, to ignore a Lawgiver and Judge, to be independent of unseen obligations. It becomes a licence to take up any or no religion, to take up this or that and let it go again, to go to church, to go to chapel, to boast of being above all religions and to be an impartial critic of each of them.41 These critics of conscience itself lead to some religious indifference, and are in turn supported by the indifference of many towards either God or their conscience: Let us consider the state of mind of the multitude, who care little or nothing for religion, who disobey their conscience, who think as little of its dictates as they can, who would get rid of it, if they could. . . . They are contented with themselves; they think themselves as happily conditioned as they can be under the circumstances; they only wish to be let alone; they have no need of priest or prophet; they live in their own way and in their own home, pursuing their own tastes, never looking out of doors; perhaps with natural virtues, perhaps not, but with no distinct or consistent religious sense. Thus they live, and thus they die. Such is the character of the many, all over the earth; they live, to all appearance, in some object of this world, and never rise above the world, and, it is plain, have nothing of those dispositions at all which lead to faith.42 Next to these cultural attacks against conscience, there are also some attacks in the name of conscience against the Catholic Church. Our Conscience in a Conflict of Allegiance between the Pope and the Queen Not surprisingly, the declaration of the dogma of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council (1870) was not very well received by Anglicans. In 1875, Newman replied on this point to the critiques published by the intermittent prime minister of Queen Victoria, William E. Gladstone. Newman summarizes Gladstone’s question: The main question which Mr. Gladstone has started I consider to be this:—Can Catholics be trustworthy subjects of the State? has not a foreign Power a hold over their consciences such, that it may at any time be used to the serious perplexity and injury of the civil government under which they live?43 41 LDN 250. 42 SPVO 68–69. 43 LDN 179. Conscience according to Newman 1071 Newman explains that papal infallibility cannot be understood without the infallibility of the Church, and that in this sense papal infallibility was already believed by Catholics before it was defined.44 Gladstone gives too much weight to papal infallibility, which does not extend to all fields of human life and in any case is rarely used.45 For our topic, the main question is to know whether Catholics have to abandon their conscience because they must accept something which comes from another human being. On top of that, can Catholics be good citizens, since they must obey a foreign Head of State also in moral questions: after all, moral questions include all fields of human life.46 Newman replies at different levels. He points out that of course the Catholic Church restricts the field of personal choices for her members, but any society restricts in a certain measure the personal liberty of its members: England itself restricts the rights of English Catholics, who do 44 See LDN 321: “To determine therefore what is meant by the infallibility of the Pope we must turn first to consider the infallibility of the Church.” And see LDN 304: “For myself, ever since I was a Catholic, I have held the Pope’s infallibility as a matter of theological opinion; at least, I see nothing in the Definition which necessarily contradicts Scripture, Tradition, or History.” See also GA 150: “But it is not the necessary result of unity of profession, nor is it the fact, that the Church imposes dogmatic statements on the interior assent of those who cannot apprehend them. The difficulty is removed by the dogma of the Church’s infallibility, and of the consequent duty of ‘implicit faith’ in her word. The ‘One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church’ is an article of the Creed, and an article, which, inclusive of her infallibility, all men, high and low, can easily master and accept with a real and operative assent. It stands in the place of all abstruse propositions in a Catholic’s mind, for to believe in her word is virtually to believe in them all. Even what he cannot understand, at least he can believe to be true; and he believes it to be true because he believes in the Church.” 45 See LDN 331: “If he forbade his flock to eat any but vegetable food, or to dress in a particular fashion (questions of decency and modesty not coming into the question), he would also be going beyond the province of faith, because such a rule does not relate to a matter in itself good or bad.” And see LDN 338: “Papal and Synodal definitions, obligatory on our faith, are of rare occurrence; and this is confessed by all sober theologians.” 46 See LDN 224: “Now the main point of Mr. Gladstone’s Pamphlet is this:—that, since the Pope claims infallibility in faith and morals, and since there are no ‘departments and functions of human life which do not and cannot fall within the domain of morals,’ p. 36, and since he claims also ‘the domain of all that concerns the government and discipline of the Church,’ and moreover, ‘claims the power of determining the limits of those domains,’ and ‘does not sever them, by any acknowledged or intelligible line from the domains of civil duty and allegiance,’ p. 45, therefore Catholics are moral and mental slaves, and ‘every convert and member of the Pope’s Church places his loyalty and civil duty at the mercy of another,’ p. 45.” 1072 Charles Morerod, O.P. not complain about it.47 He adds that obedience to civil authorities is not a specifically Catholic idea but is in the Bible: would the Anglican Gladstone tear such texts from the Bible?48 As for a possible conflict between two obediences, Newman takes some extreme examples, chosen for the sake of exposition although he considers them more or less impossible. In case of a direct conflict between England and the Pope, Catholics would first try to use their privileges as citizens to have a political influence.49 Then the choice would depend on the matter. For instance, Catholics should not obey a state that would impose on them the participation in non-Catholic religious services.50 But in some cases the Pope should not be obeyed by some Catholics, for instance against their oath as members of Parliament or as soldiers.51 Newman shows with many examples that Catholic theologians affirm the duty to follow even a conscience in error, provided that one has tried to be duly informed.52 As a matter of principle, a English Catholic should obey both the Queen and the Pope, but without giving absolute obedience to either, because neither of them has the right to such an obedience.53 47 See LDN 269–71. 48 See LDN 225–26. 49 See LDN 239–40. 50 “Suppose, for instance, an Act was passed in Parliament, bidding Catholics to attend Protestant service every week, and the Pope distinctly told us not to do so, for it was to violate our duty to our faith:—I should obey the Pope and not the Law” (LDN 240). 51 See LDN 241–42: “Let us suppose members of Parliament, or of the Privy Council, took an oath that they would not acknowledge the right of succession of a Prince of Wales, if he became a Catholic: in that case I should not consider the Pope could release me from that oath, had I bound myself by it. Of course, I might exert myself to the utmost to get the act repealed which bound me; again, if I could not, I might retire from parliament or office, and so rid myself of the engagement I had made; but I should be clear that, though the Pope bade all Catholics to stand firm in one phalanx for the Catholic Succession, still, while I remained in office, or in my place in Parliament, I could not do as he bade me. Again, were I actually a soldier or sailor in her Majesty’s service, and sent to take part in a war which I could not in my conscience see to be unjust, and should the Pope suddenly bid all Catholic soldiers and sailors to retire from the service, here again, taking the advice of others, as best I could, I should not obey him.” 52 See LDN 259–61. 53 See LDN 243: “When, then, Mr. Gladstone asks Catholics how they can obey the Queen and yet obey the Pope, since it may happen that the commands of the two authorities may clash, I answer, that it is my rule, both to obey the one and to obey the other, but that there is no rule in this world without exceptions, and if either the Pope or the Queen demanded of me an “Absolute Obedience,” Conscience according to Newman 1073 Even in the religious field, the Pope is not the supreme authority. He’s under the natural law, which is the impression in us of the divine law and which is called “conscience” when it is apprehended in us.54 Furthermore, the Pope cannot go against the previous Tradition.55 Even in the rare occurrences when the Pope would do something as strong as releasing people from their obligation of loyalty towards their temporal rulers, this action would be limited by moral law, and in any case would not be infallible: Now let us observe how the Pope restrains the exercise of this right. . . . Also in this limitation is implied that the Pope’s definite sentence involves an appeal to the supreme standard of right and wrong, the moral law, as its basis and rule, and must contain the definite reasons on which it decides in favour of the one party or the other. . . . Lastly, the Pope he or she would be transgressing the laws of human society. I give an absolute obedience to neither. Further, if ever this double allegiance pulled me in contrary ways, which in this age of the world I think it never will, then I should decide according to the particular case, which is beyond all rule, and must be decided on its own merits.” 54 See LDN 246–47: “It seems, then, that there are extreme cases in which Conscience may come into collision with the word of a Pope, and is to be followed in spite of that word. . . . I say, then, that the Supreme Being is of a certain character, which, expressed in human language, we call ethical. He has the attributes of justice, truth, wisdom, sanctity, benevolence and mercy, as eternal characteristics in His nature, the very Law of His being, identical with Himself; and next, when He became Creator, He implanted this Law, which is Himself, in the intelligence of all His rational creatures. The Divine Law, then, is the rule of ethical truth, the standard of right and wrong, a sovereign, irreversible, absolute authority in the presence of men and Angels. . . . ‘The natural law,’ says St. Thomas, ‘is an impression of the Divine Light in us, a participation of the eternal law in the rational creature.’ This law, as apprehended in the minds of individual men, is called ‘conscience;’ and though it may suffer refraction in passing into the intellectual medium of each, it is not therefore so affected as to lose its character of being the Divine Law, but still has, as such, the prerogative of commanding obedience. ‘The Divine Law,’ says Cardinal Gousset, ‘is the supreme rule of actions; our thoughts, desires, words, acts, all that man is, is subject to the domain of the law of God; and this law is the rule of our conduct by means of our conscience. Hence it is never lawful to go against our conscience; as the fourth Lateran Council says, ‘Quidquid fit contra conscientiam, ædificat ad gehennam.’ ” 55 See LDN 329: “Another limitation is given in Pope Pius’s own conditions, set down in the Pastor Æternus, for the exercise of infallibility: viz., the proposition defined will be without any claim to be considered binding on the belief of Catholics, unless it is referable to the Apostolic depositum, through the channel either of Scripture or Tradition; and, though the Pope is the judge whether it is so referable or not, yet the necessity of his professing to abide by this reference is in itself a certain limitation of his dogmatic action.” Charles Morerod, O.P. 1074 declares with indignation that a Pope is not infallible in the exercise of this right; such a notion is an invention of the enemy.56 A conflict between conscience and the Pope is thus made very unlikely by the fact that it could happen only when the Pope is infallible. But he can be infallible when he speaks about general propositions, which are not the typical field of our conscience: I observe that conscience is not a judgment upon any speculative truth, any abstract doctrine, but bears immediately on conduct, on something to be done or not done. . . . Hence conscience cannot come into direct collision with the Church’s or the Pope’s infallibility; which is engaged in general propositions, and in the condemnation of particular and given errors. . . . A Pope is not infallible in his laws, nor in his commands, nor in his acts of state, nor in his administration, nor in his public policy. . . . Since then infallibility alone could block the exercise of conscience, and the Pope is not infallible in that subject-matter in which conscience is of supreme authority, no deadlock, such as is implied in the objection which I am answering, can take place between conscience and the Pope.57 Of course it does not mean that Catholics do not have to listen to the Pope, and presume that their conscience is right against his voice. They must take the matter seriously: If in a particular case it [conscience] is to be taken as a sacred and sovereign monitor, its dictate, in order to prevail against the voice of the Pope, must follow upon serious thought, prayer, and all available means of arriving at a right judgment on the matter in question.58 Fundamentally, the authority of the Pope rests on divine authority. As conscience is a divine voice within us, a Pope acting against Conscience would act against himself as Pope: Did the Pope speak against Conscience in the true sense of the word, he would commit a suicidal act. He would be cutting the ground from under his feet. His very mission is to proclaim the moral law, and to protect and strengthen that “Light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world.” On the law of conscience and its sacredness are founded both his authority in theory and his power in fact.59 56 LDN 221–22. 57 LDN 256–57. 58 LDN 257–58. 59 LDN 252. Conscience according to Newman 1075 And the Pope cannot change this situation, because “no Pope ever will be able . . . to create a false conscience for his own ends.”60 Here Catholics and Protestants agree more than first meets the eye, because most Catholics and Protestants see conscience as “the aboriginal Vicar of Christ.”61 This is why Newman could say one of his most famous sentences: Certainly, if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts, (which indeed does not seem quite the thing) I shall drink—to the Pope, if you please,—still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.62 Not only are conscience and infallibility not incompatible, but conscience is better served by Catholic principles than by Protestant ones. Different understandings of the role of conscience can actually lead Protestants to different conclusions. A Protestant who takes the divinity of Christ as his starting point might become Catholic; one who takes private judgment as the main criterion might end up humanitarian; one who refuses the sacramental principle might come to refuse the inward divine law and end up atheist.63 So, conscience can lead from good 60 LDN 258. 61 LDN 248. 62 LDN 261. 63 See GA 245–47: “Thus, of three Protestants, one becomes a Catholic, a second a Unitarian, and a third an unbeliever: how is this? The first becomes a Catholic, because he assented, as a Protestant, to the doctrine of our Lord’s divinity, with a real assent and a genuine conviction, and because this certitude, taking possession of his mind, led him on to welcome the Catholic doctrines of the Real Presence and of the Theotocos, till his Protestantism fell off from him, and he submitted himself to the Church. The second became a Unitarian, because, proceeding on the principle that Scripture was the rule of faith and that a man’s private judgment was its rule of interpretation, and finding that the doctrine of the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds did not follow by logical necessity from the text of Scripture, he said to himself, “The word of God has been made of none effect by the traditions of men,” and therefore nothing was left for him but to profess what he considered primitive Christianity, and to become a Humanitarian. The third gradually subsided into infidelity, because he started with the Protestant dogma, cherished in the depths of his nature, that a priesthood was a corruption of the simplicity of the Gospel. First, then, he would protest against the sacrifice of the Mass; next he gave up baptismal regeneration, and the sacramental principle; then he asked himself whether dogmas were not a restraint on Christian liberty as well as sacraments; then came the question, what after all was the use of teachers of religion? why should any one stand between him and his Maker? After a time it struck him, that this obvious question had to be answered by the Apostles, as well as by the Anglican clergy; so he came to the conclusion that the true and only revelation of God to man is that which is written on the heart. This did for a time, and he remained a Deist. But then it occurred to him, 1076 Charles Morerod, O.P. dogmatic principles to the fullness of Catholic faith, and from bad principles to a loss of even natural religion. The best way to illustrate the progress of a Catholic conscience is look at the instance of Newman’s conversion. Conscience and Newman’s Conversion When Newman was young, he was convinced that the Pope was the Antichrist,64 and he attacked the Catholic Church because he was convinced that his own views were true.65 Later on, while he was tempted by Catholic views within Anglicanism, he tended to defend himself by speaking as much as possible against Rome.66 And he did not want to move faster than his actual conviction.67 When his conversion process became clear to himself, he respected the conscience of others and even prevented them from following him.68 This was in part because of his own temper: My great principle ever was, Live and let live. I never had the staidness or dignity necessary for a leader.69 Therefore he did not try to unset other people’s conscience,70 and his conversion was a personal path, not a partnership event.71 He waited until he was sure that he had to convert, because he “never could understand how a man could be of two religions at once.”72 But when he got that this inward moral law was there within the breast, whether there was a God or not, and that it was a roundabout way of enforcing that law, to say that it came from God, and simply unnecessary, considering it carried with it its own sacred and sovereign authority, as our feelings instinctively testified; and when he turned to look at the physical world around him, he really did not see what scientific proof there was there of the Being of God at all, and it seemed to him as if all things would go on quite as well as at present, without that hypothesis as with it; so he dropped it, and became a purus, putus Atheist.” 64 See AP 153. 65 See AP 294. 66 See AP 155–56. 67 See AP 214–15. 68 See AP 246, 271–72. 69 AP 160. 70 See AP 310–11: “My own soul was my first concern, and it seemed an absurdity to my reason to be converted in partnership. I wished to go to my Lord by myself, and in my own way, or rather His way. I had neither wish, nor, I may say, thought of taking a number with me.” 71 See AP 1307: “If there is any thing that was [and is] abhorrent to me, it is the scattering doubts, and unsettling consciences without necessity.” 72 AP 306. Conscience according to Newman 1077 convinced that some of his previous Anglican principles were not true, he left them: For myself, I found I could not hold them. I left them. From the time I began to suspect their unsoundness, I ceased to put them forward. When I was fairly sure of their unsoundness, I gave up my Living. When I was fully confident that the Church of Rome was the only true Church, I joined her.73 His conversion took time, and this is due to the type of process involved. His view of conversion is somehow similar to his view on the development of doctrine: What Conscience is in the history of an individual mind, such was the dogmatic principle in the history of Christianity. Both in the one case and the other, there is the gradual formation of a directing power out of a principle.74 Conversion, like the development of doctrine, proceeds by positive additions: A gradual conversion from a false to a true religion, plainly, has much of the character of a continuous process, or a development, in the mind itself, even when the two religions, which are the limits of its course, are antagonists. Now let it be observed, that such a change consists in addition and increase chiefly, not in destruction. . . . True conversion is ever of a positive, not a negative character.75 The conversion changes the situation of the conscience. Before he converted, Newman was afraid to be under a delusion.76 But after the conversion the course of his thought became finally peaceful: From the time that I became a Catholic, of course I have no further history of my religious opinions to narrate. In saying this, I do not mean to say that my mind has been idle, or that I have given up thinking on theological subjects; but that I have had no changes to record, and have had no anxiety of heart whatever. I have been in perfect peace and contentment. I never have had one doubt. I was not conscious to myself, on my conversion, of any difference of thought or of temper from what I had before. I was not conscious of firmer faith in the 73 AP 253. 74 DD 361. 75 DD 200–201. 76 See AP 319–20. Charles Morerod, O.P. 1078 fundamental truths of revelation, or of more self-command; I had not more fervour; but it was like coming into port after a rough sea; and my happiness on that score remains to this day without interruption.77 Conclusion In a sermon, Newman summarizes many of his insights about conscience. In the first place, conscience is a light that comes from Christ and that helps both Christians and non-Christians: What is the main guide of the soul, given to the whole race of Adam, outside the true fold of Christ as well as within it, given from the first dawn of reason, given to it in spite of that grievous penalty of ignorance, which is one of the chief miseries of our fallen state? It is the light of conscience, “the true Light,” as the same Evangelist says, in the same passage, “which enlighteneth every man that cometh into this world.”78 In all, this voice is recognized as an authority: Whether a man be born in pagan darkness, or in some corruption of revealed religion,—whether he has heard the name of the Saviour of the world or not, . . . in any case, he has within his breast a certain commanding dictate, not a mere sentiment, not a mere opinion, or impression, or view of things, but a law, an authoritative voice, bidding him do certain things and avoid others.79 The mere fact that the experience of conscience is common to people of different religions means that the content of conscience is not totally clear, but what is clear is the presence of this conscience: I do not say that its particular injunctions are always clear, or that they are always consistent with each other; but what I am insisting on here is this, that it commands. . . . It is more than a man’s own self. The man himself has not power over it, or only with extreme difficulty; he did not make it, he cannot destroy it. . . . He can disobey it, he may refuse to use it; but it remains.80 For Newman, whoever follows his conscience is led to the truth, even if—as happened to Newman during part of his life—that truth seems to be against the Catholic Church. It remains a duty to follow our conscience 77 AP 331. 78 SPVO 64. 79 SPVO 64. 80 SPVO 64–65. Conscience according to Newman 1079 as a divine voice. Newman raised his glass to his conscience first, then to the Pope. He had good predecessors in such an attitude. St. Thomas Aquinas invoked the divine voice of conscience in comparison with the voice of any prelate: Conscience only binds because of the force of the divine command or because of the law of nature written within. Therefore, to compare the binding force of the conscience and that of the command of the prelate is nothing other than to compare the binding force of the divine command and the command of the prelate.81 Of course such views of conscience may seem relativistic.This is not the case with Newman. In 1991, Cardinal Ratzinger showed how Newman’s view on conscience cannot be understood independently of truth: For Newman, the middle term—which establishes the connection between authority and subjectivity—is truth. I do not hesitate to say that truth is the central thought in Newman’s intellectual grasping. Conscience is central for him because truth stands in the middle. . . . Conscience for Newman does not mean that the subject is the standard vis-à-vis the claims of authority in a truthless world, a world that lives with a compromise between the claims of the subject and the claims of the social order. Much more than that, conscience signifies the perceptible and demanding presence of the voice of truth in the subject himself. It is the overcoming of mere subjectivity in the encounter of the inferiority of man with truth from God.82 For Newman, neither our conscience nor the Pope—adds Ratzinger— justifies a subjective rejection of authority. Both help us discover in a maieutic way the truth that has been put into us by God, our Creator and Redeemer.83 N&V 81 Thomas Aquinas, De veritate, q. 17, a. 5, translation in Thomas Aquinas, Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Ralph McInerny (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 237. 82 Joseph Ratzinger, On Conscience, 24–25. 83 See ibid., 34: “The true nature of the Petrine office has become so incompre- hensible in the modern age no doubt because we think of authority only in terms that do not allow for bridges between subject and object. Accordingly, everything that does not come from the subject is thought to be externally imposed. But the situation is really quite different according to the anthropology of conscience, of which we have tried to come to an appreciation in these reflections. The anamnesis instilled in our being needs, one might say, assistance from without so that it can become aware of itself. But this ‘from without’ is not something set in opposition to anamnesis but is ordered to it. It has maieutic function, imposes nothing foreign, but brings to fruition what is proper to anamnesis, namely, its interior openness to the truth.” Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2013): 1081–114 1081 Knowledge and Normality: Bl. John Henry Newman’s Grammar of Assent and Contemporary Skepticism A NSELM R AMELOW, O.P. Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology Berkeley, CA W ESTERN THOUGHT in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is marked by an increasing skepticism with regard to the very possibility of knowledge. This skepticism is exemplified in the form of endless epistemological debates in analytical philosophy as well as in the form of the relativistic pluralism of postmodern mythologies, metaphors, and rhetorical strategies. Even natural science, given its continuing paradigm shifts, seems to afford not certainty but—at most—its practical applicability, technology. We feel more certain about how things work than about what they are. As a consequence, not only will theology lack a point of reference in natural reason for its assertions of certainty and faith, but the very life of ordinary people is left without orientation, when it comes to ethical rather than technical matters. John Henry Newman’s Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent1 may have been written in response to similar scenarios.2 The nineteenth century I am immensely grateful to Prof. David Marshall for a number of linguistic improvements to my text. 1 J. H. Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992). Henceforth quoted by page number in parentheses within the text. 2 In a manuscript from 1860, Newman senses the coming of an age of skepticism, where the onus probandi is on the believer in unprecedented ways; Jay Newman, The Mental Philosophy of John Henry Newman (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1986), 13f.; William Fey, Faith and Doubt: The Unfolding of Newman’s Thought on Certainty (Shepherdstown, WV: Patmos Press, 1976), 55. 1082 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. showed greater confidence in scientific assertions; nonetheless, scientific modes of thought, including linguistic and algebraic forms of logic, seemed to fail of certitude and to remain in the realm of hypothetical inferences, whereas technology (industrialization) was developing rapidly. For Newman, too, practical application seemed to be a point of reference for assertiveness. Yet not so much in the form of technology (of which the thought remains hypothetical: if you want A, do B ), but in the form of a personal application of knowledge in life, that is, in the responsible use of an individual mind, first and foremost under the guidance of personal conscience and its categorical pronouncements (you ought to want—and do—A! ). In what follows we will explore Newman’s thought as a possible contemporary resource by explicating a number of assertions that seem to flow from the Grammar of Assent. I It appears that the quest for certitude is modern. It might be part of a need for security that the increasingly atomized individual has lost. It may have had its beginning in an individualized Protestant assurance of salvation. A little later, Descartes’s quest for methodologically controlled knowledge responds to older forms of nominalist skepticism, which now are countered by the certainties of mathematical science. Hobbes’s logic of fear aims at political security, which is yet another form of certainty. But the remote ancestor of a desire for certainty might be the certainty of faith that stems from the witness of the First Truth Himself, Who offers a participation in His very own knowledge of Himself. Nothing of this kind can be found before Christianity. When later a situation arises in which God is hidden, the age secular, and the personal encounter with Christ remote, this sense of certainty will be searching for surrogates. The modern quest for certainty would never have arisen, had the certainty of faith never been experienced. Without this experience, modern man would not despair over the apparent inability of natural reason to find certainty. This is not the diagnosis of J. H. Newman, but it might provide the proper context for his explorations of the problem of certainty. His response is not a simple and fideistic return to the certainty of faith, but the analysis and restoration of the normal workings of natural reason. Natural reason has its own certitude, but it is different from the certainty at which modern thought aims. Modern thought aims at science and at forms of investigation that are communal, that is, intersubjectively verifiable in a scientific community. The logic at which it aims is by its very nature impersonal, that is, inde- The Grammar of Assent and Contemporary Skepticism 1083 pendent of the person employing it. That is why it operates with the medium of intersubjective communication: language—and especially language in its most fixed and precise form, the form that can abstract even from the personal speaker and his location in space and time: writing. The impersonality of this medium also seems to promise an abstraction from the authority and prejudice of the speaker and make it a neutral medium for joint investigation.3 Here Newman anticipates in a very interesting way the motivations of the linguistic turn of the twentieth century, at least in its Anglo-Saxon variation. Newman also anticipates the move towards the mathematicization of logic (Frege): in its ideal form logic would use algebraic symbols, which are helpful for precision. But logic also entails an abstraction from any reference to the real world, which creates a formalistic universe wrapped up in itself.4 Even where it uses words rather than variables, these words are universal and abstract terms, “notions” as Newman calls them. Thus, logic not only abstracts from the individual person employing it, it also abstracts from the individuality of its subject matter—for the “real” (as opposed to the notional) is individual. This abstraction, too, helps logic’s precision (212); but the abstraction drains the ordinary terms of the “depth and breadth of associations” and of “their poetry and rhetoric and historical life,” it has “starved each term down till it has become the ghost of itself ” and has made the river of words into a canal (214f.). It also emphasizes “inference” over “assent,” or, to put it in a more Aristotelian way: syllogism over propositions. Propositions are about truth and reality; syllogisms are about their own relations of validity, independently of reality. They would be anchored in reality only by propositions that employ, not merely notional 3 (210f.); Newman does appreciate these linguistic procedures as a subsequent test of validity, made possible by communication with others (281). It will allow us to register where the differences lie, whether they are relevant or not, and whether the argument is worth pursuing further (283). He does remind us, however, that language is secondary: language is just one of the mind’s works, and therefore the mind is more powerful and deeper than language (ibid.). It might seem curious that, on the other hand, the word “grammar” appears in the title of his book. My sense is that grammar is used here in opposition to “logic,” i.e. as a descriptive rather than normative science. 4 In response, Newman’s thought might also share in Husserl’s attempt to go back to the things themselves, to give meaning to and “cash in” the algebraic formulae of language and to find fulfillment in the evidence of the real. Cf. also R. Michael Olson, “Real Apprehension in Newman’s ‘An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent’,” International Philosophical Quarterly 45 (2005): 499–516, e.g. 502, 516, and John Hick, Faith and Knowledge, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), 74. 1084 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. terms, but singular or “real” terms that refer to individuals.5 But neither Aristotelian syllogisms, nor the logic that Newman envisions, employ individual terms (popular examples about Socrates notwithstanding).6 The strength of certainty that comes with this procedure is also its weakness: its conclusions cannot reach the world of facts anymore (222).7 It creates a gap between universal and individual that can be crossed only by a leap. There is no algorithm for the application of laws. Science and logic have to leave it to the prudence and judgment of the engineer to cross this gap. In this dichotomy between universal and particular, Newman—not unlike his near contemporary Kierkegaard—staunchly takes the side of the individuals (or “units” as he likes to call them):“Let units come first, and (so5 Price thinks, and others repeat, that “real” does not mean existence (i.e., as opposed to “unreal”) but implies a “thingish” quality in the sense of realitas; one might also think of Kant’s notion of a “real predicate,” as precisely opposed to existence; Henry Habberley Price, Belief (London: Allen & Unwin/New York: Humanities Press, 1969), 317. I don’t think this is quite correct. While it is true that Newman speaks of “images” (which are not necessarily real), these are images that can only be derived from something that is real in the sense of existent. A. Dulles points out that Newman takes “real” in opposition to “product of the mind” (i.e., unlike notions or abstraction); cf. Avery Dulles, “From Image to Truth: Newman on Revelation and Faith,” Theological Studies 51 (1990): 252–67, at 254. L. Tuninetti connects “real” to “sincere” and “realistic”; Luca Tuninetti, “ ‘Assenso realistico’ e ‘assenso nozionistico’ nella ‘Grammatica dell’assenso’ di John Henry Newman,” in Verita nel tempo: Platonismo, Cristianesimo e contemporaneita: Studi in onore di Luca Obertello, ed. Angelo Campodonico (Genoa: Il Melangolo, 2004), 192–207, at 195f. 6 Theologically, this implies that the contingent facts of revelation are outside of syllogistic demonstration: “The reason for this is that the newness of the world does not follow from what the world is. For the principle of demonstration is the essence of a thing. Now everything according to its species is abstracted from “here” and “now”; whence it is said that universals are everywhere and always.” Summa theologiae I, q. 46, a. 2 corp. In contrast, F. M. Willam understands Newman to be developing Aristotle’s rudimentary inductive syllogism; unlike Newman, however, he thinks (following Cicero) that even an inductive syllogism can be cast in the form of a symbolic notation, namely one that uses arrows; Franz Michel Willam, Die Erkenntnislehre Kardinal Newmans (Bergen-Enkheim: Gerhard Kaffke, 1969), 14 and 19. 7 If there is a theory of truth for this kind of logical science, it could only be a coherence theory of truth, and indeed, as John Hick claims, reality cannot be reached; cf. Fey, Faith and Doubt, 96. Newman seems to anticipate this difficulty, noticing that mere coherence is insufficient for reality; Faith and Doubt, 111f. In an application to contemporary thought one might say that analytical and postmodern mind games fail to connect with reality and can be sustained only in separation from it. The Grammar of Assent and Contemporary Skepticism 1085 called) universals second; let universals minister to units, not units be sacrificed to universals” (223). In the name of the existing individual he protests against the abstract essences, especially when it comes to the incommunicability of the human person,8 which he defends against an abstract essence of “stereotyped humanity.” There are always circumstances and examples to the contrary and “each thing has its own nature and its own history” (224f.). The individual creature is just as incomprehensible as God himself (226). What Newman seems to see is what the modern scientific method of the Enlightenment systematically excludes: everything that is unique, everything that cannot be repeated in an experiment and thereby intersubjectively verified. We might think of miracles, of my personal death, the experience of love for a particular person, the particularities of religions (the uniqueness of a contingent revelation being declared a superstition),9 my choice of profession or of a vocation or a spouse, and any personal existential experience: all this must seem to become by its nature illogical and irrational; human beings can enter into the purview of science only as “species beings.”10 This entails, however, that this scientific method is useless for our real life and its existential decisions about particular matters. Here it arrives, at best, at probabilities (51f.).11 Nor do the shadows of its “notional” abstractions have any motivating force to make these decisions and assents (52). Only the “real” and its image12 in our mind can move us.13 This is therefore also a gap between theory and practice. Even within the realm of theory, this scientific method produces a gap between mere theory and actual belief. Neither education (87ff.) nor argument will fill this gap— 8 Persons have individuality, whereas animals have only specific differences (84). 9 It is Newman’s intent to defend the pious peasant against the accusation of irrational “enthusiasm” and show him to be more human than the humanism of the Enlightenment. Cf. also Edward A. Sillem, “Cardinal Newman’s Grammar of Assent on Conscience as a Way to God,” Heythrop Journal 5 (1964): 377–401, at 377–84. 10 Newman also defends the individual against statistical laws, which are just the combination of independent individuals and their activities, not their cause (83–85). 11 “I am suspicious then of scientific demonstrations in a question of concrete fact, in a discussion between fallible men” (319). 12 The appeal to imagination rather than sensation, though initially surprising, is important because, by way of the imagination, the real can affect us even in its absence. Imagination in this context is not the creative, but the conserving faculty. Cf. Tuninetti, “Assenso realistico,” 201f. 13 One might wonder, though, whether some people might not get excited about differential calculus or the idea of human equality; Ian T. Ker, “Recent Critics of Newman’s A Grammar of Assent,” Religious Studies: An International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 13 (1977): 63–71, at 70; similarly Price, Belief, 335f. 1086 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. as a few quotes might illustrate: “To most men argument makes the point in hand only more doubtful, and considerably less impressive. After all, man is not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal. He is influenced by what is direct and precise”; “Life is not long enough for a religion of inferences” (90); “Life is for action. If we insist on proofs for everything, we shall never come to action: to act you must assume, and that assumption is faith” (91); “Moses was instructed not to reason from the creation, but to work miracles” (92); “no man will be a martyr for a conclusion” (89). Trying to achieve belief by looking at an inference is like trying to be refreshed by reading a thermometer (151). This gap underlies a number of dichotomies in Newman: the notional vs. the real, inference vs. assent, the conditional vs. the unconditional, language vs. the living individual mind, common thought vs. individual persuasion (283), theory vs. practice, intellect vs. will, theology vs. religion, concept vs. image,14 the passive vs. the active, the broad and shallow vs. the narrow and deep, the progressive vs. the conservative (47), and yes, even the contrast between the Church of England and Roman Catholicism (notional and literary vs. real assent) (62f.). For an Aristotelian, however, it is important to realize that this gap is aggravated in Newman by the fact that he stands in the tradition of British empiricism.15 In other words: he is a nominalist,16 and therefore universals cannot connect with individual reality; they do not constitute the nature of things as their respective substantial forms and therefore cannot make reality intelligible. Abstract notions are “ghosts,” that is, something like the “faded copies” of D. Hume (40, 43, 44f.). Our concepts are our constructions or “creations:” All things in the exterior world are unit and individual, and are nothing else; but the mind not only contemplates those unit realities, as they exist, 14 A distinction that Locke and the empiricists do not make; Frederick J. Crosson, “Semantics of the Grammar,” Faith and Philosophy 7 (1990): 218–28, at 225; Newman became suspicious of John Stuart Mill (whom he read after 1857) for failing to make this distinction; Fey, Faith and Doubt, 93. 15 Jay Newman considers it a “love-hate relationship”; Jay Newman, “Cardinal Newman’s Attack on Philosophers,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 50 (1976): 196–207, at 197. 16 E.g. (223). He also repeatedly makes the nominalist claim that the faculties of the mind are nothing but abstractions from individual acts. On the other hand, Dr. Zeno can be worried that Newman might multiply faculties potentially ad infinitum with his illative sense; Dr. Zeno, O.F.M. Cap, John Henry Newman, Our Way to Certitude: An Introduction to Newman’s Psychological Discovery: The Illative Sense, and His Grammar of Assent (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1957), 30f.; and J. Hick finds the talk of faculties outdated altogether; J. Hick, Faith and Knowledge, 76. The Grammar of Assent and Contemporary Skepticism 1087 but has the gift, by an act of creation, of bringing before it abstractions and generalizations, which have no existence, no counterpart, out of it (29). The thing behind these notions is a mere “x,” not an intelligible substance, but the je ne sais quoi of J. Locke or perhaps the “x” in the F(x) of modern logic, an individual under a description.17 II A universal Aristotelian nature of things on the other hand is also a normative principle: it constitutes what something ought to be, it defines the thing’s “normality,” and it is the normative principle of the working of the thing characterized by this universal nature. For a nominalist like Newman, such things do not exist. But there is one crucial exception in Newman’s thought, and that is the human mind.18 Much as he defies definitions of human nature as empty and unreal generalizations, he constantly appeals to the nature of our mind as a normative principle. It is precisely this appeal which allows him to cross the gap between the universal and the particular in assent and belief:19 our beliefs and our assent to propositions are justified, when our mind is working “normally”; our certitudes are reliable where they fulfill the 17 E.g. (29); this might be the reason why Newman thinks that the apprehension of propositions lies primarily in the apprehension of the predicate; a mere “x” is not intelligible or apprehensible except by virtue of the predicate; D. Pailin is critical of this, and perhaps rightly so; David A. Pailin, The Way to Faith: An Examination of Newman’s ‘Grammar of Assent’ as a Response to the Search for Certainty in Faith (London: Epworth Press, 1969), 105–8.Without essences there is also no real basis for per se predication and nothing that could serve as “first principles” (which indeed become mere personal habits of thought for Newman). 18 Although he can use the nature of the elements (fire, water etc.) in the object world as a parallel case for the nature of the subject that knows them (272f.)— something that sounds rather Aristotelian. Newman can also defend the distinction between essences and accidents against John Stuart Mill; Zeno, John Henry Newman, 67. While Boekraad and Walgrave see Newman only as an apparent nominalist, Pailin takes Newman seriously as a nominalist and sees how this must lead to some inconsistencies with his claims for objective morality, “connatural” ideas of the mind, and the “laws of my nature,” but he thinks that Newman was probably unaware of this; Pailin, The Way, 120–22. Fey rather takes him to be a moderate realist; Fey, Faith and Doubt, 78f. 19 He disagrees with rationalism about a priori certainties and universalities, and agrees with empiricism against innate ideas, yet he wants to appeal to the “common voice of mankind,” i.e., the universal features of our mind (270). I. Williams curiously points out that this is a kind of “naturalism” and that some elements of this could be found in D. Hume as well; Ieuan Williams, “Faith and Scepticism: Newman and the Naturalist Tradition,” Philosophical Investigations 15 1088 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. nature of our mind: our mind is made for truth and its teleology is fulfilled in certitude. We are therefore epistemologically justified and do what we ought to do, when we use our faculties according to their nature: . . . errors of the individual belong to the individual, not to his nature, and cannot avail to forfeit for him his natural right, under proper circumstances, to doubt, or to infer, or to assent. We do but fulfill our nature in doubting, inferring, and assenting; and our duty is, not to abstain from the exercise of any function of our nature, but to do what is in itself right rightly (28). Normality is normative20 and corresponds to the universality of our nature. For once, the individual as individual is wrong (“errors of the individual belong to the individual”). Errors are the exception to the norm and do not, by their existence, abolish the norm (we do not “forfeit our natural right”). “No instances then whatever of mistaken certitude are sufficient to constitute a proof, that certitude itself is a perversion or extravagance of his nature” (189).21 Newman affirms the principle Usum non tollit abusus (the proper use is not abolished by a misuse); otherwise, “mind has no laws whatever and no normal constitution” (189).22 The underlying argument seems to be that what happens universally or for the most part (ut in pluribus) is natural; and what is natural cannot be misleading: natura facit nihil frustra (nature does nothing in vain). Human beings must be right for the most part, and there is an intrinsic authority to what has been said “always, everywhere and by everyone” (semper ubique (1992): 51–66, at 54f.; the tensions in this psychological approach would be overcome only in Wittgenstein, who, Williams says, bases this approach not on epistemology or an ontology of faculties but on forms of action at the bottom of our language games; ibid., 58–63. In fact, Newman, like Kant, responds to empiricism with some appeal to practical reason as well. 20 “It is enough for the proof of the value and authority of any function which I possess, to be able to pronounce that it is natural” (273). The frequent reproach that Newman confuses psychological and epistemological certitude, or phenomenology and epistemology (e.g., Jay Newman, The Mental Philosophy, 27; D. Pailin, The Way, 177ff.) misses the whole point of Newman’s book. 21 This sentence might be misleading, because for Newman there is no such thing as a mistaken certitude. 22 “We do not dispense with clocks, because from time to time they go wrong, and tell untruly. A clock, organically considered, may be perfect, yet it may require regulating” (ibid.). On this also Zeno, John Henry Newman, 206f. Jay Newman asks critically how the clock is to be adjusted ( Jay Newman, “Cardinal Newman on the Indefectibility of Certitude,” Laval Théologique et Philosophique 34 (1978): 15–20, at 18f.); Cardinal Newman’s answer would be: with nothing but the clock itself, i.e., in our case, our minds. The Grammar of Assent and Contemporary Skepticism 1089 et ab omnibus) (e.g. 192f., 270). Our minds cannot be wrong for the most part, because this wrongness would then constitute our nature; that is, nature would be unnatural in the sense of dysfunctional, counteracting its own telos; it would be a self-contradictory monstrosity. Such arguments might not initially sound convincing to the modern mind. Why would it be so impossible that everything is a self-contradictory monstrosity? In response there is no need to appeal to metaphysical or theological underpinnings; the theory of evolution will suffice: such monstrosities simply would not survive. They might exist as individuals, but they would not continue in existence for the most part, that is, not as a species. Therefore, a species can trust its typical equipment to function properly.23 We might, for example, have the hallucination of an oasis when we are mad with thirst in the desert; it is mere wishful thinking. And so in individual cases our natural faculties might fail us. But the fact that we have thirst is normal and constitutive of our nature; and this cannot fail to indicate that there are potables in the world.24 Our fundamental desires are indicative of realities.25 Newman repeatedly appeals to notions of “instinct” for the operation of our mind, and he likes to use analogies from the animal realm to illustrate its workings. Reason has its natural workings just as animal natures do; hence Newman can speak of “intellectual instincts” (194). Even inferences (formal or informal) occur as if by instinct: uno actu, spontaneously, without mediation and unanalyzably. His famous “illative sense” proceeds in the same way (260–63). We can only take it or leave it as a whole. And so, since we have nothing else to work with, we trust them as we trust natural instincts (209/260).26 23 “Every being is in a true sense sufficient for itself, so as to be able to fulfil its particular needs. It is a general law that, whatever is found as a function or an attribute of any class of beings, or is natural to it, is in its substance suitable to it, and subserves its existence, and cannot be rightly regarded as a fault or enormity. No being could endure, of which the constituent parts were at war with each other” (273). 24 This example is taken from Robert Spaemann, Schritte über uns hinaus I (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2010), 373. This might then also distinguish our sense of God from wishful thinking; being capax Dei might be indicative of a reality, if it is constitutive of our nature. Newman would certainly affirm this for our sense of conscience, as we will see. 25 “That is to be accounted a normal operation of our nature, which men in general do actually instance. That is a law of our minds, which is exemplified in action on a large scale, whether a priori it ought to be a law or no. Our hoping is a proof that hope, as such, is not an extravagance; and our possession of certitude is a proof that it is not a weakness or an absurdity to be certain” (270). 26 A similar view is taken by Zeno, John Henry Newman, 207. 1090 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. These instincts also trump the skepticism of modern thought. For example, Descartes’s skepticism about the external world is answered by an appeal to instinctual evidence rooted in nature and its teleology, for this is something that we share with animals as well (63). In response to Berkeley’s and Hume’s skepticism with regard to substances that would underlie our various kinds of sense data, Newman points to the instinctual ability of animals to discriminate between individuals, especially their mothers, right after birth. They do not have an intellect to show them substances, nor do their senses reveal more than loose sense data. Our own sense for the reality of substances must be instinctual and natural and therefore trustworthy as well (96, 102f.).27 The same can be said for trusting our reasoning and memory, or our belief in causality and in the order of the universe and some basic “connatural” concepts (66–75). While initially our nature has these latter concepts only notionally, they become real by application and experience (78ff.).28 Another important quasi-instinct is our conscience. This voice of conscience is, after all, already perceived by children. In fact, it is perceived even better by children, before their nature is corrupted by temptations and misdeeds. It is therefore indicative of a natural “instinct” (104f.). It is with us as one of the first principles of our nature, perhaps similar to thirst. It is constitutive of our nature, and in this like the first principles of our mind, which Aristotle and Aquinas describe as natural habits.29 They are not chosen, because every choice, including our choice to doubt them, presupposes them. For even our choice to doubt our minds can have no other reasons to appeal to than the reasons that our mind gives us. And the most fundamental reasons that our mind has, are constitutive of our nature. Hence, there can be no reason to be a skeptic about reasons. On the other hand, we have all reason to be skeptical about skepticism. Absolute skepticism is strictly unnatural; in fact, it is dysfunctional and a form of insanity. Newman quotes Pascal: “He who doubts, but seeks not to have his doubts removed, is at once the most criminal and the most unhappy of mortals. If, together with this, he is tranquil and self-satisfied, if he be vain of his tranquillity, or makes his state a topic of mirth and 27 Perhaps an Aristotelian would first appeal to a sensus communis. 28 There is therefore an initially notional assent to real propositions; this upsets John Hick (Faith and Knowledge, 73), because it moves from logic to psychology. But Newman never claimed to write a treatise on logic, but rather on the limitations of logic. 29 ST I–II, q. 51, a. 1. As part of our nature the habitus principiorum primorum cannot be lost: In II Sent. dist. 24, qq. 2 and 3. It is a matter of wisdom to consider these matters; In I Met., lect. 1, n. 34 and lect. 2, n. 1. The Grammar of Assent and Contemporary Skepticism 1091 self-gratulation, I have not words to describe so insane a creature” (246). Montaigne might have been able to live as a skeptic, because he was rich and carefree, but a poor girl working in a factory needs the assurance of an ultimate meaning of her life, or she goes insane indeed (247). In other words: rational inquiry and knowledge cannot begin with a hermeneutics of suspicion. If we do not give our natural equipment the benefit of the doubt, we will never get off the ground. Children will not learn if they do not trust their parents and teachers. They will not even learn the ability to question critically what they have learned, if they do not learn in trust first. We have to learn a mother tongue before we can start to ask questions in it (61).30 In that sense, as Newman writes to W. Froude (6), “skeptical caution” is not the parent of discovery.31 Newman would agree with Gadamer that one has to begin with a hermeneutical principle of charity32 and that one may use one’s own pre-understanding as a hermeneutical key.33 He would also agree with Wittgenstein that one cannot begin with doubt.34 He would agree with R. Swinburne’s “principle of credulity,” that we can trust our senses until there is evidence or 30 Our primary education is based in credence, which gives us the necessary “furni- ture of the mind;” it “diversifies” our naked nature with rich clothing. While we give it only an “implicit notional assent,” this furniture is not something we ever think of doubting; we believe it without effort. It comes to us from our senses, books, friends, conversations, and newspapers; we learn it as we do our mother tongue; it is cultural and national rather than personal, a “gentleman’s knowledge . . . neither worthless nor despicable” (60f.). While personal and real assent is the goal, this is the necessary starting point. 31 As quoted in the introduction by Nicholas Lash. 32 “. . . he keeps to the principle, implicit but present to his mind, with which he took up the book that the book is more likely to be right than he is; and this mere preponderance of probability is sufficient to make him faithful to his belief in its correctness, till its incorrectness is actually proved” (151). 33 Leo Scheffczyk, “Die Bedeutung der Kirchenväter für die Theologie Newmans,” in John Henry Newman,Vortragsreihe an der Universität Eichstätt, ed. Alfred Gläßer (Eichstätt-Vienna: Franz Sales Verlag, 1991), 17–31, at 26; similarly, Fred Lawrence, “Lonergan’s Retrieval of Thomas Aquinas’s Conception of the ‘Imago Dei’: The Trinitarian Analogy of Intelligible Emanations in God,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 83 (2009): 363–68, at 378f. The permissibility of using one’s own preunderstanding as a hermeneutical key is also behind Newman’s argument against William Paley’s evidentialism: “Why am I to begin with taking up a position not my own, and unclothing my mind of that large outfit of existing thoughts, principles, likings, desires, and hopes, which make me what I am?” (330). Our very nature itself creates a pre-understanding, for which Christianity is the only perfect fit (328, 333, 359, 375), as it also is the key for the previous salvation history (342–45). 34 E.g., Wittgenstein, On Certainty §150; or: “283. For how can a child immediately doubt what it is taught? That could mean only that he was incapable of learning certain language games”; “317. This doubt isn’t one of the doubts in our game. 1092 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. reason to the contrary; otherwise we will not have any beliefs at all: for what counts as evidence to the contrary is again another perception or reason.35 Newman therefore makes the point that we simply have no choice: our mind is all that we have to work with. I cannot think, reflect, or judge about my being, without starting from the very point which I aim at concluding. (272) I cannot avoid being sufficient for myself, for I cannot make myself anything else, and to change me is to destroy me. If I do not use myself, I have no other self to use. . . . My first elementary lesson of duty is that of resignation to the laws of my nature, whatever they are; my first disobedience is to be impatient at what I am, and to indulge an ambitious aspiration after what I cannot be, to cherish a distrust of my powers, and to desire to change laws which are identical with myself. (273) We cannot even critique our mind without using (and therefore trusting) it.36 It is legitimate to investigate occurring errors ex parte post; but this can never lead to a fundamental skepticism or universal doubt, because even the noticing of the errors—which raised the question in the first place—presupposes that our minds are functioning well enough to notice errors.37 (But not as if we chose this game!)”; “329. ‘If he calls that in doubt—whatever “doubt” means here—he will never learn this game’ ”; “458. One doubts on specific grounds. The question is this: how is doubt introduced into the languagegame?” Of course, unlike Newman, Wittgenstein is also something of a relativist with regard to language games. I.Williams, “Faith and Scepticism,” 58–63. According to W. Kienzler, Wittgenstein not only read Newman, but between 1946 and 1951 the Grammar of Assent was probably “the single most important external stimulus for Wittgenstein’s thought,” perhaps even more than G. E. Moore, whom he quotes more often. This is true especially for first principles, for which inferences are, so to speak, the wrong “grammar”; Wolfgang Kienzler, “Wittgenstein and John Henry Newman on Certainty,” in Deepening Our Understanding of Wittgenstein, ed. Michael Kober (New York: Rodopi, 2006), 117–38 (= Grazer Philosophische Studien 71 [2006]: 117, 133). One might speculate whether Wittgenstein was also curious about a title talking about a grammar of assent. 35 R. Swinburne, The Existence of God, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 303–10. 36 According to Newman it is the other way around: we do not trust our faculties, we use them (272). Or, as he says about conscience: “I use it because I must use myself ” (303f). 37 “. . . there is no ultimate test of truth besides the testimony born to truth by the mind itself ” (275). W. Wainwright thinks that the pragmatic irrationality of questioning our faculties does not make this questioning epistemically irrational. But I think that this formulation understates Newman’s implied point, which is that this distinction cannot be made. It still tries to take the perspective that we The Grammar of Assent and Contemporary Skepticism 1093 III All of this implies that we cannot start as skeptics, we cannot start with doubt. This is therefore the opposite of Descartes’s starting point or of typical discussions of modern epistemology that demand “to know how we know.” Already Hegel had pointed out that this leads to an infinite regress: epistemology is just another science, another type of knowledge—and how do we know that science? It is an impossible attempt to objectify our knowing by stepping outside of knowing, yet wanting this to be an act of knowledge.38 Trying to begin with doubt is like trying to learn how to swim before, and without, going into the water.39 Yet the impossible modern quest for certainty might indeed be a hidden “fear of knowledge” as Hegel suggests.40 It is just the correlate of Descartes’ universal doubt. Descartes himself had tried to overcome his doubt by an appeal to God. He, like Newman had indeed claimed that our faculties cannot go wrong for the most part.41 But for Descartes, this required a further metaphysical and theological argument: namely that God exists, that He created our faculties, and that He is not a deceiver. Since A. Arnauld, however, critics have pointed out that Descartes’s argument is circular, because in order to prove God’s existence, he needs to presuppose the working of our mind, by which we make this proof. But this in turn already assumes the existence of God as the guarantor of our “clear and distinct ideas,” about which he does not deceive us. Now this should lead us to ask: Is Newman’s trust in the nature of our mind therefore also just a theological presupposition? Can modern skepticism really only be answered by a “radical orthodoxy” or a fideism of some sort? cannot take, especially since that very distinction is being made with the very minds that it pretends to be about. Cf. William J. Wainwright, Reason and the Heart: A Prolegomenon to a Critique of Passional Reason (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 76f., footnote 40. 38 G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Meiner, 1986), Einleitung, 69f. Newman did not read Hegel: Johannes Artz, “Newman as Philosopher,” International Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1976): 263–87, at 285. His knowledge of Kant and German Idealism was probably only through Chalybäus’ history of philosophy; Artz, 270. 39 G.W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der Philosophischen Wissenschaften 1830 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1969), 43 (§10).Wittgenstein might agree: On Certainty “471. It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not try to go further back”; “354. Doubting and non-doubting behavior. There is the first only if there is the second.” 40 “. . . so ist nicht abzusehen, warum nicht umgekehrt ein Mißtrauen in dies Mißtrauen gesetzt und besorgt werden soll, daß diese Furcht zu irren schon der Irrtum selbst ist.” G. W. F. Hegel, Einleitung, 69f. 41 Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation VI. 1094 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. In response we should note that the argument we have made above with the help of Newman did not appeal to any sort of theology and perhaps not even to metaphysics.42 It was a reflection on the very nature of our knowing. Nor was there any need to appeal to “clear and distinct ideas.” On the other hand, it is frequently overlooked that it is the universal doubt of Descartes—and not the trust in the nature of our mind—which is a theological presupposition. For it is frequently overlooked, that (before all other proofs) Descartes cannot even set up his doubt without the appeal to a genius malignus, an evil demon.43 Only a god can have the power to make our mind go wrong systematically, to misconstruct our nature and make us into a self-contradictory monster, so to speak. This presupposes the freely deciding God of Christianity, but as turned into the voluntaristic and hidden God of the thought experiments of nominalism: God’s freedom and power are limited only by the principle of non-contradiction, and by a miracle he could do things like systematically deceiving us. Modern epistemology replaces this infinite power of God by our hypothetically infinite power of technology: its thought experiments usually appeal to science fiction. Yet modern epistemology still lives from theological premises that would not have entered the mind of an Aristotle or Plato. And the result is the same as in the earlier nominalist approach: the undermining of our natural and normative intuitions about the world and ourselves. Newman does agree with Descartes that we have to begin with our own mind.44 But he rejects the idea that this implies beginning with universal doubt (294). Doubt cannot be universal, because universality is correlated with normality and the natural trustworthy functioning of our mind. Doubt itself is just one particular functioning of this mind, because 42 Newman reflects at one point on God’s providence in the working of our minds, but as subsequent to these considerations: “Of course I do not stop here. As the structure of the universe speaks to us of Him who made it, so the laws of the mind are the expression, not of mere constituted order, but of His will. I should be bound by them even were they not His laws; but since one of their very functions is to tell me of Him, they throw a reflex light upon themselves, and, for resignation to my destiny, I substitute a cheerful concurrence in an overruling Providence” (275f.). There is, however, an occasional appeal also to necessary “special illuminations” in order to discover the “hidden God”; the reason for our darkness, however, is not the failure of our faculties, but rather originates in our own moral failure (275f., 309). 43 Descartes, Meditation I. This point has frequently been made by Robert Spaemann, e.g., in Das unsterbliche Gerücht (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2007), 45–47. 44 Rather than modern, this might be a more Augustinian element in Newman’s thought. Certainty, however, is indeed located not so much in the nature of things or objects of the mind, but in the mind itself. He occasionally sounds like Kant with regard to his postulates: not “it is certain,” but “I am certain.” The Grammar of Assent and Contemporary Skepticism 1095 it is either nothing (i.e., the absence of an inference or an assent), or it is itself “an assent to a proposition at variance with the thesis” and therefore something positive and a particular act, but not universal (28).45 As such, doubt has its own particular assumptions; it is even the “greatest assumption” (294), and in effect, one might say, a “prejudice against prejudice” (Gadamer). Rather than beginning with universal doubt, we need to begin with trust in the universal features of our nature.46 Nor is it proper to begin with asking for certainty, which is just the flip side of universal doubt: “we never say we are sure and certain without implying that we doubt. To say that a thing must be, is to admit that it may not be” (89).47 In other words, beginning with certainty elicits an infinite regress: “you must prove your proofs” (91) or you must infallibly know that you are infallible (184). Indeed, having to “prove your proofs” might lead to something akin to Lewis Carroll’s Paradox (1895);48 you would never begin to know anything. Certainty is rather a reflex act, a reflection on the knowing that is always already going on. In Newman’s terminology, it is a “complex 45 Newman might have learned this from R. Whately, who pointed out that doubt is its own form of credulity: someone who doubts the existence of Egypt must be “believing this most incredible proposition; that ‘it is possible for many thousands of persons, unconnected with each other, to have agreed, for successive ages, in bearing witness to the existence of a fictitious country, without being detected, contradicted or suspected.’ ” Whately uses this also to defend the historicity of the Gospels; W. Kienzler, “Wittgenstein and John Henry Newman,” 125. 46 “Of the two, I would rather have to maintain that we ought to begin with believing everything that is offered to our acceptance, than that it is our duty to doubt of everything” (294). I think Newman has a better argument here than C. S. Peirce, who has similar reservations about Descartes: “Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” Cf. Jay Newman, “Cardinal Newman on the Indefectibility,” 16. 47 (Quoting himself from a text from 1841.) Newman: “You are wrong in beginning with certitude—certitude is only a kind of assent—you should begin with contrasting assent and inference” (quoted in Lash’s introduction [7]). 48 If the rules of inference have to become themselves one of the premises of an inference, then their integration into the premises requires another rule, and an infinite regress ensues; therefore, a set of rules cannot contain a rule for validly following the rules, because an infinite regress of meta-rules results. The need to avoid this scenario might make Newman’s approach more plausible: “How it comes about that we can be certain is not my business to determine; for me it is sufficient that certitude is felt. This is what the schoolmen, I believe, call treating a subject in facto esse, in contrast with in fieri. Had I attempted the latter, I should have been falling into metaphysics; but my aim is of a practical character . . .” (270). According to F. Lawrence, Newman shares this view with Gadamer and Lonergan; F. Lawrence, “Lonergan’s Retrieval,” 378f. 1096 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. assent,” and it is always only notional. These are assents to assents—something that is involved in acts of conviction or in the act of continuing to believe (157–59); “reflex acts may be repeated in a series” ad infinitum, like images in a double mirror (162).This implies that to begin with certainty is to begin with an intentio obliqua that has never been preceded by an intentio recta—an empty flight of mirrors. Again, our normal, ordinary and therefore natural contact with reality is a direct contact;49 our knowledge and its principles are that by which we know, before they become that which we know—objectified perhaps in linguistic form and impersonal notations. Doubt and reflection come later; they split our more primordial contact and communion with reality. Our primal beliefs are not reflexive: belief is not the intention never to change one’s mind, but the absence of the thought of changing; this thought is unimaginable and therefore no possible object of an assent to the contrary (160). In this way we know many things that are necessary to us, yet they could not be made certain by reflective logical proof: If our nature has any constitution, any laws, one of them is this absolute reception of propositions as true, which lie outside the narrow range of conclusions to which logic, formal or virtual, is tethered; nor has any philosophical theory the power to force on us a rule which will not work for a day. (150) IV Newman’s theory of assent bridges the gap between the universal and the particular that we had discussed in the beginning. It allows for a kind of “certitude” that is at once personal (unlike the “certainty” of the impersonal outlook of modern science, logic and linguistics) and universal (like the normal and natural working of our minds, which deserves the benefit of the doubt). As such, our personal certitudes are not a leap of faith in the sense of Kierkegaard,50 nor are they a form of subjectivism (raising the suspicion 49 And the opposite is therefore insane: “I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again ‘I know that that’s a tree’, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: ‘This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.’ ” Wittgenstein, On Certainty §467. 50 A very interesting comparison of Newman and Kierkegaard is made in M. Jamie Ferreira, “Leaps and Circles: Kierkegaard and Newman on Faith and Reason,” Religious Studies 30 (1994): 379–97. John Coulson suggested that both make a leap (Kierkegaard prospectively, and Newman retrospectively). Yet, Newman works with probabilities and reason, and emphasizes the continuity between faith The Grammar of Assent and Contemporary Skepticism 1097 of “modernism”), but they have their own forms of rationality. Newman speaks of the illative sense, which also follows human nature and does not abandon logic, but incorporates it.51 It is itself a universal feature of our nature, though it needs to unfold personally: A human individual is “a being of progress.” Our nature is not “readymade”; rather we are selfmade by nature. This is not a form of existentialism, but a “sacred duty” according to Newman. The most perfect fulfillment of this sacred duty is the employment of the illative sense (274), which is not an irrational leap. To be sure, to move from logical inference to real assent does involve some kind of leap, and, not unlike the act of faith, making a judgment is not merely an act of the intellect but seems to involve the will as well.52 Separating assent from inference allows Newman to affirm volition as independent of the intellect (against Locke, Leibniz, and much of the and reason (ibid., 379f.). Interestingly, both use the image of Newton’s circle and polygon: but for Kierkegaard it serves to illustrate the non-coincidence: the polygon is the rational petrifaction of the intuitive circle (ibid.; 388f.); whereas for Newman it is the imaginative rather than logical extension of reason towards the circle as its mathematical “limit” (ibid., 382). Both hold the extremes together non-logically, in either passion (Kierkegaard) or the imagination (Newman) (ibid., 391f.). This might reflect also their different starting point in Hegelian dialectic and empiricism respectively. One may wonder also whether Newman’s use of “imagination” does not reflect some influence of idealism, albeit indirect, in which the imagination tends to mediate between subject and object. Another possible influence for the role of the imagination are the lectures of the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds; Willam, Die Erkenntnislehre, 64–66, 69. 51 “. . . it does not supersede the logical form of inference, but is one and the same with it; only it is no longer an abstraction, but carried out into the realities of life” (232). The comparison with the aesthetic sense is not that it is sensual, but precisely that it is a judgment. Cf. T. Ker, “Recent Critics,” 63f.. The illative sense is not a sensual sense: in an 1860 manuscript, Newman distinguishes between “phenomena” (sensations) and “sensation” (as non-sensual sense of, e.g., good and evil); Jay Newman, The Mental Philosophy, 25. 52 Here he might agree with Descartes’ theory of judgment: “My errors, that is, depend on both (a) my intellect and (b) my will. . . . The intellect doesn’t affirm or deny anything; its role is only to present me with ideas regarding which I can make judgments” (Descartes, Meditations, Meditation IV). Only the will provides the sufficient condition for a judgment; Eric Steinberg, “Newman’s Distinction between Inference and Assent,” Religious Studies 23 (1987): 351–66, at 353. The question is, whether the illative sense is non-volitional like an aspect shift (as M. Jamie Ferreira says in “Leaps and Circles,” 389) and therefore needs to be distinguished from a subsequent volitional assent—which seems to be what Newman says. Accordingly he can speak of a “duty to be certain”; a true proposition calls for an absolute assent; yet the will cannot create certainty, it can only hinder our acceptance of it; cf. Fey, Faith and Doubt, 114–17. 1098 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. modern age).53 Assent is not just “a necessary shadow” following upon inference.54 Reinstating this distinction also makes it possible to affirm assent as absolute rather than coming in degrees, each degree being determined by the premises of which it is the conclusion. Assent would otherwise remain ever conditional, just as its antecedents are (136f.). To be sure, assent and volition cannot do without reasoning. Newman, just like Aquinas, would say that the reasoning that leads to the conclusion is a necessary condition (144). Yet, it is not a sufficient condition: the assent stands on its own feet, has its own act, and it is either absolutely a “yes,” or absolutely a “no.” (Importantly, this does not exclude saying absolutely yes or no to the degrees of probability of some conclusions; but in this case these probabilities enter the object, not the act of assent [147].)55 If assent were to come in degrees of doubt or probability, as 53 The conflation of volition with the intellect is something common to both ration- alism and empiricism. Already Whately’s Elements of Rhetoric, which Newman coauthored, said that the identification of reason and assent would be like saying that the eyes could walk to the goal they see; cf. Willam, Die Erkenntnislehre, 79. 54 Newman has a number of arguments for this; e.g., assent can endure without the inference; sometimes assent fails, while reasons are still in force, or it is never given; we do not even agree to mathematical conclusions automatically: national sentiment can sway us even in mathematics (the Newton/Leibniz controversy?), and generally the underlying cause for assent is moral (141–44). So, against Locke, assent and inference do not vary concomitantly. While one might object, that these arguments only describe facts, which as such cannot undermine Locke’s epistemic “ought,” ought also implies can, and Newman’s arguments might show that we cannot. Cf. Price, Belief, 136f. They do prove first of all the fact that assent and inference are not the same act, which is Newman’s point. 55 Amazingly this is overlooked by many commentators, among them H. H. Price, who is led by this oversight to make a real caricature of Newman; Price, Belief, esp. 147–49. At least Gerard Casey notices this, in his Natural Reason: A Study of the Notions of Inference, Assent, Intuition, and First Principles in the Philosophy of John Henry Cardinal Newman (New York: P. Lang, 1984), 183f. On this also I. Ker, “Recent Critics,” 69. E. Steinberg (“Newman’s Distinction,” 361) fails to appreciate this distinction as well. Also, although the apprehension has degrees, the assent does not; the heathen historian assents to Christ’s existence with the same unconditionality as the believer (49f.). Price, Belief, 144–46, seems to suggest that the difference between assent and inference is merely a difference between two kinds of inferring: mere hypothetical “if . . . then” inferences (as mere thinking about inference) as compared to “because . . . therefore” inferences, which assent to the fact. E. Steinberg, on the other hand, sees Newman taking both as forms of assent, only in one case with a condition. Steinberg, “Newman’s Distinction,” 354f. Fey in turn warns against reducing assent to the “because . . . therefore” form, because that would make all assent hypothetical and therefore probable in Newman’s sense: Fey, Faith and Doubt, 147. According to M. Willam (following /Lukasiewicz), Newman anticipated the reconstruction of Aristotle’s deductive syllogism as a conditional or The Grammar of Assent and Contemporary Skepticism 1099 Locke would have it,56 then it would not be assent at all. After all, the assent is true or false, and Truth and Falsehood obey the principle of the excluded middle. As the object of the act is indivisible, so is the act itself. Thus, half-assent would be like half-truth, and both are impossible (145–48). Hence no mental reservation is possible; we have to decide and we are responsible. Nor is this decision the result of mere intellectual education,57 on the mechanistic inertial mode of the mind that can be found in the Enlightenment (323).58 It is the activity of our mind, not the passive mechanism of an algorithm,59 that leads to our assent. Except in abstract cases, the assent follows in ways that are not logically traceable, because too many premises are involved, and they depend on the personal agency of the particular mind. When literary critics are arguing about questions of authenticity in Shakespeare, for instance, their personal experience of reading texts enters into the equation, plus their particular premises and principles for interpreting texts, as well as many data that could cumulatively never be represented as written on a sheet hypothetical syllogism by modern formal logic; with that, it can indeed only be hypothetically true: Willam, Die Erkenntnislehre, 10–12, 57f. 56 For J. Locke, cf. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding IV, ch. 15, sect. 2 and 5; IV, ch. 16 and 19, sect. 1. Price thinks that probability is enough, and that Newman merely sees the glass half-empty whereas Locke sees it half full; Price, Belief, 151–53. On my view this position misses Newman’s practical point: when it comes to action, we either do or we do not. Action is absolute, regardless of the reasons for our decision. We imply an assent which is absolute. 57 A similar view is maintained in The Idea of a University; cf. Jay Newman, “Cardinal Newman’s Attack,” 197–99; learning might even weaken faith; Jay Newman, The Mental Philosophy, 193. 58 “His progress is a living growth, not a mechanism; and its instruments are mental acts, not the formulas and contrivances of language” (275). “It is the mind that reasons, and that controls its own reasonings, not any technical apparatus of words and propositions” (276). “I do not want to be converted by a smart syllogism” (330). This was the method he knew from his earlier affiliation with the Oriel Evidentialists of R. Whately, though; Fey, Faith and Doubt, 2. 59 “Men are too well inclined to sit at home, instead of stirring themselves to inquire whether a revelation has been given; they expect its evidences to come to them without their trouble; they act, not as suppliants, but as judges. Modes of argument such as Paley’s, encourage this state of mind; they allow men to forget that revelation is a boon, not a debt on the part of the Giver; they treat it as a mere historical phenomenon. . . . Like this is the conduct of those who resolve to treat the Almighty with dispassionateness, a judicial temper, clearheadedness, and candour. It is the way with some men, (surely not a good way,) to say, that without these lawyerlike qualifications conversion is immoral” (330–31). Similarly in Sermons Preached On Various Occasions (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908) V, 61–74. 1100 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. of paper. All these premises require “rather to be photographed on the individual mind as by one impression,” and do not “admit of delineation for the satisfaction of the many in any known or possible language” (220). The assent requires a cumulative “mental comprehension of the whole case” in one “clear and rapid act of the intellect” (232), which, being one (239), is without medium between antecedent and consequent and proceeds by a kind of instinct (260). It can lead to an unconditional acceptance even where nothing can be demonstrated (e.g. in the case of “I will die”) (135). This kind of reasoning is not like an iron rod, but like a cable, in which the cumulative premises are intertwined, such that to ask for an iron rod might, in certain cases be irrational and unreasonable.60 The problem is not that there is no evidence; if anything, there is too much evidence, and the problem is rather that it cannot be lined up in a syllogism. Reasoning based on this kind of evidence is therefore not a leap but an asymptotic approach of converging probabilities, like two converging straight lines, of which we anticipate the intersection, even though we do not see it (259).61 It is a kind of recognition, as we recognize family resemblances or emotions in a face, without being able to do so by logical inference (233).62 60 Quotation in Lash’s introduction (16). Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §67: “as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.” J. Hick quotes another pertinent image by John Wisdom: the evidence functions “like the legs of a chair, not like the links of a chain.” J. Hick, Faith and Knowledge, 81. Willam (Die Erkenntnislehre, 20, 42) quotes Aristotle’s remark that many memories come together in one experience (Eth. Nic.VIII, 1142a16). According to Willam, a deductive syllogism yields a false result if just one premise is wrong, but this is not so in an “illative” conclusion; Die Erkenntnislehre, 21. However, this is not quite correct, as one can easily construct syllogisms with a true conclusion and false premises; I thank Prof. D. Marshall for bringing this to my awareness. 61 Newman’s favorite example is Newton’s regular polygon inscribed into a circle, the sides being continually diminished, asymptotically coinciding, even if in fact they do not (253f.). Another good example might be character recognition in reading; J. Hick, Faith and Knowledge, 82. In these matters, Newman is also influenced by Cicero; Willam, Die Erkenntnislehre, 57. 62 F. Aquino compares this with an externalist view of justification, which nevertheless allows for internalization, i.e., for a “cultivated” illative sense with an increased cognitive grasp of reasons, where fitting; Frederick D. Aquino, “Externalism and Internalism: A Newmanian Matter of Proper Fit,” Heythrop Journal 51 (2010): 1023–34. Natural, trustworthy and normal might be only those faculties that have been teleologically perfected by education. A trained capacity cannot be prone to error. Cf. Wainwright, Reason and the Heart, 65–68; 73; 79. Aquino also develops this maturation of the illative sense as a kind of communal virtue The Grammar of Assent and Contemporary Skepticism 1101 Because the evidence and premises are cumulative only in one mind,63 this inference has a personal character (277–80);64 it produces certitude only quoad nos (289); it is mental and not linguistic, and not formalizable for common investigation (233).65 But the fact that nothing more is available does not warrant the assertion that there is a deficiency. The very nature of the application of a universal to a particular does not allow for more: after all, as rules and formal inferences employ only abstract terms, they leave us with mere conjectures and presentiments with regard to the particular (51f.). Kant similarly attributes this application to the faculty of judgment (Urteilskraft) and says that its operations cannot be brought under rules. Aristotle epistemology at book length in Communities of Informed Judgment: Newman’s Illative Sense and Accounts of Rationality (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004). But one may wonder whether this is really in the spirit of Newman, who rather stresses the individual mind and personal judgment. 63 “. . . by the nature of the human mind we are assenting absolutely on reasons which taken separately are but probabilities”; quoted in Lash’s introduction (11). Perhaps, some of the evidence can only be in our mind: our pain cannot be verified by others and is eminently personal. 64 The personal character of knowing (as an art) can be found also in M. Polanyi’s thought; Joseph Kroger, “Can Theology Be Tacit? A Review Essay on Personal Catholicism, Tradition and Discovery:The Polanyi Society Periodical 28 (2001): 23–27, at 23f., in which Kroger reviews Martin X. Moleski’s book on Newman and Polanyi. Newman seems to think that even first principles are personal, if not arbitrary (321, 293); that is why syllogisms “hang loose at both ends:” not only in individual application, but also in their first premises. Elsewhere, though, he distinguishes between genuine first principles of (our) nature (“there must be those assumptions in the process which resolve themselves into the conditions of human nature”) and those that are “traceable to the sentiments of the age, country, religion, social habits and ideas, of the particular inquirers or disputants, and passing current without detection, because admitted equally on all hands!” (217). Among those might be the basic methodological assumptions of various historians (284ff.). To impose the latter kind (but not the first) on others would be bigotry he says in 1851; cf. Casey, Natural Reason, 239; even among these latter, more conventional and culturally conditioned premises one can still discern true from false first principles by (1) the universality of their reception, (2) their age, (3) their utility, (4) the universality of the instinct that produced them, and (5) their recommendation via antecedent assumptions (ibid., 245). 65 Even where inference is traceable, it is always the whole man who reasons (actiones sunt suppositorum); it is “the whole man that moves; paper logic is but the record of it.” Apologia, quoted in Hick, Faith and Knowledge, 69. For similar reasons, John Crosby connects the illative sense with twentieth-century personalism; J. Crosby, The Selfhood of the Human Person (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 73–75. 1102 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. says something similar about phronesis (277f.), thereby distinguishing the peculiar form of reasoning in ethics from that of mathematics;66 Wittgenstein claims comparable things for rule-following;67 the Romantics talk about “divination” and “genius,” and so does Newman, ascribing it variously to weather-wise peasants, the diagnosis of a physician, the better instincts of women, Napoleon’s and Newton’s genius, as well as that of mathematical prodigies. Attempting to bring this genius under rules would rather destroy their gift (260; 262f.). V This lack of control might not satisfy some people’s quest for certainty, but the kind of insight provided by the assent Newman describes is the only thing available to us; we therefore have the right and even the duty to make use of it even for the most important transactions in life (258). Moreover, this mode of thought does provide instances of genuine certitude: they are not just cases of abstract logical principles that are selfevident or whose opposite would involve a logical contradiction, but particular and factual truths as, for example, “Great Britain is an island,” or the fact of our existence, or that we feel, think, and act, and the certainty that we are ignorant of many things, and that we are going to die (148f.).68 Again: it is the telos of our mind to know the truth and to achieve certainty about it. The apprehension of the real makes theorizing itself real, and this contact with reality is the fulfillment of its intentionality.69 66 Newman likes to quote Eth. Nic. I, 3 for this (322). One might also remember that for Aristotle, akrasia happens in the cracks between the universal and particular. For Heidegger and Gadamer phronesis and “care” (Sorge) as practical application are involved in the very act of understanding something; i.e., in the theoretical contexts that Newman is analyzing. Cf. also Lawrence, “Lonergan’s Retrieval,” 376. 67 Some of Newman’s examples might have influenced Wittgenstein (who read Newman): how a curve can look concave to some and convex to others is related to Wittgenstein’s “duck-rabbit”; the recognition of family resemblance occurs as well (291f.). 68 This seems to undercut Lessing’s “ditch,” and will therefore be important for religious certitude. Cf. also Fey, Faith and Doubt, 92. Also, Newman’s examples from historiography or studies of Shakespeare (284ff.; 217ff.) point to parallel attempts to discover a methodology for humanities, e.g. as “idiographic” rather than “nomothetic”—to use the distinction introduced by Windelband in his lecture “Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft” (1894). 69 A somewhat Husserlian read of this can be found in Olson, “Real Apprehension,” e.g., 502, 516. The apprehension of the real has a temporal and teleological priority over skepticism (ibid., 510). The Grammar of Assent and Contemporary Skepticism 1103 If this were not possible, nature would be misconstrued. Something that is by its nature made to miss its proper goal is self-contradictory. Furthermore, the nature of our mind would become unintelligible for us, since things are defined from their fully actualized state. We find the definition of the oak tree by looking at the tree, not the acorn; we define the mind from its act of knowing, not from the state of doubt and confusion. Newman is quite firm that certitude cannot be mistaken.70 And since it is therefore necessarily correlated with truth, certitude, just like truth, cannot change (163f.); it is indefectible (181). It is at least a negative test of certitude,71 whether it did in fact change. In religion, for example, someone who is 70 Where Newman speaks about “false certitudes” I think he is to be understood as having merely apparent certitudes in mind. In other cases he appears to merely consider an implicit objection or fallibility in the abstract (which for Newman is possible); M. Jamie Ferreira, Doubt and Religious Commitment: The Role of the Will in Newman’s Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press/New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 107. I don’t think Pailin, The Way, 180–85, is right in attributing it to a lack of distinction between objective and subjective certainty, such that only the subjective side could be wrong and changeable; this would contradict the whole gist of Newman’s argument, and Pailin has accordingly problems making sense of his claims. In fact, in an earlier manuscript, Newman does distinguish (against Locke) objective and subjective certainty, and considers the subjective certainty unfailing! In 1853 this distinction becomes that between (conditional) inference and (unconditional) assent (Steinberg, “Newman’s Distinction,” 352f.). Other commentators have similar problems, apparently because they simply cannot believe that Newman is actually claiming this kind of certainty and indefectibility; e.g., Ian Ker, “Recent Critics,” 66f.; and Jay Newman, “The Illative Sense vs. Interpretation: D’Arcy’s Critique of Cardinal Newman’s Approach to Insight and Inference,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 73 (1999): 179–91, at 181. In the case of Jay Newman, there is also the influence of his intense dislike for his namesake’s anti-liberalism (The Mental Philosophy, 29–33 et passim). J. Ferreira has the same problem and therefore sees Newman apparently contradicting himself (she also confuses indefectibility and infallibility; Ferreira, Doubt and Religious Commitment, 107); she attempts to reduce Newman’s claim to a mere principle of subjective tenacity in the sense of I. Lakatos (one might say: as opposed to W. Froude’s Popperian fallibilism). For her, the only absolute tenacity would be the formal promise “to be true to the truth”; what that truth is might change, even if in an absolute, i.e., all-or-nothing fashion (ibid. 117–20, 125, 128). Newman says that one cannot on the one hand claim to be certain, while at the same time suggesting that one may change one’s mind tomorrow; but to my mind he does not mean to reduce this impossibility thereby to a psychological impossibility, as Ferreira takes it (ibid., 111f.). 71 Other conditions are: the certitude follows on investigation and proof (although it is not identical with it); it also provides a sense of intellectual satisfaction (207f.). The proof, however, could change (e.g., when doing apologetics), while the certitude remains; this is the case of “investigating” our faith ( fides quaerens intellectum), whereas “inquiry” would imply having lost one’s faith, a lack of certitude (158f.). 1104 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. certain about his faith and then loses it can never have been really certain; in a way, he never did have faith but perhaps a mere conviction (175, 200).72 If certitude and truth are the natural telos of our mind, then their achievement will bring a sense of rest in our goal.73 There will be therefore no motivation for a change of mind. Furthermore, one might wonder (although Newman does not), whether we could know what we are looking for in our search for knowledge and certitude, if we did not have anticipations of its attainment in at least some instances. Nor could we deny this possibility meaningfully without evoking and therefore claiming it.74 Would we even have a meaningful notion of “mistake” if we did not have a positive notion of knowledge, of which it is the privation? Mistakes can be detected and corrected only by an appeal to a new certitude. Whether avowing our fallibility in general or noting our mistakes in particular, we can easily be quite certain that we have made a mistake: “May I not at least be certain that I have been mistaken?” (188f.). Mistakes, therefore, cannot cast doubt on the existence of certitude, or even on its normality, since they become recognizable only against the background of certitude. And therefore absus non tollit usum.75 Newman provides a number of very concrete (even if not infallible) signs of false certitudes (hesitation when asked to swear on it in court, defensiveness etc.) (165–68). True certitude, on the other hand, can be (morally) patient of its opposite, even if not (intellectually) tolerant (165). 72 This might explain 1 Jn 2:19–20: “They went out from us, but they were not really of our number; if they had been, they would have remained with us. Their desertion shows that none of them was of our number. But you have the anointing that comes from the holy one, and you all have knowledge.” 73 And it is rare (though not impossible) that something else than truth is free from circumstances and tokens that evoke suspicion. Prejudice might perhaps be indefectible, but not free from suspicion (207). Certitude is effortless and unwavering (163f.). “As there is a condition of mind which is characterized by invincible ignorance, so there is another which may be said to be possessed of invincible knowledge; . . .—I mean certitude” (174). 74 We also could not argue for other truths without anything to base our arguments on—something that cannot be argued for and does not need to be argued for, because it is self-verifying. “Without first principles there can be no conclusions at all, and . . . thus probability does in some sense presuppose and require the existence of truths which are certain” (192f.). C. I. Lewis similarly pointed out that even knowledge of probabilities must at least rest on data which are certain; Fey, Faith and Doubt, 101. Even induction rests on certitude. 75 Likewise, we can be quite certain that we have only probable knowledge, or also that one opinion is more probable than another. It would also be “against my nature” and against “duty” to withhold assent to duly established certitude, even by past generations on whose shoulders we stand. One can question individual cases of this tradition, but not its certitude in general (187). The Grammar of Assent and Contemporary Skepticism 1105 The nature of knowledge itself would not be intelligible, if we could not understand it from its telos. In that sense, certitude is normative, natural, and therefore normal. In this sense it is not the claim to certitude which is fanaticism or religious insanity; rather, it is its denial which is not really normal (and which in fact claims a certitude of its own). “Certitude is a natural and normal state of mind, and not (as is sometimes objected) one of its extravagances or infirmities” (172). What might be insane, however, would be a claim to infallibility. Infallibility is a property, not of particular acts, but of faculties and persons (183).76 According to Newman, to make a claim of infallibility for a person or faculty would be to extend the normality of certitude too far, certitude being infallibility only pro hac vice—for the occasion (185). Still, our ability to detect certitudes is a very personal ability. For example, we might have a gift in one area, but not necessarily in another; that both Newton and Napoleon were geniuses does not mean that they could exchange their particular roles.77 Other certitudes arise only with experience and age: even the legitimate assumptions of “common credence” become a real assent of certitude only with the experience of people who have made decisions and commitments about them in their lives. This is why Aristotle says we should give heed not only to demonstrations but to experience and to the aged, because, as “having the eye of experience, they behold the principles of things” (268).78 Hence evidence depends on the mode of the receiver: classics have more impact on older people, the Bible on the virtuous (78f.).79 This feature might also make certitude harder to communicate (82f.): there is an element of personal experience, even of “feeling,” to certitude. However, Newman is careful not to make this feature of experience constitutive of certitude. This experience might be part of the telos towards which we grow, but in itself it could not prove the certitude, which, in the case of a vivid imagination, could still be an illusion.Vividness does not create 76 It might be worthy of note that, although papal infallibility is indeed a property ascribed to a person, in its precise definition it is rather what Newman describes as certitude: not everything a pope says is infallible, but only very specific and circumscribed acts of his are. 77 In speaking of the illative sense, Newman does not seem to refer to a “faculty“— a fact that fits in well with his doubts about faculties (278–81). Indeed, Aristotle might have thought of the illative sense as a habit of the intellectual faculty rather than a distinct faculty; it could therefore also be specific and personal regarding applications (military, science, etc.). 78 Cf. Eth. Nic. VI, 11. 79 Job in this sense did not gain knowledge, but went from hearing to sight with regard to one and the same knowledge of God (80). 1106 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. our assent; it merely intensifies it (80f.). Still, as the telos of knowing, Newman says, certitude provides a specific feeling of possession, attainment, finality, satisfaction, and self-congratulation “as its token and in a certain sense its form”; it is the theoretical parallel to the satisfaction we experience after performing a conscientious deed in the practical realm (168f.).80 VI With all of this, Newman manages to restore our intuitions about the certitudes that we assume in ordinary life, and he helps us to apply abstract rules to the concrete. Modern skepticism, for its part, can be sustained only in scientific abstraction. Although Newman does not say so himself, we have also seen that the universal doubt modern skepticism employs has itself theological presuppositions. This is ironic, because these theological dimensions are what modern thought has been most skeptical about. For by reducing reason to generalizations over observational data, the skeptics have thought to consign ultimate metaphysical questions to the realm of the irrational. Again, Newman’s response might be that this metaphysical skepticism goes against what the normal function of our mind tells us. And here he would refer us to the working of our conscience. Conscience is another one of those natural endowments of our mind and a kind of instinct.Yet it has a greater affinity with perception than with the inference of an illative sense.81 Within this perception, it is important to distinguish two aspects: (a) the perception of the distinction between right and wrong (“critical faculty”); (b) the perception of an ultimate responsibility, which we have 80 The implication seems to be that a person committing the deed of an erroneous conscience (e.g., mercy-killing) would not experience something of this kind, or at least could not truly be certain about its goodness. 81 Jay Newman (“Cardinal Newman’s Attack,” 204) compares this with G. E. Moore’s intuition. Perhaps more plausibly, J. Gaffney compares the perception of Newman’s conscience with the theory of M. Scheler, who holds in On the eternal in Man that, just like sense perception, the voice of conscience implies (without inference) an external source of information, and that the soul starts to disintegrate if it tries to understand itself as its source; cf. James Gaffney, “Newman on the Common Roots of Morality and Religion,” Journal of Religious Ethics 16 (1988): 143–59, at 157f. Gerard Casey, following J. Ferreira, holds that formal, informal, and natural inference form a continuum (albeit logically distinct from each other), where natural inference has as its limit case intuition. This limit case would apply to conscience as a form of intuition; Natural Reason, 57–71. Intuition in turn would be the same as simple assent (ibid., 59), even though Newman initially would like to restrict intuition to internal experiences (ibid., 66f., 129f.). I am not sure that Ferreira pays due regard to the volitional elements and the crucial discontinuities between inference and assent. The Grammar of Assent and Contemporary Skepticism 1107 before someone,82 that is, the perception of the voice of an ultimate judge (“judicial faculty”).83 It is only this latter aspect which enjoys the certitude of a natural instinct. It is indeed what we find endorsed semper ubique et ab omnibus (110) and for Newman it implies the very existence of God;84 it is “our great internal teacher of religion” (304) and the root of all natural religion, especially in its universal institutions of atonement and 82 For Newman, aesthetical theories of the moral sense (Shaftesbury) or the “reli- gion of civilization” and the intellect (apparently the Enlightenment as well as Greek mythology) miss this point; they are missing the element of divine command and promulgation and our corresponding obedience (307f.). I think one would also miss this aspect if one simply equates Newman’s distinction with Aquinas’s between synderesis and conscientia, as J. Splett is inclined to do; Jörg Splett, “Gewissen und Glaubensbegründung bei John Henry Newman,” in John Henry Newman, Vortragsreihe an der Universität Eichstätt, ed. Alfred Gläßer (Eichstätt: Franz-Sales-Verlag, 1991), 33–50, at 37f. (on aesthetical theories) and 35f. An additional obligatory force—beyond a mere “moral sense,” which is known from our own nature—might be a reflection of the fact that this very nature is contingent: natural law does not hold merely because of our nature’s metaphysical necessity and dignity; rather, our nature could have been otherwise; it is given to us by the creator. By choosing to create our nature as it is, the creator by that very act promulgates the law that he speaks in our conscience. With that, he is a “legis-creator” rather than a “legis-lator”; cf. also Sillem, “Cardinal Newman’s Grammar of Assent,” 399. 83 It might be worth quoting his own famous words: “The rule and measure of duty is not utility, nor expedience, nor the happiness of the greatest number, nor State convenience, nor fitness, order, and the pulchrum. Conscience is not a long-sighted selfishness, nor a desire to be consistent with oneself; but it is a messenger from Him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by His representatives. Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ, a prophet in its informations, a monarch in its peremptoriness, a priest in its blessings and anathemas, and, even though the eternal priesthood throughout the Church could cease to be, in it the sacerdotal principle would remain and would have a sway.” “A Letter Addressed to the Duke of Norfolk on Occasion of Mr. Gladstone’s Recent Expostulation,” in Newman, Certain Difficulties, ch.V, 248f. 84 Here we would infer an is from an ought, namely the fact of God’s existence from finding ourselves under an obligation. It also tells us what God is (304); e.g., he is a person, because we experience shame only before a person, not before things or animals. John Hick thinks that Newman uses the illative sense to prove the existence of God and consequently he accuses Newman of a type fallacy in the application of the illative sense to non-observables (Hick, Faith and Knowledge, 90); but Hick completely omits the discussion of conscience in Newman, which is his true access to the existence of God. The implied proof for the existence of God, however, is not so much an argument or inference, but a perception; Casey, Natural Reason, 57–71. Similarly, Newman understands his own version of the Cogito (sentio ergo sum) as immediate; the ergo is no inference (ibid., 95f.).This immediacy will also not allow cultural projections to interfere in conscience. It can be compared to a “basic 1108 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. sacrifice (305f., 315f.).85 Variations in ethical judgment belong to the “critical faculty” alone, and they are the result of a malformation of conscience. In children, on the other hand, the voice of conscience is most clear, even wordlessly, and it is closer to them than the voice of their parents (104f.).86 Only later the normative and natural working of conscience becomes distorted by our wrong responses, bad friends, temptations, and neglects (98–110).87 belief ” in the sense of Plantinga; Casey, Natural Reason, 132-–42. One finds the same parallel in Mark Wynn, who does, however deny the immediacy of this “perception”; Wynn, “The Relationship of Religion and Ethics: A Comparison of Newman and Contemporary Philosophy of Religion,” Heythrop Journal 46 (2005): 435–49, at 436f. One might need to distinguish the hearing of the voice of conscience from the sight of perception. Neither conscience nor illative sense are supernatural and extraordinary, but normal; in this, Newman’s appeal to inner experience would be different from that of Jonathan Edwards; cf. Wainwright, Reason and the Heart, 82. 85 Equally universal are: prayer, especially the intercessory prayer of particular holy individuals; the notion of miracles and providence; and the idea of revelation (312–17). Newman hints at “endemic traditions which have their first origin in a paradisiacal illumination” (317), and suggests that there was a subsequent fall into polytheism (336). This appeal to an original historical “illumination” might not be so necessary if the universality is indeed rooted in conscience. This is a tension in Newman. 86 Which would mean that conscience (and the idea of God) cannot be, as Mackie suggests, the result of educational conditioning or introjection; cf. J. L. Mackie: The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 105f. There would be no obligation to invest matters of conscience with the dignity of something unconditional (as we do in conscience clauses and in respecting conscientious objection), if it is just the product of cultural conditioning (Splett, “Gewissen und Glaubensbegründung,” 46). Conscience is not a product; it is rather what we begin with. That is why a child can have a very clear view of his parents being ethically wrong. (An interesting corollary is that, pace Dawkins, it would be child abuse, not to nourish the voice of God in a child. It would be a malformation of its nature— maybe even more so than it would be to deprive it of its own mother.) Conscience is what we begin with, because it is a faculty that evaluates all external input and is its first judge; it is closer to us than any other faculty (“Conscience is nearer to me than any other means of knowledge” [304]), including the senses that give us the external input (and therefore the material for the illative sense!); presumably, this is also why God can ask us to disbelieve our senses (e.g., after the transubstantiation); it is also the reason why cosmological proofs or those from design presuppose trusting God’s voice in them; Fey, Faith and Doubt, 21. 87 The “bell” of conscience will then ring wrongly (190f.). Obedience makes it ring more clearly (304). Newman would probably not want to accuse atheists like his friend W. Froude of immorality; but positively speaking, not numbing one’s conscience but following it will eventually lead to recognizing the voice of God; Sillem, “Cardinal Newman’s Grammar of Assent,” 395. The Grammar of Assent and Contemporary Skepticism 1109 If this is the source of natural religion: the perception of God as judge, and a sense of our personal failure, as we face God’s wrath,88 then the one true revealed religion will respond to this experience of our conscience. Grace builds on nature (302f.) in such a way that it responds to our fallen nature by an act of vicarious atonement.89 Thus Newman’s advance towards God does not proceed by way of cosmological proofs for the existence of God. For him (not unlike Kierkegaard), these are too speculative, theoretical, and detached.90 We do not come to know God unless we employ our desires, our interests, our practical reason and conscience, and indeed our very fear (331). Revelation itself is a response, not to a desiderium naturale videndi deum, but to our bad conscience.91 Contemporary popular attempts to explain the possibility of salvation for nonChristians (or for those who did not know Christ) frequently adduce the possibility that they, too, can perform good works—be it by anonymous grace or some other means. Newman’s theory might allow for a much less Pelagian answer: pagans can rather be saved by their bad conscience, because it makes them aware of their need for a savior. Just like the patriarchs of the Old Testament, they can be saved by an act of hope and faith in such a savior. And perhaps it is not so much sin that gets in the way of salvation, but self-righteousness. If conscience is the preparation for the Gospel, then not everything in pagan religion needs to be false. As a natural and normative faculty, its 88 “. . . the aspect under which Almighty God is presented to us by Nature, is (to use a figure) of One who is angry with us, and threatens evil” (305). Fear is the first aspect of religion, and without it there is no genuine religion (311) and “ . . . where conscience is, fear must be” (331). 89 “Revelation begins where Natural Religion fails. The Religion of Nature is a mere inchoation, and needs a complement,—it can have but one complement, and that very complement is Christianity. Natural Religion is based upon the sense of sin; it recognizes the disease, but it cannot find, it does but look out for the remedy” (375). “It is the Image of Him who fulfils the one great need of human nature, the Healer of its wounds, the Physician of the soul, this Image it is which both creates faith, and then rewards it” (359). 90 Nevertheless, he does indicate a possible proof for the existence of God from causality and the mathematical laws of nature. In spite of his empiricist background, his understanding of causality is deep, metaphysical, and Aristotelian: e.g., unlike Hume he understands that regularity implies final, not efficient causality (70–75). He also understands that Bacon abandoned final causes for the sake of efficient causes because he was interested in power and control (290). 91 Positively, it might be a desire for knowledge of an undistorted law, too: “ . . . a thirst, an impatience, for the knowledge of that Unseen Lord, and Governor, and Judge, who as yet speaks to them only secretly, who whispers in their hearts, who tells them something, but not nearly so much as they wish and as they need.” Newman, Sermons Preached On Various Occasions, V, 66f. 1110 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. pronouncements ut in pluribus will provide a guide for truth and certitude.92 Hence quod semper ubique et ab omnibus is a criterion not only for the proper development of dogma93 but even for interreligious dialogue; it creates an “intercommunion of religions” (201). Newman can concede that a Protestant or a Muslim might have genuine certitude and real assent with regard to those things that he shares in common with a Catholic.94 A conversion does not imply renouncing this certitude, but deepening it and broadening it to other aspects (198).95 Although this is its telos, certitude does not require that something be universally received in fact (i.e., everybody becoming Catholic); on the other hand, the reverse is true: that something is universally received does imply certitude (195f.).96 92 “Nor is it a fair objection to this argument, to say that such prayers and rites as have obtained in various places and times, are in their character, object, and scope inconsistent with each other; because their contrarieties do not come into the idea of religion, as such, at all, and the very fact of their discordance destroys their right to be taken into account, so far as they are discordant; for what is not universal has no claim to be considered natural, right, or of divine origin” (313f.). Nor can it contradict our ethical judgment (324; 326); he exemplified this in a later novel “Callista.” Cf. Gaffney, “Newman on the Common Roots,” 151–55. 93 “. . . we have a direct and conscious knowledge of our Maker, His attributes, His providences, acts, works, and will; and, beyond this knowledge lies the large domain of theology, metaphysics, and ethics, on which it is not allowed to us to advance beyond probabilities, or to attain to more than an opinion” (194). For the role of theology and the possibility of our real and notional assent to the mysteries of the Trinity, see 55–59. 94 Interestingly, Newman acknowledges that beliefs are intricately related to a systematic whole, and can take on different “shades and tints” in different wholes; this would resonate with G. Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic approach (196f.; 202); however, true to his principles, at the end assent is absolute, and not dependent on inferential relationships of the whole: “That systematized whole is the object of notional assent, and its propositions, one by one, are the objects of real” (i.e., assent) (119f.). 95 “And thus it is conceivable that a man might travel in his religious profession all the way from heathenism to Catholicity, through Mahometanism, Judaism, Unitarianism, Protestantism, and Anglicanism, without any one certitude lost, but with a continual accumulation of truths, which claimed from him and elicited in his intellect fresh and fresh certitudes” (202).The final revelation is the hermeneutical key that triggers our illative sense, which finally understands the previous salvation history and Old Testament prophecy (342–45). 96 “The Catholic Church then, though not universally acknowledged, may without inconsistency claim to teach the primary truths of religion, just as modern science, though but partially received, claims to teach the great principles and laws which are the foundation of secular knowledge, and that with a significance to which no other religious system can pretend, because it is its very profession to speak to all mankind, and its very badge to be ever making converts all over the The Grammar of Assent and Contemporary Skepticism 1111 This certitude is the ruling principle of the life of a Christian, and without it Christianity would degenerate into sentimentalism (192f.). “Christian earnestness may be ruled by the world to be a perverseness or a delusion; but, as long as it exists, it will presuppose certitude as the very life which is to animate it” (193). Certitude is the natural and supernatural actualization of the telos of human nature,97 not just in its knowing faculties, but also in practice: conscience is for the sake of practice, and it is fulfilled in sacrifice—which is “certitude under another name” (193). VII Both conscience and the illative sense provide us with certitudes; one with regard to the ultimate realities, the other with regard to more ordinary matters. How are they related? I would suggest that conscience is the more profound and moving force and stands behind the illative sense as well, for conscience has some of the features of the illative sense, and more explicitly. It opens the ultimate horizon under which the illative sense operates on concrete matters.98 It is a first principle that is universal and personal at once. As a principle of practical decision it applies the universal to the particular; it provides something akin to a real assent, which does not follow from the premises in a simple logical algorithm. It implies activity and spontaneity of the mind, rather than the passive mechanical operations of logic. It operates with the vividness of an image, at least in children (105). It more poignantly articulates the teleology and normativity of our nature, as an explicit “ought” or duty.99 It makes clear that we have the right and the duty to follow the epistemological implications of our natural faculties as well, earth, whereas other religions are more or less variable in their teaching, tolerant of each other, and local, and professedly local, in their habitat and character” (196). 97 Regarding the relationship between the natural and the supernatural actualization, Newman tries to avoid both rationalism and fideism; the illative sense also serves as a third way between mere degrees of assent in rationalistic Protestantism, and a faith without reason in the Protestantism of the “enthusiasts,” as Newman states the problem in 1848; beginning with the infallibility of the Church would also be circular. Jay Newman, The Mental Philosophy, 12. 98 It is important to notice that the two are initially in a sense in conflict: apparently, Newman did not develop the illative sense for the sake of apologetics; rather, it developed in the context of his parallel study of modern mathematical and experimental physics and Stoic and Aristotelian logic and epistemology. Until the early 1820s he even considered leaving the Church, because of arising incompatibilities. Cf. Willam, Die Erkenntnislehre, 46ff., 61f. 99 It might be worth pointing out that Locke, too, articulates his epistemology of assent along the lines of an “ethics of belief ” (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV, 15, 5). Bishop Butler, too, puts conscience at the top of all the faculties, including the cognitive ones. 1112 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. and that here, too, ought implies can. For science does not provide the guidance that we need for decisions and commitments, yet duty calls for decisions here and now (ars longa, vita brevis). This lack of scientific guidance in our decisions, however, does not force us into a mere “will to believe” (W. James),100 but allows us the responsible use of our illative sense. Finally, conscience also places our epistemological endeavors in the context of a personal relationship, cor ad cor. Epistemology might not need theological presuppositions, but it is certainly confirmed by them: conscience is about our responsibility and response to the voice of the One who made us and gave us our nature; it will therefore put us under the duty to follow the nature of our mind. But it will also give us the right to trust in its workings, for again: ought implies can.Yet all of this is rooted in a personal relationship. In our knowledge of things we have communion with what we know. But our communion with things is affirmed and embraced in an even deeper communion with the One who made us. Nobody begins a personal relationship with a hermeneutics of suspicion or universal doubt. Putting a friendship to the test is ipso facto the end of that friendship. But the same can be said for knowledge. For Newman, science is more open to doubt than a friendship, because science is about things. But where knowledge of persons and trust in friends is involved, rejecting doubts about a friend’s conduct becomes even an obligation. Still, there might be a point at which evidence can convince us that a friend has become guilty. In the case of God, however, who gives us our faculties, this is not possible. God is not fickle, and if we could find him guilty, he would not be God. Nor, without God, could there even be any notion of guilt or responsibility to begin with.101 This precondition of our knowledge becomes crucial when we consider our belief in revelation, for revelation exceeds the expectations of our natu100 F. C. S. Schiller saw James’s pragmatism merely as a wider application of Newman. Jay Newman, The Mental Philosophy, 28. But W. James’s pragmatism might sound rather frivolous compared to Newman, who puts this in an ethical context; on the other hand, Newman might be less harsh or severe than Kierkegaard’s demand for a leap of faith. D. Burrell seems to read Newman as a pragmatist (identification of objects through religious practice); David Burrell, “Verification in Matters Religious,” in Meaning,Truth, and God, ed. Leroy Rouner (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 39f., 48. M. Wynn connects Newman’s “passional” commitments with modern studies in emotions and how they function in focusing our attention between our wide range of sense data and our lack of intellectual knowledge; Wynn, “The Relationship,” 438–43. 101 For this reason I disagree with J. Ferreira’s attempt to equate what Newman says about finite friends with what he says about God. Ferreira, Doubt and Religious Commitment, 126, 144. The Grammar of Assent and Contemporary Skepticism 1113 ral faculties.102 We cannot believe without a basic trust in God. This trust embraces all the particular truths at once, as revealed by God; they do therefore form one integral deposit of faith, which is held together by the witness of the one, simple, and indivisible God. This is why we cannot be “Cafeteria Catholics.” We cannot pick and choose among the particulars without losing the whole; we lose the basic trust and with this God’s supernatural gift of faith.103 Furthermore, we cannot know and understand everything in our faith at once, that is, with the same simplicity with which God knows it.We have to entrust our faith to a larger whole than our own mind. The true subject of faith is the Church.104 And since it is the Church that articulates and embodies this whole, the infallibility of the Church is for Newman “the 102 Although our natural conscience will also tell us that it is insufficient and dark- ened and in need of revelation, teaching, and external authority. 103 “. . . for we are not left at liberty to pick and choose out of its contents accord- ing to our judgment, but must receive it all, as we find it, if we accept it at all. It is a religion in addition to the religion of nature; and as nature has an intrinsic claim upon us to be obeyed and used, so what is over and above nature, or supernatural, must also bring with it valid testimonials of its right to demand our homage” (302). That does not exclude that our faith is personal (“. . . in these provinces of inquiry egotism is true modesty. In religious inquiry each of us can speak only for himself, and for himself he has a right to speak. His own experiences are enough for himself, but he cannot speak for others . . .” [300]). Though this faith is therefore personal, it is still not our whim or choice; it is still a personal faith in something from which we cannot pick and choose; nor is its truth merely relative to us. And though personal, it is not a mere feeling or general trust, but it terminates at a propositional content—which does not seem to find the agreement of J. Hick (Faith and Knowledge, 90) and M. Moleski, S.J. (cf. Kroger, “Can Theology Be Tacit?” 25). 104 Newman’s starting point from the “original impression,” or, as he says later, “idea” of God might set him up for modernist misunderstandings; but, as A. Dulles points out, this experience of God is not immediate and needs linguistic mediation; it rather provides the instinctive trust with which we embrace the true external revelation; A. Dulles, “From Image to Truth,” 255f., 260f. and 266f. Put in these terms, it sounds reminiscent of early Jesuit theories of a “discerniculum experimentale” as developed by A. Perez, S.J. at the Collegio Romano in the early seventeenth century; cf. T. Ramelow, Gott, Freiheit, Weltenwahl (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997), 38–41. Newman seems to have been familiar with some of these older theories, since he quotes from Suarez and Lugo; A. Dulles, “From Image to Truth;” 264. The antecedent natural motiva credibilitatis could be understood as based on the illative sense, whereas the supernatural assent of faith would operate through Newman’s notion of conscience. This assent would also involve an act of the will and it includes the very fact of revelation in its material object, as J. Connolly points out against J. Ferreira; John Connolly, “Newman on Faith and Divine Faith: Clarifying Some Ambiguities,” Horizons 23 (1996): 261–80, at 1114 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. fundamental dogma of the Catholic religion.” Accordingly, we give the assent of our “implicit” and inclusive faith not only to the Church’s present, but also to her future pronouncements (129–30). Nothing could be more contrary to modern skepticism. Certitudes of this magnitude, including in relation to innerworldly agencies, will seem outrageous. But with Newman we might understand that no certainties can be had without trust—trust in our nature and trust in the One who made it. And this might just confirm that the modern quest for certainty and its inevitable corollary of skeptical despair still gets its clue from a certainty that can only be held by faith. The modern age has misplaced its quest; it is seeking certainty in the wrong way in the wrong place. N&V 267 and 277–80. Ferreira, on the other hand, tries to streamline natural and supernatural assent, so as to open them both to fallibility and revisability; Ferreira, Doubt and Religious Commitment, 135–41. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2013): 1115–35 1115 Premotion, Holiness, and Pope Benedict XIII (1724–30): Some Historical Retrospects on Veritatis Splendor ROMANUS C ESSARIO, O.P. St. John’s Seminary Brighton, MA Christian morality consists, in the simplicity of the Gospel, in following Jesus Christ, in abandoning oneself to him, in letting oneself be transformed by his grace and renewed by his mercy, gifts which come to us in the living communion of his Church. —Veritatis Splendor, §119 Introduction D OING THEOLOGY, as Father Matthew Lamb never tires of reminding us, requires conversion of life. The “Conversion Principle” (to give it a name) finds verification within the pages of the New Testament. Saint Paul identifies mature Christian witness as “speaking the truth in love” (Eph 4:15). More proximately, we find the principle brilliantly illuminated in the life of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (†1153). One of his best known modern interpreters, Dom Jean Leclercq, describes succinctly how Saint Bernard envisioned the “Conversion Principle” at work in those who take up the burden of theology: “Just as there is no theology without moral life and asceticism, so there is no theology without prayer.”1 One indeed may inquire why, today, so many theologians ignore the timehonored “Conversion Principle.” After all, the practice it stipulates has A version of this essay was delivered at a conference titled “Living Morally and Intelligently in the Light of Christ’s Eternal Glory,” Ave Maria University, Ave Maria, Florida, 25–26 January 2013. 1 Jean Leclercq, O.S.B., The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catherine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1974), 7. 1116 Romanus Cessario, O.P. guided theologians from Justin Martyr (†165) to Father GarrigouLagrange (†1964).2 No easy answer to this question exists. One clue to the answer runs something like this: theologians no longer observe the “Conversion Principle” because they have grown tired of seeking conversion. Why would someone grow tired of prayer, asceticism, and, in some cases, aspects of the moral life? The answer may lie in the manner in which such persons attempt prayer, asceticism (which may include the discipline of study), and a life of virtue.3 Those who seek to sustain themselves spiritually by relying on their own energies always grow weary of conversion. Sound Catholic theology, such as one finds set forth in the 1993 Encyclical Letter of Blessed John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, holds out a quite different approach to persevering in conversion of life.4 I will 2 For information on Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., see his The One God: A Commentary on the First Part of St. Thomas’ Theological Summa (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder Book Co., 1943), 26–37: “When the priest’s interior life is one of great and solid piety, his theology is always more rigorous. After this theologian has made the descent from faith for the purpose of acquiring theological knowledge by the discussion of particular questions, he desires to return to the source, namely, to ascend from the theological knowledge thus acquired by the discussion of particular questions to the lofty peak of faith.The theologian is like a man who is born on the top of a mountain, for instance, Monte Cassino, and who afterward descends into the valley to acquire an accurate knowledge of individual things. Finally this man wishes to return to his lofty abode, that he may contemplate the whole valley from on high and in a single glance” (35). No doubt the life and example of St. Thomas Aquinas inspired this beautiful image to describe the theologian. Garrigou-Lagrange earlier notes: “There is often too great a separation between study and the interior life; we do not find sufficiently observed, that beautiful gradation spoken of by St. Benedict which consists in: reading, cogitation, study, meditation, prayer and contemplation. St.Thomas, who received his first education from the Benedictines, retained this wonderful gradation when speaking of the contemplative life” (31). The author’s comparison of the theologian on the mountain, who descends into the valley and returns to the mountain, puts one in mind Aquinas’s comparison in Summa theologiae I, q. 14, a. 13, ad 3 regarding God’s eternity versus time. 3 For the ascetical character of study, see Garrigou-Lagrange, The One God: “Our interior life is in many ways benefitted by good study; and the choicest fruit of penance is to be found in the arduousness of study. It is a fruit much more precious than the natural pleasure to be found in study that may consist in intellectual labor not sufficiently sanctified or directed to God. In diligent study that is commanded by charity, we find pre-eminently verified the common saying: If the roots of knowledge are bitter, its fruits are the sweetest and best. We are not considering here the knowledge that inflates, but that which, under the influence of charity and of the virtue of studiousness, is truly upbuilding” (33). 4 See the 1993 Encyclical Letter of the Supreme Pontiff Pope John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor Regarding Certain Fundamental Questions of the Church’s Moral Teaching. Premotion, Holiness, and Pope Benedict XIII 1117 discuss this approach to holiness by talking about “Premotion, Holiness, and Pope Benedict XIII.” Put simply, this essay to mark the twentieth anniversary of the abovementioned encyclical discusses how God makes us saints. In other words, I want to explicate how we can sustain the demands of Christian life and witness, and so, whether we do theology or not, merit the reward of everlasting life. The mention of the eighteenth-century Pope Benedict, Pietro Francesco Orsini (1649–1730), signals that I take up the discussion of premotive holiness within the context of the post-Reformation debates on human freedom and divine grace, whose written records fill volumes. This Dominican Pope’s reign (29 May 1724–21 February 1730) witnessed in 1728 the submission by the Archbishop of Paris to the last of the major antiJansenist papal condemnations, the 1713 bull Unigenitus.This prelate, Cardinal Louis-Antoine de Noailles (1651–1729), remained deeply attached to the ancient prerogatives of the Church in France.5 Benedict XIII’s reign was important for another reason. Throughout the high period of the Jansenist struggles, Dominicans were on guard to ensure that the papal condemnations of Jansenist distortions were not interpreted as extending to Thomist theses about grace and freedom. Benedict XIII approved these efforts of his Dominican brethren. The precious clarifications that the defenders of Thomist orthodoxy produced also shaped what—for lack of a better expression—I refer to as the “spirituality” of physical premotion. We are talking about the blueprint for salvation. Recently, Father Robert Barron and Professor Ralph Martin exchanged views about the divine plan for salvation.6 The different viewpoints of these two Catholic thinkers reveal that theologians and priests still struggle to discover the right way to encourage people toward conversion. The present essay does not address directly the question,“Will Many Be Saved?” Rather, I hope to indicate how the Thomist doctrine of physical premotion works in conjunction with a teleology of beatitude, which supplies the theoretical backbone for Veritatis Splendor.7 At the same time, it goes without saying that those who observe the “spirituality” of physical premotion discover that the question “Will Many Be Saved?” need not trouble them. To be sure, the question of who will be saved vexed the Jansenists. One of 5 Jansenism and Unigenitus in particular have been the object of many books by the renowned scholar Lucien Ceyssens, O.F.M. For further information on the life and work of Ceyssens, see Jörgen Vijgen, “Lucien Ceyssens OFM,” Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon 24 (2005): 443–45. 6 See the following web pages for details: www.catholicnewsagency.com/ column.php?n=2383; www.renewalministries.net/wordpress/?p=348. 7 For an introduction to “premotion,” see note 43, infra. 1118 Romanus Cessario, O.P. their number described Father Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit missionary to China, as a “faithful servant of the Devil, who fortified his dominion over the infidels instead of destroying it.”8 Today, few Christians, I suppose, would locate the massa damnata in China. Getting salvation right, however, remains important. Until Catholics discover how the dynamics between divine grace and human freedom work both according to God’s plan and unto the sanctification of the human person, one may not, I submit, expect a worldwide renewal of Catholic theology. Father Lamb is correct: doing theology requires conversion of life, or as Veritatis Splendor puts it,“a continuous conversion to what is true and to what is good.”9 Premotion The late Dominican historian Father Guy Bedouelle published, among his last books in English, a small volume titled The Reform of Catholicism, 1480–1620.10 With some approximation, the dates point, respectively, to the coming-of-age of Girolamo Savanarola, O.P. (1452–98) and to the death of Saint Francis DeSales (1622). As the title indicates, Father Bedouelle prefers to describe the events that surround the Council of Trent as exercises in reform instead of reaction. He eases away from presenting the post-Tridentine period as a time of Counter-Reformation. What is more important, Bedouelle argues that the unquestionable success of the Tridentine reforms derives not from the Council’s dogmatic definitions and decrees alone, but from “the joint, complementary consideration and articulation of the dogmatic and disciplinary decrees.”11 In other words, the sixteenth-century Council’s defense of Catholic doctrine, drawn mainly from the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas, proceeded both to inform and to shape the Catholic world. This renewal, however, occurred under the impulsion of the disciplinary reforms, which themselves found enthusiastic supporters in saintly figures like Charles Borromeo (†1584), Pope Pius V (†1572), Teresa of Avila (†1582), Robert Bellarmine (†1621), and Francis DeSales (†1622). Make no mistake. Father Bedouelle does not undervalue the theological achievement of the Council of Trent. “If the humanists—beginning with Erasmus—,” he writes, “had had their way, the different Churches would have been able to be reconciled and to agree on a minimalist Credo, 8 See J. H. Crehan, “Jansenism,” in A Catholic Dictionary of Theology (1971), 3:147. 9 Veritatis Splendor, §64. 10 Father Guy Bedouelle, The Reform of Catholicism, 1480–1620, trans. James K. Farge (Toronto: PIMS, 2008). 11 Ibid., 12. Premotion, Holiness, and Pope Benedict XIII 1119 a via media independent of the subtleties of scholastic theology.”12 Anyone who casts a glance onto the dogmatic decrees of the Council of Trent realizes that the Fathers do not choose the path of compromise, accommodation, and false irenicism. Trent rather enacted ante nomen the principle of reform and continuity that, in our own day, Pope Benedict XVI stipulated for the Church’s proper reading of the documents of the Second Vatican Council.13 Still, as Bedouelle goes on to observe, “despite its will and its attempts to be prudent, the Council of Trent issued many rather dense texts which, inevitably open to interpretation, already contained, from the very time they were approved, the seeds of future quarrels.”14 Within twenty years of the close of the Council of Trent, one such quarrel arose in Spain when, in the school year 1581–82, at Salamanca, a now celebrated Dominican, Domingo Bañez (1528–1604), took issue with certain theses on grace and freedom advanced by a Jesuit theologian, Father Prudencio de Montemaior (†1599). As the name of the papal commission established to resolve the disputes that subsequently developed suggests, the Congregatio de Auxiliis debate turns on the question of how to interpret human freedom within the context of the divine helps (auxilia) that make choosing unto salvation possible. Father Bedouelle observes that “the quarrel de auxiliis between Dominicans and Jesuits, which was not resolved but only postponed by a 1607 papal order that chose neither side, was only the prelude to the even greater theological debates between Catholics of the seventeenth century.”15 He points of course to the Jansenist controversies that found their most eminent expressions in the elegant, controlled aesthetic developed by certain great figures of French classicism: Blaise Pascal (1623–62), Jean-Baptiste Molière (1622–77), Jean Racine (1639–99), Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon (1651–1715). As the diverse métiers of these eminent personages suggest, “Jansenism was a complex phenomenon with a long gestation.”16 No attempt to analyze completely the “complex phenomenon” can be undertaken at this juncture in the exposition. Suffice it to remark that Jansenism arose in reaction to the ethos that the Jesuit thinker and writer Luis de Molina (1535–1600) established by his innovative accounts of the interplay between human freedom and divine grace. Molina’s Concordia, 12 Ibid., 135. 13 For further explanation, see Vatican II: Renewal within Tradition, ed. Matthew L. Lamb and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 14 Bedouelle, Reform, 135. 15 Ibid., 136. 16 Thomas O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, 1600–70: Religion and Politics in Flanders, France, Ireland, and Rome (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008), 20. 1120 Romanus Cessario, O.P. first published in Lisbon in 1588—three years after the birth of Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638), from whom Jansenism takes its name—supplied the anthropological and psychological supports for the moral theology that Molina’s Jesuit confrères had been developing since the middle of the sixteenth century.17 Emblematic of the new moral theology is the Jesuit father whom Saint Alphonsus Ligouri praised as a “moderate Probabiliorist,” Juan Azor (1535–1603), who started his teaching in 1568.18 Azor’s three-volume manual of moral theology was published in Rome from 1600 to 1611 under the title Institutiones Moralium, in quibus universae quaestiones ad conscientiam recte aut prave factorum pertinentes breviter tractantur. Juan Azor’s professional career as a moral theologian represents the start of the innovative moral systems that dominated the post-Tridentine period.What is important to remember about the period of post-Tridentine casuistry that directed Catholic life for nearly 400 years is easy to summarize.19 First, the practice of this case-based moral analysis came to a screeching (though unpublicized) end about fifty years ago. Second, one finds the replacement model for the casuist categories in Veritatis Splendor, whose twentieth anniversary we commemorated in 2013 on the feast of the Transfiguration (6 August).20 When I refer to a Molinist ethos, I mean the typically modern temptation to safeguard the autonomy of human freedom by detaching it from the divine motion that “moves” all created things that exist.21 As the Book of Wisdom sets it forth: “For Wisdom is mobile beyond all motion, and she penetrates and pervades all things by reason of her purity” (Wis 7:24). In his Summa theologiae, Saint Thomas Aquinas explains how the divine wisdom “is mobile” without compromising God’s unchangeable17 Elsewhere I argue that Molinism flows naturally, if one will, from the form of life that the Jesuits undertook, and from the way in which they separated religious and professional occupations. See my “Molina and Aquinas,” Brill’s Companion to Molina, ed. Matthias Kaufmann and Alexander Aichele (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 18 See Arthur McCaffray, “Juan Azor,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 2 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907). For further background information on the Jesuit moralist, see A. F. Dziuba, “Juan Azor, S.J., teólogo moralista del siglo XVI–XVII,” Archivo Teológico Granadino 59 (1996): 145–55. 19 One may conveniently mark the span from 1568 to 1968, the publication of the encyclical letter Humanae Vitae, as the years of casuist moral theology. 20 For my remarks on the tenth anniversary, see “Walk According to the Light: An Illustration from North America,” in Camminare nella Luce. Prospettive della teologia morale a partire da ‘Veritatis splendor,’ ” ed. Livio Melina and José Noriega (Rome: Lateran University Press, 2004), 401–7. 21 Veritatis Splendor observes: “The modern concern for the claims of autonomy has not failed to exercise an influence also in the sphere of Catholic moral theology” (36). Premotion, Holiness, and Pope Benedict XIII 1121 ness: “To call wisdom mobile,” he writes, “is a metaphorical way of saying that wisdom spreads its own likeness throughout the length and breadth of things. For nothing can exist except it be a sort of reflection (imitationem) deriving from God’s wisdom as from its primary operative and formal cause; just as works of handicraft derive from craftsmanship. . . . It is as though we talked of the sun sallying forth on the earth when lightrays touched earth.”22 To adapt this “sun metaphor” to the Jesuit-sponsored ethos, Luis de Molina considered it necessary to introduce an eclipse of the sun when rendering an account of the concordance between the divine motion and the human will. The position represents a typically modern ethos inasmuch as his followers, when giving an account of the interplay between divine grace and human freedom, deem this eclipse of the divine sun’s rays a non-negotiable element in the equation. How else to preserve, they ask, what moderns construe as the autonomy of human freedom? Molina’s critics—at the start, mainly Dominicans—made another analysis. They found Molina’s schema to embody a recrudescence of ancient errors about divine grace and human freedom that imposed the burden of growing holy squarely on the putative good will of the human creature. Leszek Kolakowski, in his book God Owes Us Nothing, provides a more precise identification. Molina’s critics found his position a form of “brazen, modern Pelagianism.”23 Pope Paul V forbade Jesuits and Dominicans from speaking “more severe words” about each other,24 so I leave things with Kolakowski’s analysis. Veritatis Splendor addresses mistakes that moderns still make about human freedom. The encyclical puts it simply: “the autonomy of reason cannot mean that reason itself creates values and moral norms.Were this autonomy to imply a denial of the participation of the practical reason in the wisdom of the divine Creator and Lawgiver, or were it to suggest a freedom which creates moral norms, on the basis of historical contingencies or the diversity of societies and cultures, this sort of alleged autonomy would contradict the Church’s teaching on the truth about man.”25 It should be noted that the Pope says that a wrong understanding of autonomy results from separating the human creature from the divine wisdom. The participation of the practical reason in the divine wisdom, which 22 ST I, q. 9, a. 2, ad 2. 23 Leszek Kolakowski, God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal’s Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 7. 24 Denzinger-Schönmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum Definitionum et Declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, ed. XXXVI (DS), 1997: “Quin optat etiam, ut verbis asperioribus amaritiem animi significantibus invicem abstineant.” 25 Veritatis Splendor, §40. 1122 Romanus Cessario, O.P. participation does not suffer rupture even in the sinner, forms the basis for premotive holiness. For the reason I mentioned above, a Dominican may not claim that this papal text puts the final nail in the coffin of sixteenth-century Molinism. Still, this twentieth-century magisterial text makes it clear that the sun of the divine wisdom suffers no eclipse when it informs the human conscience about how to act.The encyclical, moreover, expresses its pleasure with the theological practice of referring to human freedom as a “participated theonomy, since,” as the Pope insists, “man’s free obedience to God’s law effectively implies that human reason and human will participate in God’s wisdom and providence.”26 The post–Vatican II papal magisterium differs in its expression from that of the early modern period. As Father Bedouelle has reminded us, the postTridentine popes ruled largely through disciplinary canons, which for the most part, as Denzinger-Schönmetzer amply illustrates, were confined to correcting errors. Recent popes have provided constructive teaching to support their condemnations.27 26 Veritatis Splendor, §41. For a more extended examination of the importance of theonomy in Christian life and thought, see the first chapter of Steven A. Long’s book, Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), titled “On the Loss, and the Recovery, of Nature as a Theonomic Principle: Reflections on the Nature/Grace Controversy” (10–51). This is a theme I also explore in my Introduction to Moral Theology (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 215–18 (rev. ed. 206–8). 27 For this constructive teaching, popes often relied on St. Thomas Aquinas. See Pope John Paul II, who cites the eighteenth-century pope Benedict XIV, to the participants in the 9th International Thomistic Conference on September 29, 1990: “Quanto alla sua funzione di guida negli studi, la Chiesa, nel ribadirla, ha preferito far leva, più che su direttive di indole giuridica, sulla maturità e saggezza di coloro che intendono accostarsi alla parola di Dio con sincero desiderio di scoprire e conoscere sempre più a fondo il suo contenuto, comunicarlo agli altri, specialmente ai giovani affidati al loro insegnamento. A questo proposito, è bene ricordare un aspetto del metodo e del comportamento di san Tommaso, messo in risalto dal mio predecessore Benedetto XIV, quando, nella costituzione apostolica Sollicita ac provida del 10 luglio 1753, scriveva che ‘il Principe Angelico delle Scuole . . . ha necessariamente urtato le opinioni dei filosofi e dei teologi, che egli era spinto a confutare in nome della verità, ma ciò che completa mirabilmente i meriti di un sì grande dottore è che non lo si è mai visto disprezzare, ferire o umiliare alcun avversario, ma al contrario li ha trattati tutti con molta bontà e rispetto. In effetti, se le loro parole contenevano qualcosa di duro, di ambiguo, di oscuro, egli l’addolciva e spiegava con una interpretazione indulgente e benevola. Che se la causa della religione e della fede gli imponeva di respingere le loro idee, egli lo faceva con una tale modestia che lo rendeva non meno degno di elogio nel separarsi da essi che nell’affermare la verità cattolica. Coloro che si gloriano di ricorrere a un maestro così eminente—e noi ci rallegriamo che siano molto numerosi, a causa del nostro interesse e della nostra particolarissima venerazione Premotion, Holiness, and Pope Benedict XIII 1123 Ronald Knox places Jansenism among the expressions of “enthusiasm” that from time to time crystallize into movements among Christian believers.28 This episode of enthusiasm was occasioned by the publication (posthumously) in 1640 of Cornelius Jansen’s Augustinus, a book that aimed to counter Molinist theology by appeal mainly to patristic citations, especially, as the book’s name indicates, from Saint Augustine. The theological, social, and political dimensions of the Jansenist movement defy, as Jacques Gres-Gayer affirms, “a compact definition because of a conflictfilled history that spans two centuries of major change in European society.”29 At this juncture then, the present discussion takes up a very restricted consideration of the Jansenist debates and intrigues. I refer to the perils that the Jansenist outlook on salvation posed to Thomist orthodoxy and its teaching on how God premotively sanctifies the human creature. Holiness We can conclude from what has been said up to this point, at least, that respectable Christian people strongly object to accounts of human autonomy that, shall we say, make the “free” in free choice dependent upon an eclipse of the divine light: Bishop Cornelius Jansen; certain French classicists; many Dominicans—to name a few. Does this mean that in order to embrace an orthodox doctrine of grace and freedom one must adopt the five condemned propositions excerpted or paraphrased from the Augustinus? The answer, of course, to this question is clear. Whatever the political wrangling over the papal condemnation of the propositions ascribed to Cornelius Jansen, the fact remains that the five theses over which the 31 May 1653 bull Cum occasione of Pope Innocent X first cast a shadow do not express Catholic truth.30 Molinism continued on its merry way. Even saints of the period, like Saint Francis De Sales, found themselves per lui—si propongano come modello la moderazione di espressione di un tale dottore e il suo modo caritatevole di comportarsi nelle discussioni con gli avversari. Quanto a coloro che non appartengono alla sua scuola, si sforzino di conformarsi anch’essi a questo metodo . . .’ (Benedetto XIV, Sollicita ac provida, 24).” See Insegnamenti di Giovanni Paolo II, XIII/2 (1990): 768–74. For a related discussion, see Russell Hittinger, “Pascendi Dominici Gregis at 100: Two Modernisms, Two Thomisms: Reflections on the Centenary of Pius X’s Letter Against the Modernists,” Nova et Vetera 5, no. 4 (2007): 843–80. 28 Ronald A. Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion, with special reference to the XVII and XVIII Centuries (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1983), chaps IX–X. 29 J. M. Gres-Gayer, “Jansenism,” New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (Detroit Thomson/Gale, 2003), 7: 719. 30 See DS 2001–2007. Nos. 2006 and 2007 list the notes levied against the five propositions. 1124 Romanus Cessario, O.P. “molinised”—to borrow a term.31 The Dominicans, on the other hand, faced a different challenge. They had to show that Thomism was not infected with the same fatal errors as Jansenism. Right-thinking theologians, accordingly, set themselves the task of separating out orthodox Thomists from card-carrying Jansenists. The task proved challenging. Though what today one may call a ressourcement theologian, Cornelius Jansen did not exhibit the anti-Thomist outlook that motivated certain theologians of the pre–Vatican II period.32 “If one wishes,” writes Jansen, “to call the help of Christ ‘physical predetermination,’ though Augustine would not have heard of the expression, that wouldn’t bother me at all. It suffices that the substance of the Doctor of Grace gets handed on.”33 One may hope that what Saint Augustine himself means by the “help of Christ” does correspond in fact to what Thomists understand by physical premotion.34 Whether, however, what Jansen and the Jansenists took to be the doctrine of Saint Augustine may be identified with the Thomist doctrine on the bestowal of divine grace raises another 31 Francis Vincent, “The Spirituality of Saint Francis of Sales,” at www.ewtn.com/ library/spirit/salespir.txt. See also A. Schmidt, “Tirez-moi, nous courrons nous deux. Göttliche Gnade und menschliche Mitwirkung in der Theologie des hl. Franz von Sales,” in Jahrbuch für salesianische Studien 33 (2001): 7–79. However, see Aidan Nichols, The Latin Clerk: The Life, Work, and Travels of Adrian Fortescue (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2011), 169: “He [Adrian Fortescue] spent the day before going into the hospital with the Dominicans at Haverstock Hill (‘no Molinism for me, thank you’, he told Myers in what turned out to be the farewell letter—the Jesuit theology of grace was too humanistic for what he called ‘a soul that has no hope but in the mercy of God’).” 32 Jean-Louis Quantin, Le catholicisme classique et les Perès de l’Église. Un retour aux sources (1669–1713) (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1999), chap. 11, examines the relationship between positive theology and Jansenism under the heading: “Nourrir La Ferveur: La Patristique des Dévots.” Gemma Simmonds, “Jansenism: An Early Ressourcement Movement?” in Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology, ed. Gabriel Flynn and Paul D. Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 23–35, tries favorably to compare Jansenists and the liberal reformers of the pre- and post-conciliar periods. For a different approach to the place of ressourcement in contemporary theology, see my “On the Place of Servais Pinckaers (†7 April 2008) in the Renewal of Catholic Theology,” The Thomist 73 (2009): 1–27. 33 Jansenius, Augustinus, seu Doctrina S. Augustini de humanae naturae sanitate, aegritudine, medicina, adversus Pelagianos et Massiliensis, 3 vol. Louvain, 1640, t. iii, l, viii, c. ii, coll 818. 34 Although a nineteenth-century work, J. B. Mozley’s A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of Predestination (London: John Murray, 1883), offers an interesting analysis of the Augustinian account of predestination and its role in later scholastic engagements with the question. Premotion, Holiness, and Pope Benedict XIII 1125 question. As we shall note, Pope Benedict XIII surely did not think so. Earlier however, in 1656, Antoine Arnauld (1612–94) argued in a theological treatise for the conformity of Jansenist views on grace and freedom with those of the Thomist Schools.35 Additionally, there arises a methodological question. The Augustinus contains a section devoted to the limitations of human reason. Did the difficulties occasioned by the Augustinus arise as a result of its author’s heavy reliance on what today we would call a “return-to-the-sources” approach?36 “Jansen claimed”—it is interesting to note—“that in order to write the book he had read the entire works of Augustine ten times, and the treatise against the Pelagians thirty times.”37 One may be permitted to wonder, however, how much he had read of Aristotle. In any case, Jansen was not a man given to appreciation of the scholastic mode of doing theology. Bishop Jansen died in 1638, before the movement that bears his name coalesced. Antoine Arnauld’s retirement to Port Royal around 1640 may be thought to mark the start of Jansenism as an organized front, whereas the death of Louis XIV in 1715 marks its end, at least as a theological quarrel. The election in 1724 of Pope Benedict XIII, a Dominican, signals a surcease of the decades-long struggle, mainly in France, when many of the 35 See Antoine Arnauld, Dissertatio theologica in qua Augustiana propositio Defuit Petro gratia sine qua nihil possumus totius Traditionis auctoritate confirmatur, cum uariis Thomisticae Scholae sententiis conciliatur, et a peruulgata de praeceptorum impossibilitate calumnia purgatur (s.l., 1656). Le Grand Arnauld (to distinguish him from his Jansenist relatives) reveals something of what is noble in the Jansenist character, and he is said later to have developed an authentic appreciation for the Thomist doctrine of efficacious grace. 36 For background, see J. H. Crehan, “Jansenism,” in A Catholic Dictionary of Theology (London: Nelson, 1971), vol. 3: “Between 1580 and 1620 there had been a great increase in the editing of patristic works; men like Henry Savile and Peltan were followed by Sirmond, Petau. . . . It was therefore in fashion for a theologian to desire a return to the Fathers, while by a reciprocal causality the Jansenist controversy itself stimulated still further research into the Fathers” (147). 37 Cited in New World Encyclopedia: “Cornelius Jansen,” New World Encyclopedia at www.newworldencyclopedia.org/p/index.php?title=Cornelius_Jansen& oldid=685560 (accessed January 12, 2013). Crehan, “Jansenism,” 146, claims that this “boast” was made originally by the Irish Archbishop, Florence Conroy, O.F.M., (1560–1629), about his own study of Augustine. Conroy, while living in Louvain, was influential on Jansen. Antoine Arnauld, Apologie de Monsieur Jansenius evesque d’Ipre. & de la doctrine de S. Augustin, expliquée dans son livre, intitulé, Augustinus. Contre trois sermons de Monsieur Habert, theologal de Paris, prononcez dans Nostre-Dame, le premier & le dernier dimanche de l’advent 1642. & le dimanche de la septuagesime 1643, [S.l.] M.DC.XLIV, p. 8: “Il a leu Saint Augustin dix fois d’un bout à l’autre, & plus de trente fois tous ses ouurages sur la Grace, & a esclaircy auec vn trauail infatigable . . .” 1126 Romanus Cessario, O.P. Jansenists tried to present themselves as real Thomists. I will not burden the reader with the perpetual back and forth of these maneuverings. Suffice it to remark that this eighteenth-century pope, in his 28 June 1727 bull Pretiosus, “declared that the teaching of St Thomas and the Thomist school had nothing to do with the errors of Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638) and Pasquier Quesnel (1634–1719).”38 Quesnel was the last standard-bearer for the Jansenist movement. The twentieth century is not the first time that seemingly well-meaning people have mistreated the doctrine of Saint Thomas.39 Standard histories of the period do not offer great detail about how the Jansenist theological positions risked compromising the doctrine of Saint Thomas. So one welcomes the 2011 publication of an erudite 555page work by Sylvio Hermann de Franceschi titled La Puissance et la Gloire. L’orthodoxie thomiste au péril du jansénisme (1663–1724): le zénith français de la querelle de la grâce.40 It would surprise me to discover that the least detail has escaped this meticulous author’s attention. One had not, however, to wait until the publication of De Franceschi’s scholarly historical study in order to realize that Thomist views of predestination and freedom do not cast dark shadows over the human creature or make a tyrant of the world’s Creator. Thomism gives no quarter to “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”41 Professor Steven A. Long 38 J. N. D. Kelly, Oxford Dictionary of Popes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 295. See also The Papacy: An Encyclopedia, ed. Philippe Levillain, 3 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2002), which is a translation of Dictionnaire historique de la papaute (Paris: Fayard, 1994). The article on Benedict XIII (1:165–67) by Luigi Fiorani of the Vatican Library opines: “In fact, the bull Pretiosus, drafted by the Inquisition and published in 1727, brought about a stiffening in favor of the positions of the Molinists and a fresh confirmation of the bulls Unigenitus and Pastoralis officii. With this document, which clearly did not take the pope’s thinking into account, the traditional line of the Curia was reaffirmed, one close to the Molinist positions” (Levillain 1:167). For a late-nineteenth-century take on the topic, see J. Brucker, “Le Bref ‘Demissas Preces’ de Benoit XIII et le Molinisme,” Études 50 (1890): 28–53. 39 For discussion of the twentieth-century disruption, see Ralph McInerny, Praeambula Fidei:Thomism and the God of the Philosophers (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006), and my review of this book: “Neo-NeoThomism” in First Things (May 2007): 48–51. 40 Sylvio Hermann de Franceschi, La Puissance et la Gloire. L’orthodoxie thomiste au péril du jansénisme (1663–1724): le zénith français de la querelle de la grâce (Paris: Nolin, 2011). 41 “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” a sermon preached by Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) at Enfield, Massachusetts (later Connecticut), July 8, 1741. For the text, see Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”: A Casebook, ed. Wilson H. Kimnach, Caleb J. D. Maskell, Kenneth P. Minkema (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 33–50. Premotion, Holiness, and Pope Benedict XIII 1127 achieved considerable recognition when the Dominican editor of the venerable Revue thomiste invited him to submit for publication in French a paper delivered at an early symposium sponsored by Ave Maria University.42 After a suitable interstice, the essay appeared in the author’s original and challenging English prose as “Providence, Freedom, and Natural Law.43 Two texts supply the epigraph. The first comes from the Catechism of the Council of Trent: “Not only does God protect and govern all things by His Providence, but He also by an internal power impels to motion and action whatever moves and acts, and this in such a manner that, although He excludes not, He yet precedes the agency of secondary causes.”44 The second comes from the catechism published after the Second Vatican Council: The truth that God is at work in all the actions of his creatures is inseparable from faith in God the Creator. God is the first cause who operates in and through secondary causes: “For God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” Far from diminishing the creature’s dignity, this truth enhances it. Drawn from nothingness by God’s power, wisdom and goodness, it can do nothing if it is cut off from its origin, for “without a Creator the creature vanishes.” Still less can a creature attain its ultimate end without the help of God’s grace.45 The two texts rely on the philosophical notion of secondary causes. One may only infer that it is impossible to understand the relationship of divine action and human freedom without recognizing that the omnipotent God and the free human creature stand in a relationship that is best conceived as one of First Cause to secondary cause. Given a moment’s reflection, we see that no other arrangement is possible. God cannot act in half measures. This is the mistake that Luis de Molina had made and which launched the 42 See Steven A. Long, “Providence, Liberté et Loi Naturelle,” trans. Hyacinthe Defos du Rau, O.P., and Serge-Thomas Bonino, O.P., Revue thomiste, no. 3 (2002): 355–406. 43 Steven A. Long, Nova et Vetera 4, no. 3 (2006): 1–55. The author gives a short account of physical premotion: “There is a motion bestowed by God without which the rational creature cannot proceed to its act of self-determination. This motion is ‘prior’—hence ‘pre’ motion—not in a temporal sense, but in the sense in which the cause is prior to that which is caused: apart from this moving of the rational creature from potency to act with respect to its act of self-determination there can be no such act. But of course, in time, the motion is simultaneous with the activation of the power of self-determination. It is ‘physical’ not in the sense of being a material thing, but in the sense of being real. And of course its character as a motion has been noted” (11). 44 Catechism of the Council of Trent, Article One. 45 Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 308. 1128 Romanus Cessario, O.P. thousand ships of Jansenism, whose captains in fact set out to squelch secondary causes in a vain effort to leave untouched the dreadful sovereignty of God. Molina’s divinity acts partially. For, in order to safeguard human freedom, Molina had to introduce a phase—the eclipse—wherein the human will is left unencumbered, so to speak, to take some initiative. This view of the cooperation between God and man results in thinking about God and man as two partial co-causes, like—to use Molina’s own pellucid image—“two men rowing a boat.”46 It is not difficult to sympathize with those devout Christians who recoiled from the conception of Christian life that such imagery evokes. Given the challenges that confront us throughout a lifetime of living according to all that God commands of his holy ones—remember prayer, asceticism (which may include study), and the virtuous life, who would relish the thought of responding to the gift of grace on one’s own naked initiative? Consider any temptation that may occur in our lives. Which among us would cry out, “Thank you God for eclipsing your sun’s ray so that I may experience myself as truly free?” The more parlous question concerns what happens to those who do espouse this brand of “spirituality.” The Molinist duel ended, as Father Bedouelle has observed, in a draw. Jansenism drew condemnation. Mostly in France, Dominicans toiled to produce treatises that explained why the accepted theses of the Thomist school on predestination, grace, and freedom, and the overall salvific purpose of Christ’s death on the cross should not be confused with Jansenist distortions of Catholic doctrine. The Provençal Dominican Jean Baptiste Gonet (†1681) illustrates the battle that the Thomists of the period mounted in order to distinguish the teaching of Saint Thomas Aquinas from the teaching of Calvin and that of Jansen.47 The best illustration of his copious efforts occupies the pages of his celebrated Clypeus theologiae thomisticae contra novos ejus impugnatores, which saw many editions after its princeps edition published at Bordeaux between the years 1659 and 1669. Gonet takes up the theological style of the Thomist tradition that one of his Provençal confreres, John Capreolus (c.1380–1444), had initiated two centuries earlier. Capreolus and Gonet, in a word, were 46 See Molina, Concordia, q. 14, art. 13, disp. 25, ed. Rabeneck: “Ordo agentium respondet ordini finium. Sed unius rei non possunt esse duo fines immediati et perfecti. Ergo neque esse possunt duo agentia, nisi forte supplerent vicem unius agentis perfecti; quo pacto duo trahentes navem efficiunt unum agens integrum ac sufficiens et perfectum; et eodem modo ejusdem rei possunt etiam esse plures fines partiales.” 47 For background information, see B. Peyrous, “Un grand centre de thomisme au XVIIe siècle. Le couvent des Frères Prêcheurs de Bordeaux et l’enseignement de J.-B. Gonet,” Divus Thomas (Pl.) 77 (1974): 452–73. Premotion, Holiness, and Pope Benedict XIII 1129 about argument, not catenae. Gonet requires only two half-page columns of his Clypeus to explain why the Jansenist theses condemned in 1653 by Innocent X do not represent the teaching of Saint Thomas Aquinas.48 The first condemned proposition (which is the only one taken verbatim from the Augustinus) expresses a pessimistic view of human nature and its capacities. The proposition holds that some divine precepts are impossible for men to keep. The spirituality of premotive holiness does not proceed under the promise of failure. The cardinal principle of Aquinas’s blueprint for holiness is that God loves us because He is good, not because we are.49 In other words, the divine goodness governs the bestowal of the divine help. In fact, when Aquinas explains why despair is a vice he points out that the person who despairs of doing God’s will fails to embrace the divine omnipotence and the divine mercy. God can save us. God does forgive. The worst thing that can happen in the Christian life is for a Christian to become convinced that virtue is impossible. This persuasion leads not to holiness but to sin, specifically a sin against hope, whose motivating force comes from the propriety of seeking divine goodness.50 Mihi sed non propter me, underscores Cardinal Cajetan.51 I refer the divine goodness to myself, but I do not subordinate God to my own purposes. The Jansenists ignored this distinction, and so they concluded that despair, not hope, supplies the default position for the human being. However, one does not require espousing Jansenist rigorism to conclude that divine help is not forthcoming and that the divine mercy does not embrace me. Many moral laxists secretly succumb to the same despair, although they usually disguise it with rationalization and bravado. The second condemned proposition privileges “interior grace” to the point of making this grace irresistible to fallen human nature. This thesis describes the physical demolition, not premotion, of the will. Aquinas, on the other hand, recognizes both that we can resist the gift of divine grace and that the grace of the new dispensation does not confirm a man in holiness: “The grace of the New Covenant,” he writes, “although it helps man not to sin, does not confirm him in good in such a way that he cannot sin: this belongs to the state of glory.”52 Justification, in other words, does not imply impeccability.53 The spirituality of premotion finds its underpinnings 48 See the Appendix to this essay for Gonet’s Clypeus Theologiae Thomisticae. 49 For one reference from Aquinas, see ST I, q. 20, a. 2. 50 See ST II–II, q. 20, a. 3. 51 Thomas de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan (1469–1534), In IIam-IIae, q. 17, a. 5, no. 8. 52 ST I–II, q. 106, a. 2, ad 2. 53 Steven A. Long in a personal communication in January 2013 offers this obser- vation: “It is also difficult [to explain] that the divine permission does not 1130 Romanus Cessario, O.P. and pinnacles in the practice of the theological virtues—what the French call la vie théologale.54 The life of grace and the virtues establishes the Christian in a right tension that avoids, on the one hand, the uptight rigidness generated by lofty moralism enforced by servile fear and, on the other hand, the callous nonchalance inculcated by disregard of the divine law and by presumption on God’s mercy. Within the constellation of virtues that premotive holiness encourages, theological hope ensures that Christian life proceeds within the proper dynamism of grace and freedom. The third proposition takes the freedom out of merit, and so reduces the Christian believer to a mechanical robot programmed for heaven or hell: “In order to merit or demerit in the state of fallen nature,” so Jansenists held, “freedom from necessity is not required in man, but freedom from external compulsion is sufficient.”55 The Jansenists fail to distinguish between freedom with respect to exercise (quoad exercitium) and the freedom of specification. With what the whole Christian tradition teaches about everyday holiness, Aquinas places freedom of specification (quoad specificationem)—freedom with respect to a sort of action—at the heart of our meriting and demeriting. That the good actions Christians perform reflect the spirituality of premotion holds more interest for Christian theology than a merely human consideration of the freedom with which they perform them. To relate this element of Thomist doctrine to what is taught explicitly in Veritatis Splendor, premotive spirituality focuses on teleology: “The primary and decisive element for moral judgment is the object of the human act, which establishes whether it is capable of being ordered to the good and to the ultimate end, which is God. . . . These are the goods safeguarded by the commandments, which, according to Saint Thomas, contain the whole natural law (see ST I–II, q. 100, a. 1).”56 Thomists do not fuss over freedom. They, with the Church, focus on distinguishing the good from the bad. That is, on what perfects and on what detracts from the truth about the good of the imply merely libertarian indifference but the non-upholding in good (i.e., for God to permit the defect is for Him not to cause the contrary; granted, He does not owe it to the creature in justice to cause the contrary, a point missed by virtually all the customary naysayers of the tradition, who always suppose that God owes the defectible creature to preserve it from all defect). Greater good is given to all than they can possibly merit absolutely speaking; and lesser penalty is bestowed to those penalized than they actually deserve. But it is a very profound mystery . . .” 54 For further information, see my Christian Faith and the Theological Life (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996). 55 DS 2003, trans. Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma (St. Louis: Herder, 1957). 56 Veritatis Splendor, §79. Premotion, Holiness, and Pope Benedict XIII 1131 human person. Herein lies the nub of the reason for the conflicts, mainly carried on between Dominican and Jesuit moralists, that issued in the two casuist schools of Probabilism and Probabiliorism. Probabilism favored maximizing freedom of choice within the law. Probabiliorists kept their focus on the choice of the perfective good. Within the casuist systems, Probabilists were content to follow the advice of a few, whereas Probabiliorists—committed to the “more probable” course of action— sought a broad consensus about what (to use the parlance of the period) is permitted or forbidden.57 Jesuits mainly leaned toward Probabilism, whereas Dominicans, for the most part, held to Probabiliorism.58 The fourth proposition concerns the freedom of the will before the grace called sufficient. Jansenists regard talk of sufficient grace as Semipelagian. As Pascal observes in The Provincial Letters, Thomists speak in a qualified way about sufficient grace.59 Grace, since it comes from an omnipotent God, they correctly prefer to stress as efficacious. After the Jansenist condemnations, however, Thomists honed their view of sufficient grace.60 Gonet offers an insightful reply to the fourth proposition by citing Aquinas’s first Quodlibetal Question: “God moves everything according to its manner. So divine motion is imparted to some things with necessity; however, it is imparted to the rational creature with liberty because the rational power is related to opposites. God so moves 57 See Romanus Cessario, O.P. “Casuistry and Revisionism: Structural Similarities in Method and Content,” in “Humanae Vitae”: 20 Anni Dopo. Atti del II Congresso Internazionale di Theologia Morale, vol. III (Milan: Edizioni Ares, 1990), 385–409. 58 As the above reference to Saint Alphonsus makes clear, no hard-and-fast rule can be applied. 59 Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1967), 49: “ ‘We [Dominicans] would all sooner suffer martyrdom,’ said the Father, ‘than consent to the establishment of sufficient grace in the Jesuits’ sense, for St. Thomas, whom we vow to follow to the death, is directly opposed to it.’ ” 60 Steven A. Long explains the divine movement in the sinner in this way: “The issue wholly reposes on what is meant by ‘resistance’ or ‘refusal’ to grace. Insofar as the sinful act has any being or good, these derive from and are caused by God (as Thomas makes clear in De malo); but the resistance to grace itself is a function of the defectibility of the creature, and if we mean full blown resistance/refusal, this is not a simple negation, but a deprivation, i.e., a privation of something that is owing or due or necessary for the perfection of the subject. It is true that such deprivation presupposes some prior negation, but it is only when the moral agent does not advert to, and conform his action to, the rule of reason and charity, that an action is subject to deprivation and moral evil. By contrast, the simple negation of consideration is consistent with there being no act whatsoever. . . . Lastly, of course, God must permit such resistance if it occurs, but He is not bound or obligated in justice to preserve the defectible creature from all defect.” 1132 Romanus Cessario, O.P. the human mind to the good, however, that a man can resist this motion.”61 Garrigou-Lagrange summarizes the accepted teaching with help from the “Eagle of Meaux,” Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet: In sufficient grace, efficacious grace is offered to us, as the fruit is in the flower; but if resistance is made on account of our defectibility, then we deserve not to receive efficacious grace. For this reason Bossuet declares: “Our intellect must be held captive before the obscurity of the divine mystery and admit two graces (sufficient and efficacious) of which the former leaves our will without any excuse before God, and the latter does not permit the will to glory in itself ” (Œuvres complètes, Paris, 1845, I, 644).62 When one ponders the divine omnipotence and the divine mercy, it becomes evident that the Thomist double insistencies on the efficaciousness of the divine gift and the creature’s potential sinful refusal of it create an optimistic view of salvation. The questions, “How many are saved?” or “Am I saved?” never trouble the practitioner of premotive holiness. Only one question remains for the person who lives by the divine premotion: “At this moment, do I unite myself with the saving grace that God efficaciously offers me?” If so, whether the grace comes as an operative or a cooperative one, at that moment my salvation is assured.63 Only the delusional try to travel north and south at the same time. The fifth proposition considers it heretical to say that Christ died for all men. In reply, Gonet cites the Summa contra Gentiles: “As far as He is concerned, God is ready to give grace to all; ‘indeed He wills all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth,’ as is said in 1Timothy (2:4).” Aquinas continues, “But those alone are deprived of grace who offer an obstacle within themselves to grace; just as, while the sun is shining on the world, the man who keeps his eyes closed is held responsible for his fault, if as a result some evil follows, even though he could not see unless he were provided in advance with light from the sun.”64 This text, 61 Gonet cites the text “quod lib.1. art. 7. ad 2.” Modern editions make it Quoblibetal Question 1, q. 4, art. 2, ad 2, trans. Sandra Edwards (Toronto: PIMS, 1983), 46. 62 Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., Grace: Commentary on the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas, trans. Dominican Nuns, Corpus Christi Monastery (St. Louis, MO: Herder Book Co., 1952), chap. 5; also at www.ewtn.com/library/Theology/ grace5.htm#_ftn8 63 The doctrine of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–97) offers a practical application of this Thomist principle. See, for instance, Vernon Johnson, Spiritual Childhood: The Spirituality of St. Thérèse of Lisieux (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001). 64 Summa contra Gentiles, Bk III, Part II, chap. 159, trans. Vernon J. Bourke (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 261. Premotion, Holiness, and Pope Benedict XIII 1133 which affirms Catholic teaching that “God freely wills to communicate the glory of his blessed life,” brings us back to the metaphor of the sun and its rays.65 For according to the premotive holiness that follows upon the principles of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the sun represents the warmth of the divine love that preveniently anticipates our every need. How differently emerges the portrayal of the sun in the French classical tragedy Phaedra, whose author, Jean Racine, also wrote a history of Port Royal, the Parisian Jansenist convent. Racine put these words on the lips of Phaedra: “Do I yet live, wretch that I am, and dare / To face this holy Sun from whom I spring? / My father’s sire was king of all the gods; / My ancestors fill all the universe. / Where can I hide? In the dark realms of Pluto?”66 Pluto, of course, holds sway in a place of perpetual eclipse.67 Appendix Jean Baptiste Gonet, O.P., Clypeus Theologiae Thomisticae, Vol. 1 (Paris: Vivès, 1875), tract. 3, disp. 6, art. 10, pp. 583–84: Quinque propositiones a Summo Pontifice Innocentio X. damnatae, juxta doctrinam D.Thomae. CXL. Propositio I. Aliqua Dei praecepta hominibus justis, volentibus, et conantibus, secundum praesentes quas habent vires, sunt impossibilia; deest quoque illis gratia, qua possibilia fiant. D. Thomas qu. 24. de verit, art. 14. ad 1. “Illud quod praecipit Deus, NON EST IMPOSSIBILE HOMINI AD SERVANDUM .” Quodlibeto 2. art. 6. “Nullus tenetur ad hoc quod est supra vires suas, nisi per modum quo FIT SIBI POSSIBILE .” In 2. dist. 28. art. 3. in 1. argumento sed contra, “Hieronymus ait, Qui Deum dicit PRAECIPERE IMPOSSIBILIA, anathema sit.” Et in 2. argumento. “Deus non est magis crudelis quam homo: sed homini imputatur in crudelitatem, si obliget aliquem per praeceptum, AD ID QUOD IMPLERE NON POTEST : ergo hoc de Deo nullo modo est aestimandum.” CXLI. Propositio II. Interiori gratiae in statu naturae lapsae, nunquam resistitur. D. Thomas primae ad Thessalonicenses cap. 5. lect. 2. “Aliquis dicitur extinguere spiritum in se, vel in alio, cum alius aliquid boni ex fervore Spiritus sancti vult facere ; vel etiam cum aliquis bonus motus in ipso surgit, ET IPSE IMPEDIT : Actorum 7.Vos semper Spiritui Sancto restitistis.” 65 See Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 257. 66 Jean-Baptiste Racine, “Phaedra,” Act IV, vi, trans. Robert Bruce Boswell at www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1977/pg1977.txt. 67 Thanks to the Reverend Monsignor Laurence McGrath, Professor Jörgen Vijgen, and Cajetan Cuddy, O.P., for their invaluable assistance in developing this essay. 1134 Romanus Cessario, O.P. Quibus verbis aperte agnoscit S. Doctor, in statu naturae lapsae gratiam aliquam interiorem moventem, cui resistitur. Similiter aliis in locis admittit auxilium quo homo non utitur, et quod in vanum recipit: ait enim 2. ad Corinth. cap. 6. lect. 1. “Quicumque GRATIA RECEPTA NON UTITUR ad vitandum peccata, et consequendam vitam aeternam, hic gratiam Dei in vanum recipit.” Et 1. 2. qu. 106. art. 2. ad 2. “Si quis post acceptam gratiam novi Testamenti peccaverit, majori poena est dignus, tamquam majoribus beneficiis ingratus, et AUXILIO SIBI DATO NON UTENS .” CXLII. Propositio III. Ad merendum et demerendum in statu naturae lapsae, non requiritur in homine libertas a necessitate, sed sufficit libertas a coactione. D. Thomas qu. 6. de malo, quae est de electione humana: “Respondeo dicendum, quod quidam posuerunt, quod voluntas hominis ex necessitate movetur ad aliquid eligendum, nec tamen ponebant quod voluntas cogeretur ; non enim omne necessarium est violentum, etc. Haec autem opinio est HAERETICA , TOLLIT ENIM RATIONEM MERITI ET DEMERITI , in humanis actibus ; non enim videtur esse meritorium, vel demeritorium, quod aliquis sic ex necessitate agit, quod vitare non possit.” Quo nihil clarius et expressius dici potest. CXLIII. Propositio IV. Semipelagiani admittebant praevenientis gratiae necessitatem ad singulos actus, etiam ad initium fidei ; et in hoc erant Haeretici, quod vellent eam gratiam talem esse, cui posset humana voluntas resistere, vel obtemperare. D. Thomas quodlib.l. art. 7. ad 2. “Deus movet omnia secundum modum eorum, et ideo divina motio a quibusdam participatur cum necessitate, a natura rationali cum libertate, propter hoc quod virtus rationalis se habet ad opposita ; et ideo sic Deus movet mentem humanam ad bonum, quod potest HUIC MOTIONI RESISTERE .” CXLIV. Propositio V. Semipelagianum est dicere, Christum pro omnibus omnino hominibus mortuum esse, aut sanguinem fudisse. D. Thomas 1. ad Timoth. 2. lect. 1. “Christus Jesus est mediator Dei et hominum, NON QUORUMDAM , sed inter Deum et OMNES HOMINES , et hoc non esset, nisi vellet omnes salvare.” Nam voluntas Dei circa hominum salutem, et voluntas Christi mortem suam offerentis, et per eam media ad salutem sufficientia omnibus praeparantis, sunt parallelae, et sibi mutuo correspondent. Unde idem S. Doctor super caput 1. ejusdem epistolae, lect. 1. ait quod “Per illam voluntatem Deus omnibus proposuit salutis praecepta, consilia, et remedia.» Et in l. dist. 46. qu. 1. art. 1. “Hujus voluntatis effectus, est ipse ordo in finem salutis, et promoventia in finem, tam naturalia, quam gratuita.” Et super cap. 12. Epist. ad Premotion, Holiness, and Pope Benedict XIII 1135 Hebraeos lect. 5. “Deus vult omnes homines salvos fieri, et ideo gratia nulli deest, sed omnibus, quantum in se est, se communicat.” Similiter 3. contra Gentes cap. 159. “Deus quantum in se est, paratus est omnibus dare N&V gratiam, vult enim omnes homines salvos fieri.” Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2013): 1137–54 1137 Marriage and Freedom: The Splendor of Truth in a Time of Denial* D OUGLAS FARROW McGill University Montreal, Canada W E LIVE in a time of denial. I don’t mean merely denial of the obvious, for the obvious sometimes needs to be denied. The sun may appear to go round the earth, but it does not. What I mean is: we live in a time when it is common to deny the obvious without putting in its place something more compelling. In economics, for example, we do not posit a new theory whereby the laws of exchange work differently than we thought they did; we simply act as if we shall never have to pay our bills. In medicine, or at least in some branches of neuroscience, we do not posit a new way of understanding the body–soul relation; we simply deny that man has a soul, or the freedom and responsibility which the very concept of the soul implies. In morality, we do not explain how it is possible to have endless ends; we simply refuse to contemplate the fact that there is an End of ends, and so we become prey to the dictatorship of relativism. In a time of denial, self-denial tends to be in short supply. What is denied instead is man as such. “The splendour of truth shines forth in the works of the Creator and, in a special way, in man, created in the image and likeness of God,” says John Paul II in the opening lines of Veritatis Splendor. But if the splendor of truth is suppressed, this means that man himself must be suppressed. * This essay (here slightly altered) was presented at the Thomistic Institute in Washington DC to the conference “Advancing a Culture of Life: Veritatis Splendor Twenty Years Later” (22 February 2013). My thanks to Fr. Thomas Joseph White for inviting me to address the topic. Douglas Farrow 1138 Permit me to illustrate by reference to man’s most basic social institution: marriage. In the West it is increasingly common to deny that marriage is a conjugal union between a man and a woman, with founding a family and raising the next generation as its primary goal. What is put in place of this fact that cultures the world over, from time immemorial, have thought obvious? Something inevitable, we are told, but certainly nothing compelling! It is claimed today, in our corner of the world, that marriage is essentially a close personal relationship between adults, to which founding a family is not intrinsic—though adoption rights, and even reproductive rights, nevertheless appertain. The question as to how they appertain, or why society should trouble itself to recognize an institution that is private and personal but not inter-generational, is seldom addressed. Rather the existing social and legal capital of marriage, built up over long ages by investment in the business of raising the next generation, is quietly expropriated. This is no Copernican revolution, no scientific advance. Nor is it an advance in human rights, as its proponents insist. For none were ever obligated to marry, who now may refuse; nor were any forbidden to marry, who now may do so.1 To make marriage over into a sterile, unisex affair, so that those who do not wish to marry may nevertheless claim to be married, is an act of despoliation. Investment in a new generation is the work of honest men and women; dissipation of the capital of marriage, without return on investment, is the work of fraudsters. Now this denial of the nature of marriage is a denial of man as such, as Pope Benedict XVI noted in his 2012 Christmas address to the Curia. Things would not be quite so bad were that not the case. But we are not dealing here with simple fraud, much less with a mere misapprehension of human rights and freedoms or a series of honest mistakes in working out the nature and purpose of sex. Drawing on an essay by Gilles Bernheim, then Chief Rabbi of France—an essay still pertinent despite its plagiarism—Benedict agreed “that the attack we are currently experiencing on the true structure of the family . . . goes much deeper” than a misapprehension. The very idea of what it means to be human is being challenged by a philosophy that rejects the sexually dimorphic design of man: According to this philosophy, sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society. The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious. People dispute the 1 See D. Farrow and D. Cere, Divorcing Marriage (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s, 2004), 97ff. Marriage and Freedom 1139 idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves. According to the biblical creation account, being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature. . . . This very duality as something previously given is what is now disputed. The words of the creation account: “male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27) no longer apply. No, what applies now is this: it was not God who created them male and female—hitherto society did this, now we decide for ourselves. Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of the human being, no longer exist. Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will. The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be.2 This social constructionism, it should be pointed out, is not only inimical to the idea of man as fashioned by the hands of God, as having a created nature; it is also inimical to the most popular argument for embracing same-sex marriage, viz., that same-sex marriage allows people to live according to their nature. Few seem to have grasped the fact that the LGBTQ alliance that has been promoting the reinvention of marriage is an alliance of convenience only—that its very interest in marriage is a matter of convenience only, and one that is already being abandoned.3 It is the Q that represents the cutting edge of this alliance, a cutting edge that has been forged in the fires of social constructionism. Queer theorists and other social constructionists are not interested in “natures” or essences; on the contrary, they are opposed to anything that smacks of essentialism. If, to break down the hegemony of the notion that man is male and female, it is necessary pro tempore to claim that man is not male and female, but rather homosexual and heterosexual, so be it; but the end game is the abolition of nature and natures. So man (in so far as he cooperates with this agenda) is indeed calling his own nature into question. Hence he is also calling into question the dignity that attaches to that nature, the dignity it has from God. “When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then 2 Benedict XVI, 2012 Christmas Address to the Roman Curia (available on the Vatican website); cf. Rabbi Gilles Bernheim, Mariage homosexuel, homoparentalité et adoption: Ce que l’on oublie souvent de dire (available at www.grandrabbinde france.com), or the edited English version in First Things (March 2013). 3 For elaboration of this point, see “Why Fight Same-Sex Marriage?” Touchstone ( January–February 2012): 24–31. 1140 Douglas Farrow necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being.”4 In denying the dignity he was given, of course, he is perforce seeking another and different dignity. Where will he find it? On what will he base it? And what will become of him if he does not find it? The precariousness of his situation is immediately indicated—this too would be obvious to him, were he not in denial—by the net loss of political freedom through which he purchases the redefinition of marriage. To say that man is male and female, and was made so by God, that each one might (not will, but might) come into being through the intimacy of love, and have the covenant of that love as the original school of personhood, is also to say that persons belong primordially neither to themselves alone nor to society at large, much less to the State, but to those who begot them and to those whom they will beget. They belong to their family, in other words, albeit to God first. The Church transcends this notion of family, without negating or denying it.5 But same-sex marriage negates and denies it, without transcending it. As I have argued many times, same-sex marriage makes every citizen, willing or no, a ward of the State. For if marriage itself is a creature of the State, rather than of God— an inescapable conclusion if the State has the power to redefine marriage—then the families generated by marriage (whether naturally or unnaturally) are also creatures of the State, and in every respect subject to what the State deems to be in its or their best interests. The family as a locus of independent authority, limiting the power of the State, is effectively demolished. Man himself is placed in natural servitude to the State. This is the precariousness of our situation. Nothing could be more dishonest, or at all events more misleading, than the rhetorical question, “What does same-sex marriage do to your marriage?” For the true answer is not “nothing” but “everything.” It deprives my marriage and every marriage of its proper political and legal, not to mention moral, force. It is quite clear, as Bernheim observes, “that the intention behind the slogan ‘marriage for everyone’ is a substitution: a juridically, culturally and symbolically charged institution is to be replaced by an asexual juridical construct, undermining the foundations of individuals and of the family.”6 4 Pope Benedict XVI, 2012 Christmas Address. 5 Cf. D. Farrow, Nation of Bastards (Toronto: BPS Books, 2007), 70–76. 6 Mariage homosexuel, homoparentalité et adoption, p. 7: Que l’on ait l’une ou l’autre des visions du monde, on voit bien que ce qui se joue derrière “le mariage pour tous”, c’est une substitution: une institution chargée juridiquement, culturellement et symboliquement serait ainsi remplacée par un objet juridique asexué, sapant les fondements des individus et de la famille. Marriage and Freedom 1141 Once this substitution is complete, nothing—or nothing in principle— stands in the way of the State’s intervention in the most intimate aspects of human life or its restrictions of basic human freedoms. China’s onechild policy is not wicked because it is disastrous; it is disastrous because it is wicked. But we will see such things here, too, if we persist on our present path. For we are altering the very foundations. We live, then, in a time of denial; our forgetfulness is deliberate. So how do we permit the splendor of truth to shine forth in such a time? How do we engage a culture of denial with the truth it firmly intends to deny? How do we protect, not only marriage as such, but man as such? The Unity of Freedom and Truth On the twentieth anniversary of Veritatis Splendor we do well to ask whether and how this document can help us. It was aimed at a crisis in the Church, which reflected the developing crisis in western society over the relation between truth and goodness and freedom. It did much to alleviate the former—the ecclesial crisis—not by eradicating the kind of thinking or the form of dissent it criticized, but by strengthening the hearts and minds and purpose of those who had some sense that there was a crisis. The latter, however, has not been alleviated; the crisis in western society has only deepened. The document forewarned us of this possibility. It claimed that the denial of truth and of God as the source of truth, which had given rise to the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, could lead also to a democratic form of totalitarianism through the advance of ethical relativism or moral pluralism.7 And this seems to be what is happening, as various forms of intimidation and coercion are used to back projects like same-sex marriage, and indeed to back political regimes that do not wish to be held accountable to truth, much less to God as the source of truth.The closure of adoption agencies, the conscience-violating measures of the HHS mandate, vicious personal attacks (not without effect) on those who support countermeasures such as Proposition 8, draconian education policies that violate the right of parents to protect their children and to oversee their education, pastors in prison for refusing to put the demands of the State ahead of the demands of natural law and natural justice—the list is already a long one, and it is growing. Governments and NGOs throughout Europe and the Americas are almost routinely demanding that Catholics and other Christians accommodate themselves to arrangements that are morally unacceptable. How can Veritatis Splendor help us with the task of confronting a culture, not of dissent—it is we who dissent—but of denial? Of denial 7 See John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor (1993), §99 and §101. 1142 Douglas Farrow and coercion to complicity in denial? Only, of course, by helping us to order our thoughts, and in ordering our thoughts to stiffen our resolve to speak and live according to the truth, even if, like Saint Stephen, we must suffer for it from those who stop their ears at hearing the truth. It is vital that we gather our thoughts and order them aright. On this, right action ordinarily depends. Veritatis Splendor seems especially concerned to help us with the process of holding together that which we are constantly urged to pull apart: above all, freedom and truth, on which a few remarks before we consider right action in the matter of marriage. It was Jesus, of course, who famously said: “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”8 John Paul II echoes this at the very outset of Veritatis Splendor: “Truth enlightens man’s intelligence and shapes his freedom.” Blessed John Paul was the leading voice of the last century (Solzhenitsyn might also be mentioned) insisting to one and all that “only the freedom which submits to the Truth leads the human person to his true good.” He reminded the Church that helping our culture to rediscover the “essential bond between the Truth, the Good and Freedom” is a definite requirement of its mission today.9 There would of course be no particular relation between freedom and truth, no dependence of the former on the latter, were it not for “the essential bond between God’s wisdom and will”10 (which, we might say, is God’s goodness and the ground of all our good). This bond ought also to exist, on the creaturely level, for man. But it cannot exist where there is serious confusion between good and evil, and hence a lack of wisdom. Such confusion is “the most dangerous crisis that can afflict man,” because it “makes it impossible to build up and preserve the moral order of individuals and communities.”11 But it is the very crisis that has come upon us. If we ask after the sources of this crisis, we must consider at least two.The first is eucharistic, or rather, the refusal of the eucharistic. When man does not honor God as God, but fails to give thanks, his thinking (as Paul says) becomes futile.We must be under no illusion here.The post-Christian West is nothing other than a society that refuses to render thanks, a society that rejects the Eucharist as the beating heart that once quickened its culture. Otherwise it would still be Christian; or perhaps we should say that, in this perverse reactionary way, it still is Christian. And the refusal to render thanks—which we have elevated to a political and legal principle under the 8 John 8:32; see Veritatis Splendor §87. 9 Veritatis Splendor §84, quoting a 1986 address to the International Congress of Moral Theology. 10 Veritatis Splendor §99. 11 Veritatis Splendor §93; cf. Plato, Republic 10, 618c. Marriage and Freedom 1143 banner of laïcité or secularism—means that we must claim as strictly our own what is manifestly a gift: our very lives.Whence arise our deepest moral confusions about personhood, abortion, euthanasia, sexuality, authority, economics, and the political process itself; and from these confusions spring many actual and concrete evils, such as the millions of miniscule corpses produced by the abortion industry and celebrated by our blood-spattered political and cultural elite. The second source, unfortunately, and it is implicated in the first, is Franciscan nominalism, which taught us how to detach freedom. Nominalism attacked in God himself, or at all events in our knowledge of God, the essential bond between wisdom and will. Absent this bond, the human task of discerning good and evil became more or less impossible. Human freedom began to be understood as the freedom of indifference, of a man’s raw choice unconstrained by any prior consideration of the good and of possible means of achieving the good. Nature, in so far as it constrains choice, erects a barrier to freedom that must be overcome. On nominalist premises, moreover, nature cannot be thought of in terms of either formal or final causes; hence it cannot direct us to universal ends.12 But man can distinguish himself from nature, even triumph over nature, by legislating his own ends, where God has not already done so. And increasingly it came to be doubted that God had done so. Divine legislation and human self-legislation were one and the same thing. At first the divine element in human self-legislation was understood to be reason, but will vied with reason for precedence. And the will in question was no longer, as Anselm had taught, a will-to-happiness and a will-to-justice, whose freedom lay in the fact that it was both these things and not one of them only.13 Rather it was the power of choice, pure and simple; that is, in abstracto and without reference to goods such as happiness or justice. Under these conditions, law (whether natural, human, or divine) gradually ceased to be viewed as the form that freedom takes— such was the Mosaic model, the covenantal model, which had hitherto informed Christendom. Law was increasingly seen as a set of arbitrary constraints against which freedom chafed. Its positive, teleological character was displaced by something essentially negative: Law serves to restrain the will at the point where it might otherwise interfere with the will of another; law does not serve freedom by directing people towards 12 See M. Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 24. 13 See De Casu Diaboli 13f. It was Anselm who first perceived the threat posed by nominalism, in the prototype launched by his contemporary, Roscelin; see De Incarnatione §1. 1144 Douglas Farrow their true ends but rather by preventing them from interfering with the arbitrarily chosen interests of the other.14 The path from William of Ockham, whose contributions to nominalism set off this chain reaction, to moderns such as J. S. Mill is still being mapped. For Mill it is not truth that leads to freedom but freedom that leads to truth—whatever the truth is pour moi or pour toi, the qualifier attached to almost every question on the Ethics and Religious Culture exam that my youngest son brought home from school the other day! On such a view, no precept of the moral law is ever absolute. John Paul II attacked this in Veritatis Splendor, rejecting consequentialism and proportionalism for their failure to admit “the existence of negative moral norms regarding specific kinds of behavior, norms which are valid without exception.”15 He insisted that some things must be recognized as intrinsically evil (intrinsece malum) and firmly reasserted the principle that it is never licit to do evil that good may come.16 This principle, indeed, is the articulus stantis et cadentis of Catholic ethics. It is also the only true bulwark against the decline of freedom into tyranny. But Catholicism confronts the modern world with a positive as well as a negative principle, namely, that truth leads to freedom; that nature and its laws, properly understood, serve rather than negate freedom; that “universal and unchanging moral norms” undergird, rather than undermine, respect for “the uniqueness and individuality of the person,” while preserving the common good.17 Whence does it derive its confidence in this, if not from the gospel? The “alleged conflict between freedom and law,” claims the pontiff, arises only where another, more serious dichotomy is operative, in which morality is divorced from faith.18 The chief lesson to be drawn from Veritatis Splendor, on my view, is that no strategy for dealing with the crisis of confusion between good and evil can be hopeful of success if it is prepared to countenance such a divorce. And that has implications for how we ought to handle issues such as the marriage controversy, which certainly reflects our deep confusion. 14 The liberty of society, then, began to be conceived likewise, not as a function of advance towards the common good, but as a liberty that consists “in every man doing what he pleases;” or so Leo complained in Libertas Praestantissimum Donum (§10). 15 Veritatis Splendor §90. 16 Veritatis Splendor §§79f., §97. 17 Veritatis Splendor §85. 18 Veritatis Splendor §88.Which means also: the love of neighbor from the love of God. Marriage and Freedom 1145 The Unity of Morality and Faith Let me explain, first, the dichotomy itself. The separation of morality from faith is a refusal to allow that the moral sense is “rooted and fulfilled in the religious sense”; more specifically, that “only God, the Supreme Good, constitutes the unshakeable foundation and essential condition of morality.”19 Russell Hittinger offered a fine treatment of this separation in an article that appeared in Crisis magazine two years after the release of Veritatis Splendor. With John Paul II, he traced the problem all the way back to Genesis 2:17; that is, to the divine prohibition against eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. “The first law establishes the rule of law itself,” says Hittinger, “which is that men govern only by sharing in divine governance.” Their freedom to govern flows from this “participated theonomy.”20 But the rejection of the first law, of this first principle of all law, establishes—or rather, purports to establish—a sphere of “complete sovereignty of human reason in the domain of moral norms regarding the right ordering of life in this world.”21 Faith and obedience are set aside in the exercise of this sovereignty. An attempt is made to evict God himself from the garden or vineyard he has planted, of which man was to be the steward or tenant and eventually the partner. The actual result is that law is turned against itself, and that liberty fragments into license on the one hand and coercion on the other. It is man who loses his place in the garden. He is reduced to living “as if God did not exist.”22 An illustration of this “as if,” and of its coercive character, is fresh on my mind because of a case currently before the Supreme Court of Canada in which I have been involved as an expert witness. The aforementioned Ethics and Religious Culture (ERC) curriculum is mandatory in Quebec, not only for public schools, but for all schools. And in this curriculum it is forbidden that any appeal be made to God. Even Catholic schools are not allowed in their deployment of the ERC curriculum to make any such appeal.They are not to claim that God does not exist; but they are to teach as if God did not exist. Which is also to say that, while engaged in this teaching, they are to live as if God did not exist. They must conform to the State’s mandate for “neutrality” in matters religious and ethical. When one Jesuit school requested an 19 Veritatis Splendor §98f. 20 “Law and Liberty in Veritatis Splendor,” Crisis 13 (May 1995): 13–17 (available at ewtn.com). Hittinger elaborates: “The natural condition of man is one of participation in a higher norm. Man has liberty to direct himself because he is first directed by another.” 21 Veritatis Splendor §36. 22 Veritatis Splendor §88. 1146 Douglas Farrow exemption, that it might teach an equivalent curriculum in its own Catholic way, its request was denied on the grounds that no confessional approach could possibly do justice to the curriculum’s goals, namely, “the recognition of others and the pursuit of the common good.” The school sued, and the lower court called this denial—this demand for conformity in the name of tolerance—“totalitarian in nature.”Which it is. But the Court of Appeal afterward declared it only a minor infringement on religious liberty, justified by a concern for the common good. Catholics can be asked to behave as if they were not Catholics for part of their school day, so long as there is some other part in which they may declare themselves as such.23 What happens when we live as if God did not exist, whether by court order or simply by cultural osmosis? The answer is that “the criteria employed by believers themselves in making judgments and decisions often appear extraneous or even contrary to the Gospel”; our own weakness, says Veritatis Splendor, becomes “the criterion of the truth about the good.”24 In the case in point, teachers are instructed that no student opinion is to receive anything but affirmation; each one is free to provide his own measure of the good. This is supposed to make for a tolerant and inclusive society, but in fact it is an approach that corrupts the morality both of the individual and of society.25 John Paul II reminds us that the Church is charged by God with the task of interpreting the moral norm, of which it is in “no way the author or the arbiter.” “In obedience to the truth which is Christ, whose image is reflected in the nature and dignity of the human person, the Church interprets the moral norm and proposes it to all people of good will, without concealing its demands of radicalness and perfection.”26 But what is the Church to do when it is deprived of the power to propose this even to its own, never mind to all people of good will? What is it to do when it resides in a society in or for which it has been determined that the common good requires silence about Christ and about God? The pope’s answer is crystal clear. It must witness anyway, martyrially, resisting even to the shedding of its blood.27 Why? Because “the Supreme 23 Le Procureur Général du Québec c. Loyola High School et John Zucchi (Cour d’Appel 500-09-020854–105, 4 Décembre 2012). The Supreme Court of Canada has granted leave to appeal. 24 Veritatis Splendor §104; cf. again §88. 25 The battle over education that is going on in Quebec, as in many other jurisdictions, is the consequence of errors condemned already in Pius IX’s 1864 Syllabus of Errors; see §§45–48. 26 Veritatis Splendor §95, quoting Familiaris Consortio. 27 Veritatis Splendor §§90–94; cf. Heb 12:3f. Marriage and Freedom 1147 Good and the moral good meet in truth: the truth of God, the Creator and Redeemer, and the truth of man, created and redeemed by him.” To this, testimony must always and everywhere be given by the Church, regardless of what man says or does. For the Church’s raison d’être is to bear witness to Christ, in whom the truth of God and the truth of man are objectively one.To bear witness to Christ is also to bear witness to “the inviolability of the moral order,” and so to the dignity and freedom of man.28 Human freedom is today in great jeopardy, because of the crisis of confusion between good and evil that flows from a false opposition between freedom and truth, the font of which is the divorce between faith and morality; which is one and the same with our refusal to honor God as God, and to render thanks for his great gifts. Christian freedom is today in great jeopardy, because there are many, especially in places of power, who do not wish to be reminded of this, who do not wish to know—who wish rather to deny—the objective truth about God and about man to which Christians are bound to give witness. So what are Christians to do? What Then Shall We Do? Let us return to the matter of marriage, our main example of the confusion and coercion that arise when these dichotomies are operative. Here we are certainly not alone in our witness to what John Paul calls “the absoluteness of the moral good”;29 that is, in expressing our objection to the move to put heterosexual and homosexual relations on the same legal footing. Many others also see in this move an attempt to suppress the truth of nature in the name of a false freedom. “To establish a new equivalence, a new equality, a new norm, will deny reality,” complained Bruno Azérot (representative from Martinique and soi-disant “man of the left”) to the French National Assembly.30 What he pointed out to the Assembly— which, of course, voted shortly afterwards to proceed with this denial—was something that I had tried to point out to Canadian parliamentarians back in 2005, when Canada was at the same stage at which France is now: namely, that the move to same-sex marriage necessarily entails the commodification of children, whose right to a father and mother, and in particular to their own father and mother, is repudiated thereby; only, as one whose ancestors had been slaves, he could say it with much more force 28 In a certain sense, this may even be put the other way round. To bear witness to human dignity is already to bear witness to Christ, because in him and only in him are human dignity and freedom guaranteed. 29 See Veritatis Splendor §94. 30 Bruno Nestor Azérot, speaking on 1 February 2013. 1148 Douglas Farrow than I could.31 Yet M. Azérot’s speech, like Rabbi Bernheim’s essay, amounted in the end, given the Assembly’s vote, to a lament for freedom despised, for rights lost, for human dignity attacked at its very roots.32 What has happened in Canada and in France, and lately in Britain, has begun to happen in America also; the tide is evidently flowing in that direction. So what are we to do? How are we to set about recovering our freedom? It is instructive, I think, to compare notes at this point with the pope of Radical Orthodoxy, Professor John Milbank. In his magisterial article on the subject, “Gay Marriage and the Future of Human Sexuality,”33 Milbank first frames an argument against the redefinition of marriage “in broadly ‘natural law’ terms which can appeal to all human beings.” Samesex marriage, he concludes, appears to flout human nature, generating various more or less insoluble dilemmas. “The issue of sexual difference and complementarity,” he contends, “needs to be readdressed.” Milbank then observes, quite rightly, that natural law arguments are insufficient: [For] in the end the true character of human nature is only recognisable if one ascribes to the notion of a created order, and this is only likely to be done by people whose thinking already obscurely anticipates that the God who gives in creation will also give the knowledge of himself to rational spirits by grace. In other words, the “nature” and the “reason” considered by secular people, on the one hand, and religious people, on the other, are not likely to coincide. Christians are likely to frame the debate over gay marriage in terms of the true human good, the proper goals that human beings should aim for. Secular people, on the other hand, are likely to reject the idea that such goals can be objectively shared in common, and to frame the debate in terms of rights and private utility. 31 Sylviane Agacinski–Jospin, who at first opposed and then supported same-sex marriage, worried in this connection about homosexual adoption rights. Her concern is summarized by Robert Zaresky (“Égalité Meets Gay Marriage,” New York Times, 8 February 2013): “If we truly sought what is most universal in our lives, we could go no further than the fact that ‘a child can only issue from a father and mother, that is to say a man and a woman.’We ignore this ‘fundamental value’ only at our own and society’s peril, Agacinski warns. Most alarming, in her eyes, is the burgeoning market in surrogate mothers, women engaged in what she calls a commerce in human beings.’ ” 32 Or rather somewhere near its roots. For what he could not say, or at least what he did not say, is that we have been commodifying children ever since we normalized contraception. 33 13 March 2012 (ABC.net.au) Marriage and Freedom 1149 By “secular people” (an infelicitous term) I think we may understand a reference to those who do not render thanks. When Milbank turns to the question “What then shall we do?” he briefly considers the proposal that we should ask the State to withdraw from marriage and cease regulating sexual relations altogether. “This radical position,” he says, “should be refused, on the grounds that it is desirable that the state give every possible legal and fiscal encouragement to marriage as a key institution of social bonding.” If however same-sex marriage is universally embraced, the Church (he means the Anglican Church) should “deem marriage under civil law a failed experiment and . . . resume its sacramental guardianship of marriage as a natural and social condition.” In order to defend itself from the charge of “unjust discrimination against gay people,” however, it should also “move swiftly to permit the blessing of gay civil partnerships in church,” so as to “render the strongest possible theological statement of the view that it is possible to recognise the legitimacy of faithful homosexual union without conceding that this is tantamount to marriage.” To concede that it is tantamount to marriage “would mean embracing a dubious theology separating soul from body by imagining ethereal souls entirely free from their corporeal and so engendered connections.” On the other hand, to refuse to bless “faithful homosexual unions” (he suggests the sexual aspect of such unions be left to the discretion of couples and their confessors) would be to deny “the probability that homosexuality indeed falls within the range of ‘natural’ human behaviour.” And how is the distinction between sacramental marriage and civil unions, blessed or otherwise, to be maintained? By employing “the major weapon in its cultural armoury . . . the offer of a traditional Church wedding.” So: “the battle over gay marriage may well be lost, but this does not mean that Christians must also concede the war over the future of human sexuality.” In defense of human sexuality they still have in their armory—at least until the State makes it illegal to deploy it on a discriminatory basis—the offer of a traditional church wedding! I said it was useful to compare notes. I’m not sure what you may have noticed, but here is what I noticed: Milbank has some very sensible things to say about human nature, including the importance of sexual difference, on the one hand, and the gifts and curses of homosexuality, on the other. He also recognizes that asking the State to get out of marriage is no solution. But where John Paul II puts martyrial witness to Christ, and so to the truth, John Milbank puts a jazzed-up offer of a traditional church wedding, complete (he proposes) with pick-up and delivery of the bride and groom, photographing etc., all at a price that undercuts the 1150 Douglas Farrow going rate, so as to make the pagans jealous. On this the future of human sexuality apparently depends. Something has gone wrong here, very badly wrong.34 And that something is not simply a function of Milbank’s failure to grasp what is really at stake in the contraceptive mentality, or in his reading of homosexual practice, within certain unspecified limits, as natural. It is more fundamentally a function of a christological deficiency, on which I have commented elsewhere.35 It is worth noting that his article contains but a single passing reference to Christ—an allusion to Ephesians 5—the cogency of which he himself seems to miss. To his credit, however, Milbank has produced a further article that grapples with the totalitarian danger now facing us. In “The Impossibility of Gay Marriage and the Threat of Biopolitical Control,”36 he decries “the modern state’s drive to assume direct control over the reproduction of the population, bypassing our interpersonal encounters.” The gay marriage strategem, he opines, “is not about natural justice, but [about] the desire on the part of biopolitical tyranny to destroy marriage and the family as the most fundamental mediating social institution.” That indeed is a fact, and its deepest explanation lies, I would say, in modern man’s rejection of the lordship of Christ and in his need to force marriage to deny, rather than to signify, that lordship.37 Which of course suggests that we try to give an answer to the question “What then shall we do?” that is more robust than Milbank’s earlier proposal, an answer more in keeping with the guidance given in Veritatis Splendor. Uncommon Sacrifices We have learned, or we are learning, that we cannot rely on an appeal to religious freedom. Where morality is divorced from faith, religious freedom is immediately suspect. Already we hear a rising chorus of complaints about religious freedom, and of questions about whether religious free- 34 Here indeed is a fine illustration of John Paul II’s lament: “Certainly moral theol- ogy and its teaching are meeting with particular difficulty today” (Veritatis Splendor §111). 35 See my review of Radical Orthodoxy (New York: Routledge, 1999) in Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 42.3 (2000): 330f.; cf. R. R. Reno, “The Radical Orthodoxy Project,” First Things (February 2000): 37–44. 36 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 23 April 2013. 37 See further D. Farrow, Ascension Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 106ff., though an exposition of Ephesians 5, which is beyond our remit here, is also lacking there. Marriage and Freedom 1151 dom really is a fundamental right.38 I am for defending religious freedom with all the vigor we can muster, and for resisting the administrative tyranny to which Alexis de Tocqueville warned us we were susceptible.39 Arguably the present brew of militant secularism, bureaucratic totalism, and radical feminism with its LGBTQ ingredients, is the most potent and deadly draught that our civilization has yet been asked to drink. But I am not for relying on religious freedom as the antidote, for religious freedom will most certainly disappear along with marriage, if marriage itself disappears from the legal horizon, swallowed up by this beast called “gay marriage.” So here is what I think we should do. First, we should reckon with the fact that “maintaining a harmony between freedom and truth occasionally demands uncommon sacrifices,” as John Paul II warned us.40 And that this is such a time. Second, we ought not at all to shy away from the fact that the citizens of a society that does not render honor and thanks to God will, among other negative consequences, be given up “in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they have exchanged the truth about God for a lie.” And in reckoning with that we must be prepared, for our part, to renounce the contraceptive mentality and all its ways, even when—especially when—the government allies with various ideological and economical interests to reinforce it. For there can be no doubt that many features of our current situation, morally and culturally and legally, are the product of this 38 As Yuval Levin remarks: “Religious liberty is an older and more profound kind of liberty than we are used to thinking about in our politics now. It’s not freedom from constraint, but recognition of a constraint higher than even the law. It’s not ‘the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life’ but the right to answer to what you are persuaded is the evident and inflexible reality of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. It’s not the right to do what you want; it is the right to do what you must. Governments have to recognize that by restricting people’s freedom to live by the strictures of their faith they are forcing them to choose between the truth and the law. It is therefore incumbent upon the government of a free society to seek for ways to allow people to live within the strictures of their consciences, because it is not possible for people to live otherwise” (www.nationalreview.com/corner). But cf., e.g., Brian Leiter, Why Tolerate Religion? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 39 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, IV.6 (London: The Folio Society, 2002), 661ff. 40 Veritatis Splendor §102. 1152 Douglas Farrow mentality. In other words, we must model self-denial, “controlling our own bodies in holiness and honor,” as Paul says.41 Third, we must be prepared to proclaim that the body is for the Lord, and the Lord for the body, as the same apostle says elsewhere.42 We must proclaim this first of all to believers; but we must also proclaim it to unbelievers and, in the context of that proclamation, be prepared to repudiate publicly those practices that Scripture calls porneia as practices unfitting for human beings and contrary to human dignity. That includes homosexual practices, which the Catechism (§2357) describes as intrinsically disordered, and therefore morally wrong, just as the psychology that drives such practices is objectively disordered (though not ipso facto culpable). Let me say, parenthetically, that I have done my best to provide a sketch of the positive anthropology that permits such a proclamation and that also requires such repudiations, in my Thirteen Theses.43 This anthropology, or something like it, is the context in which the repudiations in particular must be couched, lest they be mistaken for malicious discrimination or hate speech.44 But there can be no getting round the fact that there is a concerted effort to displace this anthropology, or anything remotely like it, in the minds of our young people especially, and that this effort has been very successful.45 The battle over who controls public education is in significant part a battle to secure that success and to rout completely any straggling opposition; so is the battle to control the juridical definition of “hate speech.” It is past time to stand up and be counted here. Those who think the conflict can be avoided are mistaken. They are not dealing realistically either with the gospel or with the deter41 1 Thes 4:3–5; cf. Rom 1:18ff. Sexual self-denial is not the same as sexual self- repression, a point we must sometimes defend; but I am a little wary of attempts, current in some “theology of the body” circles, to counter pagan sexual eroticism by trying to cultivate a somewhat more Christian version. 42 “The body is not meant for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body” (1 Cor 3:13)—a point Paul immediately supports by way of appeal to one of the most basic doctrines of the faith, viz., the resurrection of the dead. 43 “Thirteen Theses on Marriage,” First Things (October 2012): 23f. (cf. December 2012, 14f.). 44 Or for that matter be found in contravention of the Catechism’s demand that persons of disordered sexual psychology “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity; every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided” (§2358). 45 An anecdote in illustration of that success: I recall being approached by two young women after a class at McGill University, the reading for which had been drawn from Evangelium Vitae. This reading they had found shocking, and they wished to make certain that I understood just how shocking it was.What they expressed was neither a complaint nor an appreciation, but a registration of utter surprise. Marriage and Freedom 1153 mination of its opponents. They are not considering the unbreakable bond between truth and freedom. My fourth point follows: There are good natural law arguments for marriage that must be pressed with renewed energy, even if it is true that they will only be fully convincing to those who anticipate somehow that nature is open to grace and reason to revelation.46 But if it is the eclipse of the sense of God that leads to the eclipse of the sense of man,47 and if indeed the eclipse of the sense of man is already far advanced, it is above all the gospel of Jesus Christ that we must proclaim, declaring on his authority that man may once again learn to be man.We must preach Jesus Christ and his resurrection, and with it the truth that the Lord is for the body and the body for the Lord. “The new evangelization also involves the proclamation and presentation of morality,” says John Paul II,48 and the reverse is true as well. To present morality apart from a presentation of the gospel, or without the authority that derives from the Resurrected One, is futile. Man, who qua man does yearn for the good, must draw near to Christ to discover the good, and to discern the true relation between freedom and truth, between law and liberty.49 Not for nothing does Veritatis Splendor begin with the parable of the rich young ruler, or call us to forsake worldly security to follow Jesus. Fifth—though here we only return to the first point—we must prepare for civil disobedience and its consequences.The Rev. Ken Miller, a Mennonite pastor in Virginia, recently set an example for others to follow. He was jailed for refusing to testify before a Grand Jury against those who helped a woman escape with her young daughter from a custody order that defied natural law and natural justice by assigning parental rights to a former lesbian partner. In doing so, he took the path marked out by St. Peter himself, not to mention Thomas Aquinas and Thomas More and Leo XIII and Martin Luther King, Jr., and a host of others: the path of refusing to set positive law above natural law and divine law.50 It is one thing for the State to permit transgressions of 46 Beyond Milbank, see for example Sherif Girgis, Ryan Anderson, and Robert George, What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense (New York: Encounter Books, 2012). 47 Evangelium Vitae §21. 48 Veritatis Splendor §107. 49 Cf. Augustine, De Moralibus Ecclesiae 48ff., and Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 4.12ff., both of which expound an evangelical dialectic of law and liberty that resists any tendency to substitute license for the latter and coercion for the former. 50 See Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, §52: “For laws only bind when they are in accordance with right reason, and, hence, with the eternal law of God.” (Reference is made here to the Summa theologiae I–II, q. 93, a. 3: “Human law is law only by 1154 Douglas Farrow divine or natural law, another thing for it to try to enforce transgressions. Where it does so, we are duty-bound to resist; it is right and just. But of course we must be willing, as these were, to suffer the consequences. Christian freedom is not freedom from inconvenience, or even from incarceration and death. It is freedom for God, and so also for the neighbor, in Christ crucified and risen. It is martyrial freedom, the freedom to bear witness to the truth in a time of denial. Just so, it is a manifestation of the splendor of truth. N&V virtue of its accordance with right reason; and thus it is manifest that it flows from the eternal law. And in so far as it deviates from right reason it is called an unjust law; in such case it is no law at all, but rather a species of violence.”) Cf. Pope Leo’s Libertas Praestantissimum Donum §10. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2013): 1155–72 1155 The Soul’s Transcendence: Veritatis Splendor and Phenomenology D EREK S. J EFFREYS The University of Wisconsin, Green Bay Green Bay, WI “Phenomenology is neither a rebellion against antiquity and the Middle Ages nor a rejection of modernity, but a recovery of the true philosophical life, in a manner appropriate to our philosophical situation.”1 I N 1970, the Polish Catholic Philosophical Association held a symposium on Cardinal Karol Wojtyla’s book Person and Act.2 It developed into a spirited debate about philosophical methodology. Both Thomists and phenomenologists expressed dissatisfaction with Wojtyla’s work. Noted Thomist Mieczyslaw Albert Krapiec maintained that it focused excessively on morality and was insufficiently metaphysical. Phenomenologists argued that Wojtyla illegitimately mixed phenomenology and metaphysics. Some younger philosophers defended Wojtyla’s work, arguing that it illuminates our experience of morality. This conference revealed philosophical tensions in Wojtyla’s project of using phenomenology within a Thomistic metaphysic.3 1 Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 2000), 203. 2 In English, this title has often been rendered The Acting Person. 3 For accounts of this conference, see Jaroslaw Kupczak, O.P., Destined for Liberty: The Human Person in the Philosophy of Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 76–81, and Rocco Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyla: The Thought of the Man Who Became Pope John Paul II, trans. Paolo Guietti and Francesca Murphy (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1997), 40–41.Wojtyla discusses the Polish Catholic Philosophical Association conference in the essays “The Personal Structure of Self-Determination,” in Karol Wojtyla, Person and Community: Selected Essays, trans. Theresa Sandok, OSM (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 187–95, and “The Person: Subject and Community,” in Karol 1156 Derek Jeffreys These tensions have vexed interpreters of Wojytla’s work for decades.To discover how he uses phenomenology, scholars have examined his habilitation thesis on Max Scheler. To trace developments in Wojtyla’s thought, they have discussed his 1950s Lublin lectures.They have also examined the English translations of Person and Act, debating how it employs Thomistic concepts. Finally, they have linked Wojtyla’s early work with his papal writings, considering how John Paul II’s papacy reflected his philosophical vision. In these debates, philosophers and theologians sought to understand Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II’s complex philosophical method.4 In these discussions, Thomists often approach phenomenology in a hostile and superficial manner. They misread Husserl and Scheler, and they mistakenly identify Scheler with the phenomenological movement as a whole. They claim that everything in phenomenology appears in Aristotle or St. Thomas. They uncritically accept Wojtyla’s interpretation of Scheler and conclude that a Christian ethic cannot be a phenomenological one. They assert that phenomenology offers mere rhetorical cover for reaching moderns or post-moderns. Most frequently, Thomists charge that phenomenology constitutes a form of “idealism.” We are then told that, unlike phenomenologists, Thomists heroically defend metaphysical realism.Yet, this idealism charge ignores serious debates within phenomenology. Students of Edmund Husserl vigorously dispute the definition of idealism. They discuss to what extent Husserl really is an idealist. Furthermore, many phenomenologists embrace a realist phenomenology. They either reject what they take to be Husserl’s idealism or ignore the idealism debate altogether. The Thomistic charge of idealism thus reflects considerable ignorance of the phenomenological tradition.5 Wojtyla, Person and Community: Selected Essays, trans. Theresa Sandok, OSM (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 220–75. In this essay, I refer to Karol Wojtyla and John Paul II interchangeably. 4 For discussions of the controversy over the English translation of Person and Act, see Kenneth L. Schmitz, At the Center of the Human Drama: The Philosophical Anthropology of Karol Wotyla/Pope John Paul II (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1993), 58–63; Kupczak, Destined for Liberty, 76–81; Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyla, 117–20. Recently, Jameson Taylor has rejected criticisms of the English translation, arguing instead that the English text is in fact a different one than the original Polish work. He notes that years separate the Polish and the English texts, and suggests that Wojtyla may have developed his ideas over the years. Rather than a mistranslation, then, the English translation represents a text with new ideas. For this intriguing suggestion, see Jameson Taylor, “The Acting Person in Purgatory: A Note for Readers of the English Text,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 12 (Summer 2010): 77–104. 5 For the idealism charge, see Thomas D. Williams, Who Is My Neighbor? Personalism and the Foundation of Human Rights (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of The Soul’s Transcendence 1157 The twentieth anniversary of the publication of Veritatis Splendor offers an opportunity to reexamine John Paul II’s approach to phenomenology. Both critics and admirers of this encyclical see it as the archetypal Thomistic text. Its treatment of conscience, the moral act, and the body all reflect traditional Thomistic ideas. However, John Paul II also integrates phenomenology into the encyclical.To explore his approach, I first briefly describe how in general John Paul II uses Thomism and phenomenology.This story is a familiar one, but I suggest that it remains incomplete. Second, turning to Veritatis Splendor, I examine its account of the soul and body. Third, I emphasize how it includes phenomenological ideas like self-possession, transcendence, and the person’s value. Fourth, I note how the vision of the person in Veritatis Splendor has recently come under attack: citing advances in neuroscience, popularizers and philosophers alike defend a naturalism that denies the soul’s existence. Fifth, I maintain that considering identity and temporality, phenomenology develops a powerful criticism of naturalism. I end this essay by urging Catholics to embrace John Paul II’s philosophical project. Thomism and Phenomenology Today, the story of Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II’s philosophical journey is well known. Initially trained in Thomistic thought with Reginald GarrigouAmerica Press, 2005], 114–15; Adrian J. Reimers, Truth about the Good: Moral Norms in the Thought of John Paul II (Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia Press, 2011], 90–91; Kupczak, Destined for Liberty, 74–75. In his introductory essay to John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, Michael Waldstein uncritically accepts the young Karol Wojtyla’s conclusion that “a Christian thinker cannot be a phenomenologist”; see John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them:A Theology of the Body, trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2006), 75. For a more sophisticated treatment of Wojtyla and Scheler, see Peter J. Colosi, “The Uniqueness of Persons in the Life and Thought of Karol Wojtyla/Pope John Paul II with Emphasis on His Indebtedness to Max Scheler,” in Karol Wojtyla’s Philosophical Legacy, ed. Nancy Mardas Billias, Agnes B. Curry, and George F. McLean (Washington, DC: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2008), 61–99. Colosi correctly notes that John Paul II cited Scheler frequently for years after he wrote his habilitation thesis. For a careful discussion of idealism and realism in Husserl, see Roman Ingarden, On the Motives Which Led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975). For a sophisticated account of transcendental idealism in Husserl, see Dermot Moran, Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 174–202. In his many works on Husserl, Robert Sokolowski resists simplistic understandings of Husserl as an idealist. Often, he proceeds without addressing the idealism debate. For one example, see Robert Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008]. Drawing on thinkers like Franz Brentano, Adolf Reinach and Roman Ingarden, Barry Smith develops a realist ontology. For his website that features excellent articles on ontology, see ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/. 1158 Derek Jeffreys Lagrange, O.P., he encountered phenomenology when writing a habilitation thesis on Max Scheler. Through Scheler, he learned that, if critically retrieved, phenomenology provides conceptual resources for understanding the person. The phenomenology he embraces comes not from Heidegger but is instead inspired by Edmund Husserl and his students. In John Paul II’s writings, we find references to Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, Roman Ingarden, and Edith Stein. To defend the person’s value, John Paul II locates phenomenology within a Thomistic metaphysics. He draws primarily (but not exclusively) on the existential Thomistic tradition of Etienne Gilson, Cornelio Fabro, and others. At Lublin in the 1950s, he taught in an intellectual environment shaped by the horrors of World War II. Thomists, phenomenologists, and others recognized the importance of affirming the person’s value. Totalitarian attempts to eviscerate whole classes of people motivated Lublin philosophers to accentuate philosophical anthropology. They cultivated an exciting intellectual milieu in which Thomists and phenomenologists exchanged ideas.6 John Paul II articulates his philosophical methodology in a wellknown essay called “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being.”7 In it, he rejects a sharp dichotomy between “objective” and “subjective” accounts of the person. The objective stance, which Wojtyla calls the “cosmological” approach, treats the human being as an object. It sees the human as a rational animal and links humanity to the rest of nature.8 We study “one of the objects of the world to which the human being visibly and physically belongs.”We understand the person by focusing on what she shares with other objects in the world. Despite its power, the cosmological approach fails to capture important dimensions of the person. Often, it does little to illuminate the experience of our inner life.To complement the cosmological approach, we should use subjectivity to proclaim “that the human being’s proper essence cannot be reduced to and explained by the proximate genus and specific difference.”9 6 In this paragraph, I rely on the following sources: Schmitz, At the Center of the Human Drama, 30–58; Kupczak, Destined for Liberty, 76–81; and Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyla, 44–88, 269–397. 7 Karol Wojtyla, “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being,” in Wojtyla, Person and Community, 209–19. I have learned much from John F. Crosby’s analysis of this essay: see John F. Crosby, “The Estrangement of Persons from their Bodies,” in John F. Crosby, Personalist Papers (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004], 113–28. 8 All references in this paragraph are to Karol Wojtyla, “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being,” 211. 9 Ibid. The Soul’s Transcendence 1159 John Paul II utilizes the phenomenological concept of “lived experience” to highlight the subject’s “acts and inner happenings.”10 The subject is a “concrete self, a self-experiencing subject.”11 We experience both others and our inner life. John Paul II calls this focus on the subject a “personalistic” approach. It considers the “irreducible” in the person, those elements that we cannot reduce to general properties of the species. My inner life fundamentally differs from yours, and we should value this difference. In “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being,” John Paul II suggests that we pay particular attention to the irreducible in persons. He notes that “we must always leave the greater space in this cognitive effort [to understand the person] for the irreducible; we must, as it were, give the irreducible the upper hand when thinking about the human being, both in theory and in practice.”12 John Paul II returns to the idea of the irreducible in the person repeatedly in his pre-papal and papal writings. In the “Subjectivity and Irreducible in the Human Being” essay, John Paul II displays the key elements of his philosophical work. He defends a Thomistic metaphysic, maintaining that without it, we risk falling into subjectivism and narcissism. However, Thomists can also selectively employ phenomenological ideas. Properly understood, the modern turn toward the subject can be deeply valuable. In a world that devalues the person, the personalistic approach reawakens us to the inner life of persons. It teaches us to appreciate the value of each individual. An Unfinished Project Like others, I have been inspired by John Paul II’s call to value each individual. However, I also think his philosophical project remains unfinished. At one level, this is simply because the late pope was not a full-time philosopher. He always had ecclesial and pastoral responsibilities that prevented him from devoting his full efforts to philosophical work. To many, his major philosophical work, Person and Act, seems more like an outline than a completed work. Those interested in his philosophy must comb John Paul II’s speeches and encyclicals for clues to his philosophical insights. 10 Ibid., 212. In phenomenology, the concept of lived experience is a complex one that appears often in Husserl’s work. For John Paul II’s detailed discussion of it, see Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person, trans. Andrzej Potocki, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrect, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979), 3–22, and Karol Wojtyla, Persona e atto (Milan: Bompiani, 2001), 35–79. Because of the controversy about the English translation of this text, in this essay I cite both the English and the Italian texts. 11 Wojtyla, “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being,” 212. 12 Ibid., 214. 1160 Derek Jeffreys Additionally, John Paul II’s links with other philosophers have yet to receive serious scholarly treatment. For example, scholars focus on his work on Scheler, emphasizing John Paul II’s critical response to him. However, few thinkers evaluate its accuracy. Did the young Karol Wojtyla accurately understand Scheler? Interpreters also assume that his habilitation thesis remains his final word on Scheler. Few explore whether he changed his mind about Scheler. Additionally, John Paul II distinguishes his approach to action from Husserl’s account of consciousness. He acknowledges that conscious acts are intentional, but he focuses on consciousness’s mirroring function. He also refuses to accept Husserl’s full epoché because it focuses excessively on consciousness.13 However, are these criticisms of Husserl or simply a different kind of phenomenology? If they are criticisms, does John Paul II accurately interpret Husserl? Finally, John Paul II cites the work of Edith Stein and Roman Ingarden, but we lack careful studies of how he uses their work. Unlike Wojtyla, Stein moved from phenomenology to Thomism. How does her approach differ from his? Ingarden exerted a powerful influence on Polish philosophy throughout the twentieth century. John Paul II mentions him occasionally and spoke at his memorial service. On topics like responsibility, John Paul II’s work bears resemblance to Ingarden’s discussion. Yet, we have few scholarly investigations of John Paul II and Ingarden. In sum, John Paul II grasped powerful ideas about Thomism and phenomenology, but we need to develop them in greater depth. Phenomenology and the Young Man Turning to Veritatis Splendor, commentators emphasize its Thomistic character. For example, Steven A. Long enthusiastically proclaims that Veritatis Splendor is “by my reckoning the single most Thomistic papal encyclical since Aeterni Patris over one hundred years ago.”14 Charles Curran harshly criticizes the encyclical for embracing a narrow NeoThomistic legalism.15 Despite their differences, both thinkers agree that 13 For this discussion of Husserl and the epoché, see Wojtyla, The Acting Person, 10–16 (Persona e atto, 63–71). For the consideration of Husserl, intentionality, and consciousness, see Woltyla, The Acting Person, 31–47 (Persona e atto, 99–133). 14 Steven A. Long, “The Thomistic Meta-Structure of Pope John Paul II’s Doctrinal Initiatives,” in Reason and the Rule of Faith: Conversations in the Tradition with John Paul II, ed. Christopher J. Thompson and Steven A. Long (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2011), 26. 15 Charles E. Curran, “Veritatis Splendor: A Revisionist Perspective,” in Veritatis Splendor: American Responses, ed. Michael E. Allsop and John J. O’Keefe (Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward, 1995), 224–44. I think Curran misreads Veritatis Splendor in multiple ways, but I will not make the case in this essay. The Soul’s Transcendence 1161 Veritatis Splendor is a Thomistic document. Others have expressed similar sentiments about the encyclical. Occasionally, commentators note that John Paul II uses phenomenology in Veritatis Splendor’s early sections. For example, they focus on the remarkable analysis of Jesus and the rich young man.16 Here, John Paul II begins his analysis of morality with an encounter between two persons. He analyzes Scripture to develop insights about the good. John Conley, S.J., remarks that John Paul II employs an “onion-peeling analysis common to phenomenological studies of literary texts.”17 He “moves from the superficial to the deeper, from the empirical to the spiritual, as he progressively unveils the moral and theological essences of a brief conversation noted by Saint Matthew.”18 Phenomenology guides John Paul II’s reading of Scripture. However, Conley maintains that it sits uneasily with later Thomistic sections of Veritatis Splendor. Referring also to Evangelium Vitae, he writes, “If these two seminal encyclicals on moral controversies richly illustrate both the phenomenological and Thomistic strands of John Paul II’s operative philosophy, they indicate the problem of finding a unified philosophical approach in John Paul II’s major writings. Rather than complementing or building on each other, these two approaches often appear simply juxtaposed to each other. As many critics have argued, some major encyclicals appear to have several authors.”19 For Conley, phenomenology’s appearance in Veritatis Splendor undermines the encyclical’s coherence. Conley insightfully analyzes the early parts of Veritatis Splendor. However, he uses the term “phenomenology” vaguely, and he mistakenly claims that phenomenology gives way completely to Thomistic analysis. Undoubtedly, the account of Jesus and the young man reflects an attention to personal relations. It also reveals how one person affects another, the kind of analysis we find in Max Scheler.20 Finally, by exploring the 16 This occurs in §§6–28. In this essay, I use the official Vatican translation of Veri- tatis Splendor, available on the Vatican website. For a good discussion of Jesus’ encounter with the young man, see Livio Melina, “The Desire for Happiness and the Commandments in the First Chapter of Veritatis Splendor,” in Veritatis Splendor and the Renewal of Moral Theology, ed. J. A. DiNoia, O.P., and Romanus Cessario, O.P. (Princeton, NJ: Scepter Publishers, 1994), 143–60. 17 John J. Conley, S.J., “Philosophy and Anti-Philosophy: The Ambiguous Legacy of John Paul II,” in Karol Wojtyla’s Philosophical Legacy, 34. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 38–39. 20 Although I cannot demonstrate conclusively that John Paul II draws on Scheler in this section, his analysis bears striking similarities to some of Scheler’s work. For example, Scheler discusses the idea of “exemplary persons” who influence us 1162 Derek Jeffreys encounter with the young man, John Paul II does seek essences. Nevertheless, Conley fails to identify specific phenomenological themes informing John Paul II’s analysis. Body and Soul To gain a greater appreciation for phenomenology in Veritatis Splendor, I turn to the document’s analysis of the soul and body. It occurs in the sections on natural law and human freedom. Here, John Paul II considers distorted conceptions of freedom that unlink it from the body. They treat the “human body as a raw datum, devoid of any meaning and moral values until freedom has shaped it in accordance with its design.”21 On this account, the body has no moral significance. It is merely physical, gaining its moral meaning by a subject’s free choices. The result, John Paul II argues, is a “division within man himself ” between body and spirit.22 On this account, natural law gains no insight by considering the body. Instead, the locus of morality becomes a spirit disassociated from corporeality. John Paul II responds to this conception of the body by using Thomistic concepts. The distorted conception of freedom overlooks the metaphysical truth that the soul is the form of the body. The soul is the body’s principle of unity, and we therefore cannot decouple soul and body. The person has a “spiritual and bodily structure,” a unity that we cannot sunder.23 Natural law thus takes its guidance by reference to the entire person. To illustrate this point, John Paul II discusses homicide. The prohibition against taking innocent life acknowledges the value of physical life. However, it also recognizes the dignity of the human person as an embodied spirit. The human person as a whole elicits our deep moral respect. This emphasis on the person’s unity seems entirely Thomistic, but within the analysis, we find phenomenological themes. As Alasdair MacIntyre notes, the analysis of the body in Veritatis Splendor links “Aristotlean themes in the philosophy of mind and body with perspectives developed within Polish phenomenology by, among others, Karol Wojtyla and also of course by a variety of followers of Merleau-Ponty but also, in personal encounters. For one of his discussions of this topic, see Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, trans. Manfred Frings and Roger Funk (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 572–95. For one analysis of Scheler on exemplary persons, see John R. White, “Exemplary Persons and Ethics: The Significance of St. Francis for the Philosophy of Max Scheler,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 79 (Winter 2005): 57–90. 21 Veritatis Splendor §48. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. §47. The Soul’s Transcendence 1163 earlier and as strikingly by Edith Stein.”24 Many phenomenologists reject the notion that the body is mere material to which we attach meaning. They insist that it contains hints of unity and signs of our spiritual nature. For example, in a work that John Paul II sometimes cites, Ingarden describes the dependence relation between the mind and body. Moral and creative acts are “ontically founded” on the body and are “co-determined by it in the progress of their occurrence.25 We thus look to the body for moral and spiritual meaning. This kind of analysis appears in many thinkers who are inspired by Husserl’s work. In Veritatis Splendor, John Paul II also connects the body to self-possession. He mentions that “the person, including the body, is completely entrusted to himself.”26 Those familiar with John Paul II’s philosophical writings will immediately recognize the idea of self-possession here. Through his efficacy and free acts, the person relates to ends and values. He determines himself by defining his relationship to good and evil.27 Self-determination “in some sense points to self-possession and self-governance as the structure proper to the person.”28 Each person exercises a power over his character that no one else can exercise. He also bears responsibility for his acts and character. We thus see a close connection between self-determination and self-possession. When exploring self-possession, John Paul II accentuates its relational elements. I demonstrate self-possession to others; it is not solipsistic, but instead enables me to give to others. The gift of self, so important in the late pope’s writings, must be grounded in a person with something to give. A spiritually disorganized person will experience difficulties giving to others. Self-possession and Transcendence John Paul II also links self-possession to transcendence. Transcendence means reaching or going beyond a limit. John Paul II distinguishes between vertical and horizontal transcendence. Horizontal transcendence denotes a subject going out to objects.Vertical transcendence refers to the acting subject’s freedom. Through free acts, he partly defines who he is. 24 Alasdair MacIntyre, “How Can We Learn What Veritatis Splendor Has to Teach?” In Veritatis Splendor and the Renewal of Moral Theology, 86. 25 Roman Ingarden, “On Responsibility: Its Ontic Foundations,” in Roman Ingar- den, Man and Value, trans. Arthur Szylewicz (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1983), 63–65. I will return to this essay shortly. 26 Veritatis Splendor §48 (italics in the original). 27 Woltyla, “The Personal Structure of Self-Determination,” in Karol Wojtyla, Person and Community: Selected Essays, 191. 28 Ibid. 193. 1164 Derek Jeffreys He “transcends his structural boundaries through the capacity to exercise freedom.”29 Vertical transcendence draws attention to the person’s inner structure. Vertical and horizontal transcendence complement each other. Historically, metaphysicians have emphasized horizontal transcendence. Yet, metaphysics loses nothing when “reference is made to experience.”30 On the contrary, by considering vertical transcendence, we prevent horizontal transcendence from becoming excessively abstract. Both kinds of transcendence appear in Veritatis Splendor. We see horizontal transcendence when John Paul II considers our relationship to truth and goodness. Because of our capacity to seek truth and goodness, we move beyond particular cultural norms to seek universal ones. John Paul II notes that “it must certainly be admitted that man always exists in a particular culture, but it must also be admitted that man is not exhaustively defined by that same culture.”31 Our nature transcends any particular culture and serves as a ground for universal moral norms. Horizontal transcendence thus shows why cultural relativism must be false. We find vertical transcendence in those parts of Veritatis Splendor that consider how the person relates to the natural law. Natural law is not a legalistic set of abstract demands that coerce the will. Instead, it guides the person who is seeking the good, and he actively embraces its teachings.32 The “acting subject personally assimilates the truth contained in the law. He appropriates this truth of his being and makes it his own by his acts and corresponding virtues.”33 The person internalizes universal norms in a deeply personal way. Through action, he also dynamically displays his character and reveals the meaning of vertical transcendence. Transcendence and the Soul John Paul II uses vertical and horizontal transcendence to affirm the soul’s spiritual dimensions. Often, “spirituality” describes entities we cannot reduce to materiality. However, we should supplement this negative conception with a positive one.Transcendence provides positive content to the concept of spirituality. The “evidence of the spiritual nature of man stems in the first place from the experience of the person’s transcendence in action.”34 We realize that “the personal unity of this material somebody” 29 Wojtyla, The Acting Person, 119 (Persona e atto, 293). 30 Ibid., 155 (Persona e atto, 371–73). 31 Veritatis Splendor §53. 32 Here, of course, I pass over the many complexities in John Paul II’s discussion of natural law. Scholars have considered them in great detail, and I leave this topic to others. 33 Veritatis Splendor §52. 34 Wojtyla, The Acting Person, 181 (Persona e atto, 429). The Soul’s Transcendence 1165 is “determined by the spirit, by his spiritual nature and spiritual life.”35 Through free acts and self-possession, the person reveals a spiritual core. In Veritatis Splendor, John Paul II maintains that this spiritual core also discloses the person’s inherent dignity. Immediately after affirming the soul’s presence, he insists that “it is in the light of the dignity of the human person—a dignity which must be affirmed for its own sake—that reason grasps the specific moral value of certain goods towards which the person is naturally inclined.”36 When we encounter a person we recognize her dignity. Her presence evokes a moral respect, an awareness that persons differ from things.37 The person’s dignity and value exist independently of our social constructions or legal infrastructure. Rather than creating value with exercises of freedom, we meet a pre-existing structure that makes moral demands of us. To summarize, in Veritatis Splendor we see a Thomistic analysis of the soul enriched by phenomenological insights. Metaphysics defines the soul as the form of the body, while phenomenology highlights the soul’s activities. Phenomenology brings “to prominence the unity of man as a person.”38 Self-possession and transcendence reveal the person’s spirituality. In turn, spirituality grounds the person’s value and dignity.The result is a rich conception of the human person. Neuroscience and the Soul Although phenomenology illuminates our inner life,Thomists often question its value. Instead of analyzing lived experience, they ask, why not immediately commence with metaphysics? We can describe the concept of the soul in general, move to the human soul, and then demonstrate its immortality. This way, we arrive at the truth about the human person without engaging contemporary philosophical currents. If we want to understand our inner life, we can retrieve St. Augustine’s writings or those of other pre-modern thinkers. On this account, phenomenology is either a mere rhetorical device or an unnecessary distraction. 35 Ibid., 185 (Persona e atto, 435). 36 Veritatis Splendor §48. 37 In Love and Responsibility, John Paul II explores the person/thing distinction, developing the personalistic principle to highlight the person’s dignity.This principle holds that we should never use a person merely as a means to an end. For a discussion of the personalistic principle, see Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II, Love and Responsibility, trans. H.T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1981), 21–44. I have written about values and the personalistic principle elsewhere: see Derek S. Jeffreys, Defending Human Dignity: John Paul II and Political Realism (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2004). 38 The Acting Person, 185 (Persona e atto, 435). 1166 Derek Jeffreys This response ignores significant contemporary challenges to a Thomistic conception of the soul. Since Veritatis Splendor was published, the field of neuroscience has exploded. New technologies enable neuroscientists to map parts of the brain and to correlate them with thoughts and behavior. They also use the results of the Human Genome Project to link genetics and neuroscience. Finally, the last decade has seen extraordinary development in evolutionary psychology and neuroscience.These scientific advances deeply illuminate aspects of the human person. In popular writings, thinkers use these developments to support physicalism or the idea that only the physical exists. Sometimes, they use the word “naturalism” to emphasize that morality and religion have no spiritual ground. I will use both terms interchangeably. Repeatedly, scientists and science writers pen books pronouncing the death of the soul. For example, linguist Stephen Pinker proclaims that contemporary science undermines the idea of a soul. In his best-selling book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Pinker launches a sustained attack on the concept of soul. Science, he declares “is showing that what we call the soul—the locus of sentience, reason, and will—consists of the information-processing activity of the brain, an organ governed by the laws of biology.”39 At one point, Pinker even takes up John Paul II’s discussion of the soul in the 1996 letter “Truth cannot Contradict Truth.” Noting the pope’s defense of how God creates the individual soul, Pinker concludes “needless to say, debating the Pope is the ultimate exercise in futility.”40 For him, the argument that the soul is the form of the body is an antiquated relic: today, no right-thinking person can take it seriously. Similarly, neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga maintains that his discipline overturns thousands of years of wisdom about human nature. Gazzaniga insists that consciousness is entirely physical. He resists identifying it with the brain, and he maintains that consciousness emerges from but is not identical to brain activity.41 Emergence is not “a mystical ghost but the going from one level of organization to another.”42 To understand consciousness, we need not posit a soul, but instead must understand contemporary neuroscience. 39 Stephen Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 226. 40 Ibid., 187. 41 Analytic philosophers of mind often call this position “emergent physicalism” or “non-reductive physicalism.” It has become a popular position in the last several decades. 42 Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain (New York: HarperCollins Publisher, 2011), 136. The Soul’s Transcendence 1167 Such popular celebrations of neuroscience and physicalism abound. They also receive support from analytic philosophers. In recent years, some have begun questioning what has been their dominant commitment to physicalism.43 However, philosophical allegiance to it remains strong. For example, Patricia S. Churchland continues to publish books arguing against the soul’s existence. In Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy, she insists that “the weight of the evidence now implies that it is the brain, rather than some nonphysical stuff, that feels, thinks and decides.”44 Churchland derides dualism (the idea that the person is composed of soul and body) and seeks to demonstrate that it cannot explain consciousness. In a recent book, she uses neuroscience to explain morality. She addresses many of the topics that appear in Veritatis Splendor, including conscience, moral rules, and consequentialism. However, she explains them without recourse to the soul or our spiritual lives.45 Physicalist philosophers thus raise serious challenges to the conception of the soul in Veritatis Splendor. For them, contemporary sciences eviscerate the idea of a soul. For many people fascinated with neuroscience, talk of the “form of the body” or a “spiritual” presence in the body seems nonsensical. In contrast, scientifically grounded conceptions of the person appear clear. For this reason, physicalism continues to take both popular and scholarly guises. Phenomenology and Naturalism In what remains of this essay, I want to argue that phenomenology in the Husserlian tradition is uniquely situated to engage contemporary naturalism. From his early years writing on mathematics and logic to his famous Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl critically discussed naturalism. He “continually identifies naturalism as the greatest threat to the possibility of a genuinely grounded science and of a genuine philosophy. Indeed, he believed that naturalism was not just a philosophical error, but even threatened the preservation of genuine human values and the possibility of living a fully rational, communal 43 For a good discussion of this trend, see Benedikt Paul Göcke, After Physicalism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012). For a recent and detailed defense of physicalism, grounded in neuroscience, see Jesse J. Prinz, The Conscious Brain: How Attention Engenders Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 44 Patricia Smith Churchland, Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002], 1, italics in the original. 45 Patricia S. Churchland, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011]. 1168 Derek Jeffreys life.”46 Husserl and his students engaged in extended debates about whether psychology can explain consciousness. Famously, they attacked psychologism, the “claim that things like logic, truth, verification, evidence and reasoning are simply empirical activities of our psyche.”47 By engaging psychology and other sciences, they mounted a sustained critique of naturalism. Let’s take just one aspect of Husserl’s critique, to illustrate its power. Those in the Husserlian tradition often link temporality and cognition. They emphasize that what we know undergoes temporal change. To properly explain cognition, we must consider how the mind retains identity throughout temporal change. Husserl and his students explore this problematic in great detail. They insist that we cannot coherently deny identity through time or disregard temporality.48 Many phenomenologists use identity and temporality to respond to naturalistic conceptions of cognition. Naturalists often identify consciousness with particular mental or brain events.Yet, these events are temporally and spatially indexed, and thus differ from one another. How, then, can we speak of the same cognition? In order to account for shared cognition, the naturalist must adopt some form of conventionalism or nominalism. These positions often uncritically presuppose a sense of the identity of objects of cognition. For example, they smuggle in universals like “resemblance” or “similarity” while simultaneously denying their existence. Ingarden carefully develops this argument against naturalism. Repeatedly, he employs it to criticize psychological and physicalist understandings of art, music, and architecture.49 For example, we cannot 46 Dermot Moran, “Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy and the Critique of Natu- ralism,” Continental Philosophy Review 41.4 (2008): 402. 47 Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology, 114. For discussions of psychologism, see Perspectives on Psychologism, ed. Mark A. Nottorno (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989) and Martin Kusch, Psychologism: A Case Study in the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1995). 48 For an excellent presentation of this argument, see Aron Gurwitsch, “On the Intentionality of Consciousness,” in Aron Gurwitsch, Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 124–40. In Person and Act, John Paul II notes the importance of phenomenology’s analysis of time. He states that the “the traditional philosophy of man constructed on the ground of the philosophy of being did not occupy itself directly and explicitly with this [connecting the existential status of man with time problem]. It was however, implicitly contained in the concept of the ‘contingency’ of beings which referred to the human being as well as to all other derivative (i.e. created) beings.” Wojtyla, The Acting Person, 308, n. 36 (Persona e atto, 247, n. 35). 49 For one example, see Roman Ingarden, Ontology of the Work of Art: The Musical Work, The Picture, The Architectural Work, The Film (Athens, OH: Ohio University The Soul’s Transcendence 1169 identify a symphony with either sound vibrations or mental events in the minds of creators or composers. Such ontologies of the musical work fail to account for the musical work’s identity through time. To illustrate this criticism of naturalism further, let me return to Pinker’s work. In Veritatis Splendor, John Paul II criticizes those who use the social sciences to ground moral norms. He holds that we cannot arrive at moral truth by surveying practices in diverse cultures.50 Pinker takes just this approach to morality, arguing for the existence of crosscultural universals. He insists that “universal mental mechanisms can underlie superficial variations across cultures.”51 Despite cultural variation, we find a core of universal mental mechanisms throughout the world. Pinker endorses and adds to a list of such universals compiled by Donald Brown. The mechanisms include empathy and other moral concepts. Pinker attributes many of these universals to the brain, which he sees as a computational system. Empathy, for example, arises in the brain. It is an information-processing system that takes in information and produces bodily responses. Entirely physical, it appears in many cultures and requires no spiritual capacities whatsoever. These confident pronouncements about human universals quickly crumble under critical scrutiny. For example, Pinker never considers the ontology of a universal, instead presenting universals in a philosophically naïve fashion. Ontologically, exactly what is the “information” the brain processes? Is information a brain event or a universal? Moreover, if universals like empathy originate in individual brains, how can we know they are identical? My brain differs from yours in multiple ways. Brains in different cultures also differ temporally. The computational processes (brains) functioning now in China differ from those operating in the U.S. In the face of this change, Pinker never provides a principle of identity to explain cross-cultural universals. As I have already mentioned, thinkers like Pinker usually embrace some simplistic form of nominalism or conventionalism. Universals like empathy are concepts we use to identify similar computational systems. Perhaps they are similar sound vibrations or words we employ to reach Press, 1989]. Gottlob Frege famously argued that mathematical objects cannot be mental events because mental events differ in their temporal and other properties. He uses the Pythagorean Theorem as an example: see Gottlob Frege, “The Thought: A Logical Inquiry,” Mind 65, no. 259 ( July 1956): 289–311. Frege’s philosophical commitments differ significantly from those of the Husserlian tradition, but they intersect at key points. 50 Veritatis Splendor §33. 51 Pinker, The Blank Slate, 37, italics in the original. For the list of human universals, see the Appendix in Pinker, The Blank Slate, 435–39. 1170 Derek Jeffreys agreement. However, this conceptual move confronts obvious difficulties. What does “similar” mean? How can we pick out similar computational systems without already possessing a concept of similarity? Husserl famously examines this problem in the Logical Investigations, where he demonstrates nominalism’s multiple weaknesses.52 In his brilliant discussion of the literary work of art, Ingarden, too, reveals difficulties in identifying universals with words. Such a position assumes we already possess a clear ontology of words and sentences. However, this is exactly what we need to explore.53 In sum, popular presentations of naturalism demonstrate remarkable philosophical naïveté. In his later years, Husserl commented about how scientists of his day showed little wonder about scientific concepts. Years after his death, we can declare the same verdict about today’s champions of physicalism.54 Obviously, philosophers understand the complexity of universals. However, many analytical philosophers show little awareness of phenomenological challenges to naturalism. Let me return to Churchland’s work on morality. She provides a fascinating look at the neuroscience of morality. For example, she often discusses values and, like John Paul II, she is preoccupied with them. In one chapter of her recent book she traces the origins of values to changes in the brain at key points in evolutionary history.55 In another chapter, she maintains that moral rules stem from our perception of values. For her, values take “center stage,” and rules express and codify them.56 To make her case, Churchland employs considerable evidence from evolutionary biology and contemporary neuroscience. Throughout her intriguing presentation, however, Churchland never explains precisely what a value is. The ontology of values preoccupied Scheler, Ingarden, and John Paul II, yet we find little awareness of it in Churchland’s work.57 For example, like Pinker she reflects on empathy. 52 See Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Volume 1, trans. J. N. Findley, ed. Dermot Moran (London: Routledge, 2001]) 239–313. 53 For Ingarden’s most famous work on literature, see Roman Ingarden, The Liter- ary Work of Art, trans. George G. Grabowicz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 54 My comments here are informed by Dermot Moran’s outstanding book on Husserl’s later work: see Dermot Moran, Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 55 Churchland, Braintrust, 12–26. 56 Ibid., 163. 57 Later in his life, Ingarden wrote several intriguing essays on values. In English, they appear in his wonderful book Man and Value. For one of these essays, see “What We Do Not Know about Values,” 131–64. The Soul’s Transcendence 1171 She discusses the “mirror neuron” hypothesis, which holds that neurons simulate or represent the intentions of others. This simulation makes empathy possible. Churchland questions the scientific evidence supporting the mirror neuron hypothesis. Yet, she never discusses empathy and the value of the person. Empathy, as Edith Stein notes, relates us to the person’s value.58 What exactly is that value? Perhaps, as Churchland sometimes suggests, we can identify a value with activity in the brain’s prefrontal corpus. However, we again confront the Husserlian objection about identity and temporality. Neurons change almost instantaneously, and brains differ. The idea that neurons simulate or mirror values presupposes that they enjoy an enduring identity capable of representing. Yet, they lack the constancy necessary to represent intentions or values. Churchland’s discussions of genes and values fare no better than her consideration of brains. For example, if we identify values with genes, we must ask about the ontological status of genes.They are obviously universals, but what kind? Do genes retain sufficient constancy across time to represent or somehow relate to values? Churchland adopts ideas about identity, temporality, and value without recognizing their ontological complexity. We find in her work an extraordinary naïveté about universals and time. Often, Churchland recognizes philosophical complexity, but she falls back on a simplistic pragmatism. She presupposes particular conceptions of universals or identity, and then shows their fruitfulness in supporting scientific hypotheses. Her pragmatism, however, convinces only those already committed to naturalism. It also arbitrarily halts inquiry about values by restricting this inquiry to what scientific practices reveal.59 By itself, the phenomenological critique of philosophical naturalism cannot demonstrate the soul’s existence. In fact, it might provide support for several positions on the nature of the human person. However, by criticizing naturalism, phenomenologists open a richer dialogue about human cognition. The phenomenological perspective, as John Paul II 58 Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989). Leon Kass chaired the President’s Council on Bioethics, Churchland contributed an essay to the Council’s inquiry about human dignity. It contains remarkably superficial assertions about Plato and universals. With a few sentences about “Plato’s heaven,” Churchland dismisses Plato’s profound reflections about universals. For this essay, see Patricia S. Churchland, “Human Dignity from a Neurophilosophical Perspective,” in Human Dignity and Bioethics: Essays Commissioned by the Council on Bioethics (March, 2008), chapter five, available at bioethics. georgetown.edu/pcbe/reports/human_dignity/index.html. 59 When 1172 Derek Jeffreys maintains in Person and Act, empowers us to begin a metaphysical analysis of the soul.60 Through phenomenological analysis, we first establish the spirituality of the person, and we can then consider what kind of nature exercises this spirituality. Conclusion In his excellent Introduction to Phenomenology, Robert Sokolowski maintains that phenomenology complements Thomistic thought. It clarifies key epistemological assumption about everyday life. By responding to modern philosophical challenges, it also empowers Thomists to develop their metaphysic. Finally, phenomenology reawakens our wonder at everyday life. It draws attention to the complexity of words, sentences, scientific concepts, and cultural works. Husserl’s early work attracted Catholics (and Protestants) who recognized its power to respond to modernity. They in turn influenced other Catholics, including the young Karol Wojtyla. In Veritatis Splendor, he defends a Thomistic conception of the soul and morality. However, phenomenology also appears in the encyclical’s account of selfpossession, transcendence, the soul, and the person’s value. Throughout his career, John Paul II recognized that phenomenology helps us defend the person’s value. Rather than rejecting phenomenology in a defensive and uninformed manner, Thomists should acknowledge its importance. It is a philosophical movement uniquely situated to respond to contemporary naturalism. Born in an era that celebrated psychology and other sciences, phenomenology carefully engages these disciplines. It provides a sustained critique of naturalism, one that supports Thomistic thought. In its scientific sophistication, contemporary naturalism differs from its twentieth-century ancestors. Its drive to quantify, measure, and assess appears in many aspects of life. Educational institutions must assess learning, public policies must be “evidence-based,” and biological approaches to the psyche dominate psychiatry. These tendencies stifle spiritual practices, undermine recognition of the soul, and stultify our natural wonder. John Paul II understood these negative aspects of modernity. By critically retrieving phenomenology within a Thomistic metaphysic, he discovered a way to highlight and defend the person’s dignity. Although incomplete, his project is illuminating and inspiring. It offers Catholics valuable conceptual tools with which to engage contemporary culture. Most importantly, it reminds us to wonder at the person’s value, a wonder that John Paul II retained throughout his remarkable life. N&V 60 John Paul II details the move from phenomenology to metaphysics in The Acting Person, 182–83 (Persona e atto, 433). Roman Ingarden emphasizes the move from ontology to metaphysics in some of his works. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2013): 1173–92 1173 John Paul II on the Development of Doctrine C HRISTOPHER K ACZOR Loyola Marymount University Los Angeles, CA T HE VAST theological and philosophical opus of Pope St. John Paul II forbids any brief summary and invites caution. This caution is especially appropriate when the topic is one that he did not systematically address in any one major work. Although John Paul wrote encyclicals or apostolic addresses on virtually all significant topics in theology, there is no work focused on the development of doctrine. Indeed, for some it would seem as if there could not be any such work insofar as the pope is characterized as traditional and opposed to certain proposed changes in the Church. In some ways of course, he has earned this characterization. John Paul II affirms traditional teachings, thereby rejecting what others take as legitimate developments of doctrine, in a number of controversial areas. The teaching of Veritatis Splendor affirmed the traditional Catholic teaching about intrinsically evil acts in opposition to proportionalism, and it likewise affirmed that some particular actions, mortal sins, can undermine our friendship with God in opposition to a “fundamental option,” which would make individual “innerwordly” acts of lesser importance with respect to salvation. With respect also to many particular moral issues, including contraception and reception of communion for those divorced and married without an annulment, the pope reaffirms the teaching of his Petrine predecessors. These traditional positions lead some to suggest that there exists a great reticence on the part of John Paul II to admit development of doctrine. Opponents of proportionalism are described as the “immobilisiti”1 who 1 Richard McCormick, “Moral Theology 1940–1989: An Overview,” Theological Studies 50 (1989): 1–24, at 21. 1174 Christopher Kaczor crush the faithful under unchanging principles2 in the course of “waging war with ongoing police action.”3 The National Catholic Reporter expressed this interpretation of the pontificate of Pope John Paul II in its coverage of a debate between then Fr. Avery Dulles and Fr. Richard McCormick about Church authority and dissent: “McCormick said the problem is rather the attitude of Vatican officials who act as if all doctrines except social teachings ‘are written in stone’ and treat any talk of doctrinal development as ‘confrontational.’ . . . If public dissent has become a problem, McCormick said, it is largely because of the attitudes and statements of John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger, who suppress authentic development through an overly rigorist stance.”4 However, these perspectives should take into account the numerous occasions in which John Paul II explicitly recognized development of doctrine. For example, in Veritatis Splendor, the pope noted that doctrinal development has taken place in various areas of theology. The Church “has achieved a doctrinal development analogous to that which has taken place in the realm of the truths of faith. Assisted by the Holy Spirit who leads her into all the truth (cf. Jn 16:13), the Church has not ceased, nor can she ever cease, to contemplate the ‘mystery of the Word Incarnate’, in whom ‘light is shed on the mystery of man.’ ”5 Doctrinal development is not limited to Christological or Trinitarian mysteries but includes more practical and ethical concerns. In the pope’s words, At all times, but particularly in the last two centuries, the Popes, whether individually or together with the College of Bishops, have developed and proposed a moral teaching regarding the many different spheres of human life. In Christ’s name and with his authority they have exhorted, passed judgment and explained. In their efforts on behalf of humanity, in fidelity to their mission, they have confirmed, supported and consoled. With the guarantee of assistance from the Spirit of truth they have contributed to a better understanding of moral demands in the areas of human sexuality, the family, and social, economic and political life. In the tradition of the Church and in the history of humanity, their teaching represents a constant deepening of knowledge with regard to morality.6 2 Kathleen Talvacchia and Mary Elizabeth Walsh, “The Splendor of Truth: A Femi- nist Critique,” in Veritatis Splendor: American Responses, ed. Michael E. Allsopp and John J. O’Keefe (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1995), 308. 3 Clifford Stevens, “A Matter of Credibility,” in Veritatis Splendor: American Responses, 77. 4 Pamela Schaeffer, “Giants dissent, gently, over authority,” National Catholic Reporter, vol. 35, no. 33 ( Jul 2, 1999): 3. 5 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor §28. 6 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor §4. John Paul II on the Development of Doctrine 1175 Passages such as these make clear that the pope recognized, indeed celebrated, doctrinal developments.7 This essay calls attention to this seldom discussed, and often unrecognized, aspect of his thought by giving a more systematic presentation of remarks about development of doctrine found in various places in the opera omnia of St. John Paul. Before attempting to bring together various obiter dicta in the opus of John Paul II about doctrinal development, it is also important to notice that the pope himself on various occasions contributed to the development of doctrine. In his article, “John Paul II and the Development of Doctrine,” Gerald O’Collins suggests that one can see development in three areas.8 First, the pope emphasized the human experience of God’s self-revelation, an experience that continues in our own day, in the lives of each individual believer, and will continue until the definitive revelation of God at the Second Coming of Christ. Secondly, the pope deepened the Christian understanding of suffering, viewing it as a medium through which Christ becomes present to transform from within the person in pain.9 Third, John Paul emphasized in a new way that the Holy Spirit is at work not just in the Church but also in peoples and cultures outside the Roman Catholic communion.10 We can add to O’Collins’s list the teaching of Evangelium Vitae that the use of capital punishment should be rare if non-existent, which is, arguably, a doctrinal development.11 Likewise, in Ut Unum Sint, the pope’s statement on “reinterpreting” the role of the papacy in order to facilitate greater unity with the Eastern churches may be understood as explicitly calling for if not itself being a doctrinal development.12 This list is not meant to be an exhaustive 7 See too, Pope John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis §§1 and 3; Fides et Ratio §11. 8 Gerald O’Collins, “John Paul II and the Development of Doctrine,” in The Legacy of John Paul II, ed. Michael A. Hayes and Gerald O’Collins (London: Burns & Oates, 2008), 1–16. 9 See Pope John Paul II, Salvifici Doloris §26. 10 John Paul II, Dominum et Vivificantem §5. 11 John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae §56. See too, Christopher Kaczor, “Capital Punishment and the Catholic Tradition: Contradiction, Change in Circumstance, or Development of Doctrine,” Nova et Vetera 2, no. 1 (2004): 279–304. 12 “Whatever relates to the unity of all Christian communities clearly forms part of the concerns of the primacy. As Bishop of Rome I am fully aware, as I have reaffirmed in the present Encyclical Letter, that Christ ardently desires the full and visible communion of all those Communities in which, by virtue of God’s faithfulness, his Spirit dwells. I am convinced that I have a particular responsibility in this regard, above all in acknowledging the ecumenical aspirations of the majority of the Christian Communities and in heeding the request made of me to find a way of exercising the primacy which, while in no way renouncing what is essential to its mission, is nonetheless open to a new situation.” John Paul II, Ut Unum Sint §95. 1176 Christopher Kaczor summary of all the ways in which the pope contributed to doctrinal development. However, these examples are enough to show that it is inaccurate to claim that Pope John Paul merely statically reiterates and does not develop Catholic teaching. Indeed, the pope called for and prayed for doctrinal development on several occasions.13 However, this essay does not focus on John Paul’s doctrinal developments in their particularity (on suffering, human experience, or capital punishment) but rather focuses on the subject of doctrinal development as articulated in various texts, especially Veritatis Splendor. The pope’s account of doctrinal development emerges from several factors including his understanding of Vatican II, his consideration of ‘enculturation,’ and his acknowledgement that history and the development of non-theological knowledge contributes to the deepening of theological study and practice. John Paul II on Vatican II on Development of Doctrine Any contextualized account of John Paul II’s theology must place his thought in relationship to the Second Vatican Council. The choice of his name, taken of course from the two popes who oversaw the Second Vatican Council, John XXIII and Paul VI, says something important about Pope John Paul II. He understood a primary task of his Petrine ministry to be the implementation of the Council. He wrote, “For me, then—who had the special grace of participating in it and actively collaborating in its development—Vatican II has always been, and especially during the years of my Pontificate, the constant reference point of my every pastoral action, in the conscious commitment to implement its directives concretely and faithfully at the level of each Church and the whole Church.”14 The pope’s thought on development arises from his understanding of the Second Vatican Council’s account of development. In Veritatis Splendor, John Paul calls attention to an important distinction drawn by John XXIII between the doctrine itself in its fullness, our understanding of doctrine, and its expression to diverse audiences: The development of the Church’s moral doctrine is similar to that of the doctrine of the faith.The words spoken by John XXIII at the opening of the Second Vatican Council can also be applied to moral doctrine: “This certain and unchanging teaching (i.e., Christian doctrine in its completeness), to which the faithful owe obedience, needs to be more deeply understood and set forth in a way adapted to the needs of our time. Indeed, this deposit of the faith, the truths 13 John Paul II, Ut Unum Sint §95. 14 John Paul II, Fidei Depositum, introduction. John Paul II on the Development of Doctrine 1177 contained in our time-honored teaching, is one thing; the manner in which these truths are set forth (with their meaning preserved intact) is something else.15 This quotation sums up in kernel form the essential challenge of any account of Christian doctrinal development. Jesus Christ is the fullness of God’s revelation, and prior to the Second Coming of Christ public revelation ends with the death of the last apostle. Yet, our understanding of the fullness of revelation can grow and develop over time, both for us as individual Christians and for the Christian community as a whole.16 This process of deepening our understanding and expressing this understanding in ways suitable for evangelization and catechesis of various groups is called doctrinal development. This development includes deeper understandings of the mysteries of faith, such as the Trinity or the hypostatic union, but it also includes deeper understandings of moral doctrine, such as undertaken by the pope in Centesimas Annus which developed the teachings of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum as well as Veritatis Splendor. It is important to note that both the Council and John Paul II, as mentioned in the quotation above, highlight that legitimate development retains intact the original meaning of the doctrine even if expressing this meaning in a new way. It is important, as the pope says in Veritatis Splendor, for theologians to keep this distinction in mind: “The Council also encouraged theologians, ‘while respecting the methods and requirements of theological science, 15 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, note 100; citations within the quotation omitted. 16 The Second Vatican Council put the point as follows: “This tradition which comes from the Apostles develops in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit. For there is a growth in the understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down. This happens through the contemplation and study made by believers, who treasure these things in their hearts (see Luke, 2:19, 51) through a penetrating understanding of the spiritual realities which they experience, and through the preaching of those who have received through Episcopal succession the sure gift of truth. For as the centuries succeed one another, the Church constantly moves forward toward the fullness of divine truth until the words of God reach their complete fulfillment in her. The words of the holy fathers witness to the presence of this living tradition, whose wealth is poured into the practice and life of the believing and praying Church.Through the same tradition the Church’s full canon of the sacred books is known, and the sacred writings themselves are more profoundly understood and unceasingly made active in her; and thus God, who spoke of old, uninterruptedly converses with the bride of His beloved Son; and the Holy Spirit, through whom the living voice of the Gospel resounds in the Church, and through her, in the world, leads unto all truth those who believe and makes the word of Christ dwell abundantly in them (see Col. 3:16).” Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum §8. 1178 Christopher Kaczor to look for a more appropriate way of communicating doctrine to the people of their time; since there is a difference between the deposit or the truths of faith and the manner in which they are expressed, keeping the same meaning and the same judgment.’ ”17 This distinction between the deposit of faith and the manner in which these truths are expressed keeping the same meaning and judgment, drawn by Pope John XXIII at the opening of the council, is a frequent reference point in John Paul’s thought. John Paul notes that John XXIII’s insight is glossed in Vatican II’s decree on ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio: Taking up an idea expressed by Pope John XXIII at the opening of the Council, the Decree on Ecumenism mentions the way of formulating doctrine as one of the elements of a continuing reform.18 Here it is not a question of altering the deposit of faith, changing the meaning of dogmas, eliminating essential words from them, accommodating truth to the preferences of a particular age, or suppressing certain articles of the Creed under the false pretext that they are no longer understood today. The unity willed by God can be attained only by the adherence of all to the content of revealed faith in its entirety. In matters of faith, compromise is in contradiction with God who is Truth. In the Body of Christ, “the way, and the truth, and the life” ( Jn 14:6), who could consider legitimate a reconciliation brought about at the expense of the truth?19 Authentic development of doctrine, on John Paul’s view, must always be a fuller expression of previously proclaimed truth and must never be a reduction or elimination of essential elements of the Christian patrimony. Authentic development includes the fullness of faith, a retention of the meaning of dogmatic formulas, and a proposing of Christian truths, even if not commonly understood in a particular cultural context. Keeping in mind the distinction between the deposit of faith and doctrinal formulations of the deposit of faith, Vatican Council II notes that doctrinal formulations may be deficient. 17 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor §29. 18 “What has just been said about the lawful variety that can exist in the Church must also be taken to apply to the differences in theological expression of doctrine. In the study of revelation East and West have followed different methods, and have developed differently their understanding and confession of God’s truth. It is hardly surprising, then, if from time to time one tradition has come nearer to a full appreciation of some aspects of a mystery of revelation than the other, or has expressed it to better advantage. In such cases, these various theological expressions are to be considered often as mutually complementary rather than conflicting.” Vatican II, Unitatis Redintegratio §17. 19 Pope John Paul II, Ut Unum Sint §18. John Paul II on the Development of Doctrine 1179 Every renewal of the Church is essentially grounded in an increase of fidelity to her own calling. Undoubtedly this is the basis of the movement toward unity. Christ summons the Church to continual reformation as she sojourns here on earth. The Church is always in need of this, in so far as she is an institution of men here on earth. Thus if, in various times and circumstances, there have been deficiencies in moral conduct or in church discipline, or even in the way that church teaching has been formulated to be carefully distinguished from the deposit of faith itselfthese can and should be set right at the opportune moment.20 This teaching of Vatican II finds its echo in Veritatis Splendor. The pope recognizes that doctrinal development may arise from the imperfections of the arguments put forward by the Magisterium in articulating Church teaching. He notes, “While recognizing the possible limitations of the human arguments employed by the Magisterium, moral theologians are called to develop a deeper understanding of the reasons underlying its teachings and to expound the validity and obligatory nature of the precepts it proposes, demonstrating their connection with one another and their relation with man’s ultimate end.”21 Moral theologians can contribute to development but shoring up these limitations in the human arguments deployed in addition to giving their loyal assent to the Magisterium’s teachings. In a variety of ways, the teachings of the Second Vatican Council orient and stimulate John Paul’s reflections on doctrinal development but the pope’s thought on this subject includes elements not emphasized by the Council, such as enculturation. Enculturation Contributes to Doctrinal Development A second vital stimulus to Pope John Paul’s thinking on doctrinal development is enculturation. Enculturation, defined as “the intimate transformation of authentic cultural values through their integration in Christianity and the insertion of Christianity in the various human cultures,” is a recurring theme in the thought of Pope John Paul II.22 The Gospel message encounters various cultures transforming them, but the change is not unilateral: Christian theology (and practice) can transform non-Christian culture, but non-Christian culture can also inform Christian thought and practice. Although Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 3:18), our understanding of the person and message of Jesus, 20 Vatican II, Decree on Ecumenism §6. 21 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor §110. 22 See John Paul II, Redemptoris Missio §52. Also, Slavorum Apostoli (2 June 1985) §11: AAS 77 (1985), 792, and Ut Unum Sint §19. 1180 Christopher Kaczor particular that articulation of our understanding known as theology, does change. Encounter with another culture is an engine for that change, as when early Christianity encountered Hellenistic thought and culture, giving rise to various Patristic theologies. Not just Greek culture but other cultures can contribute to a richer understanding of faith. In the words of Pope John Paul in Fides et Ratio: In India particularly, it is the duty of Christians now to draw from this rich heritage the elements compatible with their faith, in order to enrich Christian thought. . . . What has been said here of India is no less true for the heritage of the great cultures of China, Japan and the other countries of Asia, as also for the riches of the traditional cultures of Africa.23 Great care and discernment are needed in this process, for not every aspect of every culture should be embraced.Yet the Spirit of God is not confined to one people or one culture. Indeed, in virtue of God’s love for all people, we can expect to find elements of the true, the good, and the beautiful in every culture and in every person. One of the reasons that other cultures can enhance the Christian understanding of revelation is that John Paul believed that the Holy Spirit is at work, not just in the Church, but also in peoples and cultures outside the Roman Catholic communion.24 In Dominum et Vivificantem, John Paul taught that the Holy Spirit is active in every time and in every place, and in the lives of every individual.25 In Redemptoris Missio, he wrote: “the Spirit’s presence and activity affect not only individuals but also society and history, peoples, cultures and religions.”26 This insight that cultures untouched by the Gospel, nevertheless contain elements of truth is ancient in the Christian tradition. The Fathers of the Church spoke of the semina Verbi, the seeds of the Gospel from which evangelization and missionary work can spring. By encouraging the use of insights from other cultures, John Paul II echoes the thought of Augustine, who pointed out in De Doctrina Christiana that whatever is true, even as found in pagans, comes ultimately from God. Just as the Israelites stole gold from the Egyptians as they were leaving for the promised land, so too the Christian should make use of non-Christian sources of wisdom 23 John Paul II, Fides et Ratio §72. 24 Here, I am drawing on the work of Gerald O’Collins, “John Paul II and the Development of Doctrine,” The Legacy of John Paul II, ed. Michael A. Hayes and Gerald O’Collins (London: Burns & Oates, 2008), 1–16, especially 11–13. 25 John Paul II, Dominum et Vivificantem §5. 26 John Paul II, Redemptoris Missio §28. John Paul II on the Development of Doctrine 1181 in understanding God’s word.27 John Paul finds this insight also expressed in the Middle Ages by Thomas Aquinas: In the footsteps of the Fathers of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas can maintain that no spirit can be so darkened as not to participate in some way in the divine light. In fact, every known truth from any source is totally due to this “light which shines in the darkness,” since every truth no matter who utters it, comes from the Holy Spirit (Super Ioannem, 1, 5, sec. 3, n. 103).28 Every truth, whatever its cultural or philosophical origin, ultimately comes from God and can perhaps contribute to enriching our understanding of revelation. Great discernment is needed to find and refine the elements of the true, good, and beautiful in a particular system of thought or culture, and yet to find these elements and incorporate them into a fuller understanding of revelation advances the human quest for greater unity with God. Diversity of Language and Philosophy Contributes to Development Another source of development of doctrine is the diversity of language and unfolding of philosophical insights. Just as John Paul often highlighted 27 In Augustine’s words, “If those who are called philosophers, especially the Platonists, have said things which are indeed true and are well accommodated to our faith, they should not be feared; rather, what they have said should be taken from them as from unjust possessors and converted to our use. Just as the Egyptians had not only idols and grave burdens which the people of Israel detested and avoided, so also they had vases and ornaments of gold and silver and clothing which the Israelites took with them when they fled, as if to put them to a better use. They did not do this on their own authority but at God’s commandment, while the Egyptians unwittingly supplied them with things which they themselves did not use well. In the same way all the teachings of the pagans contain not only simulated and superstitious imaginings and grave burdens of unnecessary labor, which each one of us leaving the society of pagans under the leadership of Christ ought to abominate and avoid, but also liberal disciplines more suited to the uses of truth, and some most useful precepts concerning morals. Even some truths concerning the worship of one God are discovered among them. These are, as it were, their gold and silver, which they did not institute themselves but dug up from certain mines of divine Providence, which is everywhere infused, and perversely and injuriously abused in the worship of demons. When the Christian separates himself in spirit from their miserable society, he should take this treasure with him for the just use of teaching the gospel. And their clothing, which is made up of those human institutions which are accommodated to human society and necessary to the conduct of life, should be seized and held to be converted to Christian uses.” De Doctrina Christiana XL, 60. 28 John Paul II, “The Holy Spirit as the Source of Every Truth,” General Audience, September 16, 1998. 1182 Christopher Kaczor that different formulations may be used to speak of the same truth, he also emphasized that these varying expressions are a source of richness of the Church.These differences need not be viewed as detrimental for unity, but can contribute to a legitimate pluralism of expression aiding believers of different kinds to understand, believe, and live Christian teaching. In a rich quotation from Ut Unum Sint, John Paul developed his thoughts on this matter with reference to ecumenism. In dialogue, one inevitably comes up against the problem of the different formulations whereby doctrine is expressed in the various Churches and Ecclesial Communities.This has more than one consequence for the work of ecumenism. In the first place, with regard to doctrinal formulations which differ from those normally in use in the community to which one belongs, it is certainly right to determine whether the words involved say the same thing. This has been ascertained in the case for example of the recent common declarations signed by my Predecessors or by myself with the Patriarchs of Churches with which for centuries there have been disputes about Christology. As far as the formulation of revealed truths is concerned, the Declaration Mysterium Ecclesiae states: “Even though the truths which the Church intends to teach through her dogmatic formulas are distinct from the changeable conceptions of a given epoch and can be expressed without them, nevertheless it can sometimes happen that these truths may be enunciated by the Sacred Magisterium in terms that bear traces of such conceptions. In view of this, it must be stated that the dogmatic formulas of the Church’s Magisterium were from the very beginning suitable for communicating revealed truth, and that as they are they remain for ever suitable for communicating this truth to those who interpret them correctly”. In this regard, ecumenical dialogue, which prompts the parties involved to question each other, to understand each other and to explain their positions to each other, makes surprising discoveries possible. Intolerant polemics and controversies have made incompatible assertions out of what was really the result of two different ways of looking at the same reality. Nowadays we need to find the formula which, by capturing the reality in its entirety, will enable us to move beyond partial readings and eliminate false interpretations.29 This significant passage suggests several important points. First, a single proposition (a non-linguistic entity) may be expressed in contrasting linguistic forms: I believe in God, Credo in Deum, Ich glaube an Gott. These linguistically different tokens express the same proposition in English, Latin, and German. Even within a single language in varying eras, different linguistic forms may reflect the same proposition. In the wedding service from the 29 Pope John Paul II, Ut Unum Sint §38. John Paul II on the Development of Doctrine 1183 Anglican Book of Common Prayer, spouses promised in marriage, “With my body, I thee worship.” In contemporary usage, “worship” should be reserved to God alone, but in the archaic wedding vow, the proposition means roughly, “I will honor my spouse with my body.” Just as various believers in different times express their shared belief with different linguistic expressions of the same truth, so too within even one epoch various believers may have alternative ways of expression that may seem, but not actually be, contradictory. In reality, the alternative ways of expression may simply reflect that one Denkform has replaced another. For example, a Platonically grounded theology may in fact complement rather than contradict an Aristotelian-inspired theology. Just as different formulations arose in the East and in the West to speak of the same realities, so too, one form of doctrinal development is a reformulation and representation of the same truth making use of different philosophical expressions common to a particular epoch. Different philosophical approaches bring with them not just different ways of expressing propositions but also genuinely new insights into the truth. The advancement of philosophy aids the advancement of theology, which in turn stimulates doctrinal development. In Fides et Ratio, John Paul wrote, “Theology in fact has always needed and still needs philosophy’s contribution.”30 For the pope, various branches of theology require sound philosophical presuppositions in order to achieve their goals. In dogmatic theology, philosophy is needed to articulate theological concepts in a critical, consistent, and communicable way. Philosophy has contributed to dogmatic theology through clarifying the relationship of “person” and “nature,” human freedom and divine freedom, and the use of language to speak about God. Fundamental theology makes use of rational arguments to establish the credibility of Revelation. Moral theology employs concepts found in moral philosophy (including philosophy of law) such as guilt, voluntariness, conscience, law, freedom, virtue, final end, and weakness of will. Philosophy has enriched theology. The pope writes, “[S]ince God’s word is Truth (cf. Jn 17:17), the human search for truth—philosophy, pursued in keeping with its own rules—can only help to understand God’s word better.”31 On the pope’s view, theology can help philosophy itself develop over time in a variety of ways, and philosophy in turn can contribute to theology.32 Christian belief itself stimulates philosophers to ask new questions,and philosophical advances in hermeneutics and linguistics can help 30 John Paul II, Fides et Ratio §77. 31 John Paul II, Fides et Ratio §73. 32 John Paul II, Fides et Ratio §§76; 84; 101. 1184 Christopher Kaczor believers interpret Scripture. In Karol Wojtyla’s own thought, the great achievement of St. Thomas Aquinas’s metaphysics finds a complement in the personalism of more contemporary authors such as Max Scheler. On John Paul’s view, since philosophy greatly contributes to theology, and since philosophy itself develops over time, we have a source of doctrinal development in the ongoing development of philosophy. New Questions, New Scientific Knowledge, and New Circumstances Leading to Development Three vital stimuli to doctrinal development are new questions, new knowledge, and new circumstances. Often doctrinal developments take place through the asking of previously unasked questions. Only after theologians wondered how Jesus could be both the Son of the Father and the Son of Mary did they begin to work out the doctrine of the Hypostatic Union. Similarly, in moral matters, new questions begin to be debated and out of these questions a new precision, a deepening and enriching, of doctrine can take place. Indeed, such new questions led in part to John Paul’s writing of Veritatis Splendor itself: “Precisely on the questions frequently debated in moral theology today and with regard to which new tendencies and theories have developed, the Magisterium, in fidelity to Jesus Christ and in continuity with the Church’s tradition, senses more urgently the duty to offer its own discernment and teaching, in order to help man in his journey towards truth and freedom.”33 In a similar way, doctrinal development is stimulated by new questions about ecumenism, the relationship of the Roman Catholic Church to other ecclesial bodies, and so forth. He writes: Any progress which the Catholic Church makes along the path of ecumenism must always be in keeping with the organic development of doctrine. Although the patrimony of faith and moral teaching can be better explained and understood, the essential content of salvation which the Catholic Church has always proclaimed must remain intact. When new doctrinal and moral questions arise, the Church must resolve them with the same principles and with the same logic of faith with which she has acted from her origins under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.34 For this reason, doctrinal development is both unpredictable and unending. It is unpredictable because one cannot foresee the new questions that 33 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor §27. 34 Address of the Holy Father Pope John Paul II to a group of Bishops of the United States of America on their ad limina visit, Friday, October 7, 1988. John Paul II on the Development of Doctrine 1185 will arise in any particular era. It is unending because the human mind— on its restless pilgrimage towards better understandings of the truth— continually and ceaselessly questions. Indeed, faith itself gives rise to many new questions, for only if one, for example, believes that Jesus is true God and true man, does it make sense to begin to ask questions based on this belief, such as how does the human intellect of Jesus relate to the Divine Intellect? Hitherto unasked questions prod to doctrinal development; and doctrinal development leads to new questions. New knowledge, in particular scientific advancements, can also contribute to development of doctrine. The pope notes: “It is a duty for theologians to keep themselves regularly informed of scientific advances in order to examine if such be necessary, whether or not there are reasons for taking them into account in their reflection or for introducing changes in their teaching.”35 Similarly, the sciences can be of particular help when considering remedies for weakness of will or how to develop new (virtuous) habits.36 As the Second Vatican Council pointed out, “In pastoral care, sufficient use must be made, not only of theological principles, but also of the findings of the secular sciences, especially of psychology and sociology, so that the faithful may be brought to a more adequate and mature life of faith.”37 Finally, shifting historical circumstances stir the development of Christian doctrine, on the pope’s view. “For the People of God, therefore, history becomes a path to be followed to the end, so that by the unceasing action of the Holy Spirit (cf. Jn 16:13) the contents of revealed truth may find their full expression.” This is the teaching of the Constitution Dei Verbum when it states that “as the centuries succeed one another, the Church constantly progresses towards the fullness of divine truth, until the words of God reach their complete fulfilment in her.”38 This deepening over time, guided by the unceasing action of the Holy Spirit is particularly evident in the social teaching of the Church. John Paul reflected on and contributed to this development of doctrine in a number of encyclicals.The pope is historically aware of the way in which this teaching has unfolded since the nineteenth century, a prime example of how changing historical circumstances 35 John Paul II, “Faith Can Never Conflict with Reason,” L’Osservatore Romano, 4 Nov. 1992, p. 8. 36 See for example, Roy Baumeister and John Tierney, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (New York: Penguin Books, 2012); Kelly McGonigal, The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It (New York: Avery, 2011); and Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (New York: Random House, 2012). 37 Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes §62. 38 John Paul II, Fides et Ratio §11. 1186 Christopher Kaczor contribute to reformulations and reapplications of Church teaching. In Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, he notes that this 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.” It builds up gradually, as the Church, in the fullness of the word revealed by Christ Jesus and with the assistance of the Holy Spirit (cf. Jn 14:16, 26; 16:13–15), reads events as they unfold in the course of history.39 The social doctrine of the Church deepens over time, becoming enriched by successive generations of reflection as well as by diverse circumstances stimulating new reflections. In this, the social doctrine is not entirely different from more explicitly theological doctrine such as the Trinity. It took generations of theologians and bishops (and many bishop-theologians), wrestling with the fundamental Gospel truth that Jesus is one with the Father and yet Jesus is not the Father or the Spirit, to articulate the dogmatic formula of the Holy Trinity. In like manner, the fundamental truth of the Gospel message in the social order—the innate dignity of every single human person, whether a tax collector, prostitute, leper, or Samaritan—is adapted in every age to changing circumstances. The ethics of inclusion remains a constant aspiration (even if, in concrete circumstances, not the reality). This emphasis on the changing circumstances of history are relevant for understanding the pontiff ’s view on how doctrine changes. The elements of continuity— most especially, fidelity to the Gospel message of Jesus—provide an orientation within which applications of fundamental principles to everchanging circumstances can be made with practical wisdom. On the one hand it is constant, for [doctrine] remains identical in its fundamental inspiration, in its “principles of reflection,” in its “criteria of judgment,” in its basic “directives for action,” and above all in its vital link with the Gospel of the Lord. On the other hand, it is ever new, because it is subject to the necessary and opportune adaptations suggested by the changes in historical conditions and by the unceasing flow of the events which are the setting of the life of people and society.40 On John Paul II’s view, development can be stimulated by historical occurrences that shape religious practice and in turn deepen the understanding of divine revelation. John Paul saw this kind of development in 39 Pope John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis §1. 40 Pope John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis §3. John Paul II on the Development of Doctrine 1187 the East during the persecution of Christians under the authority of Byzantine emperors seeking to abolish the use of icons in the liturgy. The pontiff writes: An important doctrinal development occurred between the eighth and ninth centuries after the “iconoclast” crisis unleashed by several Byzantine emperors, who decided radically to suppress the veneration of sacred images. Many were forced to suffer for resisting this absurd imposition. St John Damascene and St Theodore the Studite come to mind in particular. The victorious outcome of their resistance proved decisive not only for devotion and sacred art, but also for a deeper understanding of the mystery of the Incarnation. Indeed, in the final analysis the defense of images was based on the fact that God truly became man in Jesus of Nazareth. It is therefore legitimate for the artist to endeavor to portray his face, not only with the aid of his talent, but especially by interior docility to God’s Spirit. The images refer to the Mystery that surpasses them, and they help us feel its presence in our life.41 This passage highlights not only the contingent historical circumstances that lead to doctrinal development but also the close link between the liturgy and development. When the persecution calls into question the legitimacy of liturgical practice, the response of St. John Damascene and St.Theodore the Studite not only stimulates liturgical devotion and sacred art but also deepens the theological understanding of the Incarnation and the importance of embodied representations of the Divine. Historical circumstances can occasion new insights into the deposit of faith. Authentic Development Deepens Prior Teaching Rather Than Rejects It Like Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman, Saint John Paul II recognized that not all changes in doctrinal expression are legitimate developments; some proposed “developments” are in fact doctrinal corruptions. One characteristic mark of authentic development, for the pope as for Newman, is continuity of the teaching with previous teachings. In other words, doctrinal development is not a contradiction or repudiation of prior teaching but rather an outgrowth and completion of what came previously. John Paul writes: Within Tradition, the authentic interpretation of the Lord’s law develops, with the help of the Holy Spirit. The same Spirit who is at the origin of the Revelation of Jesus’ commandments and teachings guarantees 41 Pope John Paul II, “Eastern Theology has Enriched the Whole World,” §1, August 11, 1996. 1188 Christopher Kaczor that they will be reverently preserved, faithfully expounded and correctly applied in different times and places. This constant “putting into practice” of the commandments is the sign and fruit of a deeper insight into Revelation and of an understanding in the light of faith of new historical and cultural situations. Nevertheless, it can only confirm the permanent validity of Revelation and follow in the line of the interpretation given to it by the great Tradition of the Church’s teaching and life, as witnessed by the teaching of the Fathers, the lives of the Saints, the Church’s Liturgy and the teaching of the Magisterium.42 For John Paul II, the authentic interpretation of the Christian Tradition develops over time with the help of the Holy Spirit. This Spirit is the same Spirit that came upon the Apostles at Pentecost, the same Spirit that inspired the authors of the various books of Scripture, and the same Spirit that guided the great ecumenical councils. This Spirit, animating the great Tradition of the Church, does not contradict itself. John Paul emphasizes that authentic development does not involve a contradiction to the truths explicated in previous centuries. Even if truths need to be reformulated and re-expressed, they remain substantially the same. Certainly there is a need to seek out and to discover the most adequate formulation for universal and permanent moral norms in the light of different cultural contexts, a formulation most capable of ceaselessly expressing their historical relevance, of making them understood and of authentically interpreting their truth. This truth of the moral law—like that of the “deposit of faith”—unfolds down the centuries: the norms expressing that truth remain valid in their substance, but must be specified and determined “eodem sensu eademque sententia” in the light of historical circumstances by the Church’s Magisterium, whose decision is preceded and accompanied by the work of interpretation and formulation characteristic of the reason of individual believers and of theological reflection.43 The work of theologians is absolutely essential in the growth and deepening of the Church’s understanding of the deposit of faith; this work, if it is to be an authentic service to theology, cannot be a radical reformulation that in fact denies the truth of what has unfolded in previous centuries. Reflecting the work of the theologian who contributed perhaps the most to an articulated understanding of the subject of development of doctrine, Blessed John Henry Newman, the pontiff also views the faithful as having a role in the deepening of the Church’s understanding of reve42 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor §27. 43 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor §53. John Paul II on the Development of Doctrine 1189 lation. The pope echoes Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman’s emphasis that authentic change involves “conservative action upon its past.”44 Development takes place in successive generations of the faithful, but authentic development is not a simple contradiction to current Church teaching. In an address to the U.S. Bishops, John Paul II noted that the faithful themselves contribute to the further growth of the Church’s understanding of God’s word (Cfr. Dei Verbum, 8), and, in this sense, faith develops in each succeeding generation of the Church. But, in the words of Saint Vincent of Lerins, “it must truly be development of the faith, not alteration of the faith. . . .The understanding . . . of individuals as well as of the whole Church ought then to make great and vigorous progress with the passing of the ages and the centuries, but only along its own line of development, that is, with the same doctrine, the same meaning and the same import” (First Instruction, ch. 23). Understanding the development of doctrine in this way, we know that the present or “current” teaching of the Church does not admit of a development that is either a reversal or a contradiction.45 This principle of development excludes, it would seem, what some theologians advocate as legitimate changes to Church teaching, such as admission of women to priestly ordination, the use of contraception, and the ethical permissibility of intentional abortion. An argument sometimes given in favor of a change of teaching on these matters is that the Catholic faithful have not received these teachings. It is the case that the vast majority of Catholics use contraception, and the inference is made that this widespread practice calls into question the teaching of Humanae Vitae. Surely, the argument goes, if so many of the faithful have not received this teaching, it is legitimate to understand that the Church’s doctrine on this point must develop to allow the use of contraceptives in at least some circumstances. Although John Paul II valued the sense of the faithful as a way of gaining greater understanding of the truths of faith, he did not accept an oppositional understanding of the sense of the faithful and the teaching of the Magisterium. In the community of the faithful—which must always maintain Catholic unity with the Bishops and the Apostolic See—there are great insights of faith. The Holy Spirit is active in enlightening the minds of 44 John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 199. 45 Address of Pope John Paul II to a group of Bishops from the United States of America on their ad limina visit, October 22, 1983, 6. 1190 Christopher Kaczor the faithful with his truth, and in inflaming their hearts with his love. But these insights of faith and this sensus fidelium are not independent of the Magisterium of the Church, which is an instrument of the same Holy Spirit and is assisted by him. It is only when the faithful have been nourished by the word of God, faithfully transmitted in its purity and integrity, that their own charisms are fully operative and fruitful. Once the word of God is faithfully proclaimed to the community and is accepted, it brings forth fruits of justice and holiness of life in abundance. But the dynamism of the community in understanding, and living the word of God depends on its receiving intact the depositum fidei; and for this precise purpose a special apostolic and pastoral charism has been given to the Church. It is one and the same Spirit of truth who directs the hearts of the faithful and guarantees the Magisterium of the pastors of the flock.46 The Catholic faithful, properly understood, are those who are full of faith. Animated by the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit guiding the Magisterium, the faithful understand and live the Gospel message. For this reason, statistical surveys of Catholics to determine the sense of the faithful are of little value. Some ethicists, writes John Paul, “can be tempted to take as the standard for their discipline and even for its operative norms the results of a statistical study of concrete human behavior patterns and the opinions about morality encountered in the majority of people.”47 Such surveys typically include both those who rightly qualify as the faithful as well as those who were validly baptized but were catechized inadequately or not at all. Such surveys typically do not differentiate Catholics who are daily communicants and “Catholics” who do not believe in God. Furthermore, it is inconsistent to selectively appeal to the “sense of the faithful” on some issues but not others. Surveys show that Catholics reject the Church’s teaching on contraception, but the same surveys also show widespread non-acceptance of Catholic teaching on the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the duty to care for the poor with voluntary charitable donations, and the illegitimacy of the practice of capital punishment in contemporary circumstances. These later teachings, however, are not often called into question on the basis of a lack of reception by the lay faithful. Even aside from such difficulties, neither surveys of human opinion nor surveys of human behavior determine what is morally right for human conduct. John Paul writes: 46 John Paul II, Address of His Holiness John Paul II to the Bishops of the United States of America, Chicago, Friday, 5 October 1979, §7. 47 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor §46. John Paul II on the Development of Doctrine 1191 Because the Church’s morality necessarily involves a normative dimension, moral theology cannot be reduced to a body of knowledge worked out purely in the context of the so-called behavioural sciences. The latter are concerned with the phenomenon of morality as a historical and social fact; moral theology, however, while needing to make use of the behavioural and natural sciences, does not rely on the results of formal empirical observation or phenomenological understanding alone. Indeed, the relevance of the behavioural sciences for moral theology must always be measured against the primordial question: What is good or evil? What must be done to have eternal life? 48 The behavior science cannot—in virtue of its empirical orientation and limitation—determine what is right and what is wrong. If we understand science as limiting itself to that which is empirically verifiable, science as such cannot and does not seek to make determinations of what is nonempirical, such as what is morally good or morally evil. The moral question is “What ought to be done?” which is not the same as the question “What has been done or what do (most) people think we ought to do?” Common human failings remain common human failings, despite being common. It is not consistent to hold (a) that the behavior of the majority of people determines what is morally right and (b) that there is an obligation to love your neighbor as yourself, since the majority of people have not lived according to this precept. Similarly, we cannot determine what is morally right by a simple consideration of public opinion. The use of contraception was condemned by all major Christian denominations and illegal in many part of the United States early in the twentieth century. Even in the early 1960s, a majority of Catholics thought that use of contraception was always wrong. Now, of course, the opinion polls have shifted in the opposite direction. But it is absurd to think that contraception was intrinsically evil and then became permissible or even obligatory when one person changed his mind about contraception and so tilted the balance in favor of contraception. It must be noted, however, that faithful assent to the teaching of the Magisterium by both pastors and laity does not exclude a legitimate pluralism. Orthodoxy does not demand, on John Paul II’s view, strict homogeneity or conformity in every theological, liturgical, or spiritual aspect. In particular, the pope was deeply aware that legitimate diversity is found in the Eastern Churches, which have developed over the centuries their own ways of living and expressing Gospel truth. 48 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor §111. 1192 Christopher Kaczor Speaking of the Churches of the East, the Council acknowledged their great liturgical and spiritual tradition, the specific nature of their historical development, the disciplines coming from the earliest times and approved by the Holy Fathers and Ecumenical Councils, and their own particular way of expressing their teaching. The Council made this acknowledgement in the conviction that legitimate diversity is in no way opposed to the Church’s unity, but rather enhances her splendour and contributes greatly to the fulfilment of her mission.49 Here, the pope spoke of doctrinal developments as they arose somewhat differently in the East and in the West. Yet his point can be broadened to include the insight that any legitimate development does not undermine but enhances the Church’s unity by enabling the Church to better fulfill its mission. Unity in orthodoxy does not demand homogeneous conformity in ways of expression, practice, or worship in every respect. Now, where precisely to “draw the line” as it were—between differences that express a legitimate plurality and those differences that threaten the unity and mission of the Church—is a vital service that is, according to the Second Vatican Council and the pope, a responsibility exercised by the Magisterium. Conclusion Although Pope John Paul II did not write a major systematic work on the subject of development of doctrine, one can find in his major works, especially Veritatis Splendor, remarks that indicate his views on this important topic. Situating his insights about development in relationship to the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, the pope recognizes that multiple factors contribute to and stimulate new formulations of the faith of the Church. These include new scientific and philosophical insights, new circumstances and questions, and a diversity of cultures which can enrich the Church’s understanding of revelation. Although one searches in vain the opera omnia of John Paul II for a full length work similar to Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, one can find in various passages from various N&V works important insights into the topic of doctrinal development. 49 Pope John Paul II, Ut Unum Sint §50. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2013): 1193–1203 1193 Person and Work: In Search of Theological Convergence G ILBERT M EILAENDER Valparaiso University Valparaiso, IN W HEN Veritatis Splendor was released by Pope John Paul II twenty years ago, I raised—from the perspective of the Reformation—some critical questions about it. But I also acknowledged that it was hard to imagine any Protestant church body in our day producing an equally searching examination of the nature of the Christian life and Christian moral reflection. Hence, I judged that those whose moral vision had been shaped by the Reformation had good reason to be grateful for the encyclical.1 Two decades later I think much as I did then. Certain questions that came to the fore at the time of the Reformation are important enough that they never go away and never cease to be puzzling. It is no surprise that John Paul forces us to think about them. My aim here, therefore, is to think again about one important issue in Christian moral theology, an issue explicitly treated in Veritatis Splendor. It is what the encyclical calls fundamental choice (or option), which in Reformation perspective we might call the problem of the relation of person and work. In order to reflect upon this, I will set the position articulated by John Paul II over against one of the most substantial works of Lutheran ethics from the twentieth century—Helmut Thielicke’s Theological Ethics.2 1 Gilbert Meilaender, “Veritatis Splendor: Reopening Some Questions of the Reformation,” Journal of Religious Ethics 23 (Fall 1995): 225–38. 2 Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics, Volume I: Foundations (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1966), xii. Future references to this volume will be by page number within the body of the text. Of course, Thielicke’s is an individual work of scholarship, not an ecclesiastical document intended authoritatively to instruct the faithful. In that sense the two are not comparable. But Veritatis Splendor is something more 1194 Gilbert Meilaender Thielicke himself believed that his attempt to write an ethic from a Lutheran perspective constituted “a new subject matter which Reformation theology, to its hurt, has thus far avoided—though Roman Catholic theology has always found a place for it. The need now is to make up for several centuries of neglect.” Even if he succeeded only partially in that aim, as I think is the case, it is worth asking whether, or to what degree, his angle of vision and that of Veritatis Splendor may converge. The Problem Veritatis Splendor distinguishes a choice to act in some particular way from a more general determination of oneself for (or against) God.3 In itself this seems unproblematic, but the distinction is radicalized in the notion of a fundamental option in which one’s overall self-determination is not just distinguished from but seemingly separated from the particular choices and actions of the person.4 And if it is persons, not isolated actions, who are called to fellowship with God, then we might begin to suppose that the person must be judged in terms of that fundamental self-determination, “prescinding in whole or in part from his choice of particular actions, of concrete kinds of behavior” (§65). This possibility Veritatis Splendor characterizes as a “radical revision of the relationship between person and acts” (§65). Using the language of the New Testament we could say that “faith” opens us freely and entirely to call God good. “There is no doubt,” John Paul writes, “that Christian moral teaching, even in its Biblical roots, acknowledges the specific importance of a fundamental choice which qualifies the moral life and engages freedom on a radical level before God. It is a question of the decision of faith, of the obedience of faith (cf. Rom. 16:26) ‘by which man makes a total and free self-commitment to God . . .’ ” (§66). Of this commitment St. Paul writes (Rom. 14:23) that “whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.” At least in that sense the character of the person determines the quality of the work. than authoritative instruction. It is also a searching essay in moral theory (and in that sense a rather unusual encyclical). 3 The Splendor of Truth (Boston: St. Paul Books & Media, 1993), §65. Future references to the encyclical will be by paragraph number within the body of the text. 4 Cf., for example, the following statement from Josef Fuchs’s discussion of Veritatis Splendor: “The encyclical attacks the idea that the moral quality of individual acts may be determined only by the intention and the fundamental option of the person concerned (67). Then it states that every particular act involves some reference to good or evil. But who would wish to deny this? The problem is how this relates to the ethical status of the person as a whole, which is on another level.” Josef Fuchs, “Good Acts and Good Persons,” in UnderstandingVeritatis Splendor, ed. John Wilkins (London: SPCK, 1994), 24. Person and Work 1195 But what follows from that? Could we also say that any action which does proceed from faith—anything done by one who has made a fundamental choice for God— must be God-pleasing rather than sinful? That surely does not follow, but it does point to our problem, to the difficulty of relating person and work.5 For if we hold, as Thielicke does, that the character of a person depends on whether he is or is not in right relation with God, and if we also say that the character of the person determines the moral quality of his works, then we might seem committed to thinking that the actions of anyone whose basic determination is that of faith must be good actions. Thielicke raises this issue very early in his Ethics, and he does so, interestingly enough, when discussing the story—so central to the discussion in Veritatis Splendor—of the rich young man who comes to Jesus inquiring about what is good (31–32). His reading of the exchange focuses on the “person” of the young man. While Veritatis Splendor characterizes the encounter as one in which Jesus directs the man into “a moral and spiritual journey towards perfection” (§15), Thielicke suggests that Jesus aims to free the man from bondage to himself in order that he may be bound to God. Jesus does this through a “movement of concentration” in which all imperatives become forms of the command to love God wholly and entirely. Particular acts seem to disappear, faith in God occupies the entire moral field, and Thielicke himself sees the difficulty. “We must therefore put the question quite pointedly. Does not all ethical reflection always involve an act whereby ethics really does away with itself by reducing the ethical question to a problem that is essentially dogmatic? . . . In short, does not the solution of the ethical problem lie in the dissolution of ethics?” (32). How we respond to this question will depend on how we understand the claim that a Christian is simul justus et peccator. One way to understand this assertion—often thought to be the Lutheran way but in reality only one of several ways Lutherans have understood it—is to take it to mean that the believer is wholly and entirely saint, and (simultaneously) wholly and entirely sinner. Viewed as one who trusts in the divine goodness and mercy revealed in Jesus, the believer is wholly saint. But viewed apart from that divine goodness, the 5 There are moments, however, when Thielicke seems to think that it does follow. Thus, for example, discussing the “personalistic” view that he believes he has taken from Luther, according to which there is “no alternative to being either in fellowship with God or out of fellowship with him,” he asks: “Is it [personalistic thinking] correct when it maintains that there are no intermediate degrees or neutral positions between faith and unbelief, so that ‘whatsoever is not of faith is sin,’ indeed, whatsoever is of faith is righteous?” (251) 1196 Gilbert Meilaender believer is entirely sinner. The state of the person seems unrelated to his particular actions, for everything depends on the person’s relation to God. The theological task is simply to announce the mercy of God that elicits the fundamental decision of faith—leaving us, in short, with what looks like the dissolution of ethics. Although the language and thought world are somewhat different, this is not unlike what happens when we think in terms of fundamental option— or, at least, as Veritatis Splendor is careful to put it, what fundamental option may become in the hands of “some authors.” Using the language of “right and wrong” to characterize particular actions, and reserving the language of “good and evil” for the fundamental choice that determines the self ’s orientation toward God, it seems that “the properly moral assessment of the person is reserved to his fundamental option, prescinding in whole or in part from his choice of particular actions, of concrete kinds of behavior” (§65). John Paul is not the only one dissatisfied with such an approach; Thielicke shares (to some extent) that discontent. The simul cannot, he says, be understood to make the act of faith entirely unrelated to what Christians do. It cannot mean that believers are always beginning again, always at the same starting point but never progressing in the Christian life. He describes as “false reasoning” the following statement: “As long as we are never anything but sinners who have received mercy, nothing really changes in our existence as sinners. . . .The only thing that changes, according to this view, is our relationship to our trespasses and sin: they can no longer separate us from God” (41). At the same time, Thielicke is reluctant—or, perhaps, unable—to say much about how the fundamental act of faith shapes here and now the believer’s particular actions.We are caught in the conflict between the old and new ages, a conflict that is eschatological. Ethics always exists in “the field of tension between the old and the new aeons, not in the old alone, nor in the new alone” (43). To try to say more specifically what the shape of the Christian life should be within this tension would be a non-eschatological ethic, which Thielicke associates with Roman Catholicism’s attempt to establish “a hierarchy of moral values with a corresponding casuistry of moral action” (44). Hence, he does not move very far or for very long beyond an understanding of the simul which he himself has found inadequate. In an eschatological ethic there can be no static “formula for the unity of the Christian’s existence,” no rules that can ease the tension between the two ages (45). In short, if we separate sharply person and work, fundamental option and particular choices of action, we endanger our capacity to make judgments about what is better or worse in the Christian life, and we thereby Person and Work 1197 endanger our capacity to invite that rich young man into “a moral and spiritual journey towards perfection.” But, of course, if we make the connection between person and work too tight, right action may seem to be a condition that must be met in order to attain God’s favor, a tendency not altogether absent from Veritatis Splendor.6 That is our problem, and it requires that we think more about what it means to be a moral agent. Agency To the degree that a person’s fundamental option floats somewhat free of his particular actions, the importance of human agency in the day-to-day demands of life may seem to be undermined. Thielicke notes that, for Luther, going forward and making progress in the Christian life is (sometimes) described simply as beginning again (226). The Christian is always a sinner, but is also always penitent—and hence, always right with God. That is one way to understand the simul.There is something very powerful about that picture of the Christian life, and we should not doubt that it can speak powerfully to those who feel themselves deeply divided—drawn by both the lure of sin and the attractiveness of the God revealed in Jesus. Nevertheless, if in every moment the divided condition of the believer is exactly the same before God, ethical reflection can only point out our failings (whether few or many) and, then, step aside for the message of the gospel to be heard. It is no accident, therefore, that Thielicke should characterize his Ethics as an attempt “to lay a new foundation for Christian preaching” (xv). On such an understanding of the simul a Christian who is faithful to his wife even when experiencing temptation and a Christian who is unfaithful to his wife have the same status before God: They are simply sinners in need of forgiveness. And if going forward is just beginning again, there is no reason to distinguish between them. Each is a sinner, each needs to repent and believe, and each may be right with God. What they do, their agency, seems to make no difference in their relation to God. Moment by moment they are reconstituted before God in repentance and faith. Moment by moment they begin again, for there seems to be no agent whose character develops (for better or worse) over time. The person’s existence is entirely momentary and punctual. 6 For example: “[T]he performance of good acts, commanded by the One who ‘alone is good,’ constitutes the indispensable condition of and path to eternal blessedness” (§72). Or: “Jesus points out to the young man that the commandments are the first and indispensable condition for having eternal life” (§17). Or: “Jesus himself definitively confirms them [the commandments of the Decalogue] as the way and condition of salvation” (§12). 1198 Gilbert Meilaender The problem is just as obvious when we consider the lives of those who are not Christian believers.Thielicke himself describes the basic issue in several related steps (264–65): If the character of the person determines the quality of the work, and if the character of the person depends on whether one is or is not in right relation with God, then how can the divine commandments tell us anything objective about the will of God? Suppose a man who has been unfaithful to his wife comes to regret that, is sorry, and recommits himself to his wife and their marriage. Is this not God-pleasing? If we cannot say that it is God-pleasing, then the commandments of God have no significance at all outside the circle of faith. If all we can say is that the (believing or unbelieving) character of the person determines the moral quality of the work, we will be unable to make any quantitative judgments about better or worse actions. The agent exists in splendid isolation from all that he does. Thielicke himself recognizes that this cannot be a satisfactory understanding of the Christian life, and he argues that Luther himself did not intend to reject all notions of moral development. “The ego undoubtedly could not be regarded as a subject if it arose each moment by new divine positing, by a continually repeated creation out of nothing.” On the contrary, “ ‘today, when we hear his voice’ we are not such as have been newly called out of paganism or unbelief and made to stand, as it were, for the first time, as if that ‘today’ were really a new day of creation” (229). Likewise, Veritatis Splendor, for all its emphasis on the person’s development in virtue, does not fail to see that the continual journey toward perfection in love is “a possibility opened up to man exclusively by grace, by the gift of God” (§24). Even while affirming that “[i]t is precisely through his acts that man attains perfection as man,” Veritatis Splendor says that “[h]uman acts are moral acts because they express and determine the goodness or evil of the individual who performs them” (§71). Express and determine. That is to say, on the one hand our actions help to determine character, to shape the person we are and become. John Paul states this more explicitly than does Thielicke. But, on the other hand, our actions also express the person we are at the most fundamental level of the self before God—an agency elicited by the gift of God’s grace. And Thielicke says this more explicitly than does John Paul. Perhaps we need to say, a little more clearly than Veritatis Splendor does, that what God’s commands ask of us is not simply certain actions but a certain kind of agent. They call for a person who trusts in God and loves God above all else. But they also offer something to such a person (and we need to say this more clearly than does Thielicke). God’s commands offer a life that has shape and form, the shape delineated by those Person and Work 1199 commands. Faith has, as Veritatis Splendor puts it, “a moral content. It gives rise to and calls for a consistent life commitment” (89). Committing ourselves in our actions to the life demanded by the moral law can, by God’s grace, help to determine us and shape us as persons of faith. Nor is this commitment simply our own. Underlying our own commitment is God’s commitment not to rest until our personal faith is fully expressed in our works. If all this is true, then the connection between person and work must be tighter than Thielicke sometimes seems to have in mind, even if perhaps not quite so tight as it sometimes is in Veritatis Splendor. We can detect at least some convergence if we consider Thielicke’s admission that in the Christian life there are “certain limits which cannot be transgressed” (643). This “casuistical minimum” means that person and work cannot be strictly separated. What we do must both express and determine who we are. Prohibitiva Thielicke’s concept of a “casuistical minimum” clearly calls to mind the insistence in Veritatis Splendor that some acts are intrinsically evil and cannot be otherwise simply because the agent has made a fundamental choice for God. Yet, the list of such acts is rather expansive in Veritatis Splendor. Citing Gaudium et Spes, the encyclical includes among acts that are always seriously wrong not only rather obvious candidates such as genocide and torture, but also contraception and (under the rubric of whatever offends human dignity) degrading conditions of work, and deportation (§80). If intrinsically evil acts are those that are always gravely evil, entirely apart from their circumstances, expansive lists of such acts are not likely to be persuasive. Here something can be learned from Thielicke. He comes to this point at several different moments in the long first volume of his Ethics. One such moment is when he struggles to make sense of the relation between indicative and imperative in the letters of St. Paul (a problem with which many others have, of course, struggled, and one that probably deserved greater attention than it receives in Veritatis Splendor). This is an obvious problem for Thielicke, because the very presence of the imperatives may seem to undermine the indicatives which suggest that God has already redeemed and renewed us through the Spirit of his Son. And once the Spirit has produced the good tree, we might suppose that this tree would “automatically” bring forth good fruit, without any need for imperatives. To be sure, Thielicke does insist that there is something automatic about this—just as, when we give the body food and drink, its organic processes automatically take over to nourish that body (85). 1200 Gilbert Meilaender Nevertheless, there are, Thielicke writes, “certain conditions under which, in principle, the work of the Holy Spirit cannot take place” (87). Actions that produce such conditions are prohibitiva; they make the Spirit’s work in us impossible.Thielicke suggests that, insofar as every way of life contains possibilities for a kind of “idolatrous bondage,” any way of life has the possibility to become a prohibitivum (89). But, taking his cue from the New Testament, he points to three such possibilities in particular: fornication (as a settled way of life, not an individual lapse); eating at the table of demons (that is, attempting to attach oneself both to Christ and to false gods); and denial of the Lord (86–93). Because fornication involves the body, it necessarily involves a giving of oneself. “This is one sin which I cannot keep at a distance” (90). Nor is it possible to worship Jesus as Lord while acknowledging other gods. And, finally, faith and denial of faith are clearly incompatible. What is so striking about Thielicke’s discussion, however, is not just the simple fact that he characterizes some acts as prohibitiva. What is striking is that he refuses to think of them in terms of his more usual understanding of the simul justus et peccator formula. As I noted earlier, Lutheran theologians—including, certainly, Thielicke—have often taken this to mean that that the Christian is wholly and entirely saint, and (simultaneously) wholly and entirely sinner. Why not, then, say of one who engages in fornication as a settled way of life that, while in himself he is surely sinner, looked at through Christ in whom he trusts, he is wholly and entirely righteous in God’s eyes? Thielicke rejects any such possibility, but what is especially striking— at least to me—is not only that but how he rejects it. With respect to each of these three prohibitiva Thielicke rejects any possibility of such an approach. Of the idolatrous bondage of fornication as a settled way of life he says: “Accordingly there is in this situation no simul ” (89). Of eating at the table of demons, he writes: “II Corinthians 6:14–16 represents another instance where the simul is excluded” (91). And of denial of the Lord, he says simply: “Faith and the denial of faith are incompatible. No simul can embrace them both” (92). Thus, while Thielicke finds in the New Testament no specific disposition for faith, he does find “a specific disposition against faith, a disposition with which the new man, the new creation can in no case coexist” (92–93). Perhaps this does not sound striking to Roman Catholic ears accustomed to the language of Veritatis Splendor, but it is striking to ears taught by the (latent antinomianism) of late-twentieth-century American Lutheranism. I first read volume 1 of Thielicke’s Theological Ethics as a Lutheran seminary student, probably in 1969 or 1970. Looking back at Person and Work 1201 my marked-up copy as I worked on this article, I took note of my youthful marginalia. Some of them, unsurprisingly, I would like to retract (and some I cannot even make sense of). But when Thielicke writes of the first of these three examples of prohibitiva that “accordingly there is in this situation no simul,” my marginal scrawling is very clear, and it testifies to my sense that this was not the approach to Lutheranism I had been learning. That marginal comment consists of just one word: “Wow!” Whatever the differences in cadence and emphasis, here Thielicke is within shouting distance of the teaching of Veritatis Splendor (which also is based on St. Paul’s writings) that there are “certain specific kinds of behavior the willful acceptance of which prevents believers from sharing in the inheritance promised to them” (§49). Human freedom, Veritatis Splendor emphasizes, is not “self-designing.” On the contrary, it “entails a particular spiritual and bodily structure” (§48). With his own emphases and in his own thought forms, Thielicke would, I think, agree. Much later in his Ethics, Thielicke returns to discuss his understanding of a casuistical minimum, of “limits which cannot be transgressed” (643). Still reluctant to develop a casuistry of moral action, he nonetheless contends that even in the darkness of what he calls the borderline situation, we remain able to make moral distinctions. Even then, he writes, “I shall never reach the state of indifference which allows me to say that in the blackness of this world’s night, in the darkness of the borderline situation, all cats are gray” (607). In the language of Veritatis Splendor, we might say that even there the splendor of moral truth may be discerned, “according to which the love of God entails the obligation to respect his commandments, even in the most dire of circumstances” (§91). What we encounter in such moments is not just a moral command; we encounter God himself. Thielicke gives two examples of such “confrontations with transcendence,” in which, even in the borderline conflict situation, there are not several possible actions in equipoise (643). “First, there is no such thing as an authentic case of conflict in which I am set before the possibility of denying Christ or blaspheming God” (644). We might, of course, imagine extreme circumstances such as those depicted in Silence, Shusaku Endo’s story of Portuguese priests in sixteenth-century Japan, who are forced to contemplate trampling on the face of Christ in order to stop the torture of others. And Thielicke himself, as a mid-twentieth-century German, was hardly unaware of such possibilities. Even then—even in such a confrontation with transcendence—we must, he asserts, remember who we are. For “I totally misunderstand my role in the kingdom of God if I think that the continuance of the kingdom depends on my continuing to live and to speak” (644). 1202 Gilbert Meilaender Still more, if we allow ourselves to be forced into apostasy, we withhold from our persecutor the possibility of true self-knowledge. For we permit him to suppose that the Lord whom we worship is “an ‘imaginary lord,’ whom I can give up ‘if need be’ ” (644). According to Veritatis Splendor, martyrdom is “the high point of the witness to moral truth” (§93). Thielicke sees clearly that there could never be a need for martyrdom were there not such confrontations with transcendence that leave no place for alternative possibilities for action. Thielicke’s second example of such a confrontation with transcendence is reminiscent of Veritatis Splendor’s invocation of the claims upon us of respect for human dignity. There can be no conflict situation, no choosing among alternatives in equipoise, when what is at stake is “the personhood of my neighbor,” who is made in the image of God and is therefore “the direct representation of transcendence” (645). Here Thielicke has in mind, in particular, torture, which seeks entirely to bypass the humanity of the person tortured. Something more than temptation or coercion is involved here. We may use force or temptation to produce acquiescence, and in that way try to work our will and achieve our goals. Doing so, whether rightly or wrongly, does not fail to recognize the personhood of the one we seek to tempt or coerce. But torture is different. It does not attempt to coax or force a decision out of another; instead it “simply bypasses the sphere of decision altogether by making it impossible” (646). It aims at the personhood of one who is “a representation of transcendence” (646). As such, it is forbidden. “For the Christian owes to the world the public confession that he is one who is committed, ‘bound,’ and hence not ‘capable of anything’ ” (646). Although once again the cadence and thought forms are somewhat different, in this concept of a casuistical minimum there is a considerable convergence between Thielicke’s Ethics and Veritatis Splendor. Push hard enough on the demands of the Christian life, we might say, and we will learn that the “person” cannot float entirely free of the “work,” which both expresses and determines the character of the person. There is, though, one way in which Veritatis Splendor might profit from adopting a little of Thielicke’s cadence. Veritatis Splendor exudes a kind of serene confidence about the Christian life that may sometimes be difficult to reconcile with the experience of individual Christians. “Temptations can be overcome, sins can be avoided, because together with the commandments, the Lord gives us the possibility of keeping them. . . . Keeping God’s law in particular situations can be difficult, extremely difficult, but it is never impossible” (§102). Surely this is true. We would not want to say of baptized Christians that the power of Christ’s Holy Person and Work 1203 Spirit could not make obedience possible in any circumstance. “And if redeemed man still sins,” Veritatis Splendor continues, “this is not due to an imperfection of Christ’s redemptive act, but to man’s will not to avail himself of the grace which flows from that act” (§103). What we miss here, though, is some sense of our weakness, of the differences in strength and circumstances that mark individual Christian lives. In the famous refrain of Book 10 of his Confessions—give what you command, and command what you will—St. Augustine also expresses confidence in the power of the Spirit to enable virtuous action. But in his repetition of that formula we sense something that is also present in Thielicke’s thought—the precariousness of our lives as Christians, the deep divisions that sometimes continue to mark the psyches of believers, our sense on occasion that the best we can do does not measure up to what we ought to do, our sense (so strong for Augustine) that God knows our character better than we know ourselves. At the level of what Thielicke affirms about the Christian life, there is some welcome convergence with the teaching of Veritatis Splendor. Christians are not simply caught in a never-ending movement back and forth between the simultaneous verdicts of “saint” and “sinner.” On the contrary, Thielicke knows a third perspective from which to picture the Christian’s existence. In himself a Christian is peccator. In Christ that same Christian is justus. But there remains that third perspective. Knowing ourselves as believing sinners who are in fellowship with God, we may turn and look back from that angle at ourselves. “This third perspective thus places me at what for me is not the end, but the beginning, the point from which I have to advance” (128). It places us, we might say, beside the rich young man as he is described in Veritatis Splendor: on “a path involving a moral and spiritual journey towards perfection” (§15). But it places us there with a keen sense that the Christian who embarks on such a journey also lives in the tension between the two aeons St. Paul so vividly depicts—and that, therefore, theological ethics must “follow the way which leads into and through the tension” (47). A little more of that cadence within Veritatis Splendor would help the cause of convergence. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2013): 1205–27 1205 The Call to Mercy: Veritatis Splendor and the Preferential Option for the Poor M IGUEL J. ROMERO University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN T HESE REMARKS concern the relationship between the teaching of Veritatis Splendor and the principle in Catholic social doctrine called the preferential option for the poor. The goal is to locate the common vocation to preferential love for the poor within the anthropological and moral horizon indicated by Blessed Pope John Paul II’s encyclical. And, in that light, to reflect upon the moral implications of Jesus’s invitation to the rich young man into the perfection of charity called mercy: “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give the money to the poor . . . then come, follow me” (Mt 19:21). Toward that end, the morality tale Deutsches Requiem by Jorge Luis Borges highlights for us an important gesture in Veritatis Splendor concerning the virtue mercy and vicious sloth (acedia): an inchoate thesis concerning themes addressed in Pope John Paul’s encyclical Dives in Misericordia (1980) and the apostolic exhortation Salvifici Doloris (1984). Throughout, St. Thomas Aquinas will help us specify key aspects of the option for the poor in relation to Veritatis Splendor and identify some of the important work that lies ahead.1 Keeping that work in mind, it is worthwhile to pause and reflect upon the sorrow of the rich young man in his response to Jesus’ invitation: “When he heard this, he went away sorrowful, for he had many possessions.”2 The young man’s sorrow at Christ’s call to mercy and his refusal 1 Cf. Stephen Pope’s recommendation for an account of the preferential option for the poor that draws upon the systematic and moral resources of Aquinas in “Proper and Improper Partiality and the Preferential Option for the Poor,” Theological Studies 54 (1993): 268–71. 2 Veritatis Splendor §§22–24. With thanks to Matthew Whelan for his generosity. 1206 Miguel Romero to relieve the misery of the poor indicate the moral significance of poverty, suffering, and the virtuous response to suffering in the Christian view of the good and authentically flourishing human life.3 I want to suggest that the sorrow of the rich young man in Matthew’s Gospel arises from the same vicious fount that feeds the malice of implacable warmongering, the rancorous spite of inhospitality toward children and migrants, and the sensationalized bourgeois “ressentiment” against both those who defend the poor and the religious traditions of the poor.4 Despair, implacable malice, spiteful inhospitality, and ressentiment are all moral conditions rooted in that capital sin against charity called “sloth” (acedia)—a spiritual apathy arising from the fact that the good is sometimes difficult and that the truth has inconvenient implications.5 The difficulty and inconvenience of moral rectitude is one thing, but we should also ask what the young man was not able to perceive. For, as we will discuss, the call to mercy is an invitation to apprehend through Christ the beauty of what is good and true, and to participate in God’s preferential love for the poor.6 3 See Walter Kasper’s chapter entitled “Blessed are the Merciful” in La Misericordia: Clave del Evangelio y de la Vida Cristiana, Spanish translation by José Manuel Lozano-Gotor Perona (Cantabria, Spain: Sal Terrae, 2012), 131–52. See also Servais Pinckaers, Sources of Christian Ethics (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 24–27. Pinckaers writes: “Once the idea of obligation becomes dominant and determines the scope of morality, the consideration of suffering becomes marginal, since it is not a matter of obligation. On the other hand, if the idea of happiness is the initial consideration in moral theology, the place of suffering will be obvious, for it is precisely the reverse of happiness. Suffering will then be an element of moral theology from the very start. . . . Happiness only becomes real when we are confronted with suffering over the long haul.This is the indispensable experience that lends genuine authenticity to any moral theology based on happiness.” 4 Cf. Patrick H. Byrne, “Ressentiment and the Preferential Option for the Poor,” Theological Studies 54 (1993): 213–41. Christopher Franks, He Became Poor: The Poverty of Christ and Aquinas’s Moral Teachings (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009); Matthew Levering, The Betrayal of Charity (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2011). With thanks to Reinhard Hütter. 5 ST II–II, q. 35. Cf. Karol Wojtyla [Pope John Paul II], Love and Responsibility (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 144. 6 Veritatis Splendor §107: “The life of holiness . . . constitutes the simplest and most attractive way to perceive at once the beauty of truth, the liberating force of God’s love, and the value of unconditional fidelity to all the demands of the Lord’s law, even in the most difficult situations.” With thanks to Roberto S. Goizueta. See Roberto S. Goizueta, Christ Our Companion: Toward a Theological Aesthetics of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009). The Call to Mercy 1207 The splendor of the truth that Christians proclaim is the perfection of love in truth called mercy.7 For Pope John Paul and Aquinas, mercy is the historical revelation and morally perfect actualization of charity vis-à-vis the reality of evil.8 Properly understood as the love that overcomes evil with good, mercy “constitutes the fundamental content of the messianic message of Christ and the constitutive power of his mission.”9 In a world wounded by sin and the reality of evil, our most magnificent imitation of the One who is rich in mercy is a volitional participation in the mystical power of salvific suffering.10 Indeed, as an indispensable dimension of charity and “love’s second name,” mercy (misericordia) is the first and primordial name of the preferential option for the poor.11 That last point, in 7 Cf. Veritatis Splendor §§18b, 24; and Caritas in Veritate §5b. In his encyclical Dives in Misericordia (1984), §13d-e, Pope John Paul provides a compelling formulation of this connection: “It is precisely because sin exists in the world, which ‘God so loved . . . that he gave his only Son,’ that God, who ‘is love,’ cannot reveal Himself otherwise than as mercy. This corresponds not only to the most profound truth of that love which God is, but also to the whole interior truth of man and of the world which is man’s temporary homeland. Mercy in itself, as a perfection of the infinite God, is also infinite.” 8 See Dives in Misericordia §7f: “mercy is an indispensable dimension of love, it is . . . the specific manner in which love is revealed and effected vis-à-vis the reality of the evil that is in the world.” Cf. ST II–II, q. 30, a. 4, resp. 9 Dives in Misericordia §6e. See also ST I, q. 21, a. 3. 10 See Salvifici Doloris §§28–30 [esp. 30]. Cf. Libertatis Conscientia (1986) §55, where then-Cardinal Ratzinger writes: “The perfection which is the image of the Father’s perfection and for which the disciple must strive is found in mercy.” 11 Dives in Misericordia §8a–b: “[T]he cross of Christ, on which the Son, consubstantial with the Father, renders full justice to God, is also a radical revelation of mercy, or rather of the love that goes against what constitutes the very root of evil in the history of man: against sin and death. The cross is the most profound condescension of God to man and to what man—especially in difficult and painful moments—looks on as his unhappy destiny. The cross is like a touch of eternal love upon the most painful wounds of man’s earthly existence; it is the total fulfillment of the messianic program that Christ once formulated in the synagogue at Nazareth and then repeated to the messengers sent by John the Baptist. According to the words once written in the prophecy of Isaiah, this program consisted in the revelation of merciful love for the poor, the suffering and prisoners, for the blind, the oppressed and sinners.” Cf. Sollicitudo Rei Socialis §42b. See also Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation (New York: Orbis Press, 1988), xxvii. Gutierrez writes: “In the final analysis, an option for the poor is an option for the God of the kingdom whom Jesus proclaims to us. . . . This preference brings out the gratuitous or unmerited character of God’s love. The same revelation is given in the evangelical Beatitudes, for they tell us with the utmost simplicity that God’s predilection for the poor, the hungry, and the suffering is based on God’s unmerited goodness to us. . . . [As Christians] our commitment is grounded, in the final analysis, in the God of our faith. It is a theocentric, 1208 Miguel Romero particular, is worth expanding upon in light of the final end and perfect happiness of the human being. Charity is the principle and purpose of Christ’s personal invitation to every woman and man, and mercy is the revelation and act of charity in history.12 What this means is that the truth of God’s eternal love is manifest in God’s gracious regard for the suffering of humanity under the guilt of sin (malum culpae) and the burden of evil (malum poenae).13 So conceived, divine love is experienced as mercy: the graced freedom to perceive the beauty of the truth of God’s love in Christ and the graced freedom to follow Christ in the perfection of our nature, as the image of God.14 In other words, the natural aptitude of every human being for knowledge and love of God—our likeness unto God, according to the image of God—is elevated via the divine mercy of sacramental grace to a presently imperfect participation in the knowledge and love of the God “who alone is goodness, fullness of life, the final end of human activity, and perfect happiness.”15 As a gift coordinate with the extension of divine mercy in time, the call to merciful love of neighbor is an invitation to imitate the perfection of Jesus Christ in his preferential option for and solidarity with those who suffer in their experience of evil.16 The call to mercy is a life-long journey with Christ into the perfection whose measure is God: “Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful” (Lk 6:36).17 Because the essential and primordial foundation of prophetic option that has its roots in the unmerited love of God and is demanded by this love.” 12 Dives in Misericordia §8c. The Pope writes: “In the eschatological fulfillment mercy will be revealed as love, while in the temporal phase, in human history, which is at the same time the history of sin and death, love must be revealed above all as mercy and must also be actualized as mercy.” 13 Cf. ST I, q. 21, a. 4, resp. Cf. ST I, q. 48, aa. 5, 6. 14 ST II–II, q. 30, a. 4. At the end of his remarks on the virtue misericordia, Aquinas writes: “On its own, mercy takes precedence of other virtues, for it belongs to mercy to be bountiful to others, and, what is more, to succor others in their wants, which pertains chiefly to one who stands above. Hence mercy is accounted as being proper to God: and therein His omnipotence is declared to be chiefly manifested. . . . [Of] all the virtues which relate to our neighbor, mercy is the greatest, even as its act surpasses all others. . . . The sum total of the Christian religion consists in mercy, as regards external works: but the inward love of charity, whereby we are united to God preponderates over both love and mercy for our neighbor. . . . Charity likens us to God by uniting us to Him in the bond of love: wherefore it surpasses mercy, which likens us to God as regards similarity of works.” 15 Veritatis Splendor §9c; cf. ST I, q. 93, a. 4, resp.; cf. I, q. 93, a. 8, ad 3. 16 Dives in Misericordia §13; Salvifici Doloris §28. 17 Veritatis Splendor §18b. The Call to Mercy 1209 Christian morality is following Jesus (sequela Christi ), we look to his life as the exemplification of “the Christian way.”18 As Pope John Paul explains, Jesus asks us to follow him—which is “the specific form of the commandment to love of God”—and “once one has given up one’s wealth and very self,” Jesus invites each one of us to imitate his nonexclusive, preferential love for those who suffer: a love consisting in selfdenial and which “gives itself completely to the brethren out of love for God.”19 To be a disciple of Jesus Christ means to follow him along the path of a particular kind of love, specifically ordered toward our conformation to his likeness (as the perfect image of the Father), by the grace of the Holy Spirit. The individual process of this conformation is a moral catechesis in the implications of our personal encounter with Jesus and our graced response to his call to conversion.20 More than a pastoral illustration, Pope John Paul’s meditation on the rich young man’s encounter with Christ in Veritatis Splendor provides a concrete frame of reference for a theological argument about the moral good and the fulfillment of human destiny. In the same way and with respect to the sorrowful response of the rich young man (which bears a striking resemblance to the spiritual apathy of acedia), it seems appropriate to reflect upon a contemporary description of acedia relevant to the call to mercy. The Argentine poet and author Jorge Luis Borges narrates in short story form the final testament of a vicious man who, after seeking the good, was faced with a call to conversion—and who underwent 18 Veritatis Splendor §19. Cf. Joseph Wawrykow, “Jesus in the Moral Theology of Aquinas,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42:1 (Winter 2012): 13–33. Wawrykow writes: “Jesus is the model for authentic behavior, the great human exemplar who shows what is possible for those who are in correct relationship to God, who indicates in his own action how they might act as they move toward God as their end” (21, emphasis original). 19 Veritatis Splendor §§18, 19, 20. 20 Libertatis Concientia §66, 75. Cf. Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, 118. Gutiérrez writes: “A spirituality of liberation will center on a conversion to the neighbor, the outcast person, the exploited social class, the despised ethnic group, the dominated country. Our conversion to the Lord implies this conversion to the neighbor. Evangelical conversion is indeed the touchstone of all spirituality. Conversion means a radical transformation of ourselves; it means thinking, feeling, and living as Christ—present in exploited and alienated persons. To be converted is to commit oneself to the process of the liberation of the poor and oppressed, to commit oneself lucidly, realistically, and concretely. It means to commit oneself not only generously, but also with an analysis of the situation and a strategy of action. To be converted is to know and experience the fact that, contrary to the laws of physics, we can stand straight, according to the Gospel, only when our center of gravity is outside ourselves.” 1210 Miguel Romero a distinctively modern form of moral catechesis under Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Spengler. This description can be taken as an imaginative, although quite regrettable, extension of the path chosen by the rich young man in his response to Christ. Borges helps us recognize important features of Christ’s call to mercy in our time, in the light of Veritatis Splendor, and as formulated in the preferential option for the poor. A Morality Tale: Conversion and the Murder of Mercy In the fictional apologia entitled Deutsches Requiem, Borges presents a portrait of the consummate Christian anti-saint and anti-martyr.21 Like the despairing young man of Matthew’s Gospel, Otto Dietrich zur Linde is a man who drinks from the well of acedia. As a young man, zur Linde first learned to despair of the divine compassion and evangelical hope announced in Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem (1868), by interpreting the piece through the pessimism of Brahms’ Vier ernste Gesänge (1896) and the distilled skepticism of Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena (1851).22 Decades later, zur Linde’s conversion from despair to the pursuit of mercilessness is sealed in a sedentary hospital, when he identifies the purpose of his life: “On the windowsill slept a massive, obese cat—the symbol of my vain destiny.”23 Zur Linde is a Nazi war criminal condemned to die for his activities as subdirector of the Tarnowitz concentration camp. The apologia is no 21 Jorge Luis Borges, Deutsches Requiem from The Aleph (1949) in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 229–34. 22 See Daniel Beller-McKenna, “Brahms on Schopenhauer: The Vier ernste Gesänge, op. 121, and Late Nineteenth-Century Pessimism.” In Brahms Studies 1, ed. David L. Brodbeck (Lincoln, NE; University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 170–88. Although Beller-McKenna argues for a different interpretation of Brahms’s response to Schopenhauer in Vier ernste Gesänge than the interpretation presumed in Borges’s narrative Deutsches Requiem, Beller-McKenna’s analysis displays the cultural background relevant to my description of the moral intuitions at work in Borges’s morality tale—in particular, those which have to do with mercy, acedia, and ressentiment. 23 Borges provides a reference to the amplified despair of Vier ernste Gesänge, which opens with songs that take their text from Ecclesiastes 3:19–22 (all is vanity and there is nothing beyond this life, no reward for good works) and 4:1–3 (the dead are most fortunate, for they have not witnessed the suffering of the oppressed, who weep without comfort). These gestures are a stark contrast with the themes of Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem, which begins with the promise of divine comfort expressed in Matthew 5:4 (blessed are those who mourn, for they will receive comfort) and ends with the hope expressed in Revelation 14:13 (blessed are the dead who rest from their mortal labors and benefit from the fruit of their good works). The Call to Mercy 1211 apology. Zur Linde narrates his confession for posterity as the celebratory announcement—the good news—of a dawning new age: I am to be shot as a torturer and a murderer. . . . I have no desire to be pardoned, for I feel no guilt, but I do wish to be understood. Those who heed my words will understand that . . . I am a symbol of the generations to come. The new humanity anticipated by zur Linde is a transformed people, no longer tempted by “insidious compassion . . . [to perform] ancient acts of tenderness.” He explains that the secret justification of his life is constituted in his death, as he and Hitler’s Germany are crushed by the nations of the world and humanity takes upon itself the mantle of violence and faith in the sword. What matters, he writes, “is that violence, not servile Christian acts of timidity, now rules.” Nationalistic warmongering is held forth as an “intrinsically moral act,” the new common school of humanity where “the old man, which is corrupt and depraved”—that is, the merciful and compassionate man—is stripped away in order that the merciless Overman take his place. The violence of nations and Nazi chauvinism, however, are only the incidental means to a higher purpose for zur Linde: perpetual war and secret prisons are crucibles in which implacable and merciless men are forged. In his own case, zur Linde “felt no calling for violence” and he admits that the tedious daily slaughter of human beings was not something he enjoyed. In that light, zur Linde reveals the purpose of his unhurried abuse and meticulous psychological torture of the impoverished poet named David Jerusalem: “I destroyed him in order to destroy my own compassion.” Mercy for the poor and miserable man, according to zur Linde, is Zarathustra’s ultimate sin. Thus the destruction of the blameless poet was zur Linde’s great moral triumph over the pernicious temptation to compassion. His perfection in mercilessness and anarchic freedom is sealed in the murder of mercy. Zur Linde takes his transfiguration into the merciless Overman to be the first fruits of a dawning moral order, and he senses in his imminent execution a ransom for the higher purpose of all mankind. Specifically, zur Linde viewed it as fitting that he and Hitler’s Germany be formally crushed in the name of truth, goodness, and love—so that war could be forever purified of servile Christian mercy.The invocation of those metaphysical notions in the call to war impart to zur Linde the “mysterious and almost horrific taste of happiness”—for their faithless utterance by his executioners signals the founding of the new order, beyond good and 1212 Miguel Romero evil, from which a merciless and insatiable humanity will arise. For zur Linde, the universal “will to power” incarnate in Nazi Germany, but beyond Nazi Germany in the violence of nations, is the principle truth of mankind. The Moral Argument of Deutsches Requiem In addition to its literary attributes, the moral insight of Borges’s Deutsches Requiem certainly includes his deft narrative inversion of the hagiographic formula: search, conversion, temptation, purification, and martyrdom.24 As the Platonic ideal of a consistently Nietzschean Nazi apostle, zur Linde is the consummate Christian anti-saint and anti-martyr: he rejects the very notions of goodness and truth, and perceives only the will to power as beautiful.25 The most notable moral insight of Borges, however, is the incidental instrumentality of violence in his formulation of the moral universe of zur Linde. Within the narrative, it is an accident of history that violence and Nazi warmongering are the means by which zur Linde is transfigured into a merciless man of chaos. What matters is that the moral disposition that predicates and prefigures zur Linde’s “vain destiny” begins in spiritual despair, from which he is beckoned into a life of diabolical discipleship. Specifically, Borges depicts a moral conversion that is mediated by the personification of Aergia—the daimon, in Greek mythology, associated with indolence and sloth—a fitting symbol of acedia: a sleeping and morbidly obese cat. Because zur Linde was no longer content to die for the new implacable age of humanity, he dedicated himself to live for the annihilation of mercy: “At last I believed I understood,” zur Linde writes, “To die for a religion is simpler than living that religion fully.” He aspired to achieve the extraordinary lawlessness and mercilessness that Rodion Raskolnikov failed to realize in Dosteyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. There is more than one way to become merciless, but it always begins with the spiritual apathy (that is, the deadly sin called sloth) which despairs at the difficulty and inconvenience of truth and goodness. Zur Linde had no taste for violence, but efficiently and joylessly performed his brutal duties in the Tarnowitz concentration camp as a discipline ordered toward 24 Donald L. Shaw, Borges’ Narrative Strategy (Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1992), 87. Shaw writes: “Deutsches Requiem . . . has as its macroscopic or multiple subtext the whole of what we know as Lives of Saints. Zur Linde is a parodic or inverted saint, one who sacrifices and mortifies himself for the Nazi ideal as a saint normally sacrifices and mortifies himself for the Christian ideal.” 25 Jorge Luis Borges and Richard Burgin, Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations ( Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 21–22. The Call to Mercy 1213 the annihilation of his apparently native disposition to compassion. Mercilessness and lawlessness, not violence and war, were his goal. Borges’s inversion of the Christian saint is not formulated according to a Manichaean cosmology of good and evil. If that were the case, zur Linde would not be content that “England is the hammer and [Germany] the anvil,” for only victory and domination would then suffice. Like Aristotle, Borges recognizes that unnerving viciousness still takes its reference from what is virtuous and noble; only beasts and “gods” live according to the absolute lawlessness toward which zur Linde aspired.26 On the Christian view and for Borges, the opposite of the good is not evil as such—evil is the privation of the good and is therefore always parasitic upon a more determinative good. For that reason, the inversion of Christian morality is depicted by Borges as an amoral ressentiment—a distinctively modern attitude diagnosed by Max Scheler that takes root in the sorrow of acedia, but exceeds both spiritual apathy (desperatio) and rancorous spite (malitia) in the devaluation of spiritual goods by way of staid indifference.27 In that way, ressentiment can be understood as the settled disposition to maintain a moral universe that ceaselessly reconfigures itself to accommodate the arbitrary preferences, desires, and whims of the modern subject.28 Moreover, with ressentiment, the entropic disintegration and disorder of human sociality are not sought as ends in themselves—even Raskolnikov, for example, murdered the shopkeeper for 26 Aristotle, Politics, 1253a1–5, 25–38. 27 Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, 143–44; cf. Max Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. Lewis B. Coser and William W. Holdeim (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1998), 29. Scheler describes the phenomenon of ressentiment in this way: “Ressentiment is a self-poisoning of the mind which has quite definite causes and consequences. It is a lasting mental attitude, caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects which, as such, are normal components of human nature. Their repression leads to the constant tendency to indulge in certain kinds of value delusions and corresponding value judgments.” See also Ramsey Lawrence, “Religious Subtext and Narrative Structure in Borges’s Deutsches Requiem,” Variaciones Borges 10 (2000): 119–38. Concerning despair and malice, see ST II–II, q. 35, a. 4. 28 Veritatis Splendor §99. Pope John Paul cites Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Libertas Praestantissimum (“On the Nature of Human Liberty,” 1888): “If one does not acknowledge transcendent truth, then the force of power takes over, and each person tends to make full use of the means at his disposal in order to impose his own interests or his own opinion, with no regard for the rights of others.” Cf. Scheler, Ressentiment, 41. “Lowering all values to the level of one’s own factual desire or ability . . . construing an illusory hierarchy of values in accordance with the structure of one’s personal goals and wishes—that is by no means the way in which a normal and meaningful value consciousness is realized. It is, on the contrary, the chief source of value blindness, of value delusions and illusions.” 1214 Miguel Romero what he viewed as the greater good of society. Rather, social disintegration and disorder are the consequence of a cultural ethos which is indifferent to truth and, as a consequence, indifferent to the pursuit and protection of superficially unpleasant moral and spiritual goods. Mercy and Indifference Strictly speaking, the radical inversion of merciful neighbor-love is not contempt and abuse of the poor but habituated indifference to truth and goodness.This is a point that warrants further explanation. In particular, and in view of the moral teaching of Veritatis Splendor, what does acedic indifference have to do with the subversion of mercy and the misery of the poor? Although every vice is aversive to the spiritual good of its opposite virtue, the vice of acedia is uniquely opposed to the divine good of charity.29 So conceived, acedia is not the mere recognition that there are difficulties associated with our participation in the divine good (that is, the challenges of moral rectitude). Rather, acedia is a dispositional despair at the fact that moral goodness and our participation in the divine good are demanding.30 Aquinas suggests that revulsion at the moral good and the truth of the divine good becomes habituated indifference when the lack of joy in spiritual pleasures is supplemented by intemperate sensual or bodily pleasures.31 For example, the sensual pleasures attached to gluttony, drunkenness, lust, anger, and curiosity (the wandering of the mind after unlawful things) can all be understood as ways to avoid the sorrow of a dispositionally unhappy life.32 That is to say, the despairing sorrow of those who live a life bereft of the happiness called mercy. According to Aquinas, participating in the goodness of God is our greatest happiness, and our love for the divine good is the gift of charity.33 The internal effects of charity are joy, peace, and mercy. Different from joy and peace (which are spiritual goods proceeding from charity), mercy is a virtuous disposition oriented towards particular kinds of action.34 As described above, for Pope John Paul and for Aquinas, mercy 29 ST II–II, q. 35, a. 2, resp. 30 ST II–II, q. 35, a. 3, ad 2. 31 ST II–II, q. 35, a. 4, ad 2 and ad 3. 32 Cf. Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston, IL; Northwestern University Press, 1973), 345. “For whenever a man is discontent in the more central and deeper strata of his being, his striving acquires a certain disposition to replace, as it were, this unpleasant state with a conative intention toward pleasure . . . someone who is at heart in despair ‘seeks’ [hedonistic] happiness in every new human experience.” 33 ST II–II, q. 23, a. 4, resp. 34 ST II–II, qq. 28–30. The Call to Mercy 1215 is the historical revelation and morally perfect actualization of charity in time, given the reality of evil.35 As recipients of divine mercy and participants in the divine good, mercy is the greatest of all the virtues pertaining to the love of neighbor—uniting the baptized with God as participants in God’s merciful regard for both humanity and the suffering of humanity. Aquinas describes two ways that mercy (misericordia) can be understood: as a passion and as a virtue.36 On the one hand, as a passion, mercy is the sensual grief that human beings ordinarily experience, by way of affective identification, when we recognize that someone is suffering. On the other hand, the virtue mercy is a rational disposition to act upon that grief as if the suffering were experienced in one’s own person. The virtue of mercy is principally concerned with mitigating the experience of evil being suffered.37 Even when nothing can be done, upon recognizing the suffering of another, the “heartfelt misery” of mercy is the settled disposition to do something; or, more precisely, the connatural inclination that I must do something. The virtue of mercy is the moral impulse to personally address the physical or spiritual cause of the experience of evil—by removing the cause of the misery or by providing what is missing. So conceived, the virtue mercy is ordered toward a particular set of external acts. Aquinas calls the acts of merciful love almsdeeds—“almsgiving is an act of charity through the medium of mercy”—and the particular need with which we are confronted in the person of our neighbor determines the alms that are due to him or her.38 It is important to note that for Aquinas merciful acts are a matter of moral precept in the case of extreme need, and neglecting to perform merciful acts out of one’s surplus of resources or capacities is a grave mortal sin.39 Aquinas identifies two classes of need that oblige acts of mercy, the traditional “works of mercy” enumerated in Matthew 25:34–46. Some needs are corporal (affecting the body), such as hunger, thirst, nakedness, homelessness, the loneliness of the sick, the ransom of captives, and the burial of the dead. Mercy responds to corporal needs by supplying what 35 Dives in Misericordia §7f; ST II–II, q. 30, a. 4, resp. 36 ST II–II, q. 30, a. 3, resp.; cf. Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Carus Publishing Company, 1999), 119–28. I am grateful to Jean Porter for her comments on an earlier draft of these remarks. 37 ST II–II, q. 30, a. 1, resp. 38 ST II–II, q. 32, a. 1, resp.; cf. Stephen Pope “Aquinas on Almsgiving, Justice, and Charity: An Interpretation of Reassessment,” Heythrop Journal 32 (1991): 167–91, esp. 176–80. 39 ST II–II, q. 32, a. 5, sc. 1216 Miguel Romero is deficient or by removing the cause of the miserable condition.40 Other needs are spiritual (affecting the soul). Mercy responds to spiritual needs with an analogous provision of support: for example, to pray for God’s help, to comfort those who grieve or who are afflicted; to relieve deficiencies of the speculative intellect through instruction and deficiencies of the practical intellect through counsel; and to forgive the debt of personal injury.41 It is important to underscore that acts of mercy are predicated upon one’s capacity to recognize evil and to be affectively moved by the misery of a fellow human being.42 Throughout the question on mercy, Aquinas formulates the prudential judgments necessary to an act of mercy as directing both the passions of the sensitive appetite and the operations of the intellectual appetite.43 This is to be distinguished, for example, from Aquinas’s formulation of the virtue justice, which is only about operations of the intellectual appetite, as justice applies the will to its proper act in accordance with the good.44 What this means is that justice remains a virtue regardless of whether or not one delights in justice. As it relates to the good of one’s neighbor, one further difference between the virtue justice and the virtue mercy is the role of beauty and our delight at beauty. Aesthetic sensibilities and affective inclination are part of what distinguishes the performance of mercy and its gratuitousness from the strict obligations of legal justice.45 For Aquinas, beauty and goodness differ only in aspect—what beauty (or aesthetic perception) adds to goodness is a reason-directed and reasondirecting sensitivity to the affective pleasure experienced when a particular good is apprehended (or, as the case may be, the displeasure when evil is apprehended).46 Because the “heartfelt misery” of misericordia is moved 40 ST II–II, q. 32, a. 2, resp. 41 Ibid. 42 See, for example, ST I–II, q. 9, a. 2, resp. Regarding human acts in general, Aquinas writes: “that which is apprehended as good and fitting, moves the will by way of object. Now, that a thing appear to be good and fitting, happens from two causes: namely, from the condition, either of the thing proposed, or of the one to whom it is proposed. For fitness is spoken of by way of relation; hence it depends on both extremes. And hence it is that taste, according as it is variously disposed, takes to a thing in various ways, as being fitting or unfitting.” 43 ST II–II, q. 30, a. 3, resp. 44 ST I–II, q. 59, aa. 4, 5. 45 Cf. Jean Porter, “The Virtue Justice (IIa IIae, qq. 58–122),” The Ethics of Aquinas, ed. Stephen J. Pope (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002), 282–84. 46 ST I–II, q. 27, a. 1, ad 3. The Call to Mercy 1217 to act by signs of evil present to the senses of particular persons, the individual affective inclinations of those confronted by human misery are integral to the operation of practical reason and merciful regard.47 For Aquinas, the virtuous man or woman is one who has been habituated to judge what is right by inclination to the good and through a connatural intimacy or sympathy with the divine good.48 So conceived, the ability to recognize evil and to be moved by the misery of the poor is a skill of aesthetic perception which must be formed and trained.49 In his book Aesthetic Perception: A Thomistic Perspective, Kevin O’Reilly attempts to reconstruct the aesthetic theory at work in the background of Aquinas’s life work, toward what he calls a “Thomistic theory of virtue aesthetics.”50 Among the fruits of O’Reilly’s close attention to Aquinas’s aesthetic presuppositions is the light it shines on the affective dispositions coordinate with acts of mercy. And, moreover, how the acedic indifference characteristic of our time makes it difficult to recognize the proper place of the preferential option for the poor within the anthropological and moral horizon of Veritatis Splendor. Because affectivity limits and controls what sensory information is relevant to the cognitional deliberations of the intellect, choice is influenced by the natural and connatural inclination of the subject toward or against what is apprehended—hence, a better affective inclination means that one will have a better grasp of reality.51 On the terms provided by O’Reilly, for Aquinas the ability to recognize evil as evil and human misery as a sign of evil is an affective inclination that is acquired through habituation into communal practices corresponding to what is good and true (or, as the case may be, lost through mal-habituation).52 For that reason, physically capable persons who are not able to recognize evil and 47 ST II–II, q. 30, a. 1. 48 ST I, q. I, a. 6, ad 3; II–II, q. 45, a. 2, resp. 49 ST II–II, q. 24, a. 11, resp. Aquinas writes: “It is proper to a habit to incline a power to act, and this belongs to a habit, in so far as it makes whatever is suitable to it, to seem good, and whatever is unsuitable, to seem evil. For as the taste judges of savors according to its disposition, even so does the human mind judge of things to be done, according to its habitual disposition.” 50 Kevin E. O’Reilly, Aesthetic Perception: A Thomistic Perspective (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007). O’Reilly outlines what he takes to be the principal themes for any inferential reconstruction of Aquinas’s inchoate aesthetic theory: the unity of human nature, the three formal criteria of beauty (proportion, integrity, and clarity), and the dynamic interplay of visio and claritas in the unified operation that O’Reilly calls aesthetic perception. 51 ST I, qq. 80, 81; O’Reilly, Aesthetic Perception, 68–73. 52 O’Reilly, Aesthetic Perception, 79–82. 1218 Miguel Romero are unmoved by human misery may have, on Aquinas’s terms, what O’Reilly would describe as an “affective moral disorder.”53 When it comes to the performance of the moral perfection called mercy in our time, far too many Christians have been affectively conditioned (through desensitizing media consumption, technological distraction, and insulating social customs) into a state of moral disorder—a condition that zur Linde could only realize through the torture and psychological mutilation of the poet David Jerusalem. Specifically, in modern society it is now possible in an unprecedented way to cauterize one’s capacity to recognize and to be moved by human misery and poverty; the sensual grief of the passion mercy is silenced. And this to a degree that the despair of the rich young man described in Matthew could be viewed as a moral achievement—albeit qualified—insofar as one must first desire the spiritual good of merciful love before the difficulty of that spiritual good can be despaired. From the perspective of individual moral rectitude, acedic indifference and affective moral blindness to human misery is worse than misanthropic hatred—because, at the very least, those who hate still recognize the humanity of their enemy.54 Pope John Paul is clear that although far too many Christians fail to respond to the universal call to mercy, it would be irresponsible to issue a generic indictment of contemporary Christianity.55 However, it is wholly appropriate to call to task those of us who have found a way to numb both the sensual grief of mercy and our capacity to be moved by human misery. In particular, I have in mind those of us who are no longer capable of moral 53 Ibid., 73–75. Thinking with Aquinas, an “affective moral disorder” would not describe the perceptive faculties of persons who are cognitively impaired or who are afflicted with a congenital mental disorder. For example, Aquinas is keen to distinguish between, on the one hand, physical conditions like “mindlessness” and “madness” (i.e., amentia and furia), which hinder the ordinary exercise of reason and, on the other hand, morally vicious dispositions that hinder the exercise of reason and arise from the withdrawal of supernatural grace, willful inattention to the good, or the distraction of disordered loves (concupiscence) (cf. ST II–II, q. 15, a. 1, resp.). See my essay “Aquinas on the corporis infirmitas: Broken Flesh and the Grammar of Grace,” Disability in the Christian Tradition: A Reader, ed. Brian Brock and John Swinton (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 101–51. 54 Cf. ST II–II, q. 34, a. 4. Aquinas does not fail to note, however, that “as regards the hurt inflicted on his neighbor, a man’s outward sins are worse than his inward hatred.” 55 In Dives in Misericordia, Pope John Paul appropriately highlights the merciful and liberating work of Christians in history and throughout the world, which should not be minimized or disregarded. In doing so, however, he maintains that the moral witness of the Church to the preferential love of God for those who suffer remains compromised in troubling ways. The Call to Mercy 1219 sorrow, like the sorrow attributed to the rich young man in Matthew’s Gospel. Remorseless in our greed, gluttony, and lust, we live indifferent to human misery that does not meet us on our terms and according to our schedule. Our lives unfold unaffected and unmoved by affliction and poverty—and we artfully explain our individual exemption from Christ’s call to mercy with an ease and boredom that Nietzsche would envy. Recall from Borges’s morality tale that the condemned Nazi did not seek violence and murder as ends in themselves; these were the means to a deeper purpose: zur Linde sought to excise compassion from his soul so that he would be free to live as he pleased, beyond good and evil, beyond human limitation and weakness. In our time and on Aquinas’s terms, too many Christians (and Christian moralists) nurture a promethean indifference to the moral demands coordinate with our constitutive creaturely limitations (defectum), postlapsarian wounds (infirmum), and the infinitely variable poverties that afflict and are inflicted upon our near neighbor (privatio boni).56 The principle enemies of those who are afflicted, impoverished, and oppressed are the desensitizing instruments of distraction and insulation that consume the moral sensibilities of those who are circumstantially capable, but unwilling, to be merciful—these are the powers, principalities, and spiritual dominions of this present darkness. It is certainly a matter of moral precept for Christians to expose the contemptuous abuse of the poor as we encounter it and, to the extent that we are able given the order of charity, to provide what is needed and to protect the vulnerable.57 Likewise, it is a matter of moral precept and among the spiritual works of mercy to admonish and correct those who harm themselves and who harm others through sin or vice—that is to say, the act of charity that Aquinas calls “fraternal correction.”58 In this way, the culpable indifference and affective moral blindness of our time calls for a timely work of mercy: virtuous women and men moved to act by the signs of evil evident in the 56 Cf. MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, xi–9. In reference to contemporary moral philosophy, MacIntyre asks what difference it would make if the fact of human vulnerability and affliction, and the related fact of the dependencies coordinate with our biological constitution, where to be recognized as central to any coherent account of the moral life. Analogously, it seems worth asking what difference it would make if Catholic theologians and moralists consistently recognized the place of creaturely limitation, woundedness, and poverty in the Christian understanding of human happiness and human flourishing—as recommended by Pinckaers above (n. 3). 57 ST II–II, q. 32, a. 5, concerning those instances when almsgiving (i.e., the works of mercy) are a matter of moral precept and are obligatory. Cf. II–II, q. 118, a. 4. 58 ST II–II, q. 33, aa. 1, 2. 1220 Miguel Romero lives of those who are remorseless in their greed and indifferent to human misery. It is the “heartfelt-misery” of misericordia that not only follows Jesus in his ministry to the poor but reiterates the demanding implications of Christ’s invitation to the rich young man for our time: asking the culpably indifferent Why are these people impoverished, afflicted, and oppressed? and, when necessary, declaring in merciful love: Repent, because your vicious sloth is the reason these people are impoverished, afflicted, and oppressed.59 The Option for the Poor and the Moral Horizon of Veritatis Splendor In Veritatis Splendor Pope John Paul reflects on the “whole of the Church’s moral teaching,” the “foundations of moral theology,” and the “principles of a moral teaching based upon sacred scripture and the living apostolic tradition.”60 Although the “lack of harmony” connected with certain theological errors was the occasion of the encyclical, the renewal proposed for the discipline of moral theology centers on the radical recovery of a Christian morality rooted in a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the revelation of truth and it is in Christ crucified that the Church receives its clearest picture of authentic freedom and the properly human good.61 Embodied in the ordinary activities of the Christian disciple’s daily life, the evangelical morality of Christ’s Church entails a call to conversion that is personal and extends to our family, social, and political life.62 As Pope John Paul explains in Veritatis Splendor, the personal renewal of Christian discipleship is one that must be lived: Faith is a decision involving one’s whole existence. It is an encounter, a dialogue, a communion of love and of life between the believer and Jesus Christ, the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. It entails an act of trusting abandonment to Christ, which enables us to live as he lived, in profound love of God and of our brothers and sisters.63 59 Veritatis Splendor §104–5. “It is quite human for the sinner to acknowledge his weakness and to ask mercy for his failings; what is unacceptable is the attitude of one who makes his own weakness the criterion of the truth about the good, so that he can feel self-justified, without even the need to have recourse to God and his mercy. . . .The Pharisee [from Luke 18:9–14] represents a ‘self-satisfied’ conscience, under the illusion that it is able to observe the law without the help of grace and convinced that it does not need mercy. All people must take great care not to allow themselves to be tainted by the attitude of the Pharisee, which would seek to eliminate awareness of one’s own limits and of one’s own sin” (emphasis mine). 60 Veritatis Splendor §4–5. 61 Veritatis Splendor §§84–85. 62 Veritatis Splendor §101; cf. Caritas in Veritate §5. 63 Veritatis Splendor §88. The Call to Mercy 1221 The vocation to which every person is called by Christ is a discipleship oriented by charity toward justice, solidarity, truthfulness, and mercy.64 Indeed, Pope John Paul is clear that this radically renewed social existence is not limited to a small group of elite individuals. Rather, Christ invites every man and woman to “go, sell your possessions and give the money to the poor” (Mt 19:20). The radical dispossession of personal property and goods, and the redistribution of personal wealth and benefits, is held forth as an aspect of moral perfection by Pope John Paul. Which is to say, the self-effacing dispossession and redistribution of personal property is described as an integral part of the good life and flourishing human life according to the Christian Way.65 Moreover, by linking christoformic neighbor-love to radical personal and social renewal, Pope John Paul forecloses upon attempts to separate the spiritual detachment from individual wealth, on the one hand, from the personal redistribution of individual wealth, on the other hand.66 In other words, for Christian disciples, a holy detachment from the excess goods and privileges we sometimes enjoy is morally meritorious primarily when the goods are personally distributed or made available for the benefit of those who suffer (vis-à-vis the corporal and spiritual works of mercy).67 In that way, according to Pope John Paul, the call to self-giving acts of merciful love for those who suffer, along with the teleological promise (treasure in heaven), bring out “the full meaning of the commandment of love for neighbor, just as the invitation which follows, ‘Come follow me,’ is the new, specific form of the commandment of love of God.”68 64 Veritatis Splendor §98. 65 Cf. Scheler, Ressentiment, 70. “When Francis of Assisi kisses festering wounds and does not even kill the bugs that bite him, but leaves his body to them as a hospitable home, these acts (if seen from the outside) could be signs of perverted instincts and of a perverted valuation. But that is not actually the case. It is not a lack of nausea or a delight in the pus which makes St. Francis act in this way. He has overcome his nausea through a deeper feeling of life and vigor! This attitude is completely different from that of recent modern realism in art and literature, the exposure of social misery, the description of little people, the wallowing in the morbid — a typical ressentiment phenomenon. Those people saw something bug-like in everything that lives, whereas Francis sees the holiness of ‘life’ even in a bug.” 66 Veritatis Splendor §98–100. With thanks to Luis Vera. 67 ST I–II, q. 114, a. 3, ad 3. For a discussion of Aquinas on the connection between the ordination of grace, good works, merit, and beatitude, see Joseph Wawrykow, God’s Grace & Human Action: “Merit” in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 180–86. 68 Veritatis Splendor §18. 1222 Miguel Romero Addressed as it is toward the vocational holiness of Christian activity, the Church’s social doctrine is a proper part of Catholic moral teaching and the discipline of moral theology.69 On the basis of that integral correspondence, Pope John Paul understood preferential love for the poor to be a moral principle for reflection, as a criterion for judgment, and as a directive for action.70 In particular, the option for the poor is held forth as the love that recognizes and responds to human misery, in all its forms—be it material deprivation, social marginalization, oppression, physical impairment, or mental illness—respecting the limitations reflected in the order of charity.71 Although human misery is individually and unequally experienced, the miseries of the human condition display the universal woundedness of humanity that is a consequence of original sin—and these miseries are indicative of our need for reconciliation with God in Christ. So conceived, preferential love for the poor recognizes and responds to the human experience of evil and our postlapsarian woundedness, taking the suffering individual as the object of its act. Among the activities associated with this preferential love on the part of the Church, then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger identified direct relief, defense of the poor, and work for integral liberation.72 For Ratzinger, the preferential love to which Christian’s 69 Veritatis Splendor §99b. In Sollicitudo Rei Socialis §41g, Pope John Paul II stipulates that the main aim of the Church’s social doctrine “is to interpret these realities [i.e., the complex realities of human existence], determining their conformity with or divergence from the lines of the Gospel teaching on man and his vocation, a vocation which is at once earthly and transcendent; its aim is thus to guide Christian behavior. It therefore belongs to the field, not of ideology, but of theology and particularly of moral theology.” Cf. Libertatis Conscientia §72, where then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger writes: “The Church’s social teaching is born of the encounter of the Gospel message and of its demands—summarized in the supreme commandment of love of God and neighbor—in justice with the problems emanating from the life of society. This social teaching has established itself as a doctrine by using the resources of human wisdom and the sciences. It concerns the ethical aspect of this life. It takes into account the technical aspects of problems but always in order to judge them from the moral point of view. Being essentially orientated toward action, this teaching develops in accordance with the changing circumstances of history . . . the Church offers by her social doctrine a set of principles for reflection and criteria for judgment and also directives for action so that the profound changes demanded by situations of poverty and injustice may be brought about, and [does] this in a way which serves the true good of humanity.” 70 Sollicitudo Rei Socialis §§41e, 42b. 71 Libertatis Conscientia §68a. See also Stephen Pope, “Aquinas on Almsgiving, Justice, and Charity: An Interpretation of Reassessment,” Heythrop Journal 32 (1991): 167–91; and idem. “Proper and Improper Partiality and the Preferential Option for the Poor,” Theological Studies 54 (1993): 242–71. 72 Libertatis Conscientia §72. The Call to Mercy 1223 are called is characterized by concrete efforts to see that individuals are liberated from sin, the wounds of sin, and the effects of sin in society. The scope of this integral liberation is coordinate with human nature, is oriented by the twofold end of the human being, and is directed toward the goods constitutive of authentic human flourishing.73 On the presumption that “the preferential option for the poor is intrinsic to the Christological faith of the Church,” it would seem to follow that how we identify the “who” of “the poor” has much to do with how we understand the precise poverty from which we are liberated by Christ.74 A clear picture of the christological foundation for the preferential option for the poor is given in 2 Corinthians 8:9, where Christ did not become poor in order to privilege poverty as such (in either epistemic or material terms); rather, in a demonstration of his grace, although he was rich, for our sake he became poor, so that through his poverty we might become rich with him. As a mode of relating, the mercy modeled in Christ addresses a lack of another for the sake of the other. This act of address is predicated upon the means, on the part of merciful Christ, to redress the lack (that is, the poverty) experienced by those who suffer. So, in what poverty are we met by Christ? In Caritas in Veritate Pope Benedict reminds the Church that through Christ we are liberated from the greatest oppression, our great poverty, which is original sin.75 This baptismal restoration of the freedom of divine grace entails the call to liberated men and women to imitate Christ in his preferential love for those who suffer.76 Called by God, Christian men and women are made free to witness to the goodness of 73 Aquinas on the order of charity: ST II–II, q. 26. Cf. Dives in Misericordia §14d. Pope John Paul writes: “Thus, the way which Christ showed to us in the Sermon on the Mount with the beatitude regarding those who are merciful is much richer than what we sometimes find in ordinary human opinions about mercy. These opinions see mercy as a unilateral act or process, presupposing and maintaining a certain distance between the one practicing mercy and the one benefitting from it, between the one who does good and the one who receives it. Hence the attempt to free interpersonal and social relationships from mercy and to base them solely on justice. However, such opinions about mercy fail to see the fundamental link between mercy and justice spoken of by the whole biblical tradition, and above all by the messianic mission of Jesus Christ. True mercy is, so to speak, the most profound source of justice. If justice is in itself suitable for ‘arbitration’ between people concerning the reciprocal distribution of objective goods in an equitable manner, love and only love (including that kindly love that we call ‘mercy’) is capable of restoring man to Himself.” 74 Apostolic Address of Benedict XVI, Aparecida, Brazil (2007), 3i. 75 Caritas in Veritate §§34, 77; cf. Evangelii Nuntiandi §9; Libertatis Conscientia §37. 76 Caritas in Veritate §§5a, 13, 17; cf. Spe Salvi §3. 1224 Miguel Romero God in Christ through the suffering love of charitable self-sacrifice; likewise, they are empowered to receive the sufferings of others into their own bodies.77 It follows, according to Pope John Paul, that we are enriched by Christ’s poverty only when we personally respond to the misery and sufferings of particular persons with acts of mercy. This is the perfection into which we are called by Christ. Those who have been liberated from sin, regardless of their station, are called to the work of integral liberation—which includes both the evangelical proclamation of the Gospel and the evangelical performance of compassionate solidarity with those who suffer.78 It is imprecise, of course, to reduce the encounter with Christ to the thin horizon of social location. Nevertheless, according to Pope John Paul, those who are disproportionately burdened by the wounds of original sin (malum poenae) and those who unjustly suffer under the moral evil wrought by others (malum culpae) become a privileged locus for encountering Christ—because, if they are Christians, through their poverty and suffering they perfect and participate in Christ’s suffering.79 Pope John Paul’s apostolic exhortation Salvifici Doloris is devoted to the implications of this Christian claim.80 By way of compassionate solidarity, those who are circumstantially free of mortal misery (for now) are able to encounter in the person of their suffering neighbor a living icon of Christ crucified. In this encounter with Christ, the spiritual affliction of the one called to mercy is in at least one important way healed.81 On that point, Pope John Paul provides a particularly important assessment: An act of merciful love is only really such when we are deeply convinced at the moment that we perform it that we are at the same time receiving mercy from the people who are accepting it from us. If 77 Caritas in Veritate §78; cf. Spe Salvi §4. 78 In Evangelii Nuntiandi §35–38, Pope Paul VI shows the formal and integral rela- tionship between our salvation in Christ and the political liberation of politically and economically oppressed persons. For Pope Paul, the proper understanding of the Christian vocation to work for the political liberation and temporal wellbeing of our neighbors can never be separated from that most determinative liberation which the Church proclaims: the complete liberation announced in the gospel and which was wrought for humanity through Christ’s death on the Cross 79 Salvifici Doloris §27. 80 See Salvifici Doloris §§19–27. 81 ST I–II, q. 114, a. 6, ad 3. Aquinas writes “The poor who receive alms are said to receive others into everlasting dwellings, either by impetrating their forgiveness in prayer, or by meriting congruously by other good works, or materially speaking, inasmuch as by these good works of mercy, exercised towards the poor, we merit to be received into everlasting dwellings.” Cf. Caritas in Veritate §§1–2. The Call to Mercy 1225 this bilateral and reciprocal quality is absent, our actions are not yet true acts of mercy, nor has there yet been fully completed in us that conversion to which Christ has shown us the way by His words and example, even to the cross, nor are we yet sharing fully in the magnificent source of merciful love that has been revealed to us by Him.82 The person of our suffering neighbor mediates to us, in our solidarity with him or her, the recognition of our need for liberation from sin and the consequences of sin. Like the stranger on the road to Jerusalem, we who were left for dead, abandoned to our misery, are raised by the mercy of the Good Samaritan, Christ; and we are commissioned to go and do likewise.83 Those who are tempted to think that we are not in need of mercy, because we do not suffer physically or spiritually, are precisely the wounded and the lost who need to receive the merciful regard of those who suffer.We receive this particular mercy when we follow Christ in his concrete, personal, and morally intimate preferential love for particular persons in their individual suffering. We must always remember that Christ is the Good Samaritan who has mercy upon us, and we must never forget that our individual reception of Christ’s eternal compassion toward us in our misery is constituted in our participation in his preferential love for the poor. Final Remarks Interpreters of the anthropological and moral horizon of Veritatis Splendor tend to underappreciate the concrete implications of Pope John Paul’s remarks on Jesus’s invitation to the rich young man.84 Contrary to the moral vision and methodological argument of the encyclical, no small number of moralists have “emptied the Cross of Christ of its power” by effectively revising the call for “maturity in self-giving” into a morally ambiguous “fundamental option” for the poor.85 More often than not, moralists attentive to the moral horizon indicated by Veritatis Splendor present the virtue of solidarity with the poor in terms that hardly exceed a “feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far.”86 With that in mind, what difference would it make if Catholic moralists were to affirm, on the terms provided by Pope John Paul and Aquinas, that Jesus was not speaking metaphorically when 82 Dives in Misericordia §14c. 83 Cf. Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 194–201. 84 For example, the implications outlined in Veritatis Splendor §§97–101. 85 Veritatis Splendor §§17b, 68, 85. 86 Sollicitudo Rei Socialis §38f. 1226 Miguel Romero he called the rich young man to “go, sell your possessions and give the money to the poor”? More directly, what if the contemporary prudential judgments relevant to merciful love of neighbor and the preferential option for the poor were not invoked as a way to avoid the radical dispossession of personal property, security, and time?87 A grave moral imperative attaches itself to each personal encounter with the suffering of another human being. This imperative is an invitation into a rich and flourishing form of life. We dishonor the high privilege of meditating upon the moral implications of the Gospel when we dilute Christ’s call to mercy; that is to say, when we refuse the call to mercy because the moral good is sometimes difficult and the truth of the Divine good has inconvenient implications. Pope John Paul II understood that our graced response to the call of Jesus prefigures a radical moral transformation that is at once personal and social.88 Holiness is the authentic and integral freedom, the moral perfection, toward which the liberative grace of Christian baptism is ordered. Liberated from sin, Christ’s disciples are invited to be conformed to his likeness as participants in the free reception and gifting of the Father’s love for the Son, in the Holy Spirit.89 As objects of God’s love, the women and men made free by Christ are called to become instruments of God’s grace through the evangelical proclamation and performance of the truth of Christ’s love in society.90 On the terms provided by Veritatis Splendor and in the light of Aquinas’s teaching, the preferential option for the poor called mercy is constitutive of the path to moral perfection and authentic human flourishing. Thus, it is incorrect to call the preferential option for the poor a “higher good” toward which one might aspire; rather, it is a moral principle that stipulates the nature of the good life. The human being is constituted in such a way that to act against the intuition of mercy is to act against one’s own humanity and natural good. Likewise, the Christian who resists the promptings of the Holy Spirit to recognize Christ in the person of his suffering neighbor is living an objectively miserable life. The happy life and the flourishing human life just is the preferential option for the poor: to share life and friendship in christoformic solidarity with those who suffer. It belongs to human nature that our flourishing is contingent upon each individual entering into messy personal relationships of mercy and solidarity. To avoid these kinds of relationships is to actively avoid exactly that perfec87 Veritatis Splendor §67b. 88 Veritatis Splendor §98a. 89 Caritas in Veritate §5a. 90 Caritas in Veritate §5b. The Call to Mercy 1227 tion and great happiness to which we are called as Christians. The life animated by the call to mercy is more difficult, complicated, and clumsy— but it is a better life. It is a good life and more human life. It is the happiness that foreshadows the eternal happiness for which we are created. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2013): 1229–47 1229 The Universality of Natural Law and the Irreducibility of Personalism J ANET E. S MITH Sacred Heart Major Seminary Detroit, MI W HILE NOT every theologian needs to be an Aristotelian/Thomist, anyone studying Catholic theology needs a good grounding in the philosophy and theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, since the concepts he employed have been used throughout Church history to establish, explain, and defend Church teaching on a myriad of issues. Moreover, because the thought of Aquinas drew so heavily on the thought of Aristotle, to understand Church teaching, theologians need to have a healthy familiarity with such Aristotelian concepts as teleology, nature, essence, substance, accidents, potency, actuality, form, matter, and efficient and final causality, among others. How many misunderstandings and disputes can be traced to a failure to understand the technical vocabulary of Aristotelian/Thomism and the concepts those terms convey? I teach in a seminary and, thankfully, there the curriculum is rightly shaped to educate the seminarians in this terminology and these concepts. During the pontificate of Pope John Paul II another set of terms and concepts started appearing in and even dominating magisterial documents, and those are the terms and concepts of personalism, such as: the dignity of the human person, self-consciousness, self-determination, self-gift, This essay draws upon two previously published articles: “Conscious Parenthood,” Nova et Vetera 6.4 (2008): 927–50, and “Natural Law and Personalism in Veritatis Splendor,” in John Paul II and Moral Theology: Readings in Moral Theology: No. 10, ed. Charles E. Curran and Richard A. McCormick, S.J. (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), 67–84, which is a reprint of chapter 13 in Veritatis Splendor: American Responses, ed. Michael E. Allsopp and John J. O’Keefe (Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward, 1995), 194–207. 1230 Janet Smith communion of persons, interiority, and unrepeatability.1 These terms and concepts increasingly shape how the Church presents and justifies its teaching, at least on moral matters. Soon seminaries will need to make an introduction to personalism a standard part of seminary education.2 Here what I would like to do is to compare and contrast some of the foundational concepts of natural law with those of personalism, so that we can have a sharper understanding of what John Paul II thought personalism contributes to moral theology. (Let me note that I will be using a number of articles Pope John Paul II wrote when he was Karol Wojtyla, but for the sake of convenience I will refer to him always as John Paul II even for his prepontificate writings.) The first portion of this essay will be theoretical. We shall see how natural law tends to focus on the universal, whereas personalism tries to integrate an interest in the irreducibility of the concrete particular person into its deliberation. Personalism does this largely through a concern with consciousness. In the second portion of the essay, I shall look at how John Paul II blends natural law and personalism in his Love and Responsibility 3 and also in his Theology of the Body.4 Briefly stated, Love and Responsibility takes nature as a point of departure for exploring sexual morality and then moves to employing personalistic terms. The Theology of the Body, on the other hand, begins with the personalistic concept of the “spousal meaning of the body” and then moves to explaining that there is a 1 See, for instance, the document from the Pontifical Council for the Family, “The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality” (Dec. 8, 1995), available on the Vatican website. 2 Wonderful texts for advanced students would be Peter Bristow, Christian Ethics and the Human Person (Leominster, Herefordshire, England: Gracewing Publishing, 2013), especially chapter 4, “Contemporary Personalism”; and Jaroslaw Kupczak, Destined for Liberty:The Human Person in the Philosophy of Karol Wojtya/John Paul II (Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press of America, 2000). See also John J. Conley, S.J. “The Philosophical Foundations of the Thought of John Paul II: A Response,” in The Thought of Pope John Paul II: A Collection of Essays and Studies (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Universitá Gregoriana, 1993), 23–28; and Thomas Williams, “What Is Thomistic Personalism?” available on line at: www.uprait.org/ archivio_pdf/ao42_williams1.pdf (accessed Oct. 8, 2013); and Adrian J. Reimers, The Thomistic Personalism of Karol Wojtyla, Atti del IX Congresso tomistico internazionale 6 (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1991), 364–69. 3 Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, trans. H. T. Willetts (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,1981; originally published in Polish, 1960). There is a new translation available by Grzegorz Ignatik, Love and Responsibility (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2013). 4 John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2006). Natural Law and the Irreducibility of Personalism 1231 language that this spousal meaning of the body “speaks” that necessitates respect for the procreative purpose of sexuality. Not only does John Paul utilize the concepts of personalism, he develops a style of presentation and terminology that is addressed to his readers not simply as rational animals but as persons, as persons obliged to seek the truth and live in accord with it. I will be commenting on that technique throughout and then I will close with a brief reference to Veritatis Splendor as another work that blends personalism and natural law. I. John Paul II: An Aristotelian/Thomist and Personalist Universal and Particular John Paul II self-identifies as an Aristotelian/Thomist.5 One of his principal criticisms of modern philosophy—to which he is drawn primarily because of its interest in man’s consciousness—is that it largely rejected metaphysics and a metaphysically grounded anthropology.6 He accepts Thomistic natural law and understands that Thomistic philosophy speaks of “nature” in the metaphysical sense, not in the biological or physical sense.7 Man has a nature; his goodness resides in his living in accord with that nature. Man’s nature is a free and rational one; a rational creature fulfills its nature by freely choosing to perform actions in accord with the truth about reality and eschewing actions that do not correspond to the truth about reality. For instance, man’s reason can determine which actions are in accord with the truth about sexuality and which actions are not. To be true to his human nature, he must seek the truth and willingly conform his behavior to that truth. John Paul II affirms all these truths about human nature but he also wants to find room for the human person in moral thought. John Paul II is intensely interested in something that traditional natural law theory does not truly cover and that is a man’s self-conscious awareness of himself as an acting person and how that awareness is key to the moral life. John Paul II understands himself to be expanding on Aquinas’s view of the person, which he speaks of as being “very objectivistic”: 5 See, for instance, Jaroslaw Kupczak, Destined for Liberty: The Human Person in the Thought of Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 49ff., and Jerzy W. Galkowski, “The Place of Thomism in the Anthropology of K. Wojtyla,” Angelicum 65 (1988): 181–94. 6 See, for instance, “On the Metaphysical and Phenomenological Basis of the Moral Norm in the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and Max Scheler,” Chapter 5 in Karol Wojtyla, Person and Community, trans. Theresa Sandok, O.S.M. (New York: Peter Lang, 1993). 7 “Human Nature as a Basis for Ethical Formation,” in Person and Community, 96–97. 1232 Janet Smith It almost seems as though there is no place in it [Aquinas’s view of the person] for an analysis of consciousness and self-consciousness as a totally unique manifestation of the person as a subject. For St. Thomas, the person, is, of course, a subject—a very distinctive subject of existence and activity—because the person has subsistence in a rational nature, and this is what makes the person capable of consciousness and self-consciousness. . . . When it comes to analyzing consciousness and self-consciousness—which is what chiefly interested modern philosophy and psychology—there seems to be no place for it in St. Thomas’ objectivistic view of reality.8 While John Paul II accepts Thomas’s metaphysical view of the person as one who “has subsistence in a rational nature” and while he also notes that man could not be a person without consciousness and selfconsciousness, he believes there is more to be said about consciousness and self-consciousness than Aquinas provided. Modern philosophy and psychology, since Descartes really, have focused on consciousness, whereas Aquinas seemed content simply to have acknowledged it as one feature of the human person without having probed it further. Aquinas’s failure to analyze consciousness is not peculiar, because there is a real sense in which the personalistic interest in the consciousness of a particular person is not a strictly suitable subject for philosophy. Philosophy is interested in what is always true or true for the most part, whereas personalism attempts to find a role of central importance for the concrete particular human being; here personal characteristics or “accidents” can be of utmost importance. Natural law is philosophical because it is interested in objective truth and universal norms. John Paul II’s personalism, on the other hand, is interested in the need for each individual to make a personal commitment to the truth and goodness of universal norms. It is, of course, difficult for philosophy to focus on the concrete particular.The task of Aristotelian philosophy was to place each entity, each act, in some wider category that gets at the features that define an entity or an act. The concrete particular, on the other hand, cannot be captured by categories; it is, in the language of philosophy, “irreducible” and indefinable. To “reduce” something philosophically speaking is to “lead it back” to the smallest group to which it belongs. “Reducing” things is a project of defining things. We define things in terms of their genus, their species, and however many subspecies there are. It is when we get to a concrete particular individual that we have something irreducible and indefinable. The word “irreducible” is equivalent to the words “unique” and “unrepeatable.” It refers to what is true about the concrete particular individual 8 “Thomist Personalism,” in Person and Community, 170. Natural Law and the Irreducibility of Personalism Genus Being Species Animal Defining Characteristic of Subspecies Rational Animal 1233 Personal Characteristics/accidents Female, American, Ph.D., unmarried, teaches in a seminary Irreducible, concrete particular 2nd daughter of John and Anne Smith: Janet that cannot be said about other things. Certainly other children were born of my parents but only I was born to my parents as the unique person I am. Only I have had the unique experiences of my life, only I have made specific choices that shape my character. Now all that information is of great interest to me and those who care about me, but it is not properly the subject of philosophy. What is unique about the concrete particular individual is uninteresting to philosophy, since philosophy, again, seeks what is always true or true for the most part. Since the unique is what is not shared by other things and thus is not always true or true for the most part, it does not enable us to learn about other things from it. Yet, as a philosopher, John Paul II wanted to find some way to incorporate an interest in the “unique” and unrepeatable into philosophy, because it is always a unique and unrepeatable person who acts. John Paul II himself remarks on the difference between a universalizing philosophy and a particularizing personalism. In commenting on Aristotle’s definition of the human being as a “rational animal,” John Paul II states, “The definition is constructed in such a way that it excludes—when taken simply and directly—the possibility of accentuating the irreducible in the human being. It implies—at least at first glance—a belief in the reducibility of the human being to the world.” He calls this view “cosmological.” 9 While John Paul II allows that “the usefulness of the Aristotelian definition is unquestionable,” he also maintains: “Subjectivity is . . . as it were, a term proclaiming that the human being’s proper essence cannot be totally reduced to and explained by the proximate genus and specific difference. Subjectivity is, then, a kind of synonym for the irreducible in the human being” [emphasis in the original].10 By subjectivity he means the unique interior world that is a person; the inner thoughts and especially the inner commitments a person has made that define himself.That is the 9 These observations appear in a very important essay entitled “Subjectivity and the Irreducibility of the Human Person,” in Person and Community, 210 10 Ibid., 211. Janet Smith 1234 portion of the human being that philosophy cannot grasp but it is, in a sense, the most important feature of a human being. The most important thing about being a human being, is being a person, is being a unique and unrepeatable subject or one who makes choices that define himself. John Paul II wanted to find room in philosophy for a “methodological operation” that he identified as “pausing at the irreducible”: We should pause in the process of reduction, which leads us in the direction of understanding the human being in the world (a cosmological type of understanding), in order to understand the human being inwardly. This latter type of understanding may be called personalistic. The personalistic type of understanding the human being is not the antinomy of the cosmological type but its complement.11 John Paul II not only wanted to draw our attention to this subjective or interior element of the person which all persons have but also wanted to draw our attention to what is unique in each one of us. He was not interested so much in the ontological status of this unique, unrepeatable element of each person; rather he was interested in it for its practical and ethical implications. He thought attention to the person would greatly enhance our understanding of morality, both as a means to proving that morality exists and for explaining the importance of being moral. When studying literature as an undergraduate I was struck by the observation that in Greek literature the characters are generally “great” persons of noble lineage who fight epic battles. The life and struggles of the lowly peasant are not deemed to be worthy of the talents of the poet or capable of capturing the aspirations of a people. Moreover, while much of Greek literature portrays the results of the internal struggle experienced by the epic or tragic hero, their modes of literature, the epic and the tragic drama, were not designed to allow display of the dynamics of the internal struggle. Many historians of literature credit St. Augustine in his Confessions for bringing the internal struggle to the light of day, with showing that the truly interesting battle in this world is not with exterior forces but lies within. Whereas philosophy is interested in the universal aspects of human nature, Christianity finds each individual soul of infinite value. Christians believe each soul is individually created by God and tenderly cared for by God. Christians find the “story” or narrative of each soul fascinating because each person’s life, like the life of Augustine, is the story of an epic battle within. While the focus on a particular individual perhaps can best be treated in a biography or autobiography or even a 11 Ibid., 213. Natural Law and the Irreducibility of Personalism 1235 novel, John Paul II wanted to find some place within moral theory for a consideration of, or really an appeal to, the concrete particular person. He was not trying to find a place for the importance of all the historical and particular details of each person’s life, but he was trying to find a place to underscore the importance of each person, and to insist upon the importance of each person being conscious that he makes choices that define himself and that he is obliged to choose in accord with the truth. Christians, of course, believe that there are eternal consequences for such choices. Thus, John Paul II’s personalism fits splendidly with a central focus of Christianity. In Love and Responsibility, John Paul II observes, “Man must reconcile himself to his natural greatness.”12 Elsewhere he also states: “The true measure of the greatness of any human being lies in morality, through morality, we each write our own most intimate and personal history.”13 John Paul II’s personalism tries to incorporate some of the Christian concern with the infinite value of each person, and the insight that each person is involved in an epic journey interiorly, into its philosophical deliberations on morality. Consider these words of John Paul II in his apostolic letter Novo Millennio Ineunte: “I have often stopped to look at the long queues of pilgrims waiting patiently to go through the Holy Door. In each of them I tried to imagine the story of a life, made up of joys, worries, sufferings; the story of someone whom Christ had met and who, in dialogue with him, was setting out again on a journey of hope.”14 In sum, John Paul II’s personalism is primarily concerned with drawing attention to the importance of man’s interior life: in his committing himself to act in accord with the truths that he knows and in his appreciation of the dignity of his own being, the dignity of a being free to determine himself. When I taught Augustine’s Confessions, it was not uncommon for me to learn that some students stayed up all night reading the work. Augustine convinced them that the particular journey of each person is really the journey with God and thus of immeasurable importance. Often as a result of reading the Confessions, my students ended up going to confession! I find some students have a similar response to some of the works of John Paul II, who makes “subjectivity” or the internal life such a strong focus of his works. Students begin to probe their consciousness and consciences to determine if they are seeking the truth and living in accord with it. At least as far as my students go, John Paul II seems to have 12 Love and Responsibility, 236. 13 “The Problem of the Theory of Morality,” in Person and Community, 156. 14 Tertio Millenio, section 8. 1236 Janet Smith achieved his goal of convincing each person that he or she needs to be conscious that he or she is a person and needs to allow that consciousness to shape all decisions. John Paul II developed a category of thought he identified as “foreign” to Aristotle’s metaphysics, and that is the category of “lived experience.”15 John Paul II uses this phrase with a particular meaning. He is not referring to some physical or emotive experience or to the type of empirical data that is measured by the psychological or sociological sciences. Nor is he referring to the experiences of our lives, such as getting married or being a parent. Rather he uses this phrase to capture what he calls “moral experience” or the experience of essential moral truths that we can know through an observation of our own interior life, essential truths that each person must acknowledge and submit to. He meant that all of us experience ourselves as persons who make good or evil choices; we come to realize that there is a moral dimension to humanity through experiencing ourselves as moral agents. There comes a time, for instance, when we know we could tell the truth or tell a lie; we know that our choice makes a difference, both to the world around us and to our own character. We experience morality from within. This subjective basis of morality is also for John Paul II the essential objective basis for morality; the fact that all human beings know that the choices we make are good or evil is for him a demonstration that morality exists. This witnessing of ourselves (and others) as making moral choices seems quite equivalent to another concept essential to his moral thought and that is the concept of “consciousness.” Consciousness is what allows us to have the experience of morality, to be witnesses of our own actions. It, again, draws us back to the uniqueness of each person; we are the only ones who can be witnesses of our own actions in this way; only we can experience ourselves as moral agents. This concept allows us to view the human being not “merely as a being defined according to species, but as a concrete self, a self-experiencing subject.”16 Personalistic Terminology One way that John Paul II incorporates personalism into his teachings is by substituting personalistic terms for traditional Thomistic terms. 15 “Subjectivity and the Irreducibility of the Human Person,” in Person and Commu- nity, 212. For an excellent treatment of the concept of “lived experience,” see Deborah Savage’s “The Centrality of Lived Experience in Wojtyla,” unpublished. 16 “Subjectivity and the Irreducibility of the Human Person,” in Person and Community, 213. Natural Law and the Irreducibility of Personalism Tradition Personalism Human Being: Member of a Species Person: Individual Substance of a Rational Nature Rational Self-conscious Free Self-determining Social Self-giving Virtue Self-mastery Human beings must live rationally Human persons must love and be loved 1237 The tradition puts all human beings into one class: the class of rational, free, and social creatures. All beings that are rational, free, and social are human beings. The tradition defines a person as an individual member of that class. John Paul II accepts both definitions but wishes to give unprecedented attention to the individual and the importance of the individual being conscious of his nature and of the benefits there are to living in accord with his nature. He wishes to emphasize the personal responsibility we have of living up to the greatness of our nature by the personal, free choices that we make. Whereas the tradition speaks of human beings as being rational, free, social, virtuous, and directed toward living rationally, John Paul II nearly always speaks of persons as being conscious and even self-conscious, selfdetermining, self-giving, and in need of self-mastery. Each of the terms used by John Paul II embraces what the traditional terms convey but adds a personalist dimension. To speak of human beings as being rational means that they can grasp universal truths. To speak of persons as being conscious or self-conscious puts the focus not only on the capacity to grasp universal truths but on the ability of persons to be aware that they have the capacity to grasp these truths that are not truths of their own making. Moreover, human beings are capable of recognizing that these truths are beneficial to them and they are capable of freely committing themselves to living in accord with them. To speak of human beings as being free simply is an ontological description that separates human beings from the other animals, but to speak of the person as being self-determining puts the focus on a particular human being who with his or her choices shapes himself or herself. To speak of human beings as being social indicates that human beings do not have the self-sufficiency to provide for all of their basic needs and thus they need to live in community.To speak of persons as “self-giving” embraces Janet Smith 1238 the notion that they need to live in community but now also addresses the person’s internal need to be in intimate relationship with others. The tradition speaks of the necessity of virtue, a reference to the perfection of human nature, whereas John Paul II speaks of self-mastery, an accomplishment of the person. Whereas the tradition speaks of human beings being made in the likeness and image of God largely because human beings are rational and free, John Paul II stresses more that the person is made in the likeness and image of God because God is a loving Trinitarian communion of persons and thus persons are made to love and be loved. Reasoning rightly and choosing well are essential to human happiness, but most fulfilling for human happiness are love relationships, and they are deeply personal. These terms and concepts permeate John Paul II’s thinking and his presentations and thus shape how we are all learning to think about ourselves and our relationships with others and with God. In his Theology of the Body, in the analysis of Adam naming the animals—a section entitled “Man in Search of his Essence”17—John Paul II explicitly notes how Adam experiences an Aristotelian moment when he realizes that he belongs to the animal world (his proximate genus) yet is different from it.18 In the next section, as John Paul II describes Adam’s realization that he is different because he is able to have knowledge of the world and also that he possesses an interior world, John Paul II includes an abundance of personalistic terms, such as self-knowledge, consciousness, subjectivity, self-consciousness. Man realizes that he is a person. John Paul II explicitly distinguishes the Aristotelian process from the personalistic one: That process of seeking a definition of himself, sketched so incisively in Genesis 2:19–20, leads not only—attaching ourselves again to the Aristotelian tradition—to indicating the “genus proximum,” expressed in Genesis 2 with the words “gave the name” (to which corresponds the specific “differentia,” which according to Aristotle’s definition is nous, zoõn noetikon). This process also leads to the first delineation of the human ˜ being as a human person, with the proper subjectivity that characterizes the person. (Emphasis in the original.)19 The above passage and section 5 of Theology of the Body, from which it is taken, quite perfectly show how the personalist definition of the human 17 Theology of the Body, 5:4. 18 Ibid., 5:5. 19 Ibid., 5:6. Natural Law and the Irreducibility of Personalism 1239 person incorporates the Aristotelian definition but also goes beyond it. The Aristotelian definition explains man as an animal that has rationality—and that is a universal objective definition. Wojtyla comments on how Adam comes to that conclusion: he does so through an experience of interiority, or subjectivity, of consciousness. It is because he is a person—that is, someone who has an interior life—that he can recognize universal truths and that he can realize that he is a person. II. Practical Applications As we have seen, John Paul II’s intense concern that each individual make choices in accord with truths that he himself has come to accept through his own “lived experience” led him to adopt terminology that emphasizes the self and consciousness. Moreover, throughout his work he manages in various ways to invite the reader to make a commitment to the truths that he is articulating. In his Love and Responsibility and in his Theology of the Body, John Paul II blends natural law and personalism and throughout “speaks” to the person and challenges persons to accept and live in accord with the truth that he proposes. Love and Responsibility In his works John Paul II makes extensive use of the word and concept “consciousness.” When studying Love and Responsibility, I was struck by the frequency with which John Paul II used the word “conscious” and the peculiar phrase “conscious parenthood.”20 If we speak of someone being conscious that X is the case, we would likely mean that the person is “aware” of some reality. The Polish word that is translated as “conscious” throughout Love and Responsibility is much richer; it connotes a deeply personalistic meaning; it means being vividly aware of some reality; it conveys experiencing something with one’s emotions as well as one’s intellect. Moreover, the word conveys not only a lively awareness of a reality but an awareness of the value of the reality and a willingness to live in accord with that reality. A person “conscious” of the meaning of sexuality, for instance, would not only be aware in some general way that sex leads to becoming a parent with another but would be acutely aware that if he or she were to have sexual intercourse, he or she might become a parent— and a parent with another, particular person. Moreover, although individuals may not be called to have children or have them at a certain time, they would be conscious that the link between sexual intercourse and babies and parenthood is a splendid reality and one worthy of shaping all 20 See my essay “Conscious Parenthood.” 1240 Janet Smith one’s decisions about sex. Natural law makes the reasonable and true claim that sexual intercourse leads to babies. Personalism puts the focus elsewhere. It speaks of sexual intercourse leading to parenthood, a claim that puts the focus more on the agents than on the result. There are many passages such as the following throughout Love and Responsibility: For human parenthood implies the whole process of conscious and voluntary choice connected with marriage and with marital intercourse in particular. Since marital intercourse is, and must be, a manifestation of love, and what is more, at the personal level, we must find the proper place for parenthood too within the limits of love. Sexual relations between a man and a woman in marriage have their full value as a union of persons only when they go with conscious acceptance of the possibility of parenthood. This is a direct result of the synthesis of the natural and personal order.21 As noted above, John Paul II is not speaking of a begrudging acknowledgment that sexual intercourse leads to children. Rather, he is speaking of a joyful acceptance of the connection between sexual intercourse and all the responsibilities entailed. Those who have a fuller understanding of the procreative good—the good of the life of the child and the good of parenthood for the parents and the importance of children to God—are more likely to achieve that joyful acceptance. Love and Responsibility delineates the truths of which persons must be conscious in order to make good moral choices about sexuality.There are several facts about the sexual act that makes it irresponsible for us to engage in it simply for our own pleasure. One is that, in what John Paul II calls the “order of nature,” the sexual act is clearly ordained towards bringing forth new human life.This is the normal starting point for traditional natural law ethics. John Paul II accepts this as a proper starting point but also makes clear that the “order of nature,” the order in which the sexual act is ordered to the coming to be of a new human being, is not equivalent to biological nature. “Nature” refers to a thing’s essence, not to its biological structure. Precisely because human beings are persons by nature, the “order of nature” involves the “order of the person.” The order of nature emphasizes the link between the sexual act and the coming to be of a new person; the order of person emphasizes the link 21 Love and Responsibility, 227. The whole section “Procreation and Parenthood” (224–36) speaks of the importance for mature personal love of the consciousness and acceptance of the natural ordination of the marital act towards shared parenthood. Natural Law and the Irreducibility of Personalism 1241 between sexual intercourse, the love of persons, and their willingness to become parents with each other. Thus, in the sexual relationship between man and woman two orders meet: the order of nature, which as has as its object reproduction and the personal order, which finds its expression in the love of persons and aims at the fullest realization of that love. We cannot separate the two orders, for each depends upon the other. In particular, the correct attitude to procreation is a condition of the realization of love.22 In this incorporation of the “order of person” into the “order of nature” John Paul II makes a very important philosophical move; he speaks of the natural purpose of the sexual act being the generation, not of another member of the species, but of another person and also of the natural purpose being to make parents of those who engage in sexual intercourse. And, not incidentally, both purposes allow the persons involved to be cocreators with God: A man and a woman by means of procreation, by taking part in bringing a new human being into the world, at the same time participate in their own fashion in the work of creation.They can therefore look upon themselves as the rational cocreators of a new human being. That new human being is a person. The parents take part in the genesis of a person.23 Certainly, natural law theory fully acknowledges that an act that results in another human being is radically different from an animal sexual act. Nonetheless, to speak of the result of the sexual act being another person particularizes the whole phenomenon. The fact that John Paul II talks about the order of the “person” rather than the order of the “human being” or the order of the “rational animal” shows how he is always making an appeal to each person with his argument. Human sexual intercourse does not generate just another member of the species; it generates a concrete particular person who needs a concrete particular mother and father to care for him, and indeed needs parents who out of love have made a lifetime commitment to each other. Most of us feel only a general responsibility to another member of the species, but we feel a great deal of personal responsibility for the persons with whom we are in relationship—the persons we have generated or may generate, especially. John Paul II has found a way to formulate universal truths that invites the 22 Love and Responsibility, 226. 23 Ibid., 54. Janet Smith 1242 reader to “personalize” all that he is teaching; to be conscious of our own need to confront the claims he is making and to live accordingly. Again, throughout Love and Responsibility, John Paul II speaks of the need for those who would engage in the sexual act to be “conscious” of the reality that the sexual act not only may make babies but also may make parents out of those engaging in it.Those who would engage in sex with each other should be prepared to be parents with each other; they should have the virtues, or be growing in the virtues, needed to be good parents.To have sex with a person and not be open to having a child with that person would be to deny the reality that sexual intercourse leads to lifetime relationships; it would be to use rather than to love the other. If the possibility of parenthood is deliberately excluded from marital relations, the character of the relationship between the partners automatically changes. The change is away from unification in love and in the direction of mutual, or rather, bilateral, “enjoyment.” . . . [W]hen a man and a woman rule out even the possibility of parenthood their relationship is transformed to the point at which it becomes incompatible with the personalistic norm.24 The personalism of Love and Responsibility requires that those who would become sexual partners must become marriage partners, because the nature of the sexual act is to make parents of those engaging in it, parents who are persons and who may generate a person. Thus a faithful and indissoluble union is the only appropriate way to express one’s loving commitment to a future parent. In my experience of teaching Love and Responsibility, I find that the students experience studying the work to be somewhat like an examination of conscience or of consciousness; they find themselves asking themselves if they have approached their decisions about sexual behavior conscious of these facts. A relevant use of the word “conscious” appears in Veritatis Splendor. The document speaks about the essential truth that we should not presume we can be saved without merit, though we should be joyful that forgiveness of our sins is offered to us. It states that the teaching of “moral doctrine involves the conscious acceptance of these intellectual, spiritual and pastoral responsibilities.”25 Again, “conscious” does not simply mean “aware”; it means a joyful acceptance of the reality and a full commitment to living in accord with the truth of the reality. 24 Ibid., 228. 25 Veritatis Splendor §113. Natural Law and the Irreducibility of Personalism 1243 Theology of the Body In Love and Responsibility, as we noted, John Paul II begins with the fact that we have a natural urge for sexual pleasure and shows how this urge must be put in service of the goods of the persons whom that urge affects. The Theology of the Body, a theological work, begins with the personalistic category of the “spousal meaning” of the body and eventually argues for the Church’s teaching on contraception using the very personalistic term “language of the body.” The Theology of the Body establishes that persons can learn from the makeup of their bodies that they are meant to be in loving relationship; revelation and the nature of the human being both disclose to us that persons are meant to be in loving relationships with others. The most natural such relationship is the spousal relationship wherein two become one flesh. I believe “spousal” is a “personalistic” term because the spousal relationship is one that is spectacularly unique: a person is married to only one person chosen as a lifetime partner.What other relationship has that degree of life-changing and irrevocable choice of a particular person written into it? The concepts, terms, and values of personalism are omnipresent in the Theology of the Body alongside of the language of natural law. Consider this passage defending the morality of natural methods of family planning against a contraceptive mentality: The qualifier “natural,” which is attributed to the morally right regulation of fertility . . . is to be explained by the fact that the way of behaving in question [periodic abstinence] corresponds to the truth of the person and to the person’s dignity: a dignity that belongs “by nature” to man as a rational and free being. As a rational and free being, man can and should reread with insight the biological rhythm that belongs to the natural order. He can and should conform himself to it for the sake of exercising “responsible fatherhood and motherhood,” which is inscribed according to the Creator’s plan in the natural order of human fruitfulness.26 The way of behaving that is suitable to human nature is the way of selfmastery, a virtue required by natural family planning, a virtue that permits spouses to make gifts of themselves to each other rather than to use one another.Those who have the virtue of self-mastery can speak the language of the body truthfully, according to which “the conjugal act ‘means’ not only love but also potential fruitfulness and thus it cannot be deprived of its full and adequate meaning by means of artificial interventions. . . . 26 Theology of the Body, 125:1. 1244 Janet Smith [W]hen the conjugal act is deprived of its inner truth because it is deprived artificially of its procreative capacity, it also ceases to be an act of love.”27 Whereas natural law speaks of the procreative and unitive purposes or ends of the sexual act, John Paul II in his Theology of the Body picks up on the phrase from Humanae Vitae §12 that the sexual act has both a procreative and a unitive meaning. John Paul II clearly means to distinguish the human sexual act from the animal sexual act. Only human persons speak a language. Language is meant to communicate a truth between persons. The body speaks a language, and just as man is obliged to speak the truth with the verbal language that he possesses, he must also truthfully speak the language of the body. The sexual act by its very nature speaks the language of openness to life, of the willingness to be a parent with another, and of making a complete gift of one’s self to another. Contraception contradicts that language; contraception speaks the language of not respecting the openness to life of the sexual act, of not being willing to be a parent with another, of not making a complete gift of one’s self to another. In fact, Familiaris Consortio §11 speaks of contraceptive sex being a lie. To lie to another person is to use that person; it is not to treat the person as an end in itself, but as an instrument to satisfy one’s desires. The Theology of the Body is constantly and implicitly asking the reader to ask him or herself, not so much: “Am I respecting the natural end and purpose of the sexual act?” but rather: “Am I speaking the truth of the body with my acts?” “Am I respecting the person of my beloved spouse?” “Are we making gifts of ourselves to each other or using each other?” “Am I acting in accord with my dignity, as one who is meant to love others and make a gift of myself to another?” The language and methodology of personalism seems to insist that those engaging with the arguments of personalism must also engage in an almost incessant examination of consciousness, and ultimately an examination of conscience. Personalistic Techniques We have seen that John Paul II has a distinctive terminology that helps him draw attention to the personalistic elements of moral action. He also uses various “personalistic” techniques in his writing that serve to invite readers to make the truths he advances, their own. For instance, throughout the Theology of the Body we see John Paul II repeatedly noting that Jesus’s words in Scripture and all the truths throughout Scripture are addressed not only to those to whom they were originally addressed but 27 Ibid., 123:6. Natural Law and the Irreducibility of Personalism 1245 they are addressed to everyone living today, for instance at the very beginning of the work he states: “In the present study, . . . we must put ourselves exactly in the position of Christ’s interlocutors today.”28 In fact, I believe John Paul II utilized some of the techniques of Ignatian meditation in developing his thoughts that are delivered in the Theology of the Body; in some sections the work reads like a journal of one who has engaged in prolonged meditation on various scriptural passages. At the very outset of the work, John Paul II extensively analyzes Adam’s coming to a recognition of his own difference from animals (commented on earlier)—a difference that John Paul II identifies as “subjectivity” or “interiority.” John Paul II seems to invite all of us to go through the exercise of “naming” the animals and thereby come to realize that we are different from them. He invites us to realize what kind of beings we are— that we are beings with subjectivity and interiority. Veritatis Splendor Now let us briefly turn to Veritatis Splendor. Throughout Veritatis Splendor the universality of natural law is stressed, while care is taken to acknowledge the dignity of the individual. A passage from §51 speaks especially to this point: [T]he natural law involves universality. Inasmuch as it is inscribed in the rational nature of the person, it makes itself felt to all beings endowed with reason and living in history. . . . [I]nasmuch as the natural law expresses the dignity of the human person and lays the foundation for his fundamental rights and duties, it is universal in its precepts and its authority extends to all mankind. This universality does not ignore the individuality of human beings, nor is it opposed to the absolute uniqueness of each person. On the contrary, it embraces at its root each of the person’s free acts, which are meant to bear witness to the universality of the true good. (Emphasis in original) In this passage we see the parallel consideration of universality of natural law with the dignity of the human person and his individuality and uniqueness. That parallel consideration, truly, is present from the start. The first words of the second section of Veritatis Splendor are “No one can escape from the fundamental questions: What must I do? How do I distinguish good from evil?” This way of presenting the material specifically addresses it to each person. We see a dramatic portrayal of the personalist demands of morality in Veritatis Splendor’s use of the story of the rich young man who approaches 28 Ibid., 1:4. 1246 Janet Smith Christ. This young man is a concrete particular individual conscious of his own faithfulness to the commandments, who further seeks the truth about human action. Veritatis Splendor §7 observes: “For the young man, the question is not so much about rules to be followed, but about the full meaning of life. This is in fact the aspiration at the heart of every human decision and action, the quiet searching and interior prompting which sets freedom in motion. This question is ultimately an appeal to the absolute Good which attracts us and beckons us; it is the echo of a call from God who is the origin and goal of man’s life.” This man has had an “experience of morality”; he knows his choices count. Veritatis Splendor makes it clear that through this story of one concrete particular individual, Scripture is inviting all persons to make a commitment to Christ. It states: “The question which the rich young man puts to Jesus of Nazareth is one which rises from the depths of his heart. It is an essential and unavoidable question for the life of every man, for it is about the moral good which must be done, and about eternal life. . . . People today need to turn to Christ once again in order to receive from him the answer to their questions about what is good and what is evil ” (§8). Here I want to share a personal testimony of the effectiveness of personalistic principles. In my youth I did a fair amount of sidewalk counseling outside of abortion clinics, trying to persuade young women not to have abortions. At first I was pathetically ineffective. I would approach the young women with philosophical arguments of various kinds; I would try to prove the humanity of the unborn; I would try to establish that the right to life trumps any right to choose.The women’s eyes would glaze over and they would not at all be persuaded by my arguments. The appeal to objective universal natural law norms did not persuade. After I received some remedial training by wiser individuals, I learned better and more effective approaches.The most effective approach was quite boldly asking the young women if they believed in God. Most of them said they did. I reminded them that no matter what they had done, God loved them immensely and that if they were pregnant, God had given them a great gift and responsibility; he had given them a child to love that only they could care for. I made a similar approach to boyfriends who would accompany the women: “Do you ever want to be a father? If she is pregnant, you are a father now and need to protect your child.” This direct appeal to their concrete moral sense, to their sense of their uniqueness, and to a truth that makes demands upon them, was not always effective, but it was sometimes effective and certainly more effective than my prior approaches. Like John Paul II, I am a resolute Aristotelian/Thomist; I believe the metaphysics of Aristotle and Aquinas are indispensable for providing the best Natural Law and the Irreducibility of Personalism 1247 and deepest justifications for ultimate truths, and among those truths are the truths of natural law morality. But I also believe that John Paul II with his personalism has supplemented Aristotelian Thomism in invaluable ways. I think it would be wise and efficacious for educators, such as seminary professors, and bishops as well, to emulate the various techniques he uses to challenge people to seek the truth and live in accord with it. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2013): 1249–86 1249 A Woman in Stone or in the Heart of Man? Navigating between Naturalism and Idealism in the Spirit of Veritatis Splendor M ICHELE M. S CHUMACHER University of Fribourg Fribourg, Switzerland “What good is the poet in barren times?” —Friedrich Hölderlin1 I N AN ENCYCLICAL whose purpose is “to reflect on the whole of the church’s moral teaching, with the precise goal of recalling certain fundamental truths of Catholic doctrine which, in the present circumstances, risk being distorted or denied,”2 one would expect—in keeping with tradition—that emphasis would be upon the “good [that] is to be done and pursued and [the] evil [that is] to be avoided.”3 What is particularly surprising in the approach of Pope John Paul II, then, is his focus upon truth and beauty, as the very name of the encyclical announces: Veritatis Splendor.4 “Why is the ‘splendor of truth’ so important?” John Paul II asks within the context of his 1994 Letter to Families. First of all, by way of contrast: the development of contemporary civilization is linked to a scientific and technological progress which is often achieved in a one-sided way, and thus appears purely positivistic. Postivisim, as we know, results in agnosticism in theory and utilitarianism 1 “. . . wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit” (from “Brot und Wein”). 2 John Paul II, Encyclical letter Veritatis Splendor (August 6, 1993) §4. 3 St. Thomas Aquinas, ST I–II, q. 94, a. 2. 4 See Veritatis Splendor §51, where John Paul II teaches that “to perfect himself in his specific order,” the human person must not only “do good and avoid evil,” but he must also “seek truth, practice good and contemplate beauty.” 1250 Michele M. Schumacher in practice and in ethics. In our own day, history is in a way repeating itself. Utilitarianism is a civilization of production and of use, a civilization of “things” and not of “persons”, a civilization in which persons are used in the same way as things are used. In the context of a civilization of use, woman can become an object for man, children a hindrance to parents, the family an institution obstructing the freedom of its members.5 Or, as the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar prophetically describes this utilitarian world, it is “a world without women, without children, without reverence for the form of love in poverty and humility, a world in which everything is viewed solely in terms of power or profit-margin, in which everything that is disinterested and gratuitous and useless is despised, persecuted, and wiped out, and even art is forced to wear the mask and the features of technique.”6 What Balthasar herein recognizes as the consequence of the separation of nature and grace (or of divine and human causality), in much of contemporary thought, might also be formulated in terms of the typically modern conflict between human freedom and natural necessity.7 Such is also the origin of the modern idea of selfhood, which results, as Louis Dupré observes, “either in a naturalist or in an idealist conception of the person.”8 Both sides . . . found it hard to preserve genuine otherness. A self-reduced to a meaning-giving function—a mere subject—loses its personal identity and, as a result, is no longer able to recognize the identity of the other. . . . Likewise, if the self is merely a substance [in a Cartesian sense] albeit it a distinct one, it becomes absorbed within an objective totality that admits no real otherness.9 5 John Paul II, Gratissimam Sane (Letter to Families) (2 February, 1994) §13. 6 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible, trans. David C. Schindler (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 142. 7 This modern tension between nature and freedom is fittingly portrayed by Michael Allen Gillespie in terms of the conflict between Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes, whom Gillespie presents as “prototypical modern thinkers” (The Theological Origins of Modernity [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008], 262). 8 Louis Dupré, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 76–77. 9 Ibid., 76. See also Dupré’s The Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 118–19. “The conceptual apparatus of modern thought, including much theology,” Dupré argues elsewhere, “has come to rest on the assumption that the subjectobject opposition must be recognized as an ultimate” (Metaphysics and Culture, The Aquinas Lecture, 1994 [Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994], 57). Navigating between Naturalism and Idealism 1251 Hence, as Kenneth Schmitz summarizes, otherness is understood either “in terms of conflict (dialectics) or equivocity (deconstruction).”10 In the second sense, Balthasar observes: “The lonely man of today meets in the ‘thou’ only himself; he is more narcissistic than ever before in the history of mankind.”11 A way beyond this impasse—the impasse of “the sharp subject-object division characteristic of modern philosophical anthropology”—is, Dupré suggests, recourse to the ideas of beauty and harmony: ideas which “do not allow themselves to be explained in either of those terms, even though aesthetic theories kept hesitating between the two, leaning at first more to the objective and later to the subjective side.”12 As for Blessed John Paul II, he follows the example of Christ in his dialogue with the rich young man (cf. Mt 19:16) by making “an appeal to the absolute good which attracts us and beckons us” as the “echo of a call from God, who is the origin and goal of man’s life.”13 As such, it is also an appeal to human freedom, insofar as it is understood—in the classic (pre-modern) sense—as “rooted in the soul’s spontaneous inclinations to the true and the good,” as Servais Pinckaers explains;14 whence also John Paul II’s appeal to beauty: the shining forth (splendor) of the truth so that it might be savored by the senses of sight and sound.15 In the profound words of Hans Urs von Balthasar, The form as it appears to us is beautiful only because the delight that it arouses in us is founded upon the fact that, in it, the truth and goodness of the depths of reality itself are manifested and bestowed. . . .The appearance of the form, as revelation of the depths, is an indissoluble union of two things. It is the real presence of the depths, of the whole of reality, and it is a real pointing beyond itself to these depths. . . . We “behold” the form; but, if we really behold it, it is not as a detached form, rather in its unity with the depths that make their appearance in it. We see form as 10 Kenneth Schmitz, “Created Receptivity and the Philosophy of the Concrete,” The Thomist 61, no. 3 (1997): 339–71, at 361. 11 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The God Question and Modern Man, trans. Hilda Graef (New York: Seabury Press, 1967), 106. 12 Dupré, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture, 76. 13 Veritatis Splendor §7. 14 Servais Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, trans. Mary Thomas Noble from the third edition (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 333. “For St. Thomas,” Pinckaers explains, “the natural inclinations to goodness, happiness, being and truth were the very source of freedom. They formed the will and intellect, whose union produced free will” (245). 15 See, for example, ST I, q. 5, a. 4, ad 1. 1252 Michele M. Schumacher the splendour, as the glory of Being.We are “enraptured” by our contemplation of these depths and are “transported” to them.16 What is thus proposed for our appropriation by Veritatis Splendor is a profoundly realist (or creational) perspective: one which affirms the goodness—and thus also the beauty—of things in themselves, and not simply from the perspective of the human subject, as goes the expression: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This, of course, is also a metaphysical perspective—one that literally surpasses the physical dimension—but one which nonetheless implies that truth might be perceived—even touched and heard—by the knowing subject, whence also John Paul II’s recourse at times to phenomenology, but a phenomenology based upon what he calls in one of his previous encyclicals a “contemplative outlook.” This, more specifically, is an outlook that arises from faith in the God of life, who has created every individual as a “wonder” (cf. Ps 139:14). It is the outlook of those who see life in its deeper meaning, who grasp its utter gratuitousness, its beauty and its invitation to freedom and responsibility. It is the outlook of those who do not presume to take possession of reality but instead accept it as a gift, discovering in all things the reflection of the Creator and seeing in every person his living image (cf. Gen 1:27; Ps 8:5).17 In short, we are invited—within the specific context of his more recent encyclical, Veritatis Splendor—to uphold the “essential bond between Truth, the Good and Freedom”18 and to correct the current tendency of “detaching human freedom from its essential and constitutive relationship to truth”19—by recognizing and affirming a world that is simply given at the outset. Ours, John Paul II suggests, is a world which is bestowed as both a fact (datum) and a gift (donum): a world which, precisely as created, includes us and our freedom, but which is not simply or necessarily subject to us and our freedom; a world which is composed of relations and relationships that are given, but given in such a way as to be willfully appropriated and fostered by human action; a world which beckons us “to see” and to affirm. 16 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, I: Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, ed. Joseph Fessio and John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982, 1989), 118, 119. See also ibid., 19–20; and Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 18. 17 John Paul II, Encyclical on the Gospel of Life, Evangelium Vitae (March 25, 1995) §83. 18 Cf. Veritatis Splendor §84. 19 Ibid. §4. Navigating between Naturalism and Idealism 1253 After all, to contemplate, as the German philosopher Josef Pieper fittingly describes it, “means first of all to see—and not to think!”20 From this perspective, the claim to truth supposes what Aquinas call the “conformity” (conformitas) or “equation” (adequatio)21—or what Hans Urs von Balthasar calls “attunement” (Einstimmung)22 —of our subjective consciousness (perception or conviction) to objective reality, of our mental and emotional states to the world that God has created, so as to act accordingly: to “assimilate” the truth, as John Paul II, puts it.23 Or, to put it in other words, truth and goodness imply the meeting of gifts: God’s goodness calling forth from human hearts the response of receptive willingness to acknowledge the world and ourselves as gifts that are not of our making, so as in turn to discern God’s project for the world and our lives and to act accordingly. As Balthasar reasons, “[A] person who contemplates a great work of art has to have a gift—whether inborn or acquired through training—to be able to perceive and assess its beauty, to distinguish it from mediocre art or kitsch.”24 Similarly the human person is given to participate in God’s governance of the world precisely by means of his or her spiritual nature— consisting of intellect and will—wherein also consists his or her likeness to God and whereby he or she is capable of discerning God’s purpose for the world and for him- or herself in the world. Far from denying either the human person’s place within (rather than beyond or above) this world or his bodily being, which is constitutive of our nature as such (i.e., as human), this perspective thus requires that we be incarnated in the body 20 Josef Pieper, Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation, trans. Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 73. 21 “True expresses the correspondence of being to the knowing power, for all knowing is produced by an assimilation of the knower to the thing known, so that assimilation is said to be the cause of knowledge. . . . The first reference of being to the intellect, therefore, consists in its agreement with the intellect. This agreement is called ‘the conformity of thing and intellect.’ In this conformity is fulfilled the formal constituent of the true.” (De veritate, q. 1, a. 1: “Convenientiam vero entis ad intellectum exprimit hoc nomen verum. Omnis autem cognitio perficitur per assimilationem cognoscentis ad rem cognitam, ita quod assimilation dicta est causa cognitionis . . . Prima ergo comparatio entis ad intellectum est ut ens intellectui correspndeat: quae quidem correspondentia, adaequatio rei et intellectus dicitur; et in hoc formaliter ratio veri perficitur.”) Marietti edition. English trans. Robert Mulligan (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1952). See also ST I, q. 16, a. 1; and Yves Floucat, La vérité selon saint Thomas d’Aquin. Le réalisme de la connaissance (Paris: Téqui, 2009). 22 See, for example, The Glory of the Lord I, 241ff. 23 See Veritatis Splendor §52. 24 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible, 75. 1254 Michele M. Schumacher and in the world. At the same time, this perspective calls upon the natural aspirations of the human heart to rise, in ecstasy, above the limits of its own self towards that which is nonetheless proper to itself: the realization of the self within a communion of persons. As such, it is also an appeal to love: not as a projection of the self or one’s own desires upon the beloved, but as a profound affirmation of the beloved’s own goodness and beauty, radiating forth from his or her interior depths. In this article, I propose to apply these insights to the specific problematic of modern feminism, which arose, I will argue in part one, out of women’s rightful opposition to what I refer to as “the man-made woman”: a combination—in keeping with Dupré’s categories referred to above—of a naturalist, a dialectical, and an idealist conception (more in the Platonic, or Romantic, than in the Enlightenment sense)25 of woman. Such is also, I will argue in this first part, the origin of the feminist refusal of the body, as “man” sees and manipulates it, but also as woman herself (that is to say, the feminist) sees it: namely, as a means to oppression. In part two, I will present the modern conflict, so well exemplified in the history of feminism, between nature and freedom and— consequent upon that conflict—the attempt of our contemporaries to re-make the human body. In part three, with the help of the distinction Karol Wojtyla makes between what he calls the natural and the biological orders, I will present the positive challenge to adopt his “contemplative outlook”—upon the world and upon our body-selves. This outlook, more specifically, I will argue in part four, is a regard which we might take as an invitation to “get out of our heads,” or to transcend the influence of modernity, much of which attempts to transcend the God-given world of creation within, ironically enough, the immanence of the finite human mind.26 In part five, I will argue that consideration of the God-given 25 For more explanation, see for example Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 94–97; and Karl Stern, The Flight from Woman (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1985). 26 This is not to deny that the human soul is, as Aristotle taught, in some sense all things, nor that the human person is, according to the formulation of St. Augustine of Hippo (cf. De Trinitate, XIV, 8), “capax Dei,” capable of [the infinite] God, because capable of grace (cf. ST I–II, q. 113, a. 10, and De veritate, q. 22, a. 2, ad 5). Nor still would we object to the teaching of Aquinas, according to which “it must be absolutely granted that the blessed see the essence of God” (ST I, q. 12, a. 1: “simpliciter concedendum est quod beati Dei essentiam videant”). However, it is also important to admit that: “The faculty of seeing God . . . does not belong to the created intellect naturally, but is given to it by the light of glory, which establishes the intellect in a kind of deiformity” (ibid., a. 6: “Facultas autem videndi Deum non competit intellectui creato secundum suam naturam, sed per lumen gloriae, quod intellectum in quadam deiformitate constituit”). Navigating between Naturalism and Idealism 1255 value, or meaning, of womanhood sets us before a mystery of the self destined to communion. Herein, more specifically, we might discover both the destiny and the vocation to love and communion, as they are inscribed within our bodies but also within our souls: by, that is to say, our natural intrinsic orientation to truth and goodness, which we might analogically compare to the beautiful. From this perspective of the world as created by an all-loving and all-powerful God, human sexuality, I will reiterate, has a profoundly metaphysical value: one that literally transcends (meta) the physical. It is, in fact, the specifically spiritual nature of human persons—not withstanding the real fecundity of our bodies—that enables us to be pro-creators and artists, as it were, cooperating with our God by way of our attunement to the Creator’s mind and purpose. Something of this mystery of attunement might be explained, as we will see in part six, by the manner in which a human lover invites his beloved to “live up” to the image that he guards of her in his heart. Similarly, or analogically, we will argue, in concluding, that the Christian is invited by the loving regard of God, in his incarnate Son, to become who she or he is: the image and likeness of God. I. Feminist Opposition to the Man-Made Woman and the Subsequent Refusal of the Body as Given In order to better appreciate the creational perspective, we might first take a quick survey of feminist thought, which often stands not only in contrast but even in direct opposition to this perspective. I suggest we might do so by turning to an ancient Greek legend, describing the delightful wonder of a young child who patiently observes a sculptor chiseling at a marble block. Eventually there emerges—after many months of persistent hard labor—a beautiful white horse. Upon perceiving the horse for the first time, the delighted child cries out to the sculptor with respectful awe: “How did you know that there was a horse in that stone?” We smile at the simplicity of the child who thinks that the artist’s work consists of setting free, as it were, the trapped horse.Yet many early feminists rightfully conceived of their work in precisely these terms: that of allowing woman (exemplified by the horse) to give expression to the fullness of her natural attributes which had been imprisoned, as it were, by social constraints prohibiting her from actualizing her God-given freedom in such a way as to realize herself and her destiny—whence the liberating work of freeing the horse from the heavy block of marble. For these early feminists, the block of marble might thus be interpreted as social expectations that not only weighed her down but also subjected her to man’s vision of herself: a vision which all too often, as not only the 1256 Michele M. Schumacher well-known French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, but also Sr. Prudence Allen, Thomas Laqueur, and Sylviane Agacinski and many others have very aptly argued,27 was merely a projection of man’s own identity as normative upon her or, at best, a projection of his own interests upon her; whence the emphasis upon her roles as his mistress or as the mother of his descendants and not as a person in her own right.28 To be sure, the notion of woman was historically viewed as a relative term, which is not to admit that it merely corresponds to our ever-changing mental states rather than to something (that is to say someone) in the real world. Rather, by this designation is meant that we understand the meaning of the word woman (like the reality that it signifies) in terms of its (her) relation to another term (corresponding to another reality or being), namely man. Man, in contrast, is both a generic term for all that is human (so as to include the concept of woman) and a gendered term (specifying the male sex). “The masculine is a ‘gender’ which is defined less by its relation to the feminine [in much of the history of philosophy] than by the capacity to rise above sexual duality,” Sylviane Agacinski explains. “The masculine, like genus, is not in a relation of lateral opposition, if you will, to the feminine . . . but in the position of a foundation: 27 See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York:Vintage Books, 1953, 1989) (Le deuxième sexe I: Les faits et les mythes; II: L’expérience vécue [Paris: Gallimard, 1949, 1976]); Prudence Allen, RSM, The Concept of Woman I: The Aristotelian Revolution, 750 B.C.–A.D. 1250 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997); idem, The Concept of Woman II: The Early Humanist Reform, 1250–1500 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002); Sylviani Agacinski, Métaphysique de sexes. Masculin/Féminin aux sources du christianisme (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2005); and Thomas Laqueur, The Making of Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1990). The latter writes: “I return again and again in this book to a problematic, unstable female body that is either a version of or wholly different from a generally unproblematic, stable male body. As feminist scholars have made abundantly clear, it is always woman’s sexuality that is being constituted; woman is the empty category. Woman alone seems to have ‘gender’ since the category itself is defined as that aspect of social relations based on difference between sexes in which the standard has always been man” (22). 28 Sylviane Agacinski contrast’s Beauvoir’s theory according to which a woman’s fecundity “constitutes a natural inferiority and a handicap” with that of Françoise Hériter, who recognizes in the traditional hierarchy of the sexes the effect of men’s attempt to control reproduction. One might in fact, Agacinski reasons, imagine that “a man’s uncertainty about his own paternity, as well as his incapacity to fully master the process of conception, constitute a handicap for him, inciting him to appropriate one or more women so as to be assured of descendants” (ibid., 83). Agacinski holds to the second of these hypotheses as more probable. Navigating between Naturalism and Idealism 1257 he is to the feminine that which the pure is to the impure, the primary to the second, the good to the evil, the original to the derived.”29 This, in other words, feminists argue, is a profoundly androcentric account of sexual differentiation: “It is always the woman who differs from the man in the classic anthropological discourse, whether philosophical or theological,” Agacinski continues, “whereas the feminine is subordinate to the masculine.The woman differs from the man; never the inverse, as if the masculine point of view was neutral, that of the universal human genus ( genre), whereas the feminine would be ‘gender’ (‘genre’) different from genus ( genre), always a little degenerate, derived, exotic, failing, particular, minor.”30 This distinction between the very broad concept of man and the necessarily restrained meaning of woman is perhaps the point at which much of the difficulty in gender theory—or better said, the “ideology” of gender31—begins. For unlike the concept of man, which is linguistically and philosophically associated with all that is human, that of women is one which can never be hidden in the general. Woman is always specified by her sex; whence the problematic encounter that much of modernity sought to avoid: the confrontation between the general and the specific (or the particular and the universal), a confrontation which inevitably challenges the modern idea of the human being as self-creating, and which, as John Paul II explains in Veritatis Splendor, obscures “the perception of the universality of the moral law on the part of reason.”32 Here, in other words, 29 Ibid., 8. See also Michele M. Schumacher, “The ‘Nature’ of Nature in Feminism: From Dualism to Unity,” in Women in Christ:Towards a New Feminism, ed. Michele M. Schumacher (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 204), 17–51. 30 Agacinski, Métaphysique des sexes, 9. 31 It is not without good reason, as shall become increasingly apparent, that Élizabeth Montfort prefers to speak of the “ideology of gender” than “the theory of gender.” In using the term “theory,” its proponents would have us believe that it is an already validated scientific hypothesis, when in fact it is only “an opinion at best, an ideology at worst” (Élizabeth Montfort, Le genre démasqué. Homme ou femme? Le choix impossible [Valence: Éditions Peuple Libre, 2011], 15). Marguerite Peeters, on the other hand, argues that gender is “not an ideology in the proper sense of the term,” since the word “evokes systems of thought linked to Western modernity,” and gender is, she insists, “a postmodern phenomenon” (Marguerite A. Peeters, “Gender: An Anthropological Deconstruction and a Challenge for Faith,” in Pontificium Consilium pro Laicis, Woman and Man: The Humanum in its Entirety. International Congress on the 20th anniversary of John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter, Mulieris Dignitatem, 1988–2008 [Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2010], 289–99, here 289, 290). 32 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor §51. 1258 Michele M. Schumacher we are confronted with the idea that there is something necessary about being a woman: something that is determined at the outset and not accorded to her in virtue of her own freedom. At the same time, the specificity of the concept of woman sets man before another being who is not simply a projection of himself or of his idea of the world: whence man’s presentation of woman as “Other.” As Simone de Beauvoir would have it in her now classic argument: “She [woman] is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other.”33 Certainly, feminists had good reason to argue against this reductionist vision of woman—a vision that makes of her the exception to the masculine rule rather than a person in her own right—but they did not always respond in such a way as to protect woman’s best interests: her interests qua woman. With the end in view of obtaining a place in a man’s world, feminists all too often simply played by his rules, as Elisabeth Badinter approvingly remarks,34 and Gertrude von le Fort, disapprovingly.35 They adopted man’s vision of the world and of the human (which, of course, was that of the normative male) and thereby obscured any traits that might distinguish woman from man, starting with her life-bearing potentiality. Seeking, more specifically, to divert man’s objectifying regard—one which would render woman nothing more than the object of man’s interest (what Jean-Paul Sartre calls an “in-itself,” an “en soi,” as differing from a “for-itself,” a “pour soi”: a distinction corresponding roughly to the difference between an object and a subject),36 early feminist philosophers and theoreticians simply conformed to the masculine norm of personhood, freedom, and 33 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, xxii. 34 See Elisabeth Badinter Dead End Feminism, trans. Julia Borossa (Cambridge/ Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2006). See also Fausse route (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2003). 35 “She [the early feminist] tried to share man’s intellectual world and sank to the level merely of his methods. In the social world she sought for space to develop her deepest potentialities and allowed herself instead to be inserted as a link in his apparatus. In a doubly fatal way she succumbed as woman to the very onesidedness, to the mistakes and the dangers upon which the man of the period had sickened. The error lay not so much in the objectives of the feminist movement and in the situations it created as in the character of the epoch, which, in its spiritual life, no longer knew its obligations or the direction of its final goal” (Gertrud von le Fort, The Eternal Woman, 60). 36 Sylviane Agacinski explains the distinction between an “en soi” and a “pour soi” as the difference “between the being who is only that which it is, like a simple object, and a consciousness which can choose itself freely, an authentic subject” (Politique des sexes [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998, 2001], 85). Navigating between Naturalism and Idealism 1259 sex37—whence the appropriate title of a recent book in French, L’Homme est l’avenir de la femme (Man is the future of woman).38 “Man’s design,” as Simone de Beauvoir saw it, for example, “is not to repeat himself in time [to reproduce descendants]: it is to take control of the instant and mold the future. It is male activity that in creating values has made of existence itself a value [whence the distinction between living in a properly human, i.e. rational, manner and simply living]; this activity has prevailed over the confused forces of life; it has subdued Nature and Woman.” This subjection has occurred, Beauvoir reasons, by way of a sort of identification of women with nature. “Men,” she argues, “have presumed to create a feminine domain—the kingdom of life, of immanence—only in order to lock up women therein.”39 Such, more specifically, is what Beauvoir calls the paternalistic “myth” defining woman “as sentiment, inwardness, immanence.”40 “If, [in fact, Beauvoir reasons,] well before puberty and sometimes even from early infancy, she [the little girl] seems to us to be already sexually determined, this is not because mysterious instincts directly doom her to passivity, coquetry, maternity; it is because the influence of others upon the child is a factor almost from the start, and thus she is indoctrinated with her vocation from her earliest years.”41 With these words from The Second Sex, published in the original French in 1949, Beauvoir might well have inaugurated the important distinction, which later feminists theoreticians will name sex and gender: the distinction, in other words, between that which is naturally determined in sexual differentiation and that which is socially, or culturally, determined; or to put it in terms of behavioral psychology, between nature and nurture. Hence the famous Beauvoirian phrase: “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.”42 Curiously, however, she does not drive a wedge between the two as do later theoreticians, as we shall see, 37 “The great battle for the right to contraception and abortion was waged as much in order to reclaim power over procreation as it was for obtaining new sexual freedoms. ‘A mother, if I choose to be’ also meant ‘enjoy sex without any limits’. And so the first wave of feminism not only largely contributed to the liberation of women, but also to the trivialization of sexuality” (Elisabeth Badinter, Dead End Feminism, 65–66). 38 Natacha Polony, L’Homme est l’avenir de la femme, Autopsie du féminisme contemporain (Paris: C Lattès, 2008). 39 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 65. 40 Ibid., 255. 41 Ibid., 268. 42 Ibid., 267. Similarly: “Biology is not enough to give an answer to the question that is before us: why is woman the Other ?” (ibid., 37). 1260 Michele M. Schumacher by arguing that there is no connection between the female body and the manner in which it is culturally presented.43 Instead, she drives a wedge between woman’s spirit and her body, so as, in fact, to actually fuel the argument in favor of biological determinism. To be sure, Beauvoir must be applauded for her refusal to admit, as did later feminists, a division between man and woman that would polarize them into two species, as it were.44 “To pose Woman,” Beauvoir objects, “is to pose the absolute Other, without reciprocity, denying against all experience that she is a subject, a fellow human being.”45 In this context the famous French feminist appears to endorse what Pope John Paul II will present nearly forty years later as “another ‘I’ in a common humanity.”46 Beauvoir nonetheless—and in this she obviously differs from the approach of John Paul II—goes so far in her argument for the equality of the sexes that she simply denies the differences between them, with the result that they can no longer be viewed as a “unity of the two,” a “uniduality,” or a communion of persons preserving the “specific diversity and personal originality” of both sexes.47 At first view of her work, it might appear as if Beauvoir is taking up the important feminist argument against biological determinism: the reduction of woman to what lies within the realm of her body and its working, as is expressed in the “anatomy is destiny” philosophy. More specifically, this is 43 Judith Butler, for example, reasons: “For Beauvoir, gender is ‘constructed,’ but implied in her formulation is an agent, a cogito, who somehow takes on or appropriates that gender and could, in principle, take on some other gender.” There is nothing in Beauvoir’s account, Butler continues, “that guarantees that the ‘one’ who becomes a woman is necessarily female” (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [New York: Routledge, 1990], 8). 44 This is especially true of the European continental approach that stressed differences between the sexes, unlike the Anglo-Saxon approach which highlighted likenesses. See Karen Offen, “Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach,” Signs 14 (1988): 119–57; and Beatriz Vollmer Coles, “New Feminism: A Sex-Gender Reunion,” in Women in Christ: Towards a New Feminism, ed. Michele M. Schumacher, 52–66. 45 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 253. 46 John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem, Apostolic Letter, “On the Dignity and Vocation of Women” on the occasion of the Marian Year (August 15, 1988), §6. 47 See John Paul II, “Letter to Women” on the occasion of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing ( June 29, 1995), in Origins 25.9 ( July 27, 1995) §§7–8; and idem, Mulieris Dignitatem §§7, 10. Similar is what Hans Urs von Balthasar calls, with reference to Albert Frank-Duquesne, “a dual-unity.” See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama (Theological Dramatic Theory) II: The Dramatis Personae: Man in God, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 365–66; with reference to Albert Frank-Duquesne, Création et procréation (Paris: Editiones de Minuit, 1951), 42–46. Navigating between Naturalism and Idealism 1261 the notion that a woman’s identity is inscribed in her body, as in stone (or marble, to return to the image above): an idea that is at odds with the metaphysical meaning of human sexuality, as I will expound it below. Beauvoir, however, presents women not so much as “condemned to passivity by society, according to an arbitrary decree of men,” but (instead) as “maintained in an inertia to which nature had initially destined them.” Hence, French philosopher Sylviane Agacinski reasons, she might just as well have admitted to biological determinism from the outset and written instead: “one does not become, but remains, a woman.”48 Or to put it otherwise: precisely in order to avoid the idea of a properly feminine nature which men (or so Beauvoir believes) had in their creation of culture, aligned with the animal (or subrational) realm at odds with the normative male (or rational) nature,49 Beauvoir simply refuses to grant any metaphysical content to sexual differences.50 48 Sylviane Agacinski, Politique des sexes, 93. The celebrated Beauvorian phrase “One is not born, but becomes a woman” “concerns historical, aquired alienation: the woman is here an artificial product. She is fabricated by history, enclosed within a convential role, obliged to bend to the status of an object and to passivity imposed upon her by society. But, behind this fabricated women there is a second, natural woman, who is already alienated. This is a being who is biologically trapped: a victim primarily of her membership to the species, which destines her to fecundity and procreation and consquently to passivity. Women are not then simply condemned to passivity by society, according to an arbitrary decree of men: they are rather maintained in an inertia to which nature had initially destined them. In other words, the fabricated and alienated woman is the woman who remains in her natural alienation. Simone de Beauvoir could thus have said, in imagining this biological destiny that she rejects: one does not become, but remains a woman” (ibid.). 49 “Man’s design is not to repeat himself in time: it is to take control of the instant and mold the future. It is male activity that in creating values has made of existence itself a value; this activity has prevailed over the confused forces of life; it has subdued Nature and Woman” (The Second Sex, 65). 50 Beauvoir is thus paradigmatic of a problematic that I have observed in much feminist thought: “[T]he body-spirit dualism that they [feminists] so often attribute to ‘androcentric’ logic is transformed—as feminists have not only observed but also advanced—into a male-female dualism which, in turn, has given birth to a sort of androgynous hybrid that is both ideological and reactionary. Denied or otherwise refused are thus the essential differences within human nature itself—namely sexual differences affecting the whole body-spirit whole of the human person—in virtue of which this nature might be understood as relational per se” (Michele M. Schumacher, “Feminism, Nature and Humanae Vitae: What’s Love Got to Do with It?” Nova et Vetera 6, no. 4 (2008): 879–900, at 884–85). On the feminist denial of metaphysical differences of the sexes, see Beatriz Vollmer de Marcellus, The Ontological Differentiation of Human Gender: A Critique of the Philosophical Literature between 1965 and 1995 (Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2004); and idem (published under her married name of Coles), “New Feminism: A Sex-Gender Reunion,” in Women in Christ, ed. Schumacher. 1262 Michele M. Schumacher In so doing, she creates a dualism within woman herself: a dualism between her body and her soul, or between nature, understood in the most base sense of the term—namely that which is sub-rational and fully determined—and reason, which is considered as constituting the essence of the human. Admitting that it is woman’s “misfortune” to be “biologically destined”51 to transmit life and thus “more enslaved to the species”52 than is man, Beauvoir counsels her to flee the body and its constraints: to rise above the so-called “animal” act of giving life and to participate instead in the properly masculine act of risking life, beginning (presumably) with her battle against men.53 One could hardly provide a better example of what Pope John Paul II presents as “the tension between freedom and a nature conceived of in a reductive way,” a tension which is finally “resolved,” he explains, “by a division within man himself ”54 or, in this case, woman herself, and ultimately within the communion of man and woman, the fundamental cell of the family and thus also of society. II. The Nature-Freedom Conflict of Modernity and the Re-Making of the Human Body Here, in the reasoning of Beauvoir as in that of so many other feminists following in her wake,55 we are confronted with the presumed conflict between human freedom and the idea of a God-given nature—which, ironically, is understood as lying entirely within the physical (subrational) realm. As such—as material and thus as immanent—nature is also, or consequently, subject to man’s manipulative efforts. At times within this history, John Paul II instructs us in Veritatis Splendor, “it seemed that ‘nature’ subjected man totally to its own dynamics and even its own unbreakable laws.” Even today, he continues, certain ethicists are 51 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 64. 52 “And likewise it is quite true that woman—like man—is a being rooted in nature; she is more enslaved to the species than is the male, her animality is more manifest; but in her as in him the given traits are taken on through the fact of existence, she belongs also to the human realm. To assimilate her to Nature is simply to act from prejudice” (ibid., 255). 53 See ibid., 64. 54 Veritatis Splendor §48. 55 A recent example might be found in Elisabeth Badinter’s book The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women, trans. Adriana Hunter (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Co., 2011) (Le Conflit, la femme et la mère [Paris: Flammarion, 2010]). See Michele M. Schumacher, “Women’s SelfInterest or Sacrificial Motherhood: Personal Desires, Natural Inclinations and the Meaning of Love,” The Thomist 77 (2013): 71–101. Navigating between Naturalism and Idealism 1263 “tempted to take as the standard for their discipline and even for its operative norms the results of a statistical study of concrete human behavior patterns and the opinions about morality encountered in the majority of people.” Others, more “sensitive to the dignity of freedom,” conceive of freedom as opposed to or “in conflict with material and biological nature, over which it must progressively assert itself.” Hence, the origin of two contrasting, even opposed, understandings of nature: For some, “nature” becomes reduced to raw material for human activity and for its power: thus nature needs to be profoundly transformed, and indeed overcome by freedom, inasmuch as it represents a limitation and denial of freedom. For others, it is in the untrammeled advancement of man’s power, or of his freedom, that economic, cultural, social and even moral values are established: nature would thus come to mean everything found in man and the world apart from freedom. In such an understanding, nature would include in the first place the human body, its make-up and its processes: against this physical datum would be opposed whatever is “constructed”, in other words “culture”, seen as the product and result of freedom. Human nature, understood in this way, could be reduced to and treated as a readily available biological or social material. This ultimately means making freedom self-defining and a phenomenon creative of itself and its values. Indeed, when all is said and done man would not even have a nature; he would be his own personal life-project. Man would be nothing more than his own freedom!56 As a case in point, we need only think of the contemporary ideology of gender. Whereas gender was once regarded as a cultural expression of biological sex, recent theoreticians argue that it is culture (and thus gender) that determines bodily sex, and not the inverse (sex that determines gender). “[T]here is no recourse to a body that has not always already been interpreted by cultural meanings,” reasons humanities professor Judith Butler. “[H]ence, sex could not qualify as a prediscursive anatomical facticity. Indeed, sex, by definition, will be shown to have been gender all along.”57 As for gender, this term must not be understood as being related to culture “as sex is to nature,” Butler argues. Rather, gender should be understood, she continues, as “the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive,’ prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.”58 Sex, in other words, is thought to have no intrinsic meaning or content that is not first given to it by culture. 56 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor §46. 57 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 8. 58 Ibid., 7. Michele M. Schumacher 1264 Butler’s claim is supported, at least implicitly, by history professor Thomas Laqueur, who seeks to “offer [historial] material [or accounts] for [demonstrating] how powerful prior notions of difference or sameness determine what one sees and reports about the body,” and thus for “deciding what counts and what does not count as evidence.”59 Laqueur thus makes “every effort,” as he puts it, “to show that no historically given set of facts about ‘sex’ entailed how sexual difference was in fact understood and represented . . . , and I use this evidence,” he continues, “to make the more general claim that no set of facts ever entails any particular account of difference.”60 As for biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, she argues that “labeling someone a man or a woman is a social decision. We may use scientific knowledge to help us make the decision, but only our beliefs about gender—not science—can define our sex. Furthermore, our beliefs about gender affect what kinds of knowledge scientists produce about sex in the first place.”61 In other words, scientists “create truths about sexuality,” which are subsequently incorporated and confirmed by our bodies.62 Indeed, Fausto-Sterling’s own analysis of the “construction of sexuality” and her preference for “theories of sexuality that allow for flexibility and the development of new behavior patterns” can hardly be divorced from her own “deep” commitment “to the ideas of the modern movements of gay and women’s liberation”63 and from her personal experience of living, as she puts it, “part of her life as an unabashed heterosexual, part as an unabashed lesbian, and part in transition.”64 Denied from the outset is what she calls—borrowing from Donna Haraway—“the God trick”: “producing,” that is to say, “knowledge from above, from a place that denies the individual scholar’s location in a real and troubled world.”65 Such, more specifically, she suggests, is a world in which it is not always so easy to determine—biologically speaking— whether a child is male or female. If a child is born with two X chromosomes, oviducts, ovaries, and a uterus on the inside, but a penis and scrotum on the outside, for instance, is the child a boy or a girl? Most doctors declare the child a girl, despite the penis, because of her potential to give birth, and intervene using surgery 59 Thomas Laqueur, The Making of Sex, 21. 60 Ibid., 19. 61 Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexu- ality (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 3. 62 Ibid., 5. 63 Ibid., 8. 64 Ibid., ix. 65 Ibid., 6. Navigating between Naturalism and Idealism 1265 and hormones to carry out the decision. Choosing which criteria to use in determining sex, and choosing to make the determination at all, are social decisions for which scientists can offer no absolute guidelines.66 It is thus not surprising that Judith Butler should ask the question: “What is ‘sex’ anyway? Is it natural, anatomical, chromosomal, or hormonal, and how is a feminist critic to assess the scientific discourses which purport to establish such ‘facts’ for us?”67 One could hardly find a better question for introducing an important distinction, which will also serve as my transition between this brief exposition of feminist teaching on what constitutes womanhood as such and a classic metaphysical (and thus also realist) understanding of the same. This distinction, more specifically, is the one made by Karol Wojtyla between the biological order and “the order of nature.” III. The Biological Order and the Order of Nature: An Important Distinction Unlike most feminist and gender theoreticians today—who simply equate nature and biology, or a naturalist philosophy (passing as physicalism) and natural law—Wojtyla presents biology as “a product of the human intellect which abstracts its elements from a larger reality, [and which] has man for its immediate author. The claim to autonomy in one’s ethical views,” he further maintains, “is a short jump from this.” In other words, when man is seen as the creator of the world order, relativism is the most logical ethical theory: how can one defend the idea of universal truths and even the idea of intrinsic human dignity, when man creates man? “It is otherwise,” Wojtyla continues, “with the order of nature, which means the totality of the cosmic relationships that arise among really existing entities.”68 As we have seen in the foregoing exposition, it is this totality of relationships, which are not only realized by human freedom but also and most especially given to human freedom, that is denied by much feminist literature, beginning with the fundamental and constitutive relation between the human body and spirit, which precisely as unified is, John Paul II teaches, the subject of moral acts.69 “Only in reference to the 66 Ibid., 5. Such is also the conclusion of Elisabeth Badinter, XY: On Masculine Iden- tity, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 40. 67 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 6–7. 68 Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, trans. J. T. Willetts (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 56–57; emphasis mine. 69 “The person, including the body, is completely entrusted to himself, and it is in the unity of body and soul that the person is the subject of his own moral acts” (Veritatis Splendor §48; emphasis his). 1266 Michele M. Schumacher human person in his ‘unified totality’, that is, as ‘a soul which expresses itself in a body and a body informed by an immortal spirit’, can the specifically human meaning of the body be grasped,” John Paul II teaches in Veritatis Splendor. It thus follows, according to Church teaching, that natural inclinations have “moral relevance only insofar as they refer to the human person and his authentic fulfillment, a fulfillment,” John Paul II adds, which “can take place always and only in human nature.”70 In fact, he further teaches, natural law refers to “the ‘nature of the human person’, which is the person himself in the unity of soul and body, in the unity of [both] his spiritual and biological inclinations and of all the other specific characteristics necessary for the pursuit of his end. ‘The natural moral law expresses and lays down the purposes’ ” of human life, which is to say, that we are created with divine intent and not chaotically set into a chaotic world so as to find our own chaotic way. At the same time, natural law is considered moral precisely because it also lays down the “rights and duties” of the human person, which John Paul II presents as “based” upon his or her “bodily and spiritual nature.” “ ‘Therefore this law cannot be thought of as simply a set of norms on the biological level [so as to be reduced to that which we share with sub-rational creation]; rather it must be defined as the rational order whereby man [that is to say, man and woman] is called by the Creator to direct and regulate his [or her] life and actions and in particular to make use of his [or her] own body’.”71 And, because human nature always includes human freedom, natural law not only cannot be interpreted as physicalism or naturalism, such that moral laws are reduced to “biological laws,”72 but it (natural law) also will allow for no division between freedom and nature. “Indeed, these two realities are harmoniously bound together,” John Paul II insists, “and each is intimately linked to the other.”73 This, in turn, means that we cannot assent to the proposition according to which the human person, precisely “as a rational being not only can but actually must freely determine the meaning of his [or her] behavior,”74 and thus surmount or transcend his or her bodily limitations. Just as the human person cannot be reduced to his or her bodily structure and its 70 Ibid. §50, with reference to John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris Consor- tio (November 22,1981) §11. 71 Veritatis Splendor §50, with reference to Vatican Council II, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes §51; and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Donum Vitae (February 22, 1987), Introduction, 3: AAS 80 (1988): 74; emphasis mine. 72 See Veritatis Splendor §47. 73 Ibid. §50. 74 Ibid. §47. Navigating between Naturalism and Idealism 1267 functioning, so also he or she “cannot,” John Paul II teaches, “be reduced to a freedom which is self-designing.” Human freedom quite simply “entails,” as he puts it, “a particular spiritual and bodily structure.”75 Such a metaphysical perspective of human nature—one which, it bears repeating, literally transcends (meta) the physical—does not only have implications upon the manner in which we perceive natural law and human freedom. It also affects the way we view human sexuality. As the Catechism puts it so well, sexuality “affects all aspects of the human person in the unity of his [or her] body and soul” and thus also, more specifically, of “affectivity, the capacity to love and to procreate, and in a more general way the aptitude for forming bonds of communion with others.”76 It follows that this primal unity of the body and the soul, constituting the human person as such, has profound implications upon the other cosmic relations to which Wojtyla refers with his distinction between the biological and natural orders, beginning with the relation of the family, that “first and fundamental school of social living,”77 and still more fundamentally, the relation between man and woman, who are “called from the beginning . . . not only to exist ‘side by side’ or ‘together,’ ” but also, John Paul II teaches, “to exist mutually ‘one for the other.’ ”78 When God-Yahweh says, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Gen 2:18), he affirms that, “alone,” the man does not completely realize this essence. He realizes it only by existing “with someone”—and, put even more deeply and completely, by existing “for someone.” . . . Communion of persons means living in a reciprocal “for,” in a relationship of reciprocal gift.79 From this perspective—that of creation—human sexuality is not simply arbitrary; nor is it merely “skin deep.” Rather, it is orientated— precisely as an essential aspect of human nature—to the vocation implied 75 Ibid. §48. 76 Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2332. Similarly, in the teaching of Pope John Paul II: “sexuality is an enrichment of the whole person-body, emotions and soul—and it manifests its inmost meaning in leading the person to the gift of self in love” (Familiaris Consortio §37) 77 John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio §37. 78 John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem §7. 79 John Paul II, General Audience of January 2, 1980, no. 2; in idem, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2006), 182. Similarly: “In the [original] ‘unity of the two,’ man and woman are called from the beginning not only to exist ‘side by side’ or ‘together,’ but they are also called to exist mutually ‘one for the other’ ” (Mulieris Dignitatem §7; emphasis his). 1268 Michele M. Schumacher within the very gift of human nature, as rational. This, in turn, does not meant that human sexuality is simply subject to human freedom; for it is not human freedom that has brought it into existence, nor human freedom that gives it meaning. Rather, both freedom and sexuality are subject together, in a body-spirit unity, to the divinely ordained meaning of human existence: a meaning which Christ has revealed as love. It is freedom’s role to discover this meaning and constantly to discern its own intentions according to this standard (the meaning of love), so as also to direct the whole person (body and soul) toward what is worthy of love. It is the body’s role, in turn, to serve reason in its discernment of the Creator’s intentions; for it is in virtue of the body that we enter into relation with all of material reality—we need only think of the role of the senses, which require direct contact with that which is thereby perceived—and it is also in virtue of the body that we enter into relationships with other body-persons. “The person, by the light of reason and the support of virtue, [thus] discovers in the body,” John Paul II teaches, “the anticipatory signs, the expression and the promise of the gift of self, in conformity with the wise plan of the Creator.”80 To assent to this proposition—that the body expresses the Creator’s intentions for us—one must have a certain confidence in reality: confidence—or better said, faith—that things really do bespeak the intentions of a wholly benevolent and supremely intelligent Creator who orders all things to their good in accord with the natures that He has bestowed upon them at the moment of creation. This in no way denies—rather it reinforces—the teaching of classical natural law theory according to which God orders human creatures “in the most excellent manner,”81 namely by giving us the capacity to govern ourselves: not in an anarchical sense—as creatures who deem themselves no longer subject to divine rule and order—but as capable, in virtue of our intelligent nature, of discerning God’s will and of acting accordingly, that is to say, virtuously. In the unavoidable confrontation with sexual differentiation, which marks the history of humankind from its inception, the human person is thus presented with a mystery that is simultaneously given, in virtue of creation, and appropriated, in virtue of human freedom.82 This, in other words, is a mystery which is given in both the creative and gratuitous senses of the word: a fact robed in gratuity. As such, it transcends the 80 Veritatis Splendor §48. 81 See St. Thomas Aquinas, ST I–II, q. 91, a. 2. 82 See Michele M. Schumacher, “John Paul II’s Theology of the Body on Trial: Responding to the Accusation of the Biological Reduction of Women,” Nova et Vetera 10.2 (Spring 2012): 463–84. Navigating between Naturalism and Idealism 1269 expertise of both the biological and the social sciences; it evokes a reality that is not of our making but that is nonetheless knowable and desirable to us. This, more specifically, is—as has been my purpose to argue—a reality which does not merely exist in our consciousness, but which, on the contrary, is offered to our consciousness in view of our willing appropriation and collaboration. As such, it is at once a gift and a call. To be human means to be called to interpersonal communion. . . . The whole of human history unfolds within the context of this call. In this history, on the basis of the principle of mutually being “for” the other, in interpersonal “communion,” there develops in humanity itself, in accordance with God’s will, the integration of what is “masculine” and what is “feminine.”83 Or to put it otherwise (again, in the words of Blessed John Paul II):“Human life is by its nature ‘co-educational,’ and its dignity as well as its balance depend at every moment of history and in every place of geographic longitude and latitude on ‘who’ she shall be for him and he for her.”84 IV. An Objective Gaze upon Woman: An Invitation to Get Out of Our Heads The call to interpersonal communion has, in addition to its necessarily personal dimension, a social dimension as well. Indeed, it is precisely in the vis-à-vis, which sexual differentiation represents, that modern men and women are offered a perspective that forces them to get out of their heads, as it were, and to confront an objective reality that is not of their making. An object cannot protect itself from someone’s false understanding of its being, nor from his or her manipulative tactics or misuse of its God-ordained purpose in the world. A person, however—and obviously I have woman in mind—can well object to man’s idea of herself and of her destiny, as Beauvoir rightly insisted, and thus also to his manipulative manner of regarding her. Here, then, in the encounter or confrontation of persons, there is also an encounter or confrontation with real objectivity: of a world that is not necessarily subject to man’s ideas and purposes, a world that invites an objective regard, or a perspective of truth in the classic understanding of the term, namely an adequation—or what Hans Urs von Balthasar calls “attunement”—between perception and reality, between subject and object, between knower and known. From this perspective—that of a given (even gratuitously given) reality—the challenge of addressing sexual difference is not simply that of 83 John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem §7. 84 General Audience of October 8, 1980: in Man and Woman He Created Them, 301. 1270 Michele M. Schumacher rethinking the way we approach scientific knowledge; for the fundamental question is more philosophical than experimental. This, to be precise, entails an epistemological question: one concerning how we view knowledge and knowing, and how we distinguish the two (the reality known from the process of knowing). When, in other words, we are confronted with the question of what is entailed in being a woman, as distinct from being a man—the question motivating John Paul II’s important apostolic letter, Mulieris Dignitatem 85 —we are simultaneously confronted within our present cultural situation with a more fundamental, or preliminary, question: that of what constitutes knowledge in the first place. This, more specifically, is the question of whether knowing entails a manipulation of reality—a sort of bending of the known according to my field of interest, such that the object (or person, as the case may be) must succumb to my preconceived notion of the real (whence Beauvoir’s theory of Woman as ‘Other’)—or whether, instead, knowing entails a conformity of my knowing powers to an objective reality: to the object known. In the latter case, it is I who, in fact or at least in a matter of speaking, must bend to the object, allowing it to speak to me, as it were, to inform me, to impress itself upon me, or otherwise to enrich me with its intrinsic goodness and beauty. Entailed in the question of womanhood—the problem of discerning its content or meaning—is thus the question of our philosophical perspective: the question of whether I hold to a modern perspective, according to which the meaning of womanhood is determined, or at least measured by, my inner, subjective, convictions; to a nihilistic position, according to which the notion of woman signifies absolutely nothing at all; to an existentialist perspective of the Sartrian kind (which is also that of Beauvoir), according to which woman is defined either by her own freedom or by that of man who constantly seeks to determine her for his own purposes or desires; to a constructionist standpoint, which considers her as an ever-evolving social construct with no intrinsic meaning; to a postmodern stance, according to which the meaning of “woman” is determined by opposition, not in the relative sense of the term, but in the violent struggle between the oppressed (in this case, woman) and the oppressor (man); or, finally, to a realist perspective, according to which the content that we assign to the word “woman” exists in reality (and not merely in 85 This, more specifically, is the question of “the reason for and the consequences of the Creator’s decision that the human being should always and only exist as a woman or a man,” a question that is raised in view of “understand[ing] the greatness of the dignity and vocation of women” so as, in turn, to address “their [women’s] active presence in the Church and in society” (Mulieris Dignitatem §1). Navigating between Naturalism and Idealism 1271 our heads, as is held, at least indirectly, by those who argue that human sexuality is socially constructed). To admit to this realist position—as I hope by now to have made clear—is hardly to reduce woman to a purely material being. Nor is it to take from her the freedom of self-determination (as distinct from selfcreation) or to remove her from the awesome world of mystery and the creative world of art. Nor, still, is it to separate her from the loving and providential regard of her Creator. Rather, it means grounding, and thus safeguarding, her freedom in her God-given human nature, such that she is free with a freedom destined for what is good and true and noble, a freedom that is realized in self-gift, because the person is realized in communion. “Freedom,” Karol Wojtyla explains, “exists for love,” which in turn means the “limit[ing] of one’s freedom on behalf of another.” It follows, Wojtyla reasons, that the human being “longs for love more than for freedom—freedom is the means and love the end.”86 Far from the very restrained or negative sense of freedom that has marked much of modernity, in general, and feminism, in particular— freedom from oppression, for example, or freedom from constraint—a positive sense of freedom is thus proposed for our consideration in virtue of its (freedom’s) God-given purpose: freedom for the other, freedom to give of oneself, and freedom to receive the other as a gift.87 V. The Beauty of Truth and the Attunement to the Real By introducing the important distinction between the biological order and the natural order, Wojtyla—who, as we have seen, draws upon this important distinction in his papal teaching—does not therefore suggest that we might subscribe to some sort of Platonic idea of womanhood: to, that is to say, an eternal ideal qualifying woman from above, to return to Haraway’s objection to the so-called “God trick.” Rather, a natural law perspective supposes that the human being is intrinsically ordered by his or her Creator from within: not by way of a simple submission to the body, its needs and desires, but in the particularly human way of freely choosing one’s life’s goal in conformity with reason and faith and of acting accordingly. 86 Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, 135, 136. Similarly: “Perfection demands that maturity is self-giving to which human freedom is called” (Veritatis Splendor §17). “Love, as a sincere gift of self, is what gives the life and freedom of the person their truest meaning” ( John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae §96). 87 See, for example, Pope John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem §7. It is “the vanity” of Beauvoir’s philosophy, “like a great part of modern thought,” Sylviane Agacinski maintains, “to believe in the autonomy of the subject and to recognize therein the privileged form of freedom” (Politique des sexes, 96). 1272 Michele M. Schumacher It follows that the divine Artist does not simply “draw forms, as it were, from the interior of matter, of wood, of stone, of marble”—to return to the image of the horse in the stone—so as to act “on the matter—let us say, even against it,” as does the human artist, as he is fittingly depicted by Pierre-Marie Emonet: Michelangelo has defined sculpture: the forza di levare—the “power to lift” the superfluous stone from around the form, the figure within. And Michelangelo trimmed with chisels and hammers, sending shots of matter to all sides. There is nothing of this in the divine acting. . . . “When God awakens a new reality, first, he does not act on things, or against things—as we are obliged to do. God works in them.”88 The divine Artist, in other words, is One whose “creative power” might be found “in the depths of things,”89 for the “divine influx passes . . . through natural agents,” who are thus “elevated to the order of instrumental causes of the divine causality.”90 As for human agents, precisely as free, we are given by the Creator the power to direct our lives and to govern the world that He entrusts to us in view of a certain world order—that of the various cosmic relations implied by God’s creative act, including most especially the relation between man and woman—all of which ought to be subject to the fundamental good of God, who, revelation teaches us, is the final end of the human person. Or to put it still more directly, we are thus set before the specific task of rationally discerning God’s purpose for our lives, so as to act accordingly. Such, I would suggest again, is not far from what Balthasar describes as attunement. This musical image—precisely as artistic—invites us to return to the image of the horse in the marble block from still another perspective: that of a classic understanding of art. Here we have, Francesca Murphy rightly suggests, a vision “for a post-modern society, in which the idea of a common rationality is threadbare,”91 but in which the basic human desire for love and beauty is not entirely lost; for the human being remains human and as such profoundly orientated by nature to what is good and 88 Pierre-Marie Emonet, The Dearest Freshness Deep Down Things: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Being, trans. Robert R. Barr (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1999), 55. Reference here is made to Stanislas Fumet, Le néant contesté (Paris: Fayard, 1972), 123. 89 Emonet, The Dearest Freshness Deep Down Things, 55. 90 Ibid., 57. 91 Francesca A. Murphy, “Inclusion and Exclusion in the Ethos of von Balthasar’s Theo-Drama,” New Blackfriars 79, no. 923 ( January 1998): 56–64, at 60. Navigating between Naturalism and Idealism 1273 true and thus also beautiful. The Christian—whom Balthasar presents as the “guardian of that metaphysical wonderment which is the point of origin for philosophy”92 —nonetheless has a very important role to play in awakening this natural human desire within the men and women of our time. After all, the very world, which for our contemporaries is characterized by the “elimination of the sacred and the loss of the ‘power of the heart’ (Siewerth) to sense the ‘majesty of being’ (Hans André) in the immediacy of God”—a world which has “no Godward tendency (since it has become mere matter, an accumulation of facts and its synthesis is man in his state of wretchedness)” is, Balthasar rightly notes, a world which nonetheless remains sacred for the Christian as inhabited—even impregnated—by “something of eternity.”93 It follows, as Balthasar perceives that only the Christian is joining children in posing the essential question of being upon which metaphysical inquiry is based: the question, born of wonderment, as typified by the delighted child discovering the horse in the marble block.94 This, more specifically, is the question: “Why is there anything rather than nothing at all?” The failure to pose this question is, John Paul II suggests, typical of an impoverished society motivated by the desire “to possess things rather than to relate them to the truth.” This, more specifically, he suggests, is a society “lacking that disinterested, unselfish and aesthetic attitude that is born of wonder in the presence of being and of the beauty which enables one to see in visible things the message of the invisible God who created 92 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics,V: The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age, trans. Oliver Davies, Andrew Louth, Brian McNeil, John Saward, and Rowan Williams, and ed. Brian McNeil and John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 646. See also Balthasar, Theo-Logic. Theological Logical Theory I: Truth of the World, trans. Adrian J. Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 106–7. 93 Balthasar, “Revelation and the Beautiful,” in idem, Explorations in Theology, I: The Word Made Flesh, trans. A.V. Littledale and Alexander Dru (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 95–126, at 109. Similarly: “In a world without beauty—even if people cannot dispense with the word and constantly have it on the tip of their tongues in order to abuse it—in a world which is perhaps not wholly without beauty, but which can no longer see it or reckon with it: in such a world the good also loses its attractiveness, the self-evidence of why it must be carried out” (Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, I: Seeing the Form, 19). 94 Philosopher and classicist Allan Bloom rightfully noted in 1987, when he published his bestseller, that only children were raising the essential questions of being, but they had sadly been left “in a day-care center called the humanities, in which the discussions have no echo in the adult world” (Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987], 372). 1274 Michele M. Schumacher them.”95 Such, he suggests in Veritatis Splendor, is a society for whom beauty, but also goodness, has been isolated from truth. To be sure, it is unthinkable for the modern or contemporary mind to refer to beauty as “true” or even “good,” for we are much too inclined to admit—as I implied in my introduction—that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Balthasar does not hesitate, however, to address the idea of “aesthetic measure.”96 As for St. Thomas, he too insists upon the objective dimension of beauty: “Something is not beautiful because we love it; rather, it is loved by us because it is beautiful and good.”97 Not surprisingly, then, the angelic doctor lists three conditions of beauty: “integrity or perfection, since those things which are impaired are by the very fact ugly; due proportion or harmony; and lastly, brightness, or clarity, whence things are called beautiful which have a bright color.”98 Ultimately this means, as Balthasar sees it, that “[t]he light of the transcendentals, unity, truth, goodness and beauty, a light at one with the light of philosophy, can only shine if it is undivided. A transcendence of beauty alone is not viable.”99 On the other hand, and more positively, “the beautiful is implied in the order of truth and goodness.”100 95 John Paul II, Encyclical Letter on the Hundredth Anniversary of ‘Rerum Novarum,’ Centesimus Annus (May 1, 1991), §37. Hence, the sigh of Emonet: “Why must we always regard things in connection with ourselves? Or, an arrogance still worse: Why must we believe that we created these beings simply because we look at them?” (The Dearest Freshness Deep Down Things, 86). 96 See The Glory of the Lord I, 34ff. 97 Thomas Aquinas, In librum Beati Dionysii De divinis nominibus expositio, c. 4, lect. 10, 439 (Turin: Marietti, 1950): “non enim ideo aliquid est pulchrum quia nos illud amanus, sed quia est pulchrum et bonum ideo amatur a nobis.” Such, then, is what he means when he presents beauty as that “which please[s] when seen.” (ST I, q. 5, a. 4, ad 1: “pulchra enim dicuntur quae visa placent.”) 98 ST I, q. 39, a. 8: “primo quidem integritas sive perfectio, quae enim diminuta sunt, hoc ipso turpia sunt; et debita proportio, sive consonantia; et iterum claritas. Unde quae habent colorem nitidum, pulchra esse dicuntur.” 99 Balthasar, “Revelation and the Beautiful,” 107. Hence, “truth cannot be explained outside of its circumincessive relation to the other transcendenals” (idem., Theo-Logic I, 10). 100 Jan Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case of St. Thomas Aquinas (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 359. For this reason, Aertsen insists that “the beautiful is not a distinct, ‘forgotten,’ transcendental” (ibid.). In other words, it does not express “a universal mode of being . . . that is not yet expressed by the other transcendentals” (ibid., 337). Jacques Maritain, on the other hand, argues that precisely because the beautiful can be reduced to the good, it should be considered a transcendental. See Maritain, Art et Scolastique in idem, Œuvres Complètes I: 1906–1920 (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires Fribourg; Paris: Editions Saint-Paul, 1986), 615–788. English translation: Art and Scholasticism, trans. J. F. Scanlan (Minneapolis: Filiquarian Publishing, 2007). Navigating between Naturalism and Idealism 1275 In fact, Aquinas maintains that “beauty and goodness in a thing are identical fundamentally,” with this difference: “beauty relates to the cognitive faculty,” whereas “goodness properly relates to the appetite (goodness being what all things desire).”101 By classing the beautiful among the transcendentals, we mean that it has, as the name implies, an intrinsically transcendent dimension, in virtue of which it draws (or literally “trans-ports”) its beholder out of the immanence of this world. The manifestation of the beautiful, like that of Being in its other transcendental properties (those of truth, goodness, and unity), “invites the creaturely spirit,” Balthasar explains, “to move away from and beyond itself and [to] entrust and surrender itself to that mystery”:102 that of beauty, in the case at hand. In this sense, at least, the encounter between a great work of art and its beholder is necessarily ecstatic: it causes one to stand (stasis) out (ex) of one’s own self. Art might thus rightly be personified, for here the object (a work of art) acts as a subject: it exercises a sort of bewitching or enchanting influence upon the one who beholds it: like a charm, whence the word charming. It nonetheless testifies to the truth of an objective world, which is open to the transcendental realm: that is to say, to a dimension beyond the confines of the subject and of his spiritual powers of imagination and projection. It is not only this encounter between art and its beholder that is characterized by ecstasy, however, for Balthasar argues that the artist himself— precisely in his greatest moment of genius—is also so marked by it. [I]n the phenomenon of inspiration there exists a moment which the heathen has always sensed but which only the Christian can grasp with all the preciseness of faith. This is the moment when one’s own inspiration mysteriously passes over into inspiration through the genius, the daimon, or the indwelling god, a moment when the “spirit that contains the god” (en-thusiasmos) obeys a superior command which as such implies form and is able to impose form.103 When, in other words, the artist acts by inspiration, he cannot be considered as simply imposing upon a marble block a vision out of his self-consciousness or even out of his own necessarily limited imagination—limited by what he has seen and experienced; for as Ecclesiastes puts it all too well, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be 101 ST I, q. 5, a. 4, ad 1: “pulchrum et bonum in subjecto quidem sunt idem”; “Pulchrum autem respicit vim cognoscitivan”; “Nam bonum proprie respicit appetitum: est enim bonum quod omnia appetunt.” 102 Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord I, 450. 103 Ibid., 35. 1276 Michele M. Schumacher done again; there is nothing new under the sun” (1:9). In the moment of inspiration, by contrast, there is something radically new that shines upon the horizon, something that literally breaks into time and man’s perspective from outside of his time and perspective. A similar phenomenon occurs when one is overtaken by love or beauty. Dante might well have immortalized the lovely Beatrice, but only after her incredible beauty inspired him to greatness, transporting him outside of himself: And when this most gracious being actually bestowed the saving power of her salutation, I do not say that Love as an intermediary could dim for me such unendurable bliss but, almost by excess of sweetness, his influence was such that my body, which was then utterly given over to his governance, often moved like a heavy, inanimate object. So it is plain that in her greeting resided all my joy, which often exceeded and overflowed my capacity.104 VI. The Creative Power of Beauty and Love In the above example of the transporting quality of beauty that awakens love, there is nothing of that falsified beauty that we call seduction: that manipulative effort to subject the beholder to one’s own power, thereby reducing him to an object, much as feminists perceive men to have done to women throughout the centuries. Instead of respectfully (indeed, lovingly) receiving the other in view of forming an authentic communion of persons wherein both are enriched in a way that sexual fruitfulness makes explicit in exemplary (though certainly not exclusive!) manner, seduction allures the other in order to trap him, as it were, for one’s own purpose or that of another: as in the use of women’s bodies to sell everything from toothpaste to pornography. As such—as manipulative—seduction not only objectifies the other, by inciting his base desires in view of obtaining a certain end (or profit) from him, it also objectifies one’s own self, at least as one is presented to the eyes of the other—namely, in the reductive sense of the body, as an outer shell, or “packaging.” 104 Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova (1290), XI, trans. Barbara Reynolds (New York: Penguin Books,1969), 41. [“E quando questa gentilissima salute salulava, non che Amore fosse tal mezzo che potesse obumbrare a me la intollerabile beatitudine, ma eli quasi per soverchio di dolcezza divenia tale, che potesse obumbrare a me la intollerabile beatitudine, ma elli quasi per soverchio di dolcezza divenia tale, che lo moi corpo, lo quale era tutto allora sotto lo suo reggimento, molte volte si movea come cosa grave inanimata. Sì che appare manifestamente che nele sue salute abitava la mia beatitudine, la quale molte volte passava e redundava la mia capacitade” (Introduzione e comemento di Vittorio Cozzoli, Milano: EDIS Edizioni Culturali, 1995, 45)]. Navigating between Naturalism and Idealism 1277 From this perspective, eros is reduced to what today we commonly call erotic. In the profound words of Pope Benedict XVI, which almost echo the insights of his predecessor: 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 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.105 As a case in point, C. S. Lewis points us to the terrible hero of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, who before sleeping with the heroine asks: “You like doing this? I don’t mean simply me; I mean the thing in itself.” The thing is a sensory pleasure; that is, an event occurring within one’s own body. We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he “wants a woman.” Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes).106 Or, to put it in the words of blessed John Paul II, even the man who “looks” at a woman in such a reductive way—as a body—“makes use” of her, of her femininity, “to satisfy his own ‘instincts’.”107 In so doing, he simultaneously devalues or impoverishes an “authentic value,” namely, “that dignity to which the integral value of her femininity corresponds in the person in question.”108 “The sexual instinct,” writes Karol Wojtyla, “wants to take over, to make use of another person, whereas love wants to give, to create a good, 105 Pope Benedict XVI, Encyclical Letter on the Love of God, Deus Caritas Est (December 25, 2005), §5. 106 C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960, 1991), 94. 107 John Paul II, General Audience of 8 October 1980, in idem, Man and Woman He Created Them, 298. 108 John Paul II, General Audience of 22 October 1980, in Man and Woman He Created Them, 309. 1278 Michele M. Schumacher to bring happiness.”109 In the first case—which we might qualify as a “love” of concupiscence—one cannot really be said to suffer ecstasy, St. Thomas teaches. To be more specific, because he seeks to have a good for himself, “he does not go out from himself simply, but this movement [of love or desire] remains finally within him[self].”110 The man, on the other hand, who is truly enraptured by a woman, in the classic sense of eros— that of a transporting love in the classic (heightened) sense111—does not simply desire a pleasure that she might grant him. What he desires, rather, is the woman herself:112 not as a commodity to be possessed, of course, but as a person with whom he can more fully or more completely express, develop, and realize his own humanity, including his proper sexuality. Far from debasing both herself and the man (as the seducer might be thought to do), the beautiful woman—and truly every woman is beautiful, as is every flower—invites (again simply in virtue of who she is) a regard from the man that might be understood as uplifting, or ecstatic, in the positive sense of the term: as that which literally draws him out (ex-) of himself toward that which is befitting, even ennobling, of his own humanity.113 109 Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, 137. 110 ST I–II, q. 28, a. 3: “non exit simpliciter extra se, sed talis affectio in fine infra ipsum concluditur.” 111 As John Paul II explains, “According to Plato, ‘eros’ represents the inner power that draws man toward all that is good, true, and beautiful. This ‘attraction’ indicates, in this case, the intensity of a subjective act of the human spirit.” This Platonic meaning he contrasts to “the common meaning—as also in literature—of attraction “above all of a sensual nature” (General Audience of November 5, 1980; in Man and Woman He Created Them, 316, emphasis his). Where the spiritual is thus contrasted to the sensual, we obviously have recourse to that which specifies the human person as such: namely, the spiritual dimension and thus freedom. 112 “Without Eros sexual desire like every other desire is a fact about ourselves. Within Eros it is rather about the Beloved” (C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 95). Similarly, Wojtyla expresses the “superiority of the value of the person to that of sex” (Love and Responsibility, 197). 113 As St. Thomas very fittingly expresses it: “[N]othing is hurt by being adapted to that which is suitable to it; rather, if possible, it is perfected and bettered. But if a thing be adapted to that which is not suitable to it, it is hurt and made worse thereby. Consequently, love of a good which is unsuitable to the lover, wounds and worsens him.” (ST I–II, q. 28, a. 5: “Nihil autem quod coaptatur ad aliquid quod est sibi conveniens, ex hoc ipso laeditur, sed magis, si sit possibile, proficit et melioratur. Quod vero coaptatur ad aliquid quod non est sibi conveniens, ex hoc ipso laeditur et deterioratur. Amor ergo boni convenientis est perfectivus et meliorativus amantis, amor autem boni quod non est conveniens amanti, est laesivus et deteriorativus amantis.”) Hence, as St. Augustine would fittingly have it: “whether for good or evil, each man lives by his love” (Contra Faustum 5.10; Navigating between Naturalism and Idealism 1279 If, moreover, she might be said to “do” this in virtue of who she is, as human and as female, it is obviously toward her very self (her person) that he is drawn, but not as the be all and end all. If, in fact, a person can never be possessed—as John Paul II rightly holds—then the only proper end of the desirous movement toward a person is communion with him or her: a communion wherein each might more fully discover and realize the meaning of his or her own humanity and sexuality. For a human being is always first and foremost himself (“a person”), and in order not merely to live with another but to live by and for that other person he must continually discover himself in the other and the other in himself. Love is impossible for beings who are mutually impenetrable—only the spirituality and the “inwardness” of persons create the conditions for mutual interpenetration, which enables each to live in and by the other [to enter, that is to say, into the other’s interiority].114 This mutual indwelling of persons requires, of course, a willingness to freely open or unveil oneself to the other, in what might be understood as an authentic gift of self: a gift in virtue of which the other is granted entry within one’s own interiority, as it were.115 Precisely this unveiling of the self provides, moreover, the occasion whereby the person might be revealed not only to the other but also to him or her own self, by the loving regard that this unveiling invites from the very one to whom he or she has entrusted the mystery of his or her person (or interiority). PL 42: 228: “quia ex amore suo quisque vivit, vel bene vel male”; cited by Josef Pieper, “On Love,” trans. Richard and Clara Winston, in idem, Faith, Hope, Love [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997], 166). 114 Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, 131. 115 Such an “entry” into the other’s interiority is obviously to be understood more in a spiritual sense than in a sexual sense, although the one certainly need not exclude the other. Edith Stein explains this phenomenon with profound insight: “I look in the eyes of an animal and from there, something looks at me. I look into his interior, into his soul, which perceives (spürt) my regard and my presence. But it is a mute and imprisoned soul: imprisoned in itself, unable to go back beyond itself and to grasp itself, unable to go out of itself to come to me. I look into the eyes of a man and his regard (sein Blick) answers me. He lets me penetrate in his interior or he repulses me. He is the master of his soul and can open or close its door. He can step out of himself and enter into the thing.When two men regard one another, an ‘I’ stands before another ‘I’. There can be an encounter before their doors or an encounter in the interior. If there is an encounter in the interior, then the other ‘I’ is a ‘you’ ” (Edith Stein, Der Aufbau der menschlichen Person. Vorlesung zur philosophischen Anthropologie, Gesamtausgabe 14 [Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2004], 78). Michele M. Schumacher 1280 As Balthasar explains in his comparison, once again, of the artist and the lover: A model . . . disrobes before the artist in the expectation that the latter’s eye will look on him as no one but the artist could behold him—as even the model himself, if he chanced to catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror, could not see himself. . . . This special gaze, which is possible only in the loving attention of the subject, is equally objective and idealizing. That these two qualities can be compatible is the grand hope of the object [who, in this case, is a person, and thus also a subject]. It [the person who is the object of the other’s gaze] hopes to attain in the space of another the ideality that it [he or she] can never realize in itself [him- or herself]. It [he or she] knows or guesses what it [he or she] could be, what splendid possibilities are present in it [him or her]. But in order to develop these possibilities, it [he or she] needs someone who believes in them—no, who sees them already existing in a hidden state, where, however, they are visible only to one who firmly holds that they can be realized; to one, in other words, who believes and loves. Many wait only for someone to love them in order to become who they always could have been from the beginning. It may also be that the lover, with his mysterious, creative gaze, is the first to discover in the beloved possibilities completely unknown to their possessor, to whom they would have appeared incredible.116 This simultaneously objective and ideal (realist and transcendental: metaphysical) regard of the beloved in the eyes of the lover is, Balthasar insists, “as much subjective as it is objective. Its subjectivity does not consist in the fact that, say, it does not conform to the truth; it is subjective because its truth attains to real, objective truth only through a subject, just as a fruit can come to maturity only in a certain climate.”117 By this the Swiss theologian means, more specifically, that the lover “conceives [erzeugt] an image” of the beloved which the latter would not otherwise have necessarily accredited to him- or herself, and “when love is genuine and faithful,” it gives the beloved the power to approach it in likeness. The beloved “does not want to disappoint; he [or she] wants to show himself [or herself] grateful that someone takes him [or her] so seriously and expects so much of him [or her].”118 116 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Logic I, 114–15. 117 Ibid., 115. 118 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Convergences: To the Source of Christian Mystery, trans. E. A. Nelson (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1983), 128–29. I have taken the liberty of changing the official translation from “produces an image” to “conceives an image,” which is more accurate not only linguistically but also philosophically and psychologically: it is a mental image that is addressed here. Navigating between Naturalism and Idealism 1281 To be sure, the human lover does not create the good and the beauty within the beloved;119 rather, he perceives, affirms, and rejoices over it: that is to say, the lover rejoices over the beloved him- or herself, who is manifest to the lover as good and beautiful. This perception accounts for the objective dimension of the love: “We must have experienced and ‘seen’ that the other person, as well as his existence in this world, really is good and wonderful; that is the precondition for the impulse of the will that says, ‘It’s good that you exist!’ ”120 Or as Balthasar would have it: “The image was only concealed in the beloved, and the eyes of love had to come and raise it from the depths.”121 On the other hand, in the experience of sensual beauty, we are not simply referred to something that is “present and discernible.” Far from arriving at some sort of satisfaction of our desire, the experience of beauty awakens one to “expectation”: “We do not see or partake of a fulfillment,” Pieper explains, “but of a promise.”122 What precisely is anticipated, Pieper suggests, is the lover’s union with the beloved. The delightful cry of affirmation, “It’s good that you exist!” expresses the lover’s specific desire to be one with the beloved. And, “[t]his once again confirms, from another angle, that love’s act of approval is not intended as mere verification; rather, it is an impulse of the will that takes the person of the other as its partner and is involved in the other himself.”123 This, in other words, is an invitation that the lover bestows upon the beloved. His is not only an objective love; it is also an ideal one: a summoning or encouraging love, a love which Pieper perceives as “a continuation and in a certain sense even a perfecting of what was begun in the course of 119 St. Thomas explains this with penetrating realism in the distinction that he draws between divine and human love: “God loves everything that exists.Yet not as we love. Because . . . our will is not the cause of the goodness of things, but is moved by it as by its object [cf. ST I–II, q. 27, a. 1; q. 25, a. 2] our love, whereby we will good to anything, is not the cause of its goodness; but conversely its goodness, whether real or imaginary, calls forth our love, by which we will that it should preserve the good it has, and receive besides the good it has not, and to this end we direct our actions: whereas the love of God infuses and creates goodness” (ST I, q. 20, a. 2: “]M]anifestum est quod Deus omnia quae sunt, amat. Non tamen eo modo sicut nos. Quia enim voluntas nostra non est causa bonitatis rerum, sed ab ea movetur sicut ab obiecto, amor noster, quo bonum alicui volumus, non est causa bonitatis ipsius, sed e converso bonitas eius, vel vera vel aestimata, provocat amorem, quo ei volumus et bonum conservari quod habet, et addi quod non habet, et ad hoc operamur. Sed amor Dei est infundens et creans bonitatem in rebus”). See also idem, Super Ioan. 5, lect. 3, no. 753, and ST I–II, q. 110, a. 1. 120 Josef Pieper, “On Love,” 198. 121 Balthasar, Theo-Logic I, 115. 122 Pieper, “On Love,” 251. 123 Ibid., 197. 1282 Michele M. Schumacher creation” when the divine Artist brought forth the universe by his Word (the Son) and, by the same Word, affirmed that it was “very good” (Gn 1:31).124 As for the beloved, who consciously experiences this simultaneously realist and idealist love, Pieper imagines him responding in the words provided by Robert O. Johann: “I need you in order to be myself. . . . In loving me you give me myself, you let me be.”125 Certainly, this does not literally mean, as Dean Martin put it in his 1960 hit: “You’re nobody ‘til somebody loves you.” To assent to any such proposition would be to deny the objective dimension of love: to the fact that it is founded not simply upon an idealized (even idolized) image of the beloved but rather upon the actual impressed image of the beloved in the mind’s “eye” of the lover; for as Pieper would rightly have it, “there can be no true love without approving contemplation.”126 Balthasar nonetheless suggests that the beloved knows that “the realization of his best potentialities is, not his merit, but the creative work of love, which impelled him to realize them, held before him the mirror and the ideal image, and bestowed the strength to attain the goal.” Hence, and in short, “In this creative happening”—that of the dynamic encounter of lover and beloved—“every distinction between subjective and objective becomes meaningless.”127 Within the parameters of love, it is true to affirm: “It is in the Thou . . . that we find our I.”128 VII. Conclusion: Christ, the Divine Archetype and the Moral Norm If the particular love of eros between man and woman is, as Pieper and Balthasar suggest, paradigmatic of what the latter calls the “basic law” of human existence (namely that it is in the “Thou” that we find our “I”), it is in the love of God revealed by Christ that this “law” receives “its full truth.”129 By this affirmation Balthasar means more specifically that “[t]he archetype of every creature lies in God, and, because it is conceived and beheld by God, this archetype contains and expresses the entire plentitude of the creature’s perfection (which is possible only in God).”130 Hence, in 124 Ibid.,172. 125 Ibid., 177. Pieper cites in this passage Robert O. Johann, Building the Human (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), 161. 126 Josef Pieper, “On Love,” 161. 127 Balthasar, Theo-Logic I, 115. 128 Balthasar, Convergences, 128. 129 Ibid., 129. See also Margaret McCarthy, “ ‘Husbands, Love your Wives as Your own Bodies’: Is Nuptial Love a Case of Love or its Paradigm?” Communio 32 (Summer 2005): 260–94. 130 Balthasar, Theo-Logic I, 265; cf. Jn 1:3–4. Similarly, the angelic doctor teaches that all creatures “necessarily . . . pre-existed in the Word of God even before they are Navigating between Naturalism and Idealism 1283 the revelation of his glory in his incarnate Son, whom Balthasar fittingly presents as the Creator’s “greatest work of art,”131 God might be thought of as simultaneously affirming our natural goodness and beauty and encouraging their growth and development. He who is “the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15), in whom “all things were created” (v. 16), is also “the first-born of all creation” (v. 15), the One who—John Paul II reminds us in Veritatis Splendor, as he so often did throughout his pontificate— “fully discloses man to himself and unfolds his noble calling by revealing the mystery of the Father and the Father’s love.”132 “The one who is Beauty itself,” writes Pope Benedict XVI, allowed himself “to be slapped in the face, spat upon, crowned with thorns,” precisely so that in his “so disfigured” face there might appear “genuine, extreme beauty: the beauty of love that goes ‘to the very end’ ” (cf. Jn 13:1). “Whoever has perceived this beauty knows that truth, not falsehood, is the real aspiration of the world.”133 Whoever, in other words, has perceived this “(literally) ‘trans-porting’ beauty”134 knows not only the beauty of divine love but also the beauty of his or her own humanity: a humanity which God did not hesitate to assume for the purpose of likening us unto himself in a manner that profoundly respects our freedom. In the powerful words of John Paul II: Christ, precisely as the crucified one, is the Word that does not pass away, and He is the one who stands at the door and knocks at the heart of every man, without restricting his freedom, but instead seeking to draw from this very freedom love, which is not only an act of solidarity with the suffering Son of man, but also a kind of “mercy” shown by each one of us to the Son of the eternal Father. In the whole of this messianic program of Christ, in the whole revelation of mercy through the cross, could man’s dignity be more highly respected and ennobled, for, in obtaining mercy, He is in a sense the one who at the same time “shows mercy”?135 in their own proper nature[s],” just as the plans of a house exist within the mind of the architect before its actual construction (Summa contra Gentiles IV, 13, 10). See also ST I, q. 45, a. 6. 131 Balthasar, “Revelation and the Beautiful,” 117. 132 Vatican Council II, Gaudium et Spes, 22. Cf. Veritatis Splendor, no. 2. 133 “The Feelings of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty,” Message to the Communion and Liberation Meeting at Rimini (August 24–30, 2002) in The Essential Pope Benedict XVI: His Central Writings and Speeches, ed. John F. Thornton and Susan B. Varenne (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 51. 134 Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord I, 221. 135 John Paul II, Encyclical letter, “Rich in Mercy,” Dives in Misericordia (November 13, 1980), §8. 1284 Michele M. Schumacher Precisely in this revelation of the infinite love of God in the Cross of Calvary, the human person comes to understand the profound mystery of his or her own desires: the fact that we naturally long “for love more than for freedom.”136 These words published in 1960—nearly twenty years before John Paul II’s pontificate began in 1978—were echoed all the louder in his first encyclical: Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.This . . . is why Christ the Redeemer “fully reveals man to himself ”. If we may use the expression, this is the human dimension of the mystery of the Redemption. In this dimension man finds again the greatness, dignity and value that belong to his humanity.137 It is not simply the revelation of our humanity that is accomplished by the magnificent gift of his death on the Cross, however; for Christ simultaneously elevates it (especially human freedom) by entrusting us with his own Spirit, through whom “he gives the grace to share his own life and love and provides the strength to bear witness to that love in personal choices and actions (cf. Jn 13:34–35).” In precisely this way, “He himself becomes,” as Veritatis Splendor continues, “a living and personal law, who invites people to follow him.”138 Hence: [Whoever] wishes to understand himself thoroughly—not just in accordance with immediate, partial, often superficial and even illusory standards and measures of his being—must with his unrest, uncertainty and even his weakness and sinfulness, with his life and death, draw near to Christ. He must, so to speak, enter him with all his own self; he must “appropriate” and assimilate the whole of the reality of the incarnation and redemption in order to find himself.139 It is thus obvious for one who has discovered him- or herself in Christ and who lives by his (Christ’s) Spirit that the divine Artist does not so much act upon us as act within us (cf. Gal 2:20): that is to say, in a manner that 136 Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, 136. 137 John Paul II, Encyclical letter, “The Redeemer of Man,” Redemptor Hominis §10. 138 Veritatis Splendor §15. Similarly, Balthasar holds that “the polarity . . . between objective norm and subjective conscience . . . is modified for believers by the Incarnation of Christ, for Christ himself becomes the norm that dwells in a new way within his followers without their ever being able to control it” (Epilogue, trans. Edward T. Oakes [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004], 76). 139 Redemptor Hominis §10; cited in Veritatis Splendor §8. Navigating between Naturalism and Idealism 1285 profoundly respects our freedom. It is, after all, by “performing morally good acts” that the Christian is said by John Paul II to “strengthen, develop and consolidate” his or her “likeness to God.”140 He or she is therefore both “artist and artifact.”141 From this perspective—that of Veritatis Splendor—there is no better way to bring about a cultural appreciation for the beauty of the truth than to be enraptured by it.142 Love is possessed only when it is given away, and beauty is seen only by one who is surrendered to it. It is by living in accord with the truth of our own humanity (and thus the truth of our sexuality), as it might be discovered in the natural law and still more profoundly in Christian revelation, that we will increasingly discover its meaning and lead others to do the same. For, while “the splendor of truth shines forth in all the works of the Creator,” it shines “in a special way, in man, created in the image and likeness of God (cf. Gen 1:26).”143 Discovering and experiencing this splendor nonetheless requires that we take time to listen and contemplate the Creator’s mind in his creation—including the creation of our embodied persons—and thus also his intentions for our lives.This, in turn, means letting go of all that deafens our hearing and obscures our sight from the perception of beauty and truth. This requires faith: a profound trust in God’s goodness and his power. It also requires humility, because what is given does not originate within us. We have claim to it only as having received it.144 Yes, this is pure and simple gift, but it is a gift which calls forth a gift: the freedom to love. In the final analysis, the woman of faith will discover herself neither in a heavy block of stone (an image of naturalism in the reduced “form” of physicalism), nor in modern man who—as modern feminism would have it—may reduce her to a projection of either himself or of his interests upon her (as in the Sartrian brand of existentialism), far less still in her isolated self (modern idealism). Rather, it is in the affectionate regard of the lover, who keenly perceives her natural beauty and goodness and simultaneously encourages her to become who she is—the beloved 140 Cf. Veritatis Splendor §39. 141 Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord I, 221. 142 Balthasar puts it well: “If all beauty is objectively located at the intersection of two moments which Thomas calls species and lumen (‘form’ and ‘splendour’), then the encounter of these is characterized by the two moments of beholding and of being enraptured” (The Glory of the Lord I, 10). 143 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, prologue. 144 “The creature can no more claim the values it carries as its own property,” Balthasar fittingly explains, “than the artwork can pass itself off as the artist, even when it contains the artist’s best” (Theo-Logic I, 236). 1286 Michele M. Schumacher (indeed, the chosen) one who is invited by his love to love in return145— that she will most fully discover the mystery of her own humanity and thus also of her sexuality. Precisely this realist vision—which Balthasar suggests is as much transcendent as it is objective—is a paradigm of the love of God in Christ Jesus: the divine Archetype in whom we were chosen “before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him” (Eph 1:4). If, however, we have perceived, in his loving regard, the affirmation of our natural goodness and beauty and have heeded his call to live accordingly, this is because we have been enraptured and transported by “the light of God’s face shin[ing] in all its N&V beauty on the countenance of Jesus Christ.”146 145 “The Bridegroom is the one who loves. The Bride is loved: it is she who receives love, in order to love in return” ( John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem §29). See Michele M. Schumacher, “The Prophetic Vocation of Women and the Order of Love” in Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 2:2 (Spring 1999): 147–192. 146 Ibid. §2. Cf. Ps 4:6; 2 Cor 4:6. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2013): 1287–1314 1287 Book Reviews The Ethics of Abortion: Women’s Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice by Christopher Kaczor (New York: Routledge, 2011), x + 256 pp. T HIS PHILOSOPHICAL work provides an excellent comprehensive evaluation of contemporary moral arguments regarding abortion and argues that “the vast majority of abortions are morally impermissible” (12). The author engages the foremost philosophers who have treated the issue in depth. Fair-minded and balanced, Kaczor’s approach criticizes weak arguments against abortion as well as all the arguments permitting it in a tone that communicates respect for all parties to the debate. The book’s argument follows the basic reasoning that personhood begins at conception, that persons have full moral status from that point, and thus that abortion is morally wrong. The first chapter sets out the book’s thesis and articulates the expectation that dialogue about abortion should respectfully address the strongest arguments on each side. For example, Kaczor works through the many problems with Judith Jarvis Thompson’s famous argument for abortion and frequently engages the arguments of David Boonin, Mary Ann Warren, Michael Tooley, and Jeff McMahan. Chapters two through four refute arguments permitting infanticide and abortion. Chapters five through seven make Kaczor’s argument that personhood depends not upon the presence or absence of certain developmental properties but upon the possession of the constitutive properties of personhood, which are by definition present at every stage of development.This “constitutive property argument” holds that personhood begins at conception, that all persons from conception have certain rights, in particular the right to life, and that abortion violates this right. Finally, chapters eight and nine evaluate arguments for and against abortion in dire circumstances, such as rape, and entertain reasons why the use of artificial wombs, if ever successfully developed, might provide an alternative that preserves life, thereby eliminating any legitimate rationale for choosing abortion. 1288 Book Reviews To some readers, the refutation of arguments for infanticide in chapter two may seem unnecessary. However, some of the most sophisticated arguments in favor of abortion also justify infanticide, implicitly if not explicitly. Moreover, some readers will wonder why Kaczor argues against positions that no one seems to hold or that seem absurd. For example, to argue for the view that species is morally relevant, the author notes the moral difference between a hit and run accident involving a squirrel and one involving a newborn, and he notes the condemnation of cannibalism; both of these examples presume the moral superiority of the human species. This strategy clears away confused thinking and helps readers work through some of the poor rhetoric in the abortion debate. It also puts in place principles that expose weaknesses in more sophisticated arguments, such as McMahan’s argument that, since we can create chimeras, the moral status of human beings is a matter of the degree to which a human being possesses a certain characteristic. By noting the obvious fact that sleep does not eliminate personhood, Kaczor demonstrates that personhood cannot be based on the presence of certain characteristics, such as consciousness. This point, however, draws into sharp relief the arbitrariness of basing personhood or moral status upon any transient condition or characteristic, a logical fault which he calls the “episodic problem” (48). Personhood, he argues, cannot be based on something that comes and goes. Chapters three and four challenge arguments for abortion that deny personhood to the child before birth. In his challenges, he attacks some justifications for current abortion legislation, which permits abortion until the child is born. Kaczor’s analysis shows clearly why birth does not modify personhood at all and exposes the weaknesses of arguments, such as those of Mary Ann Warren and of Tristram Engelhardt, to justify abortion but not infanticide. Kaczor notes that the characteristics by which those authors grant protection to the newborn—for example, biological humanity, capacity for social interaction, need for social recognition for survival, preservation of trust and protection of the weak—apply equally to the fetus. The only real difference between the newborn and the fetus is its location, which is relevant to discussions of a woman’s rights but completely irrelevant to the child’s status as a person. Supposing that location influences personhood, for example, leads to the absurd conclusion that an embryo fertilized in vitro or a fetus removed from the womb for surgery has personhood until it is replaced in the womb and by that placement loses its personhood, only to regain it at birth. Kaczor’s demonstration here illustrates one of the book’s strengths: patiently correcting false reasoning that might otherwise have been more evident, but that the debate’s heated rhetoric obscures. Book Reviews 1289 Chapter four continues to expose the arbitrary criteria used to define away personhood before birth and justify abortion. Here the most important justifications argue that if a fetus lacks conscious desires or interests or sentience, or if it has not yet implanted, then it lacks personhood and can be aborted. Against the conscious desires argument for personhood, Kaczor first recalls that, as a standard for personhood, the possession of desires and interests suffers from the episodic problem outlined previously. Then he argues that abortion deprives the child not only of personal interests but of a deeper value, of the good of life itself. He criticizes the logic of the interest standard, noting the absurdity of thinking that a greater or lesser desire to live makes a murder any more or less grave. Similarly, a greater or lesser capacity for pain or pleasure does not render nonexistent either personhood or the concomitant right to life. Regarding implantation, Kaczor explains that laws have historically given importance to implantation as a standard for judging feticide, not personhood, because guilt for murder requires knowledge of the victim’s presence. Implantation was historically a reasonable standard for making this judgment but it merely obscures the personhood debate. Chapters five through seven present the core of Kaczor’s argument that all human beings are persons because they have the necessary human constitutive properties, that even the embryo has a right to life, and that abortion violates this right. This argument is based upon an endowment account of personhood, that is, that persons are “beings with endowments that orient them toward moral values, such as rationality, autonomy, and respect,” rather than a performance account of personhood, that is, that beings command respect “if and only if, the being functions in a given way” (93). Since even adult individuals differ in performance by degrees, judgments of performance base personhood, and thus equality of rights, upon characteristics that individuals possess differently or not at all. But personhood and the right to life should be based on properties that each person shares equally. Kaczor identifies biological humanity, present at conception, as the most evident, relevant constitutive property for determining the beginning of personhood. He includes rationality as a constitutive property and argues that rationality is no less present in the embryo, who cannot exercise rationality, than reproductive capacity is present in the person who happens not to be actively reproducing. Thus his “constitutive property argument” for human personhood proposes that any being possesses its constitutive properties (including biological humanity and rationality for humans) at every moment of its existence, that an individual human person is the same being as the fetus (or embryo) from which it developed, and thus that each 1290 Book Reviews human zygote is also a human person. The long section at the end of this chapter provides a good evaluation and rebuttal of the arguments of Singer, Tooley, and McMahan that changes in rational or physical characteristics at some point after conception could represent a new identity for the being and thus the onset of personhood and right to life protection. Similarly, chapter six rebuts other arguments against the personhood of the embryo: for example, that the embryo is related to an adult as an acorn is to an oak; that it is too small, or might undergo twinning, or is like a “bag of marbles” rather than an organism. Chapter seven completes the book’s basic argument by explaining why the personhood of the embryo and the right to life make abortion morally impermissible. In this chapter Kaczor gives a clear, penetrating refutation of Thompson’s famous arguments that abortion is morally permissible even if the embryo is considered a person. He also handles revisions of Thompson’s arguments by later philosophers who attempted to reinforce those arguments. This chapter will be particularly helpful to those working through the details of various arguments in the debate. Kaczor’s thesis that the vast majority of abortions are impermissible raises curiosity about what circumstances render an abortion morally permissible and why. Kaczor has in mind only cases in which the pregnancy seriously threatens the health or life of the mother, and he argues based on the principle of double effect. Many readers will be surprised that Kaczor does not permit abortion in cases of rape. His guiding principle, an important one, is that the poor circumstances of an individual’s conception, shocking and tragic though they be, do not justify killing that individual. In the case of rape, not only is it possible to bear the child without endangering the life and health of the mother, but “to bear a child conceived in these most difficult of circumstances is to perform an act that is in complete contradiction of what takes place in a rape . . . [when] a man assaults an innocent human being” (184). Kaczor applies this principle to other cases involving difficult circumstances, such as fetal deformity, and asserts that sometimes people are “faced with the choice between the morally wrong and the morally heroic. A merely permissible option is not available” (185). While this observation about heroism has some intuitive plausibility, the book should have given it a longer discussion. Kaczor’s argument requires heroic action of some people who will be completely unprepared to perform it, and persuasive arguments for abortion trade on this reality. In the book’s final chapter, Kaczor continues to develop his previously published proposal that artificial wombs could end the abortion debate. He argues that artificial wombs (which at present are not technically possible) would provide such a clinching alternative to abortion that Book Reviews 1291 choosing abortion would reveal either malice toward the child or a discomfort with the idea of artificial wombs that would nonetheless hardly justify abortion. Kaczor adds that artificial wombs would relieve the mother of many if not most of the burdens of pregnancy and thus satisfy a major concern of abortion advocates. Kaczor’s discussion eliminates several poor arguments against the use of artificial wombs, but his own argument needs more development in order to demonstrate that the use of such wombs would constitute a morally acceptable alternative to an elective abortion. He invokes the widely accepted, correct premise that removing a nonviable child from its mother’s womb is permissible when the child’s life is threatened by a pathology in the mother, such as an incompetent uterus, or by the act of another, such as when the mother is poisoned, or even by an act of the mother, such as when her irresponsible driving leads to a car accident or when her smoking leads to lung cancer and she will die. These examples, given by Kaczor, are not controversial because the immediate threats to the child are unavoidable and were never directly intended. Thus, Kaczor effectively demonstrates that the mere use of an artificial womb is not necessarily an unjust deprivation of maternal shelter and gestation. Kaczor needs to explain in more depth how the use of an artificial womb to avoid an elective abortion could end the abortion debate. Their use might exacerbate the problem of professionals’ cooperation in that practice. Kaczor recognizes that “if the life of the human fetus is threatened by the choice of abortion, deprivation of maternal gestation is blameworthy . . . [because] the danger to the child is voluntarily caused and could be voluntarily removed” (221). The problem, which runs throughout the book but is not mentioned here, is that the danger is not likely to be removed in places where elective abortion is legal. Thus, on the one hand, it seems just to remove the child from the threat of the mother’s will to abort. Kaczor emphasizes this point by observing “[W]hether the danger is voluntarily or non-voluntarily caused makes no difference from the perspective of the preborn who are threatened with death” (221). On the other hand, it is difficult to see why this use of artificial wombs does not represent morally unacceptable cooperation in the mother’s project to deprive the child of maternal shelter and gestation, which Kaczor recognizes to be immoral. The mother wishes the child gone from her womb, and the medical team directly provides the essential means, albeit as an alternative to abortion. In practice, willing professionals could easily be found for the procedure as long as it were rare. But what if this practice became widespread? What about the corrosive effects on the moral culture of societies that adopt this practice? 1292 Book Reviews For its comprehensive treatment of arguments for and against abortion, its many wise arguments, and its forthright and respectful tone, this outstanding study is an essential read for anyone seriously considering the abortion issue. N&V Grattan Brown Belmont Abbey College Belmont, NC Benedict XVI and the Sacred Liturgy: Proceedings of the First Fota International Liturgy Conference edited by Neil J. Roy and Janet E. Rutherford (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010 ), 204 pp. T HE ISLAND of Fota lies in the harbor of Cork, behind the town of Cobh. It has now been the idyllic site of six international conferences on the Sacred Liturgy.The first of these, held in 2008, gathered scholars from North America and Europe in order that they might reflect upon the contributions of Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI to the arising of a new liturgical movement in the Catholic Church. One positive aspect of this conference is the fact that not all of the presenters were liturgical specialists. It was refreshing to see a biblical scholar, moral theologian, systematic theologian, historian, historical theologian, and professor of medieval studies being invited to contribute their insights. The book begins with a brief introduction by a former student of Joseph Ratzinger’s,Vincent Twomey, on the importance of the liturgy in Pope Benedict’s theology of creation, ecclesiology, Eucharistic theology, sacramental theology, and theology of world religions. This is followed by nine conference papers, which treat of Pope Benedict XVI’s own liturgical formation, his specific contributions to a new liturgical movement, particular liturgical issues which have attracted his interest and benefited from his insight, and his understanding of the liturgical vision of the Second Vatican Council. Joseph Murphy gives a succinct introduction to Benedict XVI’s liturgical theology. He recounts how Joseph Ratzinger became a devotee of the liturgical movement of the early twentieth century, and an enthusiastic supporter of Sacrosantcum Concilium, only to be then disenchanted with many of the changes introduced in the post-conciliar period, becoming convinced that this period had ushered in a disintegration of the liturgy rather than the reform which the Council fathers had desired, and so there arose the need for a new liturgical movement. Perhaps the material that will be most familiar to those who have been following the dispatches from the frontlines of the liturgy wars will be Book Reviews 1293 that found in the essays by Alcuin Reid, Helen Hull Hitchcock, and James Hitchcock. Reid recounts Joseph Ratzinger’s enthusiasm for the liturgical movement, and his subsequent perception of two erroneous misinterpretations of the council—one which rejects the liturgy of the past in favor of the liturgy of the present, and one which rejects the liturgy of the present in favor of the liturgy of the past. To both of these errors, Pope Benedict opposes an organic development over time. One could say that Reid sees Benedict the homo liturgicus (157) as the “wise scribe” who brings out of his storehouse things both new and old. Reid presents the Pope as proposing three pillars of liturgical reform in a new liturgical movement. They are (1) the faithful celebration of the modern liturgical rites; (2) the free use of the pre-conciliar liturgical rites; and (3) a “reform of the reform,” that revised the modern liturgical books in order to include some of the treasures previously discarded. Helen Hitchcock claims that Pope Benedict’s approach to the liturgy is a laudable balance between “conservatives” who reject the Novus Ordo and “liberals” who wish to model the liturgy on contemporary relativism. She makes the astute point that he views both of these extremes as regarding the Second Vatican Council as a radical rupture with the past, for good or ill, and that both destroy an awareness of continuity in the liturgy, whether they opt for a 400-year-old one or are forever creating new liturgies. Both parties think that faith comes through regulations and learned research rather than the living history of the Church. James Hitchcock attempts to put the post-conciliar developments in the liturgy into a cultural context. He presents the Zeitgeist of that period as moving from a more “pastoral” approach to the liturgy, in the sense of being under episcopal direction, to that of a rule by apparatchiks, liturgical “experts” possessing unfettered confidence in their agenda, which was a turn to anthropos and away from theos. He regards this confidence as misplaced, since they demonstrated little deep understanding of the relationship between the life of ritual and the life of faith. The result, according to Hitchcock, was a devastated Catholic culture. In this reader’s opinion, he presents us with two ironies—the pastoral insensitivity of much of the supposedly “pastoral” approach of many of the reformers following a “pastoral council,” and the cultural insensitivity of many, despite the fact that, in the secular sphere, there was a growing awareness of the damage done to indigenous cultures by colonial powers. By far the longest essay in this collection is that by Manfred Hauke on the work of Klaus Gamber, whom Joseph Ratzinger described, in his introduction to Gamber’s The Reform of the Roman Liturgy, as “the one scholar who, among the army of pseudo-liturgists, truly represents the 1294 Book Reviews liturgical thinking of the centre of the Church.” To one who had heard about Gamber only via this reported quote from Pope Benedict, this paper was most informative. Gamber is presented as epitomizing that which is needed in a “new liturgical movement”—someone able to steer between the Scylla of “archaism” and the Charybdis of “modern fabrication.”Yet Hauke also gives an analysis that is genuinely and appropriately critical rather than a panegyric. Despite the length of Hauke’s essay, not much space is devoted to a discussion of the reception of Gamber’s liturgical theology by Benedict XVI. Is Gamber an influence, inspiration, soul-mate, or some combination of these? In looking at what he regards as a crisis in sacred art, Uwe Michael Lang takes, as his starting point, the distinction between “religious” and “sacred” art made in Sacrosanctum Concilium §122. Sacred art is that which is destined for the sacrum, for the sacred liturgy. It is also popular, since it is intended to be understood and loved by the faithful. After briefly recounting the Church’s historical teaching on sacred art, Lang then outlines the expression and fundamental cause of a crisis in contemporary sacred art: this art, which in many ways is little more than a tired imitation of early twentieth-century art, embodies a rejection of the beautiful. It is the ugly that is true.This understanding led to a widespread notion that “beauty is not an appropriate category of the Church’s worship” (105). In spite of this notion, Lang sees the present time as a propitious moment for the Church to renew its engagement with the secular artistic world through its understanding and presentation of the transcendentals. “The search for beauty has nothing to do with mere aestheticism or flight from reason, because, from the divine perspective, beauty, along with truth and the good, is convertible with being” (103). Lang thinks that Pope Benedict agrees with Dostoevsky’s idea that “the world will be saved by beauty,” the beauty revealed on the face of Christ. Dennis McManus and Jorge Maria Cardinal Mejia give two different but complementary accounts of the difficulties facing the translator of liturgical texts. McManus gives an impressive analysis of the historical and philosophical context of current theories of translation. Although a nonspecialist in translation theory may miss a few of the finer points, McManus’s account is very enlightening. To learn that “dynamic equivalence” is only one of a number of schools of thought in translation theory, or that its philosophical foundation is to be found in logical positivism, leads one to a better understanding of the complexities involved in making “faithful” translations of liturgical and biblical texts. Mejia takes a broader approach to the problem of translation. He places this problem in a theological context—that of Babel and Pente- Book Reviews 1295 cost. He sees both as still being present with us. The need for translation is ultimately the consequence of sin. All translations are imperfect. Pentecost is a sign that, within the Church, this consequence can be overcome. Pentecost raises the possibility of true mutual understanding, of overcoming incomprehension and misunderstanding. For Mejia, translation is not merely a practical task. The translator must see it as a ministry, a service to build up the Body of Christ. Mejia finishes with the reflection that although all languages are of equal worth, the ancient practice of distinguishing Hebrew, Greek, and Latin as “sacred” is worthy of respect, since it was in the first two languages that God chose to speak to us, and Latin has been the historical vehicle for the transmission of the faith in the Latin Church. It would have been good to see Mejia develop this “incarnational” principle to include the revelation of the Father to us in Jesus the Christ, for he too is a “trans-lation”—the Word of God who came and pitched his tent amongst us. It is the final essay by Neil Roy which has remained most vividly in my mind. He gives a brief analysis of a particular point regarding those two lists of saints which fall, in the Roman Canon, before and after the narrative of institution and the consecration. The first list occurs in the prayer named for its incipit Communicantes; the second list appears in the prayer beginning with the words Nobis quoque peccatoribus. This paper contends that the two groups of saints, led, in the first instance, by the Blessed Virgin Mary and, in the second, by St John the Baptist constitute a euchological Deësis, which presents them in an intercessory role on either side of Christ made present on the altar in the institution and consecration. Roy goes on to show how this δέησις , this supplication, entreaty, petition, or intercession, is to be found in both Christian art and doctrine, especially in the east. He points out what these two groups of saints in the Roman Canon can teach us about the worship of God in the sacred liturgy, how the Canon “introduces in a marvellous order the Bride, the Bridegroom, and the Friend of the Bridegroom who will welcome all those invited to the Mystical Supper, the Lamb’s high feast (197).” Roy’s essay is a simple example of what the whole goal of liturgical scholarship should be—helping the Body of Christ to worship God in the sacred liturgy. By itself, it is worth the price of admission. Although this book gives an excellent introduction to many of the current philosophical, theological, historical, cultural, aesthetical and linguistic challenges confronting the contemporary celebration of the sacred liturgy, it does not cover everything. For example, those looking 1296 Book Reviews for an introduction to Benedict XVI’s profound insights into music in the liturgy can read the proceedings of the Third Fota International Liturgy Conference, on Benedict XVI and sacred music. There is also one potential drawback to a conference such as this—all of the presenters seem to be thoroughly convinced of the rightness of Pope Benedict’s liturgical ideas. How interesting it would have been to read the papers from a conference on Benedict XVI and the Liturgy that included such balanced critics of his liturgical theology as Joseph Komonchak, Thomas Rausch, and John Baldovin. N&V Peter John McGregor Catholic Adult Education Centre, Archdiocese of Sydney, Australia Humanism and Religion: A Call for the Renewal of Western Culture by Jens Zimmermann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012 ), x + 379 pp. T HIS SUBTLE , difficult, and wide-ranging study aims at nothing less than the revival of the religious basis of a humane culture in Western lands.There are several ways in which this aim might be realized: by direct evangelization, for instance; or, again, by adopting an educational program in which classical Christian literary texts and artifacts are key; or, yet again, by devising legislation that would align the positive law with natural and divine law in the relevant jurisdictions.The book under review eschews such strategies. Instead, it argues that values and verities accepted by humane people (there is a tautology here, for the definition of humane people includes reference to accepting the values and verities in question) depend for their historical genesis on the Judaeo-Christian tradition and, philosophically speaking, are only defensible by accepting some version of that tradition’s fundamental anthropology—summed up in the description of man as the imago Dei. Expressed thus, the work’s purpose and method don’t sound, perhaps, especially startling or even original. But what is unusual about the work (here I employ a comparison from cricket, with apologies to American readers) is how far the author feels he must move back in the crease before he can take aim and bowl. For a good deal of the book is taken up with defending such notions as epistemological realism, the use of participation language in metaphysics, the complementarity of transcendence and immanence, the necessity of historical understanding, the significance of the ability to translate from one language to another for the unity of the human species, and other basic philosophical matters which are remotely, rather than proximately, involved in any defense of the status of humanity as “in the image of God.” Book Reviews 1297 This makes the book subtle.What makes it also difficult (apart from the inherent demands of the subject-matter so described) is that the author does not expound this circle of ideas in his own name. Instead, he explores these themes through a series of investigations of other writers, whether corporately, as in the case of the Fathers (though here Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, and Augustine are specially prominent), or, more usually, individually. He paints a gallery of portraits that include, most importantly, Vico, Dilthey, Heidegger, Levinas, Gadamer, Blondel, and Bonhoeffer. As these names may suggest, a key focus of the book is interpretation theory, introduced chiefly, I believe, so as to keep at bay the two intellectual positions from which the writer seeks to distance himself: a thorough-going anti-religious skepticism, and an equally distasteful (in his eyes) religious “fundamentalism.” The problem here is that the term “fundamentalism” is exceptionally slippery unless very tightly defined. The Australian theologian Gerald O’Collins has remarked that he ceased to use it when he saw it applied to himself by a reviewer who considered it sufficiently evidenced by someone’s upholding the bodily resurrection of Christ. Throughout the body of the book, however, some very fine things are remarkably well said. This is especially so in regard to the manner in which the Incarnation is said to constitute the climactic expression of the imago Dei, and to license, not least through its own expression in the Tradition of the Church, the Eucharistic community of foot-washers, many of the philosophical motifs the author has discussed in relation to figures from whose minds (we may be fairly confident) these Christological, ecclesial, and sacramental-moral themes were entirely absent. A subtle book may influence subtle minds. More straightforward intelligences will be puzzled. How is it possible to renew a set of presuppositions, desirable for the background of thought and sensibility, in a culture that has rejected the credenda which are their foreground articulation? If a culture, still desiring (for the most part) to be humane, has lost that sense of the personal derived from Trinitarian Christology, and the feeling for the incarnational issuing from the Incarnation, can this sense and this feeling be revived without evangelical proclamation, and without a public agenda for the transformation of all dimensions of life together? I very much hope this book has a positive effect commensurate with the huge effort of thought that has gone into its making. But, without a revival of N&V the Church herself, I should also be very much surprised. Aidan Nichols, O.P. Blackfriars, Cambridge 1298 Book Reviews A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss, afterword by Richard Dawkins (New York: Free Press, 2012 ), xix + 202 pp. Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012 ), 309 pp. ATHEISTS HAVE always had particular difficulty answering Gottfried Leibniz’s famous question: why is there something rather than nothing? One sign of their perplexity is their standard non-answer: well, if God exists, who created God ? Exactly why this riposte is seen as the ace’s trump in the atheists’ deck of cards is baffling. For the God of classical theism is held to be the uncaused cause. Perhaps theists are wrong in their belief in this kind of God; but to ask who created this God is only to sidestep the issue by refusing to engage the very God monotheists claim to be worshipping. Meanwhile, in this back-and-forth round robin, Leibniz’s question goes unanswered, leaving the universe hanging out there as just a sheer, brute, unexplained fact. Some atheists must realize this, because now the ground of argument has shifted to the latest developments in cosmology, where the claim is heard that the universe brought itself into being, a position advocated most recently by Lawrence Krauss in his book A Universe from Nothing. But readers don’t have to wait long before they come to realize that the author is playing a game of Three-Card Monte here. For at regular intervals he changes his definition of nothing: initially, he seems to concede a thoroughgoing concept of nothing in the Leibnizian sense, but then— sometimes alerting the reader to his legerdemain and sometimes not—he starts talking about nothing as, well, something. Here is a particularly rich example of Krauss at work: First, I want to be clear about what kind of “nothing” I am discussing at the moment. This is the simplest version of nothing, namely empty space. For the moment, I will assume space exists, with nothing at all in it, and that the laws of physics also exist. Once again, I realize that . . . [for] those who wish to continually redefine the word so that no scientific definition is practical, this version of nothing doesn’t cut the mustard. However, I suspect that, at the times of Plato and Aquinas, when they pondered why there was something rather than nothing, empty space with nothing in it was probably a good approximation of what they were thinking about. (149) The reader will especially savor Krauss’s use here of that coy adverb probably, which can be translated to mean: “Since I can’t be bothered to Book Reviews 1299 read enough in the history of philosophy to know what I’m talking about—philosophy now having yielded the runner’s baton to physics anyway—I’ll just attribute to authors I’ve never read what they must have meant, and all to suit my own convenience.” Convenient indeed: “I am more interested here in being true to our current understanding of the universe than in making an apparently easy and convincing case for creating it from nothing” (165). But it’s Krauss who’s being easy on himself here, and not remotely convincing. For time and again he keeps importing a “something” (however wispy and speculative) to act as a stand-in for the philosopher’s true nothing, thereby avoiding Leibniz’s dilemma. His argument, in other words, is more suited to the enticements of a carnival barker trying to get patrons into the tent to see the tattooed lady flaunt her freakishness than it is to the engagement of a serious professional who is wrestling with Leibniz’s question on its own terms. No wonder, then, that the author, near the end of the book, has to shut down his curiosity about the sheer, blunt existence of the universe: “Why is there something rather than nothing? Ultimately, this question may be no more significant or profound than asking why some flowers are red and some are blue” (178). No wonder, too, that he keeps shifting his argument from metaphysics (where he is totally at sea) to the safer shores of physics: “When we ask, ‘Why?’ we usually mean ‘How?’ If we can answer the latter, that generally suffices for our purposes” (143). Again, as with his lazy adverb probably noted above, his cop-out adverbs here—usually and generally —are unintentionally hilarious. The reader is bound to ask: So what about those moments when the How question does not suffice? Our author never asks that question, and he certainly never answers it. The book comes with an Afterword from England’s most devout atheist, Richard Dawkins, who overreaches badly when he ranks it with Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. After reading the book, with all its shape-shifting maneuvers and sleights of hand worthy of a professional magician, the reader will be especially amused by another fillip of unintended irony from Dawkins’s Afterword: “Theology not only lacks decimal places: it lacks even the smallest hint of a connection with the real world” (190). So that’s theology’s problem: it lacks decimal places. The man is simply beyond parody. But as to Krauss’s book itself (rather than Dawkins’s empty dithyramb), and prescinding from Krauss’s risible arguments for a self-caused universe out of a Nothing that turns out to be a Something, even a skeptical audience can still appreciate his skill as a popularizing explainer. General readers innocent of the arcana of physics have much to learn here about the role of quantum mechanics in cosmic origins and about how dark energy 1300 Book Reviews will hasten the end of the universe. The recent discovery of the latter has now established that the universe will not eventually collapse back in on itself into what is known as a “singularity” (the initiating moment of the Big Bang) but will continue to stretch out into virtual infinity because of the repulsive force of the aforesaid dark energy: Billions of years from now, all galaxies will recede past earth’s event-horizon (thereby disappearing from our visual field), after which even atomic matter itself will eventually break up. The scenario Krauss depicts is no doubt bleak, and he says so: “the future . . . is one in which nothingness will once again reign . . . with nothing in it to appreciate its vast mystery” (179). But without a truly metaphysical argument for God’s existence, he cannot explain the hope irrepressibly present in the human heart in the face of certain death, one’s own and that of the universe as well. Jim Holt, too, subscribes to that old chestnut rejoinder of the college sophomore: “If God exists, who made God?” But at least he realizes that there is a genuine problem here once it is stipulated that God does not exist. In his pleasingly written “existential detective story,” Holt takes his readers along on his journey as he interviews several scientists and philosophers (and one novelist, John Updike, but no theologians, although Updike mentions his debt to Karl Barth), most of whom, but not all, are atheists. One great virtue of his book comes from the ease with which he dispatches Krauss’s argument (who must be glad he was not interviewed): “If the laws of physics are Something, then they cannot explain why there is Something rather than Nothing, since they are part of the Something to be explained” (161). To his credit, physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg concedes the point: “I’m not saying that the multiverse would resolve all philosophical issues. It would eliminate the sense of wonder surrounding the fact that conditions in our universe are just right for life and consciousness. But we would still be faced with the mystery of why the laws of nature are such as to produce the multiverse of which our universe is a part. And I don’t see any way out of that mystery” (157). Another virtue of the book comes from Holt’s philosophical acuity in spotting a grammatical snag in the way the word nothing is used in ordinary language. Normally, that pesky word serves as a substitute for the term not anything, as in “Nothing is better than a hot shower after a long day in the coal mines.” But the word can also be used nominally, as in “Nothing is better than life in prison” (meaning “I would prefer capital punishment to a life sentence without parole”). In a clever passage, Holt takes these two usages—as the adverbial negation of the word anything Book Reviews 1301 and as a noun in its own right—and weaves them into an amusing riff that bears quoting in full: What is nothing? Macbeth answered this question with admirable concinnity: “Nothing is, but what is not.” My dictionary puts it somewhat more paradoxically—“nothing (n.): a thing that does not exist.” Although Parmenides, the ancient Eleatic sage, declared that it was impossible to speak of what is not—thereby violating his own precept—the plain man knows better. Nothing is popularly held to be better than a dry martini, but worse than sand in the bedsheets. A poor man has it, a rich man needs it, and if you eat it for a long time, it’ll kill you. On occasion, nothing could be further from the truth, but it is not clear how much further. It can be both black and white all over at the same time. Nothing is impossible for God, yet it is a cinch for the rankest incompetent. No matter what pair of contradictory properties you choose, nothing seems capable of embodying them. From this it might be concluded that nothing is mysterious. But that would only mean that everything is obvious—including, presumably, nothing. (41–42) Beyond this drollery, Holt continues to catch out most of his interlocutors begging Leibniz’s Ultimate Existential Question—or, in the case of the famous philosopher of science Adolf Grünbaum, not asking the question at all: “Either you have a hunch that the sheer existence of the world needs an explanation, or you have a hunch that it doesn’t,” says Holt. “Grünbaum stood firmly in the latter camp, and no intuitions about the alleged simplicity of nothingness were going to move him” (75). But as Holt points out, wishing away a question does not answer it, anymore than a policeman telling pedestrians to walk briskly past a crime scene solves the crime the pedestrians have just been told to ignore. The author also catches out the Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne in another—but in this case rather different—question-begging moment. Swinburne rightly holds Anselm’s ontological argument (which claims that God must exist because that’s what the definition of God is: necessary being) to be fallacious. But then Swinburne goes on to claim that Anselm’s fallacy entails that God does not exist necessarily; rather, God only happens to exist, contingently. Holt of course joins Swinburne in noticing that the ontological argument argues from the dictionary, not from reality, and for that reason collapses: “An idea of God is not a kind of God, albeit less perfect, any more than a painting of a piece of fruit is a kind of fruit, albeit less nutritious” (112). Swinburne, however, takes that insight to prove that God exists contingently, meaning, as a brute fact— a fact so brutal that it comes as a surprise even to God: 1302 Book Reviews But would Swinburne go so far as to say that God’s existence was a “brute fact”? “Yes, I would,” he replied. “I would say that. It’s not merely that there is no explanation for God’s existence. There couldn’t be an explanation. One of God’s properties is omnipotence. If anything happens to him, it’s because he allows it to happen. Therefore, if something else brought about God, it could only be because God allowed it to bring about God.” (105; Holt’s italics) This strange way of putting things leads to intolerable conundrums; and to his credit Holt is not shy in spotting them and in driving them home to his interlocutor: “As to why God exists, I can’t answer that question. I can’t answer that question,” [Swinburne responds]. Could even Swinburne’s God, if we were able to ask him, answer it? “I am who am,” the voice from the burning bush announced to Moses. But did that voice ever ask, “Whence then am I?” If there were an explanation for God’s existence, then God, being omniscient, would know it. But if there really was no explanation—if he is indeed the Supreme Brute Fact—then he would know that too. He would know that his own existence as a contingent being was, in Swinburne’s words, “vastly improbable.” Would the divine mind be puzzled by its inexplicable triumph over the perfect simplicity of Nothingness? (106) What lies behind Swinburne’s bizarre conclusion, I think, comes from a change in the debate inaugurated by René Descartes, who led natural theology into a cul-de-sac when he defined God as causa sui, that is, as the cause of his own being. But as John Caputo notes in his lucid booklet Philosophy and Theology (Abingdon, 2006), this position is incoherent: Descartes established what would become standard practice among the moderns, to refer to God as the “cause of itself ” (causa sui ) whereas for Aquinas, God is the “first cause uncaused,” the cause of everything else but himself without a cause. If something else were the cause of God, then God’s cause would be greater than God. Then why not say that God is the cause of himself? Because that makes no sense. It would mean that a thing gives itself what it does not have—like lifting yourself up by your own bootstraps, or bringing yourself into being where you previously did not exist. To be your own cause is to be before your time, to be there ahead of your own coming into being, which you then bring about; it is to be there already when you are not there yet. Like being your own father or mother. And that makes no sense. But while such things are impossible for us, surely they are possible with God, for whom all things are possible? Not so fast, answered Aquinas. It makes no sense to say that God can do things that make no sense, not Book Reviews 1303 when God is the very height of sense and meaning and truth. It pays God no real compliment. It makes much more sense to say . . . that God is the first cause of everything else but God himself is uncaused, that God exists in and of himself, as pure and sheer eternal necessity, without beginning and without end. (25) This reader concluded Holt’s book both admiring his tenacity in keeping his interlocutors’ feet to the Leibnizian fire but also hoping that somehow that tiresome who-made-God rejoinder could be declared forever illegal—not of course in the felonious sense of a violation of criminal law, but rather in the computer-programming sense, as when one gets an error message after instructing a pocket calculator to divide by zero. That shopworn who-created-God meme might seem like the ultimate zinger in a college dormitory late at night; but it does not get at the God of classical theism. As Thomas Aquinas said, with his usual lapidary flair, “Everything eternal is necessary” (De Potentia q. 7, a. 9). Not necessary in the Anselmian sense, as if atheism is conceptually impossible; rather, necessary in the sense that the concept of God as contingent cause of himself is self-contradictory. That said, one does learn from Holt’s book that atheism always remains a live option for genuine searchers, and it does so precisely because of the human condition, a point Thomas too recognized: “Whatever is comprehended by a finite being is itself finite” (Summa theologiae I–II, q. 4, a. 3, ad 1). As Isaiah said, and as Blaise Pascal never tired of repeating in his Pensées: “Truly thou art a hidden God” (Is 45:15). N&V Edward T. Oakes, S.J. University of St. Mary of the Lake Mundelein, IL Romance and System: The Theological Synthesis of Matthias Joseph Scheeben by Aidan Nichols, O.P. (Denver: Augustine Institute, 2010 ), ix + 537 pp. T HIS WORK is something of a Summa of the work of Scheeben for those who lack the capacity to read the several thousand pages of material which remains untranslated from the original German. Scheeben’s Handbuch der katholischen Dogmatik alone ran for well over 3,000 pages. Aidan Nichols’s overarching thesis is that Scheeben’s work combines both “romance” and “system”: Owing to its emphasis on the mysteric, it must perforce press into service a range of imagery in order to express what lies beyond reason.That Book Reviews 1304 is a feature which links it to Romanticism in philosophy and the arts: hence my term “romance”. At the same time, its concern to do full justice to the epistemic status of theology as a science . . . also obliged Scheeben to make a serious effort towards “system”. That is the feature which links his work to classicism in philosophy and the arts—both pre-romantic and, in the shape, not least, of neo-Thomist metaphysics and theology, post-Romantic too. In Scheeben’s case both romance and system are in the service of recreating what in the High Middle Ages was a self-evident thesis. To wit, the human being, with his knowing and experiencing, is encompassed within a greater, more comprehensive, supernatural whole. (4–5) At almost precisely the same time as this book was published an essay by John Milbank appeared in Modern Theology with the title “The New Divide: Classical versus Romantic Orthodoxy.” The general thesis of Milbank’s article was that liberal theology is on the wane and that the interesting contemporary debates are between those who seek to defend the rationality of the faith with reference to philosophical propositions and doctrinal pronouncements and those interested in an engagement with Romantic-movement issues, including the love and reason relationship, the history and ontology relationship, and the reason and tradition relationship. Milbank presents the division in the following terms: The “romantics” think that the collapse of a reason linked to the higher eros led to the debasement of scholasticism and then to secular modernity. Resistance to the latter had therefore to oppose rationalism and even to insist more upon the role of the “erotic”—the passions, the imagination, art, ethos etc.—than had been the case up till and including Aquinas. The exponents of “classicism” on the other hand (largely located in the United States) trace secularity simply to a poor use of reason and regard the scholastic legacy, mainly in its “Thomistic” form, as sustaining a true use of reason to this very day. . . . The conflict between these two parties is therefore one between opposed metanarratives.1 The question of the influence of the nineteenth-century scholastics and German Romantics on contemporary theology is thus something of a “hot topic.” At least two authors have already sought to bridge this division with a valorization of the more erotic dimensions of Aquinas. See, for example, Graham McAleer’s Ecstatic Morality and Sexual Politics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005) and Thomas Hibbs’s Aquinas, Ethics and Philosophy of Religion: Metaphysics and Practice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1 John Milbank, “The New Divide: Classical versus Romantic Orthodoxy,” Modern Theology 26 (2010): 26–38. Book Reviews 1305 2007). In the present work Nichols is fostering a similar reconciliation project by offering Scheeben as an exemplar of a via-media between the two main schools of Catholic theology in nineteenth-century Germany: the Catholic Tübingen School (especially in its early phase) and neoScholasticism. One might argue that these schools were the precursors to the contemporary division identified by Milbank. The book contains chapters on Scheeben’s account of the theological virtue of faith, of the nature and grace relationship, of the Christian mysteries, the modes of revelation and its transmission, the one God, the attributes of divine being and life, the immanent and economic Trinity, Creation and the Fall, Christology, sacramental theology, justification and glorification, and Mariology and ecclesiology. The work is therefore a systematic theology in one volume. In the early sections Nichols makes it clear that Scheeben was no Kantian. His core concept of faith was a kind of Autoritätsglaube: “authority-faith.” This is “a firm holding as true or a decided judgement of the mind, that does not rest on its own insight or direct acquaintance (Kenntnisnahme) with the object of that judgment, but on the insight or knowledge made over to us by another intelligent being” (22). Nichols thereby concludes that Scheeben regarded reason’s authority as a participation in the authoritative rationality of God (23). Consistent with this anti-Kantian orientation, Nichols argues that Scheeben is committed to the view that not only theology but also philosophy can and should be “Christian and Catholic.” Scheeben can thus be read as a precursor to Étienne Gilson, who was a leading figure in the French debates of the 1930s on the issue of whether there can be such an animal as “Christian philosophy.”2 In an earlier work, From Hermes to Benedict XVI: Faith and Reason in Modern Catholic Thought (2009), Nichols argued that Ratzinger/Benedict XVI follows in the tradition of Gilson on this issue.Thus one might conclude that Scheeben, Gilson, and Ratzinger/Benedict approach the issue of the relationship between faith and reason from the same or a very similar perspective. 2 For an account of these debates see Reason Fulfilled by Revelation: The 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates in France, edited by Gregory B Sadler and published in 2011 by The Catholic University of America Press. This book sets out the players in the debate and places the protagonists into three camps: Neo-Thomist Opponents of Christian Philosophy, Thomist Proponents of Christian Philosophy and Non-Thomist Proponents of Christian Philosophy. Having identified the basic intellectual fault-lines between the protagonists, the editor then offers English translations of the significant articles by Étienne Gilson, Antonin D. Sertillanges, Bruno de Solages, Maurice Blondel, Fernand van Steenberghen, Étienne Borne, Gabriel Marcel, Léon Noël and Emile Bréhier. 1306 Book Reviews Nichols also observes that “for any given theological author, the relation between reason and faith is mirrored in the account offered of the relation between nature and grace; or, in other words, the reason/faith relationship is in epistemology what the nature/grace relationship is in ontology” (65). In this context Nichols explains that while Scheeben begins with “exceedingly clear distinctions” he then seeks to “marry them” and he uses a variety of nuptial metaphors to describe their union. The following is Nichols’ more expansive account of Scheeben on this pivotal issue: He [Scheeben] seeks to establish that, at any rate, sharing in the holiness specific to God himself can only be termed beyond nature in every sense. Accepting that, in an absolutely basic sense, there is a capacity for this vision in the human being or else it would not be a fulfilment for man however superlative, Scheeben insists that the “appetite” for it must be elicited and an “act of the will ordered to that beatitude without moving by a supernatural agent cannot be had.” He accepts the implication that a purely natural end for man is, therefore, thinkable (denklich) and its approximate contours could no doubt be stated theologically and philosophically (it would entail some form of knowing and loving God). But “in actual fact” (tatsächlich) it is not by reference to such a putative natural end but only in relation to the revealed supernatural end that our nature has been determined.The will must be raised above its own nature, just as the mind must be exalted by means of the light of glory. Otherwise, a “love-unity” between the blessed and God analogous to that between the Father and the Son—and this is what the New Testament holds out to us—cannot enter the anthropological picture. Caritas beatifica can only be supernatural, surely. (84) This approach was discussed in some depth by von Balthasar in Seeing the Form,Vol. I of The Glory of the Lord series at pages104–17 of the Ignatius Press English translation, wherein he drew the following conclusion: At the heart of Scheeben’s understanding of things lies the notion of the “in-formation” of nature and grace, nature thus being considered to behave as materia. This in-formation, however, is understood as a divine ‘begetting’ in the ‘womb’ of nature. Matter-and-form, a philosophical pair of concepts, is deepened and ‘transfigured’ by Scheeben into the bride/bridgroom relationship. (110–11) In one line Nichols asserts that Scheeben was indebted in his analysis of the nature and grace relationship to Francisco Suárez and Juan Martinez de Ripalda, though he does not take the observation further and offer an inventory of the debts Scheeben owed to these Spanish Book Reviews 1307 scholastics. Given Karl Rahner’s quip that Suarez’s account of the relationship between nature and grace was the “original and mortal sin of Jesuit theology,” it would be an interesting exercise to examine in depth just how close in thinking Scheeben was to Suárez. Certainly at the time when Scheeben was writing, the Suárezian account was the dominant position, but Suárez is now generally credited with fostering the idea that there are two separate ends for human beings, and this interpretation does not sit well with contemporary nuptial mystery theology. Moreover, it was an idea explicitly rejected by the young Ratzinger in his essay on the treatment of human dignity in Gaudium et Spes. If Scheeben’s work is to be appropriated for the contemporary nuptial mystery theology projects, it might first need to be de-contaminated of any Suárezian residue. It may also be necessary to examine more closely Scheeben’s use of the noun “supernature.” Henri de Lubac, in A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace at pages 33–41 of the Ignatius Press English translation, was critical of Scheeben for turning the adjective “supernatural” into a noun “supernature.” De Lubac endorsed what he called the “contorted explanation,” in Karl Rahner’s Mission and Grace, of why this is a problem. When it comes to the issue of revelation Scheeben argued that there are two significant moments: first, the acceptance of revelation through the act of faith, and secondly, the understanding of that content through the representation or conception of that truth. In relation to the second moment, Scheeben acknowledged that no conceptuality will yield a thoroughly complete understanding of revelation (41). Thus revelation cannot be reduced to a pocket-book of doctrines. There will always be a surplus. In his Mysteries of Christianity (5), Scheeben wrote: A truth that is easily discovered and quickly grasped can neither enchant nor hold. To enchant and hold us it must surprise us by its novelty, it must overpower us with its magnificence; its wealth and profundity must exhibit ever new splendors, ever deeper abysses to the exploring eye. Here one might say (though Nichols does not make this point) that Scheeben anticipated Jean-Luc Marion’s notion of “saturated phenomena,” which “exceeds what the concept can receive, expose and comprehend.” Nichols does however lament that Scheeben did not pay more attention to the Tübingen theologians on the point of the historical nature of revelation. This was the particular contribution of the Tübingen theologians (in part through Rahner, Ratzinger, and de Lubac) to the Vatican II document Dei Verbum. Nonetheless, this oversight notwithstanding, 1308 Book Reviews Nichols concludes that “everywhere the Trinity is central to [Scheeben’s] construction,” and that within the Trinity, Christ constitutes “the ‘heart’ or ‘knot’ of that nexus mysterium in his own person” (490). While Scheeben may have missed some Tübingen insights, with the consequence that he failed to reach the Dei Verbum position of treating Christ’s revelation as the primary source of both Scripture and tradition, he did nonetheless offer a systematic theology that was deeply “Christocentric Trinitarian.” In his account of the Trinity, Scheeben was influenced by a wide variety of theologians including Augustine, Anselm, and especially Richard of St. Victor (266). Here Nichols observes: For Richard, the love of Father and Son is not fully perfect in every respect since, in loving each other, they love different objects—and this introduces a difference of direction in their love. Their mutual love first becomes unconditionally perfect in the Holy Spirit. In him, the affections of Father and Son are fused into one by the fire of their love for this third, since now their love has the self-same object. (269) Nichols concludes that Scheeben’s preferred account of the Holy Spirit is not so much an echo of Richard as it is an anticipation of von Balthasar (270). Other points of particular theological interest were: 1. Scheeben’s insistence that the Church is not preaching an old natural morality with some added trimmings, but rather her proclamation is a new supernatural morality that participates in the sublime character of dogma (78). 2. Scheeben’s opposition to the notion that the minister of the sacrament of marriage is the priest who blesses the union rather than the covenanting couple themselves. On this point Nichols concludes: “theologians who accepted the notion that marriage even between the baptized is a profane reality until given a blessing by the Church’s minister have lent their support, wittingly or not, to civil attempts to separate out marriage as such from the Church” (406). 3. Scheeben’s view that a married couple are not merely a symbol of the union of Christ and the bridal Church but rather that Christian marriage is intrinsically rooted in the spousal union of Church and Redeemer (405). 4. Scheeben’s stance on predestination does not follow St. Thomas but in Nichols’s judgment comes closer to the view known as “congruism” Book Reviews 1309 associated with St. Robert Bellarmine and St. Francis de Sales. Finally, Josef Höfer proposed that Scheeben is a Catholic Dilthey—“in all his activity as a theologian Scheeben wanted to serve the more interior realization of salvation, just as Dilthey did the enrichment of secularized life” (486). They were both interested in the reality of human life as it is lived with its “supernatural” dimension (in the case of Scheeben) and a “spiritual” dimension (in the case of Dilthey). One might also suggest that there are interesting affinities between Scheeben and Blondel. Scheeben was trying to do in theology what Blondel was trying to do in philosophy, that is, to bring history and dogma together in an integrated whole. Given that Benedict XVI has emphasized that “love and reason are the twin pillars of all reality,” it is certain that one of the key projects of the current generation of theologians will be that of reconciling at a higher level of synthesis the contributions of the scholastic and the Romantic heritage. For far too long, scholastics have operated as though being a good Catholic is all about having the right intellectual framework which governs a well-disciplined will, while the heart has been treated as nothing more significant than an organ to pump blood around the body. The Romantics rebelled against that disposition, and various individual scholars have been aware of the problem. Dietrich von Hildebrand, for example, was daring enough to write about the heart as a serious philosophical subject; Robert Sokolowski in his work on natural law has emphasized that the words for the heart in Latin and Greek (cor and kardia) as used by St. Paul in his Letter to the Romans “do not connote the separation of head and heart that we take for granted in a world shaped by Descartes”; Jean-Luc Marion has carved out a space for a consideration of such subjects as love and idolatry at the highest levels of the elite academies, and Joseph Ratzinger has identified the understanding of the “mediation of history in the realm of ontology” as the most serious theological question of the twentieth century. Not only is it impossible to ignore the questions of the relationship of reason to love and of ontology to history, but the task of gaining a deeper understanding of these relationships is at the core of magisterial efforts to deal with the cultural crisis of the Western world. Nichols has therefore done scholars a great service by making Scheeben, someone sympathetic to both romance and system and interested in both history and ontology, accessible to English readers. N&V Tracey Rowland John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family Melbourne, Australia 1310 Book Reviews Inspiration and Interpretation: A Theological Introduction to Sacred Scripture by Denis Farkasfalvy, O.Cist. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010 ), x + 251 pp. T HE CENTRAL question of this book concerns the relationship between hermeneutics and the doctrine of inspiration. The starting point is the reconstruction of the formation of the Christian Bible in two parts: the choosing of the Old Testament and the joining of the Old Testament with the New. Farkasfalvy notes that the earliest expression of the Christian faith is preaching and personal witness, not the production of written documents. He observes that a new interpretation of the Old Testament in light of Christ led to production of new literary works. His central question is, if the word of God is found in the Scriptures in a unique and special way, how does this translate into exegetical practice? Problems concerning inspiration, canon, interpretation, and interconnection between the two testaments can be expressed in two categories: (1) the origins of the biblical texts as divinely inspired literary products and therefore as normative for the Church, and (2) the principles and methodology of exegesis. Farkasfalvy examines first the role of the Old Testament in the apostolic Church. Citing 1 Corinthians 15:3–4, he notes that Paul here envisions Scripture in its totality: he presupposes the authority of the Jewish Scriptures, as well as the faith Israel put into these sacred writings.The Church’s Bible, he continues, is the product of communal discernment, and this process was an organic one. Concerning the notion that the starting point for the apostolic Church was preaching and not writing, he addresses the “problem” of pseudonymity. He writes that the gospels circulated under their current titles, but this does not necessarily imply that they were written by these persons. “Authorship” can simply mean that a certain work was written on someone’s authority, and in this sense it refers more to the spirit of a certain work than to the one holding the pen. The goal in the attribution of texts was to link the text with the preaching of the supposed witness: writing is an extension of apostolic preaching. Farkasfalvy also notes that all New Testament Scripture has a Eucharistic provenance, which indicates that the texts of the New Testament originate in the historical, social, or cultic background of the early Church’s celebration of the Eucharist. The Pauline epistles are perhaps the clearest instances of this, but he also cites Acts 20 and the gospel narratives of the feeding of the multitudes. All of these texts arose with an eye toward and on the Eucharistic assembly. For Farkasfalvy, the key to the Scriptures is the discovery therein of salvation history. The central principle that governed the process of establishing the canon is that a certain work is Book Reviews 1311 built on the prophets and apostles: a gospel was accepted or rejected on the basis of its apostolic credentials. Marcion, for example, accepts Luke because he assumes that Luke follows Paul, and because for Marcion Paul was the only true apostle. Farkasfalvy spends some time speaking of patristic exegesis after Irenaeus, particularly with reference to Origen. While he concludes the chapter by drawing attention to patristic authors who were influenced by Origen’s exegetical schema (Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, etc.), his primary focus is Origen’s four senses of Scripture as he himself understood them. The literal sense is that which is gleaned through textual, literary and grammatical research, and thus it will be the same for any reader who approaches the text. The literal sense, however, is not to be equated with the historical-critical understanding of the text for two reasons: first and foremost, Origen lacks a specific historical consciousness; second, modern historiography is done critically, with special attention paid to an author’s biases and presuppositions. The allegorical sense, Origen writes, is a spiritual or symbolic meaning of the text, the Christological relevance of a given passage. Farkasfalvy observes correctly that the allegorical sense is the cornerstone of Origen’s approach. Origen’s allegorical sense could be said to be an expansion of Irenaeus’s synthesis. The modern critique of allegory, of course, is that it is open to arbitrary use and fanciful applications. Because of this tendency, Origen’s approach (as well as the allegorizing tendencies of other ancient authors) has been viewed with suspicion. Origen’s third sense is the tropological, or moral, meaning of a given text. Every text that speaks of Christ must lead to questions concerning moral conduct. The fourth sense is the anagogical or eschatological, or that which concerns the final outcome of salvation history. For Origen, the second, third, and fourth meanings are collectively the spiritual sense of the text. This is expressive of a sort of Platonic dualism between letter and spirit. Letter is a sign and symbol, and thus it both veils and reveals the reality toward which it points. For Origen, the final point of the exegetical process is a spiritual encounter between God and the human soul. Exegesis, therefore, is as much about experience as it is about intellectual comprehension. Farkasfalvy writes that Origen’s legacy led to the socalled Golden Age of Patristic exegesis: for a millennium, all exegetes were influenced by and reliant upon Origen’s model. Farkasfalvy writes of a shift that occurs in the Middle Ages. In this period, the letter by itself is counted as dead, and the context for interpretation is always the Church’s living tradition. For Aquinas, sacra scriptura and sacra doctrina are mutually inclusive, and the task of theology writ 1312 Book Reviews large is the interpretation of the Bible. Medieval exegetes perpetuate Origen’s fourfold schema, as well as the notion that all Scripture is a reflection on Christ. The rise of the Scholastic exegete brought with it a revival of classical philosophy, as well as closer attention to the literal meaning and less attention to the moral meaning. On inspiration in medieval exegesis, Farkasfalvy writes that God is counted as the principal cause and thus is fully the “author” of all biblical texts. Divine causality is, however, mediated through imperfect instruments. Therefore, the text is considered to be the product both of divine and of human authors. These are not in conflict however, because of the subordination implied by the scheme of instrumentality. Farkasfalvy’s chapter on medieval exegesis is tellingly short. On the one hand, he admires theologians of the period for their interest in textual mechanics. But his criticism is that they seem to have had more interest in constructing theological systems than in exegesis. Moreover, he maintains that exegesis in this period is overburdened by allegory and symbolism, and that the period was characterized by a lack of clarity in the relationship between interpretation and philosophical reflection. The humanistic renaissance of the fifteenth century represents a major break with the past. This movement was characterized by an eagerness to cultivate the original Hebrew and Greek and to demand a new theological discourse based on these more “authentic” forms of the text (note Erasmus’s first printed edition of the Greek NT that appeared in 1516). Following this movement, the Reformation translations brought the Bible to the masses, and these translations were considered by some to be superior to the Vulgate because of their basis in the original languages (notably, the Vulgate was itself a translation of the Greek and Hebrew, at least in theory). So-called spiritual exegesis also continued in this period. For Catholics, the Spirit was found to be active in and through the teaching office of the Church, whereas for Protestants, it was at work in the private realm of the conscience. In doctrinal disputes, the allegorical sense of Scripture was not thought to be acceptable, and so focus shifted to the literal, historical sense. This gives rise to the notion of Scripture as a source of proof texts and a collection of propositional statements which, for Farkasfalvy, constitutes confessional exegesis. In the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment gives birth to the rational study of the Bible. Moving on to Vatican II, Farkasfalvy proffers his double thesis concerning Dei Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation. First, he writes that Dei Verbum successfully restored the proper context in which Tradition developed and nurtured the theology of inspiration, inerrancy, and the ecclesial use of Scripture. Second, he argues Book Reviews 1313 that the document is a sketchy and incomplete text that still awaits completion. For it and for the theological manuals, the point of departure is the proof of the existence of inspiration. Revelation in Dei Verbum is comprehensive in that it includes all forms and means of communication that have been chosen by God. Revelation takes place in history, and so it cannot be reduced to verbal and conceptual expressions. Moreover, revealed truth itself cannot be reduced only to propositional statements; it is a complex set of historical events and developments. Farkasfalvy’s criticism of Dei Verbum, or at least an observation concerning the text, is that it makes no attempt to bridge the gap separating the precritical view of history from contemporary thought. In his view, the Council document “cautiously preferred to repeat traditional language and avoided confrontation between biblical history and modern anthropology” (173). Moreover, Dei Verbum is incomplete because it fails to provide more specific guidelines about the relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament, as well as the relationship between human and divine authorship. According to Farkasfalvy, the following questions (noted on 201–2) need to be answered. First, how does formation of the Bible transmit the charism of the prophets and apostles? Second, how did subjective inspiration that affected the biblical authors result in biblical texts and in the Church’s possession of the canon? Third, the issue of verbal inspiration needs to be revisited: we must recognize the importance of the canonical text’s accuracy and the Church’s ongoing vigilance over Scripture. Fourth, we must explore the ecumenical potential and relevance of the New Testament canon. The central question of this book is: If the Bible is an inspired book, and uniquely so, then how does its inspired character affect the way(s) in which it is to be interpreted? The presupposition, of course, is that the Bible is inspired. That is, this is not a point that Farkasfalvy is interested in—or even able to go about—proving. Instead, his main concern is to specify what is meant by inspiration and how inspiration affects such things as truth and inerrancy. These terms, to be sure, also need definition. Farkasfalvy proposes, in concert with other church documents, a relationship of mutual reciprocity between inspiration and truthfulness: the Bible is inspired if and only if it is true and vice versa. Farkasfalvy is uncomfortable with the notion that God is the author of the Bible, in the sense that God has never written anything (at least not in the literal sense). He is more comfortable in speaking of God’s inspiring the Bible in the sense that Jesus himself is the beginning of the gospel. That is, Jesus’ words and deeds inspired others to preach and share the good news of God’s salvation. It is essential in this context to remember that kerygma precedes text. 1314 Book Reviews The book as a whole is well constructed, and the chapters on Irenaeus and Origen, specifically on their pioneering exegesis, are especially insightful and clear. Those chapters establish that the two theologians read the Bible in and with a pre-critical mind and that they read various texts in concert with others. Unfortunately, he doesn’t really, in the later portions of the book, go on to use what he has established in the earlier. The chapter on inspiration and medieval exegesis—the shortest in the book—seems to be cast in an air of frustration with much of medieval exegesis.The chapters on Dei Verbum and post-Council literature are by far the most synthetic in the book. Farkasfalvy approaches Dei Verbum in a spirit of respect and admiration, but he is not wholly uncritical of the document or its propositions. Overall, the thesis of the book is that the Bible begs to be read in the same spirit in which it was written, and only when we do so may we arrive at the true meaning of the texts contained therein. Farkasfalvy has attempted in this work to address several important and daunting questions in a relatively short space, and he has done so with an enviable level of clarity. This book stands out among many recent attempts to answer questions related to interpretation of those texts that Christians considered inspired, and is recommended for anyone interested in issues pertaining to theological exegesis of Scripture. N&V Eric Vanden Eykel Marquette University Milwaukee, WI Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2013): 1315–1319 1315 General Index to Nova et Vetera Volume 11 (2013) Sr. Maria of the Angels, O.P., Vineyards and Landscapes: Lectio Divina in a Secular Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Christopher O. Blum, A Fruitful Restraint: The Perennial Relevance of the Virtue of Studiousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 953 Perry J. Cahall, The Nucleus of the New Evangelization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Romanus Cessario, O.P., Sacramental Causality: Da capo! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307 Romanus Cessario, O.P., Miscere colloquia: On the Authentic Renewal of Catholic Spirituality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 627 Romanus Cessario, O.P., Premotion, Holiness, and Pope Benedict XIII (1724–30): Some Historical Retrospects on Veritatis Splendor. . . . . . . . . . . . 1115 Holly Taylor Coolman, Proposing the Christian Vision of Marriage: What Can the Dominican Tradition Teach Us?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Adam G. Cooper, Hierarchy, Humility, and Holiness: The Meaning of Ecclesial Ranks according to Dionysius the Areopagite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 649 Lawrence Dewan, O.P., Some Notes on St. Thomas’s Use of “dignitas”. . . . . 663 Douglas Farrow, Theology and Philosophy: Inhabiting the Borderlands . . . . 673 Douglas Farrow, Marriage and Freedom: The Splendor of Truth in a Time of Denial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1137 Edward Feser, Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 707 Pablo T. Gadenz, Jesus the New Temple in the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 Marie I. George, Thomistic Considerations on Whether We Ought to Revere Non-Rational Natural Beings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 751 1316 General Index Nicholas J. Healy, Jr., Simul viator et comprehensor: The Filial Mode of Christ’s Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341 Paige E. Hochschild, John Henry Newman: Mariology and the Scope of Reason in the Modern Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 993 Reinhard Hütter, What Is Faith? The Theocentric, Unitive, and Eschatologically Inchoative Character of Divine Faith. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 Reinhard Hütter, University Education, the Unity of Knowledge— and (Natural) Theology: John Henry Newman’s Provocative Vision . . . . . 1017 Derek S. Jeffreys, The Soul’s Transcendence: Veritatis Splendor and Phenomenology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1155 Christopher Kaczor, John Paul II on the Development of Doctrine. . . . . 1173 Roch Kereszty, O.Cist., Toward the Renewal of Mariology . . . . . . . . . . . . . 779 William S. Kurz, S.J., Mary, Woman and Mother in God’s Saving New Testament Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 801 Matthew L. Lamb, The Millennial Challenges Facing Catholic Intellectual Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 969 Mark S. Latkovic, Benedict M. Ashley, O.P. (May 3, 1915–February 23, 2013): R.I.P.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303 Steven A. Long, The Gifts of the Holy Spirit and Their Indispensability for the Christian Moral Life: Grace as Motus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357 Bruce D. Marshall, Why Scheeben? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407 Ralph Martin, The Post-Christendom Sacramental Crisis: The Wisdom of Thomas Aquinas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 William C. Mattison III, The Beatitudes and Moral Theology: A Virtue Ethics Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 819 Gilbert Meilaender, Person and Work: In Search of Theological Convergence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1193 Charles Morerod, O.P., Conscience according to John Henry Newman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1057 Jeffrey L. Morrow, The Enlightenment University and the Creation of the Academic Bible. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 897 Aidan Nichols, O.P., Presenting the Chalice of God . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 601 Roger W. Nutt, Gaudium et Spes and the Indissolubility of the Sacrament of Matrimony: The Contribution of Charles Cardinal Journet . . . . . . . . . . 619 General Index 1317 Edward T. Oakes, S.J., Pope Benedict XVI on Christ’s Descent into Hell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Edward T. Oakes, S.J., Scheeben the Reconciler: Resolving the Nature-Grace Debate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 435 Simon Oliver, Aquinas and Aristotle’s Teleology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 849 Cyrus P. Olsen III, The Acts of “Turning” and “Returning” in Aquinas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 871 Thomas M. Osborne, Jr., Natura Pura: Two Recent Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Thomas Pink, The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae: A Reply to Martin Rhonheimer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Trent Pomplun, Matthias Joseph Scheeben and the Controversy over the Debitum Peccati . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 455 Kevin Raedy, What Happened to the Vulgate? An Analysis of Divino Afflante Spiritu and Dei Verbum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Anselm Ramelow, O.P., Knowledge and Normality: Bl. John Henry Newman’s Grammar of Assent and Contemporary Skepticism . . . . . . . . . . 1081 Miguel J. Romero, The Call to Mercy: Veritatis Splendor and the Preferential Option for the Poor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1205 Richard Schenk, O.P., Grace as the Gift of Another: M. J. Scheeben, K. Eschweiler, and Today . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 503 Michele M. Schumacher, A Woman in Stone or in the Heart of Man? Navigating between Naturalism and Idealism in the Spirit of Veritatis Splendor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1249 Clinton Sensat, A Call Unheeded: Walker Percy and the New Evangelization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 609 Bruno M. Shah, O.P., The Promise of a Unitary Sacred Theology: Rereading Aeterni Patris and Fides et Ratio. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Janet E. Smith, The Universality of Natural Law and the Irreducibility of Personalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1229 Robert Sokolowski, God’s Word and Human Speech. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 R. Jared Staudt, Substantial Union with God in Matthias Scheeben . . . . . 515 Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap., The Son’s Filial Relationship to the Father: Jesus as the New Moses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 Thomas Joseph White, O.P., The Tridentine Genius of Vatican II . . . . . . . . 9 1318 General Index Thomas Joseph White, O.P., The Virgin Mary and the Church: The Marian Exemplarity of Ecclesial Faith. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375 Thomas Joseph White, O.P., Good Extrinsicism: Matthias Scheeben and the Ideal Paradigm of Nature-Grace Orthodoxy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 B OOK R EVIEWS Grattan Brown, The Ethics of Abortion: Women’s Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice by Christopher Kaczor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1287 Aaron Canty, The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Antichrist or the Wisdom of God? edited by Thomas Joseph White, O.P. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281 Anne M. Carpenter, Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology edited by Gabriel Flynn and Paul D. Murray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 565 Raymond Hain, Intractable Disputes about the Natural Law: Alasdair MacIntyre and Critics edited by Lawrence S. Cunningham . . . . . . . 283 Andrew Hofer, O.P., The Trinity: An Introduction to Catholic Doctrine on the Triune God by Gilles Emery, O.P. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288 Kevin Keiser, Did Aquinas Justify the Transition from “Is” to “Ought”? by Piotr Lichacz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 923 Paul Jerome Keller, O.P., We Have Seen His Glory: A Vision of Kingdom Worship by Ben Witherington, III . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 930 Warren Kinghorn, Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice by Kent J. Dunnington . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291 Keith Lemna, La Trinitaire Théologie de Louis Bouyer by Guillame Bruté de Rémur . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 935 John D. Love, Church, State, and Society: An Introduction to Catholic Social Doctrine by J. Brian Benestad. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 568 Taylor Marshall, Biblical Natural Law: A Theocentric and Teleological Approach by Matthew Levering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296 Mickey L. Mattox, Predestination: Biblical and Theological Paths by Matthew Levering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 944 Claire Mathews McGinnis, Genesis by R. R. Reno . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 948 G. J. McAleer, Christianity and Politics: A Brief Guide to the History by C. C. Pecknold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 572 Peter McGregor, Benedict XVI and the Sacred Liturgy: Proceedings of the First Fota International Liturgy Conference edited by Neil J. Roy and Janet E. Rutherford . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1292 General Index Gilles Mongeau, S.J., The Promise of Christian Humanism: Thomas Aquinas on Hope by Dominic Doyle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1319 575 Aidan Nichols, O.P., Humanism and Religion: A Call for the Renewal of Western Culture by Jens Zimmermann. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1296 Edward T. Oakes, S.J., A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss, afterword by Richard Dawkins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1298 Edward T. Oakes, S.J., Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1298 C. C. Pecknold, Balthasar: A (Very) Critical Introduction by Karen Kilby . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 578 Andrew V. Rosato, Treatise on Human Nature: The Complete Text (Summa Theologiae I, Questions 75–102) by Thomas Aquinas, translated by Alfred J. Freddoso . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 585 Tracey Rowland, Romance and System: The Theological Synthesis of Matthias Joseph Scheeben by Aidan Nichols, O.P. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1303 Joseph G. Trabbic, Whose Community? Which Interpretation? Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church by Merold Westphal. . . . . . . . . . . . . 588 Eric Vanden Eykel, Inspiration and Interpretation: A Theological Introduction to Sacred Scripture by Denis Farkasfalvy, O.Cist. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1310 Victor Velarde-Mayol, Thomism and Tolerance by John F. X. Knasas . . . . . . . 939 Jerome Zeiler, O.P., Good and Evil Actions: A Journey through Saint Thomas Aquinas by Steven J. Jensen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299 ANNOUNCING RESEARCH INTENSIVE TRACK MA THEOLOGY AND CHRISTIAN MINISTRY Franciscan University of Steubenville’s MA Theology and Christian Ministry Program now offers a Research Intensive Track specially designed to prepare students for doctoral studies. The Research Intensive Track immerses students in Sacred Scripture, Tradition, and magisterial teaching, giving them a rigorous, authentically Catholic theological education that strikes a balance between broad formation in the basic theological disciplines and specialization in one discipline with a view to further study. Thus, students will take courses in historical theology, systematic theology, biblical studies, and H JOVZLU ÄLSK VM ZWLJPHSPaH[PVU 9LHKPUN RUV^SLKNL VM [^V foreign languages (one ancient and one modern) is required, and students will have the option to write a thesis. Franciscan University offers this preparation within a faithÄSSLK QV`M\S *H[OVSPJ JVTT\UP[` [OH[ LUOHUJLZ PU[LSSLJ[\HS formation with engaging discussions, notable guest lecturers, and a rich sacramental life. For more information about the MA Theology Research Intensive Track, contact Franciscan University at 800-783-6220 or GradAdmissions@Franciscan.edu. Franciscan University of Steubenville is committed to principles of equal opportunity and is an equal opportunity employer. AVEMARIAUNIVERSITY THEPATRICKFTAYLOR GRADUATEPROGRAMS MAANDPHDINTHEOLOGY Study Sacred Scripture, the Church Fathers, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Blessed John Paul II under the guidance of a world class faculty, including Dr. Michael Waldstein, Dr. Steven Long, and Fr. Matthew Lamb, at our beautiful Southwest Florida campus. Scholarships are available for qualified applicants. FORMOREINFORMATION: www.avemaria.edu/MajorsPrograms/GraduatePrograms Graduate Theology Department 5050 Ave Maria Blvd., Ave Maria, FL 34142 phone: (239) 280-1629 email: graduatetheology@avemaria.edu