et Vetera Nova Spring 2019 • Volume 17, Number 2 The English Edition of the International Theological Journal Co-Editors Matthew Levering, Mundelein Seminary Thomas Joseph White, O.P., Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas Associate Editors Holly Taylor Coolman, Providence College Gilles Emery, O.P., University of Fribourg Paul Gondreau, Providence College Scott W. Hahn, Franciscan University of Steubenville Thomas S. Hibbs, University of Dallas Reinhard Hütter, Catholic University of America 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 C. Pecknold, Catholic University of America Michael S. Sherwin, O.P., University of Fribourg Board of Advisors Anthony Akinwale, O.P., Dominican Institute, Ibadan, Nigeria Khaled Anatolios, University of Notre Dame Robert Barron, Auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles, CA John Betz, University of Notre Dame Bernhard Blankenhorn, O.P., Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas Christopher O. Blum, Augustine Institute Stephen Brock, Pontifical University of the Holy Cross Peter Casarella, University of Notre Dame Boyd Taylor Coolman, Boston College Michael Dauphinais, Ave Maria University Archbishop J. Augustine Di Noia, O.P., Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Douglas Farrow, McGill University Anthony Fisher, O.P., Archbishop of Sydney, Australia Simon Francis Gaine, O.P., Blackfriars, University of Oxford Timothy Gray, Augustine Institute Nicholas J. Healy, Jr., Pontifical John Paul II Institute (Washington, DC) Russell Hittinger, University of Tulsa Paige Hochschild, Mount St. Mary’s University Andrew Hofer, O.P., Dominican House of Studies Dominic Legge, O.P., Dominican House of Studies Joseph Lienhard, S.J., Fordham University Steven A. Long, Ave Maria University Guy Mansini, O.S.B., Ave Maria University Francesca Aran Murphy, University of Notre Dame Thomas Osborne, University of St. Thomas (Houston) Michał Paluch, O.P., Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas Trent Pomplun, Loyola University Maryland Christopher J. Ruddy, Catholic University of America Richard Schenk, O.P., University of Freiburg Michele Schumacher, University of Fribourg Janet Smith, Sacred Heart Major Seminary Christopher Thompson, St. Paul Seminary Thomas Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap., Capuchin College William Wright, Duquesne University Instructions for Contributors 1. Address all contributions, books for review, and related correspondence to Matthew Levering, mjlevering@yahoo.com. 2. Contributions should be prepared to accord as closely as possible with the typographical conventions of Nova et Vetera. The University of Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition) is our authority on matters of style. 3. Nova et Vetera practices blind review. Submissions are evaluated anonymously by members of the editorial board and other scholars with appropriate expertise. Name, affiliation, and contact information should be included on a separate page apart from the submission. 4. Galley-proofs of articles are sent to contributors to be read and corrected and should be returned to the Editors within ten days of receipt. Corrections should be confined to typographical and factual errors. 5. Submission of a manuscript entails the author’s agreement (in the event his or her contribution is accepted for publication) to assign the copyright to Nova et Vetera. Nova et Vetera The English Edition of the International Theological Journal ISSN 1542-7315 Spring 2019 Vol. 17, No. 2 Commentary Anointing of the Sick: The Sanctification of Human Suffering. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Romanus Cessario, O.P. 297 We Are Not God: Reflections on the Theology of Laudato Si.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reinhard Hutter Marian Faith in a Time of Crisis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Michele M. Schumacher 309 323 Symposium: Person, Soul, and Consciousness Taking Matters Personally: Papers from "Person, Soul, and Consciousness," the 2017 Dominican Colloquium in Berkeley.. . . . . . . . . . . Bryan Kromholtz, O.P. Union and Indwelling. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Eleonore Stump Response to Eleonore Stump’s “Union and Indwelling”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Steven A. Long How Can We Understand Transcendence of the Ego?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bas C. van Fraassen The Transcendence of the Self in Light of the Hard Problem: A Response to Bas van Fraassen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ted Peters The Hypostatic Union: Personhood, Consciousness, and Knowledge . . . . . . . . . Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap. Persons, Pronouns, and Perfections: A Response to Thomas Weinandy's "The Hypostatic Union: Personhood, Consciousness, and Knowledge". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anselm Ramelow, O.P. How to Keep the Non-Reductive in Nonreductive Physicalism? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nancey Murphy "How to Keep the Non-Reductive in Nonreductive Physicalism?" by Nancey Murphy: An Appreciative Response. . . . . . . . . . . R o b e r t John Russell Personhood and Recognition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Markus Rothhaar Routes Toward Personhood: Response to Markus Rothhaar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Richard Schenk, O.P. The Word Breathes Forth Love: The Psychological Analogy for the Trinity and the Complementarity of Intellect and Will. . . . . . . . Lawrence Feingold A Deeper Unity: Response to Feingold on the Psychological Analogy for the Trinity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . D.C. Schindler 339 343 363 373 391 401 425 451 465 473 489 501 533 Action, Supposit, and Subject: Interpreting Actiones Sunt Suppositorum. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Brian T. Carl The Human Person as Believer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joseph Gamache 545 567 Book Reviews Jesus, Interpreted: Benedict XVI, Bart Ehrman, and the Historical Truth of the Gospels by Matthew Ramage.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Andrew D. Swafford Commentary on Thomas Aquinas's Virtue Ethics by J. Budziszewski. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Raymond Hain A Theology of Grace in Six Controversies by Edward T. Oakes, S.J.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joshua R. Brotherton The Personalism of John Henry Newman by John F. Crosby.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Elizabeth Huddleston Engaging the Doctrine of Creation: Cosmos, Creatures, and the Wise and Good Creator by Matthew Levering. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gavin Ortlund Theology Needs Philosophy: Acting Against Reason in Contrary to the Nature of God by Matthew L. Lamb. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . David L. Augustine Aquinas and the Theology of the Body: The Thomistic Foundations of John Paul II's Anthropology by Thomas Petri, O.P.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Angela Franks Justice as a Virtue: A Thomistic Perspective by Jean Porter.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jason Heron The Sermon on the Mount and Moral Theology: A Virtue Perspective by William C. Mattison III. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Michael A. Wahl 579 583 588 592 596 599 603 608 612 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. Nova et Vetera (ISSN 1542-7315; ISBN 978-1-949013-90-0) is published quarterly by St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, 1468 Parkview Circle, Steubenville, OH 43952. Nova et Vetera is distributed to institutional subscribers for the St. Paul Center by the Catholic University of America Press. 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Nova et Vetera Subscription Rates: • Individuals: one-year $40.00, two-year $75.00 International: one-year $60.00, two-year $115.00 • Students: one-year $30.00, two-year $50.00 International: one-year $40.00, two-year $70.00 • Colleges, Universities, Seminaries, and Institutions: one-year $110.00, one-year print + electronic subscription $150.00 International: one-year $135.00 To subscribe online, please visit http://www.nvjournal.net. For subscription inquiries, email us at novaetvetera@stpaulcenter.com or phone 740-264-9535. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2019): 297–307 297 Anointing of the Sick: The Sanctification of Human Suffering1 Romanus Cessario, O.P. Saint John’s Seminary Brighton, MA Sacrament for the Rich In the thirteenth century, Extreme Unction was known as the sacrament for the rich. Parish priests—to cite one example—would claim, as a particular sort of in-kind stole fee, ownership of the linen sheets upon which the sick person had been anointed or of the candles that had been lit during the ceremony. One piece of evidence from Germany in 1260 reports that only those “worth at least two cows” should bother asking for the sacrament.2 Clerical avarice and other factors, such as the fear of contagion from those dying, contributed to making Anointing a forgotten sacrament. One may argue that today Anointing of the Sick again suffers eclipse, though for different reasons. The obliviousness results in part from various misunderstandings about the sacrament’s purpose in the Christian life. Overall, and contrary to what the Church expects, a certain lassitude has taken grip on both the ministers of the sacrament and those who should seek its administration either for themselves or for others.3 A widespread and general confusion among Catholics about the need for any sacrament partly explains today’s neglect of the Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick. By and large, contemporary Catholic thought provides sketchy instruction about the purpose of the sacraments and therefore about their necessity. To set forth this basic Christian catechesis This paper was delivered at the Priesthood Conference held in Providence, RI, on August 1, 2017. 2 See Bernhard Poschman, Penance and the Anointing of the Sick, trans. F. Courtney (New York: Herder and Herder, 1964), 244n30. 3 See however what is prescribed in canon 1001 of the Codex Iuris Canonici (Code of Canon Law). 1 298 Romanus Cessario does not require recourse to elaborate theories. Aquinas captures the Church’s teaching on the necessity of the sacraments with both clarity and succinctness: “Sacraments,” he writes, “are necessary for man’s salvation inasmuch as they constitute certain sensible signs of invisible things by which man is sanctified.”4 Instead of this solidly orthodox position, however, not a few parishioners likely think of sacramental celebrations as so many figures on their cultural landscape. They feel at liberty to choose to participate, moreover, in the ones that suit their pleasure and convenience. Young priests report that, not uncommonly, they meet parishioners at civic or social events who compliment them on their performance at the parish but who rarely attend Mass. One cannot emphasize too much the importance of priests’ giving proper instruction on sacramental efficacy for the sake of their pastoral practice.5 Forgetfulness of sacramental efficacy, namely, that the sacraments do something in the supernatural order, affects Anointing of the Sick in particularly harmful ways. Take one example. Many Catholics think of this sacrament as ordered to providing comfort to a grieving family instead of sacramental graces to the sick or dying person. Others, including lay ministers, opine that, for reasons of relevance to the average believer, the sacrament requires non-sacramental and even secular rites to complement its administration. Not a few churchgoers, for instance, consider Anointing as the appropriate Catholic setting to offer a Christian-tinged form of psychological grief counseling. It seems to me that, in order to preach effectively about the need for gravely sick Catholics to receive the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, priests must first preach about the nature of the Church’s sacraments and their efficacy. This moment of evangelization must include an explanation of what is distinctively efficacious in each of the Sacred Seven. To ensure the integrity of the Church’s sacramental practice requires, to sum up, sound preaching and catechetical instruction. As misunderstandings about the nature of Anointing spread, the Catholic people come to entertain odd notions about sacramental practice. Given the above-mentioned confusion about the last rites, many Catholics understandably came to espouse the view that lay people or at least deacons could serve as ministers of the Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick. It seemed to such folks that professional training not sacramental character best prepares one to care for the sick and dying. The popular appeal that this proposal met among Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae [ST] III, q. 61, a. 3. For further discussion, see Romanus Cessario, O.P., “Sacramental Causality: Da capo!,” Nova et Vetera (English) 11 (2013): 307–16. 4 5 Anointing of the Sick: The Sanctification of Human Suffering 299 clerics and lay people illustrates the extent to which the Church’s sacramental actions have become desacralized. This abuse, moreover, enjoys a certain logic within some schools of liturgical theology. If the sacraments are mere symbolic actions that aim to alter or to sustain a person’s religious consciousness, what difference does it make who performs them? In fact, it may be argued, one should prefer the more gifted symbolic enactor to a deputed religious functionary. Similar observations can be made about the other sacraments. If the Mass provides a meal, why can’t anyone serve it? If the Eucharist occasions a community event, why should the priest offer Mass without the event planner, and so on? If Holy Orders deputes a functionary, why reserve priestly ordination to men? If Penance affords me someone to tell my troubles to, why should I confess my seemingly unproblematic adulteries, and so on? At the Franciscan church in New York where confessions are still heard daily, I recently found a sign posted on the confessional. Its message: “Tell only your sins and not those of your neighbor or husband!” In a word, the Truth matters, as Dominicans like to remind us. In a Note dated February 11, 2005, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was obliged to clarify what had become a widespread misconception about the suitable minister for the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. The Congregation, as you know, reaffirmed that only priests and bishops can administer this Sacrament. 6 In a commentary published shortly thereafter by two Dominicans in The Priest magazine, the authors explained that the reasons for this determination pertain directly to the theological meaning of the sacrament, that is, to its sacramental efficacy. What does Holy Anointing do? It confers, declare the authors, a “radically personal configuration to Christ on the part of a faithful Christian in the final moment of earthly existence.”7 The authors conclude that this kind of consecration and the remedy for sin that accompanies it argue for the necessity that the minister of Anointing possess the priestly character, which establishes a man as “Christ’s instrument for his Church.”8 What is more, in the Sacrament of Anointing, there occurs, as in each sacrament, both a distinctive form of divine worship and a distinctive form of rescue from man’s fallen state. Only priests and bishops can validly bring about For the text, see Origins 34 (April 7, 2005): 672–73. See J. Augustine DiNoia, O.P., and Joseph Fox, O.P., “Priestly Dimensions of the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick,” The Priest 62 (2006): 10–13. One may take this consecration as a description of what abides in Anointing of the Sick, the res et sacramentum. 8 Catechism of the Catholic Church [CCC] no. 1581. 6 7 300 Romanus Cessario these effects through their administration of the sacraments.9 The Anointing of the Sick may no longer be thought of as the sacrament of the rich. However, its fruitful reception today is reserved in many cases to those who benefit from extraordinarily sound pastoral care. Anointing of the Sick and Sacramental Realism Students of sacramental realism have become familiar with the terms image-restoration and image-perfection. As the necessity for Baptism indicates, Christian living requires sacramental mediation. No one can shimmy up to heaven alone and unaided. In order to reach the goal of heavenly Beatitude, the human creature requires grace for restoration or forgiveness and grace for its perfection or ennoblement. The vision of God, as sound theologians insist, does not form part of the natural human good.10 God must enable the human intellect to see him “face to face” (1 Cor 13: 12).11 Indeed, Adam with his preternatural human perfection lacked the beatific vision of God.12 Sinful Adam and his heirs find themselves further disadvantaged by reason of their attachment to sinful disorders and the “remains”—the reliquiae—that even forgiven sins leave on the soul and in the body. According to the ordinations of divine wisdom, each sacrament distinctively readies a believer for heavenly bliss by restoring and perfecting his or her Godly image. Anointing of the Sick mainly effects image-restoration. This explains why the Church refers to it as a Sacrament of Healing.13 Because, however, the anointed Christian unites himself to Christ, Anointing also fosters image-perfection. Whoever draws close to Christ in charity receives growth in the virtues and gifts. These virtues and gifts perfect the human soul by making it grow in charity. Within the context of Anointing, this perfection arises from the participation of the believer in the sufferings of Christ. In fact, the Catechism of the Catholic Church explicitly specifies that this configuration aims to unite the believer to Christ’s Passion. The relevant text continues: “in a certain way he [the one anointed] is consecrated to bear fruit by configuration to the Savior’s redemptive Passion.”14 The Code of Canon Law was modified to make this point in canon 1003, §1: “Every priest, but only a priest, can validly administer the anointing of the sick.” 10 See Steven A. Long, “On the Possibility of a Purely Natural End for Man,” The Thomist 64 (2000): 211–37, and Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). 11 See ST I, q. 12, a. 4. 12 See ST I, q. 94, a. 1, ad 1. 13 See CCC, §§ 1420 and 1421. 14 CCC, §1521. 9 Anointing of the Sick: The Sanctification of Human Suffering 301 The editor of the Catechism usefully points out that this consecration may be compared to the abiding consecrations that those who are ordained and those who are lawfully married receive in the sacraments proper to each vocation in the Church. So Holy Anointing brings healing to what remains of sin in us and strengthens the soul for its going forth. In the sixteenth century, Trent called Extreme Unction the sacrament of those going forth, of those departing (sacramentum exeuntium).15 The place that the Anointing of the Sick holds in the pattern of Christian living receives further explanation in the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who picks up the themes from theologians who came before him. Because they believed, rightly, that the existence of seven sacraments reflected divine Providence not historical accident, the early medieval theologians sought to discover the spiritual significance hidden in the number of the sacred realities. In order to explain the number of the sacraments, Aquinas, for his part, employs two models. One model organizes the sacraments in relation to the Eucharist. On this plan, Penance and Anointing of the Sick ready a person to receive the Eucharist.16 The other model compares human growth and development over the course of a lifetime to spiritual growth. Bodily needs find their parallels in spiritual needs. Within this perspective, Anointing of the Sick (which Aquinas calls “extreme unction” [extrema unctio]) “removes the remaining effects of sin and renders man ready for final glory.”17 The old terminology captured something lost in the present usage. The word “extreme” referred to a final consecration to Christ, not to the end of life (in extremis).18 In the same article, Aquinas further explains his meaning when he places the Sacraments of Forgiveness and Healing together under the heading of sacraments that supply a remedy against the harmful effects of sin. As I have mentioned, each sacrament supplies a grace for image-restoration. So Aquinas writes: “The Eucharist [provides a remedy] against the soul’s proneness to sin; Penance against actual sins committed after Baptism; Extreme Unction against those elements of sin which remain, those namely which, whether through negligence or ignorance, are not sufficiently removed by Penance.”19 In Aquinas’s outlook, all the sacraments supply remedies for sin. This orthodox Catholic teaching, however, has all See CCC, §1523. See ST III, q. 65, a. 3. 17 ST III, q. 65, a. 1. 18 This meaning remains in the description of the sacrament that appears in the Catechism of the Catholic Church; see §1535. 19 ST III, q. 65, a. 1. 15 16 302 Romanus Cessario but disappeared from the instruction given by those liturgical practitioners and sacramental symbolists who have been overly influenced by optimistic Christian anthropologies. When the Catechism of the Catholic Church refers to what Anointing of the Sick effects, it mentions more generally the “the forgiveness of sins.”20 The reason for this broader description of the special effects of Anointing lies in the practice of the Church not to take sides in theological debates. In fact, Aquinas throughout his career denied that Anointing “is ordered to the forgiveness of venial sins.”21 On the other hand, Saint Bonaventure and Scotus and his school after him “saw,” in the words of one expert, “the principal effect [of Anointing] in the remission of venial sins which weigh on the soul of the dying man and prevent his complete abandonment to God.”22 For his part, Aquinas held that contrition suffices for the remission of venial sins and that Anointing remains ordered to the elimination of the “remains” (the reliquiae) of original and personal sins. By “remains,” he means the dying person’s weaknesses and unfitness as well as his lack of strength and vigor. Spiritual conditions that are rendered more acute by bodily infirmity. Think of the impatience that the Little Flower exhibited on her deathbed when she was given the wrong dose of medicine.23 For the purposes of contemporary pastoral practice, it matters little, in my judgment, whether one follows Aquinas or Scotus. Because of casuistry and other developments in moral theology, few people have become familiar with the analogical character of sin. Instead, the atomistic categories of mortal and venial sin predominate in catechetical instruction. Aquinas prefers a fulsomely theological account of actual sin, which he understands as any movement that originates in fallen nature and that moves a person away from the Good God. Whatever veers from the teleology of the good, even those movements which arise outside of an explicit consciousness, fall under the analogy of sin, that is, of an action deprived of its due ordering to an end.24 Unlike the moralists of the modern casuist period, Aquinas does not think first of all about culpability or guilt. His moral theology See CCC, §1532. For a discussion, see the very informative article by John F. Boyle, “Saint Thomas Aquinas on the Anointing of the Sick (Extreme Unction),” in Recovering Aquinas and the Sacraments: Studies in Sacramental Theology, ed. Matthew Levering and Michael Dauphinais (Chicago: Hillenbrand Books, 2009), 76–84. 22 Poschmann, Anointing, 253. 23 The Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, trans. J. Clarke (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1975), 267. 24 See ST I–II, q. 21, a. 1. The key to the definition consists in an act that lacks a due order (debitum finem) to its end. 20 21 Anointing of the Sick: The Sanctification of Human Suffering 303 escapes moralism. He instead emphasizes a fallen world in which God constantly comes to the help of the sinner by sacramental means, whether one of the Sacred Seven or other sacramentals. So the “remains” of sin may be thought to segue easily into what we call light or venial sins.25 In fact, the eighteenth-century papal Magisterium warned against over-analyzing the nature of the reliquiae peccati.26 The above considerations about the primary effect of Anointing raises the question of how Penance and Anointing complement each other in the life of the sinful, sick Christian. The Roman Ritual stipulates the order of the sacraments in what is called a continuous celebration of Penance, Holy Anointing, and Eucharist for those who unexpectedly find themselves in danger of death. The editio typica urges the priest to be very attentive to the desire of the dying person to make a confession.27 If we wonder why Penance and Holy Anointing would be administered together, the answer lies in the distinctive sacramental graces that each sacrament mediates through the instrumentality of the priest. Aquinas explains the difference by analogy with bodily health. One may be without illness but still not in good shape. Penance is ordered to spiritual health inasmuch as this sacrament brings healing from the illness of sin, whereas Holy Anointing restores robustness to a fatigued spiritual life. Its medicinal effects attend to the various remains of sin that weaken or limit a healthy but not vigorous spiritual life.28 Note that what Aquinas says about Anointing conforms to his overall vision of the spiritual, that is, the Christian life. “Now the aim and end of the spiritual life,” he says, “is that man be united to God, which union is achieved through charity.”29 In light of Catholic teaching, it would be difficult to argue that the Anointing of the Sick forgives grave sins when the sick person is able to obtain their forgiveness through the sacrament of Penance.30 Thus, we find the provision in the Roman Ritual for administering both Sacraments of Healing at the same time. What about the case of someone who was not The category of the imperfection remains foreign to Aquinas’s thought. It represents a juridical way of speaking about the “remains” of sin. For further discussion, see James C. Osbourn, O. P., The Morality of Imperfections, Thomistic Studies 1 (Washington, DC: Pontifical Faculty of Theology, Dominican House of Studies, 1943). 26 Pope Benedict XIV (1740–1758) issued the warning; see Poschmann, Anointing, 254. 27 Rituale Parvum, §115. 28 See Boyle, “Anointing,” 82. 29 ST II–II, q. 44, a. 1. 30 However, see what is said about the necessity of Baptism in CCC, §1257. 25 304 Romanus Cessario able to obtain forgiveness through the sacrament of Penance—a circumstance mentioned in the Catechism? There we read that the effects of the sacrament of Anointing of the Sick include “the forgiveness of sins, if the sick person was not able to obtain it through the sacrament of Penance.”31 In his standard textbook of sacramental theology, Meeting Christ in the Sacraments, the late Father Colman O’Neill offers an explanation of this provision that recognizes the difference in the sacramental causality exercised by each of the Sacraments of Healing. “Should the recipient,” writes O’Neill, “be in a state of grave sin, and granted that he has such sorrow as is compatible with this state—that is, attrition—anointing will bring him absolution.”32 Father O’Neill goes on to signal the difference between what is required for the valid reception of Penance and what Anointing requires. He even speaks of a certain advantage that Anointing enjoys over Penance. “It is not certain,” O’Neill observes, “that penance can benefit an unconscious person since, although the required imperfect sorrow may be present, it is not clear that it can be externally manifested as the sacrament requires.”33 Anointing on the other hand does not require such active external participation. Anointing requires only that one suffer from a serious illness and has exhibited at least an implicit desire to receive the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. This implicit desire may not be as widespread among Catholics as when Father O’Neill composed his volume at the time of the Second Vatican Council. No wonder the Code urges both pastors of souls and those who are close to a sick person to ensure that the priest administers the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick in a timely fashion. Timely means theologically timely. The medical determination of death does not necessarily indicate when the opportune moment for administering the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick has passed. The Roman Ritual stipulates that the priest may make a judgment about the status of the moribund person and use the form for emergencies.34 The Sanctification of Human Suffering Our contemporary cultural circumstances in North America put a certain pressure on pastors of souls. The Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick makes little sense without a firm faith in the final articles of the Apostles’ Creed. “I believe in . . . the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. CCC, §1532. Colman E. O’Neill, O.P., Meeting Christ in the Sacraments, rev. Romanus Cessario, O.P. (New York: Alba House, 1991), 287. 33 O’Neill, Meeting, 287–88. 34 Ritulae Parvum, §15. 31 32 Anointing of the Sick: The Sanctification of Human Suffering 305 Amen.”35 Abbreviated funeral rites contribute to the impression that dead bodies hold no purchase on sacred places, whether churches or cemeteries, or on sacred rites. So what about moribund bodies? Secular influences and even sometimes Catholic opinion urge people to reduce the dearly departed to a cherished memory of a life once lived. In general, popular psychological speculations make it difficult to imagine life outside of consciousness as experienced by the living. A Cartesian anthropology and other expressions of dualism also make it difficult to talk about the vision of God, Beatific Vision. People find it implausible that they can “see” something without bodily organs. The Church’s anthropology which acknowledges that the powers of knowledge and love are rooted in the immortal soul escapes the comprehension of many Christian believers.36 In short, as the growing enthusiasm for euthanasia indicates, people prefer to make short work of death instead of preparing patiently for death to happen according to the designs of divine Providence. Few, in fact, remark on how much mercy killing sins against the requirement that each creature submit to the wise and loving plan of divine Providence. How many Catholics today would grasp the pathos of these lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” subtitled, “To the happy memory of five Franciscan Nuns exiles by the Falk Laws drowned between midnight and morning of Dec. 7th. 1875”? And they the prey of the gales; / She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thickly / Falling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails / Was calling “O Christ, Christ, come quickly”: / The cross to her she calls Christ to her.37 In addition to teaching their people to accept the dying process, even under the most dramatic circumstances, as a period of time set aside to wait for Christ to come and bring them home, pastors also face the formidable challenge of explaining to their people why suffering sanctifies the Christian believer. The Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick directly addresses the human sufferings that accompany the dying process. The Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms that the anointed Christian finds solace in See CCC, §185 (overleaf ). See CCC, §367: the “soul can be gratuitously raised beyond all it deserves to communion with God.” 37 Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” from Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Robert Bridges (London: H. Milford, 1918), lns. 188–192. 35 36 306 Romanus Cessario Christ’s own sufferings: “Suffering, a consequence of original sin, acquires a new meaning; it becomes a participation in the saving work of Jesus.”38 One is reminded of the enigmatic phrase that Saint Paul utters: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, which is the church” (Col 1:24). A general rule of pastoral practice stipulates that preaching must precede the sacraments. No preacher can assume that his audience understands that Christ has instituted a special sacrament in order to consecrate human sufferings, that is, to make their patient endurance an act of worship. Dominicans draw inspiration from the Virgin of Siena. Saint Catherine used the expression “compassionate blood.”39 Her instruction to the dying sinner stresses the importance of our viewing death as an expression of divine Providence. She urges that we cherish the right remedy that the Savior offers to sinful man for all kinds of reliquiae and suffering. She insists on the sinner’s maintaining a personal union with Christ. The sick and dying who heed the wisdom of Catherine of Siena find healing and strength by invoking the power of Christ’s compassionate blood. To conclude, I return to the notion of sacramental efficacy. One may take inspiration from the examples of saints like Catherine of Siena and Thérèse of Lisieux. Not everyone, however, can find the interior strength to imitate them, even as both of these woman saints show with a theological finesse not often found in everyday saints how easily even sinners can maintain some union with Christ. So pastoral care must center on the sacrament that Christ has instituted as an effective instrument of uniting the sick and dying person to himself, one that depends first of all on his power and not on ours. To appreciate the value of this grace requires our recognizing the central place that suffering plays in image-restoration. Or, as Father O’Neill laconically puts it, “suffering has clearly a special significance in the church of the crucified Christ.”40 Think of Christ’s satisfaction for sin and of the Eucharist as sacrifice. Of course, these themes regrettably do not predominate in much of Christian education. At the same time, the Christian profession of faith contained at least implicitly in the acclamation after the consecration announces that Christ’s resurrection has conquered suffering and death. So faithful Catholics should CCC, §1521. For a discussion of Catherine of Siena’s teaching on human sufferings and the Cross of Christ, see Romanus Cessario, O.P., Compassionate Blood: Catherine of Siena on the Passion (Paris and New York: Magnificat, 2016), 85. 40 Colman E. O’Neill, Sacramental Realism: A General Theory of the Sacraments (Chicago: Midwest Theological Forum, 1998), 202. 38 39 Anointing of the Sick: The Sanctification of Human Suffering 307 be prepared to understand that the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick intervenes in the life of a Christian believer at the moment when the temptations caused by human sufferings are most likely to tempt one to doubt and despair. Consecration to the compassionate blood of Christ offers an alternative to such a dreadful end. The anointed believer can enter personally into the mystery of the suffering Christ and bear witness to his victory. O’Neill again captures the drama of this moment and the sacrament instituted to sanctify it: “It is perhaps the ultimate and unavoidable outcome of Christian life, where salvation alone can give meaning, that justifies numbering anointing among the sacraments.”41 N&V O’Neill, Sacramental Realism, 203. 41 Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2019): 309–322 309 We Are Not God: Reflections on the Theology of Laudato Si* Reinhard Hutter The Catholic University of America Washington, DC “We are not God. The earth was here before us and it has been given to us” (Laudato Si §67) by “a Father Who Creates and Who Alone Owns the World” (§75) Is Catholic Social Teaching a specifically theological enterprise? And if so, can one show it in the case of the most recent magisterial instantiation of Catholic Social Teaching, Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical letter Laudato Si, On the Care for Our Common Home? I think that a positive answer must be given to both questions. Part of the reasons I think so are of an autobiographical nature. About forty-five years ago I founded an environmental youth group, the first ever in my hometown in northern Bavaria. This youth group was part of a youth network that was a branch of a national environmental organization. I am talking here about the academic year 1974–1975, just about four years after Greenpeace had been founded in Vancouver, Canada, and five years before the Green Party was to be founded in then West Germany. The wake-up call and catalyst for my initiative had been a memorable encounter with the first Club of Rome Report from 1972, The Limits to Growth. This report shocked me and my friends into an acute awareness of an approaching ecological crisis. Our environmental youth group was a first local activist response. In our highschool chemistry lab, we tested the—at that time rather alarming—water * These reflections were originally delivered as a lecture on September 14, 2018, in Washington, DC, at the Committee on Doctrine Conference for Untenured Theologians “Teaching Undergraduate Theology: Connecting the Disconnects.” 310 Reinhard Hütter quality of the main river in our area and publicized our findings in the local newspaper; we organized polls, public events, and demonstrations in order to raise the awareness of the local population about environmental challenges and threats; we also organized the first municipal glass-recycling program; and we overall acted as “mud rakers,” exposing in the local newspaper pollution caused by companies, municipalities, and private organizations. Needless to say, we did not only have friends. Most members of our youth group eventually joined the Green Party when it was founded in 1980. I, however, decided to study philosophy and theology at the university. And this decision is part of the providential chain of events that brings me to this conference today and to the topic I am speaking about. Those among you my age or older might remember that in the mid-1970s in Europe and in the United States neither the Catholic Church nor the Protestants were really concerned about the unfolding global environmental crisis. One noteworthy exception was Blessed Pope Paul VI, who in his 1971 apostolic letter Octogesima Adveniens—written on the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the foundational text of modern Catholic Social Teaching—referred to the ecological crisis as “a tragic consequence” of unchecked human activity: “Due to an ill-considered exploitation of nature, humanity runs the risk of destroying it and becoming in turn a victim of this degradation” (§21). Together with other important teachings of Pope Paul VI, this prophetic warning remained almost completely unheeded. The post-conciliar progressives were then engaged in the “theology of revolution,” a largely Marxist-inspired radical precursor to the subsequent more moderate and more theologically grounded “theology of liberation.” Most post-conciliar progressives dismissed our ecological concerns as a bourgeois and possibly even reactionary strategy of distraction that pulled away attention and energy from the one cause that mattered—the class struggle and the eventual overthrow of global capitalism. That forty years later, the magisterium of the Catholic Church would issue a teaching document of the magnitude, scope, and depth of Laudato Si was then utterly unimaginable and beyond the range of our wildest hopes. Why did I decide to turn to philosophy and theology while most of my friends from the youth group joined the Green Party? They, quite obviously, desired to help transform our local initiatives into national and even global policies of environmental protection and ecological sustainability. While I continued to share these concerns and, as a matter of fact, voted for the Green Party regularly at all elections on the local and on the state level in then West Germany, my primary concern was a different one: I wanted to at least begin to understand the human enigma I had encountered We Are Not God: Reflections on the Theolog y of Laudato Si 311 during the previous years of environmental activism—the deeply troubling phenomenon of human indifference in light of solid evidence and sound arguments, the unwillingness to even consider changing life-styles of wasteful consumption for the sake of the common good, future generations, and the common home, planet earth. I had started out as a naïve young humanist— like so many others—believing people to be good, well-intended, teachable, responsible, and fundamentally rational in the way of ordering their lives. I was, in short, an implicit Socratic, assuming that genuine knowledge—true enlightenment about realities and facts—would lead to enlightened moral and social action. Yet the years of environmental activism taught me a different lesson. I had to revise my naïve premises and begin to think deeper about the human being and eventually also about God. Nota bene, I did not need philosophy, theology, Christian social teaching, and even the Christian faith itself, in order to appreciate the fact and grasp the magnitude of the emerging global ecological crisis—now quite articulately confirmed in Laudato Si. But I needed philosophy and eventually theology to make sense of my deeply troubling experience and to come to understand the human enigma—the mysterious inability or unwillingness to open up to life-changing realities of large scopes with time-spans encompassing several generations—and in cases where insight into these matters is achieved—the inability or unwillingness to follow up on this newly gained insight with appropriate actions or changes in habits and life patterns. Aristotle’s insight into the weakness of the human will and Augustine’s analysis of the disordered desires and the corruption of the human will were extremely helpful for me, indeed crucial, to begin to understand these puzzling experiences. Eventually, as I continued my studies, I came to realize that in order to understand more fully and more deeply the human enigma, I had to embrace the faith, indeed, eventually the fullness of the Catholic faith—as Augustine states in his treatises on the Gospel of John: Crede, ut intelligas, “believe so that you may understand” (In Iohannis evangelium tractatus 29.6). And so it was in the light that revelation shed and that faith received that I came to understand the human condition and began to abandon the philosophically rather naïve and theologically quite unsound humanist principles that informed my environmentalism in order eventually to receive my environmental and ecological commitments back as an integral component of a theologically sound and philosophically reflective Christian stewardship of God’s creation. This said by way of an introduction, I shall now turn to Laudato Si. I will show in the following that Laudato Si makes its unique contribution to Catholic Social Teaching not because of sundry environmental-policy recommendations but rather because of the theology that sits at its very heart. I will advance my theological reading of Laudato Si under the 312 Reinhard Hütter following headings: First, Doxological Theocentricy. Second, The Mystery of the Father—the Mystery of Primordial Love and Mercy. Third, the World Created by Three Persons Acting as a Single Principle. Remember, every positive statement implies a negation. So also does Laudato Si. Emphasizing the theological core—God the Creator and Redeemer, the world as creation, and the human being as created in the image of God and called to adoptive sonship—entails the negation of modern anthropocentrism, of the sovereign subject’s will to power, and of its applied metaphysics, the technological paradigm. Hence, fourth, The Corollary of Laudato Si’s Doxological Theocentricy—a Radical Critique of Modern Anthropocentrism. Fifth and finally, Technology—Anthropocentric Modernity’s Applied Metaphysics, the Sovereign Subject’s Will to Power. Doxological Theocentricity It is of great significance that Laudato Si begins and ends with a doxology— its incipit, so to speak, is the opening line of St. Francis’s famous canticle: Laudato Si’, mi’ Signore—“Praise be to you, my Lord.” The encyclical ends with a doxological prayer to the Triune Lord. This doxological opening and closing is absolutely essential, for the proper praise of the Creator and Redeemer puts the human creature into the right relationship with God, with oneself, with other human beings, and with all of creation. All proper doxology is essentially theo-centric—it begins with God and ends with God, and everything in-between is received from God, rightly ordered to God, and returned to God. Moreover, the praise of God, the Creator and Redeemer, always articulates the double gratuity that characterizes human existence: first, the absolute gratuity of creation itself, its gift-character all the way down, and secondly, the surpassing grace of humanity’s calling to adoptive sonship through the Incarnate Lord and to eternal life with God, a grace the capstone of which is the divine self-gift of the Son in the Incarnation. Proper doxology is, as Laudato Si teaches by example, always twofold. Hence, to thank and praise God only for creation or only for redemption would be a truncated, a deficient doxology. By entering into the praise of God, the Creator and Redeemer, publicly, visibly, and audibly—under the conditions imposed by modernity’s immanent frame—the human being begins to undo the eclipse of God, the eclipse of creation, and the eclipse of humanity as created in the image of God, as redeemed by God. The Mystery of the Father—the Mystery of Primordial Love and Mercy Laudato Si’s opening and closing doxology points to the very heart of We Are Not God: Reflections on the Theolog y of Laudato Si 313 reality: the Triune God, Creator and Redeemer. Two particular features of the encyclical’s way of thematizing this very heart of reality stand out in striking ways: First: By advancing an immediate, non-problematic witness to the existence of God the Creator, Laudato Si implicitly presupposes and simultaneously renews the perennial Catholic teaching that such immediate witness to God’s existence is possible, intelligible, and even persuasive because of the generally accessible natural knowledge of God from creation. Laudato Si thus re-instates by example the perennial Catholic understanding of Romans 1:19–20: “What can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (RSV). The encyclical’s immediate theological witness to God the Creator makes perfect sense and is theologically warranted on the supposition that the fundamental parameters given in Romans 1:19–20 still obtain—even under the conditions of the increasing eclipse of God imposed by the immanent frame modern anthropocentrism imposes. Laudato Si’s indirect affirmation of the natural knowledge of God from creation—arguably the strongest since the First Vatican Council’s Dei Filius—is an underappreciated theological aspect of the encyclical letter that calls for closer attention and deeper reflection by Catholic theologians. The second theological feature of Laudato Si that stands out in striking ways is the very heart and center of the encyclical—a profound theology of the mystery of God the Father. At a time when Freudianism and Feminism have succeeded in deconstructing and eventually eclipsing divine (let alone human) paternity, Laudato Si builds its whole theology of creation and redemption around the “mystery of the Father.” Significantly, the encyclical shies away neither from articulating divine paternity nor from emphasizing simultaneously the omnipotence of the Creator. Laudato Si states: “A spirituality which forgets God as all-powerful and Creator is not acceptable. That is how we end up worshipping earthly powers, or ourselves usurping the place of God, even to the point of claiming an unlimited right to trample his creation underfoot. The best way to restore men and women to their rightful place, putting an end to their claim to absolute dominion over the earth, is to speak once more of the figure of a Father who creates and who alone owns the world. Otherwise, human beings will always try to impose their own laws and interests on reality” (§75; my emphasis). The other side of Laudato Si’s theology of the Father is a radical critique of modern anthropocentrism to which I will turn shortly. At this 314 Reinhard Hütter moment, however, we need to stay a bit longer with Laudato Si’s theology of the Father. The encyclical insists on speaking about this “figure of the Father who creates and alone owns the world.” While Laudato Si puts the fact that the world is God’s and God’s alone quite starkly in a way that echoes the Lockean language of individual private ownership of property, a language that most contemporaries would clearly understand because they live by this understanding—this “figure of the Father” is emphatically not a Lockean deity for whom creation might be a commodity to be maintained or annihilated at the deity’s will. Rather, the absolute gratuity of creation and more importantly its being created by the Word, by the absolute divine eternal self-communication and self-donation of the Father to the Son “tells us,” Laudato Si states, “that the world came about as the result of a decision, not from chaos or chance, and this exalts it all the more. The creating word expresses a free choice. The universe did not emerge as the result of arbitrary omnipotence, a show of force or a desire for self-assertion. Creation is of the order of love. God’s love is the fundamental moving force in all created things: ‘For you love all things that exist, and detest none of the things that you have made; for you would not have made anything if you had hated it’ (Wis 11:24)” (§77). Consequently, Laudato Si continues, “every creature is . . . the object of the Father’s tenderness, who gives it its place in the world. Even the fleeting life of the least of beings is the object of his love, and in its few seconds of existence, God enfolds it with his affection. Saint Basil the Great described the Creator as ‘goodness without measure,’ while Dante Alighieri spoke of ‘the love which moves the sun and the stars.’ Consequently, we can ascend from created things ‘to the greatness of God and to his loving mercy’” (§77). The ontology of the gift of being instantiated and undergirded by an even deeper and more primordial Trinitarian order of love is the divine signature underwriting the entire created order. This positive statement entails a negation. Creatures are not simply commodities readily available for the consumption of the vociferous appetite of the modern consumer. Our own status as being created in the image of God, Laudato Si insists, “should not make us overlook the fact that each creature has its own purpose. None is superfluous. The entire material universe speaks of God’s love, his boundless affection for us. Soil, water, mountains: everything is, as it were, a caress of God” (§84). Yet everything, Laudato Si emphasizes, is not only, “as it were, a caress of God.” Rather, “the universe unfolds in God, who fills it completely. Hence, there is a mystical meaning to be found in a leaf, in a mountain trail, in a dewdrop, in a poor person’s face. The ideal is not only to pass from the exterior to the interior to discover the action of God in the soul, but also to discover God in all things. Saint Bonaventure We Are Not God: Reflections on the Theolog y of Laudato Si 315 teaches us that ‘contemplation deepens the more we feel the working of God’s grace within our hearts, and the better we learn to encounter God in creatures outside ourselves’” (§233). Is the encyclical losing its theological bearing and beginning to wax poetically? While its theological language stands clearly under the influence of the unique poetry of Franciscan spirituality, Laudato Si is theologically very precise in unfolding the implications of a creation ex nihilo that is penetrated by the triune order of love all the way down. The encyclical only spells out the full implications of the Christ-centered understanding of the world as creation, commonly shared by Catholics since the first century. This, however, is news—indeed, unwelcome news—to the late modern homo faber, technological man, the sovereign subject of production and consumption. The entire material universe does indeed speak of God’s love because—as revelation tells us—it has been created by the Word, the Son, who is the Father’s absolute eternal divine self-communication, united with the Father in the union of love, who is the Holy Spirit. Laudato Si makes this unmistakably clear: “In the Christian understanding of the world, the destiny of all creation is bound up with the mystery of Christ, present from the beginning: ‘All things have been created through him and for him’ (Col 1:16). The prologue of the Gospel of John (1:1–18) reveals Christ’s creative work as the Divine Word (Logos). But then, unexpectedly, the prologue goes on to say that this same Word ‘became flesh’ (Jn 1:14). One Person of the Trinity entered into the created cosmos, throwing in his lot with it, even to the cross. From the beginning of the world, but particularly through the incarnation, the mystery of Christ is at work in a hidden manner in the natural world as a whole, without thereby impinging on its autonomy” (§99). The World Created by Three Persons Acting as a Single Principle To understand the world fully as God’s creation means to understand the world not simply as the product of some ontologically and chronologically remote first cause but rather as “created by the three Persons acting as a single divine principle, but each one of them performing this common work in accordance with his own personal property. Consequently, ‘when we contemplate with wonder the universe in all its grandeur and beauty, we must praise the whole Trinity’” (§238). This triune pattern penetrates the whole created order. Laudato Si states: “The Father is the ultimate source of everything, the loving and self-communicating foundation of all that exists. The Son, his reflection, through whom all things were created, united himself to this earth when he was formed in the womb of Mary. The Spirit, infinite bond of love, is 316 Reinhard Hütter intimately present at the very heart of the universe, inspiring and bringing new pathways” (§238). Quite interestingly—and arrestingly—Laudato Si reminds its readers that before the Fall the Trinitarian marks left by the Triune God on creation were clearly to be seen: “For Christians, believing in one God who is trinitarian communion suggests that the Trinity has left its mark on all creation. Saint Bonaventure went so far as to say that human beings, before sin, were able to see how each creature ‘testifies that God is three.’ The reflection of the Trinity was there to be recognized in nature ‘when that book was open to man and our eyes had not yet become darkened.’ The Franciscan saint teaches us that each creature bears in itself a specifically Trinitarian structure, so real that it could be readily contemplated if only the human gaze were not so partial, dark and fragile. In this way, he points out to us the challenge of trying to read reality in a Trinitarian key” (§239). Laudato Si does not hesitate to spell out the ontological and anthropological implications of St. Bonaventure’s crucial theological insight: “The divine Persons are subsistent relations, and the world, created according to the divine model, is a web of relationships. Creatures tend towards God, and in turn it is proper to every living being to tend towards other things, so that throughout the universe we can find any number of constant and secretly interwoven relationships. This leads us not only to marvel at the manifold connections existing among creatures, but also to discover a key to our own fulfilment. The human person grows more, matures more and is sanctified more to the extent that he or she enters into relationships, going out from themselves to live in communion with God, with others and with all creatures. In this way, they make their own that trinitarian dynamism which God imprinted in them when they were created. Everything is interconnected, and this invites us to develop a spirituality of that global solidarity which flows from the mystery of the Trinity” (§240). The Corollary of Laudato Si’s Doxological Theocentricy—a Radical Critique of Modern Anthropocentrism It is not accidental at all, of course, that Laudato Si relies on St. Bonaventure and not on Descartes, Locke, Hume, or Kant for how human beings should understand themselves, other human beings, and the world we live in. For these very thinkers are the intellectual architects of the famous modern turn to the subject, the elevation of the individual to the position of purported subjective sovereignty, and of a mechanistic, proto-technological understanding of the world as a mere terrain available for expansion, subjection, and exploitation. Laudato Si registers rather laconically We Are Not God: Reflections on the Theolog y of Laudato Si 317 that “modernity has been marked by an excessive anthropocentrism” (§116). What characterizes this excessive anthropocentrism? Laudato Si states: “Modern anthropocentrism has paradoxically ended up prizing technical thought over reality, since ‘the technological mind sees nature as an insensate order, as a cold body of facts, as a mere “given,” as an object of utility, as raw material to be hammered into useful shape; it views the cosmos similarly as a mere “space” into which objects can be thrown with complete indifference.’ The intrinsic dignity of the world is thus compromised. When human beings fail to find their true place in this world, they misunderstand themselves and end up acting against themselves: ‘Not only has God given the earth to man, who must use it with respect for the original good purpose for which it was given, but, man too is God’s gift to man. He must therefore respect the natural and moral structure with which he has been endowed’” (§115). It is modern anthropocentrism that gives rise to the illusion that the world is just an inexhaustibly self-replenishing mega-oyster technologically prepared for consumption by the natural scientists and their ground personnel, the engineers and other technocrats, economically commodified for consumption by trans-national entrepreneurs and their ground personnel, managers, and marketing and sales specialists and finally consumed interminably by the modern sovereign subject in its related instantiations of shopper, consumer, and tourist. In the mind of the shopper, the consumer, and the tourist, the world is an instrument in service of one ultimate end, self-realization and self-fulfillment. Yet in the mind of God—shared in revelation—the ultimate destiny of the world is strikingly and for the modern sovereign subject jarringly different. Laudato Si states: “The ultimate destiny of the universe is in the fullness of God, which has already been attained by the risen Christ, the measure of the maturity of all things. Here we can add yet another argument for rejecting every tyrannical and irresponsible domination of human beings over other creatures. The ultimate purpose of other creatures is not to be found in us. Rather, all creatures are moving forward with us and through us towards a common point of arrival, which is God, in that transcendent fullness where the risen Christ embraces and illumines all things. Human beings, endowed with intelligence and love, and drawn by the fullness of Christ, are called to lead all creatures back to their Creator” (§83). Here Laudato Si articulates the vocation of humanity in relation to all other material creatures, to be “a steward of creation,” or to pick up Heidegger’s image from his Letter on Humanism, to be a “shepherd of Being” (Hirte des Seins), but with a thorough theological correction—the one 318 Reinhard Hütter true shepherd of Being, being no other than the one “good shepherd,” an image of God the Father who sends his only Son to find the lost sheep. This Christ-like shepherd of Being—embodied maybe most clearly by St. Francis—communicates the love of the Father for all creatures to them, cares for them, and—encompassing them in the sacrifice of thanksgiving and in the doxology of the Triune God—returns them in the Spirit through the Son to the Father. Yet this, quite obviously is not the story and the self-understanding of Enlightenment modernity. By increasingly turning away from this fundamental reality—God, creation, and the human stewardship of creation—and by focusing rather on ourselves, the modern turn to the subject has been instituted—religiously by Luther, philosophically by Descartes, technologically by Bacon, and politically by Rousseau. As the passage from §115 cited just above makes patent, Laudato Si is crystal clear about the fact that the notion that we might “own ourselves” or at least our bodies as instruments of willful self-expression or as tool of sovereign self-realization is nothing but a characteristic expression of the erroneous self-image of the sovereign subject that constitutes modern anthropocentrism’s “heart of darkness.” Laudato Si confronts the false self-image of the sovereign subject with the ontology of the gift. “Man, too, is God’s gift to man.” Not only is our existence gifted all the way down, but also our natural and moral constitution is gifted. As embodied beings, we participate a natural, sexually differentiated and complementary kind; by way of our intellect and our conscience we participate the eternal law; and as individual persons, supposits, each of us participates the most mysterious of gifts, freedom. Rejecting the gift we are as human persons and the call and responsibility that comes with this gift is to reject the Giver. Accepting the gift is “to accept the natural and moral structure with which [the gift] has been endowed.” It is the sovereign subject that—conceiving itself falsely as self-constituted—is the very rejection of the gift. Transcending nature with the help of technology, the sovereign subject posits the pronouncements of its self-will beyond good and evil, thereby increasingly fluidifying human nature, values, and finally truth itself. This is late-modern anthropocentrism in its tyrannical state. Laudato Si puts the matter in plain terms: “The Bible has no place for a tyrannical anthropocentrism unconcerned for other creatures” (§68). “Modernity has been marked by an excessive anthropocentrism” (§116) and “the present ecological crisis is one small sign of the ethical, cultural and spiritual crisis of modernity” (§119). It is not the Bible that is out of sync with reality, but rather technologically advanced modernity and its promoter, the sovereign subject. We Are Not God: Reflections on the Theolog y of Laudato Si 319 Technology—Anthropocentric Modernity’s Applied Metaphysics, the Sovereign Subject’s Will to Power To expose tyrannical anthropocentrism is not enough for Laudato Si. It is important for the encyclical to go one step further and address the very technique by way of which the sovereign subject puts into reality its ever expanding will to power. If the will to power is the counterfeit metaphysics of modernity, technology is its very realization. The encyclical cuts very quickly through the superficial alternatives of being “for” or “against” technology. This binary itself is nothing but the pattern of thought characteristic of technology itself. The basic problem according to Laudato Si is “the way that humanity has taken up technology and its development according to an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm. This paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object. This subject makes every effort to establish the scientific and experimental method, which in itself is already a technique of possession, mastery and transformation. It is as if the subject were to find itself in the presence of something formless, completely open to manipulation. Men and women have constantly intervened in nature, but for a long time this meant being in tune with and respecting the possibilities offered by the things themselves. It was a matter of receiving what nature itself allowed, as if from its own hand. Now, by contrast, we are the ones to lay our hands on things, attempting to extract everything possible from them while frequently ignoring or forgetting the reality in front of us. Human beings and material objects no longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational. This has made it easy to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology. It is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit. It is the false notion that ‘an infinite quantity of energy and resources are available, that it is possible to renew them quickly, and that the negative effects of the exploitation of the natural order can be easily absorbed’” (§106; my emphasis). Besides unmasking the false infinite-supply utopia, the encyclical points out the profound way the one-dimensional paradigm of technology has distorted the human perception of reality: “It can be said that many problems of today’s world stem from the tendency, at times unconscious, to make the method and aims of science and technology an epistemological paradigm which shapes the lives of individuals and the workings of society. The effects of imposing this model 320 Reinhard Hütter on reality as a whole, human and social, are seen in the deterioration of the environment, but this is just one sign of a reductionism which affects every aspect of human and social life. We have to accept that technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build” (§107). The technological paradigm has become the hegemonic counterfeit metaphysics without an emergency exit, as it seems. Laudato Si astutely observes: “The idea of promoting a different cultural paradigm and employing technology as a mere instrument is nowadays inconceivable. The technological paradigm has become so dominant that it would be difficult to do without its resources and even more difficult to utilize them without being dominated by their internal logic. It has become countercultural to choose a lifestyle whose goals are even partly independent of technology, of its costs and its power to globalize and make us all the same. Technology tends to absorb everything into its ironclad logic, and those who are surrounded with technology ‘know full well that it moves forward in the final analysis neither for profit nor for the well-being of the human race,’ that ‘in the most radical sense of the term power is its motive—a lordship over all.’ As a result, ‘man seizes hold of the naked elements of both nature and human nature.’ Our capacity to make decisions, a more genuine freedom and the space for each one’s alternative creativity are diminished” (§108). The encyclical is not a dystopian neo-Luddism on steroids, but rather a consequent application of the theology and ontology of creation to the presently hegemonic position of the sovereign subject implementing its global will to power by way of its applied counterfeit metaphysics—technology—bent on its own counterfeit eschatology, “lordship over all.” This counterfeit eschatology of the sovereign subject is the apocalyptic rejection of the mystery of God the Father, a rejection of his gifts, first the gift of being, creation as a whole and the gift of the human to the human, and secondly, the rejection of the gift of adoptive sonship in the Son of the Father, the Incarnate Lord. The self-constitution as sovereign subject amounts in one to the rejection of paternity as well as of sonship, of the loving Giver and the grateful reception of the gift, and its substitution with sovereign usurpation, lordship over all. Laudato Si’s theocentric doxology of the mystery of the Father, of the gift of creation, and the mystery of adoptive sonship—unfolding all its theological implications— entails unavoidably the unmasking of its contemporary counterfeit—the We Are Not God: Reflections on the Theolog y of Laudato Si 321 tyrannical anthropocentrism of the sovereign subject. The true doxology and worship of the Lamb, who is the true image of the Father, eventually always unmasks the self-worship of the beast, even and especially when it hides in the very heart of the Church herself. Conclusion First: Neither the environmental movement nor the United Nations need Catholic Social Teaching for policy development. Policy development is an application of natural law principles and precepts, ordered to the common good, under the guidance of prudence and justice, and in light of the specifically relevant empirical data. All people of good will and proper competency can work together in policy development. The Church has no special competency, and often no competency at all, in policy development. As in the case of Laudato Si, the Church might, of course, make recommendations to individuals, communities, whole societies, and even the global community. When these recommendations are overall sound, as I take them to be for the most part in Laudato Si, they do not differ substantially from—but rather most often happen to echo—the policy recommendations advanced by most environmental organizations. Second: As I came to realize retrospectively, the Church does have a surpassing competency, first in teaching explicitly—and thereby enabling human beings to recall—the first and secondary principles and precepts of the natural law, the nature of the common good, and the virtues of prudence and justice. And the Church has, secondly, the surpassing competency to communicate divine revelation—the world as divinely created, the triune identity of the Creator, the precarious state of fallen humanity, and the economy of salvation culminating in the Incarnation of the Son of God. Yet in a modern world dominated increasingly by the immanent frame of the sovereign subject and the correlated technocratic instrumentalization and economic commodification of virtually all reality in service to the sovereign subject and his insatiable desires—in a world haunted by the eclipse of God the Creator, by the eclipse of the world as God’s creation, and by the eclipse of the human being as created in the image of God—Catholic Social Teaching can only make sense, and indeed any difference at all, if the immanent frame’s threefold eclipse of God, creation, and humanity created in the image of God is explicitly addressed and thereby at least incipiently undone. In short, Catholic Social Teaching in general, and Laudato Si in particular, stand on their success as a transparent, consistent, and compelling theological enterprise all the way down or they fall into well-deserved irrelevance. As an ex-post-facto imprimatur 322 Reinhard Hütter of sound secular policy developments, Catholic Social Teaching is about as useful or necessary as another hole in one’s head. As the extension of the revealed truth through sound teaching, persuasive witness, acute argumentation, and effective activism into the social, political, and economic contexts, Catholic Social Teaching as an explicitly and unapologetically theological enterprise is absolutely indispensable in a world radically diminished by the threefold eclipse of God, creation, and humanity created in the image of God, imposed by modernity’s immanent frame. Fortunately, Laudato Si does not stand in danger of falling into such irrelevance, because the encyclical has a solid theological foundation, and even more importantly, a thorough theocentric orientation that challenges head-on the immanent frame’s threefold eclipse. It is for this reason and not for its rather common sense policy recommendations that Laudato Si is genuinely good news for its intended audience, that is, “every person N&V living on this planet” (§3). Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2019): 323–338 323 Marian Faith in a Time of Crisis Michele M. Schumacher University of Fribourg Fribourg, Switzerland Among the reasons to rejoice over the year 2018 is, Pope Francis mentions in his Christmas greetings to the Roman Curia, the canonization of the nineteen martyrs of Algeria: “nineteen lives given for Christ, for his Gospel and for the Algerian people . . . models of everyday holiness, the holiness of ‘the saints next door,’” he explains.1 These so-called “ordinary” saints are nonetheless extraordinary, for they proclaimed their faith in Christ by the shedding of their blood. In these lives fully surrendered to Christ, there is an exact accordance between the message and the messenger. Their final proclamation is perfect, because they witness to what the Catechism presents as “an organic connection between our spiritual life and the dogmas [of our faith],”2 that is to say, the content of what the Church proposes as worthy of faith and even “obliging”3 for those who bear the name of Christ. Their martyrdom, likened unto that of Christ himself, embodies what Pope Francis calls “the divine logic that does not halt before evil, but instead transforms it . . . into goodness.” It likewise reminds us that “God’s salvation, freely bestowed on all humanity . . . does not act independently of our will, our cooperation, our freedom and our daily efforts.” “Salvation is a gift, true enough,” Francis continues in his typically matter-of-fact manner, “but one that must be accepted, cherished and made to bear fruit (cf. Mt 25: 14-30).”4 Thomas Georgeon, “Nel segno della fraternità,” L’Osservatore Romano, December 8, 2018, p. 6, cited by Pope Francis in his Christmas Greetings to the Roman Curia on December 21, 2018, w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2018/ december/documents/papa-francesco_20181221_curia-romana.html. 2 Catechism of the Catholic Church [CCC], §89. 3 CCC, §88. 4 Pope Francis, 2018 Christmas Greeting. 1 324 Michele M. Schumacher How different is this attitude from that of those chided by the Pope for “frequently com[ing] to think and act as if they were the owners of salvation and not its recipients, like overseers of the mysteries of God and not their humble ministers, like God’s toll-keepers and not servants of the flock entrusted to their care.” “Instead of following God,” they put themselves “in front of him,” Pope Francis suggests, “like Peter, who remonstrated with the Master and thus merited the most severe of Christ’s rebukes: ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on the things of God but on the things of men’ (Mk 8:33).” Likening these unfaithful servants to King David, who committed the triple sin of “sexual abuse, abuse of power and abuse of conscience,” Francis observes that they take “advantage of their position and their power of persuasion. They perform abominable acts, yet continue to exercise their ministry as if nothing had happened. They have no fear of God or his judgement, but only of being found out and unmasked.” They discredit “the Church’s saving mission and the sacrifices of so many of their confrères.” In contrast to those who witness to Christ, even to the point of death, they, like Judas, are willing to sell him for thirty pieces of silver. In short, by their “infidelity and shame,” they “disfigure the countenance of the Church and undermine her credibility.”5 A Crisis of Credibility: A Crisis of Faith A “crisis of credibility” is, in fact, what we are currently experiencing in the Church, Francis suggests no less than six times in his letter to the bishops of the United States on the occasion of their recent retreat at Mundelein Seminary ( January 2–8, 2019). “The Church’s credibility has been seriously undercut and diminished by these sins and crimes, but even more,” he explains, “by the efforts made to deny or conceal them. This has led to a growing sense of uncertainty, distrust and vulnerability among the faithful.”6 To be sure, some have recognized in Pope Francis’ words of reproach just another example of the very attitudes behind much of the scandalous cover-up at the heart of this crisis, namely the fear that “This makes us look bad.” Hence, for example, Amy Welborn asks in reaction to this letter whether the problem is not to be situated in the sins of using people, of doing “great harm to God’s children,” and of “offend[ing] and disobey[ing] God who created us for good, not evil”—rather than in the diminished Pope Francis, 2018 Christmas Greeting. Pope Francis, Letter of the Holy Father Pope Francis to the Bishops of the United States of America, January 1, 2019, usccb.org/about/leadership/holy-see/francis/ upload/francis-lettera-washington-traduzione-inglese-20190103.pdf. 5 6 Marian Faith in a Time of Crisis 325 credibility of the institution and the resultant threat to the “bonds of communion.” Exemplary of the suspicion that many now harbor against their pastors, Welborn’s question—phrased in terms of either-or7—ironically overlooks the important connection between the sinful acts of the clergy and the diminished credibility of the Catholic Church. Let me put it straightforwardly: the profound tragedy of the Church of our time is—such I truly believe—that those entrusted with the mission of preserving the “full and living Gospel” of Christ and of teaching in his name, 8 have in fact—by their personal sins of sexual abuse, abuse of power, and abuse of conscience—actually endangered it. It is moreover precisely this endangering of the faith that renders their sin all the more abominable. “It would be better,” the Lord says, “if a millstone were hung round his neck and he were cast into the sea, than that he cause one of these little ones to stumble” (Luke 17:2). It does not suffice to point a finger toward similar crimes in other sectors of society, in an effort to lighten the culpability of our pastors. We have a right to expect integrity of those who not only bear the name of Christ, but who also—and this is what sets them apart— speak and act for Christ, even on behalf of his other members.9 After all, the Catechism incites us—the lay faithful—to exercise “docility” toward their teaching and directives, “mindful of Christ’s words to his apostles, ‘He who hears you, hears me.’”10 In question is what the Catechism claims as proper to Catholic faith: a “remarkable harmony between the bishops and the faithful” in “maintaining, practicing, and professing the faith that has been handed on.”11 As Father Regis Scanlon put it recently, “The problem of clergy sexual abuse is so serious, entrenched and widespread that it must somehow be related to a misunderstanding—or rejection—of something fundamental to the Catholic Faith itself. This is not primarily an administrative or educational problem. It is fundamentally a spiritual and pastoral problem.”12 “Is this situation a problem because it diminished the institution’s credibility and threatens bonds of communion, or because people committed all sorts of sins of commission and omission, used other human beings, did great harm to God’s children, and offended and disobeyed the Lord who created us for good, not evil?” (Amy Welborn, “The Problem with Pope Francis’ Letter to the U.S. Bishops,” The Catholic World Report, January 3, 2019, catholicworldreport.com/2019/01/03/ the-problem-with-pope-francis-letter-to-the-u-s-bishops/.) 8 CCC, §77. 9 CCC, §85. 10 CCC, §87. 11 CCC, §84. 12 Regis Scanlon, “A Three-Day Meeting in Rome to do What?” Crisis Magazine, 7 326 Michele M. Schumacher From this point of view, the crisis of credibility is quite clearly a crisis of faith: a crisis that might be likened to others that the Church has weathered, but not without great suffering and casualties. Take, for example, the Donatist controversy in the aftermath of the Roman persecutions: persecutions offering Christians the choice between idolatry and martyrdom. Born of the heresy that only “sinless” priests—those who had not given over to the Romans—could validly administer the sacraments, the Donatist crisis threw the Church of Carthage into a state of turmoil for nearly two centuries (fourth–sixth centuries). We owe most certainly to that crisis these powerful words from St. Augustine of Hippo, who had studied in Carthage during the time of the controversy, and who, as bishop, championed against the Donatists: As for the proud minister, he is to be ranked with the devil. Christ’s gift is not thereby profaned: what flows through him keeps its purity, and what passes through him remains clear and reaches the fertile earth. . . . The spiritual power of the sacrament is indeed comparable to light: those to be enlightened receive it in its purity, and if it should pass through defiled beings, it is not itself defiled.13 There is still another important lesson that we might learn from that terrible trial. After the great Roman persecution had come to an end, the question was raised: what do we do with the “traitors” (traditors), those, that is to say, who had given up the sacred books or sacred vessels, those who had denounced brethren to the Romans or those who had directly renounced Christ? It was decided that they would undergo a more or less long period of purification by way of penitence, but—and here is the clincher—the merits of those who had remained faithful in persecution (they were called “confessors” if they were not martyred) could be offered—if they would be so generous—to diminish the length and/or severity of the penitence of their sinful brethren. Such is the power of the communion of saints. It points to the powerful force of good in fighting evil! And what of the Protestant reformation that has divided the Church for five centuries and counting? Born of the personal agony of Martin Luther with regard to the certainty—or rather uncertainty—of his own salvation, but also of his rightful resistance to terrible corruption in the January 8, 2019, crisismagazine.com/2019/a-three-day-meeting-in-rome-to-dowhat. 13 St. Augustine of Hippo, Johannis Evangelium 5.15 (PL, 35:1422), cited in CCC, §1584; see also §1128. Marian Faith in a Time of Crisis 327 Catholic Church at the time, it has a much less positive view of the practice of offering indulgences. This crisis has, in fact, challenged, as perhaps no other ecclesial controversy, the very meaning of faith and salvation. Luther is, of course, famous for his insistence upon salvation by “faith alone.” By this, he means in the absence of works. We do not earn our way to heaven. It is given to us by means of faith, by which he means confidence in God’s promise.14 And “Since our salvation depends only on God’s free mercy, the transfer of merits in the heavenly bank from one account to another has,” as Luther specialist Paul Althaus puts it, “lost all meaning. . . . For God deals with each man by himself and no one can believe or obey or die for another.”15 We could hardly be further from the corrupt practice, current in the Catholic Church of Luther’s time, of selling indulgences: “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul out of purgatory springs.”16 “Yes” to Christ, “No” to the Church It should not be surprising that in these very crucial moments of Church history—moments in which the Church’s ministers have been unfaithful, and such is obviously the moment in which we find ourselves today—that the temptation is great to say “yes” to Christ, and “no” to the Church: to seek a personal relationship with the Lord that is not mediated by a corrupt body, or at least not one with a corrupt institution at its head. I cannot help but think of the last will entrusted by Martin Luther to his disciples, “Preserve this one thing when I am dead: hatred of the roman pontiff.”17 To be sure, “in the Apostles’ Creed we profess ‘one Holy Church’ (Credo. . . Ecclesiam), and not to believe in the Church, so as not,” the Catechism explains, “to confuse God with his works.” Yet, the Catechism continues, “To believe that the Church is ‘holy’ and ‘catholic,’ and that she is ‘one’ and ‘apostolic’ (as the Nicene Creed adds), is inseparable from belief in God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”18 We are not, “Faith” for Luther means, Paul Althaus explains, “accepting God’s promise from the heart and taking a chance on it” (The Theology of Martin Luther, trans. Robert C. Schultz [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966], 44). 15 Althaus, Theology of Martin Luther, 300. 16 “Sobald der Pfennig im Kasten klingt, die Selle aus dem Fegfeuer springt.” Attributed to the Dominican preacher Johann Tetzel. 17 “Hoc unum me mortuo servate: odium in pontificem Romanum” (Hans Preuss, Martin Luther, der Prophet [Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1933), 173; cited by Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church, trans. André Emery (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 16. 18 CCC, §750. Indeed, “the article of faith about the Church depends entirely on the articles concerning Christ Jesus. The Church has no other light than Christ’s” 14 328 Michele M. Schumacher interestingly enough, far from Luther’s own view: “Whoever seeks Christ must first find the church,” he preached in a Christmas homily. “Now the church,” he adds, “is not wood and stone but the group of people who believe in Christ. Whoever seeks the church should join himself to them and observe what they teach, pray, and believe. For they certainly have Christ among them.”19 The point is well made: we never believe alone. Our a-ssent (that is to say, our Yes to Christ) is always a con-sent: a yes with (con) others: a yes with all those who believe and who, precisely by their own acts of faith, have given a certain credibility to the person of Christ, inciting us to likewise cling to him. Many are the testimonies of those who look to the Church for help when their faith is weak in moments of temptation or those that the tradition presents as suffering the “dark night” of faith. One need only think of the famous scene from the autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux in which, during her terrible crisis of faith at the end of her life, she quite literally writes the creed in her own blood: a final effort, as it were, to grasp at what is tangible and objective in a faith that she could no longer subjectively feel. Certainly in that moment, we might recognize something of a heavenly conspiracy whereby the witness of those martyrs who had given their lives to defend that creed were able to bring her solace, just as her own faithfulness in adversity does for so many of us today. Take, for example, those who suffered during the Arian heresy of the fourth century: women and men—indeed some thirty bishops—who died defending the true divinity of Christ, thereby writing, as it were, a creedal article in their own blood. These beautiful examples serve to illustrate what the Catechism presents as “an organic connection between our spiritual life and the dogmas. Dogmas are lights along the path of faith; they illuminate it and make it secure. Conversely, if our life is upright, our intellect and heart will be open to welcome the light shed by the dogmas of faith.”20 It is this unity of the objective and subjective aspects of the Christian faith—the unity of (CCC, §748). Similarly, “The article concerning the Church also depends entirely on the article about the Holy Spirit, which immediately precedes it” (CCC, §749). 19 Martin Luther, Luthers Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. WA 10/I-1, Weihnachtspostille, ed. Joachim Karl Friedrich and J. K. F Knaake (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1910), 140, cited by Althaus, Theology of Martin Luther, 287. For Luther, Althaus explains, “the Church is defined by the Apostles’ Creed as a ‘communion of saints.’” He “does not understand this as a separate doctrine, but translates it as the ‘community’ [Gemeine] of saints and as an appositional phrase explaining ‘one holy Christian church’” (The Theology of Martin Luther, 288). 20 CCC, §89. Marian Faith in a Time of Crisis 329 what we believe and the actual act of believing—that points, in fact, to our need for the Church. How easy it is to be misled by our own subjectivity, to reduce Christian faith to what Friedrich Schleiermacher calls “God consciousness”: a religious sentiment, or a feeling of dependence upon God, not unlike Luther’s understanding of faith. Schleiermacher even attempted to derive the entire content of the Christian faith from such a religious experience. The Christian faith is neither based upon nor derived from a religious experience, however, but upon, rather, an historical event: an event that nonetheless implied an absolutely unique, indeed unrepeatable, religious experience, namely, the dialogue between God’s messenger and the humble handmaid of Nazareth (see Luke 1:26–38). Marian Faith at the Heart of the Church This, of course, is where Mary comes in. When we find ourselves asking whether the Church is really necessary, “we forget,” Antonio Sicari reminds us, “that the Church is not a consequence of the Incarnation but a constitutive part of it. . . . It flows from the seriousness of his Incarnation and of his life as a human being, the seriousness of his being true God and true man.”21 Being human means, in fact, Hans Urs von Balthasar observes, being “with others,” and Christ, he adds, “is no exception.”22 The presence of Mary at the center of the event of the Incarnation witnesses to this fact. If Mary’s Son were not truly human, but “merely the product of an idea,” then it would have sufficed that she become spiritually pregnant, the Swiss mystic Adrienne von Speyr reasons. The real Incarnation requires that, in contrast, she really “feel his weight in her body and, after his birth, in her arms.”23 Hers is thus necessarily an “incarnate” faith: a faith that “embraces body, soul, [and] spirit,”24 so as to be entirely disposed to God’s self-revelation and even to be assumed into the mysteries to which she personally contributes. In receiving Christ, Mary receives the entire deposit of the Church’s faith. She receives “Truth itself (ipsa veritas)” (see John 14:6), to quote St. Thomas Aquinas; the Truth upon which faith is “established Antonio Sicari, “Mary, Peter and John: Figures of the Church,” trans. Michael M. Waldstein, Communio 19 (Summer 1992): 189–207, at 192–93. 22 Balthasar, Office of Peter, 136. 23 Adrienne von Speyr, Mary in Redemption, trans. Helena M. Tomko (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), 67. For a more extensive development of these ideas, see Michele M. Schumacher, A Trinitarian Anthropology: Adrienne von Speyr and Hans Urs von Balthasar in Dialogue with Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014), 176–79. 24 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Elucidations, trans. John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998), 107. 21 330 Michele M. Schumacher and founded.”25 For in “giving us His Son, his only Word,” God “spoke everything to us at once,” St. John of the Cross explains; “and he has no more to say.”26 The sacred deposit, or treasury of the faith, that finds expression in Church doctrine is thus little more than an unpacking of God’s full self-revelation in the person of his Son. Because, moreover, “all the promises of God find their Yes” in this one Word, it is also “through him” that “we utter the Amen . . . to the glory of God,” St. Paul reasons (2 Cor 1: 20). As for Mary’s “yes,” it is “decisive, on the human level,” John Paul II explains, “for the accomplishment of the divine mystery,” making “possible, as far as it depended upon her in the divine plan, the granting of her Son’s desire.”27 In the meeting of God’s “yes” in Christ to all mankind and Mary’s “yes” spoken to God “in lieu . . . of all human nature,” as St. Thomas Aquinas claims,28 there is thus a perfect concordance, or unity, between faith’s object—the Word spoken by the Father, to whom confidence is accorded— and faith’s act: the subjective disposition that obediently surrenders. Because, in fact, Mary is preserved from original sin by the merits of her Son,29 her fiat is “made possible by the Incarnation and cross of the Son.” It is nonetheless “one of the presuppositions of the Incarnation,” accomplishing the “one flesh” union of Christ and the Church, as announced in St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, chapter 5 (vv. 21–33), while simultaneously “establishing, precisely here,” Balthasar observes, “the radical opposition between head and body, lord and handmaid, bridegroom and bride.”30 Mary, to put it still more explicitly, “becomes,” Pope St. John Paul II explains, “the authentic subject of that union with God which was realized in the mystery of the Incarnation of the Word.”31 The formulation is significant. She is not absorbed into the hypostatic union; nor is she effaced. Instead, she becomes a true actor in the mystery of redemption, St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologia [ST] III, q. 1, a. 2. Cited by the CCC, §65. 27 Pope John Paul II, Encyclical letter on the Mother of the Redeemer, Redemptoris Mater (1987), §13. 28 Thomas Aquinas, ST III, q. 30, a. 1: “loco totius humanae naturae.” 29 See Pius IX (1854), Bull Ineffabilis Deus, in Heinrich Denzinger, Compendium of Creeds, Definitions, and Declarations on Matters of Faith and Morals [DZ], 43rd ed., English edition ed. R. Fastiggi and A. Englund Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012), nos. 2800–2804, at no. 2803. 30 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord. A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 7, Theology: The New Covenant, trans. Brian McNeil, ed. John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 94. 31 Pope John Paul II, Apostolic Letter on the Dignity and Vocation of Women, Mulieris Dignitatem (1988), §4 (original emphasis). 25 26 Marian Faith in a Time of Crisis 331 for as the Catechism attests, it is only freely that one enters into a communion of love. “God’s free initiative demands man’s free response.”32 By the descent of the Son of God, who takes on her flesh, Mary is really elevated into the holy mystery of his Incarnation and of the entire earthly mission of her Son, so as to willingly participate therein. Such is what the Fathers of the Church call the “marvellous exchange,” the admirabile commercium of salvation: the becoming man of the Son of God in view of the divine adoption of the sons and daughters of man.33 In this way, Mary’s faith also reveals the two-fold dimension of salvation: the objective gift of Christ, who has come for the redemption of all, and the subjective surrender of the human person to Christ; for, as St. Augustine preaches, “He who created you without you, will not justify you without you.”34 The assent of faith is thus the means whereby the gift of the salvation in the form of very person of the Savior is actualized, becoming effective for oneself and likewise for others: especially for those whose faith is weak, for those who need to be carried, for all of those for whom the Church remains in labor until, as St. Paul puts it, “Christ be formed in you!” (Gal 4:19). Indeed, often enough the weak one is you or me. Short of a private revelation, moreover, it must be admitted that if we believe, this is due to the fact that someone, somewhere, at some time, shared his or her faith with us or, still more profoundly, was for us the very image of Christ, whose spirit had taken possession of him or her so as to speak and act through this person.35 Those of us who were baptized as infants, moreover, were baptized because our parents and godparents quite literally gave their assent of faith for us: in our place. But before anyone did this for any one of us, Mary did it for all of us, even for the entire Church and for all mankind. The communitarian dimension of the faith is, in fact, implied in St. Thomas’s recognition that Mary gave her Yes for us all. Mary is thus not only the Mother of Christ; she is also the Mother of the Church and the Mother of Christians: again, precisely by her faith, which not only models and incites the faith of Christ’s members, but also CCC, §2002 (original emphasis). See CCC, §460; and Thomas Aquinas, ST III, q. 1, a. 2 34 Augustine of Hippo, Sermo 169 (“De verbis apostoli. Ephes, cap. VI, 23”) ch. 11 (PL, 38:923). 35 I can hardly help but think of the beautiful reflection of St. Teresa of Avila: “Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has not body now but yours.” 32 33 332 Michele M. Schumacher precedes and sustains it. Indeed, it even “‘precedes’ the apostolic witness of the Church,” as Pope John Paul II notes. As the one “who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord” (Luke 1:45), Mary is “at the very basis of what the Church has been from the beginning, and of what she must continually become from generation to generation, in the midst of all the nations of the earth.”36 “The mold into which the Church is formed,”37 as well as its “deepest origin and unsullied kernel,”38 Mary was, Balthasar reasons, present in the Church, “before men were set in office.”39 Or as the Catechism reasons, because “Mary goes before us all in the holiness that is the Church’s mystery as ‘the bride without spot or wrinkle’ [Eph 5:27],” it is true to say that “the ‘Marian’ dimension of the Church precedes the ‘Petrine.’”40 As differing, in fact, from the apostles, who testify to “the word of life” whom they have “seen with their eyes,” “looked upon and touched with their hands” (1 Jonn 1: 1) and “heard” with their ears (v. 3), Mary says “yes” to what is yet intangible, unheard of, indeed unfathomable. She remains, furthermore, faithful to the incomprehensible mystery even in the darkest hour when all the apostles except John have abandoned the Lord (see John 19: 25–27). That is why Mary’s faith is presented by Pope John Paul II as inaugurating the New Covenant, so as to be comparable to the faith of Abraham, whom St. Paul calls “our Father in faith” (Rom 4:12). 41 Her faith is “the conviction of things not seen” (Heb 11:1; cf. Rom 8:24), which nonetheless enlightens the hearts of all the faithful, by giving flesh to the very object of our faith: the true Son of God. “The Virgin Mary does not conceive and believe, but believes and conceives,”42 as Augustine puts it in one of his homilies. “With faith she believes, with faith she conceives.”43 For this reason, Mary’s faith retains a certain prominence with regard to the faith of Peter, to whom the Lord entrusted the keys to heaven, along with the promise that the “gates of hell will not prevail” against the Church under his care (see Matt 16:18–19). Despite his privileged mission, Pope John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater, §27. Balthasar, Office of Peter, 207. 38 Balthasar, Elucidations, 108. 39 Balthasar, Elucidations, 113. 40 CCC, §773. 41 Pope John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater, §14. 42 St. Augustine of Hippo, Sermo 233, 3.4; (PL, 38:1114). 43 St. Augustine of Hippo, Sermo 25 (PL, 46:937). Cf. Pope John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater, §13: “She conceived this Son in her mind before she conceived him in her womb: precisely in faith!” 36 37 Marian Faith in a Time of Crisis 333 Peter and his successors remain members of the Marian Church, 44 and it is precisely the faith of Mary—“hidden,” as Pope John Paul II puts it, “like a special heritage of God’s revelation . . . in the Church’s heart”45—that Peter and his successors are charged to preserve and transmit throughout all time and places. In fact, Balthasar argues therefore that “the Petrine universality is subject to the formative influence of the Marian, but not vice versa.”46 It follows that the Christian faithful do not only believe as Mary believes; they also believe what she believes: the very mysteries to which she gave perfect consent before she actually lived through them at her Son’s side. As the archetypical Christian believer, she does far more, however, than model the attitude of faith for Christ’s disciples, even in faith’s darkest hours. She also transmits to us the very content of her faith in such a way that what is personal becomes ecclesial: the faith of the entire people of God. “The memories of Jesus, impressed upon her heart, were always with her, leading her,” John Paul II explains, “to reflect on the various moments of her life at her Son’s side.”47 Advancing with him, as his mission led to its consummation on the Cross, she carefully guarded these mysteries “in her heart,” as Luke’s Gospel attests (2:18; 51), so as to finally entrust them to the Church, through those whom Christ had entrusted to her as a final testament on the Cross (cf. John 19: 26–27). No one other than Mary, Balthasar has reason to note, has such an “unbroken memory” of the Christian events: “from the first moment of the Incarnation to the Cross, to the taking down from the Cross, to the burial and to the Resurrection.”48 Even today, John Paul II suggests, she “constantly sets before the faithful” the mysteries of her Son’s life, “desir[ing] that the contemplation of those mysteries will release all their saving power.”49 In the person of Mary is thus supremely true what the Second Vatican Council says of the Church: that she “perpetuates and transmits to every generation all that she herself is, all that she believes.”50 Balthasar, Office of Peter, 210. Pope John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater, §27. 46 Balthasar, Office of Peter, 206. 47 Paul John Paul II, Apostolic Letter on the Rosary of the Virgin Mary, Rosarium Virginis Mariae (2002), §11. 48 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mary for Today, trans. Robert Nowell (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 38. 49 Pope John Paul II, Rosarium Virginis Mariae, §11 (original emphasis). 50 Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on Revelation, Dei Verbum, §98, cited in CCC, §98. 44 45 334 Michele M. Schumacher Conclusion We might conclude that just as the mystery of Christ is unthinkable without Mary, so too the Church is incomprehensible without Mary: except perhaps as a lifeless, bureaucratic entity. When, on the other hand, the Church is adequately addressed as the partner, bride, and living body of Christ, then it is to the Marian dimension of the Church that we make reference. So important is her place in the salvific mission of Christ from its inception until his ascension into heaven and the sending of his Spirit, that it is already prefigured in the creation of Eve from Adam’s side and again in the Protoevangelium of Genesis, chapter 3, wherein is foretold the Church’s final victory over the forces of evil: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel” (Gen 3:15). Particularly striking in this depiction, which has inspired innumerable Christian artists throughout the ages, together with the woman of the Apocalypse, chapter 12, is the fact that this victory is accorded to the Woman: not in virtue of her own merits, but those of her child. For, “In the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman,” as St. Paul points out. As if in fact to highlight the divinely willed connection between the original couple and the definitive one—the new Adam united to the new Eve—the apostle to the gentiles recognizes that “as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman. And all things are from God” (1 Cor 1:11–12). This means that in the work of redemption, as in the original work of cultivating and populating Eden, it is “not good”—to continue the scriptural analogy—“that the man be alone.” That is why God makes a “helper fit to him” (2:18). “It is a question,” Saint Pope John Paul II explains of this text from Genesis, “of a ‘ help’ on the part of both”—of woman for man, but also of man for woman—“and at the same time a mutual ‘ help.’” After all, “to be human means,” to summarize what has been a key point in my argument, “to be called to interpersonal communion,” and thus to exist not only “‘side by side’ or ‘together,’” but rather, John Paul II continues, “mutually ‘one for the other’” in accord, namely, with the original “unity of the two,” that is to say, man and woman, designed by the Creator. Hence, the “whole of human history”—including, as we have seen, the history of salvation—“unfolds within the context of this call” to “interpersonal communion,” wherein might be recognized “in accordance with God’s will,” as Pope John Paul II observes, “the integration” within humanity “of Marian Faith in a Time of Crisis 335 what is ‘masculine’ and what is ‘ feminine.’”51 This means not only that the mystery of the new Adam is necessarily complemented by the new Eve, since Christ associates his Mother in his salvific mission in obedience to the Father’s will. It also means that the Petrine mission of the Church has dire need of the Marian. “Where the mystery of the Marian character of the Church is obscured or abandoned, there Christianity must become unisexual (homo-sexual), that is to say, all male,” Balthasar argues.52 Whether in fact, as much media coverage suggests,53 the current ecclesial crisis is grounded in problems stemming from a homosexual clergy often engaged in abusive acts—sexual and other—and connected by dangerous networking systems and even a so-called “lavender mafia,” or whether, as Pope Francis suggests, the problem is more properly that of clericalism or a “top-heavy” Church, as it were, Balthasar’s point remains highly pertinent. So too does he deserve a hearing when he argues that in virtue of “its unique structure, the Catholic Church is perhaps humanity’s last bulwark of genuine appreciation of the difference between the sexes.”54 The Marian dimension must be allowed to shine in the countenance of the Church, indeed to permeate and even sustain it in this moment of darkness. It is not a question of bringing balance, in an extrinsic manner, as one Pope John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem, §7. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Elucidations, 109. 53 See, for example: Mathew E. Bunson, “Is Catholic Clergy Sex Abuse Related to Homosexual Priests?” National Catholic Register, January 4, 2019, ncregister.com/daily-news/is-catholic-clergy-sex-abuse-related-to-homosexual-priests; Kevin Jones, “Clergy Sex Abuse On the Rise Again, and Church Leaders are Ignoring Why, Sociologist Says,” The Catholic World Report, November 17, 2018, catholicworldreport.com/2018/11/02/clergy-sex-abuse-on-the-rise-again-andchurch-leaders-are-ignoring-why-sociologist-says/; Francis X. Rocco, “The Tense Debate Over Gay Priests,” The Wallstreet Journal, January 17, 2019, wsj.com/ articles/the-tense-debate-over-gay-priests-11547743698; Justin Huggler, “Homosexuality is to Blame for Sexual Abuse, Not Catholic Church, Claims German Cardinal,” The Telegraph, January 4, 2019, telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/04/ homosexuality-blame-sexual-abuse-not-catholic-church-claims/; Jennifer Roback Morse, “About Those Gay Clergy Networks,” National Catholic Register, November 12, 2018, ncregister.com/daily-news/about-those-gay-clergy-networks; Aline Lizotte, “Deux types de prêtres hétérosexuels et homosexuels,” Smart Reading Press, November 16, 2018, 51 52 srp-presse.fr/index.php/2018/11/16/deux-types-de-pretres-heterosexuels-et-homosexuels/ Hans Urs von Balthasar, New Elucidations, trans. Sister Mary Theresilde Skerry (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 195. 54 336 Michele M. Schumacher branch of government balances another, for the Church is not a government. Nor can she be likened to a business or any other humanly-created entity, to “a mere administrative or organizational function in the ‘evangelization business,” as Pope Francis puts it, rather sarcastically, in his letter to the U.S. Bishops. Rather, precisely as a divine creation, the Church of Christ must reflect the Creator’s intentions: intentions that point to the natural and even supernatural complementarity of man and woman, of the male and female: “not” simply “in isolated individual acts of specific organs,” Balthasar rightly insists, “but in the total surrender of one’s own being.”55 After all, St. Paul does not hesitate to recognize in the original creation of man and woman an illusion to the mystery of the one-flesh union of Christ and his Church (see Eph 5: 29–33), whose wedding feast is announced by the book of the Apocalypse (see 19: 6–9) for the end of time. If, for example, it is true that—as John Paul II explains in his letter on the dignity and vocation of women—men must “learn their fatherhood” through their wives,56 might it not also be the case that pastors must learn their fatherhood through Mary, who was, “in a singular way,” as the Second Vatican Council acknowledges, “the generous associate” of the new and definitive Adam,57 ‘the new Eve,’ who ‘brought forth on earth the very Son of the Father . . . whom God placed as the first-born among many brethren [see Rom 8:29], namely, the faithful, in whose birth and education she cooperates with a maternal love”58? Indeed, Lumen Gentium continues, “the Church in her apostolic work also, justly looks to her, who, conceived Balthasar, New Elucidations, 196. “Who,” then, “has precedence in the end?” Balthasar asks. “The man bearing office, inasmuch as he represents Christ in and before the community, or the woman, in whom the nature of the Church is embodied—so much so that every member of the Church, even the priest [indeed, even the pope himself, we might add!], must maintain a feminine receptivity to the Lord of the Church? This question is completely idle, for the difference ought only to serve the mutual love of all the members in a circulation over which God alone remains sublimely supreme” (197–98). In a similar manner, Pope John Paul II recognizes that “all human beings—both women and men—are called through the Church, to be the ‘Bride’ of Christ, the Redeemer of the world” (Mulieris Dignitatem, §25). 56 See Pope John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem, §18. My thanks to Steven Long for the precision. Although John Paul II writes that a man learns his fatherhood “from” his wife, it more true to say, as Long has pointed out in a private conservation, that he learns his fatherhood “through” her. 57 Vatican II, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium (1964), §61 (DZ, no. 4176). 58 Vatican II, Lumen Gentium, §63 (DZ, no. 4177). 55 Marian Faith in a Time of Crisis 337 of the Holy Spirit, brought forth Christ, . . . so that through the Church he may be born and may increase in the hearts of the faithful also.”59 As for the rest of us—the lay faithful, whom they have been charged to shepherd—we must remember that infallibility (the divine protection accorded to the Church’s teaching office)—is not impeccability: the purity of the “umblemished” bride of Christ, announced by St. Paul—the bride “without spot or wrinkle” (Eph 5:27)—whom the Church has always been in the person of her Holy Mother, conceived without sin, and never guilty sinning. In moments of darkness, she encourages us, assuring us that evil will not prevail, that goodness, truth, and light are of God, and to Him has been granted the victory over evil, lies, and darkness once and for all by her Son. She shares her unstained purity with us all, as well as her own faith, interceding for us in every moment of moral and spiritual darkness. Indeed, we might imagine that she too interceded for the apostle Paul, when he wrote these important words within the very context of expounding his analogy between the original unity of man and woman and the sacramental union of Christ and the Church in Ephesians chapter 5: Follow God’s example, therefore, as dearly loved children and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people. Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving. For of this you can be sure: No immoral, impure or greedy person—such a person is an idolater—has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of such things God’s wrath comes on those who are disobedient. Therefore do not be partners with them. For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord. Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. It is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes a light. This is why it is said: Vatican II, Lumen Gentium, §65 (DZ, no. 4178). 59 338 Michele M. Schumacher “Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is. Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Eph 5:1–20) And, of course, we do well to likewise heed the advice of Mary, when she says to the servants at the feast of Cana with regard to her Son, “Do whatever he tells you” (John 2:5). Indeed, we can rest assured that neither the Mother, nor the Son will ever lead us astray. Mary, Mother of the Church and our Mother, pray for us! N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2019): 339–342 339 Taking Matters Personally: Papers from “Person, Soul, and Consciousness,” the 2017 Dominican Colloquium in Berkeley Bryan Kromholtz, O.P., Co-Organizer Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology Berkeley, CA The majority of the current issue of Nova et Vetera is dedicated to papers presented at the conference “Person, Soul, and Consciousness: Philosophical and Theological Perspectives,” which took place at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, California, in July 2017. This was the second conference in the series entitled the Dominican Colloquia in Berkeley, dedicated to bringing philosophers and theologians together every three years for conversations and interchanges on topics of mutual interest.1 The other organizers and I greatly appreciate the generosity and graciousness of the editors of Nova et Vetera for providing the opportunity to share with a broader public some of the scholarship from that event. These papers reflect the dialogical structure of the colloquium itself: the paper from each plenary session is paired with a respondent, such that a paper that is primarily theological receives a response that is primarily philosophical, and vice-versa. The response, then, is intended to show some of the paper’s implications for the other field. These exchanges of views, along with the engaging question-and-answer periods at the colloquium itself, have resulted in a fruitful cross-disciplinary exchange. The present For more on the conference series, see Bryan Kromholtz and Justin Gable, “Direct Service between Athens and Jerusalem: On the Purpose and Organizing Principles of the Dominican Colloquia in Berkeley,” Nova et Vetera 14.2 (2016): 403–7, as well as the nineteen papers from the first conference, in subsequent pages of the same issue (409–697). 1 340 Bryan Kromholtz, O.P. volume includes six papers from the plenary sessions of the 2017 colloquium, along with their respective responses. There were also nearly sixty shorter papers presented in concurrent sessions at the colloquium; of these, we have been able to include only a small but eminent selection—two papers. The following is an all-too-brief summary of the contents of the six plenary-session papers and the two concurrent-session papers. In “Union and Indwelling,” Eleonore Stump explores the way a human person can be united to God. She first considers the nature of union between two human persons who love each other as friends, and then proposes the union between God and the human person to be something analogous to human friendship. Bas C. van Fraassen asks the question, “How Can We Understand Transcendence of the Ego?” He argues that since having language is a central and crucial aspect of the self (or ego), and since language itself is inherently limited in its grasp, it is literally and logically impossible ever to have a complete or fully adequate answer to the question. In “The Hypostatic Union—Personhood, Consciousness, and Knowledge,” Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap., considers the divine personhood of Jesus; the ontological relationship between this divine personhood of the Son and his incarnate human self-consciousness and knowledge that gives rise to his human “I”; Aquinas’s understanding of Jesus’s human knowledge and a critique of this interpretation; and Jesus’s human, filial consciousness and knowledge. Nancey Murphy’s “How to Keep the Non-Reductive in Nonreductive Physicalism?” favors a monistic approach to Christian anthropology, with philosophers of mind calling it “nonreductive physicalism.” She argues that it is possible to be ontologically physicalist (with regard to humans) without reducing our traditionally understood higher faculties to mere brain functions, and draws our attention to “complex self-organizing dynamical systems theory” as a promising and recently developing explanatory paradigm that is non-reductionistic (without need for any metaphysical postulate). In his contribution, “Personhood and Recognition,” Markus Rothhaar asserts that the concept of a “person” is the core concept of every practical philosophy. For every ethical theory, he states, there are two fundamental presuppositions: that other subjects exist, and that, in a normative sense, these other subjects matter. This is precisely what is entailed in the concept “person.” In “The Word Breathes Forth Love: The Psychological Analogy for the Trinity and the Complementarity of Intellect and Will,” Lawrence Feingold proposes that while this analogy is usually considered a way of deepening our understanding of the Trinity’s inner life, it can also help us understand the spiritual operations of the human intellect and will, their fruitfulness and complementarity, and the manner of their elevation Taking Matters Personally 341 by grace and glory. Each of these six papers is immediately followed by its response, which, in each case, brings philosophical and theological considerations into conversation. In addition to the twelve pieces mentioned above, there are two papers from concurrent sessions of the colloquium, as noted. Brian T. Carl, examining Aquinas’s thought in “Action, Supposit, and Subject: Interpreting Actiones Sunt Suppositorum,” distinguishes the meanings of the term “subject” in order to consider how human souls and persons should be characterized as subjects of intellectual activity. In “The Human Person as Believer,” Joseph Gamache, exploring a suggestion of G.K. Chesterton, considers how the act of belief is central for understanding human persons, including the nature of that belief and the norms governing it. He ultimately argues for truth as a plausible norm for a person’s belief, insofar as one opts for that truth as a value. We can see in this group of papers the wide range of topic areas touched upon, including the philosophy of consciousness and subjectivity (Stump, van Fraassen, Carl, Gamache), ethics (Rothhaar), Christology (Weinandy), Trinitarian theology (Feingold), and anthropology, both philosophical and theological (Murphy, Weinandy, Feingold, Carl, Gamache). It is evident that the topic lends itself to a wide range of potential approaches and a richness of subject matter that is inexhaustible. It is also clear that there are many ways in which fundamental questions surrounding personhood, the soul, and consciousness lie behind a great number of contemporary concerns. We can name just a few of them. Technological advances allow for the replacement of human work (robotics, automation), whose significance has profound societal effects. Other advances even promise the eventual emulation of human interaction, leading to questions about the nature of the human need for interpersonal contact. New modes of social interaction show great promise for increasing the reach of social participation, yet present new kinds of social difficulty, alienation, and despair. Developments in neuroscience prompt new questions about the distinction between humans and other bodily beings. Current debates about the basis for ethics cannot forgo a deeper inquiry into regard for the person—which should also inform any attempt to reckon with the recent decline in civility and mutual respect in public discourse. These are only some of today’s currents upon which the reflections that follow may, at least indirectly, shed some light. Indeed, in the following papers—on the status, structure, and experience of the human—both the philosopher, who seeks to understand all, and the theologian, whose mission is to show how God’s Word addresses all, will find worthy matter for their respective forms of reflection. We at 342 Bryan Kromholtz, O.P. the Dominican Colloquia in Berkeley express our gratitude, once again, to Nova et Vetera for allowing us to make them available to you. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2019): 343–361 343 Union and Indwelling Eleonore Stump Saint Louis University St. Louis, MO Introduction In this paper,1 I want to explore the nature of union between God and a human person. I will first consider the nature of union possible between two human persons who love each other as friends. Union between God and a human person will be something analogous to such a union between two human friends. But because God is metaphysically greater than human beings, union with God will also be something metaphysically greater than the union between two human friends. Traditionally, in Christian theology, this metaphysically greater union is constituted at least in part by the indwelling Holy Spirit. Although the notion of indwelling at issue here is a commonplace of theological discussion, it is remarkably difficult to say what it comes to. In this paper, I will try to shed light on this Christian notion by first elucidating the notion of union between two human persons, then considering the analogous condition in God, and finally examining the additional element in Christian theology of God’s indwelling a human person. The resulting account will give us some insight into the nature of union between God and a human person. It is important to begin with a brief account of the nature of love, and Substantial parts of this paper are drawn from various parts of my book Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), but a significant amount of new material has also been added. 1 344 Eleonore Stump the best account I know is that of Thomas Aquinas. For Aquinas,2 love requires two interconnected desires:3 (1) the desire for the good of the beloved,4 and (2) the desire for union with the beloved.5 Certain things are worth noting with regard to each of these desires. To begin with the second desire first, it is worth pointing out that the desire for union is not equivalent to the desire to be in the company of the beloved.6 Other philosophers have remarked that one can love a person without desiring to be in that person’s company,7 and being in someone’s Aquinas uses four words for love; in Latin, they are: amor, dilectio, amicitia, and caritas (see Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae [ST] I-II, q. 26, a. 3). The first of these is love in its most generic sense, which is included in all the other kinds; for Aquinas, even a rock falling from a higher to a lower place can be said to have love for the place to which it falls, in this generic sense of “love” (see ST I-II, q. 26, a. 1). The second, dilectio, emphasizes the element of voluntariness in the love of rational persons; and the third, amicitia, picks out the dispositions of love in friendship. But, for Aquinas, the fourth, caritas, is the word for love in its real or complete sense. Since Aquinas privileges caritas in this way, I will focus on caritas in explaining his account of love, although I will understand his views of caritas in light of what he says about the more generic amor. 3 See ST II-II, q. 25, a. 3. 4 See ST I-II, q. 26, a. 4, where Aquinas says that to love is to will good to someone. See also ST I-II, q. 28, a. 4, where Aquinas explains the zeal or intensity of love in terms of the strength of a lover’s desire for the good of the beloved. 5 See, e.g., ST I-II, q. 26, a. 2, ad 2, and q. 28, a. 1, sc, where Aquinas quotes approvingly Dionysius’s line that love is the unitive force. Cf. also ST I-II, q. 66, a. 6, where Aquinas explains the superiority of charity to the other virtues by saying that every lover is drawn by desire to union with the beloved, and ST I-II, q. 70, a. 3, where Aquinas explains the connection between joy and love by saying that every lover rejoices at being united to the beloved. For an interesting recent attempt to defend a position that has some resemblance to Aquinas’s, see Robert Adams, “Pure Love,” Journal of Religious Ethics 8 (1980): 83–99. Adams says: “It is a striking fact that while benevolence (the desire for another person’s well-being) and Eros, as a desire for relationship with another person, seem to be quite distinct desires, we use a single name, ‘love’ or ‘Agape,’ for an attitude that includes both of them, at least in typical cases” (97). 6 For Aquinas’s views on the nature of this union, cf., e.g., ST I-II, q. 28, a. 1, where real union is described as a matter of presence between lover and beloved. 7 David Velleman, “Love as a Moral Emotion,” Ethics 109 (1999): 353. 2 Union and Indwelling 345 company is obviously not equivalent to being united to her. It is manifestly possible to be in the company of someone when one is alienated from her, rather than united to her. With regard to the first desire, the goodness in question is not to be identified with moral goodness only. It is goodness in the broader sense that encompasses beauty, elegance or efficiency, and metaphysical as well as moral goodness.8 Furthermore, because Aquinas holds that there is an objective standard of goodness, the measure of value for the goodness at issue in love is also objective. Given Aquinas’s ethical views, then, the good of the beloved has to be understood as that which truly is in the interest of the beloved and which truly does conduce to the beloved’s flourishing. It is important to see here also that, because of the strong connection Aquinas maintains between God and goodness,9 anything that contributes to the objective good for a person also brings her closer to God. The beloved’s closeness to God and her flourishing as the best person she can be will therefore be co-variant, for Aquinas. So to desire the good of the beloved, on the standard of goodness Aquinas accepts, is to desire for the beloved those things that in fact contribute to the beloved’s flourishing, and these will also increase the beloved’s closeness to God. Finally, it is important to see that, for Aquinas, the two desires of love are not independent of each other but rather interrelated. And when the two desires of love appear to conflict, Aquinas’s claim that the ultimate good for human beings is union with God gives a method for harmonizing them. Union with God is shareable, and persons united with God are also united with each other. Ultimately, then, the same thing—namely, union with God—constitutes both the final good10 for each of the persons in a loving relationship and also their deepest union with each other. The two desires of love are therefore interrelated in mutually governing ways. For Aquinas, then, love is, as it were, a systems-level feature, emerging from two interconnected, mutually governing desires, for the good of the beloved and for union with the beloved. For detailed discussion of Aquinas’s views of goodness, understood in this broad sense, see my Aquinas (New York: Routledge, 2003), ch. 2. 9 On the doctrine of simplicity, which Aquinas accepts, God is both goodness itself and also a good being. For explanation and some defense of this claim, see my “God’s Simplicity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas, ed. Brian Davies and Eleonore Stump (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 135–46. 10 By “final good” here, I mean the good for the sake of which all other goods are desirable. I do not mean to imply that this final good is the only good or that all other goods are only apparent goods. 8 346 Eleonore Stump We can conclude this very brief presentation of Aquinas’s account of love by considering the way in which it applies to the special case of God’s love of human persons. On traditional Christian doctrine, God is perfectly loving to all human beings. And so, on Aquinas’s account of love, God desires the good of each human person and union with her.11 But, for God, the two desires of love converge. That is because, as I explained above, the ultimate good of a human person, her ultimate flourishing, just is union with God. So in desiring the good for a human person and union with a human person, God is desiring the same thing, at least where the ultimate good is concerned. In addition, there is this difference between the love of one human being for another and God’s love for a human being. In the case of love between human beings, when one person Paula desires union with another person Jerome, Paula needs to be responsive to Jerome. Suppose, for example, that Jerome is incurably musically illiterate (because of a right-hemisphere stroke, for example), but that Paula is a composer. Then, if Paula understands Jerome’s condition, it would be cruel of her, not loving, to insist on trying to share her musical creativity with him. But in God’s case things are the other way around. When God loves Jerome, God’s love is not responsive to goodness in Jerome. Instead, God’s love is the source of whatever goodness or excellence there is in Jerome. On Aquinas’s view and on all resolutely anti-Pelagian views, any goodness whatsoever in creatures is derived from God directly or indirectly. Like many others in this tradition, Aquinas supposes that there is nothing good in any creature, including human persons, which is not in one way or another a gift of God, whereby God enables creatures to imitate something in God’s nature.12 On this view, in loving Jerome and desiring the good for Jerome, God is offering goodness to Jerome. If Jerome does not resist God’s love, then God’s love is productive of goodness in Jerome, not responsive to the goodness Jerome has already produced in himself by himself.13 See, e.g., ST I, q. 20, a. 2. If Pelagianism is understood as the position that there can be something good in a human person which is not a gift of God’s, then Aquinas is resolutely, vehemently anti-Pelagian. For further discussion of these elements of Aquinas’s philosophical theology, see my Aquinas, ch. 12. 13 On Aquinas’s views, God gives grace to every person who does not reject grace, but God does not give grace to a person who rejects grace, since doing so would violate that person’s will. God’s giving of grace to a person is therefore responsive to whether that person rejects grace or not. But it is always open to a human being to reject God’s grace or to cease rejecting God’s grace. With regard to 11 12 Union and Indwelling 347 For these reasons, anything good in Jerome and any closeness to God on Jerome’s part is brought about in Jerome entirely by God, but it is also true that Jerome is ultimately responsible for whether or not he is in union with God. Even on Aquinas’s resolutely anti-Pelagian views, because Jerome can always resist the love of God, God’s bringing about goodness in Jerome is responsive to something in Jerome.14 It is always open to Jerome to resist God’s love and grace or to cease resisting it; and so, even on anti-Pelagian views, Jerome has alternative possibilities for willing with regard to God’s giving him grace. So, mutatis mutandis, Aquinas’s account of love applies also to God’s love for human beings. Although God’s love for human beings is in some respects a special case, nonetheless Aquinas’s account of love as consisting in two mutually governing desires, for the good of the beloved and for union with the beloved, holds with regard to God’s love, too. With this much summary of the nature of love, we can now turn to the notion of the union that is desired in love. Mutual Closeness and Significant Personal Presence In my view, the sort of union of love possible among mentally fully functioning adult human beings15 who are friends requires two things: personal presence and mutual closeness. Mutual closeness is necessary for union; but two persons could be close to each other and still not united to each other because something separates them even while they remain close during the separation. Such a situation is a staple of romantic literature, for example. What is missing for the separated friends is the presence of one to the other, and so presence is also an element of union. God’s giving of grace, then, alternative possibilities are always available to a human person. 14 I have argued elsewhere that God can bring about goodness in a person without thereby violating her free will, where free will is to be understood in a libertarian sense. Nothing about God’s love of a human person or God’s giving goodness to her takes away her free will. It is therefore possible both that anything good in a human person, on which closeness to God is based, is brought about in her entirely by God and also that a human person is ultimately responsible for whether or not she is in union with God. Since this is so, the love of God has to be responsive to something in the beloved, even on Aquinas’s resolutely anti-Pelagian views. For more discussion of these issues, see my Aquinas, ch. 13. 15 It may be that these things are also required for friendship between human persons one or more of whom is not adult or not mentally fully functioning or both; but in the interest of brevity I am concentrating on the simplest case of friendship. 348 Eleonore Stump It is clear that there are various kinds of presence, for human beings and for God with human beings.16 So, for example, Paula’s being present with regard to Jerome can be nothing more than a matter of her being here now where and when Jerome is located. Analogously, even for immaterial God, there is a kind of presence that involves relations to both space and time. The relations involved in presence with regard to space and time are typically characterized as presence in or presence at. In addition, however, there is another kind of presence, a second-personal presence that one person can have to another; and it is the kind of presence crucial for union. Personal presence is the kind of presence we have in mind when we say, for example, “She read the paper all through dinner and was never present to any of the rest of us” or, “He sat with me at the defendant’s table, but he was never really present with me during the trial.” In these examples, there is presence at a time and in a place, but some kind of presence, characterized by one or another kind of second-personal psychological connection, is missing. Typically, this kind of presence is characterized as presence with or presence to another person. This is a kind of unilateral personal presence, but mutual personal presence is also possible. It is mediated by a certain kind of mutual awareness, of the kind that arises, for example, when one person meets the eyes of another. This kind of mutual personal presence manifestly comes in degrees. There is the minimal kind that can arise when one momentarily catches the eye of a stranger on a bus. At the other end of the scale, there is the kind of intense and intimate mutual personal presence that is possible between two persons who are mutually close to each other and engaged in mutual gaze. This kind of presence is significant personal presence.17 God’s omnipresence is the subject of an increasing literature in contemporary philosophy. For a representative excellent example, see Hud Hudson, “Omnipresence,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology, ed. Thomas P. Flint and Michael C. Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009): 199–216. My focus in this paper is on a side of omnipresence not often investigated in the standard treatments of it. 17 I have discussed the nature of the second-personal at length in my Wandering in Darkness, chs. 4 and 6. 16 Union and Indwelling 349 Although mutual closeness is necessary for this kind of intense presence, it is not sufficient; what else is needed is shared attention. It is hard to overemphasize the importance of shared attention for human life and development. It is currently the subject of much discussion among philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, but all attempts to give a clear and adequate account of it seem at best incomplete.18 Still, it is a phenomenon everyone recognizes, and clear examples of it are easy to find. When a mother looks into the eyes of her baby and the baby looks back, they are sharing attention. As between adults, shared attention is partly a matter of mutual knowledge, of the sort that prompts philosophical worry about the possibility of unstoppable infinite regress: Paula is aware of Jerome’s being aware of Paula’s being of Jerome’s being aware, and so on. The object of awareness for Paula is simultaneously Jerome and their mutual awareness—Jerome’s awareness of her awareness of his awareness and so on—and the object of awareness for Jerome is simultaneously Paula and their mutual awareness.19 These lines are misleading in multiple ways and inadequate to capture the phenomenon of shared attention, but they help to give some idea of it. Shared attention is also required for significant personal presence. If Jerome were to say of Paula, “She was distracted all through dinner and was never really present to me,” one of the things he would be complaining about would be Paula’s failure to share her attention with him. Presence between Human Persons: Empathy, Mind-Reading, and Union in Love So in addition to presence at a place or in a time, as between persons yet another kind of presence is possible, in which one person Paula is personally present to another person Jerome. In this condition, Paula has a kind of direct access to Jerome’s mind. Such access enables a knowledge of persons that is part of presence between persons, too. Paula cannot be present to Even the terminology is fluid. What I am calling “shared attention” or “joint attention” here is a dyadic relation. Some writers reserve these terms for a triadic relation, between two persons and a third object. In what follows here, by “shared attention” I mean only the dyadic relation. 19 Shared attention can be more or less deep and rich. In order for shared attention to be rich, there has to be a relation of mutual closeness between the persons sharing attention. A shared glance between relative strangers may be potent and exciting. But it is also possible for there to be sustained shared attention between two people, involving insightful mental seeing (as it were) of one another, and this can occur only between people who are close to each other. The shared attention at issue in what follows is the kind that is dependent on mutual closeness. 18 350 Eleonore Stump Jerome if Jerome somehow blocks her from having such access to him. And without mutual presence with mutual access, there cannot be union of love between Paula and Jerome. The mental access in question is a function both of empathy and of what contemporary neuroscientists and psychologists call “mind-reading.” When Paula mind-reads Jerome or has empathy with Jerome, she has a kind of personal presence to Jerome which has something of the character that telepathy would have if telepathy were real, as it is not. In empathy, for example, Paula can feel within herself Jerome’s feeling, for example. And in mind-reading Jerome, Paula somehow has within herself something of Jerome’s mind. In mind-reading him, Paula can sense as internal in her own psychology Jerome’s intentions or emotions. Consequently, when Paula mind-reads Jerome, Paula is in some sense there, present with or present to Jerome. We now know much more about empathy and mind-reading than we did only a few decades ago; and we recognize that cognitive capacities afforded by certain recently discovered neurological systems also enable the ability for empathy and mind-reading more generally. Because of recent work in neuroscience and developmental psychology, especially work on the impairments of development among autistic children, we have learned a great deal about the neurological systems that make empathy and mind-reading possible and the kind of cognition these systems produce. Whatever ties together the different clinical signs of all the degrees of autism spectrum disorder, the most salient feature of the disorder is an impairment in the cognitive capacities enabling mind-reading.20 Among philosophers, there is not one universally accepted understanding 20 of the notion of mind-reading. It seems to me to be taken ambiguously, in a way analogous to the ambiguity in the notion of perception. The notion of perception can be taken as (i) perception, (ii) perception as, and (iii) perceptual belief. To say that Max has a perception of a cup can be understood to mean i. the cup is an object of perception for Max, ii. Max perceives the cup as a cup, iii. Max perceives that that is a cup. The notion of mind-reading seems to me ambiguous in the same way. The reason for the ambiguity is that, in ordinary cases in which a cognitive capacity is operating normally, it operates as part of a whole system to give information available to consciousness, connected with other information stored in the system, and formulable in beliefs. For reasons I have given elsewhere, it seems to me better to take perception in sense (ii) than in sense (i) or sense (iii). (See my Aquinas, ch. Union and Indwelling 351 The knowledge which is impaired for an autistic child, however, cannot be taken as knowledge that something or other is the case. A non-autistic pre-linguistic infant is capable of mind-reading; she can know her mother, and to one extent or another she can also know some of her mother’s mental states. But she is not capable of knowledge that a particular person is her mother or that she is sad. Conversely, an autistic child can know that his mother is sad—say, because she has told him so and she is a reliable authority on such matters for the child. But the impairment characteristic of autism can leave the child without the direct and immediate knowledge of the sadness of his mother.21 What is impaired for the autistic child is just a non-propositional knowledge of persons and a direct intuitive awareness of their mental states. In typically functioning human beings, mind-read8, especially the section on perception.) In this paper, I am taking mind-reading analogously, in sense (ii), rather than sense (i) or sense (iii). In this respect, I dissent from Alvin Goldman’s use of the term “mind-reading.” His use of the term is a variant on (iii). He says: “By ‘mindreading’ I mean the attribution of a mental state to self or other. In other words, to mindread is to form a judgment, belief, or representation that a designate person occupies or undergoes (in the past, present, or future) a specified mental state or experience” (“Mirroring, Mindreading, and Simulation,” in Mirror Neuron Systems: The Role of Mirroring Processes in Social Cognition, ed. Jamie Pineda [New York: Springer, 2009], 312). On Goldman’s usage, it would not be true to say that autistic children are impaired with respect to mind-reading, since it is possible for them to form judgments about the mental states of others. But in order to explain what is impaired in autism, we need a term like “mind-reading” in sense (ii). Since “mind-reading” is the term already employed for this purpose by many philosophers and researchers on autism, it seems to me better to continue to use the term in that way rather than in Goldman’s way. Goldman’s goal is to interpret mind-reading in such a way as to make the new results in neurobiology compatible with his own attempts to understand mind-reading in terms of simulation theory. For arguments against Goldman’s position on this score, see Shaun Gallagher, “Neural Simulation and Social Cognition,” in Pineda, Mirror Neuron Systems, 355–71. 21 Although early work on autism emphasized its impairments, much recent research has called attention not only to the cognitive strengths possible for autistic human beings but also the way in which, by alternate systems, they can flourish in human relationship and human community. It is important to me to make sure that this point is not lost, even if for my purposes here the impairments of autism are to the fore. For my purpose in this paper, autism is helpful because it highlights human cognitive capacities that we might otherwise overlook or be skeptical of. My purpose here is not a full description or discussion of autism. But if autism were a main subject for me, then I would be at pains to highlight the way in which the human spirit can flourish and be luminescent for others in a way well worth honoring, no matter what difficulties or brokenness it must shine through. For detailed discussion of this issue, see my Atonement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), ch. 9. 352 Eleonore Stump ing yields a non-propositional, direct and immediate intuitive knowledge of persons and their mental states.22 One neurobiologist doing research on mind-reading, Vittorio Gallese, tries to explain the relevant neural mechanisms involved in mind-reading and the knowledge of persons this way: [The brain maps] representation across different spaces inhabited by different actors. These spaces are blended within a unified common intersubjective space, which paradoxically does not segregate any subject. This space is “we” centric. . . . The shared intentional space underpinned by the . . . [relevant neural] mechanism is not meant to distinguish the agent from the observer.23 And he goes on to explain empathy in this way: Self–other identity goes beyond the domain of action. It incorporates sensations, affect, and emotions. . . . The shared intersubjective space in which we live from birth continues long afterward to constitute a substantial part of our semantic space. When we observe other individuals acting, facing their full range of expressive power (the way they act, the emotions and feelings they display), a meaningful embodied link among individuals is automatically established. . . . Sensation and emotions displayed by others can also be empathized with, and therefore implicitly understood, through a mirror matching mechanism [in the brain].24 In other words, in mind-reading between human beings, there is a sense in which, through the use of the neural systems Gallese describes, one person has a kind of intuitive entrance to the thought, affect, or intention in the mind of another person. And so because of the intermingling of minds made possible by the relevant neural systems, one person can be present to another in virtue of having a kind of direct access to the mind Mind-reading or some analogue of it can be found in species other than human beings and also between members of different species, including between human beings and other animals; and so the qualification “in human beings” is necessary here. 23 Vittorio Gallese, “‘Being Like Me’: Self–Other Identity, Mirror Neurons, and Empathy,” in Perspectives on Imitation: From Neuroscience to Social Science, ed. Susan Hurley and Nick Chater (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 111. 24 Gallese, “‘Being Like Me,’” 111 and 114. 22 Union and Indwelling 353 of that other. If Paula is riding the subway next to Jerome, then she is minimally present to Jerome in virtue of being at a time and at a place where Jerome is also, so that she is available for shared attention with him, if he should happen to look at her while she is looking at him, for example. But if he is a blank book to her, if his mind is closed to her, then to that extent she is not able to be present to him with the personal presence at issue here. In virtue of the fact that his mind is closed to her, she is distant from him even while standing next to him. On the other hand, if Jerome’s mind is open to Paula, then the kind of presence to a person made possible by the relevant neural mechanisms is greatly enhanced. When Paula mind-reads Jerome, the relevant neural systems in Paula give Paula a direct, quasi-perceptual awareness of something in Jerome’s thoughts, emotions, or intentions. This awareness arises in Paula because in mind-reading Jerome she is in effect experiencing something of Jerome’s mental states. In this experience and awareness, she is also present with Jerome, with personal presence, in a way she could not be if his mind were closed to her. There is a limited degree of this kind of personal presence when Paula winces as she sees Jerome slice his finger with his steak knife, even if Jerome is unaware that Paula is observing him. This is a kind of presence of one person with another that is possible even if the two people involved are strangers to each other or know and heartily dislike each other. (Paula can wince at Jerome’s pain even while she thinks that his suffering that pain serves him right.) And if Paula is close to Jerome, then her shared attention with Jerome will yield her significant personal presence to him also. But there is a much greater degree of personal presence when two people who are mutually close to each other in a loving relationship are mutually mind-reading each other in intense shared attention. In mutual personal presence of this intimate kind, there can be something stronger than the asymmetrical relation of Paula’s being present to Jerome. There can be a mutual “in-ness” between the persons who are mutually close to each other, in a way that yields a powerful personal presence of each to the other. When this kind of mutual and shared second-personal presence occurs, one way to describe the connection between the two people in question is to say that they are united in love.25 This kind of experience is As many researchers working on these topics testify, it is very hard to capture the notion of sharing at issue in this claim. Attention, closeness, and presence can be mutual as between two persons Paula and Jerome and yet not yield union because they are not shared. For example, Paula can be mind-reading Jerome without 25 354 Eleonore Stump common between human beings, as, for example, between a mother and her child or between a sick person and her loving caretaker. God’s Presence with Human Persons: Empathy and Mind-Reading With these background reflections on the nature of union between two human persons, we can turn to the nature of union between God and a human person; and we can start with the issue of mind-reading and empathy on God’s part. Since on orthodox theological doctrine God is omniscient, God knows all truths; and so God has propositional knowledge (or the divine equivalent of propositional knowledge26) as regards all the mental states of all human beings. God knows that Paula is sad or that Jerome intends to go out. But it seems that with respect to human persons, God cannot have empathy or the mind-reading kind of knowledge. And so it seems that one kind of presence with a person, of the sort prized by human beings, is not possible for God to have with respect to human beings. When Paula has empathy with Jerome, she feels within herself what Jerome feels. But in virtue of having no body, God has no feelings either. This is the point of the Scholastic doctrine that God is impassible. Strictly speaking, a passio, which is the thing an impassible God does not have, is a feeling; and a feeling at least includes bodily sensations. Nothing immaterial can have bodily sensations, and so immaterial God has no feelings either, in this sense of “feeling.” (This claim is very different from the claim with which it is often confused, namely, the theologically unacceptable claim that God has no emotions.) Mind-reading extends to more than knowledge of the feelings of another person, but all mind-reading is like empathy in having a shared character and a qualitative feel. When Paula mind-reads Jerome, she shares something of Jerome’s mental state in virtue of somehow feeling that mental state in herself. Paula knows Jerome’s intention to shake her hand, say, because her brain forms the neural pattern it would form if Paula were going to move her arm to shake someone’s hand; and so, by feeling it within herself, she knows Jerome’s intention to shake her hand. An immaterial God cannot form an intention to move his arm, however, because he Jerome’s being aware that she is doing so while Jerome is mind-reading Paula without Paula’s being aware that Jerome is doing so. So mutuality does not imply sharedness. But sharedness is what is crucial for union. 26 The doctrine of simplicity complicates any attribution to God, so that God’s knowledge of truths may need to be explained in a way only analogical to human propositional knowledge. Union and Indwelling 355 has no arm to move. And so although God can know that Jerome intends to shake Paula’s hand, it seems that he cannot mind-read Jerome’s intention in the direct and intuitive way Paula can. And the point generalizes. A human psyche is too small and God’s mind is too great, one might say, for God to contain human mental states within himself in the shared way the relevant neural system enables as between human beings. And so, it seems, the sharing and the presence with a person that is the hallmark of the knowledge of persons is ruled out for God. But appearances are misleading here. In this respect, Christianity has special resources because of the doctrine that God became incarnate in Christ. The Chalcedonian formula for the incarnate Christ stipulates that Christ is one person with two natures. The one person is the second person of the Trinity and is thus God, and the two natures are the divine and the human. It is one of the consequences of the Chalcedonian formula that there are in Christ two minds, one human and one divine, but only one person—a divine person—who is the possessor of these two minds.27 For this reason, through the assumed human nature of Christ, God can have empathy with human persons and can also mind-read them, since God can use the human mind of the assumed human nature to know human persons in the knowledge of persons way. Therefore, for every human person, God can also be present with her in this way. So, the Chalcedonian formula for the incarnate Christ gives a way of explaining and defending God’s knowledge of persons through mind-reading and the presence with a human person that God’s mind-reading enables God to have. Second-Personal Presence: Union in Love and Indwelling The kind of presence mediated by the mind-reading that God can have with all human persons in consequence of the Incarnation falls short of the second-personal presence obtaining between persons united in love, however. When Christ mind-reads in ordinary ways or miraculously, he does so because of the power of his human capacity for mind-reading, divinely enhanced or not. But, miraculous or merely human, by itself this kind of mind-reading produces a unilateral, not a mutual, presence. And Some people might suppose that this description of Christ is incoherent and that philosophical reason can demonstrate that there could be nothing meeting this description. In my Aquinas, ch. 14, I have examined the doctrine of the Incarnation and attempted to defend it against at least some of the major arguments meant to show its incoherence. 27 356 Eleonore Stump so there is an asymmetry about it that limits mutual presence between persons. It is part of orthodox theological doctrine, though, that when a person Paula comes to faith, she opens herself up to God in love. In an act of free will that is part of faith, Paula accepts God’s grace and begins a relation of mutual love with God. In entering into this relationship, Paula accepts not only God’s grace but also God himself. On orthodox Christian doctrine, when Paula comes to faith in this way, the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, comes to dwell in her.28 However exactly it is to be understood, on the theological claims involving the Holy Spirit, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit puts the mind of God within Paula’s psyche. On Trinitarian doctrine, there is only one mind and one will in God, and this one mind and one will are common to all three persons of the Trinity. In consequence of the strong and intimate connection established by the Holy Spirit’s indwelling Paula, the relationship of love between God and Paula yields maximal second-personal presence of God with Paula. But how are we to understand the theological claim about the Holy Spirit’s indwelling? We can start by saying what it is not. God’s indwelling in Paula is not merely a matter of God’s having direct and immediate causal and cognitive access to Paula’s mind. Since God is omnipotent and omniscient, God has this kind of access to the mind of every human being, with regard to propositional knowledge (or the divine analogue to propositional knowledge). Through the human mind of Christ, God also has access to every human mind with the non-propositional knowledge garnered by mind-reading. For every person, it is possible for God to know the mind of that person with direct and unmediated awareness of the mind-reading kind. (For similar reasons, it is also possible for God to communicate in a direct and unmediated way with the mind of every person.) These kinds of cognitive relations between God and human beings hold, then, for every human person. But the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is found only in those people who have faith and are in grace. And so these kinds of cognitive relations alone are insufficient as an explanation of the nature of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling. We might try understanding indwelling as an analogue to the psychic relation between human persons who are united in love. The psychic relation between mutually loving human beings is a particularly intimate kind For a helpful discussion seeking to explain the effects of the indwelling Holy Spirit, see Aquinas’s Summa contra gentiles IV, ch. 21–22. 28 Union and Indwelling 357 of mind-reading accompanied by shared attention between persons when those persons are mutually close to each other. And so we might suppose that the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is the analogous set of relations between God and a human person. But this approach to explaining the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is not quite right either. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit is meant to be something ontologically more powerful than mutual closeness accompanied by intense shared attention. In the Holy Spirit’s indwelling, God himself is supposed somehow to be within each person in grace. Although immaterial God cannot be contained within a material container, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit does include God’s being somehow within the psyches of those who are in grace. At this point, it may help to return to Gallese’s attempt to describe the kind of relations that are involved in mind-reading. According to Gallese, when Paula mind-reads Jerome’s intention to shake her hand, for example, her mind goes into the configuration it would have if she were Jerome and preparing to shake hands. But this configuration is in Paula off-line that is, not actually connected in an active way to her muscles. She has the motor configuration for shaking hands, but on her part no hand-shaking occurs. So, the configuration of Jerome’s intention is in Paula; and because it is, it is Paula’s; but it is in Paula as Jerome’s intention, and not as hers. This complicated state is what Gallese is trying to describe when he says that there is a “we-centric” part of the human brain that enables a real sharing of mental states. Gallese is talking about brain systems in order to make a point about mental states. Aquinas makes a very roughly analogous point about the mechanisms of cognition for perception. For Aquinas, when a person Paula sees an object, such as a coffee cup, the configuration or form inhering in the cup which makes the matter of the cup be a cup is transferred to Paula’s mind. The form that is in the cup is then also in Paula’s mind, only in an encoded state. Or, as we might say, the configuration of the cup is transferred through a certain pattern of firing by Paula’s retinal cells to Paula’s visual cortex. In theory, it would be possible for a competent neuroscientist, who understands the neural coding involved, to look at the configuration in Paula’s visual cortex and infer correctly that what is impacting her visual cortex is a cup. So, in some sense, the configuration of the cup is in both the cup and Paula, only in differing ways. Analogously, we might say, when Paula mind-reads Jerome’s intention, there is a form or configuration in Jerome’s brain that is found also in Paula’s. She mind-reads him because she shares this form or configuration with him. The same configuration is in each of them, only differently insofar as it is 358 Eleonore Stump off-line in Paula.29 Furthermore, although the configuration of the cup is really in Paula’s mind when she sees the cup, that configuration is processed in Paula in such a way as to enable Paula to have cognition of the cup. Analogously, when the configuration of Jerome’s intention is in Paula’s mind, that configuration is in her mind in such a way as to enable Paula to have cognition of Jerome’s intention, not hers. So, the configuration of Jerome’s mind is in Jerome’s mind and in Paula’s at once, but Jerome feels it as his and Paula feels it as belonging to Jerome. It is possible, then, for a person Paula to have neurologically and psychologically within her mind something that is her own and yet also part of another person Jerome. Furthermore, it is also possible for Paula to feel this dichotomy, so that it is subjectively accessible to her. Paula can consciously identify a mental state as within her own mind and yet somehow not hers but Jerome’s. It is easiest to see this point in connection with empathy. If Paula sees Jerome impale his bare foot on a nail in the garden, she will wince with pain. So, something of Jerome’s pain is in Paula; she winces because she feels it within herself. But even while she feels this pain in herself, she also is conscious that what she feels with pain is Jerome’s pain and not her own. She is sharing with Jerome what is Jerome’s. Neurological research suggests that the brain has multiple systems for identifying parts of oneself as one’s own—body parts, thoughts, and the self in general.30 If there are brain systems enabling social cognition and intersubjectivity, by means of “we-centric” space that enables shared mental states or by some other means, there are also brain systems enabling the distinction between self and other. When something goes wrong with these latter brain systems, dysfunctional mental conditions involving delusions can result. For example, in consequence of an injury, a patient can suffer the delusion that some part of his body is not his own.31 In the view of some researchers, the psychological delusion of thought intrusion is also I am grateful to John Foley, who suggested to me this way of explaining the point and its usefulness for understanding the nature of God’s indwelling in a person of faith. 30 As recent work in metaphysics highlights, there are also criteria for determining that a person’s mind is his own, that it belongs to him, in ways hard to specify with precision, but crucial for issues of moral responsibility and freedom of will. For a discussion of some of the issues, see, for example, my “Persons: Identification and Freedom,” Philosophical Topics 24 (1996): 183–214. 31 For a vivid and popular description of such a case, see Oliver Sacks, A Leg to Stand On (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). 29 Union and Indwelling 359 a result of the malfunctioning of these brain systems.32 Because of these systems in the human brain for recognizing some mental states as one’s own, it is also possible for a person Jerome to have a sense of the mind operative in him as not his own but someone else’s. Since this is so, it is possible for the intersubjectivity of mental states enabled by the mirror neuron system and evident in mind-reading to transform from a mere psychological sharing to something that is metaphysical and ontological. It is possible, that is, that what is in Jerome’s mind is not just another person’s thought or affect, but in fact that other person’s mind. If such a thing is possible, then “indwelling” is not a bad word for this kind of relationship of one mind to another. It does seem appropriate to say that in such a case the other person’s mind indwells Jerome’s mind. Science fiction is replete with stories in which malevolent non-human beings indwell a human mind,33 and folklore has sometimes tended to explain certain kinds of mental illness along the same lines.34 Such stories and the correlative folklore are frightening and revulsive because in them the indwelling mind invades the mind of a vulnerable human person In Fregoli’s syndrome, a patient has the intractable delusion that he knows familiar people when he looks at the faces of strangers. In Capgras syndrome, a patient has the intractable delusion that he does not know the people he is looking at when he looks at the faces of persons who are in fact familiar to him. For discussion of such syndromes, see, for example, Sandra Blakeslee and Vilayandur Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain (London: Harper Perennial, 2005), ch. 8. Both Fregoli’s syndrome and Capgras syndrome are a kind of loss, after neurological damage, of the capacity to know something as the thing it is. Although these syndromes have been described largely as they affect the knowledge of persons, there are also reported cases in which the lost capacity extends to the knowledge of familiar things other than persons. So, for example, some researchers describe “a patient who claimed his actual home was not his ‘real’ home, although he recognized that the facsimile home has the same ornaments and bedside items as the original” (Todd Feinberg, John Deluca, Joseph T. Giacino, David M. Roane, and Mark Solms, “Right-Hemisphere Pathology and the Self: Delusional Misidentification and Reduplication,” in The Lost Self: Pathologies of the Brain and Identity, ed. Todd Feinberg and Julian Paul Keenan [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], 103; see also 105–6 and 114–25). 33 In such science fiction stories, the mind of one intelligent being can be within the mind of another one. The two minds can interact within the mind of one being, without either mind losing its identity. In the science fiction literature depicting a human being in such a condition, the indwelling mind is typically that of an alien. The alien is generally portrayed as smarter and more powerful than the human being in whom the alien mind indwells. Robert Heinlein’s The Puppetmasters is an example of such a story. 34 If one Googles “schizophrenia and demon possession,” one will find that this sort of belief is still prevalent in some communities today. 32 360 Eleonore Stump against the human person’s will or at least without his consent. Typically, in such cases, the invader has only hatred and contempt for its human victim. On the other hand, when two people Paula and Jerome are psychically united to one another in love with the sharing of attention that union requires, the interweaving of their psyches occurs only with the willingness of each to each. Paula’s psyche is open to Jerome’s because Paula wants it to be, and the same is true of Jerome’s psyche with respect to Paula. The resulting shared openness is wanted by each of them; and when they have it, it yields gladness and peace. Furthermore, insofar as they love each other, each of them wishes for the good of the other. And so the vulnerability of each of them to the other in the openness of love is acceptable to each of them because of the trust each is rightly willing to place in the other.35 In the fullest expression of such uniting in love between Paula and Jerome, each of them is as second-personally present with the other as is possible between two human beings. Depiction of human persons united in love in a variety of relationships is a perennial theme in great literature, and hardly anyone is completely immune to its attractions. But an even more powerful second-personal presence of shared love is possible for God in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. As in the case of two human persons united in love, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit requires welcome on the part of a human person Paula. When Paula comes to faith and accepts God’s grace in love, then and only then the Holy Spirit comes to indwell in Paula. In coming to faith, Paula freely accepts God, and the consequent union between Paula and God is characterized by shared love, freely given and freely accepted. In the union of love between God and a human person, then, what is within the psyche of a human person Paula is not just the thoughts and intentions of God, but God himself. Nonetheless, nothing of Paula’s own individual personhood is lost in the process. Paula’s mind remains her own, and her awareness of her mind as her own also remains. Nonetheless, when the Holy Spirit indwells in her mind, Paula will be aware of the Spirit’s mind within her own, and there will be shared mind-reading between them.36 It probably needs to be said that it is possible for two people to love each other but not to be united in that love. They might instead love each other in ways that are conflicted or mutually self-destructive. But in those cases they are not united to each other, not least because each of them, in being conflicted, is divided against himself. For a discussion of such cases, see my Wandering in Darkness, ch. 6. 36 For more explanation of the nature of this mutual mind-reading between a human person and God, see my “Faith, Wisdom, and the Transmission of Knowledge through Testimony,” in Religious Faith and Intellectual Virtue, ed. Laura Frances 35 Union and Indwelling 361 In consequence, Paula will have as present as possible, not only with herself but even within herself, the God who is her beloved. That is why the list of the fruits of this union begins with love, joy, and peace—love, because her beloved, who loves her, is present to her; joy, because of the dynamic interaction with her beloved, who is present to her in second-personal ways; and peace, because her heart already has what it most desires, her beloved, present to her.37 On orthodox theological doctrine, there is no faith, no life of grace, without the indwelling Holy Spirit, with its concomitant love, joy, peace, and the other fruits of this union.38 Conclusion On the Christian theology, then, the Holy Spirit comes to every person of faith, and it remains in that person as long as he remains in faith. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit in a person of faith establishes a union that makes the two of them one without merging one into the other or in any other way depriving the human person of his own self, his own mind and will. The selfhood of the person of faith is kept entirely intact. In the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, then, God is more powerfully present in love and more united with a human person of faith than any other human person could be. And so, for a person of faith with the indwelling Holy Spirit, in union with God, God is Emmanuel, that is, “God with us,” not only psychologically but also literally, that is, spiritually and ontologically. N&V Callahan and Timothy O’Connor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 204–30. 37 For an excellent discussion of this subject in connection with Aquinas’s ethics, see Andrew Pinsent, The Second-Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics: Virtues and Gifts (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), especially ch. 4, in which Pinsent likens the fruition of second-person relatedness, an “abiding in” the other, to a state of resonance. 38 There are twelve traditionally recognized fruits of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, long-suffering, goodness, mildness, fidelity, modesty, continence, chastity, and gentleness. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2019): 363–372 363 Response to Eleonore Stump’s “Union and Indwelling” Steven A. Long Ave Maria University Ave Maria, FL Initial Remarks The rich reflections that Professor Stump shares in her paper on “Union and Indwelling”1 invite, and merit, attentive and serious reflection. Of course, not the least value of her remarks is their intelligent account of the nature of human empathy and its foundation in cognitive perception. There seems no reason not to embrace her account of the Thomistic analysis of love into the component elements of willing the good of the beloved, and willing union with the beloved.2 This is likewise the case with her observation that for God the willing of the creature’s union with God, and the willing of the good for that person, are identical.3 While there are questions of scope that could be raised regarding “being in the company of ” another—something that seems amenable both to very thin, and very thick, readings, as for example one recollects the phrase, “being among the company of the righteous”—nonetheless, her account distinguishing mere proximity from the reciprocal shared attentiveness of those who love one another is unassailable. Eleonore Stump, “Union and Indwelling,” 343–361 in this issue of Nova et Vetera (originally given on July 12, 2017, at the Dominican Colloquium in Berkeley on “Person, Soul and Consciousness”). 2 Stump, “Union and Indwelling,” 344. 3 Stump, “Union and Indwelling,” 346. 1 364 Steven A. Long Along the way of her remarks one does happen upon a strategic theological consideration touching a subject that runs like a seismic event affecting the theological landscape. Here one observes her formulation of the relative role of the creature, and of the divine permissive decree of evil, with respect to grace and the divine good. Professor Stump affirms that, “If Jerome does not resist God’s love, then God’s love is productive of goodness in Jerome, not responsive to the goodness Jerome has already produced in himself by himself.”4 Yet she also states that “Even on Aquinas’s resolutely anti-Pelagian views, because Jerome can always resist the love of God, God’s bringing about goodness in Jerome is responsive to something in Jerome.”5 On the one hand, Professor Stump’s embrace of the anti-Pelagian intention is pronounced and salutary. On the other hand, normally one would wish to observe at this point that her formulation appears to share the kind of problems that may be found both in Maritain’s account of the permission of evil, and in the philosophy of logic of Gottlob Frege. 6 The proposition that God bestows grace, and that if only the creature does “not negate” grace, the creature will then “receive grace,” is somewhat like saying that God bestows to the creature a nose, and if only the creature does not not have a nose, then the creature will have a real nose. In other words, the formulation presents as causal what is not causal, because in a real subject, negation of negation is something positive. This means that for a real person not to negate grace is nothing different from having actually received grace, any more than not not to have a nose can be anything different in a real subject from having a nose.7 Thus there is more to the theological story here than simply the creature with its hand on the tiller, as the question of the divine permission of evil is not permission in the garden variety sense in which one person may “permit” another to do something. This is without prejudice to Dr. Stump’s observation that “even Stump, “Union and Indwelling,” 346. Stump, “Union and Indwelling,” 347. 6 See Gottlob Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. J. L. Austin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), no. 54: “In this respect existence is analogous to number. An affirmation of existence is in fact nothing other than a denial of the number zero. Because existence is a property of concepts the ontological argument for the existence of God fails to conclude. But uniqueness is not a component characteristic of the concept of God any more than existence is.” 7 Of course, in a non-real subject, negation of negation does not imply the opposed positive: the proposition that “no thousand winged fire-breathing pumpkin does not sing La Traviata at midnight” does not imply one actually existing creature of this kind (presuming that there is no such actual creature). But in a real subject, negation of negation implies the positive that is negated. 4 5 Response to Eleonore Stump's "Union and Indwelling" 365 on anti-Pelagian views, Jerome has alternative possibilities for willing with regard to God’s giving him grace”8—but this presupposes extensive consideration both of the nature of free will and of its relation to God. By the divine simplicity, it is not possible for God to bring about an entirely indeterminate effect—which would be indistinguishable from God bringing about no effect whatsoever, thus nullifying divine causality. Of course, my reference to Frege above is a reference to his famed observation that “being is only the negation of nought,” which suffers the exact same lack of distinction between conceptual and real “negation of negation.” Morally speaking, it is true that we may distinguish between acting, non-action by reason of a positive judgment—the sense in which not to act is itself a moral act—and non-action simpliciter apart from any deliberated principle or indebtedness to the positivity of particular judgment. Yet the ontological positivity of the predilection of the will as a perfection—and any kind or degree of created agency whatsoever—lies within the divine providential causality. Between being and nonbeing there is not a third, and the totality of being outside of esse subsistens per se is, in its ontological positivity, an effect of divine causality. Thus, the true proposition that “God’s bringing about goodness in Jerome is responsive to something in Jerome” must also add that this something is both from Jerome as second cause and from God as primary cause: the creature enjoys no perfection of which God is not the first and principal cause. Indeed, as St. Thomas writes in the Summa contra gentiles (bk. III, ch. 67): “Sed omnis applicatio virtutis ad operationem est principaliter et primo a Deo”— “But every application of power to operation is principally and first from God.” It is not a textual secret that for St. Thomas Aquinas this includes every contingent application of the power of the human will in free choice. Such choice is denominated as “free” inasmuch as the connatural objects of the will do not and cannot compel it, while nonetheless the least actuation of the human free will is an effect of divine efficient causality. Thomas teaches that the will is ordered to universal good and cannot be fully actuated or compelled by any finite object, inasmuch as knowledge of every finite object is compatible with viewing it as in some way “not good.”9 Further, as he argues in many places, for example, in De malo (in q. 16, a. 7, ad 15), contingency and necessity are discriminated not in relation to the first cause, but in relation to the proximate cause. A contingent cause is changeable so as to bring about a great variety of effects, while a necessary cause is unchangeable and brings about one effect. By reason of its rational nature, the will Stump, “Union and Indwelling,” 347. Summa theologiae [ST] I, q. 82, a. 2, ad 2. 8 9 366 Steven A. Long in choosing is a radically contingent cause insusceptible of complete actuation or compulsion by any finite good, although it does have a necessary and natural motion to the good in general and toward happiness. Yet every choice (and every volition) lies wholly within the divine causality such that the least actuation of the will derives from the divine motion. As St. Thomas insists in one among several places (Summa theologiae [ST] I-II, q. 6, a. 1, ad 3): “Every motion whether of the will or of nature proceeds from God as the first mover.” He makes clear in many places that he is speaking of agent causality, for example, in ST, I, q. 22, a. 2, resp.: “But the causality of God, who is the first agent, extends to all being, not only as to constituent principles of species, but also as to the individualizing principles; not only of things incorruptible, but also of things corruptible.”10 Hence whatever is ontologically positive in the cooperation of the creature with grace is itself a gift of grace, without any limitation to the creature’s freedom. But if we speak of grace as it signifies a help from God to move us to good, no preparation is required on man’s part, that, as it were, anticipates the divine help, but rather, every preparation in man must be by the help of God moving the soul to good. And thus even the good movement of the free-will, whereby anyone is prepared for receiving the gift of grace is an act of the free-will moved by God. And thus man is said to prepare himself, according to Pr 16:1: “It is the part of man to prepare the soul”; yet it is principally from God, who moves the free-will. Hence it is said that man’s will is prepared by God, and that man’s steps are guided by God.11 Here one recollects the Council of Trent referring to God “whose goodness toward all men is such that he wants his own gifts to be their merits”— “Causalitas autem Dei, qui est primum agens, se extendit usque ad omnia entia, non solum quantum ad principia speciei, sed etiam quantum ad individualia principia, non solum incorruptibilium, sed etiam corruptibilium.” 11 ST I-II, q. 112, a. 2, resp.: “Sed si loquamur de gratia secundum quod significat auxilium Dei moventis ad bonum, sic nulla praeparatio requiritur ex parte hominis quasi praeveniens divinum auxilium; sed potius quaecumque praeparatio in homine esse potest, est ex auxilio Dei moventis animam ad bonum. Et secundum hoc ipse bonus motus liberi arbitrii quo quis praeparatur ad donum gratiae suscipiendum, est actus liberi arbitrii moti a Deo; et quantum ad hoc, dicitur homo se praeparare, secundum illud Prov. XVI: ‘Hominis est praeparare animum.’ Et est principaliter a Deo movente liberum arbitrium; et secundum hoc dicitur ‘a Deo voluntas hominis praeparari,’ et ‘a Dominio gressus hominis dirigi.’” 10 Response to Eleonore Stump's "Union and Indwelling" 367 “cuius tanta est erga omnes homines bonitas, ut eorum velit esse merita, quae sunt ipsius dona.”12 Because fuller consideration of this question would preclude engaging with objects in Professor Stump’s lecture of more primary importance to this lecture itself, it seems reasonable to move onward to the heart of her analysis rather than linger at the periphery. And this is so even though, taken in a wider context, this subject is objectively of the greatest importance, and despite the circumambient danger of falling into forgetfulness regarding the divine transcendence, and the divine simplicity, both of which render it impossible that, in relation to the simple divine will, grace not be a determinate effect. Second-Person Presence Professor Stump’s distinction between mere physico-temporal presence, and the kind of shared attention requisite for intense presence “to” or “with” another, seems to me remarkably fine in its motion from ordinary experience to the formal intentional aspects of empathy and what she calls “mind-reading”—a phrase that confessedly to me seems less felicitous than simple “anticipation” or “understanding” of another’s dispositions. Still, it brings out the aspect that something occurring in one person is somehow present to another in an intentional form which reveals to that second person something of the feelings and emotional dispositions of the first person. The statement that “In typically functioning human beings, mind-reading yields a non-propositional, direct and immediate intuitive knowledge of persons and their mental states”13 does raise questions of scope. That is to say, what is the extent to which mental states are directly observable? If this is to say only that some such knowledge is part of the ordinary human repertoire, the claim is unexceptionable. But were one to think that mental states were in general directly perceptible, this would seem to understate the role of intentional disclosure in personal relations. However, the perception that personal life is on a continuum, from that which is directly perceivable to that which is private in the sense that it can only be revealed by the person but not simply “intuited,” seems consistent with the account of “shared attention.” The exploration of personal knowledge—and of connaturality achieved via friendship—in terms of contemporary neural science is fascinating. Henrici Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, 43rd ed. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012), no. 1548, from ch. 16 of the Decree on Justification from the Council of Trent. 13 Stump, “Union and Indwelling,” 351. 12 368 Steven A. Long But it is with respect to the analogical extension of this consideration to God that the analysis encounters difficulty, especially with respect to the following observation of Professor Stump: And so although God can know that Jerome intends to shake Paula’s hand, it seems that he cannot mind-read Jerome’s intention in the direct and intuitive way Paula can.14 She continues, arguing that “A human psyche is too small and God’s mind is too great, one might say, for God to contain human mental states within himself in the shared way the relevant neural system enables as between human beings.”15 So, “the sharing and the presence with a person that is the hallmark of the knowledge of persons is ruled out for God.”16 Yet she notes that these appearances are misleading, because owing to the Incarnation, “through the assumed human nature of Christ, God can have empathy with human persons and can also mind-read them, since God can use the human mind of the assumed human nature to know human persons” such that “for every human person, God can also be present with her in this way.”17 Thus “the Chalcedonian formula for the incarnate Christ gives a way of explaining and defending God’s knowledge of persons through mind-reading and the presence with a human person that God’s mind reading enables God to have.”18 Difficulties About this and the consequent extension to the question of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, it seems to me that there are two significant difficulties, the second multi-dimensional. As to the first, there is no need to deny the human empathy of Christ, and thus no need to deny that this belongs in a sui generis way to the second person of the Trinity through the assumed human nature. The difficulty is more in what seems to be missed in this formulation. The first thing that arguably is missed, is that the properly divine knowledge of God is indeed infinitely more perfect and comprehensive than any human knowledge, including empathetic knowledge. Professor Stump’s formulation does affirm that the knowledge of God is “too great” to contain human mental states within itself. But the implication of “too great” does Stump, “Union and Indwelling,” 355. Stump, “Union and Indwelling,” 355. 16 Stump, “Union and Indwelling,” 355. 17 Stump, “Union and Indwelling,” 355. 18 Stump, “Union and Indwelling,” 355. 14 15 Response to Eleonore Stump's "Union and Indwelling" 369 not seem to be fully appropriated: namely, that human empathy constitutes an inferior knowledge, a knowledge less comprehensive and intimate—of the human person by comparison with divine knowledge. The focus on empathy could be taken as offering a purely anthropocentric ratio for the Incarnation, that is, as implying that God needs the Incarnation to love human creatures empathetically: whereas, in reality, humanity needs the Incarnation to love and worship God in a divinely mediated way, and everything that is perfective in empathy seems to be possessed more perfectly in properly divine “non-empathetic” knowledge. This is simply to say what Augustine and Thomas Aquinas teach,19 that God is closer to the creature than it is to itself. God is the source of every created good, but also, as the one who sustains and actuates the creature in all its motions toward the good, is aware of human misery with a completeness that the human mind as such does not begin to approach. It is true that this is not “empathy” in the sense of a neural configuration permitting a sharing in human dispositions. And it is true that it is a virtue for human persons to “suffer with” our friends, and to “bear their sorrows.” Yet the condition for God being present to every person as infinitely wise and loving healer and redeemer is precisely the infinite divine perfection and consequent perfect liberty of God from all evil. God’s knowledge possesses supereminently and formally whatever there is of perfection in empathetic knowledge, without possessing its created limitations. It is for the sake of the redemption and elevation of the human creature that human nature and its empathetic capacity is assumed by the divine Word, but not because the intimate, tender, and comprehensive loving knowledge of God requires any further perfection. When the woman strained to touch the cloak of Jesus, she did not do so in the hope that he could feel precisely in the way that she felt, but in the hope of being healed and restored, yearning for a fullness of life. Likewise, the woman at the well did not inquire about Our Lord’s empathy, and was drawn to the water that slakes all thirst (John 4:14): “Whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him Augustine, Confessions 3.6.34: “Tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo”—“But you, you were deeper than my inmost being and higher than my greatest height.” Aquinas, ST I, q. 8, a. 1, resp. : “Esse autem est illud quod est magis intimum cuilibet, et quod profundius omnibus inest, cum sit formale respectu omnium quae in re sunt, ut ex supra dictis patet. Unde oportet quod Deus sit in omnibus rebus, et intime”— “Existence is most intimate/innermost in each that which is deepest in all things, because it is formal with respect to all that is in a thing, as has been shown above. Thus it is necessary that God is in all things most intimately/innermostly.” 19 370 Steven A. Long a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” We would think it odd were the woman to have responded: “Yes, that is all fine and good, but does God feel about this as do I?” Christ’s empathy follows upon his humanity, but one might think that the divine knowledge in Christ is and should be infinitely more consoling to the human person than any such human knowledge. Thus there is no denial of the perfection of the divine knowledge in Professor Stump’s fine paper—quite the contrary. Yet, there also does not seem to be a clear affirmation that God possesses, as it were, the full intuitive perfection of which human empathy is merely a spark—perfect love and wisdom extending to every human condition and ill, healing, redeeming, and elevating. God qua God does not possess the same disposition of empathy with human persons, because this disposition requires matter which limits its perfection. But just as one would not say that the Eucharist is not a sufficient menu, inasmuch as it does not minister univocally to the same human needs as celebrated in Babette’s Feast, so it seems odd to speak of the Incarnation principally in terms of Christ’s human powers of empathy subsequent upon the assumption of human nature by the Word. Thus when Professor Stump writes: “So, the Chalcedonian formula for the incarnate Christ gives a way of explaining and defending God’s knowledge of persons through mind-reading and the presence with a human person that God’s mind-reading enables God to have”20 we might concur, while nonetheless considering that because God is more present to each person than that person is to himself, this is a more perfect presence than any constricted mode of empathy could be. Yet this does not obviate the truth of the proposition that God in Christ does possess human empathy. However, it is not merely with respect to the perfection of divine knowledge as such, but with respect to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, that further questions arise. Here the difficulty seems to consist in a limitation of consideration that calls for complementary judgements to give an adequate picture. This second problem I would present in terms of three related considerations. First, the emphasis upon conscious awareness as opposed to being, and upon the moral effects of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit—upon conscious acts and love—occurs without reference to the more primary essential effects of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling. This could be misconstrued as reducing the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and unitive love, to a psychic state of consciousness. Also, by his atonement, Christ fulfilled all the precepts of the Old Law— not merely the moral precepts, but the ceremonial precepts, and the judicial Stump, “Union and Indwelling,” 355. 20 Response to Eleonore Stump's "Union and Indwelling" 371 precepts.21 The indwelling of the Holy Spirit is mediated. Thus secondly, this problem also pertains to the relative absence of essential soteriological judgments that are more primary than those regarding conscious awareness and are presupposed to this aspect of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling. This may be merely a methodological limit, dictated by the object of engagement. But the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is essentially mediated by Christ’s atonement. Thus one notes the importance of Christ’s satisfaction vis-à-vis the Passion, of sin as an impediment to union with God, and of the need for this impediment to be removed if one is to achieve union of charity with the infinitely perfect God. Sin introduces not merely disorder, but a debitum of just punishment, and this must be removed. Without the essential relation of suffering in Christ to Christ’s love and obedience (ST III, q. 48, a. 2), the atonement—the passion as redemptive inasmuch as Christ offers to God something infinitely more valuable than sacrifice taken separately, namely sacrifice proceeding from obedience—does not occur. For similar reasons, Christ’s perpetual presence in the Eucharist is stressed by Aquinas under the aspect of friendship,22 because friends need to be together, a togetherness with the God who is infinitely perfect beatitude that cannot occur for so long as the person is disordered in sin. The Holy Spirit purifies, elevates, and “supernaturalizes” the person, rendering the person to be a fit subject for actions that are supernaturally meritorious. These characteristics of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit seem foundational. This brings me to the third aspect under which this selfsame difficulty arises, namely, in regard to the Holy Spirit’s indwelling itself. Professor Stump rightly notes that “The indwelling of the Holy Spirit is meant to be something ontologically more powerful than mutual closeness accompanied by intense shared attention.”23 Yet despite the proposition that “the immaterial God cannot be contained within a material container,” the emphasis is placed upon “God’s being somehow within the psyches of those who are in grace.”24 Of course, the “somehow” is crucial: I have long thought that secundum quid is the most sublimely helpful of all Latin phrases. Yet metaphysically viewed, the Holy Spirit is present owing to the ad extra missions of the persons of the Trinity and by the Holy Spirit’s distinctive operation in the human soul, whereby the person is purified, elevated, and the person’s life and actions are supernaturalized—hence the Gifts. Only as following upon this soteriologically mediated operation of the Holy Spirit ST III, q. 47, a. 2, ad 1. ST III, q. 75, a. 1. 23 Stump, “Union and Indwelling,” 357. 24 Stump, “Union and Indwelling,” 357. 21 22 372 Steven A. Long do the unitive fruits of peace and love come to be. All this is in virtue of the divine mediation and satisfaction of Christ, and so again draws our attention to the manner in which God removes the impediment of sin to our final good. Conclusion It is a characteristic of fruitful analyses such as those of Professor Stump that they suggest further considerations. The transcendence and primacy of the divine causality; the infinite perfection of divine knowledge; the essential mediation of the entire order of grace by the atoning Passion of Christ as removing the impediment of sin that would otherwise block union with God; and the distinctive operation of the Holy Spirit in elevating the person and supernaturalizing the person’s action, are perhaps such considerations. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2019): 373–389 373 How Can We Understand Transcendence of the Ego? Bas C. van Fraassen Princeton University (Emeritus) San Francisco State University San Francisco, CA Introduction: What Is the Self ? As I understand the question “what is the self ?” or “what is the ego?,” it is just an abstract, generic version of the personal, existential question “what am I?” Thus understood, the question is one that can be asked only in first-person language—that is, language with such indexical expressions as “I,” “here,” “now.” Scientific theories, when officially formulated, are written in third-person language—that is, language devoid of indexical expressions. Hence, at least on the face of it, the answer to this question cannot be given by a scientific theory. A scientific theory could imply, for example, that Homo sapiens is thus or so, such as evolved from Homo ergaster, and requires oxygen to survive. Then I could take a step further by adding the first-person statement “I am of the species Homo sapiens.” But that would not end the question for me unless I added another first-person statement, such as “all that is true about me follows from the fact that I am of the species homo sapiens in such or such conditions.” Those first-person statements could not be supplied by any scientific theory. Taking the question of the self in this way contrasts with much of the literature on this subject.1 But to understand “what is the self?” as instead a See for example the collections Galen Strawson, ed., The Self ? (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), and F. Kessel, P. Cole and D. Johnson, eds., Self and 1 374 Bas C. van Fraassen query about the nature or character of an entity that could be distinct from the person whose self it is seems to me to derive from a confusion about language. In this respect I agree with Anthony Kenny, who blames much on confusion between “my self” and “myself,” and Hector-Neri Castaneda, who likens “the self” to the phrase “the whale” as in “the whale is found in both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.”2 The question “what am I?” is personal and individual, and so will have different answers depending on who is asking. As a philosophical topic, though, it requires finding universal aspects, aspects that must be present, explicitly or implicitly, in everyone’s answer. That is why the abstract, general formulation “what is the self?” is after all not inapt. The specific question on this level of generality that I wish to broach is whether the self, the referent of the word I, is immanent or transcendent. But that requires first of all a way to understand that question. On Sartre’s The Transcendence of the Ego3 Here and elsewhere I propose to approach the question “what am I?” at least in certain respects as it was approached in existential phenomenology—as read through my (analytic philosophy) eyes. Jean-Paul Sartre’s thesis that the ego is transcendent and his arguments for this become clear in the course of a largely critical discussion of this topic in modern philosophy. He begins: For most philosophers the ego is an “inhabitant” of consciousness. . . . We should like to show here that the ego is neither formally nor materially in consciousness: it is outside, in the world. It is a being of the world, like the ego of another.4 This is the informal explanation of what he means by “transcendent”: what is not “mental” or “in thought” but what thought is about, what desires are directed to outside, in the world, is transcendent. Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1992). Anthony Kenny, Self (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1988); Hector-Neri Castaneda, “On the Phenomeno-Logic of the I,” Proceedings of the 14th International Congress of Philosophy, vol. 3 (Vienna: University of Vienna, 1969), 260–66. 3 I am no Sartre scholar, and will claim only the inspiration of his work. I make no claims as to correct interpretation, but do hope to find interesting ways to understand him. 4 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), 31. 2 How Can We Understand Transcendence of the Ego? 375 The transcendent objects of thought he mentions as examples include not just concreta in nature, but also such abstract entities as the proposition that 2 plus 2 equals 4. So there is as yet no implication here about what sort of thing the self might be, nor indeed that it is a thing at all.5 When Sartre sums up some of his conclusions, he writes: First, the I is an existent. It has a concrete type of existence, undoubtedly different from the existence of mathematical truths, of meanings, or of spatio-temporal beings, but no less real. The I gives itself as transcendent.6 That the I is not in any sense “internal” became very important in the existential phenomenology of the 1940s and 1950s. Joseph Kockelmans, who was my teacher in several seminars, told us that their watchword was: “Monads need no windows, we are outside already!” What is denied then? Sartre’s initial arguments are directed against two sorts of views. The first is that the referent of I in “I think” is a transcendental ego, an entity distinct from any contents of thought, and having the role of unifying our stream of conscious activity. The second target is identification of the self with anything that could count as contents of consciousness or be constituted by what is in consciousness. For that second target, I would suggest, as a contemporary example, Daniel Dennett’s identification of the self as the fictional character who is the protagonist of the autobiography that (he contends) we are always in the process of writing.7 It is quite right to call the protagonist a fiction, for although that mentally, sotto voce, constructed autobiography (if such there be) is about me, it is undoubtedly full of inaccuracies and downright falsehoods. But its material is all stuff that inhabits consciousness, such as putative memories. On that sort of account, then, my self, that “center of narrative gravity,” is nothing more than the central node of a representation of myself to myself—an “inhabitant” of consciousness, not a being out in the world. Let us grant, if only for the sake of argument, that Sartre’s critique is successful on both counts. The referent of I in “I think,” if that has a Elsewhere I have argued that I am not nothing, but I am not a thing; see my “Transcendence of the Ego: The Non-Existent Knight,” Ratio, n.s., 17 (2004): 453–77. 6 Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego, 52. 7 Daniel C. Dennett, “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity,” in Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives, ed. F. Kessel, P. Cole, and D. Johnson (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1992), 103–15. 5 376 Bas C. van Fraassen referent, is neither a transcendental ego nor an entity constituted by some form of conscious activity. When the I appears in my thinking, as in the reflexive thought in which I am aware that, for example, I am currently enjoying myself in vivacious company and their scintillating conversation, it is an object of thought, “presenting itself” as something outside of that awareness, which is currently directed upon it. But then a worry remains. In any such very limited, partial, and possibly defective representation of myself to myself, we can point to its implicitly recognized incompleteness as supporting the impression that it is a representation of something real, “out in the world.” We appear to ourselves as at best very incompletely captured by the thoughts we have about ourselves, as indeed inexhaustibly richly decked out in non-salient attributes as well, and hence distinct from what appears in our reflexive thought. But Sartre’s method, which brings this to light, is phenomenological, and his analysis can therefore uncover only the intentional correlate of our orientation. Whatever weight this analysis carried in his contemporary context, or still does to some of us, it is weak as an argument against such a philosopher as Dennett. Specifically, as philosophers we can raise the specter of an ideal case: the case of a representation of the sort of Dennett’s idea of a sotto voce autobiography, but one that is entirely accurate, fully adequate, and complete. If I could even in principle have such an ideally adequate representation of myself, encompassing in its narrative everything that would be ascribed to me under ideal circumstances, it would be very hard to resist Dennett’s debunking contention that this narrative is really all there is to me. It would, at least on the face of it, be tenable to hold that the protagonist of that representation is all there is to the self, and that it has the same status as a fiction, for it is constituted by the story. Not the narrative’s protagonist but only the story is what is real. The story “fits” all the events and features that are normally ascribed to me, but their unity consists solely in that they fit into this elaborate construal, with its “center” holding everything together. The right way in which to understand this “holding together” would then parallel Ludwig Wittgenstein’s verdict on the “foundations of mathematics”: they found mathematics in the sense that, in a painting, the painted rock supports the painted tower. Thus Sartre’s argument for transcendence is too weak, and leaves itself open to a reductive construal that denies his conclusion, unless a case can be made that it is in fact impossible for me to have a fully adequate representation of myself as answer to “what am I?” That is, a case to the effect that I am beyond representation, beyond the very possibility of fully adequate and complete representation. This, being beyond representation, How Can We Understand Transcendence of the Ego? 377 would be the strong thesis of transcendence of the ego, and if established, it would definitively counter the sorts of views that I take to be Sartre’s target. Therefore, showing my colors as an analytic philosopher, I will turn some of Sartre’s discussion into one about language. For, just as it is crucial to what I am that I am conscious, it is equally crucial to what I am that I am a being with language. Any answer to “what am I?” must include that. How We Seem to Ourselves When we try to think about ourselves we quickly find ourselves in a certain sort of difficulty—there is inevitably something that exceeds our grasp. But we can begin by sketching some aspects of how it seems to us that we can be at once aware, and reflecting on this awareness in a discursive manner. Reflective Detachment I realize that I have been doing or thinking something: I have a certain history, which I know more or less. This history includes thoughts and feelings as well as actions that I remember, or realize I am having or doing now. But this current complex of remembering and realizing is a relation to that history (including the present doing), and so does not belong to it. I am already one step beyond what I realize. At any point whatever in my history—up to and including the present—I can have various attitudes toward that, both cognitive and evaluative: I can already be “stepped back” from it. Let us abbreviate this point to “I am detached.” This is meant as a technical phrase: it means only what I just said, not that I “feel detached” or have a “feeling of detachment” or “am neutral” with respect to my history. The conviction that we are free, that we are free agents, is closely related to this conviction, that there is nothing that can bar me from this reflective detachment with respect to my current constraints. A Sartrean point is that, even if chained to a prison wall, there are options subjectively: I can see myself as a victim or as a rebel, I can resign myself, or I can curse my fate. These possibilities, of diverse attitudes toward my situation, disappear only when I am broken physically as well as mentally, when I am reduced to the status of a thing. Or to give a less heroic example, if I smoke or gamble, even if I realize the grip that has on me, I can at the same time be of one mind or another: either wish that I were not thus, or glory in my self-assertion. 378 Bas C. van Fraassen Undetached in Act But does my phrase “I am detached” not overstate the case? Sometimes at least, I may not be “already stepped back.” I may be so engaged in my current activity that I am not “thetically” aware of what it is.8 To use one of Sartre’s examples, running to catch a streetcar, I am completely focused on the streetcar and its imminent departure. I certainly know that I am running, and, for instance, that I am dressed rather than naked, but am not reflecting on that; I am only non-thetically aware of that. Is that unreflective awareness an exception? Not an exception at all! It is the very rule, the constant reality. Although it is true that (1) I am detached in this technical sense (always capable, in principle, of stepping back from my present situated acting and thinking), it is in fact also true that (2) I am never “already stepped back” from all that is currently going on with me. For, suppose that I am remembering what I have done on some occasion, and realizing what I am doing now, and maybe even reflecting on their differences or the relation between them. Then this very condition of “being already stepped back” is just what is going on at that moment that I am not reflecting on, that I am not “thetically” aware of, that I am not “already stepped back from.” Let us abbreviate this new point to “I am never detached.” Again, this is a technical phrase: it does not mean that I cannot be taking a detached view of something or other, just that I am never thus related to everything I am about at that moment. Potentially Detached, with no Limit Technical or not, the two phrases together seem to be a contradiction. If they are not, it is because the form of these phrases was hiding their true logical form. They are all about a relationship, the terms are relative terms. At any given (conscious) moment, there is something going on with me that is not something that I am either remembering or realizing. There is also something going on (not necessarily with me!) of which I am very, explicitly, thetically aware. But whatever either of these things is, I have the possibility of relating to it in a cognizant, realizing way. Let us abbreviate this more nuanced point to “I am potentially detached, I am using Sartre’s term; “thetic” awareness of something implies being able to think about it, to draw inferences, for example. Non-thetic awareness is possible, in fact ubiquitous. The distinction, though not the term, is well recognized in analytic philosophy. One example of having been non-thetically aware of something is the case of suddenly realizing that you had been hearing, e.g., the traffic, or the monotonously barking dog, all along. 8 How Can We Understand Transcendence of the Ego? 379 with no limitation.” And if I do so relate to, for example, a prior “stepping back,” I have the possibility of thus “stepping back” from that doing-so as well. Or so it seems to me, when I think about myself. Is That Really So? So it seems to me. But this claim to be potentially detached, tout court, is actually a very strong claim, with empirical implications. It implies that, no matter how creatively I think, it is in principle possible for me to reflect on what I think or have thought. Such a stepping back, if it is to have any importance at all, must be a real act, one that will take on higher and higher complexity as I continue. If I have this capacity, that is surely a contingent matter. A machine, programmed with a particular language, can record many aspects of its own states, but there is a real limit to how far that can go. So, why think that the same limitation does not apply to me, at least in principle? What are we to think of this inkling of unlimited richness in my intellectual capacity? How We Could Be Overreaching Ourselves When we think of how we can “step back” and reflect on what we have done and are doing, we are focusing on a genuine possibility of experience. It is a genuine possibility, as we can demonstrate to ourselves simply by memory or present example, and we can easily locate examples of doing so in our past. But if our self-conception includes that I am potentially detached, with no limitation, then it does of course go far beyond what we have experienced in our intellectual life so far. The caution—that we may be extrapolating too far, a central theme for Kant—should remind us of a long controversy concerning geometry. Euclid’s Fifth Postulate implies that, through any point outside a given line, there is another line that never intersects the former, no matter how far you extend them. That is indeed borne out however long you, finite being, draw the lines. But you will not thus verify the postulate, since whatever you make will have a specific finite length. What the postulate says, no single experience will verify. Does our sense of potential detachment without limit go too far? Even if it seems to be a direct and simple generalization from what we have done to what we can do? The danger that this is so is precisely the point of Kant’s discussion of the Paralogisms: “there is no inference even from how we necessarily 380 Bas C. van Fraassen represent ourselves to what we are.” The question we have here arrived at is precisely the sort of question that Kant addresses in the second part of the Critique of Pure Reason, the Transcendental Dialectic. There he begins book II by speaking of arguments by means of which we conclude from something that we do know to something of which we do not even possess a conception but to which, by an unavoidable illusion, we ascribe objective reality.9 These are the arguments that lead us into the Illusions of Reason, because, while they lead us to “something of which we do not even possess a conception,” they do not reveal themselves as such. Instead, we are led there under the illusion that we do possess such a conception, that we are making sense, though we are not. The Paralogisms, where Kant exhibits the Illusions of Reason that give substance to the idea of the self, are introduced here, followed by the Antinomies. As his general diagnosis of the way in which Reason overreaches itself, and so of how pre-Kantian metaphysics is inevitably carried into Illusion, Kant points to the activity of subsuming propositions under ever-more-general principles in order to systematize, unify, and bring them to completion.10 This seeking conditions for every condition is not an illegitimate enterprise—quite the contrary; but the step that posits an ultimate “unconditioned,” the demand for ultimate explanation, that is the overreaching that leads to nonsense.11 But now let us return to the self, and see if the reach for the unconditioned must really be classified as an Illusion in this case, and if so, whether in some respect or tout court. The Language I Live In The much embattled conception of the self that I outlined above I encapsulated in the slogan “I am potentially detached, with no limitation.” To evaluate the strong claim here involved, we need to pay special attention to language. When I “step back” in that sense, I am reflecting. Whether the occurrence that I have thus brought to awareness—a feeling perhaps, or impression, or impulse, or intention, or bodily position or activity—is “propositional” or not, the content of the reflection surely is, and I could Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A339/B397. 10 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A308/B365–A309/B3656. 11 As is often pointed out, Kant follows this pattern of critique in the Antinomies but not in the Paralogisms, although the pattern is officially announced at the outset for all of book II of the Transcendental Dialectic. It is not difficult, though, to see how it applies to our present discussion about the self. 9 How Can We Understand Transcendence of the Ego? 381 not have that reflection unless I could express it in language. If there are really no limits to this potentiality, is it because there are no limits to the language in which my intellectual activity takes place? Even if that is the case, my command of it is surely not already entirely actual. We cannot claim to have the whole language already, only that at each “stepping back” I could either (1) enter it or (2) create a bit more of it. These are two possibilities to explore. In fact, neither will seem possible after all, as we shall see. The Apparent Universality of Our Language When we think of ourselves as living and moving in space, we do not conceive of any limits due to space, only due to our feeble finite bodies. There are things we cannot reach by moving, but we certainly do not think of that as being because those things are “beyond space,” extra-spatial. It is the same with our language: we do experience difficulties when we try to express ourselves, or describe what we see, or explicate what the world of physics is really like, for example; but we experience those difficulties as due to ourselves, and certainly do not think of those subjects as “beyond language,” ineffable. Is there anything at all that I could think but that could not be expressed in language? Any thought so ineffable that it is beyond expression? If we cannot say it, we cannot whistle it either, so what is thus ineffable would have to be inconceivable in the strongest sense.12 The very idea seems to belong solely in “far out” metaphysics, so let us consider the contrary. What is the contrary? Let’s begin by formulating it as: Whatever we think at any time we could reflect on in a “stepped back” thinking, and whenever we can do that, we can express what we are thinking in language; our reflection can take the form of a description. But there will be two ways to understand this, corresponding to the distinction I noted briefly above, between entering a language or creating more language. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus concludes: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” As Frank Ramsey put it, “what we can’t say we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it either.” See Frank Ramsey, The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Essays (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1931), 238. 12 382 Bas C. van Fraassen A Universal Language? We can begin, for now, with the easiest or simplest way to understand this, as the assertion that there is (in principle) a language in which all such descriptions can be given. This does not come with a claim that I personally am—as I am today— able to express all that I could ever come to think, in principle. I may not even be such as to be able to complete whatever sorts of infinite processes could alone put one in a position to have the entirety of such a language. But if it is possible to express everything that we could ever think, then (according to the option we are currently exploring) there must be in principle a language in which that could be done. So let us see where it leads us: (*) There is in principle a language L such that everything that I can think I can express by some sentence of L. A language L which is like that I’ll call a “universal language.” The Impossibility of a Universal Language There is an old trick to show that the idea of a universal language, in this sense, is absurd.13 I draw a rectangle on the blackboard. Once we all see it, we agree on a name for this rectangle, so that we can refer to it: let us call it “Rectus.” Now I consider the proposition that: (**) Nothing true that is expressible in L is ever written in Rectus. That does seem to make sense, does it not? • It will be true if I quickly rub out the rectangle before anyone has a chance to write something in it. • It will be false if I write “2 plus 2 equals 4” in it. But instead, let us do the following. If L is a universal language, then let A be the sentence of L that expresses that proposition (**). I write A in this rectangle and then I quickly rub out the whole thing. Paradoxes of this sort were a hot topic of conversation with my colleagues Frederick Fitch, Richmond Thomason, Robert Stalnaker, Robert Fogelin, and Charles Daniels during my years at Yale University in the late 1960s. I gladly acknowledge my debt to their insight and inspiration. 13 How Can We Understand Transcendence of the Ego? 383 For one short moment, the rectangle existed, and someone who understands this language L would have seen it as in effect like this: Nothing true that is expressible in L is ever written in Rectus. So, sentence A was the only thing that was ever written in the rectangle. Was it true? If it was true then nothing true was ever written in the rectangle, so it was not written there—but we saw it with our own eyes, so we can only conclude that it was not true. Therefore, with my precipitate rubbing out, I made sure that nothing true was ever written in that rectangle. By hypothesis, that is what A said, so it was true after all! But that, as we just saw, is impossible. What should we say about language L? The above paradox requires: (1) that there was indeed something to be expressed; (2) that L has a truth predicate and a quantifier that allows the formulation of a sentence that says of all its sentences that, if they occur in the rectangle, then they are not true; and (3) that the truth-functions can be expressed in L. If (2) or (3) are not correct, then L is certainly not universal. But we cannot deny (1), since in our own language we are clearly able to express it, on the assumption that L exists. What we could deny, in order to escape self-contradiction, is that L is our language, adding that, in our own language, we can express something inexpressible in L. But that makes the point as well, of course, for that means that L cannot be what it was meant to be. So, a universal language does not exist. It is natural to put the blame on the idea that L has a truth predicate, because there are well-known stronger arguments that conclude that familiar kinds of languages cannot have their own truth predicate. But it is also quite natural instead to say that L cannot have a quantifier ranging over all its own sentences. “All” or “everything” in L cannot mean what they sound like. As is so often observed, a paradox automatically opens up a range of escape routes, and so this argument does not show that we cannot have a language. We can; but none of the escapes leaves us with the possibility of a universal language. So, no way out: there cannot be a universal language. If my self-conception that “I am potentially detached, with no limitation” requires me even potentially to have command of a universal language, then it is simply incoherent. Language in actu and Language in potentia We are not out of options. Look here: it was we who just now found 384 Bas C. van Fraassen ourselves able to talk about any candidate for a universal language and show it to be wanting! Does that not show that, in some way or sense, we do have something more than any such candidate? I imagine that anyone reading the above had the idea, quite early on, that there might be an illegitimate commuting of quantifiers involved. Even if everyone has a mother, it does not follow that there is a mother of everyone. Similarly, even if everything we can think can be expressed in some language, it does not follow that there is one language in which everything we can think can be expressed! So let us look into the second option, which we have been ignoring, that language is something we can create bit by bit, in various ways. The language I actually have, or even a language that I could actually have at some other definite moment, now or in the future, even if my life does not end, let us call a “language in actu.” Any such language is definitely limited in resources, not universal. But that does not establish that there is anything ultimately ineffable! As tentative conclusion I offer that my self-conception entails that I can transcend any such stage, and thus command a richer language than I had theretofore. The resources for eventually express anything at all that makes sense are real as well; they constitute my “language in potentia.” For, these allow me to continually enrich my language in actu. And nothing effable is beyond their reach. Limits to this Conception of Language? But wait! How can I conceive of language in potentia? I cannot talk about it as if it were a language in the way that a language I could actually have at some stage is a language. For, that would make it a universal language, impossibly. So this is an idea that I cannot reify. However, there is an indefinitely extending tree, branching off in many directions, which consists of all the possible languages in actu that I could construct, starting from what I have now. Each new node on a branch of this tree enriches the chain of ever richer languages leading up to it. But the same question recurs here: can I really be discussing the tree of possible languages in actu in the language I have now, as it seems I am doing? Perhaps I can to some extent, but if I now claim that everything that I can think I can express by some sentence in some language in this tree of possible languages in actu, then the problem is that I can draw rectangle Rectus again. Having drawn the rectangle again, let us reflect on the following thought: How Can We Understand Transcendence of the Ego? 385 (***) Nothing true that is expressible in some language in the tree of possible languages in actu is ever written in Rectus. Unfortunately, we can now carry out essentially the same trick as before. Suppose that everything I can think is expressed by some sentence in some language that extends my current language in actu. Then (***) is expressed by such a sentence; let us refer to it as sentence B, and assume it written in Rectus, just before Rectus is wiped off. • • Suppose this sentence is not true, then »» if it also belongs to some language in the tree, it turns out to be true, hence both true and not true, which is impossible; but if it is true, then, given what it says, it follows that it is not expressible in any language in the tree. So, neither this sentence nor any translation of it belongs to any language that could be or become my actual language! At least not if the tree we just conceived of describes what my language is or could become— and now we have a contradiction. So it seems that we have now reduced to absurdity even this amended conception of our limitlessness in language. Once again, I had too high an opinion of my Self. Once again, my presentation of the idea of unlimited possibilities of discursive reflection within my scope ran into an insurmountable obstacle. What has gone wrong in this attempt of mine to represent myself to myself as a being with language? Representation and the Logic of Natural Language The import of the above reasoning may be obscure, may in fact look too tricky to be taken seriously. These paradox-producing rectangles may seem to have taken us on a detour after I announced that Sartre’s thesis of the transcendence of the ego needed strengthening. It needed strengthening, I argued, with an argument to the effect not only that the self is in practice not adequately represented, but that it could not be. What I have to lay out explicitly is just how this detour about language demonstrates precisely this, once we understand what led us into paradox. The Hidden Premise about Representation There is actually nothing wrong with our contention that we have language! Nor is there anything wrong with our conviction that we are able to express anything that we think, on the level of discursive, reflexive 386 Bas C. van Fraassen thought, in language. What went wrong was in our attempt to extrapolate conviction into a conception, a representation, of our language “as a whole,” as a complete “object” of a certain sort, as a thing to be surveyed. When we look closely, the two arguments I gave about language, each of which arrives at a contradiction, we see one salient common feature. In both cases, the sentence written in the rectangle purported to be a statement about all the sentences in the language(s) in question. By assuming, without saying so, that I could do this meaningfully, I was adding a hidden premise. For, the interpretation of such quantifying words as “all” requires always the specification, and representation, of a range.14 For example, when Yogi Berra said about a certain restaurant, “nobody goes there any more, it is too crowded,” we understand that his “nobody” referred to a particular set of people, his “set.” In my arguments, I sketched two models, representations, of our language. The first depicted it as a single, “universal,” language, and the second depicted it as a growing tree of extensions of a single, “current,” language. The emphasis here should be on “sketched,” for I did not actually construct either of those representations. In effect, I asked you, the reader, to suppose or imagine or pretend that we had those representations before us, and that they were humanly manageable representations adaptable for our use in argument. Since we ran into contradictions, what we supposed was wrong in some respect or other. The conclusion I offer is this: It is in fact logically impossible for me to have such a representation of my own language, as a whole. Below, I will support this conclusion by showing that it also follows from more technically respectable reasoning than my quick, tricky, informal “rectangle” argument. But first, grant me the conclusion for a moment, and let us see what follows for our subject of the self. If I offer an answer to the question of what I am, I must include as central the fact that I am a being with language—and indeed, language adequate to the discursive expression of reflective thought. But in that case, our conclusion entails that this answer must include that I am therefore beyond the possibility of fully adequate representation: It is in fact logically impossible for me to have a fully adequate representation of myself. This is controversial among some logicians. I am not denying that we can use such quantifier words, or the word “everything,” meaningfully without having such a range specified. My remark is about representations of language, not about the language in which we construct such representations; see further my remarks about the language-in-use in the next section. 14 How Can We Understand Transcendence of the Ego? 387 Early on in this paper, I argued that Sartre’s thesis of the transcendence of the ego needed completion. It is too weak to bear the burden of his arguments, unless the self cannot be captured in a fully adequate representation. The required strong version of the transcendence of the ego must imply that the self is, that I am, beyond the possibility of fully adequate representation. Representation of Natural Language and Its Limits There remains the doubt, which may reasonably be raised here, that my informal argument did not support my conclusion with sufficient logical rigor. What I can offer in support of the claim that it did is that, on the two major conceptions of language to have come out of the work of twentieth-century logicians, the same conclusion follows. These are the conceptions of Alfred Tarski and of Haskell B. Curry, and they were formed in response to paradoxes intimately related to my informal “rectangle” argument. On Tarski’s view, our natural language is properly represented by a hierarchy of partial languages.15 At the bottom, first level, there are statements descriptive only of non-linguistic items—statements about buildings in Paris, about the mating behavior of frogs, and the like, but not about words used to describe those things. At the second level, there are terms describing language of the first level, with sentences such as “the word ‘frog’ is a four-letter word” and, more elaborately, “some [first-level] sentences about frogs are false.” Then a third level has discourse that also describes secondlevel discourse, and so forth. We can think of each level as (a representation of) a small language, and can take the hierarchy to be cumulative, such that each level contains also all the levels below it. But no level can include discourse about what is in languages above that level. In the logicians’s terminology, any language on level below N is an object language for the language at level N and that language is a metalanguage for those below it. The hierarchy is clearly infinite. The contention is that any meaningful discourse in natural language will be part of some language found at some specific finite level. But what I just wrote is about the hierarchy as a whole, so it cannot be located at any specific level! The language I use to describe such a hierarchy is outside it. That does not automatically mean that it fails to be meaningful, for an extension of this hierarchical representation can be constructed. What I wrote is then understood to be about the prior, un-extended part Alfred Tarski, “The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4 (1944): 341–75. 15 388 Bas C. van Fraassen only, and its description is not of the extended hierarchy in which it itself can be located. Clearly, on Tarski’s conception, there can be no representation of our natural language as a whole, for each such hierarchy can be described in an extended hierarchy; there is no end to it. I am personally more sympathetic to the less well-known conception of language that was developed by Curry.16 On Curry’s view, we conduct all of our discourse, in logic and mathematics or science as well as in daily life, in a single language, our language-in-use. Our language-in-use is a natural language like English augmented with such special linguistic devices and resources as may be needed. This language is subject to change as we mobilize our linguistic resources to change or augment it. We can indeed speak about it—as I am doing now— but that does not imply that it is definitely circumscribed or identified by means of a non-indexical definite description. Only proper parts of it can be exhaustively characterized. This leaves the terms “object language” and “metalanguage” free to be properly characterized in a different way. We may study a language, call it L, as an object language, and that could be an artificial language, like a computer language, or even one we have made up without any connection to actual discourse. More often, though, it would be a circumscribed part of our language-in-use, or an artificial language offered as a good model of such a more or less vaguely or precisely circumscribed part. To discuss L, we augment the language-in-use with some technical jargon. But now we can go farther, since not all of the language-in-use needs to be mobilized to describe L. We can construct a model of the part of our language-in-use in which we described L, and call that ML, the metalanguage for L. This process we can iterate. In this way, Curry regards Tarski’s hierarchies as representations of parts of what is within the compass of our natural-language resources. But no such construction could represent the language-in-use as a whole, since each construction is carried out in a part of the language-in-use that is outside and “about” the part that is being represented. Clearly, then, on neither Curry’s nor Tarski’s conception can there be an adequate representation of our natural language as a whole. Their much more rigorous efforts imply the same as the conclusion for which I argued more informally: it is literally and logically impossible for me to have a representation of my own language. Haskell B. Curry, “Language, Metalanguage, and Formal System,” The Philosophical Review 59 (1950): 346–53. 16 How Can We Understand Transcendence of the Ego? 389 Conclusion Since having language is a central and crucial aspect of what I am, it is literally and logically impossible for me to have a complete or fully adequate answer to the question “what am I?” The I is transcendent in the strong sense that the I is not only never entirely captured by our representations in fact, but beyond the very possibility of fully adequate representation. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2019): 391–400 391 The Transcendence of the Self in Light of the Hard Problem: A Response to Bas van Fraassen Ted Peters Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences Graduate Theological Union Berkeley, CA Bas van Fraassen exists. But, he does not exist as one thing among other things. As a self he is not a physical object, not a mental substance, not an abstract entity, nor a compound thereof. I too exist as a self, in the same way Bas van Fraassen does. In fact, each of us who is a Self exists in a similar manner. It is language which uncovers and makes visible the human self. I refer to my self when I say “I,” and you refer to your self when you say “I.” Our language (langue) makes public self-reference in speech (parole) possible and understandable. With this in mind, van Fraasen winds his way through a forest of thoughts about language and ends up at this destination: “Since having language is a central and crucial aspect of what I am, it is literally and logically impossible for me to have a complete or fully adequate answer to the question ‘What am I?’ The I is transcendent in the strong sense that the I is not only never entirely captured by our representations in fact, but is beyond the very possibility of fully adequate representation.”1 Although intended to protect the self from its assailants, I fear this defense is too weak. Yes, the self escapes being “captured” by language. Whew. Yet, can we say more about the self who escapes this capture? Yes, I believe we can. First, when speaking, what we say directs everyone’s attention to the one who is speaking, to our self as a self. Second, our fundamental experience suggests the self comes prior. The self is not the product of language but See Bas van Fraasen elsewhere in this issue. 1 392 Ted Peters rather the one who is speaking. This observation, simple as it sounds, should strengthen van Fraasen’s argument. I am concerned about the existence of the self just as van Fraasen is. I am concerned about protecting the existence of the intelligent human self with interior reflection. I am concerned about protecting the existence of the self with free will who considers alternatives, makes decisions, and takes action. I am concerned about protecting the existence of the self who determines things, who takes action that has an effect on the world’s causal nexus.2 This self is under threat by those who would drop the self from existence into nonexistence. Neurocentrists who interpret brain science are rallying an army to attack the human self, to demand unconditional surrender of the self to the forces of physical brain activity. “There is no such thing as a self,” contends philosopher Thomas Metzinger.3 Metzinger is not a scientist. He is a philosopher. Can the philosophical general muster scientific soldiers into his army to go to war against the self ’s existence? To my reading, van Fraassen has loaded the muskets on the rampart to defend the conscious human self from such an assault. I join van Fraassen on the rampart, but I fire with a different weapon. Here is my canon ball: although self is not a thing, nevertheless it is not nothing. Bas van Fraasen’s phenomenological and philosophical exploration to find the self follows the trail of language, of narrative. He has fellow travelers among the neuroscience interpreters. “Do you really want to know who I am?” asks Jennifer Ouellette. “Let me tell you a story.”4 I applaud this appeal to language and narrative for self-construction. Yet, the narrative approach to selfhood is insufficient. It must be complemented by a phenomenology of the self which reveals that it is the prior self who constructs the narrative of the self. It is the prior self who tells the story in which the self is the protagonist. It is not universal language (langue) but rather speech (parole) wherein the existence of the self becomes a temporal event within the larger linguistic history. In sum, the narrative self requires supplementation by the phenomenal self. If van Fraassen would add the phenomenal self to his linguistic or narrative self, Here I apply basic arguments more thoroughly argued in Ted Peters, “Contingency and Freedom in Brains and Selves,” God’s Providence and Randomness in Nature, ed. Robert John Russell and Joshua M. Moritz (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton, 2018), 261–88. 3 Thomas, Metzinger, The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (New York: Basic, 2009), 1. 4 Jennifer Ouellette, Me, Myself, and Why: Searching for the Science of Self ( New York: Penguin, 2014), 282. 2 A Response to Bas van Fraassen 393 then he would solve the Hard Problem. What is the Hard Problem? To that we now turn. The Hard Problem as the Explanatory Gap The Hard Problem, sometimes called the “explanatory gap,” arises when one attempts to explain exhaustively first person subjective experience in terms of third person objective causation. In recent years, the explanatory gap has opened up like the Grand Canyon as interpreters of neuroscience attempt to reduce human consciousness to brain activity. According to Susan Blackmore at the University of Plymouth in England, the “hard problem” of consciousness is this: “How does subjective experience arise from objective brain activity? . . . This is a problem of dualism: How can mind arise from matter? Indeed, does it?”5 In short, this is a hard problem because subjective self-consciousness resists being reduced to objective explanation. Consciousness resists being reduced to neuronal firings. The problem does not seem to be hard enough for neurocentrists, however, because neurocentrists have hastily constructed a rope bridge across the Explanatory Gap with an assumption, namely, that the mind can be reduced to the brain. Blackmore strings her rope bridge by declaring that the subjective “I” is a delusion. “We humans are unique because we alone are clever enough to be deluded into believing that there is a conscious ‘I.’”6 I have been calling this philosophical position neurocentrism. Neurocentrism “denies that the mind is res cogitans, thinking stuff, and it denies that the mind conceived as brain could have any other fate than other smart mammals have: namely, death and decomposition.”7 Susan Blackmore, “Decoding the Puzzle of Human Consciousness,” Scientific American 319, no. 3 (September 2018): 49–53, at 50. 6 Blackmore, “Decoding the Puzzle,” 53. For neuroexistentialist philosophers, the Hard Problem leads to the Really Hard Problem: the loss of meaning that accompanies the loss of the self. “The special problem for those of us living in the age of brain science [is] making sense of the nature, meaning, and purpose of our lives given that we are material beings living in a material world” (Owen Flanagan and Gregg D. Caruso, “Neuroexistentialism: Third-Wave Existentialism,” in Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience, ed. Gregg D. Caruso and Owen Flanagan [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018], 1–22, at 9). 7 Flanagan and Caruso, “Neuroexistentialism,” 7. 5 394 Ted Peters Neurocentrism relies on a deterministic presupposition. “The universe is causally closed, and the mind is the brain.”8 Neurocentrist philosopher Daniel Dennett, whom van Fraasen cites, makes this very assumption. “The mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon. In short, the mind is the brain.”9 We can see that this is an assumption and not a conclusion, on Dennett’s part, because he uses the term “somehow” to confess that he lacks empirical evidence. A neuroscientist who actually relies on empirical evidence, in contrast, is not likely to build such a flimsy bridge. Stanislas Dehaene, who directs the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit in Saclay, France, for example, keeps the gap open. “Although neuroscience has identified many empirical correspondences between brain activity and mental life, the conceptual chasm between brain and mind seems as broad as it ever was.”10 For the empirical neuroscientist the gap remains wide, whereas the nonempirical neurocentrist prematurely bridges the gap with reductionist assumptions. Laboratory evidence falls short of proving neurocentric reductionism. What I fear from neurocentrist philosophy is the threat it poses to the existence of the human self. My fear is not from determinism; rather, my Flanagan and Caruso, “Neuroexistentialism,” 8. There is no self that, like a CEO, functions as a personal control center, according to Neil Levy, philosopher at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. “Rather, the mind consists of nothing but . . . unintelligent mechanisms. There is no central executive: nothing which occupies a seat of power” (“Choices without Choosers,” in Flanagan and Caruso, Neuroexistentialism, 111–25, at 115). Peter U. Tse objects to the “hard incompatibilism” of Levy and his denial of free will: “I find Levy’s denial of moral responsibility a profoundly nihilistic view of human beings, their choices, and life in general” (“Two Types of Libertarian Free Will Are Realized in the Human Brain,” in Flanagan and Caruso, Neuroexistentialism, 162–90, at 186). 9 Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York: Little Brown, 1991) 33. To my observation, empirical brain scientists tend not to reduce the mind to the brain. Those who interpret the science, such as neurophilosophers or neuropsychologists, however, tend to be more reductionistic, materialistic, and deterministic. Patricia Churchland is a neurophilosopher, not a neuroscientist: “Neurophilosophy . . . works the interface between philosophy’s grand old questions about choice and learning and morality and the gathering wisdom about the nature of nervous systems. It is about the impact of neuroscience and psychology and evolutionary biology on how we think about ourselves. It is about expanding and modifying our self-conception through knowledge of the brain” (Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain [New York: W. W. Norton, 2013], 20; italics original). Here is Churchland’s reductionist move: “What we think of as the soul is the brain, and what we think of as the brain is the brain” (60). 10 Stanislas Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts (New York: Viking, 2014), 162. 8 A Response to Bas van Fraassen 395 fear is the elimination of the self as one determiner among others, such as nature and nurture. I affirm three-part determinism: nature, nurture, and self-determination.11 Neurocentric philosophers reduce the determinants to two, nature and nurture alone, without the self.12 The Implications of Our Brain’s Readiness Potential Is it the brain that makes decisions and then, later, deludes our consciousness into thinking we made those decisions? If this could be proved empirically, then could we dub conscious willing as a mere epiphenomenon? Could we eliminate the self and replace it with the brain alone? To make the empirical case that consciously willed action is merely epiphenomenal and eliminable, determinists and incompatibilists frequently cite the 1983 experiments of Benjamin Libet and his colleagues on readiness potential, or “RP” (Bereitshaftspotential). In the human brain, the RP precedes self-initiated voluntary actions by measurable amounts of time. Their data showed that the motor cortex activated 350,000 milliseconds before awareness of a voluntary urge leading to action.13 This seems to support the notion that it is the brain who initiates voluntary action, not the conscious will. Some critics have countered that the RP did not indicate readiness for voluntary movement but rather ongoing attention to the situation requiring or inviting willed movement. Other critics connected RP with introspection on the eve of a conscious decision. Still other critics demonstrated that the RP reflects a “general expectation” and not a specific decision for For most philosophers, free will implies that we could have done otherwise than what we did (counterfactual freedom). Incompatibilism holds that free will and determinism are incompatible; therefore, if determinism, then no free will. Compatibilism or soft determinism holds that the concept of free will implies, first, that we have the ability to do what we want or desire to do; and this entails, second, an absence of constraints or impediments (such as political restraints, coercion, and compulsion) preventing us from doing what we want. See Robert Kane, A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 13. In short, the self is an agent. Therefore, on the one hand, my own position—free will indicates self-determination in the form of agency—could be placed in the compatibilist camp. On the other hand, I contend that free will understood as self-determination could be placed in the determinist camp, as long as we accept three-part determinism: nature, nurture, and self. 12 It is oblique to pit freedom and determinism against one another. Human freedom is best understood as self-determination. 13 Benjamin Libet et. al., “Time of Conscious Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Activity (Readiness-Potential): The Unconscious Initiation of a Freely Voluntary Act,” Brain 106 (1983): 624–25. 11 396 Ted Peters motor activity.14 According to subsequent researchers, our choices are not predetermined by brain activity. At this point it appears that the Libet experiments do not provide decisive support for an epiphenomenal or eliminative judgment regarding the existence of the human self. One of my students, Kung Rae Kim, who followed the Libet debate carefully, concludes: “Our conscious choice (or determination) is influenced by the result of unconscious brain operations such as desire, impulse, trauma, or emotion. However, this does not mean that our choice is predetermined by our unconscious brain operations.”15 I would add that, even if it is in fact the case that the brain is responsible for some automatic human movement, this does not account for all human action. Certainly a portion of human movement embodies the structure of deliberation, decision, and action. Bridging the Explanatory Gap with Neuro-Reductionism Michael Gazzaniga wedges freedom into the spandrels of his otherwise reductionist temple. “We humans are about becoming less dumb,” he says, trying to give us comfort over our loss of self. Despite our delusion, we can get smarter. But it is the brain, not the self, that is the agent for making us smarter. The brain “makes decisions based on experience, innate biases, and much more. Our freedom is to be found in developing more options for our computing brains to choose among.”16 Gazzaniga’s rope bridge across the explanatory gap asks the brain to walk where the self would otherwise have walked. Does this actually solve the hard problem, or merely restate it? Let me try to reformulate the Hard Problem: if the neurocentric philosopher claims to explain the subjective self exhaustively in objective physical terms, then that very self gets explained away, not explained. The neurocentrist reduces the intelligent self to an agglomeration of neuronal firings, to a mental product of physical processes.17 The result is that the Christoph S. Hermann, et.al., “Analysis of a Choice-Reaction Task Yields a New Interpretation of Libet’s Experiments,” International Journal of Psychophysiology 67, no. 2 (2008): 152–56, at 156. 15 KungRae Kim, “Not Puppet but Human: A Defense of Human Freedom against Arguments for Theological and Scientific Determinism” (PhD diss., Graduate Theological Union, 2019), 156. 16 Michael S. Gazzaniga, “On Determinism and Human Responsibility,” in Flanagan and Caruso, Neuroexistentialism, 223–34, at 233. 17 Intelligence belongs to the human self, and perhaps even to pre-human selves. Elsewhere I have argued that intelligence is most adequately defined in terms of seven traits: (1) interiority; (2) intentionality; (3) communication; (4) adaptation; 14 A Response to Bas van Fraassen 397 self becomes unreal, and subjective consciousness becomes an illusion. Or, to say it as van Fraassen might consider asserting it, by reducing all first-person speech to third-person speech, we eliminate the person who speaks. Yet, we ask, is this possible, due to the fact that some first-person speaker must utter every third-person statement? Why would such a problem arise? Would anyone want to eliminate the existence of the self? Again, this “hard problem” arises because the methods of objective scientific research are unprepared to deal with the phenomenon of the self ’s subjectivity. Here is my observation: we know we exist, because our very existence is the condition for the possibility of knowing that anything exists, including the objects of scientific knowing. Is this not a corollary of René Descartes’ indubitable axiom, cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore, I am”)?18 Philosopher of science Thomas Nagel recognizes the indubitability, as well as the inexplicability, of the self ’s existence. “The physical sciences will not enable us to understand the irreducibly subjective centers of consciousness that are such a conspicuous part of the world,” Nagel surmises. “If the mental is not itself merely physical, it cannot be fully explained by physical science.”19 These observations put a limit to a strictly materialist ontology. “The possibility opens up of a pervasive conception of the natural order very different from materialism—one that makes mind central, rather than a side effect of physical law.”20 (5) problem-solving; (6) self-reflection; and (7) judgment. Humans, along with many mammals, exhibit all seven traits. See Ted Peters, “Where There’s Life There’s Intelligence,” in What is Life? Earth and Beyond, ed. Andreas Losch and Andreas Krebbs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 236–59. 18 Science and religion scholar William Grassie describes the stubborn resistance of the self against brain–mind reductionism. “Our physical descriptions of the way the brain works at the level of neurons, brain anatomy, and neurological processes bear no resemblance to our subjective experience as people with brains having complex mental and emotional states. Nor is there any neurological definition of consciousness as such. We have no device that can measure presence or absence of consciousness” (The New Sciences of Religion: Exploring Spirituality from the Outside In and Bottom Up [New York: Macmillan Palgrave, 2010], 96). 19 Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 14. 20 Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 15. The self is an agent, even a causal agent that partially determines the course of future events. “Self as agent is indeed what philosophers struggling with the so-called free will paradox should be focused on, rather than freedom from determinate constraint. . . . An agent is a locus of work that is able to change things in ways more concordant with internally generated ends and contrary to extrinsic tendencies. . . . This is not a breakdown of causal efficacy; in fact, just the opposite. Being an agent means being a locus of causal efficacy.” 398 Ted Peters In sum, philosophical neurocentrism builds a weak bridge across the explanatory gap, a bridge underpinned only by an assumption that is not conclusively demonstrated by empirical brain research. Brain–mind reductionism seems to arise solely from materialist ideology, not from observation that includes the fundamental human experience of self-awareness. I wish to arm the sentries on the ramparts with a phenomenological observation—the subjective self is fundamental to knowing anything objectively—to defend the existence of the intelligent human self from this external onslaught. Models of the Self What is this self we are protecting? Just what kind of self might we be defending? Here are five models of the self which I observe at work in current discussion. The first model is the self understood in terms of ego continuity or, in religious parlance, the self as the soul. Accordingly, the self is structured by a persistent self-awareness. The traditional Western doctrine of the immortal soul relies on ego continuity in this life and the next, despite what happens to the physical body. Ego continuity would represent the classical Platonic or Cartesian position. Second, the self as confused expression of a higher self. Accordingly, our individual soul is but a manifestation of the over-soul, the spiritual reality that unites all things. We find this model in the American transcendentalists of the nineteenth century and New Age spirituality in the late twentieth century. The third model is the self as delusion. This position is taken by many philosophers who claim to base their cognitive theory on neuroscience. This is the neurocentrist position, the reductionist model according to which no substantial ego exists. The fourth model seems to be assumed in van Fraasen’s account, the self as story or narrative. According to this linguistic model, the self is an evolving social construction whose identity is defined by our language, our history, our story. For a historical or biographical self to develop, it requires relationship, a set of relationships apprehended through language.21 (Terrence W. Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter [New York: W. W. Norton, 2012], 479–80). 21 “The development of a sense of self relies on the regulating, reliable, and felt presence of the other” (Serbern F. Fisher, Neurofeedback in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma: Calming the Fear-Driven Brain [New York: W. W. Norton, 2014], 21). A Response to Bas van Fraassen 399 Neuroscience reporter Jennifer Ouellette, cited above, belongs in the self-as-narrative model.22 Because this narrative model depends largely on the role of language in self-reference, it requires philosophical hermeneutics to grasp how it functions. According to the late Paul Ricoeur, “it is therefore plausible to affirm the following assertions: a) knowledge of the self is an interpretation; b) the interpretation of the self, in turn, finds narrative, among other signs and symbols, to be a privileged mediation; c) this mediation borrows from history as much as fiction making the life story a fictive history or, if you prefer, an historical fiction.”23 When we compare the third and fourth models, we note that, for the self-as-delusion model, the self is a fiction in the sense that it does not exist, whereas for the self-as-narrative model, the self is a fiction in the sense that it is a construction.24 The fifth model is the phenomenological model, the self as experiential dimension. Here, “the self is claimed to possess experiential reality, is taken to be closely linked to the first-person perspective, and is, in fact, identified with the very first-person givenness of the experiential phenomena,” according to Dan Zahavi, who directs the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen.25 Zahavi follows in the footsteps of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, wherein the self or ego is that which understands itself pre-linguistically and pre-objectively as imbedded in the world. When consciousness of intends an object, this experience presupposes a subjective ego who is intending that object. Consciousness requires a self to be conscious, according to this model. I select two from this list of models, the fourth and the fifth, and put them together, and I recommend that van Fraassen do the same to strengthen his argument. The experiential-dimension model combines Ouellette, Me, Myself, and Why, 260. The feeling of self “is not an illusion, because the physical brain/body is providing continuity and a reservoir of memories that can be called upon, even though each thought is . . . a separate entity” (Henry P. Stapp, “The Hard Problem: A Quantum Approach” in Explaining Consciousness—The Hard Problem, ed. Jonathan Shear [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997], 197–216, at 210). 23 Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Identity,” Philosophy Today 35 (1991): 73–80. 24 Whereas van Fraassen tends to conflate Dennett’s version of the third model with the narrative of the fourth, I sharply distinguish them. The term “fiction” is equivocal, used differently in the two models. 25 Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 106. A theologian, Paul Tillich, weighs in: “A self is not a thing that may or may not exist; it is an original phenomenon which logically precedes all questions of existence” (Systematic Theology, 3 vols. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951–1963], 1:169). 22 400 Ted Peters well with the story or narrative model. Phenomenologically, the human self exists intuitively, indubitably, and unquestionably at the level of presupposition. This experiential self gains self-confidence and character through narrative formation as well as through linguistic self-reference. The model of the narrative self suggests that the philosopher coin a linguistic ontology to account for the status of the self.26 Conclusion My focal point has been this: by defending human selfhood within a fortress of language accompanied by narrative, van Fraasen has fired a warning shot against the approaching enemies who are attempting to kidnap and execute the self. However, I fear that van Fraasen’s defense is in itself inadequate. The bulwarks of his fortress could be strengthened by allying with the experiential model of the self. The narrative and the experiential models of the self are complementary, because it is the experienced self who tells his or her autobiography. I wish to thank Bas van Fraassen for defending the existence of the conscious human self against those who would assail its existence, against those who would claim that selfhood as we daily experience it is actually a delusion. I have joined forces with van Fraassen in this battle. But my march has assaulted the enemies of the self on a different flank. I have loaded my arsenal with this: the self may not be a thing, but it is not nothing either. I combine this observation with another one: the task of both science and philosophy is to explain, not explain away. The problem among neurocentrists is that they try to explain the self away. They do not explain the self; rather, they assume the self is a delusion fopped off on an epiphenomenal consciousness by physical brain activity. Nevertheless, the indubitable existence of the self as seen from the point of view of the self is a phenomenon which will inflate the horizon of objective science to grow beyond reductive materialism to include consciousness and first person subjectivity. “I must first know myself” (Υνίσθεɑuτον), said Socrates.27 We enjoy a direct intuition of our self both before and after mediated knowledge of objects in the world enters our awareness. Unless we know our self, we don not know that we know anything else. What we would like from the N&V scientifically oriented philosopher is to explain this, not explain it away. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum, 1994), part III. 27 Plato, Phaedrus 229e. 26 Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2019): 401–423 401 The Hypostatic Union: Personhood, Consciousness, and Knowledge Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap. Capuchin College Washington, DC Introduction I am pleased and honored to have been asked to speak at this august Dominican colloquium. I am especially delighted that I am able to address a topic most dear to my heart and mind—Jesus, the incarnate Son of God. In keeping with the overall theme of the conference, I will address the personhood of Jesus, including his human consciousness and knowledge. As many of you probably know, I have written on these matters before; here, therefore, I hope to clarify and advance what I have previously penned (metaphorically speaking).1 My paper is divided into four sections. The first will address the divine personhood of Jesus, that he is the one person of the Son of God incarnate. The second will examine the ontological relationship between the divine person of the Son and what I refer to as his incarnate human I. The third will focus on the Scholastic understanding of Jesus’s human knowledge as presented by St. Thomas Aquinas, as well as my critique of this interpre See Thomas G. Weinandy, “Jesus’s Filial Vision of the Father,” Pro Ecclesia 13, no. 2 (2004): 189–201, and “The Beatific Vision and the Incarnate Son: Furthering the Discussion,” The Thomist 70, no. 4 (2006): 605–15. Both essays can also be found in Weinandy, Jesus: Essays in Christology (Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia, 2014), 279–92 and 293–301, respectively. See also Weinandy, Jesus the Christ (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 2003; republished by Ex Fontibus, 2017), 83–95. 1 402 Thomas G. Weinandy tation. The fourth section will present my account of Jesus’s human filial consciousness and knowledge. These issues are philosophically complex and, at least at the present, theologically controversial. The Divine Personhood of the Son of God Incarnate The Council of Chalcedon (451) declared eight times, in various ways, that one and the same Son is perfectly God, and so homoousion with the Father, and perfectly man, and so homoousion with humankind. Following the lead of Cyril of Alexandria, the Council is very clear that the one Son who exists as God is the same Son who exists as man. Contrary to Nestorius’s position, there are not two different persons—one existing as God and another existing as man. Jesus, the man, has only one ontological identity, or one who-ness—and who the man Jesus is, his identity, is the divine Son of God. Moreover, because one and the same Son exists simultaneously as God and man, the Council declares that one and the same Son “must be acknowledged in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division and without separation.” How can this be? How can one and the same Son simultaneously exist as God and as man without the two natures being confused or changed when the two natures are not divided, or separated? The Council can make such a seemingly contradictory declaration because the Council Fathers realized that the incarnational “becoming” was not the ontological compositional union of natures, not an amalgamation of the divine and human natures, which would confuse and change the natures, and so terminate in a third kind of being, a tertium quid, which would be neither fully God nor fully man. But how then can they not be separated or divided? The reason is, as the Council professes, that “the character proper to each of the two natures was preserved as they came together in one prosopon or one hypostasis—not parted or divided into two prosopa, but one and the same only-begotten Son, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ.”2 The integrity of each nature is preserved because the incarnational act, the incarnational “becoming,” is not the ontological compositional union of natures, but rather the ontological uniting of the humanity to the person of the Son so that the Son now ontologically exists not only eternally as God but also temporally as man. Thus, according to Chalcedon, when the Gospel of John declared that “the Word became Flesh,” that “becoming” espoused neither a change in 2 Translation taken from Compendium of Creeds, Definitions, and Declarations on Matters of Faith and Morals [hereafter, DH], ed. Heinrich Denzinger, Peter Hünermann, Robert Fastiggi, and Anne Englund Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012), nos. 301–2. The Hypostatic Union: Personhood, Consciousness, and Knowledge 403 the nature of the Word’s eternal divinity nor a change in the nature of the assumed created humanity, but rather it denoted that the Son, maintaining the integrity of his full divinity, came to exist as man, maintaining the integrity of his full humanity. Chalcedon realized that John employed the term “became” in a new and singular manner, as meaning “coming to exist.” Consequently, the ontological identity of the man Jesus, the who he is, is none other than one and the same divine Son of God. Chalcedon’s magisterial definition of the hypostatic union becomes, then, the determinant metaphysical hermeneutical principle for discerning all that follows upon this incarnational reality, specifically with regard to Jesus’s human consciousness and knowledge. Thus, we will now turn to our second topic—the human I of Jesus. The Human I of the Son of God Incarnate Not a few recent theologians have argued that classical Christology, in keeping with the Council Chalcedon, is Docetic or Monophysite, in that Jesus is not depicted as fully human. Since Jesus is professed to be a divine person, something essential to his being human is absent—namely, his human personhood—and therefore it is claimed that Jesus is not homoousion with the rest of humanity as Chalcedon demanded. While such a charge is erroneous, as it completely undermines the reality that it was precisely the person of the Son of God who came to exist as man, it was the catalyst that originally led me to address more adequately the issue of Jesus’s genuine humanity.3 Importantly, “personhood” is not some discrete “thing” or supplementary distinct “module” that is added to a nature in order to make the nature personal, the absence of which makes it incomplete. Rather, “person” designates the personal identity, the who, of a rational being. Within the Incarnation, Jesus has a complete human nature, body and soul, but he is not a human person, for his identity, his personhood, who he is, is the Son of God. He who is personally identified as the divine Son of God within the Trinity is the same Son who is personally identified as the man Jesus. The who of Jesus does not diminish anything that is constitutive of humanity. What makes him extraordinarily singular is that he does not possess a human subjective identity, a human who-ness, as other human beings, but rather a divine identity as the Son of God, for Jesus is the person of the Son of God existing as man. This understanding of “personhood” in relationship to “nature” led me, secondly, to clarify See Thomas G. Weinandy, “The Human ‘I’ of Jesus,” Irish Theological Quarterly 62, no. 4 (1996): 259–68 (also in Weinandy, Jesus: Essays in Christology, 266–78). 3 404 Thomas G. Weinandy further the notions of “person” and “nature” as to what pertains to each within the Incarnation. Chalcedon distinguished the person and the manner of the person’s existence. The person of the Son of God exists both as God and as man, and so what pertains to each manner of existence must be rightly attributed to the Son of God. Now, while Jesus is one person, and so possesses one identity as Son, he also exists as man, and so possesses all that is essential to being man. As later Councils professed, Jesus, as the Son of God, possesses not only a divine intellect and will, but also a human intellect and will, for both are of the “essence” of being God and man.4 Thus, because the one person of the Son exists as man, I have proposed that the Son, as man, so lives his human life as to possess a human I. However, since Jesus is the one person of the divine Son, would that not demand that he have only one I, and that divine and not human I? The issue of Christ possessing a human I first arose within the Christologies of Déodat de Basly and Paul Galtier, both of whom were working from within a Nestorian perspective.5 Because Galtier, for example, held a Scotistic version of the Incarnation—a variation of the Assumptus-Homo Christology where the Son of God assumed the man Jesus—he posited that there were two I’s in keeping with the two distinct ontological realities, that of God and that of man. Obviously, such an understanding of the Incarnation has many Nestorian features, and like Nestorius, Galtier was hard pressed to demonstrate how the Son of God and Jesus, the man, were ontologically one. Similarly to Nestorius, Galtier appeared to allow only a moral union between the divinity and humanity within Jesus, an adoptive See the Decree of the Second Council of Constantinople (553) and the Decree of the Third Council of Constantinople (680–681), DH nos. 421–38 and 550–59, respectively. 5 See: Déodat de Basly, En Christiade Française (Paris: Vrin, 1929); de Basly, “Le Moi de Jésus-Christ, Le déplacement des autonomies,” France Franciscaine 12 (1929): 125–60, 325–52; and P. Galtier, L’Unité du Christ, Être . . . Personne . . . Conscience (Paris: Beauchesne, 1939). Karl Rahner’s position on the self-consciousness of Christ also possesses a Nestorian flavor. He sees the man Jesus becoming aware of his divinity, through the visio immediata, as an object to be known, rather than the eternal Son becoming subjectively conscious of himself as the Son of God in a human manner. Conceiving the divinity as an object to be known implies an I (a knower) that is ontologically separate from the known (the divinity). See Rahner, “Current Problems in Christology,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 1 (Baltimore, MD: Helicon, 1961), 149–200, and “Dogmatic Reflections on the Knowledge and Self-Consciousness of Christ,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 5 (Baltimore: Helicon, 1966), 193–215. 4 The Hypostatic Union: Personhood, Consciousness, and Knowledge 405 moral union that is achieved through the man Jesus possessing the beatific vision. The blessed vision, in turn, allowed Jesus to consciously know that he is God. Such a solution remains inadequate, for how can Jesus know that he is the Son of God if he is not the Son of God truly existing as man?6 In response to Galtier, various Thomists rightly took him to task.7 They did so by insisting that, since Chalcedon demanded that Jesus is the one person of the Son who is man, there is only one I, and that divine, since it is the one I of the one divine person of the Son. To attribute a human I to Jesus would, they believed, contradict his singular divine personhood. These Thomists rightly wanted to ensure that Jesus was the one person of the Son, but I believe their insistence that this demanded that Jesus possessed one I, the divine, was misplaced. I would hold that Galtier is wrong in advocating two I’s, one divine and one human, and that the Thomists in question are also wrong in proposing one I, and that divine. While Aquinas does not address this issue directly, he does correctly insist, in accordance with Chalcedon, that the Son subsists as man, and I would argue that, because the Son does actually subsist as man, he must possess, in accord with Thomas, a human I, for a human I is fundamental to his subsisting in a human manner. Even though the Thomists rightly desired to maintain that Jesus is the one person of the Son, what they failed to appreciate was that for Jesus to possess a human I does not negate his one divine personhood. Rather, it enhances the truth that the Son did actually become fully human. In keeping with Aquinas’s love for distinctions, the issue of whether or not Jesus possesses a human I demands an important new distinction. We must distinguish who the person of Jesus is as the divine Son, his divine identity, and the human manner in which that divine identity is humanly lived and expressed. As incarnate, the Son of God is psychologically conscious and, so, knows himself in a human manner, and that human Pius XII, in his encyclical Sempiternus Rex (1951), §§30–31, condemned the extreme view of de Basly, but left open Galtier’s view that Jesus possessed a human psychological I. For a contemporary critique of the above authors, see Jean Galot, La Conscience de Jésus (Paris: Duculot-Lethielleux, 1971), 97–131, 169–72, and Galot, Who Is Christ?: A Theology of Incarnation (Chicago: Franciscan Herald, 1981), 323–28. 7 See, for example: Bernard Lonergan, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan: The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2002); Pietro Parente, L’Io di Christo (Brescia, IT: Morcelliana, 1951 and 1955); Angelo Perego, “Il ‘lumen gloriae’ e l’unità psicologia di Cristo,” Divus Thomas 58 (1955): 99–110, 296–301; and Bartomeu M. Xiberta, El Yo de Jesucristo: Un conflicto entre dos cristologías, (Barcelona, ES: Herder, 1954). 6 406 Thomas G. Weinandy self-consciousness and knowledge simultaneously gives rise to and so is manifested within and through his human I. Within his incarnate state, the Son of God is conscious of himself in a human manner; he expresses himself in a human manner; he acts in a human manner; and thus he reveals who he is as the Son of God in a human manner, and so he speaks and acts from within the human psychological parameters of a human I. The new distinction I am making is that between the divine person—that is, the who—and the divine person’s human I. The ontological identity of that human I is the divine Son, but the manner in and through which that divine identity is humanly lived and manifested is as man, and thus within the confines of a human I. Thus, within the Incarnation there is only one person, that of the divine Son, and equally, there is only one incarnate I, the human I of the Son of God. This is in keeping with the theandric nature of Jesus’s actions. Whether Jesus is eating a fish or working a miracle, who it is who is eating or working a miracle is always the Son of God, and the manner in which he is eating or working the miracle is always as man. Granted that Jesus, as the Son, works miracles through the power of the Holy Spirit, it is still as man that he works them. Miracles are distinctively theandric acts in that they are divine deeds done humanly, but similarly, even Jesus’s act of eating is a theandric act, for it is the divine Son of God who is eating like any other human being.8 Thus, Jesus, as the incarnate Son, is always self-conscious and knows himself in a human manner, and so always acts and expresses himself through and within a human I. Moreover, the human I of Jesus is in keeping with the Communication of Idioms—that is, the predicating of divine and human attributes to one and the same divine person. As we rightfully say that the Son of God suffers as man, so we can rightly say that the Son of God is self-consciously aware as man, and so expresses himself as man within and through his human I. A biblical example may clarify my proposal, and so dispel any cocked and questioning eyebrows. Jesus asks his apostles: “Who do you say that I am?” It is as man that the Son of God is asking this question, and so that I is a human I, for he is asking it in a human manner—that is, as a man. Ultimately, Jesus, knowing who he is, is asking: “Who, me, Jesus the man, wants to know who you, the apostles, think I, the man Jesus, Dominic Legge provides a thorough discussion of Aquinas on this issue. He shows that Aquinas sees all of Jesus’s actions as inherently theandric, since it is always the Son of God who is acting in a human manner. See Dominic Legge, The Trinitarian Christology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 185–210. 8 The Hypostatic Union: Personhood, Consciousness, and Knowledge 407 truly is?” Jesus wants the apostles to identify the ontological “who,” the person, who humanly asks, within the parameters of a human I, who he is. Peter responds (according to Matthew): “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Peter is absolutely correct. “You, the man Jesus, are the Spirit-anointed Son of the living God.” Peter accurately identifies the divine ontological who of the humanly spoken I. Who the man Jesus is, is the Son of God.9 Now, one might ask: Is what I am proposing concerning the human I of Jesus theologically and soteriologically important? I believe it is very important for at least three reasons. First, that the divine Son of God possesses a human I enhances the truth of the Incarnation. The Son of God actually did become man, and so exists as one of us in every way, not only in possessing a human intellect and will but also in possessing a human I that arises from within and gives expression to that human rationality. Second, as the Son of God, Jesus fully interacts with his contemporaries and converses as another human I with them. Importantly, if the Son of God interacted with his contemporaries and conversed with them from within or through a divine I, it would mean that he was interacting and conversing with them as God in a man and not interacting and conversing with them as a man. To hear the human voice of Jesus is to hear the actual human voice of the Son of God—Galilean accent and all. Thus, Jesus, the Son of God, interrelated with others on an equal human level, and so there arose a communion of equals, a communion of human I’s. Only if human beings believe, however, through the light of the Holy Spirit, that the identity of Jesus’s human I is that of the Father’s eternal Son, as in the case of Peter, is that communion consummated and come to fruition. Third, faith in the risen Lord Jesus consequently becomes of the utmost importance. The faithful are taken up into Jesus’s risen humanity and, so, become living members of his Body of which he is the head. This relationship is a radically new and singular relationship, for it is founded upon the life of the Holy Spirit, a life that both Jesus and the members of his Body share as one living reality. Jesus continues, then, to interact with the faithful and to converse with them as man, through his now risen human This same analysis can be applied essentially to everything Jesus says in the Gospels, even within the Gospel of John. For example: “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am” ( John 8:58; cf. 8:24). Jesus wants the Pharisees to realize that he who is humanly speaking to them, the man who humanly says “I say,” is Yhwh: the eternal “I Am”—He Who Is. Jesus is revealing that the identity of the human I of his “I say,” is the divine “I Am.” He is none other than the eternal God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, He Who Is. 9 408 Thomas G. Weinandy I. Within the sanctifying and transforming life in the Holy Spirit, there is a graced communion of I’s between Christ and his adopted brothers and sisters. Moreover, within that living communion, the faithful conjoin their voices, their human I’s with the human I of Jesus, and together all cry out, as one new man, “Abba-Father,” for the faithful’s I’s have taken on the same identity as Jesus’s I—that of being sons and daughters of the Father.10 Aquinas’s Understanding of Jesus’s Human Knowledge of Himself as God Having addressed Jesus’s divine personhood and the human I of the Son of God incarnate, we will now examine Jesus’s human knowledge as explicated by Aquinas. On a number of occasions, as noted above, I have expressed my dissatisfaction with the received Scholastic theological and, to some extent, magisterial tradition concerning Jesus’s knowledge of himself as God, specifically his possessing the beatific vision.11 Here, I will first present Aquinas’s understanding of Jesus’s human knowledge of his divine identity and express my concerns with such an understanding. I will then newly attempt to address how I believe Jesus, in keeping with the doctrine of the Incarnation, came to know himself as the Son of God and the soteriological significance of that knowledge. Aquinas, while he treats the grace of Christ and the knowledge of Christ separately, aligns them closely, for the knowledge that Christ possessed simultaneously flows from and follows upon the grace he received.12 The It is not possible to address it here, but this communion of I’s is important within the sacraments. Within the baptism, the minister, in persona Christi, says “I baptize you.” Within the Eucharist, the ordained priest declares, in an even more profound manner, “This is my body” and “This is my blood.” The human I of the ministers and the human I of Jesus become one human I. 11 In its 1985 document “The Consciousness of Christ Concerning Himself and His Mission,” the International Theological Commission argues, from New Testament evidence, that the Son’s filial self-consciousness and knowledge was founded upon his consciousness and knowledge of his Father (see “First Proposition” and 1.1–3). While the commission insists on the Son’s human consciousness and knowledge of himself in relationship to his Father, it never broaches the issue of Christ’s beatific vision. This document is published in International Theological Commission: Texts and Documents 1969–1985, ed. M. Sharkey (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989). The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks of “the intimate and immediate knowledge that the Son of God made man has of his Father,” but does not speak in terms of the beatific vision (§473). 12 See Legge’s very clear exposition of Aquinas’s understanding of the relationship between the grace of Christ and his human knowledge in Trinitarian Christology of St. Thomas Aquinas, 132–71. 10 The Hypostatic Union: Personhood, Consciousness, and Knowledge 409 primordial or foundational grace is the grace of union—that is, God graciously and freely uniting the humanity to the person of the Son so that the Son actually exists as man.13 Nevertheless, since the human nature is united to the person of the Son, the divine and human natures, in accordance with Chalcedon, remain unconfused. Because the two natures are distinct (making the Son’s manner of existence distinct from that of all simply human persons), Aquinas emphasizes that grace must be bestowed upon the Son’s humanity, for his humanity by its very nature does not necessarily participate in grace. In addition, Aquinas further states that “it is necessary to suppose habitual grace in Christ for three reasons.” The first is founded upon the grace of union. “For the nearer any recipient is to the inflowing cause, the more does it partake of its influence,” and since the humanity is united to the person of the divine Son, “it was most fitting” that the fullness of grace be bestowed upon Christ’s humanity. Secondly, since the soul of Christ was to be filled with love and knowledge, grace proper to this love and knowledge necessarily must be bestowed. Lastly, since Christ was to bestow all grace upon others, he must himself first possess the fullness of grace.14 Thus, Aquinas later concludes that “the abundance of grace sanctifying Christ’s soul flows from the very union of the Word . . . [and] consequently, in the first instant of his conception, Christ had the fullness of grace sanctifying his body and his soul.”15 As Aquinas argued that Jesus’s humanity is in need of the fullness of grace, so it is also in need of the fullness of knowledge—and for similar reasons. “It is fitting that the Son of God should assume, not an imperfect, but a perfect human nature, since the whole human race was to be brought back to perfection by its means. Hence it behooved the soul of Christ to be perfected by a knowledge which would be its proper perfection.”16 If Christ’s humanity is to be perfect, this requires, for Aquinas, a threefold knowledge—beatific, infused, and acquired. Thus, while the grace of union does not metaphysically demand, for Aquinas, that Christ possess the fullness of grace and the fullness of knowledge, it was fitting for him to receive such fullness, since his humanity was united to the source of all grace and knowledge—that is, to the Word himself. Moreover, if Christ See Summa theologiae [ST] III, q. 2, a. 10. English translations are taken from Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947). 14 ST III, q. 7, a. 1. See also ST III, q. 8, a. 5, where Aquinas speaks of the fullness of habitual grace as the Capital Grace whereby Christ is the Head of his Body, the Church. 15 ST III, q. 34, a. 1. 16 ST III, q. 9, a. 1. 13 410 Thomas G. Weinandy was to fulfill his salvific task of bestowing the fullness of grace and the fullness of divine knowledge upon the blessed, he must himself possess the fullness of both, and he must possess both from the moment of his conception. With regard to beatific knowledge, Aquinas states that, since human beings are brought to beatitude through the humanity of Christ, “it is necessary that the beatific knowledge, which consists in the vision of God, should belong to Christ pre-eminently, since the cause ought always to be more efficacious than the effect.”17 As Christ possessed the fullness of grace from his conception, so “from the first moment of his conception Christ saw God’s essence fully.”18 Because the blessed see the divine essence from the light that flows from the Word of God, “the soul of Christ, since it is united to the Word in person, is more closely joined to the Word of God than any other creature. Hence it more fully receives the light in which God is seen by the Word himself than any creature. And therefore more perfectly than the rest of creatures it sees the First Truth itself, which is the essence of God.”19 Following upon the same principle, Aquinas holds that, for Christ’s humanity to be perfect, it must possess infused knowledge, “in as much as the Word of God imprinted upon the soul of Christ, which is personally united to him, intelligible species of all things to which the possible intellect is in potentiality.”20 Thus Christ possesses “beatific knowledge, whereby he knows the Word, and things in the Word; and an infused knowledge, whereby he knows things in their proper nature by intelligible species proportioned to the human mind.”21 Since the beatific vision, which is the immediate beholding of the very essence of God, is beyond all human comprehension, even beyond Christ’s human intellect, it is through his infused knowledge that Christ is able to humanly conceive and reveal through his words the whole of divine revelation, for example, who he is as the Son of God.22 Moreover, since his possible intellect must be fully in act for it to be perfect, Christ, through infused knowledge, knew everything that could be possibly known by man—all human sciences; and he “could use it (such infused knowledge) when he pleased.”23 ST III, q. 9, a. 2. ST III, q. 7, a. 3. 19 ST III, q. 10, a. 4. See also ST III, q. 9, a. 2. 20 ST III, q. 9, a. 3. 21 ST III, q. 9, a. 3. 22 See ST III, q. 11, a. 1. See also III, q. 7, a. 8, and q. 31, a. 2, which speak of Christ possessing prophetic knowledge. 23 ST III, q. 11, aa. 1 and 5. 17 18 The Hypostatic Union: Personhood, Consciousness, and Knowledge 411 Now, with regard to acquired knowledge, Aquinas argues that, while his intellect possesses the fullness of all knowledge, divine and human, Christ’s active intellect must nevertheless also be actualized; so, “by acquired knowledge it knew whatever can be known by the action of the active intellect.”24 Thus, while Christ’s knowledge did not advance or increase because of his beatific and infused knowledge, his empirical knowledge could increase by comparing what he knew through infused knowledge with what he came to know through his senses. Moreover, Christ was said to advance in wisdom and grace not in the sense that he learned more as he grew in age, but that, as he grew in age, he was able to reveal more fully what he already and always knew.25 Similarly, for Aquinas, since as the head of his Body, the Church, he possessed the fullness of grace and knowledge, “it did not befit his dignity that he should be taught by any man.”26 Thus, for Aquinas, Christ is at once a wayfarer and a comprehensor. To be a “wayfarer” means that one is on the way to beatitude, and to be a “comprehensor” means that one has obtained beatitude. “Now before his passion Christ’s mind saw God fully and thus he had beatitude as far as it regards what is proper to the soul; but beatitude was wanting with regard to all else, since his soul was passible, and his body both passible and mortal.”27 Christ’s soul was, therefore, passible in relationship to its passible and mortal body, while in its relationship to its divinity and the grace and knowledge that fittingly flows from this incarnational relationship, it was impassible, and so a comprehensor.28 With Aquinas’s above understanding of Christ’s human knowledge in mind, I want now to offer a critique, for only in the light of such a critique is my own positive proposal intelligible. There resides, I believe, at the heart of Aquinas’s account of Christ’s human knowledge, as well as within the whole of the Scholastic tradition, (1) a false presupposition, and (2) a misconceived incarnational principle that, in turn, contains (3) the use of one flawed concept.29 ST III, q. 12, a. 1. ST III, q. 12, a. 2. 26 ST III, q. 12, a. 3. 27 ST III, q. 15, a. 10. See also III, q. 15, a. 10, ad 3, and q. 11, a. 1, ad 2. 28 See ST III, q. 15, aa. 3–4. 29 Before proceeding to my critique of Aquinas, it would be just of me to note the many contemporary defenses of Aquinas’s position concerning the threefold knowledge of Christ. See: Benedict M. Ashley, “The Extent of Jesus’ Human Knowledge According to the Fourth Gospel,” in Reading John with St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. Michael Dauphinais and Matthew Levering (Washington DC: 24 25 412 Thomas G. Weinandy First, the false presupposition is that Christ’s earthly humanity must be perfect. This presupposition is the motivating force that demands that Christ possess the fullness of grace such that he possesses the fullness of knowledge, both beatific and infused. That said, however, there is no antecedent theological basis that requires such a principle of perfection. Rather, the doctrine of the Incarnation itself would seem to mandate the opposite. This insistence on Christ’s human perfection may be an attempt to accentuate the humanity’s singular union with the person of the divine Son such that it shares in the Son’s divine perfection; yet this misguided emphasis undermines the reality of the Incarnation itself, for such a principle demeans the authenticity of the Son’s humanity by depleting it of its genuine earthly reality.30 Aquinas himself, as we saw, emphasizes that the fullness of grace and the fullness of knowledge within Christ are not metaphysically necessitated by the humanity’s incarnational union with the person of the Son. While he argues that it is “most fitting” that the fullness of grace and knowledge be bestowed, yet because the natures Catholic University of American Press, 2005); Romanus Cessario, “Incarnate Wisdom and the Immediacy of Christ’s Salvific Knowledge,” in Problemi teologici alla luce dell’Aquinate, Atti del IX Congresso Tomistico Internazionale, Studi Tomistici 44, no. 5 (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1991): 334–40; Frederick E. Crowe, “The Mind of Jesus,” Communio 1 (1974): 365–84; Crowe, “Eschaton and Worldly Mission in the Mind and Heart of Jesus,” in Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, ed. M. Vertin (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1989), 193–234; Simon Francis Gaine, Did the Saviour See the Father?: Christ, Salvation and the Vision of God (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015); Legge, Trinitarian Christology of St. Thomas Aquinas, 172–86; Matthew Levering, Christ’s Fulfillment of Torah and Temple: Salvation According to Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 32–33, 38–39, 59–63, 73–75; Bernard Lonergan, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan: The Incarnate Word (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2016), and Collected Works: Ontological and Psychological Constitution; Guy Mansini, “Understanding St. Thomas on Christ’s Immediate Knowledge of God,” The Thomist 59 (1995): 91–124; Raymond Moloney, “The Mind of Christ in Transcendental Theology: Rahner, Lonergan, and Crowe,” Heythrop Journal 25 (1984): 288–300; Albert Patfoort, “Vision béatifique et théologie de l’âme du Christ: À propos d’un ouvrage recent,” Revue thomiste 93 (1993): 635–39; Claude Sarrasin, Plein de grace et de vérité: Théologie de l’âme du Christ selon Thomas d’Aquin (Vénasque, FR: Éditions de Carmel, 1992); Terry J. Tekippe, “Towards a Systematic Understanding of the Vision in Christ,” Method 11 (1993): 77–101; Thomas Joseph White, “The Voluntary Action of the Earthly Christ and the Necessity of the Beatific Vision,” The Thomist 69 (2005): 497–534. 30 Such perfection is merited, I believe, through his Passion and death and acquired in his Resurrection. Such perfection is required of the risen Jesus only when he fully becomes Lord and Savior. The Hypostatic Union: Personhood, Consciousness, and Knowledge 413 remain distinct, such grace and knowledge must, nonetheless, be freely given. I too want to maintain, as will be seen, that Christ possesses the fullness of the Holy Spirit, and so is without sin, yet I also want to safeguard another important, albeit at times underappreciated, truth: he is like us in every way (see Heb 2:17 and 4:15). The Incarnation demands that the Word actually became flesh (sarx) (see John 1:14), not in some perfect idyllic state, but in a manner that is to be perfected through what he suffers (see Heb 2:10). This eventual perfection pertains, I would insist, to the whole of Christ and not simply to the perfection of his mortal body and those lower passions that are intrinsically associated with his flesh. The marvelous mystery of the Incarnation lies precisely in the Son of God actually assuming a human nature like our own and, so, existing as a genuine earthly human being.31 I have argued that, while he is without sin, Jesus was of the lineage of sinful Adam, and so bore the birthmark of Adam’s sinful race. The Son of God had to assume the whole of Adam’s sinful humanity if that sinful humanity was to be healed and saved. See Thomas G. Weinandy, In the Likeness of Sinful Flesh: An Essay on the Humanity of Christ (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993). Aquinas does address the issue of Christ’s defects of body and soul, but his governing principle is the perfection that Christ must possess from his conception—perfection of grace and knowledge. Such perfection invariably mitigates much of the authenticity of Christ’s earthly life. See ST III, q. 14 and q. 15. For example, in response to the objection that Christ would seem not to know all things, since he says that he does not know the day or the hour of the last day, Aquinas answers: “He is said, therefore, not to know the day or the hour of the judgment, for he does not make it known. . . . he was unwilling to reveal it.” However, “the Father is said to know, because he imparted this knowledge to the Son. Hence, by saying but the Father, we are given to understand that the Son knows, not merely in the divine nature, but also in the human nature” (ST III, q. 10, a. 2, ad 1). Also, for Aquinas, when Jesus asked, in John’s Gospel, where Lazarus was buried, he did so in order to prove to those present that Lazarus was truly dead, while he himself actually knew where the tomb was (see Super Ioannem 11, lec. 5, Marietti no. 1536). During the course of Jesus’s life, then, whenever he expressed ignorance or asked questions, he did so not because he lacked the knowledge, but rather for some pastoral reason that would benefit his hearers. Because Jesus knew everything, he could not be taught by anyone, including Mary and Joseph (see ST III, q. 12, aa. 3–4). Similarly, his prayerful reading of the Old Testament would not actually aid him in discerning his salvific vocation or discerning his Father’s will, for it would simply be an exercise in coming to know what he already knew but now in a new manner, but ultimately in an unnecessary manner. The imputing of all of this knowledge to the earthly Jesus, I believe is unwarranted and contrary to the very nature of the Incarnation. Jesus’s infused or prophetic knowledge should be limited to his salvific mission—the knowing of his Father’s will, his awareness that he must suffer and die and be raised on 31 414 Thomas G. Weinandy Second, the misconceived incarnational principle is that Jesus ultimately comes to know who he is as the Son of God because of the incarnational union of the divinity and humanity in the one person of the Son—that is, from within the one incarnational reality. Jesus knows, therefore, his divine identity, from the moment of his conception, through the graced internal interplay between his divinity and humanity—the relational interchange, founded upon the beatific vision, between his divine knowledge as God and his human intellect as man, whereby what is known divinely comes to be known humanly. Such a perfecting of the humanity by the divinity, it appears to me, undercuts the separate and distinct natures—the unconfused manner in which the Son of God exists as God and as man. While there may not be an ontological confusion and mixture of natures, the perfecting attributes of the Son’s divine nature appear to be graciously imparted upon, or fittingly seep or even wash into, his human nature, providing it beatific and infused knowledge. Such an osmosis, so to speak, would seem to lend itself to confusion of natures. Thirdly, as intimated above, inherent within the above-criticized misconceived incarnational principle is a flawed concept of the beatific vision. If the manner by which Jesus comes to know that he is God infers the improper direct imparting of divine knowledge from the divine nature into the human intellect of the human nature, then the concept of the beatific vision itself tends toward an improper division or flawed separation of the natures. The beatific vision, as first conceived and traditionally employed, is defined as the immediate vision of God possessed by the blessed souls in heaven, and so as a knowledge of God enjoyed by those who are not God. Jesus is not in this ontological situation. Jesus does not possess a full knowledge of God as if he were not God. For this very reason, to employ the concept of the beatific vision for Jesus is inappropriate, for it implies that the man, Jesus, is different and separate from his being the Son of God. The concept of beatific vision is not in accord with the theological or Christological issue at hand—how or in what manner does the Son of God as man come to know humanly that he is the Son of God? The knowing subject must be the Son of God, and the manner in which the the third day, his ability to know what the Pharisees are thinking and that Judas would betray him, etc. There is no salvific value in Jesus knowing when the last day would occur or where Lazarus was buried or that there are giant redwood trees in California. To attribute to Jesus the fullness of knowledge undermines the actual authentic life that Jesus lived on earth. His daily human life verges on being a mere pretense and charade. I will express this same concern throughout my critique of Aquinas. The Hypostatic Union: Personhood, Consciousness, and Knowledge 415 one subject of the Son comes to know must be as man, within the Son’s human consciousness and intellect—within his human I. Moreover, the concept of the beatific vision, as seen above, is, by its very nature, a post-death concept. Under normal circumstances, as Aquinas argues, only the blessed in heaven obtain the beatific vision and, so, come to experience God fully, even if they cannot comprehend him fully.32 Aquinas and the Scholastics, following upon the principle of perfection and the necessity of wanting Jesus to know that he is God, attributed to Jesus this post-death heavenly beatitude already from the moment of his conception. This position demanded, as Aquinas acknowledges, that the significance of Jesus’s Resurrection pertained only to the glorification of his body. Again, however, under normal causal circumstances, the beatific glory possessed by the human soul would, by its very ontological and graced relationship to the body, glorify the body. For Aquinas, however, it was for the sake of “the divine economy” that “the glory [beatific glory] did not pass from his soul to his body, in order that by his passion he might accomplish the mystery of our redemption.”33 Here we find an artificial preventive intervention, a positive hindering of a causal effect that would naturally—or better, supernaturally—flow from the causal agent. Aquinas himself acknowledges that, immediately upon Jesus’s death, “the soul communicated its glory to the risen body in the Resurrection; and so that body was made glorious.”34 It strikes me that, when one has to prevent—in an artificial and positive way—a cause from achieving its natural/supernatural end for the sake of another end, in this instance for the sake of making real Jesus’s Passion and death, there is something inherently wrong with one’s entire conception of the issue. In this occasion, the inappropriate demand is that Jesus possessed the perfection of the beatific vision from the moment of his conception for the sake of his knowing that he is God. This possession of the beatific vision has further very detrimental soteriological repercussions. Aquinas also holds that Jesus possessed beatific and infused knowledge, for he must be, from his conception, the head of the Church and the revealer of all divine knowledge. Moreover, as head of the Church, this beatific and infused knowledge allowed Jesus to will and so merit humankind’s salvation from the first moment of his conception. “Since the sanctification of Christ was the most perfect, because he was so sanctified that he Aquinas argues that no one in this life can possess the beatific vision. See ST I, q. 12, a. 11. 33 ST III, q. 54, a. 2. 34 ST III, q. 54, a. 2. 32 416 Thomas G. Weinandy might sanctify others; consequently he was sanctified by reason of his own movement of the free-will towards God. Which movement, indeed, of the free-will is meritorious. Consequently, Christ did merit in the first instant of his conception.”35 What then is the purpose of Jesus’s life, death, and Resurrection? Aquinas states: “Nothing prevents the same thing belonging to someone from several causes. And thus it is that Christ was able by subsequent actions and sufferings to merit the glory of immortality, which he also merited in the first instant of his conception; not, indeed, so that it became thereby more due to him than before, but so that it was due to him from more causes than before.”36 Here once again, I fear, Aquinas has evacuated Jesus’s humanity of its full and authentic earthly soteriological significance. Salvation was instantaneously merited at the moment of Jesus’s conception because he already possessed the fullness of actualized grace and the fullness of beatific and infused knowledge, thus knowing perfectly who he is as the Son of God, and so as a zygote, he could will and so merit humankind’s salvation. It is, however, only the intellect and the will of this one-celled zygote that is truly soteriologically decisive. The materiality of that cell is only important in that it provides a “home” for the intellect and will. This materiality is not actively contributing anything to humankind’s salvation—the actual material body of Christ is not soteriologically in play because it is physically impossible; being but a zygote, it cannot contribute any salvific act, for only the intellect and will are soteriologically acting. This smacks of a Platonic notion of the soul–body union, but more importantly it deprives the full humanity of Christ, specifically his material body, of any salvific consequence. What is really important is simply Christ’s soul, for it, through its intellect and will, is the sole active salvific agent. Moreover, then, Jesus’s human life, Passion, death, and Resurrection are deprived of their critical salvific meaning and purpose. They no longer comprise those ultimate, decisive, sine qua non human acts that effect humankind’s salvation, for all was already achieved from the moment of Jesus’s conception. I find this biblically unacceptable. Nowhere does Jesus, throughout his entire life, give the impression that he has already achieved humankind’s salvation from the moment of his conception. Rather, the forward-looking trajectory of his entire public ministry purposely and inevitably leads to and culminates in his Passion, death, and Resurrection, for Jesus is acutely aware that only in his enacting these acts will humankind be saved. All of the above-mentioned consequences—which have detrimental ST III, q. 34, a. 4 (see also a. 3). ST III, q. 34, a. 4, ad 3. 35 36 The Hypostatic Union: Personhood, Consciousness, and Knowledge 417 biblical, Christological, and soteriological ramifications—logically follow upon the false presupposition that the earthly Christ must be perfect, and so know his divine identity from his conception through his beatific and infused knowledge. How are we then to sort out what I consider to be a Christological and soteriological muddle? Jesus’s Filial Vision of His Father We must return to the Chalcedonian metaphysics of the Incarnation: Jesus is one and the same divine Son who actually exists as a genuine human being. Thus, who it is who must come to know humanly who he is, is the divine Son. Moreover, Chalcedon would then demand that the path by which the Son of God came to know his divine self-identity as man must be a thoroughly human manner. With the above in mind, I want now to present my own understanding of Jesus’s human consciousness and knowledge, hopefully in accord with Chalcedon and the New Testament. Since the Son of God is conceived as man in Mary’s womb by the overshadowing power of the Holy Spirit—that is, through the singular grace of union—Jesus, the incarnate Son, possesses, within that same incarnating act, the fullness of the Spirit of Sonship. As the Father eternally begets his Son in the love of the Holy Spirit, he thus eternally possesses fully the Father’s Spirit of Sonship, and so the Father lovingly sends forth his Son into the world so as to be begotten or conceived as man by the Holy Spirit so that the Son’s humanity, from the first moment of conception, possesses fully the same Spirit of Sonship that he eternally possesses as God. This possession of the fullness of the Holy Spirit, founded upon the incarnating act of the Holy Spirit, is the fullness of habitual grace that is freely given to the Son of God as man. In accordance with Aquinas, as the grace of union, the incarnating act of the Holy Spirit is a free gracious act, and so the full indwelling of the Holy Spirit that flows from the incarnating act of the Spirit is equally a free gift bestowed upon the incarnate Son. Moreover, then, Jesus’s habitual grace, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, does not come upon him from without, as with other human beings, such as Aquinas conceives it, but arises from within him, since it is founded upon the very incarnating act by which the Son of God becomes man, the Son of God being conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit. Thus, as the Son constitutively possesses the Spirit of Sonship as the Father’s Son, so he constitutively possesses the Spirit of Sonship as the Father’s incarnate Son. As the Father’s incarnate Son, Jesus, therefore, possesses the Spirit of Sonship in a unique manner that differs in kind from the manner in which Christians possess the Spirit of Sonship. Similarly, this singular possession 418 Thomas G. Weinandy of the Holy Spirit is what constitutes Jesus, from his conception, as the anointed Messiah. While Jesus, the Son of God, possesses the fullness of the Holy Spirit from conception, that habitual abiding of the Spirit of Sonship is actualized, comes to be in act, only as the incarnate Son of God is capable of bringing it into act. This means that the infant Jesus, the incarnate Son, while he possesses fully the Spirit of Sonship, is not humanly conscious of his divine identity as the Father’s Son, nor is he capable of meriting salvation, for as an infant, he is humanly incapable of actualizing the fullness of grace that he possesses. This inability is simply in keeping with the metaphysical principle that one can enact an act only to the extent that one is in act. In keeping with his human maturation, as his human self-consciousness developed—that is, his human I—Jesus became aware of who he is as the Son of God. This becoming aware of who he is, however, is not, in relationship to himself, an inner act of reflection by which the human soul or intellect contemplates the divinity of the Word within the beatific vision, and so, through the accompanying infused knowledge, grasps his divine identity. Rather, as ordinary human children differentiate themselves in relationship to others, parents and siblings, and so conceive themselves as I’s, so the child Jesus came to differentiate himself in relationship to others. Most importantly, in keeping with the singular metaphysics of the Incarnation, as Jesus humanly matured he humanly became aware of his Father, through and in the light of the indwelling Spirit of Sonship, and within this knowing of his Father, he became consciously aware, and so humanly knew himself, within his human I, as the Father’s only-begotten Son. The Son of God did not come to know who he is as man in relationship to himself, but in and through his relationship to his Father. The indwelling Father’s-Spirit-of-Sonship is the foundational principle by which the Son humanly came to know his Father, and in so doing simultaneously came to know himself as the Father’s Son. He did not, then, come to know God as if God were an object distinct from himself, as in the beatific vision, but he came to know God the Father as the Father’s Son, for the Father, in the love of the Holy Spirit, revealed himself to his Son, Jesus; and Jesus, the Son, in the same love of the Holy Spirit, came to know himself as the Father’s beloved Son. Apart from humanly knowing his Father, within the communion of the Holy Spirit, Jesus, the Son, would not humanly know himself as the Father’s Son. Chalcedonian incarnational metaphysics demands this. Jesus, the Son of God existing as man, must, as man, come to know humanly that he is the Father’s Son not in relation to his own divinity, but in and through his human relationship with his heavenly The Hypostatic Union: Personhood, Consciousness, and Knowledge 419 Father. It is no wonder, then, that, in the Gospels, Jesus reveals his Sonship not in relationship to himself, but rather insofar as he reveals the Father. Hence, he never says: “I am the Son of God.” Instead, Jesus reveals who he is by revealing his Father, “my Father,” and in revealing his Father, he reveals that he is indeed the Father’s Son. Moreover, this coming to know that he is the Father’s Son is not a protracted psychological or intellectual process. By the time the child Jesus could humanly say, “I,” the human I of a divine who, he had some self-conscious awareness of who he is, and so had some knowledge that God is his Father, and thus he concurrently knew himself to be the Father’s Son. Possessing the fullness of the Spirit of Sonship, the child Jesus, as he prayed the Psalms with his parents, particularly with Joseph, and as he weekly heard and pondered the Scriptures together with them in the synagogue, and as he went with them to the temple to celebrate the great high feasts, enacted the power of the Spirit that dwelt within him, and in so doing, came to know ever more clearly and intensely that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is truly his eternal Father. In so doing Jesus, the Son, humanly became ever more conscious, within his human I, that he is truly the Father’s Son, that this is who he is—the Son of God. Jesus’s human self-conscious awareness of his Sonship was most dramatically manifested when he, at the age of twelve, was well aware that he was in his Father’s house, the temple, and must be about his Father’s business (Luke 2:41–51). As seen above, my understanding of the manner in which the Son of God humanly comes to know that, in and through his Spirit of Sonship, he is the Father’s Son is fully in keeping with the inner Trinitarian divine relationships. Within the Trinity, the Father knows himself as Father only in the begetting and knowing his Son in the love of the Holy Spirit, and the Son knows himself as Son only in being begotten and knowing his Father in the love of the Holy Spirit. The Father and the Son do not know themselves in relation to themselves, but only in relation to one another within the communion of the Father’s Spirit of Sonship. As they subsist as persons only in relation to one another, the persons of the Trinity know themselves only in knowing one another. Apart from knowing the Son in the Holy Spirit, the Father would not know himself as Father, and apart from knowing the Father in the Holy Spirit, the Son would not know himself as Son. The self-identity of the persons of the Trinity, and thus their own self-awareness, resides not in themselves, but only as they subsist in relation to one another. Apart from one another, they are, literally, no one and nothing. Thus, as I have argued, the Son humanly knows that he is the Father’s Son not through an introspective relationship between his divinity and humanity founded upon the beatific vision, but only through 420 Thomas G. Weinandy his filial vision of the Father founded upon his possessing his Father’s Spirit of Sonship. Furthermore, while the earthly Jesus possesses a filial vision of his Father, and so knows himself to be the Father’s Son, he possesses the fullness of this filial vision only within his glorious Resurrection. This gives rise to four soteriological issues. The first concerns his being the revealer of the fullness of divine truth. Because the earthly Jesus does not possess the fullness of his filial vision, which would be incomprehensible, and so incapable of being humanly fully conceived and articulated, he does not need infused knowledge, as envisioned by Aquinas—that is, in order to conceive and articulate the divine truth he humanly possesses. Jesus, within the light of the indwelling Spirit, is able to know his Father, and so reveal his Father through his human words and actions. Moreover, in his filial vision, again through the Holy Spirit, Jesus comes to know the will of his Father, and this would entail his having, what I would term “prophetic knowledge.” The Father revealed to Jesus, within their Spirit-filled communion, his messianic mission—the establishing of God’s kingdom through death and Resurrection. It would also entail his ability to read hearts and minds so as to know, for example, the heart of Judas and what the scribes and Pharisees were thinking. This prophetic knowledge would not, however, be an act of faith in what the Father revealed to him. Rather, it would be something that he actually knew as the Father’s incarnate Son. This would be in keeping with what Aquinas sees as part of Jesus’s infused or prophetic knowledge.37 All of this takes place within Jesus’s ever-present filial relationship with his Father that would be especially enacted and manifested within his prayer. Second, because he possesses the fullness of the Holy Spirit and, so, is imbued with the fullness of love, Jesus, throughout his salvific ministry, enacts this love. Every word he speaks and every act he performs, particularly his miracles, healings, and exorcisms, are performed in the fullness of love. Yet, while every act that Jesus performs is done in the fullness of love, not every act expresses or enacts the fullness of love. Only within his Spirit-filled sacrificial death does Jesus perform the perfect act of love, and so enact the fullness of the indwelling Spirit. “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). In this perfect act of Spirit-filled love, the sacrificial giving of his life in love to his Father out of love for humankind, Jesus merits the forgiveness of our sins See ST III, q. 7, a. 8. For a good exposition of Aquinas’s understanding of Christ’s prophetic knowledge, see Legge, Trinitarian Christology of St. Thomas Aquinas, 182–86. 37 The Hypostatic Union: Personhood, Consciousness, and Knowledge 421 and simultaneously merits the fruit of that supreme act of love—his own glorious Resurrection and that of the faithful who are in communion with him. Within this resurrected glory, the life and love of the Holy Spirit, the life and love he possessed from the moment of his conception, becomes fully actualized so that Jesus’s filial vision of his Father is fully actualized, and within that fully actualized filial vision, Jesus experiences the fullness of being the Father’s Son. Only when love is fully actualized does love merit its full reward—the immediate absolute unmitigated vision of God. Within the glorious perfecting of the totality of who he is as the incarnate Son, Jesus’s ardent prayer to his Father is answered. “I glorified you [Father] on earth, having accomplished the work you gave me to do; and now, Father, glorify thou me in your presence with the glory which I had with you before the world was made” (John 17:4–5). It was precisely because Jesus as the Father’s Son did not cling to his divinity but emptied himself in becoming man even to the point of obediently accepting death on the Cross that his Father “highly exalted him and bestowed upon him the name which is above every name,” the name “Lord” (Phil 2:6–11). Third, precisely because Jesus is the risen incarnate Lord, he is now empowered to send forth his Spirit upon the whole of humankind and, in so doing, as the now-risen Head, found the Church, his living body. Thus, unlike in Aquinas’s notion that Jesus possessed his Capital Grace from the moment of his conception, Jesus now achieves such grace of headship within his death and Resurrection, for only in these definitive salvific acts does Jesus merit fully his supreme dignity as Lord of the Church and Head of his Body. Only in those decisive salvific acts is the Church born from his pierced side and is his Mystical Body enlivened by his risen glory. Fourth, while the earthly Jesus, as the incarnate Son, revealed his merciful and loving Father, he reveals the fullness of who the Father is, and so the fullness of the Father’s love and mercy, as the risen Lord Jesus. Likewise, the risen Jesus, in fully revealing his Father, fully reveals that he is the Father’s risen and glorified Son, and he does so by sending forth the Father’s Spirit of Sonship. While Jesus promised his Spirit to the faithful, the Spirit is given only when Jesus is glorified (see John 7:37–40). This is why it is better that Jesus goes—that is, ascends to his Father in the fullness of glory—for only then, as the glorious Lord, can he send forth the Holy Spirit (see John 16:7). While Jesus enacts the fullness of revelation on earth, he makes it fully luminous to his Apostles and disciples only when he, as the risen Lord and Savior, sends forth the Holy Spirit—the Spirit of Truth who will guide his followers to all truth (see John 16:12–15). My hope is that what I have proposed concerning Jesus’s human consciousness and knowledge conforms to the Creed of the Council of Chal- 422 Thomas G. Weinandy cedon and is in keeping with the Gospel proclamation. While my exposition is not as complex as Aquinas’s or that of the Scholastic tradition as a whole, I believe its greater simplicity more clearly embodies the metaphysical principles that reside within the ontology of the Incarnation—that is, that Jesus is the one divine person of the Son truly existing as an authentic man. As man, then, the Son of God, through the indwelling of the Spirit of Sonship, comes to know his Father, and in so doing, comes to know himself as the Father’s Son. This understanding of Jesus’s human personal filial vision of the Father, a vision that is imbued with the Spirit of Sonship, accentuates the reality that it is truly the Son who exists as man and who, within his humanity, comes to know consciously his identity as Son in knowing his Father. Moreover, I believe that I have recovered the definitive salvific importance of Jesus’s earthly life and death and enhanced the decisive salvific significance of his Resurrection—elements that seem almost superfluous if we take the Thomistic/Scholastic theology to its conclusions. Such an emphasis is in accord with the Gospel narrative, which portrays the whole progression of Jesus’s life, from his conception, leading to and climaxing in his death and Resurrection, for upon these acts is humankind saved from sin and death so as to obtain fellowship in Jesus’s resurrected glory. This Spirit-filled fellowship with the risen Jesus leads me to my concluding point.38 Sharing in Jesus’s Filial Vision of the Father First, Aquinas maintained that Jesus must possess the beatific vision from his conception so that the faithful might obtain his blessed vision through his humanity. While it is necessary for Christians to obtain the blessed vision of God through the humanity of Jesus, this does not necessitate that Jesus possess that vision from his conception. What is necessary is that Jesus possesses his blessed vision of the Father within his bodily Resurrection, for only as the risen Lord of the Church and Head of his Body is his heavenly vision shared with the risen faithful through their fully sharing in Jesus’s Spirit of Sonship. Second, I have insisted that the concept of the beatific vision, when applied to Jesus, is inappropriate. Instead, I have proposed that it is more fitting to speak of Jesus possessing a personal filial vision of the Father, since My understanding of the incarnate Son’s filial vision of the Father has some similarities with the positions espoused by Lonergan (see Collected Works: Ontological and Psychological Constitution) and, especially, Galot (La Conscience du Jésus and Who Is Christ?). However, I significantly differ with them on key points. For these similarities and differences see, as noted above, Weinandy, “Jesus’s Filial Vision of the Father.” 38 The Hypostatic Union: Personhood, Consciousness, and Knowledge 423 it is the Son as man who becomes conscious of himself as Son in knowing his Father. I want now to submit that it is equally appropriate to speak of the blessed in heaven possessing a filial vision of the Father. Traditionally, as noted before, the beatific vision is an objective, immediate vision of God as God exists in himself by those who are not God. Since, however, those who come to faith and are baptized become members of Christ’s body by sharing his Spirit of Sonship, they too become adopted children of the Father. This adoption means that the faithful share in the same divine life, in the same divine relationships, that exists within the Trinity. In union with Jesus, the risen incarnate Son, through the transformative indwelling Spirit, the faithful come to live in communion with the Father as his children. Thus, in Spirit-filled communion with Jesus and after the manner of Jesus, the faithful, too, rightly cry out “Abba, Father” (see Rom 8:7 and Gal 4:6). This filial cry fulfills Jesus’s filial prayer that “they may all be one; even as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us” (John 17:21). Because Christians relate to the Father as his sons and daughters, their knowledge of him is not simply an objective knowledge of someone who stands over against themselves, as in the beatific vision, but a filial knowledge, a filial vision, of him whose very life they now share. They partake of and share in one and the same blessed, Spirit-imbued filial vision of the Father as does Jesus, the risen Son. Similar to Jesus then, the faithful come to know who they truly are not in relation to themselves, but in relation to their Father: they recognize their authentic identity as his sons and daughters. This filial vision and knowledge finds its completion in heaven, where the blessed will share fully in Christ’s resurrected glory, and so share fully in his Spirit of Sonship, and thus participate fully in his glorious immediate filial vision of the Father. There is really, then, only one filial vision of the Father, that of his exalted incarnate Son, Jesus, in which all the Saints who are in communion with him share, for together in Christ, all share in the Father’s Spirit of Sonship.39 ***** I trust that I have not caused additional confusion or cultivated undue ambiguity as to the mystery of the Incarnation. Rather, I hope that what I have articulated has engendered greater clarity and understanding, and in so doing, fostered greater love for Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of the Father and our definitive Lord and universal Savior. N&V For another rendering of the filial vision of the blessed see, as noted above, Weinandy, “Jesus Filial Vision of the Father,” 290–92. 39 Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2019): 425–450 425 Persons, Pronouns, and Perfections: A Response to Thomas Weinandy’s “The Hypostatic Union: Personhood, Consciousness, and Knowledge”1 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology Berkeley, CA This article responds to Thomas Weinandy’s account of the consciousness and knowledge of Christ. Deserving of careful consideration, his is a rich and multifaceted proposal on a difficult and complex topic. Some of the complexity is theological in nature, not all of which I will be able to avoid in my response. Still, this response is meant to be primarily philosophical in nature. And it appears that there are two kinds of philosophical presuppositions that typically go unacknowledged in discussions of this topic. One concerns theories of personhood and self-consciousness. The other has to do with the “principle of perfection,” a “principle of fittingness”—or what Thomas Weinandy calls “the false presupposition” of Thomas Aquinas’s Christology. To my mind, both are philosophical presuppositions, but the first (on personhood and self-consciousness) fits the theme of this volume more closely, and so it will be the topic of this response. Person versus I—The Trinity Weinandy’s proposal regarding the human consciousness of Christ seems peculiar if not unique in that it suggests that in Christ there is no divine I, but only a human I. In fact, in this proposal none of the divine persons has an I—though I am not sure the suggestion is that they share a common I would like to thank Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P., for his comments on an early draft of this article. 1 426 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. I.2 Thus Christ would be a divine person without a divine I. The personal pronoun I would be connected with a human nature as self-conscious, rather than with the divine person in which this nature subsists. While it might seem strange to disconnect personal pronouns from the persons to whom they refer, I think we can indeed make sense of this distinction, if we identify being an I with being self-conscious. Being self-conscious is that which is left from being an I, if we subtract personhood from the I—if we subtract from it the who in which the property of self-consciousness subsists. We may indeed have philosophical or ethical reasons to make such a distinction between persons and their self-consciousness in the case of embryos and persons in a permanent vegetative state, who presumably are persons, though they are not self-conscious and cannot say, “I,” to themselves.3 In the case of divine persons, of course, we would wonder whether this distinction can be more than conceptual. Divine persons do not develop from an embryo state, nor are they ever in a permanent vegetative state. Here the distinction seems to be rather based in the fact that all three persons share one and the same essence, but not their personhood, and that this essence might then be the one and only location for self-consciousness. The full actualization of personhood in the Trinity would then be rather different from what our knowledge of human personhood suggests. I do not currently see any philosophical objections to this suggestion regarding the Trinity. But neither do I see what would force us to make this assumption. By contrast, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, for example, would hold that there are three intelligent and free subjects in God.4 And Déodat de Basly made a similar suggestion, because he wanted to conceive of the relationship between the Trinity (as one I) and the homo assumptus (as another I) as a tragic battle of love; see Jean Galot, “La psychologie du Christ,” La nouvelle revue theologique 90 (1958): 337–58, at 348–49. The crucial relationships are then not those of the Trinity, but those between God as a whole, on the one hand, and the homo assumptus, on the other hand. See also Felix Malmberg, Über den Gottmenschen, Quaestiones Disputatae 9 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1960), 33–34. Paul Galtier will modify Basly only in his later work; see Galot, “La psychologie,” 343–44. This is a curious parallel, since Weinandy otherwise does not seem inclined to agree with this school of thought. 2 3 There are also good theological reasons for this distinction. The Günther school equated person and self-consciousness, and therefore denied Christ a human self-consciousness; see Engelbert Gutwenger, S.J., “Das menschliche Wissen des irdischen Christus,” in Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 76 (1954): 225–46, at 171. This is noted also by Paul Galtier, L’unité du Christ (Paris: Beauchesne, 1939), 321. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., “L’unique personnalité du Christ,” Angelicum 4 A Response to Thomas Weinandy 427 indeed, though the three persons are distinct from each other, each is not “really” distinct from the divine essence, and we would therefore expect each person to have all the properties that the essence has. The persons are distinct only by their proper relationality with each other. And this relationality consists in the way in which each person passes on the whole and entire essence to the other.5 Thus the Son has the whole essence as received from the Father; he has the essence in a filial way. He has the divine will in a filial manner, and the divine mind as “conceived” or in the form of a concept, word, or logos. If therefore self-consciousness is a property of the divine essence—for God is Spirit—and if persons are beings that have a nature or essence, then each of the divine persons has this one divine essence and the property of self-consciousness in his own, personal way. Since the three persons are not distinct from the essence, they are three ways in which the divine essence has itself. Because the three persons are three ways in which God’s self-conscious nature has itself, God is self-conscious in three ways. There is only one act of divine self-consciousness, yet it is had by three persons in three different ways. While this does not necessarily prove that God must have three I’s or selves, I would find this to be a more plausible reconstruction because it is in accord with our prima facie intuitions about what persons are.6 Autonomy? Are there other reasons for why we might reject a threefold I or self-consciousness in the divinity? Weinandy notes: As they subsist as persons only in relation to one another, the 5 6 29 (1952): 60–75, at 64. Likewise Lonergan: “Ulterius secundum quod processiones divinae sint intelligendae ad modum emanationum intelligibilium verbi a dicente et amoris ab utroque, etiam tres personae sunt subiecta psychologica secundum actus notionales singulis proprios. Et ideo Christus ut Deus est sui conscius tum qua Deus tum qua persona distincta [Further, in so far as the divine processions are to be understood in analogy to the intelligible emanations of a word from a speaker and of love from both, so also are the three persons psychological subjects according to the notional acts that are proper to each. And therefore Christ as God is conscious of himself, insofar as he is God as much as insofar as he is a distinct person]” (Lonergan, De constitutione Christi ontologica et psychologica, 3rd ed. [Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University, 1961], 134; translation mine; he agrees in this with Pietro Parente on 141). They could not pass on only part of the essence, because that would split the simple divine essence. And perhaps also with the way God reveals himself; see Malmberg, Gottmensch, 102. 428 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. persons of the Trinity know themselves only in knowing one another. . . . The self-identity of the persons of the Trinity, and thus their own self-awareness, resides not in themselves, but only as they subsist in relation to one another. Apart from one another, they are, literally, no one and nothing.7 And elsewhere he notes that for reasons of this dependence in subsistence, one should not even speak of a divine I.8 From this, it would seem that the three persons do indeed know themselves and are self-conscious. What seems to prevent them from being an I, nevertheless, is their mutual dependence. The ontological dependence—that is, a dependence in subsistence that follows from the fact that the divine persons subsist only relationally—implies a correlated epistemological dependence: the Father and the Son do not know themselves in relation to themselves, but only in relation to one another; that is, their self-consciousness and therefore self-knowledge is a dependent one. Or, taking one’s clue from the economic Trinity: as the Son reveals the Father, but not himself, so the divine persons are not self-conscious, except as they reveal each other. Their self-consciousness is not autonomous, and therefore they do not have an I. Thus, contrary to what I have suggested earlier, in Weinandy’s account it seems that self-consciousness is not co-extensive with being an I. Rather, there is one added feature that makes us an I, and that is autonomy. “Selfhood” or I-ness would be more than self-consciousness; in addition, it would require that we can have self-consciousness independently from anything else (perhaps like Avicenna’s “flying man,” or Descartes’s res cogitans). While one can be a person, yet lack autonomy, this would be impossible for an I; persons are relational, but I’s are autonomous. But now we might wonder whether we have not just defined selfhood out of existence altogether. Can anyone be an I in an autonomous way? Leaving aside angelic beings, it does not seem that God can, at least on this account. But most certainly, we cannot. Human persons in their fully actualized state are self-conscious. But whether they can be so in an autonomous way is at least a matter of philosophical debate. While Cartesians hold that we have a privileged self-access that is unrestricted and autonomous, others will claim that we are rather opaque to ourselves, lacking insight into ourselves. Some, like David Hume, will take this self-opacity Weinandy, “The Hypostatic Union: Personhood, Consciousness, and Knowledge,” 401–423 in this issue of Nova et Vetera (English). 8 Thomas Weinandy, “Jesus’ Filial Vision of the Father,” Pro Ecclesia, 13, no. 2 (2004): 189–201, at 195n10, and more clearly in an earlier draft of his paper. 7 A Response to Thomas Weinandy 429 all the way to a denial of the very existence of a self. The truth would seem to be somewhere in the middle: While human self-consciousness does not exhibit a complete, autonomous translucidity, we are not therefore inclined to say that there is no such thing as a human self or I at all.9 There can be an I without epistemic autonomy. But, if even we can have an I without complete autonomy, then this should be possible a fortiori for the divine persons. They, too, can lack epistemic autonomy while not therefore lacking a self or I. Nor is there any obvious reason why their unique relational subsistence and ontological dependence on each other should change this. Weinandy seems to suggest that this ontological dependence would affect self-consciousness in such a way that the location of self-consciousness would be external to the self, and hence that the self is not an I. But again: It is not clear how this would follow from the ontological dependence of the divine persons; to suppose so would seem to require us to retract the distinction between persons and I’s on which the whole debate is based in the first place. Nor is it clear how my self-consciousness could be outside of myself. Self-knowledge, much as it might be informed by the view of others, is something that only I myself can have; nobody can have it for me. By contrast, Weinandy suggests that “the self-identity of the persons of the Trinity, and thus their own self-awareness, resides not in themselves but only as they subsist in relation to one another.”10 Perhaps what “resides in” means in this context needs further explanation. It can at most mean that the other is a necessary condition of my self-consciousness, but not its location. That others help me to become self-conscious does not mean that they have my self-consciousness. As other persons, they cannot have the typical first-person quality of my self-knowledge that results from the identity and intimacy that I have with myself and my own mind. The Number of I’s in Jesus And this leads me to the question of the human I of Jesus. It is Weinandy’s concern, shared by many contemporary theologians, to make Jesus more “like us in all things.” This includes a human I like ours, not to be replaced by the divine I that Bernard Lonergan and many Thomists11 suggest For Aquinas’s balanced account, see Therese Scarpelli Cory, Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), e.g., 215–20. 10 Weinandy, “Hypostatic Union,” 419. 11 E.g.: Jean-Hervé Nicolas, “Chronique de theologie dogmatique,” Revue thomiste 53 (1953): 415–31, at 423; Mario Luigi Ciappi, O.P., “De unitate ontologica ac psychologica personae Christi,” Angelicum 29 (1952): 182–89, at 186. Weinandy 9 430 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. against the autonomous human psychology and “personality” proposed by Paul Galtier, S.J.12 Moreover, Weinandy and others would make this human I less replete of divinely inspired knowledge, infused or beatific, than Thomas Aquinas suggests.13 And consequently, Jesus in his human knowledge, including his human self-knowledge, should be thought of as less autonomous, and more dependent on circumstances and acquired knowledge. Now, here the first problem emerges: As we have seen, within the Trinity, lack of epistemic autonomy was an argument against having an I, whereas according to Weinandy’s account, in Jesus, such a lack does not seem to prevent him from having a human I; it rather seems to be required for a human I to lack this autonomy. So, something does not quite line up in this picture, at least when we connect it with Weinandy’s account of the divine persons. From the Trinitarian presuppositions, it would seem more logical to deny Jesus a human I as well. This would also align better with Weinandy’s suggestion that Jesus never talks about himself, but only about the Father and the Spirit. In his own words: “[Jesus] never says: ‘I am the Son of God.’ Instead, Jesus reveals who he is by revealing his Father, ‘my Father,’ and in revealing his Father he reveals that he is indeed the Father’s Son.”14 This is an interesting observation, but it also suggests a rather problematic use of pronouns. It is at least not obvious that one can say “you” or “he” without at the same time being ready to say “I.” For how can Jesus reveal “his” Father as “my Father,” without implying a knowledge of himself by which he can relate to the Father as “his”? Personal pronouns are indexical expressions; they depend for their meaning on the identity of their respective user. Moreover, in the case of possessive pronouns, such personal pronouns are also reflexive. They cannot be had without presupposing and identifying one’s own location, himself seems to agree in his earlier work, in Does God change? (Still River, MA: St. Bede’s, 1985), 121. Franz Diekamp attributes only one “Ich, Ichgedanke” to Christ, though a dual self-consciousness; see Franz Diekamp, Katholische Dogmatik nach den Grundsätzen des heiligen Thomas, vol. 2, ed. Klaudius Jüssen (Münster Westfalen: Aschendorff, 1952), 285. Garrigou-Lagrange, “L’unique personnalité,” 65–68, compares this consciousness to the saints who lose their identity in God, who becomes their “alter Ego.” 12 See the account of Hermann Diepen, “La Psychologie humaine du Christ selon saint Thomas d’Aquin,” Revue thomiste 50, no. 3 (1950): 515–62, at 533–38. 13 For Aquinas, however, being like us in all things includes precisely something of all of our three states: the state of innocence ( Jesus was without sin), the state of glory (beatific vision), and the state of sin (being under the penalties of this life); see Summa theologiae [ST] III, q. 13, a. 3, ad 2. 14 Weinandy, “Hypostatic Union,” 419. A Response to Thomas Weinandy 431 even if one at the same time locates others. The system of pronouns would seem to emerge only as a whole. If anything, the first-person pronoun would seem to precede the other pronouns, in so far as the use of “I” necessarily implies the existence of the speaker, which is not true for the use of the other personal pronouns; and this much might be true in Descartes. What, then, should we suggest as an alternative account? I have suggested earlier ascribing a threefold I to the divine persons, including the second person of the Trinity, the one person who became incarnate in a human nature. Should this second person also have an additional human I? Since the condemnation of Apollinaris, it is at least theologically settled that Christ’s human nature included a full human mind. And in this sense, Christ was indeed like us in all things. That he was not a human person did not preclude him from having a full human nature, and this human nature included a human consciousness. Whether this consciousness amounts to a human I is debated. Lonergan and others will say no, fearing Galtier’s Nestorian tendencies. For two I’s in Christ might suggest a duality of persons—or else a schizophrenic person, such that the human I of Jesus could erroneously think of himself as being someone else than the Son of God.15 However, I am not so sure that this follows. If the distinction between a person and self-consciousness is correct, then it should be possible to say that in Christ there was one (divine) person that was expressed in two forms of self-consciousness. And if being self-conscious and being an I are the same, then this would imply two forms of being an I. This would avoid a confusion of divine and human natures in their respective properties of self-consciousness. At the same time, it need not suggest Nestorianism, because both forms of self-consciousness would be had by and refer to the same person or who.16 There is, then, no “Baslyan” autonomy of the human I, nor is autonomy required for something to be an I, as we have said earli- Jacques Maritain, On the Grace and Humanity of Christ (London: Burns & Oates, 1969), 118–19. 16 That an I as a state of consciousness is not the same as the (ontological) person does not imply eliminating the grammatical and epistemic function of the I as referring to a person. 15 432 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. er.17 The I’s are perfectly in sync with each other and know it to be so.18 Still, in making this claim, I am going outside of what most authors are willing to say. Not only Lonergan, but many traditional Thomist authors are willing to ascribe two consciousnesses to Christ, but not two I’s.19 But what, then, is the human consciousness that they ascribe to Christ? Must it not be a form of self-consciousness? And if so, how can it not be an I— given at least our earlier definition?20 A human consciousness that is not self-consciousness might leave us with a truncated human nature that is not like us in all things.21 How indeed would this consciousness be different from a mere animal consciousness? Rational animals have self-consciousness by virtue of their rationality. For a rational mind is open to all being— that is, it has a capacity for universality—and it is under this universal horizon that such a mind can come to thematize itself as one particular among others. This is then also the condition of the possibility for having a system of pronouns: from this self-transcendent perspective, consciousness is able to reflect on itself and see itself in relation to other beings.22 Should Jesus, saying “I” to himself in a human way, locating himself in relation to other human beings, not have had that ability as well, in a human way? We Nor does this non-autonomy in turn make Jesus into a ventriloquist; there is full human self-consciousness, but a self-consciousness that (against Basly) refers in recto to the divine person, not just in obliquo; see Hermann Diepen, “Note sur le basilisme et le dogme d’Éphèse,” Revue thomiste 51 (1951): 162–69, at 167. If the human self-consciousness were truly autonomous, then Christ’s beatific vision would be necessary to correct it, rather than perfecting it (and hence, gratia tollit naturam); see Nicolas, “Chronique,” 423. 18 Christ must also know that his human self-consciousness is different from his divine self-consciousness. And he knows this difference with each of his minds, for Christ knows who he is with all the levels of his divine and human natures. 19 E.g., for Malmberg, we should speak of “Christ’s human consciousness of his divine ‘I’”; see Malmberg, Gottmensch, 110. 20 Diekamp distinguishes Christ’s I from his self-consciousness, of which there are indeed two (Dogmatik, 285). While this might be possible, it does not align with the definitions from which our current discussion began. 21 Perhaps one needs to agree with Galtier at least to the extent that he says that this would not be human consciousness (Galtier, L’unité, 332–33). But Galtier makes the mistake of thinking that self-consciousness is coextensive with a “quelqu’un,” and a human one at that; see Hermann Diepen, “L’Unique Seigneur Jesus Christ,” Revue thomiste 53 (1953): 28–75, at 64. 22 Such a universal, self-transcendent perspective would also be required for having a sense of personal unity over time and across various acts that our mind performs. Lonergan (quoting Galtier!) says that Christ has had that sense; otherwise his ontological unity would have been humanly unconscious to him (De constitutione, 138). 17 A Response to Thomas Weinandy 433 do, after all, ascribe to Christ, besides his divine will, also a fully rational human will, not just a truncated drive or animal appetite. If this is true for Christ’s appetitive powers, should it not also be true for his cognitive powers—especially given that these appetitive powers presuppose the cognitive powers?23 Why would we eliminate self-consciousness from his consciousness, leaving it truncated? One fear might be that ascribing a double self-consciousness to Christ might imply Nestorianism. On the other hand, not ascribing to both natures their proper operations might bring us close to Apollinarian monergism. So we can and have to ascribe to both natures their proper operations. We can do so even to the extent that they function as two grammatical subjects.24 From all of this it would not follow that we are dealing with two ontological subjects, as Nestorians are inclined to say.25 Both natures do still subsist in the same person, which is the second person of the Trinity. They are the operation of this person,26 even though And hence, “Christ as man cannot love God perfectly unless he knows him perfectly”; see Dominic Legge, The Trinitarian Christology of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 179. This might also be important to recall regarding another question: Since the beatific vision makes Christ also impeccable, does it take away his freedom and merit (and hence our salvation)? Gutwenger (“Das menschliche Wissen,” 183) points out that knowledge rather fulfills freedom and its spontaneity—as indeed Aquinas says (In III sent., d. 18, q. 1, a. 2, ad 5; see also Malmberg, Gottmensch, 120–21). Timothy Pawl also argues convincingly that deliberation is not essential to freedom even in a deep sense, but only under the conditions of a lack of knowledge; hence Christ did not need to lack knowledge to be free, but rather the opposite; see Timothy Pawl, “The Freedom of Christ and the Problem of Deliberation,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 75 (2014): 233–47. Balthasar’s appeal to a trans-temporal decision of the whole Trinity preceding the Incarnation (Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theodramatik, vol. 2/2, Die Personen in Christus [Einsiedeln: Johannes, 1978], 172), as the root of merit, might then not be necessary. Christ at the same time also remains viator, and hence he is still able to merit (Gutwenger, “Das menschliche Wissen,” 183). 24 With Leo’s tome: “Agit enim utraque forma cum alterius communione quod proprium est [each form ‘acts’ (performs) in communion with the other that which is proper to it]”—and just as within each nature, intellect and will are different principles of operations and can therefore occasionally function as grammatical subjects in sentences, without an implication of ontological independence. 25 As Lonergan points out: relativa are not multiplied by their correlatives; a father begetting a second son does not become two fathers. Similarly, we can say that a person acting through a second nature does not therefore become two persons; see Lonergan, “Christ as Subject: A Reply,” Gregorianum 40 (1959): 242–70, at 248–49. 26 Contrary to Galtier, for whom the divine person does not operate at all in the 23 434 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. every person must operate through a nature, and in this case through two self-conscious natures at once.27 The Psychological Coordination of Two I’s But there is another problem that arises from my assumption of two I’s in Christ. For how are these two to be correlated and coordinated, especially on the psychological level? Yes, there is an ontological unity in the hypostatic union, but how is it that these two are not schizophrenic in their operations? And does Jesus’s having a human I mean that he does not think of himself, in his human self-consciousness, as a divine person? This certainly must not be the result of our proposal. For I is a personal pronoun, and therefore must refer to the person whose pronoun it is. And this person is the same for both the human and divine self-consciousness or I—namely, the second divine person.28 Let us take an example from Scripture: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how many times I yearned to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you were unwilling!” (Luke 13:34). The I that is speaking here is obviously the one who is using human vocal chords and human self-consciousness (and a human I in this sense); but at the same time, this I cannot possibly be separated from the divine I, since he refers to activities from the time before the existence of Christ’s humanity (that is, God sending prophets in the Old Testament). And so also, if Jesus says in his human nature, “Before Abraham was, I AM,” the I cannot refer to two entities at once or at different times, but always only to the same divine person that is also present in the human I that is speaking here. The only solution is that both I-consciousnesses, both self-consciousnesses, will think of the same person. After all, the human self-consciousness has no other person to refer to. Unless, that is, this self-consciousness is mistaken about its identity.29 The question is: What kind of knowledge hypostatic union which tends towards a mere moral union of activities (coordinated by the beatific vision) such as would be possible even without a personal union; see Galtier, L’unité, 366. 27 For all related issues, see Thomas Joseph White, “Dyotheletism and the Instrumental Human Consciousness of Jesus,” Pro Ecclesia 17 (2008): 396–422. 28 The distinction of a grammatical from an ontological subject might be porous in that regard. This includes his early life. As Rudolf Haubst points out: there would be a disruption and sudden change of identity from an autonomous human I in Christ to a consciousness of his divine identity, if he did not begin with the latter right away, or else, early on, others would have known more about his identity than he himself; see Rudolf Haubst, “Über das Seelenleben des Kindes Jesus,” Geist und 29 A Response to Thomas Weinandy 435 does Christ’s consciousness have to have, in order not to be mistaken and hence schizophrenic?30 One suggestion might be that God arranges for this harmony of the self-consciousnesses by some kind of occasionalist parallelism.31 Human and divine nature function in tandem like two synchronized clockworks. God could arrange for Jesus’s consciousness to be coordinated with his divine mind by orchestrating—perhaps by means of some middle knowledge—all the circumstances of his life that make him learn and think the appropriate things in such a way that he will not go wrong. His knowledge of his divine identity might then be entirely acquired knowledge of some sort. But this is not how Jesus himself describes it in John 5:19: “Amen, amen, I say to you, the Son cannot do anything on his own, but only what he sees his Father doing; for what he does, his Son will do also.”32 Nor does ordinary human knowledge seem sufficient for knowing oneself as having a divine identity. Acquired human knowledge, however inerrant it might be, cannot positively know such an identity. Knowing an ontologically divine identity is not possible without some cognitive assimilation to that divinity. That sort of knowledge would have to be supernatural. But not even every supernatural knowledge might be sufficient. “Infused knowledge,” for example, though it can provide various ideas supernaturally, would at most provide some theoretical knowledge about such an identity, Leben 33 (1960): 405–15, at 411–12. Unlike Raymond Brown, who thinks that Jesus was infallible only in his moral teaching, and positively wrong in his ideas about demons and the afterlife—see Jesus, God and Man (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 55–56 and 97–98— I will assume that, though there are limitations in the human knowledge of Christ, there is no error in him. Given the analogy with scriptural inspiration, this might be important. 31 This would provide an alternative to a causal influence of the divine nature on the human nature (as an instrumentum coniunctum). Yet this causality, beyond mere psychological coordination (see White, “Dyotheletism,” 413–14), is inevitable: the causal asymmetry between the two natures is unavoidable, given that it is God who through his divine nature creates and sustains in being the human nature of Christ; the latter also subsists in a divine person, not in a human person. The real question might be whether this is efficient causality (which would imply the whole Trinity) or something akin to formal causality (see Nicolas, “Chronique,” 424–46), expressive causality (Galot, “La psychologie,” 356–57), or an influxus intra lineam personalitatis et existentiae (Ciappi, “De unitate,” 187). 32 Diepen points out that, if this statement is true, then every sin of Christ would be a sin of God, and not just for ontological reasons (quoting Capreolus and John of St. Thomas); see Diepen, “L’Unique Seigneur,” 76. 30 436 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. but not an immediate experience of the identity as identity. As such it can be subject to doubt; the human response to such thought content would at most be some sort of faith.33 But because faith is subject to uncertainty and compatible with struggles for belief, the Synod of Carthage in 426 condemned the opinion that Christ was subject to the limitations of mere faith, let alone that Christ was in a “Nestorian” struggle to accept his identity, as some popular movies might have it.34 Under such circumstances he might have been awaiting salvation with us, rather than being our Savior.35 Christ must know his divine identity and know it with certainty. For if Jesus could not with truly divine certainty claim his divine identity, then, according to C. S. Lewis’s famous trilemma (“mad, bad, or God”), other people would need to identify him has either a liar or lunatic. The claim to be God is presumptuous or insane, unless it can be made with truly divine authority and certainty.36 Infused knowledge, based in created and finite species, does not provide certain knowledge—just as one cannot know whether one is in the state of grace even by infused knowledge: grace is intrinsically a relation to God, which cannot be known without knowing the divine essence; so it would also be with the “sensus filiationis” (see Bernard Lonergan, De Verbo Incarnato [Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University, 1961], 349–51). 34 See the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, On the works of Father Jon Sobrino, SJ: Jesucristo liberador: Lectura histórico-teológica de Jesús de Nazaret (Madrid, 1991) and La fe en Jesucristo: Ensayo desde las víctimas (San Salvador, 1999) (November 26, 2006), §8: “The filial and messianic consciousness of Jesus is the direct consequence of his ontology as Son of God made man. If Jesus were a believer like ourselves, albeit in an exemplary manner, he would not be able to be the true Revealer showing us the face of the Father. . . . Jesus, the Incarnate Son of God, enjoys an intimate and immediate knowledge of his Father, a ‘vision’ that certainly goes beyond the vision of faith. The hypostatic union and Jesus’s mission of revelation and redemption require the vision of the Father and the knowledge of his plan of salvation.” 35 This is the striking observation of Thomas Joseph White: “If Christ did not possess this grace in his earthly life, then in a very real sense, Christ was not saved as of yet, and lived in faith, awaiting the salvation or redemption of his human nature. This is incongruent because it means that Christ, while in solidarity with us by virtue of his faith, would also be in solidarity with us in his awaiting redemption from another (the Father for example). He would not be the savior but only one saved” (White, “The Infused Science of Christ,” Nova et Vetera [English] 16, no. 2, 634). 36 Gutwenger, not otherwise a maximalist, insists that Christ knew all the free decisions and the inner intelligibility of this mystery in such a way that no infused knowledge could provide (“Das menschliche Wissen,” 176). And indeed, how else could Jesus promise the good thief that he will be in paradise? 33 A Response to Thomas Weinandy 437 In Persona Christi This can be further illustrated with one of Weinandy’s own examples. The example concerns the minister of the sacraments, who is speaking in persona Christi when he uses the first-person pronoun. This is a rich and intriguing analogy to our topic at hand. As Weinandy suggests, the minister joins the human I of Jesus in saying “I absolve you from your sins,” or “This is my body.” Weinandy rightly suggests that joining a human I of Jesus is a beautiful and suggestive way of thinking about this process. But does the minister only join the human I of Jesus, or must he not also join his divine I? After all, no man can forgive sins, or consecrate, but only God. Even the mere humanity of Christ alone might not be enough; it must be a theandric act involving his divinity as well. But in the case of an ordained minister, unlike the case of Christ himself, there is the difference that the priest’s humanity and his self-consciousness is not joined to Christ’s divinity in the very same sense that Christ’s humanity is. And correspondingly, in joining the I of Christ, the minister might be in an analogous, but not in an identical state of mind. This is important, for to speak validly in the person of Christ requires only an act of faith from the minister. Indeed, not even faith is necessary, as long as the minister intends to do what the Church does. The “infelicity conditions” of such “speech acts” are wide enough to prevent it from misfiring.37 But whatever Jesus’s own self-consciousness was, it must have been more than what is required from the minister who speaks in his person. For Christ acted not only as the minister of the sacrament, but as the one who instituted it and thereby established its infelicity conditions in the first place.38 These infelicity conditions establish an assurance of validity precisely because Christ’s certainty supplies for our uncertainties. Not the administration, but the institution of a sacrament requires divine identity and certainty.39 The validity of the administration depends, in its I am referring, of course, to the speech-act theory of John Austin. Similarly, the validity of a judge’s sentencing does not depend on the degree of his personal qualities, but only on his actually holding the office. 38 The perichoresis of the two natures in Christ must be different from that of the minister’s I with Jesus’s human I. 39 As Helmut Riedlinger points out, in Matthew, Jesus knows that the power of binding and loosing bestowed by him upon the apostles is valid (“Geschichtlichkeit und Vollendung des Wissens Jesu,” Theologische Quartalschrift 146 [1966]: 40–61, at 44). William Most rightly asks how else he could have assumed that he can institute the Eucharistic presence in perpetuity (The Consciousness of Christ [Front Royal, VA: Christendom College Press, 1980], 88). Agere sequitur esse implies Christ cannot act as God if he is not God also in the sense that he knows himself to be God; for such actions cannot be mere acts of a man (actus hominis), but human acts (actus humanus). 37 438 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. certainty, on this institution. For administration, faith is enough, precisely because the institution is not based on mere faith, but on the certainty of Christ’s identity. And unlike faith, neither identity nor certainty is a matter of degree, for persons and identities do not come in degrees. That persons and identities do not come in degrees is true even on a human level, for human self-consciousness: we, too, know our own identity with that same kind of certainty and immediacy. I know that I am not you and, more generally, I know my own identity as distinct from any other thing with an intuitive and direct kind of knowledge. And so we should also expect Christ’s human knowledge of his divine identity to have this certain, intuitive, and immediate quality. Though, in his case, it is the knowledge of an identity with a being of a nature other than the nature that has this knowledge. No acquired or infused knowledge can bring about this intuitive immediacy with another nature, but only the beatific vision, which, according to tradition, Christ had in his human nature already during his life on earth, as a wayfarer. The beatific vision is the best candidate to guarantee his proper way of referring to himself.40 Self-Consciousness, Subject and Object Now, no philosopher would make any of these claims, unless he were already convinced by a revelation that something like the Incarnation actually took place and that the various magisterial statements of the Church regarding this Incarnation are correct. Moreover, some of the claims I just made are at best theological opinions (though we hasten to add that Christ’s beatific vision in particular is supported by magisterial statements). The most a philosopher can do in the face of theological opinions about revealed content is to ask whether these opinions are viable options, or whether they run into some conceptual or metaphysical problems, or else to ask whether some of the objections made against the position I just outlined are cogent or not. One such objection would claim that for Christ to have the beatific vision in his human nature during this lifetime would precisely not bring This identity lifts him also out of the perspectival nature of human knowledge: he is not only a first-century Jew (the exegetical principle of dissimilarity confirms this); he does not reveal just a certain cultural identity, but a divine identity. He incarnates and embodies a divine “view from nowhere” beyond the dichotomy of appearance and reality. See Klaus Müller, “Über die neurobiologische Unhintergehbarkeit von Subjektivität und ein religionsphilosophischer Folgegedanke,” in Ich Denke, Also Bin Ich Ich? Das Selbst Zwischen Neurobiologie, Philosophie und Religion, ed. Tobias Müller and Thomas M. Schmidt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 161–87, at 179–80. 40 A Response to Thomas Weinandy 439 about the required self-consciousness of being identical with a divine person. It is said that, if Christ would know himself in such a vision, he would see himself in this vision only as an object. And since every object is an object for a subject, the object would be distinct from the subject that knows this object. Hence Christ could not know his identity in this manner. If anything, such a vision might lead him to be mistaken about his identity, because he would see his divinity as an object—that is, as other than himself, the subject. In fact, this vision might make Jesus into some sort of a Nestorian.41 For this reason, even some of those who defend the beatific vision of Christ have come to reinterpret this vision as a “subjective” rather than an “objective” vision. What might this mean? The problem that is being raised is not unique to Christ’s self-consciousness but occurs in any self-consciousness. If we use the terms “object” and “subject” in their modern sense (as I will in what follows), then any explicit self-consciousness would seem to be a form of knowledge in which a subject knows itself as an object. The kind of reflexivity that human, rational consciousness affords allows us to take a step back from ourselves and look at ourselves as if from a distance. We thus objectify ourselves. This is true not just for the human consciousness of Christ, but for all human self-consciousness. And yet, in our ordinary human self-consciousness, this does not seem to entail a split consciousness or schizophrenia or self-alienation. How is that possible? There are two riddles that need to be answered. (1) The first problem is that complete self-objectification seems impossible, because the object that we are looking at is an object for a subject— that is, for us. And in so far as we are those who are looking, we are not the object, but the subject. Yet we are trying to look at ourselves. We are necessarily on both the subject and object side; complete self-objectification seems impossible. This quandary is the root of the self-opacity that we have mentioned earlier. (2) The second problem is this: In the object that we see, we do indeed see ourselves. But how do we know that we are looking at ourselves and not This might be true regardless of what that divine object is taken to be: the divine Word (ST III, q. 9, a. 3, resp.), or the Father, or the whole Trinity, or the divine essence. Perhaps the object of the vision includes all of these, depending on what we are trying to explain: Christ’s obedience or his prayer cannot be directed to himself; but his self-consciousness is not directed to the Father, even if he is conscious of himself in a filial manner, i.e., in relation to the Father. Garrigou-Lagrange, “L’unique personnalité,” 71, conceives of it as an immediate vision of his own divine intelligence, with which the human mind as a compenetration similar to that of air and light. 41 440 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. someone or something else?42 How, for example, do we recognize ourselves in a mirror—and by analogy in the “mirror” of our own consciousness? Our ability to recognize ourselves in an objectified form implies two things. (a) We have to be in some kind of third position that holds together both subject and object—a perspective or view from nowhere from which we recognize both subject and object in their identity. This perspective is what German Idealists, for example, will appeal to under the name of “intellectual intuition.” Moreover, secondly (b), in order to re-cognize ourselves in the object that we are looking at, we need to have a prior acquaintance with ourselves. This is what St. Augustine would call the memoria, a recollection that we have of ourselves prior to any explicit thematization of ourselves, but which allows us to recognize ourselves as identically the same in those thematizations. If the oracle of Delphi asks us to “know ourselves,” then we must already be acquainted with ourselves, or else we would not know what we are looking for, nor would we recognize that we have found ourselves once we have arrived.43 In other words, there must be some kind of pre-reflexive awareness of ourselves that is only further explicated in our subsequent, reflexive self-objectifications. This latter process, St. Thomas Aquinas, following the Liber de causis, describes as reditio in seipsum, as reflexive going back into oneself.44 For Aquinas, too, this presupposes a form of prior, habitual self-knowledge, as well as an actual but implicit self-awareness that accounts for the sense of ownership that we have of our own cognitive acts. These presupposed forms of self-awareness can then become the focus of an attention that cannot and does not need to leave behind the particular cognitive acts that inform and actualize our minds. The subsequent self-explication can be called an increasing objectification of the self; unlike our basic sense of identity, this self-explication does come in degrees.45 This second issue of prior self-acquaintance, intellectual intuition, The object can come arbitrarily close to the subject: How do I know that the nose I am looking at is my nose? How do I know that my pain is indeed my pain, and not someone else’s? What constitutes “mine-ness”? 43 This acquaintance is minimally, like Kant’s transcendental apperception, “that which accompanies all of our thoughts” in such a way that we can say that this thought is my thought, or this pain is my pain. 44 Philosophers who take this to be the model not only of human self-consciousness but also of reality in its entirety will accordingly have large-scale explanations along these lines; the result will look like Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit. 45 For a further analysis along these lines, cf. Scarpelli Cory, Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge, especially 202–14. The intricate details of Aquinas’s analysis need not concern us here. 42 A Response to Thomas Weinandy 441 habitual self-awareness, or memoria, then, is the other side of human self-consciousness; it is the side of privileged self-access, by contrast with the first problem, the self-opacity that results from an always incomplete self-objectification.46 The Vision: Subject, Object, or Both? Now, to return to the human self-consciousness of Christ, as a consciousness of his own identity, his knowledge of his divinity cannot be merely on the object side of things. Just as in our self-consciousness, Christ’s cannot be merely a conscientia-perceptio, but must be a conscientia-experientia. It must be a subiecti experientia as well as an obiecti perceptio.47 As Jean Galot points out, this immediacy of self-consciousness on the subject side also implies that Jesus cannot “discover” his divine self in the beatific vision, because it is this self itself that does the discovering; this self is the subject of this discovery, and not only the object.48 Other theologians are not content to point out that there must be a subjective side also, but rather want to reduce the beatific vision to the subjective pole alone. Karl Rahner, for example, though willing to entertain some notion of the beatific vision of Christ, will nevertheless like to limit this vision by locating it on the side of this pre-reflexive acquaintance that every human mind has with itself.49 In doing so, one may hope to It is worth noting that this complex structure is something that no artificial intelligence can replicate. 47 Lonergan, “Christ as Subject,” 250, and De constitutione Christi, 136. By contrast, Galtier would leave the beatific vision entirely on the object side (connaitre rather than conscientia), to protect the human moi from being anything more than autonomously human (L’unité du Christ, 310–12). Because this I is incommunicable, even God cannot understand himself to have Christ’s human affects (317), even though these affects are in fact his (323) and are as such redemptive; God’s ownership is more like the signature of famous painter on his work (327–28). Within human self-consciousness, Galtier distinguishes the pre-reflexive, active je (subject) from a phenomenal, objective moi. Both have an empirical or psychological side, and an ontological, substantial side, though for Galtier none of these is to be identified with the person; see the summary in Galot, “La psychologie,” 341. 48 Galot, “La psychologie,” 348–49. 49 Karl Rahner, “Dogmatische Erwägungen über das Wissen und Selbstbewußtsein Christi,” in Schriften zur Theologie, vol. 15 (Cologne: Benziger, 1962), 236. This vision is not a gegenständliches Vorsichhaben; rather, it is am subjektiven Pol des Bewußtseins Jesu gelegen and merely a farblos scheinende Grundbefindlichkeit (236– 37) or Gestimmtheit (238–39). It can be had even without knowing it (238–40). Lonergan pupils like Frederick E. Crowe will reduce Lonergan’s understanding of the beatific vision to his notion of infinite openness and (natural) desire to know. This openness is without objective or expressible content—although it is a most 46 442 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. avoid the implications of an objectification that would alienate Christ from his divine identity rather than uniting him with it. But one will also eliminate much of the content that comes with the object side. The preferred term for such a reduced vision is visio immediata, as opposed to visio beatifica.50 Still others will suggest degrees of clarity of this vision,51 or make it “supra-conscious,”52 but will not consider it objective in the sense perfect desire to know; see Frederick E. Crowe, “Eschaton and Finite Knowledge in the Mind of Jesus,” in The Eschaton: A Community of Love, ed. J. Papin (Villanova, PA: Villanova University Press, 1971), 110–24, at 115. Most objects that desire as such implies a lack, not a perfection (Consciousness, 153). That Lonergan himself preferred “knowledge” to the “ocular” term “vision” ( see Randall S. Rosenberg, “Christ’s Human Knowledge: A Conversation with Lonergan and Balthasar,” Theological Studies 71 [2010]: 817–45, at 834) does not mean that it is not beatific knowledge for Lonergan himself. This is different for Crowe, “The Mind of Jesus,” Communio 1 (1974): 365–84, at 371–72. 50 Rahner, “Dogmatische Erwägungen,” 232; the visio immediata is the absolute closeness of the mystery (as opposed to knowledge) and its “blessed acceptance.” Yet, it is not only not beatific, but can even be terrifying (231). Most rightly objects that it is terrifying only for sinners (Consciousness, 150). Ciappi (“De unitate ontologica,” 188–89) likewise insists that “immediate” can mean only beatific. Balthasar also speaks of a visio immediata instead; (Theodramatik, 2/2:152). It has no content except his “mission”; see also Rosenberg, “Christ’s Human Knowledge,” 828. 51 E.g., Parente, as Lonergan notes: “ubi ille ponit Verbum tamquam obscurum terminum perceptionis cuiusdam indirectae et mediatae, nos ponimus Verbum clarum subiectum conscium cuiuscumque operationis psychologicae [where he posits the Word as if it were some obscure object of an indirect and mediated perception, there we posit the Word as a clear subject, conscious of all its psychological operations]” (De constitutione Christi, 142; translation mine). Parente apparently claims that Christ knows only his divine esse subsistens, which he shares qua person (only) with the Godhead, and which is the principle of action (actiones sunt suppositorum); hence he would know himself in reflection on these actions. But how would these deeds not be presumptuous if he did not know his divinity beforehand, rather than in subsequent reflection? Since his disciples are promised to do even greater works, how would his own deeds reflect his divinity to him? He must know and claim his divinity beforehand so that his deeds can confirm it ad extra. And, as Maritain (On the Grace, 123–24) points out, where Christ made that proclamation only later (e.g., before Caiaphas), it was not because he did not know, but because he had to show his holiness in theandric acts first, before proclaiming it. While Maritain maintains, against Diepen, that Jesus cannot have had merely the experience of the absence of a human I, but something more positive, he only envisions a subjective knowledge by connaturality, too (114–16). 52 Maritain, On the Grace, 54–144. That Christ knew and loved each member of his Mystical Body from conception (Pius XII, Mystici Corporis [1943]), Maritain, consequently also relegated to this supra-conscious paradise in his soul (89) that is cordoned off by a partitioning (54–61). In Jesus’s childhood, this supra-conscious- A Response to Thomas Weinandy 443 of having the content traditionally associated with it—at least not at all times, if ever.53 On that basis one would then be able to claim that Christ, in addition to this subjective knowledge, grows in an objective understanding of himself,54 possibly by using his first-century Jewish environment as a clue.55 ness is compatible with illusory images (99). Even Gutwenger, who endorses an objective vision (“Das menschliche Wissen,” 184–85), would limit this vision to habitual rather than actual knowledge; the vision would be something like the act of surveying a landscape while refraining from looking at details (such as the day of judgment; similarly, see Most, Consciousness, 144). Gutwenger claims Bonaventure, Albert, and Scotus as antecedents (184), but in these authors, it seems to be rather about limiting the comprehensive knowledge of the infinite that indeed only the divine nature can have; Christ’s human knowledge can know the infinite only habitually, not actually. See also Philipp Kaiser, Das Wissen Jesu Christi in der lateinischen (westlichen) Theologie (Regensburg: Pustet, 1981), 167–98 and 193–94. That a limited actual knowledge depends on Jesus’s paying attention would not impose a limitation—for Aquinas, Christ can do that perfectly and does not suffer from distraction; see Matthew Levering, Christ’s Fulfillment of Torah and Temple: Salvation According to Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 32, quoting Torrell. Nor can Jesus choose not to know something (like the day of judgment), because one cannot decide not to know something without thereby presupposing the knowledge; see Johannes Theodorus Ernst, O.P., Die Lehre der hochmittelalterlichen Theologen von der vollkommenen Erkenntnis Christi (Freiburg: Herder, 1971), 158. Gutwenger admits that his is an arbitrary limitation that can be argued for only for reasons of some principle of fittingness. Charles Hess, on the other hand, claims that there is no such reason, because such voluntary ignorance would be useless; see Hess, “Jesus’s Knowledge as Man,” Angelicum 53 (1976): 3–10. For Aquinas, the degree of clarity and of seeing things in God depends on the measure of grace, and Christ was full of grace; his vision therefore is not vague and without content; see ST I, q. 12, a. 8, ad 4; see also Most, Consciousness, 155, and Lonergan, De Verbo Incarnato, 353. If Christ can know in his human nature all relevant details as judge at the end of times, then this must be possible during his lifetime as well. He can know each one personally and intimately (the beatific vision thus not making him remote from us, but rather the opposite). After this life, this will also be true for the Blessed Virgin Mary. 54 There is growth from potency to act, for this “immediate vision” searches “nach einer Thematisierung und geistig-begrifflichen Objektivation [for a thematization and intellectual-conceptual objectification]” (Rahner, “Dogmatische Erwägungen,” 240–42); in this way, Christ in his humanity may avoid being an “onto-theologian,” but he might become the first modernist theologian instead. 55 It is frequently claimed, even by Thomists, that the beatific vision lacks necessary finite species and hence requires additional infused knowledge, or application to acquired knowledge (and conversio ad phantasmata). Maritain thinks that infused knowledge is necessary for Jesus even to express to himself who he was, and hence for his self-consciousness (On the Grace, 94). He claims that, for Jesus’s human 53 444 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. Similarly, Weinandy suggests: This becoming aware of who he is, however, is not, in relationship to himself, an inner act of reflection by which the human soul or intellect contemplates the divinity of the Word within the beatific vision and so, through the accompanying infused knowledge, grasps his divine identity. Rather, as ordinary human children differentiate themselves in relationship to others, parents and siblings, and so conceive themselves as “I’s,” so the child Jesus came to differentiate himself in relationship to others.56 All of these proposals, which are obviously plausible in ordinary human self-awareness, will have to wrestle with the specific problems of Jesus’s claims to divinity that we have discussed earlier. And if I have been correct, then merely human knowledge of himself, either subjectively or objectively, is not sufficient. In fact, this form of knowledge might not even suffice for adequate human self-knowledge. Aquinas and Immanuel Kant seem to agree that mere subjective self-knowledge or pre-reflexive acquaintance with ourselves is at most a knowledge that we are (and perhaps of a basic identity with ourselves); but it is not a knowledge of what we are.57 Whatever we linguistic expression, even infused knowledge (as quasi-angelic) is not enough: material signifiers are acquired only with action of the agent intellect (94, 103); this is true even in heaven (97). But Aquinas never really says such things (Most, Consciousness, 159); rather, images can be directly generated from the beatific vision (ST I, q. 12, a. 9, ad 2). White notes: “The text of Aquinas that comes closest to affirming this idea is found in ST III, q. 9, a. 3, corp. and ad 3, coupled with q. 11, a. 5, ad 1” (“Infused Science”). Yet even these texts speak only of infused knowledge and indicate that it is (a) proportionate to human nature, and (b) less perfect, because at times only habitual—neither of which indicates a necessity for any purpose whatsoever. Leo Scheffczyk explains that these additional forms of knowledge are, for Aquinas, only demanded by an “integrity principle” for Jesus’s human nature (“Der Wandel in der Auffassung vom menschlichen Wissen Christi bei Thomas von Aquin und seine bleibende Bedeutung für die Frage nach den Prinzipien der Problemlösung,” Münchener Theologische Zeitschrift 8 [1957]: 278–88, at 284–85). For Bonaventure, acquired knowledge is not necessary, but penitential; see Gutwenger, “Das menschliche Wissen,” 180, and Kaiser, Das Wissen Jesu, 150 and 175. 56 Weinandy, “Hypostatic Union,” 418. 57 That is, this pre-reflexive acquaintance is Descartes’s sum without the Cogito, let alone the res cogitans. If we indeed knew with the same immediacy what we are, then we would not have mistaken philosophies of mind, and no artificial intelli- A Response to Thomas Weinandy 445 know “quidditatively” about ourselves must be located on the object-side of self-knowledge, and this is true also for the human self-knowledge of Christ. His subjective knowledge of himself would have allowed him to say “I am I,” but not “I am who AM”; the first statement is analytically true, the second statement synthetically (even if, in Christ’s case, perhaps synthetically a priori). Knowing one’s nature therefore cannot be merely subjective; it requires objective elements. Thus, Jesus’s human nature cannot even know itself subjectively, let alone have knowledge of his divine nature in this way. If, then, quidditative knowledge must be objective knowledge, where does Jesus find this objective knowledge? If Jesus’s human environment is not sufficient to reveal his divine identity, then perhaps it is in the person of the Father that the human consciousness of Christ finds himself to be a divine person? Weinandy indeed suggests a “filial” vision that Jesus has of the Father: Jesus, the Son of God existing as man, must, as man, come to know humanly that he is the Father’s Son not in relation to his own divinity, but in and through his human relationship with his heavenly Father.58 This contrast between the Father and the divine nature, however, defeats the purpose, if the purpose is precisely for Christ to come to know his divinity in the Father. It is even doubtful that he could come to know the person of the Father in this way. For, much as we may distinguish person from nature and identify personhood with ineffable uniqueness, it is still the uniqueness of a specific nature, and we cannot know or love a unique person apart from his or her nature (it is not clear what this would even mean).59 Only if Jesus knows the Father also in his nature, does he truly know both himself and the Father; only then does he know his own divinity. Jesus cannot know who he is without knowing that he is not only the Son, but God; for he is not just anyone’s son, but the Son of God. His personal identity presupposes both his incommunicable personhood and his shared nature. Knowing his identity therefore requires both the filial and the beatific vision at once. gence theorists or materialists. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles [SCG] III, ch. 46, and Scarpelli Cory, Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge, 174–98. 58 Weinandy, “Hypostatic Union,” 418. 59 See Blaise Pascal’s quandaries in Pensées, no. 688. 446 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. Self-Consciousness and Our Own Fulfillment These considerations are relevant also for our own self-knowledge; for we, too, strive for such a perfect knowledge of our own nature, in which we have a fully objective grasp of ourselves. Can this desire for perfect self-knowledge ever be completed? Jean-Paul Sartre thought that this is not possible, and hence that our desire for perfect self-knowledge is a “useless passion” that will make us perpetually miserable. It is in fact, he says, the desire to be God, since the idea of God is the idea of an “in-itself-for-itself ” or of a completed self-objectification. Sartre for that reason thought that God himself is an impossible idea.60 But perhaps we should draw the opposite conclusion instead. I think that Sartre is right that the very idea of God, if he exists, must be the idea of someone who has perfect self-knowledge without self-opacity. It is the idea of someone whose return to himself is always already completed, because there is no split between subject and object in a perfectly simple being.61 There cannot be the process of an actualization of the potentiality for self-consciousness in someone who is a pure act. God’s self-explication does not come in degrees. The example of God therefore also indicates that perfect self-objectification does not necessarily imply self-alienation, but rather exemplifies the actualized telos of self-consciousness. Ab esse ad posse valet consequentia (“from the fact that something exists, it follows that it is possible”): perfect self-explication cannot be impossible in principle, because it is actual in God’s perfectly simple knowledge of himself. How about human self-consciousness? If Sartre is right, then we strive for something similar, but it is not possible for us by our own resources. Left to our own devices, it would be a “useless passion” indeed. For how indeed can we, in the return to ourselves, make a unified whole of subject and object in ourselves; how indeed can we actualize the unity of these Lonergan traces the origin of this idea of a necessary, real distinction of subject and object in God to the Platonists and their distinction between the One and the Nous (De constitutione Christi, 130–31). This would be also the proton pseudos of Hegel, who thinks that self-consciousness requires a “diremption” from itself, even in God. 61 Thomas Aquinas, De veritate, q. 2, a. 2; nor can such a split be the meaning of the Trinity, as Hegel thought, who accordingly suggested that God needs the process of the world for his self-consciousness, just as Jesus does according to newer theories of his human self-consciousness. Nevertheless, one might have to maintain some kind of “virtual distinction” of subject and object in God, qua self-transparency; or else one might end up with an Absolute that is beyond subject and object in such a way that it is not a person or self at all (as in F. H. Bradley), but rather thing-like or Spinozistic. 60 A Response to Thomas Weinandy 447 subjective and objective parts without a source of unity that is itself already and actually supremely one, and that comes to us thyraten, “from the outside”? Yes, there is an underlying unity, a “Ground in Consciousness” that undergirds the duality of subject and object, even in ordinary human self-consciousness.62 But in this life, human self-consciousness remains in potentia toward the full self-knowledge that it aims at; it requires actualization and unification by a source that is always already eternally one. If this is correct, then human self-consciousness, the reflexive bending of ourselves on ourselves in a circular return, is—like the movement of the ancient heavens—an image of the eternal unity that God has with himself. He is the one who enables us by his activity in our souls to be “at one” with ourselves. This activity in our souls, this participation in his unity is, in its completion, what we call the beatific vision. It is the beatific vision in which we have an objective knowledge of ourselves—yet not in ourselves, but rather in the objective knowledge that God has of us and that he shares with us. Would it not be pertinent to think of Christ’s beatific knowledge as the instrumental and exemplary cause of this fulfillment? Rahner would seem to make our point, when he notes that being and returning to oneself (reditio in seipsum) are convertible: the more something is, the more it is aware of itself and has self-knowledge.63 This he believes to be true not only for God as he is in himself, but even for the hypostatic union as the apex Dieter Henrich, Der Grund im Bewußtsein (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1993), 62–64. For Henrich, following Fichte and Hölderlin, this Ground is an anticipation of something beyond the split between appearance and reality, phenomenon and noumenon, and hence an anticipation of Kant’s idea of God as an intellectus archetypus rather than an intellectus ektypus. As noted above, Müller (“Über die neurobiologische Unhintergehbarkeit” 179–80) sees this intellectus archetypus as incarnate in the human mind of Jesus. Augustine’s memoria is similarly grounded in God: “I will pass even beyond this power of mine which is called memory: yea, I will pass beyond it, that I may approach unto Thee, O sweet Light. What sayest Thou to me? See, I am mounting up through my mind towards Thee who abidest above me. Yea, I now will pass beyond this power of mine which is called memory, desirous to arrive at Thee, whence Thou mayest be arrived at; and to cleave unto Thee, whence one may cleave unto Thee” (Confessions 10.17, trans. Edward Bouverie Pusey [London and Toronto: J. M. Dent & Co., 1920], 220). 63 Rahner, “Dogmatische Erwägungen,” 234. Aquinas, following the Liber de causis, would indeed think of self-knowledge in ontological terms as well; persons have their very subsistence reflexively in self-knowledge: “redire ad essentiam suam nihil aliud est quam rem subsistere in seipsam [to return to its own essence is nothing else, but that a thing subsists in itself ]” (ST I, q. 14, a. 2, ad 1; see also Super de causis, lec. 15). 62 448 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. of the analogia entis in creation.64 According to Rahner the visio immediata Dei is intrinsic to the hypostatical union as such.65 His claim that this vision is, nevertheless, not beatific and objective does not really seem to be consistent with his own premises.66 Such a completed return to ourselves in the beatific vision may also make sense of an earlier suggestion of Weinandy: we come to self-knowledge only in another of ourselves, such that the other-directedness of our mind and our self-knowledge are of one piece. This would certainly be true in the beatific vision. And yet, for Weinandy this vision is “filial” rather than “beatific,” because he thinks of objective knowledge as an alienation from our identity. This alienating feature, he suggests, makes any beatific vision actually impossible—for Christ as well as for us, including our heavenly state. This seems only consequent: if Christ cannot have the beatific vision on earth, then he cannot have it in heaven either. And if Christ himself cannot have it in his glorified, post-Resurrection state, then we can have this fulfillment even less (nemo dat quod non habet [“nobody can give what he does not have”]). Beatific visions are then impossible simpliciter. Something else needs to take their place, and that is what Weinandy calls “filial vision”—a term that is not entirely clear to me.67 In his own words: Because Christians relate to the Father as his sons and daughters, their knowledge of him is not simply an objective knowledge of someone who stands over against themselves, as in the beatific vision, but a filial knowledge, a filial vision, of him whose very life they now share.68 Rahner, “Dogmatische Erwägungen,” 234. D. Legge makes the important qualification that Aquinas explicitly states that the hypostatic union is not sufficient for any vision, because the hypostatic union concerns only Christ’s personal being as opposed to the cognitive operations of a nature (which is rather where the Holy Spirit comes in); see Legge, Trinitarian Christology, 174–77. Rahner equally explicitly finds this distinction between an ontic and a subjective level a metaphysical impossibility; accordingly, he understands his argument to be of greater force than one from mere fittingness (“Dogmatische Erwägungen,” 235). 66 He suggests a positive will to not-knowing, celebrating freedom as “risk” and “openness” (Rahner, “Dogmatische Erwägungen,” 230, 244)—which, however, might imply some fundamental misconceptions about the nature of freedom. 67 If the vision is not objective, is it then a loss of ourselves in another, a form of mere intoxication? Or is something like Rahner’s ursprüngliches, ungegenständliches Gottessohnbewußtsein (Rahner, “Dogmatische Erwägungen,” 237)? But while, for Rahner, this filial consciousness is seeking its objective completion, for Weinandy it seems to be content with itself. 68 Weinandy, “Hypostatic Union,” 423. 64 65 A Response to Thomas Weinandy 449 This formulation retains a certain ambivalence: that it is “not simply” an objective knowledge would not seem to exclude that it is that also. If so, then there is no need to create what might be a false dichotomy; why could the beatific vision not be filial as well? And why would the filial vision not be beatific and objective? What greater way to share someone’s life, filially, than by knowledge? After all, “We will be like him, because we will see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).69 Nor would this self-forgetful knowledge of an Other be in opposition to self-knowledge and human self-consciousness. As I have argued earlier: That we need another to know ourselves does not mean that this knowledge is not still our knowledge. Indeed, such self-knowledge is even necessary in the beatific vision; for truly to know God as God we need to know him as different from ourselves. But this implies that we know ourselves as well, as different; knowledge of self and other are necessarily intertwined. We know ourselves in our knowledge of God. We become acquainted with ourselves in the very same process by which we become acquainted with God. Such knowledge is knowledge both in God and of God. And thus the problems that seem implied in Christ’s objective knowledge of himself may turn out to be neither unusual nor unsolvable. A complete reflective and objective self-knowledge exists in God in all simplicity. Even in our own, still incomplete state, objective knowledge does not imply an alienation from ourselves, and we hope it to be complete in the beatific vision. It is therefore not metaphysically impossible for Christ to have the beatific vision as a wayfarer; nor would such a vision imperil his knowledge of his identity, but rather enhance it. For the philosopher, no metaphysical impossibility ensues. Christ’s beatific vision is a philosophical possibility. Whether this possibility is also actualized is not for the philosopher to decide. But given theological premises, it might be that a person who has two natures with their two respective self-conscious operations can have one true subjective identity only under the premise that the person’s human self-consciousness has always already completed its return to itself in another of himself—namely in the beatific vision. We should also note, that, in this quotation, the personal pronoun “he” refers to Christ, not the Father. Our beatific vision is not exclusively “filial”! 69 450 Anselm Ramelow, O.P. This would then also mean that perfect self-knowledge has at least once been realized in a human being, this side of heaven—namely, where the mind of God himself entered creation in a human being. This is the beginning and exemplary cause of our salvation, which includes the fulfillment of our cognitive desires regarding perfect self-knowledge.70 N&V Christ’s human self-knowledge may then even be the exemplary cause for what continues to be present in the infallible mind of the Church, which incarnates in its own way an anticipated divine view from nowhere, looking from all perspectives, from all the ends of the world, speaking in all tongues of all the nations and cultures. 70 Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2019): 451–464 451 How to Keep the Non-Reductive in Nonreductive Physicalism? Nancey Murphy Fuller Theological Seminary Pasadena, CA Introduction I was delighted to be invited to give a presentation at the conference “Person, Soul, and Consciousness,” organized by the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, July 14, 2017. However, it is a bit odd for me to be speaking at a conference with this title, because, first, I have regularly objected to using “person” as a philosophical concept. The definitions end up either ruling out many individuals whom we want it to cover, such as babies and people with disabilities, or else they rule in too much: I would vote for Kanzi, the bonobo, to be admitted. Second, I have spent years arguing that there is no such thing as a soul; and, third, I do not think anyone knows enough about consciousness yet to say much at a scholarly level; however, I reserve this particular remark to neuroscientific contexts. Nonetheless, I was delighted to be invited, especially because there are so many papers on Aquinas’s anthropology. He has seemed to me to be the most difficult of significant theologians to classify in terms of dualism, or something else. He appears to be a very complicated monist until you get to his argument for the survival of the rational soul during the intermediate state. At that point he sounds more like what is called a holistic dualist, in that a mere soul is not considered to be a complete human being. My plan for this lecture involves two parts. First, I will give as brief an account as I can of why I favor a monistic approach to Christian anthro- 452 Nancey Murphy pology, which, following fellow philosophers of mind, I generally call “nonreductive physicalism.” Where I hope to make my contribution will be to make good on the claim that it is possible to be ontologically physicalist (with regard to humans) without reducing our traditionally understood higher faculties to mere brain functions. So in my second section, Atoms versus Complex, Self-Organizing, Dynamical Systems, I will present an account, as the title suggests, of complex dynamical systems theory. I believe that it not only solves the problem at hand, but also represents a genuine worldview change that has been happening quite quickly over the space of only about ten to fifteen years. Why Christian Physicalism? There are plentiful writings from the twentieth century up to today arguing against dualism and for monism, along with an enhanced appreciation for the centrality of bodily resurrection in the good news of the Gospel. However, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, biblical critics had called miracles into question, especially the Resurrection of Jesus. So, whereas for centuries the immortality of the soul had been combined, in eschatology, with the general resurrection, “Enlightened” Christians focused only on the immortality of the soul. However, as biblical criticism became more sophisticated, especially in recognizing the need to read words (such as the Hebrew nephesh) in context, the question was raised around 1910 of whether nephesh had rightly been translated into Greek as psyche and then eventually into “soul.” Now, in speaking of Protestant developments, I have discovered, after moving from a liberal seminary to teach at an evangelical institution, that one always needs to specify whether one is speaking, on the one hand, of liberal or mainline scholars, or, on the other, of conservatives. Among liberal Protestants, by the 1950s, there was near consensus that dualism was a Greek cultural accretion to an earlier, more authentic, Hebraic theology and ought to be rejected. Conservatives are going through the same process now. It has been difficult to sort out Catholic scholars. Using my quick and dirty research methods of reading secondary literature, it seems that during the twentieth century, Catholic biblical scholars were increasingly more likely to reject dualism, but no general account of Catholic theologians was possible. It is now recognized that no simple distinction can be made between Greek dualism and Hebraic monism. First, Hellenistic and Hebraic cultures had been mixing for several centuries before Jesus’s day. Second, How to Keep the Non-Reductive in Nonreductive Physicalism? 453 we moderns have too much of a tendency to read René Descartes’s sharp distinction between material and nonmaterial back into early Christian writers. But suppose a dualism of material body and non-material soul or spirit was not biblical teaching. We need some explanation of how scholars could have gotten it wrong for so many years. Among Catholic scholars, this would be at least from Augustine up to Thomas; for most Protestants, it has been considerably longer.1 This question would require volumes to answer adequately. So I present only a few scholars’ insights. First, we need to emphasize that biblical authors had different concerns than we do, and the question of what happens at death was not always central to Jewish thinking. This has been confirmed by several contemporary Jewish authors as well. Second, I have found James Dunn’s work immensely helpful. Without falling into the 1950s error of trying to characterize the Greek view, he distinguishes between what he calls “aspective” and “partitive” accounts of human nature. He writes: In simplified terms, while Greek thought tended to regard the human being as made up of distinct parts, Hebraic thought saw the human being more as a whole person existing on different dimensions. As we might say, it was more characteristically Greek to conceive of the human person “partitively,” whereas it was more characteristically Hebrew to conceive of the human person “aspectively.”2 Thus, many of the ancient Greek philosophers were interested in the question: What are the essential parts that make up a human being? In contrast, for the biblical authors each “part” (“part” in scare quotes) stands for the whole person thought of from a certain angle or dimension. For example, Paul’s distinction between spirit and flesh is not our later distinction between soul and body; “spirit” stands for the whole person in relation to God.3 Dunn claims that “flesh” had a spectrum of meanings, but from some of Jesus’s teachings I would guess that a central meaning was the hugely But see note 3 below. James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 54. 3 Note that many of the Radical Reformers (Anabaptists), beginning in the sixteenth century, held aspective positions. For example, Menno Simons described the “soul” as one’s openness to God. 1 2 454 Nancey Murphy important role of kinship in the culture of his day. Michael Welker writes that “the heart is an exceptionally important entity in Paul’s anthropology. As in the Old Testament . . . it connects vegetative, emotional, noetic and voluntary functions. If psyche signifies the earthly, corporeal–mental unity of the human person, then the heart, kardia, stands for the emotional–voluntary depths. It is via the heart that the divine spirit reaches the human body and its mental capacities.”4 Note that Welker’s account of “heart” incorporates bits of Thomas’s vegetative, sensitive, and rational souls. Systematic theologian Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen rejects dualism and claims that the best of current theologians do so also. However, he objects to my term, “nonreductive physicalism,” because he thinks it emphasizes the physical at the expense of all of our other characteristics. Based on the complex account Scripture gives of the various aspects of human life, we decided that the best term for Christian theology would be “multi-aspect monism.” A fine representation of these multiple aspects is found in Dunn’s summary of Paul’s anthropology: Paul’s conception of the human person is of a being who functions within several dimensions. As embodied beings we are social, defined in part by our need for and ability to enter into relationships, not as an optional extra, but as a dimension of our very existence. Our fleshness attests our frailty and weakness as mere humans, the inescapableness of our death, our dependence on satisfaction of appetite and desire, our vulnerability to manipulation of these appetites and desires. At the same time, as rational beings we are capable of soaring to the highest heights of reflective thought. And as experiencing beings we are capable of the deepest emotions and the most sustained motivation. We are living beings, animated by the mystery of life as a gift, and there is a dimension of our being at which we are directly touched by the profoundest reality within and behind the universe. Paul would no doubt say in thankful acknowledgement with the psalmist: “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Ps 139:14).5 Michael Welker, “Flesh-Body-Heart-Soul-Spirit: Paul’s Anthropology as an Interdisciplinary Bridge-Theory,” in The Depth of the Human Person: A Multidisciplinary Approach, ed. Michael Welker (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 59 (ch. 2). 5 Dunn, Theology of Paul, 78. 4 How to Keep the Non-Reductive in Nonreductive Physicalism? 455 If biblical research and so much of contemporary theology were not at least open to monism, I would find myself in a tough spot. I appreciate Ernan McMullin’s term “consonance”—I believe we need to seek consonance between theology and science. And it is certainly the case that biology, and especially neuroscience, point toward monism. I also seek consonance between theology and contemporary philosophy. During the 1960s and 1970s, Anglo-American philosophical method was understood to be conceptual analysis. That is, in all statements (except tautologies) there were empirical elements (now ceded to science), but also conceptual elements. For example, the empirical question of how we acquire knowledge is empirical, but analysis of the concept knowledge was the philosopher’s job. A correct analysis was thought to provide universal knowledge, immune to scientific refutation. The conceptual arguments at that time were on mind–body dualism versus the mind–brain identity thesis. Arguments for and against dualism, for and against the identity thesis, appeared to be interminable. However, W. V. O. Quine’s demolition of the analytic–synthetic distinction made empirical knowledge once again relevant to philosophical arguments (in ways I will not go into here).6 In Jeffrey Stout’s terms, conceptual archaeology needs to replace conceptual analysis. We need to know what a concept means in a particular era, and for a particular community of scholars.7 Consequently, the findings of neuroscience, making it increasingly difficult to explain why a mind is needed in addition to the brain, has turned nearly all secular philosophers into physicalists.8 Many claimed to reject reductionism but, in my judgment, no one had an adequate account of how to avoid it. My claim is that there are good biblical and theological reasons to prefer physicalism, but only if good reasons can be given to reject reductionism. Otherwise we lose all of the higher human capacities important to a theological vision of humankind. Daniel Dennett’s book, Freedom Evolves, has received a lot of attention, but many reviewers accuse Dennett of “bait and switch” arguments.9 W. V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of View, ed. W. V. O. Quine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), ch. 2. 7 Jeffrey Stout, The Flight from Autonomy: Religion, Morality, and the Quest for Autonomy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 83–84. 8 Note that since the writings of Descartes, “soul” and “mind” have been nearly synonymous. 9 Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006). 6 456 Nancey Murphy Now, as reported above, Paul’s anthropology emphasized our essential sociality, reflective thought, deep emotions and sustained motivations, and the ability to be touched by the Holy Spirit. My account of Dennett’s simulacra of human capacities does not line up in direct opposition, but I believe it indicates enough of what the reductionist is willing to give up. “Intentionality,” in the philosophical sense, including beliefs, desires, and intentions, is essential for human sociality. Dennett claims we do not possess these characteristics. However, because attributing them to others allows us to predict behavior so well, this justifies us in taking “the intentional stance” toward others. Also, Dennett substitutes for altruism a concept of “benselfishness.” Because of the social pay-off of being perceived as a good person, and the fact that the easiest way to maintain this perception would be to be a good person, we behave so as to appear to be altruistic, but it is for selfish motives. This has been described as pseudo-altruism. Likewise, he has been accused of providing only for pseudo-responsibility and pseudo-freedom. His account of human thought is based on a view of human language as nothing more than computer-like manipulation of strings of symbols. And Dennett, being a strident atheist, does not even think to provide an account of pseudo-spirituality. He believes religion is based on fear.10 So the question for the next section is how to account for the fact that we are not, in fact, at the mercy, as Dennett says, of an organization of a trillion mindless robots. Atoms versus Complex, Self-Organizing, Dynamical Systems Now, I have been speaking of these biblical and theological issues for years, so the first section was easy to write. However, I am not experienced in speaking about complex systems theory. My mentor at Berkeley, Paul Feyerabend, once said that significant conceptual changes begin with a group of people speaking nonsense to one another, but it eventually makes sense, and a new paradigm or conceptual scheme is created. I think I an still on the verge between sense and nonsense. But here goes: first, an account of why reductionism had such a hold on modern thought; second, what are the best accounts of anti-reductionism still working within the usual vocabulary of philosophy of science; and, finally, my attempt to convey the sense in which complex systems theory contributes to a new, “after-modern” worldview. Already in the mid-seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes developed Dennett, Breaking the Spell. 10 How to Keep the Non-Reductive in Nonreductive Physicalism? 457 a theory of human nature and society based on an analogy with the new atomism in physics. He was also the first to propose the concept of a hierarchy of sciences, reflecting a hierarchy of complexity. In the early days of modern physics, causal reductionism was, I believe, inevitable. Following Epicurus, the essential assumption was that everything that happens is a consequence of the motions and combinations of atoms, whose behavior was (most likely always) deterministic. The atoms were not thought to be affected by the wholes they composed. Thus, the behavior of the wholes, from the levels of physics, to chemistry, to biology, and finally to psychology, was ultimately the product of causation from the bottom up, and complex entities were not causes in their own right. So the defeat of causal reductionism in the human case needs to be the defeat of bottom-up causation; or as some would say, of part-to-whole determination. The most significant criticisms of causal reductionism fall into three historical stages: first, an early emergentist movement (approximately 1920–1950), which was soon displaced by the reductionist ambitions of the positivists in philosophy of science; second, there was the exploration of the concept of downward causation beginning in the 1970s; and, currently, new attempts to define and defend both emergence and downward causation. If bottom-up causation is the problem, then does downward causation solve the problem? I believe that Robert Van Gulick has done the best job of describing and defending downward causation. He says that although the objects picked out by the higher-level sciences are indeed composites of physical constituents, the causal powers of such an object are not determined solely by the physical properties of its constituents and the laws of physics, but also by the organization of those constituents within the composite. That is, a given physical constituent may have many causal powers, but only some subsets of them will be active in a given situation. The larger context or pattern of which it is a part may affect which of its causal powers get activated. Thus, the whole is not any simple function of its parts, since the whole at least partially determines what contributions are made by its parts. Such patterns or entities, he says, are stable features of the world, often despite variations or exchanges in their underlying physical constituents; the pattern is conserved even though its constituents are not (for example, in a hurricane or even a blade of grass). Many such patterns are self-sustaining or self-reproducing in the face of perturbing physical forces that might degrade or destroy them (for example, DNA patterns). Finally, the selective activation of the causal powers of such a pattern’s parts may in 458 Nancey Murphy many cases contribute to the maintenance and preservation of the pattern itself. Taken together, these points illustrate that higher-order patterns can have a degree of independence from their underlying physical realizations and can exert what might be called downward causal influences without requiring any objectionable form of emergentism by which higher-order properties would alter the underlying laws of physics. Higher-order properties act by the selective activation of physical powers and not by their alteration.11 Downward causation and emergence are complementary concepts, in that emergence explains how the complex entities form in the first place. I believe that Terrence Deacon has provided the best account so far of emergence. He distinguishes three types or levels of emergence. There is no emergence in mere aggregates. The important difference between an aggregate and a system is that, in a system, it is relational properties of the constituents (as opposed to primary or intrinsic properties) that constitute the higher order. Cases of first-order emergence include the viscosity of liquids and typical feedback systems such as a thermostatically controlled heating system. Because fluctuations in such systems are dampened out across time it is possible to give (rough) reductionist accounts of their behavior. Second-order emergence occurs when there is amplification of a fluctuation rather than dampening. Systems in which this occurs are nonlinear; that is, their history matters. A simpler sort of self-organizing system is one in which higher-order patterns selectively constrain the incorporation of lower-order constituents into the system or select among possible states of the lower-level entities (this is Van Gulick’s point, as well). More complex second-order emergent systems are also autopoietic: This means that they change the lower-order constituents themselves. An example is that the behavior of an organism can change its genome in certain cases. An autocatalytic cycle is more complex still, in that the system manufactures some of its own components; here a cell is an example. All of life involves second-order emergence of the more complex sort. Deacon distinguishes between first- and second-order (as well as Robert Van Gulick, “Reduction, Emergence, and Other Recent Options on the Mind/Body Problem: A Philosophic Overview,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, nos. 9–10 (September–October 2001): 1–34; and Van Gulick, “Who’s in Charge Here? and Who’s Doing All the Work?” in Mental Causation, ed. John Heil and Alfred Mele (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 233–58. Both are condensed and reprinted in Evolution and Emergence: Systems, Organisms, Persons, ed. Nancey Murphy and William R. Stoeger, S.J. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 11 How to Keep the Non-Reductive in Nonreductive Physicalism? 459 third-order) emergence in terms of what he calls “amplification logic” or “the topology” of causal processes. In first-order emergent systems there is “nonrecurrent” causal architecture: A simple bottom-up and top-down relation in which global properties of the system (for example, density of components) makes a difference to the relations among components and thus to the behavior of the whole system. Second-order systems have more “tangled” or “recurrent” causal architecture as a result of the amplification of lower-level fluctuations. This amplification changes the total state of the system in a way that makes a decisive difference for the future development of the system. This can lead to new orders of complexity. Third-order emergence involves the interaction among three levels and appears (naturally) only in the biological realm. Here a variety of second-order forms emerge, such as cells, and are selected or constrained by the environment, but in such a way that a representation of its form is introduced into the next generation—the system has “memory.” The simplest example is the evolutionary process. The micro-level (the genome) in interaction with the organism’s environment, directs the construction of the organism (the mid-level), whose reproductive fate is determined top-down by the environment (top level). The preservation of information regarding the organism’s success in the environment (a form of inter-generational memory) is the means by which relatively stable populations of successful organisms can be produced, but within which future fluctuations appear. Some of these may be amplified (preserved and re-entered into the system) by means of interaction with the environment, thus enabling the appearance of still higher degrees of complexity. Deacon describes such systems as exhibiting recurrent-recurrent causal architecture. The most important advance, of course, is the development of memory in individual organisms.12 Do these more sophisticated accounts of emergence and downward causation together solve the problems of the reduction of human capacities to biology? At first I believed that they did. But then the question arises: How is it not the case that humans are, in a sense, trapped by a combination of downward causation from their environments and the biological factors that do (still) contribute to their behavior? Where is there room for human agency? This is the point at which we must turn to the resources of complex systems theory. “Systems” thinking has been developing over the past half-century, Terrence W. Deacon, “Three Levels of Emergent Phenomena,” in Murphy and Stoeger, Evolution and Emergence, 88–112. 12 460 Nancey Murphy although it has only recently begun to have a significant impact. Systems theory draws from a number of sources. As the term implies, there are significant roots in general systems theory, developed from 1928 through the 1970s by thinkers such as Ludwig von Bertalanffy. The idea was that the structure of complex entities, regardless of the academic field they fell into, could be modeled mathematically. Another early source was the study of cybernetics, the study of automated control systems, whether mechanical or biological. Current contributions come from information theory, nonlinear mathematics, the study of chaotic and self-organizing systems, and non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Examples of the systems of interest range from autocatalytic chemical processes, at the most basic, to weather patterns, insect colonies, social organizations, and, of course, human brains. Alwyn Scott, a specialist in nonlinear mathematics and neuroscience, states that a paradigm change (in Thomas Kuhn’s sense) has occurred in science beginning in the 1970s. He describes nonlinear science as a meta-science, based on recognition of patterns in kinds of phenomena in diverse fields. This paradigm shift amounts to a new conception of the very nature of causality (and he says that it is in a way a return to Aristotelian concepts of causality).13 Francis Heylighen, professor at the Free University of Brussels and founder of the Evolution, Complexity, and Cognition Community, has made a bolder claim: systems theory provides the resources for an entirely new worldview, including ontology, epistemology, and ethics. I attempt to set out here some of the essential concepts involved in this change.14 Several authors call for what might be called a shift in ontological emphases. Alicia Juarrero (another Aristotelian) says that one has to give up the traditional Western philosophical bias in favor of things, with their intrinsic properties, for an appreciation of processes and relations.15 Heylighen states that the basic ontological categories for systems theory are agents and actions. Systems have permeable boundaries, allowing for the transport of materials, energy, and information. The boundary is a matter of the tighter coupling of its components with one another relative to their coupling with entities outside of the system. The crucial components of complex systems Alwyn Scott, “The Development of Nonlinear Science,” Revista del Nuovo Cimento 27, nos. 10–11 (2004): 1–115; 2. 14 Francis Heylighen, unpublished paper written for a “Symposium on Research Across Boundaries” (University of Luxembourg, June 16–19, 2010). 15 Alicia Juarrero, Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 124. 13 How to Keep the Non-Reductive in Nonreductive Physicalism? 461 are not things but processes. So, for example, from a systems perspective a mammal is composed of a circulatory system, a reproductive system, and so forth, not of carbon, hydrogen, calcium. The organismic level of description is largely decoupled from the atomic level—that is, if the functional system works, it does not matter what its components are made of. Systems are different from both mechanisms and aggregates in that the properties of the components themselves are dependent on their being parts of the system in question (for example, a circulatory system can only be what it is within the context of an organism). Philosophers distinguish between internal and external relations. External relations do not affect the nature of the relata, but internal relations are partially constitutive of the characteristics of relata. An essential assumption of the predominant modern worldview was that the world is composed of things related to one another externally. Systems theory takes the relations among the constituent processes of a system to be internal. Systems range from those exhibiting great stability to those that fluctuate wildly. This is due to the fact that complex systems are nonlinear, that is, the current state affects the development of each future state. The difference in stability is due to the extent to which the system is sensitive to slight variations in initial conditions, and also to the extent to which there are feedback processes that either do or do not dampen out fluctuations. Systems at the extremes of this spectrum of stability are not of great interest to systems theoreticians. For example, a thermostatically controlled heating system is very stable but produces no novelty because it involves a negative feedback system that keeps the temperature within a set range. Imagine a “reverse” thermostat that provides positive feedback such that the hotter the building becomes, the more it increases the heating. This system is unpredictable, but not likely to last long. Thus, the systems of interest are those in the middle of the spectrum. Chaotic systems are now familiar to many. They result from having a sensitivity to initial conditions that falls into a very narrow range, resulting in their behavior falling into a predictable range of states. More interesting are those at the edge of chaos. Here the system has the freedom to explore new possibilities and may “jump” to a new and higher form of organization. An understanding of how this can happen in terms of physics comes from the study of far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics. Such systems are called complex adaptive systems. They are characterized by goal-directedness, at least insofar as they operate in order to maintain homeostasis. In the process of self-maintenance they may create their own components. For example, in an autocatalytic reaction, molecule A catalyzes molecule B, which catalyzes more of A. The process will stabilize at 462 Nancey Murphy some point unless additional materials are introduced into the system. In order for the system to maintain itself, the internal dynamics must determine which molecules are fit to be imported into the system and survive.16 Complex adaptive systems theory has dramatic consequences for understanding causation. While ordinary efficient causation is presupposed, systems theory developed specifically because such causation is inadequate to describe complex systems. This inadequacy is in part because complex systems operate on information as much as on energy and matter. More important is the fact that the relations among the components of a system need to be thought of in terms of constraints. An efficient cause makes something happen. A constraint reduces the number of things that can happen, due to the fact that the components are internally related to one another such that a change in one automatically changes the other. Juarrero says that the concept of a constraint in science suggests “not an external force that pushes, but a thing’s connections to something else . . . as well as to the setting in which the object is situated.”17 More generally, then, constraints pertain to an object’s connection with the environment or its embeddedness in that environment. They are relational properties rather than primary qualities in the object itself. From information theory Juarrero employs a distinction between context-free and context-sensitive constraints. For example, in successive throws of dice, the numbers that have come up previously do not constrain the probabilities for the current throw (gamblers’ superstitions notwithstanding); the constraints on the dice’s behavior are contextfree. In contrast, in a card game the constraints are context-sensitive: the chances of, say, drawing an ace at any point in the game are sensitive to history because the rules of the game, the number of cards in the deck, and so forth, create relations among the possible outcomes such that the probability of one occurrence is related to all of the others. This account suggests that a better term in place of “downward causation” is “whole– part constraint.” The “higher-level” system, the whole, does not exert efficient, forceful causation on its components. Rather, global features of the system are such that a change in one component changes the probabilities of the occurrence of other lower-level events (an explanation of Van Gulick’s selection). Due to the role of probability in complex systems, it is necessary to do away with the sharp distinction between determinism and indeterminism, either quantum indeterminacy or complete randomness. The appropriate Juarrero, Dynamics in Action, 126. Juarrero, Dynamics in Action, 132. 16 17 How to Keep the Non-Reductive in Nonreductive Physicalism? 463 middle term is “propensity,” coined by Karl Popper to mean “an irregular or non-necessitating causal disposition of an object or system to produce some result or effect.”18 An understanding of the concept of a propensity has been aided by the study of nonlinear mathematics and especially chaotic systems. It begins with a visual or imaginary “state space” or “phase space,” which is an n-dimensional space in which a trajectory represents possible transitions from one state of the system to another. Chaotic systems theory introduced the concept of a “strange attractor” to describe the development of chaotic systems over time. This is a “shape” in phase space that depicts the boundaries within which the system can be found during its evolution. From the concept of a strange attractor the idea of an “ontogenic landscape” has been developed. This is a “topographical map” in which valleys represent areas in phase space in which the system is likely to stay. Peaks represent states in which the system will only be found as a result of a major perturbation, such as the injection of a great deal of energy. So the system has a propensity to remain within the valleys. The topography represents a summation of the general effects of a vast number of contextually-constrained interactions among the system’s component processes. Now, a number of us claim that systems thinking represents a change in worldview. A number of years ago I developed criteria to distinguish modern from postmodern philosophies. Modern thought was constrained by (among other assumptions) a foundationalist epistemology; by a general theory of meaning as reference, supplemented by an expressivist theory to accommodate discourse that is obviously not mere nonsense, but failed to refer to the world; and by an individualist understanding of human nature. I suggested that anyone who simply left all of the arguments relating to these issues behind had escaped from the intellectual “space” of modernity. Epistemological holism left foundationalist arguments behind, the philosophy of language of “meaning as use” left the modern dichotomy of referentialism versus expressivism behind. While correctly recognizing the important role of individualism in modernity, it has only been in these past fifteen years that I came to see individualism as but one manifestation of the modern metaphysics of atomism and reductionism. And it is only now that I know the escape route from this set of assumptions—namely complex systems theory. David Sapire, “Propensity,” in Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Robert Audi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 657. 18 464 Nancey Murphy Conclusion A number of other scholars would argue that this new set of concepts, particularly those of complexity theory, gives us the conceptual tools to explain how downward “causes” cause without violating the causal closure of the physical and without postulating causal overdetermination. Humans, who are complex, self-organizing, dynamical, adaptive systems, are partially decoupled from their biology, attend selectively to environmental constraints, and thus are able to become agents in their own right. However, higher animals possess these features as well. So a remaining question is what distinguishes adult humans’ morally responsible actions from those of animals and even small children. I have adopted an account of moral agency worked out by Alasdair MacIntyre.19 Morally responsible action (as I summarize it very briefly) depends on the ability to evaluate one’s reasons for acting in light of a concept of the good. These philosophical capacities can then be investigated in terms of the cognitive prerequisites for such action, such as a sense of self, the ability to predict and represent the future, and high-order symbolic language, which allows for abstract concepts such as goodness, virtue, and so forth. So with this addition to the argument that organisms are (often) the causes of their own behavior—the argument I have made briefly in this paper—I believe it is possible to make the claim to have eliminated many of the reductionist worries that seem to threaten our traditional theologically informed conception of ourselves—and without needing to postulate N&V any additional metaphysical component. Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999). 19 Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2019): 465–471 465 “How to Keep the Non-Reductive in Nonreductive Physicalism?” by Nancey Murphy: An Appreciative Response Robert John Russell Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences Berkeley, CA It is a rare privilege to respond to my colleague and friend of nearly four decades, Nancey Murphy. It is especially wonderful given the nature of this paper, with its inclusion of such diverse areas as biblical and theological anthropology, atomism versus dynamical systems, and a response to the problem of reductionism through an appeal to emergence and downward causality in complex dynamical systems. In this response I will first summarize the second part of Nancey’s paper and then raise three questions about it. In the second part of her paper, Murphy begins with the new atomism in classical physics and with it the “inevitability” of causal reductionism. Under the shadow of Thomas Hobbes’s reductionist theory of human nature and society the “defeat” of causal reductionism became crucial. A vital step was taken through the articulation of downward causation by Robert Van Gulick. While a system is composed of its parts, the causal powers of a system include both those of its parts and their organization. In the latter case, the system “at least partially determines what contributions are made by its parts.”1 An additional step in the defeat of causal reductionism was achieved through the idea of emergence in nature. Murphy cites Terrence Deacon as “providing the best account so far of emergence” and spelled out in terms of three orders of emergence. Nancey Murphy, “How to Keep the Non-Reductive in Nonreductive Physicalism?” 451–464 of the present volume, here at 457. 1 466 Robert John Russell Systems with first-order emergence display properties such as the viscosity of liquids, but these properties do not endure. Instead they are dampened out in time, and the reductionist claim is left unthreatened. But in second-order emergence such properties are amplified and have system-wide and long-lasting effects. Finally, third-order emergence arises in biological systems in which second-order systems are selected and constrained by the environment. This complex form of emergence has characteristics which can be called “memory” and give the system a “history.” Now she asks a pivotal question: “Do these more sophisticated accounts of emergence and downward causation solve the problem of the reduction of human capacities to biology?” While previously she thought they might, she now raises a point which I find very exciting: How is it not the case that humans are, in a sense, trapped by a combination of downward causation from their environments and the biological factors that do (still) contribute to our behavior? Where is there room for human agency? This is the point at which we must turn to the resources of complex systems theory.2 Here she turns to the work of philosopher of science Alicia Juarrero and her 1999 book, Dynamics in Action. Murphy paraphrases Juarrero in calling for a “shift in ontological emphasis” from “things, with their intrinsic properties, to processes and their relational properties.” This shift is warranted by the fact that biological systems are “decoupled” from their atomic components; “if the functional system works, it does not matter what its components are made of.”3 Such systems have what philosophers call “internal relations” while elements such as atoms have only “external relations.” Hence complex dynamic systems enhance our understanding of causation: Along with routine, efficient causation we now find that constraints are placed on the system by the internal relations between its components and by its relations to the environment which serves as its context. Juarrero also distinguishes between “context-free” and “context-sensitive” constraints. So successive throws of a pair of dice are independent of the results of past throws, but as a card game proceeds, the probability of an “ace” changes by the results of previous draws. This leads Murphy Murphy, “How to Keep the Non-Reductive in Nonreductive Physicalism?” 459. Murphy, “How to Keep the Non-Reductive in Nonreductive Physicalism?” 461. 2 3 An Appreciative Response to Nancey Murphy 467 to recommend that we speak of whole–part “constraints” instead of “downward causation.” Here the whole does not exert efficient causality on its parts; instead the whole changes the probabilities of the behavior of its parts. This in turn leads Murphy to set aside the traditional sharp distinction between determinism and indeterminism and adopt the idea of “propensity,” a term created by Karl Popper to mean “an irregular or non-necessitating causal disposition of an object or system to produce some result or effect.”4 The cluster of propensities acting within the trajectories of complex dynamic systems can be imaged as a three-dimensional landscape within which the system moves in time as a result of the contextually constrained interactions within the system. Murphy concludes by describing a major change in worldview from modern to postmodern theologies. This change involves three shifts: (1) from foundationalism to holism in epistemology, (2) from meaning as reference to meaning as use in the philosophy of language, and (3) from an individualist understanding of human nature to something which lay along what can be called a “metaphysical” axis. Murphy tells us she has come to realize that individualism is “but one manifestation of the metaphysics of atomism and reductionism.” Hence the “escape route” from modernism lies through insights regarding an expanded understanding of causality offered by complex systems theory. As Murphy writes: [Complexity theory] gives us the conceptual tools to explain how downward “causes” cause without violating the causal closure of the physical and without postulating causal overdetermination. Humans, who are complex, self-organizing, dynamical, adaptive systems, are partially decoupled from their biology, attend selectively to environmental constraints, and thus are able to become agents in their own right.5 I would now like to raise three questions about the paper. (1) In her paper Murphy appropriates Juarrero’s distinction between external and internal relations and between context-free and context-dependent constraints to lead us toward what she calls a major change in worldview. Nevertheless Murphy does not draw explicitly on what arguably is Juarrero’s most important point: namely a critique of Aristotle’s rejection of self-causation and its persistence in, and its profound shaping Murphy, “How to Keep the Non-Reductive in Nonreductive Physicalism?” 463. Murphy, “How to Keep the Non-Reductive in Nonreductive Physicalism?” 464. 4 5 468 Robert John Russell of, the contemporary discussions about agency. It is worth quoting Juarrero at some length since her critique of Aristotle is particularly relevant to the Thomistic context of our conference: To explain Aristotle’s analysis of organisms’ actual behavior, it is first necessary to understand his views on change. All becoming, he maintained, involves the transformation of something that is so only “potentially” into something that is “actually” so. . . . There are two kinds of potencies: one the passive potency to be acted upon . . . the other the active potency to act on. . . . Inanimate objects and the elements possess only the first kind; organisms . . . have both. However, “in so far as a thing is an organic unity, it cannot be acted on by itself; for it is one and not two different things.” . . . For organisms to act on themselves they would have to possess simultaneously both the passive potency to be acted on as well as the active potency to act upon (something else). Since nothing can simultaneously possess both potencies with respect to the same property, nothing can act on itself. . . . [But animals obviously act through self-motion.] Aristotle therefore explains animal self-motion by splitting the organism in two: soul (the unmoved mover) and body (the moved). Strictly speaking, the prohibition against self-cause is thereby upheld: nothing moves itself. And so things remain to this day.6 While Murphy does not specifically mention Juarrero’s challenge of Aristotle in her paper, she and her co-author Warren Brown do refer to it explicitly in their pivotal work of 2007, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?7 Indeed it would not be an overstatement to say that the entire book is shaped by a two-sided coin: The rejection of body–soul dualism, on the one side, and the acceptance of self-causation on the other. Here are a few sample texts: Juarrero convinced us that [the defeat of neurobiological reductionism] requires . . . an account of how a complex system, as a whole, can be the cause of its own behavior. . . . We shall argue . . . that [Aris Alicia Juarrero, Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 17–18. 7 Nancey Murphy and Warren S. Brown, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 6 An Appreciative Response to Nancey Murphy 469 totle’s assumption] accounts for the reluctance to recognize that humans eventually become the causes of their own moral character.8 The goal [of this book] will be to end with the picture of an organism that is an agent, the cause of (some of) its own behavior.9 Our position is that complex organisms are in fact self-causes, self-movers.10 Our suggestion, then, is that free will be understood as being the primary cause of one’s own actions.11 So my first question is quite straightforward: What led to the inclusion of much of Juarrero’s work in Murphy’s paper but not the inclusion of what seems to be Juarrero’s most important point, namely her challenge to Aristotle’s prohibition on self-causation? This seems oddly missing particularly in light of arguments Murphy gives in the first part of her paper against body–soul dualism and their clear relation to the rejection of Aristotle’s prohibition on self-causation. (2) My second question consists of two parts, first regarding human agency and then regarding divine agency. The first goes to Murphy’s crucial claim, which I quoted already, namely that: “[Complexity theory] gives us the conceptual tools to explain how downward ‘causes’ cause without violating the causal closure of the physical and without postulating causal overdetermination.” Suppose the physical world is fully deterministic, as it was according to classical physics. In this case I do not see how Murphy escapes a violation of causal closure, and more particularly the problem of overdetermination in the bodily enactment of human agency. If I am in a straight-jacket, then even if I can come to a decision about what to do that is not entirely the product of my biology or my environment, how do I carry out that decision—say to get up and walk out of the room—if I am stuck in the straight-jacket of all-determining physical forces? The second part focuses on the question of God’s action in the world, and here in previous writings Murphy explicitly takes into account quantum indeterminism. In her 1995 paper for the second conference in the Vatican Observatory / Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences Murphy and Brown, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? 86. Murphy and Brown, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? 103. 10 Murphy and Brown, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? 244. 11 Murphy and Brown, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? 305. 8 9 470 Robert John Russell series Murphy argues that God acts at the subatomic, quantum level where nature is characterized by ontological indeterminism: My proposal is that God’s governance at the quantum level consists in activating or actualizing one or another of the quantum entity’s innate powers at particular instants, and that these events are not possible without God’s action. . . . I claim that God’s participation in each (macro-level) event is by means of his governance of the quantum events that constitute each macro-level event. There is no competition between God and natural determinants because, ex hypothesi, the efficient natural causes at this level are insufficient to determine all outcomes.12 My question, then, is why divine action requires indeterminism in nature when human action can be enacted somatically in nature with no appeal to indeterminism. (3) My third question relates to Murphy’s telling us of the “metaphysical axis” which helps distinguish modernity from postmodernity, an axis which moves us from atomism to complex dynamical systems. Murphy tells that she had not understood the “metaphysical axis” until her recent work with systems theory in which systems consist not so much in aggregates of individual entities but wholes within wholes, like organs in an organism, wholes which have internal relations as well as external ones, and context-dependent constraints function along with context-independent ones. But I wonder if she has fully explored the depth of the shift from the metaphysics of atomism, which dominated the natural sciences over the past three centuries, to the metaphysics of complex, dynamical systems. I know from personal conversations with her that, as an analytic philosopher, Murphy may not want to press the metaphysical implications of such terms as “atoms” and “systems” too far. Nevertheless here at this conference, organized and hosted by Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, I anticipate there to be a great deal of interest in exploring the potential richness of neo-Thomism for a metaphysical shift from atomism to systems theory, particular in light of neo-Thomism’s exquisitely detailed Nancey Murphy, “Divine Action in the Natural Order: Buridan’s Ass and Schrödinger’s Cat,” in Chaos and Complexity: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, ed. Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy, and Arthur R. Peacocke (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory Publications; Berkeley, CA: Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 1995), 325–57, at 342–43. 12 An Appreciative Response to Nancey Murphy 471 appropriation of the philosophy of Aristotle. I have been wonderfully helped in understanding the Thomistic world of thought by the writings of, and extensive conversations with, Father Michael Dodds, especially in his recent books The Unchanging God of Love13 and Unlocking Divine Action.14 It would be very intriguing to ask whether Murphy would find resources in such Thomistic arguments about wholism and downward causation helpful for her project of defending non-reductive physicalism by providing a shift along the “metaphysical axis” or would her commitment to analytic philosophy be satisfied with a less developed metaphysical interpretation as suggested by her everyday terms of “atoms” and “dynamic systems”? Let me close by expressing, once again, my enormous appreciation for Nancey’s work in this remarkable paper and in the many publications which preceded and which feed and nourish it. I look forward to hearing her responses to my questions and to continued conversations and lasting friendship. N&V Michael J. Dodds, O.P., The Unchanging God of Love: Thomas Aquinas and Contemporary Theology on Divine Immutability, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008). 14 Michael J. Dodds, O.P., Unlocking Divine Action: Contemporary Science and Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012). 13 Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2019): 473–488 473 Personhood and Recognition Markus Rothhaar Katholische Universität Eichstätt–Ingolstadt Eichstätt, Germany Introduction: The Ethical Dimension of Personhood It is characteristic for the concept of a “person” that it is not only an ontological or descriptive concept, that is, a concept that describes a certain mode of being (Seinsweise), but at the same time a normative concept: If a living being is experienced or identified as a person, this experience or identification carries with itself a normative claim: the claim to recognize it as a subject of rights or at least as a being with regard to which we have duties. This is even true, if we do not yet know what exactly these rights or duties consist in or how our ethical theory is further specified. Therefore the concept of a “person” is not just some concept of practical philosophy, but its very core concept. Every ethical theory, be it utilitarian, virtue ethical, deontological, contractarian or whatever must make two presuppositions: First, the anti-solipsistic assumption that there are other subjects at all; second, the assumption that these others—their lives, interests, needs, rights, freedoms—do somehow matter in a normative sense. Many ethical theories just presuppose these two assumptions without further justifying or addressing them (notable exceptions are, of course, Kant and Fichte, about whom I will speak later). This means that many, if not most, ethical theories have a blind spot which can be articulated by asking: “What obliges me to respect the lives, interests, needs, etc. of other people?” The concept “person” tries to give an answer to this question: “It is the fact that they are persons that obliges me to this kind of respect.” Hence, “person” is one of those fundamental 474 Markus Rothhaar concepts in practical philosophy that are meant to bridge the gap between “is” and “ought,” between normativity and descriptivity. Notwithstanding the notorious charge of an “is–ought” fallacy, this is not something specific to a certain ethical theory, but something necessary to any ethical theory. Any ethical theory needs a systematic place for such a “bridging concept”: For example in preference utilitarianism it is the concept of “interest”; in Kantianism, the concepts of “dignity” and “autonomy”; in virtue ethics, “eudaimonia”; and so on. However, this observation still does not answer the question of how the claim that personhood is the foundation of duties and rights can be explained without falling into some philosophical obscurantism (as we find it, in my opinion, in Levinas) or just giving “dry assertions” (as Hegel called them). This is even more so, because the concept of a “person” has a paradoxical structure that Robert Spaemann has pointed out: On the one hand, the experience of someone as a person is the foundation of duties and obligations toward him. But, on the other hand, there is also already some kind of fundamental duty to recognize another human being or another subject as a person. Spaemann writes: Duties of one to another are generated by the moment of recognition in which one person notices another. Prior to this moment there is no obligation. On the contrary, obligation follows from noticing the person, which is one and the same as recognizing another as “like myself.” Yet to recognize a person is not to posit one, as if we owed our personal existence to someone else’s recognition. I recognize, because recognition is due, yet I do not first know that it is due, then recognize. To know that it is due is no more and no less than to recognize.1 If that is true, we must ask Spaemann, how is it supposed to be possible that something that is the very foundation of moral obligations is in itself a moral obligation. Since Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s “Foundations of Natural Right,” a specific type of theory, usually called a theory of “recognition” (the term Spaemann himself uses here), tries to answer this question. This type of theory has become quite influential especially with Hegel’s famous “Master–Slave” chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, and it has inspired a lot of contemporary thinkers as different as Jürgen Habermas, Axel Robert Spaemann, Persons: The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something,’ trans. Oliver O’Donovan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 184. 1 Personhood and Recognition 475 Honneth, Charles Taylor, Jean Piaget, Stephen Darwall, and Spaemann. Just recently psychologist Wolfgang Prinz has revisited and extended the approach from the perspective of his discipline.2 The Recognition-Theoretical Approach The quintessential recognition-theoretical approach can be characterized by five basic features (which does, however, not mean that the works of all of the above mentioned authors contain all these features): (1) The starting point is the assumption that intersubjectivity is the condition of the possibility of individual, finite subjectivity—that is, that intersubjectivity is prior to and constitutive for individual finite subjectivity. Or as Habermas sums it up: “Rather self-consciousness forms itself from outside to inside through a symbolically mediated relation with an interactor. In this sense it has an intersubjective core.”3 (2) The intersubjective process constitutive for individual subjectivity has the character of a reciprocal recognition of finite subjects as subjects. According to this, the very existence of finite individual subjects can only be explained as the result of an act of recognition by another, or many other, subjects. Therefore, every subject can only understand herself as a subject, if she understands herself as a part of a broader, intersubjective process of mutual recognition, which is prior to herself as a subject. (3) Acts of recognition can only be performed in freedom by other subjects. In order to conceive of herself as free, a subject therefore must admit that there are other free subjects. Furthermore, she has to grant them the freedom that is necessary to perform an act of recognition at all. Hence, the freedom and subjectivity of others turns out to be the condition of my own freedom and subjectivity and vice versa: My own freedom and subjectivity turns out to be the condition of other subjects’s freedom and subjectivity. (4) Points (2) and (3) taken together lead to a more specified act of recognition: the recognition of other subjects as beings characterized by freedom. Therefore, the recognition of other subjects as subjects implies their recognition as free subjects. (5) The recognition of other subjects as free beings, combined with the insight that my own free subjectivity has as its condition the freedom of Wolfgang Prinz, Open Minds: The Social Making of Agency and Intentionality, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). 3 Jürgen Habermas, Nachmetaphysisches Denken (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 217. (All quotes of which there is no English version available were translated by the author of the paper.) 2 476 Markus Rothhaar other subjects, leads to a further specification of the act of recognition: If there is a plurality of interconnected free subjects, every single subject can only be free in a practical sense, if every subject limits its own sphere of freedom in a way that admits every other subject an indisposable sphere of freedom of its own. This means that recognition must be thought as the recognition of all other subjects as bearers of fundamental rights or at least as beings towards whom every other person has strong ethical duties. Before I explain these five features in a more detailed way with regard to Fichte, I want to step back for a moment and take a brief look at the history and current use of the concept of “recognition.” What I have described so far leads first of all to a philosophical foundation of law or rather of natural right. During the last two hundred years, however, the concept has made its career rather in social philosophy than in the philosophy of law. Today we mostly find it in authors like Axel Honneth, who turns it into an empirical concept derived from developmental psychology and social psychology. Or we find it in authors advocating a so-called “politics of recognition,” that is, the claim that the identities of minority groups should be appreciated and honored in public and by the public.4 Both approaches, however, do not deal with what Fichte and Hegel mean by “recognition.” In Hegel and Fichte, recognition is a transcendental concept, by which they try to reveal intersubjectivity as the condition of possibility of finite subjectivity. And this lays the ground of law and ethics as such. Contrary to that, “recognition” in the sense of Honneth, Iris Marion Young, Judith Butler, Charles Taylor, and so on, is a politico-psychological concept, which is about the affirmation of self-esteem and group identities. Especially in the work of Honneth the crucial difference between the two meanings of “recognition” is almost systematically blurred. It does therefore not astonish that most of Honneth’s contributions to the “structure of social recognition relations” amount to a discussion of the findings of empirical psychology on the formation of self-esteem and self-respect.5 Over this, he completely loses sight of the relevant normative question, that is, the question what obliges us to respect others as subjects of fundamental rights. Instead of this, he proposes a philosophical version of This usually goes hand in hand with an effort to “deconstruct” the majority identity. In this sense it is rather a “politics of difference” than “identity politics,” because what makes the minority identities valuable and even normatively preferable for the proponents of this politics is obviously the fact that they differ from identity of the majority. 5 Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 4 Personhood and Recognition 477 descriptive social psychology, which is underpinned by some more or less explicit normative premises. These premises, however, are never justified within the theory itself and probably cannot even be justified within such a theoretical framework. The reason for these confusions is obviously an ambiguity in the expression “recognition.” On the one hand, “recognition” can mean an act of affirmation of the psychological self-esteem of a person by another person, for example if we say about an athlete: “This jump was an achievement that should be ungrudgingly acknowledged.” On the other hand, we talk about “recognition” in the sense of recognizing something as having a certain legal or normative status, as, for example, when we say that a new political entity has been recognized by the international community as a state. It is this latter sense of “recognition” that is prevalent in Fichte, Hegel, Spaemann, and implicitly even in Habermas. Now I first want to further clarify the transcendental concept of “recognition” with reference to Fichte’s initial proposal in the “Foundations of Natural Right” of 1796. Then I am going to discuss some objections to the idea that intersubjectivity is prior to subjectivity. And against this background I will try to propose a “theory of recognition” that can be defended against these objections. Finally I want to outline some bioethical implications of my proposal. The Circle of Self-Consciousness Fichte’s starting point in the “Foundation of Natural Right” is a problem, which Dieter Henrich has described in a famous paper from 1967 as “Fichte’s initial insight.”6 According to this, any attempt to explain the existence of self-consciousness as an act of reflection by which an already existing subject somehow starts to observe itself, leads into a circle and therefore fails. In order to understand this, we first have to clarify what it means to exist as a self-conscious subject. Existing as a “self” in this sense means for P to exist as a conscious reference to herself. Of course, one might object that a person P is not only a self-referring subject, but also has—or rather is—a body and does exist as a corporeal being. But this objection would miss the point, since P would not be a subject, if it were only a body. What makes P a self-conscious subject is her reference to herself. So, for a subject, being is self-reference. And more precisely: a kind of self-reference that “knows” that it is self-reference. This point is important, because there are Dieter Henrich, Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1967). 6 478 Markus Rothhaar many forms of unconscious self-reference. Many technical devices—like, for example, a temperature regulator—refer to themselves. Plants and animals refer to themselves, for example, when they incorporate nutrients. And even humans sometimes refer to themselves unconsciously, for example, when a person reads a text about herself, but does not understand that it is about herself. Therefore, self-reference is only self-consciousness, if the self-reference is a special kind of self-reference: self-reference that is aware of its being self-reference or in other words: conscious self-reference. This whole structure, however, seems to make the existence of selves or subjects in this world mysterious, as Henrich has pointed out. It seems that any attempt to explain the coming-into-being of a self-conscious entity through an act of reflexive self-observation must presuppose that this entity already exists as a self-conscious entity. Since otherwise the reference to herself would not be the reference of a self-conscious entity to a self-conscious entity—and therefore not self-reference. Rather it would be that of a self-conscious entity to a non-self-conscious entity. Consciousness and self-consciousness would then be two distinct entities. But that means that the reference would not be self-reference and therefore there would not be any self-consciousness. Henrich describes the problem as follows: I am supposed to be the one who refers to himself through an act of reflection. Therefore, he who starts the reflection must already be both at the same time: the one who knows and the one that is known. But then, the subject of reflection already satisfies the whole equation I = I beforehand. Yet, this equation is supposed to come into being only through the act of reflection.7 For this very reason Fichte had tried to determine the character of subjectivity as a kind of a permanent activity of self-positioning (Thathandlung) rather than a fact (Thatsache): Positing oneself is (reflection upon oneself) is an act of this activity. Let this reflection be called A. Through the act of such activity, the rational being posits itself. All reflection is directed to something as its object, B. What kind of something, then, must the object of the requisite reflection, A, be? The rational being is supposed to posit itself in this reflection, to have itself as an object. But the mark of the rational being is activity that reverts into itself. Therefore, final and Henrich, Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht, 13. 7 Personhood and Recognition 479 highest substratum, B, of the rational being’s reflection upon itself must also be an activity that reverts into itself and determines itself.8 This “solution,” however, simply seems to beg the question. Specifically in his “Foundations of Natural Right,” Fichte takes the problem a step further by introducing intersubjectivity into the picture. As already in the Wissenschaftslehre, he insists that the constitution of self-consciousness can only be explained via practical self-consciousness, because theoretical consciousness is in a certain way always consumed by the object it thinks. By setting, pursuing, and realizing aims and ends, however, the self is free from being determined by the objects it thinks. In a theoretical perspective knowing something can be turned into self-consciousness because I can always think of myself as of the one who thinks that object (that is, Kant’s transcendental apperception). The practical perspective to the contrary must go along with self-consciousness, because I cannot think of an end that I have chosen and that I pursue without referring to myself. That is why freedom is crucial for the constitution of subjectivity: there is no self-consciousness without the very basic experience of being able to determine some objects freely instead of being determined by them. Yet, this kind of freedom seems to require that I am already conscious of myself, because otherwise there would be no self who could choose und pursue her ends. At this point the infamous “circle of self-consciousness” seems to return in a different, yet equally destructive way: Self-consciousness requires the practical experience of oneself as free. But being free requires an already existing theoretical self-consciousness. Fichte’s answer to this problem is to consider the freedom of one being, say Smith, as something that is initially “proposed” to Smith by another free being, say Jones. It is Jones who thinks theoretically of Smith as a free being. For Jones it is not circular to have Smith as an external object of her thoughts in a theoretical perspective and to think of her as a practically free and self-referring being. This would be impossible for Smith, because having herself theoretically, as an external, distinct object of her thoughts, brought to mind through an act of reflection, negates precisely the freedom and self-reference we want to explain. Therefore only Jones (or any other subject) can perform the speech act of “inviting” Smith to act freely upon some object. An example of this would be something like “You decide what we are going to do with that piece of wood.” Even: “Do some Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right according to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Frederick Neuhouser, trans. Michael Baur (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 18. 8 480 Markus Rothhaar thing with that piece of wood or leave it.” This “invitation to freedom,” performed by Jones, negates the initial passive relation of Smith toward the object, on behalf of Smith. Smith must react to the invitation and does so by setting a goal of her own with regard to that object. By doing so, Smith experiences herself as a being that is able to freely decide what to do with some external object. Here, it is important to keep in mind that Jones’s “invitation to freedom” addresses Smith not only as an entity that has goals and ends, but as someone who posits her goals freely. This is important because animals also have goals and pursue ends. They are, however, not able to decide about their ends or “to posit” them. But Jones addresses Smith as someone who could always do otherwise. On the side of Smith, being addressed as someone able to do otherwise, brings about an explicit self-reference, which Smith could not have brought about on her own. On these grounds, Fichte reaches the following conclusion: The human being becomes a human being only among other human beings; and since the human being can be nothing other than a human being, and would not exist at all if it were not this—it follows that, if there are to be human beings at all, there must be more than one. . . . Thus the concept of a human being is not the concept of an individual—for an individual human being is unthinkable—but the concept of a species.9 In the “Foundations of Natural Right” Fichte then builds up on this intersubjectivist theory in order to derive his concept of mutual recognition of persons as bearers of rights. This deduction goes more or less along the lines of thought, which I have already pointed out in my discussion of the five basic features of recognition theories: If one subject would claim an unlimited sphere of freedom, that is, claim all freedom for herself, she would negate the condition of possibility of her own existence as a free subject. Therefore every single subject must limit her sphere of freedom with regard to the freedom of all other subjects, just as the other subjects must limit their spheres of freedom for the same reason. This leads to a system of mutually limited spheres of freedom, in which every subject is endowed with her own legitimate, inviolable sphere of limited freedom. So, everybody’s sphere of freedom is limited, but inviolable and it can only be inviolable, because it is limited. This system of mutually limited freedom is called the law and the Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right, 37–38. 9 Personhood and Recognition 481 normative claims implied in the idea of an own, yet limited sphere of freedom for every subject are called rights: the right to life, the right to property, the right to free speech, the freedom of religion, and so on. Fichte himself has a two-level theory of rights: on the first level, there is an “original right” (Urrecht) to freedom, life, and bodily integrity, from which all the other fundamental human rights can be derived on a second level. Objections against an Intersubjectivist Theory of Subjectivity Now, even this brief sketch of a paradigmatic theory of recognition raises some serious questions. I want to single out two of them: the first one, because I think that it might be interesting from a theological perspective; the second one, because it is a fundamental challenge to the whole theoretical framework. The first objection mainly concerns Fichte. As some authors like Vittorio Hösle have suggested, Fichte’s approach would lead into another infinite regress.10 If there must always have been a subject or a person in order to “awaken” personhood or subjectivity in other beings with a disposition to subjectivity, there must have been one first being who did not need an “invitation to freedom” in order to exist as a subject. Of course, Fichte is aware of this problem and introduces God as this first, unconditioned subject that does not need other subjects to be what he is. This, however, literally seems like a deus ex machina, who is just introduced in order to save an otherwise problematic theory. Furthermore it is disastrous for Fichte’s claim that there can only be finite subjects, if there are other finite subjects, that is, that the concept of a human being is that of a species. As soon as God is introduced, it becomes thinkable that there is just God as an infinite subject and one more finite individual subject. This is, however, a problem I will not try to resolve in this article. Solving it would probably require stressing the reciprocity of acts of recognition more and in another way than Fichte does. There is, however, another, even more fundamental objection: an objection to the very idea that intersubjectivity is prior to subjectivity. This objection was specifically put forward by Dieter Henrich and Manfred Frank against Habermas’s version of the argument. The main point of the objection is that recognition theories like the one of Habermas propose that finite subjectivity is the result of an adoption of the perspective of an interactor. The interactor thinks of myself as a subject or a “self” and by adopting her perspective, I come to develop a “self” and to think of myself Vittorio Hösle, “Intersubjektivität und Willensfreiheit in Fichtes Sittenlehre,” in Fichtes Lehre vom Rechtsverhältnis, ed. Michael Kahlo, Ernst A. Wolff, and Rainer Zaczyk (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992), 29–52. 10 482 Markus Rothhaar as a subject. According to Henrich and Frank, however, such an “adoption” would not be possible if I were not already a self-conscious being: for I can only relate another person’s perspective on myself to myself, if I can already refer to myself at all. Henrich therefore writes: “If I had not already the possibility to relate to myself, I could by no means of studying self-relations in the world (and be my own self-relation in another person’s perspective) be prompted to draw the conclusion that I exist and that I am essentially in such a relation.”11 And Frank points out that “Habermas gives a very instructive example of a circular explanation of self-consciousness when he writes that the self consists in a performative self-relation created by relating another person’s perspective to oneself.”12 A possible solution to this problem might be found in the recognition theories of Hegel and Spaemann. Both authors seem to think that self-consciousness as such is not constituted via intersubjectivity. Nonetheless they think that the realization (Verwirklichung) and stabilization of self-consciousness can only take place within the framework of an intersubjective world. Hegel, for example, makes an interesting distinction between “self-consciousness,” which is possible without recognition, and the “truth of self-consciousness,” which requires a process of intersubjective recognition. And Spaemann, in his critique of Descartes, says that another subject is required in order to guarantee that I am not a mere “thought,” but a being: A solipsistic consciousness, encompassing the whole terrain of reality in itself, would not get so far as to understand itself as being. Its being, like everything else, would be no more than a thought. A solipsistic cogito would have to be expressed as “I think that I think that I think. . . .” For Descartes it takes the thought of another thinker, God or an evil demon (genius malignus), to bring this infinite series of reflections to an end. The Other cannot mistake my thought for his own, for I am not merely his thought. . . . So in relation to him my thought acquires the dignity of being. We stand in relation to one another as existents.13 Unfortunately Spaemann does not explain this idea further and Hegel’s Dieter Henrich, Fluchtlinien: Philosophische Essays (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 148. 12 Manfred Frank, Ansichten der Subjektivität (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2012), 166. 13 Spaemann, Persons, 67. 11 Personhood and Recognition 483 arguments in the Phenomenology of Spirit are notoriously obscure. Yet I think that they both address a problem that already Fichte has addressed: the problem of how we can at the same time be subject (“thought”) and object (“being”) within a complex process of conscious self-reference. As we have seen, the “circle of self-consciousness” is caused by the fact that self-consciousness cannot come into being by referring to something that is not already conscious self-reference, because then the relation would not be a relation of self-reference. In other words: The object to which is referred must be the reference itself. But then it cannot come into being through an act of referring to something that existed without self-reference beforehand. Manfred Frank has tried to solve this problem by recurring to Sartre’s idea of a “prereflexive cogito.”14 According to Frank,15 the problem only exists because we usually try to understand conscious self-reference as the result of a posterior act of reflection by which a mind starts to observe its own thoughts and perceptions. The alternative to this approach is to think of self-consciousness as something that is already present in any act of conscious reference to an external object and therefore by no means the result of a posterior act of reflection. Schelling called this coincidence of consciousness and self-consciousness the “intellectual intuition” (intellektuelle Anschauung—a term, by the way, which is borrowed from theology). What reflection then does is to make this implicit self-reference, already given in any act of referring to an object, explicit. I think that Schelling, Sartre, and Frank are simply right about this: The idea of a “prereflexive cogito,” no matter in which way we try to explain it further, seems to be the only viable solution to the problem of self-consciousness. And this is even truer when we take into account that any attempt to derive subjectivity directly from intersubjectivity fails, because it also leads into that “circle of self-consciousness” (as we have just seen). On the other hand, I think that Frank, Schelling, and Sartre miss one extremely important point. If their description of the “prereflexive cogito” is right, this “prereflexive cogito” is purely instantaneous and presentist. It is nothing but the empty and formal, implicit self-relation of a subject referring to an object. Thus, it cannot provide a self-conscious, personal identity over time. For personal identity over time, it is therefore necessary to really make the implicit self-relation of the “prereflexive cogito” explicit through an act of posterior reflection. Only then, self-consciousness can be Sartre first develops this idea in Jean-Paul Sartre, “La Transcendence de l’Ego: Esquisse d’une déscription phénomenologique,” in Recherches philosophiques 6 (1936–1937): 85–123. 15 Manfred Frank, Präreflexives Selbstbewusstsein (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2015), 53–94. 14 484 Markus Rothhaar the basis of personal identity over time; only then we leave the grounds of pure presentism. Without an intersubjective framework, however, this act of reflection would only produce the “I think that I think that I think . . .” described in Spaemann’s critique of Descartes. Hence, it would fall victim to an infinite regress like the one of the “circle of self-consciousness.” This, however, is not true from the perspective of another person: in her perspective, I (that is, my consciousness and self-consciousness) am not something that escapes into an infinite regress. For her I can exist as a reflexive self-reference without falling victim to any circle, while at the same time, I can relate her perspective to myself, because I am already a “prereflexive cogito.” The intersubjective process of recognition therefore has the following steps: A conceives B as a self-conscious being. By this and only by this, B can make her implicit self-reference explicit and think of herself as a self-conscious being in the world. This is possible, because A has B as a distinct object of her thoughts, existing in the world over time. Therefore by adopting A’s perspective, B can also think of herself as an object, existing in the world over time—which B could not if it would remain an instantaneous prereflexive self-reference. B can only relate the perspective of A to herself, because she already relates to herself as a “prereflexive cogito.” Thus, it is only through the perspective of A that B can be and think of herself as a corporeal being in the dimensions of past, present, and future, that is, can be and think of herself as a person with a certain personal identity. If we understand the relationship between subjectivity and intersubjectivity in this way, I think it is quite possible to save the essential insights of Fichte’s, Hegel’s, and Habermas’s recognition theories, as well as the foundation of fundamental human rights following from it: I can only be a person and understand myself as a person, if there are other persons, who at the same time can only be persons and understand themselves as persons, if they understand me as a person. Understanding myself as a person with rights and duties therefore implies to recognize other persons as subjects of rights and duties—or to be more precise: to already have them recognized. And this bridges the gap between normativity and descriptivity that must be bridged by any ethical theory in some way. Recognition, Species, and Nature If this is correct, it is also evident that the process of recognition is not something that relies on “properties,” characteristics, or traits that might be empirically observed or perceived. Real processes of recognition, especially the recognition of a being as a person and hence endowed with funda- Personhood and Recognition 485 mental human rights, do not work through a conclusion from properties or characteristics to a moral status. For if this would be true, the process of recognition would have the form of a syllogism of the following kind: 1. An entity with property x has a normative claim to be recognized as a subject of rights. 2. Entity P has property x. 3. Therefore entity P has a claim to be recognized as a subject of rights. Most so-called “liberal” approaches in bioethics rely on such a syllogism, making the act of recognition dependent upon the existence of some externally observable properties. Real processes of recognition, however, do not ask for observable properties or characteristics of an entity, concluding from their existence or non-existence to the moral status of that entity. Even in Kant, who explicitly grounds human dignity in autonomy and rationality, we do not find such a syllogism. Autonomy and rationality are the grounds of human dignity, but the recognition of other human beings as rational, autonomous beings must already have happened, before we can start to act morally (or immorally). For Kant, autonomy and rationality are not externally observable, empirical traits or properties that one human may have and another human not, but something that every human being is endowed with, insofar as she is—or rather, has to be considered—a non-empirical homo noumenon. Kant states this very clearly in the Doctrine of Right, where he says: For the offspring is a person, and it is impossible to form a concept of the production of a being endowed with freedom through a physical operation. So from a practical point of view it is a quite correct and even necessary idea to regard the act of procreation as one by which we have brought a person into the world without his consent and on our own initiative. . . . They [the parents] cannot destroy their child as if he were something they had made (since a being endowed with freedom cannot be a product of this kind) or as if he were their property, nor can they even just abandon him to chance, since they have brought not merely a worldly being but a citizen of the world into a condition which cannot now be indifferent to them even just according to concepts of right.16 Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals: The Doctrine of Right, in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor, The Cambridge Edition of the 16 486 Markus Rothhaar We find an argument that is similar, yet different in how it refers to nature—once again—in Spaemann, who insists that the ideas of human dignity and human rights entail a kind of unconditionality (Unbedingtheit), which makes it impossible to make them dependent on properties, traits, or characteristics. Any kind of “conditional recognition” would miss the very essence of recognition, because recognition in itself comes with the normative claim to be unconditional. Spaemann has expressed this thought as follows: If there is to be anything like human rights, then they are only possible given the presupposition that no one is entitled to render judgment, whether someone is subject of such rights. For the logic of human rights entails that the human is not a member of the human society who is co-opted on the basis of certain properties, but that everyone enters it by virtue of his own right. “By virtue of his own right,” however, can only mean: by virtue of being a member of the biological species of homo sapiens.17 This argument, which has been extremely influential in the German debate on embryonic stem-cell research, has often been understood as an elaborate version of tutiorism, that is, as a plea to rely on the most general and most non-arbitrary criterion possible when it comes to determine the scope of human rights: the criterion of species membership. Walter Schweidler, for example, understands it like that, when he says: If human dignity is the legal concept at the top of the legitimatory pyramid of the order of our living together, we do not commit ourselves to any material definition whence we could derive, which beings are endowed with dignity and which are not. Rather we commit ourselves to a limiting accomplishment or more precisely to a fundamental prohibition for all moral actors not to render judgement of other members of the community of rights, whether they are endowed with human dignity or not.18 Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 429–30. 17 Robert Spaemann, Glück und Wohlwollen (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1993), 220. 18 Walter Schweidler, “Ethische Neutralität und weltanschauliche Souveränität des Staates,” in Begründung von Menschenwürde und Menschenrechten, ed. Wilfried Härle and Bernhard Vogel (Freiburg im Breisgau: Alber, 2008), 177. Personhood and Recognition 487 Yet, if this would be the point of Spaemann’s argument, it would be circular. If we replace “human dignity” in the last part of the sentence in accordance with Schweidler’s own view by the “moral status of a subject of rights,” it would simply say that members of the community of rights may not exclude other members of the community of rights from it. But this only makes sense, if they already have a claim to be treated as members thereof. But that is exactly in question when it comes to unborn or severely demented humans. That is why I think that Spaemann’s argument must be understood in another way. The crucial point of his argument is the reference to nature, that is, the suggestion that everyone must enter the community of rights by virtue of his own right and therefore by virtue of his nature as homo sapiens, because otherwise the act of recognition would not be an act of “unconditional recognition.” This means that Spaemann introduces species membership to operationalize an essential aspect of recognition that has already been pointed out: Because recognition is an intersubjective process, it transcends our finite, individual subjectivity. Therefore, the act of recognition is only an act of recognition if it is not the result of particularistic, subjectivist, and arbitrary decisions of a finite subject. Now, what is not made by us, but what forms itself and grows out of itself, is usually called “nature” or “life” or, to use a more technical term: “entelechy.” Thus, the reference to “nature” results from the insight that the intersubjective character of recognition urges us to think of it as something independent from our subjective, arbitrary makings and suppositions. In this world, only “nature” and more specifically “life” and “entelechy” fulfill this requirement, because they are essentially that which is independent from our finite subjectivity. Unborn or severely demented human beings must be recognized as persons and as subjects of human dignity and human rights exactly because of this. If we would not recognize humans as persons by virtue of what they are by nature, we would not recognize them at all, because then our recognition would be conditioned by our finite subjectivity—and, as we have just seen, “conditioned recognition” is not recognition. Hence, if we refer to characteristics like rationality or autonomy in debates on the so-called “moral status” of human embryos, and so on, we must always be aware that we are already on a reflexive level, on which we react to arguments that challenge or doubt what happens in the real processes of recognition. In this regard, philosophy probably has the famous “therapeutic function” the late Wittgenstein has assigned to it. This reflection is a reflection on the transcendental conditions of moral and legal recognition. And that is why it cannot have the character of an 488 Markus Rothhaar assertion that the beings in question “have” the properties of rationality, autonomy, or personhood, despite not expressing them. Rather, we demonstrate that denying them recognition relies on a misguided understanding of our own life form: a life form which cannot be that of an isolated individual being, but only that of a species (as Fichte said) or a community of beings. Understood properly, we are bodily, social, and at the same time rational and free beings, into whose life form recognition is already N&V inscribed and takes place in every moment in our daily life. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2019): 489–499 489 Routes toward Personhood: Response to Markus Rothhaar Richard Schenk, O.P. Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg, Germany Markus Rothhaar has provided us with well-thought-through reflections on what is obviously one of the central themes of his own philosophical calling. As he notes at the start of his essay in this volume, the path of reflected recognition is not the sole via inventionis of personhood, but it is in its implicit forms universal and in its explicit forms a well charted and accessible path, arguably the via manifestior toward personal identity. I will begin my response by recalling two recent figures familiar with the topography of the recognition-approach to affirming human dignity as a basis for just laws: Robert Spaemann, whom Dr. Rothhaar references several times, and Paul Ricoeur, who here has yet to be heard from. Let me begin with the second figure. After both of these voices, some texts of Thomas Aquinas will be brought into the discussion as well. In his final work, The Course of Recognition,1 Paul Ricoeur, for all his studious avoidance of the concept and problematic of “person,”2 addressed many of the same issues with many of the same argumentative goals as those thematized by Markus Rothhaar in his essay, regarding what several interconnected forms of recognition could tell us about subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Once these parallels are seen, it will be evident that other Paul Ricoeur, Parcours de la Reconnaissance (Paris: Stock, 2004), cited here in the English translation of David Pellauer, The Course of Recognition (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2005). 2 Compare his cautious remarks on “person” already in his studies of 1990, Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1994), especially in the First Study, 30–39. 1 490 Richard Schenk, O.P. dimensions of recognition thematized by Ricoeur can augment Rothhaar’s more explicit reflections on personhood. Recognition (the German Anerkennung as referenced by Ricoeur) is meant by all these roughly contemporary thinkers as something more than, say, the acknowledgement and recognition of a sovereign nation by other sovereign nations, more than the acknowledgement of being recognized by the chair at a conference as a speaker given the floor for a time, or again, as Rothhaar shows in what he argues convincingly is in agreement with Spaemann, more, too, than simply the acknowledgement or recognition of a juridically protected status as the claimant of rights. And yet there is another side of this phenomenon, recognition, because at the same time recognition is also meant to remind us that the recognition of personhood is also something less than direct, certain cognition, less than indisputable knowledge of an evidentiary kind. For this reason, Spaemann can say: “The recognition of being-a-self is always an act of freedom.”3 Ricoeur returns in his cited work on The Course of Recognition to the idea of “attestation,” which as “scattered” or “broken” (brisée) attestation had been what he described as the “watchword” of Oneself as Another.4 There he had explored diverse and—due to circumstantial evidence— necessarily partial “witnesses” to selfhood that are found in instances intrinsically related to and yet “other” than subjectivity, witnesses which could be ignored or denied only at the price of losing oneself. The three exemplary witnesses identified and examined in that earlier work (not as an exhaustive list) are (1) my body, as not always in life and certainly not in death compliant to the inclinations of the subject; (2) other persons, who, as Levinas had insisted, have always already bound us by obligations, even before we might ask them to; and (3) the conscience, insofar as its voice can differ even from the good intentions of the moment. The reader might be reminded here of what Thomas Aquinas includes among the many voices of the conscience: obligation (ligare), inspiration (instigare), accusation Translated here according to the text of Robert Spaemann, Personen: Versuche über den Unterschied zwischen “etwas” und “jemand” (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1996), 191, at the beginning of the chapter on “Anerkennung” or recognition, 191–208. This essay was not able to consult the translation by Oliver O’Donovan in Spaemann, Persons: Studies on the Difference between ‘Something’ and ‘Someone’(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 4 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 318 and 289n82: “Bezeugung, which signifies ‘attestation,’ the watchword for this entire work.” See also ix: Ricoeur had developed his initial text with the Schelling Lectures, which he presented 1986 in Munich at Spaemann’s invitation. From the beginning of these studies onward, Ricoeur is attentive not just to the strength, but also to “the weakness of attestation” (22). 3 A Response to Markus Rothhaar 491 and self-accusation (accusare), regret or remorse (remordere), and even excusing (excusare), all calls of the conscience to become other than in fact we already are.5 The list of three witnesses was not meant by Ricoeur to be exhaustive and might easily be extended to include further witnesses such as non-revisionist history (a key topic of his Memory, History, Forgetting6), tedious work (labor improbus7), and in certain contexts the body of the other. 8 Common to all of these categories of witness is that they are given a hearing because the full sense of personhood is not self-evident a priori. Anticipating all but the initial step in the course of recognition, a robustness of the self is needed for its robust relation to the other, without which it would atrophy as a self. Ricoeur traced his sense of witness back through Levinas to Heidegger’s Bezeugung in Being and Time (1927),9 but we might suspect here as elsewhere that Ricoeur had profited philosophically also from the best heritage of his Calvinist tradition. In attestation, synonymous with movements toward recognition, Ricoeur can include that affirmation of human capacities that forgets neither the many reasons to doubt them nor the cost of discounting their credibility. In the final passage of this final work, Ricoeur warns against the construction of a rivalrous opposition between readings of two of his principal sources of this kind of recognition of the dignity of the self: “that of Husserl, which takes the ego as its pole of reference, and that of Levinas, See Richard Schenk, “Perplexus supposito quodam: Notizen zu einem vergessenen Schlüsselbegriff thomanischer Gewissenslehre,” in Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 57 (1990): 62–95. 6 Cf. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 7 For the affinity between Theodor Haecker’s exegesis of Virgil’s labor improbus and Ricoeur’s phenomenology of work see Richard Schenk, “Work: The Corruption or Perfection of the Human Being?” Nova et Vetera (English) 2 (2004): 129–45. 8 This is clear in many cases of concern for the vulnerability of others, including the unborn, the newly born, the ailing, and the aged. Further examples could be identified in the convergence of Pope Benedict XVI’s Christmas encyclical of 2005, Deus Caritas Est, with Jean-Luc Marion’s 2003 studies, The Erotic Phenomenon: Six Meditations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 9 See P. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 289, and Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, especially §§ 54–60, cited here according to the 19th ed. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006), 267–301. The second chapter of the second division is dedicated to the kind of witness to the fullness of existence, including but not limited to authenticity, which can never be simply experienced empirically as a realized state but whose possibility comes to the fore in a troubled conscience. The witness which is summoned to testify here provides “a reliable, if indirect attestation” (“untrügliche, obzwar ‘nur’ indirekte Bezeugung”; in the edition cited, 266). 5 492 Richard Schenk, O.P. which proceeds from the other person to the ego.”10 Proceeding somewhat more resolutely than Ricoeur or Spaemann from the intersubjective sources of subjectivity, with reference not to Levinas but to Fichte, Markus Rothhaar has avoided the temptation to antithetic polarization by making his own several of the emendations of Fichte’s thought on the connection of subjectivity and intersubjectivity offered by Dieter Henrich, Robert Spaemann, and others, drawing our attention to the actualization and development of a subjectivity already implicitly intersubjective in its structure. One is reminded of analogous attempts in the past to integrate into a new whole the substance-oriented definition of person in Boethius11 and the relation-oriented notion of person in Richard of St. Victor.12 The interplay of subjectivity and intersubjectivity is evident in the linguistic capabilities of what traditionally was described as the zoon logikon, whose primordial ability to speak makes it possible for other speakers to elicit in the self its own acts and habits of speech. Robert Spaemann goes one step further in the chapter on “Recognition” in his 1996 work on Persons: Describing a kind of return to the other, he writes: “We do not know whether we ourselves understand a language, until we know whether others understand it.”13 We note here what is characteristic for Spaemann of the proximate end of the dynamics of intersubjectivity, not just that I recognize my own dignity but that I recognize the dignity of others, and within many of the same limits. As Spaemann puts it in this chapter, “There is no privileged access to one’s own personhood. . . . Rather our own personhood is not a given for us any earlier than the personhood Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, 260; cf. Spaemann, Personen, 169. “naturae rationabilis individua substantia” (Boethius, Liber de persona et duabus naturis, Contra Eutychen et Nestorium 3.5, in The Theological Tractates, Loeb Classical Library [Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1978 (1918)], 84). 12 Richard of St. Victor, De Trinitate 4.16–22, in De Trinitate: texte critique avec introduction, notes et tables, ed. Jean Ribaillier (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1958), and Gaston Salet, Sources chrétiennes: Série des textes monastiques d’Occident, no. 3 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1959): “incommunicabilis existentia divinae naturae.” 13 Spaemann, Personen, 193. 10 11 A Response to Markus Rothhaar 493 of others.”14 Both my personhood and that of the other remain ineffable.15 Had Thomas Aquinas applied his caution about the degree to which we can know ourselves more even explicitly to his analysis of Proclus, he might well have spoken of the transcendental apperception as a kind of reditio incompleta in seipsum.16 Where Martin Heidegger’s famous integration of hermeneutics into phenomenology in Being and Time had rejected the conceit of presuppositionless thought for any existent by recommending that we instead find ways to “enter in the right way” into the already living, inexhaustible, non-vicious, hermeneutical circle between our understanding and its interpretation,17 Rothhaar, Ricoeur, and Spaemann all seem to suggest, if in slightly different ways, that we enter by reflection the already Spaemann, Personen, 192–193; see also Robert Spaemann, Schritte über uns hinaus: Gesammelte Reden und Aufsätze II (Stuttgart: Klett-Kotta, 2011), and the translation of a representative collection of Spaemann’s essays in A Robert Spaemann Reader: Philosophical Essays on Nature, God, and the Human Person, ed. D. C. Schindler and Jeanne Heffernan Schindler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). A bibliography of Spaemann’s earlier publications, prepared by Rita Ries, can be found in Oikeiosis: Festschrift für Robert Spaemann, ed. Reinhard Löw (Weinheim: Acta Humaniora VCH, 1987). 15 Spaemann, Personen, 196; and Spaemann, Love and the Dignity of Human Life: On Nature and Natural Law (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011). 16 See Therese Scarpelli Cory, Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), which documents the consistent but progressively insistent link in Thomas’s writings between exteriority and a necessary (especially regarding the “existence” of the self as distinct from its objects) but limited (especially regarding the “quiddity” of the self, which is ever only partially fathomed) self-knowledge as the dual condition of subjectivity and (as a subset of exteriority) intersubjectivity. On Proclus and the Liber de causis with its axiom of reditio completa in seipsum, see 2, 23–24, 57–60, 135, 195–98. The systematic innovation of Thomas, the thematization of an abiding but partial self-opacity which did not conceal the importance of (limited) self-knowledge, was missed by most readings of the reditio completa in transcendental Thomism and its more angelic paradigm of human knowledge, while Thomas’s attention to self-opacity misled many empirically minded Thomists into a neglect of their master’s insistence on spontaneity and self-knowledge in his epistemology. For Thomas’s use of the phrase “reditio incompleta” to examine sense perception cf. Therese Scarpelli Cory, “Reditio completa, reditio incompleta: Aquinas and the Liber de causis, prop. 15, on Reflexivity and Incorporeality,” in Alexander Fidora and Nicola Polloni, ed., Appropriation, Interpretation and Criticism: Philosophical Exchanges Between the Arabic, Hebrew and Latin Intellectual Traditions (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 185–229. 17 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 7–8, 152–53, 314–15; and John C. Maraldo, Der hermeneutische Zirkel: Untersuchungen zu Schleiermacher, Dilthey und Heidegger (Freiburg: Alber, 1974). 14 494 Richard Schenk, O.P. established—not circle, but—ellipse of subjectivity and intersubjectivity with its twin foci of selfhood and alterity. Even on “this side” of identifying the absolute starting point of all finite subjectivity or intersubjectivity, there is a sufficient basis in this lived elliptical dynamic, the temporal and narrative course of emerging identity and alterity, to serve as a basis for ethical norms and laws, in the pursuit of what Ricoeur described as “a good life with and for others in just institutions.”18 Our denial or misrecognition of the dignity and freedom of others comes at the price of a misrecognition of the dignity and freedom of ourself, just as the suppressed or unrecognized sense of the dignity and responsibility of the self will prove detrimental to society as well. Without claiming that this sense, scope, and normative “course” of recognition exhausts the meaning of person, Rothhaar argues that the practical dialectic of subjectivity and intersubjectivity is what is at the core of much of the modern language of persons and is the chief place where the normativity it spawns becomes tangible and institutional. Granting his reference to the provenance of the modern discourse around personhood in practical or ethical reason, Rothhaar could easily have added to his frequent references to this interpersonal dynamic in the thought of Robert Spaemann an additional argument for our particular attention to “recognition.” The guiding thesis of Spaemann’s 1989 study on “Happiness and Benevolence”19 is that a well-rounded ethic needs to complement its “Aristotelian” starting point in the pursuit of one’s own happiness with something like a “Kantian” dimension of the recognition of and benevolence toward others as a good in and for themselves. In this contrast, Aristotle appears as the more idealistic thinker (striving first and foremost for one’s own happiness, including the joy the megalopsychos takes in organizing society and benefiting others), and Kant, the more realistic one (with his obligatory recognition of exterior persons).20 Spaemann’s doubts about an exclusively eudaimonistic approach to ethics, even one complemented by reflections on the opportunities provided by generous and politically responsible friendship, are strengthened by what Rolf Schönberger has described as a central theme of Spaemann’s thought: the See Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, especially from the seventh study onwards, 169–202. 19 Robert Spaemann, Glück und Wohlwollen: Versuch über Ethik (Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 1989), translated into English by Jeremiah Alberg as Happiness and Benevolence (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000). 20 See Richard Schenk, “The Ethics of Robert Spaemann in the Context of Recent Philosophy,” in One Hundred Years of Philosophy, ed. Brian J. Shanley (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 156–68. 18 A Response to Markus Rothhaar 495 critique of functionalism and instrumentalization.21 Already evident in Spaemann’s initial works with his analysis of the instrumentalization of tradition by the counter-revolutionary restoration in France, 22 and then in his reconstruction of the debate between Fénelon and Bossuet on selfless love,23 Spaemann would extend his critique of instrumentalization to the iterations of ethical consequentialism, even while rejecting the adequacy of a purely deontological Gesinnungsethik or of hybrid versions of the two. The recognition of oneself and others as persons, in one of many “steps beyond ourselves” and beyond the weight of my immediate perceptions and desires, is a kind of distance that leads to unique forms of nearness. Such distance makes possible what Levinas would intend with the term exteriority.24 If Markus Rothhaar’s and Robert Spaemann’s reflections on persons show parallels to Ricoeur’s path toward mutual recognition, we might ask in this response, if Ricoeur’s The Course of Recognition could also concur with a discussion of soul, the third figure in this conference, but one which was beyond the scope of Ricoeur and Rothhaar’s explicit presentations. Even in Spaemann’s book on Persons, the chapter on the soul is limited to an extension of the expectation of immortality as an unthematic or habitual postulate of practical reason from the affirmation on one’s own morality to the affirmation of others who are loved. Those much discussed passages, such as at the beginning of Thomas Aquinas’s De regno and its parallel texts, especially in the Summa theologiae, which Joseph Pieper would share with an approving Arnold Gehlen only well after the first publication of Gehlen’s main work in 1940, 25 Rolf Schönberger, “Robert Spaemann,” in Philosophie der Gegenwart in Einzeldarstellungen, ed. J. Nida-Rümelin (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1991), 571–75, and in the 2nd ed. (1999), 706–11. 22 Robert Spaemann, Der Ursprung der Soziologie aus dem Geist der Restauration: Studien über Louise-Gabriel de Bonald (Munich: Kösel, 1959; Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 1998). 23 Robert Spaemann, Reflexion und Spontaneität: Studien über Fénelon (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1963). 24 A watchword of his programmatic “first philosophy” from 1961 onward: Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969). See also Richard Schenk, “The Place of Mimesis and the Apocalyptic: Toward a Typology of the ‘Far and Near,’” in Apocalypse Deferred: Girard and Japan, ed. Jeremiah Alberg (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), 215–41. 25 Now as Arnold Gehlen, Der Mensch: Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2016). See also John Thomas Mellein, “Deficiency and Possibility: Thomas Aquinas and Arnold Gehlen on Technology and Anthropol21 496 Richard Schenk, O.P. point to the many native deficiencies in human beings that are more than compensated for by familial and communal assistance, especially thanks to language, where the communication made possible by many other speakers across time more than compensates initial ignorance. No human being on his own is able to provide sufficiently for his life. It is therefore natural for human beings to live in the company and society of many. Moreover, to other kinds of animals already equipped with external advantages lacking in the human body there has also been placed within them an innate spontaneous sense of all that is useful or damaging to them, as for example sheep naturally consider the wolf their enemy. Some animals recognize by an innate spontaneous sense certain plants as medicinal and still other plants as necessary for their lives. But human beings have an innate knowledge of what is needed for life only in a general sense, as if by the power of discursive reason it can move from universal principles to the knowledge of the singular things needed for human life. Yet it is impossible for any one human being to attain to all the things of this kind merely by his own reason. Rather, it is necessary for a human being to live in a multitude, so that the one might be helped by the other, as different persons can be occupied with discovering different things by reason, e.g., one in medicine, a second in this and a third in that. This is made clear most evidently [evidentissime declaratur] by this, that it is unique to human beings to use speech, by which one human being can express to another the whole of what he is thinking. True, other animals express to one another their passions in a general way, as for example dogs express anger by barking and other animals express their passions in various ways. But the human being is more communicative with others than is any other animal living in society, such as the crane, the ant or the bee. Considering this fact, Solomon says in Eccl. 4:9: “It is better for there to be two than one. For they have the benefit of mutual companionship and society.” 26 ogy” (master’s thesis, Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, Graduate Theological Union, 2003). Gehlen cites the correspondence with Pieper in his later editions of the work. 26 Thomas Aquinas, De regno ad regem Cypri, in Sancti Thomae de Aquino Opera omnia iussu Leonis XIII P. M. edita, vol. 42 (Rome and Paris: Leonine Commission, 1979), 447–71. An English translation of the authentic sections of the tradi- A Response to Markus Rothhaar 497 But, while here the necessity of community for the person is stressed, Thomas knows as well of the other focus of this ellipse: He notes, for example, that mercy, the consideration of another’s sufferings as one’s own with a view toward overcoming them, can be rendered impossible by two false stances toward oneself: those who have no robust sense of their own fallibility or who have no firm hope for themselves, will not be able to consider another’s sufferings as their own with a view toward overcoming them; qualified selfhood is here the condition of qualified alterity.27 Only a being who is incommunicabilis is capable of the mutually recognized communicatio that makes friendship and genuine statecraft possible.28 As was noticed by Thomas’s contemporaries and their immediate successors (say, in the official censures from 1277 on and in the correctories disputes), the later Doctor communis had formulated initially uncommon positions on the body and the unicity of the intellectual soul as the sole substantial form.29 Such a form gears the body toward spiritual and interpersonal goods, but at the same time it also underscores both the limitations and the necessary assistance that the exterior and interior senses and the passions imply. The human soul, as the least of all intellectual beings in itself also the most “empty,” needs the exteriority provided by the body with its external and internal senses, even as its limited sense of self and, more generally, its limited spontaneity, is a condition of its ability to be receptive. That is so much the case that, even in the newer disputes in the controversy between what crudely and misleadingly have been labeled the “corruptionist” and “survivalist” attempts at a retrieval of Thomas’s thoughts on this matter, no one could deny with comprehensive historical arguments that Thomas, in ways controversial in his own time and inasmuch with verifiable programmatic intentions (if not entirely thoroughgoing), raised objections to calling the “separated soul” a substance (that is, a person in the full sense of Boethius). The soul after death, if left to itself, tional text was prepared by Gerald B. Phelan and I. Th. Eschmann and is available as Thomas Aquinas, On Kingship to the King of Cypress (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1949 [2014]), 5–7, as well as at dhspriory.org/thomas/ DeRegno.htm. 27 Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae [ST] II-II, q. 30, resp. and ad 2. 28 Cf. Joseph Bobik, “Aquinas on Communicatio: The Foundation of Friendship and Caritas,” The Modern Schoolman 64 (1986): 1–18. 29 See Theodor Schneider, Die Einheit des Menschen: Die anthropologische Formel “anima forma corporis” im sogenannten Korrektorienstreit und bei Petrus Johannis Olivi, ein Beitrag zur Vorgeschichte des Konzils von Vienne, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters n.F. 8 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1973). 498 Richard Schenk, O.P. is more wounded than enhanced by its loss of bodiliness. Recent attempts to establish resurrection-in-death or death-as-resurrection as the standard of Catholic eschatology and pastoral practice have been challenged both by the magisterium and by the legacy of Thomistic thought. Beatitude is not simply the fruit of the soul’s maturation. Thomas argues in ways both philosophical and, if less discussed in today’s dispute, theological, that death is not perfective but calls for Christian mourning and for a hope for the resurrection that Platonism, Stoicism, and Pelagianism in their older and newer versions cannot comprehend.30 The need of the soul in Thomas’s view for what Levinas would later call exteriority31 finds important complements today in discussions of human intentionality outside the thematic of interpersonality, such as in Günter Figal’s recent phenomenology of our sense of external space as a condition of all knowledge32 but also throughout Spaemann’s work on Persons (for example, in the chapter on time). The exteriority of other persons intensifies but does not does substitute for the exteriority of non-personal otherness. Even for Heidegger’s Being and Time, which lacks a programmatic consideration of the exteriority of the body and plays down the analysis of the social world (chapter 4 of the first division is one of the shortest), the forms of exteriority include the manifold possibilities of my being other than I am and other beings being different than they are (avoiding the collapse of past and future into the present), including among the priorities of possibility over actuality famously the one unsurpassable possibility, death, the becoming impossi For “exegetical” and systematic discussions prior to and at points outside the parameters of the current English-language debate, see Richard Schenk, Die Gnade vollendeter Endlichkeit: Zur transzendentaltheologischen Auslegung der thomanischen Anthropologie, Freiburger theologische Studien 135 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1989), esp. ch. 4 (443–513); Schenk, “Tod und Theodizee: Ansätze zu einer Theologie der Trauer bei Thomas von Aquin,” Forum Katholische Theologie 10 (1994): 161–78; Schenk, “And Jesus Wept: Notes Towards a Theology of Mourning,” in Reading John with St. Thomas Aquinas: Theological Exegesis and Speculative Theology, ed. Michael Dauphinais and Matthew Levering (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 212–37; Schenk, “Factus in agonia: Zur Todesangst Christi und der Christen,” in Christus–Gottes schöpferisches Wort: Festschrift für Christoph Kardinal Schönborn, ed. Georg Augustin, Maria Brun, Erwin Keller, and Markus Schulze (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2010), 401–28. 31 For the necessary interplay of interiority and exteriority according to Thomas himself, see Scarpelli Cory, Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge. 32 See the important studies by Günter Figal, Unscheinbarkeit: der Raum der Phänomenologie (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2015), and Gegenständlichkeit: das Hermeneutische und die Philosophie (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2006). 30 A Response to Markus Rothhaar 499 ble of properly human possibilities. In Thomas Aquinas’s own eschatology, understood as novel both by his opponents (such as Robert Kilwardby or William de La Mare) and by his supporters (such as Bernard of Trilia), the post-mortal soul does not cease to be a “part” of the now lost whole. It does not itself begin to be a whole on its own. It retains an order to the unique bodiliness it once co-constituted. The human spirit is not advanced simply by shedding materiality; of itself, human knowledge tends to become more “general and confused,” as Bernard of Trilia argues, unless these deficiencies be compensated for by exterior powers. The Scholastic term for the sense of alterity or exteriority of this kind is timor reverentiae or timor filialis, which both before and after death is needed in order to recognize the otherness of the Giver and the gracious character of the Gift. Because resurrection cannot be deduced as likely from reflection upon one’s own desires and powers, and is not evident, humans can at most live like Job ex fiducia veritatis manifestandae. The implicit recognition of personhood, often first made explicit by the pain of its misrecognition or loss, is a hope not to become persons in the future, but a hope that in the future the personhood and mutual recognition already given will be manifested and perfected. Like the hope that we are already in grace, there is room for the hope that we are already indeed persons, a hope which strengthens the witness of other persons that made such hope possible and in the best cases plausible. The mutual recognition of persons, as called to the fullness of knowledge, love, and life, calls as well for a protreptic defense of hope for oneself and others. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2019): 501–532 501 The Word Breathes Forth Love: The Psychological Analogy for the Trinity and the Complementarity of Intellect and Will Lawrence Feingold Kenrick-Glennon Seminary St. Louis, MO The “psychological analogy” refers to the parallels that are found between the Trinitarian processions and the operations of intellect and will. This analogy is generally thought of as a way of deepening our understanding of the inner life of the Trinity, but it can also help us understand the spiritual operations of intellect and will, their fruitfulness and complementarity, and how they are elevated by grace and glory. Marginalization of this analogy, which occurs frequently in the theology of the last century,1 is detrimental not only to our ability to penetrate into the Trinity, but also for supernatural anthropology. In the second section of this paper I will make use of this analogy to argue against an absolute primacy of either the intellect or the will, defending instead their complementary roles in human life in general, and particularly in final beatitude. The complementarity of the Trinitarian processions is mirrored in the soul by the complementarity of the spiritual operations of intellect and will, in which the first makes God known and is thus the principle of the second, but the second brings the subject into more perfect In many strands of theology of the last century, the psychological analogy has been replaced with a “social analogy.” See: Neil Ormerod, “The Psychological Analogy for the Trinity—at Odds with Modernity,” Pacifica 14 (2001): 281–94; The Cambridge Companion to the Trinity, ed. Peter C. Phan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 16, 213; Robert Doran, The Trinity in History: A Theology of the Divine Missions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 146. 1 502 Lawrence Feingold union with the beloved through a “sincere gift of self,”2 completing the circle. The Psychological Analogy The Names of the Second and Third Persons of the Trinity Suggest Operations of Intellect and Will One of the most fruitful of the many great contributions of St. Augustine to theology was his exploration of the analogy between the processions of the Word and of the Spirit in the divine life and the operations of our intellect and will. Here we will look at the psychological analogy above all as further developed by St. Thomas Aquinas. This analogy is suggested in the first place by Revelation in the words “Logos” and “Spirit,” which refer to the second and third persons of the Trinity. “Logos,” or “Word,” suggests the process of intellectual knowing, and “Spirit,” which means wind, breath, or impetus, is expressive of the activity of the will, which is a kind of impetus to the beloved. Other names given in Revelation also highlight the intellectual and volitional aspect of the Word and the Spirit. The Word is also called Wisdom3 and Image,4 and the Holy Spirit is also Love5 and Gift.6 The name Gift applied to the See Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, §24. 1 Cor 1:24. 4 Col 1:15. 5 See Rom 5:5: “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” See also St. Augustine, De Trinitate 15.5.27: “According to the holy scriptures this Holy Spirit is not just the Father’s alone nor the Son’s alone, but the Spirit of them both, and thus he suggests to us the common charity by which the Father and the Son love each other” (The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill [Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1991], 418). For St. Thomas’s development of this name of the Holy Spirit, see Summa theologiae [ST] I, q. 37, aa. 1–2. 6 See: Acts 2:38; 8:20; 10:45; 11:17; John 4:10; St. Augustine, De Trinitate 15.5.29: “And yet it is not without point that in this triad only the Son is called the Word of God, and only the Holy Spirit is called the gift of God” (trans. Hill, 419). See the extended discussion in De Trinitate 15.5.29–37. For St. Thomas on the Holy Spirit as Gift, see ST I, q. 38. For a defense of this Augustinian approach, see Matthew Levering, Engaging the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit: Love and Gift in the Trinity and the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016), 51–70, esp. 69–70: “In sum, the web of scriptural texts that insistently associate the coming forth of the Spirit with ‘love’ and ‘gift’ suggests that in these two terms we have found a scriptural parallel with the Son’s name ‘Word.’ ‘Love’ and ‘Gift’ offer a limited, but precious, instruction from God the Teacher regarding the distinctiveness of the Holy Spirit in the Trinity. Through the economic manifestations of and inspired scriptural witness to the Spirit, we gain insight into the eternal identity of the Spirit. Augustine’s interpretation of the New Testament’s characteristic ways of speaking 2 3 The Word Breathes Forth Love 503 Holy Spirit seems to indicate that the Spirit proceeds through love, for love manifests itself in the giving of gifts, and ultimately in the giving of oneself. The Holy Spirit is the personal Gift in God.7 Immanent Operations Although the scriptural evidence is primary, theological reflection, through the establishment of a psychological analogy, supports our initial connection of the Word and the Spirit with the operation of the divine intellect and will. In seeking an analogy for the Trinitarian processions, it is important to start with what is highest in the created order. St. Thomas remarks that it is crucial to use an immanent rather than a transitive activity as the basis for an analogy of the Trinity. Otherwise one will fall into the Arian or the Sabellian heresy.8 An immanent operation produces a fruit or product that remains about the Spirit, therefore, should continue to guide contemporary theology of the Spirit: the Holy Spirit is the Gift of Love.” See also Luigi Gioia, The Theological Epistemology of St. Augustine’s De Trinitate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 7 See ST I, q. 38, a. 2: “Now, the reason of donation being gratuitous is love; since therefore do we give something to anyone gratuitously forasmuch as we wish him well. So what we first give him is the love whereby we wish him well. Hence it is manifest that love has the nature of a first gift, through which all free gifts are given. So since the Holy Spirit proceeds as love, as stated above (q. 27, a. 4; q. 37, a. 1), he proceeds as the first gift.” 8 See ST I, q. 27, a. 1: “Divine Scripture uses, in relation to God, names which signify procession. This procession has been differently understood. Some have understood it in the sense of an effect proceeding from its cause; so Arius took it, saying that the Son proceeds from the Father as his primary creature, and that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as the creature of both. In this sense neither the Son nor the Holy Spirit would be true God: and this is contrary to what is said of the Son, ‘That . . . we may be in his true Son. This is true God’ (1 Jn 5:20). Of the Holy Spirit it is also said, ‘Know you not that your members are the temple of the Holy Spirit?’ (1 Cor 6:19). Now, to have a temple is God’s prerogative. Others take this procession to mean the cause proceeding to the effect, as moving it, or impressing its own likeness on it; in which sense it was understood by Sabellius, who said that God the Father is called Son in assuming flesh from the Virgin, and that the Father also is called Holy Spirit in sanctifying the rational creature, and moving it to life. The words of the Lord contradict such a meaning, when he speaks of himself, ‘The Son cannot of himself do anything’ ( Jn 5:19); while many other passages show the same, whereby we know that the Father is not the Son. Careful examination shows that both of these opinions take procession as meaning an outward act; hence neither of them affirms procession as existing in God himself; whereas, since procession always supposes action, and as there is an outward procession corresponding to the act tending to external matter, so there must be an inward procession corresponding to the act remaining within the agent.” 504 Lawrence Feingold within the agent, while the product of a transitive action is external to the agent. If one uses a transitive action, such as biological generation, as a model for the Trinity, then the person generated will be understood as external to God, which was Arius’s heretical conclusion. An immanent operation, on the other hand, produces an interior fruit that does not constitute a separate being, although there is a distinction of relation, for the interior fruit proceeds interiorly from its source. Only in this way can a procession generate a distinct divine person without it being another god separate from the first, compromising monotheism. We experience immanent actions in cognition and appetition. Both of these exist on the sense level and the intellectual level. The operations of our internal senses have an aspect of immanence, for the phantasm remains within the internal senses. Sensing, however, also involves transitive activity by which the sensed object causes a physical change in the organs of the external and internal senses. Similarly, the sense appetite always involves transitive activity and physical changes, as when our mouth waters and our heart starts to pound, and so on. It is only the intellect and will that have perfectly immanent and reflexive operations, and it is there that we must look for an analogy to illuminate the divine processions.9 The psychological analogy thus gives an account of why there are precisely two processions in God, for the two processions coincide with the two spiritual and immanent operations of knowing and loving. The Immanent Action of Knowing and the Eternal Generation of the Logos In the operation of knowing, we can distinguish the act of knowing and an interior product that we form in our mind. If we examine our act of thinking, we experience that we form an interior word, called the “concept” or “idea,” which is signified by the spoken word. The concept is not properly what we know, but that through which we know reality. This interior word is formed in the operation of knowing and remains within as that in which we see what we have come to know.10 See ST I, q. 27, a. 5: “The divine processions can be derived only from the actions which remain within the agent. In a nature which is intellectual, and in the divine nature these actions are two, the acts of intelligence and of will. The act of sensation, which also appears to be an operation within the agent, takes place outside the intellectual nature, nor can it be reckoned as wholly removed from the sphere of external actions; for the act of sensation is perfected by the action of the sensible object upon sense. It follows that no other procession is possible in God but the procession of the Word, and of Love.” 10 See ST I, q. 85, a. 2. 9 The Word Breathes Forth Love 505 If we apply this analogy to the divine operation of knowing, it is reasonable to think that, in knowing himself, God also forms an immanent product or interior Word. The divine intellect, however, is infinitely perfect, and its interior fruit, likewise, must be infinitely perfect. This interior Word, therefore, which is generated as the fruit of God’s infinite intellectual action, must be an infinite immanent “product” that perfectly images all that God is. Indeed, as noted above, “Image” is another name given to the second person of the Trinity by St. Paul (Col 1:15). Our concepts are imperfect likenesses of what we know because they are abstract and leave out particularity. The divine Word, on the other hand, must be a perfect Word, and thus will be lacking nothing that belongs to God, and will in no way deviate from its source. If there is a relation of perfect identity, it follows that the Word that is generated will itself be God just as the source or speaker of the Word is God. Hence this interior Word can be understood as “God from God.” Furthermore, the Word eternally brought forth in this way is fittingly spoken of as Son eternally generated. The notion of generation implies that something proceeds from another by way of similarity in nature, for a son shares the nature of his father.11 As in biological generation, the concept or interior word proceeds in the intellectual operation according to similarity, for the concept is a true likeness of what it represents. In the case of the Word of God, the concept produced by the divine act of self-knowing so perfectly represents the knower that it is identical in nature. This procession therefore merits the name of generation, and its fruit merits the name of Son. It is not accidental that, even with regard to human knowing, the word “concept” is taken from “conception,” for it indicates the profound relationship between biological generation and the generation of ideas through the immanent operation of knowing. However, in human self-understanding there is not an identity of nature between the concept and the thing conceived, because our ideas are abstract and leave out much of the reality they represent. Thus our ideas are distinct in nature from the reality they enable us to know. In God, however, the knowing is perfect and the St. Thomas explains why the procession of the Logos is called generation in ST I, q. 27, a. 2: “In this manner the procession of the Word in God is generation; for he proceeds by way of intelligible action, which is a vital operation . . . by way of similitude, inasmuch as the concept of the intellect is a likeness of the object conceived. And he exists in the same nature, because in God the act of understanding and his existence are the same, as shown above (q. 14, a. 4). Hence the procession of the Word in God is called generation; and the Word himself proceeding is called the Son.” 11 506 Lawrence Feingold interior word fully realizes the notion of generation, which is procession from another according to identity of nature. St. Thomas explains: The act of human understanding in ourselves is not the substance itself of the intellect; hence the word which proceeds within us by intelligible operation is not of the same nature as the source whence it proceeds; so the idea of generation cannot be properly and fully applied to it. But the divine act of intelligence is the very substance itself of the one who understands. The Word proceeding therefore proceeds as subsisting in the same nature; and so is properly called begotten, and Son. Hence Scripture employs terms which denote generation of living things in order to signify the procession of the divine Wisdom, namely, conception and birth; as is declared in the person of the divine Wisdom (Pr 8:24), “The depths were not as yet, and I was already conceived; before the hills, I was brought forth.”12 The Immanent Action of Loving and the Eternal Procession of the Holy Spirit Since there are two persons who proceed in God, there must be a second immanent operation in God. Here too the psychological analogy can be applied, for the operation of the will also involves immanent activity. When we think of the will, we may think first of transitive activity, for it is true that the will commands operations that have an external result, such as the movement of our limbs, or God’s act of creating the world. The will, however, is first the source of interior affective movements (affective love) before it is the source of commanding acts that result in external or transitive operation (effective love). No one would will any external action if one did not first interiorly love and desire the object of that action. The affective acts of loving, desiring, and rejoicing are immanent acts that result in a change within ourselves. The act of loving already interiorly qualifies the lover and creates a relation to the beloved, before it leads us to do any external action. We can see this immanent effect of love by the fact that we are changed interiorly when, for example, we love God or fail to love him. Similarly, our love for our spouse, family, and country forges our inner identity and results in our becoming interiorly for the beloved. We are also changed for the worse if we love something disordered and sinful, and especially if we order our life to it. Through the immanent effect of the act of loving, we ST I, q. 27, a. 2, ad 2. 12 The Word Breathes Forth Love 507 carry our loved ones with us even when we are physically separated from them and give ourselves interiorly to them. Our loved ones are not only known by our intellect through our concepts of them, but are also present in our will as the object of the impetus of love and self-gift. Ultimately it is through love of benevolence that we order ourselves to our final end, by loving either God above all, or self, according to the brilliant analysis of St. Augustine in the City of God.13 The difficulty lies in identifying the interior product or fruit of the action of the will. St. Thomas explains that the beloved becomes present in the will as the object of the movement or impetus of love: The operation of the will within ourselves involves also another procession, that of love, whereby the object loved is in the lover; as, by the conception of the word, the object spoken of or understood is in the intelligent agent. Hence, besides the procession of the Word in God, there exists in him another procession called the procession of love.14 Human love engenders a movement or impetus in the soul of the lover to the beloved. This impetus is an immanent fruit of the operation of loving which remains in the soul and makes the beloved somehow present as the goal of the will’s interior movement of love.15 Applying this analogy to God, the Holy Spirit would proceed as the immanent impetus of the mutual love of Father and Son. Hence the Holy Spirit is fittingly described as “proceeding” or being “breathed forth.” St. Thomas also uses the psychological analogy to show why the procession according to will or love is not called generation. As stated above, in the act of knowing we form a likeness of the object in ourselves, and thus it is naturally compared to conception or generation. In willing or loving, we form not a likeness but an impulse that orders us toward the object of our love, for an impulse of love gives the lover to the beloved. Thus it is fitting that the fruit of the procession of love in God is referred to not as a second Son but as the Holy Spirit, for spirit, in Hebrew and Greek, means “breath,” “wind,” or “impulse”: The procession of love in God ought not to be called generation. In See St. Augustine, De civitate Dei 14.28 (found in vol. 2 of Hendrickson’s edition of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series). 14 ST I, q. 27, a. 3. 15 See ST I, q. 27, a. 4. 13 508 Lawrence Feingold evidence whereof we must consider that the intellect and the will differ in this respect, that the intellect is made actual by the object understood residing according to its own likeness in the intellect; whereas the will is made actual, not by any similitude of the object willed within it, but by its having a certain inclination to the thing willed. Thus the procession of the intellect is by way of similitude, and is called generation, because every generator begets its own like; whereas the procession of the will is not by way of similitude, but rather by way of impulse and movement towards an object. So what proceeds in God by way of love, does not proceed as begotten, or as son, but proceeds rather as spirit; which name expresses a certain vital movement and impulse, accordingly as anyone is described as moved or impelled by love to perform an action.16 Distinction of Love of Concupiscence and Love of Benevolence St. Thomas’s explanation of the procession of the Holy Spirit is not lacking in difficulty, for it is hard to see how this divine impetus of love constitutes a divine person.17 His explanation can be clarified, I think, by the distinction he introduces between two aspects of love, which are love of concupiscence (or desire) and love of benevolence,18 and connecting that distinction with the notion of self-gift as developed above all by St. John Paul II.19 ST I, q. 27, a. 4 (my italics). It seems that St. Thomas’s thought on this point matured significantly over time. In his earlier works, such as In I sent., d. 10, q. 1, a. 1, and De veritate, q. 4, a. 2, ad 7, St. Thomas denies that there is an interior term or product. Instead he holds that the Holy Spirit proceeds as the subsistent operation of love. In ST I, q. 27, a. 3, and q. 37, a. 1, on the contrary, he maintains that there is an interior fruit in the will in the operation of love. See: M. T.-L. Penido, “Gloses sur la procession d’amour dans la Trinité,” Ephemerides theologicae Lovanienses 14 (1937): 33–68, at 37–40; Frederick Crowe, “Complacency and Concern in the Thought of St. Thomas [part 1],” Theological Studies 20, no. 1 (March 1959): 1–39. For the development of St. Thomas’s teaching on love, see Henri D. Simonin, “Autour de la solution thomiste du problème de l’amour,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 6 (1931): 174–276. 18 See ST I-II, q. 26, a. 4. This distinction is already present in his commentary on the Sentences, In III sent., d. 29, a. 3, in On Love and Charity: Readings from the Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, trans. Peter A. Kwasniewski, Thomas Bolin, and Joseph Bolin (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 212. See also In de div. nom. 4, lec. 9. 19 See Pascal Ide, “Une Théologie du don: Les occurrences de Gaudium et spes, no. 24, 3 chez Jean-Paul II,” Anthropotes 17 (2001): 149–78, 313–44; Michael M. Waldstein, “Introduction” in John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, trans. M. Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 16 17 The Word Breathes Forth Love 509 In every act of love, we will some good for someone. The aspect of love that is directed to some good is referred to as love of desire, or eros. The love directed to the person for whom we will the good is called love of benevolence, or agape. When love of benevolence is mutual, it is love of friendship. This distinction is very often understood as if it were a distinction between two different kinds of complete acts of love which would be distinguished according to whether a good is willed for oneself or for another. Eros and agape would be contrasted as selfish and selfless love.20 This is not how St. Thomas understands the distinction. It is not a distinction between two different kinds of complete acts of love ordered either to self or other, but rather a distinction between two tendencies simultaneously present in every complete act of rational love. Goods are always willed for the sake of someone. There can be no love of concupiscence for any good divorced from a love of benevolence for someone, whether it be oneself, family, friend, community, or God. Love of benevolence thus has a primacy with respect to love of concupiscence, because it is its motive and because only the object of love of benevolence is loved for its own sake.21 We love goods for the sake of persons and communities. St. Thomas writes: As the Philosopher says (Rhetoric II, ch. 4), “to love is to wish good to someone.” Hence the movement of love has a twofold tendency: towards the good which a man wishes to someone (to himself or to another) and towards that to which he wishes some good. Accordingly, man has love of concupiscence towards the good that he wishes to another, and love of benevolence towards him to whom 2006), 24–34. This type of interpretation was made famous by Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip Watson (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1953). 21 See In IV sent., d. 49, q. 1, a. 2, qa. 1, ad 3: “An object of love is of two kinds. There is an object that is loved in the manner of benevolence, when we will the good for another on account of himself, as we love our friends, even if nothing should come to us from them. And there is an object that is loved by the love of concupiscence. . . . Now whatever is loved with a love of concupiscence cannot be the ultimate object of love, since it is referred to the good of another (his, namely, who has concupiscence for it); but that which is loved by a love of benevolence can be the ultimate object of love. Therefore the created beatitude that is within us is loved only by a love of concupiscence; hence the love of it we refer to ourselves, and consequently we refer it to God, since we ought to refer even ourselves to God; and thus, it cannot be the ultimate object of love. Nevertheless it is the ultimate object of concupiscence by the very fact that it is the greatest good that comes to us from union with God” (On Love and Charity, 354). 20 510 Lawrence Feingold he wishes good. Now the members of this division are related as primary and secondary: since what is loved with the love of friendship is loved simply speaking and for itself; whereas what is loved with the love of concupiscence, is loved, not simply speaking and for itself, but for something else.22 St. Thomas clearly indicates that these two aspects of love should be understood as a “twofold tendency” that comprises the full act of love. The Twofold Tendency of Love Applied to the Procession of the Holy Spirit How should we apply this distinction to understand a procession according to love in the divine will? Should we think of the procession of the Holy Spirit according to the tendency of eros or agape, or both? According to what has been explained above, however, it seems that both aspects must be present—a good willed that is referred to a beloved person. Since we are speaking about the inner life of the Trinity, both aspects of love must clearly be directed to God himself.23 That is, it seems that the eternal act of love that breathes forth the Holy Spirit should be understood as a love directed to a divine person for whom the divine good is willed. I think that this idea can be illuminated by reflecting on the notion of gift of self in the love of friendship. The love that gives rise to an eternal breathing forth of a divine person should be understood according to the highest and most primary kind of love that we encounter in human experience, which is the mutual love of benevolence in friendship or conjugal love. And the highest or most total form of the love of friendship is that in which the good that one wills for the beloved consists not simply in exterior goods, but includes one’s self, which is given for the other. In spousal love, one is called to make a total gift of self to the beloved, and it is perfect to the extent that it is total and mutual. Of course, in this life all our movements of love are imperfect and fall far short of a complete self-gift. In God, an impetus of self-gift must ST I-II, q. 26, a. 4. See De potentia, q. 9, a. 9: “Both in us and in God there is a certain rotation in the acts of the intellect and will: for the will returns to that whence came the beginning of understanding: but whereas in us the circle ends in that which is external, the external good moving the intellect and love tending to the external good; in God, on the other hand, the circle ends in him” (On the Power of God, trans. English Dominican Fathers, 3 vols. [Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1952], 3:158). 22 23 The Word Breathes Forth Love 511 be entire, for nothing will be lacking, and perfectly mutual. The whole divine good that each person is, is eternally given to the other in a perfectly mutual way, so that it is but one love of mutual self-giving, uniting the two, that proceeds from the two persons. Although he does not use the term, “self-gift,” St. Thomas refers to the Holy Spirit as the inter-Trinitarian Gift, for the nature of love is to give oneself to the beloved. This love is the source of all other gifts. Now, the reason of donation being gratuitous is love; since therefore do we give something to anyone gratuitously forasmuch as we wish him well. So what we first give him is the love whereby we wish him well. Hence it is manifest that love has the nature of a first gift, through which all free gifts are given. So since the Holy Spirit proceeds as love, . . . He proceeds as the first gift.24 Understanding the divine love in this way as self-giving agape, it is easier to see that the fruit of this immanent operation is indeed nothing other than God himself.25 So God, in knowing himself, which generates the Son, loves the Son, as the Son does the Father, and a mutual total gift of self is the bond of unity, which is another divine person, the Holy Spirit. St. Thomas writes: The Holy Spirit is said to be the bond of the Father and Son, inasmuch as he is Love; because, since the Father loves himself and the Son with one Love, and conversely, there is expressed in the Holy Spirit, as Love, the relation of the Father to the Son, and conversely, as that of the lover to the beloved. But from the fact that the Father and the Son mutually love one another, it necessarily follows that this mutual Love, the Holy Spirit, proceeds from both. 26 ST I, q. 38, a. 2 (my italics). A different account of the procession of the Holy Spirit is given in Crowe, “Complacency and Concern,” 15–18. Crowe, following Lonergan, sees the interior term of the divine love not in the divine self-donation, as I have suggested, but as the complacency breathed forth in the will by the Word. See also: Bernard Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 2, ed. Frederick Crowe and Robert Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 209–16; The Triune God: Systematics, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 12, trans. Michael Shields, ed. Robert Doran and H. Daniel Monsour (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 621–25. 26 ST I, q. 37, a. 1, ad 3. See also ST I, q. 36, a. 4, ad 1: “But if we consider the supposita of the spiration, then we may say that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father 24 25 512 Lawrence Feingold Order of the Processions The psychological analogy also illuminates the distinction and order of the three divine persons in the Trinity. The real distinction of the two processions is made clearer by the contrary directions of the operations of knowing and loving. The object of knowledge is assimilated to the knower because he speaks its form interiorly and thus conceives it within himself. In the self-donation of love, the lover is interiorly ordered and given by the impetus of love to the beloved.27 In our soul, knowing is both chronologically and logically prior to willing, for we cannot will or love what we do not know. In God there is no chronological progression, but there is a logical order between the two eternal operations/processions. By analogy with our knowing and willing, it is fitting that also in God the procession of the Holy Spirit logically presupposes the generation of the Word, who breathes forth love. There is no temporal priority in God, for the three persons are co-eternal, but there is a logical order of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which order is also found in Revelation, as in the baptismal formula in Matthew 28:19. The fact that knowing logically precedes willing also shows that the Word is involved in the procession of the Holy Spirit. The Son proceeds from the Father alone, but the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son together. The order of the processions can also be grasped from the fact that a mutual love of benevolence or friendship presupposes two persons, for it is an interpersonal love.28 The procession of the Holy Spirit, therefore, presupposes the procession of the Son. The operation of knowledge, on and the Son, as distinct; for he proceeds from them as the unitive love of both”; In I sent., d. 29, q. 1 (unic.), a. 4, ad 2: “Since spiration requires a distinction in the subjects (supposita), it is therefore in some way from more than one subject insofar as they are distinct, since it is a personal act” (my translation). 27 See ST I, q. 82, a. 3; In III sent., d. 27, q. 1, a. 4: “Through willing and loving man is, in a way, drawn into the very things willed and loved, whereas through knowledge, on the contrary, things known are made to be in the knower by way of their likenesses” (On Love and Charity, 140). 28 See St. Thomas, De potentia, q. 9, a. 9, ad 20: “The process of nature and the process of the intellect have this in common that in either case one thing proceeds from one thing in likeness to that whence it proceeds. But love which proceeds from the will, proceeds from two who love each other mutually” (On the Power of God, 3:164–65); In I sent., d. 2, q. l, a. 5, ad 1; St. Bonaventure, In I sent., d. 10, a. l, q. 3: “Since love has the perfection of delectation and union and rectitude out of a mutuality, either it is not that one posits a person among the divine to proceed through a manner of love, or, if he does proceed, he proceeds through a manner of mutual charity” (Opera omnia, vol. 1, On the One and Triune God [Mansfield, MA: Franciscan Archive, 2014], 199). The Word Breathes Forth Love 513 the other hand, does not presuppose any prior procession or distinction of persons. The Word Breathes Forth Love: Circular “Movement” in the Trinitarian Life The psychological analogy also suggests that the two processions entail a circular kind of movement involving a going forth and a return, or exitus and reditus.29 The Son comes forth from the Father as his Word that is uttered. The Word then breathes forth love for the Father, giving himself back to him, and the Father likewise by the same perfect impetus gives himself to his Son. The Spirit proceeds thus from the mutual and eternal self-gift of Son to Father and Father to Son. Thus the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as the bond of unity. The filioque is not merely an abstruse point of theological speculation, but something that is existentially vital. If the Spirit truly proceeds from a love that is agape, how could that love be one-sided? Through love of benevolence, the eternal vital activity that goes forth in the generation of the Word or Image returns back to the source through the impetus of mutual self-gift, generating the most perfect kind of “movement,” which is circular. This is particularly appropriate for a vital operation that is eternal. Human movements in this life tend to have a linear aspect because we have a beginning and a final end. God, whose eternal life has neither beginning nor end, fittingly is constituted by a circularity of eternal vital operation eternally returning to its source.30 The Psychological Analogy and the Economic Trinity A theory that seeks to shed light on the Trinitarian processions in the inner life of God should find confirmation from the missions of the divine persons in salvation history.31 We have seen that the psychological analogy See De potentia, q. 9, a. 9, quoted above. St. Thomas received this idea from St. Albert, who speaks about a circular “movement” in the Trinitarian processions in his commentary, In I sent., d. 11, a. 1, sol. See Gilles Emery, Trinity in Aquinas (Ypsilanti, MI: Sapientia, 2003), 44. 30 St. Thomas, drawing on Pseudo-Dionysius (On the Divine Names 4.8–9), speaks of the most perfect contemplation as a circular movement in ST II-II, q. 180, a. 6, ad 2: “Dionysius assigns the circular movement of the angels to the fact that their intuition of God is uniform and unceasing, having neither beginning nor end: even as a circular movement having neither beginning nor end is uniformly around the one same center. But on the part of the soul, ere it arrive at this uniformity, its twofold lack of uniformity needs to be removed.” 31 In more technical terms, the immanent Trinity is revealed by the economic Trinity. 29 514 Lawrence Feingold has its point of departure not in metaphysical speculation, but in the names given in Revelation for the Logos and the Spirit. Scriptural support for the analogy, however, is not limited to the intellectual and volitional character of these names. Because we cannot love what we do not know, it is fitting that the Word was sent visibly to reveal the Father. Revelation, which began through prophecy, culminates in the Mission of the Word made flesh, and especially in his Paschal mystery. In the well-known words of Gaudium et Spes §22: Only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of him who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and his love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear. The Word reveals the Father as his visible Image, and his task is to restore the imago Dei of the sons and daughters of Adam that has become deformed by sin. Since the second person is generated by way of likeness, and as the divine Word is the exemplar cause of creation,32 it is fitting that the Image of the Father becomes man to restore our likeness to himself. Hence Gaudium et Spes §22 states: “He who is ‘the image of the invisible God’ (Col 1:15), is himself the perfect man. To the sons of Adam he restores the divine likeness which had been disfigured from the first sin onward.” God’s plan from the beginning was to elevate man to share in the divine nature and thus become his sons and daughters. After this sonship was lost through original sin, again it is fitting that God the Son become man to make the sons and daughters of men into sons and daughters of God.33 The natural Son comes to restore our adopted sonship. Since the Son breathes forth the Holy Spirit in his love for the Father, it is fitting that the Son’s mission culminate with the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost ten days after his Ascension. We would have no likeness See Summa contra gentiles [SCG] IV, ch. 42 (no. 3803). See St. Irenaeus, Adversus haereses 3.19.1: “For it was for this end that the Word of God was made man, and he who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God” (in Ante-Nicene Fathers [Hendrickson ed.], 1:448–49). See also St. Augustine, Sermon 23B.1: “The Son of God became a son of man, in order to make sons of men into sons of God” (Sermons, vol. 3/11, Newly Discovered Sermons, trans. Edmund Hill [Hyde Park, NY: New City, 1997], 37). 32 33 The Word Breathes Forth Love 515 with the Son unless we too breathe forth love for the Father. The likeness with the Son cannot be the work of the Son alone, for if we are made sons and daughters of the Father, we must be made to share in the “spirit of sonship,” which is the work of the Spirit, as St. Paul testifies in Romans 8:16: “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” Or in Galatians 4:6: “And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” Since the Holy Spirit proceeds in the divine life by way of love, it is fitting that the mission of the Spirit is ordered to infusing love into our hearts34 and inciting us to return the love shown to us by the Father who “so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Trinitarian Dimension to Beatitude Let us now turn the analogy around and use the Trinitarian processions to shed light on a disputed question in the Scholastic tradition concerning the relation of the intellect and will. Is beatitude constituted essentially by the operation of one or the other of these faculties, or both together in complementarity?35 This suggests a second question: does one of these faculties have an absolute primacy with respect to the other?36 These two questions See Rom 5:5: “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” 35 Bl. Duns Scotus holds the primacy of the will in beatitude; see Ordinatio IV, d. 49, q. 4–5, and Reportatio parisiensis IV, d. 49, qq. 2–3. Many earlier Scholastics— such as Hugh of St. Victor, St. Bonaventure, and St. Albert the Great (In IV sent., d. 49, a. 4)—held that beatitude involves the complementary operation of intellect and will. See Hugo of St. Victor, Expositio in hierarchiam coelestem S. Dionysii, bk. 7: “Knowledge illuminates, love satiates. . . . Beatitude consists in knowing and loving the good. Scripture says, ‘Taste and see that the Lord is good’ (Ps 33). In ‘taste’ love is indicated, and knowledge in ‘see.’ Both knowledge and love are distinctly commended” (PL, 175:1065B ; my translation). Although St. Bonaventure puts the emphasis on beatific love (In II sent., d. 38, a. 1, q. 2, conclusio), he includes both vision and love in the essence of beatitude in In IV sent., d. 49, pars 1, q. 5, conclusio, in which he speaks of them as “dowries” (together with fruition) in the heavenly matrimony between the soul and God. 36 See ST I, q. 82, a. 3: “If therefore the intellect and will be considered with regard to themselves, then the intellect is the higher power. And this is clear if we compare their respective objects to one another. For the object of the intellect is more simple and more absolute than the object of the will; since the object of the intellect is the very idea of appetible good; and the appetible good, the idea of which is in the intellect, is the object of the will. Now the more simple and the more abstract a thing is, the nobler and higher it is in itself; and therefore the object of the intellect is higher than the object of the will.” For an engagement with this 34 516 Lawrence Feingold are intimately related, because if beatitude were essentially constituted by the operation of only one of these two faculties, then it would seem to have an absolute primacy with respect to the other. The psychological analogy, with its parallel between the divine processions and the operations of the human intellect and will, sheds much light on this question.37 We have seen that, although both Trinitarian processions and the three divine persons are co-eternal, there is nevertheless a priority of order of the first procession with regard to the second, for love presupposes knowledge of the beloved, and because the impetus of benevolent love or agape requires the logically prior constitution of two persons. We can also say, however, that the procession of the Holy Spirit has an ultimate and finalizing character, for with it the divine life returns to its eternal source in a circular movement. Through the first procession, the second person is generated from the first (“God from God”), and through the second procession, the first and second persons are for the other through the Spirit who is the bond of unity, since he proceeds as the love of the two.38 The two processions thus have a complementary relationship, and neither has an absolute primacy, which would be incompatible with the consubstantiality of the divine persons constituted by the processions. Since the divine life is its beatitude, it follows that the divine beatitude is constituted equally by the two processions in their complementarity. It would be absurd to suppose that the divine beatitude is constituted essentially by only the first or only the second procession, because that would imply some kind of inequality in the divine persons. The psychological analogy should also reveal a parallelism between the operations of the soul in beatitude and the divine processions. St. Thomas hints at this in his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. He teaches that, just as the divine processions are the exemplar causes of text, see David C. Schindler, “Towards a Non-Possessive Concept of Knowledge: On the Relation between Reason and Love in Aquinas and Balthasar,” Modern Theology 22, no. 4 (2006): 577–607. 37 This analogy is the principal foundation for understanding man as the image of God. See ST I, q. 45, a. 7: “Now the processions of the divine persons are referred to the acts of intellect and will, as was said above (q. 27). For the Son proceeds as the word of the intellect; and the Holy Ghost proceeds as love of the will. Therefore in rational creatures, possessing intellect and will, there is found the representation of the Trinity by way of image, inasmuch as there is found in them the word conceived, and the love proceeding.” See also ST I, q. 93, aa. 4–5. 38 See ST I, q. 93, a. 7: “Now the divine persons are distinct from each other by reason of the procession of the Word from the speaker, and the procession of Love connecting both.” The Word Breathes Forth Love 517 creation, so likewise they must be the exemplar cause of beatitude, which is the perfect return of rational creatures to their Source. It is fitting that the return to God be realized through the same exemplar principle by which they were brought forth. St. Thomas takes this idea of perfect return from Pseudo-Dionysius: In the going forth of creatures from the first principle there is found a certain circular movement or return [circulatio vel regiratio], in that everything returns to its end in that from which it took its beginning. And thus it is necessary that the return to the end be through that principle from which it was brought forth. Since, as was said above, the procession of the divine persons is the exemplar of the production of creatures by the First Principle, so also the same procession is the exemplar of their return to the end. Since we were created through the Son and the Holy Spirit, so likewise we are joined through them to the final end.39 St. Thomas is saying that there is a circular movement in creation by which the creature is meant to be rejoined to its first principle. This rejoining is effected by the same principle by which the creature was brought forth. The principle of our creation is the procession of the divine persons. Therefore, it is fitting that the principle of reunion with our source also be through the same processions of the divine persons, which are the generation of the Word and the breathing forth of the Spirit of Love. St. Thomas’s main point here is that it is fitting that we are saved through the missions of the Son and the Spirit, such that the cause of salvation—the missions of the Son and the Spirit in salvation history— mirrors the exemplar cause of creation, which are the eternal processions of the Son and the Spirit. However, this principle that the final end should mirror its exemplar has fuller implications, because it implies that our final beatitude should also mirror its exemplar in the Trinitarian life. Although St. Thomas does not draw this conclusion, it would seem to imply that the rational creature reaches perfect beatitude through the divinized operation of intellect and will together in their complementary and circular movements. It is fitting that we return to our source in beatitude by mysteriously participating in the two divine processions through beatific knowledge—seeing the Father in the Word—and beatific love, giving ourselves perfectly back to God through and with the Holy Spirit. In this way the In I sent., d. 14, q. 2, a. 2 (my translation). 39 518 Lawrence Feingold Trinitarian image of God in the soul is brought to perfect similitude.40 St. Thomas himself, however, has various texts that do not take this position suggested by the psychological analogy. On the contrary, he argues in these texts that beatitude is essentially constituted by the act of the intellect alone. Let us examine his argument. St. Thomas’s View That Beatitude Is Essentially Constituted by the Act of the Intellect Seeing God In various texts spanning his career, of which the most well-known are one in the third book of the Summa Contra Gentiles (ch. 26) another in the prima secundae (q. 3, a. 4) of the Summa theologiae,41 St. Thomas examines the question of whether beatitude consists essentially in the operation of the intellect or the will. He first makes a distinction between the objective final end outside the rational creature, which is God himself, and the acts of the creature by which God, the final end, is attained. This latter must consist in the highest operation(s) of the creature with regard to God, for every creature reaches its perfection through the operations proper to it. But which operations are these? Knowing, loving, or delighting in the knowing and loving? St. Thomas consistently holds that the essence of beatitude consists in the action of the intellect in knowing God in the beatific vision. The will then completes and “consummates” this essential beatitude by delighting in it.42 He begins his argument by looking at the acts of the will of love, desire, and joy. He reasons that beatitude cannot consist essentially in any of these because both love and desire precede the attainment of the final end, and joy (delight) rests in its attainment: Now it is impossible for the act of desiring to be the ultimate end. For it is by desire that the will tends toward what it does not yet possess, but this is contrary to the essential character of the ultimate end. So too, the act of loving cannot be the ultimate. For a See ST I, q. 93, aa. 7–8. Other parallel texts are: ST I, q. 26, a. 2c and ad 2; Super Ioannem 17, lec. 1 (Mariettie no. 2186); Quodlibet 8, q. 9, a. 1; Compendium theologiae I, ch. 107; In IV sent., d. 49, q. 1, a. 1, qa. 2. For a comprehensive analysis of this question, see Jacobus Ramirez, O.P., Opera omnia, vol. 3, De hominis beatitudine, In I-II Summae theologiae Divi Thomae Commentaria (QQ. 1–5) (Madrid: Instituto de Filosofía “Luis Vives,” 1972), 3:173–248. 42 See ST I-II, q. 3, a. 4: “So, therefore, the essence of happiness consists in an act of the intellect: but the delight that results from happiness pertains to the will.” 40 41 The Word Breathes Forth Love 519 good is loved not only when possessed but also when not possessed. Indeed, it is as a result of love that what is not possessed is sought with desire, and if the love of something already possessed is more perfect, this results from the fact that the good which was loved is possessed. So, it is a different thing to possess a good which is the end, and to love it; for love, before possession, is imperfect, but after possession, perfect. . . . So delight is not the ultimate end.43 St. Thomas illustrates this with the example of money. A covetous man who puts his end in wealth both loves and desires money before he actually attains it. Clearly neither the love of money nor the desire of it is able to make him happy. He becomes happy only upon knowing that he actually possesses the money and can use it whenever he wills. His will then delights in the knowledge of the money possessed. St. Thomas therefore concludes: “So it is with an intelligible end. For at first we desire to attain an intelligible end; we attain it, through its being made present to us by an act of the intellect; and then the delighted will rests in the end when attained.”44 Another analogy that he uses in his treatment of this question is that of local movement.45 In every natural movement we can observe four things: a natural tendency toward an end (such as gravity), the movement itself, the reaching of the destination, and the resting in it. He then compares this with the process of attaining beatitude and with the three primary movements of the will toward a good: love, desire, and joy. Love corresponds to the natural tendency underlying the movement; desire and the actions which issue from it correspond to the movement itself; and the joy therein corresponds to the resting. But what about the actual attainment of the end? Can that also correspond to an act of the will? It would seem not, because of the three fundamental acts of the will, two of them—love and desire—occur before the attainment of the end, and the third, joy, is a consequence of the attainment. Therefore, St. Thomas reasons that the actual attainment of beatitude must be the act of another faculty: the intellect.46 SCG III, ch. 26, no. 12. ST I-II, q. 3, a. 4. St. Thomas concludes: “So, therefore, the essence of happiness consists in an act of the intellect: but the delight that results from happiness pertains to the will. In this sense Augustine says (Confessions X, 23) that happiness is ‘joy in truth,’ because, to wit, joy itself is the consummation of happiness.” 45 Compendium theologiae I, ch. 107. 46 Another argument frequently used by St. Thomas is similar. He says that since the formal object of the will is the good and the final end, it is impossible that an act of the will itself be the final end. For if that were the case, an act of the will would be both the end, and for the end (insofar as it is an act of the will). See In IV sent., 43 44 520 Lawrence Feingold Tension in St. Thomas’s View St. Thomas’s position in these articles47 raises a difficulty for several reasons. First of all, it is out of harmony with the complementarity of intellect and will suggested by the psychological analogy. In order to mirror the Trinitarian life, the human soul in beatitude should mirror both divine processions through the complementary operation of intellect and will. Secondly, St. Thomas’s position seems hard to reconcile with various biblical texts on the primacy of charity, such as 1 Corinthians 13:13. A third difficulty with St. Thomas’s position is that it seems to contradict other statements that he makes in other contexts, in which he implies that the love of God has a primacy with respect to the understanding of the intellect.48 He affirms the relative superiority (secundum quid) of the act of love over that of knowledge, when the object of love and knowledge is higher than the soul.49 This is because the intellect receives into itself a d. 49, q. 1, a. 1, qa. 2: “But it is not possible that the act of the will itself be the ultimate end of anyone, because since the will’s object is the end, this very act (namely, to will), and any other act of the will, are nothing other than to order some things to an end; hence such an act presupposes another end, and so, if the willing itself may be said to be willed, one must presuppose that something is willed before this” (On Love and Charity, 342). This argument is also used in SCG III, ch. 26, nos. 9–10, and ST I-II, q. 3, a. 4, ad 2. The problem with this argument is that it applies only to love of concupiscence, but not to love of friendship, in which one wills the good for a person. In love of friendship for God, one can will one’s own perfect love for God (giving oneself perfectly to God) as one’s final perfection, not ultimately for its own sake, but as a good for God, who is loved above all. 47 SCG III, ch. 26; ST I-II, q. 3, a. 4; I, q. 26, a. 2, corp. and ad 2; Super Ioannem 17, lec. 1 (no. 2186); Quodlibet 8, q. 9, a. 1; Compendium theologiae I, ch. 107; In IV sent., d. 49, q. 1, a. 1, qa. 2. 48 For this tension in Aquinas’s thought, see Schindler, “Towards a Non-Possessive Concept of Knowledge.” 49 See ST I, q. 82, a. 3: “But relatively and by comparison with something else, we find that the will is sometimes higher than the intellect, from the fact that the object of the will lies in something higher than that in which lies the object of the intellect. . . . For as we have said above (q. 16, a. 1; q. 27, a. 4), the action of the intellect consists in this—that the idea of the thing understood is in the one who understands; while the act of the will consists in this—that the will is inclined to the thing itself as existing in itself. . . . When, therefore, the thing in which there is good is nobler than the soul itself, in which is the idea understood, by comparison with such a thing, the will is higher than the intellect. But when the thing which is good is less noble than the soul, then even in comparison with that thing the intellect is higher than the will. Wherefore the love of God is better than the knowledge of God; but, on the contrary, the knowledge of corporeal things is better than the love thereof.” See also De veritate, q. 22, a. 11: “Thirdly, with respect to divine things, which are superior to the soul. In this way to will is more excellent than to The Word Breathes Forth Love 521 likeness of the thing known, whereas love tends to the beloved as it is in reality outside the soul. The operation of the intellect thus reduces higher objects to its own level, whereas love draws the soul upward toward the level of the beloved. This superiority of love of God with respect to knowledge of him implies that the act of spousal love of God unites the soul more perfectly with God than any knowledge of him could do. To this it is usually objected that the love of God is higher than knowledge of him in this life, but in the beatific vision it would be the reverse.50 However, as Sylvester of Ferrara pointed out, this standard answer does not seem to conform to the mind of St. Thomas, nor to right reason. Even in the beatific vision, God is still higher in himself than as he is contained in the understanding of the blessed, who, although they see God, do not comprehend him.51 Therefore, the operation of love by which we give ourselves to God as he is in himself is still higher than the intellect’s operation of receiving him in the vision.52 Light is shed on this question by an article of St. Thomas (ST I, q. 108, a. 6) evaluating the fittingness of the nine-fold division of the angelic hierarchies given by Pseudo-Dionysius and St. Gregory the Great.53 Dionysius puts the seraphim as the highest of the orders. St. Thomas explains: “The seraphim excel in what is highest of all—to be united to God himself.” This is because the name “seraphim” refers to burning love. It is interesting that they are put higher than the order of “cherubim,” whose name refers understand, as to desire God or to love him is more excellent than to know him. This is because the divine goodness itself exists more perfectly in God himself as he is desired by the will than the participated goodness is in us as known by the intellect” (my translation, modifying that of Robert W. Schmidt in Truth [Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1954], 3:75). See the excellent article by Daniel Shields, “On Ultimate Ends: Aquinas’s Thesis that Loving God Is Better than Knowing Him,” The Thomist 78, no. 4 (2014): 581–607. 50 This position is taken, for example, by Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange in Beatitude: A Commentary on St. Thomas’s Theological Summa, Ia IIae, qq. 1–54 (St. Louis. MO: B. Herder, 1956), 91. 51 See ST I, q. 12, a. 7. 52 See also In III sent., d. 27, q. 1, a. 4: “But if it be asked which of these is worthier simply speaking, it should be said . . . that there are things superior to the soul and things inferior to it. Accordingly, since through willing and loving man is, in a way, drawn into the very things willed and loved, whereas through knowledge, on the contrary, things known are made to be in the knower by way of their likenesses, it follows that with respect to things above the soul, love is nobler and higher than knowledge, but with respect to things below the soul, knowledge is preferable” (On Love and Charity, 140–41). 53 See the discussion of this text by Shields, “On Ultimate Ends,” 591–93. 522 Lawrence Feingold to knowledge of the secret things of God. St. Thomas then goes on to comment on the fittingness of Dionysius’s division. He lays down a favorite principle: “The highest of an inferior order has an affinity with the last of a superior order.” He then says: “Now the first order is that of the divine persons, which terminates in the Holy Spirit, who is Love proceeding, with whom the highest order of the first hierarchy has affinity, denominated as it is from the fire of love.”54 It would seem to follow from this text that the highest operation of the intellectual creature would be the movement of love by which the creature is assimilated to the Holy Spirit who proceeds by way of love. St. Thomas returns to this point in the response to the third objection, which states: “Further, knowledge comes before love, and intellect is higher than will. Therefore the order of ‘Cherubim’ seems to be higher than the ‘Seraphim.’” St. Thomas replies: As explained above (q. 27, a. 3), knowledge takes place accordingly as the thing known is in the knower; but love as the lover is united to the object loved. Now higher things are in a nobler way in themselves than in lower things; whereas lower things are in higher things in a nobler way than they are in themselves. Therefore to know lower things is better than to love them; and to love the higher things, God above all, is better than to know them.55 This text is interesting because it makes it clear that the primacy of love of God with respect to knowledge of God is maintained also in the beatific vision. The primacy of charity is not simply limited to this life of the “wayfarer.” In addition, there are other texts that also seem to indicate that St. Thomas considered the act of beatific charity in heaven to be an essential part of beatitude, complementary to the intellect’s act of receiving the vision. For example, he explicitly says that the “perfection of charity is essential to happiness, as to the love of God.”56 He also states that the love of God is that “whereby principally we attain to our last end,”57 and that “the interior act of charity has the character of an end, since man’s ultimate ST I, q. 108, a. 6. ST I, q. 108, a. 6, ad 3. 56 ST I-II, q. 4, a. 8, ad 3. 57 ST II-II, q. 27, a. 6. 54 55 The Word Breathes Forth Love 523 good consists in his soul cleaving to God, according to Psalm 72:28: ‘It is good for me to adhere to my God.’”58 Furthermore, St. Thomas teaches that charity in heaven is the end to which the perfection of charity in this life is ordered: “Now God intends by this precept [of charity] that man should be entirely united to him, and this will be realized in heaven, when God will be ‘all in all,’ according to 1 Corinthians 15:28. Hence this precept will be observed fully and perfectly in heaven.”59 It would seem, therefore, that there is an unresolved tension in St. Thomas’s treatment of the interaction of the intellect and will in the essence of heavenly beatitude. Proposed Solution I think that there is a simple way to resolve this tension. The distinction mentioned above between love of desire (eros) and love of benevolence or friendship (agape) is crucial in this regard.60 We have seen that this distinction is helpful in clarifying the procession of the Holy Spirit who proceeds as the eternal, infinite, and mutual self-gift of the Father to the Son and vice versa. This is an eternal movement of self-giving agape. Therefore, if the operations of the human soul in final beatitude are to mirror the Trinitarian processions, the movement of the will must be taken according to the love of friendship (agape) that culminates in the gift of self.61 ST II-II, q. 27, a. 6, ad 3. See also II-II, q. 23, a. 6: “Charity attains God himself that it may rest in him, but not that something may accrue to us from him.” 59 ST II-II, q. 44, a. 6. 60 Shields has the merit of emphasizing this distinction to resolve this tension in Aquinas; see “On Ultimate Ends,” 583: “Aquinas distinguishes two interrelated types of love: the love of friendship and the love of desire. Although he states in many places that happiness is a human being’s ultimate end, a close reading of his work shows that he only intends this statement in a restricted sense: happiness— which is a created good, inhering in the human being himself—is the ultimate object of the love of desire (ultimum concupitum). But the love of friendship is more fundamental than the love of desire—we only desire something because we love someone—and the ultimate object of the love of friendship (and thus the ultimum dilectum) is God, not oneself.” 61 The use of the category of self-gift in this regard is suggested by Gaudium et Spes §24, so often cited by John Paul II: “Indeed, the Lord Jesus, when he prayed to the Father, ‘that all may be one . . . as we are one’ ( Jn 17:21–22) opened up vistas closed to human reason, for he implied a certain likeness between the union of the divine persons, and the unity of God’s sons in truth and charity. This likeness reveals that 58 524 Lawrence Feingold In the texts of St. Thomas examined above that argue that the act of the intellect constitutes beatitude, St. Thomas seems to consider only the love of concupiscence, and never explicitly addresses the question of whether spousal love of God (agape) could be an essential element of beatitude, together with the vision of the intellect. Despite the fact that St. Thomas clearly distinguishes the love of concupiscence (eros) from the love of friendship or benevolence (agape) and holds that the latter is primary,62 he seems to have neglected to sufficiently consider love of friendship in his resolution of this particular question. Thus his argument demonstrates only that the act of love of desire, or eros, does not itself constitute beatitude, but leads to it and rejoices in it. His argument, however, does not prove, nor does he hold (as witnessed by the texts given above), that the will’s act of self-giving love (agape) to God does not enter into the essence of beatitude, mirroring the procession of the Holy Spirit in the divine life. This oversight is further marked by the example that he uses of the miser, which involves love of concupiscence rather than friendship; and the same is true of the analogy of local movement. Eros is like the impetus of local movement. It is a love ordered precisely to overcoming the distance between oneself and the object of desire. Love of friendship, however, is not related to local movement in the same way. Through love of friendship, one is already united with the beloved through the mutual interior acts of self-donation, by which each one becomes interiorly for the other. Instead of the example of a miser or local movement, which are not the highest realities that could be used in this analogy, a far better example would be to look at the happiness that men and women seek in marriage, the most total form of love of friendship in the natural order. It seems that the highest happiness found in spousal love consists in a dual union, mutually knowing one another and mutually giving oneself to the other. Who would say that the bliss of marriage is constituted solely by the mutual knowledge that the spouses have of each other? Rather, we would say that it is also constituted by their mutual self-donation. This self-donation includes the gift of mind, heart, and will to the other, whereby each one’s happiness becomes identified with that of the beloved. St. Thomas’s reasoning is clearly correct with regard to the love of eros. The love of eros does not directly unite the lover with the beloved object, man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.” 62 ST I-II, q. 26, a. 4: “That which is loved with the love of friendship is loved simply and for itself; whereas that which is loved with the love of concupiscence, is loved, not simply and for itself, but for something else.” The Word Breathes Forth Love 525 but only moves him toward the beloved when absent, or rejoices when the beloved is already present, for eros desires union with the beloved as a good for the lover. St. Thomas’s principal concern is to counter the idea that delight (consisting in the satisfaction of eros) is the essence of beatitude, and his reasoning is perfectly sound, for it is not the essence but its completion and “consummation,” a resting in the substantial happiness of contemplation, which is loved with our noblest eros.63 Love of friendship, or agape, on the other hand, which involves the gift of self, is not simply a natural inclination for happiness, a movement toward the end, or a delighting in it when it is already present,64 but an act that essentially participates in attaining union with the beloved. The love of friendship with God in heaven is not simply delighting in a union already essentially completed, but is itself, in its perfection, the self-donation of the spirit back to God, which completes the union. Through it, the soul gives itself with the gift of God that it has received in the vision back to God through love. The glorification of God by the creature, and union with him, is not essentially completed with the act of the intellect, but needs to be completed in the act of self-giving love.65 Citing Pseudo-Dionysius,66 St. Thomas speaks of love of friendship as a “unitive power”: “It is the very union or connection or transformation by which the lover is transformed into the beloved and in a way is turned into him.”67 Through love of friendship, “the beloved is contained in the lover, by being impressed on his heart and thus becoming the object of his Another argument given by St. Thomas in SCG III, ch. 26, no. 8, also seems to be valid with regard to love of concupiscence but not love of friendship. He argues that the essence of man’s beatitude must lie in a perfect act of understanding, for understanding is man’s proper operation, whereas love, desire, and delight are not proper to rational creatures, but common also to animals. However, while it is true that we share love of concupiscence (and the corresponding delight in its satisfaction) with the animals, this is not true of love of friendship and the gift of self, which is no less proper to a spiritual being than is the act of understanding. Only a spiritual being with true self-dominion is able to freely give himself to his beloved. 64 In other words, the love of friendship does not correspond to any of the three movements of the will—desire, love, and joy—that St. Thomas considers in Compendium theologiae I, ch. 107, when he compares the process of attaining beatitude to local movement. 65 See ST II-II, q. 180, a. 7, ad 1: “And this is the ultimate perfection of the contemplative life, namely that the divine truth be not only seen but also loved.” 66 On the Divine Names 4. 12 (PG, 3:709). 67 In III sent., d. 27, q. 1, a. 1, ad 2 (On Love and Charity, 123). See also ST I-II, q. 28, a. 1. 63 526 Lawrence Feingold complacency. On the other hand, the lover is contained in the beloved, inasmuch as the lover penetrates, so to speak, into the beloved.”68 Both knowledge and friendship love create union, but in two distinct and complementary ways. Through cognition the beloved object is brought into the knower’s mind; through love of friendship not only is the beloved brought into the lover, but the lover is brought into the beloved, acutely penetrating him.69 The former creates intentional union; the latter creates affective union involving mutual “indwelling.” Cognition brings about the conformity of the intellect of the knower with the known object, whereas love of friendship realizes the conformity of the will of the lover with the will of the beloved, so that there is one will and one love between the two. It would seem therefore that the perfect union with God which is the essence of beatitude is effected through the simultaneous and complementary presence of the perfect operation of the intellect and the will: perfect knowledge of God and perfect self-giving love (agape). This is precisely what the psychological analogy between the Trinitarian processions and our spiritual operations leads us to expect. St. John Paul II confirms this insight in a General Audience of December 16, 1981, in which he speaks of heavenly beatitude not only as the vision of God, but also as including the gift of self of man to God through love. Only in this way does man fully mirror the Trinitarian life: The reciprocal gift of oneself to God—a gift in which man will concentrate and express all the energies of his own personal and at the same time psychosomatic subjectivity—will be the response to God’s gift of himself to man. . . . This concentration of knowledge (“vision”) and love on God himself . . . cannot be anything but full participation in God’s inner life, that is, in Trinitarian Reality itself.70 St. John of the Cross on Our Participation in the Divine Processions in Beatitude ST I-II, q. 28, a. 2, ad 1. See St. Bonaventure, In I sent., d. 1, a. 2, q. un., ad 2: “Whence (love) is like a penetrating acumen, and for this reason it is most fitting for it to unite and as a consequence, to take delight and rest: for this reason (love) is essentially, not dispositively, enjoying” (Opera omnia, 1:37). 70 John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, no. 68 (General Audience, December 16, 1981), §§3–4 (p. 395). 68 69 The Word Breathes Forth Love 527 The divinization of the soul in glory produces within her the perfect image of the Trinity. She receives the Word from the Father in the beatific vision, and, on the basis of that vision, breathes forth Love for the Father and Son in and with the Holy Spirit. Since the Holy Spirit is the inter-Trinitarian Gift,71 it is fitting that the divinization of the soul in glory should enable the soul to make a perfect gift of self back to God, thus being fully likened to the Holy Spirit. St. John Paul II brings this out in Mulieris Dignitatem §7: Being a person means striving towards self-realization (the Council text speaks of self-discovery), which can only be achieved “through a sincere gift of self.” The model for this interpretation of the person is God himself as Trinity, as a communion of persons. To say that man is created in the image and likeness of God means that man is called to exist “for” others, to become a gift. Not surprisingly, the author who perhaps has most acutely grasped the role of self-giving spousal love in beatitude is a great mystic as well as theologian: St. John of the Cross. Michael Waldstein72 has shown that the doctrine of the gift of self, used so profoundly and extensively by St. John Paul II, was found by Karol Wojtyła in his study of St. John of the Cross.73 In his dissertation, “Faith According to St. John of the Cross,” Wojtyła quotes the following passage from Living Flame of Love: Being the shadow of God through this substantial transformation, it [the soul] performs in this measure in God and through God what he through himself does in it. For the will of the two is one will, and thus God’s operation and the soul’s are one. Since God gives himself with a free and gracious will, so too the soul (possessing a will more generous and free the more it is united with God) gives to God, God himself in God; and this is a true and complete gift of the soul to God. It is conscious there that God is indeed its own and that it possesses him by inheritance, with the right of ownership, as his adopted child through the grace of his gift of himself. Having him for its own, it can give him and communicate him to whomever it wishes. Thus it gives him to its Beloved, who is the very God who gave himself to it. By this donation it repays God for all it owes him, See John 4:10. Waldstein, “Introduction,” 24–34. 73 Karol Wojtyła, Faith According to St. John of the Cross (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1981), 228–29. 71 72 528 Lawrence Feingold since it willingly gives as much as it receives from him.74 Perfect spousal love creates a union of wills. This means that the soul is not content with receiving grace and glory from God, but, impelled by love, seeks to imitate God’s giving and thus to return the gift received through self-giving love. But what can the soul give in return? Since the soul has received nothing less than God himself indwelling, she can return God to God by giving herself (as she has been enriched) entirely to God through love. This logic can be extended to the state of heavenly beatitude, and implies that the reception of the beatific vision in the intellect makes possible a gift of self different from and far richer than what is possible for a wayfarer on earth. The gift of self of the blessed back to God includes all that they have received, which includes God himself. Thus the blessed in a sense return God to God through their total oblation. Furthermore, if beatitude is the satisfaction of all upright desire, the soul will not be satisfied until she is able to love God as perfectly as he can be loved by her. The beatific vision alone would not satisfy this desire. The soul must also receive beatific love, by which she can give herself wholly, utterly, and irrevocably to God. In The Spiritual Canticle, St. John of the Cross addresses an objection that a Thomist might make to this idea. Does not St. Thomas teach that essential beatitude lies solely in the act of the intellect in seeing God? How could the soul desire something more? St. John of the Cross gives two reasons: First, just as the ultimate reason for everything is love (which is seated in the will), whose property is to give and not to receive, whereas the property of the intellect (which is the subject of essential glory) lies in receiving and not giving, the soul in the inebriation of love does not put first the glory she will receive from God, but rather the surrender of herself to him through true love without concern for her own profit. Second, the desire to see is included in the desire to love and already presupposed in the preceding stanzas, for it is impossible to Living Flame of Love 3.78, in Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, DC: ICS, 1991), 706 (my emphasis). See also Living Flame of Love 3.80: “This is the soul’s deep satisfaction and happiness: To see that it gives God more than it is worth in itself, the very divine light and divine heat that are given to it. It does this in heaven by means of the light of glory and in this life by means of a highly illumined faith” (707). 74 The Word Breathes Forth Love 529 reach the perfect love of God without the perfect vision of God.75 John of the Cross accepts the Thomistic terminology according to which the beatific vision received by the intellect comprises the essence of beatitude.76 Nevertheless, he shows that beatitude would not be completely satisfying and final if it did not necessarily include, in complementarity with the vision, the act of beatific love whereby the soul gives or “surrenders” herself back to God with God’s own love. In stanza 39,77 St. John of the Cross takes this reflection one step further and connects the act of beatific love with the procession of the Holy Spirit. Since the soul in glory loves God with the same love with which he loves himself, by which the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds, St. John of the Cross concludes that the beatified soul, through its act of perfect charity, participates in some sense in the procession of the Holy Spirit: By his divine breath-like spiration, the Holy Spirit elevates the soul sublimely and informs her and makes her capable of breathing in God the same spiration of love that the Father breathes in the Son and the Son in the Father. This spiration of love is the Holy Spirit himself, who in the Father and the Son breathes out to her in this transformation in order to unite her to himself. There would not be a true and total transformation if the soul were not transformed in the three persons of the Most Holy Trinity in an open and manifest degree. And this kind of spiration of the Holy Spirit in the soul, by which God transforms her into himself, is so sublime, delicate, and deep a delight that a mortal tongue finds it indescribable, nor can the human intellect, as such, in any way grasp it. Even what comes to pass in the communication given in this temporal transformation is unspeakable, for the soul united and transformed in God breathes out in God to God the very divine spiration that God—she being transformed in him—breathes out in himself to her.78 God is not content to enable the soul to receive him perfectly in the vision, conforming the soul to the Son, but enables the soul to perfectly The Spiritual Canticle 38.5 (Collected Works, 620). Spiritual Canticle 38.5 (Collected Works, 620). 77 This text is also quoted by Wojtyła in Faith according to St. John of the Cross, 230. 78 Spiritual Canticle 39.3 (Collected Works, 622–23). 75 76 530 Lawrence Feingold give not only herself, but the uncreated Love back to God, conforming the soul to the Holy Spirit. It would seem that both the receiving (beatific vision) and the self-giving (beatific love) together essentially constitute the essence of supernatural beatitude, mirroring the life of the Trinity. Furthermore, as St. John of the Cross explains, the beauty of this gift of self is that it includes the beloved. When the lover has been enriched by the beloved, then his gift of self back to the beloved involves giving also all that he has received. To make the gift of oneself to God means returning to God the gift of God’s very Self that he has given to us in Christ and the Holy Spirit. The Psychological Analogy Illuminates the Structure of the Eucharist The psychological analogy for the Trinity also illuminates the structure of the Eucharist with its profoundly nuptial character that anticipates heavenly beatitude. In the Eucharist, there is a twofold movement: the Word incarnate comes to us, and we offer him and ourselves back to the Father in sacrifice. Christ becoming present on the altar and being received in Communion mirrors the first procession of the Word. The sacrificial offering of Christ to the Father in the Holy Spirit together with the gift that the faithful make of themselves mirrors the second procession through love. As Lumen gentium teaches: “Taking part in the Eucharistic sacrifice, which is the source and summit of the whole Christian life, they offer the Divine Victim to God, and offer themselves along with it.”79 The phrase “source and summit” also reflects these two movements. In Communion we receive the source of the Church’s life, the Word incarnate, but in the movement of sacrifice the Church reaches the summit of her life in offering herself, with her Head, to the Father. Too often the faithful think of the Eucharist, like heaven, only in terms of receiving, but the Eucharist, the Christian Sacrifice,80 is no less about self-offering.81 Vatican II, Lumen Gentium, §11. See also Vatican II, Sacrosanctum Concilium, §48: “Offering the immaculate victim, not only through the hands of the priest but also together with him, they should learn to offer themselves”; Pius XII, Mediator Dei, §98: “In order that the oblation by which the faithful offer the divine Victim in this sacrifice to the heavenly Father may have its full effect, it is necessary that the people add something else, namely, the offering of themselves as a victim.” 80 See John Paul II, Dominicae Cenae (1980), §9: “The Eucharist is above all else a sacrifice.” 81 See the Third Eucharistic Prayer: “Grant that we, who are nourished by the Body and Blood of your Son and filled with his Holy Spirit, may become one body, one spirit in Christ. May he make of us an eternal offering to you” (The Roman Missal, 3rd typ. ed. [Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2011], 653). 79 The Word Breathes Forth Love 531 The Eucharist thus mirrors the circular movement of the Trinitarian processions. Christ gives himself to us so that, through the Spirit, we can return the Son to the Father together with the gift of ourselves. Trinitarian Exemplarity in Creation In summary, the psychological analogy is helpful not only for illuminating the Trinity, but also for seeing the Trinity as the pattern or archetype for creation and the life of heaven. In his Introduction to Christianity, Joseph Ratzinger has a profound reflection on how the triune God is the exemplar not only of unity, but also of multiplicity and individuality.82 We can add that the psychological analogy helps us to see the triune God, with its two eternal processions according to intellect and will, as the exemplar especially of all created complementarity, starting with that of intellect and will, but also extending to other fundamental complementary pairs, such as that of male and female, paternity and maternity, analysis and synthesis, receiving and giving, communion and sacrifice, bridegroom and bride, Christ and the Church.83 Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 178–79: “Although to us, the nondivine, it [God] is one and single, the one and only divine as opposed to all that is not divine; nevertheless in itself it is truly fullness and plurality, so that creaturely unity and plurality are both in the same degree a likeness and a share of the divine. Not only unity is divine; plurality, too, is something primordial and has its inner ground in God himself. . . . This has a further important consequence. To him who believes in God as tri-une, the highest unity is not the unity of inflexible monotony. The model of unity or oneness toward which one should strive is consequently not the indivisibility of the atom, the smallest unity, which cannot be divided up any further; the authentic acme of unity is the unity created by love. The multi-unity that grows in love is a more radical, truer unity than the unity of the ‘atom.’” See also Emery, Trinity in Aquinas, 31: “The Trinitarian distinction is, for Aquinas, the cause not only of the distinction of creation (distinction between God and the world), but also of the plurality of creatures.” See In I sent., d. 26, q. 2, a. 2, ad 2. 83 It can be seen from this that the complementarity of marriage is a uniquely important icon of the Trinity, as of the Eucharist and the Church. See Pope Francis, General Audience of April 2, 2014: “The image of God is the married couple: the man and the woman; not only the man, not only the woman, but both of them together. This is the image of God: love, God’s covenant with us is represented in that covenant between man and woman. And this is very beautiful! We are created in order to love, as a reflection of God and his love. And in the marital union man and woman fulfil this vocation through their mutual reciprocity and their full and definitive communion of life. When a man and woman celebrate the Sacrament of Matrimony God as it were ‘is mirrored’ in them; he impresses in them his own features and the indelible character of his love. Marriage is the icon of God’s love 82 532 Lawrence Feingold Karl Rahner has complained that the Scholastic treatise on the Trinity, built on the psychological analogy, tends to stand in majestic isolation from the rest of theology and from human experience.84 A right understanding of the psychological analogy, however, far from isolating the Trinity, enables it to be seen for what it is, the exemplar of all of creation, of the work of salvation, and of the life of the Church on earth and in heaven. N&V for us. Indeed, God is communion too.” See also: Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans. John Betz and David Bentley Hart (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 610–11; Marc Cardinal Ouellet, Divine Likeness: Toward a Trinitarian Anthropology of the Family, trans. Philip Milligan and Linda M. Cicone (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006); Donald J. Keefe, S.J., Covenantal Theology: The Eucharistic Order of History (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1996), 379–99. 84 See Karl Rahner, The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Crossroad, 1999), 14: “Thus the treatise on the Trinity occupies a rather isolated position in the total dogmatic system. To put it crassly, and not without exaggeration, when the treatise is concluded, its subject is never brought up again. Its function in the whole dogmatic construction is not clearly perceived. It is as though this mystery has been revealed for its own sake . . . locked up within itself. We make statements about it, but as a reality it has nothing to do with us at all. Average theology cannot reject all these assertions as exaggerations.” Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2019): 533–543 533 A Deeper Unity: Response to Feingold on the Psychological Analogy for the Trinity D. C. Schindler Pontifical John Paul II Institute Washington, DC Professor Feingold has provided a much-needed service in retrieving a theme of fundamental significance in Aquinas, namely, the complementarity of intellect and will, and he reinforces Aquinas’s position by retrieving yet another theme, the psychological analogy, as a model for interpreting the Trinity. This analogy, which Professor Feingold says has been regrettably marginalized in the theology of the last century, then leads him to a rather novel position regarding man’s final beatific condition—novel, that is, among Thomists. While, somewhat notoriously, Aquinas explicitly affirms that man’s final end consists essentially of an act of intellect—which is why this end is described as a “beatific vision”—Feingold presents some marvelous, lesser-known texts from Aquinas to make a case that charity ought to be understood as a co-essential part of beatitude. I will admit that he has opened my eyes on this particular point, and I am grateful to him for it. But going distinctly beyond the letter of Aquinas (and it will be worth considering whether and it what sense he goes beyond the spirit of Aquinas), Feingold proposes that the act of intellect, by which man receives a direct intuition of the divine essence, remains in itself unsatisfying, and demands of itself the further act by which man gives himself to God in return (and indeed by doing so gives God back to God in imitation of the procession of the Holy Spirit). This self-giving he identifies as the essential act of will, and the essence of love. While I am sympathetic with Professor Feingold’s concern to uphold a deep and ultimately abiding reciprocity between intellect and will, and to incorporate love more deeply than is 534 D.C. Schindler usually done into beatitude, I have some concerns about how he understands the reciprocity and how he understands the nature of love, which I hope at least to sketch out in general terms in this brief response. As Professor Feingold’s paper makes clear, the so-called psychological analogy is not “psychological” in the modern sense of the term, meaning more or less “what goes on inside my head.” Instead, it is psychological in the classical sense, concerning the logos of the human psyche, or soul, particularly in the operation of its specific powers, intellect and will. These powers do not operate simply “inside my head”; instead, it is by these powers that the soul exceeds its own borders, so to speak, and encounters the reality of things outside of itself. The paradigm of such an encounter with an “other,” of course, is the soul’s knowing and loving, not just another thing in the world, but another person (God and other human beings). There is thus a natural opening of the “psychological” analogy into the so-called interpersonal analogy, with which the psychological analogy is too often problematically contrasted. I wish to suggest that a reciprocity between these two analogies is essential for a proper understanding of either one, which is to say that our interpretation of each will go astray in significant ways if we simply oppose either one to the other. On this score, it is interesting to note that, although he refers constantly to the psychological analogy, as a matter of fact Professor Feingold spends a good deal of time discussing the interpersonal relation between the lover and the beloved, and in this respect transcending the psychological analogy in just the way I am suggesting is necessary for a proper understanding of it. Do we find a similar movement beyond the psychological analogy alone in Aquinas? It seems to me that there is a certain ambiguity here, which can become problematic in a modern context in which the nominalistic fragmentation of reality has become the very air we breathe. As Feingold has explained so clearly, the reason Aquinas privileges the psychological analogy is that the soul in its spiritual dimension, that is, in its intellectual and volitional powers, represents the summit of created things.1 But when Aquinas seeks to characterize what makes it supreme, he highlights a single aspect: the spiritual soul is capable of a kind of action that is unique in creation, namely, perfectly immanent action, which is to say that, even in their relation to an other, the acts of intellect and will remain within the soul, they return to themselves in a perfect reflexivity. It is precisely this dimension that Feingold himself highlights. This immanence is, of As Aquinas puts it, “person”—the individual substance capable of spiritual acts of knowing and loving—“signifies what is most perfect in all nature,” Summa theologiae [ST] I, q. 29, a. 3. 1 A Deeper Unity: A Response to Feingold 535 course, essential to the analogy since it is what enables us to preserve the simplicity of God as we interpret the Trinitarian persons, and avoid the heresies of Arianism and Sabellianism. But it seems to me that what is truly unique about the spiritual powers is not only the perfect immanence of their operation, but also their perfect transcendence, a transcendence that perfectly coincides with their immanence.2 Through our senses, we reach as it were only the surfaces of things; the sensitive power allows us to perceive the essence of a being only in and through its sensible accidents, rather than directly in itself. But in the intellectual operation we are able to know the inner reality of a being (intus-legere), to arrive beyond the necessary and good limit of our individual subjectivity, to grasp things as they are in themselves, and in our will we are able to affirm them as such: “It is good that you exist!”3 The simultaneity of transcendence and immanence in the spiritual acts may not have been so necessary to emphasize in the Middle Ages, but it seems to me crucial in our contemporary setting, in which we are beset by cultural patterns of pure extroversion and pure introversion, in which the response to the modern predicament of being trapped in our heads is answered only by the postmodern obliteration of subjectivity simply, an obliteration that the modern subject nevertheless continues somehow to survive like one of the living dead. But recognizing the simultaneity of transcendence and immanence is also crucial, I suggest, for a proper understanding of the Trinity. The necessity for the transcendent aspect of the simultaneity becomes On this point, see De veritate, q. 2, a. 2, ad 2: “But subsistent forms reach out to other things, perfecting them and influencing them—in such a way, however, that they still retain their immanence and self-possession [sed formae in se subsistentes ita ad res alias effunduntur, eas perficiendo, vel eis influendo, quod in seipsis per se manent]” (emphasis mine). Note that we are drawing a distinction between the transcendence of a spiritual operation and “transitive” action, such as Feingold describes, which entails motion and physical alteration. (Aquinas identifies a kind of transition from potency to act that does not entail an alteration of the sort Feingold means. This is the sort of potency Aquinas ascribes to the intellect: ST I, q. 79, a. 2.) Nevertheless, it is worth considering how the perfection of transcendence, thus conceived, would seem to allow room for the relative imperfections of transitivity: some such thing would seem necessary to affirm God’s actions ad extra—e.g., creation and redemption (the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection)—which are at least in some respect transitive, without importing some sort of change in God. 3 According to Josef Pieper, this declaration is the essence of love and supreme act of will (Faith—Hope—Love, trans. Richard and Clara Winston [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997], 164). 2 536 D.C. Schindler most directly evident in the procession of the Spirit and the nature of the will, as we will see in a moment, but it is already apparent in the procession of the Son, the Logos or Word, and the corresponding act of intellection. To be sure, Aquinas points again and again to Aristotle’s “circle of psychic acts” to show that the act of intellect terminates in the soul. This act is unquestionably the pre-eminent immanent act. But it would be improper to think of this act as merely immanent for several reasons: First, going beyond Aristotle in an important respect, Aquinas specifies, with Augustine, that the act of intellect terminates not simply in the intellectual power as such, but in the word that proceeds. This procession remains in the intellect, at least in one respect, but the very word “procession” suggests a movement outward. This movement stands out especially when we recognize that the word is, as Aquinas frequently says citing Augustine, notitia cum amore, explaining that the other-directed movement of love “belongs to the notion of word.”4 Moreover, as Feingold himself observes, the word, in the human soul, is not itself the object of knowledge, but is instead that in and through which the real thing is known. Knowledge of things as they actually exist occurs properly in the act of judgment, an act that necessarily involves the free act of the will, and by which the intellect transcends in some respect even the verbum mentis that remains in it. But is this need to transcend not precisely what marks the difference between the human soul and the Trinity, since in the latter the Word itself is not a mere sign but the subsistent object of knowledge? Yes and no. It is important to recognize that what distinguishes the Trinitarian procession from human knowing is not that it is an immanent act rather than a transcendent one, but that it is a more perfect simultaneity of both immanence and transcendence. This point becomes evident in the famous text of Summa contra gentiles IV, ch. 11, in which Aquinas makes an argument for the divine procession of the Logos by means of a series of analogies to various processions in the created world, passing from the generative reproduction of plants all the way up to the spiritual act of intellection. Aquinas intends to show here the increasing immanence of the acts of procession as we proceed up the chain of being, so to speak. But, as Michael Higgins has pointed out to me, a funny thing happens on the way to his conclusion: When Aquinas reaches the Trinity, he re-introduces biological generation to illuminate the full mystery of the procession of the Word, which is See De veritate, q. 4, a. 3, ad 3: “Love belongs to the notion of word.” The precise text from Augustine (De Trinitate 10.10) runs thus: “Verbum est igitur quod nunc discernere ac insinuare volumus, cum amore notitia.” 4 A Deeper Unity: A Response to Feingold 537 indeed also the generation of the Son.5 By doing so, he rather ironically returns to what he had initially posited as the most extrinsic form of procession to illuminate what is the perfection of an immanent act. Feingold claims that we cannot use the analogy of biological generation to understand the procession of the Son without falling into heresy. This is true only if we absolutize the “interpersonal” dimension that generation implies in a one-sided way. It is also the case that we will fall into heresy if we fail to appeal to biological generation and the “otherness” it implies.6 Now, let us return to the will and the Holy Spirit, who bears the names “Love” and “Gift.” 7 Because of the brevity of our time, I will not make a detailed case for the transcendence of the act of the will even in its immanence, which I presume is much more obvious. As I pointed out before, Feingold himself discusses the “immanent effect” of love only in relation to friendship, the interpersonal relationship between the lover and beloved. Aquinas could not be clearer that the will’s operation terminates in what is other than itself in a decisive way, that it represents the outward movement of the circle of the acts of the soul. In this, he agrees with Aristotle.8 It is interesting to note that this self-transcending movement is precisely why Aristotle, who has his own sort of “psychological analogy,” ascribes an intellect to God (though, revealingly, without a procession of a word), but does not ascribe a will to God in himself. Aristotle, after all, is all about immanent activity. Aquinas, by contrast, affirms a will; he recognizes God as love in himself (and not a mere supreme object of love), and this is because the perfect unity he sees in God is a tri-unity.9 This makes clear that the immanence of the psychological analogy, taken simply by itself, See especially Summa contra gentiles [SCG] IV, ch. 11, no 18. Michael Higgins has completed a dissertation on Aquinas’s interpretation of the Trinity: “Giving Perfections, Receiving Perfections: The Essential Divine Attributes in Aquinas’s Trinitarian Theology” (PhD diss., The John Paul II Institute, 2017). 6 Note that the aspect of biological generation is one of the reasons Aquinas offers to support the claim that man is more properly the imago dei than the angels are (even if he indicates man is more imago dei than angels only in accidental, not essential, respects: ST I, q. 93, a. 3). 7 ST I, qq. 37 and 38. 8 More or less: The extent to which Aristotle would recognize something like a “will” in Aquinas’s sense remains an open question. 9 One of the most fascinating texts produced in ancient, non-Christian philosophy is Plotinus’s treatise on will and freedom in God, Ennead 6.8, which presents a counter-example to the point I have made. It would be an interesting question how far Plotinus could sustain the perspective he presents outside of Christian revelation (and it has remained a regular question how far he himself may have been influenced by Christianity in his own philosophizing). 5 538 D.C. Schindler is both indispensable and profoundly inadequate as an analogia trinitatis. There seems to be an ambiguity in Aquinas on just this point, which an emphasis on the interpersonal analogy helps to clarify. Without it, there will be a tendency to make self-love the “greatest love of all,” as Whitney Houston proclaimed in the self-obsessed eighties. This is a tendency we discover, not only in Aristotle (for whom self-love is the source and model of all love), but also in Aquinas.10 Second, the decision to remain with the psychological analogy alone will lead one to look for the final perfection of love in its immanent effect, which entails a significant difficulty. In a text cited by Feingold, Aquinas seems to do just this: “The will is made actual, not by any similitude of the object willed within it, but by its having a certain inclination to the thing willed.”11 To affirm just this is to terminate the operation in its very movement, which is to subordinate actuality in an ultimate way to potency. This is no doubt quite high on the Thomistic list of sins of the intellect. These problems can be avoided, I suggest, by integrating the psychological and interpersonal analogies, which allows us to affirm the simultaneity, and indeed the interdependence, of immanence and transcendence, rather than attempting to affirm one aspect precisely by downplaying the significance of the other. Professor Feingold helpfully takes a step in the direction of the interpersonal analogy, as we have pointed out, drawing not only on Aquinas but even more decisively on John of the Cross, Gaudium See, for example, ST I, q. 27, a. 3. The most distressing text on this score is no doubt the response to Richard of St. Victor, in which Aquinas affirms that only imperfect beings need to share, or in other words that self-communication does not belong essentially to perfection: “Likewise, when it is said that joyous possession of good requires partnership, this holds in the case of one not having perfect goodness: hence it needs to share some other’s good, in order to have the goodness of complete happiness” (ST I, q. 32, a. 1, ad 2). Pieper seeks (Love, 233–45) to justify this aspect in Aquinas (as does Pierre Rousselot, who argues that the absolutizing of unity, understood precisely as spiritual unity, does not exclude the difference of personal relations; see The Problem of Love in the Middle Ages [Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2001]), but it is one thing to say that self-love is an essential component of all love, which no sane person ought to deny (though there are to be sure quite a few in the history of thought, especially post-Reformation and into our day, that cheerfully abandon their reason on this point); it is an altogether different thing to say that self-love is the “source and summit” of love. 11 ST I, q. 27, a. 4. 10 A Deeper Unity: A Response to Feingold 539 et Spes, and John Paul II.12 But there are a number of points to be made about the particular way he makes this step. Feingold suggests that Aquinas’s argument against love as strictly essential to beatitude is valid with respect to the imperfect love of eros, but does not exclude the perfect love of agape, which is friendship. Leaving aside for a moment the eros–agape distinction drawn here, I wish to affirm in a fundamental way Feingold’s observation that friendship is perfect because it entails a real unity of wills. On the other hand, however, it seems to me a more careful argument on this point would be required to justify this reading, one that would take into account the simultaneity of transcendence and immanence I have been insisting on. To see this point, we need only ask a simple question: Where does the principal locus of the unity of lovers lie in the order of the will? One would have to say it lies principally outside of the soul, following the logic of the will’s operation, which is appetitive (to say this is not to exclude its immanence). But one can say this only if one recognizes the real transcendence of the psychic acts. If one fails to see this, one will tend—as Aquinas appears to, and Feingold with him—to reduce this unity to a mere “affective union,” which is deeply inadequate. A coincidence of interior inclinations is, to be sure, the internal fruit of unity, but it is not the unity itself, nor can it be the principle of unity. Some more basic unity has to be posited as the actuality that makes the inclination possible. Aquinas’s argument against love as part of the essence of happiness would apply equally to what Professor Feingold calls agape to the extent that this love reduces to an affective unity. If Feingold wishes to develop Aquinas in the direction of a deeper integration of love into beatitude, he would have to develop an argument for something like the substantial unity, in itself, of a bond, beyond a mere “unity of affections.”13 But let us look more directly at Professor Feingold’s account of love as pure self-gift. Because Feingold absolutizes the immanence of the intellectual act in his interpretation of Aquinas, it is not a surprise that he finds it unsatisfying with respect to its ultimate instance, and so needs to supplement it with an act of love, which strikes me as equally unsatisfying in Feingold explicitly follows the line of argument presented by Michael Waldstein, who has been fundamentally critiqued on his interpretation of John Paul II by David L. Schindler in “Being, Gift, Self-Gift: Reply to Waldstein on Relationality and John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, Part 1,” Communio 42 (Summer 2015): 221–51, and “Being, Gift, Self-Gift, Part 2,” Communio 43 (Fall 2016): 409–83. 13 More specifically, one would have to deepen the meaning of esse commune, and determine the extent to which this presents a kind of actuality that is neither a mere coincidence of two actualities (a moral union) nor a “real” thing in itself (unity of substance). 12 540 D.C. Schindler precisely the opposite way: He describes this love as a purely spontaneous act in the sense that it is a giving rather than a receiving, a transcendence that does not include in itself a receptive immanence. There is time in the present context just to enumerate what seem to me to be the shortcomings in Feingold’s characterization of love, leaving a more detailed explication, qualification, and argument for some other context (perhaps starting with the question period?). First, Feingold’s contrast between eros and agape is deeply problematic, both with respect to Aquinas and with respect to right reason and basic human experience. Desire and goodwill or friendship are not two separate loves, but, as Aquinas makes clear, they are inseparable aspects of every love, and every act of love. Aquinas’s main Christian sources on love are Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, and Dionysius the Areopagite, all of whom quite emphatically deny any significant difference between eros and agape. (Indeed, the very text that Feingold cites from Aquinas to explicate what he means by agape [love as vis unitiva] is from Dionysius, who is arguing why eros is an even more divine word for love than agape.) Aquinas himself does not use the word caritas, that is, agape, to describe the procession of the Holy Spirit, who is Supreme Love in person, but is content with amor, the Latin equivalent (more or less) for eros.14 As for human experience, we all recognize, with a little reflection, how hard it is to separate giving and receiving, generosity and desire. It seems to me that a love without desire is able to give everything but itself. (Much, much more could be said on this point, if we had more time.15) Feingold’s separation is more akin to modern altruism than to love in the classical Christian tradition. This leads to the second point: The isolation of agape from eros inclines one to reduce love to a deliberate act of will, or in other words to characterize the act of will as fundamentally spontaneous. This conception of will is to be found more obviously in Scotus (and indeed in John Locke) than in Aquinas. Aquinas distinguishes the more spontaneous aspect of the will, the liberum arbitrium, which is its causa sui aspect, from voluntas or will proper, which, as intellectual appetite, is precisely defined by desire for the universal good, and embeds the former in the latter. This means that the will is always more fundamentally a receptive being moved by another than it is a moving of itself, which is to say the will is more fundamentally It is worth noting that the classic book arguing for a radical separation of eros and agape (Anders Nygren’s Agape and Eros [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982]) presents Aquinas as having definitively synthesized the two. 15 For a more ample presentation of this point, see my article “The Redemption of Eros: On Benedict XVI’s First Encyclical,” Communio 33 (Fall 2006): 374–98. 14 A Deeper Unity: A Response to Feingold 541 an attraction than it is a self-giving. Or to put it more adequately: The most basic form of its self-giving is its being attracted by and to the other. Finally, this characterization as “pure” self-giving neglects a dimension of love that is of decisive importance for Aquinas: Strictly speaking, love is not an act of the will in the subjective sense of the genitive.16 It is better understood as a kind of act on the will; it is the introduction into the appetite of a form that then enables any and every particular act of appetite and therefore of the will in all of its spontaneity.17 This is what Aquinas means by explaining the complacentia that represents the essence of love as a co-aptatio, the beloved’s acting on the lover’s appetite so as to attune the appetite to itself (and itself to the lover). This prior presence of the disposition, which is an actuality that makes the will’s potency possible, is what allows all the subject’s appetitive acts, including those of the intellectual appetite or will, to conform to the beloved. The particular acts of will by which we give and receive goods, and ultimately the good of our selves, to and from the other, are not identical with love, but can be called acts of love insofar as they proceed from love (ex amore).18 The will acts by virtue of a love that To be sure, Aquinas states that love is the “first movement of the will” (ST I, q. 20, a. 1), but it becomes clear that he means this in the objective sense of the genitive, insofar as this movement is love’s disposing the will to its operation. It bears remarking that Aquinas’s discussion of love occurs, not in his treatment of the will, but in his treatise on the passions. Love is characterized as the “first of the passions” (ST I-II, q. 26), and it is as such that it represents the principle of every act will. This means that every “spontaneous and self-giving” act of will is founded on, and so borne by, a prior receptivity. 17 In his classic text on love in Aquinas, “Autour de la solution thomiste du problème de l’amour,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 6 (1931): 174–274, H.-D. Simonin points out what he takes to be an evolution in Aquinas’s thought: while Aquinas originally emphasized the reception of the form of the beloved in love, he came to emphasize the movement toward the beloved, and so brought out more decisively the “dynamic” aspect of love. While this helps to underscore the essentially self-transcending, and so spontaneous, aspect of the will, and thus clarify its distinction from the receptivity of the intelligence (on this point, see Fr. Michael Sherwin, By Knowledge and by Love: Charity and Knowledge in the Moral Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas [Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011]), this evolution surrenders what I am proposing is a crucially important dimension of love, namely, its fundamentally receptive character. One can bring out the spontaneity of the will, and yet retain the receptivity of love, I will suggest below, by connecting love principally with beauty, rather than with the good that is the proper object of the will. This connection allows love to represent a unity of apprehensive receptivity and appetitive transcendence. 18 Aquinas says that “Every agent, whatever it be, does every action from love of some kind [ex aliquo amore]” (ST I-II, q. 28, a. 6). 16 542 D.C. Schindler precedes its active operation in every single case. This is why Aquinas presents love in the Summa, not in his discussion of the will and its acts, but in his discussion of the passions of the soul. Love is not most essentially an act of the will, but a passio, a reception of the form of the beloved. To gather all of the foregoing up: Professor Feingold seeks to present a complementarity between intellect and will in light of the Trinity (and vice versa). But I want to raise a respectful question whether he manages to do justice to the circumincession of the persons. It seems to me he tends to reduce the Trinitarian taxis to a mere sequential order of discrete moments, and thus does the same with respect to the relation between the soul’s powers: first the Father alone, then the Son, and then the Spirit. Similarly, first the intellect alone, then the will, the intellect achieving itself in pure immanence and the will representing a purely transcendent supplement. Without in the least compromising the basic order in each case, I wish to suggest nevertheless that a genuine complementarity requires not just an addition of one movement to another, or simply an insistence on both; instead, there must be a mutual indwelling, a reciprocal inherence, a recognition that each movement includes the movement of the other in itself, so that it does not complete its own operation without also undergoing analogously the movement of the other: The intellect does not terminate in the soul without transcending itself in the procession of the word and in its actual knowledge of the real thing in judgment; the will does not move appetitively, and self-givingly, to the other except inside of its desirous reception of the other. Real complementarity means each analogously contains the other according to its own specificity. If I may make a final observation, which perhaps will open up a whole new array of questions: I am increasingly convinced—and reflecting on Professor Feingold’s essay the past month has reinforced this conviction— that one of the most fruitful ways forward on all of the issues Feingold has recalled to our attention lies in a recovery of the significance of beauty— specifically, in a retrieval of the ancient view of beauty as the proper correlate of love, more basically than the good, which is the proper object of the will.19 Many commentators on Aquinas have noted the role beauty could play precisely in sealing, as it were, the complementarity of intellect and will. It seems to me that an affirmation of beauty as a transcendent property with its own integrity, its perfection in itself in distinction from the perfections of truth and goodness, and an association of beauty with For a more detailed argument on this point, see my article, “Love and Beauty, the ‘Forgotten Transcendental,’ in Thomas Aquinas,” Communio 44, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 334–56. 19 A Deeper Unity: A Response to Feingold 543 love would allow us to liberate the deliberate self-transcending activity that belongs specifically to the will without falling into modern altruism, or in other words while not in the least compromising the essentially receptive character of love, and at the same time to enrich in profound ways our understanding of understanding. What would the introduction of beauty imply for our conception of beatitude? Would it permit us to reconceive our knowing of the divine essence as a contemplation that includes the self-transcending openness of wonder as part of its perfection,20 and the act of will as both desirous reception of God and gift of self (and of God) back to God (and indeed both ultimately as one and the same)? Would it perhaps also open a way to integrate the gazing on the human face of Christ, the grateful and astonished touching of the wounds that remain in his resurrected body, with all of the sensibility and corporeality this implies, a dimension that is notoriously absent from Aquinas’s conception of visio beatifica as immediate intuition of the divine essence? And—to conclude with a huge question— what would the introduction of beauty imply for our understanding of the Trinitarian processions? Rather than trying to give any facile responses to these questions, I want to end by leaving them open, offering them perhaps as little “doggie bags” to bring home from the extravagant intellectual feast N&V we have all had the privilege to enjoy at this colloquium. As Aquinas puts it in SCG III, ch. 62, “the divine substance is always viewed with wonder by any created intellect, since no created intellect comprehends it.” 20 Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2019): 545–565 545 Action, Supposit, and Subject: Interpreting Actiones Sunt Suppositorum Brian T. Carl Dominican House of Studies Washington, DC The claim that “actions are of supposits” appears numerous times, in this and other formulations, in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas.1 Interpreters of Aquinas cite this thesis in discussions of Aquinas’s cognitive theory, his account of personal identity (including in the recent dispute between survivalism and corruptionism), and his Christology.2 Alain de Libera, in his work I offer my gratitude to Kendall Fisher and Francis Feingold for helpful remarks on a draft of this paper. Special thanks are due to Therese Scarpelli Cory for suggesting numerous sources and for remarks on an early draft. My thanks also to Daniel De Haan, Michael Gorman, Thomas Joseph White, O.P., and Chris Hauser for helpful suggestions and criticisms in conversation. Latin texts of Aquinas are cited according to the Opera omnia, iussu impensaque Leonis XIII P.M. edita [Leon.] (Rome: Leonine Commission, 1882–), where available, with the following abbreviations: Summa theologiae [ST], Quaestiones de quolibet [Quodl.], Compendium theologiae, Quaestiones disputatae de spiritualibus creaturis, Quaestiones disputatae de anima [QDA], Sentencia libri de anima [In de anima], De unitate intellectus. In addition, I use: Scriptum super libros sententiarum magistri Petri Lombardi [In sent.], vols. 1–4, ed. P. Mandonnet [Mand.] and M. F. Moos [Moos] (Paris: Lethielleux, 1929–1947); Summa contra Gentiles [SCG], Leonine Manual Edition [Leon. Man.] (Rome: Leonine Commission, 1934); Quaestiones disputatae de virtutibus [De virtutibus], in Quaestiones disputatae, vol. 2, ed. E. Odetto (Rome: Marietti, 1965); and Quaestio disputata de unione Verbi incarnati [De unione Verbi], ed. W. Senner, B. Bartocci, and K. Obenauer (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2011). All translations from the Latin are my own. 2 For some recent appeals to this principle in these contexts, see e.g.: Daniel D. De Haan, “Perception and the Vis Cogitativa: A Thomistic Analysis of Aspectual, Actional, and Affectional Percepts,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 88, no. 3 (2014): 411; Therese Scarpelli Cory, Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge 1 546 Brian T. Carl tracing the historical development of the modern subject, has proposed that Aquinas’s use of this thesis helps to pave the way for the emergence of the “subject-agent,” the self that is the subject of all cognitive activity.3 There is a tendency in the recent literature that cites this thesis to take its meaning for granted: recent readers of Aquinas such as Carlos Bazán, Jean-Baptiste Brenet, and Corey Barnes all take this thesis to mean that the supposit—the individual existent, the primary substance, or the person (where applicable)—is the subject of actions.4 De Libera himself offers “actions belong to subjects” as a translation of actiones sunt suppositorum, and he calls this thesis the “subjective principle of action.”5 There is a uniform tendency, in recent literature on Aquinas, to transition quickly from the term “supposit” (or “person”) to the term “subject,” without fanfare.6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 105; Mark K. Spencer, “The Personhood of the Separated Soul,” Nova et Vetera (English) 12, no. 3 (2014): 897; Richard Cross, “Accidents, Substantial Forms, and Causal Powers in the Late Thirteenth Century: Some Reflections on the Axiom ‘actiones sunt suppositorum,’” in Compléments de substance: études sur les propriétés accidentelles offertes à Alain de Libera, ed. C. Erismann and A. Schniewind (Paris: Vrin, 2008), 133–46; Michael Gorman, Aquinas on the Metaphysics of the Hypostatic Union (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2017), 19, 42, 135. 3 See: Alain de Libera, “Les actions appartiennent aux sujets: Petite archéologie d’un principe leibnizien,” in Ad ingenii acuitionem: Studies in Honor of Alfonso Maierù, ed. Stefano Caroti et al. (Louvain-La-Neuve, BE: Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Etudes Médiévales, 2007), 199–219, esp. 210–12; de Libera, “When Did the Modern Subject Emerge?” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 82, no. 2 (2008): 181–220; de Libera, Archéologie du sujet I: Naissance du sujet (Paris: Vrin, 2007), esp. 51–59, 303–11. 4 B. Carlos Bazán, “The Doctrine of the Creation of the Soul in Aquinas,” in Philosophy and Theology in the Long Middle Ages: A Tribute to Stephen F. Brown, ed. Kent Emery Jr., Russell L. Friedman, and Andreas Speer (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 533–34; Jean-Baptiste Brenet, “‘. . . set hominem anima’: Thomas d’Aquin et la pensée humaine comme acte du composé,” Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph 59 (2006): 91–94; Brenet, “Thomas d’Aquin pense-t-il? Retours sur hic homo intelligit,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 93 (2009): 240; Corey L. Barnes, “Aristotle in the Summa Theologiae’s Christology,” in Aristotle in Aquinas’s Theology, ed. Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 192–95. 5 De Libera, “When Did the Modern Subject Emerge?” 181, 211; de Libera, “Les actions appartiennent aux sujets,” 207; de Libera, Archéologie du sujet I, 51. 6 There is some precedent for this in Aquinas’s own practice. See e.g. ST I, q. 29, a. 2, in which Aquinas distinguishes the meaning of suppositum and begins by appearing to imply its equivalence with subiectum: “Alio modo dicitur substantia subiectum vel suppositum quod subsistit in genere substantiae” (“In another way, a subject or a supposit that subsists in the genus of substance is called a substance”). Action, Supposit, and Subject 547 According to its typical meaning in Aquinas’s usage, the term “subject” (subiectum) picks out something that stands, in relation to that of which it is the subject, as potency to act.7 In this sense, a subject is something that is actualized, as by a formal principle. Given this, if we interpret “action is of the supposit” to mean that “the supposit is the subject of action,” without fanfare, we can wander into interpretive difficulties. Aquinas holds that human intellectual activity is an operation that occurs through the soul itself rather than through any part of the living body. Although the operations of sensation and of vegetative life occur in and through bodily organs—parts of the living composite of body and soul—Aquinas insists that the intellectual power and its operation are in the soul alone “as in their subject.”8 This might seem to contradict any claim that the human person, who is the composite of soul and body, is the subject of intellectual activity as an action. Recent interpreters of Aquinas reach seemingly contradictory conclusions about whether the human soul or the human person should be characterized as the subject of intellectual activity.9 Cf. De unione Verbi, a. 5, in which Aquinas speaks of both the “acting supposit” (in obj. 3) and the “acting subject” (in the responsio). The purpose of this study is to clarify in what sense an acting supposit is a subject, as Aquinas uses the term “subject.” 7 Quaestiones disputatae de spiritualibus creaturis , a. 1, ad 1: “Ad primum ergo dicendum, quod ratio formae opponitur rationi subiecti. Nam omnis forma, in quantum huiusmodi, est actus; omne autem subiectum comparatur ad id cuius est subiectum, ut potentia ad actum” (“To the first it must be said, therefore, that the notion of form is opposed to the notion of subject. For every form, as such, is an act; but every subject is related to that of which it is the subject as potency to act”). 8 Compendium theologiae I, ch. 89: “Non solum autem intellectus agens et possibilis in una essentia animae humanae conveniunt, sed etiam omnes aliae potentiae, quae sunt principia operationum animae. Omnes enim huiusmodi potentiae quodammodo in anima radicantur: quaedam quidem, sicut potentiae vegetativae et sensitivae partis, in anima sunt sicut in principio, in coniuncto autem sicut in subiecto, quia earum operationes coniuncti sunt, et non solum animae: cuius est enim actio, eius est potentia; quaedam vero sunt in anima sicut in principio et in subiecto, quia earum operationes sunt animae absque organo corporali, et huiusmodi sunt potentiae intellectivae partis. Non est autem possibile esse plures animas in homine” (see note 34 below for English translation and discussion of the use of coniunctum). 9 See, e.g., de Libera, “When Did the Modern Subject Emerge?” 211: “What is the subject in man? It is certainly not his own soul. Soul is not even the subject of man’s thought.” See also Marilyn McCord Adams and Cecilia Trifogli, “Whose Thought is It? The Soul and the Subject of Action in Some Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century Aristotelians,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85, no. 3 (2012): 632: “Thus, for Aquinas . . . the intellectual soul is also the proximate subject of intellectual functions. The fact that the intellectual soul is the form of 548 Brian T. Carl In addition to its purely anthropological application, whereby Aquinas claims that actions that are proper to the soul are nevertheless the actions of the human person, Aquinas also employs the thesis actiones sunt suppositorum in his discussions of the actions of Christ, the divine person who subsists in two natures. It is the divine Word who, according to his human nature, senses, understands, weeps, and suffers. Here too, the quick transition from the term “supposit” (or “person”) to the term “subject” may lead to philosophical difficulties. For if we identify the divine Word as the subject of his human action, does this mean that we are positing within the divine Word a potency that is actualized? Although this aspect of the question will not be my focus in this piece, the interpretation of actiones sunt suppositorum has major implications for Christology. The purpose of this brief study is threefold: (1) to clarify the meanings of the term “subject” in Aquinas’s thought; (2) to examine in what senses the human soul and the human person should be characterized as subjects of intellectual activity; and (3) to show that actiones sunt suppositorum is consistent with the view that the human soul operates per se and is the sole “actualized-subject” of its per se operation. I will argue that, for Aquinas, the truth of actiones sunt suppositorum is founded upon the metaphysical unity of the person rather than upon a claim, foreign to Aquinas’s thought, that the person is the proximate actualized-subject of human action. At the very least, I will show that speaking of the human person as “the subject of intellectual activity” requires nuanced explanation, rather than being an expression whose meaning is so straightforward that it should be employed to explain the meaning of actiones sunt suppositorum. Clarifying the Meaning of the Term “Subject” Concerning the meaning of the term “subject” in Aquinas’s thought, de Libera offers the distinction between a subject-of-attribution and a subject-of-inherence.10 As I will use these terms, a subject-of-inherence is something that is, in reality, informed by something that inheres in it, existing in it and depending upon it. For example, a leaf is the subject-of-inherence of green as an accident. A subject-of-attribution is some matter and the source of organic powers, does not keep it from being the immaterial proximate subject of understanding the way the visually empowered eye is a material proximate subject of vision.” 10 De Libera, “When Did the Modern Subject Emerge?” 194; de Libera, Archéologie du sujet I, 63–79. De Libera offers his own nuanced account of this distinction and some of its variations. I employ the terminology, but offer my own articulation of the distinction. Action, Supposit, and Subject 549 what is signified by the subject-term of a proposition. For example, a leaf is also a subject-of-attribution, just insofar as we can affirm that “the leaf is green.” In some cases, something might be a subject-of-attribution without it being the case that what is signified by the subject-term is in fact a subject-of-inherence. An example of a per accidens predication will suffice: “the white is musical.” This can be true because the subject-term “white” signifies whiteness and refers to (supposits for) a man, who happens to be both white and musical. The man is the subject-of-inherence of both whiteness and musicality as accidents; his whiteness is not the subject-of-inherence of his musicality. Having drawn this distinction between a subject-of-attribution and a subject-of-inherence, one is faced with two alternative situations when something is predicated of a subject. In some cases, the metaphysical reality corresponds in a straightforward way to the grammatical expression, and in other cases it does not. If the human soul is a subject-of-inherence with respect to its per se operation, this occasions the worry that actiones sunt suppositorum might mean that the supposit is merely a subject-of-attribution, by way of a linguistic convention such as synecdoche, without it being the case that such attribution corresponds to any noteworthy metaphysical reality. If “the human person understands” is true only because one is allowed (with certain qualifications) to attribute to a whole an accidental characteristic of its part—as we can say that Michael is blond because his hair is blond11—then the claim that intellectual activity is “of the person” This example is in conformity with the principle given by Aquinas in, e.g., In III sent., d. 11, q. 1, a. 3, resp.: “Pars autem aliquando habet aliquam dispositionem quae nata est convenire toti; aliquando autem aliquam quae non est nata convenire toti. Sicut albedo quae inest capillis, potest etiam toti convenire; crispitudo autem ita convenit capillis quod nullo modo toti, vel alicui alteri parti. [Ergo] secundum dispositiones illas quae insunt tantum parti, denominatur totum simpliciter et proprie per dispositionem partis, nullo addito; sicut dicitur homo crispus. Sed quantum ad illas dispositiones quae natae sunt et toti et parti convenire, non denominatur totum a parte simpliciter, sed addita parte, ut cum dicitur albus homo secundum capillos; nec hoc proprie, sed figurative per synecdochen” (“But sometimes a part has some disposition that is naturally apt to belong to the whole; and sometimes [a part has] some [disposition] which is not apt to belong to the whole. Just as the whiteness which is in the hair can also belong to the whole [man]; but curliness belongs to the hair so that in no way does it [belong] to the whole, or even to another part. Therefore, with respect to those dispositions which are only in a part, the whole is absolutely and properly denominated by the disposition of the part, with nothing added; as a man is called ‘curly.’ But with respect to those dispositions which are naturally apt to belong to the whole and to a part, 11 550 Brian T. Carl seems to be merely a claim about a permissible linguistic expression. This sort of concern can also be raised with respect to the role of actiones sunt suppositorum in Aquinas’s Christology. If “the Son of God weeps” is true only because one is allowed by synecdoche to attribute the action of Christ’s human nature to the divine supposit, then actiones sunt suppositorum might seem entirely compatible with—or even to be an expression of—Nestorianism.12 When Aquinas cites the thesis that actions are of supposits, however, he insists not merely that one is permitted to say that “the human person understands” or that “the Son of God weeps,” but that these expressions are more proper than “the human soul understands” or “Christ’s human nature weeps.” It seems clear that the greater propriety of the former expressions must be grounded in something real, rather than being only a matter of a linguistic convention such as synecdoche. What does Aquinas himself mean by the term “subject”? First, we can attribute to Aquinas the distinction between a subject-of-attribution and a subject-of-inherence. Aquinas affirms that something can be signified by the subject of a true proposition without it being the case that what is signified by the predicate inheres in it or actualizes it. For example, in the proposition “God is wise,” God is a subject-of-attribution, despite the fact that divine wisdom does not inhere in or actualize God; rather, the divine wisdom is really identical with the divine essence, which is pure act. Aquinas observes that our normal way of understanding and speaking is proportioned to the things that we know through the senses, which are composites of matter and form, of potency and act. In most cases, the subject–predicate grammatical structure of our judgments is proportioned to the potency–act metaphysical structure of that about which we speak, as the grammatical structure of “the leaf is green” parallels the potency–act relation of the leaf and its greenness. The leaf is a subject-of-attribution the whole is not denominated absolutely from the part, but with the part added [to one’s denomination], as when a man is called ‘white according to his hair’; nor is this [denomination] said properly, but only figuratively through synecdoche”).For discussion of the conditions under which the accidental characteristics of parts can be predicated of their corresponding wholes, see Gyula Klima, “Libellus pro sapiente—a Criticism of Allan Bäck’s Argument against St. Thomas Aquinas’ Doctrine of the Incarnation,” The New Scholasticism 58 (1984): 212–17. 12 For a criticism along these lines against Klima’s defense of Aquinas’s Christology, see Richard Cross, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation: Thomas Aquinas to Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 198n63, which cites Klima, “Libellus pro sapiente.” Cross raises the concern that, without some metaphysical claim (such as the identification of Christ’s natures as parts), Klima’s “linguistic analysis will raise the suspicion of Nestorianism.” Action, Supposit, and Subject 551 because it is a subject-of-inherence. But when we say that “God is wise,” we must deny what this way of speaking might seem to imply about potency and act in God, because God is pure act, and he is really identical with all of the perfections properly attributed to him.13 Something can therefore be a subject-of-attribution without being a subject-of-inherence. Second, with respect to a subject-of-inherence, Aquinas distinguishes between a broad and a strict sense of the term “subject.” In the broad sense, anything that is related to something else as potency to act can be called the subject of that which is its act. For example, in this broad sense, prime matter is the subject of substantial form. In the strict sense, only something that is already a being-in-act can be called a subject. In this way, a substance is the subject of accidents that exist in it. Prime matter cannot be a subject in this strict sense, because it is in itself pure potency rather than a being in act: it actually exists only by the reception of the substantial form that actualizes it.14 Third, focusing on a “subject” in this stricter sense—a being in act in which something else exists—Aquinas distinguishes, in a text in his Quaestiones disputatae de virtutibus (q. 1, a. 3), three different ways in which a subject is related to its accident, in order to determine whether ST I, q. 13, a. 2, ad 2: “Ad secundum dicendum quod intellectus noster non potest formas simplices subsistentes secundum quod in seipsis sunt apprehendere, sed apprehendit eas secundum modum compositorum, in quibus est aliquid quod subiicitur, et est aliquid non est. Ed ideo apprehendit formam simplicem in ratione subiecti, et attribuit ei aliquid” (“To the second it must be said that our intellect cannot apprehend simple, subsistent forms as they are in themselves, but it apprehends them according to the mode of composite [things], in which there is something which is subjected and something which is not. And therefore it apprehends a simple form according to the notion of a subject and attributes something to it”). Cf. In I sent., d. 4, q. 2, a. 1, and SCG I, ch. 36. 14 In II de anima, lec. 1: “For by ‘soul’ we understand that by which a thing-havinglife lives: whence it is necessary that it be understood as something existing in a subject, taking ‘subject’ here broadly, not only as some being in act is called a subject, in which way an accident is said to exist in a subject; but rather as prime matter, which is being in potency, is called a subject.” Cf. De principiis naturae, ch. 1: “Item proprie loquendo quod est in potentia ad esse accidentale dicitur subiectum, quod vero est in potentia ad esse substantiale dicitur proprie materia. Quod autem illud quod est in potentia ad esse accidentale dicatur subiectum, signum est quia dicuntur esse accidentia in subiecto, non autem quod forma substantialis sit in subiecto” (“Again, properly speaking that which is in potency to accidental being is called a subject, but that which is in potency to substantial being is properly called matter. But that what is in potency to accidental being is called a subject is indicated [by the fact] that accidents are said to be in a subject, but [it is] not [said] that a substantial form is in a subject”). 13 552 Brian T. Carl one of the soul’s powers can be the subject of virtue. This is a difficult question because, as the third objection in this article observes, a power of the soul is itself an accident, and it does not seem that one accident can be the subject of another accident. Aquinas explains that a subject is related to an accident: (1) “as providing sustenance to it, for an accident does not subsist through itself, but is supported by a subject”; (2) “as potency to act, for a subject is subjected to an accident, as a certain potency to [something] active; whence an accident is also called a form”; (3) “as cause to effect, for the principles [of the] subject are the principles of a per se accident.”15 Aquinas does not assert that every subject is related to all of its accidents in all three of these ways.16 In answering the question of whether a power of the soul can be the subject of virtue, Aquinas explains that one accident cannot be related to another as a subject in the first way, “unless perhaps it be said that insofar as [one accident] is sustained by a subject, it sustains another accident.” But an accident can be related to another accident as a subject in the second and in the third ways, and in these ways a power of the soul can be the subject of a virtue. As regards the second way, Aquinas asserts that “one accident is related to another as a subject: for one accident is in potency to another.” Aquinas then repeats that one accident cannot sustain another in existence, but “a subject is receptive of one accident by the mediation of another.” With respect to the notions of inherence (how an accident is related to a substance) and substanding (how a substance is related to an accident), then, we should distinguish between the aspect of inherence/substanding according to which a subject sustains an accident in existence and the aspect according to which a subject is actualized by an accident.17 I will call what is a subject in the former sense a sustaining-subject and what is a subject in the latter sense an actualized-subject.18 I will depend in what De virtutibus, q. 1, a. 3, resp. With respect to the third way, in particular, he refers only to per se accidents, also known as proper accidents or properties, and most interpreters have taken him to have in mind efficient causality when he says that the principles of the subject cause the properties; he does not advance the claim that a subject is the efficient cause of all of its accidents. 17 To be clear, I am suggesting that inherence and substanding are in fact complex relations in Aquinas’s thought. 18 One might also call the actualized-subject a “receptive-subject,” taking “receptive” broadly, such that any subject (a being in act) that is further actualized by an accident will be said to be the receptive-subject of that accident. My preference for “actualized-subject” has to do with my primary focus in this piece on the act of understanding, an immanent action. See, e.g., ST I-II, q. 51, a. 2, ad 1, in which Aquinas claims that an agent, as such, is not receptive. For other accidents, such as 15 16 Action, Supposit, and Subject 553 follows on a threefold distinction between a subject-of-attribution, an actualized-subject, and a sustaining-subject.19 As indicated previously, the twofold distinction between a subject-of-inherence and a subject-of-attribution can present us with a dilemma: if something is not a subject-of-inherence, then it is merely a subject-of-attribution. But something can be a subject-of-attribution merely by a linguistic convention such as synecdoche, without expressing (or being grounded in) anything of metaphysical import. It is clear from Aquinas’s discussion in De virtutibus (q. 1, a. 3) that an actualized-subject is not necessarily a sustaining-subject. This raises the question of whether something could be a sustaining-subject without being an actualized-subject. In what follows, I will attempt to show how the distinction between a sustaining-subject and an actualized-subject (that is, the distinction between these two aspects of substanding/inherence) may allow us to ground the propriety of attributing intellectual operation to the human person. The Case of Human Intellectual Activity Framing the Question In order to frame the question about the meaning of actiones sunt suppositorum in its application to human intellectual activity, it is necessary to state a few of Aquinas’s metaphysical claims that I will take for granted as background. (1) We must distinguish, with Aquinas, between transitive and immanent action. Transitive action has its terminus outside of the agent, producing an effect distinct from the agent. The classic example of transitive action is a physical action such as heating: fire heats a stone, bringing it about that the stone possesses heat. Immanent action, by contrast, has its terminus within the agent; it remains within the agent and is the perfection of the agent rather than bringing about a perfection extrinsic to the agent. The classic examples of immanent action are cognitive operations such as seeing and intellectual understanding. In posing a question about the application a quality like heat or a virtue (the sort of accident at issue in De virtutibus, q. 1, a. 3), to speak of what is actualized by these accidental forms as a “receptive-subject” would be appropriate without qualification. My thanks to Francis Feingold for his comments on this issue. 19 I have set aside the third of the ways in which a subject can be related to its accident in De virtutibus, q. 1, a. 3. 554 Brian T. Carl of actiones sunt suppositorum to the case of human intellectual activity, I am concerned with immanent action rather than transitive action.20 (2) Aquinas recognizes action as one of the nine accidental categories of being. There has been some dispute among Aquinas’s interpreters about whether immanent actions (such as understanding and sensing) in fact belong to the category of action. Several recent interpreters of Aquinas have defended the view that immanent operations do belong to the category of action. The more common view among Thomists historically is that immanent action—and the act of understanding in particular—is in the category of quality. I need only take for granted that an immanent operation is something inhering accidentally within the agent, whether this be according to the category of action or according to some other category. If action is something inherent and accidental, then this raises the question about the subject in which action inheres. (3) There is a dispute among interpreters of Aquinas as to the status of accidental esse and its relationship with substantial esse. On one reading of Aquinas, Socrates has only one esse, the esse totius, encompassing both his substantial existence and his accidental existence. On this reading, substantial esse and accidental esse are only conceptually distinct, and the esse of Socrates-sitting-and-understanding would be, as R. E. Houser has put it recently, “the existence of the individual, whole creature, as manifested in one of its parts.”21 This reading of Aquinas has enjoyed the support of numerous Thomists, including most famously Étienne Gilson and Cornelio Fabro.22 By contrast, the reading of Aquinas that I will follow posits a real distinction between substantial esse and accidental esse, such that it is by one act that Socrates exists as a human being and by other really distinct acts that Socrates is sitting, or standing, or thinking. This reading of Aquinas has been defended carefully—and, I think, defin- For insightful recent discussion of transitive physical action (and the way in which an agent is the subject of such action) in Aquinas’s thought, see Gloria Frost, “Aquinas’ Ontology of Transeunt Causal Activity,” Vivarium 56, no. 1–2 (2018): 47–82. 21 R. E. Houser, “Avicenna and Aquinas: Essence, Existence, and the Esse of Christ,” The Saint Anselm Journal 9, no.1 (2013): 16–17. 22 Étienne Gilson, “La notion d’existence chez Guillaume d’Auvergne,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 15 (1946): 89n1; Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. L. K. Shook (New York: Random House, 1956), 31; Cornelio Fabro, Participation et causalité selon s. Thomas d’Aquin (Louvain, BE: Publications Universitaires de Louvain, 1961), 299–302. 20 Action, Supposit, and Subject 555 itively—by Barry Brown and by John Wippel.23 We can now pose the question about the meaning of actiones sunt suppositorum more clearly. If an immanent action, such as human understanding, is as an accident really distinct from both the essence and the substantial esse of the person, when it is said that this action is “of the supposit,” does this mean in every case that the person, as a whole, is the subject of that action? The answer to this question needs to be articulated in light of the various meanings of the term “subject” treated above. Intellectual Activity as the Human Soul’s Per Se Action As a final preliminary to discussing in what sense the human person is the subject of intellectual activity, it is necessary to clarify that, for Aquinas, the human soul does properly act in its own right in its intellectual activity. Here we should attend to an example frequently given by Aquinas, that heat does not heat; rather, what is hot heats, by virtue of its possessing heat as a form. Heat is thus only a formal principle by which its subject acts; it is not a form that acts in its own right. Aquinas usually cites this example, however, in order to contrast the case of heat, a material form that does not act, with that of the human soul, a subsistent form that acts in its own right.24 For example, in the first article of his Quaestiones disputatae de anima, Aquinas writes: It is necessary that the intellectual soul should act per se, insofar as it possesses a proper operation lacking any communion with the body. And since every thing acts insofar as it is in act, it is necessary that the intellectual soul have an absolute existence per se, without depending on the body. For forms which have existence depending upon matter or upon a subject do not have a per se operation: for heat does not heat, but [what is] hot [heats].25 Barry Brown, Accidental Being: A Study in the Metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985); John F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 253–65. 24 For the distinction between material forms and subsistent forms, see ST I, q. 75, a. 2, ad 2. 25 QDA, a. 1, resp. Cf. QDA, a. 14, resp.: “Whence it is clear that the intellect has a per se operation, in which the body does not share. But everything operates insofar as it exists: for what has a per se existence operates per se. But what does not have existence per se does not have a per se operation: for heat does not heat per se, but [something] hot [heats]. So it follows, therefore, that the intellectual principle by which man understands has an existence surpassing the body [lit.: elevated beyond 23 556 Brian T. Carl The human soul’s capacity to act per se, in its intellectual activity, is grounded in its possession of per se existence, of existence in its own right. The human soul surpasses the body, upon which it does not depend for its existence, and the human body participates in the soul’s act of existence. As a form that subsists in its own right, the soul also has the capacity to operate in its own right. Perhaps the most important text for determining Aquinas’s view about the intellectual agency of the human soul and of the human person is found in a reply to an objection in the article of the Summa theologiae devoted to the question of the human soul’s subsistence.26 The second objection against the claim that the human soul is subsistent is motivated by a famous text from Aristotle’s De anima (bk. I, ch. 4): “Everything subsistent can be said to operate. But the soul is not said to operate, since, as is said in De anima I, to say that the soul senses or understands is similar to saying that it weaves or builds. Therefore the soul is not something subsistent.”27 Aquinas offers a twofold response to this objection. As a first avenue of response to the objection from the De anima, Aquinas simply denies that this famous text expresses Aristotle’s decisive view.28 Aquinas adopts this same avenue of response in a parallel text in the Quaestiones disputatae de anima, without adding the second response (the vel dicendum quod of the reply to the second objection in the Summa text).29 Similarly, in his Commentary on De anima, on this famous text, Aquinas asserts that in this passage Aristotle is not expressing his own view, but is speaking suppositionally in response to interlocutors who think that understanding is a physical motion.30 In the vel dicendum quod of the reply to the second objection, Aquinas continues: Or it must be said that to act per se belongs to what exists per se. But sometimes something can be called a per se existent so long as it is not inherent, like an accident or a material form, even if it is a part. But that is called subsistent, properly and per se, which is neither the body], not depending upon the body.” Cf. ST I, q. 75, a. 2. ST I, q. 75, a. 2, ad 2. 27 ST I, q. 75, a. 2, obj. 2. See Aristotle, De anima I, ch. 4. 28 ST I, q. 75, a. 2, ad 2: “Aristotle said those words not according to his own opinion, but according to the opinion of those who said that to understand is to be moved; this is clear from what precedes [Aristotle’s statement].” 29 QDA, a. 15, ad 1. 30 In I de anima, lec. 10. 26 Action, Supposit, and Subject 557 inherent, in the aforementioned mode, nor a part. In this sense, the eye or the hand cannot be called subsistent per se; and consequently neither [can they be called] operative per se. Whence the operations of parts are attributed, through the parts, to the whole. For we say that the man sees by the eye and feels by the hand, otherwise than how something hot heats by [its] heat, since heat in no way heats, properly speaking. It can therefore be said that the soul understands, as the eye sees, but it is more properly said that man understands by the soul.31 To interpret this text correctly, it is necessary first to consider its context and the position adopted by Aquinas in the responsio of this same article. However one interprets the reply to the second objection, it cannot contradict the conclusion of the responsio that the human soul does operate per se and is therefore subsistent per se.32 To maintain consistency with this responsio, we must read Aquinas in the vel dicendum quod as distinguishing between (1) a more proper/strict sense in which only a whole substance subsists and operates per se and (2) a less proper/strict sense in which a part like the eye can be said to subsist and operate per se. Both of these can be distinguished from (3) the improper sense in which a non-subsistent form, such as heat, is said to act.33 Aquinas does not here explicitly commit ST I, q. 75, a. 2, ad 2. ST I, q. 75, a. 2, resp.: “Ipsum igitur intellectuale principium, quod dicitur mens vel intellectus, habet operationem per se, cui non communicat corpus. Nihil autem potest per se operari, nisi quod per se subsistit. Non enim est operari nisi entis in actu, unde eo modo aliquid operatur, quo est. Propter quod non dicimus quod calor calefacit, sed calidum. Relinquitur igitur animam humanam, quae dicitur intellectus vel mens, esse aliquid incorporeum et subsistens” (“Therefore the intellectual principle, which is called the mind or intellect, has a per se operation in which the body does not share. But nothing can operate per se except that which subsists per se. For to operate is only of a being in act; whence something operates in the mode in which it is. Accordingly, we do not say that heat heats, but [something] hot. It follows therefore that the human soul, which is called the intellect or mind, is something incorporeal and subsistent”). 33 One frequently cited text in which Aquinas articulates the principle actiones sunt suppositorum is ST II-II, q. 58, a. 2, resp. In this text, we find an especially strong statement of the thesis: “Actiones autem sunt suppositorum et totorum, non autem, proprie loquendo, partium et formarum, seu potentiarum, non enim proprie dicitur quod manus percutiat, sed homo per manum; neque proprie dicitur quod calor calefaciat, sed ignis per calorem. Secundum tamen similitudinem quandam haec dicuntur” (“But actions are of supposits and wholes, but not, properly speaking, of parts, forms, or powers; for it is not properly said that the hand 31 32 558 Brian T. Carl himself to the claim that the human soul is a part in the way that the eye is a part; he only compares the human soul to a part like the eye, in that both can be said to subsist and to operate per se in sense (2), while only the whole substance or supposit operates in sense (1). Having clarified that Aquinas holds that the human soul acts, properly speaking, but that there is a stricter sense in which only the whole human person operates, we can now turn to the question of what the subject of human understanding is, employing the distinctions drawn above between different meanings of the term “subject.” The Person and the Soul as Subjects of Action As indicated above, Aquinas indicates that the intellectual power and its activity are in the soul alone “as in a subject.”34 But in what sense should we strikes, but the man by [his] hand; nor is it properly said that heat heats, but fire by [its] heat. Nevertheless these things are said according to a certain similitude”). In this text, we find only the distinction between (1) the strict sense in which the supposit is said to act and (3) the improper sense in which heat is said to heat, although Aquinas gives “the hand strikes” as an example on the same level as “heat heats.” Since Aquinas clearly indicates in ST I, q. 75, a. 2 (and elsewhere) that the soul understands, properly speaking (in sense [2]), I do not think that ST II-II, q. 58, a. 2, a text concerned with the question of whether the virtue of justice can regard oneself, should be taken as the governing text for determining the agency of the human soul in its intellectual activity. 34 Compendium theologiae I, ch. 89: “But not only the agent and possible intellect belong to the one essence of the human soul, but also all other powers, which are principles of the operations of the soul. For all powers of this sort are in some way rooted in the soul: some, indeed, such as the powers of the vegetative and of the sensitive part, are in the soul as in [their] principle, but in the composite (coniunctum) as in [their] subject, since their operations are of the composite and not of the soul alone: for a potency [belongs] to that to which the [corresponding] action [belongs]. But other [powers] are in the soul as in [their] principle and as in [their] subject, since their operations [belong] to the soul without any corporeal organ, and the powers of the intellectual part are of this sort. But it is not possible for there to be several souls in a man.” Brenet has urged that it is necessary to distinguish between the coniunctum that is a bodily organ and the compositum of soul and body. As a terminological matter, Brenet seems to be correct about Aquinas’s use of coniunctum and compositum. A bodily organ is a “conjunct” of a power of the soul with the part of a living body that is organized so as to function as the instrument of that power; but the whole living body is the composite of the soul (as a substantial form) and matter. For Aquinas, the essence of the human soul, as a substantial form, is fully present in every part of the body; but the powers of the soul that have corporeal organs are only present in those parts of the body aptly formed for functioning as their respective organs. Aquinas’s real distinction between the essence of the soul and Action, Supposit, and Subject 559 take the term “subject” here? Aquinas’s argumentation for the subsistence of the human soul makes clear that the soul is the actualized-subject of the intellectual power and, through this power, the actualized-subject of intellectual activity. Aquinas’s argumentation for the subsistence of the rational soul turns on the claim that the unlimited range of the object of intellectual activity precludes that the power by which intellection occurs should inform a bodily organ, because if the intellectual power were itself a bodily nature or a power employing a bodily organ as its instrument, this would impede its reception of the forms/natures of some bodies.35 That is, the argument for the subsistence of the human soul is centrally concerned with what can be the actualized-subject of intellectual cognition, and the argument only succeeds if Aquinas is claiming that intellectual activity is in the soul alone as in its actualized-subject. If the living body or any corporeal part of the living body were the immediate actualized-subject of intellectual activity, then the object of intellectual activity could not be unlimited. But the living body, the composite of soul and body, is for Aquinas the human supposit or person. So it cannot be that the human person is, as a whole, the immediate actualized-subject of intellectual activity, as an accident.36 the powers of the soul is essential for making sense of his position. All of this being said, Brenet uses the distinction between a coniunctum and the compositum to argue that, for Aquinas, intellectual activity is in the compositum as a subject and that, ultimately, the human soul is a principium quo of action rather than something that properly acts. Brenet’s principal evidence for this conclusion is the claim that actiones sunt suppositorum, and as indicated above he transitions readily from the claim that the supposit acts to the claim that the supposit is the subject of action. See Brenet, “Thomas d’Aquin pense-t-il?” 235–38, 240–43. 35 ST I, q. 75, a. 2. 36 This being said, the linguistic convention of synecdoche permits us in this case to transfer what is said of the part to the whole: I can say that the human person is actualized by the act of understanding, insofar as the rational soul, as a formal part of the whole substance, is actualized by that act. In a similar way, I can be said to be receptive of heat when one of my hands is warmed by a fire. It is a particular part of my body whose potency for receiving heat has been actualized; this is how it can be that one of my hands is warm while the other is cold. When we say that I (as a person) am receptive of heat when my hand is hot, we do not mean that I am receptive of heat immediately and as a whole. I contend that the same is true when we say that I, as a person, am actualized by intellectual activity as an accident: it is not the living body, the composite of body and soul, or any of its corporeal parts that stands to intellectual activity as potency to act, but nevertheless I can say that I am actualized by intellectual activity, insofar as my soul and my intellect are actualized by it. I do not wish to suggest, however, that the propriety of attributing intellectual operation to the human person is merely a matter of synecdoche; only 560 Brian T. Carl Neither the body (taken as a material part of human nature), nor the body–soul composite (the living body), nor any parts of the living body can be the actualized-subject of the intellectual power or of intellectual activity: none of these stand to the intellectual power or to intellectual activity as potency to act. To generalize, we should identify the actualized-subject of a power for immanent operation as the actualized-subject of the corresponding operation. Aquinas advances a claim along these lines as a general principle, taken from Aristotle: cuius est actio, eius est potentia.37 I take this to mean that a power belongs to the same actualized-subject as does the action resulting from that power. Understood in this way, this principle extends a thesis we encountered above from De virtutibus (q. 1, a. 3): something can be receptive of one accident by the mediation of another accident. In the case of the human soul, we should say that the human soul is the actualized-subject of the possible intellect, and by the mediation of the possible intellect, the human soul is the actualized-subject of intellectual activity. What of the sustaining-subject of human intellectual activity? This is, I think, the more difficult and complex issue. On the one hand, Aquinas’s arguments also indicate that he regards the human soul as a sustaining-subject of intellectual activity. Aquinas concludes that the human soul must be subsistent, because only what subsists per se can act per se, and the human soul does act per se in its intellectual operation. Action must follow upon being; only what is can act. Is this not because action, as an accident, must be sustained in existence by something that subsists? As Aquinas puts it: “Nothing can operate per se except what subsists per se, because operation is only of a being in act. . . . On account of this, we do not say that heat heats, but [that] something hot [heats]. It follows therefore that the human soul . . . is something incorporeal and subsistent.”38 Furthermore, Aquinas holds that the human soul is incorruptible, capable of surviving the corruption of the living body, and he affirms that, in its separated state, the human soul will be capable of acting. Certainly, in the separated state, the human soul will be both the sustaining-subject and the actualized-subject of intellectual activity. Nothing would seem to prevent the way in which the human person is an actualized-subject of intellectual operation is by synecdoche. 37 Compendium theologiae I, ch. 89; ST I, q. 51, a. 3; QDA, a. 19; Quaestiones de spiritualibus creaturis, a. 4, ad 3. For the source in Aristotle, see On Sleep 1.454a8–9. De Libera notes Aquinas’s use of this principle and its source in On Sleep; see, e.g., Archéologie du sujet I, 50–59. Cf. Brenet, “Thomas d’Aquin pense-t-il?,” 234–35. 38 ST I, q. 75, a. 2. Action, Supposit, and Subject 561 us from saying that it is also the sustaining-subject of intellectual activity while it is united to the body. On the other hand, although Aquinas holds that the separated human soul will be capable of intellectual acts, the separated soul’s mode of understanding is different from its mode of understanding when it is united to the body. Aquinas holds that, when the soul is united to the body, the act of understanding is itself incomplete except through the turn to the phantasm.39 Our intellectual understanding concerns natures that exist in sensible singulars, and it pertains to the understanding of such a nature to know it as something that exists in singulars. But it is through the senses rather than through the intellect that human beings know the sensible singular, and so human intellectual cognition is in a way incomplete except insofar as the act of understanding is simultaneous with acts by the inner senses.40 Lacking the sense powers, the separated soul’s natural knowledge will be imperfect, as it will not be by the soul’s own intellectual light that the soul’s understanding will bear on singulars.41 This is to say that the perfection of the soul’s proper operation in fact depends upon the union of the soul with the body. Furthermore, the human soul is both (1) something that subsists in its own right, existing per se so as to not to depend upon matter, and (2) the substantial form of the human body. It belongs to a substantial form to give existence to matter. The human soul does not cause a new, distinct act of existence when it causes the living body to exist: rather, it shares or For recent discussion of the meaning of the “turn to the phantasm” in Aquinas’s cognitive theory, see Therese Scarpelli Cory, “What is an Intellectual Turn? The Liber de Causis, Avicenna, and Aquinas’s Turn to Phantasms,” Tópicos, Revista de Filosofía 45 (2013): 129–62. Brenet discusses the turn to the phantasm and employs this notion to argue that the supposit must be the subject of human intellectual activity (“Thomas d’Aquin pense-t-il?” 244–48). Brenet ultimately concludes that while the soul is the “subject-substrate” of the intellectual power, the composite, the human person, is the “subject-supposit of action.” As Brenet acknowledges, his conclusion undercuts Aquinas’s arguments for the subsistence and incorruptibility of the human soul (“Thomas d’Aquin pense-t-il?” 248). 40 ST I, q. 84, a. 7. Patrick Toner has pointed to the fact that human intellectual cognition is always concurrent with and completed by sense cognition in order to respond to the “too many thinkers problem,” which seems to arise if we affirm both that the human soul thinks and that the human person thinks; see Toner, “St. Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Too Many Thinkers,” The Modern Schoolman 89 (2012): 209–22. My interpretation of actiones sunt suppositorum will certainly occasion a concern about having posited “too many thinkers,” but the brevity of this piece precludes a direct response to this difficulty. 41 ST I, q. 89, aa. 1 and 4. 39 562 Brian T. Carl communicates its own act of existence with matter, and the human body participates in the soul’s act of existence. There is only one substantial act of existence in a human being, that which the human soul shares with matter so as to constitute the composite, the human person. The act of existence by which the human soul is the sustaining-subject of intellectual operation is thus the same act of existence that is, most properly, of the whole human composite, the person. Because of the unity of the existence of the human person, we must in fact say that it is the person’s act of existence by which the human soul sustains its own per se operations. This is not to say that the soul depends upon the body for its existence; but Aquinas is willing to assert that “the soul does have a certain dependence upon the body, insofar as without the body it does not attain to the completion of its species.”42 The soul, as a substantial form and as part of a corporeal nature, is ordered “not to mere existence, but to existence of this species. Therefore, although the soul can exist per se, nevertheless it cannot exist in the completion of its species without the body.”43 Given all of this, although it should be affirmed that the human soul exists per se and is a sustaining-subject of the act of understanding as an accident, nevertheless I think we can also say that the act of understanding, as the soul’s proper operation, depends upon the human person’s existence, so long as the soul is united to the body. If the subject of an accident, in the strict sense, is the sustaining-subject and actualized-subject, then in this strict sense, it would seem that the subject of intellectual activity is, for Aquinas, the human soul. The human person does not, immediately and as a whole, stand to the act of understanding by a relationship of potency to act, and the soul, by its existence, sustains the act of understanding as an accident. I would suggest that, if we are to speak of the human person as the subject of intellectual activity, then this is insofar as the person is a sustaining-subject, in two respects. First, because the act of understanding is imperfect without concurrent sense activity, in a way the act of understanding depends upon the existence of the living body, through whose sensitive organs sense activity occurs. Second, and I think more fundamentally, the existence by which the soul sustains its operation is also the existence of the human person; QDA, a. 1, ad 12: “Ad duodecimum dicendum quod etiam anima aliquam dependentiam habet ad corpus, in quantum sine corpore non pertingit ad complementum suae speciei; non tamen sic dependet a corpore quin sine corpore esse possit.” 43 QDA, a. 1, ad 16: “Ad decimumsextum dicendum quod principia essentialia alicuius speciei ordinantur non ad esse tantum, sed ad esse huius speciei. Licet igitur anima possit per se esse, non tamen potest in complemento suae speciei esse sine corpore.” 42 Action, Supposit, and Subject 563 and so it can be said truly that it is by the existence of the person that understanding is sustained as an accident. Actiones Sunt Suppositorum and the Metaphysical Unity of the Human Person If nothing else, the previous section should have made clear that speaking of the human person as “the subject of intellectual activity” requires nuanced explanation. Consequently, this expression should not be offered as if it is a clear explanation of the meaning of actiones sunt suppositorum. The distinction between actualized-subject and sustaining-subject has allowed us to articulate the thesis that the human person can be characterized as a sustaining-subject of intellectual operation, even if the soul alone is the actualized-subject of this activity. Here I wish to conclude with some additional evidence that Aquinas understands the force of actiones sunt suppositorum along the lines that I have outlined. We have seen above that in the Summa theologiae Aquinas articulates the principle that the action of parts is attributed, through the parts, to the whole. 44 For Aquinas, the unity of the whole human person seems to be sufficient to account for the truth and the propriety of the claim that “this human being understands” (hic homo intelligit), even if understanding is the soul’s per se operation. The unity of the human person—the person’s unity of substantial existence—is a consequence of the human soul’s union to the body as its formal cause. Aquinas responds to a position that would assert that the soul is united to the body only as its mover rather than as its form with the following: But if you should say that Socrates is not one thing absolutely, but one thing by the aggregation of mover and moved, many unfitting consequences would result. First, because each thing is one and a being in a similar fashion, it would follow that Socrates is not a being and that he is not in a species or genus; and furthermore, that he would not have any action, since action is only of a being. Whence we do not say that a sailor’s [act of] understanding is the understanding of the whole that is a sailor and a ship, but that it is the sailor’s alone. And similarly understanding would not be Socrates’ act, but only [the act] of the intellect using the body of Socrates. For only in a whole that is something one and a being is the action of the part the action of the whole: and if one should speak otherwise, ST I, q. 75, a. 2, ad 2. 44 564 Brian T. Carl he speaks improperly.45 “Only in a whole that is something one and a being is the action of the part the action of the whole.” Action always belongs to what is, to a being. An accidental unity, a mere aggregate, does not act, properly speaking, because it does not have a singular substantial existence; but whatever has a singular substantial existence acts, and the action of the part can be the action of the whole. To be precise, by this statement Aquinas has identified substantial unity only as a necessary condition for the claim that the action of the part is the action of the whole.46 But Aquinas also seems to recognize the substantial unity of man, which comes from the human soul as formal cause, as sufficient for the propriety of the statement that “this human being understands.” Thus he concludes in his Quaestiones disputate de anima that, “although the possible intellect is not a power founded upon any bodily organ, nevertheless the man understands formally by [the possible intellect], insofar as [this power] is founded upon the essence of the human soul, which is the form of the man.”47 I have attempted to show that the identity of the human soul’s esse with the esse of the human person grounds the claim that the per se action of the human soul is most properly the action of the human person.48 De unitate intellectus, ch. 3: “Sed si tu dicas, quod Socrates non est unum quid simpliciter, sed unum quid aggregatione motoris et moti, sequuntur multa inconvenientia. Primo quidem, quia cum unumquodque sit similiter unum et ens, sequitur quod Socrates non sit aliquod ens, et quod non sit in specie nec in genere; et ulterius, quod non habeat aliquam actionem, quia actio non est nisi entis. Unde non dicimus quod intelligere nautae sit intelligere huius totius quod est nauta et navis, sed nautae tantum; et similiter intelligere non erit actus Socratis, sed intellectus tantum utentis corpore Socratis. In solo enim toto quod est aliquid unum et ens, actio partis est actio totius; et si quis aliter loquatur, improprie loquitur.” 46 “Only substantial wholes are wholes, the action of whose part is the action of the whole” is equivalent to “every whole, the action of whose part is the action of the whole, is a substantial whole.” Aquinas does not in this text commit himself to more than is strictly necessary to criticize the position to which he is responding. 47 QDA, a. 2, resp.: “Dum intellectus possibilis non est potentia fundata in aliquo organo corporali; et tamen eo intelligit homo formaliter, in quantum fundatur in essentia animae humanae, quae est hominis forma.” Cf. De unitate intellectus, ch. 3: “Si autem dicas quod principium huius actus, qui est intelligere, quod nominamus intellectum, non sit forma, oportet te invenire modum quo actio illius principii sit actio huius hominis” (“But if you should say that the principle of this act, which is understanding, which [principle] we name the intellect, is not a form [of this man], it is necessary for you to discover [another] way in which the action of that principle should be the action of this man”). 48 Although it is impossible to enter in detail here into the Christological impli45 Action, Supposit, and Subject 565 In order to safeguard the claim that hic homo intelligit, that intellectual activity is “of the supposit,” it is not necessary to discard the view that understanding is the soul’s per se operation and is in the soul alone as in an actualized-subject. For Aquinas, the metaphysical unity of the person accounts for the truth and propriety of the claim that “this human being understands.” If we are to interpret actiones sunt suppositorum correctly, in its application to both human intellectual activity and to the case of Christ’s human action, it is necessary to be precise concerning the meaning of the term “subject.” It is right to insist that there is more, metaphysically, to the relationship between person and action than would be expressed if the person were merely a subject-of-attribution by synecdoche. This does not mean, however, that the person must be the subject of action as the immediate actualized-subject. In order to be an agent, a supposit need not be a subject in this typical sense. N&V cations of the interpretation of actiones sunt suppositorum I am defending, the emphasis upon the importance of the unity of esse in the case of the human person finds a parallel, I would suggest, in Aquinas’s typical emphasis upon the unity of Christ’s esse. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2019): 567–577 567 The Human Person as Believer Joseph Gamache Boston University Boston, MA Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human.—G. K. Chesterton1 What does it mean to be a human person? One sliver of the answer to this immense question, suggested by this quotation of G. K. Chesterton, is that to be a human person is to be a believer.2 If this is so, then a complete understanding of the human person must incorporate an understanding of belief. In turn, such an understanding must, if it is to be complete, account not only for the nature of belief, but also for the norms governing belief. That is, we must be able not only to say of some person S, that she believes that p, but also be able to say whether S is right to hold her belief that p. Thus, if Chesterton’s suggestion is correct, to understand what it means to be a human person is also, in part, to understand the norms of belief. But it is inadequate to consider the norms of belief in isolation from the subject of belief, namely the believing human person. For norms are always norms for some entity or other. To understand the norms of belief, then, G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, ed. David Dooley, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 196. 2 An important question which, for reasons of space, cannot be addressed here, is that of the contents of the beliefs that are essential to the person as believer. As Chesterton suggests, these will be especially one’s philosophical and religious beliefs. 1 568 Joseph Gamache requires reference to that entity for whom they are norms. In other words, while any understanding of the human person will require an understanding of the norms of belief, it is equally true that any understanding of the norms of belief will require an understanding of the human person.3 Now this goes against the grain of how one tradition of philosophy, the analytic tradition, has approached the questions of personhood and belief. The contemporary literature of this tradition has (by and large) separated the questions, attempting to give accounts of human personhood that prescind from accounts of the norms of belief, and attempting to give accounts of the norms of belief that prescind from accounts of human personhood. Appealing to a distinction made by Gabriel Marcel, we can say that such a method instantiates primary reflection—a reflection that “tends to dissolve the unity of experience”—about personhood and belief.4 While such reflection has a role to play in thought, what is missing is an attempt at secondary reflection on the unity of personhood and norms of belief. Such reflection is, as Marcel says, “recuperative,” allowing us to reconquer the unity that is dissolved under primary reflection.5 Making sense of Chesterton’s suggestion of the person as believer requires embarking upon a secondary reflection of the unity of person, belief, and the norms of belief. It is the beginnings of such a recuperative reflection that I set out to provide in what follows. Belief and Truth To focus the discussion, I propose to consider truth as a norm of belief, that is, that we ought to believe a proposition p, only if it is true that p.6 We must first consider, then, the relationship between belief and truth. The dominant analysis of this relation is that belief aims at truth.7 I will refer to this as the “aimedness thesis” about the relationship between belief and Have we entered a circle? I do not think so, for, while to understand what it means to be a person we must understand the norms of belief, to fully understand these will require appealing not just back to person as believer, but to other aspects of personhood. 4 Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, vol. 1, Reflection and Mystery, trans. G. S. Fraser (London: Harvill Press, 1950–1951; South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2001), 83 (citations refer to the 2001 edition). 5 Marcel, Mystery of Being, 1:83. 6 Whether truth is a norm of belief has generated a considerable debate. For a review of some recent literature, see Conor McHugh and Daniel Whiting, “The Normativity of Belief,” Analysis 74, no. 4 (2014): 698–713. 7 The locus classicus of this claim is Bernard Williams, “Deciding to Believe,” ch. 7 in Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 148. 3 The Human Person as Believer 569 truth. The interpretations of this claim in the contemporary literature fall into two broad categories. On the one hand, there is the view that beliefs aim at truth in the sense that believers form beliefs as a means to satisfy their desire for truth (or, alternately, in the sense that sub-personal processes of belief-formation act as if their goal was to satisfy such a desire).8 This is known in the literature as the teleological account. On the other hand, there are those who interpret the aimedness thesis as a constitutive feature of belief. These thinkers claim that a “mental-state” just does not count as a belief unless it is a state to which one applies truth as a norm when one is considering whether to believe that p.9 This is known in the literature (perhaps misleadingly) as “normativism.” It is not my intention here to get bogged down in the details and exact problems of these views, but to point to a more fundamental problem with the aimedness thesis as such. When we consider what it means to hold a belief, I think that it is quite clear that to form a belief, and then to hold that belief, is never to aim at the truth. In forming and holding a belief, we are not taking aim at the truth, but rather we are claiming already to possess it. That is, by conceiving of the relationship between belief and truth as one of aiming, we make the relationship out to be one that obtains extrinsically. On the teleological-aim interpretation, this is to think of truth as an end that we seek to obtain through the means of forming beliefs. But if this is so, then, unless we are infallible, it is a means that may fail to obtain its end. That is, we must be willing to admit that our belief that p, say, might be a poor means to getting the truth (that is, our belief that p might be false). But no one says, of their belief that p, that it is false, for to believe that p is, minimally, to believe that p is true. The idea that I am trying to express here is that the normal position that we find ourselves in with respect to something that we take to be a means to some end, is such that our insistence on its fittingness as a means is not as strong as our insistence that what we believe is true. We are, on pain of irrationality, bound to claim that what we believe is true, but we are not so bound to claim that our means must be the best possible means. But if belief is a means to truth, and we must (rationally) take our beliefs to be true, then this would be equivalent to claiming that our beliefs are the best possible means to truth. Given this implication of the teleological-aim interpretation, the teleological-aim interpretation is false. In other words, it is not the case that belief See, e.g., J. David Velleman, “The Aim of Belief,” ch. 11 in The Possibility of Practical Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 244–81. 9 See, e.g., Nishi Shah, “How Truth Governs Belief,” The Philosophical Review 112, no. 4 (2003): 447–84. 8 570 Joseph Gamache is to truth as means are to ends. On the normativist-aim interpretation, to believe that p is to apply truth as a norm when deliberating over whether to believe that p. But, again, this makes the belief–truth relation out to be extrinsic. It makes the relation between belief and truth out to be one on which you can neatly separate what you believe from what you take to be true. Truth is not a standard that we aim at meeting, but is rather a standard that we always already take ourselves to have satisfied, if only tacitly, in believing that p. Let us turn, then, to an alternative. Perhaps the nature of the relationship between belief and truth is rather one of commitment. But what is the nature of this commitment? It has at least three dimensions. It is, first, a commitment of rationality. If someone asks you whether you believe that p, and you answer, “yes,” you cannot go on to deny that p is true. Believing that p rationally commits you to the truth of p.10 It is, second, a commitment of agency. Our beliefs play a role in our determining for ourselves the answers to questions of the form ought I to perform an action A. Thirdly, it is also a commitment of one’s interpretations. A world created by God looks different from a world without him. The historical crucifixion of Christ takes on a different significance for the believing Christian. How we interact with others when we see them as God’s children differs from how we might approach them if we see them as purely material entities. It is because of these ways in which the relationship between belief and truth can be enacted, that commitment, rather than aimedness, best describes the relationship between belief and truth.11 Person and Belief To review, beliefs embody a commitment on the part of the believing person to the truth of the proposition believed. So, for a person to count as believing that p, the person must be committed to the truth of p. Considered dyadically (belief as committed to truth), we have already seen what this commitment entails. But the commitment of belief is not merely dyadic, but triadic. The third element comes from considering the person who believes, and, more specifically, by considering the locus, or emphasis, of the commitment in question. It is with respect to the loci or emphases of our commitments that there lurks an ambiguity. A commitment to the See John Gibbons, The Norm of Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 199–203. 11 I would also point out that, as the examples have been crafted to show, these dimensions (rationality, agency, interpretation) are not radically separable in practice. 10 The Human Person as Believer 571 truth of p can have one of two diametrically opposed emphases. Either it can instantiate a commitment to maintaining the truth of p come what may, or else it can instantiate a commitment to maintaining the truth of p only so long as one has no sufficient reason to think that it is false.12 Once he comes to believe that p, a person can take one of two paths: either he can place the truth first, and hold on to his belief that p only insofar as it squares with objective truth, or else he can hold on to his belief that p no matter what. This might be seen as a manifestation of a sort of “epistemic fallenness” on the part of the human person—that is, the ever-present temptation to reverse the nature (and emphasis) of the commitment from the truth of what I believe to the truth of what I believe. We can understand these two possible ways of being committed to the truth of our beliefs with the help of some insights of Aquinas and Marcel. Belief, as Aquinas notes, is a thoughtful assent (to some proposition). By such an act of thoughtful assent, the person cleaves firmly to the proposition in question.13 Which way we live out the commitment to the truth of our beliefs will depend on the character of our thoughtful assent to the truth of some proposition. I propose that we use the term “belief” in a “thin” sense (as that of an attitude that persons bear toward propositions that they regard as true) to range over what Aquinas calls “belief” and “opinion,” interpreting Aquinas’s “belief” and “opinion” as modes of the commitment that we bear toward the truth of our beliefs. To believe according to the “belief-mode” is concomitant with, or accompanied by, inquiry and ongoing discursive thought regarding p.14 To be clear, “inquiry” should not be understood to imply the presence of doubt regarding p. In fact, it is this association that leads Newman, in the Grammar of Assent, to eschew talk of “inquiry” in favor of talk of “investigation.” The former implies doubt, whereas the latter denotes looking into the credibility, or “argumentative proofs,” of that to which we assent.15 Now since Aquinas clearly distinguishes belief from doubt, we need not quibble about the precise word (in fact, “investi I put the point in this way to allow for beliefs held as a matter of faith. As Aquinas notes in the Summa contra gentiles [SCG], propositions knowable only by faith cannot be proven to be true by human reason, but we are able to refute their negations (i.e., the claims that they are false) by human reason, since truth cannot contradict truth. Aquinas, SCG I, ch. 7, especially no. 7. 13 For these and the other points made by Aquinas that are referred to in what follows, see Summa theologiae [ST] II-II, q. 2, a. 1, and De veritate, q. 14, a. 1. 14 ST II-II, q. 2, a. 1; De veritate, q. 14, a. 1. 15 John Henry Cardinal Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906), 191–92. 12 572 Joseph Gamache gation” seems just as good a translation of Aquinas’s Latin). Whether you call it “inquiry,” or you call it “investigation,” it is a disposition to work through one’s beliefs, with an eye both to understanding why they are true, and to harvesting the logical and existential implications of our beliefs. On the other hand, to believe in the mode of opinion is to believe cum formidine (with fear) that the content of one’s belief is false.16 This point of Aquinas neatly explains an insight of Marcel regarding opinion, namely that it is an attitude that develops aggressively over the course of its “lifetime” from a claim about what seems to one to be the case to a claim about what “everybody knows” to be the case.17 Opinion, then, is an attitude that begins its life wed with fear and doubt, and, as a result, disposes the person to soothe and assuage his fear of possible error by arrogating to his opinions the status of knowledge and universal acceptance. But to believe in such a way is to believe in a tenuous manner. It requires the opposite of working through one’s beliefs—it rather requires that one detach oneself from any serious scrutiny of one’s beliefs. Thus, the commitment-relation can be enacted in two radically different ways. On the one hand, we have a commitment, in the first instance, to our beliefs’ actually being true. As a result, believing that p in this sense is concomitant with an openness to the truth with respect to p. This openness manifests itself in our belief being accompanied by a disposition to inquire into that which we believe. On the other hand, we have a commitment, in the first instance, to maintaining that our beliefs, whatever they happen to be, are true.18 As a result, believing that p in this sense is concomitant with a more-or-less suppressed fear of error (according to Aquinas) or with a fear of not being taken seriously by others (according to Marcel).19 This fear in turn underlies a disposition both to disengage from our beliefs, and to aggrandize them into that which is universally known. Such a way of living the commitment-relation is a closedness to the truth, marked by detachment from, and a lack of ST II-II, q. 2, a. 1; De veritate, q. 14, a. 1 Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, vol. 2, Faith and Reality, trans. G. S. Fraser (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2001), 70–71. 18 See Marion David, “On ‘Truth is Good,’” Philosophical Books 46, no. 4 (2005): 296, for a similar statement of this distinction in terms of truth as an epistemic goal. 19 More specifically, we fear not being taken seriously by others on account of our not sticking by our established opinions. This is a familiar problem in political life, manifested, for example, in the reluctance of candidates for public office to revise their beliefs, fearful of being labelled as “flip-floppers.” For Marcel’s point see Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator, trans. Emma Craufurd and Paul Seaton (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952; South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2010), 124 (citations refer to the 2010 edition). 16 17 The Human Person as Believer 573 engagement in, what we believe. Beliefs, then, as commitments to the truth, do not inevitably obey the norm of truth. All that is “inevitable” about the commitment-relation is, as was pointed out above, that one is rationally committed to claiming that what one believes is true, and that one is influenced in one’s agency and interpretations by what one genuinely believes. But what is not inevitable is that these commitments really are commitments to having actually true beliefs, as opposed to merely maintaining that whatever we happen to believe is true. How we live out and enact this commitment determines whether we comply with truth as a norm of belief. Neither (supposed) conceptual necessity (as on the normativist-aim interpretation), nor some universally held truth-aim (as on the teleological-aim interpretation) will get us to live this commitment to the truth itself. We must make a choice for the truth. To use a phrase of Marcel’s, we must choose to incarnate the spirit of truth in our lives.20 But why should we make a choice for the truth? Given the limits of space, my response here will be somewhat schematic. I think that making the case for why we ought to make a choice for the truth needs to involve an attempt to elucidate the value of truth. Before saying anymore, let me first say briefly what I think that such a response should look like. Following an insight of Bernard Williams, I think that what we should aim for is explanation without reduction.21 That is, in trying to answer this question for someone, we should aim for an explanation that says more than just that truth is intrinsically valuable (however true that may be) but that does not reduce truth to a merely instrumental value. Rather, we want an account of the value of truth that situates it alongside other fundamental values of the person, in such a way that we are attracted to, grasp, and choose to incarnate, the value of truth in our lives.22 Person and Truth In the remainder of this paper, I propose to examine how it is that truth is situated alongside the value of friendship. To understand this relationship, we must inquire, with Marcel, into how one goes about living so as to incarnate the value, or spirit, of truth. According to Marcel, the spirit of Marcel, Homo Viator, 133. Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 90. 22 Although this is not the course that the subsequent reflection explicitly takes, what I think that this requires is an investigation into those values the incarnation of which makes for an objectively good life, qua person. 20 21 574 Joseph Gamache truth is incarnated in the act by which we stop indulging in self-complacency.23 Self-complacency takes many forms, but in the domain of belief, it is best understood as indulging in a kind of easiness with respect to what we believe. We become, as it were, unthinking adherents of our beliefs, falling into that intellectual torpor characteristic of the opinion-mode of belief, whereby we are no longer open to understanding, and harvesting the fruits of, the truths that we believe. Think, in this regard, of one whose belief in his religion is merely “tribal,” or whose political views are taken over wholesale from certain websites or social media. But think mostly of those who indulge in a truly self-complacency, whose self-understanding, if it exists at all, is based on a combination of wishful thinking and conformity to the opinions of others. Incarnating the value of truth is, as Marcel describes it, a “perpetual struggle against easiness.”24 As persons, we are beings not determined to live up to the full potentiality of our condition. If we do not strive to actualize our personhood through the incarnation of values such as truth, the default is a slide into a state of the merely instrumental, where all that is of “value” is whatever can maintain us in a stable state of self-complacent easiness. Nowhere is this more crucial for the person than with respect to his answer to the question, “Who am I?” For it is partially by reference to answering this question—who am I—that I come to actualize myself as a person. It is primarily through an authentic grappling with this question— one that does not, as I mentioned above, rest upon the shifting sands of wishful thinking and the opinions of others—that I set myself apart from what Marcel calls the “one,” the faceless everyone and no-one, the irresponsible, illusive phantom that is the negation of our capacity for agency and thought.25 It is through opposing myself to the “one” that I come to actualize my personhood more and more. As Marcel rightly notes, this opposition is established through the courage to confront one’s situation, with the opinions and values latent in it, and to subject it to an active evaluation and appraisal. By this act of confrontation and evaluation, I refuse to be a mere spectator of the beliefs I passively come to hold, and instead become an active participant in the formation of my beliefs.26 By way of Marcel, Homo Viator, 133–34. Marcel, Homo Viator, 135 25 Gabriel Marcel, Creative Fidelity, trans. Robert Rosthal (New York: Fordham University Press, 1964), 110. 26 Marcel, Creative Fidelity, 111–13. It is through these acts, as well as communicating our beliefs to others, that we assume responsibility for what believe, which, for Marcel, is another hallmark of the personal as an “active negation” of the impersonal. 23 24 The Human Person as Believer 575 contrast, we can think of those individuals who seek out content that reinforces their preexisting opinions and then go on to form further opinions (unthinkingly) by absorbing associated content. If, for example, you view President Obama favorably, then you are likely to watch MSNBC. If, on the other hand, you view President Trump favorably, then you are likely to view Fox News. This will serve both to confirm you in an already-held opinion (in favor of the president in question) as well as to expose you to other possible contents of opinions that you are likely to just acquire passively. An analogue exists in the case of trying to answer the question of who am I—we surround ourselves with those who implicitly promise to ratify our preexisting self-image. We can begin to see the connection between truth and friendship when it comes to answering the question of who am I. Coming to grips with the truth of myself is not a project that can be realized alone. It requires the mediation of friends. It is only through the love of friendship that certain truths—the good and the bad—come to light for me: my friends not only grasp that I exemplify certain values that I may not have realized I embody, but also, through their solicitous concern for my own growth as a person, that I exemplify certain disvalues, and fail to see that I do. I may, for example, think of myself as just an “average” friend, but my friend may see what I, in either modesty, ignorance, or both, fail to see, namely that I am a very loving, supportive friend. Or, I may have a hidden fault which escapes my attention, either due to pride, ignorance, or both. Perhaps, for example, my friend helps me to see that I can be very insensitive in my humor, and so unwittingly come to wound those I claim to love. Either way, true friendship is what enables us to correct for the distortions of pride, false humility, or just plain ignorance. But if incarnating the spirit of truth requires friendship, friendship just as equally requires incarnating the spirit of truth. Whereas friendship is needed fully to incarnate the spirit of truth, we must at least have begun to incarnate the spirit of truth if friendship is to be made possible for us in the first place. In the first place, this is because friendship is a form of being with another. But we cannot be with another unless we communicate the truth of ourselves to the other and, correlatively, are receptive to the other’s self-revelation of the truth to us. By deliberately refusing to incarnate the spirit of truth, we close ourselves off to the prospect of being with others, and thus to the prospect of an authentically personal existence. Such a refusal may take the form of lying about myself to others, thus keeping them at arm’s length from who I really am, and dominating the “relation- 576 Joseph Gamache ship” through controlling the other’s idea, or image, of me.27 Alternatively, it may take the form of believing falsely about the other, either benignly, as in the case where I am a victim of the other’s lying attempt to keep me at bay and dominate me, or else malignantly, as when I attempt to imprison the other in my idealized representation of him.28 Either way, the very possibility of being with the other, and thus of friendship, is thwarted.29 Second, as Jason Kawall has observed in recent work, the spirit of truth is necessary for the exercise of certain central acts of friendship, among them forgiveness, encouragement, and acceptance.30 All of these acts depend on an acquaintance with the truth of our friends. Insofar as friendship, as a form of love, must be solicitous for the growth of the beloved friend, the absence of these acts of acceptance and forgiveness (wed, as they are, to encouragement to be better) destroys the friendship. This is, of course, a matter of degree, but the point remains that if we cannot lovingly accept our friends, while also acknowledging their faults, and pushing them to be better, then we cannot be friends. While there are liminal cases, the end result of this is the degeneration of friendship into something merely transactional: a doxastic quid pro quo. Thus, incarnating the spirit of truth, so crucial to one’s being a person, both requires, and is required by, another aspect of being a person—namely of being that entity which is capable of giving and receiving love. What we have learned, then, is that truth is a norm of belief insofar as truth is a value for the person. Truth is a value for the person insofar as it is interconnected with another fundamental value of the human person, namely friendship. Placing this within the larger context of this paper as a whole, the results of this secondary reflection are as follows. To believe that p is not to aim at, but to be committed to, the truth of p. But introducing the concrete person into our reflections shows us that the enactment of See Harry Frankfurt, On Truth (New York: Knopf, 2006), 80–81. See Marcel, Homo Viator, 53. 29 To see this, consider one phenomenon of friendship: two friends enjoying each other’s presence in silence. This can be difficult, but if you believe the truth about your friend, and have communicated the truth of yourself to her, then you have at least made this possible metaphysically. For if you have lied, then you have erected a barrier around yourself which your friend cannot pierce. To the extent that such a barrier is built, being with another becomes increasingly impossible. And to the extent that you believe falsely about your friend, you live either behind a barrier of your (supposed) friend’s lies or else imprison your friend within the cell of your own idealization. 30 Jason Kawall, “Friendship and Epistemic Norms,” Philosophical Studies 165 (2013): 356–57. 27 28 The Human Person as Believer 577 this commitment is fraught with temptation. If truth is a norm of our beliefs, this is not because of some standing desire we have for truth (such a desire can be perverted, as we saw), nor is “conceptual necessity” going to do the job: we can accept that truth is the constitutive norm of belief, and just maintain that what we believe meets that standard, or, in a radically Protagorean vein, maintain that what we believe just is the standard of truth. Rather what this reflection on the ambiguity of belief as a commitment to the truth has shown us is that if truth is (as has been plausibly assumed) a norm of belief it must be so in virtue of being a value for the person, one that is neither merely instrumental nor “merely” intrinsic, one that we can grasp through its situation alongside other values, and one which we can make a choice for. In this paper, I considered truth in relation to friendship, which I just assumed was uncontroversially a value. Vindicating that assumption requires widening the scope of the present secondary reflection, but that is a task for another day. For now, however, we have seen how introducing the person into our thinking about belief and its norms shows (1) how better to understand the relationship between belief and truth, (2) what the norm of truth must look like (in its broad contours) if it is to be a norm for the person, and (3) how we might articuN&V late truth as a value of the person alongside others. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2019): 579–616 579 Book Reviews Jesus, Interpreted: Benedict XVI, Bart Ehrman, and the Historical Truth of the Gospels by Matthew J. Ramage (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2017), 263 pp. Matthew Ramage has shown himself to be a formidable exponent of the thought of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. In his Jesus, Interpreted, he situates Benedict’s exegetical vision alongside that of Bart Ehrman—where skeptic and Pontiff alike receive an eminently fair hearing. By the end of the book, we have encountered not just a dispute over grammar and syntax—over historical inquiry itself—but of philosophical worldview. Ramage deftly brings out the centrality of these meta-questions, going so far as to say they more or less determine the exegetical outcome. The beginning of the book takes one through a tour of how—at least on its face—revolutionary Ratzinger’s exegetical project was: Ramage demonstrates the tension between Ratzinger’s positions and those seemingly rejected by the Pontifical Biblical Commission at the early part of the twentieth century (27–37). Throughout, one is introduced to Ratzinger’s exegetical program—where the emeritus Pope is shown to be at once a practitioner and admirer of modern historical-critical methods, and yet is at the same time their “incisive critic” (57–72, 233). If patristic biblical interpretation tended to focus on the divinity and unity of Sacred Scripture, modern historical methods tend to accentuate the diversity of human voices at the origin of the Bible. As Ramage well notes, “Spiritual exegesis can go beyond the text of Scripture only after it has gone through the text by dealing with its literal sense” (60, emphasis original). If there is a perceived weakness in the patristic method, it is jumping too quickly to the spiritual. But as Ramage explains, Benedict clearly sees deficiencies in the modern approach as well: “Since faith is not a fundamental component of Method B [historical-critical] exegesis, those who employ this method sometimes miss the ultimate end, the very raison d’ être of Scripture: the opportunity to encounter the living God who teaches man through his sacred word” (63). The middle section of the book takes one through Erhman’s historical-Jesus analysis, detailing and summarizing his arguments principally against the divinity of Jesus and the resurrection (101–44). This 580 Book Reviews is followed by a survey of Benedict’s counter positions, providing what Ramage takes to be a reasonable exegetical alternative (145–93). Ramage distills Benedict’s penchant for trying to discern the “core” of faith and his willingness to concede extraneous “accidental” aspects as non-essential—a case in point being Benedict’s opting for John’s chronology and his rejection of the Synoptic account that the Last Supper was in fact a Passover meal (160–61). Another key feature that comes out—in contrasting Ehrman and Benedict—is the issue of development. For Ramage, the importance of Newman here could hardly be overstated. Ehrman’s position is that Christology had its “Big Bang” within the first twenty years after the death of Jesus—at which point followers of Jesus began to believe in Jesus’s resurrection and thereby mythologized the apocalyptic rabbi, setting forth a trajectory that would culminate in Nicea. But for Ehrman, of course, such a trajectory has very little to do with the historical Jesus. And for Ehrman, the whole question of “orthodoxy” has more to do with claims of power than it does truth. Ramage readily concedes development: the question is whether this development is the work of divine providence, leading the Church into an ever-deeper encounter with the truth (see 145). Ramage likewise provides a similar analysis for the question of Christ’s Second Coming. Here, too, Ramage is willing to concede Ehrman’s point that the “second coming” is largely the result of a delayed imminent expectation of Christ’s coming (198). Ramage takes the reader through Ratzinger’s willingness to countenance this basic framework, while attempting to discern faith’s essential core: “For Ratzinger this is the critical point: in dealing with the second coming, the biblical authors subordinate the question of timing to the question of how Christians ought to behave regardless of when Christ returns” (217). Where Ratzinger is especially critical of modern approaches, as Ramage well lays out, is the tendency to disavow God’s activity in the world—that is, an a priori presupposition that assumes at best deism, if not outright agnosticism/atheism. If one begins with this assumption, then of course one will have to find a merely human/natural explanation for miracle claims and the like (234). The final chapter of Ramage’s treatment is extremely well done: even more than other parts of the book, here he drills down on the essentially philosophical cruces of the issue at hand. And here is where he returns once Book Reviews 581 again to this conviction of Ratzinger: “The debate about modern exegesis is not at its core a dispute among historians, but among philosophers” (232),1 citing Ratzinger, “Biblical Interpretation in Conflict,” 19). Ramage follows with a discussion of the possibility of miracles and a fairly extensive treatment of the problem of evil. The latter is relevant because Ehrman notes that it was not historical-critical issues per se which led him to reject his Christian past—it was in fact the problem of evil (238). Ramage proceeds to show that the arguments drawn from either naturalism or the problem of evil do not have demonstrative force, though he does concede their prima facie cogency (see 251). Overall, this is a fantastic work: rarely, does one find such theological acumen coupled with such exegetical and historical precision. Ramage is clearly comfortable in the Scholastic world of St. Thomas, as well as the exegetical framework of Bart Ehrman. This dexterity is needed if we are to move the exegetical and theological discussion forward regarding Sacred Scripture—if we are to engage and not ignore the modern question, and if we are to do so in a manner that avoids getting mired in an exegetical paralysis that sterilizes the Word of God. Here, however, are a few questions: if it is really a matter of worldview first and foremost—as determining the position beforehand—then why enter into historical argumentation at all? It seems to me that we argue over things when we assume reason has something to say about the matter; after all, we do not really argue over flavors of ice cream (because we realize this is a matter of mere taste). But we do engage in moral argument; and like exegesis, there is wide disparity and seemingly no public consensus. And worldview certainly affects this discussion. But if we attribute the debate entirely to worldview (whether morally or historically about Jesus)—to the mere opting for one worldview over another—it would seem that it is utterly fruitless to enter into public debate and argumentation; it would seem that this debate is (and should be) settled at a non-rational level. Now, this is not Ramage’s position and he does give discussion as to how one might adjudicate between worldviews (see 237ff.); but I wonder if he is conceding too much to the influence of worldview as it concerns historical argumentation. For example, one might say Ramage lets Ehrman off the hook when the latter says the resurrection cannot be proved (see 234). Ramage writes: “This indeed is why we call it faith, not science” (234). Ramage does discuss the Thomistic teaching on external helps (say Citing Ratzinger, “Biblical Interpretation in Conflict,” in Opening up the Scriptures: Joseph Ratzinger and the Foundations of Biblical Interpretation, ed. Luis Sánchez Navarro (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 19. 1 582 Book Reviews historical argument here) and internal helps (e.g.., divine grace) when coming to faith (235). And he is no doubt correct here. But—especially as it pertains to history (and especially ancient history)—is the dichotomy between faith and science all there is? In other words, if we mean by “proof” something that might happen in a physics lab (or a philosophical demonstration), then of course there is no “proof” of the resurrection. But if we recognize upfront that historical inquiry (secular or otherwise) is not subject to this kind of “proof” at all—since it is always a matter of taking something on the testimony of another (since we were not there)—then is it not possible that a reasonable historical argument could be made for, say, the resurrection that is just as cogent as one made for some other aspect of ancient history? Just because the non-believer does not accept it does not mean it is a bad argument. And since history deals with particulars, historical “proof” is never demonstrative in the sense of episteme, whether sacred or profane. In other words, if we have a high Cartesian bar of proof, then of course these matters are not subject to proof; but if such a bar is not in any way appropriate to the discipline of history, then historical affirmations about Jesus do not instantly become a matter of pure faith. In fact, perhaps some of them could be reasonably supported—that is “proved” in a manner appropriate to the standard of ancient history (which I would take to be plausible/reasonable belief ). Ramage cites Michael Bird, who advocates for a “criterion of historical plausibility” (125); one can find a similar position in Brant Pitre.2 Such a criterion lowers the bar of what we mean by “proof”—one which in fact is more realistic with respect to history—in which case we could say that even things like the resurrection might be eminently reasonable at the level of historical analysis. That said, in order to come to saving faith in Jesus, one certainly needs the movement of grace. But perhaps natural reason could aver that it is more reasonable to say Jesus rose from the dead than that he did not. If we do not accept this, then we should stop writing historical treatments on the resurrection and the like; I take it that we continue to do so precisely because we believe reason has something to say on the matter—that it is not just a matter of philosophical worldview, and that historical argumentation can be convincing. I do not think Ramage would dispute my point here, but his text does suggest that he is perhaps less sanguine about the enterprise than I might be. He is completely correct to say that if one assumes an atheistic E.g., Brant Pitre, Jesus and the Last Supper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), 41. 2 Book Reviews 583 worldview then certain explanations will be a priori out of bounds (e.g., the miraculous). And to that extent, it is a debate about worldviews. But is atheism really natural reason’s true starting point? As a Thomist, I take it that natural reason can know that God exists—and thence it must be at least possible that he could interact in history in unique, supernatural ways. If that is the starting point of natural reason, then it seems to me possible that a rational defense—even a proof (properly qualified)—for the resurrection could be mustered. Again, on the whole Jesus, Interpreted is required reading for anyone interested in these issues. Its merits lay in a thoroughly charitable and meticulous treatment of the exegetical arguments involved, in conjunction with an in-depth analysis of the philosophical issues at hand. In addition, it is always nice to be reminded what a first-rate thinker our emeritus Pontiff was (and still is)—Ramage displays this nicely! N&V Andrew D. Swafford Benedictine College Atchison, KS Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics by J. Budziszewski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), xxvii + 295 pp. J. Budziszewski’s Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics follows his similarly structured 2014 Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law. But while the earlier commentary, over 500 pages long, works straight through all of questions 90–97 of the prima secundae and is supplemented by an additional 250-page online commentary, this commentary is shorter, highly selective, and lacks a supplemental online commentary. And since the first half considers selected articles on the virtues in general, while the second half considers selected articles on justice, the Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics itself feels like a supplement to the earlier law commentary. After describing its overall content and structure, I will comment on how useful it might be for its intended audience: “scholars,” “students” and “even . . . serious general readers” (xxi). The Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics includes the text of, and commentary on, eighteen articles from the Summa theologiae. Ten articles focus on the virtues in general: I-II, q. 55, a. 4 (Whether virtue is suitably defined?) I-II, q. 58, a. 4 (Whether there can be moral without intellectual virtue?) I-II, q. 58, a. 5 (Whether there can be intellectual without moral virtue?) 584 Book Reviews I-II, q. 61, a. 2 (Whether there are four cardinal virtues?) I-II, q. 61, a. 3 (Whether any other virtues should be called principal rather than these?) I-II, q. 62, a. 1 (Whether there are any theological virtues?) I-II, q. 63, a. 1 (Whether virtue is in us by nature?) I-II, q. 63, a. 2 (Whether any virtue is caused in us by habituation?) I-II, q. 65, a. 1 (Whether the moral virtues are connected with one another) I-II, q. 84, a. 4 (Whether the seven capital vices are suitably reckoned?) And the remaining eight articles focus on the virtue of justice: II-II, q. 30, a. 3 (Whether mercy is a virtue) II-II, q. 58, a. 1 (Whether justice is fittingly described as being the perpetual and constant will to render to each one his right?) II-II, q. 60, a. 1 (Whether judgment is an act of justice?) II-II, q. 60, a. 2 (Whether it is lawful to judge?) II-II, q. 60, a. 5 (Whether we should always judge according to the written law?) II-II, q. 60, a. 6 (Whether judgment is rendered perverse by being usurped?) II-II, q. 80, a. 1 (Whether the virtues annexed to justice are suitably enumerated?) II-II, q. 122, a. 1 (Whether the precepts of the Decalogue are precepts of justice?) The text of each article is presented twice—once in the 1920 Blackfriars translation (now in the public domain and widely available) and once in a paraphrase by Budziszewski. Line-by-line commentary follows each portion of the text and is keyed to the sentences in the Blackfriars translation. Besides the text of the commentary itself, an eleven-page general introduction and an index are included as supporting material. Budziszewski is most interested in understanding the plain meaning of the text, and in working through Aquinas’s sources, and there are almost no comments that engage contemporary scholars or critics of Aquinas. As he says, “Some may think I do not spend enough time quarreling with critics of St. Thomas. My conviction is that before we enter these quarrels, we had better make sure we understand him. If we do understand him, many of the criticisms fall away like dead leaves” (xxii). Serious general readers will find this commentary very helpful, espe- 585 Book Reviews cially if they are coming to Aquinas for the first time. Consider this representative passage from ST I-II, q. 55, a. 4 that discusses the “matter” of virtues and Budziszewski’s paraphrase (10–11): Text: [5] Now virtue has no matter “out of which” it is formed, as neither has any other accident; but it has matter “about which” it is concerned, and matter “in which” it exists, namely, the subject. [6] The matter about which virtue is concerned is its object, and this could not be included in the above definition, because the object fixes the virtue to a certain species, and here we are giving the definition of virtue in general. [7] And so for material cause we have the subject, which is mentioned when we say that virtue is a good quality “of the mind.” Paraphrase: The material cause of a thing is its matter, which may be taken in three senses: the matter of which it is composed, the matter to which it pertains, or the matter in which it exists. Now virtue is not composed of anything—it is an “accident” or nonessential property of something else (a mind), and no accident is composed of anything. So matter in the first sense could not have been included in its definition. Virtue does have matter to which it pertains—its object, that to which it is directed— but this could not have been included in the definition either, because we are speaking of virtue in general, and the object of virtue depends on what kind of virtue we are talking about. That leaves matter in the third sense, the thing in which virtue exists, which is the mind—thus, quite properly, the definition states that virtue is a good quality of the mind. The commentary on the corpus explains the four causes in even greater detail, and includes an important passage from Aristotle’s Metaphysics 5.2 explaining each cause. Then the specific commentary on this passage follows: [5] Since virtue is not composed of anything, one might be inclined to say that it has no matter. However, it is essentially related to 586 Book Reviews certain matter, and this is the matter that we call its material cause. One way in which a virtue may be essentially related to matter is that this matter is its object. The object of generosity, for example, is the giving of things to others. [6] However, different virtues have different objects. For example, the object of temperance is not the same as the object of fortitude. So no particular object of virtue is properly included in the definition of virtue in general. [7] Another way in which a virtue may be essentially related to matter is that this matter is its subject—that in which the virtue inheres. In what then does virtue inhere? It inheres in the mind. There, the mind is its material cause. To contemporary readers, it may seem strange to describe mind as material, but the puzzle is easily dispelled when we remember that by matter he means anything that can receive a form. He is not using the term “matter” as we do when we say that the brain is material but thinking is nonmaterial but rather as we do when we say that the matter of thinking is thoughts. (12–13) For similar reasons, this will be a very helpful text for students, especially those who wish to dig deeper into Aquinas’s sources. For example, the sed contra of I-II, q. 65, a. 1 (Whether the moral virtues are connected with one another?), includes very short quotations from Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory, and Cicero. Budziszewski’s commentary includes a long quotation from each of them that includes the quotation in the sed contra as well as its larger context before and after the quoted passage. This is Budziszewski’s standard practice throughout; he regularly includes longer quotations that give the context of a relevant passage, and sometimes includes a handful of passages from which a more ambiguous reference might have come (as when Aquinas refers in the sed contra of I-II, q. 55, a. 4, to Augustine’s De libero arbitrio 2.19, and Budziszewski includes eight relevant passages from De libero arbitrio in his commentary, only six of which are from book 2, and only two of those from chapter 19). Its usefulness for scholars, however, is more mixed. If a scholar is coming to these texts without much familiarity with Aquinas, then this will give a good introduction to the main lines of his thought in these articles. The many quotations from Aquinas’s sources are particularly helpful, and Budziszewski is also very good at preventing easy misunderstandings Book Reviews 587 of the text, such as those that might occur if one were not careful with common medieval figures of speech (such as metonymy [xxiii], synecdoche [184], and enallage [282]); indeed, as Budziszewski says, “Failure to recognize the classical figures of speech is one of the most common reasons for misinterpreting St. Thomas’s writings” (184). But there is much less here for the scholar who needs to go beyond the plain meaning of the text. The contextual quotations from Aquinas’s sources remain the most helpful feature of the commentary (and they are a genuinely impressive feature), and there are also some important corrections of the Blackfriars translation. But deeper puzzles regarding what Aquinas is doing, whether they be interpretative questions or substantive issues, remain undeveloped. When Aquinas refers to our natural insufficiency to direct ourselves to our supernatural end, Budziszewski says merely that, “We must be lifted. But unless God had made man liftable, this could not happen, for not even God can do what is contradictory. Our liftability, then, is a genuine aspect of our created nature. St. Thomas’s term for it is the ‘obediential potency,’ the passive potentiality to receive God’s direct influence” (72). There is no further development or reference to other discussions of the topic, or even a hint that this is a difficult matter in Aquinas’s synthesis of Augustine and Aristotle. And when Aquinas mentions that virtue cannot be “badly used,” Budziszewski says, “To contemporary readers, the claim that it is impossible to put virtue to bad purposes may seem preposterous, but see the Reply to Objection 5” (13). Aquinas’s reply to the fifth objection is not particularly helpful, and Budziszewski’s comments are too brief to be of much use to “the contemporary reader” to whom it seems obvious that virtuous behavior can be at the service of bad ends (or, in another vein, that exercising one virtue can entail violating another). Writing for the generally educated reader, the student, and the scholar all at once is a noble and important task. Budziszewski’s Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics succeeds admirably for the general reader and the student, and offers some real benefits for the scholar, especially if he or she is not an Aquinas specialist. And happily enough, the disappointN&V ment of the specialist is often a price worth paying. Raymond Hain Providence College Providence, RI 588 Book Reviews A Theology of Grace in Six Controversies by Edward T. Oakes, S.J. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), xxii + 248 pp. The late Fr. Edward T. Oakes’s ingenious work reads mostly like a collection of essays in which he draws on a relatively significant array of literature, scholarly and popular (although mostly scholarly), primary and secondary (although mostly secondary), to address some of the most difficult topics in theology from a broadly ecumenical perspective. Six topics are addressed in this order: (1) the relationship between nature and grace, (2) the question of justification, (3) the problem of whether the empirical data of contemporary science and the theological stances of the Catholic Church on original sin may cohere, (4) the debate concerning the nature of human freedom and the divine gift of supernatural life (grace), (5) the an sit and quid sit of divinization/deification, and (6) whether Protestants and Catholics can agree on the predestination of Mary by divine grace. Although the book’s primary purpose does not seem to be ecumenical rapprochement, the second and sixth chapters are the most overtly ecumenical. The chapters that most directly concern intra-Catholic debates, but nonetheless certainly have ecumenical ramifications that Oakes does not take the time to explicate, are the first and fourth; there are sections of the third chapter that are also relevant to the fourth (not to mention the relevance of the second to the fourth). As Oakes acknowledges, there is no way for a single book or a single author to resolve all of these debates. In this review I will focus primarily on the chapters that have indirect ecumenical import, which concern perhaps the two most contentious and still largely unresolved debates in Catholic theology. Oakes advances in chapter 1 a somewhat surprising solution to the twentieth-century debate between the nouvelle theologie and the “Thomists of the strict observance” concerning the relationship between the natural realm of created being and the supernatural realm of participation in the Trinitarian life (i.e., divine grace): the nineteenth-century “romantic” Thomist articulation of the issue by Matthias Joseph Scheeben. Relying on Andrew Swafford, John Courtney Murray, and Aidan Nichols, O.P., Oakes proposes Scheeben as a kind of via media between Henri de Lubac and recent defenders of the hardline position of Thomists like Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., principally Lawrence Feingold and Steven A. Long. Most of the time Scheeben sounds more like the latter, but Oakes points to a couple passages where it sounds like he might question the autonomy of ethics as a science apart from revelation (see 42–43)—I think he is actually only minimizing its efficacy—and to his utilization of the metaphor of nuptiality for the Book Reviews 589 relationship between nature and grace (see 35 and 44). I might argue that this metaphor is more equipped to help illuminate how nature and grace actually interact in the redeemed than to elucidate how they operate as speculative principles in the economy of creation and salvation history. But, certainly, Oakes would have done well to turn to a fellow Jesuit who lived during the heat of the debate, but stayed out of (or stood above?) the fray of the debate, Bernard J. F. Lonergan. Lonergan’s precise technical treatment of the natural desire for God would have been a welcome complement to Scheeben’s metaphorical-romantic solution. Nonetheless, Oakes demonstrates cogency in a number of theses: (1) that the intrinsicist–extrinsicist division of parties in the debate is too easy (see 34 and 43), (2) that Lubac’s intention to break down the two-tiered approach was laudable, even if his metaphysical analysis of the question is faulty, but his understanding of the commentator tradition was superficial (see 16–20 and 32n47), (3) that there are sets of texts supporting each school in Thomas’s corpus, although the Thomist school has stronger arguments on its side (21n32 and 24–32), and (4) that the Thomists correctly insist that nature and grace must be distinguished properly before they may be united (see 33–35 and 37). I do not think all of this can be taken straight from Scheeben, but Oakes wants to point to a precursor to the debate in order to avoid taking sides, even though it is striking to see a Balthasarian acknowledge the legitimacy of recent criticisms made of Lubac. In chapter 4, Oakes is right both to find the root of the debate concerning predestination, grace, and freedom in Augustine of Hippo’s mistaken interpretation of divine sovereignty in Romans 9 and to seek a resolution to the debate beyond the intractable terms of it set by the Bañezians and Molinists. While referencing the fact that Lonergan understands the latter to have no grasp of Thomas Aquinas (see 156n33), Oakes spends no time with Aquinas himself and quotes much from Barth that seems rather to push the issue off rather than attempt to grapple with it. Barth turns the question of predestination and grace into a question about the salvation of all versus the damnation of most (in Augustine), transforming Calvin’s predestinarianism into a doctrine of universal election and singular reprobation (of Christ). It is understandable that Oakes, as a Balthasarian, turns to Barth. But Balthasar was also a professed Thomist, which is why it is disappointing also not to see in Balthasar any serious treatment of Thomas Aquinas on the grace–freedom dynamic. In addition to Lonergan’s classic 590 Book Reviews Grace and Freedom,1 Michal Paluch’s magisterial La Profondeur de l’amour divin2 would have been helpful in the task of engaging Aquinas on the issue. Finally, Oakes does well to cite repeatedly Dom M. John Farrelly’s Predestination, Grace, and Free Will3 on the parameters and terms of the debate (see 148–49, 154–57), but it is a glaring omission to leave aside all consideration of the notion of fallible or frustrable grace, which is found throughout that work, especially given the context of man’s fallen nature set up by the previous chapter. The most pivotal question left unaddressed in Oakes’s magnanimous book is the following: does fallen man have the power to resist grave sin without infallible (or irresistible) grace? In other words, if Augustine’s massa damnata theory of original sin is mistaken, as Oakes effectively argues (121–35, 171–81), even if not completely accurate on every point (particularly, on 136 and 182), then how badly is human nature damaged by concupiscence: is it impossible for post-lapsarian man to choose the good unless caused to do so by an irresistible divine grace or may God condition his predestining will upon human resistance or lack thereof? Oakes simply does not ask the question. Francisco Marin-Sola, as Michael Torre has shown, was a master of both Aquinas and the commentator tradition on fallible graces, the conditional divine decrees that bestow them, and their sufficiency for meritorious works. Oakes certainly ran across both Marin-Sola as well as Jacques Maritain and Charles Journet, who popularized this interpretation of Thomas, which says God’s antecedent permission of evil deeds is not infallible, since he cites William Most’s book on the matter (and favorably! [see 183n79]). Distancing himself slightly from Marin-Sola’s articulation, Most focuses on the element of divine foreknowledge (hence his formula: praedestinatione ante praevisa merita, reprobatione post praevisa demerit [“predestination before foreseen merits, reprobation after foreseen demerits”]), although he professes essential agreement with Maritain.4 One might argue that Oakes did not want to adjudicate the differences between these authors. In fact, Oakes utilizes for his argument authors as diverse 1 2 3 4 Bernard Lonergan, Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1 of Works of Bernard Lonergan, eds. Frederick E. Crowe, S.J., and Robert M. Doran, S.J. (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2000 [repr.]) Michal Paluch, La Profondeur de l’amour divin: La prédestination dans l’oeuvre de saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: J. Vrin, 2004). Dom Mark John Farrelly, O.S.B, Predestination Grace and Free Will (London: Burns and Oates, 1964). See William Most, Grace, Predestination, and the Salvific Will of God: New Answers to Old Questions (Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press, 1997), 485. Book Reviews 591 as Robert Barron, Brian Shanley, Henri Rondet, Denys Turner, and Reinhard Hütter (see 154–59), who each hold slightly different views, all arguably belonging to this emerging consensus of which I speak, but without distinguishing between their differences (perhaps conflating them) and without engaging their common master, the Angelic Doctor. His argument is simply that God’s causality of free acts transcends the distinction between contingency and necessity, that God works for the salvation of all, and that the details are beyond us (although he does not spell this last point out). Despite the slight variations between Lonergan (whom Oakes does cite supportively on occasion without engaging in a significant manner), Marin-Sola, Maritain, Journet, and others, the emerging consensus among Catholic theologians on the nature of God’s permission of moral evil (against the neo-Bañezian insistence on infallible antecedent permissive decrees) is a development that is pivotal to the question of the relationship between divine grace and human freedom. The real problem is that, for a Balthasarian, to confront the possibility of fallible or frustrable grace risks leading to a diffusion of the following conundrum: if God’s grace is efficacious and God desires all men to be saved, why are not all men saved? Oakes wants to leave the question open-ended, as if it is too high a question for men to address, as Balthasar himself does (even amidst his lofty Trinitarian speculations), but the truth is that many have addressed it in a satisfactory manner, relying on divine revelation—the power of the human being to resist grace does not diminish the efficacy of grace because God has willed to condition his grace upon our lack of resistance, of which we are capable even after the fall, at least, when it comes to grave matters. If we are not to hold a “total corruption” understanding of concupiscence, we have to admit the possibility of post-lapsarian man to yield to fallible grace. And if we admit this possibility, then there is no reason to insist that every grace be infallibly efficacious or that predestination be conceived solely in terms of infallible decrees. Without this Augustinian pre-conception of grace as necessarily infallible, there is no reason to have to choose between a restrictive view of election and a universalism akin to Barth’s. Oakes does not address the question of universalism, but it lurks beneath the surface, and I have the sneaking suspicion that he avoids the question of the possibility of fallible grace in an attempt to forge rapprochement with the neo-orthodox. The theology of grace is at the center of the Catholic–Protestant divide. Part of overcoming this divide is overcoming the problems incumbent upon Augustinian exegesis of Romans. But in evaluating historical reception of the Augustinian hermeneutic, Thomistic developments cannot be ignored. We can all agree that the grace of justification is a gratia gratis 592 Book Reviews data, a phrase conspicuously absent from the book. Nonetheless, for this grace to be received in any sense by the free creature, it must be preserved in existence not only by gratia operans, but also by gratia cooperans. It is the nature of this cooperation that is most contentious—perhaps a more robust conversation on the perfective relationship between the supernatural and natural orders would be helpful in ecumenical discussions on the question of original sin. Oakes does a decent job of getting beyond Augustine’s exegetical extrapolation of divine sovereignty, but I think he could have also encouraged Protestant traditions to engage twentieth-century arguments concerning the conditional nature of some divine decrees, the fallibility of some graces, and the possibility of fallen man to be moved by them, rather than skirting the issue by focusing exclusively on the transcendence of God and the universality of the salvific will of God. Perhaps, if Fr. Oakes were granted more time on this earth, he would have addressed these aspects of the issue, but without a doubt divine mercy has bestowed on him a vision of these and many other things infinitely superior to the comprehension of this and every reader. Although I have focused mostly on the shortcomings of the book, it is a very interesting read and the secondary literature he cites broadened the horizons of this particular “scholar.” The book is highly intriguing and very much worth thorough N&V perusal by scholar and layman alike. Joshua R. Brotherton Sunrise, FL The Personalism of John Henry Newman by John F. Crosby (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014), xxv + 227 pp. Personalism as a philosophical category is difficult to define. Jacques Maritain noted in 1947 that there are at least “a dozen personalist doctrines, which at times have nothing more in common than the word ‘person.’”1 Since the designation of “personalism” as a philosophical category was largely a product of the first half of the twentieth century, one wonders how a monograph on Newman’s (1801–1890) personalism is possible without falling victim to anachronism. It is true, as John Crosby demonstrates in the introduction to his The Personalism of John Henry Newman, that the theological and philosophical foundation for Jacques Maritain, The Person and the Common Good, trans. By John J. Fitzgerald (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 12–13. 1 Book Reviews 593 what would later be deemed “personalism” was laid by nineteenth-century thinkers, such as John Henry Newman, even if Newman and his contemporaries did not use the term to describe their theological schema. Crosby is careful not to argue for a direct connection between Newman and any known personalist philosophers. To this end, Crosby writes, “I do not mean to say that Newman knew the early personalists and was directly influenced by them, or that he called himself a ‘personalist’” (xxii). Nor does Crosby argue that Newman provides a comprehensive “philosophical account of these ideas, or that each of them can be found in him” (xxii). Crosby’s central thesis is that Newman “was a pioneer, ‘the pioneer of a new philosophy of the individual Person and the Personal Life’” (xxii). Likewise, Crosby sets out to “show that his pioneering personalism coheres entirely with and in fact stands in the service of his radically theocentric religion” (xxii). Crosby reads Newman through what he deems Newman’s “ethos,” namely that he “seems to understand human things through understanding his own human heart; he knows human beings through the medium of what he himself is” (xxiii). Newman’s “ethos,” Crosby argues, is expressed succinctly in his cardinal’s motto, cor ad cor loquitur, translated as “heart speaks to heart.” Thus, what concerns Crosby in this book is “the richness, the fruitfulness of his [Newman’s] personalism and of the unity that it forms with his theocentric religious existence” (xxv). Crosby’s analysis of Newman’s personalism progresses in seven chapters. Chapter 1, “Theocentric Religion,” begins with an explanation of the relationship between Newman’s dogmatic principle2 and what Crosby Crosby associates the dogmatic principle with a “zeal for truth” (2). The passage that he uses to explain the dogmatic principle is from Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine: “That there is a truth then; that there is one truth; that religious error is in itself of an immoral nature; that its maintainers, unless involuntarily such, are guilty in maintaining it; that it is to be dreaded; that the search for truth is not the gratification of curiosity; that its attainment has nothing of the excitement of a discovery; that the mind is below truth, not above it, and is bound, not to descant upon it, but to venerate it; that truth and falsehood are set before us for the trial of our hearts; that our choice is an awful giving forth of lots on which salvation or rejection is inscribed . . .—this is the dogmatical principle, which has strength” (quoted in Crosby, The Personalism of John Henry Newman, 1–2). While Crosby is assuredly emphasizing the objective nature of Newman’s dogmatic principle, there is another important element of the dogmatic principle that is not explained, namely, that, in the passage quoted by Crosby, Newman is explaining that humans can understand revelation, albeit imperfectly: “supernatural truths [are] irrevocably committed to human language, imperfect because it is human, but definitive and necessary because given from above.” See also, Andrew 2 594 Book Reviews calls the “radical theocentric spirit,” or the notion that, “the doctrine of the Trinity concerns not only the economy of our salvation, but also, and first of all, God as He exists in Himself” (3). In this chapter, Crosby articulates how Newman avoids the dangers of an overly subjective understanding of our relationship with the Triune God. Chapter 2, “Imagination and Intellect,” explains the distinction that Newman makes “between the notional and real apprehension of propositions, and . . . notional and real assent to propositions” (35). Crosby compares Newman’s notion of God as “outside of me” with Kierkegaard: “both thinkers are referring to a truth that is outside of me, at a distance from me, truth that leaves me cold even when acknowledged” (49). Crosby explains that it is Newman’s real assent, which is akin to Kierkegaard’s existential truth, that “closes this distance” between God and our human heart, “giving me an experiential immediacy to the truth apprehended and enabling the truth to engage me as a whole person” (49). Chapter 3, “Heart Speaks to Heart,” and chapter 4, “Personal Influence,” investigate the way in which God is present in our human relationships. Crosby writes that “it is important for understanding Newman’s personalism that the abundance of affective life coheres entirely with that spirit of adoration that lies at the center of religious experience” (70). To this end Crosby demonstrates that Newman holds together the importance of the affective aspects of our human existence and relationship with God and the eternal truth described in his dogmatic principle: “He [Newman] knows that theocentric religion engages not only the intellect and the will, but also the heart” (74). Similarly, in chapter 4, Crosby explains “how religious truth is transmitted by personal influence” (111). Chapter 5, “You Must Consent to Think,” describes Newman’s “personalist account of thinking, of intellectual understanding, and of reasoning” (111). An extended explanation of Newman’s illative sense is included in this chapter, which, as Crosby notes, involves both heart and character. Crosby argues that “knowledge by connaturality” (chapter 3) “is important for personalism because it is knowledge that is gained not just through the intellect but through the medium of one’s whole being and character” (127). For Newman, Crosby argues, “one venerates revealed truth more by apprehending it with one’s whole being than by apprehending it just with one’s intellect. . . . One venerates revealed truth more by a thinking faith than by a narrow-minded faith” (150). Meszaros, The Prophetic Church: History and Doctrinal Development in John Henry Newman and Yves Congar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 2–7. Book Reviews 595 In chapter 6, “An Infinite Abyss of Existence,” Crosby describes the subjective nature of Newman’s personalism and distinguishes Newman’s view of personal subjectivity with subjectivism. As is the case with chapters 2–5, Crosby places Newman’s conceptualization of subjectivity against his notion of theocentricity and concludes that Newman’s notion of “inward infinity resonates with, and awakens in response to the living God” (184–85). In the conclusion of this chapter Crosby notes an insufficiency in Newman’s understanding of the material world, namely that “there is a subjectivist tendency in this part of his thought” (185). However, Crosby concludes that “this lack in Newman” does not “compromise his theocentric religion”; therefore, it is not seen as a grave error. Chapter 7, “The Creative Principle of Religion,” asks the question: “What is, for Newman, the primordial knowledge of God that engenders and awakened religious existence?” And, more specifically, “what is distinctly personalist about Newman’s conception of our primordial religious knowledge” (186)? The conscience, Crosby argues, is how humans know and experience God: “He [Newman] explains that our primordial religious knowledge arises in our conscience. It is through our sense of being morally obliged that we can gain a real apprehension of the reality of God” (188). Crosby’s analysis of Newman’s personalism highlights the very aspect of Newman’s thought that has intrigued so many Christian thinkers in the last two centuries, namely, that humans in our very being were created for the purpose of communion with the Trinitarian God, which is known to us through our experience of God. Cardinal Ratzinger, for example, wrote in 1990 that “Newman’s teaching on conscience became an important foundation for theological personalism, which was drawing us all in its sway. Our image of the human being as well as our image of the Church was permeated by this point of departure.”3 Ratzinger succinctly states the significance of Newman’s personalism as relationship between the human heart and God in our conscience, which, as is noted, is not an individualist philosophy: “Precisely because Newman interpreted the existence of the human being from conscience, that is, from the relationship between God and the soul, was it clear that this personalism is not individualism, and that being bound by conscience does not mean being free to make random Joseph Ratzinger, Presentation by His Eminence Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger on the Occasion of the First Centenary of the Death of Cardinal John Henry Newman, Rome, 28 April 28, 1990, www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/ documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19900428_ratzinger-newman_en.html. 3 596 Book Reviews choices—the exact opposite is the case.”4 Crosby’s analysis of Newman’s personalism is well-written, thought-provoking, and nuanced. As Ratzinger recognized, an unnuanced description of personalism could easily turn into either individualism or idolatry, in which human nature becomes the primary focus, rather than understanding it as oriented toward God in our experience of God in our personhood. Crosby is careful from his very first chapter to situate Newman’s understanding of conscience as Theocentric, which keeps the focus squarely on the human experience of God in our personhood. Crosby’s book is “not written just for Newman specialists; it means to serve as an introduction to the intellectual and spiritual world of Newman” (xxv). Though Crosby writes this book for a wider audience than Newman scholarship per se, the book is best served for an advanced undergraduate with professorial guidance, graduate students in theology and philosophy, and professors of theology and philosophy. Crosby’s book is theologically deep and often technical in nature, though not overtly jargon-laden. This book comes recommended for those interested in Newman’s theology and N&V philosophy, as well as scholars of personalist philosophy. Elizabeth Huddleston National Institute for Newman Studies Pittsburgh, PA Engaging the Doctrine of Creation: Cosmos, Creatures, and the Wise and Good Creator by Matthew Levering (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017), xi + 372 pp. In his third contribution in the Engaging the Doctrine series, Matthew Levering tackles the doctrine of creation, which he rightly recognizes to be a neglected and “atrophied” area of Christian theology (20). Levering opens his book with reference to several challenges that modernity has posed to the traditional Christian view of creation, and throughout his book, he displays a keen sensitivity to skeptical challenges that arise, particularly from the natural sciences. At the same time, Levering’s work is not driven by a scientific or apologetic concern. Noting Colin Gunton’s warning that treatment of the doctrine of creation is often reduced to a discussion of the relation of science and religion (13), Levering instead aims to treat creation theologically, in a way that is ultimately Ratzinger, Presentation on the First Centenary of the Death of Cardinal John Henry Newman. 4 Book Reviews 597 rooted in Scripture and tradition. As a result, Engaging the Doctrine of Creation is both conversant with modern concerns as well as rich in the heritage of classical Christian theology. In what follows I articulate three particular strengths of this insightful, engaging, and impressive book. First, Engaging the Doctrine of Creation has a remarkable breadth of scope, ranging from topics like divine ideas (chapter 1) and divine simplicity (chapter 2) to the atonement (chapter 7). Few books about creation treat topics like these, and their inclusion runs the risk of seeming forced or inauthentic; but Levering manages to draw them together into an overall vision of the Christian Gospel as involving, in John Webster’s terms, the God who has life in himself and the creatures who have life in him (4; see his summary as well on 315–17). Along the way, Levering displays a curiosity in topics that most books on creation pass over, such as the question of chapter 3, namely, “why a wise and good God willed to create dinosaurs to rule the earth for more than 150 million years and then disappear, to create the sun as merely one among many octillion stars, and to create countless species of which 99.99 percent are now extinct” (110). At the same time, Levering has not attempted to be exhaustive—he acknowledges that his book lacks treatment of, for instance, divine providence, angels, creation ex nihilo (though he does engage this topic in relation to divine ideas), and new creation (5–6). This breadth of vision is not merely an incidental feature of style or thoroughness, but has a material foundation in the doctrine of creation itself. Levering’s approach to creation shows the profound interconnection that this doctrine has with the whole range of Christian theology—for instance, in its implication for the Creator–creation distinction (requiring a God who is ontologically unique and yet not aloof from creatures), or in its entailments in the doctrine of redemption (requiring a created order imbued with a relational order of justice). This is a vast improvement from common approaches to the doctrine of creation that seem to draw their energy only from the controversial issues, whether within the church or between the church and the culture. A second strength of Engaging the Doctrine of Creation lies in its impressive command, and judicious employment, of classic theological resources on the doctrine of creation. In treating the nature of the days of Genesis 1, Levering draws from Basil’s Hexaemeron (128–34); his approach to the imago Dei is informed by the perspective of Athanasius (153); the insights of Thomas Aquinas are deployed throughout (most conspicuously in chapters 2, 4, 6, and 7). Along the way, Levering engages respectfully, but not uncritically, with the best contemporary theological work. The footnotes of this book are a tour de force of navigating the world of Christian theol- 598 Book Reviews ogy. Even readers who do not share Levering’s views or are uninterested in his selected topics may benefit from reading this book as a model of doing theology studiously and eloquently. Like his breadth of vision, Levering’s tendency toward retrieval of the tradition is not merely a stylistic feature, but rather bears upon the whole quality of his work. By approaching the doctrine of creation with an informed respect for the tradition of Christian theology, Levering offers his readers a new framework in which to work through many contemporary challenges related to this doctrine. In many cases, strikingly, those very aspects of a doctrine that contemporary theology sees as a problem, Levering pursues as a solution. This is particularly evident in chapters 1–2, where Levering argues that divine knowledge is not only compatible with creaturely freedom, but establishes it—“the immediacy of divine presencing, therefore, enables, rather than negates, created freedom” (71, italics his)—and that divine simplicity is not only harmonious with divine freedom, but its ground: “the Triune God can be freely creative not despite, but precisely because he is simple” (107). This tendency to turn the tables on the assumptions of modernity leads to a final observation of Levering’s work: he engages the natural sciences respectfully, but in the process, does not compromise classic Christian convictions in the doctrine of creation. Levering’s interest in engaging contemporary thought is present immediately in the book’s introduction, as he broaches the topic of creation with reference to books such as Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing, Stephen Hawking’s and Leonard Mlodinow’s The Grand Design, and Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (13–18). And yet Levering is also concerned that theology not yield uncritically to the dictates of modernity. This is evident in his treatment of various doctrines throughout the book and then reemphasized in the book’s conclusion (e.g., 312–13). Thus, Levering’s treatment of the image of God traces contemporary evolutionary theories concerning the origin of human consciousness (155–63), but he insists that consciousness is not merely a strictly biological phenomenon, but rather the fruit of rational ensoulment prepared for by evolution (see 153–54). Chapter 5, “Be Fruitful and Multiply,” takes current environmental and ecological concerns seriously, but ultimately defends “the generous welcoming of children” on the grounds of the priceless value of the addition of each human soul into the world (226). In chapter 6, on the difficult doctrine of original sin, Levering recognizes the challenge against traditional understandings of Adam and Eve presented by the paleoanthropological and genetic data, but ultimately defends the notion of a historical fall, whose consequence is human death Book Reviews 599 as now experienced, namely, the cutting off of fellowship and communion (258–67, 270–71). While he acknowledges that Genesis 2–3 bear differences from ancient and modern ways of narrating history, he nonetheless pushes back against Peter Enns for downplaying the interest of these chapters in questions of human origins and sinfulness (241–49, 267–69). In treating the atonement in chapter 7, Levering takes seriously contemporary objections to the notion of retributive justice, articulated by Nicolas Wolterstorff and others, but defends this notion from Scripture and simultaneously distinguishes it from caricature (277–90). In these areas and others, Levering’s work opens up new avenues of thought for how traditional Christian notions of createdness and fallenness can be reaffirmed in the face of modern challenges. Of course, the book does not resolve every challenge that must be faced. Still, Engaging the Doctrine of Creation has set a new standard for Christian engagement with the doctrine of creation, modeling a way of thinking about this topic that is theologically rich, historically informed, critically alert, and N&V wisely reasoned. Gavin Ortlund First Baptist Church Ojai, CA Theology Needs Philosophy: Acting Against Reason is Contrary to the Nature of God, edited by Matthew L. Lamb (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2016), 325 pp. What is the relationship of human reason to faith? Of philosophy to theology? Essays in this anthology—many of which originated in a conference held at Ave Maria University on February 10–12, 2011, “Philosophy in Theological Education,” and which became owing to circumstances a posthumous tribute to the life and work of Ralph McInerny—explore the “universality of the God-given light of human reason” in its relation to the Catholic faith to meet “the intellectual challenges we face at the dawn of Catholicism’s third millennium” (xi). Matthew L. Lamb’s introductory essay, “The Need for Reason in Theology,” locates the historical root of these contemporary intellectual challenges in fourteenth-century nominalism, which, “in exalting the will over reason, broke all living continuity with the great philosophical and theological traditions of the past” (xiv). In evacuating nature of its intrinsic intelligibility, nominalism brought into play the modern “dualism between mind and body, between subjects and object, between empirical science and theoretical 600 Book Reviews wisdom” (xiv–xv). And yet, Lamb responds, the “universality of reason is oriented to the universality of being” (xii). This is why, he notes, “recent popes have shown that the intellectualism of an Augustine and Aquinas provides us with ways to correct the distortions caused by nominalism and voluntarism” (xiii). In this vein, the essays in this volume seek to illustrate the important contributions metaphysical realism can make for Catholic theology in the present day. The essays in this volume are grouped topically into five parts. Essays in the first part seek to illustrate the general need for a sound philosophy interior to theology. Essays in the second part focus on the role of a metaphysics of nature and the natural knowledge of God in theology. Essays in the third part elucidate the relation of human reason to divine revelation. Essays in the fourth part examine the place of philosophy in systematic theology and those in the fifth, moral theology. Given limitations of space, not all of the many worthy essays in this volume can be mentioned in the course of this review. Nevertheless, the following overview will hopefully serve to provide the reader with a sample of the riches this anthology has to offer. In the first essay, “All Theologians are Philosophers, Whether Knowingly or Not” (3–18), Charles Morerod, O.P., argues that the rejection of philosophy, tacit or otherwise, is simply impossible for a theologian. Theology is intrinsically bound up with the issues tackled by philosophers, hence the theologian who engages in a program of dehellenization usually ends up swapping out metaphysics for other philosophical commitments, many of which impinge upon the proclamation of the Gospel (4–5). Morerod takes as an example Rudolf Bultmann’s deployment of an existentialist philosophy to explain the substance of the Gospel to modern man, who, so Bultmann alleges, can no longer acknowledge miracles (6). For Bultmann, discourse about God must give way to the “personal-existential dimension” (6). “More or less consciously,” Morerod notes, “Bultmann is influenced by a Kantian view or, more generally, modern anthropocentrism. Bultmann is clear: What matters is the human being, what we do, what we are. Not what God is in himself, but how he acts with us. We are the center” (7). In this way, God is displaced from the center he used to occupy as the traditional center of theology. What particularly concerns Morerod about this procedure is that theologians act so quickly to adopt the philosophies of their age without seemingly “caring about their compatibility with Christian faith” (9). Much the same is true if theologians adopt the philosophical underpinnings of postmodernity. While the benefit of postmodernity is that it undermines the metanarrative that supports atheism, it likewise undermines the metanarrative that supports Christianity: “interpretation has been substituted for Book Reviews 601 truth” (10). In sum, Morerod notes, “the point is not whether we are influenced by philosophy or not, but whether our philosophy . . . is true or not” (17). “What can be used is what is true” (18). The question is not whether the theologian will embrace some philosophical framework or the other; the question is whether we will embrace one that is compatible with Christian faith and open to the questions it asks and the answers it gives. In the second essay, “Videtur quod non sit necessarium, praeter theologicam disciplinam, aliam doctrinam haberi: Legitimacy of Philosophy as an Autonomous Discipline and Its Service to Theology in Aquinas and Ralph McInerny” (19–40), John P. O’Callaghan tackles the role of philosophy in the service of the faith. O’Callaghan’s title, “It Seems That It Is Not Necessary to Have Another Doctrine, beyond the Theological Discipline,” is a playful reworking of Thomas’s defense of sacra doctrina in Summa theologiae [ST], q. 1, a. 1, where the onus probandi was on Thomas’s defense of the existence and necessity of a theological discipline beyond the philosophical ones. Today, the burden of proof has shifted, and theologians are more often than not skeptical of the contribution that Greek philosophy—particularly if it is of an Aristotelian bent—has to make to theology. Accordingly, O’Callaghan wishes to make a case in this essay in favor of the abiding place of the philosophia perennis interior to theology. Granted that the Church in her pronouncements does not adopt existing philosophical “systems” in their entirety, she does nevertheless adopt “philosophical claims about the world and human nature” (36–37), and to deny this is to evacuate many of the Church’s pronouncements on revelation of their essential content. To illustrate this idea, O’Callaghan has reference to the Council of Vienne, (1311–1312) and its rejection of Peter Olivi’s anthropology, during the course of which the denial that “the rational or intellective soul” is the “form of the human body” is condemned (23). In light of this, O’Callaghan asks what it means for the soul to be a “form”? Although the language of forms is important in Platonic philosophy, this obviously is not Platonic usage, otherwise the Council would be affirming that “there is only one soul for all human beings” (24). Is the term then meant in an Aristotelian sense? O’Callaghan’s answer is “broadly,” but even here, not without qualification (25). After all, there are ambiguities in Aristotle’s writings as to whether there are, again, numerically one form for a species, or else a distinction between nous and soul that could lead to the conclusion that there is only one intellect for all human beings (25–26). Rather, what we seem to have is a medieval Christian modification of Aristotle that draws out how the Church understands Scripture’s designation of the human being as imago Dei. As O’Callaghan rightly notes, “The medieval aristotelian position was a philosophical understanding of human nature that had 602 Book Reviews been a hard won theological victory in the thirteenth century” (28). Or, as he again notes, “the background of the conciliar acts is precisely a positive movement of sacra doctrina to inquire into the meaning of Revelation” (29). O’Callaghan then goes on to contrast this medieval appropriation of the classical metaphysical tradition (that combined insights of Aristotle and Plato by building on the backbone of the Augustinian patrimony) with the modern historicization of the theological project. Many modern theologians, he notes, aver that “we must learn to live with the shifting historical categories of experience” and thereby “banish all philosophy from theological understanding . . . to retrieve the purity of the Gospel” (36). Or, more precisely, we must “banish all philosophy, except that philosophical position that holds that all experience is conditioned by historically contingent categories that are in some sense wholly dependent upon the immanent mind” (36). However, as O’Callaghan also notes, “Epistemological skepticism or Kantian and post-Kantian epistemological critique are no more immediately biblically grounded than are Greek metaphysical categories, and they are no less innocent of philosophical presuppositions generally than is Aquinas’s medieval aristotelian anthropology” (37). Rather than “theology employing philosophical metaphysics of a Greek sort,” it instead substitutes a “philosophical epistemology of a more modern and broadly European sort” (37). Either way, however, theology cannot avoid employing or presupposing some kind of philosophy, even if only negatively. The last essay I would like to survey, from the fourth part on the role of philosophy in systematic theology, is the fine essay by Gilles Emery, O.P., “Ad aliquid: Relation in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas.” In this work, Emery surveys the role of the philosophical category of relation as utilized by Thomas Aquinas in properly theological treatises. In its philosophical use, the category of relation is one of the ten predicaments “into which Aquinas divides extramental being” (177). Relation is an unusual predicament, not being a quantity or a quality. Rather, it describes something that “inheres in the subject ‘not absolutely but in connection to something else’” (178). Thus, although Aquinas “places relation among the accidents which affect the subject ‘intrinsically’” (179), nevertheless, it “‘does not posit anything in the subject’” (180, citing Aquinas, In I sent., d. 26, q. 2, a. 1, corp.). This is why Thomas, following Augustine and Boethius, is willing to posit relation as a mode of predication proper to God in addition to substance (183). Having discussed the basic category of relation in Aquinas, Emery next turns to an analysis of Aquinas’s distinction between real relations and relations of reason. Real relations are those that are founded on either quantity (double/half) or action/passion (e.g., father–son) (185). Relations of reason obtain, on the contrary, when either the correlative terms in the relation Book Reviews 603 are not really distinct (a thing’s relation to itself, e.g., something is equal to itself), if one of the pair lacks objective reality (e.g., a horse is like a unicorn), or if the foundation in quantity or action/passion is lacking. From these two types of relations, three possible combinations emerge as employed by Aquinas (188). The first is bilaterally real relations (e.g., father–son); the second is bilateral relations of reason (e.g., the relation of a thing to itself); the third is a relation which is real in one term and of reason in the other (189–90). Emery then observes that the first kind of relation is employed to account for Trinitarian relations, especially under the heading relative opposition (194–95), and the third for relations between the Creator and creatures, in which the relation is real in the creature but of reason in God (196). Although I have only had space to survey a handful of the fine essays collected in this volume, they are exemplary of the quality of the whole. Taken in its entirety, Theology needs Philosophy represents an outstanding contribution to the ongoing recovery of the place of metaphysics interior to theology for contemporary theological renewal. David L. Augustine Catholic University of America Washington, DC N&V Aquinas and the Theology of the Body: The Thomistic Foundations of John Paul II’s Anthropology by Thomas Petri, O.P. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2016), xiii + 338 pp. The oft-quoted “time bomb” prediction of George Weigel appears to have come true, at least in the United States: John Paul II’s theology of the body has exploded into prominence, from the obscure topic of impenetrable audience talks to the foundation for sex-ed curricula. Along with this higher profile has come criticism, in particular of its perceived over-sexualization of anthropology. More measured voices have been in play, but a critical mass of careful scholarship had not arisen to nuance the popular paradigm very substantially. In the last five years or so, the scholarly treatment of the theology of the body has finally caught up with its popularization. The volume under review by Thomas Petri, O.P., is just one of several published by Catholic University of America (CUA) Press alone, which is situating itself as the foremost Anglophone publisher of monographs on John Paul II. CUA Press books tend toward contextualizing the thought of the Pope within its scholastic matrix. Along these lines, Petri states his thesis forthrightly: “An authentic understanding of this ‘theology of the body’ relies on an appreciation of the intersection of the thought of John Paul II and Thomas 604 Book Reviews Aquinas” (1). In an insightful and original move, Petri finds this intersection particularly in the Pope’s idea of the “spousal meaning of the body,” the realization that our bodies testify that man is made for self-gift. Before turning to his elaboration of this point, it is necessary to see more clearly why this intersection is not obvious. The first reason is John Paul II’s prose, which lacks the limpid clarity of Thomas Aquinas and is heavily salted with neologisms of a phenomenological flavor. Garrigou-Lagrange, he was not, even if he was the former’s student. More significantly, the English translation of Wojtyła’s philosophical magnum opus, Osoba i Czyn (translated as The Acting Person), deliberately obscured his dialogue with the metaphysical tradition by phenomenologizing his language even further. The most egregious example is the word suppositum, left in the Latin in the Polish original. The English translation indefensibly translates the subtitle “Man as ‘Suppositum’” as “The Person as a Basic Ontological Structure.” This rendering leaves the reader confused. What exactly is a “basic ontological structure”? Why “basic”? How “ontological”? All this is a wholly unnecessary distraction, given that Wojtyła was in fact developing a metaphysical tradition, not recreating one from scratch. Given this avoidable complication, Petri’s book is most welcome, and he is correct to argue that an understanding of Thomas is necessary for grasping Wojtyła. Petri’s secondary, unspoken goal seems to be to evangelize the untutored reader in Thomas’s thought itself. He does this in a serene and comprehensive style that echoes his master. Along the way, the reader encounters ideas that are not, strictly speaking, necessary for the argument, such as a few pages here on the virtue of hope or there on the agent intellect. Without these digressions, the book might be a hundred pages shorter but also poorer, for the way in which Petri inserts the reader into the beauty of Thomas’s comprehensive world-view is one of the many delightful experiences of this lovely book. The introduction and the first two chapters provide a detailed theological context for Wojtyła’s thinking on sexual ethics. Chapter 1 contrasts Wojtyła’s methodology with that of the neo-Scholastic manualist tradition by ably summarizing the historical scholarship exemplified by Servais Pinckaers, O,P. If the reader finds this approach persuasive, then this chapter will illuminate. But for any reader already unconvinced by Pinckaers’s genealogy, the book does not provide any new evidence. Chapter 2 lays out the twentieth-century debates on contraception within Catholic theology, focusing on the question of the end(s) of sex and marriage: procreation and/or unity? The historical works he utilizes center around the debates within Catholicism, and this reviewer wished for some broader context. For example, the Rockefeller-funded and eugenically oriented Population Council quietly provided Book Reviews 605 funding for symposia at Notre Dame in the 1960s, with the goal of altering Catholic teaching on contraception by encouraging theologians to dissent. Hence, the picture of a spontaneous Catholic awakening concerning the legitimacy of contraception is not supported by the facts. Few histories of twentieth-century Catholicism advert to this broader context, however, so the book cannot be reasonably faulted for this omission. Petri next devotes three chapters to the work of Wojtyła, first on his moral theology (ch. 3), then his sexual ethics (ch. 4), and finally (ch. 5) his concept of the spousal meaning of the body in the mature work of the theology of the body. These chapters are, for the most part, clear and reliable syntheses of difficult primary texts. The book shows that Wojtyła’s early work (in the 1950s, in his Lublin Lectures and his earliest essays) deploys Aquinas as a corrective for the errors of modern ethical systems. Yet his essays beginning in the 1960s highlight some lacunae in Thomas that modern approaches fill (albeit deficiently), in particular the themes of consciousness and the subject. These are the precise areas in which Wojtyła will bring a Thomistic metaphysics into conversation with modernity. Further, in these pages, Petri grasps what some commentators miss, namely, that the body’s role as the visible expression of the person—and not sexuality—is the “overriding theme” of the theology of the body (147). Ultimately the book arrives at the “spousal meaning of the body,” which Petri defines as the “drive for the other, the capacity for love and self-giving” (175). The last three chapters of the book before the synthetic conclusion are dedicated to an elaboration of the thought of St. Thomas, moving (as did the chapters on Wojtyła) from the more general to the more specific: his anthropology (ch. 6), his treatment of love (ch. 7), and his understanding of marriage and the conjugal act (ch. 8). Each of these chapters could serve as a stand-alone introduction to their respective topics for a graduate course. A few key ideas emerge for the purpose of the argument of the book: the importance of the hylomorphic constitution of the human person; the nature of love as an appetite for the good; the perfection of appetite in virtue; and marriage as the greatest friendship. Each of these ideas undergird or explicitly appear within the theology of the body. Along the way, Petri gives an honest treatment of the less appealing aspects of Thomas’s theory of sexual difference, although this reviewer would have liked to have seen more recent treatments of the theme (such as the dissertation by Pia de Solenni published in 2000) utilized. The book concludes with a brief synthesis of Wojtyła and Thomas. He does not tie together all the loose ends of the previous chapters, instead allowing each of the systems to stand on their own, while reiterating that the theology of the body both presupposes and develops Thomas’s anthro- 606 Book Reviews pology. So while we never learn if Wojtyła agrees with, for example, Thomas’s explicative sense (ch. 6), such a point-by-point treatment does not seem to be the volume’s purpose. This open-ended exploration is a stimulus to thought, but some readers might be frustrated by the lack of closure. I agree with the book’s exegeses, but I have both a substantive and a methodological concern. First, the substantive: Petri conflates the spousal meaning of the body with Thomistic appetite. For example, he states, “The spousal meaning of the body is the capacity to express the persons’ gift of self to another human person and, ultimately, to God” (197). Not quite. The body has a spousal “attribute” (this is the category in which appetite would fit), but the spousal meaning of the body is not a capacity or an appetite. John Paul II defines “meaning” as the subjective comprehension of the objective truth of a reality: “‘Meaning’ is born in consciousness with the rereading of the (ontological) truth of the object.”1 Meaning, in other words, is not a property of bodies but the achievement of a knower. What John Paul II wishes to say in the theology of the body is that (objectively) our bodies express a truth—human beings are made for self-gift—and we are capable of understanding this truth—meaning. A few times, the book notes that meaning occurs within a subject, but more often the spousal meaning is presented as a bodily attribute or appetite. If grasped, the subjective location of meaning casts further light on the twentieth-century debate concerning the end(s) of sex and marriage summarized in chapter 2. Humanae Vitae deftly side-stepped the question of whether sex has one end or two by referring to both procreation and unity as meanings of the conjugal act. John Paul II understands this to say that persons have the responsibility to “reread” the truth of the conjugal act in both its meanings. Thus, both Humanae Vitae and the theology of the body remain neutral on the ends question but reframe the ethical question to emphasize the need for persons to be thoughtful and responsible agents engaged with reality. By identifying the spousal meaning of the body with appetite instead of understanding, Petri overlooks this larger point. The methodological concern: the focus of the book on Wojtyła’s scholastic background is both a strength and a limitation. I have noted how it contributes to a needed renewal in appreciating Wojtyła’s Thomism. Yet this lens also obscures, because it brackets realities that would help answer the book’s broader questions. Early on, Petri notes that the scholastic debates he so ably summarizes could not approach sexual ethics John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, ed. and trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2006), no. 119, §1 (p. 620; italics original). 1 Book Reviews 607 with methods adequate to the modern challenges. Yet those challenges are presented in the book primarily as inside baseball—an intra-ecclesial crisis, responding (to be sure) to an external crisis but yet one whose main players are operating within a Catholic context. Thus we learn how Wojtyła’s ideas respond to both overly objective and solely subjective moral theologies, but it is less clear how he is in dialogue with the larger culture. Yet his questions were driven as much by the pervasive technological reduction of sexuality to utility as by theological error. So, when the conclusion of the book argues that Wojtyła’s distinctive approach was intended to meet modern challenges, those challenges are only vaguely sketched. Had he looked beyond Thomism, Petri could have specified one extra-ecclesial factor: materialism, found both in consumerism and in the Marxism that surrounded Wojtyła for decades in Poland. The paradox the book addresses in the conclusion, that of a Thomist often sounding quite un-Thomistic, is lessened when one sees that Wojtyła is using Thomas to respond to Marx (among others). More: while Thomism provides the necessary matrix for the categories of Wojtyła’s thought, he is not driven by classically Thomistic questions. Rather, his questions are prompted by the mission field. Thus, as Marx challenges private property, Wojtyła responds with an account of the person that places “self-possession” at the forefront—a move that simultaneously rejects the Marxist materialistic framework and also situates private property within a larger anthropological context. More relevant to Petri’s theme is Marx’s treatment of interpersonal interaction within capitalism, which reduces all relationships to exchange and possession. John Paul II’s response is, as we have seen, the spousal meaning of the body as the fulfillment of the person in self-gift (an impossibility for Marx before the communist eschaton). Seen this way, the theology of the body is particularly useful for narrowing the gap between sexual ethics and social justice. Alluding to this larger context would help to move scholarship to what may be its next frontier, namely, connecting the theology of the body to John Paul II’s thought on freedom and Catholic social doctrine. Expecting a book to break ground on multiple scholarly fronts is churlish, of course, and these weaknesses do not considerably subtract from the achievement of this valuable work of scholarship. It will become a standard because of its illumination of the scholastic horizons of John Paul II’s thought. N&V Angela Franks St. John’s Seminary Brighton, MA 608 Book Reviews Justice as a Virtue: A Thomistic Perspective by Jean Porter (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), xiii + 286 pp. Students of Thomistic moral philosophy will be grateful to Jean Porter for her contribution to conversations regarding justice’s place in both the virtue ethics tradition and modern liberal thought. It is gross understatement to say that justice is complex. But the complexity is amplified in our context, where justice is imagined as fairness in the organization of institutions and distributed goods. Add to this the effort one must spend when we attempt to speak in Aristotelian terms of the mean or when we try to describe justice as a personal perfection of the will, and one discerns Porter’s motivations in offering us a Thomistic account of justice. Porter exposits Aquinas’s account of justice as a virtue perfecting the will and rightly ordering our social relations. The upshot of this analysis is a rich treatment of justice as both an external moral ideal and the relationship of that ideal to the perfection of the person’s will. Porter’s objective in chapter 1 is twofold. First, to demonstrate the coherence and relevance of Aquinas’s account of the virtues. And second, to set up the problem animating her inquiry: the fact that justice as a virtue stands apart from the other cardinal virtues, especially as an ideal. We typically conceive of virtues as habitual dispositions, internal to the agent and judged praiseworthy or blameworthy according to a “rational mean” that, while potentially functioning normatively, is also internal to the agent and her circumstances. Thus, the courageous or temperate person acts courageously or temperately according to very specific—maybe even unrepeatable—contingencies that require prudence, practice, and knowledge of what other courageous or temperate persons have done in similar situations. But when it comes to justice, we judge agents and their acts according to the “real mean” of the right ( jus), which is necessarily external to the agent, her circumstances, her knowledge, and so on. In other words, the tension between justice’s relationship to a “real mean” and the other virtues’ relationship to a “rational mean” seems to throw us into unhelpful binaries: law/virtue, rules/ideals, universals/particulars, and the right / the good. But as Porter demonstrates, the tension between these binaries lessens when we recognize that the tension is not between two different ways of evaluating action. Rather, the divisions characterizing these binaries “track the fundamental division between the virtues of the passions, which observe a rational mean only, and justice, which observes a real mean” (41). The concept of a rational mean guiding our evaluation of courage and temperance is relatively straightforward (as a concept!), and is squarely at home in a conventional account of virtue. But the concept of a Book Reviews 609 real mean guiding our evaluation of justice is decidedly more complex and requires careful attention to the faculty perfected by the virtue. Thus, chapter 2 exposits the Thomistic doctrine of the will as the causal principle of voluntary action. The hope here is that if we adequately represent the faculty of the will, then we will have some insight into the virtue that is supposed to perfect it, even if that virtue seems oddly out of place among the rest of the perfective habits. Aquinas’s account provides valuable insight into the rational agent’s participation in the appetitive orientation of all natures toward their perfection. But in humans, we see this appetite exercised in a distinct way that makes action susceptible to personal and social reflection and evaluation. Human actions are susceptible to such evaluation because they are voluntary—the result of complex processes of deliberation and choice among myriad goods proposed to the rational appetite. At this point, Porter considers whether the will is completely subject to the dictatorial intellect. Her treatment of the issue unsurprisingly defends the liberty of the will. But in attempting to make this case without recourse to theology, one may wonder about the significance of her contribution to the infinite regress inherent within the question. Porter then asks: why must the will be perfected if it is already naturally oriented to the universal good? Porter reminds us that the will must be inclined to the good in some determined way that makes action possible; and she further notes that one may know the good conducive to one’s happiness and still freely choose otherwise. Thus, as the will works on the passions to order them toward the agent’s happiness, so there must be a way in which the will, free from compulsion, can work on itself in order to direct itself toward the same happiness. Porter states that “we naturally desire life and effective operation in accordance with the structuring principles of our existence” (100). Porter’s work here, as elsewhere in her body of work, raises a cluster of contentious issues, at the center of which are the following questions: by what standard is the “ideal of rationality” set? Is it, as Porter claims, set by “mature, self-reflective” agents who enjoy “autonomy and self-command” (97)? Or is such an ideal only describable in theological terms? Whence “structuring principles”? And are the authorities that commend the principles to us external or internal? Porter favors an inductive approach that emphasizes the prolonged, complex, and reflexive process of developing the capacity to recognize how one’s “overall ideal is exemplified by particular actions, or perhaps undermined or contradicted” by them (103). At this point, Porter has poised us to appreciate the way justice works with other virtues to expand and develop the will in accord with the unique nature of the rational animal. The egoism and relativism that seem ingredient to her inductive account of human desire 610 Book Reviews indeed loom large here. But Porter has only prepared us for appreciating the complex relationship between justice as a personal, internal perfection, and justice as an objective, external ideal. In chapter 3, Porter returns us to the externality of justice as an ideal that can be described in terms of an internal perfection of the will and in terms of a real mean relevant for objective standards of action in relationship to other rational agents. Porter untangles the complex relations between natural law and natural right in thirteenth-century Scholasticism generally and Aquinas’s thought particularly. She successfully accounts for the sometimes confusing moments in Aquinas’s improbable, but ultimately successful, synthesis of Aristotelian concepts of just exchange, Ciceronian concepts of just relations, and Roman legal traditions of rights claims at law. Porter’s achievement is impressive in this chapter, for she shows how Aquinas integrates the notion of jus naturale with the moral and legal ideal of equality among persons, created in the imago Dei. Furthermore, she convincingly shows that Aquinas’s integration is possible because it is rooted in a “referential realism” that grasps not only the first principle of practical reasoning, but also the specification of this principle in other-regarding relations. The spontaneous grasp of others’ rightful claims suggests to Porter that, on a deep and thorough reading of Aquinas, we can say the following regarding the perfection of the will and justice as a mean: The will requires unique habits to orient the agent’s natural desire for self-perfection toward the further capacity to regard others as ends in themselves. One’s desire for happiness and perfection is not going to naturally become just regard for the claims of others simply on account of one’s innate and spontaneous recognition of those claims. Rather, justice, as a perfection of the will, introduces “a distinctively new orientation, implying a normative standard that cannot be derived from the natural inclination of the agent toward its own perfection” (157). This chapter’s emphasis on natural rights, equality, and justice is a sophisticated response to conventional criticisms of the Thomistic social vision as oppressively hierarchical, static, and organicist. Though some might accuse her of anachronism, Porter’s read of Aquinas puts him at the center of important modern conversations about freedom, authority, equality, order, rights, and the duties incumbent on rational agents pursuing common life. Chapter 4 is an insightful examination of how we can speak accurately about the application of the precepts of justice. The chapter addresses a number of contemporary controversies about the structure of the act, the role of intention in determining the moral character of an act, the role of practical reason in the moral life, and whether there is such a thing as an intrinsically evil act. Porter provides a concise account of Thomistic philos- Book Reviews 611 ophy of act in order to clarify why Aquinas appears to us to be impractically strident when it comes to determining the morality of an act. As Porter helpfully points out, the foundation of Aquinas’s supposed inflexibility regarding intrinsically evil acts is the dignity of those (including the agent’s self) who will suffer as a result of our evil acts. The high dignity of the human person is sufficient ground for rejecting two popular accounts of moral justification: emotivism and (for lack of a better term) prudentialism. Porter soundly dismantles the suggestion that we may justify our acts by recourse to our visceral moral emotions; but she performs this dismantling without jettisoning the passions. Indeed, she provides us with an insightful grammar for speaking about the relationship between subjective passions and objective justice. Similarly, Porter dismisses the disproportionate confidence contemporary moral philosophers have in the creativity and flexibility of practical reason. Instead, she places the reality of moral discernment within the broader matrix of human nature and the myriad actions we spontaneously recognize as conducive to the flourishing of ourselves and others. Moral discernment certainly retains a pivotal place in the moral life, but we must keep at least two things in mind when speaking about discernment: 1) discernment is not itself a perfection of the will and so cannot stand in for justice, which is unique in its ability to perfect the will’s disposition toward the other; and 2) the necessity of discernment is secondary to the requirements of justice as a type of universal love. The final chapter ties up an important loose end regarding the challenge of properly ordering our love for others and our love for comprehensive goods ingredient to happiness. Porter describes the challenge as a perceived tension between our duty to others and our desire to give ourselves to higher pursuits and/or communities, (E.g., I love my family and I desire to enter the Catholic theological tradition. These two loves require a moral negotiation that transcends mere scheduling conflicts or questions of productivity and multitasking). The chapter returns to our spontaneous grasp of first principles and the commonsensical admission that we do not praise humans who forsake all others in pursuit of more comprehensive goods. Instead, we praise those humans who, through practice, induction, course-correction, and learning come to pursue happiness without egoism. Such persons creatively synthesize the particular claims of others with the general claims of truth, goodness, and beauty on human agents in such a way that general and particular justice mutually reinforce one another. These moral exemplars have achieved a special type of love that truly is a perfection of the will even as it is an external ideal rooted in the transcendent dignity of each human person. Porter’s book is a welcome companion for those of us concerned 612 Book Reviews about human dignity, the origins of human rights, political discourse on liberty, equality, and autonomy, intrinsically evil acts, and the role of practical reason in the moral life. Critics of Porter’s past work on natural law will continue to be challenged by her incisive work with Aquinas. Those suspicious of Aquinas’s relevance within secular liberal discourse will be challenged by her careful attention to rational psychology and its irreducible necessity in the defense of human dignity. As with Porter’s previous works, Justice as a Virtue presents philosophers and theologians with many new ways to critically dialogue about the transcendent vocaN&V tion of the human person. Jason Heron Mount Marty College Yankton, SD The Sermon on the Mount and Moral Theology: A Virtue Perspective by William C. Mattison III (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), xiii + 279 pp. William Mattison’s The Sermon on the Mount and Moral Theology endeavors to remedy the lack of sustained engagement between theological exegesis of Matthew 5–7 and the tradition of moral reflection grounded in the virtues. In short, it argues that the convergences between the Sermon and virtue ethics prove mutually illuminating. Reading the Sermon on the Mount through the lens of the virtues casts light on the structure and content of Jesus’s words, while the vision of the Christian life presented in the sermon both refines and reorients a classical understanding of the virtues. Mattison explicitly situates his project within the trajectory of moral theology advanced by Servais Pinckaers (5). This claim is substantiated by his insistence that a shared understanding of morality as the pursuit of happiness rather than the fulfillment of duty undergirds the fruitfulness of the engagement between the Sermon and virtue ethics. Moreover, drawing liberally from the treasury of patristic and medieval (especially Thomistic) commentary on the scriptural text, Mattison’s exegesis of the Sermon reflects an evident concern for the sources of Christian ethics. This approach is bound to generate valuable insights, of course, given the congeniality of those commentators to an approach rooted in the virtues. At the same time, he also refers to a plethora of contemporary biblical scholarship in order to highlight the commonalities between more recent research and the tradition. Nevertheless, readers seeking a historical-criti- Book Reviews 613 cal examination of Matthew 5–7 will be disappointed, for despite his facility with the literature, Mattison’s is decidedly a work of moral theology, and his engagement with contemporary exegesis is at the service of that aim. Indeed, his strategic deployment of biblical commentary—ancient and modern—constitutes one of the book’s key virtues. The structure of the book follows, for the most part, the order of the biblical text. The first chapter examines the beatitudes and argues for an “intrinsic relationship” between “the characteristics of the blessed and the rewards they attain” (17). This relationship holds that there exists a continuity of activity between the qualifying condition declared blessed here and now and the reward promised to those who embody those qualities. Mattison surveys each of the beatitudes in order to illustrate this point, showing how, for instance, there exists, contrary to expectations, profound continuity between “refusing to find relief in worldly comforts” which characterizes those who mourn, the qualifying condition, and those who receive “the comfort of eternal reward” (29). This analysis aims to illustrate the connection between ethics and eschatology by demonstrating the beatitudes’ simultaneous promise of God’s future deliverance and exhortation to a particular way of living here and now. A potential weakness of Mattison’s approach, however, is that emphasis on the continuity between the qualifications and rewards of the beatitudes overshadows the discontinuity between the content of the beatitudes and the powers of this world. In the process, Mattison overlooks an opportunity to consider how a virtue-based analysis of the sermon might prove useful not only for personal holiness but also for social transformation. Mattison offers the beginnings of such an analysis in his treatment on the “utterly ecclesiological” verses about salt and light, but a more extended discussion of this matter would be helpful (55). Chapter 2 considers the six antitheses of Matthew 5:17–48 in order to determine how Jesus can be understood to fulfill the Mosaic Law in both its moral and ceremonial dimensions. Mattison argues that the foundation of the new law’s fulfillment of the old resides in their possession of a common telos, namely, bringing about the kingdom of God. Consequently, the new law can be understood as “enjoining prudent activity that constitutes a more perfect participation of the person in the ultimate end sought” even when it commands different material content than the old law (85). Moreover, the new law, as the grace of the Holy Spirit, fulfills the old law by endowing human beings with the capacity to live according to the law in ways that were previously impossible. Mattison argues that a similar dynamic applies to the new law’s fulfillment of the ceremonial law, for “by sharing in the same telos and engaging in new law practices instituted by 614 Book Reviews and directly reflective of what the old ceremonial law prefigured, the new law fulfills the old” (101). It is precisely because the ceremonial rites of the old law prefigure Christ that these rituals can be brought to fulfillment in the sacraments of the new law. The third chapter takes up questions surrounding intentionality and moral formation by examining Jesus’s admonitions against hypocrisy. Mattison argues that Thomistic action theory and virtue ethics enhance our understanding of these passages by showing how the proximate and remote ends of human action relate to one another. Clearly, one’s further goal is significant for moral evaluation of an act, but Mattison also proposes the moral object, the immediate goal chosen “from the perspective of the acting person,” is also crucial for ethical assessment. In fact, he argues it is precisely the incompatibility of one’s immediate and further goals that gives rise to the hypocrisy that Jesus condemns. Mattison also suggests that this section of the sermon offers practical advice for growth in virtue by including hyperbolic metaphors about prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. These, he argues, are themselves suggestive of additional concrete actions and practices one could perform in order to cultivate good moral habits. The fourth chapter argues that, contrary to the common interpretation among biblical scholars, Matthew 6:19 – 7:12 possesses a thematic unity governed by Jesus’s injunction to “seek first the kingdom of God” (6:33). He argues that the single-minded pursuit of this ultimate goal “functions not only as one’s highest priority, but also and perhaps even more significantly as shaping or ‘in-forming’ all of one’s more proximate actions” (166). In particular, the Sermon on the Mount reorients classical virtue ethics by revealing that humanity’s ultimate end is not an abstraction but the heavenly Father, a personal and provident God. Mattison further argues that this knowledge of the last end “has a transformative impact on practical decision-making” with respect to temporal goods (180). Faith in God’s “provident gratuity” excludes both excessive worry about temporal security and also presumptuous inactivity (183). Likewise, in the realm of interpersonal relations, the injunction to seek first the kingdom “invites us to adopt . . . God’s generous and merciful standard,” leaving behind pettiness, vengefulness, and even concern for our own security (189). Chapter 5 considers the concluding portion of the Sermon with its emphasis on the final judgment, and it contends that reflection on the virtue of hope is instructive for understanding these passages. Mattison submits that the intrinsic relationship between the life of grace and heavenly reward allows one to hope not only in God as a means of enduring life’s trials but also “to hope in temporal goods as ordered to eternal happiness” (221). More illuminating, perhaps, is Mattison’s suggestion Book Reviews 615 that the vice of presumption can identify the faults of those who fail to attain eternal life in Matthew 7:13–27. He argues that those who fail to enter through the narrow gate and those who build their houses on sand “presume . . . eternal life will be attained without living accordingly in this life” (230). Similarly, those who cry out “Lord, Lord!” in Matthew 7:22 are turned away from the kingdom because they are guilty of another kind of presumption insofar as they “think they can secure eternal life on their own by their actions” (235). The book’s concluding chapter argues that the Lord’s Prayer “can be accurately understood as a request for the seven foundational virtues of the Christian life” (240). Mattison here proposes a novel alignment between the Prayer’s seven petitions and the seven foundational virtues of the Christian life. He correlates the first three petitions, which ask that God’s name be hallowed, God’s kingdom come, and God’s will be done, with the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, respectively. He then aligns the last four petitions, asking for “our daily bread,” forgiveness of sins, strength again temptation, and deliverance from evil, with the infused moral virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. In contrast to the two other sets of parallels—between the beatitudes and virtues in chapter 1 and between the sacraments and antitheses in chapter 2—that Mattison offers with some degree of tentativeness earlier in the book, this alignment lacks any sense of being “forced” and is therefore not only novel but also illuminating. The parallel between the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer and the virtues has the benefit both of respecting the traditional grouping of the petitions into those concerning God and those regarding temporal matters and of aligning each of these with the traditional sets of virtues which take as their objects God himself and “matters of this life,” respectively (268). Furthermore, examining the Lord’s Prayer as a request for the virtues underscores the fact that “happiness does not simply happen to us” (268). Rather, it is an activity in which human beings are called to participate, even as that participation is itself a divine gift facilitated by the infused virtues. Mattison’s exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount is comprehensive and treats, with greater or lesser detail, every verse of Matthew 5–7. In the course of his exegetical analysis, Mattison touches on a number of other ongoing theological and ethical controversies: the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, the structure of the moral act, the role of the infused virtues, and relationship between eschatology and ethics. He deftly appropriates the resources that emerge from these conversations and incorporates them constructively into his own argument. As a result, his analysis is marked by both penetrating depth and incisive clarity. Perhaps surprisingly, however, 616 Book Reviews Mattison offers little by way of extended discussion on certain controversial topics constituting the ethical materia of the Sermon, such as marriage or the use of force. Rather, his focus remains fixed on how a virtue-based analysis might illuminate the forma of the sermon as a depiction of the Christian life as ordered to happiness, even as the Sermon transforms virtue ethics in light of the revelation of humanity’s ultimate end as eternal union with “our heavenly Father,” and this is precisely the book’s chief accomplishment (127). By adopting an exegetical approach which identifies and analyzes the convergences between the Sermon on the Mount and virtue ethics, Mattison has offered a valuable contribution—both in method and N&V in substance—to the renewal of moral theology. Michael A. Wahl Boston College Chestnut Hill, MA