et Vetera Nova Summer 2020 • Volume 18, Number 3 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 Book Review Editor James Merrick, Franciscan University of Steubenville 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, Duke University Divinity School 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., Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas 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, University of Notre Dame 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 Summer 2020 Vol. 18, No. 3 Commentary Newman and the Roman College: A Formative Exchange. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joseph Carola, S.J. No Decapitated Body. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Robert Imbelli “Gnoseological Concupiscence” and the Lines of Division in Post-Conciliar Theology.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tracey Rowland 741 757 777 Articles Extrinsicism?: Revisiting the Preconciliar Theology of Nature and Grace. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . David L. Augustine Moral Hope: Aquinas and Cajetan on Magnanimity.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nicholas Austin, S.J. Aquinas the Voluntarist? An Investigation of the Claims of James Keenan, S.J.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ryan J. Brady Beauty among the Transcendentals in the Summa Halensis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Justin Shaun Coyle Human Rights as Natural Juridical Goods and the Juridical Domain of the Principles of Catholic Social Doctrine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Petar Popović The Metaphysics of Evolution: From Aquinas’s Interpretation of Augustine’s Concept of Rationes Seminales to the Contemporary Thomistic Account of Species Transformism.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. 791 817 853 875 909 945 Review Essays The Second Vatican Council Then and Now.. . . . . . . . . . . . Guy Mansini, O.S.B. Once There Was No Church and State: Re-Envisioning the Social Order in Light of Thirteenth-Century History .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jeffrey L. Morrow 973 991 Retrieving the Tradition Where Should We Place the Treatise on Conscience in Moral Theology?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Benedict Merkelbach, O.P. 1017 Book Reviews Do Not Resist the Spirit’s Call: Francisco Marin-Sola on Sufficient Grace by Michael D. Torre. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joshua R. Brotherton 1041 Women, Enlightenment and Catholicism: A Transnational Biographical History edited by Ulrich Lehner. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shaun Blanchard 1045 Kardinal Leo Scheffczyk (1920–2005): Das Vermächtnis seines Denkens für die Gegenwart, mit wissenschaftlichem Gesamtverzeichnis seiner Schriften edited by Johannes Nebel, F.S.O.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fr. Emery de Gaál 1049 A Saint for East and West: Maximus the Confessor’s Contribution to Eastern and Western Christian Theology edited by Daniel Haynes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Benjamin E. Heidgerken 1053 God Visible: Patristic Christology Reconsidered by Brian E. Daley, S.J.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . J. David Moser 1058 Hope and Christian Ethics by David Elliot. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nicholas Ogle 1062 From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers by Jean Daniélou, S.J., translated by Wulstan Hibberd, O.S.B., with new introduction by Michael Heintz. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . John Sehorn 1068 T&T Clark Companion to Henri de Lubac edited by Jordan Hillebert.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . William M. Wright IV 1073 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 978-1-64585-063-2) 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. 18, No. 3 (2020): 741–756 741 Newman and the Roman College: A Formative Exchange Joseph Carola, S.J. Pontifical Gregorian University Rome, Italy Introduction The Pontifical Gregorian University’s archives contain an autograph letter from Saint John Henry Newman of the Birmingham Oratory to Jesuit Father Giovanni Perrone, Prefect of Studies at the Roman College and Consultor for Propaganda Fide. Newman wrote to Perrone on May 5, 1867, in response to the Jesuit’s letter of April 27 of that same year. Perrone had written to Newman in order to assure him of his affection, support, and defense. “You cannot believe how much I have always loved and esteemed Your Reverence,” Perrone writes in Italian, “I know that Your Reverence has lately had some bitter disappointments, and I have felt them as if they were mine.” “In certain circumstances,” Perrone continues, “I have taken up your defense, and I have been successful. I cannot tell you anything more, given the nature of the affair. If another occasion should present itself to me, you may be sure that you will always have in me one who will defend your cause.”1 The immediate case, to which Perrone refers, may well have Archivio Storico della Pontificia Università Gregoriana [APUG], 105.II.299–300 (1954): “Non può credere quanto io abbia mai sempre amata e stimata V. R. . . . So che V. R. in questi ultimi tempi ebbe alcuni acerbi dispiaceri, e li sentii come fossero stati miei. . . . In alcune circostanze io ho prese le sue difese, e sono riuscite a buon termine. Non posso dirle altro, così esigendolo la natura della cosa. Se mi si presenterà un’altra occasione, ella può esser sicura, che avrà sempre in me chi 1 742 Joseph Carola, S.J. been the question of mixed education, that is, the question of Catholics studying at Protestant educational institutions, namely, Oxford University. Officials at Propaganda Fide, the Cardinal Prefect Alessandro Barnabò, and Pope Pius IX himself opposed such education. They were, moreover, under the false impression that Newman not only tolerated it in isolated cases, but indeed encouraged it in general. When Newman responded to Perrone’s letter, his fellow Birmingham Oratorian and dear friend Ambrose St. John was at that very moment in Rome attempting to clarify the matter of mixed education and to reassure all concerned of Newman’s obedience. But St. John also sought to resolve another matter. Newman’s 1859 Rambler article, “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine,” had been delated to Propaganda Fide on the grounds that it contained material heresy—the neuralgic point being that for the sixty years after the Council of Nicaea the Ecclesia docens had been silent before the continual onslaught of Arianism.2 Already, in 1860, at Newman’s request, Propaganda Fide had composed a letter containing problematic passages from the article in order for Newman to clarify them. The Congregation had entrusted that letter to Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman, who was then in Rome. But Wiseman, busy with other matters, failed to deliver that letter to Newman. Consequently, Newman simply thought that the Congregation had dropped the matter when, in fact, it had not. Receiving no response from Newman, the Congregation concluded that the English Oratorian remained obstinately disobedient. Unfortunately, they themselves made no further inquiries.3 As a result, a cloud hung over Newman in Rome for years until Ambrose St. John traveled to the Eternal City in May of 1867 with the dual mission of both resolving the misunderstanding concerning mixed education and investigating the lingering problems arising from the Rambler article. Writing in Latin to Perrone that same month, Newman expressed his joy and gratitude for Perrone’s letter. “For who am I,” Newman humbly remarks, “that after so many years I am still in your memory and heart? And by what means have I deserved to be vindicated and defended so difenderà la sua causa.” See also John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman [LD], vol. 23, ed. Charles Stephen Dessain and Thomas Gornall, S.J. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 204–5. For the English translation, see Carleton P. Jones, O.P., Three Latin Papers of John Henry Newman: A Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Rome: Pontificia Universitas S. Thomae in Urbe, 1995), 104. 2 See LD, 23:219. 3 See Ian Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 488–89. Newman and the Roman College 743 charitably by you?” Perrone’s defense immensely consoled him. Indeed, it meant a great deal to Newman to have the support of “a man distinguished and subtly versed in the schools of theologians.” For Newman always protested that he himself was not a theologian, but rather one who tried his best to treat theological matters “in a zealous, accurate and cautious way.” “I rejoice greatly now,” he concludes, “to be thought of as having written on these matters so as to seem to have pleased, not myself alone, but also you.”4 This heart-warming, epistolary exchange between the greatest English Catholic of the nineteenth century and the same century’s most venerable theologian at the Roman College was rooted in a friendship that had begun some twenty years before. Rome 1846–1847 On October 9, 1845, at Littlemore near Oxford, Passionist Father Domenico Barberi received John Henry Newman into full communion with the Catholic Church. One year later the then Bishop Nicholas Wiseman sent Newman and his companion Ambrose St. John, also a recent Catholic convert, to the College of Propaganda Fide in Rome in order to prepare for ordination to the Catholic priesthood. Newman and St. John arrived in the Eternal City at 10:00 p.m. on October 28, 1846—a very rainy day, Newman reports.5 They found temporary lodgings at the Casa Bouisse on the Piazza d’Ara Coeli, where they remained for almost two weeks while the Jesuits, who administered the College at Propaganda near the Spanish Steps, completely renovated their distinguished guests’ rooms. The morning after they had arrived in Rome, Newman and St. John made their way directly to the Vatican basilica in order to recite the Apostles’ Creed at St. Peter’s tomb. To their surprise, Pope Pius IX was celebrating Mass there nearby them. It was their first Mass in the city. The Pope, moreover, was providentially the first person whom they saw in Rome.6 By mid-November Newman and St. John had moved into their rooms at Propaganda. Among the approximately 150 students in college, they were the only Englishmen. Their college-mates, who were notably younger than Newman and his companion, spoke thirty-two different languages. Approximately thirty students spoke English. As a young man touring the Mediterranean in 1833, Newman had studied conversational Italian. With APUG, 105.II.299–300; LD, 23:204–5; for the English translation, cf. Jones, Three Latin Papers, 105. 5 See John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. 11, ed. Charles Stephen Dessain (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1961), 266. 6 See LD, 11:282. 4 744 Joseph Carola, S.J. his previous knowledge of Italian grammar, he had found it to be an easy language, and he had thought that, given sufficient immersion, he could have mastered it.7 But in 1846, he confesses: “Speaking languages is not my gift.”8 At the “dopo pranzo recreation” with the Italian Jesuit fathers, he simply remained silent as he had once done when a shy undergraduate in the Oriel College common room. Nonetheless, Newman did manage to strike up friendships in college “with various clever youths from the United States who,” Newman predicts, “will be important persons there hereafter, if they live.”9 For, sadly, the Roman climate, which Newman himself continually lamented, undermined their health. The American students were often in the infirmary, and a good number of them died in Rome before ever returning to the United States. As for the Jesuits, Newman could not have spoken more highly of them. “Nothing can exceed the kindness of the people with whom I am,” he writes.10 The Jesuit rector at Propaganda Fide, Father Antonio Bresciani, sympathized deeply with his English guests. He anticipated all their needs, even providing for their afternoon tea. He was, according to Newman, “a man of real delicacy as well as kindness.”11 But Newman reserves his highest praise for the college’s Jesuit confessor, Father Giuseppe Repetti, whom he described nineteen years later as “one of the holiest, most prudent men I ever knew.”12 Newman did indeed come to know the Roman Jesuits well during his thirteen-month sojourn in the Eternal City. They “were the real men in Rome,” he observes, “i.e. we fall in with none others. I don’t mean to say how great they are, but only they are the prominent men.”13 Admittedly, he found them to be generally “cut and dried.”14 But nonetheless, they did edify him. They were in his estimation “a really hardworking, selfsacrificing [sic] body of men . . . like first class men at Oxford.”15 Newman was particularly struck by their See John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. 3, ed. Ian Ker and Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 243. 8 LD, 11:284. 9 John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. 12, ed. Charles Stephen Dessain (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1962), 74. 10 LD, 11:294. 11 LD, 11:294. 12 John Henry Newman, “Letter to Pusey 1865,” in Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching Considered, vol. 2 (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1969), 21. 13 LD, 11:268. 14 LD, 11:295. 15 LD, 12:103. 7 Newman and the Roman College 745 asceticism. “What a self denying life theirs is, as regards their enjoyment of this world!” he remarks: They have no enjoyment of life. I go up in a cold evening to Padre Repetti, one of the Confessors, to keep myself awake, or rather from being torpid. I find him in a cheerless room, door and window not shutting close—no fire of course—a miserable bed—a few poor pictures on the walls—a few books on a shelf—the room, however, perfectly clean, and he reading. What has he to look forward to in life? Nothing; nothing is there to support him but the thought of the next world.16 Newman had initially considered entering the Society of Jesus. But the Jesuits’ asceticism frankly dissuaded him. He felt that he was simply too old to give up property and to change his habits.17 Consequently, the Jesuit vocation was not to be his own.18 Nonetheless, Newman never ceased to hold the Jesuits in the highest regard.19 It was, moreover, with the Jesuits that Newman made his ordination retreat in April of 1847 at Sant’ Eusebio amid the fields not far from the Basilica of Saint Mary Major. As a sign of his gratitude for the hospitality received at Propaganda Fide, Newman gave to Father Bresciani a portrait of Saint Ignatius Loyola that he commissioned his English friend, recent Catholic convert resident in Rome, and artist Maria Giberne to paint.20 On Wednesday November 11, 1846, Newman and St. John began attending lectures in college. They had two hours of dogmatic theology and one hour of moral theology. “We are in daily lectures (!) with the boys,” Newman reports.21 He and his companion must have resembled Ignatius of Loyola seated among ten-year-olds learning Latin! In the lecture hall, the professor of dogmatic theology followed Giovanni Perrone’s Praelectiones theologicae—a nine-volume course in dogmatic theology designed for four years of study. Unfortunately, when Newman asked for clarifications, the Jesuit professor failed to provide satisfactory answers. Newman LD, 12:26. LD, 11:306. 18 LD, 12:25. 19 John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. 29, ed. Charles Stephen Dessain and Thomas Gornall, S.J. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 128. 20 The painting hangs presently in the office of the Jesuit Rector of the Collegio Bellarmino in Rome. 21 LD, 11:276. 16 17 746 Joseph Carola, S.J. grew frustrated. “Lecture after lecture,” he complains, “to draw through a few tedious pages—All this is quite necessary for boys, not for grown men.”22 Educated at Oxford, Newman preferred to read and to exercise his intellect in a more fitting manner. 23 During those boring lectures, he would simply nod off to sleep.24 Eventually, he and St. John began skipping class, especially on Saturdays. 25 After Christmas, they stopped attending lectures altogether. For, as far as Newman was concerned, they were a waste of time.26 Before arriving in Rome, Newman had heard that he would find little theology there. After his arrival, a Jesuit at Propaganda told him that he would also find little philosophy. Newman had inquired if the students studied Aristotle. The Jesuit retorted that neither Aristotle nor even Thomas Aquinas were in favor in Rome. Newman’s interlocutor himself had read and benefitted from both. He clearly belonged to that group of nascent neo-Scholastics among the Roman Jesuits. But during the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century, positive theology held sway. While not disdaining the proper use of dialectics in theological discourse, Rome’s positive theologians—primarily Giovanni Perrone and Carlo Passaglia—gave greater weight to the study of Scripture and the ancient sources. “Facts are the great things,” the Jesuit at Propaganda told Newman, “and nothing else. Exegesis, but not doctrine.”27 Newman thought the situation unfortunate and considered the Pope duty-bound to maintain the study of Aristotle and Thomas in the Church. In 1879, Pope Leo XIII—the Pope who would make Newman a cardinal that very same year —would do just that. In the meantime, Newman’s academic experience at the College of Propaganda Fide notably dissatisfied him. He consequently turned his gaze elsewhere and looked to the Jesuits’ flagship institution in the papal capital, the Roman College founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1551. Newman first visited the Roman College on November 6, 1846—a little over a week after his arrival in Rome. Canon Law Professor Father Giacomo Mazio, just one year Newman’s elder, received him. For, among the Roman College Jesuits, it was Father Mazio who spoke English. To Newman’s delight, they discussed his Essay on Development. Newman’s LD, 12:48. See LD, 12:97. 24 See LD, 11:298. 25 See LD, 12:97. 26 See LD, 12:15. 27 LD, 11:279. 22 23 Newman and the Roman College 747 diary for the next twelve months attests that he visited the Roman College on eleven occasions. But his letters indicate that he must have made other visits there as well. In late autumn, he made the acquaintance of Father Carlo Passaglia, eleven years Newman’s junior—“the only prominent theological professor” in Rome, according to Newman.28 Passaglia invited Newman to attend lectures at the college—most likely in the form of monthly disputations. Newman began attending those disputations in January of 1847 after he had stopped attending lectures at Propaganda. But as we shall see, Passaglia would prove to be a closed door for Newman. In November or early December of 1846, the Englishman also met Father Giovanni Perrone, seven years Newman’s elder, inquiring with him about the possibility of an unconscious certainty in matters of faith.29 But only on February 26, 1847, did Newman have an opportunity to engage Perrone privately in serious conversation.30 For, as Newman lamented: “Everyone is so busy here, that it is very difficult to see much of those who might give an opinion, or rather enter into discussion, on the subject of many points of theology on which I am much interested.”31 Yet, years later, at the beginning of that 1859 problematic Rambler article, Newman expressed his gratitude to Perrone, “a venerable man, who never grudged me his valuable time.”32 At their February meeting, Newman had hoped “to scrape acquaintance with Perrone,”33 not knowing if anything would come of it. But, as it turned out, that February meeting marked the beginning of an enduring and mutually beneficial friendship. When they met, Newman already esteemed Perrone’s work on faith and reason—a theme whose inclusion in the classical theological syllabus Church historian Roger Aubert attributes to Perrone.34 “I have been much pleased with Perrone’s treatise on the subject,” notes Newman.35 But while Newman respected Perrone as a dogmatic theologian, he thought “him LD, 12:42. See LD, 11:290. 30 See LD, 12:55. 31 LD, 12:59. 32 John Henry Newman, On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, ed. John Coulson (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1961), 65. This volume contains both the original 1859 Rambler version of the article of the same name and the 1871 amended version. 33 LD, 12:55. 34 See Roger Aubert, “The Continuation of Catholic Renewal in Europe,” in The Church in the Age of Liberalism, trans. Peter Becker, ed. Hubert Jedin and John Dolan (London: Burns and Oates, 1981), 46–47. 35 LD, 11:293. 28 29 748 Joseph Carola, S.J. often most absurd in polemics.”36 According to Newman, Perrone did not understand the arguments that he treated in his polemics against the Church of England. “It was rash to undertake England,” Newman remarks, “knowing neither English language nor English character.”37 Perrone, for example, had taken all too literally Anglican Newman’s comparison of the Church of Rome to a demoniac governed by an evil spirit—an image that young Newman, touring the Mediterranean in 1833, had previously employed in his epistolary descriptions of Pagan Rome’s genius loci.38 It led the Italian Jesuit to conclude: “Newman Romanum Pontificem vocat diabolum [Newman calls the Roman Pontiff the devil)].”39 Nonetheless, Perrone may not have been completely off the mark. For Newman himself confesses that it took him many years to overcome his childhood conviction “that the Pope was the Antichrist predicted by Daniel, St. Paul, and St. John.”40 Perrone and Newman’s friendship providentially served to introduce the Jesuit to the English character. One year later, Newman would also help to introduce Perrone to Oxford University itself.41 For, as revolutions erupted across Europe, the Roman College Jesuits fled Rome in exile to England. Perrone would remain there for almost two years. While in England, Father Perrone also borrowed Father Mazio’s English grammar and began to study his host country’s language.42 Doctrinal Development The summer before Newman arrived in Rome, the American Catholic journalist Orestes Brownson, who had himself converted to Catholicism from Unitarianism only the year before Newman’s conversion, launched a full scale-attack against Newman’s Essay on Development in his quarterly review. The Boston coadjutor, Bishop John Fitzpatrick, encouraged Brownson’s fierce critique. For the Essay had apparently confirmed Boston’s Unitarians in their rejection of Trinitarian doctrine. Among the early Christians, faith in a triune God, Newman’s Essay seemed to suggest, was only a later development. Of course, Newman did not deny the primitive Church’s Trinitarian faith. He simply noted that its doctrinal articulation took centuries to develop. Brownson’s vehement opposition LD, 11:293. LD, 12:21. 38 See LD, 3:288. 39 LD, 11:275. 40 John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 129. 41 Perrone accompanied his fellow Jesuit exile, Carlo Passaglia, on a visit to Oxford University that Newman had helped to arrange; see LD, 12:258–59. 42 See APUG, 105.III.a.66. 36 37 Newman and the Roman College 749 to Newman was well-known in Rome, and it prejudiced Roman authorities and academics against him even before he had arrived in the city. To make matters worse, no adequate Romance-language translation—more precisely, no correct French translation—of the Essay existed. Such a translation became a top priority for Newman. But, of course, it took time. Consequently, few who were not native English speakers had direct access to Newman’s work. Even after a year in Rome, Newman still laments: “My book itself is not known here—hardly any one reading English.”43 Father Giacomo Mazio, however, did read English, and he had indeed read Newman’s works, such as The Church of the Fathers (1840) and Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). Moreover, during the summer and autumn of 1847, he published a series of two articles on the Anglican liturgy in which he favorably cites Newman’s Essay on Development.44 Newman knew that the Jesuits admitted the principle of development even though, from what two unnamed Jesuit professors at the Roman College had told him, they thought that he had taken it too far.45 One of these Jesuits was most likely Mazio himself, with whom Newman regularly spoke. Newman identifies the other simply as a professor of dogmatic theology. In 1846, Father Giovanni Perrone and Father Carlo Passaglia held the two chairs in dogmatic theology at the Roman College. It seems quite likely that the dogmatician with whom Newman spoke was Passaglia. For, as Newman explains to his surprise and obvious displeasure, his interlocutors “took the part of [the early eighteenth-century Anglican Bishop George] Bull against [the seventeenth-century Jesuit Patrologist Dionysius] Petavius.”46 Bull held that the Trinitarian doctrine, among other doctrines, was clearly stated in the pre-Nicene Church, whereas Petavius admitted doctrinal development. According to Newman, the two Jesuits maintained that Petavius eventually retracted. Newman also attests later that Passaglia highly appreciated Bull’s work.47 Newman heard, moreover, that, without having read his entire book, theologians at the Roman College were introducing bits of his Essay into their lectures in order to dissent from it. He denounced the absurdity of their methodology.48 When he complained to Mazio about this situation, Mazio assured him LD, 12:128. See Giacomo Mazio, “Liturgia Anglicana,” Annali delle Scienze Religiose, 2nd series 5, no. 13 ( July–August 1847): 50–160; 2nd series 5, no. 14 (September–October 1847): 181–292. 45 LD, 11:274. 46 LD, 11:274. 47 See LD, 12:358: “F Passaglia at Rome spoke extremely highly of Bull’s work.” 48 LD, 11:281. 43 44 750 Joseph Carola, S.J. that no one had been speaking against it. “Yet there must have been some foundation for the report,” Newman insisted, attempting to frighten kind Father Mazio with the threat of harm to the Church’s cause in England if word of their opposition ever got out!49 Two months later, however, Newman learned that Passaglia had indeed lectured against his Essay. For, when asked after class, Passaglia had openly acknowledged that he was speaking against Newman.50 “There is no disguising the fact,” Newman writes to Bishop Wiseman on February 14, 1847, “that the only prominent theological professor here (Passaglia of the Col. Rom.) is opposed to my book on Development.”51 Newman realized that he would get nowhere with Passaglia. This lack of Roman support, coupled with opposition from both Brownson in North America and Dr. Alexander Grant, Rector of the Scots College in Rome, did not bode well for Newman’s future as a Catholic theologian.52 Newman was frankly disillusioned, but he did not despair. For, already in mid-November of 1846, he had had an inkling that Perrone would prove to be more favorable to him. “By the bye,” Newman writes that autumn to a colleague in England, “it is an encouraging fact, connected with the theory of development, that the said Perrone is writing a book to show that the immaculate conception may be made an article of faith.”53 That book, no doubt, was what had initially impeded Perrone from finding sufficient time to visit with Newman. Indeed, their February meeting took place only after Perrone had consigned the manuscript to the publishing house.54 Newman knew that his Essay on Development presented the chief theological obstacle that he had to overcome in Rome. Even though he should never relinquish the LD, 11:281. LD, 12:36. 51 LD, 12:42. 52 See LD, 12:42. 53 LD, 11:275. 54 See Newman, On Consulting, 64–65: “I should have been led to fancy, perhaps, that he was shaping his remarks in the direction which he considered he might be especially serviceable to myself, who had been accustomed to account for the (supposed) phenomena [the earlier absence of well-elaborated dogmatic formulas] in another way, had it not been for his work on the Immaculate Conception, which I read the next year with great interest, and which was passing through the press when I saw him” (italics added). This observation challenges C. Michael Shea’s conjecture that, in light of his exchanges with Newman, Perrone modified his text during the spring and summer of 1847 in order to include the notion of doctrinal development (Newman’s Early Roman Catholic Legacy 1845–1854 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017]). 49 50 Newman and the Roman College 751 theory privately, he did not intend to cling to it tenaciously in public.55 He admitted to Wiseman that he would gladly submit to Rome’s decision regarding the matter. But Rome moved slowly. So, Newman turned to Perrone, already in 1847 a venerable Roman authority, in order to find a more immediate answer. Perrone received Newman in late February. It was Newman’s intention to begin their discussions with the question of faith and reason—a safe theological topic, as it were, for Newman knew already that he and Perrone basically agreed. Hardly more than one week later, Newman lamented that the lack of a translation rendered his Essay on Development unknown to those with whom he wished to discuss it.56 Perrone would have been chief among them. To remedy the situation, Newman prepared for Perrone a short Latin treatise entitled De catholici dogmatis evolutione that summarized his theory of doctrinal development. He left ample space in the margins for Perrone to comment. Newman consigned that treatise to him sometime in the Spring. Simultaneously, Newman also published in Latin some dissertations taken from his translation of Athanasius in order to demonstrate that his work on development was grounded in a thorough knowledge of the Church Fathers.57 By early April, St. John wrote to a mutual friend in England that “N. [Newman] has struck up quite a close friendship with F. [Father] Perrone: they embrace each other.”58 Ever since its 1935 publication in the Gregorianum, that Latin summary of Newman’s theory of doctrinal development has been commonly known at the Newman-Perrone Paper.59 In his 1995 doctrinal dissertation on both that treatise and two other Latin treatises by Newman, Dominican Father Carleton Jones astutely observes that “Newman was able to find in Perrone both sufficient confirmation, and some needed correction, for his own original ideas.”60 Contrary to Owen Chadwick’s mistaken notion published originally in 1957 that Perrone and Newman opposed one another on the question of doctrinal development61—a notion that Walter Kasper carried forward in his 1962 dissertation on the Roman School62—Jones has master See LD, 11:274. LD, 12:60. 57 LD, 12:60. 58 LD, 12:40. 59 T. Lynch, “The Newman-Perrone Paper on Development,” Gregorianum 16 (1935): 402–47. 60 Jones, Three Latin Papers, 8. 61 See Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 181–84. 62 See Walter Kasper, Die Lehre von der Tradition in der Römischen Schule (Freiburg: 55 56 752 Joseph Carola, S.J. fully demonstrated that Newman and Perrone fundamentally agree. In his recent monograph, Newman’s Early Roman Catholic Legacy 1845–1854, C. Michael Shea rightly argues that Chadwick’s narrative and its further elaboration by others cannot be maintained.63 As Jones notes, the differences that do exist between Newman and Perrone are primarily a matter of emphasis rooted in Newman’s particular interest in human consciousness. Whereas Newman emphasizes the process of development—a process that involves a movement from a foundational awareness or unreflective knowledge to a complex or reflective consciousness—Perrone emphasizes the Church’s immutable faith whether implicitly held or explicitly professed. It is most important to keep this difference of emphasis in mind when one reads Newman’s reference to “new dogmas.” Contrary to Chadwick, Newman does not intend by “new dogmas” additions made to the deposit of faith.64 He is referring rather to new dogmatic formulations of truths previously held in an implicit manner. Three years later, in order to clarify his argument, Newman employed Perrone’s terminology and rephrased his theory, emphasizing that the novelty of development pertains to definitions, not dogmas per se.65 Unfortunately, Chadwick’s misunderstanding of Newman and Perrone’s exchange continues to influence adversely our own present understanding of Newman’s theory of doctrinal development. Beginning in February of 1847, then, Newman found in Perrone a constructive partner in dialogue. When he read Perrone’s treatise on the Immaculate Conception the following year, he found further confirmation for his insights into doctrinal development. That same year Perrone favorably quoted Newman’s Essay at length in an article for the Annali delle Scienze Religiose, Rome’s premier theological journal.66 In 1849 Newman enthusiastically received Pope Pius IX’s Encyclical Letter Ubi Primum that called on the world’s bishops to inquire among the Catholic faithful about their devotion to the Immaculate Conception. Newman recognized that the Pontiff’s request touched on “the doctrine of development.”67 For the encyclical made no mention of antiquity per se, but rather sought Herder, 2011), 217–32. See Shea, Newman’s Early Roman Catholic Legacy, 189. 64 See Wilfrid Ward, The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1912), 184–87. 65 See Newman, Certain Difficulties, 1:394–95. 66 See Giovanni Perrone, “Della denominazione che la Chiesa Cattolica dà alle comunioni da lei divise di eretiche e di scismatiche,” Annali delle Scienze Religiose, 2nd series 6, no. 17 (March–April 1848): 215–21. 67 John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. 13, ed. Charles Stephen Dessain (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1963), 81. 63 Newman and the Roman College 753 to probe the “everflowing, precise, living tradition.”68 In Ubi Primum Newman found that Rome had indeed begun to decide on the question of development, albeit indirectly, and its decision effectively vindicated Newman against the anti-developmentalists. The English Oratorian maliciously hoped that “Old Brownson” had publicly committed himself to opposing the doctrine’s definability, as had Ignaz von Döllinger, and that he would henceforth be obliged to retract.69 On Consulting the Faithful In nineteenth-century Catholicism, Perrone commanded great respect. He corresponded with saints, cardinals, bishops, theologians, and missionaries across the world. In October of 1847, while Newman was still in Rome, Frédéric Ozanam, the founder of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, wrote to Perrone, declaring him to be “the greatest contemporary theologian.”70 As a new Catholic convert, Newman knew the importance of obtaining Giovanni Perrone’s seal of approval. Indeed, the Englishman hesitated to take a possibly controversial step without Perrone’s support.71 After the promulgation of Ubi Primum, Newman recognized that, concerning the question of development, Pope Pius IX had embraced Perrone’s vision.72 Even fourteen years after his conversion, Newman continued to appeal to Perrone. In 1859, Newman published in The Rambler what was perhaps his most controversial article. The article, “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine,” considers the role of the consensus fidelium in theological discourse. It employs the specific example of the laity’s fidelity during the fourth-century Arian crisis when many bishops, whether consciously or not, effectively espoused Arianism. Newman had already touched on this historical theme in his 1833 monograph on Arianism. In the Rambler article, Newman recalls his 1846–1847 Roman sojourn. He refers to his conversations with Passaglia and Perrone “in such interviews as they were kind enough to give [him].” 73 With them he addressed the often scant evidence in ecclesiastical writings for defined Church doctrine prior to the doctrine’s definition. More specifically, Newman was concerned about the early Church Fathers’ silence that LD, 13:82. LD, 13:82. 70 APUG, 105.IV.387. 71 See LD, 12:55; LD, 13:82. 72 See LD, 13:82. 73 Newman, On Consulting, 205. 68 69 754 Joseph Carola, S.J. apparently witnessed against the antiquity of a particular doctrine. The question perplexed Newman, and he was eager to discuss it with the Roman College’s two dogmatic theologians. We have already seen how Passaglia’s and Perrone’s respective engagements with Newman notably differed. Concerning their conversations, Newman reports that: While Father Passaglia seemed to maintain that the Ante-Nicene writers were clear in their testimonies in behalf (e.g.) of the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and Justification, expressly praising and making much of the Anglican Bishop Bull; rather Perrone, on the other hand, not speaking, indeed, directly upon those particular doctrines, but rather on such as I will presently introduce in his own words, seemed to me to say “transeat” to the alleged fact which constituted the difficulty, and to lay great stress on what he considered to be the sensus and consensus fidelium, as a compensation for whatever deficiency there might be of patristical testimony on behalf of various points of the Catholic dogma.74 In other words, the consensus fidelium, especially when the Church Fathers are silent, is an authentic witness to the apostolic faith. This notion played a crucial and indeed indispensable role in Perrone’s work on the definability of the Immaculate Conception. According to Newman, then, when the Ecclesia docens fell silent for some six decades during the Arian crisis, the laity’s belief in Christ’s divinity assured the Christian community’s continuous profession of the apostolic faith. Despite Newman’s irreproachable appeal to Perrone and the recently defined Marian dogma, the Rambler article provoked great controversy. At the Roman College, Johann Baptist Franzelin, Perrone’s former student and his successor in one of the two chairs of dogmatic theology, denounced Newman in the classroom. He rejected the article’s implication that the Church’s entire magisterium did not always remain the divinely assisted instrument of the tradition’s preservation. Franzelin insisted that there could never be a time when the Ecclesia docens was not an active instrument of the Church’s infallibility.75 In addition to Franzelin’s denunciation, others delated Newman to Propaganda Fide for material heresy. As we have already noted, this cloud hung over Newman for eight years. In 1867, it was Perrone who yet once again offered John Henry Newman, On Consulting, 205–6. See Johann Baptist Franzelin, “Thesis XII: The Consensus of the Faithful,” in On Divine Tradition, trans. Ryan Grant (n.p.: Sensus Traditionis, 2016), 160–61. 74 75 Newman and the Roman College 755 Newman a helping hand. On mission in Rome in May of 1867, Ambrose St. John called on Perrone. He found him at his usual place in the Roman College library. After lecturing St. John about the evils of mixed education, Perrone told the Oratorian that he knew the controversial passages in Newman’s Rambler article. He assured St. John that he would help him to identify them. Perrone, then, requested that Newman send him his clarifications so that Perrone could attest to his orthodoxy. St. John, in turn, made a request of Perrone: could he not plead Newman’s case at Propaganda Fide? Perrone responded jesuitically. “Then he looked cunning,” St. John relates to Newman by letter that same day, and said that was not the way to do things there. They would say “you have been put up to this and come as a petitioner for your friend,” and would look with suspicion on what he said. Let me have something to say and let them come to me, then I shall have so much more weight as being consulted than as a petitioner.76 In sum, Perrone definitely wanted to help Newman, but he also wanted his assistance to be kept quiet. From the library Perrone led St. John to Father Valeriano Cardella, who had been a Jesuit scholastic during the Roman College Jesuits’ British exile. In 1867 Cardella held the other chair in dogmatic theology alongside Franzelin. He himself was even more sympathetic to Newman’s cause than Perrone. Cardella gave St. John a copy of Franzelin’s lecture notes. But he, too, did not want his cooperation in this matter to become public knowledge—“for he said we must keep peace with our own people, though I wish to serve Fr. N. [Newman] in any way in my power.” 77 In the end, Perrone suggested that Newman publish his clarifications in a new appendix to the next edition of his monograph The Arians of the Fourth Century. Four years later, in 1871, the book’s third edition did indeed include a new appendix. Newman unabashedly declares: “Fr. Perrone agrees with me.” 78 Attributing all to Perrone, Newman states that the consensus fidelium is an instrument of the tradition and that it supplements other instruments in their absence—the Church’s magisterium, as exercised at Nicaea, always understood to be operative. LD, 23:222. LD, 23:225. 78 John Henry Newman, The Arians of the Fourth Century (Herefordshire, UK: Gracewing, 2001), 467. 76 77 756 Joseph Carola, S.J. Conclusion On August 5, 1847, Father Perrone, along with Father Mazio, paid Newman and his fellow Oratorian novices a visit at the Basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. Perrone later remarked how the English novices “edified Rome with their exemplary lives and their eminent piety.”79 After returning to Rome from exile in England, Perrone continued to extol Newman. He named him the “chief ornament and champion of the Catholic Church in England.”80 “His beautiful pious soul,” Perrone exclaims, “made for the truth, thirsting for the truth—his logical mind, consequently, poured abundantly into the Church’s antiquity and history, aided by the lights and impulses of grace—ardently embraced in the end Catholic truth which alone could satisfy it.”81 For the Pontifical Gregorian University in the twenty-first century, Saint John Henry Newman’s friendship with the Roman College Jesuits—most especially with Giovanni Perrone—remains not a dead letter conserved in the university’s archives. It forms rather a precious part of the university’s living heritage. N&V Giovanni Perrone, Il Protestantesimo e la Regola di Fede (Turin: Marietti, 1854), 496: “. . . edificarono Roma colla esemplarità di lor vita e colla loro eminente pietà” (translations from this work are my own). 80 Perrone, Il Protestantesimo, 26: “. . . quel precipuo ornamento e campione della chiesa cattolica in Inghilterra.” 81 Perrone, Il Protestantesimo, 191–92: “La sua bell’anima pia, fatta pel vero, anelante al vero, la sua mente logica, conseguente, versata a dovizia nell’antichità e storia della chiesa, aiutata da’ lumi e impulsi della grazie, abbracciò infine con ardore la cattolica verità , che sola potea satisfarla.” 79 Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2020): 757–775 757 No Decapitated Body Robert Imbelli Boston College Chestnut Hill, MA Remembering and Misremembering Vatican II Having reached the biblical four-score years, one is more and more drawn to consider gratefully the blessings one has received in the course of one’s life. Among these was the gift of being in Rome as a seminarian during the four sessions of the Second Vatican Council. Though only standing on the margins of that epochal event, one still could not help being drawn into the drama of the Council, both experientially and intellectually. I think it fair to say that my subsequent years of priestly ministry and theological teaching and writing have been decisively oriented and inspired by the event and documents of the Council. However, it would be disingenuous not to confess my persuasion that for all the gains the Council set in motion, some of its promise has faded and, in some instances, has even been subverted. Benedict XVI, in his wellknown 2005 Christmas Address to the Curia, acknowledged that there has arisen, in some quarters, what he termed an “hermeneutics of rupture and discontinuity.” It would be well to recall his words: The question arises: Why has the implementation of the Council, in large parts of the Church, thus far been so difficult? Well, it all depends on the correct interpretation of the Council or—as we would say today—on its proper hermeneutics, the correct key to its interpretation and application. The problems in its implementation arose from the fact that two contrary hermeneutics came face to face 758 Robert Imbelli and quarreled with each other. One caused confusion, the other, silently but more and more visibly, bore and is bearing fruit. On the one hand, there is an interpretation that I would call “a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture”; it has frequently availed itself of the sympathies of the mass media, and also one trend of modern theology. On the other, there is the “hermeneutic of reform,” of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us. She is a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God.1 Moreover, such an assessment on the part of Joseph Ratzinger was not the reactionary conclusion of an aging Pontiff. It was already evident even before the Council had adjourned and emerged forcefully in the famous lectures the young theologian gave at Tübingen in 1967. In the “Preface” to Introduction to Christianity, dated Summer 1968, Ratzinger lamented the growing “confusion about the real content and meaning of Christian faith” and the consequent “watering down of its demands.”2 He provocatively recounts the parable of “Clever Hans” who successively exchanges the gold which he had inherited for items of lesser value until he is left, at last, with a worthless stone which he insouciantly discards. Then, in 1992, looking back upon the situation in 1972 when the new journal Communio was founded, Ratzinger spoke of some in the immediate post-conciliar period who made endless appeals to the supposed “spirit” of the Council. He wrote: “They sold goods from the old liberal flea-market as if they were new Catholic theology.”3 Indeed, it was precisely to counter this hollowing out of Catholic substance that Ratzinger, together with Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar launched the new journal. On a third occasion, in the “Preface” to the new edition of Introduction to Christianity in 2000, Ratzinger specifies (what was already abundantly clear in the first edition): the “crisis” in question was—and remains— fundamentally a Christological crisis. Here he states his conviction concerning the way forward beyond our current enervating impasses: w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2005/december/documents/ hf_ben_xvi_spe_20051222_roman-curia.html. 2 Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trans. J. R. Foster, rev. ed. with new “Preface” (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 31. 3 Joseph Ratzinger, “Communio: A Program,” Communio 19, no. 3 (1992): 437. 1 No Decapitated Body 759 If God has truly assumed manhood, and thus is, at the same time, true man and true God in Jesus, then he participates as man in the presence of God, which embraces all ages. Then, and only then, is he, not just something that happened yesterday, but is present among us, our contemporary in our today. That is why I am firmly convinced that a renewal of Christology must have the courage to see Christ in all his greatness, as he is presented by the four gospels together, in the many tensions of their unity.4 The crucial issue, then, was and remains Christological. Having experienced in Rome the unfolding event of the Council, the drama of the debate and refining of the texts, the cultural mutations in the climate of clerical Rome, one could not but be aware that important change was in the air. But, despite notable changes, one was also conscious that the foundations of the Church’s life and theology were firmly in place. Indeed, they seemed to stand out all the more clearly. And, for all the Council’s undoubted focus upon the Church, its nature and mission, those foundations were not the Church itself, but the Church’s Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. The very first words of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, made that abundantly clear: “Lumen gentium cum sit Christus.”5 In many ways the Council’s achievement could be read as a prolonged meditation upon the meaning and implications of Saint Paul’s confession: “For no other foundation can anyone lay than that which has been laid: Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 3:11). Indeed, I have long argued that the documents of the Council are “Christologically saturated,”6 instancing not only Lumen Gentium, but Sacrosanctum Concilium, Dei Verbum, and even the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes—all of which must not be read in isolation, but “intertextually,” mutually illuminating and reinforcing one another. Without belaboring the point at great length, let me simply recall one particularly salient passage from Gaudium et Spes, since its Christocentric confession and vision are so clearly on display. Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 29. It would be well to recall the first line of Lumen Gentium, which recapitulates the Council’s agenda: “Since Christ is the light of the nations, this holy synod, called together in the Holy Spirit, strongly desires to enlighten all people with his brightness, which gleams over the face of the church, by preaching the gospel to every creature (see Mark 16:15)” [Tanner translation]. 6 Robert P. Imbelli, Rekindling the Christic Imagination: Theological Meditations for the New Evangelization (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014), xiii–xxviii. 4 5 760 Robert Imbelli The Church firmly believes that Christ, who died and was raised up for all, offers, through His Spirit, the light and the strength to respond to their highest vocation. Nor has any other name under heaven been given to men and women by which they may be saved. She likewise believes that in her Lord and Master can be found the key, the center, and the goal of all human history. The Church also maintains that beneath all changes there are many realities which do not change and which have their ultimate foundation in Christ, “who is the same yesterday and today, and forever” (Heb 13:8). Therefore, it is in the light of Christ, “the image of the invisible God, the first-born of every creature” (Col 1:15), that the council intends to address all men and women in order to shed light on the mystery of humankind and to cooperate in finding the solution to the outstanding questions of our own time.7 The Christological foundation of Gaudium et Spes’s “pastoral” commitment and concern is patent, though too often neglected by advocates of a “social justice” that lacks distinctively Christian roots.8 John O’Malley, in his history of Vatican II, has written that three categories, aggiornamento, development, and ressourcement, “plunge us into the dynamics of the Council.” And he continues: “Of the three categories ressourcement was the most traditional, yet potentially the most radical.”9 But still more radical is what I have called Vatican II’s defining achievement, namely its re-Sourcement,10 its Spirit-guided return to the Source of the Church’s being and life: Jesus Christ. Thus, in its robust Christological confession and its explicitly Christocentric agenda, Vatican II realized one of the primary goals of the mid-twentieth century theological movement that became known as la nouvelle théologie. Gaudium et Spes §10 (my translation). This passage is particularly noteworthy since it is the conclusion of the constitution’s “Introduction” and thus sets the stage and provides the theological orientation for the two main parts that follow. For a brief but important account of the development of this “Christological Credo” of Gaudium et Spes and the roles of Karl Rahner and Joseph Ratzinger in its elaboration, see Jared Wicks, S.J., Investigating Vatican II: Its Theologians, Ecumenical Turn, and Biblical Commitment (Washington, DC: Catholic University of American Press, 2018), 213–18. 8 I take it that the reweaving of the intimate nexus between Christological doctrine and pastoral commitment to social justice was a major aim of the last of Benedict XVI’s trio of encyclicals, Caritas in Veritate (w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/ en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate.html). 9 John W. O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 300, 301. 10 Imbelli, Rekindling the Christic Imagination, xxiv, 79. 7 No Decapitated Body 761 Theologians such as Jean Daniélou, Henri de Lubac, Marie-Dominique Chenu, and Yves Congar sought to go back beyond the neo-Scholasticism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to recover the riches of the biblical, patristic, and medieval traditions. But theirs was no merely antiquarian project. Rather, their key motivation was to reintegrate theology and spirituality in a new synthesis that could spiritually nourish both heart and mind. And the animating center of their vision was Jesus Christ.11 In the concluding chapter of his study of the Council, John O’Malley makes a striking claim. He writes: Among the recurring themes of the Council expressive of its spirit, the call to holiness is particularly pervasive and particularly important. . . . It is a theme that to a large extent imbued the Council with its finality. If the call to holiness is what the Church is about, as the Constitution on the Church indicates, then it is not surprising that that is what the Council to a large extent was about. Behind the many ressourcements of the long nineteenth century lay the persuasion that the past held treasures useful for the present, not so much as knowledge for its own sake but as guides to deeper and more authentic Christian living.12 However, I contend that what needs to be stressed far more than O’Malley does is the Christic foundation of this “pervasive” theme of the Council. The Church needs to re-appropriate its own doxological confession: “Tu solus sanctus, tu solus Dominus, tu solus Altissimus, Iesu Christe!” And to do so not as a rote liturgical formula, but as a passionate life-defining conviction and commitment. “But when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8)13 This persuasion leads us back, then, to the present and to a Church afflicted A recent article on von Balthasar speaks of his conviction that a crucial component of the crisis of contemporary Catholicism is “its forfeiture of its spiritual and mystical heritage” (Kevin Mongrain, “Hans Urs von Balthasar,” in The Oxford Handbook of Catholic Theology, ed. Lewis Ayres and Medi Ann Volpe [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019], 720). This persuasion was widely shared by those seeking to recover the inseparable nexus between ressourcement and aggiornamento at the Council. 12 O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II, 310. 13 Cited by Yves Congar at the end of Fifty Years of Catholic Theology: Conversations with Yves Congar, trans. John Bowden, ed. Bernard Lauret with introduction (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1988), 85. 11 762 Robert Imbelli by the sex-abuse crisis and its poisonous fruit. What especially alarms is that, despite a continual call by many to “discernment,” the level of spiritual discernment frequently appears so impoverished. The “analysis” proffered seems too often limited to the intonation of competing mantras. Either the root cause is “clericalism” or it is “homosexuality.” The culprit is either the privileged clerical culture or the decadent ambient culture. Though neither analysis is devoid of insight, both fall woefully short of an adequate discernment of the pathology, and hence provide little direction toward a truly salvific remedy. In 1975, ten years after the Council, Henri de Lubac felt compelled to pen his sobering assessment about various milieus of theological and pastoral activity in France and elsewhere. He wrote, to his dismay, of a “vast phenomenon of the Church’s self-destruction and inner apostasy.”14 One can only ponder with trepidation the cri du coeur that would issue today from the great theologian who had been attacked quite ferociously both before and after the Council—though, of course, from opposite poles of the ideological spectrum. Having experienced the aftermath of the Council for fifty-five years now, I confess to finding “apostasy” the apt term. Indeed, on the occasion of the issuance in 2000 of the declaration Dominus Iesus by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, I wrote an essay in which I suggested that “there is abroad a measure of innocent and, sometimes, quite intentional apostasy.”15 In light of the experiences of abuse, scandal, and infidelity, of the ensuing twenty years, I would be disposed to remove such qualifications as “a measure,” “innocent,” and “sometimes.” An intentionally provocative phrase I have since employed to designate the “apostasy” too often in evidence is to speak of an experience and understanding of the Church etsi Christus non datur—thus a “decapitated body.”16 I wish in the remainder of this section briefly to outline some symptoms of this disease, to provide a fever chart, if you will, that each can verify Henri de Lubac, At the Service of the Church, trans. Anne Elizabeth Englund (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 148. It is worth noting that the subtitle of Louis Bouyer’s book Newman’s Vision of Faith (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986) is “A Theology for Times of General Apostasy.” 15 Robert Imbelli, “The Reaffirmation of the Christic Center,” in Sic et Non: Encountering Dominus Iesus, ed. Stephen J. Pope and Charles Hefling (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002), 98. 16 If my analysis of the pathological condition has any merit, it suggests the inadequacy of the “field hospital” metaphor. The condition requires “long term” healing and rehabilitation. 14 No Decapitated Body 763 and record with greater detail from their own discernment of our ecclesial plight. Here, then, are four manifestations that one experiences in hymns and sermons, as well as in both popular and academic journals. And each of them traduces the explicit Christo-logic of the Council’s constitutions. By the same token, a creative re-appropriation of the Council’s constitutions, in their full Christological concentration, does indicate a way forward for the future.17 The first symptom of our current malady is a “horizontalism” in the liturgy which completely distorts Sacrosanctum Concilium’s call for “active participation.” So often the challenging summons to a personal participation in and appropriation of the Paschal Mystery of Christ, which is the heart of the liturgical celebration, has been trivialized into the assuming of overt liturgical functions which, however important, should serve to only evoke and foster that deeper reality.18 It is well known that Joseph Ratzinger deplored this “development,” attributing it, in no small measure, to the change in the priest’s posture vis-à-vis the congregation. Now, facing the people, the priest almost inevitably calls undue attention to himself. Further, Ratzinger contends that “the turning of the priest toward the people has turned the community into a self-enclosed circle.” He continues: “In its outward form, it no longer opens out on what lies ahead and above, but is closed in on itself.”19 The liturgy thus risks losing its eschatological and, indeed, its cosmic dimensions. Too often the practical outcome is a forgetfulness of Jesus Christ, a de-centering of him who is ever the prime agent of the celebration, the Head of the Body. The salutary recovery of Christ’s presence in the congregation can result in losing sight of the Lord who always stands “over against” the congregation as well as in its midst. In one of his last audiences in Saint Peter’s Square, Benedict XVI insisted with fervor: “If in the celebration the centrality of Christ did not emerge, we would not have Christian liturgy, totally dependent on the Lord and sustained by his This conviction stands at the heart of Matthew Levering, An Introduction to Vatican II as an Ongoing Theological Event (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2017), especially chapter 5, “Vatican II as an Ongoing Theological Event: The Way Forward.” 18 For a splendid reflection on Jesus Christ’s Paschal Mystery and our full and conscious participation in it as the heart of the Church’s liturgical life, see Jeremy Driscoll, O.S.B., Awesome Glory: Resurrection in Scripture, Liturgy, and Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2019). I will return to this fine work below. 19 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 80. 17 764 Robert Imbelli creative presence. God acts through Christ and we can act only through and in him.”20 Hence Ratzinger’s constant recourse to Augustine’s injunction: “Conversi ad Dominum!”—“turn to the Lord!” Turn to him who is the Head of the Body, from whom the Body continually draws direction and nourishment, without whom we can do nothing. Thus, turned to the Lord, we recognize that the meal, of which Jesus is the unique host, is the fruit of his sacrifice, the anamnesis of his Cross and Resurrection. Thus the “geographic East” is of considerably less importance than the “spiritual East” which fixes our attention on him whose final coming is already anticipated in the Eucharistic celebration. To this end Pope Benedict placed a cross upon the altar of Saint Peter’s Basilica as iconic representation of him whose sacrifice gives form and substance to the unique meal that is the Eucharist. Far from being a “decapitated body,” the Church is totally dependent on Christ “who loves her and gives himself up for her.”21 As Benedict XVI writes in his Apostolic Exhortation, Sacramentum Caritatis: The Eucharist is Christ who gives himself to us and continually builds us up as his body. . . . The Church is able to celebrate and adore the mystery of Christ present in the Eucharist precisely because Christ first gave himself to her in the sacrifice of the Cross. . . . We too at every celebration of the Eucharist, confess the primacy of Christ’s gift. The causal influence of the Eucharist at the Church’s origins definitively discloses both the chronological and ontological priority of the fact that it was Christ who loved us “first.” For all eternity he remains the one who loves us first.22 Let me turn to the second manifestation of what I perceive to be the loss of a vivifying sense of the active presence of the risen and ascended Lord in the midst of the community. It receives pointed expression in Benedict XVI’s forewords to the first two volumes of Jesus of Nazareth. Here he refers explicitly to the negative effects of a sole reliance on a historical-critical approach to the biblical text. It perforce relegates the person of Jesus to a figure of the past. Moreover, it loses to view the unity Benedict XVI, General Audience of October 3, 2012 (w2.vatican.va/content/ benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2012/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20121003.html). 21 See Gal 2:20 and Eph 5:25. 22 Benedict, XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis §14 (trans. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2007). 20 No Decapitated Body 765 of the Scriptures and dissolves them into a series of discrete books from different historical epochs. But Benedict’s overriding concern is not merely theoretical, but profoundly pastoral. He laments: “Intimate friendship with Jesus, on which everything depends, is in danger of clutching at thin air.”23 He reiterates that concern in his second volume, stating that critical exegesis “is focused too much on the past for it to make possible a personal relationship with Jesus.”24 Such “intimate friendship and relationship” lies at the very heart of Christian faith; and obstacles to it, whether erected by abusive clerics or agnostic academics, severely wound the Body of Christ. Echoing this concern, John Cavadini has critiqued biblical courses in Catholic colleges and even in seminaries for not fulfilling Dei Verbum’s injunction that “the study of the Sacred Page is, as it were, the soul of theology” (§24). He writes: “There is almost nothing rarer than a course which actually studies the sacred page as the sacred page, that is, as inspired Scripture, rather than simply as a text, perhaps of special significance for Western culture and the Church, but yet simply a text to be studied just like any other textual artifact left to us from Antiquity.”25 What is most urgent, as Benedict XVI both asserts and undertakes in his Jesus of Nazareth volumes, is a Christological hermeneutic that is inspired and guided by the crucial confession of Dei Verbum: “Jesus Christ is the mediator and fullness of all revelation (§2) who “saves us from the darkness of sin and death and raises us to eternal life” (§4). Furthermore, I contend that, beyond particular courses in Bible, there has been a disturbing neglect of Dei Verbum in some Catholic theological circles, as though the constitution’s robust Christological affirmations prove embarrassing. The bitter fruit of such misremembering of Dei Verbum is a reductionist Christology in theological and pastoral circles, one in which Jesus is extolled as herald of the Kingdom and moral Teacher but in which the unique claims of the Tradition about his person and work are too often passed over in silence. A happy phrase of Origen admirably sums up New Testament faith when he confesses Jesus as autobasileia: the Kingdom in Person. But some in the Academy and even in parishes seem Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, vol. 1, From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, trans. Adrian J. Walker (New York: Doubleday, 2007), xii. 24 Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, vo1. 2, Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, trans. Philip J. Whitmore (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), xvi. 25 John C. Cavadini, Foreword to Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M.Cap., Jesus Becoming Jesus: A Theological Interpretation of the Synoptic Gospels (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018), ix. 23 766 Robert Imbelli loath to pronounce a heartfelt “Amen!” to the claim.26 When, shortly after Vatican II, I undertook graduate studies at Yale, one of my professors remarked sadly that he hoped that Catholic theology after the Council would not replicate in twenty years the mistakes it took Protestant theology two hundred years to make.27 He meant, of course, the reductionisms of Liberal Protestantism (from Kant to Harnack and beyond) wherein Jesus is reduced to a sublime moral teacher, and religion to ethics. Sadly, in many ways he was prescient. The classic exposition of the descent into Protestant Liberalism is, of course, H. Richard Niebuhr’s The Kingdom of God in America, with its stark summation: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”28 A primary manifestation of such Christological reductionism, as the Niebuhr quote vividly highlights, is this marginalization of the Cross. A fair amount of contemporary theological reflection upon the crucifixion of Jesus reads it solely as the punishment inflicted by an oppressive political-religious establishment upon a provocative threat to its power. When asked whether anything salvific transpired on the Cross, many would demur. For liberal Christian theology, the salvific ministry of Jesus unfolded in his life of teaching and healing and social advocacy. But his death itself was only the consequence of his radical challenging of the “powers that be.” The more extreme advocates of liberation and feminist approaches to theology go so far as to savage theories of the atonement as evidence of heavenly parental “child abuse.” In so doing they render incomprehensible the Gospel narrative in both the Synoptics and John, where the Cross is the culmination of Jesus’s mission, summed up in the centurion’s cry—“Truly this man was the Son of God” (Mark 15:39)—or the Johannine Jesus’s own testimony in his “It is consummated” (John 19:30). The cruciform logic of Catholic liturgy and spirituality through the centuries is already patent in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, where he exults “in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ by which the world has been cruci For a stimulating and suggestive example of the employment of a Christological hermeneutic in preaching, see Hans Boersma, Sacramental Preaching: Sermons on the Hidden Presence of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016). 27 I have since discovered that Hans Frei may have been “channeling” Karl Barth (see Levering, Introduction to Vatican II, 202n82). 28 H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harper , 1959), 193. 26 No Decapitated Body 767 fied to me and I to the world” (Gal 6:14) and confesses that he has “been crucified with Christ” and now lives “by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2:20). John Henry Newman rightly entitles one of his richest sermons: “The Cross of Christ the Measure of the World.”29 In her monumental study The Crucifixion, Fleming Rutledge has cogently shown how far the witness of the Great Tradition to Jesus, Lord and Savior, differs from the pale Nazarene of liberal imaginings. She writes: “The cross, incomparably vindicated by the resurrection, is the novum, the new factor in human experience, the definitive and world-changing act of God that makes the New Testament proclamation unique in all the world.” She further insists that “the crucifixion is the touchstone of Christian authenticity, the unique feature by which everything else, including the resurrection, is given its true significance.”30 In sum, the Christological deficit of Liberalism leaves a Christian congregation bereft of its Lord, a headless body of believers that may poignantly echo Magdalene’s lament: “They have taken the Lord and we do not know where they have laid him” (John 20:2). Absent Christ, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, Christian self-understanding inevitably succumbs to what Ratzinger has decried as “the dictatorship of relativism.”31 I pass now to a third symptom of the theological-pastoral plight that I have been calling the “decapitated Body.” I point here to a pronounced tendency to advocate and embrace a “Spirit monism.” Let me briefly revert once again to personal history. I have already mentioned pursuing graduate studies at Yale shortly after John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, VI, 7 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 1239–1245. For an insightful perspective upon Newman’s own quarrel with “Liberalism,” see Cyril O’Regan, “John Henry Newman and the Argument of Holiness,” in Newman Studies Journal 9, no. 1 (2012): 52–74. 30 Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), 61, 71. 31 See the memorable homily he delivered at the Mass prior to the conclave of 2005 (www.vatican.va/gpII/documents/homily-pro-eligendo-pontifice_20050418_ en.html). Though speaking explicitly of Ernst Troeltsch, Matthew Levering clearly intends the following as a characterization of liberal theology, whether in its Protestant or Catholic guise: “Troeltsch historicizes Christianity and identifies its truth with the emergence of new forms of liberative praxis (political and economic movements). . . . These evolving forms are not rooted in or bound by an authoritative Word of God, dogma, or faith in redemption from sin and death won by Jesus Christ” (The Achievement of Hans Urs von Balthasar: An Introduction to his Trilogy [Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. 2019], 221). 29 768 Robert Imbelli the closing of the Council. 1968 became for myself and many the annus horribilis marked by the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and widespread political and social unrest. It also saw the long-delayed appearance of the encyclical Humanae Vitae, with the ensuing religious and theological turmoil it sparked. My own theological interests became focused upon the theology of the Holy Spirit, which seemed a neglected and promising area of research and prayerful exploration. One fruit of this pondering was the article “Holy Spirit,” which appeared in The New Dictionary of Theology.32 Yet, even while working on the article, I was becoming increasingly aware of a growing allergy among some at making explicit appeal to the name of Jesus Christ. In Catholic college and university settings one became sadly accustomed to public events where a “generic brands” deity was invoked, lest any take offensive at explicitly Christian prayer. But also at meetings of Catholic theologians it seemed the vogue to invoke an often anonymous Spirit that, as one participant put it, allows for “more wiggle room.” A small but telling indication for me was the (unwitting, careless, deliberate?) misremembering of the opening of Lumen Gentium. Countless times the following, hugely important sentence was cited in articles and presentation. “The Church is in Christ like a sacrament or sign and instrument of intimate union with God and of the unity of all humankind” (§1). More often than not, however, the crucial “in Christ” was omitted from the quote, without even the courtesy of providing ellipses! Cyril O’Regan’s fine study of von Balthasar’s engagement with philosophical modernity speaks of philosophical modernity’s “Christological Derailment.” Led by Hegel and his epigones, Christian thinkers offered a “rinsed rendition of Christ.” They “fundamentally reversed the order of reference, and made Christ refer to the Spirit rather than the Spirit to Christ.” The result is one that has haunted Protestant Liberalism for two hundred years. “The community divests itself of the concrete particularity of Christ, and in its reference to Spirit concludes in abolishing transcendence altogether. Through pneumatic displacement the community’s memory of Christ becomes self-referential .”33 The “rinsed rendition of Christ” of Protestant Liberal theology has too Robert P. Imbelli, “Holy Spirit,” in The New Dictionary of Theology, ed. Joseph A. Komonchak, Mary Collins, Dermot A. Lane (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1987), 474–89. 33 Cyril O’Regan, The Anatomy of Misremembering: Von Balthasar’s Response to Philosophical Modernity, vol. 1, Hegel (New York: Crossroad, 2014), 200. 32 No Decapitated Body 769 often been copied in the decapitated Body presented in some quarters of contemporary Catholicism. This constitutes not only a misremembering of the Council, but a traducing of the New Testament itself. John Henry Newman surely represents the more authoritative and faithful witness. In one of his Anglican sermons he declares: “The Holy Spirit causes, faith welcomes, the indwelling of Christ in the heart. Thus the Holy Spirit does not take the place of Christ in the soul, but secures that place to Christ.”34 And Congar, who did so much to promote the renewal of the theology of the Holy Spirit in the Western Church, insisted: “The vigor of a lived pneumatology is to be found in Christology: there is only one body which the Spirit builds up and quickens, and that is the body of Christ.”35 In Gospel truth, without its Head there is simply no Body. This leads, finally, to the fourth temptation which, in effect, sunders Jesus from his Body, the Church: the disjunction of the “doctrinal” from the “pastoral” that is so frequently a mark of Catholic discourse today. Indeed, some go so far as to contend that a new “pastoral paradigm,” purportedly inspired by the magisterium of Pope Francis, is to replace the “doctrinal paradigm” that may have served the Church in the past, but, in the present historical and cultural context, no longer authentically reflects the movement of the Spirit.36 Already in 1985, the extraordinary synod convened to celebrate and reflect upon the twentieth anniversary of the close of Vatican II had strongly affirmed: “It is not licit to separate the pastoral character from the doctrinal vigor of the documents.” Even a cursory perusal of the Constitutions of the Council reveals how intimately connected the two perspectives are, whether in Lumen Gentium or in Gaudium et Spes. To separate them is to dissect a living whole. But the insidious temptation is not a new one. In the darkest days of World War II, with half of France under Nazi occupation, Henri de Lubac wrote a passionate essay deploring just such a sundering—for it bore lethal repercussions. He passionately affirmed the inextricable nexus between John Henry Newman, “The Spiritual Presence of Christ in the Church,” Parochial and Plain Sermons, VI, 10 (p. 1265–66). 35 Yves Congar, The Word and the Spirit, trans, David Smith (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986), 6. I myself sought to outline an approach that did justice to the work of God’s “two hands” in “The New Adam and Life-giving Spirit: the Paschal Pattern of Spirit Christology,” Communio 25, no. 2 (1998): 233–52. 36 For a recent instance, see George Dennis O’Brien, “The Risks of History: Does the Church Do Paradigm Shift?,” Commonweal, May 3, 2019, 8–10, and my own response, “The Risks of Disjunction,” Commonweal, June 4, 2019, 4. 34 770 Robert Imbelli doctrine and practice, between truth and love. And he showed their unity by leading them both to their foundation in the Mystery of Jesus Christ: hence a re-ductio in Mysterium Christi! Both Christian doctrine and Christian practice have their unique Source in the Mystery of Jesus Christ, the generative Dogma of the Great Tradition. De Lubac writes: No more, in fact, than one could dissociate the revealed truths from the very Person of the Revealer could one conceive a just and complete idea of the transcendent newness of Christianity if one did not see that in this Person of Christ, such as the Apostles already show him to us and such as the Church never ceases to contemplate and reproduce him, the reality of Charity and the truth of Dogma are indissolubly united, Charity constituting the reality of this Dogma, as this Dogma itself constitutes the truth of this Charity.37 Nicholas Healy expresses this conviction well: “Before dogma is something the Church formulates, dogma is something Christ himself is; dogma is first and foremost Christ himself as incarnate Word and enfleshed truth.”38 Christian doctrine, therefore, is the mystagogic unfolding “of God’s mystery, of Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge: (Col 2:2–3). And the foundational Christian practice is the realization (in the strong sense Newman gives the word) of the mystery “which is Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col 1:27). It is being configured to Christ, “Christification.” To quote de Lubac once again: “It is a matter of a spiritual life that makes the mystery of Christ real in each Christian, member of the Body of Christ.”39 The four tendencies/temptations outlined above literally conspire to foster, wittingly or not, the apostasy of a Headless Body. For, as Pope Francis vividly proclaimed in his very first homily to the cardinals after his election: “If we do not profess Jesus Christ, things go wrong. We may become a charitable NGO, but not the Church, the Bride of the Lord.” And Francis continued: “When we journey without the Cross, when we Henri de Lubac, “The Light of Christ,” in Theology in History, trans. Anne Englund Nash with foreword by Michel Sales (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), 216. 38 Nicholas J. Healy Jr., “Henri de Lubac on the Development of Dogma,” Communio 44, no. 4 (2017): 679. See also the fine article of José Granados, “The Synergy of Doctrine and Life,” Communio 43, no. 1 (2016): 104–22, drawing upon Irenaeus, Augustine, and Aquinas. 39 De Lubac, “The Light of Christ,” 215n33. 37 No Decapitated Body 771 build without the Cross, when we profess Christ without the Cross, we are not disciples of the Lord, we are worldly: we may be bishops, priests, cardinals, popes, but not disciples of the Lord.”40 In truth, without Jesus Christ and his Paschal Mystery at its center the Church goes tragically astray. It lapses into apostasy. Toward Re-Sourcement I have indicated both in this essay and in Rekindling the Christic Imagination my conviction that the “Way Forward” is to undertake a creative re-appropriation of the Vatican II constitutions in their full Christological concentration. This re-appropriation must, of course, be the responsibility of many. It will undoubtedly require theological and spiritual acumen, creative fidelity, and courageous, persevering commitment. As one ages, a certain “simplification” inevitably sets in (hopefully not one that is merely “simplistic”). I am more and more convinced that in reading the New Testament and the Fathers (the “ressourcement” that inspired so many of the theologians at Vatican II) a governing pattern, a “depth grammar,” if you will, unmistakably emerges. It underlies the diverse writings in their various modes and manners. I call it the pattern of “novum/transformation.”41 Irenaeus of Lyons provides a succinct summary when he exclaims of Christ: “Omnem novitatem attulit, semetipsum afferens”—“He brought all newness by bringing himself!”42 In face of Liberalism’s “rinsed Christology” that results in a Body deprived of a defining relation to the living and life-giving Presence of its risen, ascended Lord, it is imperative for Catholic life and theology to witness, in word and deed, to the absolute newness and transformative mission of Jesus Christ. I would briefly like to call upon two figures who, in my view, articulate and embody such conviction. Rowan Williams and Jeremy Driscoll can serve the Church as guides and, indeed, mystagogues on our way forward. Creative fidelity is on ample display in Rowan Williams’ recent book Christ The Heart of Creation. There Williams writes: “The central themes of classical Christology are closely bound up with the doctrine of Christ’s w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2013/documents/papa-francesco_20130314_omelia-cardinali.html. 41 I first discussed it at length in the introduction to Handing on the Faith: The Church’s Mission and Challenge, ed. Robert P. Imbelli, The Church in the 21st Century (New York: Crossroad, 2006), 1–9. 42 Irenaeus of Lyons, Adversus haereses, 4.34.1. This quote serves as the leitmotif for de Lubac’s “The Light of Christ,” and indeed for the entire volume Theology in History (see note 37). 40 772 Robert Imbelli Headship: that is, to acknowledge the divine life of the Word at work in Jesus is the foundation of thinking of the community of believers as bound together with him in a relation that is unlike any other.”43 He further asserts: “This finite life that is Jesus’ enacts the infinite in such a way that its loving agency permeates and transfigures the lives of those touched by it, and so transfigures the meanings of the entire material world.”44 Finally, he expresses a hope and presents a challenge: “Perhaps these pages will serve to prompt some at least to look harder and longer at the classical shape of incarnational teaching, to see how it is in this light that we see light on the entire creaturely landscape which we inhabit, and which we are called in and with Christ to transform.”45 The grammar of newness/ transformation clearly structures Williams’s work. Let me underscore some elements of this “incarnational teaching” that Williams highlights. He privileges the Headship of Jesus so that it becomes central to his Christological vision. The risen and ascended Jesus is not only “the first-born from the dead”; he is thereby constituted “Head of the Body the Church,” so that “in everything he might be pre-eminent” (Col 1:18). By his Headship Jesus is bound intimately to the members of his Body “in a relation that is unlike any other,” a relation whereby his “loving agency permeates and transfigures the lives of those touched by it.” A prime way that Williams ponders and explores the novum of Christianity is from the standpoint of relationality. Jesus Christ, the “new Adam,” is the progenitor of a new grace-endowed network of transfigured relations that image the mutual relations that are the very life of the tri-personal God. Hence, not only does the Christic novum inspire a Christological hermeneutic of the Scriptures. It requires a Christological hermeneutic of reality itself. It signals a Christological ontology whose Magna Carta could well be the verse from the Christological hymn of Colossians: “He Rowan Williams, Christ The Heart of Creation (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2018), 249 (emphasis mine). 44 Williams, Christ The Heart of Creation, 251 45 Williams, Christ The Heart of Creation, 254. I suggest that too little noted in the discussion of Charles Taylor’s monumental A Secular Age has been his sense of the grave human and spiritual deficiencies of modernity and the task incumbent upon Christians. He writes: “[Christians] live in a world where objectification and excarnation reign, where death undermines meaning . . . . We have to struggle to recover a sense of what the Incarnation can mean” (A Secular Age [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007], 753). Rowan Williams’s book is a profound meditation on what the Incarnation means. 43 No Decapitated Body 773 is before all things and in him all things hold together” (Col 1:17). 46 All things (the New Testament’s ta panta) are related to him and for him. And all find their fulfillment in him (Eph 1:23). The divine energies emanating from the risen, ascended Lord work the transfiguration, the Christification, of those united to him in faith and in love and, through them, of the whole created order. 47 I am evermore persuaded, in this regard, that it is a theological and pastoral imperative to recover the significance and implications of the Ascension of Jesus Christ, to rescue the feast that celebrates his Ascension from its “orphan” status (in danger of losing even its proper liturgical placement) so that it might foster a renewed appreciation of Christ’s Ascension as the very telos of the Incarnation and the pole star of incarnational faith. 48 As these last remarks indicate, the way forward, the Christic re-Sourcement of Catholic life and theology, must entail more than theoretical appropriation (however necessary). It must, even more crucially, promote and sustain a personal and communal realization of the unique Headship of Jesus Christ and disciples’ intimate and life-giving relation to him. As the collect for the Feast of the Ascension prays: “The Ascension of Christ your Son is our exaltation and, where the Head has gone before in glory, the Body is called to follow in hope.” No hint of a “decapitated body” here! Thus, to complement Williams’s more theoretical insights, I draw upon the liturgical-pastoral reflections of Jeremy Driscoll. In his book Awesome Glory, Abbot Driscoll offers, among other riches, a penetrating meditation upon the link between the body of Jesus and that of his disciples, both his original and contemporary disciples. Jesus’s charismatic bodily presence I suggest that one of the speculative tasks pressing upon Catholic theologians is to further elaborate a “relational ontology.” For some preliminary observations see Robert P. Imbelli, “The Heart Has its Reasons: Giving an Account of the Hope that Is in Us,” in Handing on the Faith: College Theology Society Annual Volume 59, ed. Matthew Louis Sutton and William L. Portier, Annual Publication of the College Theology Society (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2014), 21–42, esp. 34–37. 47 Another neglected aspect of Charles Taylor’s appreciative-critical engagement with secularity is his appeal to the Eastern Christian understanding of theosis to challenge modernity’s truncated anthropology. He speaks of theosis as “the further greater transformation which Christian faith holds out” (A Secular Age, 737). And the New Testament reveals that the form of theosis is Christic. 48 See the rich reflections in Jean Corbon, The Wellspring of Worship, trans, Matthew J. O’Connell (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1988), chapter 4 (“The Ascension and the Eternal Liturgy”). I have offered some considerations in Robert P. Imbelli, “Sursum Corda: Ascension Theology and Spirituality,” in “Sufficit Gratia Mea”: Studi Offerti al Cardinale Angelo Amato, ed. Manlio Sodi (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2019), 359–68. 46 774 Robert Imbelli summoned and apprenticed a body of disciples. His crucified body challenged the dispirited body of disciples. His transformed resurrected body initiated a body of disciples on the way of transformation. The grammar of newness/transformation permeates Driscoll’s book. He writes that the resurrected and ascended body of Jesus is “an event of an entirely new order”: It involves space and time, it involves bodies; but it pulls space and time and bodies into a new realm, a realm which establishes its own terms of how it can be known.”49 We can know it only in the Body of Christ which is the Church, as we are being ever more fully incorporated into the new reality. An acute realization evident in Williams’s theology and Driscoll’s liturgical spirituality and practice is what I call “somatic relationality.” Williams has for many years spoken and written forcefully of our radical inter-dependence, how we are im-plicated (literally “folded into”) one another, both for good and ill. And Driscoll, drawing upon Ephesians, insists: “Christ’s ascension involves gifts flowing out from him that build us all into one body. It appears to be a progressive process that is reaching toward all of us somehow being built up and taken together into what [Paul] calls ‘the full stature of Christ.’”50 What Driscoll especially accents and powerfully illustrates is how the new life in Jesus Christ receives its fullest actualization in the celebration of the Eucharist. How our “full, conscious, and active participation” (Sacrosanctum Concilium §14) is nothing less than the joyful celebration of the novum who is Christ the Head and the generous surrender to the transforming work of the Spirit: our ongoing incorporation into Christ. The Eucharist manifests and enables the new relational life in Christ: a life all-encompassing and never-ending. Thus, both Williams and Driscoll, in their vision and ministry, provide a powerful counter to “excarnation”—that fear of and flight from the flesh with its fragility and mortality—that Charles Taylor finds pervasive in our “enlightened” secular age. Moreover, contrary to the “buffered self” of modernity that strives to protect itself against the incursions of others, Williams and Driscoll celebrate the bodily self, immersed in a polymorphous web of relations. They see that the decisive issue is whether those relations (both among humans and with the natural environment) are life-giving or death-dealing—whether they are being transfigured in Christ. In their writings both notably stress the theme of “transformation” Driscoll, Awesome Glory, 27 (emphasis original). Driscoll, Awesome Glory, 132. 49 50 775 No Decapitated Body and “transfiguration.” They are painfully aware of the depth of human need and hence the imperative of redemption, the at-onement that only the Cross and Resurrection of Christ can accomplish. They keenly perceive that transformation transpires in community and is for the sake of communion. Together they bear remarkable testimony to the real and transforming Presence of Jesus Christ, who is Head of the Body and the very heart of creation. Conclusion The celebration of the Eucharist, which proclaims the death of the Lord until he comes, is the privileged locus where somatic relatedness and transformation, friendship and communion find their font and fulfillment in Jesus Christ, the Head of the Body. To elucidate the grammar of novum/ transformation, as I maintain Williams and Driscoll cogently do, does not obviate the urgent need for a mystagogic ars celebrandi. However, it discloses the res that must inform, govern, and guide our liturgical celebrations if they are to “realize” (in Newman’s pregnant sense) the true worship of the Head and the authentic participation of the Body. The transformative thrust of the Eucharistic mystery receives striking expression in Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ in words that Williams and Driscoll would surely second. Let the closing words, then, be those of Francis . . . and Benedict: The Lord chose to reach our intimate depths through a fragment of matter. He comes not from above but from within, he comes that we might find him in this world of ours. In the Eucharist, fullness is already achieved; it is the living center of the universe, the overflowing core of love and of inexhaustible life. Joined to the incarnate Son, the whole cosmos gives thanks to God. . . . In the bread of the Eucharist “creation is projected toward divinization, towards the holy wedding feast, towards unification with the Creator himself.”51 N&V Pope Francis, Encyclical Letter on Care for Our Common Home Laudato Si’ §236 (w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html; the internal quote is from a Corpus Christi homily of Benedict XVI). 51 Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2020): 777–790 777 “Gnoseological Concupiscence” and the Lines of Division in Post-Conciliar Theology1 Tracey Rowland University of Notre Dame Australia Sydney, Australia After the Second Vatican Council ended one of the memes of the era was that Catholic scholars needed to be open to ideas that came from outside their own academies and scholarly circles.2 There is some merit in this. No one wants to foster a Catholic ghetto culture. The Catholic position has always been that the spoils of the Egyptians are legitimate plunder. However just as parents think it is good for their children to have friends from outside their immediate family circle, and indeed to ultimately marry someone from outside the family, most responsible parents have criteria for discerning the suitable from the unsuitable friends and fiancés. In the 1960s however no criteria were offered by the Council fathers or other ecclesial leaders for discerning good intellectual partners from bad intellectual partners, perhaps because they assumed that no faithful Catholic would be mad enough to be attracted to many This lecture is a summary of the main lines of analysis in my book Catholic Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). The book is part of Bloomsbury’s “Doing Theology” series, in which each book in the series is dedicated to the subject of how theology is done in a particular Christian denomination. Hence there is Lutheran theology, Anglican theology, Calvinist theology, etc. The book’s title does not really do justice to its content which is an attempt to show that in the Church today there are four significant ways of “doing theology”—Thomist theology, Communio-style theology, Concilium-style theology, and Liberation Theology. Some of the paragraphs from this lecture were therefore lifted from the book. 2 A “meme” is a unit of cultural information, such as a concept, belief, or practice that spreads from person to person in a way analogous to the transmission of genes. 1 778 Tracey Rowland of the social theories on offer in the 1960s and 1970s. Nonetheless, in volume 9 of Karl Rahner’s Theological Investigations, written between 1965 and 1967, Rahner observed that theologians were being confronted with numerous philosophies that cannot be synthesized with each other, and as a consequence “theology today is experiencing perforce what we may be permitted to call its ‘gnoseological concupiscence.’”3 For Rahner this meant that “every theologian will bring to his theology the particular form, the historical and fragmentary nature of his own given understanding of existence.”4 Different theologians will be influenced by different philosophical schools. Rahner added to this his prediction that in the future, theology’s chief partner in dialogue will not be philosophy in a traditional sense at all, “but the ‘unphilosophical’ pluralistic sciences and the kind of understanding of existence which they promote either directly or indirectly.”5 In an interview published some two decades later in 1985 Rahner was asked whether he was of the opinion that “European theology cannot be exported to other parts of the world, but that in Africa an independent, autonomous theology must come into being that can totally differentiate itself from our European theology.” He replied, “Yes, of course” and added that “in time, an African, an Asian and a South American theology must arise.”6 When further questioned as to whether the moral theology would be different and whether he would allow an African chief his harem, Rahner replied, “I don’t know, I don’t know enough about Africa, . . . [but] obviously, the Church doesn’t need to revitalise old ethical life-styles that are now disappearing on their own.” 7 Rahner was prescient. He predicted the fragmentation of Catholic theology because of the wide variety of philosophical and even sociological theories to which elements of the deposit the faith would be hooked up in successive decades. He also predicted the criticisms of so-called “European” theology, which is usually code (or what we Anglophone speakers call a “weasel word”) for established magisterial teaching, and he predicted the strange phenomenon of different moral theologies being taught in different parts of the world such that something can be regarded as a mortal sin in one diocese and merely a canon law issue in another.8 Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. 9, Writings of 1965–1967 (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1972), 52. 4 Rahner, Theological Investigations, 9:56. 5 Rahner, Theological Investigations, 9:56. 6 Karl Rahner, I Remember, An Autobiographical Interview with Meinrod Krauss, trans. Harvey D. Egan (New York: Crossroad, 1985), 91. 7 Rahner, I Remember, 92. 8 “Weasel words” are words that are designed to be ambiguous and to paper-over 3 “Gnoseological Concupiscence” and the Lines of Division 779 He had no problem with these theological phenomena, but others did and continue to do so. In my book Catholic Theology I suggested that today Catholic scholars can be thought of, metaphorically, as animals in a zoo. The zoo is the theology academy and the different animal species can be identified by what position they take on different issues in fundamental theology. The most important building blocks of fundamental theology are: (1) the relationship between faith and reason, and thus philosophy and theology, (2) the relationship between nature and grace, (3) the relationship between Scripture and Tradition, and (4) the relationship between history and ontology. These four building blocks or critical couplets are like spots and stripes on animals. Just as we can identify animals in a zoo by looking at their spots and stripes and thereby distinguish a leopard from a tiger, we can classify different species of Catholic theologian by looking at how they understand these critical couplets. Today I will narrow the scope of the book to a focus on how four species of Catholic theologians understand the relationship between philosophy and theology. These four are: (1) Thomists, (2) theologians in the Communio tradition, (3) theologians in the Concilium trajectory, and (4) theologians who belong to one of the schools of Liberation Theology. The words Communio and Concilium of course refer to the two theology journals that were founded by theologians who were the leading theological advisors to the bishops at the Second Vatican Council. Concilium was founded in 1965, and Communio in 1972 after irreconcilable divisions within the Concilium group became obvious at the Concilium Congress held in Brussels in 1970. I will begin with the Thomists. There are of course different sub-species of Thomists. You will all be familiar with Lublin Thomists and maybe you have heard of Toulouse Thomists and Fribourg Thomists, River Forest Thomists, Existential Thomists, Aristotelian Thomists, and even people who call themselves Thomists of the Strict Observance and Hillbilly Thomists. Some of these sub-species of Thomists are defined by their research priorities, others by how they understand the relationship between essence and existence, and yet others by how they understand the relationship between philosophy and theology. One thing they all agree upon is that only certain types of philosophy make suitable partners for theology. Elements of Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy are acceptable, and for most Thomists, personalist philosophy is also acceptable as contentious claims. Weasels are small mammals known for their sly, predatory behavior, and are related to stoats, ferrets, and minks. 780 Tracey Rowland a partner for theology. Saint John Paul II famously developed his Lublin style Thomism by supplementing elements of classical Thomism with ideas taken from phenomenology and personalism. However, for Thomists of all sub-species, Marxism is not acceptable as a philosophical partner to theology, nor is the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School of Social Research so revered in the German academies, nor many of the ideas to be found in the works of Immanuel Kant and other luminaries of German Idealism or in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and any number of post-modern schools of philosophy which deny the existence of absolute truth, of moral absolutes, and of beauty that is something more than personal taste. Nor do Thomists buy into themes in Freudian psychology. The major internal fault line among the Thomists has been between those who argue that philosophy and theology must be kept completely separate and those who think of the two disciplines existing in a more symbiotic relationship. Today the trend is to consider the two as symbiotic, as was the general thrust of Saint John Paul II’s 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio. An excellent book for understanding how different sub-species of Thomists in the twentieth century understood the relationship between philosophy and theology is Reason Fulfilled by Revelation: the 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates in France by Gregory B. Sadler. In his classification scheme Sadler placed the French laymen Étienne Gilson (1884–1978) and Maurice Blondel (1861–1949) as the leaders of the Christian philosophy camp, that is, those who wanted to read the relationship between philosophy and theology as intrinsic and symbiotic, while Emile Bréhir (1876– 1952), Léon Brunschvicg (1869–1944), Pierre Mandonnet (1858–1936), and Fernand Van Steenberghen (1904–1993) were identified as the leaders of the circle who favored a sharp separation of the two disciplines. Josef Pieper was a German philosopher in the Thomist tradition who thought that the two disciplines could never be completely separated. In his book The End of Time, Pieper wrote: It is a peculiarity of philosophical inquiry, inherent in the matter itself, that it stands from the outset in a fully-fledged “contrapuntal” relationship to theology; there is no philosophical question which, if it really wants to strike the ground intended by itself and in itself, does not come up against the primeval rock of theological pronouncements.9 Josef Pieper, The End of Time: A Meditation on the Philosophy of History, trans. 9 “Gnoseological Concupiscence” and the Lines of Division 781 Pieper was influenced by Werner Jaeger’s interpretation of Aristotle in Jaeger’s 1934 Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of his Development (Oxford University Press). Pieper believed that the most exciting conclusion of Jaeger’s book was that behind Aristotle’s metaphysics there lies the credo ut intelligam. Pieper heavily influenced the thought of Joseph Ratzinger / Benedict XVI, and as a matter of historical fact it was Josef Pieper who introduced Joseph Ratzinger and Karol Wojtyła to each other. So this brings me to the second major species of contemporary Catholic theologian—the Communio types. The three most significant founding fathers of the Communio journal were Joseph Ratzinger, Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988), and Henri de Lubac (1896–1991). As a generalization we can say that Ratzinger’s favorite philosophers were Pieper and personalists like Peter Wust (1884– 1940), Martin Buber (1878-1965), and Robert Spaemann (1927–2018). He was also heavily influenced by Romano Guardini (1885–1968), who so insisted on the symbiotic relationship between philosophy and theology that his chair at the University of Munich was called the Chair in the Philosophy of Religion and the Christian Weltanschauung. Guardini roamed freely across the borders of philosophy and theology. De Lubac’s favorite philosophers were the French laymen Gilson and Blondel. Balthasar also roamed freely across the borders of philosophy, theology, and literature. He famously complained about what he called “sawdust scholasticism” or the variety of Thomism presented in many of the pre-conciliar academies. He even wore ear plugs to his classes on Scholasticism and used the time to do translations. De Lubac once remarked to Joseph Fessio that Balthasar would sit at the back of the classroom during lectures on Scholasticism reading Origen in Greek. Nonetheless, while Balthasar was repulsed by a vision of theology as a large, finite system of tightly defined Scholastic concepts, such as might appeal to lawyers but not to humanists with a love of literature and music, he argued strongly for the need to retain Thomistic metaphysics and especially to retain such concepts as the analogia entis. In this context Balthasar was especially impressed by the philosophy of Ferdinand Ulrich (1931–), including Ulrich’s treatment of the analogia entis, and the philosophy of Gustav Siewerth (1903–1963), especially Siewerth’s account of Thomistic metaphysics. Balthasar was also favorably influenced by the thought of Erich Przywara (1889–1972), who worked extensively on the development of Thomistic metaphysics. Andrzej Wierciński is a leading international authority on Siewerth’s Michael Bullock, repr. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1999 [originally 1954]), 16. 782 Tracey Rowland reading of Thomist metaphysics and has published a bilingual (English and German) edition of the Balthasar–Siewerth correspondence. This collection includes Balthasar’s obituary for Siewerth in which Balthasar praises Siewerth for his hostility to Suárezian metaphysics.10 Balthasar also praised Siewerth for his lack of interest in a philosophy separated from theology. He wrote that for Siewerth, as for Aquinas, “Aristotle was ‘the last philosopher,’ since all that followed always-already thinks well or ill, with approval or censure, to its salvation or damnation, within the space of the Revelation that has already taken place.” He concluded: “After Greek philosophy, all great philosophy is theology.”11 By this he meant, at least in part, that there is no neutral position from which to make judgements about theological questions. As he expressed the principle: “Theology proceeds always as a continuous dialogue between Bridegroom and Bride. The Bridegroom gives and the bride receives, and only in this acceptance of faith can the miracle of the pouring forth of the Word, which is both sower and seed, be accomplished.”12 In a full frontal assault on Kantian epistemology, Balthasar concluded that there is “no neutral standpoint outside the encounter between Bride and Bridegroom.” As a consequence, he wrote: It is of the utmost importance to see that what is lacking [in the relationship between spirituality and theology] is not just a piece of material that can be easily incorporated into the existing structure, or else a sort of stylistic quality to be reproduced anew. . . . The fact is that the spiritual dimension can only be recovered through the soul of man being profoundly moved as the result of his direct encounter with revealed truth, so that it is borne in upon him, once and for all, how the theologian should think and speak, and how he should not. This holds good for both the estranged disciplines, dogmatic theology and spirituality.13 Speaking directly of dogmatic theology, Balthasar further asserted that it is “no mere connecting link between revelation and something else, such See Andrzej Wierciński, Between Friends: The Hans Urs von Balthasar and Gustave Siewerth Correspondence 1954–1963 (Konstanz: Gustav Siewerth Gesellschaft, 2005–2007), 159n4. 11 Wierciński, Between Friends, 165. 12 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Explorations in Theology, vol. 1, The Word Made Flesh (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989), 201. 13 Balthasar, Explorations in Theology, 1:201. 10 “Gnoseological Concupiscence” and the Lines of Division 783 as human nature or reason or philosophy.” Rather: Human nature and its mental faculties are given their true center when in Christ; in him they attain their final truth, for such was the will of God, the Creator of nature, from eternity. Man, therefore, in investigating the relationship between nature and supernature, has no need to abandon the standpoint of faith, to set himself up as the mediator between God and the world, between revelation and reason, or to cast himself in the role of judge over that relationship. All that is necessary is for him to understand “the one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim 2:5), and to believe him in whom “were all things created in heaven and on earth . . . all by him and in him” (Col: 1:16). Christ did not leave the Father when he became man to bring all creation to fulfilment; and neither does the Christian need to leave his center in Christ in order to mediate him to the world, to understand his relation to the world, to build a bridge between revelation and nature, philosophy and theology.14 There is, in other words, no neutral space in which any scholar may stand. The desire for such neutrality is a kind of infidelity, if not outright idolatry. It is a case of kneeling before the altar of an eighteenth-century god. As Ratzinger put the idea: there is no such thing as “pure reason”; there is only “impure reason” or “purified reason.”15 Because of their opposition to the ideas of Suárez and Kant, the Communio theologians have a lot in common with the British-based Radical Orthodoxy scholars. Radical Orthodoxy (RO) is not the name of a collection of theological doctrines. It has been described as more of an intellectual sensibility. It grew up in Cambridge in the early 1990s after the High Church Anglican theologian John Milbank published his seminal work Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. The driving idea of this work is that there is no such thing as theologically neutral social theory. The leading lights of the RO circle, Milbank, Graham Ward, and Catherine Pickstock, are all High Church Anglicans, but those who have published under the RO banner include Catholics, Calvinists, and Anabaptists, and a significant number of scholars have Balthasar, Explorations in Theology, 1:195. Joseph Ratzinger, “The Dignity of the Human Person: Commentary on Gaudium et spes,” in Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler, vol. 3 (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 155. 14 15 784 Tracey Rowland converted to the Catholic faith while studying in this circle. Ward has described RO as a project of Christian cultural criticism whose chief concern is “unmasking the cultural idols, providing genealogical accounts of the assumptions, politics and hidden metaphysics of specific secular varieties of knowledge—with respect to the constructive, therapeutic project of disseminating the Gospel.”16 This description could equally apply to the work of many of the Communio scholars. They all believe that secularism is a bad thing, that it has its origins in the Franciscan nominalism of the fourteenth century and the subsequent destruction of a sacramental cosmology. They are also interested in showing how so-called secular scholarship carries within it hidden theological assumptions. The most significant difference between the Communio scholars and RO scholars is that some (not all) a difference in stances on the theological significance of gender differences. The typical concrete issues here are the ordination of women and the moral status of homosexual practices. The Anglicans who publish under the RO banner have no opposition to the ordination of women, and some, not all, regard homosexual practices as morally unproblematic, whereas the Catholics follow the magisterial teaching of the Catholic Church on all issues, including those pertaining to gender distinctions and sexual morality. As a generalization, there is a tendency for RO scholars who concur with the Catholic understanding of the significance of sexual difference to “swim the Tiber,” something that was psychologically easier during the pontificate of Benedict XVI, who was not only a world-class scholar to whom Oxbridge types could relate, but someone who shared many of the intellectual presuppositions of the RO circle. So to summarize, both the Thomists and the Communio scholars, as well as many of the RO scholars, believe that not just any philosophy is able to operate as a handmaid to theology. Some philosophies are completely unsuitable. Both the RO types and the Communio types tend to be much more Platonic than they are Aristotelian, and this is in part because of their interest in Platonic conceptions of participation. They are also, along with some of the Thomists, interested in personalism. But no one in any of these three groups is of the view that theology can be hooked up with Marxism and its intellectual derivatives, and no one in any of these three groups believes that social theory, indeed the entire academic discipline that calls itself sociology, is theologically neutral. This is Milbank’s Graham Ward, “Radical Orthodoxy/and as Cultural Politics,” in Radical Orthodoxy: A Catholic Enquiry, ed. Laurence Paul Hemming (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), 104. 16 “Gnoseological Concupiscence” and the Lines of Division 785 number 1 argument: social theory is never theologically neutral. This brings us to the other two major species of contemporary Catholic theologian: the Concilium types and the Liberation Theology types. These types are intellectual cousins. The Concilium types are interested in correlating the faith to contemporary social movements or, to use their own academic idiom, to “re-contextualize the faith with reference to the ‘critical consciousness’ of a given era.” In other words, their basic orientation is to begin with contemporary philosophies and social theories and to then “correlate” or “re-contextualize” the faith to these theories. The concept of correlation was promoted by the Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx (1914–2009). The idea was to market the faith by reference to elements that were popular in the contemporary culture. For example, if liberation is a popular idea and the “critical consciousness” of the era is in favor of liberation, then the Catholic faith needs to be correlated to this concept and presented as a form of liberation. Today second-generation Schillebeeckxians whose natural habitat is the universities of Holland and Belgium have dropped the concept of correlation and replaced it with the concept of re-contextualization. Like correlation, re-contextualization is all about starting with fashionable social theories and then positioning the faith in reference to them. The difference between correlation and re-contextualization is that first-generation Schillebeeckxians thought they had to correlate the faith to the culture of modernity, while the second-generation Schillebeeckxians now think that the culture of modernity was flawed, that all right-thinking people are now post-moderns, and therefore Catholic theology has to be re-contextualized to the many different sub-cultures operating within our post-modern culture today. Whether we are talking about correlating or re-contextualizing, it amounts to the same thing of giving an epistemic priority to some contemporary social theory or powerful social phenomenon such as gender identity. In one stark statement about re-contextualization, Schillebeeckx’s former student Erik Borgman has explained that: “What is normative, from the perspective of faith, are not Jesus’ words and actions but the relationship between the words and the deeds of Jesus on the one hand and their context on the other. Believers here and now are not asked to imitate what Jesus said or did, rather they are to relate to their context as Jesus related to his.”17 This principle, of course, has enormous implications for how we understand scriptural hermeneutics and the relationship between Scripture and tradition and dogmatic theology. Eric Borgman, “Gaudium et spes: the Forgotten Future of a Revolutionary Document,” Concilium 4, (2005): 54. 17 786 Tracey Rowland Of all the philosophies on the intellectual smorgasbord, one of the most influential among the Concilium network of theologians has been the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School of Social Research. The fundamental principles of “Critical Theory” were set out by Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Journal for Social Research), most of which were republished in 1968 under the title Kritische Theorie (Critical Theory). The Polish historian of Marxist theory Leszek Kołakowski has described Horkheimer’s thought as “permeated by the Marxist principle that philosophical, religious, and sociological ideas can only be understood in relation to the interests of different social groups (but not that everything ‘in the last resort’ comes down to class-interest), so that theory is a function of social life.”18 Accordingly, there are no such things as “facts”—“perception cannot be isolated from its social genesis; both it and its objects are a social and historical product”—and “the facts ascertained are in part determined by the collective praxis of human beings who have devised the conceptual instruments used by the investigator.”19 In short, as William L. Portier concluded: “Critical Theory attempts to exploit one of the fundamental insights of the Marxist tradition, . . . that the interpretation of any tradition likely involves systematic distortions of communication in the interests of those who have power and privilege.”20 When this kind of thinking is applied to the world of theology the result is that a hermeneutic of suspicion hangs over the ideas of those who are highly educated scholars from first-world countries, or at least, such people are vulnerable to criticism by intellectual opponents on the grounds that in promoting certain ideas they are merely serving some class or other personal interest. In his article “Theology and Praxis” published in 1973, Charles Davis, who was a huge name in British Catholic theology circles in the 1960s, but by 1973 a laicized priest, described the attraction of the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory to contemporary Belgian and Dutch theologians in the following terms: Fundamental for them as a consequence of their acceptance of the Marxist unity of theory and praxis is a conviction that the permanent Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 347. 19 Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, 3:353. 20 William L. Portier, “Interpretation and Method,” in The Praxis of Christian Experience: An Introduction to the Theology of Edward Schillebeeckx, ed. Robert J Schreiter and Mary Catherine Hilkert (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989). 18 “Gnoseological Concupiscence” and the Lines of Division 787 self-identity of the Christian faith cannot be presupposed. . . . They reject a theoretical system of identity. . . . Truth does not yet exist; it cannot be reached by interpretation, but it has to be produced by change.21 In the final paragraph of his article Davis pointed to the significance of this appropriation of Critical Theory with the rhetorical question: “Is theology, as Schillebeeckx says, the critical self-consciousness of Christian praxis, or is Kołakowski right when he says: ‘For theology begins with the belief that truth has already been given to us, and its intellectual effort consists not of attrition against reality but of assimilation of something which is ready in its entirety’?”22 All Thomists and Communio scholars would agree with Kołakowski. The great majority of, if not almost all, Concilium and Liberation Theologians, would agree with Schillebeeckx. When we turn finally to the territory of the Liberation Theologians, the bridge between them and the Concilium types is the work of Johann-Baptist Metz (1928–). Metz accused the standard magisterial theology of the 1960s of being too concerned about matters of individual salvation and not sufficiently concerned with the political dimensions of the faith. German “Political Theologians” such as Metz demanded a political interpretation of the Gospel rather than what they called an existential interpretation. The Liberation Theologians take up this theme. According to Jose Comblin: “Faith does not consist in [the] intellectual acceptance of specific truths drawn from the Bible. Faith consists in recognizing God’s plan, or the coming of the kingdom of God. It is a matter of recognizing the march of the people of God in our times.”23 To do this work of “recognizing the march of the people of God in our times” the Liberation Theologians turn to social theory as an intellectual partner for theology. According to Michael R. Candelaria, one of the intellectual historians of Liberation Theology: A basic theological fundamentum of Liberation Theology in general, is the unitary view of history, una sola historia. This idea affirms the unity of salvation and liberation, redemption and earthly progress, the sacred and the profane. Reality is one. There is no supernatural Charles Davis, “Theology and Praxis,” Cross Currents 23, no. 2 (1973): 154–68, at 167. 22 Davis, “Theology and Praxis,” 167. 23 Jose Comblin, “The Signs of the Times,” Concilium 4 (2005), 73–85, at 83. 21 788 Tracey Rowland realm outside of and above the natural realm of human history. . . . For [Juan] Segundo, [one of the big names in Liberation Theology] secularisation moves humanity closer to total human liberation. In his mind, secularisation is a “central postulate of the Christian message.” Seen in terms of theology’s task, secularization means shifting the focus of our intellectual endeavours from the realm of the heavenly to the realm of the earthly. . . . At bottom, secularisation means that everything in the Church must be translated from “religious” terms into man’s tasks in history.24 Another common thread running through all the versions of Liberation Theology is that they give priority to praxis over theory, to ethos over logos. Doctrine and dogmatic theology are almost regarded as obscene ideas. This is the exact opposite of the position taken by Romano Guardini, who argued that logos must always precede ethos—a position with which Ratzinger strongly concurred. The Argentinian strain of Liberation Theology goes by the name of “People’s Theology.” It is said to be Peronist in inspiration rather than Marxist, and the adjective “Peronist” is a reference to the social ideas of Juan Peron (1895–1974), who was an Argentinian general and politician. One of the most interesting articles on this subject of People’s Theology is Juan Carlos Scannone’s “El papa Francisco y la telogia del pueblo,” published in the journal Razón y Fe.25 Scannone is a Jesuit and a former teacher of Pope Francis. In this paper Scannone claims not only that Pope Francis is a practitioner of “People’s Theology,” but that his favorite four principles—time is greater than space; unity prevails over conflict; reality is more important than ideas; and the whole is greater than the parts— actually come from a letter of the nineteenth-century Argentinian dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793–1877) sent to another Argentinian caudillo, Facundo Quiroga (1788–1835), in 1834. These principles have their own section in Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium and references to one or other of them can be found scattered throughout his other papal documents. Many people have tried to explain these principles by reference to different philosophies, but according to Scannone their foundations are in the field of political strategy, not philosophy. A sub-species of Liberation Theology is Feminist Liberation Theology. Michael R. Candelaria, Popular Religion and Liberation: The Dilemma of Liberation Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 110. 25 Juan Carlos Scannone, “El papa Francisco y la telogia del pueblo,” Razón y Fe, no. 1395 (2014): 31–50. 24 “Gnoseological Concupiscence” and the Lines of Division 789 A snapshot summary of the methodology of feminist theologians was offered by Gloria L. Schaab in the journal Theological Studies in 2001. Schaab wrote: Critique in the feminist theological process begins with a “hermeneutics of suspicion” that is wary of underlying prejudices and presuppositions that exclude women’s perspectives. During this stage of the process, oppressive texts are demythologized, exclusive male symbolism for the divine is exposed, dualisms of body and spirit are rejected, and hierarchical understandings of power are destabilised. Having thus exposed the insufficiency of the biblical and theological tradition at face value, the process moves below the surface of texts and beyond traditional sources to a retrieval of women’s experiences found between the lines, in the silence, and from alternative sources. In the movement to (re) construction, feminist theology enters in to the task of reshaping key religious symbols, especially those that are problematic from the Christian feminist perspective, through strategies elaborated from the critiques outlines above. Among such concepts are Christology and soteriology, particularly as regards the maleness of Jesus. Posing particular difficulty is the doctrine of the Cross, with its conflicting symbolism of victimization and violence, as well as empowerment and solidarity. Ultimately the mystery of God articulated in predominately male imagery and Trinitarian symbolism based upon hierarchical gender models is fundamentally challenged as subversive to the reality of woman as imago Dei and imago Christi.26 While there are different strands in Feminist Theology (for example, liberal, Marxist, essentialist, constructivist, structuralist, post-structuralist, first-wave, second-wave, third-wave, fourth-wave, and eco-feminist), Schaab’s description above does identify the typical hallmarks of the genre. Feminist hermeneutics have been a powerful element in what Rahner identified as the post-conciliar “gnoseological concupiscence.” In conclusion, from all the above, it may be argued that the fundamental question is: does Christ position philosophy, ethics, and cultural forms or do they position Christ? Or to repeat the question of Charles Davis: “Is theology, as Schillebeeckx says, the critical self-consciousness of Christian praxis, or is Kołakowski right when he says: ‘For theology begins with the Gloria L. Schaab, “Feminist Theological Methodology: Toward a Kaleidoscopic Model,” Theological Studies 62 (2001): 341–65, 357–58. 26 790 Tracey Rowland belief that truth has already been given to us, and its intellectual effort consists not of attrition against reality but of assimilation of something which is ready in its entirety’?” How one answers these two questions, which essentially are just one question expressed in two different ways, will determine whether one is more at home in the circles of Thomist and Communio scholars or more at home in the world of Concilium scholars and Liberation Theologians. Beneath this question is the issue of the relationship of logos to ethos and a whole raft of metaphysical presuppositions. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2020): 791–816 791 Extrinsicism?: Revisiting the Preconciliar Theology of Nature and Grace David L. Augustine Catholic University of America Washington, DC Introduction The lives of even the most virtuous people are complex wholes and can be cast in different lights depending on the speaker’s vantage point and personal agenda. Thus, for Roman Catholics, Theresa of Calcutta is a saint. For Christopher Hitchens, she is a self-righteous fraud.1 Mother Theresa’s works of corporal mercy are capable of wildly different interpretations based on one’s presuppositions. Much the same holds true for the complex doctrines of venerable theological schools. Their doctrines can be characterized in different ways depending on the speaker’s historical moment, personal history, and even prejudices. In this light, the aim of this essay is a simple one: to correct the common conception of what Karl Rahner vaguely calls the “average textbook-conception on the relationship between nature and grace”2 and what many scholars associated with the nouvelle théologie associate with the early See Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (New York: Verso, 1995). 2 Karl Rahner, S.J., “Concerning the Relationship between Nature and Grace,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 1, God, Christ, Mary and Grace, trans. Cornelius Ernst, O.P. (Baltimore and London: Helicon and Darton, Longman, & Todd, 1961), 297–317, at 298. When not noted or cited from English-translation titles, English translations are my own. 1 792 David L. Augustine twentieth-century manualist approach to nature and grace. Namely, I will aim to show that the neo-Scholastics were not “extrinsicists” in any negative sense of the term. In the first part of the essay, I will briefly present several of the critiques of the preconciliar “textbook” theology as found in the writings of Karl Rahner, Henri de Lubac, and Louis Bouyer. Again, my focus is on their concern that the manuals are “extrinsicist” in their understanding of nature and grace. In the second part, I will respond to the above characterization via extensive recourse to the neo-Scholastic literature. The Supernatural as Extrinsic Superstructure? By the mid-twentieth century, the conception of the interrelationship between nature and the supernatural in the manuals was regularly being dubbed as “extrinsicist” by its opponents.3 For example, Karl Rahner begins his essay “Concerning the Relationship between Nature and Grace” by noting that the “average teaching on grace,” or again “the average textbook-conception of the relationship between nature and grace,” does indeed present a teaching on their relationship that can fairly be described as “extrinsecism [sic].”4 By “extrinsicism,” Rahner means that human nature has first been conceived of as “sharply circumscribed” and “oriented to the nature of less than human things.”5 Next, to nature defined thusly, “supernatural grace,” according to Rahner, “can only be the superstructure [Überbau] lying beyond the range of human experience imposed upon a human ‘nature’ which . . . turns in its own orbit [in sich selber kreist] (though with a relationship peculiar to itself to the God of creation).”6 Grace thus comes The charge seems to originate with Maurice Blondel’s The Letter on Apologetics of 1896, in The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, trans. Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 127–217, at 148. Blondel’s own account, however, is rather nuanced. He maintains that high Scholasticism placed the supernatural and natural orders in an “ascending hierarchy” that were in contact with one another. It was old Protestantism that pulled down the “edifice of reason,” which then liberal Protestantism later rebuilt with an “independent integrity,” thereafter leading to the “juxtaposition” and “opposition” of the orders which the new Scholasticism now maintains (see 154–55). 4 Karl Rahner, “Concerning the Relationship,” 298. It is significant that Rahner develops his own theory of the “supernatural existential” against this foil in his first article on the nature–grace problematic in dialogue with “D” (someone who holds a theory akin to de Lubac’s). 5 Rahner, “Concerning the Relationship,” 298. 6 Rahner, “Concerning the Relationship,” 299. One might ask whether it is coherent to posit a nature that “turns in its own orbit” even while appending in parentheses 3 Revisiting the Preconciliar Theolog y of Nature and Grace 793 as a “purely external ‘decree’ of God” which “disturb[s] [gestört]” a nature that, in the present economy, is otherwise equivalent to the “man of ‘pure nature.’”7 Henri de Lubac, in his late A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, makes a similar if more sharply-pointed charge, noting that the new “Thomist” position posits a nature–grace relationship that can be described as “two juxtaposed realities (two ‘natures’), or, if one prefers, two realities the second of which would be superimposed on the other, while both remained exterior to the other.”8 De Lubac, of course, rejects this understanding of grace as a “supernature,”9 since the nature–grace relationship is not about “two substantial natures, incapable of copenetrating each other, one of which would override the other.”10 Louis Bouyer’s assessment of the problem is similar to de Lubac’s. In his Introduction to Spirituality, Bouyer alleges that the extrinsicist conception arose from a misunderstanding of the Scholastic doctrine of created grace. From this starting point, he avers, “grace as created was taken as a pretext for representing it as a second nature, a ‘supernature’ superimposed on our original nature.”11 However, so Bouyer notes, this conception is false because grace is not a new nature or supernature, but is rather “as it were a new ‘accident’ inserted into the substance of the soul, fitting it as a soul to live the very life of God.”12 In the most intimate connection with the falsification of the notion of grace or the supernatural, many authors likewise note that the Scholastic as a kind of concession that this same nature maintains a relationship to God the Creator. I will return to this point below. The German is cited from Karl Rahner, “Über das Verhältnis von Nature und Gnade,” in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 5/1 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2015), 66–83, at 68. 7 Rahner, “Concerning the Relationship,” 299 (“Über das Verhältnis,” 68). 8 Henri de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, trans. Richard Arnandez, F.S.C. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984), 34. This work originally appeared in 1980 in French. 9 De Lubac, Brief Catechesis, 33. De Lubac notes correctly that the term “supernature” in its contemporary application originates with Matthias Joseph Scheeben’s usage. See Scheeben’s 1861 work, Nature and Grace, trans. Cyril Vollert, S.J. (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2009), esp. 29–33, 37–39. 10 De Lubac, Brief Catechesis, 35. De Lubac goes on to note that it was Blondel who provided the impulse for the twentieth-century return to what he views as a more traditional nature–grace theology (37). 11 Louis Bouyer, Introduction to Spirituality, trans. Mary Perkins Ryan (New York: Desclee, 1961), 153. 12 Bouyer, Introduction to Spirituality, 153. 794 David L. Augustine manuals similarly distort the traditional teaching on human nature’s capacity for receiving the supernatural—even in the present economy— in an extrinsicist direction. The problem is their interrelated notions of obediential potency for grace, natural desire to see God conceived of as a velleity or wish, and their overall notion of the possibility of a state of pure nature as a theologoumenon necessary to secure the ontological gratuity of grace next to the so-called debitum naturae. To give just one example: Henri de Lubac critiques the sixteenth-century Dominican and influential Thomistic commentator Thomas de Vio Cardinal Cajetan for truncating Thomas’s conception of human nature in such a way that Thomas’s dictum that the “soul is naturally capable of grace”13 has been tacitly replaced with the concept of potentia obedientiae—a category of potency used to account for extrinsic miracles—that reifies man and leads to a concomitant “naturalization of the soul.”14 In doing so, Cajetan turned the “[human] spirit back upon itself, enclosing it in ‘its own species’” like lower natures.15 With this new conception too, man’s natural desire to see God was likewise truncated, reduced to a mere velleity or wish—what de Lubac regards as a “vague”16 or “superficial” desire without “profound roots”17—that has been “water[ed] . . . down as far as possible” from the traditional conception.18 Similarly, de Lubac— Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae [ST] I-II, q. 113, a. 10. See Henri de Lubac, S.J. The Mystery of the Supernatural, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Crossroad, 2012), 140–43, esp. 140. De Lubac does go on to note on 142–43 that it is possible with “some of the moderns” to affirm an obediential power that is specific to man, but he does not develop this idea further, other than noting at 143n13 that the “incautious analogical extension” of the idea of obediential potency fostered “a certain confusion between the order of grace and that of miracle.” See too Henri de Lubac, Surnaturel: Études Historiques [Supernatural: Historical Studies] (Paris: Aubier, 1946), 135. 15 De Lubac, Mystery of the Supernatural, 144. De Lubac goes on to note that “later [i.e., Dominican] Thomism” largely followed Cajetan on this point (146), as did Francisco Suarez (147). Presumably, the later Jesuit commentators, who access Thomas via a greater or lesser dependence on Suarez, do so with him as well. 16 De Lubac, Mystery of the Supernatural, 180. 17 De Lubac, Surnaturel, 433. 18 De Lubac, Mystery of the Supernatural, 180–81. On this point, de Lubac was anticipated especially by a series of articles by Guy de Broglie, S.J., that came out in the 1920s, beginning with de Broglie’s “De place du surnaturel dans la philosophie de saint Thomas [On the Place of the Supernatural in the Philosophy of St. Thomas],” Recherches de science réligieuse 14 (1924): 193–246, 481–96. For discussion of de Broglie’s position and the contention that it represents a twentieth-century revival of Giles of Rome’s reading of Thomas as revived and perpet13 14 Revisiting the Preconciliar Theolog y of Nature and Grace 795 whose fundamental concern is with the dominance of Aristotelian categories, which he aims to subvert—also regards the concept of debitum naturae as a fundamental misconception of the relation between creaturely and uncreated being that presupposes a fundamentally “univocal” concept of being.19 In questions of the relation between creature and Creator in general, de Lubac maintains that the “term exigency [exigence]” is simply out of place.20 “The monster of exigency,” he writes, is a “phantom.”21 All along Scholastic theologians were trying to “solve a false problem.”22 As we can see, a number of influential mid-century theologians are quite critical of the earlier literature on nature and grace that stands in the manualist and commentarial tradition on Thomas. Their concern is that this literature posits an extrinsicist concept of the supernatural that functionally becomes a divine superimposition on nature insofar as it no longer fulfills the latter’s aspirations, since nature could just as well get along without it, coming to rest comfortably in the natural end posited for it by the natura pura hypothesis. Let us turn now to the relevant literature and see what it has to say about the nature–grace relationship. The Supernatural in Early Twentieth-Century Neo-Scholastic Thought The first half of the twentieth century is the era of the theological “manu- uated among the Order of the Hermits of St. Augustine, see C. C. Pecknold and Jacob Wood, “Augustine and Henri de Lubac,” in T&T Clark Companion to Augustine and Modern Theology, ed. C. C. Pecknold and Tarmo Toom (London: Bloomsbury, 2016 [paperback edition]), 196–222, at 201–203. 19 De Lubac, Surnaturel, 485, and Mystery of the Supernatural, 88. 20 De Lubac, Surnaturel, 484. See also 487–88. 21 De Lubac, Surnaturel, 487. 22 De Lubac, Surnaturel, 487. It is worth noting that Karl Rahner defends the notion of debitum nature in “Concerning the Relationship,” 306–8, over and against the de Lubacian-type position of “D.” That said, Rahner also posits that the creature’s primordial ordering to the supernatural is not proper to the creature as such—and so does not fall under the exigency of the debitum—but is instead to be accounted for by Rahner’s “supernatural existential,” which constitutes the a priori ordering of the creature in concreto for its supernatural last end. In this way, Rahner’s position reunites with the de Lubacian, all the while remaining distinct in its underlying metaphysical presuppositions. 796 David L. Augustine als,”23 both Jesuit24 and Dominican25—although of course ecclesiastical If below I often use the term “manual” to refer to any number of the especially Jesuit dogmatic textbooks of this period, I do so only because it is a by-now familiar term. I intend none of the pejorative connotations—“dry,” “dusty,” etc.—that frequently accompany its use. 24 The following is a representative sample of the many Jesuit manuals on grace. Ludovico Lercher, S.J., Institutiones theologiae dogmaticae [Institutions of Dogmatic Theology], vol. 3, 2nd ed. (Innsbruck [Oeniponte]: Felix Rauch, 1934); originally published in 1924, Lercher’s manual stayed in print into the 1950s with a fourth edition; vol. 3 contains three books: “De Verbo Incarnato”; “De B.M.V. et Cultu Sanctorum”; “De Gratia Christi” [On the Word Incarnate; on the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Cult of the Saints; On the Grace of Christ]. Joseph Pohle, Lehrbuch der Dogmatik in sieben Büchern [Manual of Dogmatics, in Seven Books], vols. 1 and 2 of 3, 4th improved ed. (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schönigh, 1908–1909]); vol. 1 has material on the supernatural order; vol. 2 contains Pohle’s treatise on grace; for abridged English translations, see (vol. 1) God: The Author of Nature and the Supernatural, ed. Arthur Preuss (St. Louis, MO: Herder, 1942 [1st ed., 1912]), and (vol. 2) Grace: Actual and Habitual, ed. Arthur Preuss (St. Louis, MO: Herder, 1941 [1st ed., 1915]); Pohle’s manual would ultimately go through ten editions (9th ed. known as “Pohle-Gierens”; 10th ed. known as “Pohle-Gummersbach”), remaining in print through the late 1960s. Charles Boyer, S.J., Tractatus de gratia divina [Treatise on Divine Grace] (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1938); although published for the first time in 1938, the contents of this work were used by Boyer with students at the Pontifical Gregorian University for years. Louis Billot, S.J., De gratia Christi: commentarius in primam secundae S. Thomae [On the Grace of Christ: A Commentary on the Prima Secundae of St. Thomas], 4th ed. (Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University Press, 1928); a Thomist, Cardinal Billot was one of the most prolific, profound, and important theologians of the early twentieth century. Christian Pesch, S.J., Praelectiones dogmaticae [Lectures on Dogmatic Theology given at Ditton Hall]: vol. 3, De Deo Creante et Elevante: De Deo Fine Ultimo [On the Creating and Elevating God: On God as Ultimate End], 4th ed. (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1914); vol. 5, De Gratia: De Lege Divina Positiva [On Grace: On Positive Divine Law], 3rd ed. (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1908). Although the first edition of Pesch’s Praelectiones was published in 1896, it ultimately went through seven printings up through 1924. Gabriel Huarte, S.J., Tractatus de gratia Christi (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1923). Blasio Beraza, S.J., Tractatus de Gratia Christi (Bilbao: Alameda de Mazarredo with Elexpuru Hermano, 1916). Dominico Palmieri, S.J., Tractatus de ordine supernaturali et de lapsu angelorum [Treatise on the Supernatural Order and the Fall of the Angels], rev. ed. (Prati: Giachetti, 1910); although published in 1910, the materials in this volume have been reworked from those found in his Tractatus de Deo Creante et Elevante [Treatise on the Creating and Elevating God] (Rome: Ex typographia Polyglotta S.C. de Propaganda Fide, 1878). George H. Joyce, S.J., The Catholic Doctrine of Grace, 2nd ed. (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1930); the first edition of this work was published in 1920. Hermann Lange, 23 Revisiting the Preconciliar Theolog y of Nature and Grace 797 authors of every persuasion25likewise make their own literary contribu- S.J., De gratia: tractatus dogmaticus [On Grace: A Dogmatic Treatise] (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1929). Gustavo Lahousse, S.J., Tractatus de gratia divina [Treatise on Divine Grace] (Bruges: Carolum Beyaert Biliopolam, 1902). For additional Jesuit works on grace, which do not follow the textbook format, see J.-B. Terrien, S.J., La grace et la gloire ou la filiation adoptive des enfants de Dieu: étudiée dans sa réalité, ses principes, son perfectionnement et son couronnement final [Grace and Glory or The Adoptive Sonship of the Children of God Studied in its Reality, Principles, Perfecting and Final Coronation], 2 vols. (Paris: Lethielleux, 1901, rev. ed. [original: 1897]). See too the important work by Pedro Descoqs, S.J., Le Mystère de notre élévation surnaturelle [The Mystery of our Supernatural Elevation] (Paris: Beauchesne, 1938); in this work, Descoqs, a professor of Jersey, argues that we cannot demonstratively prove the possibility of the visio beatifica (20); this work is directed principally against Guy de Broglie, S.J., “Du caractère mystérieux de notre élévation surnaturelle [On the Mysterious Character of our Supernatural Elevation],” Nouvelle revue théologique 59 (1937): 337–76, but also is written tangentially against Gioacchino Sestili, De naturali intelligentis animae capacitate atque appetite intuendi divinam essentiam: theologica disquisition [On the Natural Capacity of the Understanding and the Appetite of the Soul for Intuiting the Divine Essence: A Theological Disquisition] (Rome: A. et Salvatoris Festa, 1896), and Pierre Rousselot, S.J., L’Intellectualisme de S. Thomas (1909), published in English as The Intellectualism of Saint Thomas, trans. James E. O’Mahony, O.M. Cap. (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1935). For other Jesuit works on grace, see also Hermann Lange, S.J., Im Reich der Gnade [In the Kingdom of Grace] (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 1934). 25 See especially the magisterial work by Norberto Del Prado, O.P., De gratia et libero arbitrio [On Grace and Free Will], 3 vols. (vol. 1, Pars prima: in qua explanantur sex quaestiones de gratia Dei ex D. Thomae summa theologica [First Part: in which is Explained Six Questions on the Grace of God from St. Thomas’s Summa Theologica]; vol. 2, Pars secunda: concordia liberi arbitrii cum divina motione juxta S. Augustinum et D. Thomam [Second Part: the Agreement of Free Will with the Divine Motion according to Sts. Augustine and Thomas]; vol. 3, Pars tertia: concordia liberi arbitrii cum divina motione juxta doctrinam Molinae [Third Part: the Agreement of Free Will with the Divine Motion according to the Doctrine of Molina] (Fribourg: Ex typis Consociationis Santi Pauli, 1907). The first volume of this work serves as an extended commentary in six parts on ST I-II, qq. 109–14, treating accordingly of: (1) the necessity of grace; (2) on the grace of God according to its essence; (3) on the division of grace; (4) on the cause of grace; (5) on the justification of the impious; and (6) on merit. Vol. 2 serves as an extended explanation and defense of the Bañezian system of physical premotion, whereas vol. 3, not unsurprisingly, is a scathing critique of Molina’s system, the congruism of Bellarmine and Suarez, and the eclecticism of the Sorbonne school. See also Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., De gratia: commentarius in summam theologicam S. Thomae Iae IIae q. 109–114 (Turin: Berruti, 1947 [originally 1946]. For English translation, see Grace: Commentary on the Summa theologica of St. Thomas, Ia IIae, q. 109–14, 798 David L. Augustine tions felt.26 While the dogmatic textbooks aim to provide comprehensive explanations of the major nodal areas of Catholic doctrine, this is perhaps nowhere more true than in the subject of nature and grace, treatments of which are often covered in separate monographs devoted to the subject. In what follows, I will begin my exposition of the manuals’ approach to the nature–grace problematic by first surveying a few definitions of grace or the supernatural to establish a baseline, thereafter turning to a more detailed response to the critiques outlined above. A Supernatural Gift of God: Huarte, Pesch, Garrigou-Lagrange Jesuit and Dominican authors alike define grace as being a supernatural gift of God. Thus, the Jesuit and professor at the Gregorian University trans. Dominican Nuns (London: Herder, 1952). For an extended (2 vol.) work, the first volume of which treats the soul’s capacity for grace, see Antoine Gardeil, O.P., La structure de l’âme et l’expérience mystique [The Structure of the Soul and Mystical Experience], 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Paris: Gabalda, 1927). 26 For additional works on grace, see Richardo Tabarelli C.P.S., De gratia Christi in I-II partem summae theologicae S. Thomae Aquinatis a. q. XIX ad q. CXIV [On the Grace of Christ in I-II of the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas qq. 109–114], in Opere Teologiche di P. Riccardo Tabarelli, vol. 4, De gratia Christi, new ed., ed. Cornelio Fabro (Rome: Pontificia Universitas Lateranensis, 1962 [originally 1908]). H. Ligeard, La théologie scolastique et la transcendance du surnaturel [Scholastic Theology and the Transcendence of the Supernatural] (Paris: Beauchesne, 1908). Not tied to any one school, Ligeard, a professor of apologetics at l’Ecole de Théologie de Lyon-Francheville, surveys the systems of diverse schools, including the Thomist, Scotist, and Augustinian schools, to elicit their views on the supernaturality of the last end of man, which must be firmly maintained—so the author contends—if modern rationalist obstacles to Catholic preaching are to be overcome apologetically (see ch. 4). See too the historical work on the question of the pure nature hypothesis in light of the challenges posed by Baianism, Jansenism, and the Synod of Pistoia in Fernand Litt, La question des rapports entre la nature et la grâce de Baius au Synode de Pistoie: doctrines théologiques et documents ecclésiastiques [The Question of the Relationship between Nature and Graces from Baius to the Synod of Pistoia: Theological Doctrines and Ecclesiastical Documents] (Fontainel’Évêque: Louis Daisne, 1934). Litt maintains, contra de Broglie, that the question of the possibility of a state of pure nature has ceased to be a free question following the condemnation of the Synod of Pistoia (149–50). See also: Louis Prunel, Cours supérieur de religion, vol. 4, La Grâce [Higher Course on Religion, vol. 4, Grace] (Paris: Beauchesne, 1922); Petrus Parente, Anthropologia supernaturalis: de gratia et virtutibus [Supernatural Anthropology: On Grace and the Virtues], rev. ed. (Rome: Marietti, 1943); Gerardius van Noort, Tractatus de gratia Christi [Treatise on the Grace of Christ], 3rd ed. (Bussum: Sumptibus Societatis Editricis Anonymae, 1920). The first edition of van Noort’s work was published in 1908. Revisiting the Preconciliar Theolog y of Nature and Grace 799 Gabriele Huarte, in his Tractatus de Gratia Christi [Treatise on the Grace of Christ], published in 1923, begins with a then-standard definition among Jesuits: grace is “a supernatural gift that is unowed [indebitum], given by God to the rational creature, in some way pertaining to eternal life [that is, the beatific vision].”27 In commenting on this definition, Huarte notes that grace is above all that which is supernaturale seu indebitum (supernatural or unowed) in every respect (i.e., as exceeding not only creaturely merit but even the exigencies of nature in general, thus his identification of the notions supernatural and indebitum). It is only in this way that it is freely given. Moreover, in this way too, grace pertains only to “an end, which altogether exceeds the powers and exigencies of not only human nature, but angelic nature too.”28 As such, it is the means by which we attain to the “intuitive vision [of God] which is not owed to man,” which is to say, “it surpasses simply and absolutely every debt of nature [debitum naturae].”29 We find the supernatural defined in a similar way in the Jesuit Christian Pesch’s well-known manual Praelectiones Dogmaticae [Lectures on Dogmatic Theology], first published in the 1890s but remaining in print for three decades. The supernatural simpliciter (supernatural simply so-called) is “that which is altogether unowed [indebita] to the created subject and is given gratuitously to it.”30 As such, properly supernatural grace is, simply put, “that which exceeds every natural potency and the exigency [exigentiam] of every creature.”31 Unlike creation, however, which is “negatively unowed”—since God did not have to create—supernatural grace is what Pesch terms “positively unowed,” since it is not in any way presupposed in creation.32 (I will discuss the Thomistic rationale underlying this distinction between negative and positive debt below.) It is as a corollary of this idea of grace as indebitum with respect to creation—as a firewall to the paradisiacal nature–grace integralism and post-lapsarian pessimism of Michael Baius— that Pesch then posits the sustainability and theological relevance of the natura pura hypothesis. “Because supernatural gifts are unowed to nature,” Pesch maintains, “man could have been created without supernatural gifts Huarte, Tractatus de gratia Christi, 8. Huarte, Tractatus de gratia Christi, 8–9. 29 Huarte, Tractatus de gratia Christi, 9. 30 Pesch, Praelectiones dogmaticae, 3:111 (see also 5:3). For a cognate definition, see Pohle, Lehrbuch der dogmatik, 1:453: “The supernatural is a gift of God, unowed and superadded [indebitum et superadditum] to nature.” 31 Pesch, Praelectiones dogmaticae, 3:110. 32 Pesch, Praelectiones dogmaticae, 3:111 (see also 5:3). 27 28 800 David L. Augustine and consequently in a state of pure nature.”33 We find a convergent understanding of grace and its implications in the Dominican Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s De gratia, a commentary on Summa theologiae [ST] I-II, qq. 109–14. There, while discussing the spectrum of related meanings of the word “grace,” Garrigou-Lagrange posits that that which is supernatural substantially—as opposed to modally or on the part of the efficient cause and so is supernatural properly speaking—is that intrinsic effect “which is above all created nature.”34 As such, “the life of grace and glory . . . surpasses not only the efficient powers and requirements [exigentias] of any created nature, but also the cognitive and appetitive powers (or natural merit) of any intellectual nature created or capable of being created.”35 As a corollary, Garrigou-Lagrange, like Pesch, also regards it as possible that God could have created man in a state of pure nature, although he is also quick to note that “this state never existed” historically.36 Created and Uncreated Grace: Pohle, Lercher, del Prado, van Noort, Gardeil, Terrien, Boyer, Lange The Jesuit manualist Joseph Pohle, whose Lehrbuch der Dogmatik remained in print for over sixty years in diverse iterations (1904–1968), first begins to discuss the biblical notion of grace in a section entitled “Von der Übernatur im Menschen [On Supernature in Man].”37 Although use of the Pesch, Praelectiones dogmaticae, 3:146–48 (esp. 3:146). Garrigou-Lagrange, Grace, 6. 35 Garrigou-Lagrange, Grace, 6 (De gratia, 6). With the last clause, Garrigou-Lagrange is making it clear that he rejects Juan Martínez de Ripalda’s controversial thesis on the possibility that God could create a being for whom the supernatural quoad substantiam would be natural. Garrigou-Lagrange views this notion as an inherently contradictory idea, and the divine power does not extend to nonsense (like a square triangle or suchlike). Hence, it is impossible for God. 36 Garrigou-Lagrange, Grace, 32–34, at 32. On the non-existence of the state of pure nature, see too Billot, De gratia Christi, 28–29: pure nature is a “merely possible state,” receiving all the helps which are in general proper to its being, but one “which has never existed in actual reality [rei veritate].” In the present providential order, man has been ordained to a supernatural end. 37 Pohle, Lehrbuch der Dogmatik, 1:450. In the English translation in God: The Author of Nature and the Supernatural, 179, Pohle’s translator renders this phrase “The Supernatural in Man”; Preuss consistently translates Pohle’s substantive Übernatur into English as if it were the adjective übernatürlich (Pohle uses both throughout), but this is not really accurate and obscures Pohle’s deliberately Scheebenesque terminological choices. 33 34 Revisiting the Preconciliar Theolog y of Nature and Grace 801 word “supernature” does not seem to be ubiquitous in this period, Pohle regularly employs Matthias Scheeben’s neologism Übernatur.38 Does this mean then that Pohle views grace as a second substance, a juxtaposed reality superimposed on nature? By no means. As Pohle notes when he defines graces as a superadditum over and above nature, what he means is that “the supernatural [Übernatürliche] presupposes nature, inheres in it as something newly coming from without [ihr als etwas neu Hinzukommendes inhäriert]”—it is in this latter sense that Pohle views grace as extrinsic—“and raises it up [emporhebt] to a specifically higher order.”39 Or as he again puts it a bit further on: “Through the supernatural inhering in it as an accident [durch das ihr als Accidens inhärierende Übernatürliche],” nature “is raised up into a higher sphere of existence and operation.”40 In other words, what Pohle means by supernature is what Matthias Scheeben meant a few decades earlier: it is human nature, with all of its dynamic teleological orientation, raised up by God through a new quality inhering in the soul to a new sphere of vital acts beyond the reach of its created powers so that it can approach God himself through its own grace-enabled acts of knowledge and love.41 Scheeben uses this term throughout his 1861 work, Natur und Gnade. Pohle, Lehrbuch der dogmatik, 1:453. 40 Pohle, Lehrbuch der dogmatik, 1:455. 41 For Scheeben’s fullest definition of Übernatur, see Matthias Joseph Scheeben, Handbuch der katholischen Dogmatik [Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics], vol. 3, Schöpfungslehre [Doctrine on Creation], 3rd ed., ed. Wilhelm Breuning and Franz Lakner, in Gesammelte Schriften [Collected Writings], vol. 5, ed. Josef Höfer et al. (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1961), no. 607: By supernature, we mean “one such perfection of a lower nature in union with a higher one, whereby the lower nature does not merely come to participate in individual excellences, powers, and acts that are natural to the higher nature, but rather also in this higher nature itself, i.e. in that fundamental constitution of the substance of the higher being, by virtue of which those higher excellences are natural to this higher being and whereby its manner of life is determined. For if the communion of goods, especially of the powers of life and acts should be a truly vital and perfect one, then this communion of goods must include an elevation of the lower nature to equality with the higher nature, and thus must include a higher state and rank and a higher existence or an inner ennobling, refinement and transfiguration of the lower nature’s substance, by virtue of which that which is of itself supernatural to the lower nature becomes perfectly intrinsic and proper to this nature, so much so that it even becomes to a certain extent natural to it, to the extent that the supernatural in itself is owed to the new rank thereof, is rooted in the higher constitution of its substance and is inserted into this latter as its root in the deepest ground and innermost being of the nature of the lower being and is, as it were, intertwined with it.” 38 39 802 David L. Augustine The Jesuit manualist Ludovico Lercher, in his Institutiones Theologiae Dogmaticae, defines sanctifying grace as “a spiritual quality inhering to the soul in the manner of a new nature.”42 However, as Lercher also notes, “an abiding quality is either a substance or an accident.”43 Now, habitual grace is not a substance. Therefore it “is a certain accidental form,” in this case, a “quality.”44 Moreover, this accidental form is an entitative rather than an operative habit. Thus when Lercher avers that “habitual grace inheres in the soul in the manner of a new nature,” what he means is that it is an entitative habit and not a “new power or operative habit” (these latter are the infused theological and moral virtues).45 The Dominican Norberto del Prado maintains in his three-volume work De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio that sanctifying grace is a “quality,”46 and as such, an “accident.”47 Grace and charity, he writes, are “infused divine qualities, inhering in the soul.”48 Unlike the virtues, however, which reside in the powers, habitual grace “is in the essence of the soul.”49 So too with the Jesuit Charles Boyer: “Habitual grace,” Boyer maintains, “is an accident in the genus of quality, reduced to the species of habit; it is not a virtue [i.e., an operative habit], and thus is distinguished from charity.”50 Gerardius van Noort puts it this way: “Sanctifying grace is a quality inhering in the soul by way of a habit. . . . [Moreover] since grace is a finite gift and cannot be a substance, it remains that it is an accident, spiritual (for it is in the soul) and supernatural.”51 Or, as the Dominican Antoine Gardeil simply notes together with Thomas: sanctifying grace is a “habitual quality infused into the soul by God.”52 Or to quote Boyer once more: “Habitual grace is no mere extrinsic favor of God, but is a gift inhering in the soul.”53 Nor does the manualists’ emphasis on the role of created grace as the formal (and thus inhering) cause of our justification mean that they are not concerned with giving uncreated grace its due place. Certainly, the Lercher, Institutiones theologiae dogmaticae, 3:553. Lercher, Institutiones theologiae dogmaticae, 3:556. 44 Lercher, Institutiones theologiae dogmaticae, 3:556. 45 Lercher, Institutiones theologiae dogmaticae, 3:557. 46 Del Prado, De gratia et libero arbitrio, 1:149. 47 Del Prado, De gratia et libero arbitrio, 1:154. 48 Del Prado, De gratia et libero arbitrio, 1:152. 49 Del Prado, De gratia et libero arbitrio, 1:168. 50 Boyer, Tractatus de gratia divina, 211 (thesis XV). 51 Van Noort, Tractatus de gratia Christi, 124. 52 Gardeil, La structure de l’âme, 1:361. 53 Boyer, Tractatus de gratia divina, 172 (thesis XIII). 42 43 Revisiting the Preconciliar Theolog y of Nature and Grace 803 majority of neo-Scholastic authors of the early twentieth century reject the thesis of the Jesuit Dionysius Petavius repopularized by Scheeben in the nineteenth century on the proper, non-appropriated indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the souls of the just.54 Thus, for example, J.-B. Terrien maintains that our adoptive sonship is in truth55 appropriated to the Holy Spirit by divine revelation, since the new effect the Trinity produces in the soul reveals to us something of the hypostatic mode in which the Holy Spirit possesses the divine nature.56 Although not dogmatically ruled out, Terrien regards Petavius’s position as untenable and as running contrary to the common sentiment of theologians.57 That said, Terrien also assigns an important place to uncreated grace—that is, to God himself—in his account of our adoptive sonship, since uncreated grace is “the principle and term of the supernatural gifts that transform us.”58 Charles Boyer, who maintains simply that each of the divine persons communicate themselves to man,59 holds that the “inhabitation of the Most Holy Trinity in the soul” is indeed the result of our engracement, and is something that begins here below inchoately through grace and is later perfected through glory.60 Boyer accounts for this inhabitation in three ways: first, through the “infusion and conservation of sanctifying grace which is a certain impression [sigillatio] conforming the soul to the supernatural image of the Trinity”; second, through the divine motions or auxilia (helps) by which “we are disposed for the gifts of the Holy Spirit”; See: Matthias Joseph Scheeben, The Mysteries of Christianity, trans. Cyril Vollert (St. Louis, MO: Herder, 1954), 158–80; Scheeben, Handbuch, 3: nos. 832–84. For discussion, see Aidan Nichols, O.P., Romance and System: The Theological Synthesis of Matthias Joseph Scheeben (Denver, CO: Augustine Institute, 2010), 86–94. 55 I say “in truth” rather than “merely.” In my view, the use of the adverb “merely” in discussions of the appropriation of divine indwelling to the Holy Spirit—i.e. “it is merely appropriated,” etc.—colors the discussion and prejudges the outcome of this line of inquiry. There is nothing “mere” about an appropriation, insofar as it refers to the wonder of a divine effect ad extra revealing something proper to one the persons of the Most Holy Trinity. 56 Terrien, La grace et la gloire, 1:405. See also 1:418 on the mission of the Holy Spirit: “The mission of the Holy Spirit is the eternal procession of this same Spirit manifested by an effect or by an operation, in virtue of which he is present in the creature in a new manner, and abides therein.” 57 Terrien, La grace et la gloire, 1:433. 58 Terrien, La grace et la gloire, 1:407. 59 Boyer, Tractatus de gratia divina, 193, 198. 60 Boyer, Tractatus de gratia divina, 193. 54 804 David L. Augustine and third, through the “union with God that results from the possession and fruition of the divinity that charity offers.”61 The German Jesuit Hermann Lange is an eclectic on this point. Thus, he speaks favorably in rapid succession of Thomas’s position (we receive uncreated grace as the object of new acts of intellection and volition)62 and Francisco Suarez’s (by sanctifying grace a true love of friendship arises between God and man)63 and Scheeben’s escalation of Suarez’s language of friendship with the imagery of nuptial union.64 Lange’s own conclusion lays a strong emphasis on the Trinitarian indwelling in the soul through the Holy Spirit: “The Holy Spirit, who personally dwells in the soul, also draws down into it the person of the Son of God. And the Son draws [down] the Father with him. Thus the circle is completed, and the entire Most Holy Trinity dwells as uncreated grace in the soul.”65 Finally, Lercher for his part maintains that, though the inhabitation of the Holy Spirit is indeed an appropriated one,66 this does not rule out a real indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the soul of the just. He accounts for this, however, along Suarezian lines, by positing that “habitual grace constitutes the just person a friend of God [amicus Dei].”67 And this union happens not only through conformity of affections, but likewise through an “inseparable presence.”68 In sum, though their manner of explanation is diverse inasmuch as the relation of created and uncreated grace is a disputed question between the schools, there is widespread recognition in this period of the need to account not only for a created grace that inheres in the soul of the just disposing them for divine life, but also for the manner in which this created grace, as the formal cause of human beings’ justification, gives them a new relationship to the Holy Trinity. Far from considering grace to be a “supernature,” then, in the sense of some kind of extrinsic superimposition on the soul, the neo-Scholastics actually consider it to be a gratuitous gift of God infused into the soul Boyer, Tractatus de gratia divina, 193. Lange, Im Reich der Gnade, 116. 63 Lange, Im Reich der Gnade, 119. 64 Lange, Im Reich der Gnade, 122. See Scheeben, Mysteries of Christianity, 171. 65 Lange, Im Reich der Gnade, 126. 66 Lercher, Institutiones theologiae dogmaticae, 579–80. 67 Lercher, Institutiones theologiae dogmaticae, 578. See too 577: It is not enough to say “that the Spirit is present [in the just] through some supernatural operation, which is appropriated to him.” Nor does he think it is enough to say that “the Spirit is in the just as the object of acts of knowledge and love.” 68 Lercher, Institutiones theologiae dogmaticae, 578. 61 62 Revisiting the Preconciliar Theolog y of Nature and Grace 805 by God so as to capacitate the just for a new relationship with the Holy Trinity. Human Nature’s Obediential Potency: Palmieri, Pohle, Descoqs, Garrigou-Lagrange, Gardeil There is of course another issue at play which lends itself to the nouvelle theologians’ characterization of the neo-Scholastics’ nature–grace theology as “extrinsicism.” If the issue is not the latter’s concept of grace, then perhaps it is their truncated understanding of human nature, which is characterized by (1) a receptivity for grace as a potentia obedientialis, (2) a conditional natural desire for beatitude as a velleity, and which (3) equate fallen man’s condition with the state of pure nature, so that in any event the human person has been conceived by them in such a way that he now “turns in its own orbit” and has in general been secularized, the net result being that grace, de facto if not in theory, has become in their systems a “purely external ‘decree’ of God” that “disturb[s]” nature,69 despite protestations to the contrary. As the Jesuit Domenico Palmieri correctly notes, on the Thomist understanding,70 there is a “twofold passive power” in the creature, one of which responds to “natural agency”—as the eye responds to light and color—the other responding to the “first agent,” who can reduce nature with its powers to a higher act than is possible through natural agency. It is this latter that is called “potentia obedientiae [i.e., capacity to obey God].” 71 Obediential potency as a category is important because, on the Scholastics’ view, it alone preserves the gratuity of the supernatural as a disproportionate and thus properly “super-natural” perfection of nature, so much so that, without it, in Pohle’s words, “any theory of supernature must remain fragmentary and incomplete.” 72 Given the correlation between natural agency and passive powers that it postulates, this concept of obediential Rahner, “Concerning the Relationship,” 299. See ST III, q. 11, a. 1. See Lawrence Feingold, The Natural Desire to see God according to St. Thomas Aquinas and His Interpreters, 2nd ed. (Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia, 2010), 141–46, for Feingold’s refutation of Étienne Gilson’s interpretation of this passage. 71 Palmieri, Tractatus de ordine supernaturali, 80. Palmieri’s treatment is very metaphysical in its cast, and so his principal concern in this section is to distinguish obediential potency from the natural active and passive powers of the soul. See also Pohle, Lehrbuch der Dogmatik, 1:455, for a definition of obediential potency and its upshot. 72 Pohle, Lehrbuch der Dogmatik, 1:455. 69 70 806 David L. Augustine potency is accordingly also intimately bound up with the neo-Thomist understanding of natural desire as a conditional elicited desire, one which is metaphysically disproportionate to God as he is to himself and so can reach out to him only by way of a certain aspiration or wish for the seemingly impossible until this desire has been elevated by grace. Thus, as the Jesuit Pedro Descoqs notes in his 1938 work Le mystère de notre élévation surnaturelle [The Mystery of our Supernatural Elevation], written in response to Guy de Broglie’s revival in the 1920s and 1930s of the neo-Augustinian thesis of a natural desire for the formally supernatural, if we accept the latter thesis, Descoqs maintains: Fact of the possession of God in himself thus becomes a normal prolongment of nature and nature’s power in relation to the divine union is nothing more than a natural power. The spirit, intuitive faculty of the divine, despite all verbal accommodations otherwise, at the end of its innate desire does not have any line of demarcation, no essential distinction between nature and supernature: the transcendence, which the whole supernatural order necessarily implies, no longer seems to be anything but a word.73 Moreover, Descoqs continues, as goes the real transcendence of the supernatural, so goes its gratuity: it is no longer anything but a word.74 Despite the weighty objections in favor of an obediential potency for grace and a concomitant conditional elicited natural desire as a velleity, does this not then ultimately mean that human nature has been closed in on itself and turned to the order of nature, whence man is understood as having no or at least limited reference to God or supernatural revelation? After all, when we read, for example, Garrigou-Lagrange’s commentary De gratia, does he not state that “obediential power signifies nothing but a non-aversion [non repugnantiam],” 75 from which it seemingly follows that we as human beings must be indifferent to its fulfillment?76 Moreover, does this same conclusion not likewise follow from Gardeil’s statement to the Descoqs, Le mystère de notre élévation surnaturelle, 118. Descoqs, Le mystère de notre élévation surnaturelle, 118–19. 75 Garrigou-Lagrange, Grace, 309 (De gratia, 246). 76 Thus Rahner, “Concerning the Relationship,” 315: “This openness [of the spiritual nature for the supernatural existential] is not to be thought of merely as a non-repugnance, but an inner ordination.” Rahner looks for this inner ordination in the “unlimited dynamism of the spirit,” although this dynamism as we concretely experience it may itself be at least in part the product of the supernatural existential. 73 74 Revisiting the Preconciliar Theolog y of Nature and Grace 807 effect that pure nature is a candidate for the supernatural insofar as it “is not opposed to a complement and an achievement that God alone is able to bestow upon it”?77 In fact, this conclusion does not follow. Garrigou-Lagrange and Gardeil are not saying that human beings are existentially or psychologically indifferent to the call of grace that elevates and heals human nature. What they do mean is that, considered from the metaphysical vantage point, the human capacity for elevation to the supernatural is a nonrepugnance in the sense that, qua potency, it is indifferent in terms of its actuation. Yet as existent human beings, we are not indifferent to the call of grace. First, this is so because, as Gardeil notes, our capacity for elevation arises from “the analogical structure of our intelligence,” 78 which we alone possess from among all the visible creation. It is in the soul’s nature as ordered to truth and goodness to be innately open to the further supernatural perfection that Christian revelation proffers along these lines by extending our natural aspirations further. As Gardeil notes regarding the natural desire to see God, it arises from the natural human desire to know the causes of created effects and is, by its nature, “a desire to contemplate openly the very essence of this cause.” 79 Thus, the doctrine of obediential potency does not mean that we as human beings are existentially indifferent to Christian revelation and the supernatural end it offers, nor does it mean that the soul is reified and treated as if it were like any other subhuman nature.80 It Gardeil, Structure de l’âme, 1:266. Gardeil, Structure de l’âme, 1:348. See too 1:318–19: “The intellectual nature, with its own power, active and vital, is recognized, prior to any activity, in all its being . . . as being in passive obediential potency for everything that God is able to and wishes to work in it.” 79 Gardeil, Structure de l’âme, 1:305. 80 See Gardeil, Structure de l’âme, 1:303, where he notes that animals are not capable of the beatific vision. “It must be an intellectual nature.” On the consensus that emerged on obediential potency among Dominican Thomists and Jesuit Suárezians, the following remarks of Steven A. Long, in Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 234n34, are apropos (against de Lubac and Étienne Gilson): “How could all the interpreters of St. Thomas on this point be completely in error? Of course, such is not impossible. But it is not a likely supposition, nor is it reasonable to discard generations of theological and philosophic work on the force of such a supposition. Both Thomists and Suárezians read the Angelic Doctor as holding for obediential potency as pertaining to the relation of nature to grace. Their in-house disputation about the sense of ‘obediential potency’ cannot obscure the datum that, at bottom, each views it as a passive potency of a very particular sort, the sort involving a specific range of actuation to which a nature is amenable solely 77 78 808 David L. Augustine simply means that we cannot effectively strive for this end until we receive a further actuation by the external active agency of God. Moreover, there is a second reason that we as existent human beings might be interested in Christian revelation. The reason for this is that grace not only elevates our nature to a supernatural end (gratia elevans) but also heals our nature from the wounds of sin and, in any event, our natural frailties (gratia sanans). Discussion of this latter issue, however, requires a bit of nuance, insofar as with it we enter into a dispute especially between the Jesuit and Dominican schools about the extent of the so-called wounds of nature after the Fall. The Wounds of Nature: Pohle, Rahner, Garrigou-Lagrange, and Others In general terms, Jesuit authors, perhaps owing to their ever-present concerns about Jansenism, tend to be weaker on the effects of original sin on human nature after the Fall than their Dominican counterparts. For example, Pohle indicates his substantial agreement with the nineteenth-century German theologian Herman Schell’s assessment that “this state [of pure nature] is conceived of as pretty much in agreement with the [i.e., fallen] state in which man actually exists, only minus the character of punishment and guilt that mark the absence of the higher prerogatives, and the powers of grace, which are at work in all human beings for redemption,”81 even if Pohle, contra Schell, also goes on to note that he thinks that there has been an increase in idolatry and concupiscence in fallen man beyond what would otherwise be the case.82 When Pohle comes to the question of the wounds of nature, he notes that “there is no agreement among theologians over the extent of the four83 wounds of nature, since one group speak of through the active agency of an extrinsic cause. Today, many persons who have read neither Thomas, nor Thomistic commentators, nor Suárez, nor Suárezians, are equally convinced that all are incorrect on this point, and also are convinced that the scholastics were ahistorical. But sed contra: it seems that they were correct, and that however ahistorical their work, at least they did not judge authors without first reading them.” 81 Herman Schell, Katholische Dogmatik, 2:293, as cited in Pohle, Lehrbuch der Dogmatik, 1:476 (God: The Author of Nature and the Supernatural, 228: I have modified Preuss’s rendering from the German). 82 Pohle, Lehrbuch der Dogmatik, 1:476. Pohle also thinks that much of what we now characterize as the wounds of sin—he singles out concupiscence and ignorance, together with death and life’s sufferings—would also be common to the state of pure nature, at least to some extent. 83 St. Thomas’s account of the four wounds is outlined below in a citation from Garrigou-Lagrange. Revisiting the Preconciliar Theolog y of Nature and Grace 809 a weakening of nature in the sense of an actual deterioration [Verschlimmerung] of the natural powers of the soul themselves, whereas the other group speaks of a mere penal consequence of the privation of supernatural innocence.”84 For his part, Pohle notes the complexities of this dispute and leaves it formally unsettled, although his remarks cited above indicate about where he stands on this spectrum. It is this commonly held Jesuit position—with roots in the works of Suarez85—that stands behind Rahner’s complaint that the average textbook theology of his day presents man “in the present economy” as otherwise equivalent to the “man of ‘pure nature.’”86 Rahner’s concern here does seem to point to a real weakness with much of the textbook theology of his day, since the view in question, insofar as it potentially mitigates the deleterious effects of sin on man, has the real potential to minimize or at least naturalize man’s plight under the regime of sin, a plight which the grace of redemption responds to as gratia sanans. It should be noted, however, that this is treated as a disputed question in the literature, a question in which, on my view, Dominican Thomists generally hold a more satisfactory view. So, for example, Garrigou-Lagrange describes the “state of fallen nature” as follows: “It is the state of nature despoiled of sanctifying grace, of the virtues attached to it, and of the gift of integrity, in other words, subject to pain and death as well as the four wounds of ignorance in the intellect, malice in the will, concupiscence in the concupiscible appetite, and weakness in the irascible.”87 When Garrigou-Lagrange goes on to note that “Thomists generally hold that man in the state of fallen nature . . . has less strength for moral good” than in a state of pure nature, this is because “man is [now] born with his will directly opposed88 to his final supernatural end and indirectly opposed [therefore] to his final natural end.”89 Indeed, in debates in the literature Pohle, Lehrbuch der Dogmatik, 1:513. For discussion, see Thomas Joseph White, O.P., The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015), 135–37. 86 Rahner, “Concerning the Relationship,” 299. 87 Garrigou-Lagrange, Grace, 26. The author refers the reader to ST I-II, q. 85, aa. 3, 5, and 6. 88 What Garrigou-Lagrange is referring to here is the well-known incurvature of the will to the bonum privatum in Thomistic discourse. See De Prado, De gratia et libero arbitrio, 1:32. This incurvature simultaneously diverts us from both our natural and supernatural ends, the latter directly, the former indirectly. 89 Garrigou-Lagrange, Grace, 26. The Jesuit Charles Boyer is also quite adamant that fallen man is in a worse condition than he would have been in a state of pure 84 85 810 David L. Augustine between Dominicans and Jesuits, this dispute about the powers of fallen nature over against pure nature often plays out in the debate over whether fallen man is capable of, if not an effective love of God above all things (which involves keeping all the commandments),90 then at least an affective love of God above all things.91 Garrigue-Lagrange defines an affective love above all things as a “simple act of love of God above all things with the intention of pleasing Him in all things and withdrawing from mortal sin.”92 Garrigou-Lagrange and Dominican Thomists generally deny that fallen man is capable even of this.93 On the other hand, Jesuits such as Lercher,94 Pesch,95 Blasio Beraza,96 and Pohle97 affirm this, as does Richard Tabarelli, a member of the Congregation of the Sacred Stigmata.98 On the other hand, Gerardius van Noort punts on this question, leaving it disputed,99 as does Huarte, who thinks the question is “insoluble” and “of little value.”100 nature: “Fallen man, if he is not raised up by the grace of Christ, is in a worse condition than he would be in a state of pure nature” (Tractactus de gratia Christi, 16). For, first of all, he is adverse toward his ultimate end; second, nor does he receive necessary help for the whole good pertaining to his connatural end; and third, he is under the thrall of demons. As such, he is “wounded in natural things, and despoiled in things having to do with grace” (16). 90 For Garrigou-Lagrange on effective love of God above all things, see Grace, 62. I have not found an author who maintains that we can have an effective love of God above all things without the help of medicinal grace. See on this point, Tabarelli, De gratia Christi, 71–73, esp. 73: “Fallen man is not able to effectively love God without healing grace.” See also: Billot, De gratia Christi, 49; Lercher, Institutiones theologiae dogmaticae, 3:463 (effective love without grace is morally impossible, albeit physically possible). See too Boyer’s nuanced discussion in Tractatus de gratia Divina, 74–77, as well as van Noort, Tractatus de gratia Christi, 21: “It is certain that fallen man is not able, without the help of medicinal grace, to love God with an effective perfect natural love.” See too Pesch, Praelectiones dogmaticae, 5:73–74. 91 Garrigou-Lagrange, in Grace, 63, notes that resolution of this question is the main controversy between Dominican Thomists and theologians who follow the Jesuit Molina on this point. 92 Garrigou-Lagrange, Grace, 62. Van Noort, in Tractatus de gratia Christi, 21, defines an affective love of God above all things as: “a transitory act, by which man refers everything he has unto God and seriously proposes to please him in all things.” 93 Garrigou-Lagrange, Grace, 63. 94 Lercher, Institutiones theologiae dogmaticae, 3:464. 95 Pesch, Praelectiones Dogmaticae, 5:73–74. 96 Beraza, Tractatus de Gratia Christi, 282. 97 Pohle, Lehrbuch der Dogmatik, 2:366–68. 98 Tabarelli, De gratia Christi, 72. 99 Van Noort, Tractatus de gratia Christi, 21. 100 Huarte, Tractatus de gratia Christi, 114. Revisiting the Preconciliar Theolog y of Nature and Grace 811 Debitum Naturae and Natura Pura: de Lubac, Terrien, Descoqs, and Others Turning to the question of the Scholastic affirmation of the so-called debitum naturae, the question is whether this does indeed presuppose a “univocal” concept of being that denies a proper understanding of divine transcendence, as de Lubac suggests.101 De Lubac’s concern here is that the notion that God can owe anything to a creature implies a relation of commutative justice between God and creature, which in turn presupposes a certain equality between the two parties.102 Since this is obviously false, there would be no need then to posit the possibility of a state of pure nature to secure the gratuity of grace with respect to innocent man, since grace simply cannot be owed to the creature. Briefly, it is easy enough to demonstrate that de Lubac’s objection to the debitum naturae in his Surnaturel rests on a mistaken premise. He does not understand the kind of “justice” the Thomist authors are appealing to. We can see this readily enough in Terrien’s La Grace et La Gloire, where the author, when defining the supernatural per essentiam, notes that it is such that it must extend beyond the exigence of nature.103 To account for this exigency, Terrien has recourse to St. Thomas’s account of God’s distributive justice in ST I, q. 21, a. 1, ad 3.104 There Thomas notes, in response to the objection that “God is no man’s debtor,” that there is also De Lubac, Surnaturel, 485, and Mystery of the Supernatural, 88. For the preconditions for a relation of commutative justice, see Scheeben, Handbuch der katholischen Dogmatik, vol. 2, GottesLehre oder die Theologie im engeren Sinne [Doctrine on God or Theology in the Narrower Sense], 3rd ed., ed. Michael Schmaus, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1948), no. 609. Scheeben maintains that there are two things necessary for a true commutative relationship between parties: independence and equality. Obviously, neither of these can exist between God and man. See too Thomas, ST I-II, q. 114, a. 1: “Justice is simply between those that are simply equal; but where there is no absolute equality between them, neither is there absolute justice. . . . Now it is clear that between God and man there is the greatest inequality: for they are infinitely apart, and all man’s good is from God. Hence there can be no justice of absolute equality between man and God, but only of a certain proportion.” 103 Terrien, La Grace et La Gloire, 2:330–31. 104 See too Palmieri, Tractatus de ordine supernaturali, 6, where the author, after noting that the supernatural is indebitum with respect to nature, goes on to immediately cite: ST I, q. 21, a. 1; I-II, q. 111, a. 1, ad 2. See also 17–19 for Palmieri’s more extended treatment of the question of the debitum naturae. See too van Noort, Tractatus de gratia Christi, who directs the reader to ST I-II, q. 111, a. 1, ad 2, where Thomas applies the notion of debitum naturae to secure the gratuity of grace over and above the “condition of nature.” 101 102 812 David L. Augustine a justice that God owes to himself, and more particularly, to his own wisdom so as to manifest his goodness in creation. This kind of justice, which is called distributive justice, is what secures the integrity of creation, and it is by it that God orders things in such a way that they manifest the divine goodness.105 This brings us to the distinction between being negatively and positively unowed that we encountered earlier. Creation is negatively gratuitous, since God did not have to create. But since God did freely choose to create, there are certain entailments that follow in the train of this decision. For grace to be positively unowed, then, it must not be entailed in the first creation, which has its own integrity. Otherwise, it would have been “due” to Adam and so would only be grace with respect to sinners, but not with respect to innocent man. The neo-Thomist authors employ the notion of debitum naturae and the corresponding notion of the possibility of a state of pure nature—which of course has never been realized historically106 —as a firewall against Baianism, thereby securing the gratuity of grace as an unowed, disproportionate, and therefore super-natural perfection of human nature over and against the integrity of the first creation. Thus, Terrien frames his discussion of pure nature as a midpoint between Pelagianism, on the one hand, and the related errors of Martin Luther, Michael Baius, and Cornelius Jansen, on the other.107 His conclusion after his historical survey is that: “It follows that we cannot reject what is commonly called the state of pure nature without placing the Catholic doctrine of the supernatural and grace in peril. In other words, we can and even must consider a state [i.e., a providential order] to be possible and absolutely realizable in which the rational creature would have come forth from the hands of its author with purely natural gifts and without the present ordination to the beatific vision; in a word, outside the whole order of grace and glory that is promised us.”108 Nor is Terrien alone in his concern here, since Pesch’s point of departure is the same as Terrien’s, insofar as he too deploys the natura pura hypothesis as a firewall to the nature–grace integralism of Baius.109 The natura pura hypothesis has nothing to do with man turning on his own axis or being For discussion of the idea of debitum naturae in the Thomistic tradition, see Feingold, Natural Desire, 223–29. 106 See Garrigou-Lagrange, Grace, 23: “All theologians agree that this state of pure nature never existed.” The difficulty, of course, is that “Baius and the Jansenists denied its possibility” (emphasis added). 107 Terrien, La grace et la gloire, 2:351. 108 Terrien, La grace et la gloire, 2:357. 109 See Pesch, Praelectiones dogmaticae, 3:146–48. 105 Revisiting the Preconciliar Theolog y of Nature and Grace 813 epistemically insulated from God. The reason for this is that natura, on a Thomistic conception, is always ordered to God. The question that arises with consideration of the possibility of a state of pure nature is whether God could have created man with an ordination to God that follows from the principles of his nature and its native powers without the assistance of supernatural grace leading him to a supernatural end. This is why, while speculating on what man’s natural end would be in a state of pure nature, the Jesuit George Joyce identifies it with knowledge of God. He writes: “Certainly man’s ultimate beatitude even then [i.e., in a state of pure nature] would have consisted in the knowledge and love of God; for a rational nature cannot find beatitude elsewhere. But it would have been a knowledge and a love commensurate with his natural powers.”110 Descoqs for his part tentatively advances a thesis with antecedents in Cajetan on the possibility that man’s natural last end would consist in some kind of intuitive nonabstractive possession of God that would nevertheless not reveal God as Trinity or in general “in the intimate perfections of the transcendent supernatural order.”111 On any conception, however, man in the status naturae purae is conceived of as being open to God as First Cause and as transcendent source of truth and goodness, a natural orientation in man which then serves as the foundation for the analogical extension of man’s spiritual acts in the supernatural order once these latter acts are elicited by God from man’s obediential potency. Conclusion I hope to have given reasons for holding that the “extrinsicist” label is itself an extrinsic and inaccurate denomination. At a minimum, it is certainly not the only way to characterize the authors’ own conception of their thought, and in at least some instances it is downright erroneous, as for example, when de Lubac, Rahner, and Bouyer depict the neo-Scholastics’ understanding of created grace as a superstructure that effectively suffocates nature while remaining extrinsic to it. If the neo-Scholastics were not in fact extrinsicists, what accounts for the nouvelle théologie’s polemical characterization of this literature? Although Joyce, Catholic Doctrine of Grace, 50 (emphasis added). Descoqs, Le mystère de notre élévation surnaturelle, 126: “Is it thus absurd to conceive of a real vision of God, author of nature, which would not reveal him according to his intimate perfections of the transcendent supernatural order, but which, while remaining in a certain way proportionate to our nature, would nevertheless be intuitive and would surpass the way of abstract concepts or of infused species?” 110 111 814 David L. Augustine this question goes beyond the limits of this essay, I suggest that the answer has to do with the pre-acceptance of a certain strategy thought to be able to revitalize Christian faith in the early twentieth century, against the inroads of Kantian or Feuerbachian humanisms.112 Arguably, we can see this in the counterposed nature–grace constructions of Maurice Blondel113 and especially the Jesuit Pierre Rousselot,114 as well as the works of Joseph Maréchal See Long, Natura Pura, 3: “If one inherits a reduced and anti-theistic idea of ‘nature,’ and if one also inherits an absolutization of the libertarian idea that human freedom lies naturally outside the divine causality and providence, then the denial of any natural proportionate end distinct from supernatural beatitude may seem essential to safeguarding the theonomic character of the human drama. . . . De Lubac’s position would be the only one available to the thoughtful Christian were it necessary to accept as true the remote judgments that formed the problem situation to which he was responding—but . . . it is not necessary to accept them.” Long’s argument here reminds me of Alasdair MacIntyre’s in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008 [repr.]). MacIntyre thinks that Nietzsche’s critique of the Enlightenment-era moralists is definitive. But the question still remains: were the Enlightenment-era moralists correct in their rejection of Aristotelian virtue ethics? If not, then Nietzsche’s argument is seriously undermined. 113 Foundational here is Blondel’s L’action of 1893. For a recent edition, see Action (1893): Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice, trans. Oliva Blanchette (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). Of course, behind Blondel also stands nineteenth-century traditionalism—its diverse French instantiations and the Tübingen school—as well as the ontologisms of Gioberti and Rosmini. For an account of the traditionalist and ontologist reactions to post-Kantian thought, see, for an erudite overview at least, Gerald A. McCool, S.J., Nineteenth-Century Scholasticism: The Search for a Unitary Method (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999 [3rd printing]). It is worth noting that McCool’s volume—written as a kind of 1977 Transcendental Thomist victory dance over the grave of Joseph Kleutgen, S.J.—is extremely hostile to neo-Scholasticism. His argument really only succeeds if Rahner and Lonergan are the only possible heirs to St. Thomas’s epistemology—a dubious proposition. For a contemporary rethinking of the role of the agent intellect in Thomas, see Andrea Ayala, “The Agent Intellect in Aquinas: A Metaphysical Condition of Possibility of Intellectual Knowing as Intuition.” Unpublished dissertation: (PhD diss., St. Michael’s College and the Theology Department of the Toronto School of Theology, 2018). 114 Important here are Rousselot’s L’intellectualisme de S. Thomas of 1909, already cited, and his pair of articles—“Les yeux de la foi,” Recherches de science religieuse 1 (1910): 241–59, 444–75; “Réponse à deux attaques,” Recherches de science religieuse 5 (1914): 57–69—now collected in the English edition The Eyes of Faith (“The Eyes of Faith,” trans. Joseph Donceel, S.J., with introduction by John M. McDermott, S.J.; “Answer to Two Attacks,” trans. Avery Dulles, S.J., with introduction [New York: Fordham University Press, 1990]). 112 Revisiting the Preconciliar Theolog y of Nature and Grace 815 and the Louvain School of Transcendental Thomism.115 The initial impetus to this line of thought is given by Blondel in his original L’Action of 1893, in which Blondel posits that a phenomenology of human action can demonstrate that human nature comes to its fulfillment only in the philosophically undetermined supernatural, the content of which is filled out by Christian positive revelation. Although Rousselot’s point of departure is different than Blondel’s, his thought nevertheless embodies a similar tendency, one which is expressed however in a revaluation of Thomistic epistemology. Rousselot engages in the question of man’s relationship to the supernatural by means of a rethinking of the human mind’s relationship to esse (being), positing that the human mind is a faculty ordered to being not, in the first instance, through the medium of the abstracted conceptus (concept), but instead through possessing an a priori dynamism for the First Truth itself which is expressed in the act of judgment.116 As Rousselot scholar John McDermott notes, Rousselot “conceived knowledge as a tendency toward its goal and effectively rendered man connatural with that goal, specifically the First Truth, God Himself, and with all that led to that goal.”117 For the neo-Scholastics, this position runs the risk of denying the supernatural quoad substantiam even while affirming the effect’s supernaturality on the side of the efficient cause.118 As such, Rousselot’s conception represents a different For important early works by Joseph Maréchal, see Le point de départ de la métaphysique: leçons sur le développement historique et théorique du problème de la connaissance [The Point of Departure for Metaphysics: Lessons on the Historical and Theoretical Development of the Problem of Knowledge], 5 vols. (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1965 [4th ed]). Maréchal’s volumes originally appeared between 1922 and 1947. 116 See McDermott, introduction to Rousselot, “Eyes of Faith,” in Eyes of Faith, 16. For Rousselot’s subordination of the concept to the a priori horizon of infinite being, see Eyes of Faith, 71: “For some, our intelligence gathers up intelligible replicas of things, and these representations are not intrinsically modified by the total dynamism of the subject. For others, what is most knowing in knowledge depends essentially on the relation of the subject to his ultimate End.” 117 McDermott, introduction to Rousselot, “Eyes of Faith,” in Eyes of Faith, 17. For further discussion of Rousselot’s position, see Declan Marmion, “Transcendental Thomism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Catholic Theology, ed. Lewis Ayres and Medi Ann Volpe, with Thomas L. Humphries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 701–17, at 706: “Many of Rousselot’s emphases including the natural desire for the vision of God, the continuity between the natural and the supernatural realms, the relation between faith and reason, and the limitations of conceptual knowledge would be developed by De Lubac, Rahner, and Lonergan.” 118 This is similar to Fernand Litt’s upshot of Jansenism, in La question, 144: for the 115 816 David L. Augustine point of departure and a different metaphysics on nature and grace than that of the modern schoolmen, whether Jesuit or Dominican. These are the emerging battle lines that generate the conflict between the nouvelle théologie and the new schoolmen on the question of the relation between N&V nature and grace. Augustinus of Jansen, “there is no elevation [of human nature] to a supernatural end; the supernatural is defined solely from the point of view of efficiency,” i.e., with sole reference to the efficient cause. This is also Litt’s assessment of Baiainism on 143. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2020): 817–852 817 Moral Hope: Aquinas and Cajetan on Magnanimity1 Nicholas Austin, S.J. Campion Hall, University of Oxford Oxford, England It is lamentable that the concept of magnanimity has largely retired from active service in our moral discourse. Anodyne labels such as “self-esteem,” and even old expressions for vices, like “ambition” and “pride,” often act as quasi-virtue terms; “magnanimity,” with its deep genealogy, languishes. Yet one may well hesitate to recall magnanimity to active duty. Today we are unclear what magnanimity is, and the vague idea we have of it leaves us unsure of its ethical credentials. Aristotle’s classic portrayal of this virtue of greatness gives the impression of an elitist, aristocratic ideal.2 The magnanimous man has a high opinion of his greatness. He is conscious of the rewards, especially those of status and wealth, that are due to him. From his perch of isolated independence, he looks down on his many inferiors. John Casey opines, “it goes without saying that [Aristotle’s magnanimous man] is directly opposed to Christian humility.”3 Even Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the best-known advocates for the retrieval of Aristotelian virtue, consistently complains that Aristotle’s magnanimous man is guilty of “an illusion of self-sufficiency . . . all too characteristic of Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Heythrop College, London, Summer Conference “Let Him Easter in Us,” July 5, 2018, and the Aquinas Seminar Series, Blackfriars, University of Oxford, February 20, 2019. My thanks for those who offered responses and comments. 2 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics [NE] 4.3.1123b–4.3.4.1125b; translations are taken from Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1999). 3 John Casey, Pagan Virtue: An Essay in Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 200. 1 818 Nicholas Austin, S.J. the rich and powerful in many times and places.”4 Magnanimity’s few champions today often turn to Thomas Aquinas to answer the charge of moral elitism.5 Aquinas brilliantly places the apparently opposed virtues of magnanimity and humility in mutually interpretive dialectic.6 These two habits work in contrariwise directions: humility tempers the will for an arduous good; magnanimity fosters it. Yet they meet in the rational mean, since both rest on self-knowledge, whether of weakness or worth.7 The marriage of this unlikely couple corrects both the self-effacement that masquerades as humility and the presumptuous pride with which magnanimity is easily confused. “Humble magnanimity,” therefore, names a dynamic tension between contrasting moral qualities that cannot rightly be conceived without each other. To ready magnanimity for a return to vigorous duty, however, requires more than its reconciliation with humility. Still required is a cogent account of what exactly magnanimity is, and why today we should acknowledge it as a virtue. In this essay, I seek to show that magnanimity is both intelligible and attractive when understood as a quality of moral hope. To analyze magnanimity, I work from the principle that Aquinas lays down when he defines virtue in the Summa theologiae [ST]: “The complete concept of Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (London: Duckworth, 1999), 126–27. See also: MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics: A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1998), 51; 169; MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 182. 5 Some take Aquinas to show that Aristotle’s version of magnanimity can be defended without significant change: David A. Horner, “What It Takes to Be Great: Aristotle and Aquinas on Magnanimity,” Faith and Philosophy 15, no. 4 (1998): 415–44; Lindsay K. Cleveland, “A Defense of Aristotelian Magnanimity Against the Pride Objection with the Help of Aquinas,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 88 (2014): 259–71. Gregory Pine argues that, while humility is foreign to Aristotle’s thought, in Aquinas’s ethics it “does not run roughshod” over Aristotelian magnanimity (“Magnanimity and Humility according to St. Thomas Aquinas,” The Thomist 82, no. 2 [April 2018]: 286). Others claim that the marriage of magnanimity with Christian humility significantly corrects and transforms Aristotle: Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, “Aquinas’s Virtues of Acknowledged Dependence: A New Measure of Greatness,” Faith and Philosophy 21, no. 2 (April 2004): 214–27; Mary M. Keys, “Aquinas and the Challenge of Aristotelian Magnanimity,” History of Political Thought 24, no. 1 (2003): 37–65. 6 See especially Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae [ST] II-II, q. 129, a. 3; q. 161, a. 1.; q. 162, a. 1, ad 3. 7 ST II-II, q. 161, a. 1, ad 3. 4 Aquinas and Cajetan on Magnanimity 819 anything is gathered from all its causes.”8 I have argued elsewhere that this principle entails a fruitful “causal” approach to delineating the contours of a specific virtue by identifying its causal principles (material, formal, final, and efficient).9 I therefore offer a definition by identifying what the virtue is about (matter), what work the virtue does in this sphere (mode), which persons bear it (subject), what target it is directed toward (object), and what brings it about (efficient cause). At its core, I argue, is the well-ordered hope for excellent moral agency. In my argument I draw generously, and perhaps controversially, from significant figures in the Thomist tradition, especially Thomas de Vio Cajetan († 1534).10 I find the turn to tradition necessary because of an especially intractable problem I encountered in my attempt to causally analyze the virtue of great-heartedness. The aporia concerns magnanimity’s very object: to what great things does the virtue of greatness tend? The classical sources are marked by a disconcerting ambivalence on this question.11 Even in Aquinas, magnanimity can seem shockingly Janusfaced, appearing first as an Aristotelian orientation to great honor and then as a Ciceronian aspiration to great moral achievement.12 It is unclear which of these two dispositions is more essential, how they are related, and even whether they are mutually compatible. A promising resolution, both to the theoretical problem about magnanimity’s nature and to the hermeneutical question of how to read the text, lies in Cajetan’s “very luminous commentary”13 on Aquinas’s first article on magnanimity in ST. My own account of magnanimity’s twofold object follows Cajetan’s analysis but also raises—and attempts to resolve causally—a serious objection that ST I-II, q. 55, a. 4, resp.: “Perfecta enim ratio uniuscuiusque rei colligitur ex omnibus causis eius.” All translations from Latin and French texts are my own. Latin text of Aquinas is from corpusthomisticum.org. 9 Nicholas Austin, Aquinas on Virtue: A Causal Reading, Moral Traditions (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017). 10 Also helpful are the accounts of magnanimity by the Carmelites of Salamanca (Salmanticenses) and, in the twentieth century, by René Antoine Gauthier and Josef Pieper. I read these thinkers not as unquestioned authorities, but as allies in the investigation of this confusing but intriguing virtue. 11 The history of magnanimity from ancient thought to the thirteenth century is traced by Gauthier in Magnanimité: l’idéal de la grandeur dans la philosophie païenne et dans la théologie chrétienne (Paris: Vrin, 1951). 12 For Cicero’s account of magnanimity, see especially De officiis, 1.20.66–67, in Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis, trans. Walter Miller, Loeb Classical Library 30 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 68–69. 13 This is Henri-Dominique Noble’s phrase in Somme théologique: la force 2a-2ae, questions 123–140, trans. J.-D. Folghera (Paris: Desclée & Cie, 1926), 293. 8 820 Nicholas Austin, S.J. Cajetan does not seem to notice. Cajetan’s account is worth defending because his subtle analysis, by relegating the well-ordered desire for honor to an entirely subordinate place in the virtue, illumines magnanimity as, at core, a lively hope for excellent moral agency. Second, to deepen the analysis of magnanimity as what I am calling a “moral” hope, I argue for this virtue’s primary affinity not with humility, but with the theological virtue of hope. The Christian ethic understands the moral subject as a pilgrim, guided and aided by grace, on the way to eternal life. Aquinas’s perspective of Christian hope cannot but place the virtue of great-spiritedness in a new light: magnanimity becomes the quality by which we lean on others’ friendship and God’s help to attain a steep moral good, rising above the minimal requirements of the moral law. Magnanimity’s deep causal structure therefore reflects the hope by which we journey to life with God. More than the other moral virtues, magnanimity is a participant in theological hope, participans aliquid a spe, as Aquinas puts it.14 Once recognized to be an earthly complement to the theological hope that orients us to eternal beatitude, magnanimity’s intelligibility and appeal, as a virtue of moral hope, need no longer be in doubt. What’s in a Word Since the idea of magnanimity barely functions in our moral discourse today, contemporary usage stands as a poor signpost to the virtue. Admittedly, relics of a former concept do remain. We may praise someone for their magnanimous generosity and admire sports men and women who are magnanimous in victory or defeat. However, to laud someone for their magnanimity today insinuates moral superiority. “How magnanimous of you!” rarely conveys anything other than a backhanded compliment. Where contemporary usage fails, etymology is a more promising guide, as it speaks from a richer tradition before its modern decline. Aquinas himself recognizes the value of etymology in understanding specific virtues, seeing a virtue’s name as a sign of its nature.15 He often uses etymological analysis when he inquires into a virtue or vice.16 His simple but incisive etymology of magnanimitas asserts: “Magnanimity from its name implies a certain stretching of the animus toward great things [magna].”17 In III sent., d. 26, q. 2, a. 2, ad 4. ST II-II, q. 157, a. 3. 16 For example: ST II-II, q. 49, a. 6; q. 123, a.2; q. 134, a. 2; q. 141, aa. 1–2.; q. 151, a. 2; q. 152, a. 4. 17 ST II-II, q. 129, a. 1, resp.: “Magnanimitas ex suo nomine importat quandam extensionem animi ad magna.” 14 15 Aquinas and Cajetan on Magnanimity 821 Only significant labor can clarify Aquinas’s condensed formula. It breaks down into its “causal” components as follows: a certain stretching of the animus toward great things quaedam extensio animi ad magna mode matter object I leave animus untranslated for now because, in Aquinas’s Latin, animus may refer to any one of several components of the human person, such as soul, mind, heart, or spirit. In this context, I shall argue, it has a more specific, technical meaning. Magna means “great things”; as a substantive adjective, however, it leaves open which things are considered great: works, honors, or other external goods. Whatever is the animus, and whatever are the great things to which it is directed, magnanimity is a certain stretching of the animus toward these great things. Only the elucidation of each element will lead to a full, causal definition. Lost in Translation: Magnanimity’s Subjective Matter It is difficult to start a game of baseball without first finding the ballpark in which to play it. Similarly, to define a virtue, one must first circumscribe the matter upon which the virtue operates: what the virtue forms and perfects in the human soul. Only once the matter is correctly identified can the definitional game begin. Magnanimity is a certain stretching of the animus toward great things. Aquinas also says, “we call someone magnanimous principally because he has an animus toward some great act.”18 Again: “Magnanimity is called a greatness, as it were, of animus.”19 The animus here refers to the virtue’s subject or subjective matter (materia in qua, to use Aquinas’s technical vocabulary).20 What, though, is the animus? Two commonly proposed candidates can be excluded. The older Dominican translation uses “mind” for animus.21 This may unwittingly follow David Hume’s use of “greatness of mind” as a synonym for “magnanimity.”22 As a translation for Aquinas’s Latin, it cannot work. For Aqui ST II-II, q. 129, a. 1, resp.: “Principaliter dicitur aliquis magnanimus quod animum habet ad aliquem magnum actum.” 19 ST II-II, q. 129, a. 1, obj. 1: “Magnanimitas dicitur quasi magnitudo animi.” 20 On virtue’s subjective matter, see Austin, Aquinas on Virtue, 131–33. 21 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger, 1947). 22 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 592–601 (pt. III, sect. 2). 18 822 Nicholas Austin, S.J. nas, magnanimity is a moral virtue, a virtue of appetite, not of mind. Magnanimity is misrepresented, then, as “a stretching forth of the mind to great things.” Others use “great-souled” as a synonym for “magnanimous.” Yet we know that, when it comes to defining virtues, Aquinas is too precise to use a general term when a more specific term can be found.23 “Soul” is a poor translation of animus in Aquinas’s formula, since all the virtues are seated in the soul; consequently, “soul” is too generic to name a virtue’s specific subject. While Aquinas does often use animus quite broadly in some contexts, a stricter meaning emerges from his characterizations of three closely connected virtues: humility, magnanimity, and fortitude.24 Humility, Aquinas says, “tempers and restrains the animus, lest it tend immoderately to high things.”25 Magnanimity, by contrast, “strengthens the animus against despair and urges it on to the pursuit of great things according to right reason.”26 Finally, Aquinas speaks of a brave person as having a strong animus in the face of the dangers of death.27 Indeed: “Fortitude strengthens the animus of a human against the greatest dangers, namely, mortal dangers.”28 In sum, then: humility restrains and tempers the animus so that it does not overreach itself; magnanimity drives and stretches the animus to reach for great things, and strengthens it against hopelessness or giving up; and fortitude strengthens the animus in the face of mortal danger. From these three virtues, and their diverse “modes” or ways of dealing with the animus, the animus emerges as an active, forceful part of the soul that needs, by turns, to be tempered by humility, stretched by magnanimity, and strengthened by fortitude. Aquinas himself may have puzzled over how to define animus. Certainly, Aristotle’s explication of magnanimity does not offer much help. In the Nicomachean Ethics—in the Latin translation that Aquinas uses—the For example, Aquinas corrects Augustine’s use of “quality” to define the genus of a virtue because “habit” is more precise (ST I-II, q. 55, a. 4, resp.). 24 Magnanimity and humility concern the same matter and are so intertwined that Aquinas refers to them as a duplex virtus, a twofold virtue (ST II-II, q. 161, a. 1, resp.). Magnanimity is a “potential part” of fortitude (ST II-II, q. 128, a. 1), since it shares in the mode of this cardinal virtue but applies it to a connected but different moral sphere. 25 ST II-II, q. 161, a. 1, resp.: “. . . temperet et refrenet animum, ne immoderate tendat in excelsa.” 26 ST II-II, q. 161, a. 1, resp.: “. . . firmat animum contra desperationem, et impellit ipsum ad prosecutionem magnorum secundum rationem rectam.” 27 ST I-II, q. 61, a. 4, ad 1. 28 ST II-II, q. 123, a. 5, resp.: “Fortitudo confirmat animum hominis contra maxima pericula, quae sunt pericula mortis.” 23 Aquinas and Cajetan on Magnanimity 823 Philosopher begins his treatment of magnanimity by explaining magna, yet curiously staying silent about animus.29 I argue that Aquinas finds the solution not in the Nicomachean Ethics, but in Aristotle’s De anima. At the very start of his treatment of magnanimity in ST, Aquinas notes the following: Animus refers to the irascible power, as is clear in De anima III, where the Philosopher says that desire and animus, that is, the concupiscible and irascible, are in the sensitive appetite.30 This observation is easily missed since it comes in an objection. Yet the reply to the objection does not dispute the reference of animus. The text from De anima enables Aquinas to assign a strict meaning to animus in the definitions of magnanimity, humility, and fortitude, identifying their common subject: the capacity for irascible or spirited passion.31 Further qualification is necessary to identify magnanimity’s specific subject with precision. The irascible appetite, for Aquinas, is strictly a part of the sensitive appetite, the capacity for passion, rather than of the intellectual appetite or will. Aquinas notes, however, that speaking less strictly, the will also has an irascible quality when directed toward a challenging object.32 Indeed, theological hope subsists in the irascible will alone, since its object is a difficult intelligible good, an arduum intelligibile, which only the intellect can present to the appetite.33 It is necessary to determine, then, whether magnanimity dwells in the irascible sensitive appetite alone, or, like theological hope, in the irascible will. The seventeenth-century Carmelites of Salamanca speculate that there are two magnanimities, each with its respective subject. Acquired magnanimity concerns sensible honors, and so must exist in the irascible sensitive appetite, whereas infused magnanimity concerns spiritual honors, and so must be located in the will.34 This seems unduly dualistic, even if one For Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Latin text, see In IV eth., lecs. 8–12. ST II-II, q. 129, a. 1, obj. 1: “Animus autem pro vi irascibili ponitur, ut patet in III de anima, ubi philosophus dicit quod in sensitivo appetitu est desiderium et animus, idest concupiscibilis et irascibilis.” 31 For confirmation, see, e.g., ST I-II, q. 60, a. 5, resp. 32 ST I, q. 82, a. 5. 33 ST II-II, q. 18, a. 1, ad 1. 34 Salmanticenses, Cursus theologicus, vol. 12, Arbor Praedicamentalis, no. 100, in Cursus theologicus summam theologicam angelici doctoris D. Thomae complectens, vol. 6, Tractatus 11: De bonitate et malitia humanorum actuum; Tractatus 12: De virtutibus—Arbor praedicamentalis (Paris: V. Palme, 1878). 29 30 824 Nicholas Austin, S.J. straightforwardly accepts the division between moral virtues acquired by practice and those infused through grace (more of which later). Acquired magnanimity is directed to great moral goods that are not directly sensible, and so cannot be confined to the sensible irascible alone. Moreover, magnanimity as such conveys a visceral pursuit of arduous goods, so even its infused variety could not be located in the will alone. Thus, while Aquinas thinks a virtue cannot coexist in two powers equally,35 we need to see magnanimity, whether acquired or infused, as spanning both irascible appetite and will. Textual support for this interpretation can be derived from Aquinas’s treatment of the vice of pride. Pride’s subject must bridge both kinds of irascible appetite, since one can be prideful about one’s excellence in either sensible or spiritual matters (one’s imagined physical beauty or alleged moral virtue, for example).36 Now, Cajetan points out that humility, as a virtue opposed to pride, must similarly exist in both kinds of irascible appetite. 37 The same argument applies to magnanimity: as a virtue opposed to pride,38 magnanimity must therefore similarly bridge both appetitive powers. The subject of magnanimity, the animus, is a capacity for both irascible passion and irascible voluntary commitment in the pursuit of an arduous good. It is now possible to reconsider fitting synonyms. “Mind” and “soul,” the commonly proposed translations, limp badly as proxies for animus. Both fail to pick out magnanimity’s specific subject, the irascible potency of sensitive and intellective appetite. The English “animus” would be a tempting translation were it not for its connotation of hostility, even malice. A more plausible suggestion is found in the more recent Dominican translation of ST: “Magnanimity by definition implies a certain aspiration of spirit to great things.”39 “Spirit,” is better than “mind” or “soul,” since it conveys the virtue’s dynamic force and aspirational character. An alternative is “heart,” as found in phrases such as “don’t lose heart” or “put your heart into it.” Indeed, the dictionary records “big-heartedness” as a ST I-II, q. 56, a. 2, resp. ST II-II, q. 162, a. 3, resp. 37 Cajetan, Commentary on ST II-II, q. 162, a. 2, nos. 2 and 3, in Thomas Aquinas, Opera Omnia, Iussu Impensaque Leonis XIII. P.M. Edita, vol. 10 (Rome: Leonine Commission, 1899), 316–17. All texts from Cajetan’s commentary are taken from the Leonine edition. 38 ST II-II, q. 162, a. 1, ad 3. 39 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Vol. 42, Courage: (2a2ae. 123–140), ed. Anthony Ross and P. G. Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 99. 35 36 Aquinas and Cajetan on Magnanimity 825 synonym for magnanimity.40 The magnanimous one is less accurately the great-souled than the great-spirited or big-hearted one. “A Small Bit of Grammar”: Magnanimity’s Objective Matter The magnanimous one’s animus is an animus ad magna. Fergus Kerr comments on Aquinas’s use of the Latin preposition ad: “A small bit of grammar carries a good deal of theology.”41 Kerr’s observation arises in a different context but is no less valid here in the discussion of magnanimity. Ad means “toward,” and conveys movement in the direction of some object. This is a vital clue in the search for magnanimity’s objective matter (materia circa quam), the specific cognitive or appetitive acts the virtue guides and regulates.42 A virtue’s objective matter is always a more specific determination of its subjective matter, since the former is an act of the latter.43 Given that its subject is the irascible power, magnanimity must regulate some specific irascible passion or passions. Irascible passions, however, can be vectors toward or away from their challenging object. Some move toward a good difficult to attain, or an evil difficult to defeat; some fly from an evil one must work to avoid. Magnanimity pursues more than runs from its object.44 It strengthens its bearer in the pursuit of goods.45 Its objective matter is therefore the irascible movement toward some arduous good, an appetitive motion characterized by the mode of impulsion.46 The magnanimous one’s great animus, then, is a salmon-like desire straining for a demanding goal. Its animus is animus ad. More specifically, as an irascible passion directed toward some object, animus ad can be narrowed to three candidates: daring, anger, and hope. Daring aggressively and boldly approaches some imminent danger to overcome it.47 Anger aims toward some harmful human and toward vindi- Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), s.v. “Magnanimity” (online edition available at dictionary.oed.com). 41 Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 124. 42 On a virtue’s objective matter, see Austin, Aquinas on Virtue, 111–12. 43 ST II-II, q. 58, a. 4, resp: “A power is a virtue’s subject when that virtue is ordered to rectifying that power’s act [illa potentia est subiectum virtutis ad cuius potentiae actum rectificandum virtus ordinatur].” 44 ST II-II, q. 129, a. 1, obj. 3. 45 ST II-II, q. 129, a. 6, ad 2. 46 ST II-II, q.161, a.1, resp. and ad 3. 47 ST I-II, q. 45, aa. 1–2. 40 826 Nicholas Austin, S.J. cation.48 Hope, in contrast, targets a future good that it is difficult but possible to attain, bonum futurum arduum possibile.49 Since these different irascible passions have diverse objects, different virtues are required to rectify them: “Fortitude is about fear and daring; magnanimity is about hope and despair; gentleness is about anger.”50 Aquinas therefore names the magnanimous one’s animus ad as a hope: “Magnanimity is properly about the hope for something arduous.”51 Hope, for Aquinas, is a passion, a movement of the appetite. While depending on the prior judgment that some future good is attainable, it refers strictly to the appetitive response to that judgment: “Hope is a motion of the appetitive power following the apprehension of an arduous future good as possible to attain, namely, the stretching of the appetite to an object of this sort.”52 The high-strung passion of hope therefore has an intrinsic directionality toward action. Because directed to a future good, hope is, as Charles Pinches observes, “inherently ‘tensed.’ Its action does not so much cause us to partake as to pursue.”53 The intense passion of hope to which Aquinas refers does not sit on the sidelines in wistful sanguinity but impels a person toward the attainment of a challenging, future good. As René Antoine Gauthier expresses it, “because it has first measured the possibilities, hope and hope alone can command the action; it is the driving passion par excellence.”54 Magnanimity, then, is ordo spei, a right ordering of active and assertive hope. More precisely still, magnanimity deals in an especially hardy way of hoping that Aquinas names fiducia. This may be translated as “confidence,” since both terms have an etymological origin in fides, or faith.55 Confi ST I-II, q. 46, a. 2. ST I-II, q. 40, a. 5, resp. 50 ST I-II, q. 60, a. 4, resp.: “Fortitudo circa timores et audacias; magnanimitas circa spem et desperationem; mansuetudo circa iras.” 51 ST II-II, q. 129, a. 6, resp.: “Magnanimitas proprie est circa spem alicuius ardui.” 52 ST I-II, q. 40, a. 2, resp.: “Spes est motus appetitivae virtutis consequens apprehensionem boni futuri ardui possibilis adipisci, scilicet extensio appetitus in huiusmodi obiectum.” 53 Charles Pinches, “On Hope,” in Virtues and Their Vices, ed. Kevin Timpe and Craig A. Boyd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 351. 54 Gauthier, Magnanimité, 332. 55 Aquinas considers following Cicero in identifying confidence with magnanimity. He takes Cicero to characterize confidence as follows: “Confidence is that by which the animus applies itself to great and honorable enterprises with great confidence and hope in oneself [Fiducia est per quam magnis et honestis rebus multum ipse animus in se fiduciae cum spe collocavit].” Cicero’s actual text reads differently: “Fidentia [not fiducia] est per quam magnis et honestis in rebus multum ipse 48 49 Aquinas and Cajetan on Magnanimity 827 dence is robur spei, a strength of hope, or alternatively spes roborata, a hope strengthened by some belief or strong conviction.56 It is from robur that we get the English “robust.” In its root meaning it refers to a hardwood, such as oak. The confidence characteristic of magnanimity is therefore a robust hope, a hardwood hope. Its oak-like sturdiness is based upon the faith or strong conviction that one can attain some good, whether by oneself, through one’s friends, or by the help of God.57 Magnanimity’s immediate and direct objective matter lies in a confidence or robust hope: hope, both as a passion and as a commitment of the will, for the attainment of some arduous and great future good. Tuning and Tuning Forks: Magnanimity’s Mode A piano tuner’s job is to tighten each string neither too much nor too little, to ensure it reaches its correction tension and so plays at perfect pitch. Similarly, if magnanimity’s matter is a person’s confident hope in her power to attain great and difficult goods, then the virtue’s mode, the work it does to rectify this matter, is to leave it neither too tight nor too slack. Aquinas names magnanimity’s mode with the phrase quaedam extensio: a certain stretching of the animus to great things. The qualifier is indeterminate but not redundant: magnanimity is not just any kind of extension of the animus, but a certain or specific kind. It is, in fact, a reasonable one. Magnanimity drives or urges on (impellit) the animus, he says, in accordance with right reason.58 Even though it aims at great things, magnanimity aims at the mean, since it tends to great things “according to the rule of reason, that is, where it is fitting, and when it is fitting, and for the reason that it is fitting.”59 As Aquinas puts it in his Commentary on the Sentences, “the magnanimous one tends to great things moderately.”60 The work that magnanimity does with the hope for animus in se fiduciae certa cum spe collocavit.” (De inventione 2.163, in Cicero, On Invention, The Best Kind of Orator, Topics, trans. H. M. Hubbell [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949], 330). In any case, Aquinas prefers to say that confidence belongs to rather than is magnanimity. See ST II-II, q. 129, a. 6, resp. 56 ST II-II, q. 129, a. 6, resp. and ad 3. 57 ST II-II, q. 129, a. 6, resp.: “Confidence implies a certain strength of hope arising from some consideration that produces a strong conviction about attaining some good [Fiducia importat quoddam robur spei proveniens ex aliqua consideratione quae facit vehementem opinionem de bono assequendo].” 58 ST II-II, q. 161, a. 1, resp. 59 ST I-II, q. 64. a. 1, ad 2: “. . . secundum regulam rationis, idest ubi oportet, et quando oportet, et propter quod oportet.” 60 In II sent., d. 42, q. 2, a. 4: “Magnanimus mediocriter tendit in magna” (emphasis added). 828 Nicholas Austin, S.J. great things is to stretch and urge it on, not excessively, but reasonably. A rational and measured stretch of the animus is one that is proportionate to the capacities of the agent, secundum proportionem ad propriam facultatem.61 Magnanimity therefore stands in the mean between vices that get the proportion wrong, either overextending or underextending the animus. Each of these vices is exemplified, for Aquinas, by a biblical figure or character. The vice of presumption is exemplified by Peter before the Passion thinking he can suffer with Christ (Luke 22:33). This vice aims at great things disproportionate to the agent’s capacity or virtue, thus exceeding magnanimity’s due mode.62 Pusillanimity is exemplified by the servant in the parable who buried his talent in the ground (Matt 25:18; Luke 19:20). This vice has an atrophied animus, one that is cut down or prostrate, deicitur.63 In each case, the agent’s aim lacks proportion to the agent’s capacity or worth. Presumption and pusillanimity are both moral failures because both contrary, albeit in opposite ways, to the natural inclination to undertake an action commensurate to one’s potential.64 In contrast, the magnanimous one’s self-conception of her own worth or dignity is correct: secundum dignitatem seipsum dignificat.65 Grounded in this veridical self-image, she hopes and acts accordingly. The correct self-perception of one’s dignity, potential, or virtue, then, is like the tuning fork for magnanimity, which is a well-tuned animus for great things. Hope is not the only string magnanimity needs to tune. As noted above, Aquinas says that magnanimity is about the passion of despair as well as that of hope.66 Magnanimity’s mode must therefore be twofold: it does not merely stretch the animus to great things; it also “strengthens the animus against despair or giving up.”67 “Despair” (desperatio) here does not name the vice opposed to theological hope, but simply an appetitive movement contrary to the passion of hope, a withdrawal from the striving for some goal in the light of its perceived difficulty or impossibility.68 Not all despair, in this sense, is vicious, since it is reasonable to give up when a finite goal proves to be beyond reach and it would be obstinate to persist. Nevertheless, despair is a significant threat to magnanimous agency. Any hopeful pursuer of an arduous good risks losing heart in the face of labor ST II-II, q. 130, a. 2, resp. ST II-II, q. 130, a. 2, resp. and ad 3. 63 ST II-II, q. 133, a. 1, resp.; a. 2, ad 3. 64 ST II-II, q. 133, a. 1, resp. 65 ST II-II, q. 129, a. 3, resp. 66 ST II-II, q. 60, a. 4, resp. 67 ST II-II, q. 161, a. 1, resp. 68 ST I-II, q. 40, a. 4. 61 62 Aquinas and Cajetan on Magnanimity 829 and obstacles. What starts as a great-spirited quest can easily run ashore on the sands of pusillanimity or smallness of animus. Great-heartedness, therefore, must not merely drive the animus toward great things, but also brace it against precipitous despair.69 Who can be Great? Magnanimity’s Personal Subject The irascible power is named as magnanimity’s “subject” only in an analogical sense. Virtues’ primary bearers or subjects are not powers of the soul, but persons.70 Who, then, can possess magnanimity? There are dangers on either side: to restrict the magnanimity’s potential bearers too stingily, thereby falling into elitism, or to open the class too liberally, thus negating the uncommon greatness of this virtue. If the agent is “great” and thinks, desires, and acts accordingly, says Aquinas, he will be magnanimous; if he is not great, but thinks, desires, and acts according to his lesser worth, he will be “temperate.” 71 This apparently introduces an Aristotelian exclusivism into the virtue. Only the few are great. Not all can be magnanimous, even if they have appropriate selfworth and set their aim proportionately. Aquinas moderates this exclusion, to some extent, by appealing to grace as the principle of virtue.72 All who have grace and prudence can be magnanimous according to habit and proximate disposition, if not according to act: the “temperate” one would act magnanimously if he had the capacity to do so. No one is systematically excluded from the potential to be magnanimous in habit. Aquinas’s qualification of Aristotle’s elitism, while moving in the right direction, falls disappointingly short. One may dare here to ask Aquinas to spur Aquinas on further. Commenting on the injunction of Ephesians to “walk in a manner worthy of the vocation to which you have been called” (Eph 4:1), Aquinas glosses: Attending to the dignity to which you have been called, you should walk according to what agrees with it. For if someone had been called to be a noble King, it would be unworthy for him to do the works of a peasant. Thus, the Apostle admonishes the Ephesians, as if he were to say: “You have been called as fellow citizens ST I-II, q. 60, a. 4, resp.; II-II, q. 161, a. 1, resp. A soul’s power or capacity is the subject by which the virtue is possessed (subiectum quo), whereas the person is the subject that has a virtue (subiectum quod). See Austin, Aquinas on Virtue, 131. 71 ST II-II, q. 129, a. 3, obj. 2 and ad 2. 72 ST II-II, q. 129, a. 3, ad 2. 69 70 830 Nicholas Austin, S.J. with the saints of God’s household.” (Eph 2:19)73 The Christian vocation reveals the greatness to which all are called. As Rebecca Konyndyk Deyoung suggests, “Christian magnanimity is not only for a male, upper-class, moral elite; great acts are now open to anyone willing to answer God’s call and accept his grace.”74 Since magnanimity’s high reach is rooted in the self-awareness of one’s God-given dignity, it is not unfaithful to Aquinas’s deeper theological commitments to extend the potential for magnanimity—in act, not merely in habit—further than his respect for the Philosopher seems to allow him to go. However, universalizing the capacity for magnanimity risks sliding from liberality into profligacy. As the crown or ornament of the virtues, magnanimity can belong only to those who already possess a morally sound character. Only presumption aims at moral greatness before learning to walk in the virtuousness of a more temperate, workaday kind. Yet the Gospel message of human dignity does not allow us to write off from the start whole classes of people as incapable of magnanimous moral achievement. In the light of grace, there is hope for all. Hoping for What? Cajetan on Magnanimity’s Twofold Object Now for the most important and challenging task in the unfolding of Aquinas’s definition: to clarify the virtue’s object. The primary defining feature of a virtue, in Aquinas’s account, lies in its object, obiectum, that is, the target or immediate end to which the virtue is oriented.75 Magnanimity is a reasonable stretch (mode) of animus (matter) to great things (object). It is, then, a hope for great things. For what great things, however? Different answers result in highly divergent portrayals of magnanimity. In my attempt to resolve this question, Cajetan serves as my primary interlocutor. The great commentator draws attention to an apparent textual ambiguity about magnanimity’s object: In considering ST II-II, q. 129, a.1, a doubt arises: Whether magnanimity is about doing great works as its proper act and object, or Super Eph 4, lec.1: “Attendentes dignitatem ad quam vocati estis, ambuletis secundum quod ei convenit. Si enim quis vocatus esset ad nobile regnum, indignum esset quod faceret opera rusticana. Sic monet Ephesios apostolus, quasi dicat: vocati estis ut sitis cives sanctorum et domestici Dei, ut dictum est supra cap. II, 19.” 74 DeYoung, “Aquinas’s Virtues,” 14. 75 On the object of a virtue, see Austin, Aquinas on Virtue, 79–88. 73 Aquinas and Cajetan on Magnanimity 831 whether it is about doing great works as a circumstance of rightly hoping for great honors.76 As a habitus, a virtue is defined primarily by reference to the proper act and object to which it is oriented. Cajetan here proposes two candidates for the object: great works, or great honors for great works. In the first case, magnanimity primarily and directly intends the performance of great works; in the second, it primarily and directly hopes for great honors, albeit only in return for great works. Is magnanimity, then, primarily an orientation toward great works or to great honors? As Cajetan laconically observes, “the reason for the doubt is that diverse things are said of magnanimity.”77 Hoping for Honor The first two articles on magnanimity in ST may give the impression that magnanimity’s object lies in great honors. Honor is the greatest among exterior goods; since magnanimity concerns what is great simply and absolutely, magnanimity must therefore be about honors,78 indeed great honors.79 Moreover, magnanimity’s immediate matter lies in hope for great things; its object, then, lies in the great things that are the object of this hope. Aquinas explains, however: “Magnanimity is indeed immediately about the passion of hope, but mediately about honor, as the object of hope.”80 Once again, magnanimity’s object seems to be honor, or more precisely, great honor.81 Finally, the proper act of a virtue lies in the due use of its matter; however, Aquinas explicitly says, “the proper matter of magnanimity is great honor”;82 therefore, magnanimity’s proper act is the due use of honor.83 As Aquinas later summarizes, “magnanimity is about Cajetan, Commentary on ST II-II, q. 129, a. 1, no. 1: “In articulo primo quaestionis centesimaevigesimaenonae dubium occurrit: An magnanimitas sit circa magna operari tanquam proprium actum et obiectum: an sit circa magna operari ut circumstantiam recte sperandi honores magnos.” (Leonine ed., 10:58a). 77 Cajetan, Commentary on ST II-II, q. 129, a. 1, no. 1: “Et est ratio dubii quia de magnanimitate diversa dicuntur” (Leonine ed., 10:58a). 78 ST II-II, q. 129, a. 1. 79 ST II-II, q. 129, a. 2. 80 ST II-II, q. 129, a. 1, ad 2: “Magnanimitas est quidem immediate circa passionem spei, mediate autem circa honorem, sicut circa obiectum spei.” 81 ST II-II, q. 129, a. 1, resp. 82 ST II-II, q. 129, a. 2, resp.: “Propria materia magnanimitatis est magnus honor.” 83 ST II-II, q. 129, a. 1, resp. 76 832 Nicholas Austin, S.J. honors, and uses them fittingly.”84 Once again, fitting honor seems to be the object of magnanimity, and therefore that at which it aims. The desire for honor, for Aquinas, should be rightly ordered. Admittedly, within Christian ascetical thought, hope or desire for honor is suspect and is often seen as stemming from ambition or vanity. As Aquinas puts it in an objection: “The virtuous are not praised for desiring honors, but more for spurning them.”85 However, the objection is too sweeping in its blanket rejection. Honor’s limitation as a good is shown in the fact that it is a thing existing extra animam, outside the soul.86 For Aquinas, nevertheless, it is a genuine good.87 It is defined as “a certain reverence shown to someone in witness of his excellence.”88 The root of its value is that it bears witness to virtue.89 One may and should desire honor, then, albeit only in the right way. What is it to desire honor in the right way? Reversing Aquinas’s description of the inordinate appetite for honor (ambition), one should desire honor only for a genuine excellence, and desire it for a due end.90 For, as Cajetan observes, honor is a bonum utile, something not to be desired for itself, but only as useful for some further good.91 Honor is closely related to glory, in which someone’s good is not merely honored by one person, but known and approved by many.92 Aquinas’s description of the right desire for glory, then, applies closely also to honor: It can be desired insofar as it is useful for something: either that God be glorified by humans; or that humans progress by the good they know in another; or that a human himself, from the goods that he knows in himself by the testimony of others’ praise, may strive to persevere and progress to greater things.93 ST II-II, q. 131, a. 1, resp. ST II-II, q. 129, a. 1, obj. 3: “Virtuosi non laudantur ex hoc quod cupiunt honores, sed magis ex hoc quod eos fugiunt.” 86 ST II-II, q. 129, a. 2, ad 2. See also ST I-II, q. 2, a. 2, sc. 87 ST II-II, q. 131, a. 1, obj. 1. 88 ST II-II, q. 131, a. 1, resp.: “Honor importat quandam reverentiam alicui exhibitam in testimonium excellentiae eius.” 89 See ST II-II, q. 131, a. 1, ad 2. 90 ST II-II, q. 131, a. 1, resp. 91 Cajetan, Commentary on ST II-II, q. 131, a. 1, no. 4 (Leonine ed., 10:75). 92 ST II-II, q. 132, a. 1, resp. 93 ST II-II, q. 132, a. 1, ad 3: “Potest tamen appeti inquantum est utile ad aliquid, vel ad hoc quod Deus ab hominibus glorificetur; vel ad hoc quod homines proficiant ex bono quod in alio cognoscunt; vel ex hoc quod ipse homo ex bonis quae in se cognoscit per testimonium laudis alienae studeat in eis perseverare et ad meliora proficere.” 84 85 Aquinas and Cajetan on Magnanimity 833 There is, then, such a thing as right desire for proportionate honor: it is desired rightly when desired for progress in virtue (one’s own or another’s) or God’s glory. Just as ambition, a vice opposed to magnanimity by excess, is disordered desire for honor,94 magnanimity initially seems, on first reading, to be the habitus of right desire for honor, especially great honor. Beyond the Minimum Aquinas also characterizes magnanimity as the virtue that concerns not great honor and glory, but great works. The clearest example comes from Aquinas’s early Commentary on the Sentences: [The magnanimous one] tends to that which is great simply, that is, perfect acts of virtue; he does not, however, principally tend to that which is great in some respect, such as are exterior goods, among which great honor holds first place. For the magnanimous one does not seek honor as the end of his will, because he thinks this too cheap for him, since it is a vain and transitory good.95 The argument is that honor, while not evil, it too slight a good (even a “vain” good) to be the primary object of pursuit for the great-spirited one. Given that, as Aquinas explains in ST, the magnanimous one is neither lifted up by great honors nor cast down by dishonors,96 it would be odd to make great honors magnanimity’s defining object. Only virtue is truly great in human life; honor is, by comparison, a small thing. Magnanimity aims primarily at the great in the former, not the latter. According to this second strand of Aquinas’s thinking on magnanimity, then, this virtue is directed to great moral enterprises. Its hopefulness expresses itself in the initiation and completion of great works. Note, however, that the “great works” at which magnanimity aims are great works of virtue. Thus, magnanimity’s aim is for moral greatness. It is therefore subtly distinct from a sibling virtue of greatness that Aquinas calls “magnificence,” magnificentia, the etymology of which suggests a See ST II-II, q. 131, a. 2, resp. In II sent., d. 42, q. 2, a. 4: “[Magnanimus] tendit in id quod est magnum simpliciter, quod est scilicet actus virtutis perfectus; non autem tendit principaliter in id quod est magnum secundum quid, sicut sunt exteriora bona, inter quae praecipue magnum honor. Non enim magnanimus honorem quaerit tamquam finem voluntatis suae, quia hoc nimis sibi parvum reputat, cum sit vanum et transitorium bonum.” 96 ST II-II, q. 129, a. 2, ad 3. 94 95 834 Nicholas Austin, S.J. concern for making rather than for doing.97 As the Carmelites of Salamanca explain: Magnanimity intends of itself, in the first place, the great in the acts in which moral goodness is primarily located, namely, the intrinsic and immanent acts of the virtues. Magnificence, in contrast, primarily intends greatness in works produced exteriorly by art, for example, a great house, a beautiful temple, a splendid feast, and so on.98 Magnanimity is the virtue of moral enterprise. Since aimed at great acts of virtue, magnanimity is what we may describe as the supererogatory virtue. It is the habit of going beyond virtue’s basic minimum, ultra necessitatem virtutis.99 For, “the magnanimous one is not content to avoid wrong actions and do good actions as generally suffices, unless he does this more excellently.”100 This orientation to moral excellence explains the traditional accolade accorded to magnanimity: “Magnanimity is the crown of the virtues, since magnanimity inclines to doing great things in all the virtues, so that it does the great acts of fortitude, of temperance, and so on.”101 Again, magnanimity is a virtue of moral hopefulness. Cajetan notes that there is a problem with identifying magnanimity’s object as the great in any virtue. The risk is that magnanimity collapses into the other moral virtues, as there seems no basis on which to distinguish their respective formal objects. As he formulates the objection: Magnanimity coincides with any virtue, insofar as it produces its great act. Thus, it is not a specific virtue, but any virtue as exercising a great act. Magnanimity is therefore not one virtue, but the greatest fortitude, the greatest justice, the greatest temperance, and thus of the others.102 ST II-II, q. 134, a. 2, Salmanticenses, Arbor Praedicamentalis, nos.102 and 474. 99 In III sent., d. 33, q. 3, a. 3, qa 4. 100 In III sent., d. 33, q. 3, a. 3, qa 4: “Magnanimus enim non est contentus vitare prava et facere bona secundum quod communiter sufficit, nisi excellentius faciat hoc.” 101 In II sent., d. 42, q. 2, a. 4: “Magnanimitas est ornamentum virtutum omnium: quia magnanimitas inclinat ad faciendum magna in omnibus virtutibus, ut quod faciat maximos actus fortitudinis, temperantiae, et hujusmodi.” 102 Cajetan, Commentary on ST II-II, q. 129, a. 4, no. 1: “Magnanimitas coincidit cum qualibet virtute inquantum facit suum actum magnum. Et sic non est virtus 97 98 Aquinas and Cajetan on Magnanimity 835 Whether an act of fortitude, for example, is a great or a small act of fortitude, it is still an act of fortitude, not the act of some other virtue. Magnanimity, therefore, appears to lack any specific act of its own. Great-heartedness, so the objection goes, is no longer a single virtue, but many: it reduces to the collation of super-sized versions of the moral virtues. Cajetan sees this problem of collapse as a “great difficulty.”103 He is frankly not impressed with Aquinas’s own reply to this objection, which makes magnanimity a special virtue only because it concerns a special matter, namely, great honors.104 If, as Cajetan contends, great honors are not the virtue’s intended target, then the problem of distinguishing magnanimity from the other virtues by a distinctive formal object remains.105 In a rare moment of self-disclosure, Cajetan later confesses he came to a way of addressing the problem only with great effort, cum tanto labore.106 The core of Cajetan’s solution, nevertheless, is remarkably simple: Magnanimity has for its formal object and end the great in the work of any virtue. Temperance and the other virtues, in contrast, have for their formal objects the temperate, just, brave things, and so on, and only regard the great as a consequence.107 While the motivating and intended object of magnanimous action is materially the same as that of greatly temperate, just, or brave action, it is formally distinct, since magnanimity intends great morally virtuous action under its own specific formal aspect, namely, as great virtuous action. The other moral virtues, even when exercised to an excellent degree, direct the intention primarily to that which is proper to each virtue. Temperance, for example, aims at the moderation of the greatest desires and pleasures of touch. Since the possession of a distinct motivating object is sufficient to distinguish and specify a virtue, this insight preserves magnanimity’s integrity as one virtue, distinct from the others. Nevertheless, the magnanimous one performs temperate, brave, and specialis, sed quaelibet virtus ut exercens magnum actum” (Leonine ed., 10:64). Cajetan, Commentary on ST II-II, q. 129, a. 4, no. 1 (Leonine ed., 10:64a). 104 ST II-II, q. 129, a. 4, obj. 1, resp. and ad 1. 105 Cajetan, Commentary on ST II-II, q. 129, a. 4, no. 1 (Leonine ed., 10:64a). 106 Cajetan, Commentary on ST II-II, q. 134, a. 2, no. 3 (Leonine ed., 10:91b). 107 Cajetan, Commentary on ST II-II, q. 129, a. 4, no. 5: “Magnanimitas habet pro formali obiecto et fine magnum in cuiusque virtutis opere: temperantia vero et aliae virtutes habent pro formalibus obiectis ipsa temperata, iusa, fortia et huiusmodi; magna autem haec ipsa ex consequenti” (Leonine ed., 10:65b; italics added). 103 836 Nicholas Austin, S.J. just acts. How can a great virtuous act simultaneously express diverse moral virtues—magnanimity and temperance or fortitude or justice—if these are really distinct habits? The Carmelites of Salamanca build on Cajetan’s solution by proposing that magnanimity is a kind of general virtue, commanding108 the acts of the other moral virtues: Although magnanimity does not effect (at least not immediately and elicitively) the works of the other virtues, nor their greatness, nevertheless, when by hope and confidence it raises the appetite to these works as great, it helps and disposes to this: that these virtues, as it were obeying magnanimity, work great acts.109 Magnanimity is like a military general who spurs on his soldiers, the moral virtues, to perform their respective roles in the battle superlatively well. A great brave act commanded by magnanimity but elicited by fortitude is formally magnanimous and materially brave. Thus, magnanimity is a distinct moral virtue with its specific motive and role, namely, to dispose to a great exercise of the other moral virtues. Refusing the Dilemma The core problem of ambivalence, however, remains: whether magnanimity’s target or object is to be identified with great honors, or with great acts of virtue. Cajetan, in drawing attention to the problem, has perhaps unknowingly hit upon a fault line in Scholastic discussions of magnanimity before Aquinas. Gauthier, in his learned monograph on magnanimity, observes that Albert the Great, Aquinas’s teacher, had vacillated on the question, initially following the Abelardian and Ciceronian interpretation that sees magnanimity primarily as a virtue of great moral enterprise, but later preferring an interpretation of Aristotle that regards it as the virtue concerning honor.110 Aristotle’s text, however, is susceptible of either interpretation: while the Philosopher claims magnanimity is about honor, he also notes that the magnanimous man does the works of all the virtues: On the metaphor of commanding and obeying virtues, see Austin, Aquinas on Virtue, 181–82. 109 Salmanticenses, Arbor Praedicamentalis, nos. 97–98: “Licet [magnanimitas] haec non efficiat (saltem immediate et elicitive) aliarum virtutum opera, neque eorum magnitudinem: dum tamen per spem et fiduciam erigit appetitum ad illa ut magna, juvat et disponit ad hoc ut ipsae virtutes quasi magnanimitiati obsequentes, magna operentur.” 110 Gauthier, Magnanimité, 305–9. 108 Aquinas and Cajetan on Magnanimity 837 “Greatness in each virtue also seems proper to the magnanimous person.”111 Cajetan refuses the dilemma between honor-based and virtue-based accounts of magnanimity: “When it is said that the magnanimous one is ‘worthy of great things,’ this is understood of both great works and great honors.”112 He proposes this not merely as an interpretation of Aquinas, but as an account of magnanimity’s defining object.113 Can such a synthetic approach to magnanimity’s object succeed? While many praise Cajetan’s response, few analyze it closely or notice that he offers not one, but two complementary solutions. The Obliquity of Honor Since a virtue’s object is its primary defining feature, the greatest challenge in defining magnanimity is to clarify the duality of its object without threatening the virtue’s unity. Cajetan repeats the view of the Commentary on the Sentences that, while there is a moderate or well-ordered desire for honor, this desire does not define the virtue of greatness. “For the magnanimous one,” Cajetan argues, “would not truly be magnanimous if he did not tend directly to great things—that is, great not in the genus of least goods, like exterior goods, but truly great goods, namely, goods of the soul— since then he would not be tending into truly and simply great goods.”114 Honor is great at best in the secondary sense that it is great among merely exterior goods; it is not great in comparison to virtue. To act in a way that is greatly just, brave, and merciful therefore defines the greatness of the magnanimous one far more than the great honors that she may receive as a consequence. For this reason, Cajetan rules out a tempting solution to the problem of magnanimity’s dual directedness. Aquinas writes, “the magnanimous one intends to do great works in any virtue, namely, insofar as he tends to those things that are worthy of great honor.”115 This ambiguous statement Aristotle, NE 4.3.1123b. Cajetan, Commentary on ST II-II, q. 129, a. 4, no. 3: “Dum dicitur quo magnanimus est magnis dignus, intelligitur et de magnis operibus et de magnis honoribus” (Leonine ed., 10:58b; italics added). 113 Gauthier, similarly, interprets Aquinas as synthetic. Gauthier, Magnanimité, 311–12. 114 Cajetan, Commentary on ST II-II, q. 129, a. 4, no. 2: “Nisi magnanimus tenderet directe in magna, quae sunt non in genere minimorum bonorum, qualia sunt exteriora bona, sed vere magna bona, quae sunt sola animi bona, non esset vere magnanimus, utpote non tendens in vere et simpliciter magna bona” (Leonine ed., 10:58b). 115 ST II-II, q. 129, a. 4, ad 1: “Magnanimus intendit magna operari in qualibet 111 112 838 Nicholas Austin, S.J. is easily read as asserting that the magnanimous one does great acts for the sake of receiving honor. Thus interpreted, Aquinas would neatly unite great acts and great honors in a twofold object, as means and end. Yet, for Cajetan, this would be a serious moral error; indeed, it would get things upside down, putting honor before virtue. For, virtue is not for honor; honor is for virtue: The proper end wherefore someone should be a seeker after great honor is that he did, does, preserves, and so on, a great work of virtue; for, the testimony of virtue is ordered to virtue and the virtuous as its end.116 The primary object of magnanimity, then, cannot lie in great honor. Cajetan therefore grasps the nettle and asserts outright that Aquinas’s statement, if taken formally, is false: It is clear that magnanimity does not have honor for its object, and if it were to tend formally into great acts as worthy of great honor, already it would have great honor for its object, because it would tend to any such act under its rationale.117 Cajetan’s reasoning is compelling. If magnanimity were directly to intend great virtuous acts under the description “worthy of great honor,” then honor would become the end of great virtuous acts and ultimately definitive of magnanimous greatness, thereby inverting the proper relation between virtue (end) and honor (means). This ethically disastrous move would vitiate magnanimous virtuous agency by subordinating it to an inferior, external goal. Cajetan’s clarity and boldness in ruling this solution out of court, however, leaves the great commentator with the challenge of saving Aquinas’s text. Cajetan interprets Aquinas’s statement that magnanimity tends to what is worthy of great honor as false formally speaking. Yet he allows virtute, inquantum scilicet tendit ad ea quae sunt digna magno honore.” Cajetan, Commentary on ST II-II, q. 129, a. 1, no. 3: “Proprius autem finis quare aliquis est magno prosequendus honore, est quia magnum virtutis opus fecit, facit, custodit, etc.; testimonium enim virtutis ad virtutem et virtuosum ordinatur ut finem” (Leonine ed., 10:58b). 117 Cajetan, Commentary on ST II-II, q. 129, a. 1, no. 3: “Patet quod magnanimitas non habet honorem pro objecto: et si tenderet in magna formaliter inquantum sunt digna magno honor, iam haberet honorem magnum pro obiecto, quia sub eius ratione tenderet in quaecumque” (Leonine ed., 10:58b). 116 Aquinas and Cajetan on Magnanimity 839 great honors into the object of magnanimity by the back door, so to speak: Because it has for its formal object the great in any virtue, and the great in this sense is by its nature worthy of great honor, thence it is that magnanimity is about “great things” in both senses [i.e., both great acts of virtue and great honors], but principally insofar as “great things” are absolutely great.118 Magnanimity directly intends great acts of virtue as its end, and because such acts are worthy of great honor, the virtue tends as a consequence, ex consequenti, to the honor and glory due to such great acts. Since Cajetan normally prefers to use “object” for the formal object, he refrains from saying that great honor is any kind of object at all; he refers to it only as the “matter” of the virtue. However, the matter is the materia circa quam, the matter about which, which is the material object.119 Cajetan’s thought can legitimately be expressed, then, by saying that magnanimity’s formal and direct object is great acts of virtue, and the material, oblique object is the great honor due to great acts of virtue. The magnanimous one directly intends great works of virtue, not honor; but by intending great virtuous acts, she thereby, obliquely, tends to the honor and glory that is their due. The Use of Honor Cajetan’s obliquity solution succeeds in keeping honor out of the direct intention of the magnanimous one; it does not, however, resolve all problems of interpretation. Aquinas’s fullest portrayal of the twofold object of magnanimity runs as follows: Magnanimity is directed toward two [objects]: to one [object] as its intended end, which is some great work, which the magnanimous one focuses on according to his capacity. . . . Magnanimity is directed toward the second [object] as the matter it uses rightly, namely, toward honor.120 Cajetan, Commentary on ST II-II, q. 129, a. 1, no. 3: “Quoniam habet magnum in cuisvis virtutis opere pro formali obiecto, et magnum est suapte natura dignum magno honore: ideo magnanimitas est cira magna utroque modo, sed principaliter prout sunt absolute magna” (Leonine ed., 10:58b). 119 Austin, Aquinas on Virtue, 111–12. 120 ST II-II, q. 131, a. 2, ad 1: “Magnanimitas ad duo respicit. Ad unum quidem sicut ad finem intentum, quod est aliquod magnum opus, quod magnanimus attentat secundum suam facultatem. . . . Ad aliud autem respicit magnanimitas sicut ad materiam qua debite utitur, scilicet ad honorem.” See also ST II-II, q. 129, a. 8, resp. 118 840 Nicholas Austin, S.J. Here magnanimity’s twofold object is divided into the intended end, namely, a great work, and the matter, namely, honor. Honor, however, is described not merely as the indirectly intended object, but as the matter that magnanimity “uses rightly.” Thus, while magnanimity is not trained on honor as an end, for Aquinas, it does choose this useful good, bonum utile, as means to an honorable good, namely, great acts of virtue. Magnanimity does therefore target honor, not merely obliquely, but directly, albeit only as a means. Cajetan therefore offers a second solution, not normally noted, to the problem of magnanimity’s twofold object. He clarifies Aquinas’s distinction between magnanimity’s matter (great honor) and its formal object or immediate end (great acts of virtue) by drawing an illuminating analogy between magnanimity and fortitude, which evidences a similar duality of object: Fortitude relates in one way to the matter it modifies, for example, fear of death, and in another way to its proper act. For, the proper act is the proper end of fortitude, but the matter is moderated because of the end (since the brave person fears and dares moderately in order to attack and stand firm bravely, and not conversely). Similarly, it happens thus in a parallel way in magnanimity. Its proper act is to do great things, just as the proper act of the brave person is to act bravely. But because this act is impeded and encouraged by hope of great things such as honor and glory, so it is necessary to moderate the hope of honor. . . . Therefore, magnanimity moderates the appetite for great honor in order to do great things in any virtue.121 The magnanimous one, then, does desire great honor, although she desires this in the right way, as a means. The right appetite for honor integral to magnanimity is the choice of honor as a means to its end and primary work of doing greatly virtuous acts. Cajetan therefore offers not one but two solutions to the place of honor Cajetan, Commentary on ST II-II, q. 129, a. 1, no. 2: “Sicut fortitudo aliter se habet ad materiam quam modificat, puta timorem mortis, et aliter ad proprium actum; quia proprius actus est fortitudinis (moderate siquidem timet et audet fortis ut fortiter aggrediatur et sustineat, et non e converso): ita proportionaliter contingit in magnanimite. Actus siquidem proprius eius est operari magna: sicut fortis proprius actus est fortiter agere. Sed quoniam hic actus ex spe magnorum, puta honoris et gloriae, impeditur et promovetur, ideo opertet moderari spem honoris. . . . Idcirco magnanimitas moderatur appetitum honoris magni, ut magna in qualibet virtute operetur” (Leonine ed., 10:58a). 121 Aquinas and Cajetan on Magnanimity 841 within magnanimity. Magnanimity is first and foremost directed to great works of virtue. However, magnanimity is also oriented toward great honor both obliquely because of its primary directedness to acts that are greatly virtuous (and are therefore greatly honorable), and directly as a means to great virtuous action. Building on Cajetan’s Solution There is a serious difficulty with this second solution. The challenge is to explain how honor may serve as a means for virtuous acts. As already seen, for Cajetan, virtue is not for honor, but honor for virtue. Here he accords with Aquinas, for whom those who do good deeds only for honor are not virtuous.122 Indeed: “If [the virtuous] were to work for honor, it would no longer be virtue, but rather ambition.”123 The mechanism by which honor motivates virtue is therefore unclear. The dilemma is this: either honor is the intended end of virtuous acts, in which case it subverts virtuous motivation by ambition, or it is not, in which case it apparently cannot motivate virtuous acts. How, then, can honor serve as a means to virtuous acts? Cajetan’s core position can be defended, I argue, by means of a causal distinction: honor does foster the magnanimous one’s aspiration to great acts, but only as an efficient and quasi-formal, rather than final, cause. That is, honor motivates the magnanimous one not by providing the goal to be attained by great acts of virtue, which are their own end, but by bringing about the self-image that causes and measures a great animus. This proposal combines two insights: first, that self-image plays a crucial role in forming magnanimous motivation, and second, that honor fosters the right kind of self-knowledge. First, then, self-image exercises a role integral to magnanimity’s work. Aquinas derives from Aristotle the thesis that the magnanimous one “thinks himself worthy of great things.”124 Aquinas interprets—or creatively reinterprets—Aristotle as follows: Magnanimity makes a human think himself worthy of great things by considering the gifts he possesses from God, just as, if he has great power of animus, magnanimity makes him tend to the perfect works of virtue.125 ST II-II, q. 131, a. 11, ad 3; see also q. 132, a. 1, ad 2. ST I-II, q. 2, a. 2, resp,: “Si a utem propter honorem operarentur, iam non esset virtus, sed magis ambitio.” 124 Aristotle, NE 4.3.1123b. 125 ST II-II, q. 129, a. 3, ad 4: “Magnanimitas igitur facit quod homo se magnis 122 123 842 Nicholas Austin, S.J. There are two qualifications of Aristotle here. First, one’s own worthiness for great things is derived from the gifts of God. To acknowledge one’s gifts may seem contrary to humility, but Aquinas elsewhere defends the idea that there can be a “good pride,” bona superbia, deriving from the abundant goods bestowed by God.126 Moreover: “That someone thinks and approves his own good is not a sin, for it is said, ‘we have not received the spirit of this world, but the Spirit that is from God, that we may know the gifts given to us by God’ (1 Cor 2:12).”127 While Aristotle’s magnanimous man finds satisfaction in his own virtuous achievement, Aquinas’s recognizes his own goodness as a gift of God. Secondly, great worthiness for Aquinas is not in the first place being deserving of great honor, as for Aristotle, but being fit to exercise great works of virtue. Knowing oneself worthy of great things is not a cause for self-satisfaction, therefore, but an occasion for getting started and persevering in moral agency. The characterization of the magnanimous one in terms of his self-image as worthy of great things is often repeated in the literature as though it defines the virtue. However, magnanimity cannot be defined as the virtue of knowing oneself worthy of great things, since magnanimity is an appetitive, not an intellectual virtue. Yet self-knowledge does play a vital role in the virtue for this very reason, as the right measure for appetite. The role of self-image in humility, another appetitive virtue, one closely related to magnanimity, provides a helpful comparison: It properly belongs to humility that someone restrain himself, lest he be borne toward what is above him. However, for this, someone must know the extent to which he falls short of what exceeds his own power. Therefore, cognition of one’s own defect, as a certain rule directive of the appetite, belongs to humility.128 dignificet secundum considerationem donorum quae possidet ex Deo, sicut, si habet magnam virtutem animi, magnanimitas facit quod ad perfecta opera virtutis tendat.“ 126 ST II-II, q. 162, a. 1, ad 1. 127 ST II-II, q. 132, a. 1: “Quod autem aliquis bonum suum cognoscat et approbet, non est peccatum, dicitur enim I ad Cor. II, nos autem non spiritum huius mundi accepimus, sed spiritum qui ex Deo est, ut sciamus quae a Deo donata sunt nobis.” 128 ST II-II, q. 161, a. 2, resp.: “Ad humilitatem proprie pertinet ut aliquis reprimat seipsum, ne feratur in ea quae sunt supra se. Ad hoc autem necessarium est ut aliquis cognoscat id in quo deficit a proportione eius quod suam virtutem excedit. Et ideo cognitio proprii defectus pertinet ad humilitatem sicut regula quaedam directiva appetitus.” Aquinas and Cajetan on Magnanimity 843 That is, since humility restrains the force or impetuosity (impetus) of the animus from tending to great things in an inordinate way, it is a moral virtue, one situated essentially in the appetite. Nevertheless, the intellect plays its role as directive rule in this virtue, by rationally restraining the stretch of the animus in the light of a person’s limitations.129 By parity of reasoning, the knowledge of one’s worth, while not magnanimity’s essence, is nevertheless a directive rule of the magnanimous one’s stretch of animus. To underestimate one’s own dignity or capacity is to fall into pusillanimity: the small-hearted one, lacking consciousness of her worthiness, shrinks from the great things to which she is suited.130 Her ignorance of her own condition is the cause of the smallness of her animus.131 Accurate self-awareness is the tuning fork by which the animus is neither presumptuously overstretched nor pusillanimously understretched, but magnanimously tuned to proportionately great things. If magnanimity depends on an accurate self-image of one’s potential and gifts, it is also true that honor cultivates this self-knowledge. For Aquinas, we grow in knowledge of our own virtue not so much by an act of introspection, but by seeing our goodness reflected in another’s eyes when we are honored. Thus Aquinas says: “From the goods that a human knows in himself by the witness of another’s praise, he may be eager in those good things and progress to better.”132 Honor is thus literally an “affirmation,” a making firm, of a person’s virtue: it is ordered toward virtue becoming strong in its bearer. As such, honor may be desired as a means to virtue without it becoming the end for which virtue is desired. Cajetan’s solution therefore stands. Honor is not the final cause of magnanimous virtuous acts, but an efficient and quasi-formal cause, as it helps cultivate the self-image—the self-knowledge of one’s goodness—that is the cognitive cause and directive rule of a great animus. Cajetan’s elucidation of the twofold directedness of magnanimity, understood in this way, is attractive because it shows that magnanimity’s ST II-II, q. 161, a. 6, resp.: “Humility lies essentially in the appetite, insofar as someone restrains the impetuosity of his animus from tending inordinately to great things; however, it has its rule in cognition, namely, that someone should not judge himself to be above that which he is [Humilitas essentialiter in appetitu consistit, secundum quod aliquis refrenat impetum animi sui, ne inordinate tendat in magna, sed regulam habet in cognitione, ut scilicet aliquis non se existimet esse supra id quod est].” 130 ST II-II, q. 133, a. 2, resp. 131 ST II-II, q. 133, a. 2, resp. and ad 1. 132 ST II-II, q. 132, a. 1, ad 3: “Homo ex bonis quae in se cognoscit per testimonium laudis alienae studeat in eis perseverare et ad meliora proficere.” 129 844 Nicholas Austin, S.J. bivalent orientation to great virtuous acts and great honor need be seen neither as a threat to the unity of a single habitus nor as a morally dubious elevation of great honor as a moral motive. Honor is never to be desired directly as an end in itself; rather, it is relegated to an appropriately subordinate place within magnanimity, as oblique object and direct means, without its crucial importance for the life of magnanimous virtue being erased. With the secondary place of honor clarified, the core of magnanimity shines out more clearly as an animus for great works of virtue: a moral hope. Kindred Virtues I have thus far postponed consideration of what contribution the theological perspective makes to Aquinas’s account of magnanimity. In his account of this virtue, is Aquinas addressing the nature of “infused” or “acquired” magnanimity, or both? The relationship between the moral virtues begotten in the soul by the gift of grace and their acquired counterparts generated by habituation is a matter of significant interest in the contemporary literature, perhaps because it is thought that we find the core of Aquinas’s distinctively theological virtue theory in his account of the infused moral virtues. The interpretation that, in the Christian, there cannot be acquired, only infused moral virtue, has recently been gaining ground.133 I have argued, on the contrary, that a careful causal analysis of infused and acquired moral virtues shows that, on Aquinas’s view, they can coexist in the baptized person.134 A more fruitful line of theological enquiry, I suggest, is not to explore what Aquinas says about infused For a trio of recent articles defending this viewpoint, see: William C. Mattison III, “Aquinas, Custom, and the Coexistence of Infused and Acquired Cardinal Virtues,” Journal of Moral Theology 8, no. 2 (2019): 1–24; Angela Knobel, “Elevated Virtue? A Reply to Bowlin and Aquinas,” Journal of Moral Theology 8, no. 2 (2019): 25–39; Jean Porter, “Moral Virtues, Charity, and Grace: Why the Infused and Acquired Virtues Cannot Co-Exist,” Journal of Moral Theology 8, no. 2 (2019): 40–66. 134 Austin, Aquinas on Virtue, 180–85. All three authors in the previous note argue for the incompatibility of acquired and infused moral virtue on the basis of a different finality. Yet Aquinas thinks that political prudence (ordered towards the common good of the kingdom) commands domestic and monastic prudence (ordered to the good of the household and the individual, respectively), despite an analogous difference in intrinsic finality (ST II-II, q. 47, a. 11, ad 3). My interpretation is that, for Aquinas, acquired moral virtues acquire a new extrinsic finality to supernatural beatitude under the command of infused moral virtue, just as monastic prudence acquires a new finality to the common good under the command of political prudence. 133 Aquinas and Cajetan on Magnanimity 845 versus acquired magnanimity, which is very little, if anything, but rather to identify the way his theological perspective, at a very deep level, shapes his account of this virtue. The interpretive key is the connectivity of the moral virtues.135 When justice loses fellowship with mercy, for example, it becomes unforgiving hardness; when fortitude ignores prudence, foolhardiness results. Moral virtues are truly themselves only when in communion with the others. The connectivity of the moral virtues applies also to their respective concepts. We best understand a virtue like magnanimity not in isolation, but in company with other virtues. Mary M. Keys is right, therefore, to resist those who see Aquinas’s magnanimity as substantially the same as Aristotle’s, albeit with some Christian virtues added on. She insists, “a magnanimity that is fully at home in the world of humility and gratitude must be a transformed magnanimity in some crucial respects.”136 The idea of magnanimity does not remain unchanged when transplanted from Aristotelian ethics into the theological ecology of Christian virtues. While Keys examines the influence of humility, gratitude, and charity on Aquinas’s understanding of magnanimity, I believe the most important virtue is omitted. Magnanimity’s primary and immediate matter is the passionate and committed hope for the attainment of some great work of virtue. Although Aquinas unites great-spiritedness and the virtues of humility, gratitude, and charity, I argue that magnanimity’s inner causal structure, in Aquinas’s thought, imitates more closely that of the theological virtue of hope. If humility is magnanimity’s spouse, hope is its twin sister. Several authors have connected magnanimity and theological hope. Gauthier, while drawing contrasts between them, does not neglect to acknowledge their “kinship.”137 Josef Pieper understands magnanimity as a “natural hope” contrasted with the “supernatural hope” of the theological virtue.138 More recently, like Pieper, Pinches sees magnanimity as a natural hope that has been vivified by theological hope.139 For him, these two virtues “intertwine” as part of a “nexus” of “finely laced” virtues.140 A ST I-II, q. 65, a. 1. Keys, “Aquinas and the Challenge of Aristotelian Magnanimity,” 58. 137 Gauthier, Magnanimité, 344. 138 Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), 189–92; Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 101–3, 108–11, 118–19, 122, 127. 139 Pinches, “On Hope,” 357. 140 Pinches, “On Hope,” 356. 135 136 846 Nicholas Austin, S.J. sign of their close connection is that they both are opposed to a vice named “presumption.”141 These suggestive remarks fall short of an accurate exploration of the relation of hope and magnanimity. The parallelism Pieper and Pinches allegedly find between “natural” magnanimity and “supernatural” hope is awkward, as there is no reason why magnanimity, like the other moral virtues, cannot be infused. Moreover, Pinches glosses over the fact that, for Aquinas, the presumption opposed to theological hope differs in species from that contrary to magnanimity.142 A closer scrutiny of the analogy and disanalogy between these kindred virtues is needed. The textual evidence, it turns out, it conflicting. Convergence or Divergence? Every hope has a twofold object: the good or end for which someone hopes (final cause), and the means by which someone hopes to attain this good (efficient cause). We hope for some good while hoping in some person, whether ourselves or another. David Elliot explains in his recent monograph that the theological virtue of hope is similarly defined by its twofold object: God as the source of eternal beatitude (final cause), and God as aiding the attainment of this good (efficient cause).143 As Aquinas says, “the hope of attaining eternal life has two objects, namely, eternal life itself (what someone hopes) and divine help (that by which someone hopes).”144 In Pieper’s gloss on Cajetan, the one hoping hopes for God from God, sperans sperat Deum a Deo.145 The dual object of theological hope provides a helpful point of comparison with magnanimity. Texts from the discussion of the virtue of hope in ST (II-II, q. 17) Pinches refers to “this same vice (with a different object)” (“On Hope,” 356). ST II-II, q. 1, a. 1, resp. Pace Pinches, a difference of object implies diversity of vices. 143 David Elliot, Hope and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 63–65. 144 Thomas Aquinas, De virtutibus, q. 4, a. 1, resp.: “Et ideo spes adipiscendi vitam aeternam habet duo obiecta, scilicet ipsam vitam aeternam, quam quis sperat, et auxilium divinum, a quo sperat” (italics added in English). 145 Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 103. While not an exact quotation of Cajetan, Pieper’s gloss is a faithful reflection; see Cajetan, Commentary on ST II-II, q. 17, a. 5, no. 27 (Leonine ed., 8:130a): “Just as the one hoping hopes immediately by God, so he hopes for God immediately as the end, such that that by which he hopes and what he hopes for are the same [Quemadmodum igitur sperans a Deo immediate sperat, ita Deum sibi immediate sperat ut finem, ut sic aequa sint a quo et quod speratur]” (italics added). For Cajetan, then, God is both what one hopes for and that by which one hopes. 141 142 Aquinas and Cajetan on Magnanimity 847 suggest that, while magnanimity and theological hope are both forms of virtuous hope, they differ in regard to both that for which they hope and the one in whom they hope: Magnanimity tends to the arduous, hoping for something that is of one’s own power. Whence it properly regards the operation of certain great things. But hope, as it is a theological virtue, regards the arduous to be attained by another’s help.146 The final causes of the two virtues diverge, then, since magnanimity aims at a goal attainable by one’s own power, whereas theological hope’s goal— God as the source of eternal beatitude—is attained only by God’s help, auxilium. Moreover, the efficient causes are distinct. Magnanimous hope trusts in the agent’s own power, whereas theological hope leans (innitur) on the divine help.147 The same contrast recurs in discussion of the vice of presumption: magnanimity involves confidence derived from the agent’s own power (de propria virtute), whereas theological hope clings to the divine power (inhaeret divinae potentia).148 By theological hope, someone trusts in God; by magnanimity, she trusts in herself.149 Here, the twofold disparity of object for magnanimous and theological hope could not appear more stark. However, when we reach the question on magnanimity (q. 129), Aquinas subverts the apparent contrast between magnanimity’s self-trust and theological hope’s trust in God. While considering whether confidence belongs to magnanimity, Aquinas raises an Aristotelian objection: one may have confidence not only in oneself but also in another, such as God, whereas magnanimity needs the help of no one.150 Aquinas’s reply tries to save Aristotle’s text, but stretches it to breaking point: As the Philosopher says, it belongs to the magnanimous one “to need nothing,” for need belongs to a deficient one. However, this [needing nothing] must be understood in a human way, hence he adds, “or scarcely anything.” For, it is above a human being to ST II-II, q. 17, a. 5, ad 4: “Magnanimitas tendit in arduum sperans aliquid quod est suae potestatis. Unde proprie respicit operationem aliquorum magnorum. Sed spes, secundum quod est virtus theologica, respicit arduum alterius auxilio assequendum, ut dictum est.” 147 ST II-II, q. 17, a. 1. 148 ST II-II, q. 21, a. 1, resp. 149 See Gauthier, Magnanimité, 339. 150 ST II-II, q. 129, a. 6, obj. 1. 146 848 Nicholas Austin, S.J. need nothing entirely. For every human being needs, in the very first place, divine help, but secondarily even human help, because a human being is a naturally social animal, since he does not suffice of himself for life. Therefore, insofar as he requires others, thus it belongs to the magnanimous one to have confidence deriving from others, because this also belongs to the excellence of a human being, that he has others at hand who can help him.151 Employing a theological anthropology of grace, as well as the Philosopher’s understanding of the human as naturally social, Aquinas exploits Aristotle’s concession that the magnanimous one needs nothing “or scarcely anything.” While Aquinas’s magnanimous person is not a needy kind of fellow, he does place confidence in others and God, on whom he rightly depends. In his midrash on Aristotle’s text, the influence of the perspective of theological hope on Aquinas’s conception of magnanimity emerges strongly. The viewpoint of theological hope is one of confident dependence on friendship, especially the friendship possible with God through charity: “With the advent of charity, hope is rendered more perfect, since we hope especially in our friends.”152 A magnanimity increasingly modeled on theological hope transforms Aristotle’s self-sufficient magnanimous one into a cooperative agent who pursues a difficult and great good through the help of others. The note of magnanimity’s trust in God’s help sounds again in Aquinas’s discussion of the vice of pusillanimity (q. 133). Aquinas refers to Moses and Jeremiah, who, when called by God to their respective prophetic offices, nevertheless humbly declined: ST II-II, q. 129, a. 6, ad 1: “Sicut philosophus dicit, in Ethic. IV, ad magnanimum pertinet nullo indigere, quia hoc deficientis est, hoc tamen debet intelligi secundum modum humanum; unde addit, vel vix. Hoc enim est supra hominem, ut omnino nullo indigeat. Indiget enim omnis homo, primo quidem, divino auxilio, secundario autem etiam auxilio humano, quia homo est naturaliter animal sociale, eo quod sibi non sufficit ad vitam. Inquantum ergo indiget aliis, sic ad magnanimum pertinet ut habeat fiduciam de aliis, quia hoc etiam ad excellentiam hominis pertinet, quod habeat alios in promptu qui eum possint iuvare. Inquantum autem ipse aliquid potest, intantum ad magnanimitatem pertinet fiducia quam habet de seipso.” 152 ST II-II, q. 17, a. 8, resp.: “Adveniente caritate, spes perfectior redditur, quia de amicis maxime speramus.” 151 Aquinas and Cajetan on Magnanimity 849 By divine grace, Moses and Jeremiah were fit for the office to which they were divinely elected. Considering the insufficiency arising from their own infirmity, they declined, but not obstinately, lest they lapse into pride.153 Christian magnanimity is implicit here as the vocational virtue opposed to the prideful refusal of God’s call. The altitude to which God calls a person gives rise to a vertiginous queasiness.154 The humble awareness of one’s own limitations may therefore slide into stubborn resistance to vocation that paradoxically blends pusillanimity with pride.155 The corrective to such small-heartedness is a magnanimous confidence in God: Moses and Jeremiah were fit for their high office “by divine grace.” Thus, what risked being prideful and pusillanimous refusal of the call gives way to a magnanimous acceptance of office by trust in God’s help. Importantly, this virtuous dependence on God and others does not undermine the magnanimous one’s agency. Aquinas advocates a concurrentist theology of divine–human cooperation.156 Grace and freewill do not compete in a zero-sum game. Doing something by God’s help and doing it oneself are not mutually exclusive options: one acts well precisely through God’s help. Aquinas explains, in his discussion of the vice of presumption (q. 130): As the Philosopher says in [Nicomachean] Ethics III, “what we can do through others, we can in some way do by ourselves.” Therefore, because we can think and do good with divine help, this does not totally exceed our own capacity. Thus, it is not presumptuous if someone intends to do some virtuous work. It would be presumptuous if someone were to aim at this without confidence in divine help.157 ST II-II, q. 133, a. 1, ad 4: “Moyses et Ieremias digni erant officio ad quod divinitus eligebantur, ex divina gratia. Sed ipsi considerantes propriae infirmitatis insufficientiam, recusabant, non tamen pertinaciter, ne in superbiam laberentur.” 154 Pieper refers to acedia as “a lack of magnanimity”: “It lacks courage for the great things that are proper to the nature of the Christian. It is a kind of anxious vertigo that befalls the human individual when he becomes aware of the height to which God has raised him” (Faith, Hope, Love, 119). 155 ST II-II, q. 133, a. 1, ad 3. 156 ST I, q. 105, a. 5, ad 1. 157 ST II-II, q. 130, a. 1, ad 3: “Sicut philosophus dicit, in III Ethic., quae per alios possumus, aliqualiter per nos possumus. Et ideo, quia cogitare et facere bonum possumus cum auxilio divino, non totaliter hoc excedit facultatem nostram. Et 153 850 Nicholas Austin, S.J. This is decisive evidence that, despite some earlier texts to the contrary, Aquinas does not attribute pure self-reliance to the great-hearted. Presumption is a vice opposed to magnanimity. Since it would be presumptuous to aim to do a virtuous work without confidence in divine help, the magnanimous one, who aims at great virtuous works, must place confidence in God as well as self. Aquinas’s earlier Commentary on the Sentences supports the interpretation that the perspective of theological hope fashions magnanimity anew, making confidence in God’s help integral to the virtue. Aquinas considers whether hope is the same as magnanimity.158 The reply distinguishes, but only to unite: Magnanimity more closely approaches to hope than the virtues mentioned [namely, longanimity and patience]: for, it exists when there is a stretching of the appetite to some arduous good to be attained, and so concerns hope the passion. . . . Nevertheless, magnanimity is not the same as hope the virtue: for, it concerns the arduous that lies in the human affairs, not the arduous that is God. Hence, it is a moral, not a theological virtue, although it is a participant in hope.159 While Aquinas closely relates magnanimity and theological hope, he distinguishes them on the basis of their final cause. Magnanimity is an active hope for attaining an arduous good within the bounds of earthly or human concerns (res humana) rather than being a hope for God as the highest good and beatitude. Yet the resemblance between magnanimity and hope in this passage goes further than the mere similarity between the passion of hope and theological hope: magnanimity is a participant in theological hope (participans aliquid a spe). Magnanimity participates in theological hope because it hopes in ideo non est praesumptuosum si aliquis ad aliquod opus virtuosum faciendum intendat. Esset autem praesumptuosum si ad hoc aliquis tenderet absque fiducia divini auxilii.” 158 In II sent., d. 26, q. 2, a. 2, obj. 4. 159 In III sent., d. 26, q. 2, a. 2, ad 4: “Magnanimitas magis accedit ad spem quam aliqua dictarum virtutum: quia est secundum extensionem appetitus in aliquod bonum arduum obtinendum; et ideo circa spem passionem versatur, et ejus opposita. . . . Sed tamen magnanimitas non est idem quod spes virtus: quia est circa arduum quod consistit in rebus humanis, non circa arduum quod est Deus; unde non est virtus theologica, sed moralis, participans aliquid a spe.” Aquinas and Cajetan on Magnanimity 851 divine help to attain its arduous and great good.160 Indeed, magnanimity aims at something great “by considering the divine help, or the divine gift, whether gratuitous or natural.”161 This is a theologizing of magnanimity: magnanimity sets its aim high because, like theological hope, it relies on help from God. While the final causes of hope and magnanimity differ, they share the same efficient cause. The Carmelites of Salamanca express this theocentric magnanimity well: Magnanimity takes it motive and rule of operating from what is of God in us: for the magnanimous one, seeing in himself great gifts of God, or at least great helps promised to him, derives thence the motive and rule of doing great things, not succumbing to their arduousness, as he knows they do not exceed the said gifts or helps. When he does great things, he thinks himself fit for great honor not because of himself, but because of what he receives from God.162 Far from being a virtue of pride-filled self-sufficiency, magnanimity is a cooperative virtue. The tuning fork for her animus is her self-image as someone gifted and helped by God. Magnanimity hopes to do a great work by confidence in the self ’s bestowed goodness, the friendship of others, and in the first place, the help of God. Aquinas’s magnanimity imitates its big sister, theological hope. A Definition of Magnanimity It is finally possible to offer something approaching a formal definition of magnanimity, based upon the Cajetan-influenced reading of Aquinas presented above. The definition of magnanimity identifies its different “causal” elements: (1) personal subject, (2) mode, (3), subjective matter, (4) objective matter, (5) object, (6) efficient cause, and (7) exemplar. Aquinas has just explained that patience and longanimity both participate in hope, since patience hopes for divine help in dangers and longanimity hopes for divine help when laboring in some difficult enterprise (In III sent., d. 26, q. 2, a. 2, ad 3). 161 In III sent., d. 33, q. 2, a. 1, ac. 4, ad 3: “. . . ex consideratione divini auxilii, vel divini doni, vel gratuiti vel naturalis.” 162 Salmanticenses, Arbor Praedicamentalis, no. 141: “Magnanimitas sumit motivum et regulam operandi ab eo, quod est Dei in nobis: videns enim in se magnanimus magna Dei dona, aut saltem magna auxilia sibi promissa, sumit inde motivum et regulam operandi magna, eorum arduitatis non succumbens, quia scit non superexcedere praedicta dona vel auxilia: dumque magna agit, reputat se, non propter se, sed propter illa quae ex Deo accepit, magno honore” (italics added in English). 160 852 Nicholas Austin, S.J. Magnanimity is a habitus of (1) a morally virtuous person that (2) drives and stretches, in proportion to the goodness and capacity of the agent, (3) the animus in exercising (4) a passionate and committed hope (5a) toward great works of virtue (and thereby obliquely to great honor and glory), and (5b) directly to great honor and glory as testimony and therefore means to great virtue, a hope that is (6) strengthened by awareness of and confidence in the gifts of soul and helps given by God, (7) and exemplified in those who rise to God’s call. All this is an elaboration of Aquinas’s marvelously compressed definition, quaedam extensio animi ad magna. I have never been convinced by the oft-repeated claim that, for Aquinas, there can be no natural or moral virtue of hope.163 If theological hope aims at eternal beatitude with God, why could there not be an earthly virtue of hope that aims at more proximate goods? The arguments against this view are not convincing.164 While “hope” often refers to a passion, there is no reason why it could not also refer to the habitus that disposes to the right ordering of this passion and the actions flowing therefrom. Moreover, while there is always uncertainty in the attainment of a hoped-for outcome, such a virtue’s formal object need not share in this contingency if the virtue’s immediate target is morally virtuous agency. (The medic risking her life in war-torn Syria is no less brave or magnanimous for failing, due to circumstances beyond her control, to save an injured child’s life.) Finally, while hope in general is too broad to serve as the specific domain or matter of a moral virtue, the specific hope to perform great virtuous actions is not, as Cajetan shows. While Aquinas does not use the term “hope” to name a moral virtue, the argument of this paper has been that he certainly does advocate a moral virtue of hope, namely, magnanimity, which is, at core, nothing other than a spirited drive toward ethically excelN&V lent agency: a moral hope. Christopher A. Bobier, “Why Hope Is Not a Moral Virtue: Aquinas’s Insight,” Ratio 31, no. 2 (2018): 214–32; Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 99–101; Pinches, “On Hope,” 349; Mary Michael Glenn, “A Comparison of the Thomistic and Scotistic Concepts of Hope,” The Thomist 20, no. 1 (1957): 32. 164 For a sensible acknowledgement of the possibility of a Thomistic natural virtue of hope, see Aaron D. Cobb and Adam Green, “The Theological Virtue of Hope as a Social Virtue,” Journal of Analytic Theology 5, no. 1 (2017): 231n4. 163 Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2020): 853–873 853 Aquinas the Voluntarist? An Investigation of the Claims of James Keenan, S.J. Ryan J. Brady St. John Vianney College Seminary Miami, FL Daniel Westberg observes that “one of the most fundamental and challenging problems in the interpretation of St. Thomas is the proper relationship of intellect and will, on which so much of moral theology (and thus of the Summa Theologiae) hinges.”1 Indeed, one’s theology is radically dependent upon such fundamental philosophical principles. Rightly, then, Aquinas argues that the theologian must be concerned with all of the effects of God—even on the level of nature.2 Because being is God’s proper effect,3 the relationship between being and the good (and, by extension, between the intellect and the will4) is a foundational consideration even for the theologian. Actually, the question of the relationship between cognition and volition in particular has far reaching implications for understanding the ideals of the moral life. For Thomas, the fact that “having reason is that which makes man to be a man” means “it is necessary that the good of man be to exist in accordance with reason.”5 It is, therefore, so foundational that one cannot be virtuous unless he live in accordance with it.6 In other Daniel Westberg, “Did Aquinas Change His Mind About the Will?,” The Thomist 58, no. 1 (1994): 41–60, at 41. 2 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae [ST] I, q. 1, a. 7, ad 1. 3 See, ST I, q. 8, a. 1, corp.; q. 45, a. 5 corp. 4 Being is the “proper object of the intellect” (ST I q. 5 a. 2 c.) whereas “good is the proper object of the will” (De potentia, q. 3, a. 15, ad 5). 5 De virtutibus, q. 1, a. 13, corp.: “Nam cum homo sit homo per hoc quod rationem habet, oportet quod bonum hominis sit secundum rationem esse” (all translations in the present article are my own. 6 Whereas the intellectual virtues are in the intellective part and are, therefore, 1 854 Ryan J. Brady words, reason—and the activity of reasoning accurately about reality—is necessary for goodness. For authors such as James Keenan, however, the will’s movement is “independent of and prior to reason”7 so one is able to be good and virtuous apart from any consideration of rightness because “goodness and rightness describe two different realities.”8 Keenan arises at the conclusions he does partially because he follows the thesis of Odon Lottin that the condemnation of intellectual determinism in the year 1270 led Aquinas to revise his teaching “in order to eradicate from it any idea of the will’s being passive with regard to the intellect.”9 Although Keenan was certainly not the first to make this voluntarist thesis his own,10 he is probably the most influential and prolific11 contemporary author to draw attention to it.12 In fact, he was so captivated by the theory necessarily connected with reason, the moral virtues are those which observe the mean that is defined by reason (see ST I-II, q. 64, a. 1, corp.). 7 James F. Keenan, Goodness and Rightness in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1992), 47. 8 Keenan, Goodness and Rightness, 182. See also 38, 49, and 173, where Keenan argues “the defect in rightness does not affect the description of goodness.” 9 This concise summary of Lottin’s position is from Rosemary Zita Lauer, “St. Thomas’s Theory of Intellectual Causality in Election,” The New Scholasticism 28 (1954): 301. See: Dom Odon Lottin, Psychologie et morale aux XIIe et XIIIe siecles, vol. 1, Problèmes de psychologie (Louvain: Abbaye du Mont-César, 1942), 222; Lottin, “La preuve de la liberté humaine chez Thomas d’Aquin,” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 23 (1956): 323–30; Lottin, Princepes de Morale (Louvain: Abbaye du Mont-César, 1946), 262; Lottin, Morale Fondamentale (Tournai, BE: 1954), 50–51; Lottin, “La date de la question dispute De malo de saint Thomas d’Aquin,” Revue d’histoire ecclesiastique 24 (1928): 373–88. Finally, for Keenan’s explanation of Lottin’s theory, see his A History of Catholic Moral Theology in the Twentieth Century: From Confessing Sins to Liberating Consciences (New York: Continuum, 2010), 39–41. 10 Westberg provides a good overview of the history behind this theory in “Did Aquinas Change His Mind About the Will?” See also The Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 1, Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 96. 11 In October of 2017, Keenan co-organized (with Cardinal Cupich) an event discussing the implementation of Amoris Laetitia—which exhortation he wrote about in “Receiving Amoris,” Theological Studies 78, no. 1 (2017): 193–212. He also wrote an influential article in Theological Studies (2015, Vol. 76 (1) 129–147) called “Redeeming Conscience.” For a brief explanation of the import of Keenan’s relatively recent thought, see Richard A. Spinello, “Debate Continues over Amoris Laetitia,” Crisis Magazine, May 25, 2017, crisismagazine.com/2017/ debate-over-amoris-laetitia. 12 Actually, he seems to adhere to it with even greater tenacity than Lottin himself did. As Kevin Flannery, S.J, argues, Lottin actually seemed to be rather uncon- Aquinas the Voluntarist? 855 that it became a central aspect of his dissertation (which was published in 1992 as Goodness and Rightness in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae)13 and a foundation of all of his work.14 With these facts in mind, his name has found its way even into the title of this chapter even though, in the final analysis, our primary endeavor is simply to discern what Saint Thomas’s understanding was of the relationship between the intellect and the will in moral matters and whether or not he had any significant developments in this regard. Before we engage some of the relevant texts from the Thomistic corpus, it may prove fruitful to explore the reasons Keenan was predisposed to embrace the thesis that Thomas ultimately espoused the Franciscan formule volontariste.15 To begin with, it is especially noteworthy that the situation ethicist Joseph Fuchs (who rightly has been said to have accepted “a modern voluntarist view of practical reasoning”)16 had a strong influence on Keenan. Having heard many positive things about Fuchs during his studies at Weston Jesuit School of Theology, Keenan went to Rome to study under his tutelage. He subsequently decided to write his dissertation under him as well.17 Keenan points out how ironic it was that even though the Vatican would not allow Fuchs to teach future priests, he was allowed to teach future moral theologians such as himself.18 This vinced of the veracity of his own position (Flannery, Acts Amid Precepts: The Aristotelian Logical Structure of Thomas Aquinas’s Moral Theory [Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001], 115). Flannery demonstrates that either Lottin was rather unconvinced of the veracity of his own position or it was at least frequently in a state of flux. As he says, “Lottin’s various disclaimers ensure that his position itself will always defy falsification, with the natural consequence that it also lacks a clear sense” (Acts Amid Precepts, 115). For this reason as well, Keenan’s relatively consistent explication of the theory provides a more fitting foil for my own position. 13 See Keenan, History of Catholic Moral Theology in the Twentieth Century, 40–41 and note 29. 14 The third chapter of Keenan’s History of Catholic Moral Theology in the Twentieth Century (35–58) is dedicated to Lottin. 15 See Lottin, Psychologie et morale aux XIIe et XIIIe siecles, 1:222, and Lauer, “St. Thomas’s Theory,” 299–300. 16 See Michael S. Sherwin, O.P., By Knowledge and By Love: Charity and Knowledge in the Moral Theology of Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 10. 17 See Keenan’s introduction to Mark Graham’s Josef Fuchs on Natural Law (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002), ix–xi. 18 Keenan, introduction to Graham, Josef Fuchs on Natural Law, xii. Perhaps Fuchs’s influence on moral theologians explains why, during the time of Keenan’s studies in Rome, eight of the nine Jesuits at Keenan’s residence who refused to obey the 856 Ryan J. Brady permission enabled Fuchs—who appropriated Karl Rahner’s emphasis on human subjectivity and transcendence by coining concepts such as “basic freedom” and “fundamental option”19 —to significantly influence not only the future of moral theology but also the thought of his prolific protégé.20 It is likely that Keenan’s interest in Lottin’s theory is partially a consequence of his affection for his mentor combined with the desire to exonerate him and other thinkers whom Michael Sherwin labels “theologians of moral motivation.”21 Indeed if Lottin was correct that the later Thomas was a voluntarist of sorts who attributed both final and efficient causality to the will,22 Keenan may be justified in his efforts to maintain that the Angelic Doctor ultimately developed “a theology of moral motivation similar to the one advanced by Fuchs and his disciples.”23 Understandably, then, Keenan strove to build upon Lottin’s thesis by positing the existence “of the distinction between goodness and rightness”24 in the later writings of Aquinas in addition to assertions to the effect that “antecedent willingness” necessarily precedes the reason25 in a kind of precognitive motion toward the good. Regardless of what his motivations may or may not have been, Keenan’s claim is clear: during Aquinas’s second Parisian regency, “precisely while writing De malo 6 and question nine of the Prima secundae,” Thomas “develop[ed] a new position concerning the will’s autonomy.”26 Since Keenan considers this autonomy to be “a necessary condition for under- Pope and wear clericals were moralists. Fuchs himself attributes these concepts and terms to Rahner (Josef Fuchs, “Good Acts and Good Persons,” in John Paul II and Moral Theology: Readings in Moral Theology No. 10, edited by Charles E. Curran and Richard A. McCormick, S.J. [New York: Paulist Press, 1998], 47; cited in Sherwin, By Knowledge and By Love, 6). 20 Keenan, introduction to Graham, Josef Fuchs on Natural Law, x. 21 Sherwin, By Knowledge and By Love, xix. 22 Lottin, Psychologie et morale, 1:222: “It is therefore the will that will simultaneously play both the role of efficient cause and that of final cause; and to reason will be ascribed the role of formal cause.” 23 See Sherwin, By Knowledge and By Love, 11. 24 Keenan, Goodness and Rightness, 34. 25 Keenan, Goodness and Rightness, 50. On 7, he argues that “in contemporary moral theology, goodness is not consequent to rightness, but antecedent to and distinct from rightness.” He repeats this assertion on 15, adding, “goodness describes striving and is antecedent to rightness.” For him, “insofar as the will first exercises itself, it is not moved by an object” (43). 26 Keenan, Goodness and Rightness, 9. 19 Aquinas the Voluntarist? 857 standing moral goodness,”27 Thomas’s “reversal”28 is key. We will be considering the arguments he provides in defense of this “reversal” throughout the present article, but one of the more salient ones merits mention here. Keenan observes that neither De malo, q. 6, nor ST I-II, q. 9, (both written ca. 1270) repeat the assertion of De Veritate (1256–125929) that “the will is a passive power”30 even though they are treating the same subject matter. Keenan, who obviously separates himself from this idea since he thinks the first exercise of the will is always prior to any intellectual specification,31 maintains that the earlier Thomas was led astray regarding the will’s passivity precisely because of the notion that the intellect is a final cause. For Keenan, “if reason is the final cause . . . the will is a passive power, and reason alone explains freedom.”32 There are, then, two primary questions that arise. (1) Did Thomas initially maintain and subsequently abandon a teaching that the will is passive? (2) Did he ultimately abandon his teaching pertaining to the reason’s or intellect’s33 final causality in order to make Keenan, Goodness and Rightness, ix–x. “The arguments in the Prima secundae constitute a reversal of Thomas’s earlier position on the will” (Keenan, Goodness and Rightness, 41). 29 Dated by Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P. to 1256–1259; see Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, The Person and His Work, rev. ed., trans. Robert Royal (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 62. 30 De veritate, q. 22, a. 12, obj. 3 (“the will is a passive power”) and ad 3: “the intellect moves by way of an end [per modum finis]; for it is in this way that the intellect is related to the apprehended good and the will.” Lauer says, “St. Thomas does not deny the minor proposition that the voluntas est potentia passiva” (“St. Thomas’s Theory,” 307). She initially considers the possibility that Lottin could have been correct that “assigning a role of final causality to the intellect would make it impossible to call the will an active power,” however, she ends up demonstrating that “St. Thomas does not consider a final causality on the part of the intellect as detrimental to the will’s active nature” (314). 31 See Keenan, Goodness and Rightness, 47: “As first mover, the will’s movement is independent of and prior to reason’s presentation of the object.” On 148 and elsewhere, he speaks of exercise as preceding specification. This is because Keenan believes that “formal interior acts” are “antecedent to questions concerning specification” (142). 32 Keenan, Goodness and Rightness, 29. Two pages later, he says something similar: “Thomas’s premise that the will is a passive power is a[n] . . . effect that results from the identification of the presented object with final causality.” 33 Although the reason and intellect are distinguished because the intellect pertains to simple apprehension and the reason to a dialectical process of ratiocination, they are often spoken of as synonymous. Aquinas does so by saying, “reason or intellect” in many places (e.g., ST I, q. 21, a. 2, ad 1; I-II, q. 13, a. 1, corp.; I-II, q. 62, a. 3, corp.). See also, In I eth., lec. 1, no. 8, and ST I-II, q. 58, a. 3, corp. 27 28 858 Ryan J. Brady room for some kind of autonomy of the will?34 When we evaluate Thomas’s statements about the relationship of the intellect and will before and after the supposedly “significant shift”35 in Aquinas’ thought, it will serve us well to have these two questions in mind. Before doing so, however, we will consider whether such a shift would even be conceivable. Could Thomas Have Radically Changed His Mind? Though those who know Aquinas’ writings well would rightly be reticent to concur with a claim that he would reverse his position, it is at least conceivable that he would do so in obedience to ecclesiastical authority. It is true that Thomas maintains that “the argument based upon authority” is weakest when it is merely “based upon human reason,” but he insists that this kind of argument is strongest when it is based upon revealed principles,36 and it is certainly possible to view ecclesiastical censures in this way. It even seems likely Thomas would have viewed them in this way because despite his somewhat nuanced position on this point, it is clear he thought the “precepts of a prelate” could be “considered as precepts of God” in regard to certain particular judgments.37 Even if a significant shift would have been a possibility, however, one might rightly ask whether the condemnations would have been particular enough to cause Thomas to re-evaluate his thinking. In other words, were the Parisian condemnations of 1270 written in such a way that they could lead to a transition away from an Aristotelian mindset that some consider to be intellectually deterministic and toward a more radically voluntaristic notion of freedom38—or not? To answer this, we should consider that these condemnations were essen- See Keenan, Goodness and Rightness, 44: “By designating reason’s presentation of the object as the formal cause of the specific act of the will, Thomas has an argument to support his assertions that the will is autonomous.” Similarly, he argues that, if we were to “describe the causal effect of reason’s presentation of the object as final, we [would] ultimately preclude the will’s accountability” (28). 35 Keenan, Goodness and Rightness, 41. 36 See, ST q. 1, a. 8, ad 2. 37 See ST II-II, q. 104, a. 5, ad 2, and I-II, q. 104, a. 5 obj. 2 and ad 2. Although Thomas grants in this latter article that an inferior need not obey a superior if the latter’s power does not extend to a certain particular, he affirms the authority of prelates in general. Thus in the third reply, he says one who perfectly obeys does so in all lawful things. He also speaks of the need for spiritual prelates to make determinations in matters pertaining to the common good in I-II, q. 108, a. 2. 38 Denis J. M. Bradley, “Reason and the Natural Law: Flannery’s Reconstruction of Aquinas’s Moral Theory,” The Thomist 67 (2003): 123–24. 34 Aquinas the Voluntarist? 859 tially directed against four particular ideas promoted by the so-called39 Averroists. Jean-Pierre Torrell lists them as follows: “the eternity of the world, the denial of God’s universal providence, unicity of the intellectual soul for all men (or monopsychism), and determinism.”40 It is this last error that concerns us. Keenan adverts our attention to the relevant theses condemned by Bishop Stephen Tempier by saying: Two of the condemned theses concern the will: (1) that the will is a passive power and not an active one, and (2) that the will necessarily wishes what it chooses. These theses are explicitly critiqued in Thomas’s De malo 6. The title of De malo 6 echoes one thesis and an objection echoes another. 41 If Aquinas had, in fact, meant to imply in his earlier writings that the will is entirely and unqualifiedly passive and that the will is “necessarily moved by the desirable object,”42 he may well have been forced to alter his position. To determine whether he would have held these positions, however, we need to peruse the texts. We will begin with those written prior to 1270 and subsequently evaluate what changes may or may not have occurred. The Will Prior to 1270 The early Aquinas certainly tended to strongly emphasize the dependence of the will upon the reason. Indeed, in the years prior to the purported shift, he considers the will to be the appetite which follows the intellect43 For some sources indicating Averroes himself was not an Averroist and that this is a false predication, see Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1:192–94. 40 Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1:336. 41 Keenan (Goodness and Rightness, 40) links “Whether man has free choice over his actions, or chooses from necessity, with the third condemned thesis, which asserted that “man’s will wills or chooses out of necessity.” He also links De malo, q. 6, obj 7 (“The will is a passive power and to will is to undergo; . . . therefore, it seems that the will is moved out of necessity by the desirable object”) with the ninth condemned thesis asserting that “free will [liberum arbitrium] is a passive power, not an active one; and that it is moved out of necessity from the desirable object.” For the condemnations in Latin, see H. Denifle and A. Chatelain, Chartularium universitatis parisiensis, vol. 1 (Paris: Frairs Delalain, 1889), 486–87. Interestingly, in one manuscript, the words “not an active one” (non activa) do not appear (see Flannery, Acts amid Precepts, 112n1). 42 This is a better translation of “necessitate movetur ab appetibili” than Keenan’s “necessarily wishes what it chooses.” 43 Aquinas, Compendium theologiae I, ch. 1 (ca. 1267; see Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1:164–65). 39 860 Ryan J. Brady because the act of the rational appetite that is known as the will is “nothing other than a certain inclination following an understood form.”44 In the commentary on the Sentences of Lombard (known as the Scriptum and dated to 1255–1266 by Torrell45), Aquinas speaks to the way this occurs in regard to foundational principles of action. Presupposing a distinction between liberum arbitrium (“free judgment” or “free will,” which is indifferently related to choosing well or badly46) and the voluntas ut natura (“will as nature” or “simple will,” i.e., the voluntas inasmuch as it is inclined toward something for its own sake47), he says: The will as nature . . . follows the judgment of the reason because there is something in the reason that is naturally known as an indemonstrable principle in practical matters which is related [to the will as nature] in the manner of an end—because in practical matters, the end holds the place of the beginning. Accordingly, that which is the end of man is naturally known in the reason to be good and desired and the will that follows this is called the will as nature. 48 In other words, the will as nature follows the natural reason / reason as nature49 when it proposes an end that is known to be good and desired ST I, q. 87, a. 4, corp. (pre-1270): “Actus voluntatis nihil aliud est, quam inclinatio quaedam consequens formam intellectam” (emphasis added). Powers, of course, are distinguished by their acts (and objects) as ST I, q. 77, a. 3, makes clear. 45 See Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1:328. 46 See In II sent., d. 24, q. 1, a. 1, corp.: “Free will [liberum arbitrium], though, is related to the act of choice as that by which a certain act is sometimes good, sometimes bad, and sometimes indifferent. Accordingly, it does not seem to designate some kind of habit if habit is taken properly. Instead [it designates] that power whose act is properly to choose” (dated to 1255–1266 by Torrell [Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1:328]). Also see two other pre-1270 texts in ST: I, q. 19, a. 8, sc; I, q. 83, a. 2, corp. 47 See: In III sent., d. 17, q. 1, a. 1, qc. 3, ad 1; ST III q. 18, a. 3, corp.; and John Damascene’s On the Orthodox Faith 2.22 and 3.14–18. 48 In II sent., d. 39, q. 2, a. 2, ad 2: “voluntas ut . . . natura . . . sequitur judicium rationis: quia in ratione est aliquid naturaliter cognitum quasi principium indemonstrabile in operabilibus, quod se habet per modum finis, quia in operabilibus finis habet locum principii, ut in 6 Ethic. dicitur. Unde illud quod finis est hominis, est naturaliter in ratione cognitum esse bonum et appetendum, et voluntas consequens istam cognitionem dicitur voluntas ut natura.” 49 Martin Rhonheimer rightly equates “natural reason” and “reason as nature” in “Nature as Reason: A Thomistic Theory of Natural Law,” Studies in Christian Ethics 19, no. 3 (2006): 357–78, at 361. “Reason as nature” refers to reason 44 Aquinas the Voluntarist? 861 (appetendum) for its own sake. Moreover, since in practical affairs, the “end holds the place of the beginning,” an end of this sort will necessarily be a principle of action. Worded differently, it will be related to the rational appetite per modum finis or “in the manner of an end.”50 Speaking of the will in general, Thomas’s teaching at this time was that the “good, which is the end,” is the object of the will. 51 As a consequence, the end has such a strong influence upon it that the will is “principally described” by that which “has the ratio of the good by its very essence (per se),” namely, the end.52 The moment an unmitigated good is intellectually apprehended as such, the will goes after it as an end. Something that may potentially be desired for the sake of the end (i.e., as a means), however, has to participate in this ratio in virtue of the reason—which alone is capable of ordering the will toward the end as an object of pursuit.53 Rosemary Lauer perceptively explains Thomas’s teaching at this time by saying he thought of the intellect as moving the will “mediately through the object, insofar as it is because of the ordering intellect that the object is understood to partake of the nature of the will’s end.”54 In other words, the intellect moves the will, but only by pointing in some way to the end it is naturally ordered toward. In the Summa contra gentiles [SCG] (ca. 1259–126555), this moving property of the intellect is described in a way that complements this understanding while providing further detail: First and per se, the intellect moves the will because the will, as such, is moved by its object, which is the apprehended good. For the will moves the intellect per accidens inasmuch as the act of understanding is apprehended as a good and is thus desired by the will, from which it follows that the intellect understands in act. And in this [act of understanding] itself, the intellect precedes the will: for “inasmuch as it knows something naturally” without dialectical reasoning. See De Veritate, q. 16 a. 1 c. It is a natural habit also known as natural reason or synderesis (see II-II, q. 47 a. 6 ad 1). 50 In II sent., d. 39, q. 2, a. 2, ad 2. 51 De ver., q. 22, a. 13, corp.: “bonum, quod est finis . . . est obiectum voluntatis.” Similarly, the sed contra refers to this object as “the good and the end” (“bonum et finis est obiectum voluntatis”). 52 In II sent., d. 24, q. 1, a. 3, ad 3: “Each power is defined from that which is its per se object—and formally. Since, however, the object of the will is the good, it is for this reason described from the end because it is related per se to the notion of the good.” 53 See In II sent., d. 24, q. 1, a. 3, ad 3. 54 Lauer, “St. Thomas’s Theory,” 305. 55 See Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1:96–117. 862 Ryan J. Brady the will would never desire to understand unless the intellect first apprehended understanding itself as a good. And again, the will moves the intellect for doing things in act in the way an agent is said to move. The intellect, however, moves the will in the way an end moves because the good understood is the end of the will; the agent, however, comes later in moving than the end because the agent does not move except on account of the end. For this reason, it is apparent that the intellect is simply higher than the will.56 At least at this point in time, then, Keenan is certainly correct that St. Thomas was far from thinking of the will in terms of autonomy. He also would have unequivocally rejected the idea that the first exercise of the will is always prior to any intellectual specification.57 If Keenan were correct that Aquinas changed his mind on both these points, Thomas would have to be said to have radically reversed this thought. As I hope to demonstrate in the pages to follow, however, the evidence for such a change is tenuous at best. The Quaestiones disputatae de veritate (1256–1259)58 provide further insight into the thought of Thomas during this pre-1270 time period. He says there that the reason for acting (ratio agendi) is provided by the intel- Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles [SCG] III ch. 26, no. 22: “Quod autem quinta ratio proponit, voluntatem esse altiorem intellectu, quasi eius motivam, falsum esse manifestum est. Nam primo et per se intellectus movet voluntatem: voluntas enim, inquantum huiusmodi, movetur a suo obiecto, quod est bonum apprehensum. Voluntas autem movet intellectum quasi per accidens, inquantum scilicet intelligere ipsum apprehenditur ut bonum, et sic desideratur a voluntate, ex quo sequitur quod intellectus actu intelligit. Et in hoc ipso intellectus voluntatem praecedit: nunquam enim voluntas desideraret intelligere nisi prius intellectus ipsum intelligere apprehenderet ut bonum. Et iterum, voluntas movet intellectum ad operandum in actu per modum quo agens movere dicitur; intellectus autem voluntatem per modum quo finis movet, nam bonum intellectum est finis voluntatis; agens autem est posterior in movendo quam finis, nam agens non movet nisi propter finem. Unde apparet intellectum simpliciter esse altiorem voluntate.” 57 See, Keenan, Goodness and Rightness, 47: “As first mover, the will’s movement is independent of and prior to reason’s presentation of the object.” On 148 and elsewhere, Keenan speaks of exercise as preceding specification. This is because Keenan believes that “formal interior acts” are “antecedent to questions concerning specification” (142). 58 Dated by Torrell to 1256–1259 (Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1:62). 56 Aquinas the Voluntarist? 863 lect,59 which implies that the will is ruled by its judgment.60 Once again, the Common Doctor explains this dynamic in terms of final causality: The end . . . properly preexists in the mover according to the intellect, to which it pertains to receive something intentionally [per modum intentionis] . . . Accordingly, the intellect moves the will in the manner by which an end is said to move, namely, inasmuch as it preconceives the ratio of the end and proposes it to the will. But to move in the manner of an efficient cause [causae agentis] pertains to the will and not to the intellect.61 Interestingly, the will is still clearly thought to be an efficient cause despite the intellect acting in the manner of an end. For both Lottin62 and Keenan,63 speaking of the intellect in this way precludes the possibility that the will can be free as it implies intellectual determinism. For the early Thomas, however, this was certainly not the case even though the “whole root of freedom” is strikingly said to be located in reason.64 How can this be? How could the intellect “move in the manner in which an end moves (since the understood good is the end of the will)”65 while the will acts efficiently and retains some kind of freedom? If the end is the “beginning of human actions”66 and that for the sake of which De ver., q. 22, a. 12, corp.: “The reason for acting (ratio agendi) is the form of the agent by which the agent acts; it is necessary, therefore, for it to be in the agent for the agent to act. . . . The end, therefore, properly preexists in the mover according to the intellect” (dated by Torrell to 1256–1259; see Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1:62). 60 In the Scriptum, in fact, he explicitly spoke of the will being ruled by the “judgment of the will”: “Sin is said to be in the reason on account of the will, which is ruled by the judgment of the reason” (In II sent., d. 24, q. 3, a. 3, corp.). 61 De ver., q. 22, a. 12, corp.: “Et ideo finis praeexistit in movente proprie secundum intellectum, cuius est recipere aliquid per modum intentionis, et non secundum esse naturae. Unde intellectus movet voluntatem per modum quo finis movere dicitur, in quantum scilicet praeconcipit rationem finis, et eam voluntati proponit. Sed movere per modum causae agentis est voluntatis, et non intellectus.” 62 Lottin argues Thomas decided to ascribe formal causality alone to the will to avoid the psychological determinism that would be implied if final causality were attributed to it instead. See Lauer, “St. Thomas’s Theory,” 4, and Lottin, Psychologie et morale, 1:254. 63 See Keenan, Goodness and Rightness, 33. 64 See De ver., q. 24, a. 2, corp. 65 SCG III, ch. 26, no. 22. 66 “Principium humanorum actuum, in quantum sunt humani, est finis” This quote is from ST I-II, q. 1, a. 3, corp., and is thus antecedent to q. 9, the precise place Keenan says “Thomas shifts his description of the causal relation between reason and the will” (Goodness and Rightness, 38). 59 864 Ryan J. Brady the will moves, 67 and if the intellect is that which appoints the end, 68 how did Thomas envision the will’s freedom? A preliminary consideration is that Aquinas thought of the intellect as being a primary source of human freedom in general. For him, the intellect’s ability to appoint the end enables the rational animal known as man to rise above mere instinct. As he explained in De potentia (1265–1266 69) and elsewhere, the gradation found among creatures is contingent upon the ability (or lack thereof) to determine their own practical ends for themselves,70 which is something that can only occur in virtue of the intellect or reason.71 This, however, only explains that Thomas thought of man qua man as free in virtue of his reason. What about his will in particular? Keenan criticizes the earlier works because he thinks the notion that “the whole root of freedom is located in reason”72 necessarily implies that Thomas “decisively identifies reason and not the will as the source of freedom.”73 What Keenan appears to view as even worse is Thomas’s description of reason’s causality in a manner “similar to final causality,” as he thinks this essentially “precludes any autonomous movement of the will, because any movement is ultimately derived not from what is moved, but from the mover.”74 We will consider these objections in turn. The Root of Freedom Regarding the question of the will’s liberty in particular—and the related See SCG IV, ch. 97, which Torrell dates to ca. 1264–1265 (Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1:104). 68 See, for instance, In III sent., d. 33, q. 2, a. 5, corp., which is dated between 1255– 1266 by Torrell (Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1:328), and in which we are told that humans, unlike irrational animals, must use their reason to appoint (praestituere) both the common and particular end to the virtues. 69 See Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1:328. 70 De ver., q. 22, a. 4, corp., speaks of the rational nature (as opposed to the insensible and sensitive nature) in terms of its ability to “incline or not incline” toward the desirable apprehended object. See also other passages where the basic division of creatures into two is into those who are able to determine their own actions and others who have it determined to them by another, since they do not have rational natures and thus cannot appoint it to themselves: De pot., q. 1, a. 5, corp.; De ver., q. 3, a. 1; In I eth., lec. 9, no. 6; and In II sent., d. 25, q. 1, a. 1, corp. 71 The intellect and the reason are one power (see, ST I, q. 79, a. 8, corp.). Thomas himself often speaks of them as synonyms; see In I eth., lec. 1, no. 8, and ST I-II, q. 58, a. 3, corp. 72 De ver., q. 24, a. 2, corp.: “totius libertatis radix est in ratione constituta”; see also Keenan, Goodness and Rightness, 32. 73 Keenan, Goodness and Rightness, 31–32 (emphasis added). 74 Keenan, Goodness and Rightness, 23. 67 Aquinas the Voluntarist? 865 issue pertaining to the degree to which it is or is not passive—the early Aquinas unequivocally argued the root of liberty is found in the reason75 and that the will’s very nature is to follow that which it apprehends.76 Indeed, the “will as nature” follows whatever is “known in the reason to be good and desired.”77 He did not, however, see any contradiction between this fact and the reality of free will. As he argued in the SCG, “all intellectual beings have free will [liberam voluntatem]” precisely because of the judgment of the intellect, which enables them to transcend impulsive behaviors. This judgment, moreover, encapsulates what it means to have free will (liberum arbitrium)—which he notably defines as “the free judgment of reason.”78 We should note, however, that when Keenan argues Thomas had “decisively identif[ied] reason and not the will as the source of freedom,”79 he overlooks the fact that Thomas also explicitly argued in De veritate that the will is a root of liberty.80 In a sense, this should be no surprise because even though the will as nature (i.e., the simple will) is necessarily ordered to things such as “the last end, happiness and whatever things are included in happiness such as being and the knowledge of truth” (though without coercion81), Thomas insists that the will as will is the master of its own acts.82 Thomas never thought there was any need to posit competitive causality between intellectual and volitional liberty. Indeed, they are both roots of freedom even though one of the roots must necessarily be rooted in the other for there to be anything other than a mere parody of true freedom. What seems implied in all this is the later teaching of the prima secundae, according to which, “the will is the root of freedom as its subject, but reason is the root as a cause.”83 At the very least, he clearly thought of the De ver., q. 24, a. 2, corp.: “The root of the whole of liberty is constituted in the reason.” 76 De ver., q. 22, a. 4. 77 In II sent., d. 39, q. 2, a. 2, ad 2: “Whence that which is the end of man is naturally known in the reason to be good and desired—and the will following this knowledge is called the ‘will as nature.’” 78 SCG II, ch. 48 (emphasis added). 79 Keenan, Goodness and Rightness, 31–32 (emphasis added). 80 De ver., q. 23, a. 1, sc 4: “voluntas est radix libertatis.” 81 De ver., q. 22, a. 5, corp. Parenthetically, Bernard Lonergan thought Thomas later abandoned his teaching about the will’s freedom pertaining to non-coercion, but Flannery shows this is not the case (Acts Amid Precepts, 117). 82 De ver., q. 22, a. 5, reply to the seventh difficulty to the contrary: “It is proper to the will, inasmuch as it is the will, that it be the master of its own actions.” 83 ST I-II, q. 17, a. 1, ad 2: “Radix libertatis est voluntas sicut subiectum, sed sicut causa, est ratio.” 75 866 Ryan J. Brady will, which he insisted was “related indifferently” to all mitigated goods, 84 as being a source of man’s freedom. In addition, the will itself was considered free in regard to its act, its object, and the order of the object to the end. 85 This means the will is not only able to choose freely regarding subordinate ends, but even in regard to ends such as happiness and being—at least inasmuch as the will can refrain from efficiently moving the intellect to consider these things in act.86 One might wonder, though: is this freedom really possible if the intellect acts in the manner of an end? Final Causality and Freedom Many texts affirming the will’s passivity are found in Thomas’s earlier years when he tended to speak of the intellect in terms of final causality. Accordingly, in the prima pars, the intellect is said to be compared to the will (i.e., the intellective power) as that which moves.87 The will is referred to as an “intellective appetite,”88 and the nature of any appetite requires that it be a moved mover. Though it is superior to the sensitive appetite, it remains a “passive power” (potentia passiva)89 that relies upon the intellect: That which is first simply and according to the order of nature is more perfect. For this reason, act is prior to potency. In this way, the intellect is prior to the will as the mover is prior to the movable and as the active is prior to the passive; for the understood good moves the will.90 De ver., q. 24, a. 14, corp.: “But the will of man is not determined to some one action, but is related indifferently to many.” Unsurprisingly, he says much the same about the free will (liberum arbitrium) at this time; ST I q. 83, a. 2, ad 1, for instance, says, “those things, however, to which we are naturally inclined, are not subject to free will. . . . Free will is indifferently related to choosing well or badly.” See also: In II sent., d. 24, q. 1, a. 1, corp.; ST I, q. 19, a. 8, sc. 85 De ver., q. 22, a. 6, corp. 86 De ver., q. 22, a. 6, corp.: “[The will] is able, in regard to the determined object, to make use of its own act when it wills or does not will to make use of it; for it is able to proceed to an act of willing in respect to anything, or to not proceed.” For the will’s efficient causality, see De ver., q. 22, a. 12. 87 ST I, q. 83, a. 4, ad 3: “Intellectus comparatur ad voluntatem, ut movens.” 88 See: ST I, q. 80, a. 2; q. 82, a. 5, obj. 3; and the later I-II, q. 31, a. 4, corp.: “appetitus intellectivus, qui dicitur voluntas.” 89 See ST I q. 80, a. 2, corp. 90 ST I, q. 82, a. 3, ad 2: “Illud, quod est prius simpliciter, et secundum naturae ordinem, est perfectius: sic enim actus est prior potentia. Et hoc modo intellectus est prior voluntate, sicut motivum mobili, et activum passivo: bonum enim intellectum movet voluntatem.” 84 Aquinas the Voluntarist? 867 By tending to think of the intellect as enabling the will to intend the end in the first place (since the end must be cognized intellectually for it to be willed91), Thomas certainly thought of the will in passive terms to a certain extent. Lauer explains his reasoning at this time by observing that: The intellect moves the will inasmuch as the intellect apprehends the object . . . as having the ratio of good, which is the final cause of the will, and orders the object to the ultimate end of the will. The will acts according to this order, or specifying principle, imposed upon it by the intellect.92 An important, question, however, is whether the “finality” of the intellect necessitates the passivity of the will, and on this point, Lauer insists here that the answer is no: “Thomas does not consider a final causality on the part of the intellect as detrimental to the will’s active nature.” Kevin Flannery rightly echoes this sentiment.93 Two texts from the prima pars are instructive on this point. First, in question 82, the intellect is said to move the agent in the manner of a final cause (per modum finis) even though the will moves all the powers of the soul to their acts in the manner of an efficient cause.94 Secondly, in question 77, a power is said to be active when its object is compared to it “as a term or end,” which implies, Lauer notes, that the will is in some way active. After all, the apprehended object is often described as the end of the will.95 Lauer seems correct when she goes on to suggest the will, for the early Thomas, must be both active and passive. Thomas himself says there is no need to distinguish an active and a passive component96 in the will and perhaps one reason for this is that it is both active and passive. In keeping with question 77, we can say it is active to the degree it moves itself toward As ST I, q. 87, a. 4, corp., words it, an act of the will is an inclination following after an understood form (“actus voluntatis nihil aliud est, quam inclinatio quaedam consequens formam intellectam”). 92 Lauer, “St. Thomas’s Theory,” 318. 93 See Flannery, Acts amid Precepts, 115n12. 94 See ST I, q. 82, a. 4; see also Lauer, “St. Thomas’s Theory,” 313. 95 The end is the proper object of the will. See: ST I-II, q. 18, a. 6, corp.; a. 7, corp.; II-II, q. 8, a. 8, corp.; q. 110, a. 1, corp.; q. 122, a. 2, corp. 96 ST I, q. 83, a. 4, obj. 3: “The will is an intellective appetite; but there are two powers on the part of the intellect; namely, the agent and the passive [possibilis].” He responds in ad 3: “It is not necessary to distinguish in the will an active and a passive [possibile].” The standard translation of possibile is “passive” here, and though many qualifications could be made, I have chosen to go along with the custom, as “possible” could lead to confusion without extensive explanation. 91 868 Ryan J. Brady its term or end and passive inasmuch as its object acts as a causa movens—a moving cause.97 This helps explain why the early Thomas insists the intellect moves the will in one way while the will moves the intellect and all the powers of the soul—and as an efficient cause—in another.98 It seems undeniable, then that even though the early Thomas tended to speak of the intellect as acting in the manner of a final cause (though not exclusively99), he did not think this fact eliminates free will. For this reason, he insisted that the intellect does not “move according to the manner of an efficient cause” and that it merely moves the will “by proposing to it its object, which is the end.”100 It is the will “and not the intellect” which acts in the manner of an efficient cause,101 and since the influence of an efficient cause consists in its activity (i.e., the opposite of passivity), it must be active in some way.102 Accordingly, he sometimes went so far as to describe the will as an active power, and he even considered it to be superior to the intellect regarding its ability to effect change.103 These facts make it unlikely Aquinas would have considered himself compelled to change his teaching in view of Tempier’s 1270 insistence ST I, q. 77, a. 3, corp., ad: “Objectum autem comparatur ad actum potentiae passivae, sicut principium, et causa movens.” It is certainly passive in a way, then, because a few questions later we learn that the “intellectus comparatur ad voluntatem, ut movens” (ST I, q. 83 a. 4, ad 2). 98 See De ver., q. 22, a. 12, sc 2, and the body of the article. 99 See Lauer, “St. Thomas’s Theory,” 304. As we have seen, the ratio of acting is called “the form of the agent by which the agent acts” in De ver., q. 22, a. 12, corp., and ratio and intellectus are often considered synonymous (see: ST I, q. 21, a. 2, ad 1; I-II, q. 13, a. 1, corp.) and may be in this case, as well—which means intellectus/ understanding would exert formal causality. As Lauer says, “since it is necessary that the form be in the agent, the intellect is also a formal cause inasmuch as it informs the agent” (“St. Thomas’s Theory,” 307; see also 304). Finally, in SCG II, ch. 47, the possible intellect is said to be the most formal thing in man. 100 SCG III, ch. 72, no. 7: “Intellectus, non secundum modum causae efficientis et moventis, sed secundum modum causae finalis, moveat voluntatem, proponendo sibi suum obiectum, quod est finis.” 101 De ver., q. 22, a. 12, corp.: “Movere per modum causae agentis est voluntatis, et non intellectus.” 102 De ver., q. 22, a. 2, corp. 103 He refers to it as an active power in SCG III, ch. 56. Regarding its nobility, De ver., q. 22, a. 11, ad sc 2, says, “the freedom of the will does not manifest it to be more noble simply speaking, but more noble in moving” (see also q. 14, a. 5, ad 5, which says, in part, “in moving or acting, the will is first,” and q. 22, a. 12, ad 5). Despite all this, the intellect, of course, retained superiority simpliciter (see ST I, q. 82, a. 3, ad 2, and a. 4, ad 3). 97 Aquinas the Voluntarist? 869 that the will is not entirely active.104 Moreover, though the same bishop also addressed liberum arbitrium when condemning the proposition that it “is a passive power, not an active one and that it is necessarily moved by its object” (“quod liberum arbitrium est potentia passiva, non activa; et quod necessitate movetur ab appetibili”),105 Thomas would not have fallen under censure on that point, either. As he had already made clear, free will / free judgment (liberum arbitrium) is “the cause of its own motion” as that which is “indifferently related to choosing well or badly.”106 The intellect, then, exerts significant influence when considered as acting in the manner of a final cause, but its influence or causality is certainly not oppressive. One might even go beyond Lauer’s refusal to grant that “formal causality on the part of the intellect is less implicative of a passive will than is final causality”107 and argue with Lawrence Dewan that formal causality actually implies a more robust causality on the side of the intellect, inasmuch as the intellect thereby has “its own universal formal character stressed.”108 We will revisit this question in the next section. For now, the crucial consideration is a simple one: the early Thomas took pains to defend the freedom of the will even while describing it in terms of final causality. Post-1270 Lottin and Keenan seem correct to say there were not any explicit affirmations that the intellect acts in the manner of a final cause in the last two years of Aquinas’ life and that he tended to speak of it in terms of formal causality instead. As this point is incontrovertible, the question that remains is whether this led to, or was tied up with, a teaching that the will’s movement is “independent of and prior to reason,” as Keenan would have us believe.109 We will first discuss in further detail whether, despite the earlier Thomas’s understanding of the matter, the truth of things requires that, if the intellect acts as a kind of final cause, the will must be passive. As mentioned above, Lauer and Dewan both reject the thesis that attributing formal causality to the intellect (instead of final causality) That it is not entirely active, we might note, is especially evident from the fact that the rational appetite known as the will is a moved mover—something he repeats often. See, for instance, ST I, q. 80, a. 2, corp. 105 See Denifle and Chatelain, Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, 1:486–87. 106 ST I, q. 83, a. 1, ad 3, and a. 2, corp. 107 Lauer, “St. Thomas’s Theory,” 309. 108 Lawrence Dewan, Wisdom, Law, and Virtue: Essays in Thomistic Ethics (New York: Fordham; University Press, 2007), 170. 109 Keenan, Goodness and Rightness, 47. 104 870 Ryan J. Brady would somehow leave the will more free to determine its own activity. For Dewan, the more mature Thomas actually stresses the intellect’s “own universal formal character” and “omnipresent determination” by speaking of its formal causality.110 This seems correct. Aquinas accepts Aristotle’s explanation of a formal cause in terms of “the essence and what it was to be” (ἡ/τὴν οὐσία/ν καὶ τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι [hē/tēn ousia/n kai to ti ēn einai]) of a thing,111 so a formal cause must have an all-pervading influence. It would not, however, necessarily have this if it were to act only in the manner of an end (per modum finis), because if it were to do so, one might think the intellect merely appoints the end and then leaves the will to its own devices. Speaking of it in terms of formality precludes this mistaken notion by making it more likely for us to understand that the intellect informs the rational appetite not only by presenting first principles to it but also by formally specifying it during any particular act performed for the sake of those principles. Interestingly, Flannery points out that in the commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle (which Torrell dates between 1270 and 1272) and in SCG (ca. 1259–1265) Thomas appears to link formal causality to efficient causality due the potent nature of the former.112 This is striking because final causality, on the contrary, is frequently sharply distinguished from efficient causality.113 Turning now to the role of the will, the later Thomas is clear that some acts of the will are prior to some acts of the intellect. Nevertheless, “every act of the will proceeds from some act of the intellect, . . . for the will tends to the final act of the intellect.”114 Since the will “follows the apprehension of the reason or intellect inasmuch as the ratio of the good is apprehended,”115 the intellect certainly retains some kind of necessary connection with final causality. It does so only to the degree it exerts causality through Dewan, Wisdom, Law, and Virtue, 170. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.3.983a35 (this passage contains the accusative; the nominative is used in 12.9.1075a2), in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, ed. W. D. Ross (Medford, MA: Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924). See also Aquinas’s commentary on that passage in In I metaphys., as well as In VII metaphys., lec. 13 (on Metaphysics 7.13. 1038b14; “that which was to be . . . pertains to the form”), and In V metaphys., lec. 2, no. 764. 112 See: Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1:232 and 1:96–117; Flannery, Acts amid Precepts, 115n2; Aquinas, In V metaphys., lec. 2, nos. 766–70; SCG II, ch. 48. 113 SCG III, ch. 72, no. 7. 114 See ST, I-II, q. 4, a. 4, ad 2, and In II sent., d. 39, q. 2, a. 2, ad 2. 115 ST I-II, q. 19, a. 10, corp.: “Voluntas sequatur apprehensionem rationis vel intellectus secundum quod ratio boni apprehensi.” 110 111 Aquinas the Voluntarist? 871 the medium of the object when it perceives the ratio of the good in the object, but it does do so. The intellect, then, always precedes the will on some level even if “some act” of the will is prior to some particular act of the intellect. Thomas gives the example of when someone initially judges as if “by speculating through principles” that committing fornication with a woman is wrong even though he goes on to choose otherwise.116 Since choice pertains to the same power as the will,117 this means his will intervenes to cause his reason to instead think about the “delight of fornication.”118 Now, for Keenan, one of the ways the later Thomas supposedly makes use of “even more significant forms of expression to highlight the independence of the will’s efficiency” is by coming to argue that the will is “the principle of movement.”119 If Thomas did go on to do so, we might concur with Keenan that the “strivings” of the will are “antecedent to questions of intention and choice.”120 However, the later Aquinas is also clear that, even if the appetite is a principle of action,121 the foundational principle is reason. Actually, it is remarkable that Keenan neglects to mention that his proof text pertaining to the will being a principle of movement is immediately followed by the qualification: “nevertheless according to the command and direction of the reason.”122 Time and again, Thomas is clear that the ultimate principle of movement is the intellect,123 which “absolutely and of itself [secundum se] precedes the will as moving it.”124 The will’s very nature is to tend “toward See De ver., q. 17, a. 1, ad 4. See ST I, q. 83, a. 4, ad 2. 118 See, De ver., q. 17, a. 1, ad 4. 119 Keenan, Goodness and Rightness, 45, emphasis added. See, ST II-II, q. 47, a. 9, ad 1. 120 Keenan, Goodness and Rightness, 142. For further explanation of this quote, see Sherwin, By Knowledge and Love, 14. 121 ST I-II, q. 58, a. 3, corp.: “The principle of human actions is only in man in a twofold way; namely, in his intellect or reason and in his appetite; for these are the two moving powers in man.” See also In I eth., lec. 1, no. 8. 122 ST II-II, q. 47, a. 9, ad 1: “Motus quidem pertinet ad vim appetitivam, sicut ad principium movens.” 123 ST I-II, q. 100, a. 1, corp.: “reason . . . is the proper principle of human acts.” See also De malo, q. 10, a. 2, corp.; ST I-II, q. 68, a. 1, corp.; q. 90, a. 2, corp.; a. 1, corp.; q. 18, a. 8, corp.; q. 104, a. 1, ad 3. 124 De virtutibus, q. 1, a. 7, corp.: “It should be known, though, that the intellect, both the speculative and the practical, can be perfected in two ways by a habit. In one way, absolutely and as such (secundum se) preceds the will as moving it.” It should be known, though, that the intellect, both the speculative and the practical, can be 116 117 872 Ryan J. Brady that which is judged by the reason”125 and the “intellect apprehends the end before the will does.”126 In other words, the will “follows the apprehension of the reason or the intellect,”127 since the “appetite for the fitting end presupposes the right apprehension of the end, which comes through reason.”128 What this necessarily implies is that the will cannot be entirely active. Understandably, then, the later Thomas explicitly says the will is “both passive and active.”129 This exact phrase is, in fact, lacking in the earlier texts. To some extent, then, there may be a slight alteration of emphasis, but as we saw in the last section, the earlier Thomas also seemed to at least imply that the will was also passive to some extent.130 Conclusion We must conclude that when it comes to the claim that Thomas had a voluntarist turn around the beginning of the prima pars (at the time he wrote De malo, q. 6), there is hardly a scintilla of evidence. Actually, even the De malo text argues that “the will wills nothing except under the ratio of the good.”131 This ratio had earlier been described as coming about through the influence of the “ordering reason”132 and nothing substantial has changed. No doubt, the manner of explaining the intellect’s causality perfected in two ways by a habit. In one way, absolutely and as such [secundum se] . . .” 125 St I-II, q. 74, a. 7, ad 1: “Voluntas tendit in id quod est ratione iudicatum.” 126 ST I-II, q. 3, a. 4, ad 3: “Finem primo apprehendit intellectus, quam voluntas.” 127 ST I-II, q. 19, a. 10, corp.: “Voluntas sequatur apprehensionem rationis, vel intellectus.” 128 ST I-II, q. 19, a. 3, ad 2: “To the second it should be said that the Philosopher is speaking there about the practical intellect inasmuch as it takes counsel and reasons discursively about means (for in this way it perfects prudence); now in regard to means, the rectitude of the reason consists in the conformity to the appetite for the fitting end; nevertheless, even the appetite itself presupposes the right apprehension of the fitting end, which comes about through reason.” 129 See: ST I-II, q. 77, a. 1, obj. 1 and ad 1; I-II, q. 50, a. 5, obj. 2 and ad 2. 130 As quoted above, in ST I, q. 83, a. 4, obj. 3, he said, “The will is the intellectual appetite but there are two powers on the part of the intellect; namely the active and the passive,” and in obj. 3, he responds, “It is not necessary to distinguish the agent and the passive.” 131 De malo, q. 6, ad 6: “From the fact that the object of the will is the good, it can be held that the will wants nothing unless it be considered as good.” 132 In II sent., d. 24, q. 1, a. 3, ad 3: “That which is done for the sake of an end is not considered good solely on account of the end. It is rather considered to be good in view of how ordered it is towards the end. Nevertheless, to the degree that it participates in the notion [ratio] of the good, it is the object of the will, inasmuch as whatever is in the will pertains to the power of ordering reason.” Aquinas the Voluntarist? 873 changed to some extent, but Thomas does not appear to have changed his tune in order to make more room for volitional freedom. Sixty-four years ago, Lauer concluded her article by saying, “there does not seem to be sufficient evidence to warrant a categorical statement that Bishop Tempier succeeded in coercing St. Thomas to change either his mind or his teaching.”133 I would go further by arguing there is not even evidence that he had St. Thomas in mind when he put forward the relevant condemnations. Furthermore, Thomas would not have had any reason to change his teaching because he always maintained the freedom of the will even while insisting on the primacy of the intellect. N&V Lauer, “St. Thomas’s Theory,” 319. 133 Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2020): 875–907 875 Beauty among the Transcendentals in the Summa Halensis1 Justin Shaun Coyle Mount Angel Seminary Saint Benedict, OR “ So I think, Hippias,” Socrates muses in Plato’s Hippias Major, “that I have been benefitted by conversation with both of you; for I think I know the meaning of the proverb, ‘Beautiful things are difficult.’”2 Among beauty’s difficult things, at least for readers of Scholastic texts in the last century, stands the question of its transcendental status. Is beauty a transcendental determination of being like one, true, and good? The transcendental question kindles debate in recent literature. Probably it burns hottest in Thomistic camps.3 Sometimes scholars pose the question to the Summa halensis (SH) too, an early summa confected under the direction Alexander of Hales.4 Beauty’s place there, as in Thomas Aquinas’s My thanks are due Boyd Taylor Coolman, Philipp W. Rosemann, Stephen F. Brown, and Jordan Daniel Wood, who commented an earlier draft of this essay. 2 Plato, Hippias major 304e, trans. Harold North Fowler in Plato: Cratylus, Parmenides, Greater Hippias, Lesser Hippias. Loeb Classical Library 167 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 323. 3 The best recent study on the transcendental question in Thomas Aquinas is Michael J. Rubin’s “The Meaning of ‘Beauty’ and Its Transcendental Status in the Metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas” (PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 2016). Rubin’s work bears the dual virtues of summarizing and analyzing the long debate—he is expert at both tasks. 4 Here is a compressed biography: Alexander of Hales, English by birth and scholastic by training, was born around 1186; he studied and began teaching in the faculty of arts at Paris before 1210; he became regent master in the theology faculty around 1221, then the first lecturer to adopt the Lombard’s Sentences as his syllabus; he took the Franciscan habit in 1236 while occupying a chair, thereby smuggling the mendicants into the University; and he died in 1245, leaving his 1 876 Justin Shaun Coyle texts, lacks consensus among its readers. That a single interpretive reading of Scholastic arcana should fail consensus hardly scandalizes. What does, however, is how this literature conducts its investigation of beauty’s transcendental status without registering the peculiarities of Alexander’s transcendental thought. This article assays beauty’s status among the transcendentals by registering those peculiarities. Doing that, I show, reveals something unexpected. SH conceives beauty very differently from its readers allow or notice. Alexander—I call him that5—evinces little interest in sorting beauty’s transcendental status (which he finally denies). He prefers to speak beauty with Trinitarian grammar. For Alexander, beauty does not name one transcendental determination of being among others. Instead, he identigreat Summa unfinished. This disappointed one of his admirers, Pope Alexander IV, who tasked the Franciscans with its completion in his 1255/1256 bull De Fontibus Paradisi. Other literary donations include his Glossa on the Lombard’s Sentences, very many sets of disputed questions, and several scriptural commentaries—the majority of which remain unedited. For more on Alexander’s life and work, see Kenan B. Osborne, “Alexander of Hales: Precursor and Promotor of Franciscan Theology,” in The History of Franciscan Theology, ed. Kenan B. Osborne (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1994), 1–58. 5 I do not mean to vindicate the uncritical assumption of book I’s Quaracchi editors that Alexander of Hales penned the entire Summa halensis [SH] alone. I mean rather but to respect that the SH’s authors (whoever they were) preferred to write scenes under a single name: that of “Brother Alexander.” In this way, the business of composing a summa follows what Lesley Smith calls “common mendicant pattern of working” (“Hugh of St. Cher and Medieval Collaboration,” in Transforming Relations: Essays on Jews and Christians throughout History in Honor of Michael A. Signer, ed. Franklin T. Harkins [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010], 258). Whatever the case, by the time Roger Bacon submitted his now-famous dubium over Alexander’s authorship, he confessed that “tamen propter reverentiam adscripta fuit et vocatur Summa fratris Alexandri [still it is reckoned and called the Summa of Brother Alexander out of reverence]” ( J. S. Brewer, Fr. Rogeri Bacon Opera Hactenus Inedita [London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1859], 326). Still, I think it important to honor the friars’ wishes to be read per nomen magistri. Wishes for and attempts at pseudepigraphic anonymity, after all, ought to be honored even—or perhaps especially—among the dead. For more on the authorship problem, see Victorin Doucet, O.F.M., “The History of the Problem of the Authenticity of the Summa,” Franciscan Studies 7 (1947): 26–41; 274–312. For a shorter study, see “Introductory Remarks,” in Meldon C. Mass, O.F.M., The Infinite God and the Summa Fratris Alexandri (Chicago: Franciscan Herald, 1964), 1–13. On the same, see also the introduction to Walter H. Principe’s magisterial Alexander of Hales’s Theology of the Hypostatic Union (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1967). Beauty among the Transcendentals in the Summa Halensis 877 fies beauty with the very taxis of the Trinitarian persons—it forms their structure, their taxis, their “sacred order.”6 It is exactly this taxic shape of Alexander’s theological aesthetics that the literature pays little mind. There is little wonder why: the Trinitarian grammar of beauty in SH transgresses the constricted boundaries of the transcendental status question. So this article meets the transcendental question in Alexander’s Summa mostly to transfigure it. Only a transfiguration of the question renders Alexander’s elegant and highly distinctive Trinitarian aesthetic again visible. That, anyway, is what this article seeks: the public display of Alexander’s Trinitarian aesthetic for appreciation and scrutiny. Or so the goal—here is its structure: First, I relay an aporia in the literature over beauty’s transcendentality SH. Second, I commend an anonymous thirteenth-century text that reinscribes and reshapes Alexander’s position on beauty. Third and before concluding, I study a forgotten scene in Alexander’s Summa to remember his alternative Trinitarian account. That account bears considerable promise, I think. But it must first be recovered from depths that have long since passed out of theological memory. Is Beauty a Transcendental? An Aesthetic Aporia I begin by opening an aporetic gap,7 one that yawns between two answers to the question of beauty’s transcendental status in SH. The prima pars of SH seems to subordinate beauty to the good, at least structurally. Alexander affords one, true, and good each a treatise all their own. 8 Beauty merits no such treatise—not even a membrum or chapter. It claims only a single article9 within a larger dialectical cycle of questions on SH I, no. 103, in Summa Theologica Doctoris Irrefragabilis Alexandri de Hales Ordinis Minorum (Summa halensis), 4 vols. (Quaracchi: Ex Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1924–48), 1:163. All Latin from SH is from this edition and all translations are my own. Unless otherwise noted, all other English translations are also my own. 7 To my mind, only Edgar de Bruyne registers this apparent aporia; see “Les premiers scolastiques” in Études d’esthétique médiévale III: Le xiii siècle (Bruges: De tempel, 1946): “ Alexander thus begins the metaphysical subjectivism in the doctrine of beauty and perhaps even in that of the transcendental properties” (89 ; emphasis mine) ; “Wanting to demonstrate in turn that everything is good and beautiful, Alexander comes across two definitions of beauty of equal value. The first definitely does not have a transcendental meaning” (97 ; emphasis mine). 8 On one, SH I, nos. 72–86 (Quaracchi ed.,1:112–36); on true, nos. 87–101 (1:138–58); on good, nos. 102–30 (1:160–99). 9 SH I, no. 103 (Quaracchi ed.,1:162), or “An idem sit bonum et pulcrum” (“Whether the Good be the same as the Beautiful”). 6 878 Justin Shaun Coyle the good’s relation to other terms—to being, to beauty, to the final cause.10 Some readers parlay Alexander’s structural subordination of beauty to the good into a metaphysical hierarchy. Beauty, they think, “ becomes more or less an epiphenomenon of the good.”11 Often these readers say vanishingly little about how beauty relates to other transcendentals. On their view, it matters only that beauty does not number among them. That beauty appears indexed to the good means it forms a second-class transcendental, whatever indeed that might mean. But Alexander’s prima secundae weaves another tale. Its long treatise De pulchritudine creati begins thus: Next to consider, after the conditions of creatures with regard to quantity, are the conditions of creatures with regard to quality, and these are true, good, and beauty. But truth and goodness were discussed above in the treatise on the essential things said of God. Now follows a consideration of the beautiful or beauty.12 True, good—and beauty?13 Beauty now stands among the other transcendentals without qualification. Gone are its structural chains to the good. That beauty appears here alongside “true” and “good” persuades other readers to confer upon it a transcendental status.14 These readers rarely notice Together these comprise the question Quid sit bonum secundum rationem suae intentionis at SH I, nos. 102–4 (Quaracchi ed.,1:160–63). 11 The primary proponents of the anti-transcendental reading are Dieter Halcour, “Tractatus de transcendentalibus entis conditionibus,” Franziskanische Studien 41 (1959): 41–106, and Jan Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case of Thomas Aquinas (Leiden: Brill, 1996) As I will show below, Aertsen’s argument depends heavily upon Halcour’s. 12 SH I-II, no. 75: “Vertitur deinde consideratio, post conditiones creaturae ex parte quantitatis, circa conditiones ex parte qualitatis, quae sunt: verum, bonum, et pulcrum. De veritate autem et bonitate dictum est superius in Tractatu de essentialibus dictis de Deo. Siquitur consideratio de pulcritudine et pulcro” (Quaracchi ed., 2:99). 13 Aertsen is likely correct to say that the “true, good, beautiful” as a formulation of a “classical” ideal in, say, Victor Cousin’s 1836 Du Vrai, du Beau et du Bien, or Immanuel Kant’s three critiques, or in Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Antagonismus von ‘wahr’ und ‘schön’ und ‘gut,’” actually crops up for the first time in SH (“The Triad ‘True-Good-Beautiful’: The Place of Beauty in the Middle Ages,” in Intellect et imagination dans la philosophie médiévale: actes du XIe Congrès international de philosophie médiévale de la Société internationale pour l’étude, vol. 1, eds. Maria Cândida Pachecho and José F. Meirinhos [Leiden: Brill, 2006], 415–35). 14 Among these readers are Henri Pouillon, “La beauté, propriété transcendantale chez les scolastiques (1220–1270),” in Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du 10 Beauty among the Transcendentals in the Summa Halensis 879 that “one” has vanished. Neither do they ask after it. They notice only beauty’s sudden presence among true and good. And that is proof enough, it seems, of beauty’s transcendentality. So opens the aporia before us, clear and vivid: How to construe beauty’s transcendental status as Alexander imagines it? Is beauty a transcendental in its own right? Or is it otherwise accessory to the good? Recent interest in SH on beauty prizes its novelty. “Hales is the first,” de Bruyne argues, “to formulate this question in a precise manner.”15 Minor qualifications aside, this is very nearly right. Scholars agree that SH marks an axial moment in the transcendental question and its development across the Scholastic idiom. Among the most prominent interpretive lines on the transcendental question in SH and its influence are those traced by Umberto Eco and Jan Aertsen. Both thread SH into their broader work on medieval aesthetics. Eco first, since it is to him that scholars defer and his whose reading Aertsen disputes. Eco tenders a bashful “yes” to the transcendental question. Yes, he writes, “the Summa of Alexander of Hales . . . decisively solved the problem of the transcendental character of beauty, and its distinction from other values.”16 There is no question for Eco, that is, that SH gifts to beauty all the benefits proper to a transcendental. It does all this, too, “in an act of speculative courage.”17 But how on this reading, recalling the aporia before us, to explain beauty’s apparent subordination to the good in SH I? Here Eco assumes SH’s speculative courage yields to the prudence of convention. Alexander hesitates to catalog beauty among the transcendentals, Eco claims, “no doubt because of the usual prudent reluctance of the scholastics to give an open and unambiguous welcome to philosophical innovation.”18 Whatever the reason, Eco meets the aporia by affirming the transcendental status of Moyen Age (Paris: Vingt et unième année, 1946): 278–79, and Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986). Eco depends heavily on Pouillon’s reading. 15 De Bruyne, “Les premiers scolastiques,” 90–91; see also 96: “Few Scholastics grasped its depth and coherence.” This is not to say, of course, that others had not raised the question in a theological key. I think specifically of Augustine, Boethius, Dionysius, Eriugena, Anselm, Hugh of St Victor, Alan of Lille, Bernard of Clairvaux, and William of Auvergne. Neither do I mean necessarily to endorse de Bruyne’s claim that SH is the first to raise the question systematically. I repeat it only to flag the importance (and paradoxical neglect) of SH’s theological aesthetics. 16 Eco, Art and Beauty, 23. 17 Eco, Art and Beauty, 24. See also Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Hugh Bredin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 45. 18 Eco, Art and Beauty, 24; Eco, Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, 45. 880 Justin Shaun Coyle beauty. And doing that, it seems obvious to say, means favoring SH I-II, no. 75, over SH I, no. 103. Still Eco’s “yes” remains qualified exactly to the extent that he thinks Scholastic decorum required Alexander to innovate in hushed corridors, in whispers, in secret. “The boldness of [Alexander’s] innovation,” Eco concludes, “required caution in its implementation.”19 Aertsen disagrees. In his final book, Aertsen razes Eco’s arguments with dispatch and without remainder in two moves.20 The first rejects as flaccid Eco’s argument from Scholastic prudence. The doctrine of the transcendentals, Aertsen writes hotly, was itself a recent innovation. How on Eco’s account to explain why Thomas Aquinas announces some six transcendental terms only ten years later and without much hand-wringing?21 Second, Aertsen thinks Eco’s fevered search for beauty rides roughshod over textual difficulties. Principal among these difficulties, of course, runs the subordination of beauty to the good in SH I, n. 103: The Summa does not speak about the beautiful as expressing a universal mode of being. The exposition is restricted to the differen Eco, Art and Beauty, 24; Eco, Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, 45. Eco attempts a palimpsest of his source, but he manages only a carbon copy. His source is Pouillon’s “La beauté,” 278–79, which argues: “Philip the Chancellor’s treatise on the transcendental properties of being includes only three properties. Without expressly adding a fourth, Considerans, after Jean de la Rochelle, introduces beauty into this circle and treats it like the other transcendentals: they are the same in substance but differ by reason, bringing it very close to the Good. He affirms its universal extension. On this point Jean de la Rochelle and Considerans innovate. This explains the brevity and relative timidity of their assertions about the transcendental value of beauty. . . . Were they the first to do so? As far as we know, yes.” Eco references Pouillon only once in Art and Beauty, and not on these points. Eco makes his references plainer in his 1970 Il problema estetico in Tommaso d’Aquino, the original of Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. Anyhow, I report this not to arraign Eco, but to summon another voice in favor of the transcendental thesis. Pouillon’s voice, after all, sounded first among recent scholarship on beauty in SH. And it is his too that Eco imitates as he argues for beauty’s transcendentality. 20 Aertsen makes similar arguments in his earlier “Beauty in the Middle Ages: A Forgotten Transcendental?,” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 1 (1991): 68–97, and “Die Frage nach der Transzendentalität der Schönheit im Mittelalter,” in Historia Philosophiae Medii Aevi: Festschrift für Kurt Flasch, ed. Burkhard Mojsisch and Olaf Pluta (Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 1991), 1–22. 21 Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy as Transcendental Thought: From Philip the Chancellor to Francisco Suarez (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 172 (hereafter, Transcendental Thought, to distinguish from Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case of Thomas Aquinas). Aertsen here invokes Thomas’s treatment in De veritate, q. 1, a. 1. 19 Beauty among the Transcendentals in the Summa Halensis 881 tiation between the good and the beautiful. This differentiation is . . . a new element in comparison with pseudo-Dionysius, yet it still does not provide a sufficient reason for the distinctive transcendentality of the beautiful.22 Better to class beauty an “epiphenomenon of the good,”23 Aertsen counsels. After all, beauty is present only where the good is also. Buried within his critique of Eco lies Aertsen’s own position on beauty’s transcendental status. The position Aertsen draws is, as the above suggests, weighted heavily toward protestation. For Aertsen, the extent to which beauty runs subordinate to the good is just the extent to which beauty cannot prove a transcendental under its own steam.24 So run the two interpretive lines on beauty’s transcendentality in SH—neither of which overcome the aporia, really. Both finally boost one text only to knock the other. With Henri Pouillon, Eco privileges SH I-II, no. 75, to defend beauty’s transcendentality. Is not beauty there named a conditio creaturae alongside true and good? With Dieter Halcour, Aertsen privileges SH I, no. 103, precisely to deny the same. Beauty stands there as an “epiphenomenon of the good,” not as a determination of being on its own. There is more. Readers familiar with sea battles over beauty’s status in Thomistic waters will recognize that SH floats far from safe harbor. The positions Eco and Aertsen draw on beauty’s status in Alexander already anticipate their positions on the same in Thomas. The contest over Alexander’s SH, it turns out, is hardly neutral. It is a skirmish—an exercise in reconnaissance for the gathering battle over Thomas Aquinas. Look again at Eco. Which are his criteria for transcendentality? He stipulates (1) convertibility with being and (2) intentional distinction. SH, Eco concludes, quietly allows beauty to meet this canon without trumpet Aertsen, Transcendental Thought, 172. Aertsen here reinscribes Halcour’s judgment (see Halcour, “Tractatus,” 49). 24 Aertsen rehearses a similar argument in his earlier “Das Schöne,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie vol 8, R–Sc, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer (Basel: Schwabe, 1992), 1354: “ It is striking that the Summa fratris Alexandri in its presentation does not add Beauty as an independent transcendental to the ‘first determinations of Being’ (One, True, Good), but rather discusses Beauty in the context of the Good. ” See also Aertsen, “Triad,” 429: “The first book of the Summa halensis gives an extensive account of the ‘first determinations of being,’ namely, ‘the one,’ ‘the true,’ and ‘the good,’ but does not incorporate ‘the beautiful’ into this list. Eco’s observation that this Summa ‘decisively solved the transcendental character of beauty’ seems unfounded.” 22 23 882 Justin Shaun Coyle ing it. On this point, Aertsen is no doubt correct to register doubt over Eco’s indulgent psychologizing. But notice the work this does for Eco. He flags Alexander’s hesitation to blazon beauty’s transcendentality exactly because he finds the same in Thomas Aquinas. “Not many years separate [Thomas’s Summa theologiae] from the work of John of la Rochelle. Some element of caution must have remained.”25 Thomas “tackled the themes of his Summa with reserve; moderation had to be reestablished.”26 Otherwise put, Thomas too endorsed beauty’s transcendentality furtively—he mimicked SH. So much seems clear: Eco’s answer to the transcendentality question in SH remains overwritten by his answer to the same in Thomas Aquinas. Aertsen too betrays preoccupation with the Thomistic question. In near perfect counterpoint to Eco, it is Aertsen’s denial of beauty’s transcendentality in Alexander that betrays his preoccupation. Consider Aertsen’s transcendental criteria. Aertsen discounts beauty as a transcendental in SH on the grounds that it fails to name an expression of being. Yet that transcendentals ought to add something conceptually to being features as one of Aertsen’s central criteria for transcendentality in Thomas: The question as to the transcendentality of the beautiful cannot be resolved until it has become clear what universal mode of being the beautiful expresses that is not yet expressed by the other transcendentals, and what its place is in the order of these properties.27 This new canon renders “indisputable that [Aertsen] has made the greatest contribution of any scholar to the debate over beauty’s transcendental status.” Why? Because Aertsen “has manifested the only principle by which one can determine whether beauty is a transcendental in Thomas’s thought.”28 Surely that is right, at least for the Thomistic question. That debate raging around it needed clear criteria. And these criteria, Aertsen argued, reveal that Thomas denies beauty’s transcendental status.29 Eco, Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, 45. Eco follows many in assuming John of Rochelle penned SH I and SH III. 26 Eco, Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, 46. 27 Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy, 337, and Transcendental Thought, 176. 28 Rubin, “Meaning of Beauty,” 91. 29 Rubin summarizes nicely in “The Meaning of Beauty,” 92, that Aertsen “comes to three conclusions: (1) that a ‘clarification’ of beauty’s transcendental status ‘is not to be found in Thomas’s writings’ [Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy, 351], (2) that ‘the attempts of various scholars to find a distinct place for beauty as a transcendental must be regarded as having failed’ [353], and (3) that in fact 25 Beauty among the Transcendentals in the Summa Halensis 883 However successful Aertsen’s transcendental canon within Thomistic circles,30 he transposes it now onto SH. And as we might expect, his conclusion there portends his conclusion in Thomas. So far as SH does not write of “the beautiful as expressing a universal mode of being,” beauty cannot prove a transcendental. Together, these notes yield two conclusions. First, the literature has drawn but scarcely overcome an aporia over beauty’s transcendental status in SH. Second, that literature has read SH mostly as a cipher for Thomas’s texts. Or deeper reading reveals the debate between Eco and Aertsen to be heavily coded. Their respective criteria for transcendentality, that is, derives from and anticipates their interpretation of Thomas. As a result, their collective reading of SH assumes conclusions borrowed from their arguments over Thomas. More, both Eco and Aertsen do this without registering differences between transcendental thought in SH and in Thomas.31 Neither reader has adopted Alain de Libera’s axiom that sometimes to read other Scholastics well, “we must forget Thomas Aquinas.”32 Nor has either reader allowed the text to surprise him, to disrupt his expectations.33 This can be forgiven Eco—whose interest in SH remains peripheral—but not Aertsen. It is Aertsen, after all, who stresses the distinctive notes sounded in Alexander’s transcendental thought.34 It is he, too, who discerns the peculiarity of Alexander’s “trinitarian motive.”35 But why, ‘the beautiful is not a distinct transcendental’ in Thomas’s thought [354], but is rather ‘the extension of the true to the good’ [359].”. 30 Several scholars attack Aertsen’s guideline as inadequate, such as: Michael Waddell, “Truth Beloved: Thomas Aquinas and the Relational Transcendentals” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2000); Louis-Marie de Blignieres, Le mystère de l’être: L’approche thomiste de Guérard des Lauriers, preface by Serge-Thomas Bonino (Paris: J. Vrin, 2007); and D. C. Schindler, “The Transcendentals,” in Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth: A Philosophical Investigation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 350–421. See also Rubin’s fine taxonomy and evaluation of arguments for and against beauty’s transcendentality in Thomas Aquinas in his “The Meaning of Beauty,” 88–149. 31 These differences are many, though I shall not explore them here. The major difference, however, has to do with Trinitarian appropriation. See note 63 below. 32 Alain de Libera, Albert le Grand et la philosophie: A la recherche de la vérité (Paris: Vrin, 1990), 11. 33 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 280. 34 Aertsen, Transcendental Thought, 135–76. 35 Aertsen, Transcendental Thought, 147. And later, at 674: “From the very beginning the medieval concern with the transcendentals was motivated by a theological interest. The most extensive account of these notions in the thirteenth century appears in the Summa halensis, where it serves as the metaphysical basis for the 884 Justin Shaun Coyle then, does Aertsen uncritically transpose his canon for transcendentality in Thomas onto SH?36 An Anonymous Proposal Aertsen is not content merely to overturn Eco. He wants to locate the site of the aesthetic confusion, to map its genesis. He wants to learn who first accords beauty a transcendental status. He discovers a candidate—or a culprit—in an anonymous Franciscan gloss on SH called the Tractatus de transcendentalibus entis conditionibus.37 The title commits anachronism—it is furnished by an editor, not its author. History hides that author from view. The text circulated under Bonaventure’s name for some time, though its true provenance remains unclear.38 Clearer, however, is that it is the first treatise to register beauty among the determinations of being. Or so Aertsen, who follows rather closely Halcour’s introduction to his edition of the text. The passage in question comes early in the Tractatus: explanation of the divine attributes ‘unity,’ ‘truth’ and ‘goodness.’. . . A specific interest of the relation between the transcendentals and the divine bears upon a fundamental doctrine of Christian theology, the doctrine of the Trinity.” 36 This is especially curious given the fact that Aertsen himself, quoting Norman Kretzmann, notices that Thomas “never presents the Trinitarian appropriation of the transcendentals unmistakably in his own voice. . . . This appropriation remains much more in the background of his work than it does in the writings of the representatives of the early Franciscan school at Paris, Alexander of Hales and Bonaventure” (Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy, 412; see also Kretzmann, “Trinity and Transcendentals,” in Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement: Philosophical and Theological Essays, ed. Ronald J. Feenstra and Cornelius Plantinga Jr. [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990], 91). 37 Aertsen, Transcendental Thought, 169. See also Halcour, “Tractatus,” 47: “The author of Assisi B.C. 186 is actually the first and, strictly speaking, the only one explicitly to present the transcendentals as fourfold! . . . Thus beauty is a transcendental.” 38 Halcour assays the authorship question in “Tractatus,” 58–63: “ Assisi B.C. 186 presents a summary which a student of Alexander’s—from his [disputed] questions, from his Summa [fratris Alexandri], and from the works of other masters like Jean de la Rochelle, Odo Rigaldus, Guerric—produced in several redactions. He supplemented and expanded it with his own thoughts to use it either as a concept for the purposes of teaching (perhaps he was a future master) or as a draft for his own commentary on the Sentences. This student might but need not be Bonaventure” (63). Sister Emma Jane Marie Spargo demurs without having herself consulted the text and on the authority of Pouillon alone, “whose judgment . . . need not be questioned” (The Category of the Aesthetic in the Philosophy of Saint Bonaventure [St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1953], 34). Beauty among the Transcendentals in the Summa Halensis 885 We should say that these conditions are established above being, for they add a certain ratio. Hence one, true, good, and beauty presuppose the understanding of being, in which they share and redound upon one another: for beauty foreknows good, and good true, and true one, but one being itself, for which reason being is said to be absolute. One adds indivision beyond being; for one is the indivision of being. But true is called the indivision of form from matter or quod est and quo est. But good is called the indivision of potency from act. Hence, according to appropriation [secundum appropriationem], one considers the efficient cause, true the formal, and good the final. But beauty circulates through [circuit] all causes and is common to them.39 Aertsen discerns the logic of appropriation at work. This lends evidence to Halcour’s claim that the Tractatus probably comments or glosses the transcendental treatise of Alexander’s SH. Perhaps the anonymous friar penned it “as a concept for the purposes of teaching,” perhaps “ as a draft for his own commentary on the Sentences.”40 Whatever its intimacy with Alexander, Aertsen registers a difference. He thinks the anonymous friar’s decision to accord beauty “a place of its own in virtue of its synthesizing function” marks a “surprising” innovation.41 Aertsen continues. The text’s definition of beauty as “circulating through all causes” concocts “an isolated statement,” not “explained or grounded.”42 Aertsen’s point is clear. If the Tractatus be the first to crown beauty with transcendental status, it does so only by innovating SH—or by transgressing it. An innovation perhaps. But a transgression neither “explained” nor “grounded”? Notice a passage in the Tractatus that Aertsen does not. An objection issues from Augustine’s by-then cliché definition of beauty in De Tractatus de transcendentalibus, q. 1: “Dicendum, quod istae conditiones fundantur supra ens, addunt enim aliquam rationem. Unde unum, verum, bonum et pulcrum praesupponunt intellectum entis, in quo communicant, et rursus haec invicem praeintelligunt se: nam pulcrum praeintelligit bonum, et bonum verum, et verum unum, unum autem ipsum ens, quod patet, quia ens dicit absolutum. Unum addit indivisionem supra ens; unum enim est indivisio entis. Sed verum dicit indivisionem formae a materia sive ‘quod est’ et ‘quo est.’ Bonum autem dicit indivisionem potentiae ab actu. Unde unum respicit causam efficientem, verum formalem, bonum autem finalem secundum appropriationem. Sed pulcrum circuit omnem causam et est commune ad ista” (Halcour, “Tractatus,” 65). 40 Halcour, “Tractatus,” 63. 41 Aertsen, Transcendental Thought, 170. 42 Aertsen, Transcendental Thought, 170. 39 886 Justin Shaun Coyle civitate Dei 22.19 as partium congruentia. Must this mean that beauty is in bodies only (pulchritudo est solum in corporibus)? The Tractatus responds: There is a congruence of parts, a congruence of ratios, and a congruence of order. The first is beauty in bodies; the second is beauty in creatures of spiritual substances, according to essential but not qualitative parts, which are matter and form, quod est and quo est, but this is not in God. In God there is the highest congruence of order, the highest congruence of ratios, thus this is the highest beauty. 43 This hardly forms a complete explanation, but it is a start. At the very least, the passage explains why the text invests beauty with a “synthesizing function.” Beauty, the anonymous friar learns from Augustine, entails a harmony or congruence of parts. And not just in bodies. The angels too are beautiful because they are composed, however exactly that is.44 Of course God remains uncomposed—divine simplicity demands it. But this need not subvert God’s claim to beauty. For in God, anonymous writes, lives the highest congruence of order (summa congruentia ordinis), itself the highest beauty (summa pulcritudinis). The text does not detail this order. Neither does it name the order’s constituent “parts.” It teaches only that beauty arranges and orders its constituents—in bodies parts, in angels form and matter (or essence and existence). Beauty reprises this role among the transcendentals, or those conditiones which addunt aliquam rationem supra ens (add a certain reason to being). Alexander illustrates this “certain reason” by appeal to Aristotle’s immaterial causes. Each adds to the next. So too, each new transcendental performs a “progressive” or “cumulative” function. 45 And beauty Tractatus de transcendentalibus, q. 1: “Aliter dici potest, quod est congruentia partium, est congruentia rationum, est congruentia ordinis. Prima est pulcritudo in corporalibus; secunda in substantiis spiritualibus creatis, non secundum partes quantitativas, sed essentiales, quae sunt materia et forma, ‘quod est’ et ‘quo est’, haec autem non est in Deo. Sed in ipso est summa congruentia ordinis [et] summa congruentia rationum, ideo et summa pulcritudinis” (Halcour, “Tractatus,” 67). 44 The line the text here draws on the constitution of angels is puzzling. The angels seem constituted both by matter and form and by essence and existence. How exactly this coheres with other Franciscan texts at the time (Bonaventure’s, say, or else Odo Rigaldus’s or John of Rochelle’s) seems unclear, though it might offer another point of comparison for resolving the authorship question. 45 The former term belongs to Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy, 351; the latter to Boyd Taylor Coolman, in “‘A Cord of Three Strands Is Not Easily Broken’: The Tran43 Beauty among the Transcendentals in the Summa Halensis 887 comes last, sublating every and each transcendental—which is also every and each cause—within itself. So “beauty circulates through [circuit] all causes and is common to them.”46 Aertsen thought the Tractatus’s synthetic role for beauty neither “explained” nor “grounded.” We have seen it explained, if incompletely. Might it be grounded too? Beauty as Sacred Order This section mounts a partial defense of the anonymous Tractatus author. The synthetic role he vests beauty with among the transcendentals is not, I claim, a “surprising innovation.” Attention to SH shows that the Tractatus author writes a legitimate—if not finally exact—icon of Alexander’s aesthetics. That Aertsen can so easily dismiss the nameless author’s claim to legitimate interpretation of SH, that interpreters neglect beauty’s synthetic presence among the transcendentals in SH, and that aesthetic interest in SH is wholly circumscribed by the transcendental question—all this follows from neglect of a single passage in SH. This is a pity, since that passage rewards close readers with a rather different and, I think, more delicate pattern of Alexander’s thought on aesthetics. His readers ignore that pattern, not least because they have dialed their scopes for the transcendental question alone. So far as I can tell, all of SH’s recent readers simply cease reading after Alexander’s respondeo. 47 “That is all we find on Beauty,” Pouillon announces after reading it, “in the first part of the Summa fratris Alexan- scendental Brocade of Unity, Truth and Goodness in the Early Franciscan Intellectual Tradition,” Nova et Vetera (English) 16, no. 2 (2018): 561–86. Both describe the same phenomenon, that each transcendental is synthetic to the extent that each conceptually contains the transcendentals which precede it. See also Rubin, “The Meaning of Beauty,” 93. 46 It is worth noting that Spargo’s judgment that beauty is a transcendental for Bonaventure rests on this text alone, whose authorship she ascribes to Bonaventure: “From the point of view of causality, it can be said that the one refers to efficient causality, the true to formal causality, and the good to final causality. But the beautiful embraces all these causes” (Category of the Aesthetic, 36). Spargo’s conclusion gets reinscribed in David E. Ost’s “Bonaventure: The Aesthetic Synthesis,” Franciscan Studies 36 (1976): 243. For a more sophisticated treatment of Bonaventure on beauty’s transcendentality, see Karl Peter’s Die Lehre der Schönheit nach Bonaventura (Werl: Dietrich-Coelde, 1964), esp. 115–29. 47 Exceptions here are Pouillon’s “La beauté,” 276, and de Bruyne’s “Les premiers scolastiques,” 110. 888 Justin Shaun Coyle dri.”48 This explains why his and others’ interest begins and ends with how to conceive beauty’s relation or subordination to the good or the true. But there lingers below an important, tightly compressed argument interred in a response to the second objection. What escapes modern readers, however, rarely eludes Scholastics. The passage does not escape the Tractatus author’s gaze. For this reason, I read in reverse: the forgotten reply to objection 2 first, the respondeo next. Open curtains, then, on that forgotten scene. There, as in the Tractatus, SH meets an objection that the Augustinian definition of beauty renders the beautiful coterminous with the corporeal. Alexander responds. “There Augustine defines the beauty of visible or bodily things, but the same might be said of the beauty of fleshy, sensible things just to the extent that it leads to beauty intelligible or spiritual.”49 The created order thus constitutes what Bonaventure later calls a ladder whose parallel rungs chart the Itinerarium mentis in Deum.50 Here already in SH the beauty that flits across creation’s surface discloses its transcendent depths. All that is typical to any broadly Platonic aesthetic, really. But Alexander presses further still: For just as [Augustine says that] “the beauty of bodies is from a harmony of the composition of its parts, ” so also is the beauty of souls from a harmony of powers and the ordering of faculties [ex convenientia virium et ordinatione potentiarum]. And beauty in the divine is from the sacred order of the divine persons [ex ordine sacro divinarum personarum], in such a manner that one person is not from another—[a person] from whom another is by generation [per generationem], and from [these two persons] a third is by procession (per processionem].51 Pouillon, “La beauté,” 276. SH I, no. 103 (Quaracchi ed.,1:163). 50 Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum 1.2–3, 4.2, 7.1 (Doctoris Seraphici S. Bonaventurae Opera Omnia, ed. The Fathers of the College of St. Bonaventure, vol. 5 [Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1891], 297, 306, 312). 51 SH I, n. 103: “Ad secundum dicendum quod illud Augustini definit pulcritudinem visibilem sive corporalem; tamen dicitur de pulcritudine corporali sensibili, in quantum ducit ad intellligibilem sive spiritualem. Sicut enim ‘pulchritudo corporum est ex congruentia compositionis partium,’ ita pulcritudo animarum ex convenientia virium et ordinatione potentiarum, et pulcritudo in divinis ex ordine sacro divinarum personarum, qua una persona non ab alia, a qua alia per generationem, a quibus tertia per processionem” (Quaracchi ed.,1:163). 48 49 Beauty among the Transcendentals in the Summa Halensis 889 The passage proceeds in three steps. It first extends the Augustinian line on fleshy beauty to the beauty of souls. Then it extends the definition of beauty as “a harmony of parts” still more—it stretches even to God.52 (Again, a prima facie problem given divine simplicity.) Third and most striking, the text submits an explicitly Trinitarian canon for beauty. Notice how this Trinitarian canon already resolves the problem of parts-talk in God. Here, talk of “parts” issues negation. Unlike the body’s limbs and the soul’s powers, God’s “parts” enjoy essential identity and personal difference.53 So God the Trinity has and is God’s “parts.” This introduces Alexander’s peculiar grammar of divine beauty. For him, it is not God as divine essence that makes God beautiful and indeed Beauty itself, as Dionysius and the long Neoplatonic tradition had Though Harald Hagendahl does not cite any classical source for Augustine’s definition of beauty at De civitate Dei 22.19—well-known also to Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and Ulrich of Strasburg—he cites Cicero’s Tusculanae disputationes 4.13.30–31 as the source for a near identical passage in Augustine’s Epistle 3, no. 4 (Augustine and the Latin Classics [Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1967], 319). Oleg V. Bychkov shows that Cicero’s own definition owes to the Stoics, particularly Chrysippus, whom Galen reports as holding that “beauty arises from the symmetry of parts” (see “The Reflection of Some Traditional Stoic Ideas in the Thirteenth-Century Scholastic Theories of Beauty,” Vivarium 34, no. 2 [1996]: 141–60). 53 It was by now a Franciscan tradition to deny the soul’s essential identity with its parts. The so-called identity thesis derived mostly from chapter 13 of the pseudo-Augustinian De spiritu et anima. It found its strongest thirteenth-century defender in Philip the Chancellor and its strongest opponent in William of Auxerre. In any case, the Franciscan school from Alexander’s Glossa on attempted conciliation and seems to have won the day. For early Franciscan positions, see: Alexander of Hales, Glossa 1, d. 3, 46a, in Glossa in quatuor libros Sententiarum Petri Lombardi (Quaracchi: Ex Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1951), 64–65; John of la Rochelle, Summa de anima 60, ed. J.-G. Bougerol (Paris: Vrin, 1995), 181–84; and SH I-II, no. 349 (Quaracchi ed., 2:424–25). For William of Auxerre’s position, see his Summa aurea II, tr. 9, c. 1, q. 6, ed. J. Ribaillier (Rome: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas Grottaferrata, 1982). For more on this tangled Scholastic issue, see, e.g., Pius Künzle, O.P., Das Verhältnis der Seele zu ihren Potenzen: problemgeschichtliche Untersuchungen von Augustin bis und mit Thomas von Aquin (Fribourg: Universitätsverlag, 1956); Magadalena Bieniak, The Soul–Body Problem at Paris, ca. 1200–1250: Hugh of St-Cher and His Contemporaries, trans. Raffaella Roncarati (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2010), 95–118; and Denise Ryan, “An Examination of a Thirteenth-Century Treatise on the Mind/Body Dichotomy: Jean de La Rochelle on the Soul and its Powers” (PhD diss., National University of Ireland Maynooth, 2010), 115–20. 52 890 Justin Shaun Coyle taught.54 No, it is rather God as Trinity.55 From Augustine, Alexander adopts a grammar of beauty whose definition is harmonious or relational.56 Beauty on this view names a harmony of parts. From Dionysius, he adapts a Neoplatonic identification of the cause of beauty with Beauty itself, or a grammar of beauty that is causal. So beauty is a name for the supremely simple God. Then Alexander commingles these: divine beauty is a harmony of God’s persons, which are not really “parts.” This synthesis, the coalescing of an Augustinian aesthetic with the Dionysian, becomes the style-signature of SH’s theological aesthetics. Beauty is at once relational and causal exactly because God is at once Trinity and Creator. And this fits rather comfortably with what the Tractatus author writes, even if the latter Remember Plotinus’s arguments against Stoic grammars of beauty at Enneads 1.6: “Nearly everyone says that it is good proportion of the parts to each other and to the whole, with the addition of good colour, which produces visible beauty, and that with the objects of sight and generally with everything else, being beautiful is well-proportioned and measured. On this theory nothing single and simple but only a composite thing will have any beauty. It will be the whole which is beautiful, and the parts will not have the property of beauty by themselves, but will contribute to the beauty of the whole. . . . But how does the bodily agree with that which is before the body? How does the architect declare the house outside beautiful by fitting it to the form of house within him? . . . All these other things are external additions and mixtures and not primary . . . in any case, however, beauty [to kalon] is in the intelligible world” (Plotinus: Porphyry on Plotinus: Ennead I, trans. A. H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library 440 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press], 235–63). Proclus underlines the unity of beauty by naming it the “form of form” in Theology of Plato 3.18, reproduced in Brendan Thomas Sammon in The God Who Is Beauty: Beauty as a Divine Name in Thomas Aquinas and Dionysius the Areopagite (London: James Clarke, 2014), 72. Neither Plotinus nor Proclus obviously identify beauty with the One, though Dionysius tightens this connection at Divine Names 4.7, trans. John Parker in Dionysius the Areopagite, Works (London: James Clarke, 1879), 33: “But, the superessential Beautiful is called Beauty, on account of the beauty communicated from Itself to all beautiful things, in a manner appropriate to each, and as Cause of the good harmony and brightness of all things which flashes like light to all the beautifying distributions of its fontal ray, and as calling all things to Itself (whence also it is called Beauty), and as collecting all in all to Itself.” 55 Not that God as divine essence is somehow other than God as three persons. The difference I highlight here is one of emphasis. I should say, too, that there’s a loose connection here to the kind of “Trinitarian aesthetics” Coolman discovers in Hugh of St. Victor, though the latter’s grammar of aesthetics seems grounded more in the subjective delight of the persons one in another than in their objective perichoresis (Boyd Taylor Coolman, “‘In Whom I am Well Pleased’: Hugh of St. Victor’s Trinitarian Aesthetics,” Pro Ecclesia 23, no. 3 [2014]: 331–54). 56 Or rather simply Stoic. See note 51 above. 54 Beauty among the Transcendentals in the Summa Halensis 891 does not reproduce all of Alexander’s Trinitarian precisions. Suppose as Alexander does that beauty names the sacred order that comprises the inner life of the Trinity. Suppose too that this order serves as both canon and source of all beauty. What follows? Which are the implications of thinking beauty Trinitarianly? They are at least four—I arrange them in ascending order of importance before returning to the respondeo. A first implication: this passage from Alexander establishes precedent for the Tractatus. Not that there exist no variations between them—there are some. The Tractatus only susurrates, for instance, the Trinitarian connection that Alexander pronounces.57 The former admits that beauty arranges parts in bodies and metaphysical elements in angels. It then locates beauty in Deo as summa congruentia ordinis.58 But the text remains oracular about how this synthesizing feature of beauty works in—and presumably as—God. After all, what in God does beauty synthesize? On this point, Alexander’s Summa completes the analogy. Beauty names the sacred order of the Trinitarian persons (ex ordine sacro divinarum personarum), their mutual interpenetration, their taxic order. The “elements” of beauty’s synthesis in God, put differently, must be the divine persons. Perhaps a spoor of this Trinitarian logic lingers in the Tractatus. Anonymous, recall, writes of beauty that it circuit omnem causam. Remember that circuitio often replaces the Greek perichōrēsis in Burgundio of Pisa’s twelfth-century translation of De fide orthodoxa. So a Trinitarian correlation is not unthinkable, however gossamer its thread.59 Halcour, “Tractatus,” 49: “ The author of Assisi B.C. 186 attempts on the other hand to preserve the independence of the transcendental beauty by letting it encompass all causes: for him beauty is, like the other transcendentals, identical with being (and not only with good), but differs from it conceptually. In the same way beauty is convertible with each of the other transcendentals. . . . Yet beauty encompasses all of these causes and is common to all of them. And thus in itself being beautiful comprehends being one, being true, and being good. . . . But whether beauty in the appropriation of the transcendentals belongs to all three ways of divine causation and therefore must be accorded to all three persons of the Trinity—about this our treatise is silent.” 58 Tractatus de transcendentalibus, q. 1 (Halcour, “Tractatus,” 67). 59 The other option is, of course, circumincessio. See John of Damascus, De fide orthodoxa: Versions of Burgundio and Cerbanus, ed. Eloi Marie Buytaert (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1955): 45, 64. See also Gilles Emery, O.P., The Trinitarian Theology of St Thomas Aquinas, trans. Francesca Aran Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 301, and Peter Stemmer, “Perichorese: Zur Geschichte eines Begriffs,” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 27 (1983): 36. Circuitio is used again in Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples’s sixteenth-century Traduction latine des livres de la foi orthodoxe de saint Jean de Damas; see August Deneffe’s “Perichoresis, 57 892 Justin Shaun Coyle There runs another major variation between the texts. I mean anonymous’s claim that beauty adds conceptually to being just like one, true, and good—something absent in Alexander’s Summa.60 These differences are no doubt deep and serious. But granting that need not mean conceding with Aertsen that the “synthesizing function” the Tractatus accords beauty proves nonnative to Alexander’s text. The family resemblance between them, I think, seems conspicuous enough. The forgotten passage also hints at an answer to the transcendentality question—this is the second implication. Which are Alexander’s criteria for transcendentality? So far as it goes, Aertsen’s canon for Thomas applies to SH. If it be a transcendental, a term must (1) add something to being that the other transcendental terms cannot and (2) find its place among their order. 61 Alexander himself demands the first criterion at SH I, no. 72. There he announces that the primae intentiones add something conceptually to being (per rationem additam ad ens). Alexander stipulates the second too in the three places he arranges an order for the transcendentals.62 But to Aertsen’s criteria I append a third item, one peculiar to Alexander and that I cannot here detail in full. In SH, that is, transcendental determinations of being must be (3) appropriable to one or another person of the Trinity.63 So again, the three criteria: a transcendental (1) adds to circumincessio, circuminsessio: Eine terminologische Untersuchung,” Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 47, no. 4 (1923): 510. 60 SH I, no. 72: “Si per rationem additam ad ‘ens’ ista, quae sunt primae intentions. . . . Dicendum quod cum sit ‘ens’ primum intelligibile, eius intentio apud intellectum est nota; primae ergo determinationes entis sunt primae impressiones apud intellectum: eae sunt unum, verum, bonum, sicut patebit” (“If those [terms] add conceptually to being, which are the first intentions. . . . . We should say that since being is the first intelligible, its intention before the intellect is known; therefore the first determinations of being are the first impressions before the intellect: they are one, true, and good, as we shall see)” (Quaracchi ed.,1:113). 61 Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy, 337, and Transcendental Thought, 176. 62 SH I, no. 72 (Quaracchi ed.,1:113–15), no. 88 (1:139–41), and no. 102 (1:160– 61). 63 SH I, no. 89: “Alia vero de veritate increata secundum quod accipitur personaliter et appropriatur Filio, sicut unitas Patri et bonitas Spiritui Sancto, quae est: ‘Veritas est summa similitudo principii’ etc.” (“But others [say] of uncreated truth that it is accepted personally and appropriated to the Son, just as unity is to the Father and goodness is the Holy Spirit, that is: ‘Truth is the highest likeness to the principle,’ etc.”) (Quaracchi ed.,1:143–44). More, Alexander shows that he means “appropriation” in its technical acceptation. An objection worries that this definition rives truth from the Father and the divine essence. It need not—and that it need not has everything to do with the logic of appropriation. Truth belongs to the divine essence, which is to say that truth is an essential attribute. But on this particular Beauty among the Transcendentals in the Summa Halensis 893 being, (2) finds its place among the others, and (3) correlates a divine attribute to a personal property. Beauty fails all three. Against (1), nowhere does Alexander say that beauty adds conceptually to being. 64 Yet he repeats this again and again of one, true, and good. Against (2), nowhere in the three places that Alexander arranges the order of the transcendentals does he include beauty. 65 After all, the intrinsic relation between one, true, and good does not obviously yield space for beauty. 66 And against (3), the case appears rather definition of truth (among others), truth belongs in a special sense to the Son as summa similitudo principii. That is, it corresponds to a particular personal propria that distinguishes the Son from the other persons—principally that summa similitudo principii guaranteed by his begottenness from the Father. But this does not therefore sequester truth to the Son without remainder. Again, the syntax of appropriation demands a sharp distinction between personal properties and essential attributes. Applying that syntax means that truth belongs to the divine essence and, it follows, to the Father (and to the Spirit too). For more on Alexander’s expansive account of Trinitarian appropriation, see SH I, nos. 448–61 (Quaracchi ed.,1:641–58). 64 The text gets close in one place. SH I-II, no. 75 does ask “cum utrumque [Dionysius] addat super ens, quid addit pulcrum super ens quo differt a bono” (“If Dionysius adds both to being, does he add beauty to being according to how it differs from the good?”) (Quaracchi ed., 2:99). But the respondeo seems to ignore answering the question as posed. In fact, the text never again speaks of beauty “adding” anything to being, though the respondeo assumes that both good and true add to being. 65 Ordinarily—at least in other medieval texts—omission of a term need not necessarily disqualify the term’s transcendentality. On this point in Thomas’s texts, see Rubin, “The Meaning of Beauty,” 21–87 (especially 56–57 on res and aliquid as precedent). Still beauty’s omission from lists of transcendentals in the SH, especially when taken together with the third criterion of appropriability, suggests that absence means more in the SH than it does in Thomas. 66 SH I, no. 73: “Dicendum quod istae intentiones, ‘unum, verum, bonum’, se circumincedunt et inde est quod aliae rationes induunt rationem causae finalis et ita rationem boni: unde ‘verum’ non appetitur nisi quia bonum; ‘unum’ similiter non appetitur nisi quia bonum; nec ‘bonum’ nisi in quantum bonum. Similiter in quantum apprehenduntur intellectu, induunt rationem veri: non enim intelligitur ‘bonum’ nisi in quantum verum; nec ‘unum’ nisi in quantum verum; nec ‘verum’ nisi in quantum verum. Similiter in quantum ordinantur in memoria induunt rationem ‘unius’: non enim ordinatur bonum in memoria nisi ut ‘unum’, nec verum nisi ut ‘unum’, nec unum nisi ut ‘unum’” (“We should say that these intentions, ‘one, true, good,’ interpenetrate one another [se circumincedunt] and thus that other rationes take up the ratio of the final cause and so the ratio of the good: hence ‘true’ is not desired except as good; likewise ‘one’ is not desired except as good; nor is ‘good’ [desired] except insofar as it is good. Likewise insofar as [these] are apprehended by the intellect, they take up the ratio of the good: for ‘good’ is 894 Justin Shaun Coyle glaring. In fact, Hans Urs von Balthasar already flags the difficulty. The appropriative character of Franciscan transcendental thought, Balthasar notices—one to Father, true to Son, and good to Spirit—exacerbates “the difficulty of assigning to the beautiful its systematic place.”67 Given the criterion of appropriation, it seems impossible that Alexander could endow beauty with a transcendental status. Doing that would mean granting transcendentality to a term that flutters free of Trinitarian gravity in a way that no other transcendental does or can.68 On Alexander’s account, the Tractatus’s claims that beauty (a) names a transcendental and that it (b) synthesizes the others after a pattern analogous to trinitarian ordo prove incompatible.69 In any case, it is not Alexander’s way. Against Eco, then, I concede Aertsen’s conclusion (though not always his premises). Beauty, it seems, is not a transcendental in SH. What to say then, to complete this second implication, about beauty’s presence among the transcendentals in SH I-II, no. 75? Might beauty as sacred order redress the aporia? This would be ideal, since ruling against Eco on the transcendental question should not mean burying textual evidence to the contrary.70 An easy option might chalk up the discrepancy between SH I, no. 103, and SH I-II, no. 75, to different authors. SH knew several, after all. Still, I assume continuity before disruption, at least until not understood except insofar as it is true; neither is ‘one’ [understood] except insofar as it is true, nor ‘true’ except insofar as it is true. Likewise, insofar as they are ordered in memory, they take up the ratio of ‘one’: for the good is not ordered in memory unless it is ‘one,’ neither is true unless it is ‘one,’ nor is one unless it is ‘one’”) (Quaracchi ed., 1:116). 67 Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Transcendental Aesthetics: Francis, Alexander, Albert, Ulrich, Mechthild,” in The Glory of the Lord, vol. 4, The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 377. Balthasar’s source is likely also Halcour, “Tractatus,” esp. 48. 68 Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, 4:377: “Since the One, True, and Good of being referred back to the trinitarian causality of God as Father, Son, and Spirit, there seemed to be no more room in God for another” (emphasis mine). 69 Halcour notes this difficulty at “Tractatus,” 48: “ It is extremely difficult for Franciscan thought in the high middle ages to ground the independence of beauty’s transcendentality . . . [especially because] the three transcendentals of one, true, and good are divided among the three divine persons, among the three modes of divine causes, and among the three modes of knowing of measure, form, and order. Beauty cannot maintain an independent place in this triply structured context. ” Aertsen repeats it in “Das Schöne,” 1353: “The reason for this might have been the appropriation of this triad to the persons of the divine Trinity (Father, Son, and Spirit), which left no more room for another transcendental. ” 70 Aertsen says very little about SH I-II, no. 75. Beauty among the Transcendentals in the Summa Halensis 895 continuity proves unlikely.71 Its likelihood here is already destabilized by the second text listing true, good, and beautiful. Why not one, true, and good, as everywhere else in SH I? Here again, attention to the text suggests an answer. There Alexander explains exactly what he lists. And it is not the primae determinationes entis.72 Instead, he is interested in “the conditions of creatures [conditiones creaturae] concerning quality, which are true, good, and beautiful.”73 More, Alexander addresses the sudden absence of “one” from his index. He has already treated unity as a created condition in his questions ex parte quantitatis.74 So yes, this list of conditiones creaturae differs from the list of primae determinationes entis. But this does not—or need not—spell disruption. Not, that is, if these passages connote different (if related) things. Aertsen shows that the primae determinationes entis comprise three related spheres: (1) divine attributes, (2) primae intentiones, and (3) primae impressiones.75 As divine attributes the transcendentals work theologically, as first intentions logically, as first impressions epistemically. SH I-II’s talk of the conditiones creaturae reads otherwise. If the emphasis on the transcendentals in SH I has more to do with discerning the Trinitarian source and shape of all being as such, the emphasis here on the conditiones creaturae ex parte qualitatis concerns how concrete creatures exist. Whichever Étienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York: Random House, 1955), 327: “The so-called Summa of Brother Alexander. . . is a compilation, probably undertaken by John of la Rochelle and completed by later Franciscan theologians. . . . Despite its composite character, it has a unity of its own, due to the fact that its component fragments are all borrowed from Franciscan theologians belonging to the same doctrinal school. Owing to this unity of inspiration, it remarkably illustrates what may be called ‘the spirit of the thirteenth-century Franciscan school of theology at the University of Paris.’ Even as a collective work, it has a distinct signification.” 72 SH I, no. 72 (Quaracchi ed.,1:113). 73 SH I-II, no. 75: “Verititur deinde consideratio, post conditiones creaturae ex parte quantitatis, circa conditiones ex parte qualitatis, quae sunt: verum, bonum et pulcrum. De veritate autem et bonitate dictum est superius in Tractatu de essentialibus dictis de Deo. Sequitur consideratio de pulchritudine et pulcro” (“After [considering] the conditions of creatures concerning quantity, we turn next to the consideration of the conditions of creatures [conditiones creaturae] concerning quality, which are true, good, and beautiful. But we spoke of truth and goodness above in the treatise on the essential names of God. There follows a consideration of beauty and the beautiful”) (Quaracchi ed., 2:99). 74 See question 2 of SH I-II, De creatura secundum quantitatem, which comprises nos. 54–74 (Quaracchi ed., 2: 63–83). 75 Aertsen, Transcendental Thought, 140. 71 896 Justin Shaun Coyle species of qualitas Alexander invokes—Aristotle catalogs four76 —qualitas always concerns the determination of a subject. Or, as the Philosopher has it, “that by which things are said to be such and such.”77 Thomas later advises that studies of qualitas consider “evil and good, and also changeableness.”78 These are precisely the sorts of questions that follow in SH I-II: “Whether evil be called beautiful, whether monstrous things should be called beautiful, whether beauty in the world is able to increase or decrease, whether things that are mutable and good contribute to the beauty of the universe.”79 And so on. All this recommends a better solution to the textual aporia—better, at least, than the multiple-author solution. True: SH I speaks of one, true, and good; SH I-II of true, good, and beautiful. But this difference is explained by the fact that each text treats of different things, or rather the same things under a different aspect.80 So again, the second implication: beauty is not a transcendental in SH. There follows a third and more important implication. If the above passage meets the transcendental question, it also transfigures it. I mean that It follows from SH’s Trinitarian account of beauty that the transcendental question is not the only one to pose. Not that I advocate against asking the question—no, I posed it above. In fact, posing the transcendental question to SH forms the condition for the possibility of discovering Aristotle, Categories 8b26–10a11. Aristotle, Categories 8b26–27: “Esti de hē poiotēs tōn pleonachōs legomenōn” (Greek from Aristotle: The Organon I: The Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938], 62; translation mine). 78 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae [ST] I-II, q. 49, a. 2, corp.: “Sed modus et determinatio subiecti in ordine ad naturam rei, pertinet ad primam speciem qualitatis, quae est habitus et disposition . . . ideo in prima specie consideratur et bonum et malum; et etiam facile et difficile mobile” (“But the mode and determination of the subject regarding the nature of the thing belongs to the first species of quality, which is habit or disposition. . . . Thus in the first species we consider evil and good, and also changeableness, whether easy or difficult”; Latin from the Leonine edition, at corpusthomisticum.org/sth2049.html). 79 “Utrum malum dicatur pulcrum, utrum res monstruosae dicendae sint pulcrae, utrum pulcritudo possit augeri vel minui in mundo, utrum bona mutabilia conferant ad pulchritudinem universi.” These are, respectively, SH I-II, no. 78 (Quaracchi ed., 2:101), no. 79 (2:101), no. 80 (2:102), no. 83 (2:105). 80 In other words, SH I seems more interested in the transcendental divine attributes—one, true, and good—as such; SH I-II in their created traces (vestigia). The latter follows a long discussion De vestigio at SH I-II, nos. 34–40 (Quaracchi ed., 2:44–49). For more on vestiges in SH, see Elisabeth Gössmann’s “Die Vestigium-Lehre,” in Metaphysik und Heilsgeschichte: Eine theologische Untersuchung der Summa Halensis (Munich: Max Hueber, 1964), 186–89. 76 77 Beauty among the Transcendentals in the Summa Halensis 897 beauty’s expanded scope. That is, the narrow transcendental question reveals its own limits. Asking it first discloses Alexander’s elegant peculiarities on both beauty and transcendentality. The trouble comes only when readers presume that it is the first and final question to ask. Nursing a fetish for the finality of the transcendental question leads Eco to exaggerate and Aertsen to understate. Doubtless Aertsen is right to challenge Eco on the question. But it does not follow that Aertsen himself is correct to banish beauty to the realm of epiphenomena. Beauty may not number among the determinations of being themselves. But that does not and need not render its significance epiphenomenal—far from it. On my reading, beauty’s absence from SH’s transcendental index invites another explanation. Key to that explanation is the fact that Alexander identifies beauty with the sacred order of the Trinitarian persons, not to a person specifically. The deep significance of beauty, then, lies precisely in its omission.81 This is because there are three and three only persons that together constitute and individually comprise the Trinity. Plainer still: if one belongs to the Father, true to the Son, and good to the Spirit, then beauty—as Brother Alexander writes—names the sacred order of the Trinitarian persons. Beauty names nothing less than their taxis. And that, to put the point sharply, is no epiphenomenon. The fourth and final implication of the above passage is that it yields a fresh and distinctively Trinitarian account of beauty, perhaps a medieval supplement to recent theologies of beauty that revolve almost exclusively around Christology. 82 Attending to and explicating Alexander’s theology I flag a difference between my argument that beauty’s omission betrays its significance and Winfried Czapiewski, who argues that beauty’s relation to good and true “cannot be grasped directly since the finite spirit can only realize its conformity to being by means of the distinct powers of intellect and will, and thus beauty can only be apprehended through truth and goodness; therefore, despite its being a transcendental, beauty cannot be included in the list of the transcendentals” (Rubin, “The Meaning of ‘Beauty,’” 94–95). Aside from our writing on two different figures, the deep difference between my suggestion here and Czapiewski’s “ingenious solution” that attempts to make “beauty’s absence from the list of transcendentals into evidence Thomas did consider it such a term” (Rubin, “The Meaning of ‘Beauty,’”94) is that he argues for beauty’s transcendentality, and I against it. See also Aertsen, The Transcendentals, 353, and Czapiewski, Das Schöne bei Thomas von Aquin (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1964), 121–31. 82 I think principally of the donation of Hans Urs von Balthasar to theological aesthetics, both in retrieval and systematic construction. Still, both of Balthasar’s efforts at retrieval and construction are ineluctably Christocentric. Consider, for example, his chapters on Augustine and Bonaventure in Glory of the Lord, vol. 2, Studies in Theological Styles: Clerical Styles, trans. Andrew Louth, Francis 81 898 Justin Shaun Coyle sounds a call that I cannot here answer.83 That task, like that of the angels scaling Jacob’s ladder, involves two directions—heavenward and earthbound. It would first, that is, relate Alexander’s description of beauty as ordo sacer divinarum personarum to Alexander’s mostly ignored Trinitarian theology. 84 If divine beauty be the canon of all beauty, and if divine beauty be the order of the persons, then what exactly is that order?85 Next and world-facing, it would then repair back to SHs delicate pattern of thought that threads beauty through all of the causes—not unlike what the Tractatus describes. 86 These are tracks along which this essay cannot now move. Instead, I close by returning at long last to the respondeo in SH I, no. 103. Recall the question: Are beauty and good the same? Alexander begins by reinscribing a passage from Augustine’s De diversis quaestionibus. 87 The passage draws a distinction, cum bonum dicatur dupliciter. If good as honorable (honestum) names what is sought for its own sake, good as useful (utile) names a waypoint toward another end.88 Then Augustine indexes honestum to intelligiblem pulcritudinem, utile to divinam providentiam. The former describes something’s intrinsic beauty, the latter how providence works all things toward the good. On Augustine’s authority, Alexander identifies beauty with the good as honestum, not as utile. Why? Their difference arises from how beauty and good relate to the final cause. As dispositio boni, beauty has its end in pleasing apprehension.89 But the proper end of McDonagh, and Brian McNeil, C.R.V. [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984]). I explore this topic at greater length across my dissertation, “An Essay on Theological Aesthetics in the Summa halensis.” 84 Exceptions are: Theodore de Régnon’s Études sur la Sainte Trinité, vol. 2 (Paris: Victor Retaux, 1892); Albert Stohr, Die Trinitätslehre des hl. Bonaventura: Eine systematische Darstellung und historische Würdigung., vol. 1, Die wissenschaftliche Trinitätslehre, Münsterische Beiträge zur Theologie 3 (Munster: Aschendorff, 1923); and Kevin Patrick Keane, “The Logic of Self-Diffusive Goodness in the Trinitarian Theory of the ‘Summa fratris Alexandri,’” (PhD diss., Fordham University, 1978). 85 SH I, nos. 320–27 (Quaracchi ed., 1:471–81). 86 SH I, nos. 6–26 (Quaracchi ed., 2:14–37). 87 SH I, nos. 103 (Quaracchi ed., 1:162). See Augustine, question 30 in De diversis quaestionibus octaginta tribus (PL, 40:19). 88 SH I-II, no. 76, will later draw an analogous distinction between pulcrum and aptum: “Videtur ergo differentia pulcri et apti in hoc quod pulcrum dicatur in se ipso, aptum vero secundum quod homini accommodatur vel alteri rei cui convenit” (“Thus it seems that the difference between beauty and aptness lies in this: that beauty is said of the thing itself while aptness is said according to how it accommodates the human or fits something else to it”) (Quaracchi ed., 2:100). 89 Note here the resonance with the famous dictum from Thomas’s ST I, q. 39, a. 83 Beauty among the Transcendentals in the Summa Halensis 899 the good is to delight affection. And delighting affection seems to concern divine providence, and so utile. Pleasing apprehension concerns intrinsic beauty, and so honestum.90 Beauty’s relation to the final cause, then, has to do with its intrinsic allure. Later SH names this allure species. The species of any given thing t connotes “that by virtue of which [t] gives pleasure and is appreciated.”91 So species bears something that attracts. What is it? “Something is said to be beautiful in the world,” Brother Alexander continues, “when it bears the proper measure [modum], species [species], and order [ordinem].”92 Alexander learns from Augustine to read Wisdom 11’s triad Trinitarianly—“a triple trace of the Creator.”93 This every creature bears.94 What enraptures us about something beautiful, then, is exactly its trace of Trinitarian taxis. An appetite for this beauty, Alexander later argues, suffuses the ensemble 8. SH likely adapts this definition from William of Auvergne’s De bono et malo: “Quemadmodum enim pulchrum visu dicimus, quod natum est per se ipsum placere spectantibus et delectare secundum visum, sic et pulchrum interius, quod intuentium animos delectat et amorem sui allicit” (“Just as we call beautiful for the eyes that which of itself is able to please those who see it and afford visual delight, so also we call internal beauty that which delights the minds of those who see it and inclines them to love it”; reproduced in Wladyslav Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, vol. 2, Medieval Aesthetics, trans. R. M. Montgomery, ed. C. Barrett [Bristol: Thoemmes, 1970], 221). SH I-II, no. 75 (Quaracchi ed., 2:99), develops this point further. 90 SH I, no. 103 (Quaracchi ed., 1:162). 91 SH I, no. 115 (Quaracchi ed., 1:181). 92 SH I-II, no. 81 (Quaracchi ed., 2:103). It seems curious at first blush that SH should list species as the content of species. But this is explained at SH I, no. 115: “Species dicitur duobus modis. Uno modo dicitur quo res distinguitur; et sic condividitur contra modum et ordinem, quia modus est, quo res limitatur, species, quo distinguitur, ordo, quo ad aliud ordinatur. Alio modo dicitur species, quo res placet et accepta est: et hoc modo dicit rationem boni decurrentia per illa tria” (“Species is said in two ways. In the first way it is said [to be] that by which a thing is distinguished, and thus contrary to mode and order, since mode is that by which a thing is limited, species [that] by which it is distinguished, [and] order that by which it is ordered. In another way species is said [to be] that by which something pleases and is acceptable: and by this mode the ratio of the good runs throughout these three”) (Quaracchi ed., 1:181). 93 SH I, no. 113 (Quaracchi ed., 1:117). 94 SH I-II, no. 37 (Quaracchi ed., 2:46), no. 39 (2:48), no. 485 (2:673), no. 518 (2:769). De Bruyne’s rather neat citation “pulchritudo creaturae est vestigium pulchritudinis increatae” does not, so far as I can tell, actually occur in the text (“Les premiers scolastiques,” 110). Perhaps he misremembers SH I-II, no. 38: “ut trinitas in creatura Trinitati increatae respondeat” (“that the trinity in the creature might respond to the uncreated Trinity”; 2:48). 900 Justin Shaun Coyle of creation.95 Or as George Herbert divines: “True beauty dwells on high: ours is a flame / but borrowed thence to light us thither.”96 So much, altogether too briefly, on beauty’s relation to the final cause. Beauty and good differ too in their relation to the efficient cause.97 The good concerns quod fluit a causa secundum indistinctionem, beauty secundum distinctionem. Alexander invokes Dionysius to corroborate. “The good is called first beauty, since from it all things that exist are given the beauty proper to them.” Alexander does not elaborate. He intimates only that beauty’s relation to efficient causality concerns “distinction.” The mists that shroud this relation dissipate where Alexander details efficient causality later in SH I-II. There, he notes that St. Paul’s phrase per ipsum typically denotes the Son’s role in formal or exemplar causality.98 But not always—sometimes it describes the Son’s efficient causality. As very God, the Son too causes efficiently—or he receives the power to cause efficiently from the Father. But aside from stressing the unity of causality in God,99 why spotlight the Son’s efficient causality? Because per Verbum facta sunt quae facta sunt. Under that ratio, Alexander thinks it fitting to predicate efficient causality of the Son. When we do that, we name an intrinsic connection between “the source of all things and the most perfect beauty.”100 Since omnis artifex est sapiens per artem suam, and since the Son is eternal ars Patri, Pater noscit creaturas esse per Filium.101 Again, this is fitting, since the Son names the locus of the divine ideas. In him they are SH I-II, no. 75: “et secundum hunc modum decorum sive pulcrum cadit in naturali appetitu omnium rerum” (“and according to that mode decor or beauty falls within the natural appetite of all things”) (Quaracchi ed., 2:99). 96 George Herbert, “The Forerunners” (1633), in George Herbert: 100 Poems, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 144. 97 SH I, no. 103: “Item, in intentione causae efficientis: bonum respicit quod fluit a causa secundum indistinctionem; pulcrum vero, quod fluit a causa secundum distinctionem. Unde Dionysius: ‘Bonum primum decor dicitur, quia ab eo omnibus entibus proprius decor impartitur ’” (“Again, in the intention of the efficient cause: the good concerns that which flows from the cause according to indistinction; but beauty [concerns] that which flows from the cause according to distinction. Hence Dionysius: ‘The first good is called decor, since from it is imparted the decor proper to all living things’”) (Quaracchi ed., 1:162). 98 SH I-II, no. 20 (Quaracchi ed., 2:30–31). 99 SH I-II, no. 8 (Quaracchi ed., 2:17). 100 SH I-II, no. 20: “In illa Trinitate summa origo est omnium et perfectissima pulchritudo et beatissima delectatio” (Quaracchi ed., 2:31). Alexander here glosses Augustine’s De Trinitate 6.10.12. 101 SH I, no. 453 (Quaracchi ed., 1:649). 95 Beauty among the Transcendentals in the Summa Halensis 901 one, in creation many.102 The Son’s, then, is the work of distinction. And this details beauty’s relation to the efficient cause. Beauty and good differ last in their relation to the exemplar cause. We call the good “exemplar” in relation to an end, “like an art or rule of operation to a goal [velut ars et regula operanti ad unum terminum].”103 Again Alexander summons Dionysius to testify. As lux intelligibilis, the good “collects and gathers all things” to itself. In this way, good relates to exemplar cause as final cause relates to formal. The final cause, Aristotle taught, holds explanatory priority over the others.104 What a thing is for determines all else about it, including what it is. Causa enim finalis ratio est aliarum causarum.105 Or so the good to the exemplar. SH I, no. 175: “Respondeo quod licet idem sint secundum rem illa, in hoc tamen differunt secundum dictionis modum. Nam sapientia, exemplar, et ars se tenent plus ex parte Dei cognoscentis, quod omnino est unum; ideo illa non recipiunt pluralitatem, ut dicantur plura exemplaria, plures sapientiae, plures artes; ratio vero et idea ex parte rei cognitae: et propter hoc, sicut res cognitae plures, ita et ideae; et propter hoc quia unaquaeque res habet proprium finem, sunt plures rationes, secundum quas fines determinantur. Propter respectum ergo ideae ad formam et rationes ad finem, cum sint formae rerum plures et fines, dicuntur rationes et ideae plures” (“I answer that while those are identical in the thing, they nevertheless differ in a manner of speaking. For wisdom, exemplar, and art themselves represent more with regard to God’s knowledge, which is entirely one. Thus they do not admit of plurality such that they are called many exemplars, many wisdoms, and many arts. But ratio and idea [differ] in the things known. And according to this, just as the things known are many, so too are the ideas. And for this reason since each individual thing has its proper end, there are many rationes according to which ends are determined. With respect, then, to ideas to the form and rationes to the end, since there are many forms and ends of things, it is said that rationes and ideas are many”) (Quaracchi ed., 1:258).This almost exactly matches Alexander’s Glossa I, d. 36, no. 5 (Quaracchi ed., 1:357–60), though it differs from Alexander’s Quaestiones disputatae ‘antequam esset frater’ I, q. 46, no. 36 (Quaracchi: Ex Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1960). For more on this topic in Alexander and later Franciscan thinkers like Odo Rigaldus, Richard Rufus, and Bonaventure, see Rega Wood’s “Distinct Ideas and Perfect Solicitude: Alexander of Hales, Richard Rufus, and Odo Rigaldus,” Franciscan Studies 53 (1993): 7–31. 103 SH I, no. 103 (Quaracchi ed., 1:162). 104 Aristotle, De partibus animalium 639b.12–13. 105 SH I, no. 107 (Quaracchi ed., 1: 168). Cf. SH I-II, no. 115 (2:181). Quoting Philip the Chancellor, Summa de bono II, Aquinas will repeat this in In II phys., lec. 5 , no. 186, and, more pithily, in De principiis naturae 4.29: “Unde dicitur quod finis est causa causarum, quia est causa causalitatis in omnibus causis”(Hence it is said that the end is the cause of causes, since it is the cause of causality in all causes”; De principiis naturae ad fratrem Sylvestrum in Opuscula philosophica, ed. Raimundo Spiazzi, O.P. [Turin/Rome: Marietti, 1954], 121–28). 102 902 Justin Shaun Coyle Beauty functions differently. Beauty does not gather and collect all things to itself like the good. As exemplar ipsum, beauty rather names “distinction and harmony of difference.” For this reason, beauty has less to do with beginnings or ends than it does with metaphysical structure—or order. According to Dionysius, beauty names “the exemplar according to which all things are distinguished.”106 Beauty relates to the exemplary cause, then, to the extent that beauty rules and norms all distinction. Rather dense Scholastic business, that—too dense for protracted commentary here. For now, my point is modest. I want only to point up beauty’s presence across Aristotle’s three immaterial causes. Given the quaestio under review, we might expect Alexander’s notes on the relation between beauty and good as they concern the final cause. The good and the final cause share an intimate relation, of course—Alexander appropriates both to the Spirit.107 Less expected, however, is Alexander’s correlation of beauty to the exemplar and efficient causes. It is true that he continues to assay beauty’s relation to the causes in light of the good. But in each case, the good works like a heuristic.108 Alexander does not mention the good across his explanations to remind the reader of beauty’s subordination to it so much as he wields the good in order to contrast its relation to the causes with beauty’s. Beauty, then, bear its own relation to the causes, different from and unmediated by the good’s. The point, anyway, is that beauty runs across the causes in SH—very like what the Tractatus describes. And this raises a final question. Alexander discerns a tight braiding between the causes and the transcendentals: one to the efficient cause, true to the formal, good to the final.109 Alexander also insists that both these transcendentals and their respective causes function as Trinitarian appropriations. A crude visual might render those relations thus:110 SH I, no. 103 (Quaracchi ed., 1:162). Cf. Dionysius, De divinis nominibus 4.7 SH I, no. 73 (Quaracchi ed., 1:114). 108 This raises the objection Aertsen notes and Rubin: “Distinction in meaning from the good does not necessarily entail conceptual distinction from all of the transcendentals” (“Meaning of ‘Beauty,’” 78).This seems true, so far as it goes—especially in view of the Thomistic texts that Aertsen and Rubin review. But this objection seems to presume that “conceptual distinction from all of the transcendentals” necessitates a transcendental in its own right. Or at least this is why Aertsen raises the objection: he attempts a refutation of beauty’s transcendentality in Thomas. Why exactly this does not prove a final difficulty for SH has everything to do with its peculiar criterion for transcendentality, namely that the transcendentals must function as Trinitarian appropriations (see note 63 above). 109 SH I, no. 73 (Quaracchi ed., 1:114). 110 Readers of Bonaventure will recognize this pattern across his texts too. For similar schematics, see, e.g.: Esther Woo, “Theophanic Cosmic Order in Saint 106 107 Beauty among the Transcendentals in the Summa Halensis 903 Transcendental One True Good Cause Efficient Formal Final Person Father Son Holy Spirit But where does beauty belong? How to depict its relations? I rebutted beauty’s transcendentality above, so it is not clear how it belongs in the first row. And as I just showed, beauty runs across all the causes in a way the other transcendentals do not. So the second row also puzzles. Last, the reply to the second objection explicitly identifies divine beauty with the sacred order of the divine persons. But their order or taxis does not and cannot belong to one person to the exclusion of others. So again, the third row presents a difficulty. I ask again: Where and how does beauty belong? I propose a solution. It begins by working backward from the Trinitarian persons. If beauty describes the taxis among the Trinitarian persons, then it cannot bear content of its own. It is a structure, an ordo—one conditioned by perichoretic relation. So much seems clear: conceiving taxis as subsisting somehow independently of the persons courts absurdity.111 But suppose we extend this perichoretic line on beauty to the causes. On this picture, beauty would neither belong to any particular cause nor subsist separately from them. There, like in the Trinity, beauty would run across and under the causes as their structure. Alexander hints at exactly this connection when he elucidates the order of the causes.112 The causes derive their order from the Trinity, in whom they are one (à la divine attributes). But in creation they are many, and so personal appropriations. As appropriations, the causes are normed by Trinitarian order. And if Trinitarian order be identical to divine beauty, beauty structures and runs across the causes too—just as we see in the respondeo of SH I, no. 103. Thus beauty names order among the persons and the causes, both. And the first row? How does beauty fit among the transcendentals? Remember first the Trinitarian peculiarities of SH’s transcendental Bonaventure,” Franciscan Studies 32 (1972): 306–30, esp. 321–23; David Ost, “Bonaventure: The Aesthetic Synthesis,” Franciscan Studies 36 (1976): 233–47; esp. 246; Jay M. Hammond, “Appendix: Order in the Itinerarium mentis in Deum,” in J. A. Wayne Hellmann, Divine and Created Order in Bonaventure’s Theology (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 2001), 191–271; and Philip L. Reynolds, “Bonaventure’s Theory of Resemblance,” Traditio 58 (2003): 219–55, esp. 242. 111 Alexander raises the question of “an abstractis hypostasibus sit intelligere ordinem naturae in Trinitate et e converso” (“whether, abstracting the hypostases, we can understand an order of nature in the Trinity and vice versa”) at SH I, no. 327 (Quaracchi ed., 1:481). His answer, of course, is negative. 112 SH I-II, no. 8 (Quaracchi ed., 2:16–17). 904 Justin Shaun Coyle thought. Alexander claims that one, good, and true “interpenetrate one another [se circumincedunt].”113 Each presupposes the other—no one without true and good, no true without one and true, and so on. That Alexander applies perichoretic grammar to speak the relation between the transcendentals cannot prove accidental. Indeed, here Alexander very nearly overtures the cadence of the Council of Florence’s eleventh session: “The Father is wholly in the Son and the Spirit, the Son is wholly in the Father and the Spirit, the Spirit is wholly in the Father and the Son.”114 What Alexander never claims, however, is that beauty “interpenetrates” one, true, and good. He constantly and consistently relates beauty to one, true, and good, yes. And yet beauty does not feature among them as another transcendental. How then does it relate? Beauty relates to the transcendentals, I submit, just like it relates to the Trinitarian persons first and to the causes next. It names not a person, not a cause, not a transcendental term, but a taxis, an order, a structure. In Alexander, then, beauty names the ordered interpenetration of the transcendentals.115 Why? SH I, no. 73 (see note 66 above). Pope Eugene IV, Cantate Domino (1442): “Hae tres personae sunt unus Deus, et non tres dii: qui atrium est una substantia, una essential, una natura, una divinitas, una immensitas, una aeternitas, omniaque sunt unum, ubi non obviat relationis opposition. Propter hanc unitatem Pater est totus in Filio, totus in Spiritu Sancto; Filius totus est in Patre, totus in Spiritu Sancto; Spiritus Sanctus totus est in Patre, totus in Filio. Nullus alium aut praecedit aeternitate, aut excedit magnitudine, aut superat potestate” (“These three persons are one God and not three gods, because they have one substance, one essence, one nature, one divinity, one immensity, one eternity, and all are one, where there interferes no opposition of relation. According to this unity the Father is entirely in the Son [and] entirely in the Holy Spirit; the Son is entirely in the Father [and] entirely in the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is entirely in the Father [and] entirely in the Son. None precedes the other in eternity or exceeds in magnitude or overcomes in power”; Heinrich Denzinger, Compendium of Creeds, Definitions, and Declarations on Matters of Faith and Morals, 43rd edition, ed. Peter Hünermann, English ed. Robert Fastiggi and Anne Englund Nash [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012], nos. 343–44; emphasis mine). 115 For some, my interpretation here may recall Jacques Maritain’s claim that for Thomas, “beauty is the radiance of all the transcendentals united” (Art and Scholasticism and The Frontiers of Poetry, trans. Joseph Owens [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962], 173n66). This reading seems to have been advanced first in B. G. Paredes, “Ideas estéticas de Santo Tomás,” La ciencia tomista 2 (1910–1911): 345. Several Thomists repeat it, such as: Francis J. Kovach, “The Transcendentality of Beauty in Thomas Aquinas,” in Scholastic Challenges to Some Mediaeval and Modern Ideas, ed. Francis J. Kovach (Stillwater, OK: Western Publications, 1987), 89; Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Les perfections divins (Paris: Beauchesne, 1936), 299; André Marc, Dialectique de l’affirmation (Paris: Desclée, 1952), 237; Gunther Pöltner, Schönheit: Eine Untersuchung zum Ursprung des Denkens bei Thomas von 113 114 Beauty among the Transcendentals in the Summa Halensis 905 Because transcendentals in creation reflect their ground in divine attributes. And those divine attributes exist Trinitarianly—they bear a fitting relation to a personal property.116 They too, Alexander claims, “interpenetrate themselves.”117 To bring these points together: beauty, like one, true, and good, relates to all the causes. But beauty also names a “sacred order,” the very structure of the Trinitarian persons. Divine beauty is Trinitarian taxis. Yet Trinitarian taxis bears no metaphysical content. Neither does it subsist as a cause separate or independent from the others. Nor again does it constitute a transcendental in its own right. Within this redrawn picture, beauty relates to each line on the chart above. But it does so curiously, inexactly, dimly: Transcendental One Cause Efficient Person Father True Formal Son Good Final Holy Spirit Beauty* All causes* Taxis* Beauty, the asterisks mean to signal, is not a transcendental, not a cause, and not a specific Trinitarian person. Even still, beauty relates to the transcendentals, the causes, and the persons. Beauty endows their structure, their taxis, their “sacred order.” So Eco and Aertsen are not altogether wrongheaded to seek beauty’s relation to the transcendentals. Asking after beauty’s relation is not the question that needs transfiguring. I want rather to transfigure the question as posed, the one that assumes beauty might number among the transcendentals in the same way that one or true or good does. If the motifs Aquin (Vienna: Herder, 1978), 76. See also Rubin, “Meaning of ‘Beauty,’” 93. Recent Thomist literature does not find Maritain’s line here terribly persuasive, at least as a description of beauty in Thomas. It is not perfectly suited to my interpretation of beauty in SH either, but it is close. Maritain seems to think that because beauty (in Thomas) relates to all the transcendentals, it must be some kind of super-transcendental. He assumes that beauty must itself be a kind of transcendental to relate to the others. It is this that distinguishes Maritain’s reading of Thomas from the aesthetic logic of SH. Maritain’s line runs without the Trinity—the SH’s does not. 116 Alexander follows Richard of St. Victor in insisting that the order of God’s essential attributes itself follows a Trinitarian taxis. God, on this picture, is his attributes Trinitarianly. For more on the difference between the Richardian-Franciscan axis and the Albertine-Thomist one, see Emery, Trinitarian Theology, 313–26. 117 SH I-II, nos. 135 (Quaracchi ed., 2:207), claims that divine power, wisdom, and will circumincedunt se. 906 Justin Shaun Coyle I scrawled above reflect Alexander’s, then beauty for him does not stand among the transcendentals as one among others. No, beauty is that by which the transcendentals relate one to another. It is their very principle, the means of their circumincession. Or, in SH’s preferred idiom: ipse ordo est pulcher; order itself is beauty.118 To extend the Trinitarian analogy, asking after beauty’s transcendental content is like asking for the content of Trinitarian taxis in abstraction from the persons. At best it indulges irrelevance, at worst heterodoxy. Blindness to the taxic dimension of beauty betrays a blindness to the Trinitarian stimulus behind SH’s transcendental thought.119 The extent to which this blindness is born out of the limitations of the transcendental question is exactly the extent to which the question obscures more than it illumines, at least in SH. Finally, and in a loud voice: that beauty does not number among the transcendentals as typically conceived does not mean that beauty does not always and everywhere determine being.120 Nor does it spell beauty’s absence from some or another pitiable being in creation’s ensemble.121 It means only that beauty is present among creatures in a way other than are one and true and good. These, remember, are divine attributes appropriable to the persons and which creatures participate. But Alexander contrives beauty otherwise. Beauty is not a divine attribute but a divine structure, a “sacred order.” Determining exactly what this structure is and how it manifests across creation—this anticipates just a single feature of SH’s massive project, one that at length yields a codex which Roger Bacon thought “heavier than a horse.”122 SH I-II, no. 77 (Quaracchi ed., 2:100). Their inattention to the taxic and so Trinitarian shape of beauty in SH I leads de Bruyne to conclude that “We might hope to find oneself in the presence of an aesthetician, but we are quickly disabused” (“Les premiers scolastiques,” 88). 120 Rubin is especially good on this: “For a term to be a transcendental, it is not sufficient that it merely transcends the categories. In order to contribute to the explication of being, as is the function of the transcendentals, a term must express a general mode of being that is not already expressed by ‘being’ or by any other transcendental. . . . Thus, a term can be transcendental, or an attribute of every being, without also being a transcendental, or a distinct attribute of every being” (Rubin, “Meaning of Beauty,” 6; emphasis mine). 121 SH I-II, nos. 27–40 (Quaracchi ed., 2:38–48), nos. 75–90 (2:99–114). 122 Brewer, Fr. Rogeri Bacon Opera hactenus inedita I, 326. The whole quotation runs: “Et adscripserunt ei magnam Summam illam, quae est plusquam pondus unius equi, quam ipse non fecit sed alii. Et tamen propter reverentiam adscripta fuit et vocatur Summa fratris Alexandri. Et si ipse eam fecisset vel magnam partem” (“And they attribute to [Alexander] that great Summa that is heavier than a horse, even though others, and not he, who wrote it. Still, it is reckoned and called the Summa 118 119 Beauty among the Transcendentals in the Summa Halensis 907 Conclusion So: is beauty a transcendental in SH? The literature remains deadlocked. But it does mostly to the extent that it reads SH as cipher for Thomas Aquinas. Eco tenders a “yes” because he advocates the same in Thomas. Aertsen thinks similarly, if contrariwise. Transcendentalists on the beauty question, he thinks, seem bewitched by the Tractatus de transcendentalibus, probably a later gloss on SH. The image of beauty sketched there, he argues, bears little relation to its archetype. I demur: the Tractatus and SH share deep resemblances, even if not final identity. Among the most important of these resemblances is the Tractatus’s description of beauty as the highest congruence of order.123 This exhibits traces of the thicker Trinitarian account of beauty in Alexander. Recall that he grounds beauty in the “sacred order of the divine persons.” Of the many implications of Alexander’s account, one answers the transcendental question negatively only to transfigure it. Alexander’s account, that is, teaches his readers that grounding beauty in Trinitarian taxis invites deeper questions than the transcendental one. Questions about beauty’s work within Trinitarian processions, for example, or in creatures, or in their restoration by grace. Studying Alexander’s aesthetics, then, means tracing beauty across various theological loci in his texts. Andreas Speer argues that if “aesthetics” signals only a modern philosophic discipline scrubbed of theological interest, then we should deny that there ever was any “medieval aesthetics.”124 Surely it is absent SH, anyway, whose interest in conceiving beauty remains inexorably and unapologetically Trinitarian. N&V fratris Alexandri out of reverence, even if he did not write it or a large part of it”; emphasis mine). 123 Tractatus de transcendentalibus, q. 1 (Halcour, “Tractatus,” 67). 124 Andreas Speer, “Aesthetics” in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 677: “Theoretical reflection on this growth of meaning as well goes beyond an understanding of philosophy in a narrow sense, especially if philosophy is characterized merely by its independence from theology. Most of the aesthetic patterns allude to theological features. . . . Hence, aesthetics must be understood in a comprehensive and expanded manner, which goes beyond the borders defined by a concept of philosophical aesthetics that tries to find its object in the intersection of art and beauty.” Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2020): 909–944 909 Human Rights as Natural Juridical Goods and the Juridical Domain of the Principles of Catholic Social Doctrine Petar Popović Pontifical University of the Holy Cross Rome, Italy Introduction In recent years , research has flourished concerning the historical occurrences and particular contextual settings of the term “human rights” in the magisterial documents of the Catholic Church—along with its other, usually interchangeably used,1 equivalents such as “natural rights,” “basic rights,” or “fundamental rights.”2 It is no exaggeration to say that Russell Hittinger advocates the thesis that the magisterial usage of the terms “human rights,” “natural rights,” or “fundamental rights” may be understood as interchangeable; see: “The Problem of the State in Centesimus Annus,” Fordham International Law Journal 15 (1991–1992): 980; “Quinquagesimo Ante: Reflections on Pacem in Terris Fifty Years Later,” in The Global Quest for Tranquillitas Ordinis: Pacem In Terris, Fifty Years Later, ed. Mary Ann Glendon, Russell Hittinger, and Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo (Vatican City: Pontificia Academia Scientiarum Socialium, 2013), 44. 2 For a seminal study of this subject, see Mary Elsbernd, “Papal Statements on Rights: A Historical Contextual Study of Encyclical Teaching from Pius VI—Pius XI (1791–1939)” (PhD diss., Catholic University of Louvain 1985). See also Elsa Déléage, Les droits de la personne selon l’Église catholique de 1891 à 2013 (Paris: Institut Universitaire Varenne, 2013). For briefer historical overviews of the concept of human rights in the Catholic social doctrine, see: Thomas D. Williams, Who Is My Neighbor? Personalism and the Foundation of Human Rights 1 910 Petar Popović magisterial documents’ consistent use of the term “human rights” or its equivalents is practically coextensive with the development of official teaching on various issues of Catholic social doctrine. In fact, the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church dedicates an entire section of its chapter 3 (“The Human Person and Human Rights”) to the concept of “human rights,”3 thereby indicating that this concept is an integral part of the Catholic social doctrine (CSD). However, the exact meaning of the concept of “human rights” is significantly less obvious than the historical consistency of its usage in CSD. Granted, the magisterial documents that mention “human rights” contain certain elements that, taken together, present at least a partial understanding of what is understood by this concept. Nonetheless, some authors regard these elements as insufficient for a clear doctrinal understanding of the concept, as well as for its precise connection with other essential principles of CSD. Roland Minnerath argues that the magisterial “rights” talk risks implying a subjectivist shift toward a consideration of the person as the focus of rights while disregarding the objectivist perspective of that which is, according to nature, due in justice to the person.4 In Russell Hittinger’s opinion, the magisterial usage of rights language, especially when not accompanied by a reference to the metaphysical scheme of duties arising from the natural law, is vulnerable to confusion with the “thin accounts of the human good that are so typical of contemporary liberal thought,”5 where rights are envisioned as mere conceptual extensions of a “negative anthropology.”6 Jean-Yves Calvez and Jacques Perrin, in their defense of (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 31–47; J. Brian Benestad, Church, State, and Society: An Introduction to Catholic Social Doctrine (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 51–73; Roland Minnerath, “La doctrine sociale de l’Eglise et les droits subjectifs de la personne,” in Catholic Social Doctrine and Human Rights, ed. Roland Minnerath, Ombretta Fumagalli Carulli, and Vittorio Possenti (Vatican City: Pontificia Academia Scientiarum Socialium, 2010), 49–59; Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace, The Church and Human Rights (1975); Javier Ruiz Bursón, “El lenguaje de los Derechos Humanos en el magisterio pontificio,” Persona y Derecho 80 (2019): 207–251. 3 Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace, The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (2004), §§152–59. 4 Minnerath, “La doctrine sociale,” 52–53. 5 See Hittinger, “Problem of the State in Centesimus Annus,” 994. 6 To consider rights as the extensions of a “negative anthropology” amounts to affirming that these rights are founded upon the architectonic anthropological premise of the “radical indeterminacy of human nature,” where philosophical Human Rights as Natural Juridical Goods 911 the magisterial teaching on human rights, construe a rather provocative, “straw-man” critique: from the premise that “man has rights, in himself, before even we consider his relationships with other free persons or with society,” it follows that human rights in CSD might contain a foundational reference to individualism; now, “is not this simply a new edition of the . . . belief . . . of those who proclaimed rights of man in 1789?” 7 In a trenchant critique of the concept of human rights in general, the French legal historian Michel Villey asserts that “the appearance of human rights bears witness to the decomposing process of the concept of right.”8 In his opinion, the theoretical attempt to “measure a [juridical] relationship which includes plural terms by taking as the starting point only one of these terms, namely man (or his desires, his will or the individual’s subjective understanding),”9 inevitably leads to a concept of right that promotes radical individualism.10 These and similar perplexities may be summed up in the following question: “Cannot the word ‘rights’ be used without endorsing a whole series of propositions that would be judged incompatible with the Christian tradition?”11 Most of the authors who express such perplexities are prepared to defend the thesis of the compatibility between the concept of human rights and CSD. The crucial question is: under what conditions? What are the exact elements that a doctrinal position on the concept of human rights claims of “what man is not” are “combined with a deep seated reluctance to affirm [positive] normative anthropological content” (Russell Hittinger, “Human Nature and States of Nature in John Paul II’s Theological Anthropology,” in Human Nature in its Wholeness: A Roman Catholic Perspective, ed. Daniel Robinson, Gladys M. Sweeney, and Richard Gill [Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006], 10, 18–20). 7 See Jean-Yves Calvez and Jacques Perrin, The Church and Social Justice: The Social Teaching of the Popes from Leo XIII to Pius XII (1878–1958), trans. J. R. Kirwan (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1961), 109–10. 8 Michel Villey, Le droit et les droits de l’homme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983), 154. The translation of this text, as well as other translations in this article from original texts in French, Spanish, German, or Italian into English, are our own. Therefore, the responsibility for their correct translation to English, as well as for eventual shortcomings regarding these translations, is completely ours. 9 Michel Villey, “Le droit dans les choses,” in Controverses autour de l’ontologie du droit, ed. Paul Amselek and Christophe Grzegorczyk (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989), 24. 10 Michel Villey, Philosophie du droit, vol. 1, Définitions et fins du droit (Paris: Dalloz, 1978), 166–67. 11 Williams, Who Is My Neighbor? 72. 912 Petar Popović should possess in order to faithfully reflect other essential claims of CSD? Certainly, the Catholic Church considers the coherence between the concept of human rights and CSD to be one of the pillars of its social teaching.12 The social magisterium seems to employ the concept of human rights as if there is no room for potential perplexities regarding its usage. In the first part of this article we shall argue that the academic understanding of CSD’s underlying conception of human or natural rights is in need of a more adequate and more explicit synthesis. Moreover, we are convinced that this synthesis must also be juridical. That is, it must be adequately founded upon not only a correct philosophical anthropology but also the proper juridical anthropology, rooted in both the tradition of CSD and in an adequate understanding of the concept of “right” (ius).13 Without a clear understanding of the concept of human or natural rights precisely as juridical rights, this part of CSD risks participating in a “considerable disagreement” and “much ambiguity” which exists in the secular realm regarding the “philosophical justification, juridical interpretation, or political possibilities” of human rights.14 On the contrary, “human rights must be clearly defined and given juridical explanation.”15 A possible doctrinal confusion may arise not only ad extra between CSD’s position and secular conceptions of human rights, but also ad intra of the CSD itself. The lack of precision in understanding the concept of human or natural rights causes the interrelation between these rights and the principles of the social doctrine to remain on an unduly vague level of analysis.16 How exactly are the human rights linked to the principle of the “The movement toward the identification and proclamation of human rights is one of the most significant attempts to respond effectively to the inescapable demands of human dignity” (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, §152); “It belongs to the Church always and everywhere to announce moral principles, even about the social order, and to render judgement concerning any human affair insofar as the fundamental rights of the human person or the salvation of souls requires it” (1983 Code of Canon Law, can. 747, no. 2). 13 We shall henceforth refer to the concept of “right” (in the singular) for the phenomenon denoted by the Latin term ius. As we shall see, the original meaning of this concept is different from the ordinary meaning of “rights” (in the plural), “human” or “natural.” Thus, whenever we mention rights (in the plural) we actually presuppose the doctrinal content of what we shall present as the objectivist-conceptual meaning of right (in the singular). 14 International Theological Commission [ITC], The Dignity and Rights of the Human Person (1983), §3.2.2. 15 ITC, Dignity and Rights of the Human Person, §3.2.2 (emphasis added). 16 “In fact, the roots of human rights are to be found in the dignity that belongs to each human being” (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, §153); “The 12 Human Rights as Natural Juridical Goods 913 dignity of the human person or to the principle of the common good? Is there any connection between human or natural rights and the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity? And, if there is, what does it amount to? Can the CSD “arrive at a correct understanding of the basic concepts . . . such as . . . right [and] justice”17 without proposing to settle more technical questions, and without establishing (or identifying itself with) a particular school of juridical philosophy to the exclusion of all others?18 In the second part of this article we shall present our understanding of the link between the concept of human or natural rights and the juridical domain inherent in the four principles of CSD. The last part of the article will be dedicated to tracing out possible juridical implications of Pope Francis’s new guidelines “derived from the pillars of the Church’s social doctrine.”19 The Objectivist-Contextual Approach to Human Rights: The Natural Law In order to safeguard CSD’s conception of human rights from any subjectivist20 interpretations, it is usually affirmed that human rights should be unambiguously posited within an “objectivist” metaphysical context. This usually includes the imperative to explicitly invoke or to implicitly demands of the common good . . . are strictly connected to respect for and the integral promotion of the person and his fundamental rights” (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, §166). 17 Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, §77. 18 See Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, §§68, 85. 19 Pope Francis, Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (2013), §221. As the note 181 attached to this text explains, “the pillars of the Church’s social doctrine” are, in fact, the general, fundamental, universal, and permanent “principles” of CSD. This note directs the reader to §161 of Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, which presents the “Principles of the Church’s Social Doctrine.” 20 By the term “subjectivist interpretation” we understand a conception of human rights that is based on an individualist account of human nature, where natural rights of the person may be inferred in abstraction from the social, relational aspect of his nature (a view criticized by Villey, as we have seen). In addition, this “subjectivist interpretation,” wherein man is envisioned as “essentially alone,” is merged with the so-called “negative” juridical anthropology—itself a combination of the claim for a “radical indeterminacy of human nature” and what Martin Rhonheimer critically refers to as the “strong concept of autonomy.” See: Hittinger, “Human Nature and States of Nature,” 10, 18–20; Martin Rhonheimer, “The Liberal Image of Man and the Concept of Autonomy: Beyond the Debate between Liberals and Communitarians,” in The Common Good of Constitutional Democracy: Essays in Political Philosophy and on Catholic Social Teaching (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 38. 914 Petar Popović appeal to the natural law, as it is outlined in its Thomistic synthesis. This imperative, it is said, establishes an inextricable link between rights and the concept of duties. Pope John XXIII paradigmatically adopts this view when he writes, “The natural rights . . . are inextricably bound up with as many duties. . . . These rights and duties derive their origin, their sustenance, and their indestructibility from the natural law, which in conferring the one imposes the other.”21 In fact, one of the principal contexts in which the Catholic Church invokes the natural law is precisely in response to “the need to provide a basis in reason for the rights of man.”22 It seems, however, that each time when the magisterium addresses the issue of human rights without immediate reference to natural law or to the duties derived therefrom, the concept of human right is considered to be left eo ipso vulnerable to the possibility of confusion with various reductionist visions of human rights. Thus, for example, Hittinger claims that while Pope Leo XIII’s endorsement of the concept of natural right “represented a significant adjustment to the semantics, if not the substance, of modern rights theories,” his conception of “right was contextualized in terms of both the eternal or natural law, as well as duties to the common good.”23 By contrast, when the appeal to natural law is not explicitly highlighted in a magisterial document, for example in Pope John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus, the concept of human rights employed therein is immediately viewed with extreme caution. Does the absence of explicit reference to natural law represent a rhetorical anomaly or oversight, or does it bespeak a substantive position? . . . Has the Pope taken the next step, which is to drop the metaphysical language of natural law . . . in favor of an all-purpose language of natural rights?24 Pope John XXIII, Encyclical Letter Pacem in Terris (1963), §28. Hittinger observes: “Ever since the pontificate of Leo XIII, Rome has endeavored to integrate this human rights project with natural law. . . . Pacem in Terris (1963) was the high tide of that ambition” (“Natural Law and Public Discourse: The Legacies of Joseph Ratzinger,” Loyola Law Review 60 [2014]: 271; see also Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, §156). 22 ITC, In Search of a Universal Ethic: A New Look at the Natural Law (2009), §35. 23 See Hittinger, “Problem of the State in Centesimus Annus,” 954. 24 See Hittinger, “Problem of the State in Centesimus Annus,” 982. Hittinger adds further that Pope John Paul II “seems to ground these rights in a personalistic-theological view of the human person, but without any of the intermediate reasons tradition associated with natural law [in the Scholastic method that permitted greater clarity of expression]” (993). We have elsewhere advocated the thesis that John Paul II’s philosophical method is compatible and intrinsically 21 Human Rights as Natural Juridical Goods 915 In a similar vein, throughout her study on the occurrences and contexts of the concept of ius in papal statements, Mary Elsbernd filters the mentions of ius through their relation with the natural law as the source of duty. She thereby assigns the textual occurrences of the term ius to an objectivist (wherein the relation between ius and natural law as the source of duty is verified) or subjectivist meaning (wherein ius is used in the fashion of modern-era natural-rights schools).25 In addition, the 1975 document entitled The Church and Human Rights, published by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, describes the intrinsic link between the concept of right and corresponding duties as the “logical and real relationship which exists between the two aspects of the same right: facultas and obligatio, existence of right and its consequent responsibility.”26 Remarkably similar to this argument is Ernest Fortin’s claim that the concept of right, understood essentially as a faculty ( facultas), necessarily demands an additional element to adequately safeguard the essence of right against its potential subjectivist reductions. In his view, this additional element is precisely the rights’ structural “subordinance to an antecedent law that circumscribes and relativizes them.”27 linked to a Thomistic approach, and especially with regard to Aquinas’s natural-law theory; see Petar Popović, “Securing the Foundations: Karol Wojtyła’s Thomistic Personalism in Dialogue with the Natural Law Theory,” Nova et Vetera (English) 16 (2018): 233–59. 25 See Elsbernd, “Papal Statements,” 134, 175, 330, 332, 397–99, 438–39, 610–14. According to Hittinger, an interesting parallel argument may be built around the contrast between the notion of objectivist ius founded on the concept of duty as a munus and the modern subjectivist conception of “rights” precisely as “immunities.” The term munus denotes a natural or supernatural office or mission consisting of specific tasks to be acted out, and is sometimes used by the magisterium in the place of the terms such as “duty” or “obligation.” On the other hand, immunitas actually implies, already on an etymological level, the very lack of munus. In Hittinger’s view, the principles of the social order cannot begin with immunities or with negative rights, but with the correct understanding of the concept of munus which, in CSD, “provides the teleological and social framework for the juridical conception of rights.” As he himself highlights, “the iura are located in the munera” (Hittinger, “Social Pluralism and Subsidiarity in Catholic Social Doctrine,” Annales Theologici 16 [2002]: 393, 398, 404). For the concept of munus, see also: Elsbernd, “Papal Statements,” 625–630, 653–655; Janet Smith, Humanae Vitae: A Generation Later (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1991), 129, 136–48. 26 The Church and Human Rights, §4. 27 Ernest L. Fortin, “‘Sacred and Inviolable’: Rerum Novarum and Natural Rights,” Theological Studies 53 (1992): 221. 916 Petar Popović Since rights are already implied in the notion of duty—if I have a duty to do something, I must have the right to do it—there is no point in opposing them to each other. What they represent would be nothing other than the two sides of a single coin.28 According to this objectivist-contextual view, then, if we leave out the explicit reference to the aspect of obligatio, the concept of right is essentially denoted by the term facultas. Now, is the term facultas really the best doctrinal option to conceptualize the essence of right? From what has been noted so far, this term is not considered as adequate, of itself, to provide sufficient warrant that the right, without the appeal to obligatio, will be understood as anything other than an empty, free-floating, or as Hittinger says, “all-purpose” concept. Hence, the right understood as facultas, stripped of the appeal to natural law, may potentially be conceived as a mere conceptual tool to be employed within any doctrinal context. The result is a highly weakened conception of the essence of right.29 Is it possible to formulate a juridical argument that (1) inheres in the semantics of the concept of right alone and (2) parallels that of the foundation of right in natural law and the obligations derived thereof? We believe that an alternative viewpoint on the doctrinal-historical evolution of magisterial rights language would provide considerable help in answering this question. Francis Canavan is among those who advocated such a viewpoint: “[There is] a notion, advanced by some, that the recent popes have switched from traditional natural law to a modern natural-rights theory [but] it would be more accurate to say that . . . they have incorpo Fortin, “‘Sacred and Inviolable,’” 222. To be sure, there is no question whether human rights should be conceptualized as intrinsically linked to prior duties arising from the natural law, since they most certainly should be. In this sense, the above described version of the objectivist-contextual approach is both valid and adequate, as well as deeply rooted in the terminological and doctrinal tradition of rights talk in the CSD. Surely, no pontiff has ever formulated a statement regarding human or natural rights without at least implicitly envisioning them as deeply anchored in the objective metaphysical context of natural law and duties which arise from it. Even John Paul II, beyond the critiques of his doctrine of natural rights and its potentially subjectivist interpretation, frequently referenced “a correct understanding of the rights of the person” (see John Paul II, Encyclical letter Centesimus Annus [1991], §47) and, even more so, the “objective rights of man” (see John Paul II, Encyclical letter Redemptor Hominis [1979], §17). However, even if the natural-law discourse was at times “tuned down” in certain magisterial documents, the aspect of the tradition inherent in CSD should of itself supply the missing elements of the objective metaphysical context (See Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church §§80 and 85–87). 28 29 Human Rights as Natural Juridical Goods 917 rated human rights into their doctrine of natural law.”30 Another example is Zachary R. Calo’s claim that, instead of granting “an unqualified imprimatur,” the Catholic Church rather cultivates “a distinctive understanding of rights theory that incorporates aspects of liberalism while advancing a fundamental reconceptualization of its meaning and foundation.”31 It is precisely this “reconceptualization” of the very concept of human rights, and its implications, that we wish to expand upon in the following section. The Objectivist-Conceptual Approach to Human Rights: The Concept of “Right” We would like to call attention to a different approach in the Thomistic tradition of the objectivist line of argumentation regarding natural rights. It is not focused on the metaphysical-normative context of natural law, but rather on the semantics of the concept of “right” itself. We may call it the objectivist-conceptual (as distinct from contextual) approach. It is by now a well-researched doctrinal issue that the premodern— and paradigmatically Thomistic—essence of the term “right” was not founded upon the term facultas or potestas, but instead on a conception of a certain “just order.”32 In this premodern “primary objective sense,” right was envisioned as the object of the virtue of justice, as “exterior to the agent, dependent on a certain objective equity between another and the activity of justice.”33 The essence of ius is that of “the right thing,” “one’s due,” or “one’s proper share” in the relationship of justice.34 This doctrine of the “objective” meaning of right is rooted in Thomas Aquinas’s dictum on the ius as—primarily and essentially—the “just thing itself ” (ipsa res iusta), precisely as the object of the virtue of justice.35 By contrast, the relocation of the essence of right from “the just thing itself ” to the sphere of moral powers or faculties to advance claims regarding things or otherwise appeal to liberties and immunities—denoted by the term “subjective right”—is often said to represent a decadent modern, Francis S. Canavan, “The Image of Man in Catholic Thought,” in Catholicism, Liberalism, and Communitarianism: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition and the Moral Foundations of Democracy, ed. Kenneth L. Grasso, Gerard V. Bradley, and Robert P. Hunt (Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), 19–20. 31 Zachary R. Calo, “Catholic Social Thought and Human Rights,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 74 (2015): 94. 32 Williams, Who Is My Neighbor?, 23. 33 See Elsbernd, “Papal Statements,” 12–13. 34 Fortin, “‘Sacred and Inviolable,’” 220. 35 ST II-II, q. 57, a. 1. 30 918 Petar Popović decidedly “subjectivist” version of medieval ius.36 Beyond the lack of scholarly consensus regarding his conclusions, it is undisputed that Michel Villey catalyzed the debate on the distinction between premodern objectivist and modern subjectivist conceptions of right that took place during the second half of the twentieth century. Villey argued that the tradition of the usage of the term ius had seen the conceptual shift—a crossing of what he calls the “watershed”—from the classical “objective” sense to the modern vision of right as essentially “subjective right.”37 The premodern context was an expression of the medieval reicentric juridical culture, wherein juridicity was essentially predicated of “things” precisely as they are “caught” within relations of justice. Aquinas’s work, in Villey’s view, witnessed to the premodern mainstream juridical mentality in which nothing could have been further from the concept of ius than to predicate individual “power” or “faculty” of its essential meaning.38 Although a simultaneous, diversified usage of the term ius between its primary objectivist meaning and the accidental subjectivist sense was already practical in medieval juridical experience, Villey claimed that Aquinas never placed ius in the conceptual realm of anything other than the just thing (res iusta).39 This historical visit upstream from the “watershed” takes us back to the See Elsbernd, “Papal Statements,” 12–13. Michel Villey, La formation de la pensée juridique moderne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013), 261. 38 Michel Villey, “Droit Subjectif I (La genèse du droit subjectif chez Guillaume d’Occam),” in Seize essais de philosophie du droit dont un sur la crise universitaire (Paris: Dalloz, 1969), 152–53. 39 Michel Villey, “Si la théorie générale du droit, pour Saint Thomas, est une théorie de la loi,” Archives de philosophie du droit 17 (1972): 428. Villey writes elsewhere: “The subjective sense of the word ‘ius’ still constitutes but an accidental feature, a reflection of the principal sense” (“Les origines de la notion de droit subjectif,” in Leçons d’histoire de la philosophie du droit [Paris: Dalloz, 2002]), 240). One of Villey’s most fervent critics, Brian Tierney, seems to agree with Villey in at least this argument, namely, that Aquinas’s doctrine of right cannot be said to have a predominant subjectivist meaning (Tierney, “Natural Law and Natural Rights: Old Problems and Recent Approaches,” The Review of Politics 64 (2002): 393). For more information on the doctrinal and historical debate between Villey and Tierney, see: Petar Popović, “The Concept of ‘Right’ and the Focal Point of Juridicity in Debate Between Villey, Tierney, Finnis and Hervada,” Persona y Derecho 78 (2018): 65–103; Thierry Sol, “La controverse Villey-Tierney sur la naissance du droit subjectif au XIIe siècle: difficultés et valeur heuristique d’un anachronisme conceptual,” in Penser l’ordre juridique médiéval et moderne: regards criosés sur les méthodes des jurists, ed. Nicolas Laurent-Bonne and Xavier Prévost (Paris: Lextenso éditions, LGDJ, 2016), 209–34. 36 37 Human Rights as Natural Juridical Goods 919 same doctrinal problem that we encountered earlier. When the theorists of Thomistic natural law downstream from the “watershed,” and right up to our present context, sought to secure an objective foundation for this new, paradigmatic subjectivist concept of right, they appealed exclusively to the legal order of natural law. A good example of this approach is John Finnis’s so-called “new natural law theory.” Finnis maintains that nothing really significant was lost by crossing the conceptual “watershed.” The subjective and objective conceptions of right are interchangeable, in his view. However, he prefers the modern conception of subjective rights, provided that the continual appeal to the order of natural law is structurally secured.40 Thus, if we appeal only to the natural law and duties derived therefrom in order to provide the concept of human rights with the objective foundations, then we are probably operating with the concept of right which has the essential structure of subjective right: a faculty, a moral power, a liberty, or an immunity.41 It follows, then, that at least some of the John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 205. Finnis writes further: “There should be no question in wanting to put the clock back. The modern idiom of rights is more supple and, by being more specific in its standpoint or perspective, is capable of being used with more differentiation and precision than the pre-modern use of ‘the right’ (jus)” (209). For the necessity of the subjective rights’ appeal to natural law, see Finnis, Aquinas: Moral, Political and Legal Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 135. For his claim that Aquinas had, in fact, adopted a doctrinal position and language of subjective rights, see Finnis, “Postscript,” in Natural Law and Natural Rights, 465. For more of Finnis’s claims that nothing of importance was lost by crossing the conceptual “watershed,” see: Finnis, “‘Natural Law,’” in Reason in Action: Collected Essays, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 207; Finnis, “Aquinas on Ius and Hart on Rights: A Response to Tierney,” The Review of Politics 64 (2002): 410. 41 Finnis compliments the American jurist Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld for “accommodating satisfactorily” the modern grammar of subjective rights into a comprehensive schema wherein “all assertions or ascriptions of rights can be reduced without remainder” to one or some combination of the following four categories: claim-right, liberty, power, immunity (Natural Law and Natural Rights, 199). Finnis advocates that “rights of each of the four Hohfeldian types are spoken of by Aquinas” (“A Grand Tour of Legal Theory,” in Philosophy of Law: Collected Essays, vol. 4 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011], 115–16). In Finnis’s view, when Aquinas spoke about the “duties of justice” to other people (in ST II-II, q. 122, a. 6) he had actually implied their logical, structural flipsides: Hohfeldian subjective rights (Aquinas, 136; “Aquinas on Ius and Hart on Rights,” 409–10;“On Moyn’s Christian Human Rights (2015),” King’s Law Journal 28 [2017]: 14–15). For Hohfeld’s original insights, see: Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, “Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning,” Yale Law Journal 23 (1913): 40 920 Petar Popović perplexities regarding CSD’s rights talk derive from the possibility that the magisterium conceives human rights as essentially the Hohfeldian type of subjective rights. There are a number of reasons why such a conclusion would not prove to be valid. First, regardless of the occasional subjectivist expressions in magisterial rights talk,42 John Lamont notes that “the inference from the Church’s defending human rights to her defending subjective rights could only be warranted if Church teachings explicitly identified human rights with subjective rights—which they do not.”43 Lamont elsewhere affirms that “a grasp of [the] actual meaning [of the notion of human rights], and of its roots in Thomist thought, is essential if this teaching is to bear any good fruit.”44 True, CSD never affirmed, nor implied, that it understands human or natural rights as essentially Hohfeldian subjective rights.45 Is it 28–59; Hohfeld, “Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning,” Yale Law Journal 26 (1917): 710–70. 42 Besides the already mentioned reference to the essence of right as a facultas in the 1975 Iustitia et Pax document on human rights, Pope Leo XIII has also, in one textual locus, defined right (ius) as “a moral power”; see Encyclical Letter Libertas (1888), §23. For Pope Leo’s more frequent, objectivist-conceptual references to ius, see Elsbernd, “Papal Statements,” 278–86, 294–98. Leo’s subjectivist dictum should also be read in connection with other expressions across the CSD timeline, like iurisoffici (a single word “right-duty”; see John Paul II, Centesimus Annus §§5, 29) or the “just rights” (iustorum iurium, see John Paul II, Laborem Exercens [1981], §20). For other incidental examples of subjectivist “rights” talk, see the reference to “subjective right” in Paul VI, Discourse to the Tribunal of the Sacred Roman Rota, January 29, 1970, §1. See also the mention of the “protection of subjective rights” in the Preface to the Latin edition of the 1983 Code of Canon Law. 43 John R. T. Lamont, “Conscience, Freedom, Rights: Idols of the Enlightenment Religion,” The Thomist 73 (2009): 233. 44 John R. T. Lamont, “Historical Notions of Rights and Freedom,” in Relativism and Human Rights: Can They Coexist?, ed. Philip Elias (Sydney: Warrane College, 2007), 14. 45 The 2009 document In Search of a Universal Ethic: A New Look at the Natural Law by the International Theological Commission (ITC), on natural law, does in fact mention the term “subjective rights.” The context of the appearance of this term, however, is very insightful. In the first place, the paragraph in which the term appears is rather revealing with regard to the fact that the document does not endorse Hohfeldian subjective rights: “The norms of natural justice [Italian i diritti naturali; French les droits naturels] . . . express what is naturally just, prior to any legal formulation. [They] are expressed in a particular way in the subjective rights of the human person. . . . These rights, to which contemporary thought attributes great importance, do not have their source in the fluctuating desires of individuals, but rather in the very structure of human beings and their humanizing Human Rights as Natural Juridical Goods 921 true, however, that CSD never acknowledged the adequacy of the Thomistic doctrine of right as the ipsa res iusta (“the just thing itself”), or that it has never otherwise distanced itself from a subjectivist interpretation of human rights? According to Minnerath, the magisterium of the Catholic Church initially expressed reservations about the notion of human subjective rights, precisely because such a notion was formulated within a context of “an anthropology which is alien to the Church.”46 He adds that the Church did, in fact, later adopt the language of subjective rights, but not as a term which replaced antecedent conceptions of right.47 In his view, CSD accommodated the language of subjective rights within the objectivist metaphysical context of natural law, but also within the “classical perspective on natural right.”48 Surely, John Paul II’s above-mentioned appeal to the “objective rights of man” is not a terminological coincidence: human rights are clearly envisioned as “objective,” in clear opposition to their potential interpretation as “subjective.” The concepts of human rights and law, as well as their moral foundations, are a recurrent theme of Pope Benedict XVI’s writings both prior to and during his pontificate. It seems that Benedict understands the essence of right as an autonomous juridical concept dependent upon, but not reducible to, the objectivist metaphysical context of natural law. The right, he claims, “loses its foundational terrain” once the “moral level of analysis is not recognized as a juridical good that should be defended, because it is understood as something already pertaining to subjective judgement.”49 relationships. The rights of the human person emerge therefore from the order of justice that must reign in relations among human beings. To acknowledge these natural rights of man means to acknowledge the objective order of human relations based on the natural law” (§92). The last sentence of the quoted paragraph contains a clear reference to the objectivist metaphysical context provided by natural law, which is actually the main thematic focus of the whole document. Next, the ITC document clearly refutes a conception of subjective rights understood as mere juridical “vehicles” for the “fluctuating desires of individuals.” Perhaps even more importantly, the document understands ius naturale as “that which is naturally just” (i.e., right in the objective, premodern sense), while the subjective rights are only the “particular expressions” of ius naturale. 46 Minnerath, “La doctrine sociale,” 49. 47 Minnerath, “La doctrine sociale,” 49. 48 Minnerath, “La doctrine sociale,” 54. 49 Joseph Ratzinger, “Christliche Orientierung in der pluralistischen Demokratie?,” in Pro Fide et Iustitia: Festschrift für Agostino Kardinal Casaroli zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Herbert Schambeck (Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt, 1984), 752 (emphasis added). See also Joseph Ratzinger, “Crises of Law,” in The Essential Pope Bene- 922 Petar Popović In one of Benedict’s addresses to the Tribunal of the Roman Rota, the pontiff notes that the law already contains an inherent reference to the nucleus of the juridical domain denoted by the term “natural right.”50 He refers to this approach as “realistic.”51 In another address to the Tribunal of the Roman Rota, Benedict highlights the distinction of the moral domain from the juridical domain, wherein the essence of right was clearly not envisioned in a subjectivist fashion (as a mere faculty or liberty), but as a good belonging to the order of justice: a juridical good.52 Next, the final statement of the 2009 plenary session of The Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, dedicated to the topic of “Catholic Social Doctrine and Human Rights,” highlights the fact that CSD adopted “the realistic Aristotelic-Thomistic anthropology” in its proclamations on the anthropological bases of human rights.53 This realistic Aristotelic-Thomistic juridical anthropology is founded on the argument for the objectivist-contextual view.54 The Academy has added a parallel argument asserting that such anthropology is also linked to the very semantics of the concept of right. dict XVI: His Central Writings and Speeches, ed. John F. Thornton and Susan B. Varenne (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 378: “Because, in modern states, metaphysics and Natural Law are devalued, . . . the very concept of [right] is losing its precise definition.” 50 “The reality which is regulated [by the law] always contains a nucleus of natural right . . . with which every norm must be in harmony in order to be rational and truly juridical” (Pope Benedict XVI, Address for the Inauguration of the Judicial Year of the Tribunal of the Roman Rota, January 21, 2012; emphasis added). 51 Benedict XVI, Address for the Inauguration of the Judicial Year of the Tribunal of the Roman Rota 2012. 52 In one such address, Benedict claimed that from the anthropological truth of marriage “it is possible to work out an authentic juridical anthropology,” affirming that “with regard to the subjective and libertarian relativization of the sexual experience, the Church’s tradition clearly affirms the natural juridical character of marriage, that is, the fact that it belongs by nature to the context of justice in interpersonal relations” (Pope Benedict XVI, Address for the Inauguration of the Judicial Year of the Tribunal of the Roman Rota, January 27, 2007). Thus, following his argument, the human good of marriage (res) belongs by nature (as the juridical title) to the context of justice in interpersonal relations (res iusta). 53 Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Catholic Social Doctrine and Human Rights: Final Statement of the 15th Plenary Session, 1–5 May 2009, ed. Ombretta Fumagalli Carulli, Roland Minnerath, and Vittorio Possenti (Vatican City: Pontificia Academia Scientiarum Socialium, 2009), 13. 54 “The central assumption of the Catholic Magisterium is that human rights are void when their ties with duties are broken” (Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Catholic Social Doctrine and Human Rights, 14). Human Rights as Natural Juridical Goods 923 [The secular anthropologies which present an evolutionistic and constructivistic background] have come to somewhat abuse the notion of right, intended in a very flexible sense. A right, however, does not derive from a wish or a passion, but is the just measure of what is due to a person in his or her relationship with other people or with the institutions. This measure is correct not because of an arbitrary decision, but because it originates from the natural order of things.55 Finally, in his seminal work on CSD, Joseph Höffner affirms that “by ‘right’ those values are understood to which the individual and the society are entitled as ‘theirs,’” because “certain goods are assigned as [their] own.” Höffner labels this position on the essence of right as “objective right.”56 The title-holder of objective right has, thus, a claim to those values or goods that are encompassed by the term “objective right.”57 After reviewing the arguments which refute a subjectivist reading of CSD’s rights talk, we must ask a different question. Has an academic study, in line with the arguments enlisted above, addressed the issue of the objective-conceptual view of human rights within the realistic Aristotelic-Thomistic juridical anthropology? The Juridico-Realistic Conception of Rights as Natural Juridical Goods Höffner’s argument reported above encapsulates the main elements of a so-called “juridico-realistic” conception of right, principally advocated by two authors: Villey and the Spanish jurist and legal philosopher Javier Hervada. Their juridico-philosophical doctrine is firmly rooted in the project of re-reading classical texts of Aristotle, the Roman jurists, and Thomas Aquinas on the essence of right. The main methodological presupposition of Villey’s and Hervada’s account of human or natural rights is the need for a prior clear understanding of the very concept of right (ius). Villey notes that, in the modern and contemporary juridical mentality, the “objective” sense of the term “right” is usually identified with the concept of law, which, in its turn, implies the concept of positive law as its See Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Catholic Social Doctrine and Human Rights, 14. 56 Joseph Cardinal Höffner, Christian Social Doctrine, trans. Stephen Wentworth-Arndt and Gerald Finan (Bratislava, SK: LÚC, 1997), 54. 57 Höffner, Christian Social Doctrine, 54. 55 924 Petar Popović primary association.58 This is not Aquinas’s position. In the thought of the Angelic Doctor, the law is not, “strictly speaking,” the same as ius, but is only a rational rule of right—aliqualis ratio iuris.59 Aquinas identifies the right in the objective sense with the just thing itself or with, as Villey sometimes affirms, the “objectively just relation.”60 If the ius is that which is just (in the objective sense), then there is a “that which is just” regarding each thing and person: it is precisely the juridical status, the precise place which justice, in the general order, attributes to each, and therefore, certainly not this advantage, this faculty, this power, which we call the right.61 The difference between the subjective and objective meanings of right is not purely terminological, nor are these meanings merely interchangeable according to the preferred emphasis on the thing itself or on its title-holder. With regard to the very essence, or the primary definition of the notion of right, the two meanings are, according to Villey, mutually exclusive. If the right is understood as the juridicized domain of the individual’s moral powers, faculties, or liberties regarding certain things as objects of right-claims,62 then the premodern meaning of right as the very thing itself “caught” in a relation of justice could eventually end up as easily discarded. If, however, the right is understood as the just thing itself, as that thing, good, or value which is attributed or apportioned to its title-holder within a relation of justice, then a subjective meaning of right—“claim-right”— must be relegated to the structural position of a secondary juridical phenomenon, dependent and arising from the primary meaning of right. Villey, “Les origines,” 229. This is especially the case in the Anglo-Saxon terminology, where “right” is predominantly understood as subjective right while the concept of “objective right” is reserved for denoting “the law.” An example of this position may be found in the thought of another legal historian, Tierney, who advocates the thesis that contemporary usage of the concept of “right” may abstain from a classical realistic understanding of ius without losing anything significant from juridical argumentation other than mere “emphases,” “tone,” and “spirit.” Once the classical realistic concept of ius is regarded as less than essential, Tierney, much like Finnis, seems to envision the concept of “right” within a structural realm of the exclusive interrelation between subjective (natural) rights and objective natural (or positive) law (Tierney, “Villey, Ockham and the Origin of Individual Rights,” in The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law and Church Law 1150–1625 [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001], 13–42). 59 ST II-II, q. 57, a. 1, ad 2. 60 Villey, “Droit Subjectif I,” 146, 148. 61 Villey, “Les origines,” 233. 62 Villey, “Droit Subjectif I,” 146–147; Villey, “Les institutes de Gaius et l’idée du droit subjective,” in Lecons d’histoire de la philospohie du droit (Paris: Dalloz, 1957), 186. 58 Human Rights as Natural Juridical Goods 925 According to Villey, there is no doubt that, in the classical, premodern perspective, the latter hierarchy of the meanings of right was the operative paradigm.63 Hervada’s interpretation of Aquinas’s realistic conception of right closely follows Villey’s account, but is more elaborate and arguably more systematic. What constitutes the right or the person’s suum owed in justice is the thing itself.64 Of course, the juridical domain is not, ontologically speaking, inherent in the thing itself, in its substance. The right is the thing as it is in itself, but only in so far as it is viewed in the relational aspect of the virtue of justice. This means that the right is that concrete thing which is apportionable to a determinate subject as his suum by virtue of a juridical title (law, contract, testament, human nature, etc.). However, the relation between the title-holder and the thing is in itself insufficient to explain the nature of the juridical obligation. The constitution of an authentic juridical obligation depends rather upon the inclusion of the property of other-directedness, which belongs to justice in an essential way,65 into the scheme of the relation between the title-holder and his suum. Hervada accommodates the property of other-directedness within the relation of justice in the following way: given the fact that the thing—the suum—is or is able to be in the sphere of power of other persons, different from the title-holder, and susceptible to their interference, all potential subjects of interference become debtors in the relation of justice. In this sense, they “owe” the thing—the concrete measure of the title-holder’s suum as determined by the title—to the title-holder. Hervada claims in this way66 to adequately explain the genesis of the authentic juridical obligation while fully retaining Aquinas’s essential meaning of right as the just thing67 itself. Villey, “Droit Subjectif I,” 153. Javier Hervada, Critical Introduction to Natural Right, trans. Mindy Emmons (Montréal: Wilson & Lafleur Ltée, 2020), 19–20. 65 ST II-II, q. 58, a. 2; q. 58, a. 12. 66 For more details on the main theses of Hervada’s doctrine on the essence of right, see: Hervada, Critical Introduction, 7–30; Hervada, Lecciones propedéuticas de filosofía del derecho (Pamplona: EUNSA, 2008), 165–250. 67 Hervada is careful enough to highlight that the “thing,” res, or “good” should be understood in the broadest possible sense, as a universal convertible with being, meant to encompass any outward corporeal or incorporeal reality which may be the object of the relation of justice. These terms are not intended as tools for conferring any ontological status to somebody or something. To say, together with Aquinas, that right is essentially the thing itself means to already outline the foundations in re of the juridical domain. See Hervada, Critical Introduction, 19–20, and Jean-Pierre Schouppe, Le réalisme juridique (Brussels: E. Story-Scientia, 63 64 926 Petar Popović In Hervada’s view, confusing Aquinas’s “objective” meaning of right with the Hohfeldian type of subjective right brings about important consequences “especially in the theory of human rights.”68 If we adopt a “subjectivist” position on the essence of right, then ius is seen as inhering exclusively in the sphere of faculties, powers, or liberties of the person, and is thus conceivable as separable from the concrete thing, from the “object” of the subjective “claim-right.”69 The thing itself (e.g., life, paycheck, house, privacy, picnic basket, authorship, freedom to form the act of assent in matters of faith, etc.) is seen as an essentially non-juridical entity. It may have many philosophical properties. Some “things” may even constitute basic human goods in the moral sense (e.g., life). The juridical domain related to these “things” does not essentially include them; right has to be found elsewhere—in the subjective rights of the individual or in the positive law of the state. By contrast, the classical realistic conception of right already implies, in its very semantics, the reference to duties within an objective state of affairs. It refers to the concrete thing in all its metaphysical givenness—including the order of natural law—precisely as a constituted right within the objective order of relations of justice. How is Villey’s and Hervada’s doctrine of the essence of right applicable to the conception of human or natural rights? Both authors are inclined to first clearly distinguish natural rights from human rights and then, in a second moment, evaluate the necessary conditions for their interchangeable terminological usage. Regarding the concept of “natural right,” they follow Aquinas’s argument that the res may itself be attributed, and consequently owed in justice (iusta), in virtue of the nature itself (ex ipsa natura rei).70 According to this doctrine, human nature is the juridical title which attributes certain basic or natural human goods to persons not only as aspects of human moral perfection or fulfilment, but also as goods or res owed in justice to those persons as title-holders: natural juridical goods.71 In Hervada’s own words: 1987), 154. Hervada, Critical Introduction, 22. 69 Hervada, Lecciones propedéuticas, 242–43. 70 ST II-II, q. 57, a. 2. 71 For a more detailed account of Villey’s approach to this argument, see: Michel Villey, La formation, 155–65, 242–48, 592–94; Villey, “Abrégé du droit naturel classique,” in Leçons d’histoire, 109–65; Villey, Philosophie du droit, vol. 2, Les moyens du droit (Paris: Dalloz, 1978), 148–49, 155; Villey, “Si la théorie générale du droit,” 429. For a more detailed Hervada’s account, see Hervada, Critical Introduction, 51–70, and Lecciones propedéuticas, 471–542. 68 Human Rights as Natural Juridical Goods 927 There are things that are attributed to a person by virtue of the very nature of man—in other words, that his title arises from man’s very being—and they are measured according to the nature of things . . . for example, his life, his physical integrity, etc. . . . Each of those things—corporeal and incorporeal—that are attributed to man by nature constitutes a natural right.72 Both Villey and Hervada insist that the value of the human-rights project needs to be assessed within the context of its coherence with the juridico-realistic account of, first, the essence of right and, second, with the connected Thomistic doctrine of natural rights. The predominant understanding of the project of human rights as an essentially subjective concept resulted in Villey’s radical disillusionment with the prospect of accommodating them within a juridico-realistic conception of right and natural right,73 regardless of possible positive aspects within such a project.74 In his view, the problem stems not only from an erroneous conception of right but also from a flawed philosophical tradition. He considers the project of human rights to be irreparably corrupt because of its deep-rooted philosophical metastasis, which dates back to the paradigmatic myth of the Hobbesian “state of nature.” 75 The concept of natural right in the Hobbesian “state of nature” scenario is posited in its so-called “pure” state, meaning as an absolute “liberty-right” inherent in the individual’s faculties and powers. At the same time, Hobbes’s natural right is “caught” within a dialectic tension with the natural law, which is by contrast envisioned as purely moral, and thus essentially extra-juridical.76 On the other side of the philosophical “coin,” Villey maintains that the modern project of the rights of man is hopelessly entangled with individualistic philosophical premises that prevent it from being understood within the properly relational perspective required by Hervada, Critical Introduction, 51–52. For example, see Villey, Le droit et les droits de l’homme, 131–54, and “Le droit dans les choses,” 24. 74 See Michel Villey, “Polémique sur les ‘droits de l’homme,’” Les Études philosophiques 2 (1986): 192–94. 75 See Villey, Le droit et les droits de l’homme, 138–39, and “Polémique,” 191. See also, Michel Villey, La nature et la loi: Une philosophie du droit (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2014), 242. 76 See Michel Villey, “Droit Subjectif II (Le droit de l’individu chez Hobbes),” in Seize essais de philosophie du droit dont un sur la crise universitaire (Paris: Dalloz, 1969), 189–90, 193–95. See also Villey’s treatment of Hobbes’s conception of natural right in La formation, 559–618. 72 73 928 Petar Popović the virtue of justice. The rights of man are thereby formulated by considering the human person exclusively as an individual, in abstraction from the property of other-directedness.77 Since Villey perceives no signs of discontinuity between the twentieth-century rights talk and the modern genesis of the rights-of-man project, he believes that not even a practical consensus on the values protected by these rights could secure their consistent and durable foundations in the changing contexts of the individualist conceptions of the “self.” Hervada’s approach to the human-rights project is more moderate. He is prepared to accept the possibility of a doctrinal continuity between the juridico-realistic account of the essence of right, the classical tradition of ius naturale, and the human-rights project. A clear sign of his openness for establishing such continuity is his explicit reference to human rights as “inherent juridical goods.” 78 Therefore, all the goods inherent to [a person’s] own being are the object of his dominion, are his in the most strict and proper sense. With this in mind, it is evident that the set of goods inherent to his being represents his things, with which others cannot interfere and which they cannot appropriate; . . . they are, then, rights of the person, rights that the person has by virtue of his nature. They are the natural rights of man in the strictest sense of the word.79 Hervada’s positive evaluation of such doctrinal continuity, however, is subject to a condition sine qua non: the continuity is operative only within a doctrinal framework where term “right” in “human rights” is understood according to the conceptual hierarchy of the primary and essential (ipsa res iusta) and secondary (subjective) meanings of “right.” Subjective rights, as the individual’s faculties or powers to claim things (res), according to Hervada, certainly occupy an important structural place in the juridical phenomenon. But these rights, including Hohfeldian types of subjective rights, should be envisioned as only a consequence—a manifestation or a See: Villey, Le droit et les droits de l’homme, 120–21, 154; Villey, “Polémique,” 199; Villey, La nature et la loi, 241–42. 78 Javier Hervada, “Problemas que una nota esencial de los derechos umanos plantea a la filosofía del derecho,” in Escritos de derecho natural (Pamplona, ES: EUNSA, 2013), 157. Hervada even claims that the correct understanding of the essential meaning of right (“ius”) must contain a reference to those rights which are called human or natural rights, since these type of rights clearly indicate that the elements of the juridical domain are preexistent with regard to positive law (155–59). 79 Hervada, Critical Introduction, 54. 77 Human Rights as Natural Juridical Goods 929 derived juridical meaning—dependent upon a prior objective concept of right: the res itself within determined relations of justice.80 Thus understood, ius subiectivum81 has concrete and positive value. It cannot be reduced to a mere “free-floating” and essentially instrumental faculty that subsists only as a juridical extension of the law, natural or positive. We believe that the evidence gathered from the magisterial dicta on human rights, as well as their subsequent academic interpretations, indicates that the notion of human rights in CSD presupposes the conceptual hierarchy inherent in the semantics of ius, as proposed by Hervada’s re-reading of the classical texts in the juridico-realistic tradition. There are, thus, three essential elements for CSD’s understanding of human rights. Within the objective-conceptual approach there is, first, right in the objective sense (ipsa res iusta) as the Thomistic primary meaning of ius. Then, second, we have the subjective rights as the secondary manifestation of the concept of right. Third, we have the necessary parallel argument on the metaphysical context of natural law within the objectivist-contextual approach. We believe that each time the concept of human rights is invoked within CSD all three elements are simultaneously included within a single coherent argument which suffices to explain the foundations of rights talk. Having established the first task of this paper—the meaning of the term “human rights” in CSD—we may now turn to our second, closely connected task. How is the conceptual continuity of rights talk integrated within the whole of CSD, and what are the contours of the specifically juridical domain inherent in the principles of CSD? The Juridical Domain of the Principles of Catholic Social Doctrine The four principles of CSD are: the principle of the dignity of the human person, the principle of the common good, the principle of subsidiarity, and the principle of solidarity.82 A complete presentation of the argument for the juridical domain pertinent to these principles exceeds the proportions of this work. We shall instead limit ourselves to an outline of some of Hervada, Critical Introduction, 22–24. See also Hervada, Lecciones propedéuticas, 243: “[The concept of right as the just thing] generates in the title-holder of the right the possibility to demand the handover of the thing or the respect of the right. . . . Therefore, subjective rights exist and are a constitutional factor or element of the right. But they are not autonomous from the right; subjective rights are one of its manifestations.” 81 For a useful study on the genesis of the concept of subjective right, see Alejandro Guzmán Brito, “Historia de la denominación del derecho-facultad como ‘subjectivo,’” Revista de Estudios Historico-Juridicos 25 (2003): 407–43. 82 Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, §160. 80 930 Petar Popović the main topics where such domain comes into particular focus and which have not yet received sufficient academic attention. The Principle of Human Dignity With regard to the first principle, CSD holds that human rights represent a conceptual and doctrinal response to the demands of human dignity;83 they are rooted in human dignity84 and correspond to the demands of human dignity.85 These general claims establish that human rights should be considered as a juridical domain inherent to the anthropological content of human dignity. But how exactly is it inherent? In his message for the World Day of Peace in 1999, John Paul II affirmed that “to promote the good of the individual is thus to serve the common good, which is that point where rights and duties converge and reinforce one another.”86 He added that human rights are directed “towards the promotion of every aspect of the good of both the person and society.”87 CSD seems to understand the individual and common good as the loci of human dignity that are particularly relevant for the constitution of the juridical domain.88 At the same time, CSD firmly establishes that “the natural law expresses the dignity of the human person and lays foundations of the person’s fundamental duties.”89 Elsewhere, the natural law is said to provide the basis for the dignity of the human person, for the common good, and for the human rights.90 Moreover, in its 2009 In Search of a Universal Ethic: A New Look at the Natural Law, the International Theological Commission (ITC) document affirms that “the rights of the human person . . .emerge from the order of justice,” and that “to acknowledge these natural rights of man means to acknowledge the objective order of human relations based on natural law.”91 Hence, the juridical domain pertaining to the principle of the dignity of the human person seems to be connected to the correct balance within the interplay of the following elements: human rights as natural juridical Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, §152 Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, §153. 85 Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, §154. 86 Pope John Paul II, Message for the Celebration of the World Day of Peace, January 1, 1999, §1. 87 John Paul II, Message for World Day of Peace 1999, §3. 88 The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, §388–389, 391. 89 Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, §140. 90 Pope John Paul II, Encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae (1995), §70. 91 ITC, In Search of a Universal Ethic: A New Look at the Natural Law, §92. 83 84 Human Rights as Natural Juridical Goods 931 goods, the individual and common human good, and the precepts of the natural law.92 What CSD does not do is present an explicit, detailed, and fully developed argument on the nature of this balance. In any case, it is clear from the foregoing that one of the central questions regarding the juridical domain of the principle of human dignity concerns the juridical domain of natural law. Both Villey and Hervada have contributed to the discussion of that question. A simplified but nonetheless sufficiently clear formulation of their argument on this topic can be made as follows: The precept of natural law points to certain natural human goods as the necessary aspects of the person’s moral perfection and fulfilment.93 However, this same precept of natural moral law may be considered under the aspect which is decidedly juridical. When such a precept is seen as the source of attribution of certain natural human goods to persons as their title-holders and these goods are at the same time seen as consequently owed by other determinate subjects in a relation of justice, it is actually reconstituted as a precept of “ juridical natural law.”94 A precept of natural law, considered in its juridical aspect, contains the order of that which is just according to human nature. It is essentially a natural norm, in the sense that it is promulgated through nature itself. Therefore, we may propose an alternative term for this “juridical” natural law: “natural norms of justice.” This term is actually already present within the academic treatment of human rights and the natural law in the texts of some of the commentators of CSD. The supreme juristic principles are that part of natural law which is concerned with the establishment of the social order. In Latin The law in general, and thus also natural law, is defined by Thomas to be “an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has the care of community, and promulgated” (ST I-II, q. 90, a. 4; emphasis added). 93 See ST I-II, q. 94, a. 2:“Whatever the practical reason naturally apprehends as man’s good (or evil) belongs to the precepts of the natural law as something to be done or avoided. Since, however, good has the nature of an end, . . . hence it is that all those things to which man has a natural inclination, are naturally apprehended by reason as being good, and consequently as objects of pursuit.” 94 For example, see: Hervada, Critical Introduction, 94–95, 119–130; Hervada, Lecciones propedéuticas, 522, 531–32, 586; Hervada, What is Law? The Modern Response of Juridical Realism: An Introduction to Law, trans. William L. Daniel (Montréal: Wilson & Lafleur Ltée, 2009), 116, 143–44. For Villey’s implicit, but still sufficiently clear, argument on the juridical domain of natural law, see Villey, La formation, 593; Villey, Philosophie du droit, 2:154; Villey, “Si la théorie générale du droit, ” 429; Villey, “La nature des choses,” in Seize Essais de philosophie du droit dont un sur la crise universitaire (Paris: Dalloz, 1969), 50. 92 932 Petar Popović this part is termed “ius naturale” distinct from “lex naturalis,” the natural law in general. In English we might perhaps call it natural juristic law, just as we speak of natural moral law.95 Interestingly enough, the 2009 ITC document presents an understanding of the specifically juridical domain constituted within the normative structure of natural moral law as one aspect of the meaning of the term “natural right” (ius naturale). The English translation of ius naturale is rendered in plural: “norms of natural justice.”96 The Principle of the Common Good In order to fully understand the juridical domain pertinent to the principle of the common good, we should first precisely delimit the principle’s meaning. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church frequently mentions what it calls the “primary and broadly accepted”97 definition of this principle: The common good indicates the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfilment more fully and more easily. The common good does not consist in the simple sum of the particular goods of each subject of a social entity. Belonging to each person, it is and remains “common,” because it is indivisible and because only together it is possible to attain it.98 Hittinger, in his studies on the social ontology of group-persons or communities, provides an alternate definition of the meaning of the common good, one which complements the Compendium’s definition. Johannes Messner, Social Ethics: Natural Law in the Modern World, trans. J. J. Doherty (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder, 1949), 156–57. 96 ITC, In Search of a Universal Ethic, §83:“[There is an] essential distinction between natural law [i.e., lex naturalis] and the norm of natural justice [i.e., ius naturale].” The document continues: “The norm of natural justice is the inherent standard of the right interaction among members of society. It is the rule and immanent measure of interpersonal and social human relations” (§88); “The norm of natural justice . . . articulates the judgement of practical reason in its estimation of what is just. Such norm, as the juridical expression of the natural law in the political order, thus appears as the measure of the just relation among the members of the community” (§90). 97 Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, §164. 98 Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, §164. 95 Human Rights as Natural Juridical Goods 933 He holds that the common good is, in a sense, twofold. In its strict sense, it denotes the desired form of order of communal action, or the common good of shared action. Hittinger calls this the intrinsic common good. In addition, the common good includes the end (or ends) sought through the entrance into a societal union as its member. Hittinger calls this aspect the extrinsic common good.99 On Hittinger’s account, “the salient mark of a bonum commune is that it cannot, just as such, be distributed or divided in exchange, but only participated by its members.”100 The common good of a society “cannot be distributed or cashed-out,” because it really “never exists as a private good, and therefore when someone exits a marriage or a polity he cannot take away his private share.”101 A societal union—the common order itself—is not divisible.102 “Like any true friendship, there is only one way to have it—to participate in it by action.”103 In both of Hittinger’s mutually complementing104 definitions, the common denominator is the indivisibility of the common good. On the other hand, the constitution of the juridical domain is precisely dependent on the fact that a “thing” (res) is somehow divisible in order to be apportioned to determinate persons as their juridical suum, as something that is Russell Hittinger, “Love, Sustainability, and Solidarity: Philosophical and Theological Roots,” in Free Markets with Solidarity and Sustainability: Facing the Challenge, ed. Martin Schlag and Juan A. Mercado (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2016), 23. A similar account of the internal differentiation of layers within the concept of common good is given by Dominic Farrell: “Furthermore, given the nature of communities and unified wholes, the common good consists of a twofold ordering or disposition of their members. On the one hand, it consists of the intrinsic ordering of the community: ordering the members among themselves in such a way that a working, unified whole is brought about. . . . On the other hand, the common good lies ultimately in the end of community and its attainment. Indeed, the common good qua order intrinsic to the community derives from and is directed toward the common good qua end” (“Wanting the Common Good: Aquinas on General Justice,” The Review of Metaphysics 71 [2018]: 522–23). 100 Russell Hittinger, “Divisible Goods and Common Good: Reflections on Caritas in Veritate,” Faith & Economics 58 (2011): 39–40 101 Russell Hittinger, “The Coherence of the Four Basic Principles of Catholic Social Doctrine,” Nova et Vetera (English) 7 (2009): 800. 102 Hittinger, “Coherence of the Four Basic Principles,” 830. 103 Hittinger, “Love, Sustainability, and Solidarity,” 24. 104 V. Bradley Lewis labels the first definition the “instrumental account of the common good” (“Is the Common Good an Ensemble of Conditions?,” Archivio di filosofia 84 [2016]: 124). In this optic, the second definition would, perhaps, amount to an “essentialist” account of the common good. 99 934 Petar Popović “mine” or “ours” as opposed to “yours,” or for that matter, anybody else’s.105 In order to be apportionable, a certain “thing” must be attributable to a person not primarily in view of his moral perfection, but precisely under the aspect of its being apt to enter into the sphere of the person’s suum and, consequently, of constituting other persons’ correlative debt in justice. Where does this leave us with regard to the juridical domain of the principle of the common good? Even though the indivisible common good cannot, as such, constitute anyone’s juridical suum, the juridical domain may still be predicated of those “things” (res) which represent apportionable channels of attaining the common good of particular societies. For example, the common good of shared action within the family is indivisible, transcending the possibility of constituting a juridical good. It is essentially participative, and it pertains to the domain of morality. But some of its aspects may be apportioned as the members’ suum. 106 With regard to the good of transmission of values within a family, which certainly represents an aspect of its common good, the juridical domain may be constituted as the juridical good of parents’ role as the primary When speaking about natural rights, Hervada affirms that “what we call the nature of things must refer to dimensions that can be valued or measured” (Critical Introduction, 59). See also: Hervada, What is Law?, 16, 18; Hervada, “Apuntes para una exposición del realismo jurídico clásico,” Persona y Derecho 18 (1988): 284–85. 106 For example, the Pontifical Council for the Family’s Charter of the Rights of the Family (1983) enumerates those rights of the person which, “even though they are expressed as rights of the individual, have a fundamental social dimension.” The Charter also highlights the fact that “the family, a natural society, exists prior to the State or any other community, and possesses inherent rights.” The intrinsic and extrinsic common good of the family is indivisible and, as such, cannot be readily constituted as right. Members of the family can only participate in its common good. The rights mentioned in the Charter, however, represent examples of what we here refer to as “apportionable channels” of attaining the common good of the family. These rights are not the common good in itself. They do, however, represent certain juridical goods which are naturally inherent to the individual person as a member of the family, or to the family itself as a group-person. On the other hand, the apportionable channels of the common good should be distinguished from and are not reducible to common goods (common utilities as means, or, as Finnis calls them, “common stock,” the incidents of common enterprise). Common goods are divisible—material or structural—preconditions which are made common for the fulfilment of the common good in the strict sense. For more details on “common goods” or “common stock,” see: Russell Hittinger, “Polity in Catholic Social Doctrine: Some Recent Perplexities,” in Religion and Civil Society: The Changing Faces of Religion and Secularity, ed. Mary Ann Glendon and Rafael Alvira (New York: Georg Olms, 2014), 42–43; Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 194; Gregory Froelich, “The Equivocal Status of Bonum Commune,” The New Scholasticism 63 (1989): 53–55. 105 Human Rights as Natural Juridical Goods 935 educators of their children according to their own philosophical or religious convictions. Hittinger makes a similar argument when he claims that “recognizing the natural right of parents as primary educators of their children is not, in the first place, a question of social justice, but rather of their rights vis-à-vis other individuals or societies.”107 In our present argument, however, we are taking his claim a step further. We claim that, in the juridico-realistic conception of right, natural rights are relatable to the common good precisely because they, as natural juridical goods, form some of the apportionable channels of the common good. In this sense, the juridical domain of the common good subsists both ad extra, with regard to other individuals and group-persons, and ad intra, among the members themselves of particular societies. The Principle of the Subsidiarity In CSD, the principle of subsidiarity is usually defined as the imperative that “social entities properly perform the functions that fall to them without being required to hand them over unjustly to other social entities of a higher level, by which they would end up being absorbed and substituted, in the end seeing themselves denied their dignity and essential place.”108 One of the key terms in this definition is the reference to the proper level of communal action. As Hittinger correctly notes, the principle of subsidiarity secures that the munera, which are essential for the attainment of a society’s specific common good, are performed by this society at its proper level of action, and hence not necessarily at the “lowest possible” level: Subsidiarity. . . presupposes that there are plural authorities and agents having their “proper” (not necessarily, lowest) duties and rights with regard to the common good.109 If the claim that societies have their proper rights with regard to the common good is to be properly understood, such rights must be seen in light of what are the proper duties referenced above. We have already seen that the natural norms of justice (i.e., the juridical aspect of natural law) orient the individual person to certain natural juridical goods, which are, in turn, owed in justice by others. Aside from this, the natural norms of Hittinger, “Coherence of the Four Basic Principles,” 830. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, §186 (emphasis added). 109 Russell Hittinger, “The Coherence of the Four Basic Principles of Catholic Social Doctrine,” 825. 107 108 936 Petar Popović justice also point to certain juridical goods whose title-holder is a certain group-person as a sui generis unity of order, and which are related to that group-person’s attainment of the common good.110 Hence, certain “proper” moral “duties” regarding the attainment of the common good are constituted as the group-person’s “proper rights” or juridical goods. The nucleus of the principle of subsidiarity—the imperative that each group-person maintains its own specific “proper” level of dynamics toward attaining its common good—implies, at the same time, a framework of duties related to these dynamics, but also a right. The principle of subsidiarity is not only a principle of social ontology or social ethics;111 it also possesses an inherent juridical domain, a so-called “subsidiary right.”112 The very good of each society’s proper level of activity for the attainment of the common good constitutes a juridical good, which may not be interfered with or be illegitimately appropriated by other individual or group agents.113 For example, the state, or a university, or a church cannot legitimately appropriate the juridical goods that comprise the apportionable channels of attaining the common good proper to a family if that family is capable of pursuing its common good at its own proper level of action. The Principle of Solidarity The principle of solidarity is defined by CSD as the fundamental virtue of social morality which considers the “firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good [precisely as the] good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all.”114 It thus expresses the adequate mode of communicatio itself—of making something For example, as we already saw, the Charter of the Rights of the Family highlights that “the family, a natural society, exists prior to the State or any other community, and possesses inherent rights” (“Preamble“). 111 See Russell Hittinger, “Social Pluralism and Subsidiarity,” 395: “Subsidiarity does not tell us who has which function or munus. One has to look elsewhere (natural law . . .) for the munera. Therefore, subsidiarity cannot be used to settle the debates about the ontology or the distribution of munera; rather, it is a principle governing the relations of already distributed functions.” 112 Höffner notes that it was Bishop Emmanuel von Ketteler who first spoke of “subsidiary rights” as the “right [of people] to accomplish themselves what they can do in their homes, in their communities” (Christian Social Teaching, 53). 113 In short, my claim is that John Paul II’s argument that “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving it of its functions which properly belong to it” (Centesimus Annus, §48) is not only a claim of social morality or social ontology of group-persons but also a juridical claim. 114 Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, §193. 110 Human Rights as Natural Juridical Goods 937 common, where one rational agent participates in the life of another115— within any society which possesses an intrinsic common good. Another way of understanding solidarity is as “social love.”116 The quality of the social bond—an intrinsic common good—is reflected in the fact that the bond is “loved” for its own sake. There is no other way to attain the intrinsic common good except by participating in it through various modes of “social love.”117 Now, just as the common good is indivisible, so too its dynamic aspect—the mode of participating in its communicatio, “social love”—is indivisible. For that reason, solidarity is not readily apportionable for specifically juridical purposes. Participation in the quality of “social love” or “friendship” within a society is the primary aspect of solidarity. The common good is a matter of “things” (res) owed in justice only in a secondary and mediate way. Could we nonetheless pinpoint an argument that represents the specific juridical domain of solidarity (besides the ones already identified in close connection to the first three principles)? The principle of solidarity aims precisely at the adequate quality of relations which constitute the intrinsic common good. Is there any way in which this quality of intrasocietal relations may be interfered with at the level of (dis)respect for a debt in justice? One of the examples that comes to mind is the case of a higher society (e.g., the state) that attempts to substitute, by laws or policies of social pressure and on an all-encompassing conceptual level, the proper quality of the very bond of “social love” with some reduced and mandatory vision of the moral quality of communal life itself.118 The recognition of See Russell Hittinger, “Reasons for Civil Society,” in The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law in a Post-Christian World (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003), 271. 116 See Russell Hittinger, “The Process of ‘Creative Destruction’ and Subsidiarity: A Response to professors Archer and Donati,” in Crisis in a Global Economy: Re-Planning the Journey, ed. José T. Raga and Mary Ann Glendon (Vatican City: Pontificia Academia Scientiarum Socialium, 2011), 170: “The common good motif is best considered under the principle of love.” 117 John Paul II refers to various terms in which solidarity was expressed in CSD, like “social charity,” “friendship,” or “civilization of love” (Centesimus Annus, §10). See: Russell Hittinger, “Social Inclusion Beyond Exchanges and Distributions,” in Towards a Participatory Society: New Roads to Social and Cultural Integration, ed. Pierpaolo Donati (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2018), 247; Hittinger, “Love, Sustainability, and Solidarity,” 19–23. 118 Hittinger frequently points to an example in which modes of solidarity may be completely absorbed—on a general, conceptual level—within a singular, paradigmatic social category (e.g., citizenship) in the totalitarian regimes. He calls it 115 938 Petar Popović social love as the adequate mode of relational dynamics for the attainment of the common good may therefore be understood to constitute a natural juridical good of societies. The Juridical Implications of Pope Francis’s Guidelines for the Application of the Principles of CSD Pope Francis has, during the course of his pontificate, inaugurated four principles or guidelines which are derived from the four fundamental principles of the CSD. These principles seek to address the tensions inherent in every social reality and “guide the development of life in society and the building of a people where differences are harmonized within a shared pursuit.”119 These principles or guidelines are: time is greater than space; unity prevails over conflict; realities are more important than ideas; and the whole is greater than the part.120 We may omit from our analysis the first of those four, since it predominantly considers the more practical and dynamic aspect of the development of processes across time. We shall also omit from consideration the third principle (“realities are more important than ideas”), since we have already mentioned a possible implication of this principle for the correct understanding of the realistic concept of “right” with respect to certain conceptions of subjective rights (i.e., those which posit an inherent structural detachment from the realistic givenness of the objects of subjective rights). We are, therefore, left with two principles which seem to raise certain important questions regarding the constitution and adequate understanding of the juridical domain. We believe that these two principles may the “monistic notion of solidarity” (Hittinger, “Making Sense of the Civilization of Love: John Paul II’s Contribution to Catholic Social Thought,” in The Legacy of Pope John Paul II: His Contribution to Catholic Thought, ed. Geoffrey Gneuhs [New York: Crossroad, 2000], 74–77). 119 Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, §221. 120 Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, §§ 221–37. Francis developed an outline of these principles during the 1970s, taking inspiration especially from Romano Guardini’s understanding of social realities through “polar oppositions.” See: Austen Ivereigh, The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope (New York: Henry Holt, 2014), 142–43; Massimo Borghesi, The Mind of Pope Francis: Jorge Maria Bergoglio’s Intellectual Journey (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018), 57–130. In a very insightful comment, Barett Turner affirms that the basic idea of these guidelines is that “a healthy synthesis of opposites in a living thing, including civil society . . . will not destroy or collapse the contrast into one side or another [but,] rather, by embracing the polarity, the organism comes most fully alive” (“Pacis Progressio: How Francis’s Four New Principles Develop Catholic Social Teaching into Catholic Social Praxis,” Journal of Moral Theology 6 [2017]: 120). Human Rights as Natural Juridical Goods 939 be viewed as a single composite principle. The composite social tension is expressed through the contrast between “unity” and “whole,” on one side of the tension, and “conflict” and “part” on the other. According to Pope Francis, conflict must be engaged and transcended in view of a unity. If reality is viewed exclusively through the lens of conflict, our sense of its profound unity may be lost, and persons end up projecting onto institutions their partial conflictual agendas. By contrast, Francis holds that conflict may be resolved, and that communion may be built amid disagreement. The way to achieve unity and the resolution of conflict has, in his view, the following elements: the resolution of conflict takes place on a higher plane; the resolution thereby preserves what is valid and useful on both sides of conflict; persons on both sides of the conflictual arena are seen in their deepest dignity; and the structure of resolution maintains its openness for the attitudes of true solidarity and social peace among parties in conflict. The achieved unity (the synthesis or the whole) is diversified, and greater than the sum of its parts, although the polar tensions are not thereby eliminated, but remain active. The unity embraces all persons in a society who seek its common good, and whose “cultural covenant” has the form of a “reconciled diversity.”121 To depict this argument, Francis famously uses the image of the “polyhedron,” whose structure “reflects the convergence of all its parts, each of which preserves its distinctiveness.”122 If we are reading Francis’s argument correctly, the Pontiff is providing the criteria for CSD’s engagement with those aspects of social conflicts which have an inherent juridical domain, those which necessarily demand the assessment of the juridical goods in question. A paradigmatic contemporary example of such conflict is precisely the social tension between different, seemingly irreconcilable and mutually exclusive visions regarding certain natural juridical goods (human rights) and the common good itself of political society. Against contemporary tendencies of viewing the political common good as an oppressive hierarchy, or otherwise as merely an optional utility,123 Francis maintains that the unity of the political common good may and should be achieved. Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, §230. Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, §236. A “polyhedron” is brought up here in contrast to the model of the sphere, which is “no greater than the sum of its parts, where every point is equidistant from the centre, and there are no differences between them.” 123 For a diagnosis of the contemporary situation regarding the political common good, see Hittinger, “Social Inclusion,” 256–57. 121 122 940 Petar Popović Francis’s account of the elements necessary to achieve unity by means of transcending the conflict are very similar to the application of the principle of toleration. Toleration124 is ordinarily understood as a resolution of the conflict between a social norm and certain contrasting behaviors through the optic of a twofold normative system. The first part of this twofold normative system, called the “basic normative system,” is the part where certain acts which are the occasion of social conflict are prohibited. The other part, the “justifying normative system,” consists of the criteria for evaluation of the (non)existence of “superior” reasons for the toleration of those acts.125 According to the dominant contemporary understanding of the concept of toleration, paradigmatically represented in John Rawls’s thought,126 the principle of toleration “must be applied to political philosophy itself.”127 The citizens should be left to settle the disputed questions of religion, philosophy, and morality themselves, in accordance with views they firmly hold.128 This means that, in a system deeply marked by a diversity of opposing and irreconcilable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines, the grounds of toleration should be settled in abstraction from any particular conception of the good. A conception of human rights founded upon the doctrine of natural juridical goods would most certainly be qualified as a particular conception of the good unsuitable for a Rawlsian social consensus. To apply the principle of toleration to political philosophy itself means to create a conception of justice which is purely political—and not metaphysical—and from which all particular conceptions of good are equally distant.129 We shall analyze the concept of toleration only in its “vertical public” understanding, that is, within the juridical and policy-based relationship between the state, on one hand, and individuals or social groups, on the other. For the concept of vertical public toleration, see: Ernesto Garzón Valdés, “Some Remarks on the Concept of Toleration,” Ratio Juris 10 (1997): 127–30; Fabio Macioce, “Toleration as Asymmetric Recognition,” Persona y Derecho 77 (2017): 228. 125 The outline of this scheme of toleration is provided in Valdés, “Some Remarks,” 127–38. 126 See Rainer Forst, Toleration in Conflict: Past and Present, trans. Ciaran Cronin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 468: “No other work in recent political philosophy has accorded the connections between justice and toleration greater prominence than John Rawls’s Political Liberalism, a work which has earned a special place in the further development of the modern discourse of toleration.” 127 John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 9–10. 128 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 154. 129 See: Rawls, Political Liberalism, 3–4; Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political, not 124 Human Rights as Natural Juridical Goods 941 Rawls’s idea of toleration seems to be in direct contrast to Pope Francis’s guidelines, especially when these are read in the light of CSD’s previous statements regarding toleration.130 First, Francis’s conception of toleration as resolution of conflict on a “superior” level, in our opinion, does not imply a juridical superiority of the justifying normative system, in the sense of hierarchical superiority of legal sources. The natural norms of justice, and the natural juridical goods which these norms point to, are present in both the basic normative system and the justifying normative system. Other criteria for deliberation, like reasons from prudence or from contextual, social states of affairs, are introduced in the justifying normative system. This does not mean that the natural juridical goods are necessarily trumped by these additional reasons; quite the contrary. But it does mean that, in Francis’s words, “others are seen in their deepest dignity.”131 At the same time, one understands that “the locus of this reconciliation of differences is within ourselves [in Italian: ‘one’s own inner world’; la propria interiorità], in our own lives, ever threatened as they are by fragmentation and breakdown [in Italian: ‘dialectical dispersion’; dispersione dialettica].”132 Thus, Francis’s argument actually restates the traditional thread of CSD’s view of toleration by highlighting one of its essential elements: putting oneself in the position of others.133 Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (1985): 223, 231; Rawls, Law of Peoples: with The Idea of Public Reason Revisited (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 16, 152, 176. 130 CSD’s exemplary approach to the integration of the idea of toleration and the doctrine of natural rights as natural juridical goods is often expressed in arguments regarding the juridical good of marriage: “Although legislation may sometimes tolerate morally unacceptable behaviour, it must never weaken the recognition of indissoluble monogamous marriage as the only authentic form of the family” (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, §§228–29). See also John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, §71; Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons (2003), §§5–7, 9; Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Contribution to World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (2001), §§15, 18–19, 21. For a Thomistic synthesis of the elements pertinent to this argument, see: ST I-II, q. 91, a. 4; q. 96, aa. 2–3; II-II, q. 10, a. 11; J. Budziszewski, True Tolerance: Liberalism and the Necessity of Judgement (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1992); Budziszewski, “Tolerance and Natural Law,” Revue générale de droit 29 (1998): 233–38; Robert P. George, Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 28–47. 131 Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, §228. 132 Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, §229. 133 For this element of toleration, see Valdés, “Some Remarks,” 137. 942 Petar Popović Second, in Francis’s framework, the “superior” level is not related to hierarchical superiority between levels of normative systems, but to the superiority over conflict. “If we remain trapped in conflict,” he argues, “we lose our sense of the profound unity of reality.”134 This may be the cause of losing the ability to see the other in his deepest dignity, even if his acts and life-options are contrary to the norm of the basic axiological system. On the other hand, the Pontiff rather clearly affirms that the resolution on a superior level does not mean “to opt for a kind of syncretism, or for the absorption of one into the other,” but only to “preserve what is valid and useful on both sides.”135 Thus, Francis’s model of the polyhedron reflects the true nature of toleration as a concept inherently marked by polar tensions: on one side we have the juridical validity of natural juridical goods, and on the other side we have acts and life-structuring options which are contrary to that which is naturally just. Both sets of arguments enter into the deliberation on the existence of reasons for toleration. At the end of the process of evaluation, on a level superior to the conflict, the natural juridical goods are preserved, and the other is seen in his deepest dignity—regardless of the fact that his act or his life-structuring option is ultimately not juridically, but only factually tolerated while never becoming accommodated as permissive from the aspect of public morality. This is something completely different from Rawls’s idea of toleration where the model is actually the sphere: each comprehensive conception of good is nominally equidistant from the center, from the political conception of justice.136 Another aspect of CSD’s doctrine on a juridical approach to toleration merits further reflection in this regard. Most of the research on toleration Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, §226. Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, §228. In his earlier, 1989 article, Jorge Maria Bergoglio claimed that syncretism may seem attractive as a way of reconciling the conflicts, but the polar tension is never really engaged with. He then concludes by saying that syncretism is the most hidden form of modern totalitarianism, because it promises reconciliation without the reference to substantive values which transcend the conflict; see Jorge Maria Bergoglio, “Necessità di un’antropologia politica: un problema pastorale,” in Pastorale sociale (Milan: Jaca, 2015), 299–300. 136 Unlike Francis’s claim that the individual is the locus of the reconciliation of differences, in Rawls’s system diversity is relieved by transferring social conflict regarding values at the level of the individual person. The individual should accordingly adopt what is referred to as “schizophrenic personality”: “In their private persona [people] possess conceptions of the good [while] in their public capacity as citizens, however, they must divest themselves of these personal commitments” (Richard Bellamy, “Toleration, Liberalism and Democracy: A Comment on Leader and Garzón Valdés,” Ratio Juris 10 (1997): 180. 134 135 Human Rights as Natural Juridical Goods 943 outside of CSD usually presents the “justifying normative system” as a meta-juridical system of certain moral values.137 According to CSD, by contrast, the normative aspects of reasons for (or against) toleration may be considered genuinely juridical norms (i.e., the natural norms of justice) and not only moral or prudential ones. Applied to the framework where toleration is seen according to a twofold normative system, this means that conflict cannot be resolved only on a meta-juridical level of moral or prudential reasons. The natural law, in both its moral and juridical aspects, forms part of the “basic normative system.” But it is necessarily included in the evaluation of reasons for toleration also as the essential part of the superior “justifying normative system.” The concept of toleration itself thus possesses an inherently juridical domain. No position on toleration regarding an act that is contrary to natural norms of justice may prescind from a foundational reference to these norms. The prudential reasons, and reasons from social contexts, thus, enter into the deliberation process within the justifying normative system together with juridical reasons provided by human or natural rights understood as natural juridical goods. Conclusion From the outset of this article we highlighted the idea that the concept of human or natural right in CSD necessitates a restatement of the idea of right in the objectivist-conceptual sense, as an argument running parallel to the postulate of the objectivist-contextual, metaphysical setting provided by the natural law. In a recent address to the symposium on the “Fundamental Rights and Conflicts among Rights,” Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Holy See’s Secretary of the State, reaffirmed the imperative to rediscover “the objectiveness” on which the Church understands human rights. The absence of the objective dimension of human rights, the secretary continued, “causes a short-circuit within rights, which, then, from being universal and objective, become individual and subjective.”138 This line of argumentation is congenial to Benedict XVI’s claim that the crisis of the foundations and the phenomenon of multiplication of human rights represents a problem that corrodes “the very concept of right.”139 For example, see: Valdés, “Some Remarks,” 134; Forst, Toleration in Conflict, 468–79; Macioce, “Toleration,” 234; Paolo Comanducci, “Sobre el problema de la tolerancia,” Ideas y Derecho 1 (2001): 199. 138 Cardinal Secretary of the State Pietro Parolin, Intervention at the International Symposium on “Fundamental Rights and Conflicts Among Rights,” November 15, 2018. 139 Pope Benedict XVI, “The Multiplication of Rights and the Destruction of the Concept of Right,” in Faith and Politics: Selected Writings, trans. Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2018), 20. 137 944 Petar Popović The concept of right may indeed corrode when its content is emptied of the anthropological normative premises. The last half-century has seen many attempts at conceiving the semantics of human rights on a “negative” juridical anthropology—immunitas—which posited a freedom of indifference at the core of rights talk. The idea of free-floating freedom recognized a conceptual ally in the all-purpose notion of subjective right. If the legal mentality is to be rebuilt according to a juridico-realistic anthropology, it will have to learn how to bring the structure of “freedom for” back to the core of the very semantics of right. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2020): 945–972 945 The Metaphysics of Evolution: From Aquinas’s Interpretation of Augustine’s Concept of Rationes Seminales to the Contemporary Thomistic Account of Species Transformism1 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. The Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas Rome, Italy Introduction One of the most important aspects of Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim is his concept of rationes seminales, which enabled him to assert that although God created everything instantaneously, in the initial state of the universe all species were present in the potency of the primordial matter, to be actualized at the consecutive stages of the history of its development.2 Interpreted by St. George Jackson Mivart (1827–1900), John Zahm, C.S.C (1851–1921), and Henri de Dorlodot This article develops our preliminary delineation of the Thomistic metaphysics of evolutionary transitions presented in Mariusz Tabaczek, “What Do God and Creatures Really Do in an Evolutionary Change? Divine Concurrence and Transformism from the Thomistic Perspective,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 93, no. 3 (2019), 445–82, at 455–56 (section IV). Its core ideas were presented at the conference “Thomas Aquinas on Creation and Nature,” organized by the Thomistic Institute at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome in October of 2019. 2 See Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim 5.5. All English translation of De Gen. ad litt. is taken from The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. John Hammond Taylor (New York: Newman Press, 1982). 1 946 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. (1855–1929) as an early anticipation of the theory of evolution, the idea of rationes seminales did not find much appreciation on the side of the father of the nineteenth-century revolution in biology—Charles Darwin. The fact is that Augustine’s theory did not assume a gradual transformation of one species into another. Such transition would not be acceptable within the context of the neo-Platonic definition of forms as fixed ideas in the mind of God, participated by created beings. Moreover, it seems that speaking of the actualization of rationes seminales, Augustine assumed two possibilities: they either (1) have a natural potential to gradually develop (unfold), under proper conditions, to the fullness of maturity, or (2) provide a proper ground (occasion) for God’s instantaneous and direct (ordinary or special) intervention effecting an instantaneous appearance of the first representative of a given species in its adult form.3 Needless to say, See De Gen. ad litt. 6.14. Divine action in the world can be understood first as (1) direct (immediate) or (2) indirect (mediated). The former mode consists in God’s affecting causal factors and natural occurrences at the level of their operation, which presupposes univocal predication of divine action and the causality of creatures (however, one may argue that the Thomistic idea of God’s direct action of bestowing esse on each contingent entity is conceived in nonunivocal terms). The latter mode is defined as sustaining and bringing changes in nature by God as primary and principal (transcendent) cause, working (immanently) through secondary and instrumental causation of the creatures. As a side note, occasionalism may be treated as an extreme version of (1). Secondly, divine action in the world may be conceived as (3) instantaneous or (4) extended in time. On another (third) approach to its objective character and nature, divine action can be defined as (5) ordinary (general) or (6) special (particular, or miraculous). The former refers to God’s regular action in the world, while the latter describes his particular actions in order to achieve some specific purposes in its history independently of the course of nature. God may achieve those purposes through: (a) producing effects that are beyond the power of nature (directly yet not univocally), (b) restraining secondary causes from producing their normal effects or producing those same effects directly (but not univocally) by his causal power alone, or (c) the mediation of secondary causes acting as instruments in working miracles. On yet another, fourth level of the debate concerning divine action, another distinction is made based on whether the world on which God acts is (7) deterministic or (8) indeterministic. The possibility of (7) assumes theo-physical compatibilism (which is opposite to theo-physical incompatibilism, stating that God could not act in the world that is deterministic). Finally, in reference to human beings, we may conceive God’s action on them as (9) entities having true freedom of the will or (10) merely an elusive impression of it. The possibility of (9) assumes anthropo-theological compatibilism (which is opposite to anthropo-theological incompatibilism, stating that God could not act on a truly free human being). The five distinctions mentioned here result in a plurality of positions concerning divine action in the world. Some of the possible combinations are: 1-3-5-7; 1-3-5- 3 The Metaphysics of Evolution 947 the latter option is unacceptable and becomes a stumbling block for the proponents of the modern evolutionary synthesis. Thomas Aquinas refers to Augustine’s rationes seminales on several occasions in his commentary on the work of six days in Summa theologiae, and in his other works, seemingly accepting the idea of all species (except for human species) being virtually present in the outcome of the initial act of creation, as well as accepting both possibilities of their actualization—through gradual development and through instantaneous and direct divine intervention. Assuming his theology in this matter follows faithfully the original thought of Augustine, it might be considered as being unable to fit within the context of the contemporary version of the evolutionary theory. However, we must not forget that Aquinas’s reference to Augustine’s concept of rationes seminales was accompanied by his general acceptance of Aristotle’s moderate realism about universals, including species, grounded in his hylomorphic metaphysics of substance. This fact provides an opportunity for redefining Augustine’s concept of rationes seminales in terms of the hylomorphic theory of matter, which—in turn—enables it to accommodate the idea of the gradual transformation of species. The main goal of this article is to develop such reinterpretation. In order to reach this goal, we will begin, in the first section, with the general presentation of Augustine’s notion of creation in his De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim and the short reflection upon the motives that inspired his introducing the concept of rationes seminales. The exact understanding 8; 2-4-5-7-9 (in the Cartesian-type of a universe in which human freedom occurs in otherwise completely deterministic world); 2-4-5-7-10; 1-3-6a-8-9; etc. Concerning Augustine’s notion of God’s intervention in bringing about the occurrence of the first exemplar of a given species in the mature stage of its development, it should be certainly classified as 1-3. With regard to the third distinction mentioned here, it seems to us that it might be considered as an instantiation of either 5, or 6a or 6b. God might have designed the world such that an instantiation of a new animal (or a new plant?) species requires his direct (immediate) and instantaneous intervention, which, nonetheless, belongs to its natural way of operation. Equally reasonable is an alternative scenario in which such an intervention is special and goes beyond God’s regular causal activity in the world. Naturally, neither 1-3-5 nor 1-3-6a/6b is acceptable for Darwinian evolutionists because of 1-3. Concerning the fourth distinction, Augustine’s notion of rationes seminales—regardless of whether their unfolding is spontaneous or requires direct and instantaneous God’s intervention—will most likely opt for (7). The last distinction is irrelevant in this context, but we may assume that Augustine’s weak theological determinism places him somewhere in between (9) and (10), most likely closer to (9), although this might be considered debatable. 948 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. of this concept in Augustine’s theology is the subject of our investigation in our second section, which is then followed by a third section critically evaluating some early tendencies of regarding it as evolutionary. The fourth and fifth sections introduce the main objectives of Aquinas’s reflection and interpretation of the account of the work of six days found in Genesis, as well as his use of Augustine’s notion of rationes seminales. Next, in our sixth section, we develop and provide a constructive proposal of the Thomistic metaphysics of evolutionary transformism, which is then followed by our constructive proposal of the redefinition of the concept of rationes seminales in the seventh section. The article closes with the evaluation of the faithfulness of the proposed model to the core principles of the Aristotelian-Thomistic system of metaphysics and philosophical theology, as well as its relevance in the context of contemporary science. Augustine’s Notion of Creation The point of departure for our analysis is the thought of Augustine commenting on the creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 in his De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim.4 Concerning the very act of creation Augustine clearly states that “God made everything together without any moments of time intervening.”5 Hence, he does not think we should understand literally the six days of the Genesis account: “We should not think of those days as solar days.”6 For how could there be solar days before the sun itself Ernan McMullin notes: “Twice Augustine attempted a commentary along allegorical lines on the disputed text of Genesis, but he was unsatisfied with the results. Finally in 415 A.D., after fourteen years of labor, he completed the De Genesi ad litteram, a detailed study of all the alleged points of conflict according to the ‘proper historical meaning,’ with frequent prescriptions as to how such conflict ought to be handled” (“Introduction: Evolution and Creation,” in Evolution and Creation, ed. Ernan McMullin [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986], 1–56, at 1). Among these prescriptions, adds McMullin, one was to bring an attention of future generations, most notably of Galileo. He found inspirational and relevant Augustine’s advice that, when conflict arises between a literal reading of the Bible and a truth about nature which has been demonstrated by reliable argument, the Christian should strive to reinterpret the biblical text in a metaphorical way (see De Gen. ad litt. 1.21). Our account of Augustine’s concept of rationes seminales follows the one offered by McMullin. 5 De Gen. ad litt. 5.11. 6 De Gen. ad litt. 5.5. Following J. H. Taylor’s introduction to the English translation of De Gen. ad litt., Mc Mullin notes: “It ought be noted that Augustine’s usage of the term ‘literal’ was much broader than ours. The ‘literal meaning’ alluded to in the title of his book, the meaning he searches for so painstakingly, was the meaning intended by the original author. ‘Literal’ for him was opposed to ‘allegorical,’ not to ‘metaphorical.’ Thus he could claim that ‘day’ in the Genesis account clearly had 4 The Metaphysics of Evolution 949 came to be (in the Genesis account it was created on the fourth day)? At the same time, unlike the contemporary advocates of the old earth creationism, he does not extend the ordinary twenty-four-hour days of the creation account in Genesis 1 into much longer periods of time (thousands, millions, or billions of years).7 Quite to the contrary, he thinks that God’s creative act was instantaneous and that the six days in the biblical description might be interpreted allegorically as referring to the six stages of the angelic knowledge about creation.8 to be taken metaphorically, that this was the author’s plain intention. Hence the ‘literal’ meaning here (in his sense) was the metaphorical one” (McMullin, “Introduction,” 50n29). 7 The camp of old-earth creationists includes: (1) gap creationists (ruin-restoration creationists), who think that, although the six-yom creation period in Genesis did involve six twenty-four-hours-long days, literally interpreted, there was an extended temporal gap between the two distinct stages of creation (as described respectively in Gen 1:1–2 and 1:3–31); (2) progressive creationists, who, accepting microevolution, think that God created so-called “natural species” (species defined at the level of family or order in the modern classification) through direct divine intervention, yet gradually, over a period of hundreds of millions of years; (3) day-age creationists, who hold that the six days referred to in the Genesis account of creation were not ordinary twenty-four-hour days, but rather were much longer periods (thousands or millions of years); and (4) cosmic time creationists, who, in reference to contemporary physics, consider the period of six days in the Genesis account under the conditions of quark confinement, when the universe was approximately a trillion times smaller and hotter than it is today, and suggest it is equal to fifteen billion years of earth time today (due to space expansion after quark confinement). Proponents of theistic evolution are oftentimes classified as day-age creationists (3), which is rather inadequate in the case of Augustine and those who follow him in his assertion that creation of the universe was instantaneous. For more information on (1), see Tom McIver, “Formless and Void: Gap Theory Creationism,” Creation/Evolution Journal 8, no. 3 (1988): 1–24; for more on (2), see Alan Hayward, Creation and Evolution: Rethinking the Evidence from Science and the Bible (Ada, Ml: Bethany House, 1985), and Hugh Ross, A Matter of Days: Resolving a Creation Controversy (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004); for more on (3), see Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, Expanded Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), chs. 2–4; for more on (4), see Gerald Schroeder, Genesis and the Big Bang Theory: The Discovery Of Harmony between Modern Science And the Bible (New York: Bantam, 1990). 8 As notes Aquinas: “For Augustine understands by the word ‘day,’ the knowledge in the mind of the angels, and hence, according to him, the first day denotes their knowledge of the first of the Divine works, the second day their knowledge of the second work, and similarly with the rest. Thus, then, each work is said to have been wrought in some one of these days, inasmuch as God wrought nothing in the universe without impressing the knowledge thereof on the angelic mind; which 950 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. Naturally, Augustine did not think that all things, including sun, earth, seas, plants, animals, and so on, came to be fully formed in that first moment. Comparing and contrasting the two creation accounts opening the book of Genesis he suggests that what were present in the first instant of the existence of the universe were only the “seed-principles” (rationes seminales; logoi spermatikoi [λόγοι σπερματικοὶ]) of all natural kinds, and that over the history of the universe God “unfolds the generations which He laid up in creation when He first founded it.”9 In other words, “[God] created all [creatures] together . . . whose visible forms He produces through the ages, working even until now.”10 What inspired Augustine’s thesis were not only the metaphysical principles of stoicism and neo-Platonism but also some biblical passages. First, in the Vulgate and, presumably, in the Vetus Latina version of the Bible available to Augustine, in the short passage from Sirach 18:1a we read “Qui vivit in aeternum creavit omnia simul,” which translates as “He that liveth for ever created all things together.”11 Secondly, in the same version can know many things at the same time, especially in the Word, in Whom all angelic knowledge is perfected and terminated. So the distinction of days denotes the natural order of the things known, and not a succession in the knowledge acquired, or in the things produced. Moreover, angelic knowledge is appropriately called ‘day,’ since light, the cause of day, is to be found in spiritual things, as Augustine observes [De Gen. ad litt. 4.28]. In the opinion of the others, however, the days signify a succession both in time, and in the things produced” (Summa theologiae [ST] I, q. 74, a. 2, corp.; all English translation of ST comes from that done by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province). McMullin values Augustine’s cautiousness and openness for further clarifications of the proper interpretation of the “day” metaphor: “Whoever, then, does not accept the meaning that my limited powers have been able to discover . . . let him search and find a solution with God’s help” (De Gen. ad litt. 4.28). 9 De Gen. ad litt. 5.20. Augustine calls rationes seminales also causales rationes, rationes primordiales, primordia causarum, or quasi semina futurorum (see 253n67 in Taylor’s translsation of De Gen. ad litt.). 10 De Gen. ad litt. 5.23. Later on, in book 7, he adds: “The things [that God] had potentially created . . . [came] forth in the course of time on different days according to their different kinds . . . [and] the rest of the earth [was] filled with its various kinds of creatures, [which] produc[ed] their appropriate forms in due time” (De Gen. ad litt. 7.22). 11 This is the reading of the Douay-Rheims and represents Augustine’s understanding of simultaneity in the statement. In The New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE), the same passage reads: “He who lives forever created the whole universe.” The Greek version in the Septuagint is closer to the older translations, with the Greek panta more in its usual sense of “all” or “whole,” rather than in the sense of the Latin simul: “Ho Zōn eis tōn aiōna ektisev ta panta koinē [῾Ο ζῶν εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα ἔκτισεν τὰ πάντα κοινῇ].” The Metaphysics of Evolution 951 of the Bible, the passage from Genesis 2:4–5a reads as follows: “Istae sunt generationes caeli et terrae, quando creata sunt, in die quo fecit Dominus Deus caelum et terram, et omne virgultum agri antequam oriretur in terra, omnemque herbam regionis priusquam germinaret.” This translates into English as: “These are the generations of the heaven and the earth, when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the heaven and the earth: and every plant of the field before it sprung up in the earth, and every herb of the ground before it grew.”12 It is commonly accepted that both passages mentioned here inspired Augustine’s use of the concept of rationes seminales in the context of his commentary on Genesis. Going back to his work, even if he thought that the first account of creation in Genesis was summarized by the second one, Augustine emphasized the difference between the two descriptions and claimed that the latter referred to the later stage of divine action in the already created universe, bringing about from the primitive matter new kinds of entities (new species), that preexisted in it as rationes seminales. Hence, we may say that for Augustine all species had been created at once, while their unfolding was (is?) extended in time.13 This reading of Genesis, notes Ernan McMullin, was not entirely a novel one. The Alexandrine fathers already thought that the universe began from a single divine act and that six days in Genesis 1 should be taken allegorically. Gregory of Nyssa went even further saying that what came to be in the act of creation were the potencies of all that would come later: The sources, causes, and potencies of all things were collectively sent forth in an instant, and in this first impulse of the Divine Will, the essences of all things assembled together: heaven, aether, star, fire, air, sea, earth, animal, plant—all beheld by the eye of God. . . . There followed a certain necessary series according to a certain order . . . Douay-Rheims. In NABRE the same passage reads: “This is the story of the heavens and the earth at their creation. When the LORD God made the earth and the heavens—there was no field shrub on earth and no grass of the field had sprouted.” A purely formal-equivalence translation from Hebrew would follow the old translation: “These [are] the generations the heavens and the earth when they were created in the day that Yahweh God made the earth and the heavens, before any plant of the field was in the earth and before any herb of the field had grown” (see biblehub.com/interlinear/genesis/2.htm). 13 Although he may not state it clearly, we can assume Augustine understood divine action in unfolding of the rationes seminales as the activity of God working through contingent (secondary) causes. 12 952 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. as nature the maker [technikē physis (τεχνικὴ φύσις)] required . . . appearing not by chance . . . but because the necessary arrangement of nature required succession in the things coming into being.14 The Meaning of Rationes Seminales But what exactly are rationes seminales? They do not seem to be empirically verifiable seeds in the common understanding of the term. They are hidden from our sight. Augustine compares them to the principle whereby we grow old, which lies in each one of us already when we are young.15 Even if such a principle cannot be seen by our eyes, “by another kind of knowledge we conclude that there is in nature some hidden force by which latent forms are brought into view.”16 In other words, says Augustine: “There is, indeed, in seeds some likeness to what I am describing, because of the future developments stored up in them. Indeed, it is the seed-principle which is the more basic of the two, since it comes before the familiar seeds we know.”17 Hence, each seminal reason (seed-like principle) is best described as potentiality—a very specific potentiality of a particular and fixed type of entity or natural kind (species). Augustine introduces an analogy of the tree that originates from the seed that itself originates from another tree, noting that they both originate from the earth: In the seed, then, there was invisibly present all that would develop in time into a tree. And in this same way we must picture the world, when God made all things together, as having had all things which were made in it and with it when day was made. This includes not only heaven with sun, moon and stars . . . but also the beings which water and earth produced in potency and in their causes before they came forth in the course of time.18 And here comes a major difficulty in interpretation. On the one hand, Gregory of Nyssa, Apologia in hexaemeron (PG, 44:72); quoted by Ernest C. Messenger in Evolution and Theology: The Problem of Man’s Origin (New York: Macmillan, 1932), 24 (trans. slightly modified). 15 “The principle which makes this development possible is hidden to the eyes but not to the mind; but whether such a development must necessarily come about is completely unknown to us. We know that the principle which makes it possible is in the very nature of body; but there is no clear evidence in that body that there is a principle by which it must necessarily take place” (De Gen. ad litt. 6.16). 16 De Gen. ad litt. 6.16. 17 De Gen. ad litt. 6.6. 18 De Gen. ad litt. 5.21. 14 The Metaphysics of Evolution 953 Augustine seems to claim that when the proper conditions are met, gradual and spontaneous unfolding of rationes seminales occurs naturally: “All things were created by God in the beginning in a kind of blending of the elements, but they cannot develop and appear until the circumstances are favorable.”19 On the other hand, however, he sometimes tends to interpret Genesis more literally as implying that each new kind originates in its adult form. This, naturally, makes it hard to imagine how an adult form may originate from a seed without going through a normal process of development and growth. Hence, it becomes apparent that such an origin might require a more direct and instantaneous divine intervention. Consequently, when discussing the origin of the first human body—in reference to the neo-Platonist dualistic distinction between body and soul, and presupposing that human soul does not originate from rationes seminales but is directly created by God ex nihilo—Augustine seems to assert that the seed-principles have a double potentiality: (1) the potentiality that manifests in the slow growth (unfolding) in the favorable conditions of the environment; (2) the potentiality that provides a suitable ground for the instantaneous and direct (general or special) divine production of the first adult form of a new kind.20 If (1) is true with regard to the origin of natural kinds of living organisms, then no special divine intervention seems to be necessary. And yet, says Augustine: God has established in the temporal order fixed laws governing the production of kinds of beings and qualities of beings and bringing them forth from a hidden state into full view, but His will is supreme over all. By His power He has given numbers to His creation, but He has not bound His power by these numbers.21 The “numbers” here are the laws of nature.22 Even if the seed-principles unfold according to these “numbers,” this does not exclude the possibility of divine intervention that is able to bring about an outcome that would Augustine, De Trinitate 3.9, quoted in Eugène Portalié, A Guide to the Thought of St. Augustine (Chicago: Regnery, 1960), 138. 20 See De Gen. ad litt. 6.13–14. Although the question about the way of unfolding of rationes seminales is asked in reference to the origin of the first human body, Augustine refers it to all other seed-principles. 21 De Gen. ad litt. 6.13. 22 McMullin says this was Augustine’s influential interpretation of Wis 11:20: “Thou hast ordered all things in measure and number and weight” (see De Gen. ad litt. 4.3–5; McMullin, “Introduction,” 51n47). 19 954 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. not “naturally” occur. Hence, “whichever way God made Adam [and he might have made him through a direct divine intervention], He did what was in accordance with his almighty power and wisdom.”23 If (2) is true with regard to the origin of natural kinds of living organisms, then no rationes seminales seem to be needed, since the Creator is able to transform anything into anything at his divine will. And yet, says Augustine, If we should suppose that God now makes a creature without having implanted its kind in His original creation, we should flatly contradict Sacred Scripture which says that on the sixth day God finished all his work.24 In other words, even if God directly intervenes to make man (and, arguably, other natural kinds of living organisms), he does not do this ex nihilo, as in the first creation, but takes the earth (the elements or matter on a lower level of its complexity) and draws on its potencies, even if what he does goes beyond its natural active and passive dispositions. Augustine discusses both possible interpretations of the potentiality of rationes seminales and asks which option (1 or 2) is ultimately true. Unfortunately, he does not seem to provide us with a clear-cut and satisfying answer to this question. He thinks we should acknowledge that natural kinds came (come) into being in both ways: “We must conclude, then, that these reasons [rationes seminales] were created to exercise their causality in either one way or the other: by providing for the ordinary development of new creatures in appropriate periods of time, or by providing for the rare occurrence of a miraculous production of a creature, in accordance with what God wills as proper for the occasion.”25 However, while it becomes apparent that he thought Adam came to be without an observable process of growth and development (i.e., through direct divine intervention), he does not seem to clarify whether other species might have been produced/ created in the same way or, if so, which one might have been.26 De Gen. ad litt. 6.13. Augustine seems to assume that God indeed brought Adam into existence as an adult man. 24 De Gen. ad litt. 5.20. 25 De Gen. ad litt. 6.14 26 Augustine uses the term “making,” which is equivalent with “producing” with reference to human body. At the same time, he believes human soul is created by God ex nihilo. 23 The Metaphysics of Evolution 955 Augustine’s Creation Theology as Evolutionary Despite the difficulty in explaining the nature of the potentiality of rationes seminales, Augustine’s interpretation of the creation account in Genesis became an attractive point of reference in the advent of the debate concerning Darwin’s theory of evolution. It was in this context that an attempt was made to describe Augustine’s theory as “evolutionary.” Such was the opinion of a number of theologians and philosophers, especially at the early stage of the controversy over Darwin’s Origin of the Species, when the attitude of the Church and of Christians to this new theory was, to say the least, reserved and skeptical. To have the authority of Augustine in support of the preliminary version of theistic evolution was regarded by them as a major argument in favor of the credibility of their theory. To give some examples, in 1871, in his On the Genesis of Species, Mivart, a British biologist and convert to Catholicism, although critical about strictly naturalistic (agnostic or atheistic) interpretations of Darwin’s ideas, claimed that theistic evolution was “thoroughly acceptable to the most orthodox theologians.” In doing so he referred to the works of Augustine, Aquinas, and Francisco Suárez.27 Similar to Mivart, John Zahm, C.S.C., in 1896, in his Evolution and Dogma, claimed that the “most venerable philosophical and theological authorities” of the Catholic Church (including Augustine and Aquinas) supported theistic evolution.28 In 1921 Henry de Dorlodot, the director of the Catholic University of Louvain’s geological institute, in his Le Darwinisme aupoint de vue de l’orthodoxie catholique (translated in St. George Jackson Mivart, On the Genesis of Species (New York: D. Appleton, 1871), 317. See also 302–5. More information about Mivart and the criticism of his position may be found in Mariano Artigas, Thomas F. Glick, and Rafael A. Martínez, Negotiating Darwin: The Vatican Confronts Evolution, 1877–1902 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 236–69 (ch. 7: “Happiness in Hell: St. George J. Mivart); and Don O’Leary, Roman Catholicism and Modern Science: A History (New York: Continuum, 2006), 78–93, 103–8. 28 John Augustine Zahm, Evolution and Dogma (Chicago: McBride, 1896), 312. Zahm’s book was well received and became a bestseller in the United States. It also received some good reviews in Europe, but not in Rome. Some officials of the Roman Curia accused Zahm of presenting Augustine and Aquinas as evolutionists. His book was denounced to the Congregation of the Index on November 5 of 1897 with the recommendation of issuing a public condemnation of the book. The Congregation did not accept this suggestion but issued a decree of personal condemnation to Zahm, channeled through the Superior General of his congregation. After that Zahm quietly withdrew from his role as an apologist of the Church in matters of theology and science dialogue. See Artigas, Glick, and Martínez, Negotiating Darwin, 124–202 (ch. 4: “Americanism and Evolutionism: John A. Zahm”), and O’Leary, Roman Catholicism, 97–100. 27 956 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. 1922 by E. C. Messenger as Darwinism and Catholic Thought), argued that Catholics were at liberty to accept Darwin’s idea of the transformation of species. Similar to Mivart and Zahm, he was confident that he remained within the bounds of orthodoxy and invoked the works of Augustine in particular for support. He referred extensively to De Genesi ad litteram.29 But one has to be careful not to make too strong a claim. For Augustine certainly did not hold that one species can arise from the other. Within the context of his neo-Platonist theory of forms as eternal and unchangeable ideas in the mind of God, participated by created beings, such hypothesis would not be acceptable.30 In his understanding of nature, species unfold at the proper time out of their own seed-principles, which were already present at the first moment of the existence of the universe. Hence, although he accepted gradualism (without contradicting the possibility of direct divine interventions in the actualization of rationes seminales), he should not be regarded as a precursor of the modern evolutionary theory. Indeed, it was precisely Augustine’s strong conviction that God made everything simultaneously at the moment of creation ex nihilo (without any moments of time intervening) that made his theory unacceptable for Darwin, who wanted to argue in favor of the historical origin of new species which were not present before. Moreover, the uncertainty regarding the possibility, if not a necessity, of a direct and instantaneous divine intervention in the actualization of rationes seminales, made Augustine’s position even less tolerable for the proponents of Darwinian evolution.31 See: Henry de Dorlodot, Le Darwinisme au point de vue de l’orthodoxie catholique (Brussels: Lovanium, 1921); de Dorlodot, Darwinism and Catholic Thought (New York: Benziger, 1922). Dorlodot’s tribute to Darwin was warmly received in England but invoked some criticism in Belgium (see O’Leary, Roman Catholicism, 126–28). Messenger also discusses his ideas in his Evolution and Theology. 30 See De Gen. ad litt. 4.5. 31 Darwin explicitly criticized the concept of God independently creating each species: “To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled” (Charles Robert Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 6th ed. [London: John Murray, 1872], 428). In the same, concluding chapter of his book, Darwin quotes from the letter received from his friend the Reverend Charles Kingsley, who had written that he had “gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original 29 The Metaphysics of Evolution 957 Augustine’s world appears to be a kind of a pre-established harmony in which everything has been decided and “written” down in the potentiality of the first primitive matter. He did not understand the potentiality he spoke about as a general metaphysical principle underlying the very fabric of the universe. Rather, he saw it as a potentiality for unfolding and coming into existence of concrete and fixed types of entities (natural kinds). Hence, even if he says that “it is obvious that in accordance with those kinds of creatures which He first made, God makes many new things which He did not make then,” he adds that “we cannot believe that He establishes a new kind, since He finished all His works on the sixth day.”32 Consequently, the question arises of whether the unfolding new natural kinds are truly new or just appear to us to be new, while in fact they are not. Aquinas’s Notion of Creation Augustine’s concept of rationes seminales and his interpretation of the opening chapters of the book of Genesis found acceptance and support among various thinkers, including Bonaventure, Albert the Great, Roger Bacon, and Nicolas Malebranche. Yet the most prominent and influential follower of his ideas was most likely Thomas Aquinas. As is well known, the Angelic Doctor contrasted Augustine’s position with the opinion of Ambrose and other fathers of the Church, who read the Bible more literary and considered the act of creation not as instantaneous, but rather extended in time (six days or six longer periods of time). Aquinas is known for his balanced evaluation of both opinions. Early on, in his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, we find him saying: Thus with respect to the beginning of the world something pertains to the substance of faith, namely that the world began to be by creation, and all the saints agree in this. But how and in what order this was done pertains to faith only incidentally insofar as it is treated in Scripture, the truth of which the saints save in the different explanations they offer.33 forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the actions of His laws” (422). 32 De Gen. ad litt. 5.20. 33 In II sent., d. 12, q. 1, a. 2, corp. (translation from the Scriptum is mine; from the Latin ed. P. Mandonnet [Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1929–1947]). Similar is Aquinas’s opinion offered in his Quaestiones disputatae de potentia Dei: “This incorporeal agent by whom all things, both corporeal and incorporeal are created, is God, as 958 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. Later on, in De potentia, commenting on the positions of Augustine and Ambrose, Aquinas adds: The first explanation of these things, namely that held by Augustine is the more subtle, and is a better defense of Scripture against the ridicule of unbelievers: but the second, which is maintained by the other saints, is easier to grasp, and more in keeping with the surface meaning of the text. Seeing however that neither is in contradiction with the truth of faith, and that the context admits of either interpretation, in order that neither may be unduly favored we now proceed to deal with the arguments on either side.34 However, although he is supportive of both interpretations of Genesis, Aquinas seems to be following Augustine’s opinion more than the one offered by Ambrose. First of all, he understands creation ex nihilo as the coming into being out of nothing (i.e., not from a preceding being of any kind) of the most primitive types of contingent entities: the elements. He thus sees it as an act that was instantaneous, rather than extended in time. We infer this based on Aquinas’s differentiation between the work of creation (opus creationis) and those of distinction (opus distinctionis) and adornment (opus ornatus), in his analysis of the work of six days in the first part of the Summa theologiae.35 The outcome of the work of creation (opus creationis) was the coming into existence of the most primitive matter (materia secunda), which was, in fact, inseparable from the first three stages of distinction (opus distinctionis), the second of which was the distinction “of the elements according to their forms.”36 The outcome of the work of distinction (opus distinctionis) was the separation of land from the sea, accompanied by the preliminary we have proved above (De potentia, q. 3, aa. 5, 6, 8), from whom things derive not only their form but also their matter. And as to the question at issue it makes no difference whether they were all made by him immediately, or in a certain order as certain philosophers have maintained” (De potentia, q. 5, a. 1, corp.; all English of De potentia is from the translation by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province). 34 De potentia, q. 4, a. 2, corp. 35 See Aquinas’s introduction to ST I, q. 65. 36 And even if only earth and water are named, adds Thomas, the author of Gen 1:2 had in mind air and fire as well. The reason he does not mention them is that “the corporeal nature of these would not be so evident as that of earth and water, to the ignorant people” to whom he spoke (see ST I, q. 66, a. 1, ad 3, reply to sc 2 of obj. 3). 959 The Metaphysics of Evolution stage of the work of adornment (opus ornatus), the production of plants.37 The outcome of the work of adornment (opus ornatus) was the production of celestial bodies and animals, and the creation of man.38 See Figure 1. The work of 6 days 0 1 2 opus opus creationis distincionis the work of the work of creation distinction creation of matter distinction of heaven, earth, and elements 3 4 5 6 7 opus ornatus the work of adornment distinction of heaven, earth, and sea production of plants production of celestial bodies and animals, creation of humans creatio, bara (‫בּרא‬ ‫ ) ׇ ׇ‬to create productio, asah (‫ ) ׇע ׇשׂה‬to make Figure 1. Graphic depiction of the sequence of the work of six days in the account of Genesis 1. Aquinas’s Use of Augustine’s Notion of Rationes Seminales If this is true, it becomes clear that for Aquinas the subsequent production (productio) of more complex contingent beings was, in a way, mediated through the most basic forms of material stuff—the origin of which was the outcome of the work/act of creation (opus creationis). In other words, more complex entities, in some respect, came “from” them. Aquinas realizes that even literal interpretation of Genesis suggests that (1) it was earth that brought forth plants, the green herbs and fruit trees; (2) it was water that brought forth an abundance of swimming creatures and birds (although Genesis does not say explicitly where they came from); (3) it was earth that brought forth all kinds of living creatures, such as cattle, creeping things, and wild animals of all kinds. Hence, following Augustine’s concept We must remember that in antiquity many thought plants were not living organisms because they do not move and allocate themselves. Hence, the production of plants in the account of Genesis preceded the actual opus ornatus. 38 Aquinas’s distinction between creatio and productio seems to correspond with the distinction between Hebrew “to create” (bara [‫)]בּרא‬ ‫ ׇ ׇ‬and “to male” (asah [‫)]ע ׇשׂה‬. ‫ׇ‬ 37 960 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. of rationes seminales,39 Aquinas states that plants and trees might have been produced “in their origin or causes,” that is, the earth “received . . . the power to produce them.” They were subsequently brought into existence in “the work of propagation.”40 Similar with fishes and birds, which Augustine saw as produced by “the nature of waters on that [fifth] day potentially,” 41 and animals, whose “production was potential” as well.42 This clear reference to Augustine’s concept of rationes seminales faces the challenge of their double potentiality, that is, (1) their potentiality to naturally and spontaneously unfold in favorable circumstances, and (2) their Although Aquinas uses the term rationes seminales explicitly on numerous occasions in his commentary on the Sentences., in other parts of ST, in De veritate, De potentia, and De malo, and in some biblical commentaries, he paradoxically does not use it in his analysis of the works of six days (ST I, qq. 65–74). At the same time, however, he does refer in these questions directly to the authority of Augustine and his concept of all types of creatures existing in statu potentiae in the earth (the primitive elements) and unfolding at the proper time, contrasting his view with the one held by “other holy writers.” 40 ST I, q. 69, a. 2, corp.: “In these first days God created all things in their origin or causes, and from this work He subsequently rested. Yet afterwards, by governing His creatures, in the work of propagation, ‘He worketh until now.’ Now the production of plants from out the earth is a work of propagation, and therefore they were not produced in act on the third day, but in their causes only.” 41 ST I, q. 71, a. 1, corp. 42 ST I, q. 72, a. 1, corp. See also De potentia, q. 4, a. 2, ad 28: “Before the plants were produced causally, nothing was produced, but they were produced together with the heaven and the earth. In like manner the fishes, birds and animals were produced in those six days causally and not actually”. Aquinas alludes to the concept of rationes seminales on several other occasions: (1) “God is said to have stopped creating new creatures on the seventh day because nothing was made afterwards that did not come first in some likeness according to genus or species, at least in a seminal principle . . . Therefore, I say that the future renewal of the world indeed came first in the works of the six days in a remote likeness” (In IV sent., d. 48, q. 2, a. 1, ad 3); (2) “For we see that all things which, in the process of time, being created by the work of Divine Providence, were produced by the operation of God, were created in the first fashioning of things according to seedlike forms [seminales rationes], as Augustine says [De Gen. ad litt. 7.3], such as trees, animals, and the rest” (ST I, q. 62, a. 3, corrp.); (3) “In the first production of things matter existed under the substantial form of the elements. . . . In the first instituting of the world animals and plants did not exist actually. . . . On the day on which God created the heaven and the earth, He created also every plant of the field, not, indeed, actually, but ‘before it sprung up in the earth,’ that is, potentially [potentialiter]. . . . God created all things together so far as regards their substance in some measure formless. But He did not create all things together, so far as regards that formation of things which lies in distinction and adornment” (ST I, q. 74, a. 2, corp. and ad 1–2). 39 The Metaphysics of Evolution 961 potentiality understood as providing a suitable ground for the instantaneous and direct (general or special) divine intervention in the production of new forms of living creatures. Unlike Augustine, who, as we have seen, remained uncertain as to whether the production of each animate species involved(s) a direct divine intervention, Aquinas introduces an important distinction, which strives to further clarify Augustine’s position. Commenting on the second book of Sentences of Peter Lombard Aquinas claims that the origin of plants requires merely causal principles proper for the work of distinction (opus distinctionis), and adds that the role of fathering in this process belongs to the powers of celestial bodies, while the role of the mother is fulfilled by the primordial matter (i.e., elements).43 Similar is his opinion presented in De potentia, where we find him saying: Now the production of plants from the earth into actual existence belongs to the work of propagation, since the powers of the heavenly body as father, and of the earth as mother suffice for their production. Hence the plants were not actually produced on the third day but only in their causes: and after the six days they were brought into actual existence in their respective species and natures by the work of government.44 However, the case of animals might look different. Concerning their origin Aquinas emphasizes that: Those things that are naturally generated from seed cannot be generated naturally in any other way. . . . In the natural generation of all animals that are generated from seed, the active principle lies in the formative power of the seed. . . . The material principle, however, in the generation of either kind of animals, is either some element, or something compounded of the elements. But at the first beginning of the world the active principle was the Word of God, which produced animals from material elements, either in act, as some holy writers say, or virtually [virtute], as Augustine teaches.45 See In II sent., d. 14, q. 1, a. 5, ad 6. De Potentia, q. 4, a.2, ad 28. It should be remembered that the second part of the corpus and all responses to arguments in this article were probably written by Vincentius Castronovo and not by Aquinas himself, who probably left the article in question unfinished. 45 ST I, q. 71, a. 1, ad 1; see also In II sent. d. 14, q. 1, a. 5, ad 6. 43 44 962 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. This theological opinion of Aquinas leaves space for an interpretation assuming that no direct divine intervention is needed in the actualization of animal species. They might have been produced virtually (as rationes seminales), and similar to the plant species, they may spontaneously unfold in the proper conditions of the environment. However, we must not forget that, concerning the origin of Adam, Thomas clearly states that a direct divine intervention was necessary: The first formation of the human body could not be by the instrumentality of any created power, but was immediately from God. . . . Therefore as no pre-existing body has been formed whereby another body of the same species could be generated, the first human body was of necessity made immediately by God.46 This assertion concerns Adam’s body. When it comes to his soul Aquinas emphasizes that “the rational soul can be made only by creation.” At the same time, he adds this “is not true of other forms,” which means they may be generated by contingent causes.47 Indeed, on another occasion Aquinas claims that “the form of the thing generated depends naturally on the generator in so far as it is educed from the potentiality of matter.”48 This might suggest, once again, that the occurrence of new animate (including animal) species may proceed from the natural processes of actualization (unfolding) of rationes seminales. However, one may argue ST I, q. 91, a. 2, corp. We should also remember that because heavenly bodies were thought of as indestructible, they could not have come into existence from any preexisting destructible matter. Hence, in accordance with Augustine’s view, they could not have unfolded from rationes seminales. It seems they must have been created through a direct divine intervention as well. However, McMullin notes that even if Aquinas asserts Augustine was “not at variance” with other writers in regard to the heavenly bodies (“For he says that they were made actually and not merely virtually, since the firmament has not the power of producing luminaries, as the earth has of producing plants” [ST I, q. 70, a. 1, corp.]), the reference to the text he cites from Augustine (De Gen. ad litt. 5.5) makes his reading dubious. For although Augustine does say there that “on the fourth day, the lights and stars were created,” he makes this claim in a paragraph about “those beings which were formed from formlessness (unformed matter) and are clearly said to be created.” He appears to be using the term “created” here in the sense of “drawing forth from a prior matter,” the sense that Aquinas wants to exclude (See McMullin, “Introduction,” 52n65). 47 ST I, q. 90, a. 2, corp. 48 De Potentia, q. 5, a. 1, corp. On Aquinas’s defense of the unity of man, see ST I, q. 76, a. 4. 46 The Metaphysics of Evolution 963 that what Aquinas has in mind here is the generation of new exemplars of an already existing species, and not the coming to be of the first exemplar of a new species. For, indeed, on yet another occasion Thomas seems to be saying that the origin of the first member of each new animal species requires, in fact, a direct divine intervention: [Some things come into being neither through motion nor through generation] because of the necessity that generation always generates what is similar in species. For this reason the first members of the species were immediately created by God, such as the first man, the first lion, and so forth.49 Consequently, we must acknowledge that, although he tried to, Aquinas did not succeed in clarifying Augustine’s position on the exact nature of the potentiality of rationes seminales. Similar to Augustine, he remained unclear in specifying which types of natural kinds may originate through natural unfolding (actualization) of seed-principles and which require a direct divine intervention. Moreover, assuming his theology in this matter follows faithfully the original thought of Augustine, it might be considered as being unable to fit within the context of the modern and contemporary versions of the evolutionary theory. However, we must not forget that Aquinas’s reference to Augustine’s concept of rationes seminales was accompanied by his general acceptance of Aristotle’s moderate realism about universals, including species, grounded in his hylomorphic metaphysics of substance. Aristotle is known for criticizing Plato’s concept of species conceived as immutable forms, separated from matter and existing in the realm of eternal ideas. For him species are real, immutable, and eternal in the sense that each one of them is defined by a substantial form of a particular kind, which causes each organism belonging to a given species to be what it is and to exhibit a set of fixed and permanent traits. At the same time, however, every species exists only as realized in concrete, temporal, individual, and contingent organisms. Thus, while the essential intrinsic traits of a species are immutable, their In II sent., d. 1, q. 1, a. 4, corp. However, this might not be true about at least some species of insects, of which Aquinas says here that they originated from putrefaction: “Man, for instance, can only be generated from man. It is, however, otherwise with those things which are not generated by an agent that is similar to them in species. For these, rather, the power of celestial bodies along with appropriate matter is sufficient, as, for example, those things which are generated by putrefaction.” 49 964 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. existential exemplifications and realizations in nature are not. Aristotelian metaphysics allows us to argue that all representatives of a species share a “common nature” (defined by a substantial form of a particular kind), which finds its expression in the variety of inter-actions and inter-relations between unique individuals that differ in terms of many accidental features. This understanding of species provides an opportunity for redefining Augustine’s concept of rationes seminales in terms of the hylomorphic theory of matter, which, in turn, enables it to accommodate the idea of the gradual transformation of species. Thomistic Metaphysics of Evolutionary Transformism The point of departure is the abovementioned passage from Aquinas saying that “the form of the thing generated depends naturally on the generator in so far as it is educed from the potentiality of matter.”50 What Thomas has in mind here is, most likely, empirically verifiable secondary matter (materia secunda), a substance that has the potentiality to be shaped or transformed into a different substance. The potentiality in question is ultimately grounded in primary matter (materia prima), which Aquinas— following Aristotle—defines as the most basic metaphysical principle of potency (prōtē hylē [πρώτη ὕλη] = primary matter; hypkeimenon physis [ὑποκείμενοη φύσις] = underlying nature; or prōtov hypkeimenon [πρῶτον ὑποκείμενον] = primary substratum) that persists through all changes that a given substance can be exposed to.51 As such it is matched by a complementary metaphysical principle of act—substantial form—which Aristotle De Potentia, q. 5, a. 1, corp. See Aristotle, Physics 1.9.192a 25–33: “The matter comes to be and ceases to be in one sense, while in another it does not. As that which contains the privation, it ceases to be in its own nature, for what ceases to be—the privation—is contained within it. But as potentiality it does not cease to be in its own nature, but is necessarily outside the sphere of becoming and ceasing to be. . . . For my definition of matter is just this—the primary substratum [prōtov hypokeimenon (πρῶτον ὑποκείμενον)] of each thing, from which it comes to be without qualification, and which persists in the result.” See also Aquinas, De principiis naturae 13, 14, 16: “[13]Only that matter which is understood without any form or privation, but which is subject to form and privation, is called prime matter, inasmuch as there is no other matter prior to it. It is also called ‘hyle.’ . . . [14] We know prime matter as that which is related to all forms and privations, as bronze is related to the form of a statue and to the privation of some shape. It is called primary without qualification. . . . [16] We should note also that prime matter is said to be numerically one in all things” (English trans. in Selected Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. by Robert P. Goodwin [New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965]). 50 51 The Metaphysics of Evolution 965 describes as “the definition” or “the statement” of the essence of an entity (ho logos tou ti ēn einai [ὁ λόγος τοῦ τί ἦν εἶναι]), a principle causing a given substance (secondary matter—materia secunda) to be the particular kind of thing it is.52 Hence, properly speaking, we should say that new substantial form is educed from the primary matter underlying empirically verifiable secondary matter. Most importantly, as pure potentiality, primary matter can be actualized by any substantial form. At the same time, the type of form actualizing primary matter in case of a substantial change in which a given substance A is replaced by another substance B is not random. It depends both on the substantial form and on accidental forms actualizing A. These principles of actuality dispose A to enter specific accidental or substantial changes, which narrows the scope of potentialities of primary matter that may be actualized in a given change. To give an example, if you put a wooden log into a fire, it does not melt but burns and turns into a pile of ash, and not, let us say, into a butterfly. Although pure potentiality of primary matter underlying the log can be actualized by any substantial form, the fact that it is currently actualized by the substantial form of wood disposes it and sets up a limited scope of its potentialities that can be actualized within a limited range of substantial changes a wooden log may enter. In other words, we may say after Aquinas that—together with accidental forms, which are responsible for secondary properties of a given entity (such as its size or color) and may change without it changing its identity—the substantial form of the entity in question disposes it, that is, becomes decisive about the array of new substantial forms that may be educed “from” the potentiality of primary matter that underlies it. The action of eduction (actualization of primary matter) is exercised by the efficient causality of one or many agents. Commenting on this topic in the Metaphysics, Aristotle states what follows: Regarding material substance we must not forget that even if all things come from the same first cause or have the same things for See Aristotle: Physics 2.3.194b26; Metaphysics 5.2.1013a27. On the defense of essentialism in biology, see: Michael Devitt, “Resurrecting Biological Essentialism,” Philosophy of Science 75, no. 3 (2008): 344–82; Olivier Rieppel, “New Essentialism in Biology,” Philosophy of Science 77, no. 5 (2010): 662–73; Travis Dumsday, “Is There Still Hope,” The Thomist 76, no. 3 (2012): 371–95; and Christopher J. Austin, “Aristotelian Essentialism: Essence in the Age of Evolution,” Synthese 194, no. 7 (2017): 2539–56. 52 966 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. their first causes, and if the same matter serves as starting-point for their generation, yet there is a matter proper [i.e., properly disposed] to each, e.g., for phlegm the sweet or the fat, and for bile the bitter, or something else; though perhaps these come from the same original matter.53 Aquinas, in turn, comments on this passage thus: From the things which are said here then it is evident that there is one first matter for all generable and corruptible things, but different proper [i.e., properly disposed] matters for different things.54 And earlier, in the Summa contra gentiles, Aquinas has already postulated: Thus, form and matter must always be mutually proportioned and, as it were, naturally adapted, because the proper act is produced in its proper [i.e., properly disposed] matter. That is why matter and form must always agree with one another in respect to multiplicity and unity.55 Speaking of the importance of the proper disposition of primary matter for particular accidental and substantial changes of a given substance, Aquinas formulates an observation that might inspire a new development of the classical notion of hylomorphism, enabling it to provide a necessary metaphysical foundation for the contemporary version of the theory of evolution: From the fact that matter is known to have a certain substantial mode of existing, matter can be understood to receive accidents by which it is disposed to a higher perfection, so far as it is fittingly disposed to receive that higher perfection.56 Aristotle, Metaphysics 8.4.1044a 15–20. All translations of the works of Aristotle are taken from The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Modern Library, 2001). 54 Aquinas, In VIII metaphys., lec. 4, no. 1730 (trans. in Commentary on The Metaphysics of Aristotle, trans. John Rowan [Chicago: Regnery Press, 1961]). 55 Aquinas Summa contra gentiles [SCG] II, ch. 81, no. 7 (trans. in On the Truth of the Catholic Faith: Summa Contra Gentiles. 4 vols., trans. Anton C. Pegis, et al. [Garden City, New York: Image Books, 1955–1957]) 56 Quaestio disputata de anima, q. 9, corp. (trans. in Quaestions on the Soul, trans. 53 The Metaphysics of Evolution 967 Based on this assertion, despite the fact that Aristotle thought species were eternal (everlasting) and Aquinas—with the rare exceptions of species originating from putrefaction and interbreeding—considered them as created without ancestors in the form of seminal seeds (potencies), dormant in primordial matter and actualized (with or without direct divine intervention?) under favorable conditions of the environment, we may describe natural kinds of animate creatures as evolving. They may be seen and classified as lineages of closely related organisms, whose underlying primary matter is gradually disposed to be informed by novel and more perfect substantial forms, educed from its potentiality. Certainly, metaphysical perfection—defined in terms of the complexity and scope of active and passive dispositions of a given entity—is not equivalent to the biological and evolutionary perfection defined in terms of reproductive success and dominant occupying of an ecological niche. However, this does not prevent us from conceiving natural kinds within the framework of the classical Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics as evolving. An evolutionary transition might be thus defined, in this account, as a series of minor genetic and epigenetic changes that effect minor phenotypic variations (accidental changes), which, in turn, gradually change the disposition of primary matter underlying subsequent organisms of the lineage L1 of the species S1. This process, highly complex and extended in time, might lead to a precise instant at which the primary matter underlying the egg and the sperm coming from particular female and male organisms of sexually reproducing species S1,57 at their entering the substantial change in which they join and give an origin to a new organism, is not disposed to be actualized by the “old” substantial form of the species S1, but by a “new” substantial form of the species S2 , which is educed from the potentiality of primary matter that underlies them. The new organism (or organisms, as the process described here is commonly considered to take place within a population) starts a new lineage L2 , which happens to be the lineage of the new species S2 . See Figure 2. James H. Robb [Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1984]). See also In II de an., lec. 7, no. 315; De potentia, q. 5, a. 1, corp. and ad 5; SCG III, ch. 22, no. 7; Antonio Moreno, “Some Philosophical Considerations on Biological Evolution,” The Thomist 37, no. 3 (1973): 417–54, at 440–41. 57 Similar metaphysical analysis may be developed with reference to organisms reproducing asexually. 968 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. egg sperm new organism SF = substantial form PM = primary matter S1 S2 = species 1 and 2 Figure 2. Hylomorphic metaphysics of an evolutionary transition. Gametes—parental egg and sperm—are separate entities and may be treated as instrumental causes, acting under principal causation of the organisms that produced them. Normally, when they join, entering thus a substantial change which becomes an origin of the existence of a new organism, the primary matter that underlies them is disposed to be actualized by the original substantial form of the type S1. In case of an evolutionary transition, however, accidental changes in the DNA and the epigenetic causal factors inherently affecting phenotypes of the consecutive organisms within the lineage L1 lead to the situation in which primary matter, actualized by the given egg and sperm, produced by female and male organisms of species S1, is disposed to be actualized in the substantial change these gametes enter by a new substantial form of the type S2, which is educed from its potentiality. This originates the new evolutionary lineage L2. It takes many mutations and epigenetic changes (the outcomes of which are regulated by natural selection) to produce such an effect, and its actual occurrence may be extremely difficult (if not impossible) to capture. But this does not exclude the possibility of its occurring, especially in a situation where some members of a species migrate to a new environment and can be modified gradually in subsequent generations, to the point where they can no longer mate with the other descendants of their ancestors.58 This concept of the metaphysics of evolutionary transitions is inspired by the works of a number of Thomistic philosophers and theologians. Among them, we would like to mention in particular: (1) Antonio Moreno, “Some Philosophical Considerations”; (2) Fran O’Rourke, “Aristotle and the Metaphysics of Evolution,” The Review of Metaphysics 58 (2004): 3–59; (3) William E. Carroll, “At 58 The Metaphysics of Evolution 969 Redefinition of the Concept of Rationes Seminales The constructive proposal of the Thomistic metaphysics of evolutionary transitions presented here reframes both Augustine’s notion of rationes seminales and Aquinas’s interpretation of its main objectives, within the context of the core principles of Aristotelian metaphysics in its encounter with contemporary science. We suggest seed-principles should not be defined as organisms virtually present in their dormant forms, hidden forces, or potencies (fixed and limited in number), that are inherent to the most primitive matter created with the origin of the universe. We might redefine them, instead, in terms of the two levels of potentiality inherent in the very fabric of the cosmos: (1) pure potentiality of primary matter (materia prima), which can be actualized by all possible types of substantial forms, proper for both inanimate and animate natural kinds; (2) potentiality of primary matter underlying each and every instantiation of secondary matter (materia secunda), which is specified (qualified) by the substantial form and accidental forms characteristic of a particular natural kind it belongs to. The principles actualizing entities classified as instantiations of secondary matter dispose their underlying primary matter in particular way, enabling thus—on the way of substantial change—an eduction of particular types of new substantial forms (typical of other natural kinds) from its potentiality. This allows for introducing the idea of evolutionary changes and transitions within the framework of the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics and philosophical theology. The advantage of the proposed model is that, on the one hand, it does not constrain the idea of rationes seminales to their interpretation in terms of the potentiality of mere unfolding of what has always been actually present in some latent form in the fabric of the cosmos. In other words, it allows for the genuine novelty of evolutionary processes, leading to the origin of new natural kinds which were not present before at any level of actuality. On the other hand, the originating new types of natural kinds do not come into existence out of nothing (ex nihilo). Rather, they are “written” in the above-mentioned, clearly distinguished and specified two levels of potentiality inherent to the reality of the universe and the entities it contains. What is crucial in this account is what the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics understands under the term “potentiality.” It does not perceive it the Mercy of Chance? Evolution and the Catholic Tradition,” Revue des questions scientifiques 177 (2006): 179–204; and (4) Étienne Gilson, From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species, and Evolution (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). 970 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. as the potency for a limited number of (fixed) natural kinds to unfold from already existing secondary matter. Rather, it sees it, ultimately, as one of the most basic metaphysical principles underlying the very fabric of the universe, a potency that may be actualized by any substantial form. Obviously, primary matter, as such, is always actualized by a given substantial form, which limits the range of possible future actualizations it may go through. At the same time, the flexibility of the dynamic processes is such that the fact that primary matter is informed at time t1 by the substantial form SF1, which disposes it to be actualized in the next substantial change at t2 by the substantial form SF2, while preventing it from being actualized (in the same substantial change at t2) by the substantial form of SF2*, does not prevent it from being actualized by SF2* after a number of substantial changes it may go through. They may dispose it such that, at one point, it may actually be “ready” to be informed by SF2*. For the potentiality of the secondary matter, although relative and limited, as ultimately grounded in the pure potentiality of primary matter, changes on the way of substantial and accidental transformations that a given “portion” of secondary matter enters. See Figure 3. Fig. 3. Two levels of potentiality and the flexibility of the dynamic processes in nature. Hence, the two levels of potentiality that we can define within the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics seem to enable us to provide an accurate description of the dynamic and flexible character and nature of the reality—the one that is in line with contemporary science. Conclusion In conclusion, we would like to specify some important ways (four) in which the proposed model both mirrors and goes beyond the philosophical aspects of Aquinas’s notion of creation and his reflection on the work of six days in Genesis. The Metaphysics of Evolution 971 (1) Since evolutionary processes are classified as productive of new types of natural kinds, and not as creating them ex nihilo, our understanding of the act of creation, following the one offered by Augustine and Aquinas, limits it to the origin of the least complex primordial (secondary) matter. Consequently, evolutionary processes, as such, belong to the work of adornment (opus ornatus) within Aquinas’s distinction of the three stages in the Genesis account of the work of six days. (2) As a Result, the work of six days is not completed, as its last stage is still ongoing and effects the origin of new types of natural kinds, both animate and inanimate—if we wish to extend the scope of our analysis beyond biological evolution and to reflect upon its chemical and physical counterparts.59 (3) The origin of new species occurs through “production” (productio) from pre-existing matter with ancestry, in a process of universal common descent, within a complex nexus of genetic and epigenetic variations, the outcomes of which are regulated by natural selection, “working” on populations that consist of concrete organisms, characterized by their natural teleological tendencies to survive and produce fertile offspring. (4) With the exception of the origin of man, whose soul—created directly ex nihilo at the moment of his/her conception—actualizes primary matter properly disposed within the lineage of his/her parental hominids, evolutionary transformations do not require God’s direct causal intervention. This, naturally, does not exclude or prevent such an intervention of the Creator in the natural processes (including evolutionary processes), at his will and command.60 It is worth noting that even if points (2), (3), and (4) might be considered as going beyond the way Aquinas understood and explained creation, their Contrary to this assertion we find Aquinas saying that: “In its beginning the universe was perfect with regard to its species [quantum ad species]” (De potentia, q. 4, a. 2, ad 22); “Nothing entirely new was afterwards made by God, but all things subsequently made had in a sense been made before in the work of the six days” (ST I, q. 73, a. 1, ad 3). On the other hand, we also find him asserting that: “The universe in its beginning was perfect . . . as regards nature’s causes from which afterwards other things could be propagated, but not as regards all their effects” (De potentia, q. 3, a. 10, ad 2); “When he [God] made things out of nothing he did not at once bring them from nothingness to their ultimate natural perfection, but conferred on them at first an imperfect being, and afterwards perfected them, so that the world was brought gradually from nothingness to its ultimate perfection” (De potentia, q. 4, a. 2, corp.). 60 Contrary to assertions (3) and (4) is (above-mentioned) Aquinas’s conviction that “the first members of the species were immediately created by God, such as the first man, the first lion, and so forth” (In II sent., d. 1, q. 1, a. 4, corp.). 59 972 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. introduction seems to be necessary, taking into account contemporary science, the current status of evolutionary biology in particular, and the most recent scientific and philosophical analysis of causation and causal relationships in nature. At the same time, they certainly do not contradict any of the core principles of the Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy and theology. Quite the contrary, the possibility of harmonizing them with the main objectives of the classical thought proves the flexibility of the latter and its relevance within the context of contemporary science. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2020): 973–990 973 The Second Vatican Council Then and Now Guy Mansini, O.S.B. Ave Maria University Ave Maria, Florida Jared Wicks, S.J. Investigating Vatican II: Its Theologians, Ecumenical Turn, and Biblical Commitment. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018. Matthew Levering. An Introduction to Vatican II as an Ongoing Theological Event. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2017. Thomas G. Guarino. The Disputed Teachings of Vatican II. Continuity and Reversal in Catholic Doctrine. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018. All three of these books understand the Second Vati- can Council as a theological event, though they show this in various ways. Wicks shows it by noting the collaboration of bishops and theologians indispensable to the work of producing the Council’s documents. Levering shows it by re-embedding each of the four constitutions in theological work contemporary with and enabling the teaching they deliver. Guarino demonstrates it by attending to the conciliar effort to remain strictly in continuity with prior definitive Church teaching on the priesthood, on Mary, and on the Church’s relation to non-Catholic ecclesial communities and to non-Christian religions. He defends conciliar teaching on collegiality, on revelation, and on religious freedom as effecting at certain points a reversal of prior positions on these topics, but a reversal of non-definitive, non-infallible teaching. Guarino’s task is an expressly dogmatic theological task, and understands the Council as a dogmatic theological event. Is it worthwhile to stress the theological character of the Council? 974 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. Could it not have been a theological event? To be sure, some think the Council better described as a political event internal to the Church; its chief aim was a re-distribution of power in the Church from the Roman center to the episcopal and diocesan periphery. Here, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, is the focus in as much as it gives power to the bishops (chapter III) and power to the people (chapter II). Alternatively, could the Council not be better described as a cultural event? In this way, the aggiornamento John XXIII wanted consists chiefly in ecclesial adaptation to Enlightenment political and philosophical thought and the post-Enlightenment rise of the authority of historical studies. Think, perhaps, of George Weigel’s recent history of the last two centuries of the Church.1 In this way, the Council makes the Church come to more pacific terms with both the liberal state and the modern academy and the agnostic demand for religious toleration. So the cutting edge of the Council is Gaudium et Spes, together with the Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, and the Declaration on Non-Christian Religions, Nostra Aetate—policy papers more than theological tracts. The “countersyllabus” these three documents comprise, in Joseph Ratzinger’s phrase,2 and the Church’s re-location of herself in the modern world are the salient point of the Council. Or again, why is the Council not primarily an ongoing aesthetic event? The Council consigned the old liturgy and its forms to the museum, and enabled the Missal of Paul VI. And evidently, for most Catholics, it is the Constitution on the Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, that has made the most immediate and comprehensive impact on their ecclesial lives. It is easy to recognize some truth in these other takes on the Council. However, if the Church be what she says she is, the Body of Christ, then power is not re-arranged except concordantly with the revealed institutional form of the Church, and so not without theological understanding and judgment. Again, she cannot alter her stance toward the world unless the new stance is measured by the commission to preach the Gospel to all nations and by the constraints this imposes on her relation to what is not her. Last, the Church can find no form of worship that is not the repreGeorge Weigel, The Irony of Modern Catholic History: How the Church Rediscovered Itself and Challenged the Modern World to Reform (New York: Basic Books, 2019). 2 Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology, trans. Sister Mary Francis McCarthy, S.N.D. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 381. Ratzinger means to contrast the conciliar product with Pius IX’s 1864 Syllabus of Errors. 1 The Second Vatican Council Then and Now 975 sentation of the central theological event of history, the Paschal Mystery. That is to say, none of the other views of the Council are possible without the Council being first of all a theological event—unless we think the Church really is just an expression of the will to power, or a cultural product of human history, or a sort of large-scale equivalent of the poetry and literature of the world functioning as Matthew Arnold thinks them to do. And in fact, the New Testament is quite clear that the Church is not of our building, that its liturgy is a gift of God just as was that of the Israelites, something ordained by God and not fashioned by gravers of metal, and that what she is to say to the worldly powers that be is, in the end, given her to speak by the Holy Spirit. This makes the Council a theological event, and so Dei Verbum, the Constitution on Divine Revelation, holds the first rank place among the conciliar constitutions. But each of the volumes under review pursues the theological character of the Council in its own way. I return to why the Council has to be an ongoing theological event (Levering) at the end of this review. ***** The aim of Investigating Vatican II extends beyond its modest title. Wicks wants to revitalize a Church in which many “emerging adult” Catholics are indifferent to Catholicism and have left the Church because “the transmission of Catholic convictions and values broke down during the years 1965 to 1985” (3–4). The cause of this catastrophe, for both individual souls and the Church as a whole, is that the Second Vatican Council was not received by their parents (and grandparents I would add), and “the uplifting and motivating influence of the council” passed them by (3). Wicks wants to effect a reception of the Council unto the renewal of Catholic life. He undertakes to do this, first, by recalling the original intention of John XXIII for the Council, which was to revitalize the Church in the same way as did the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century. More at length, he proposes to do this by making us alive to the theological event the Council was (1), and where that theological event blossomed in Dei Verbum, and its simple but theologically comprehensive and pastorally moving evocation of the plan and point of revelation as culminating in the revelation of Trinitarian love in the Paschal Mystery of Christ, thence entrusted to the Church to guard and unfold. All will recognize the aim of this book as something entirely worthy of an apostolically minded Jesuit, if the pleonasm be forgiven. Investigating Vatican II falls into two parts, and Dei Verbum dominates both halves. The five chapters of part 1, “Major Figures and Aims,” 976 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. treat: John XXIII’s hopes for the Council (chapter 1); how theologians contributed to the Council (chapter 2); the pre-history of Dei Verbum (chapter 3; anticipated in attention to the constitution in chapter 2); and John XXIII’s establishment of the Secretariat for Christian Unity under the leadership of Cardinal Augustine Bea and how the secretariat and the Council provided a new face of Catholic ecumenism (chapters 4 and 5). Part 2, “Outcomes,” reviews the four sessions of the Council in chapters 6 through 9, and closes with an appreciation of Dei Verbum’s sixth chapter—the renewal of the Church John aimed at will be fulfilled according as Catholics follow the urgent exhortation of the Council (vehementer exhortatur) to discover Christ in Scripture (§25). But there is much about Dei Verbum in chapter 9 and chapter 6, too. The chapters of Investigating Vatican II often began as lectures at the Pontifical College Josephinum in Ohio or some other venue and there is some crisscrossing and repetition (which will be welcome for first readers of this material). However, Wick’s expertise relative to Dei Verbum, founded on his extensive historical studies of the constitution, many of which were devoted to the work of Pieter Smulders, provides the golden thread, not only historically but also theologically, to the unity of the book. Chapter 6 relates the Council’s rejection of the draft schema De fontibus revelationis from the Theological Commission in November of 1962. This rejection was on the grounds that the schema did not measure up to John’s ecumenical and pastoral hopes for a more accessible presentation of Catholic doctrine, and served as the catalyst that ultimately bound the majority of Council fathers to the spirit and agenda of John XXIII. It is an exciting story; it drives home the fact that the Council really was animated and governed by John’s hopes and his spirit. And our appreciation of it gains by the biography Wicks sketches in chapter 1, which tells us why Giovanni Roncalli, called to the See of Peter, might think conciliar thoughts, and what those thoughts would be. The historian of the reception of Trent in the Diocese of Bergamo, the historian for whom Saint Charles Borromeo remained a convincing figure of reform, wanted similarly to rejuvenate the Church, to re-invigorate it with a more ardent pastoral zeal, a more fervent Christian life, a more zealous evangelical mission, a more accessible teaching (recall the Catechism mandated by Trent). John wanted his Council to do in the twentieth century what Trent did in the sixteenth. And therefore the failure of Catholics to receive the Council, which Wicks gives some explanation for in chapter 7, is all the more poignant. “It belongs to the complete history of Vatican II that this reception of the council’s results [“the elegant and idealistic final documents”] did not occur in placid and peaceful times, but in a The Second Vatican Council Then and Now 977 cultural and ecclesial ambience fraught with difficulties” (185). The pill and the war in Vietnam, student revolt against the sexual mores and politics of their elders, all bound up in America with the quest for civil rights for African Americans and the violence it occasioned, overwhelmed not only a fair reception of the Council but the continuity of catechetical and pastoral practice presupposed to such reception. Notwithstanding his focus on Dei Verbum, Wicks also devotes considerable attention to John XXIII’s concern for Christian unity and the role of the Secretariat for Christian Unity in the work of the Council (chapters 4 and 5). Readers should be aware that the attention given to ecumenism, like the attention given to Dei Verbum, also has deep roots in Wicks’s prior scholarly and theological work, and he speaks here with polished and confident expertise. Many will thank him for making prominent the Council’s express adoption of what must be an explicit presupposition of ecumenical contact and concern, and that is the recognition of the properly ecclesial character of non-Catholic Christian organizations (140–41, 178). Wicks also brings into full light the Council’s attempt to effect a détente and find some rapprochement with the modern world, the world of post-Enlightenment liberal cultural and political reality, with the Declaration on Religious Liberty, Dignitatis Humanae; and the Declaration on Non-Christian Religions, Nostra Aetate; and the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes (chapter 9). Ratzinger takes these three documents, as has been mentioned, as a kind of “counter-syllabus,” exchanging the demeanor of the Church shaped by Pius IX for a friendlier face more open to engagement with the modern world (30, 101, 109–114, 231). Wicks has much to say also about Lumen Gentium and the reform decrees implementing its dogmatic teaching (chapter 8). Still, the theological heart of the Council for Wicks is Dei Verbum (see 84–85), for the reception of the word of God is presupposed to the Church as an embodied response to its truth in faith (Lumen Gentium), as it is also to her worship (Sacrosanctum Concilium) . Revelation (Dei Verbum) is theologically prior to the Church (Lumen Gentium), which is itself prior to worship (Sacrosanctum Concilium) and to engaging the non-Catholic and non-Christian world (Gaudium et Spes) (222–23). The argument for the necessarily theological character of the Council and the primacy of Dei Verbum is simple enough. The pastoral and evangelical hope of the Council depends ultimately on an expression of the Gospel, a formulation of the deposit of revealed truth, more accessible to the contemporary world and Christians within that world. This was Pope 978 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. John’s directive at the opening of the Council, and was repeated in the instructions to the Council following the rejection of the draft schemas on the fonts of revelation and on the Church prepared in Rome, curial documents, as it were, composed under the direction of Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani. The rejection of these drafts was based not only on their form— too scholastic—but also on their content. But it took theological minds to discern this and bring it to expression. It took a historically informed theological mind to observe that the summaries of recent papal teaching that the draft documents instantiated were not worthy of a conciliar mode of expression, which should be constructed far more from the word of God itself than from a word of the Church, even in one of its highest and most authoritative forms (see 55 and the judgment of Yves Congar). This more accessible expression, a sort of aggiornamento of doctrine, would be based on the work and competence of those theologians who had by their efforts at ressourcement come to find a more biblical, more patristic, more liturgical style of expression. Thus Wicks demonstrates the necessity of the close collaboration of bishop and theologian before and during the Council. Episcopal criticism of the first-draft schemas, unsuited to John’s purpose, depended on the prior critical work of Karl Rahner and Ratzinger, of Congar and Jean Daniélou, Pieter Smulders and of Eduard Schillebeeckx (60–67). And the formulation of amended texts and new texts depended on these same and like-minded and similarly trained men: Daniélou and Congar for what became Dei Verbum, Gerard Philips and Congar for Lumen Gentium, Congar and Joseph Lécuyer and Willy Onclin (to take another illustration) for the Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests, Presbyterorum Ordinis (73). All of this collaboration of bishops and theologians is laid out in considerable length, clearly and helpfully, by Wicks. He introduces us to it in chapter 2 (“Theologians at Vatican II”), but it is a continuing theme throughout the book. The last two chapters of the book return to Dei Verbum. Chapter 9 emphasizes that Dei Verbum supplies what the First Vatican Council left unfocused or as something simply presupposed in Dei Filius, namely, a statement of the very content of revelation: the content is Christ (§4; Wicks, 221), whose Gospel is handed on by the apostolic preaching, example, institution, and writing (§7). We meet Christ therefore in both the Scripture and the Tradition of the Church which together form one deposit of revelation (§9), which we know to be faithfully expounded by the magisterium (§10). Chapter 10 fruitfully contrasts the cautious and admonitory commendation of Scripture to theologians and laity of the The Second Vatican Council Then and Now 979 original schema De fontibus with the confident, even exuberant, exhortation of Dei Verbum to exegetes, theologians, and all the faithful to the study and use of Scripture so that all may be nourished in their life and work by the word of God. The Council was confident that the word of God will “speed on and triumph” (2 Thess 2:3; at §26). And so is Wicks. But for this to happen the Book must be opened, the Book must be read, and the Book must be meditated and studied and preached and made theologically active. ***** For Levering, as for Wicks, the ultimate aim of the Council was to realize a more effective formulation of the truth of the Gospel, of the truth of Christ himself, both for the Church’s own renewal and for the conversion of the world. Imitating the 1985 extraordinary synod’s example, Levering wants to show this aim by a detailed review of the four conciliar constitutions. This is a review ordered to following the exhortation of Pope Francis unto “a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ” (Evangelii Gaudium §3; Levering, 3) and of achieving that “full participation in divine truth” that John Paul II described as the aim of the Council (4).3 The review of all four constitutions demonstrates how each one fosters this encounter with Christ and participation of the truth: Dei Verbum focuses on a personal and cognitive encounter with Christ, Sacrosanctum Concilium on the active participation in the liturgy that makes Christ present, Lumen Gentium on the transparency of the human Church to the divine realities of which it is the sign and the instrument, and Gaudium et Spes on the orientation of human nature to the grace that alone can fulfill it (6). This means that, as for Wicks, Dei Verbum is the theologically foundational document. For if the Church occupies the bulk of the output of the Council, counting up both Lumen Gentium and the reform decrees applying its teaching (as to bishop, priest, laity, religious, and so on), the Church is nevertheless a social and community-founding response to the revelation whose culmination is Christ. Moreover, both the interior reality of the communio of the Church and the institutional form unto the realization of communion with God and men are themselves outlined in revelation as part of its content. So, we have in Levering’s ordering of things, first, Dei Verbum, then the immediate response to revelation in praise and worship detailed by Sacrosanctum Concilium, a response which is also to follow the 3 See Karol Wojtyła, Sources of Renewal (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979), 15. 980 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. instruction of revelation. Third, the adoration and thanksgiving of Christians is more expeditiously enabled from the heart of a renewed Church as understood by Lumen Gentium. Fourth and last, a renewed Church with a renewed liturgy and a renewed possession of the revealed word of God can make a more convincing and urgent invitation to the modern world and modern man to address its griefs and realize its hopes in the light of Christ, and such is the project of Gaudium et Spes. Thus we have the first four chapters of the book on the four constitutions. We do not appreciate Levering’s work unless we measure the extent of his ambition, an ambition like unto that of Wicks. They both want to do what they think the Council itself wanted to do. And they would be perfectly satisfied with each other’s characterizations of its aim. Like the Council, Levering seeks a renewal of the Church, a rejuvenation of the Church. Here is one of Levering’s synthetic statements. Such renewal or reform is nourished by love for the living Person of Jesus Christ [Dei Verbum], whose personal presence is mediated liturgically [Sacrosanctum Concilium] and doctrinally by the Church of the Holy Spirit [Lumen Gentium], and who calls us to share in his life and mission [Gaudium et Spes]. (19) There you have Levering’s book, and Levering’s Council, in one sentence. In this way, we find an important justification for how Levering presents each of the constitutions. Detailed review of the constitutions is prefaced in each case with an important work of theology contemporaneous with the drafting of the constitution. This lets us see the theological context apart from which it would be impossible to have an adequate historical understanding of the conciliar texts. So, chapter 1 matches Dei Verbum to René Latourelle’s Theology of Revelation (French original, 1963), Sacrosanctum Concilium to Louis Bouyer’s Liturgy and Architecture (1967), Lumen Gentium to Yves Congar’s True and False Reform in the Church (French original, 1950), and Gaudium et Spes to Henri de Lubac’s The Mystery of the Supernatural (French original, 1965). Readers of Levering will recognize the Levering Way: a target text (here, one of the constitutions) is illuminated by running it up against another text. So, just as Henri de Lubac vindicates the unity of the economy of nature and grace by his teaching on man’s natural desire for the vision of God, Gaudium et Spes teaches that man is not fully known except in the light of Christ and his call (§§10, 21–22). It is this anthropology that underlies the Council’s confident embrace of the “new humanism” it perceives in modern culture (§§53–56) and its encouragement of cooper- The Second Vatican Council Then and Now 981 ation between the Church and the modern state, even while the Church must assert her freedom (§76). Both de Lubac and Gaudium et Spes understand that no one can realize himself as a person alone and separate from some human community, and that the perfect human community is the one that relates us to God, such that a world without God is a world against man (168–69). It is ironic that Congar’s True and False Reform can be taken by Levering to characterize the theological culture that produced Lumen Gentium, but so it was. The re-calibration of Catholic thinking on the Church Congar aimed at was in many respects realized in the constitution on the Church. Like John XXIII, Congar sees the need for catechetical and pastoral renewal (101). Congar recognizes the key role of the development of institutions and doctrine (98–100), but knows that development (aggiornamento) is not accomplished except from within tradition (ressourcement) (103–106). All this is exactly what we have when the constitution brings forward the patristic sense of the mystery and communion of the Church, the Church’s holiness as the Body of Christ and its abiding need to purify the people of God. Then, too, there is the foundation of ecumenism laid in §§8 and 16 (for which there is Congar’s Chrétiens désunis), the balance of episcopal and papal office, bringing forward the priesthood of the faithful (for which there is also Congar’s Lay People in the Church), and the realization of the Church especially in the Mother of God (for which there is Congar’s Christ, Our Lady, and the Church, not to mention de Lubac’s The Splendor of the Church). As Bouyer calls for the active participation of the laity in the liturgical celebration of the Church, especially the mass, so does Sacrosanctum Concilium begin by stating its aim to foster such participation. It can do so all the more confidently because of the work of such theologians as Bouyer who know the history of the gradual marginalization of congregational participation worked by both theology and architectural forms and judge it as a deformation of the Church’s liturgy. Still, with Levering’s emphasis on encounter with Christ, following Francis, and possession of the revealed truth of Christ, keeping to the word of John Paul, the success of the Council, and so the success of the kind of appropriation of the Council for today Levering wants, stands or falls with the success of Dei Verbum in maintaining the unity of the Person of Christ and Gospel truth, and the impossibility of meeting the Person of Christ apart from the truth of Christ mediated by the propositions of doctrine and creed, Tradition, and Scripture. And in fact, this theme, and the importance of the sometimes neglected role of the proposition in the work of revelation, returns in Levering’s treatment of Lumen Gentium and 982 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. occupies an important place in his fifth and concluding chapter. Latourelle is concerned to think the reality of revelation in terms of three poles: the word of God; testimony to this word and to the event in which it is received; and personal encounter. The word of God is not only a vehicle of cognitive content, but in Christ especially, an encounter with a Person. The recorded witness to this cognitively rich personal encounter calls on the freedom of those who receive it and enables those who did not first receive it to possess both the cognitive content and the Person of Christ in the freedom of faith. So to speak, witness to the word, to the Person who speaks it, makes the original encounter “portable,” able to engage other people originally absent. The word that mediates both the Person who speaks it and the truth he speaks can be further mediated by testimony so as to enable a further personal encounter and possession of the truth by those not originally present. Thus, if it is a mistake to think revelation concerns only truths and not personal manifestation, it is equally a mistake to think one can have the Person without the words, without the truths he speaks, as delivered by the original witnesses. Hence the point of Levering’s title for this chapter: “Persons and Propositions: Dei Verbum in Context.” Is this realization of the necessary role of the proposition in the encounter with the Person of Christ also asserted in Dei Verbum? Commenting on the prologue’s declaration that “it wishes to set forth the true doctrine of divine revelation and its transmission,” Levering writes: “Such true doctrine could be set forth only if revelation itself, within the community established by the self-revealing God, communicated doctrinal truths” (34). And summing up the most important, second paragraph of the constitution: The truths that God reveals for our salvation are summed up in Jesus Christ, who reveals God to us and who invites us to share in his life of wisdom and self-giving love. Of course, this does not mean that we can know the Person, Jesus, in a nonpropositional way, since the human act of knowing cannot bypass propositional judgments. Furthermore, Jesus’ own propositional teaching and the apostles’ teachings about him inform and instruct our personal encounter with Jesus. (36) Levering defends this view vigorously against contemporary attempts to downplay the importance of the objective value and time-transcending character of the propositional of revelation making it clear that loss of the proposition, or thinking the propositions can be mutually incoherent, The Second Vatican Council Then and Now 983 makes for the loss of the Person (48–49). I will return to this when I take up the question of why the theological event of the Council must be an ongoing event. ***** A presupposition of Catholic unity is apostolicity, which entails the diachronic identity of Catholic tradition, as Levering recognizes. Thomas Guarino undertakes to manifest this identity in The Disputed Teachings of Vatican II. Of course, without the absolute agreement of the doctrine of the Council with prior definitive doctrine, the Council could not be a theological event in a Catholic sense at all, but would be radically a-theological. For just this reason, Dei Verbum is as important for Guarino as for Levering and Wicks. Guarino does not overtly rank and relate the constitutions as Wicks and Levering do. But Dei Verbum is foundational to his undertaking in three ways. First of all, its teachings on the material sufficiency of the Scriptures for Catholic doctrine, on scriptural inerrancy, and on the historicity of the Gospels are all issues relative to the continuity of conciliar teaching with prior teaching. Second, the constitution treats the nature and transmission of revelation, which is the framework within which all of Guarino’s discussion takes place. Third, Dei Verbum recognizes the fact of doctrinal development (§8), the key to Guarino’s adjudication of many of the accusations that the Council broke with prior Tradition. Guarino’s first chapter introduces us to two accounts of development, first that of Vincent of Lerins, and second that of Cardinal Newman, accounts he is well-equipped to deal with, given his monograph on Vincent and his long engagement with fundamental theological topics over the years. The second chapter also takes up in more detail the nature of doctrine itself, already introduced in chapter 1. But chapter 2 also has a word about analogical predication and metaphysical participation. This is because Guarino thinks to understand many of the disputed teachings of the Council and their relation to previous magisterial teaching by invoking a Thomist understanding of analogicity and participation. Following Congar, he thinks that such fundamental Thomist principles are underneath much of the conciliar teaching, even if they are not expressly appealed to and if the Scholastic machinery of primary and secondary analogues does not appear on the surface of the text. Surely this is a sound instinct. Where it is a matter of stating the relation between two or more things that are partially the same and partially different, he is on firm, not 984 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. to say incontrovertible, ground. And this will give him strong reasons to understand much of the disputed teaching of Vatican II as developments and not novelties. After chapter 3 addresses such issues as development, ressourcement, and aggiornamento head on, chapter 4 applies participationist thinking with great success to the conciliar teaching on the priesthood, on Marian mediation, and on the ecclesial character of non-Catholic Christian churches and communities. As to the priesthood, while Christ is the true and perfect priest in himself, the priesthood of the faithful and the priesthood of ministerial priests participate in this priesthood, and to be sure, in different ways: the priesthood of the faithful and the priesthood of ordained priests differ not only in degree, but in essence (Lumen Gentium §10); both, however, share in the priesthood of Christ and are named from his priestly fullness. As to mediation, the unique and as it were per se mediator of all grace is Christ who merits this grace condignly and who in virtue of his divinity distributes it efficiently. But the uniqueness and originating character of his mediation does not preclude that Mary and the saints (and priests, for that matter) share in it. Mary so cooperates with the saving activity of her Son that she is justly called the mediatrix of salvation and grace (Lumen Gentium §62). Thinking of the Church and other Christian communions—that is, thinking of Lumen Gentium §8 and the Decree on Ecumenism—we have another convincing deployment of the logic of participation and the use of analogical names. The Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church, indeed, but not in such a way that there is no ecclesial reality outside the visible confines of her communion. According as and to the measure that they share evangelical truth and possess the means and accoutrements of salvation such as baptism and prayer—according as they possess ecclesial “elements of sanctification and of truth”—they participate in the ecclesiality that exists fully only in the Catholic Church. While Catholics are fully incorporated into the Church, and non-Catholics not so fully, still, they really participate in the one Church, as it were, by degrees (see Lumen Gentium §§14–15). So we may speak of entire non-Catholic churches or communities sharing in the life and truth of the one Church and so sharing in her, formally and not metaphorically. This is all to the good, I think. Guarino also wants to extend this pattern of understanding to the relation of the Church to non-Christian religions (Nostra Aetate) and to the modern world (Gaudium et Spes). It is evident that there is a real relation of sharing and participation in revealed truth between Judaism and Christianity, of course, where the same revelation is given to the Church and Judaism but in its fullness only to the Church. And when the Council The Second Vatican Council Then and Now 985 recognizes the presence of truth and goodness in non-Christian religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, Guarino wants to say much the same thing, although he recognizes “that Judaism’s participation in the truth of divine revelation differs not only in degree but in essence from the participatory relationship of other religions” (112). The Catholic Church is then the primum analogatum also relative to non-Christian religions, and they share in her reality according to the elements of truth and goodness to be found in them (113–14). “Other religions, insofar as they are vessels of God’s truth and goodness, are formally and intensively related to the church of Christ” (113; Guarino’s emphasis). This way of speaking raises the question of whether other religions may be thought of as “repositories of divine revelation,” although Guarino knows the Council did not speak in that way (119). On Cardinal Newman’s understanding of revelation, the other religions may in fact be repositories of revelation, especially insofar as they represent in their moral teaching what is congruent with the subjective revelation of conscience and represent in myth and sometimes darkly anticipate the atoning sacrifice and death of one man for the sake of others. But they cannot be repositories of revelation that comes to us with publically and historically ascertainable certainty as revelation. That description of things belongs only and exclusively to Christianity and its forerunner, Judaism. Just so, it is a mistake to count Christianity as analogically related to other religions under the over-arching category of “religion.” Of course we may choose so to do if we are sociologists of religion or constructing some “history of religions” in the style of Wilhelm Bousset. But if we are theologians, thinking of things so seems to rub off too much of the distinctive character of Christian revelation and worship as something that comes down to us from above. What is missing from the discussion, to my mind, is the role of the natural virtue of religion in constituting non-Christian religions. For of course all truth and every good thing comes down to us from above (James 1). But they do not come down to the differing religions in the same way, and this, for me, makes it hazardous to speak of non-Christian religions as “participating” in Christianity or the Church. Sometimes the true and the good things come down to us bound up with the very act of creation and the creation of human nature. But sometimes they come down to us with a flash, with a trumpet crash. Some of what comes down to us in this way, in Christianity, includes what we might naturally know of God, our nature, and the moral law, but could know only with difficulty. But, in addition to the naturally knowable truths about God and the moral law that are revealed (see Pius XII’s Humani Generis), there 986 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. are also strictly speaking supernatural truths that enable us to cooperate with the supernatural grace that leads us to naturally unknowable and naturally unattainable supernatural end. Both the way God communicates in Christianity and Judaism and the content of what is communicated so remove them from the other religions that, although it be true that every man is ordered to Christ as to the true exemplar of his humanity and his divine friend, and is so ordered by whatever truth or goodness there is in his religion, this does not make his religion a participation in Christianity. As to the modern world, then, Guarino casts the net of analogy one last time to express the Church’s relation to whatever is good in Enlightenment modernity and liberalism with, it seems to me, as much or as little success as he has had with non-Christian religions. Chapter 5 takes up those teachings of Vatican II that do not develop but reverse prior Catholic teaching. However, they reverse or substantially qualify teaching that while authoritative was not definitive: so the relation between pope and bishop in Lumen Gentium; religious freedom in Dignitatis Humanae; the issues referred to above in Dei Verbum. ***** At the opening of the Council, John XXIII famously declared: “The depositum fidei or truths which are found in our venerable doctrine is one thing while the way [modus] in which these truths are expressed is another, always with the same meaning and the same judgment” (Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, October 11, 1962). Guarino takes John XXIII to be making a point similar to the position on doctrinal continuity laid out by Henri Bouillard in the closing pages of his Conversion et grâce,4 where Bouillard distinguishes between theological affirmations and the representations that compose the affirmations (19). The same affirmation can be made with quite different representations— quite different “theological vocabulary and concepts (representations),” as Guarino paraphrases. Again, we can have a “plurality of conceptual formulations” used to express the same affirmation, the same truth. And Guarino speaks in this way throughout the volume (19–20, 32–36, 39, 46, 68).5 Guarino thus lumps together vocabulary and concepts, words Henri Bouillard, Conversion et grâce chez s. Thomas d’Aquin. Étude historique (Paris: Aubier, 1944), 219–24. 5 See also the discussion in Guarino’s Foundations of Systematic Theology (New York: T&T Clark International, 2005), 146–49, where he takes the distinction to be equivalent to that between content and context, or equivalently content and form, 4 The Second Vatican Council Then and Now 987 and ideas, in the box of things subject to change. Conceptual “formulations” (19) and “conventions” (32) in which a doctrine is expressed can change, but the doctrine will remain the same, the same truth with the same meaning. Guarino knows of the theological reservations about this distinction between the content and form of a teaching expressed by the International Theological Commission and others,6 and shares them, but thinks some form of it is nonetheless indispensable for a Catholic theology that wants to maintain the universality and time-transcending truth of Catholic doctrine.7 Just as such, Bouillard’s proposal and Guarino’s appropriation of it is, I think, difficult to countenance. It seems to escape the doctrinal relativism Michel Labourdette and Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange imputed to it in the 1940s only by abstracting such a slimmed down affirmation from the many conceptually diverse formulations of it as cannot be distinguished from a kind of agnosticism. For instance, if we are not bound by the Council of Trent to confess that grace is the “formal cause” of justification, but are bound only to confess some interior change, or even merely that justification is a gift, then we lose the understanding of justification embedded in the idea of formal cause, where we understand not only that justification is a gift, but how it is a gift.8 And anyway, it seems difficult to escape the question of whether grace either is or is not the formal cause of justification. To be sure, it depends on what we think a concept is. If it is a representation in the sense of the “ideas” of John Locke and other seventeenthand eighteenth-century thinkers, then, granted that such representations express and can give us no insight into the object of their reference, granted that they are, in the end, a sort of nominal and nominalist definition of what they refer to, then we may very well change them every day to stay fresh and up to date, and make the same nominalist affirmations that, unfortunately, tell us nothing about the subject of the affirmations. We construct different realities from age to age. But no one who holds to Newman’s dogmatic principle wants that. On the other hand, if a concept is the intelligibility of the thing it is the concept of, then concepts cannot be changed without changing the meaning of the serial affirmations in which one concept substitutes for another. 145, 149, 188–90. Guarino, Foundations, 149–52. 7 Guarino, Foundations, 188–98. See also Guarino’s article, “Henri Bouillard and the Truth-Status of Dogmatic Statements,” Science et Esprit 39 (1987): 331–43. 8 Guarino is quite aware of this challenge; see “Henri Bouillard and the Truth-Status of Dogmatic Statements,” 341. 6 988 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. But a concept must be the intelligibility of the thing it is the concept of, or else the sort of (commodious) metaphysical realism Guarino plunks for in chapter 2 of his 2005 Foundations of Systematic Theology cannot be sustained. Guarino thus aligns himself with that tradition in the twentieth-century Catholic understanding of trans-temporal doctrinal identity embraced by Bouillard, Jean LeBlond, and Karl Rahner, among others. For them, the key is the judgment and its tethering of thought to being by force of the copula. There is, however, another tradition that seems to ensure this same thing by appeal to the concept itself. This is the tradition of Ambroise Gardeil, Garrigou-Lagrange, and Congar. These theologians defended the time-transcending identity and universal accessibility of certain basic principles (identity, causality) and certain basic notions (person, nature, substance, property, life, for instance). It is this Dominican way rather than the Jesuit way, moreover, that has found expression in magisterial attempts to address this issue, notably in Pius XII’s Humani Generis (§16), Paul VI’s Mysterium Fidei (§24), and John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio (§§ 4, 95–96). I think as well that, unless we think a concept is the intelligibility of the thing it is the concept of, then we find ourselves in striking philosophical—and so theological—discontinuity with Saint Thomas, Saint Bonaventure, Saint Augustine. ***** The Second Vatican Council was a theological event for all three of the authors reviewed here. Since the reception of the Council is by no means accomplished, one supposes Wicks would also readily assent to the Council as an “ongoing” theological event. This is more evidently true for Guarino, of course, since he is in the thick of arguments for and against the continuity of conciliar teaching with prior ecclesial teaching. But it is most evident for Levering, and his last chapter makes this especially clear. In his introduction to An Introduction to Vatican II, Levering, like Wicks, calls for a more perfect reception of the Council, “a new ressourcement” leading to ecclesial reform and renewal. He frames this wonted renewal between two excesses to be avoided: an “ahistorical extrinsicism” according to which an unchanging formulation of revelation can be fittingly layered over every age of the Church’s life, indifferent to what must be merely accidental cultural and historical changes, and an “atheological historicism,” where the Church rearranges her structures and story according to shifting constellations of power (19). These are the very poles by which Maurice Blondel framed the task facing theology in thinking The Second Vatican Council Then and Now 989 about tradition and the continuity of an abiding dogmatic identity in the midst of the modernist crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century. Blondel reappears in Levering’s last chapter (192, 196). Here, Levering opposes two interpretations of the Council’s achievement, two ways to read the documents and receive the event. First, there is Robert Imbelli’s reading, according to which the reception of the Council is the reception of Dei Verbum (177–78, 181–82) and the reception of Dei Verbum is the reception of Christ, the culmination of revelation, the linchpin and turning point of the history of the people of God, to see whom is to see the Father, and who accomplishes his work especially by his Cross and resurrection (Dei Verbum §4). Is Imbelli’s reading, and Dei Verbum’s teaching, an instance of a-historical extrinsicism? Manifestly it is not according to Levering. Rather, by making timely the patristic understanding of Christ the revealer, and the role of Scripture and Tradition in making him and his truth present, the Council does truly enact John XXIII’s hope that “the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine should be more effectively defended and presented” (Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, Oct. 11, 1962). This Christological understanding of the Council and its adequate reception Levering contrasts to that of Massimo Faggioli, a noted apologist for the History of Vatican II edited by Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph Komonchak (English version). Faggioli dismisses a concern for the continuity of Christian doctrine and Catholic ethos as relevant to understanding the Council and, in fact, does not think such continuity is to be discerned there (187–88). Guarino, it would seem, has labored under a great delusion. Absent a concern for doctrinal continuity within a changing form and presentation of the same truths, the Council turns out to have been really only about re-arranging the power structure of the Church. Faggioli gives us, in other words, an atheological, historicist reading of the Council. I would spell out the line of thought that impels thinkers like Faggioli to this position as follows—a line of thought Blondel first explicated in 1904 with History and Dogma. History may be done in two ways: apart from faith and theology, or within faith and taking account of what by faith we know as certainly true because it is revealed doctrinal truth. Even more and apart from faith, moreover, history is incapable of discerning the unity of doctrine itself and the unity of the Catholic ethos that lives by it. Did Cardinal Newman not think the unity and continuity of these things in the Church are themselves objects of faith? The continuity of these things is in principle subject to being impugned by reason in its historical form (“critical history”). But they are not themselves objects of purely historical knowledge. History must be able to be read concordantly with them. Still, at the end of the day, they are fulfillments of the promise 990 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. of the Lord to remain with us until the closing of the age, and to send forth into the Church the Spirit of truth. Thus, the continuities in question are grasped by faith, or not at all. Absent faith, absent the guardrails of doctrine, the history of doctrine and the Catholic thing disintegrates into separate and sometimes incoherent sub-narratives whose principle of unity is not the Holy Spirit and the Tradition of the Church (as Blondel and Congar conceived it), but power and the will to power. Truth with a capital T is the very first thing, after all, that Nietzsche sends packing in his hermeneutics of the history of good and evil. Thus our present misery, with Faggioli as a prominent exponent of doctrinal relativism. There are many other interpreters of the Council in addition to Imbelli and Faggioli whom Levering treats with his usual thoroughness and comprehensive scope in his last chapter. He ends, suitably, with homage to Joseph Ratzinger, defending his reading of Gaudium et Spes from those who see in him “only” an Augustine redivivus (if only it were so). Levering sees with Ratzinger that the reception of the Council leaves us with the choice between a self-constituting Church (203), the Church of Faggioli and others, and a Church that has the audacity to think she has heard a revelation and that it is her duty merely to guard it. Custodi depositum. The context of the reception the Second Vatican Council now in the first part of the twenty-first century therefore remains exactly the same in its essentials as the context of the dispute over the nature of dogma at the beginning of the twentieth century. We may well thank all three of these authors reviewed here for helping us to negotiate this reception historically and theologically. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2020): 991–1015 991 Once There Was No Church and State: Re-Envisioning the Social Order in Light of Thirteenth-Century History Jeffrey L. Morrow Seton Hall University South Orange, NJ “In the love that pours forth from the heart of Christ, we find hope for the future of the world.” —Pope St. John Paul II, Memory and Identity1 Andrew Jones’s Before Church and State is a truly revolutionary book.2 It not only challenges many of the assumptions that underwrite so many studies in history, political science, theology, and related disciplines, but lays the groundwork for others to take his work further and apply them in their own fields.3 To say that Before Church and State has what it takes to shift paradigms in the reigning scholarship is too mild. Before Church and State is more like a time bomb, each new reading of which brings it closer to detonation. Like a live hand grenade tossed at a bookshelf, Before Church and State rips through the scholarship of so many books. His intent was not as hostile as these metaphors imply. Jones is simply trying Pope Saint John Paul II, Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium (New York: Rizzoli, 2005), 168. 2 Andrew Willard Jones, Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2017). 3 I would venture to opine that Scott Hahn, The First Society: The Sacrament of Matrimony and the Restoration of the Social Order (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Road, 2018), is the first book that takes partial inspiration from Jones’s work, which he cites. He also dedicates the volume to Jones. 1 992 Jeffrey L. Morrow to get the history right. In doing that, however, he has left mountains of literature containing received scholarly assumptions and misreadings in his wake. There is no going back after reading Before Church and State. Medieval history, the thirteenth century, the history of secularization, and the history of Western political thought can never be read the same again. More importantly, Jones’s work poses a challenge for us today, as we seek to envision our role in the social order in which we live, and as we strive for a brighter hope-filled future.4 In what follows, I provide an overview of Before Church and State and then situate Jones’s work in the broader context of theories of secularization and genealogies of modernity. The Anachronism of Church versus State Jones’s volume kicks off with a brief preface (xiii–xvi) wherein he explains the genesis of his work, which began as his history doctoral dissertation at Saint Louis University, whose name derived from the very same Saint Louis Jones would study in his project. As he approached the study, however, he soon began to realize that modern paradigms for understanding medieval society just did not fit the evidence: “Notions of Church and State, of religious and secular, of worship and politics, of private and public, simply couldn’t be made to express what I saw in the sources” (xiii). Rather, what Jones discovered in the copious primary texts he examined was a “unity of the spiritual and the temporal powers within a coherent medieval Christian worldview” (xiii). What he does in the rest of the volume is unpack just what that unified “medieval Christian worldview” looked like, by walking through the primary evidence. What he discovered was a unified sacramental society completely bereft of any modern analogue to “sovereignty,” contrary to virtually all prior scholarship. He proceeds with a lengthy and thorough introduction, “Church and State?” (1–28). The introduction begins with four quotations from Saint Augustine, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Cardinal Henry of Susa, and Vincent of Beauvais. After this introduction, every single section and chapter commences with a quotation from Saint Augustine, all but one coming from the same source, his City of God.5 It becomes clear that Jones is reading through this history alongside City of God, which I think helps him keep a supernatural perspective as he does his careful historical work. He states his main argument up front: Hahn’s First Society takes up this challenge and proposes to do just that, inspired in part by Jones’s work. 5 The singular exception is chapter 13, which opens with a quotation from St. Augustine’s On the Trinity. 4 Once There Was No Church and State 993 Thirteenth-century France was not a world of the secular and the religious vying for position and power, but a world in which the material and the spiritual were totally dependent on each other and penetrated one another at every level. This was a world not of the religious and the secular, but of the New Testament and the Old, of virtue and vice, of grace and law, of peace and violence. This world offered a coherent vision of the whole in which mankind moved through grace from the lesser to the greater, from the fallen to the redeemed (2).6 Jones underscores how different this society was from our own: Our own vision is secular. Even when we acknowledge the importance of religion, we do so from within the assumption of the secular: that reality itself is ultimately free of the religious. Religions come and go; they are relative. The secular is permanent; it is absolute and universal. To us, the secular is the field on which the game of history—including religious history—is played. Within this secular vision, religion as a sociological category is often considered inessential to the concept of society itself. In this view, religious societies are, in a sense, accidentally religious: their religion can fade away. . . . To us moderns, the secular is fundamental. . . . In such an approach “religion” is a category that functions within the secular. (3) Before summarizing his volume (22–28), Jones lays the fundamental groundwork that is necessary to understand the vision of medieval society he articulates—derived directly from the primary sources. He calls for the abandonment of the anachronistic categories we habitually use and read back into the medieval sources—like “secular” and “religious,” “Church” and “State.” These individual terms were used, but not in the way we employ them today. He also introduces us to the main figures who will serve as the focus of his study: Saint Louis IX (1214–1270; ruled France 1226–1270) and Gui Foucois (1190–1268). Both men are incredibly interesting characters. In other words, “the Middle Ages were neither religious nor secular because the religious and the secular are two features of a single construction: the modern, Western social architecture of ‘Church’ and ‘State,’ ‘private’ and ‘public,’ ‘individual’ and ‘market,’ and so on. The societies of the Middle Ages had a different architecture based on different assumptions and different concepts, ultimately on a different vision of the cosmos” (4). 6 994 Jeffrey L. Morrow Saint Louis was a layman and temporal ruler. He is the last king to have been canonized thus far—the only canonized king of France—and thus provides us a glimpse into how a saint governs in his society. Foucois is particularly fascinating in that he played important roles in both the spiritual and temporal realms. He was a married laymen with children and served as an important legal aid to the king, Saint Louis. After the death of his wife, Foucois was ordained a priest and then very quickly was ordained a bishop. He was named a cardinal and served as the papal legate to France. He was then elected Pope Clement IV and reigned from 1265–1268. The ways in which Saint Louis and Clement IV worked together provide a great example of what Jones is trying to describe. Jones explains what their medieval context was like, in contrast to our own: In the Middle Ages the “secular” was integral to a conception of social reality that was thoroughly “supernatural” in character. . . . The “religious” was not accidental to this world, and the kings were not the State. It was a sacramental world in which the material and the spiritual were everywhere and always present together. The spiritual power was the power of the priests to dispense the grace that sustained this society in charity and they wielded the spiritual sword of excommunication against the mortal sinner. The temporal power was the power of the laymen to organize the world of things and events, and they wielded the temporal sword against the violent. (5) The rest of his book walks through the evidence for his argument, showing the unity of the sacramental society of the thirteenth century. Heretical Violence Jones divides his book into four main parts. He entitles part 1 “The Business of the Peace and the Faith” (29–165). This notion, “the business of the peace and the faith,” will be important for understanding the remainder of the book. He begins each part with a brief overview. In the overview of the first part (29–32) he explains the relationship between the Inquisition and the French institution of the enquêteurs, who functioned as “itinerate judges” (30). Significantly, Foucois, the future Clement IV, was intimately involved with the development of both the Inquisition and the institution of enquêteurs, and played a hands-on role for both. The key to understanding how both institutions worked, which becomes the key to understanding the union of temporal and spiritual authorities in general, was their shared goal of negotium pacis et fidei, that is, “the business of the Once There Was No Church and State 995 peace and the faith.” Spiritual and temporal rulers worked in their different ways for that shared goal. In chapter 1, “Enemies of the Faith and of the Peace” (33–51), Jones culls the primary textual evidence, using case after case, to show the intimate connection between heresy and crime in medieval society, that challenges to orthodox doctrine were threats to earthly peace and threats to earthly peace were tied up with heresy. Jones explains: “We can understand neither the heretics without the mercenaries nor the mercenaries without the heretics. It is their unity that makes the entire business of the peace and faith intelligible, and it is a unity that goes to the core of the thirteenth-century conception of society” (35–36).7 It was the mercenaries that protected the heretics, and the heretics provided the intellectual architecture that supported the anti-society of the mercenaries. This view of society was connected with medieval biblical exegesis as well. Jones uses Pope Innocent III’s sermon which opened Lateran IV, and the classic issue of the “two swords,” by way of example: The movement from the historical to the allegorical, to the tropological, and on to the anagogical was not simply a movement of scriptural exegesis, as if the senses were parallel glosses to the biblical text. Rather, the historical was fulfilled in the allegorical, the allegorical in the tropological, and all in the anagogical, and this sequence was nothing short of the very path of salvation, for society as a whole as much as for each of its individuals members. Revelation was read this way because reality was, in fact, understood this way. Both swords, the spiritual power’s excommunication . . . and the secular power’s iron, then, performed the function of the law. (47) Jones’s second chapter, “Enemies of the King and the Church” (53–73), follows the theme of the first by showing how the enemies of the king were the enemies of the Church, and vice versa. When “peace perished, . . . heresy spread” (54), and likewise, when heresy spread, peace perished. Temporal and ecclesiastical authorities had different functions within medieval society, but the functions of both often overlapped the temporal and spiritual In regard to the official relevant canon from Lateran III (canon 27), Jones elaborates: “To the orthodox the heretic was a type of perverted monk or priest, a distortion of the spiritual and his defender a type of perverted knight, a distortion of the secular, a violent and unjust warrior, a mercenary—the drafters of the canon understood the spiritual and the secular as always bound up together both in orthodoxy and in heresy” (36). 7 996 Jeffrey L. Morrow realms, and moreover, they shared a single mission, that of the “business of the peace and the faith.” Thus, as Jones underscores, when Louis launched a crusade, it would be mistaken to view this as the king simply following the express desires of the pope; rather, Louis understood it as the necessary demands of his position precisely as king. As Jones examines various oaths and legal documents, he points out how obedience to the Church and obedience to the king were seen as two sides of the same coin. If you were faithful to the king, you understood yourself, and were understood by others, to be faithful to the Church, and vice versa. If you were unfaithful to the king, you were seen as unfaithful to the Church, and vice versa. Thus, heresy and crime were viewed as going hand-in-hand. This was enshrined in secular and ecclesiastical laws from the time. One prominent example of this that Jones brings to light is how “contempt for the sentence of excommunication became rebellion against the king, and rebellion against the king was grounds for excommunication” (64–65). Arguably the most important example Jones provides in this chapter of the unified sacramental vision of this medieval society is the Council of Toulouse and the crusade against southern France, and the Peace of Paris. Jones explains: The council was not concerned only with rooting out the blackrobed heretics hiding in the woods, but also with up-rooting the entire heretical social order and replacing it with a Catholic social order. . . . Read together, the documents of 1229 aimed at dismantling an entire way of life and replacing it with another. They were directed against a society of small-scale warfare and vendetta. As the orthodox saw it, it was a world in which vassals had little obligation to their lords, and in which lords fought their wars with mercenaries, a world of castles and fortified villages and near perpetual violence. Within the orthodox sacramental cosmos, the society of the South was understood to be as intrinsically spiritual as it was temporal. To the orthodox, the “heretics” of the documents were not isolated dissidents; they were the holy men of a deeply unholy society. (69–72) Chapter 3 is entitled “For the Extirpation of Heretical Depravity and for the Conservation of the Peace” (75–94). This chapter deals with Gui Foucois’s pivotal role in the Inquisition and secular enquêteurs. This dual secular and ecclesiastical cooperation for the same end explains the context for Louis’s crusade and broader reforms: Once There Was No Church and State 997 Louis sought to reform his officials and cleanse his kingdom of sin not just because that would help him gain the favor of God and so win a war. Rather, he was engaging in the crusade because he moreover intended to be the type of king who also reformed his officials and cleansed his kingdom of sin—they were multiple sides of the same business, a business to which Louis was committed as a Davidic monarch. (84) The lines between the ecclesiastical inquisition and its secular counterpart were likewise blurred, at least for us, since “there was nothing ‘secular’ (in the modern sense) going on here” (85). Friars serving as “secular” judges did so in their role as working to do their part of the business of the peace and the faith.8 Gui’s role here was instrumental, since he was tasked with creating the regulations for the enquêteurs, but this was not some secular attempt to increase the state’s authority over that of the Church; rather it was an attempt for the temporal rulers to do their part in ensuring the business of the peace and the faith. Davidic Kingship In chapter 4, “From the Duty of Royal Power” (95–111), one of the key documents Jones examines is Louis’s Grande ordonnance, which too often is viewed as an example of state-building—an attempt to increase the secular State’s authority over and against that of the Church. Jones clarifies the situation and how it fits within the sacramental social order of the time in a more unified way: Regardless of what these offices eventually evolved into, Louis was not building an absolutist State, let alone the foundations of a secular one. In the thirteenth century the Grande Ordonnance was a part of something that had nothing to do with absolutism, “divine right of kings,” the separation of Church and State, or the construction of the modern State. It was a part of the construction of a Christian kingdom. . . . When they are read as a secular action within orthodoxy, we can see that the articles of the Grande Ordonnance that not only forbid royal officers from swearing, playing games of chance, fornicating, and visiting taverns, but actually forbid all gambling, prosti On this, Jones notes: “The clerics and friars were working for peace and justice, and such things were understood to be as much a part of the ‘religious’ world in which they lived as were questions of doctrine or right worship—the concern of those other mostly Mendicant friars, the ‘inquisitors’ into heresy” (85). 8 998 Jeffrey L. Morrow tution, and frequenting taverns (by any except travelers) in the king’s domain are not some moralizing or puritanical gloss to legislation otherwise notable for its establishment of official and bureaucratic government; they rather point to the very core of the Grande Ordonnance’s significance. In the pursuit of the fulfillment of the “debt of royal power,” Louis brought together the long-running discourse on right rulership with that on the moral life itself. . . . To Louis in the Grand Ordonnance the moral life of the laity was the same as that of the clergy. (98–100)9 This is quite radical for the time and shows a de facto recognition of the call to holiness among the laity as well as among the clergy and religious. Jones’s fifth chapter, “Desiring that the King Not Gain Some Advantage from This Violence” (113–44), explains the vision of medieval society, including its laws, in terms of peace as normative. This is not something we moderns are accustomed to. For us, war is the norm. Think of Thomas Hobbes’s famous dictum about the state of nature, which he described as “such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.”10 Such an ontology of violence makes sense of our modern rights language and legal infrastructure. Jones shows, however, how foreign such an ontology of violence is to medieval society, wherein an ontology of peace reigned. Courts stepped in when peace was violated, and they typically sided with established custom trying to restore peace where it had been broken. The view was not, as ours is, individuals running around with rights and desires kept in check by coercive force, but rather a peaceful society where coercive force had to enter to restore peace once it was shattered. Such breakers of the peace were a threat to both the temporal and ecclesial orders. Jones concludes this chapter: “Peace was found not in the unity forged by the overwhelming violence of the ‘State’ but in the partnership, really the friendship, of these powers engaged in a business, in the pursuit of a goal—the sanctification of the world and, ultimately, salvation” (143–44). Chapter 6, “Gird Thy Sword Upon Thy Thigh, O Thou Most Power Jones elaborates: “Far from laying the groundwork for the ‘secular’ State, the Grande Ordonnance was a proposal to bring the spiritual and the temporal powers further into each other. It expanded the domain in which they overlapped and strengthened their unity within an orthodoxy that included the lay and clerical estates intrinsically and that recognized through its sacramental understanding of reality that fundamentally the spiritual and the material were not only not in conflict—rather, they interpenetrated each other at every level” (100). 10 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 13, in Leviathan, vol. 2, The English and Latin Texts (i), ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: Clarendon, 2012), 192. 9 Once There Was No Church and State 999 ful (Ps 44)” (145–65), helps clarify how the kings were viewed as a sort of continuation of the Davidic monarchy, at least, in so much as they were attempting to live out the spirit of the Davidic kingdom, which was concerned with both spiritual and temporal matters. Jones explains: In the world, in the realm of sin, the king wields the sword as did the historical kings of the Old Testament, but he does so not simply to achieve an earthly peace that consists only of submission, even submission to the Law. Rather, he wields the sword to prepare the sinner for Christ and ultimately to convert the kingdom of the Law into that of grace and so into the kingdom of true peace that was ruled by Christ himself. (151) The Mass, where heaven meets earth, becomes the model. In the king’s rule, heaven is intended to meet earth in the broader sacramental society. In this society, spiritual and temporal are linked with a shared goal, albeit using their different means in the cooperation appropriate of friendship. Disturbers of the Peace Jones begins part 2, “Counsel and Aid” (167–310), with an overview (167–76) of what he will cover in the proceeding chapters. The first of these, chapter 7, “The Lord King Orders that the Plain Truth Be Found” (177–217), takes a look at copious parliamentary proceedings to examine how peace and justice were restored when conflict arose. This becomes an especially important chapter in demonstrating that, rather than a conflict between secular and religious authorities, we rather find temporal and ecclesiastical rulers exercising their respective authorities only when the peace is disturbed, and then only in order to restore peace, not in secular– religious power struggles. Sometimes the “secular” parlement ruled against the king. The questions were those of inquiring about who disturbed the prior peace, and then they were intent on setting things back in order. Union of Spiritual and Temporal In chapter 8, “The Spiritual and the Temporal” (219–47), Jones again shows the unity between spiritual and temporal authorities. He shows how what sometimes looks to moderns like the king “doing the Church’s bidding” (223) was actually the king exercising authority for the sake of justice, as he understood it. Such matters were always both spiritual and temporal. There were distinctions, such as between laity and clergy, but such distinctions were united with a common purpose. Jones observes: “Parlement sought to maintain peace in the temporal realm and the clerics 1000 Jeffrey L. Morrow most certainly lived and dispensed the sacraments in the temporal realm. Indeed, the whole field of action was as much ‘the Church’ as it was the kingdom” (234). Although different, both swords found their origin in God, and the wielders of both understood themselves as wielding them differently for God. The ninth chapter, “Counsel and Aid” (249–74), examines how the social “network of friends” (250) enabled large-scale achievements despite the lack of modern political centralization. Jones shows how “social power was wielded not through controlling ‘proto-absolutist’ institutions such as ‘the Church’ or ‘the State,’ but through building networks of cooperation, of loyalty, of debt, of favor, and of friendship” (250). Society thus was governed through such a network of consilium (counsel) and auxilium (aid). Such social networks functioned within the Church as well. It is in this context that Jones explains how peace and difference could coexist. In the modern period, after a Hobbesian ontology of violence has become assumed in virtually all Western political and legal traditions, difference and peace can coexist only through the imposition of centralized authority wielding a monopoly on legitimate forms of violence, and that violence, or threat of violence, can secure and maintain peace amidst difference. In contrast to this, however, Jones shows the medieval “Trinitarian cosmos” wherein “difference does not necessitate such conflict. Rather, differences can coexist and cooperate through friendship, through mutual giving and trust, and through a shared vision of divine justice” (260). Thus, when peace fails, coercive law enters; such laws do not emerge as the grounding of peace, but rather when the peace which is the grounding norm of society has failed. Thus, Jones aptly concludes, “The social order that the Crown was trying to build and that which the papacy was trying to build were basically the same—they were two aspects of the same organization of thought and power—and both believed the role of the other to be essential” (274). In the tenth chapter, “In the Fullness of Royal Power” (275–310), Jones isolates the power of the crown in order to elucidate its role in medieval society, showing how, again and again, “apostolic and royal power worked in concert toward the achievement of shared ends, with neither side bending the other to its will” (281). Jones takes the concrete example of the elevation of three men who had been assisting the king to aid the work of Pope Ubran IV: Gui Foucois, Simon de Brie, and Radulph Grosparmi, all of whom the Pope made cardinals. The first two would both become popes. Jones observes: “With the elevation of these men, the council of the pope, the college of cardinals, and the council of the king found real integration: these men remained in the king’s network—this was the reason for their elevation—but were not thereby less in the council of the pope, Once There Was No Church and State 1001 far from it” (284).11 In this context, we find the theoretical expressed in the actual concrete set of circumstances which actually happened, namely that the idea of the consilium et auxilium which Jones identifies was precisely that there was no “State” as such that governed, as in the modern period, but rather that society was governed by a “network of friends” wherein each party, each “friend,” “wielded his differentiated power on the field that was the peace, and with bits of law inserted here and there” (306). The vision he articulates, driven by the date in the historical sources, is that of “a single sacramental and incarnational world within which the material and the spiritual were always and everywhere intertwined” (310). Part 3, “The Fullness of Papal Power” (311–91), begins with an overview (311–14). The focus here will be on the authority and role of the pope and his legates within the shared social order. Chapter 11, “In the Image of a Proconsul” (315–38), takes an in depth look at canon law at the time as it relates to his discussion of papal authority. He shows how the sacraments were not the only means the Church had of exercising its spiritual authority, but rather, Church law made its own contribution. All law, civil and ecclesiastical, had both temporal and spiritual goals, and they worked together in harmony to achieve the same end. In chapter 12, “With the Counsel and Assent of the King” (339–69), Jones takes a look at the crusades under Pope Clement (Foucois), both to the Holy Land and in what would later become Italy. In this context, gathering money, using it to help in the Holy Land, and stirring up support for the crusade were united as “a single project” (342). In the persons of King Louis and Pope Clement we find again an instantiation of the theory Jones has been demonstrating of the unified vision, working in their own collaborative but unique ways for the same shared end. Jones explains: The pope’s apostolic power was only one aspect of the fabric of this network, albeit an essential one. It had to be combined with royal power within the context of a total effort. It was not that an alliance between the king and the pope was advantageous; it was rather that the very structure of society, of the order that pope and king had built, was such that the execution of a major initiative required apostolic and royal power to act in concert within the context of a vast network of consilium et auxilium that was made up as much of prel Jones presents as an interesting side note but something well worth remembering within this history the fact that, “with his elevation, Gui moved to the papal curia, where he worked as Urban IV’s legal advisor just as the Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas served as his theological advisor” (285). 11 1002 Jeffrey L. Morrow ates as of laymen. It was through such networks that social power was wielded and the pope’s fullness of power had to be deployed within this context. (357–58) In light of this history, a whole host of questions arise when a pope died. This is the topic Jones takes up in the last chapter of this section, chapter 13, “Sede Vacante” (371–91). Jones shows how, “the status quo always took precedent” (379). The questions concerned what to do about the authority of papal legates after the pope died. What sorts of decisions could be made, what were ratified, and so on. Had the status quo somehow been challenged? The logic was basically as Jones describes it: “Nothing new could begin after jurisdiction was removed, but all pending cases were to be completed” (380). The relationship between the pope and his cardinals was far more intimate than average networks of friends in medieval society, but the relationships were more “moral” or “familial” than “constitutional” or “democratic” (386). Thus, when a pope died, although the cardinals could not legally make novel innovations, they were so connected to the office and person of the pope in his life, that they could function as part of his body even after he died. The logic here follows the assumption that the pope, as father of the Catholic family spread across different lands, intends the good of the family, of the Church, and that the cardinals similarly intended fidelity to the pope and the Church. Again, Jones reminds his readers: “Friendship, not the violence of human law, was the fundamental principle of social order” (388). Christian Kingdom Part 4, “Conclusions: St. Thomas Aquinas and the ‘Most Christian Kingdom’” (393–454), begins with an overview (393–95) and sums up the volume’s conclusions. He reiterates a point difficult for moderns to keep in view, but essential for understanding this history, namely: The State did not exist at all. The State exists only as a particular organizational scheme of thought and practice, as a particular social order at a particular time and place. It has no independent, transhistorical or transcultural existence, no universal applicability. It may be true that the State described by Max Weber . . . had historical reality in the West during the modern period, but that was as transitory as was the social order of the thirteenth century. . . . “The State” and its companion, “the secular,” have a history, and there was a time before they existed. . . . The “religious” has a history, and the construction of the concept of the Church as the Once There Was No Church and State 1003 realm of the religious is a product of that history. (394) This is important to keep in mind as Jones begins chapter 14, “The New Law and the Two Swords” (397–448), taking Saint Thomas Aquinas as his guide. Jones reads salvation history with a focus on natural law, in light of the reality of sin, with Saint Thomas. Although natural law reflects God’s design for how we are to live, sin rendered us unable to live out these demands apart from grace. Jones points out how human law is intended to be “nothing other than the practical determination of the natural law, its application” (401). In Saint Thomas’s reading, however, sin has so fundamentally damaged us that we do not reason or act in accord with the dictates of the natural law, and this affects our human laws. The Old Law, according to Saint Thomas, was intended by God “to begin to correct this condition” (407). As Jones elaborates: The Ten Commandments were the most basic dictates of the natural law. Through them, God re-promulgated a law that before sin had been immediately available to reason. . . . The totality of the natural law, the entire life in accordance with reason and so with virtue, was contained within the precepts of the Old Law. Through the Old Law, God’s promulgation of the natural law internally through the illumination of the human mind and through human reason’s contemplation of creation, now compromised by sin, was re-accomplished externally through the revelation of the same law. (408–9) The divine law of the Old Testament was intended to help the people worship God aright, but also to live rightly with each other. The Old Law not only restored the natural law, but “habituated” the people in living according to the divine decrees (412). As an attempt to help us live by the natural law, the Old Law pointed beyond itself to the New Law Christ would institute, which would be primarily interior. Jones explains that, “within the New Law . . . human nature was redeemed, becoming once again itself and most fully ‘natural,’ even as grace elevated it past itself to its supernatural end” (414). Unlike the Old Law, then, the New Law not only pointed out how to live, but went beyond this, supernaturally enabling us to actually live out the precepts indicated by God. The theological virtues, faith, hope, and love, were foundational to the New Law. This is the context for understanding medieval conceptions of instantiating the New Law in society. This would require both tempo- 1004 Jeffrey L. Morrow ral and spiritual powers. The temporal power “provided organization and direction to the grace-filled community as it satisfied the necessities of life” (421). Again, in this context, the violence involved in wielding the temporal sword was not the main thing keeping the peace, in contrast to modern conceptions; rather, the temporal sword was wielded only when such peace was already threatened or lost. The challenge on the ground, so to speak, was, as Jones puts it, “that the realm of perfected nature and the true, interior peace it proposed was everywhere and always . . . intermingled with the realm of fallen nature and the exterior peace it proposed” (426). Jones summarizes the work of the two swords, temporal and spiritual, thoroughly and eloquently, and is thus well worth quoting at length: The spiritual and temporal powers’ project was to bring people to interior peace, to life under the New Law. . . . It was as they operated in the realm of sin that the most pronounced distinctions between the temporal and spiritual powers emerged: they became most clearly two powers when they were the two swords. . . . Against the violence of sin, the temporal power was that authority that used force, and the spiritual power was that authority that invited the sinner back to the realm of true peace, that preached penance and offered mercy and so a return to grace through the sacraments. . . . The spiritual sword sought to scare the sinner back into the realm of grace before he really left it. Excommunication was first medicinal. . . . If this failed, . . . the temporal sword would be deployed to frighten or force him into accepting a worldly peace. This exterior peace not only protected the society of true peace from the violent but also created in the sinner habits that were conducive to acquired virtue and conversion, and it was the space within which the spiritual power sought conversions back to, first, a sort of faith and so subjection to the divine law (as had been the case under the Old Law), and then to Charity through grace and so freedom and true peace. (426–27) In this context, the ultimate purpose of Church law was to regulate “the availability of the sacraments to a fallen world” (428). The purpose of law from the perspective of the temporal power was “to build a society of virtue” (428). Thus, the spiritual and temporal powers worked together in their different ways for the same goal: the beatific vision.12 Jones explains it thus: “The temporal power sought to build a society of virtue, a task that included education, good counsel, leadership, discipline . . . and 12 Once There Was No Church and State 1005 In light of all of this, it is a mistake to view the legal developments of the thirteenth century, and prior in the twelfth, as some sort of early beginnings to modern secularization, modern state-building, and so on, over and against the religious. On the contrary, as Jones has demonstrated quite persuasively, “it was the effort to convert more and more of the world from violence to true peace, to produce in the law the bridge from fallen nature to redeemed nature” (431). Jones brings his important volume to a close with his approximately five-page fifteenth chapter, “The Most Christian Kingdom” (449–54), wherein he explains how Jesus—the Second Person of the Trinity taking on human nature—is the ultimate grounding of the relations between temporal and spiritual. The two powers worked together, and both needed each other in order to be fully themselves: “What made the spiritual power a power was that it operated in the material world of the temporal. . . . What made the temporal power a power, rather than the violence of the pagan kings, was that it operated within the spiritual, that it participated in divine law” (452). Genealogies of Modernity In what follows, I hope to situate Jones’s argument within the broader context of contemporary theories of secularization, and thus genealogies of modernity. The “secular” is a contested term. Often juxtaposed with “religion” and “religious,” we assume modern definitions, which Jones has shown to be foreign to the earlier medieval universe. Thus one of the great contributions his work makes is to highlight the inevitable anachronisms which occur when we read such modern notions back into the medieval sources. Related misunderstandings occur even when we discuss “modernity,” which my own doctoral advisor, William Portier, used to say was “embodied in modern secular states.”13 protection from outside threats. . . . The spiritual power was necessary for the achievement of this object [a virtuous life] because . . . true virtue was not possible without grace. . . . What is more, the end of human society was not simply the life of virtue, but rather, through it, to achieve the enjoyment of God, the beatific vision, which was perfect peace. . . . The royal and the priestly were therefore distinct but united in a single endeavor that was rooted in the united kingship and priesthood of Christ himself. The spiritual power was ‘higher’ than the temporal power not because the rule of the temporal world of virtue was a delegation from the spiritual power, but because the temporal world was brought up and into true peace through the spiritual power” (428–29). 13 William L. Portier, Divided Friends: Portraits of the Roman Catholic Modernist Crisis in the United States (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 7 (see 7–12 for the broader context). 1006 Jeffrey L. Morrow By the “secular” we typically mean something like the world apart from God: the public space from which “religion” has been banished. Jones problematizes this dichotomy as it is too often applied to earlier times where such words meant something quite different. As he explains, “in the Middle Ages the ‘secular’ was integral to a conception of social reality that was thoroughly ‘supernatural’ in character” (5). Or as the anthropologist Talal Asad states: “At one time ‘the secular’ was part of a theological discourse.”14 Earlier Jones elaborates: “Thirteenth-century France was not a world of the secular and the religious vying for position and power, but a world in which the material and the spiritual were totally dependent on each other and penetrated one another at every level” (2). Certain segments of the Catholic theological world have retained this older sense. Thus we still speak of religious life in reference to religious orders, and diocesan priests are understood to be secular clerics. Some official Church documents still write of the secular as the temporal realm where God is present and which is the ordinary operating theater of the lay faithful.15 We find this as well in some of the writings of the saints.16 Changes in definition become clear as secularization enters English idiom in reference to the violent “stripping of the altars,” as detailed in Eamon Duffy’s book by the same title, whereby lands held by the Catholic Church were violently taken over by the state in the English Reformation.17 Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI summarizes the modern view of the secular: The secular state arose for the first time in history, abandoning and excluding as mythological any divine guarantee or legitimation of the political element, and declaring that God is a private question that does not belong to the public sphere or to the democratic formation of the public will. Public life came to be considered the domain of reason alone, which had no place for a seemingly unknowable God: from this perspective, religion and faith in God Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 192. 15 E.g., Lumen Gentium §31 and Apostolicam Actuositatem §2. 16 E.g., Pope Saint John Paul II, Ecclesia in America §44 (which is a formal document of the Church), and Saint Josemaría Escrivá, “Amar al mundo apasionadamente. Homilía pronunciada en el campus de la Universidad de Navarra el 8–X-1967,” in Conversaciones con Mons. Escrivá de Balaguer: Edición crítico-histórica, ed. José Luis Illanes and Alfredo Méndiz (Madrid: Rialp, 2012), 473–508. 17 See Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400 – c. 1580 (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1992). 14 Once There Was No Church and State 1007 belonged to the domain of sentiment, not of reason. God and His will therefore ceased to be relevant to public life.18 Contrast this notion of the secular with the use of “secular” in the thought of Saint Josemaría Escrivá: God is calling you to serve him in and from civil, material, secular doings of human life: in a laboratory, in the hospital operating room, in the barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the field, in the home and in all the immense panorama of work, God awaits us each day. . . . There is something holy, divine, hidden in the most common situations, that is up to each one of you to discover.19 These represent very different uses of “secular”: in one God is absent; in the other God is present and calling for a divine encounter, a form of contemplation in the middle of the world. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto belongs to what we might call the early stages of a modern secularization theory.20 We might add the work of Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, all of which seem to envision the secular world as “disenchanted,” to use Weber’s nomenclature.21 Critiques of Enlightenment “disenchantment” emerged especially after the Second World War. I am thinking here specifically of the neo-Marxist thinkers of the Frankfurt School, like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno with their Dialectic of Enlightenment.22 The idea that the secular required the demise of religion has not died, as we are likely all too well aware. Something akin to this appears as the backdrop and Joseph Ratzinger, “The Spiritual Roots of Europe: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” in Joseph Ratzinger and Marcello Pera, Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam, trans. Michael F. Moore (New York: Basic, 2006), 62–63. 19 St. Josemaría, “Amar al mundo apasionadamente,” 487 (translation mine). 20 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848), 3rd ed. (Berlin: Dietz, 1973). 21 Émile Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: le système totémique en Australie (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1912); Max Weber, Wissenschaft als Beruf (Munich: Duncker and Humblot, 1919). Weber used the phrase “die Entzauberung der Welt” (“the disenchantment of the world”), which was inspired by Schiller’s earlier “die Entgötterung der Natur” (“the de-divinization of nature”; “Die Götter Greichenlands,” in Gedichte von Friedrich von Schiller, [Philadelphia: Schäfer and Koradi, 1868], 55–57). 22 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1969 [originally 1944]). 18 1008 Jeffrey L. Morrow assumption of our culture today. Indeed, Jones points out as much when he admits that: Our own vision is secular. Even when we acknowledge the importance of religion, we do so from within the assumption of the secular: that reality itself is ultimately free of the religious. Religions come and go; they are relative. The secular is permanent; it is absolute and universal. To us, the secular is the field on which the game of history—including religious history—is played. . . . To us moderns, the secular is fundamental. . . . In such an approach, “religion” is a category that functions within the secular. (3) This was not the vision of the world of the thirteenth century. There have been several histories of modernity that have contributed something helpful to this discussion. Below I briefly mention a few of them in passing, in order to situate Jones’s fine work within this tradition. Richard Popkin published an enormous amount uncovering the early modern reception of philosophical skepticism.23 His most famous work is The History of Scepticism, which went through three separate editions.24 Popkin’s scholarship helping demonstrate the role of skepticism within the traditions associated with Enlightenment thinkers showed an important part of this history, which was anything but the work of unbiased science.25 The work of Alasdair MacIntyre was also important in showing the changing contexts and practices that rendered virtues once intelligible from antiquity through the medieval period unintelligible after the See, e.g.: Richard H. Popkin, The High Road to Pyrrhonism (San Diego: Austin Hill, 1980); Popkin, The Third Force in Seventeenth-Century Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1992); Popkin and Avrum Stroll, Skeptical Philosophy for Everyone (Amherst, MA: Prometheus, 2002). 24 Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (Assen, NL: Van Gorcum, 1960); Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 25 Mention should be made here of Benjamin Wiker’s much neglected Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2002), which does similar work. Also the work of Jonathan Israel has been important, showing specifically how Baruch Spinoza’s thought influenced virtually every aspect of Enlightenment intellectual debate. See, e.g., Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), and Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 23 Once There Was No Church and State 1009 Enlightenment, particularly in his After Virtue. 26 He followed this with Whose Justice? Which Rationality?27 In his Gifford Lectures, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, MacIntyre then looked at the nineteenth-century encyclopedic rationality, the Nietzschean postmodern genealogical project, and the ways in which tradition (in this case, Thomism) hearkened back to an earlier mode, escaping the problems of both modern and postmodern critique. 28 Talal Asad’s work helped undercut the old assumptions about the neutrality of the secular order, mentioning the twin origins of “religious” and “secular” newly redefined in the modern period. He tackled these first in his Genealogies of Religion and then in his Formations of the Secular. 29 A major turning point in these sorts of studies occurred with the publication of John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory in 1990.30 Ostensibly about the relationship of theology to the social sciences, Milbank’s tour de force was an attempt at showing the inadequacy of the social sciences at explaining human behavior when compared with theology. Milbank’s controversial volume challenged the methodological atheism inherent in the social sciences as modern science. In light of Milbank’s work, questions arise concerning even the possibility of another way, even of Paul Hanly Furfey’s “supernatural sociology” as a social science.31 Perhaps no line Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). 27 Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). 28 Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990). To MacIntyre’s work might be added Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2001), Hauerwas, The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), and Gavin D’Costa, Theology in the Public Square: Challenges in Contemporary Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). 29 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Asad, Formations of the Secular. 30 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006 [1990]). 31 E.g., Paul Hanly Furfey, “Why a Supernatural Sociology?” American Catholic Sociological Review 1 (1940): 167–71. On Furfey and his “supernatural sociology,” see, e.g.: Nicholas K. Rademacher, Paul Hanly Furfey: Priest, Scientist, Social Reformer (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017); William L. Portier, “Paul Hanley Furfey: Catholic Extremist and Supernatural Sociologist, 1935–1941,” Josephinum Journal of Theology 16, no. 1 (2009): 24–37; George P. Graham, “Sociology and Faith: The Witness of Paul Hanley Furfey,” Catholic Social Science 26 1010 Jeffrey L. Morrow within these post-Weberian studies is as well-known as Milbank’s “once, there was no ‘secular.’”32 By denying the secular’s often assumed perennial existence, Milbank is not denying its long history. Rather, he is attempting to point out the new meaning it achieves in modernity.33 Writing further he mentions something that lies at the center of Jones’s more careful and focused study, namely that, in the medieval period, “there was the single community of Christendom.”34 Shortly after Milbank’s and Asad’s works, William Cavanaugh published his 1995 article “‘A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House’: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,”35 which he later expanded in his book The Myth of Religious Violence.36 Cavanaugh tackled that favorite myth of modern secular nation states, namely that the modern secular centralized nation state is necessary in order to keep the peace. The story he counters is well-known. The Protestant Reformation shattered Christendom, resulting in violent religious conflagrations erupting across the continent. Following the work of Asad and others, Cavanaugh shows how this story is anachronistic. Religion was only then being redefined in the modern sense. Moreover, as he demonstrates in fine detail, many of these conflicts defy this overly simplistic narrative, since the various sides in the battles were not easily divisible into Protestant versus Catholic; that is, they were not fighting over religious doctrines. In the wake of these studies, a number of others have emerged attempting to show the neglected theological origins of modernity. Charles Review 8 (2003): 111–21. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 9. 33 Milbank clarifies his meaning further: “Once, there was no ‘secular.’ And the secular was not latent, waiting to fill more space with the steam of the ‘purely human,’ when the pressure of the sacred was relaxed. Instead there was the single community of Christendom, with its dual aspects of sacerdotium and regnum. The saeculum, in the medieval era, was not a space, a domain, but a time—the interval between fall and eschaton where coercive justice, private property and impaired natural reason must make shift to cope with the unredeemed effects of sinful humanity” (Theology and Social Theory, 9). 34 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 9. 35 William T. Cavanaugh, “‘A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House’: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,” Modern Theology 11, no. 4 (1995): 397–420. Cavanaugh followed this with “Killing for the Telephone Company: Why the Nation-State is Not the Keeper of the Common Good,” Modern Theology 20, no. 2 (2004): 243–74. See also Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination (London: T&T Clark, 2002). 36 William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 32 Once There Was No Church and State 1011 Taylor’s A Secular Age is perhaps the most visible and commented-upon of these more recent studies.37 For Taylor secularization is not the complete disappearance of “religion,” but rather the relegation of any religion to simply one among many. In this group of newer studies belongs Michael Gillespie’s The Theological Origins of Modernity.38 Focusing on intellectuals from the Renaissance and early modern periods, Gillespie attempts to trace specific theological origins of modernity, as his title implies. The specter of nominalism figures prominently in both Taylor’s and Gillespie’s accounts. Eric Nelson’s The Hebrew Republic joins a growing scholarly interest in Jewish theological sources of the early modern politics that gave rise to modern secular states, thus again showing theological developments as essential to the emergence of modernity.39 One problem with these studies is their failure to recognize the secularizing trend in the theologies they identify, like Erastianism or Gallicanism. This is one area where Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation has an edge on these earlier studies.40 Gregory understands the secularizing trends already present in the theological positions of the Protestant Reformers, as when he writes: “By rejecting the Roman church’s authority and much of medieval Christianity, the Reformation pushed the Republic of Letters in a secularizing direction: instead of being a network focused on the renewal of Christendom, it became a refuge from divisive, disruptive, and embattled religious affairs.”41 Many of these studies, however, are grounded in the work in political history that envisions the medieval world as one of increasing tension between church and state. This is especially true of Cavanaugh’s narrative and has been true of much of my own work as well.42 Much of this is indebted to the scholarship of Joseph Strayer.43 This is perhaps one of the Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 39 Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). See also the contributions to Political Hebraism: Judaic Sources in Early Modern Political Thought, ed. Gordon Schochet, Fania Oz-Salzberger, and Meirav Jones ( Jerusalem: Shalem, 2008). 40 Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 41 Gregory, Unintended Reformation, 335. 42 E.g., Jeffrey L. Morrow, Three Skeptics and the Bible: La Peyrère, Hobbes, Spinoza, and the Reception of Modern Biblical Criticism (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2016). 43 E.g., Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970). 37 38 1012 Jeffrey L. Morrow most important boons from Jones’s study. Before Church and State promises to break us free from the anachronistic trap of reading contemporary church–state conflicts back into medieval Christendom, where such concepts, let alone conflicts, would have been completely unintelligible. Jones’s work requires us to relearn the vocabulary of our medieval forebears in order to understand what they were about. This is important for Catholics especially since what they were about tells us something about what we are about. Hope for the Future Based on Jones’s Vision of the Past In 1980, Monsignor Eugene Kevane wrote an unabashedly Catholic reading of this history, stretching from classical antiquity to the contemporary period after the Second Vatican Council in a forgotten volume entitled The Lord of History.44 Kevane entitles his seventh chapter “Modernity as Apostasy from God.” In a way, as Jones’s work clarifies, this is a telling description. The implications are that modern atheism and secularism are, in a certain sense, Christian heresies. With meticulous detail, Jones documents the unified Christian world of thirteenth-century France. One gets the sense that the sacramental vision was not unique to France and her workings with the papacy, but obtained throughout Christendom. It was a theological and political whole. What modern secularization does is keep the legal structure in place—at least some of it—and jettison the theology that rendered the law and social order intelligible.45 Jones powerfully makes the case for a coherent unified sacramental Christendom that explains both why clerics and religious were so concerned with temporal matters and why lay rulers were so concerned with excommunications, penance, and the like—matters we would consider religious. Priests, bishops, popes, and religious were concerned with temporal matters as well as spiritual. The same was true of the laity, Eugene Kevane, The Lord of History: Christocentrism and the Philosophy of History (Boston: Daughters of St. Paul, 1980). A new edition of this volume has just been published in 2018 by Emmaus Road. For briefer treatments of the history of secularization within the history of philosophy and theology, see Pope Saint John Paul II, Fides et Ratio §§45–48 and Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi §§42–44. 45 Jones phrases it this way: “The modern Sate remains ‘secular’ only in the medieval sense. Or perhaps another way to put it is that the modern ‘secular’ remains profoundly ‘religious.’ It is the bottom tier of exteriorized and highly specified law within the Christian dynamic divorced from the upper tier of interiorized and harmonized law. . . . The spiritual power is reduced to its function in the lower tier, to its preaching and its example of upright living, and canon law becomes little more than the bylaws of religious clubs” (444–45). 44 Once There Was No Church and State 1013 be they princes, kings, or members of parliament. This was the case because both lay and clerical authorities were concerned with the “business of the peace and the faith,” and both temporal and spiritual realities were united there. Understood along these lines, there was no battle between church and state, precisely because there was no concept of “church” that excluded the laity, nor was there a concept of “state” as separable from the spiritual order administered through the sacraments via the priesthood. Thus, what appears to modern historians as conflicts between church and state were instead attempts by the temporal rulers to ensure justice by ecclesiastical rulers, and vice versa; the two distinct authorities or “swords” were inextricably bound in the unified “business of the peace and the faith.” This vision of society, unified as it was and centered on the sacraments, has its attractions. But there is no going back. Jones’s account does not deny the rise of secular states, nor the real situations in which we find ourselves today. He helps us have a better understanding of the past. He builds on the insights of Asad, Cavanaugh, MacIntyre, Milbank, and Taylor. But in deftly challenging the work of Strayer and others, without denying their gains, Jones has brought the conversation to a new place, which promises to explode prior paradigms. What we must do now is think through the implications Jones’s narrative has for us today, as well as for our future. Promising, I think, is the fact that the social structure Jones describes “was predicated not on war, but on the peace of differentiated relationships. . . . Peace was possible precisely because difference made Charity—duty, gift, love—possible” (50). Cavanaugh writes: If we understand the unity of body and soul, we must understand that what is really at stake is not body-power versus soul-power, but competing types of soul/body disciplines, some violent and some peaceful. Christians must understand that the state’s control of the body is a control of the soul as well. The church must see that its own disciplinary resources—Eucharist, penance, virtue, works of mercy, martyrdom—are not matters of the soul which may somehow “animate” the “real world” of bodies, but are rather body/ soul disciplines meant to produce actions, practices, habits that are visible in the world.46 William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 197. Cavanaugh’s own account is hampered by his reliance upon the work of Strayer, thus the throne-versus-altar debate he sees in the thirteenth century is anachronistic: “By the end of the thirteenth century, 46 1014 Jeffrey L. Morrow The stakes are high. Our task is none other than the evangelization of our culture, which appears to be in tatters. We must bear in mind, however, that the purpose is not merely earthly, the re-forging of an authentic culture, but heavenly, the evangelization of our neighbors within this decaying culture. The ultimate goal is to remove obstacles to their sanctification, their divinization, and our own. But not only that. We need to put them, and us, in direct contact with “the God whose light shines even in an age of metaphysical winter; indeed, the God whose perennial light as Creator shines even in the face of modernity.”47 As Jones’s narrative implies, this would mean entering fully into the Church’s rich sacramental life, which provided the context for medieval society in the thirteenth century, and must again for us today. Here, in the sacraments and the rich sacramental life of the Church, including her liturgical calendar and disciplines, we have great hope. For here, in the Church’s sacramental life, we encounter that grace which is able to transform our own tattered lives, and thus the world. As David Fagerberg so eloquently writes: “The Christian mysteries are explosions that transfigure everything that lies within their blast radius; they cannot be restrained within the walls of the temple.”48 The place to begin is with our vocation, and thus with ourselves, as Scott Hahn’s Jones-inspired argument powerfully lays out in his The First Society. Few saw the perils we face as deeply and darkly, and yet with a robust hope, as did Pope Saint John Paul II. And so, I end by returning to his quotation with which I began this review essay, but in its lengthier context: In our times evil has grown disproportionately, operating through perverted systems which have practiced violence and elimination on a vast scale. . . . The evil of the twentieth century was not a smallscale evil, it was not simply “homemade.” It was an evil of gigantic it had become common to distinguish the international church from the secular polities within which it operated. Church and state had become more or less autonomous jurisdictions, parallel institutions legally separated. The church had attempted to meet the power of the rising state by stressing its own jurisdictional power. The first treatises on the church as an organization were written only in the early fourteenth century, with the purpose of establishing the church as an ‘ecclesiastical kingdom’ parallel to the secular polity” (219). Cavanaugh is relying upon Strayer, specifically Strayer’s article “The Laicization of French and English Society in the Thirteenth Century,” Speculum 15 (1940): 76–86. Strayer’s reading of this history is no longer tenable in light of Jones’s study. 47 Thomas Joseph White, O.P., Wisdom in the Face of Modernity: A Study in Thomistic Natural Theology, 2nd ed. (Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia Press, 2016), xx. 48 David W. Fagerberg, On Liturgical Asceticism (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 194. Once There Was No Church and State 1015 proportions, an evil which availed itself of state structures in order to accomplish its wicked work, an evil built up into a system. At the same time, however, divine grace has been superabundantly revealed. There is no evil from which God cannot draw forth a greater good. There is no suffering which he cannot transform into a path leading to him. . . .The suffering of the Crucified God is not just one form of suffering alongside others, not just another more or less painful ordeal: it is an unequaled suffering. In sacrificing himself for us all, Christ gave a new meaning to suffering, opening up a new dimension, a new order: the order of love. . . . It is this suffering which burns and consumes evil with the flame of love and draws forth from sin a great flowering of good. . . . All human suffering . . . contains within itself a promise of salvation. . . . This applies all forms of suffering, called forth by evil. It applies to that enormous social and political evil which divides and torments the world today: the evil of war, the evil of oppression afflicting individuals and peoples, the evil of social injustice, of human dignity trodden underfoot, of racial and religious discrimination, the evil of violence, terrorism, the arms race. . . . In the love that pours forth from the heart of Christ, we find hope for the future of the world.49 N&V John Paul II, Memory and Identity, 167–68. 49 Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2020): 1017–1037 1017 Where Should We Place the Treatise on Conscience in Moral Theology? Benedict Merkelbach, O.P. Translated (with introduction) by Matthew K. Minerd Byzantine Catholic Seminary of Ss. Cyril and Methodius Pittsburgh, PA Originally: Benedict Merkelbach, “Note: Quelle place assigner au traité de la conscience?,” Revue des Sciences philosophiques et théologiques 12, no. 2 (1923): 170–83. Translator’s Introduction The topic of conscience has been at the center of many ecclesial discussions of late.1 Much is to be said positively about the desire to 1 At the original time of the drafting of this translation and introduction, many of the debates surrounding Amoris Laetitia were much more heated. It seems that the world of ecclesiastical discussions moves at a speed nearly as quick as does the popular media, replacing one topic with another quite rapidly. Although I share in worries that have been expressed concerning the creeping inexactness of ecclesiastical language in these matters, I am in agreement with the reading of the exhortation in question provided in Matthew Levering, The Indissolubility of Marriage: Amoris Laetitia in Context (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2019). With that being said, this article has been translated as part a broader research project of mine, being undertaken in the hope of doing some small part, alongside others of greater erudition and culture than myself, to articulate a Thomist account of conscience drawing upon the wisdom of the Thomist school historically as providing guiding light for a more robust articulation of conscience than what is readily fashioned if one draws solely upon the several questions devoted to conscience ex professo in Aquinas (e.g., Summa theologiae [ST] I, q. 79, a. 13; I-II, q. 19, aa. 5 and 6; De veritate, q. 17; In II sent., d. 24, q. 2, a. 4; d. 39, q. 3, a. 1, ad 1; d. 39, q. 3, a. 2; Quodlibet III, q. 12). For recent discussions drawn from a different, though faithfully Catholic, hermeneutic, see David L. Schindler, “Conscience and the Relation between Truth and Pastoral Practice: Moral Theology and the Problem of Modernity,” Communio 46, no. 2 (2019): 333–85. 1018 Benedict Merkelbach, O.P. emphasize the importance of the inner sanctuary in which moral judgment springs forth in our lives. To refer to the heavily-cited passage from Gaudium et Spes §16,2 conscience does indeed represent a profound sanctuary in the heart of the human person. From its deepest roots in faith and synderesis,3 as well as in the gains added by moral culture, philosophy, and theology, all the way to the terminal judgment of prudence, our moral reasoning (when it is indeed right and certain) sets the human person upon the path of the personal moral and divine self-governance4 that “existentializes” the 2 3 4 The text is cited in Amoris laetitia, §222. A stand-alone history could be written concerning the uses and misuses of these words during the past fifty-five years of Catholic history. An interesting study would compare this to the preconciliar schema De ordine morali christiano, §§7–11 ( “Draft of a Dogmatic Constitution on the Christian Moral Order,” trans. Fr. Joseph Komonchak, jakomonchak.files. wordpress.com/2012/09/on-the-christian-moral-order.pdf ). There is much to be said for reading the final wording incorporated into Gaudium et Spes as being interpretable in line with the more conservative wording of the schema, despite the way that this text was taken up by those who wished to find discontinuity in the Council’s expressions. Fr. Benedict Merkelbach has made interesting recommendations regarding the way that synderesis is illuminated in the supernatural order in order to declare the universal truths that motivate Christian conscience qua Christian and supernatural, both in the order of the theological virtues as well as the infused moral virtues; see Merkelbach, Summa theologiae moralis, 5th ed., vol. 1 of 3, De principiis (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1947), pt. 3 (De actibus humanis—sub-treatise De conscientia in generali), q. 3 (De conscientia Christiana prout est regula actuum supernaturalium), nos. 216–19 (1:203–6). Merkelbach cites the work of Fr. Noble, La conscience morale (Paris: Lethielleux, 1923); also see this same point cited by Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange in De beatitudine (Turin, IT: Berruti, 1951), 347. For a recent critique of this recommendation, see Paul Rambert, “Conscience et loi naturelle dans les manuels d’avant Vatican II,” Revue thomiste 119 ( July– September 2019), 428–29. This article contains much of interest and use in the matters to be discussed at detail below in note 7. However, the reader should take care regarding the use of Dom Odo Lottin, whose systematic work is questionable in comparison to his historical erudition. Whatever might be the case, a Thomist position concerning moral principles cannot limit itself merely to synderesis as a natural moral norm, for not only will the entire domain of acts of faith, hope, and charity be left out of consideration but, moreover, the entire domain of the infused moral virtues will be unexplained (for natural synderesis will never declare a word concerning the ends of moral virtues proportioned to the supernatural ends given through grace). This is an expression containing great power, used by Fr. Ambroise Gardeil in “La faculté de Gouvernement,” in La vraie vie chrétienne (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1935), 101–89. This volume is expected to be published in translation by Catholic University of America Press in the relatively near future. Where Should We Place the Treatise on Conscience in Moral Theolog y? 1019 human conquest of freedom for the good. Very often the term “conscience” is used somewhat loosely to refer to all of these aspects of moral reasoning. For Saint Thomas, it had a more specific sense, properly referring to the act of moral judgment applying moral knowledge to a particular case (see Summa theologiae [ST] I, q. 79, a. 13). In the synthetic outlook presented in the Summa theologiae, conscience is not treated by itself as a subject set apart. However, soon after the thirteenth century, it became normal to discuss the nature of conscience somewhere in the neighborhood of the treatise on human acts (i.e., ST I-II, qq. 6–21), often swelling the discussion with later controversies and subtleties, especially those that arose in the context of the great debates over probabilism. The history became incredibly complex, and we find ourselves faced with a question: “Is this the best solution for synthetically treating the nature of conscience?” This article is presented as providing one possible approach to answering this question, one that seems seemed quite respectable to the famed Thomist Father Garrigou-Lagrange.5 In the text presented here by Nova et Vetera, Father Benedict Merkelbach (the author of the erudite and lengthy Summa theologiae moralis6) presents the results of his own research concerning these matters, providing a historical outline of the problem of conscience in the tradition of Catholic moral theology, as well as his opinion that a significant portion of this discussion should be conducted explicitly within the context of the treatise on prudence. Merkelbach and Garrigou-Lagrange 7 argued that if right and certain conscience is 5 6 7 See Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, “Remarks Concerning the Metaphysical Character of St. Thomas’s Moral Theology, in Particular as It Is Related to Prudence and Conscience,” trans. Matthew K. Minerd, Nova et vetera 17, no. 1 (2019): 245–70. See Merkelbach, Summa theologiae moralis. But it is important to note that a significant vein of critique exists among Thomists on this very point. Some are concerned with this annexation of conscience to the virtue of prudence, and this concern is understandable. Thomas’s texts do at times emphasize the “speculative” character of conscience, to the point that some authors have seemed to hold that it is a purely speculative judgment and not a speculatively-practical judgment. On the meaning of this latter expression, coming from the later Thomist school, see my remarks in “Appendix 2: On the Speculatively-Practical, and the Practically-Practical,” in Garrigou-Lagrange, “Remarks Concerning the Metaphysical Character of St. Thomas’s Moral Theology,” 266–70. In any case, to my eyes, the main dividing line seems to be drawn between those who would have conscience be only a kind of judgment of “moral science”—that is, reflective moral thought, a kind of casuistic judgment (in moral philosophy and 1020 Benedict Merkelbach, O.P. moral theology), not ordered at all to the direction of one’s own acts but merely to the analysis of cases—and those who would say that conscience extends, also, beyond such scientific casuistry, to the domain of prudential (or imprudential) reasoning. Here, in the latter domain, the judgment of conscience no longer applies to any X whatsoever but, rather, to the acting subject himself or herself. It is important to remember that prudential reasoning does not merely pick up a judgment emanating from “moral science” in order to readily apply its not-fully-concretized judgment to the acting subject. Rather, this judgment would serve merely as a preliminary in the practical discursus involved in the prudential activity of deliberation. Much work remains to be done in order to arrive, then, at the terminal judgment of prudence, for a moral-scientific casuistical judgment remains still at a great remove from the full particularization of the act in question for me, here and now, given my own character, faults, strengths, circumstances, etc. When I first translated this article two years ago, I was an unqualified adherent to Merkelbach’s and Garrigou-Lagrange’s language on this topic. However, it was the reading of an essay by Fr. Pius-Mary Noonan, O.S.B., that changed the strength of my claim here, finally realizing, for instance, what separated myself from the explanations given by thinkers like Fr. Cajetan Cuddy and Ralph McInerny, who distinguish conscience and prudence more cleanly than I generally do. I was (and still remain) wary of the fact that too often this position renders moral science too completely speculative and not speculatively practical. And on this head, I remain deeply indebted to what is found in Jacques Maritain, “Appendix VII: ‘Speculative’ and ‘Practical,’” in The Degrees of Knowledge, trans. Gerald B. Phelan et al. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 481–89. However, even though Maritain himself seems to carefully distinguish conscience and prudence, he refers to concretized moral reasoning as “conscience” as well, even as included in prudential reasoning (perhaps in the order of deliberation, if not the terminal practico-practical judgment guiding the will’s choice). See the insightful chapter “La rectitude du vouloir,” in Jacques Maritain, Loi naturelle ou Loi non-écrite, ed. Georges Brazzola (Fribourg: University Editions, 1986), 63–78; cf. Maritain, Existence and the Existent, trans. Lewis Galantiere and Gerald B. Phelan (New York: Pantheon, 1948), 52n3. For two excellent histories and overviews on these two main veins of thought, see the following, superb studies: Reginald G. Doherty, The Judgments of Conscience and Prudence (River Forest, IL: Aquinas Libray, 1961); P- M. Noonan, “Auriga et Genetrix: Le rôle de la prudence dans le jugement de la conscience,” Revue thomiste 114 (2014): 355–77 and 531–68. For several others who voice similar concerns as those raised by Noonan, see: Michel Labourdette, Les Actes Humains (Paris: Parole et Silence, 2016), 204–45; Labourdette, “Morales de la conscience et vertu de prudence,” Revue thomiste 50 (1950): 209–27; Cajetan Cuddy, “St. Thomas Aquinas on Conscience,” in Christianity and the Laws of Conscience: An Introduction, ed. Helen M. Alvaré and Jeffrey B. Hammond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); Ralph McInerny, “Prudence and Conscience” The Thomist 38, no. 2 (1974): 291–305. Nonetheless, I cannot help but feel that contemporary language discusses conscience in a way that applies not merely to moral science but also to personal-ex- Where Should We Place the Treatise on Conscience in Moral Theolog y? 1021 istentialized moral reasoning. We cannot bend terms to fit a vocabulary that is no longer in use among our contemporaries (or, truth be told, by ourselves). I think we Thomists lose the intellectual fight by hand-cuffing ourselves to a vocabulary that even Aquinas himself did not develop in detail. Here, as a matter of methodology, I am of like mind with the sage words expressed in John C. Cahalan, “On the Training of Thomists,” in The Future of Thomism, ed. Deal W. Hudson and Dennis W. Moran (Notre Dame, IN: American Maritain Association, 1992): 133–47. Hence, I think voices like Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange’s and Fr. Merkelbach’s remain important in trying to craft a way forward in these matters. Moreover, Saint Thomas himself seems to talk about conscience both in relation to personal-prudential reasoning and in relation to “moral-scientific-casuistic” reasoning. The texts cited by Fr. Cajetan Cuddy show the latter clearly enough. However, merely to name one text testifying to the former bent, consider this portion of the body of Aquinas, De veritate, q. 17, a. 1: “Now, we use the word, ‘conscience,’ for both of these modes of application. Indeed, inasmuch as knowledge [scientia] is applied to an act as directive of that act, conscience is said to prod, urge, or bind. However, inasmuch as knowledge [scientia] is applied to an act by examining those things which have already been done conscience is thus said to accuse or cause remorse, when what has been done is found to be out of harmony with the knowledge [scientia] in light of which it is examined, or to defend or excuse when what has been done is found to have proceeded in accord with due reasoning [secundum formam scientiae].” Perhaps such directing belongs solely to the order of moral-scientific reasoning. The use of scientia here in this early-career text of Aquinas could mean “moral science” or could merely mean “discursive reasoning” broadly speaking, whether practical or speculative in its mode of resolution. Later in his career, he would attribute this kind of broad use to Augustine (see ST II-II, q. 47, a. 4, ad 1). I admit, however, that later in his career, he does not use conscientia in the treatise on prudence. We are not here adjudicating whether this is of significance as regards his terminology and the development of his thought. I merely note this ambiguity, which is present throughout, for instance, the work of Beaudouin-Gardeil, bearing witness to an imprecision in the Angelic doctor’s own vocabulary. However, lest I raise too much ire for making such a claim, I happily will accept the well-grounded findings of others if brought forth. Nonetheless, if the aforementioned application is performed in relation to my act (hence prodding, urging, or binding me), then we find ourselves in the domain of prudential reasoning, for moral science is one thing and prudential reasoning another, even if they are closely interrelated. Here, for whatever differences I have voiced in the past (and feel in the present, especially concerning a slight overemphasis on the speculative in the speculatively-practical domain), I find myself in agreement with the main thrust of the argument made by Fr. Philip-Neri Reese in “The End of Ethics: A Thomistic Investigation,” New Blackfriars 95 (May 2013): 285–94. In the end, at least to my eyes, “conscience” in Aquinas himself seems to straddle both moral science and prudence, and therefore, the way forward is for Thomists to lay out a teaching that is concerned with the problem and not with solely textual studies. 1022 Benedict Merkelbach, O.P. the judgment declared as prudence’s dictamen-judgment (in distinction from the imperium directing execution of the act), the only way to have a complete account of conscience is to discuss it in the company of the great host of virtues that are annexed to prudence, aiding in the lofty and difficult task of rectifying our natural and supernatural self-government in the moral and divine life. We thus come to see conscience as being centrally involved in the “conquest of the good” that is the task of prudence. Prudence provides the context within which further discussions can then take place: the necessity of the virtues for rectitude of will in relation to the ends of the acquired and infused moral virtues, the relationship of prudence to faith, synderesis, and “moral science” (as well as moral culture), the perfection of prudence by the Spirit’s gift of counsel, the nature of practical truth as helping us understand the certitude involved in conscience, and so forth. Yet, before the specific details are considered, it is best to know the general terrain. Why not turn to a great master of a former age to consider this matter—especially when that master provides us with an erudite article like the one being presented here? Therefore, the intention of this translation is not to provide a mere “throwback” to past thought on the matter of conscience. Rather, it is to provide the reader with arguably one of the sagest Thomistic accounts concerning conscience presented by one of the great pedagogues of preconciliar moral theology. We will not find in the past all of the answers to the questions pressing upon the Church today concerning this much-vexed topic. Nonetheless, in all such matters, I think that most of us find ourselves to be beginners and learners, and whatever may be the case for the reader, I know well the fruit I have personally drawn from listening to those sage words of Aristotle’s De sophisticis elenchis, cited on occasion by Aquinas: oportet addiscentem credere, as the old Blackfriars translation expressed it so charmingly: “It behooves the learner to believe” (ST II-II, q. 2, a. 3). In order to make new progress on these topics, let us first turn to a master, ourselves forearmed with docility, that great tool in the exercise of all forms of prudence—even academic prudence! Well-armed in this manner, we can indeed be that wise scribe of whom our Lord said, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (Mt. 13:52; RSV). Fr. Merkelbach’s Text Through the course of the centuries, the theology of conscience has undergone notable development, above all from the time when Bartholomeo de Medina, O.P., systematized moderate probabilism (1577). Moreover, discussion surrounding this topic continued its development in the wake of Where Should We Place the Treatise on Conscience in Moral Theolog y? 1023 the controversies between the tutiorists and the probabiliorists on the one hand and between the probabilists and the laxists on the other (ca. 1650). Before this (above all, from the thirteenth century onward), conscience was principally discussed in the treatise on human acts. However, in that treatise, such discussions were limited solely to the establishment of the general principles involved: “What is conscience? Why is it the rule of our acts? How does it bind, accuse, or excuse? What are the qualities required of it, especially regarding truth and certitude?” In speculative moral theology, true conscience and erroneous conscience (considered both as invincibly and vincibly erroneous) were discussed.8 Sometimes (above all in specific questions addressed in the “moral summas” and “penitential cases”9) doubtful conscience was discussed. Once this teaching began to undergo development, it quite naturally continued to be exposited in the context of human acts, adding to this discussion all the various questions which arise concerning conscience. Medina inaugurated this methodology, and it was taken up by all the principal commentators on Saint Thomas, as well as by all the great theologians of the age. In this vein, the theory of conscience continued to be part of the treatise on human acts. Besides Medina, we can find10 among the Dominicans [the following writers following this methodology]: Diego Alvarez (†1635); John of Saint Thomas (†1644); Labat (†1670), Contenson (†1674); Gonet (†1681); Grossi (†1704); Gotti (†1742); Billuart (†1757); and Gazzaniga (†1799). Among the Jesuits: Azor (†1603); Vasquez (†1604); Suarez (†1617); Becan (†1624); Pallavicini (†1667); Platel (†1678); the professors of Würtzburg (1766–1771); and more recently Father Pesch. Among the Franciscans: Herincx (†1678); Reiffenstuel (†1704); and Henno (†1713). Finally, among the Belgian clergy: Wiggers (†1639) and Daelman (†1731), professors at Louvain; Sylvius (†1649), a theologian from Douai; and 8 9 10 See: Albert the Great, Summa de creaturis, pt. 2 (de homine), qq. 71–72; Saint Thomas, ST I-II, q. 19, aa. 3, 5, and 6; De veritate, q. 17, a. 4; In II sent., d. 39, q. 3, a. 3; Saint Bonaventure, In II sent., q. 39; Giles of Rome, In II sent., d. 39; and Scotus’s discussion of this distinction in the Reportatio parisiensis. [Tr. note: No indication is given as to which reportatio of Scotus’s Parisian lectures is being referred to here.] See Saint Thomas Quodlibet VIII, q. 6, aa. 3 and 5, and IX, q. 7, a. 2. See also: Albert the Great, Summa de creaturis, pt. 2 (de homine), q. 72; Scotus, In I sent., prol., a. 2, no. 15; William of Paris [Gul. Paris], De coll. Benef., a. 8; Jean Gerson, De Praep. Ad mis., cons. 3. We do not intend to furnish a complete classification. Even less is it our intention to undertake a full and continuous history of the treatise on conscience. Here, we will limit ourselves to citing the principal authors, above all those whom we have at hand. 1024 Benedict Merkelbach, O.P. Perin (†1724), a professor at the Seminary of Namur. This is even the case for J.-B. Du Hael (†1706), for Tournely (†1729) at the Sorbonne, and for Laloux (†1853).11 The importance of this subject soon led many authors to compose a special treatise, separated from the treatise on human acts.12 Neesen (†1679) and the Dominicans John Syrus de Uvadano (†1727) and Preingné (†1752) placed it between the treatise on human acts and the treatise on sin, setting all of these treatises before the treatise on law: Human Acts— Conscience—Sins—Laws. On the contrary, Henry of Saint Ignatius (†1720), Schmier (†1728) and Dens (†1775) followed the order: Human Acts—Sins—Conscience—Laws. In Boudart (†1707), we already find the layout that will be dear to many modern theologians: Human Acts— Conscience—Laws—Sins.13 Already before this, the subject had taken on such importance in other authors that it overtook the importance of the treatise on human acts and was placed at the head of these treatises. Inspiration in this direction was able to be drawn from Saint Antoninus, O.P. (†1459), who in his summa follows a wholly idiosyncratic plan, beginning with the soul and its faculties, studying conscience (an act of the mind) before speaking about the will and voluntary acts. In any case, Laymann, S.J. (†1635), adopted the order: Conscience—Human Acts—Sins—Laws. Sporer, O.F.M. (†1714), followed him, while suppressing the treatise on laws, whereas Roncaglia (†1733) ordered them: Conscience—Human Acts—Laws—Sins. Illsung, S.J. (†1695): Conscience—Laws—Human Acts—Sins. And in contrast, Cuniliati, O.P. (†1759): Conscience—Laws—Sins—Human Acts. In his Medulla, Busenbaum, S.J. (†1668), completely suppressed the utterly essential and fundamental moral treatise,14 namely the treatise on 11 12 13 14 Fr. de la Barre (in La Morale d’après saint Thomas et les anciens scolastiques) cites also Valentia, S.J. (†1603), Tanner, S.J. (†1632), Arriaga, S.J. (†1622), Ysambert (†1642), Arauxo, O.P. (†1664), and Salas, S.J. (†1612). However, we have not been able to verify his accuracy on this matter. Preparation for this change can be found in many theologians listed in the preceding category (such as Suarez and John of Saint Thomas), who, while continuing to study conscience in the treatise on human acts, made it into a distinct chapter, which they relegated to the end of the treatise. He probably is not the first to do so. We have not discovered the origin of this ordering. [Trans. note: The assertion is surprising, given that the fundamental treatise of moral theology is the treatise on beatitude. Hence, we have, for example, the lengthy five-volume commentary De beatitudine by Fr. Ramirez. And Fr. Merkelbach himself does not neglect this fact in his own Summa theologiae moralis. However, it seems that here he has perhaps slightly fallen prey to the spirit of the Where Should We Place the Treatise on Conscience in Moral Theolog y? 1025 human acts, probably on the pretext that students had acquired knowledge about it in their study of moral philosophy. He places the treatise on conscience at the head of his discussions, followed by the treatise on laws, relegating the treatise on sins to the more specific treatises on moral theology,15 after the study of the commandments of the Decalogue! This plan was followed by Mazzotta (†1746) and by those who commented on Busenbaum, like Lacroix (†1714) and Saint Alphonsus (†1787), who nonetheless interposed a small treatise on human acts before the treatise on sins. Antoine, S.J. (†1743), no longer had a treatise on human acts. He presupposed it and followed the order Conscience—Laws—Sins, though without separating them by any interval. This plan prevailed in modern theologians who preceded it with the treatise on human acts, which they reintroduced (Human Acts—Conscience—Laws—Sins). This order can be found in Collet (†1770), Voit (†1780), Gousset, Gury, Scavini, Van der Velden, Haine, Raphaël of Saint Joseph, Pruner, Génicot, and others. Even among the Redemptorists, we find Konings and Aertnijs [following this order].16 Likewise, this order is found in Lehmkuhl, who, however, detaches the question on probabilism from the treatise on conscience in order to place it in the treatise on laws. Again, it is found in Ballerini, who comments on Busenbaum and who, in order to remedy his deficiencies, composed an outline de actibus humanis, which he placed, by way of commentary, at the head of his entire work. In addition to these general methodologies, some authors followed their own, idiosyncratic approaches. Noël Alexander, O.P. (†1724), follows the plan of the Catechism of the Council of Trent and inserts the treatise on conscience into the treatise on sins. Bonacina (†1631) had already done the same before this. And the Salamanca Carmelite moralists (1665–1724) combined the sequence Human Acts—Conscience—Sins into a single treatise, de principiis moralitatis, though they completely separated it from the treatise on laws. Patuzzi, O.P. (†1769), first discusses the rules of morality: laws and 15 16 moral theology of his age.] [Trans. note: The traditional expressions “special moral theology” and “general moral theology” are a bit opaque in contemporary English. Roughly speaking, the division for Thomists was between the various treatises on the virtues found in the Secunda secundae and the more general principles discussed in the Prima secundae. It is rendered freely in this translation.] Marc, on the contrary, retains Saint Alphonsus’s order, though he does so while bringing the treatises on human acts and sins back into the general treatises on moral theology, immediately after the treatise on conscience and the treatise on law. 1026 Benedict Merkelbach, O.P. conscience. Then he discusses the principles of morality: acts, virtues, and sins. Others still, like Müller and Bouquillon among contemporary authors, place the treatise on laws in the first place, then conscience, thus finishing with the treatise on human acts. This represents a confusion between the order of juridical science and the order of ethics. The former begins by studying the laws and envisions everything from their perspective. The latter has our actions as its proper and immediate object, given that it is the directive science of these acts. It studies other topics (i.e., laws, habits, virtues, faculties, motions, influences) only inasmuch as they are related to our acts. The theological works of Malines, Noldin, Tanquerey, and most recently Father Vermeersch mix together the two methodologies and adopt the plan: Human Acts—Laws—Conscience—Sins. Others study conscience in a discussion set apart, which they do not integrate into the overall framework of ethics but, instead, place at its head.17 Among these latter, we can cite Mercorus, O.P. (†1669), Thyrsus Gonzales, S.J. (†1705), and Concina, O.P. (†1756), for the probabiliorists and Terillus, S.J., for the probabilists. The outlook is the same in De Brocard ([†]1726) who, in this introduction, combines the teaching concerning acts with that concerning conscience.18 Finally, quite recently, Father Sertillanges, in his Philosophie morale de saint Thomas d’Aquin, places conscience in the specific ethical treatises, after the study of all the particular virtues. ***** How are we to orient ourselves in the midst of such chaos? Are we not forced to conclude that, in the end, it does not ultimately matter where one chooses to house the doctrine on conscience? Or, on the contrary, should we say that it ought to be assigned a determinate place? Should it be studied with human acts or, rather, should it depend on the study of laws? Does it belong to the general ethical treatises? Or, instead, should it be cut 17 18 [Trans. note: Arguably, in context “morale” should be translated “moral theology.” Yet for faithfulness and (in some cases readability) I will use the indifferent term “ethics.” Nonetheless, one should recall that moral theology is not a separate discipline from theology as such but, instead, is an integrating part of acquired theological wisdom. Fr. Merkelbach himself notes this point in his Summa theologiae moralis, vol. 1, nos. 1–6 (esp. 3). Also, Fr. Merkelbach himself is a little ambiguous at times, using expressions that are more appropriate for moral philosophy than moral theology. The reader should note this ambiguity, though his overall framework is arguably that of moral theology.] This work figures in the Cursus theologiae of Migne. Where Should We Place the Treatise on Conscience in Moral Theolog y? 1027 up into several sections and connected to different parts of ethical science? In recent days, this question has been raised in explicit terms. Already in 1884, the Carmelite, Raphaël of Saint Joseph, wrote: According to right order, the treatise on conscience follows the treatise on human acts, both because it is the proximate and formal rule [of human acts] and also because in the treatise on human acts we discuss the human (or, moral) act abstractly, whereas in the treatise on conscience, we discuss the same act concretely. Indeed, as we said elsewhere, in Quodlibet III, q. 12, a. 2, Saint Thomas writes, “A human act is judged to be virtuous or vicious in accord with an apprehended good, toward which the will is moved, and not in accord with the act’s material object.”19 Fr. Reginald Beaudouin, O.P., is of the same opinion: Saint Thomas discusses this argument briefly in Summa theologiae I-II,20 q. 19, aa. 5 and 6, and in passing in other places. He holds that its proper location is found in the place where he treats of the human act inasmuch as it is moral [i.e., the treatise on human acts in I-II, qq. 18–2121], for properly speaking, the goodness of the will depends on its object. However, the will’s object is proposed to it by reason, for the understood good is the object proportioned to the will. . . . And therefore, the goodness of the will depends on reason in the same way that it depends upon its object (ST I-II, q. 19, a. 3).22 This opinion did not find favor before the eyes of Father Leonard Lehu, O.P. (to whose side Father Dominic Prümmer, O.P., rallies),23 who treats of conscience after sins, habitus, and laws: Fr. Beaudouin thinks that the proper place [for discussions concern19 20 21 22 23 Raphäel of Saint Joseph, Institutiones fundamentalis theologiae moralis (Alosti: Vernimmen, 1884), tr. 2 (De conscientia), in proem. [Trans. note: Reading “II-II” as “I-II”.] [Trans. note: See: Leonard Lehu, “A quel point précis de la Somme théologique commence le Traité de la Moralité,” Revue Thomiste 33 (1928): 521–32; B.-H. Merkelbach, “Le traité des actions humaines dans la morale thomiste,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 15 (1926): 185–207.] Reginald Beaudouin, Tractatus de conscientia, ed. Ambroise Gardeil (Paris: Gabalda, 1911), 4. See Dominic Prümmer, Manuale theologiae moralis, vol. 1 (Freiburg: Herder, 1914), no. 141, note 1. 1028 Benedict Merkelbach, O.P. ing conscience] is found in the treatise on morality, following the example of Saint Thomas, who treats of conscience in ST I-II, q. 19, aa. 5 and 6. In response to this opinion, one can say that this was indeed the case in Saint Thomas’s day, when the entire question on conscience was reduced to these two questions: “Does erroneous conscience bind? Does erroneous conscience excuse?” However, since the treatise on conscience nowadays finds itself to have been greatly amplified, it is fair to ask ourselves: “According to the logical order, which should come first, the treatise on laws or the treatise on conscience?” Conclusion: According to the logical order, the treatise on laws must be placed first, with the treatise on conscience coming afterwards. This can be proven in two ways. (1) It is the office of conscience to apply universal laws to particular cases. Now, “Nobody can suitably apply one thing to another unless he knows both, namely both that which is to be applied and that to which it is applied” (ST II-II, q. 47, a. 3). Therefore, knowledge of the laws is a prerequisite for the treatise on conscience. (2) Modern treatises on conscience chiefly focus on the problem of probabilism, which is entirely concerned with the conflict between the rights of the law and rights of freedom. Whence, in such discussions, we often read, “The law is in possession [of its rights]. . . . Freedom is in possession [of its rights].” Now, in order to justly resolve a given quarrel, the prudent judge must know the rights of both contending parties. Therefore, the controversy concerning probabilism would be settled according to the wrong order of procedure were it exposited before the rights of the law.24 Before this, Father Lehmkühl, S.J., had certainly posed the question to himself and practically resolved it (in 1883) by dividing up the doctrine on conscience (as we saw in passing above). Considering this solution in its general outlines (and without approving all the details of applied morality that are encountered in Father Lehmkuhl), we believe that it could indeed be the most logical and best resolution of this matter because the doctrine of conscience, in its full breadth, contains a general part and a specific part. The general part serves as a continuation of the theory of human acts. Indeed, it is even an integral part of this topic. Conscience is the proximate, formal, and intrinsic rule of our actions, and it is impossible to understand 24 Leonard Lehu, Philosophia moralis et socialis, vol. 1 (Paris: Gabalda, 1914), no. 341. Where Should We Place the Treatise on Conscience in Moral Theolog y? 1029 the general principles of conscience without knowing why, how, and in what conditions it is their sure rule. Thus, with Saint Thomas, we must continue to exposit this portion in the treatise on human acts or must form it into a small treatise set apart, one which would follow the first part of the treatise on human acts. Indeed, logically, this part precedes the treatise on laws. In ethics, everything is studied on account of our acts, and in the study of the latter, the proximate and intrinsic rule (i.e., conscience) must logically precede the remote and extrinsic rule (i.e., law). It also precedes the study of habitus (i.e., virtues and vices). These latter can be the principles of human acts, but they are not a constitutive element of them. This general part contains only the three following points: (1) conscience is the rule of our actions; (2) this rule must be practically true or right; (3) it must be certain.25 However, this subject also includes a specific part. In the latter, we come to envision questions that are more practical in nature, being more determinate and more concrete, concerning the practical details involved in forming a true and certain conscience for oneself: 1. How does one acquire a right conscience? 2. How does one set aside an erroneous conscience? 3. When and how must a superior or confessor reform the erroneous conscience of his inferior or his penitent? 25 If we were to divide the treatise on human acts and the treatise on habitus into three parts, respectively envisioning them according to their psychological, moral, or supernatural being, we could adopt the same division for the treatise on conscience in general: I. On conscience according to esse physicum (or, psychological existence)—What is conscience? (See ST I, q. 79, a. 11.) II. On conscience according to its esse morale: 1. It is the rule of human acts; 2. It must be right; is it a right rule when it is… . . . true conscience? . . . invincibly erroneous conscience? . . . vincibly erroneous conscience? 3. It must be certain. III. On conscience according to its esse supernaturale For this last part, inspiration could be drawn from the articles published by Fr. Noble in Vie spirituelle. 1030 Benedict Merkelbach, O.P. 4. How does one educate one’s conscience? 5. What kind of certitude does conscience require? 6. How does one form one’s conscience in cases of negative or positive doubt? 7. When one can form only probable opinions aiming solely at the permissibility or soundness of our acts, what legitimate use may one make of probable opinions? 8. What is the species or gravity of the sin of the person who acts against his conscience or with an insufficiently formed conscience? 9. And so forth . . . The eighth question obviously presupposes the treatise on sins. Most of the others presuppose the treatise on laws and the general principles concerning right which are explained there, such as: the condition of the possessor is better; a doubtful law does not obligate; the fact is not presumed but must be proven; [in a doubt] one must stand for the value of the act; positive biases are to be broadened, offensive ones restricted [“Favores sunt ampliandi, odiosa restrigenda”]; a commanding law does not obligate with a great inconvenience; in obscure matters, what is least [minimum] is to be held, etc. Therefore, the specific part [of the treatment of conscience] presupposes and applies the entire general theory of laws. Likewise, it presupposes the treatise on sins. Now, we are no longer in agreement with Father Lehmkuhl when he places it at the beginning of the treatise on laws. We are even less in agreement when he places the study of lax conscience and of scrupulous conscience in the general part. We believe that these issues presuppose the general ethical treatises and belong to the specific ethical treatises. Merely scanning the statement of some of the questions that we just noted and, even more so, when we read them in [treatises on conscience in works of] theology, we get the impression that we are reading treatises belonging to “special ethics” [i.e., those which treat of the various virtues], given the diversity of immediately practical applications set forth in such treatises on conscience. Indeed, this impression can only increase when the study of lax or scrupulous conscience is added to it, something that is usually addressed in the same treatise. Therefore, we think that the treatise on conscience must be divided up. The first part must remain among the general ethical treatises. It envisions conscience in its most general aspects and establishes that it is the rule of all our actions, though on the condition of possessing the two qualities of truth and certitude. The second part, which is much more considerable in size, will emerge in the specific (or, applied) ethical treatises. It will exam- Where Should We Place the Treatise on Conscience in Moral Theolog y? 1031 ine each of the particular states or species of conscience (true, erroneous, doubting, probable, lax, scrupulous, and perplexed) in order to see whether each is a legitimate rule of action, then the practical ways to acquire, on these various hypotheses, a sufficiently true and certain conscience, and finally the different ways that one can sin in relation to conscience. It will be objected that this breaks up the unity of moral teaching. We respond by saying that nothing prevents one from sacrificing a little bit of unity on a particular point, like that of conscience, in view of the unity of the entirety of moral science. The synthetic order of the whole obviously must hold primacy. He who would consider the subject of conscience all by itself could not divide it up. However, if he studies conscience from the perspective of human acts and that of the various circumstances of these acts, the general order can require him to separately consider certain parts that touch on each other so as to better connect them, respectively, to the great divisions of the whole. Again, one may well object that it is useless for the same subject to be treated two times, for it will be necessary to repeat the general part when one addresses the specific part, on pain of not understanding the latter. In response, let us first of all note that this second objection completely destroys the first, since, by recalling and applying the principles explained in the general part, the unity of the whole doctrine will be placed in full light. However, the reproach of duplication is unmerited. One could register the same complaint against every other general ethical treatise. If the objection had some worth, one would need to refuse to divide the sciences into a general part and a specific part. The general principles that are concerned with laws are applied to all the commandments of God and of the Church. Nonetheless, one does not claim that the principles and commandments must be gathered together into a single whole. The principles of human acts have their own application and must be recalled throughout the whole of ethics. Must we conclude from this that we no longer need to study them separately, apart? The notion of sin is found in all the species of sins, and nonetheless the study of different sins does not enter into the treatise on sins in general. Thus, the study of various states of conscience must not enter into the treatise that considers conscience in general, although it presupposes the principles that are established in that treatise. Therefore, just as we separately study, on the one hand, human acts, law, virtue, sin in general, and on the other hand, the different species of acts, of laws, of virtues, and of sins in particular, so too we must study conscience and its qualities in general in the general ethical treatises, coming to discuss, only later on, in applied ethics, the various species of conscience 1032 Benedict Merkelbach, O.P. and the means for acquiring a conscience having all the qualities required. The fact that this latter part itself has a universal scope does not demonstrate that it must be incorporated into general morality. Legal justice, obedience, and charity (above all the order of charity) all likewise have their own general scopes. Nonetheless, the study of these particular virtues belongs to the specific ethical treatises. Likewise, the particular virtue of prudence and the way it must proceed in order to rightly form its act well (i.e., right conscience) do not cease to belong to the specific ethical treatises merely because those virtues govern all our actions and, for this reason, exercise a universal form of influence. The only things that belong to the general ethical treatises are the principles that are completely universal, governing human acts, conscience, law, virtue, or sin, all envisioned in general. ***** If the doctrine on conscience predominantly belongs to the specific ethical treatises, the next question is: “Where should it be placed in that section?” Without a shade of doubt, it should be connected to the treatise on prudence. The judgment of conscience is an act commanded by prudence, though prepared and posited by the virtues that are connected to it: euboulia (good counsel), as well as synesis (good sense) and gnome (the sense for exceptions).26 Therefore, the study of prudence and conscience must unhesitatingly be pursued together. As a result, the treatise on prudence will receive the unique recognition it deserves. It is a dumbfounding that the most perfect, most essential, and most fundamental of the moral virtues occupies such a diminished position in moral science today—a quite bizarre state of affairs indeed, given that no good act can fail to be simultaneously prudent. Students and even professors are so blind to its importance that many manuals pass over it in silence, or if they do speak about it, the entire treatise is reduced to four or five pages. As soon as it is connected to conscience, its exceptional importance will stand forth in its peerless character. To bring this point to the fore, we merely need to entitle this treatise: “On prudence and the virtues connected to it, considered in the formation of conscience.” 26 ST II-II, q. 51, a. 2, ad 1: “It pertains to prudence to counsel (and judge) well by commanding it, to euboulia (and synesis) by eliciting it.” ST I-II, q. 57, a. 6, ad 1: “Prudence makes use of good counsel (and judgment) not as though its immediate act would be to counsel well (and to judge well), for it perfects this act by the mediation of the virtue of euboulia (and synesis), which is subject to it. Where Should We Place the Treatise on Conscience in Moral Theolog y? 1033 Hence, we must face the question set before us: “How should the treatise on prudence be ordered?” We will furnish two responses to this question. The first option is to unite the theory of prudence and that of conscience, simultaneously envisioning the cardinal virtue and the annexed virtues, introducing the doctrine of conscience into the overall plan of prudence, such as it was constructed by Saint Thomas.27 This is what is suggested in the following table. General Conspectus The Treatise on Prudence and the Virtues Connected to it, Considered in the Formation of Conscience Introduction 1. On the various states of mind: doubt, opinion, and certitude with its various species 2. What are synderesis, moral science, conscience and law, and prudence? 3. Definition of prudence 4. Necessity of prudence28 5. Division of the treatise Part 1. On Prudence in Itself Q. 1 On the subject in which prudence inheres [i.e., the intellect-as-practical] Q. 2 On the object of prudence Q. 3 On the acts of prudence: a) On its acts in general b) On conscience taken specifically29 Its definition Its various species It is the conclusion of reasoning It is the rule of human acts Q. 4 On the habitus of prudence a) From the perspective of being a virtue b) From the perspective of truth: practical truth suffices (wherein true and erroneous conscience are discussed) 27 28 29 See ST II-II, qq. 47–56. See ST I-II, q. 57, a. 5. This consists in a summary of what had been explained in the treatise on conscience in general. 1034 Benedict Merkelbach, O.P. c) From the perspective of certitude: it suffices to have practical (or, moral) certitude broadly speaking Q. 5 On the cause[s] of prudence a) On those having prudence b) On the generation, increase, and corruption of prudence Part 2. On the Parts of Prudence Q. 1 On its integral parts Q. 2 On its subjective parts Q. 3 On its potential parts a) On those parts in general30 b) On euboulia, which is a prerequisite in deliberation for the formation of right conscience —on the obligation of employing solicitude in the formation of one’s conscience —the means to be employed in its formation —the forming of right conscience in oneself and in others c) On synesis and gnome in the formation of certain conscience: in a negative doubt in a positive doubt in a state of opinion in a state of perplexity in a state of scrupulosity or of laxity Conclusion: On the practical formation of certain conscience in oneself and in others Part 3. On the Sins Opposed to Prudence Q. 1 On sins opposed by defect a) On imprudence in general and on the sin of acting against conscience b) On precipitancy and on the sin of acting without right conscience (i.e., with a vincibly erroneous conscience) c) On thoughtlessness and on the sin of acting without a certain conscience d) On inconstancy and on the sin of acting with a scrupulous conscience 30 The special gift of the Holy Spirit called “counsel” could be introduced here. Where Should We Place the Treatise on Conscience in Moral Theolog y? 1035 e) On negligence and on the sin of acting with a lax conscience31 Q. 2 On sins opposed by excess a) On false prudence b) On craftiness c) On guile and fraud d) On excessive solicitude However, prudence could just as well be studied separately by following the order established by Saint Thomas and then adding the treatise on the annexed virtues envisioned from the perspective of the formation of conscience, thus adopting, for example, the following plan. General Conspectus The Treatise on Prudence and the Virtues Connected to it, Considered in the Formation of Conscience (To be placed immediately after the treatise on prudence ordered in accord with Saint Thomas’s treatise) Introduction 1. The virtues connected to prudence exist so that the judgment of conscience may be rightly formed. Indeed, good counsel is ordered to the right practical judgment through which counsel/deliberation is brought to its terminus, just as the right practical judgment is ordered to the command that commands the judgment of execution. Therefore, just as commanding is the proper and most important act of prudence itself, so too the judgment of conscience (which is formed from prerequisite counsel and in accord with which prudence’s command must itself be rendered) is the proper or most important act of the annexed virtues which prudence utilizes for its own end. Whence, after we have spoken about prudence itself, we now come to those things that must be said concerning the virtues connected to it, viewed from the perspective of the practical formation of conscience. 2. From general moral theology, we know: a) what conscience is and how it is distinguished from synderesis, moral science, law, and prudence; b) that it is the conclusion of [practico-moral] reasoning; c) that it is the proximate and subjective rule of human acts; 31 Scrupulous conscience and lax conscience could be connected to precipitancy and thoughtlessness. 1036 Benedict Merkelbach, O.P. d) and that, however, in order for it to be such a rule it must be right (from the perspective of its object) and certain (from the perspective of the subject). 3. Having posited these points, since we do not always have right and certain conscience immediately and easily, we must now investigate how one is to proceed prudently in practice in order to form a conscience that is right and certain in the various states or circumstances that are involved in conscience’s activity. However, all the defective states of conscience are reduced to three categories: a defect in truth, a defect in certitude, and a defect in truth together with a defect in certitude. Whence, we must discuss: (1) the discovery and formation of right conscience for the sake of removing errors (this belongs, in particular, to euboulia because rectitude in judgment especially depends upon preceding deliberation); (2) the formation of certain conscience for the sake of doing away with uncertainty (this is particularly concerned with synesis or gnome because certitude is a quality of judgment). (3) and the way to form right and certain conscience in a case of uncertainty that is coupled with error (where aspects of both euboulia and synesis are observed together). Part 1. On the Formation of Right Conscience for the Sake of Removing Errors Q. 1. On the obligation to undertake the inquiry [of counsel] with care and to form a right and true conscience, as well as concerning the means for achieving this Q. 2. On the species of conscience considered from the perspective of the object (i.e., from the perspective of rectitude) Having established the inquiry needed for the discovery of [the judgment of] conscience, when we consider matters from the perspective of conscience’s object, we know that this can be either true or erroneous (whether vincibly or invincibly). Hence, we must ask whether there are several rules for acting prudently (i.e., in a practically certain manner): a) on true conscience; b) on invincibly erroneous conscience; c) on vincibly erroneous conscience. Where Should We Place the Treatise on Conscience in Moral Theolog y? 1037 Q. 3. On the practical formation of right conscience in oneself and in others (on how to discern erroneous conscience—on how to set it aside—on the obligation of teaching those who labor under erroneous conscience—on the education of conscience) Part 2. On the Formation of Certain Conscience for the Sake of Eliminating Uncertainty 1. On various states of mind: doubt, opinion, certitude, and their various species 2. After bringing a diligent inquiry and deliberation to its close, man either arrives at direct certitude of conscience or remains in a state of doubt or opinion. Hence, we ask: a) What kind of certitude suffices so that conscience may be the rule of acting prudently and in a practically certain manner? b) In the case of doubt or of opinion, how can someone (in accord with prudence) form an indirectly certain conscience which is the rule of acting prudently, doing so in a practically certain manner? 3. Various systems have been devised in order to resolve these questions. Q. 1. On the quality of the certitude required for conscience Q. 2. On the species of conscience, considered from the perspective of the subject and of certitude: a) On negatively doubtful conscience b) On positively doubtful conscience c) On opining or probable conscience d) On the right and prudent use of probable opinions Q. 3. On the practical formation of certain conscience in oneself and in others Q. 4. On the sin of the person acting against conscience Part 3. On the Formation of Right and Certain Conscience in the Case of Uncertainty Together with Error A single question on the species of conscience considered from the perspective of the object and the subject at once: a) On perplexed conscience b) On lax conscience (definition and division—signs—causes and effects—remedies—imputability) 1038 Benedict Merkelbach, O.P. c) On scrupulous conscience32 (definition—signs—causes and effects—remedies—imputability—methods for directing scrupulous people) We did not wish to consider, in a disconnected manner, each of the virtues that are connected to prudence. Indeed, for now, the best position seems to be that synesis and gnome undergo the same process in forming the judgment of certain conscience. The only difference that exists between them arises from the principles that they invoke.33 With regard to the counsel of euboulia and the judgment of synesis or of gnome, these two acts naturally call for each other: judgment presupposes certain deliberation, and deliberation is brought to its close by a judgment. Therefore, good conscience simultaneously flows from two virtues. However, as we indicated on the plans erected above, euboulia plays a preponderant role in the formation of right and true conscience, whereas synesis and gnome play a preponderant role in the formation of certain conscience. The rectitude (or truth) of a [practico-moral] judgment principally depends on one’s prior deliberation, whereas certitude depends above all on the judgment itself. This seems to be in conformity with Saint Thomas’s doctrine: To one ultimate end, which is to live well in a complete manner, there are ordered various acts according to a kind of gradation, for counsel precedes, judgment follows, and finally there is the command, which is immediately related to the ultimate end. However, the other two acts are remotely related to each other. Nonetheless, they themselves have certain proximate ends: counsel has the end of discovering those things that (truly) must be done and judgment has certitude as its end.34 This is why erroneous conscience declaring an evil course of action to be taken is a defect of euboulia, and the craftiness that seeks false ways is an abuse of counsel: 32 33 34 We take the words “lax conscience” and “scrupulous conscience” in the proper sense of an actual judgment, and not, like many theologians, in the sense of a habitual disposition to scruples or laxity. If one were of another opinion on this matter, one could add a part: “On gnome in the formation of certain conscience.” Saint Antoninus (Summa, pt. 1, tit. 3, ch. 10) seems to connect the reformation of scrupulous conscience to equity (ἐπιείκεια [epieikeia]) and consequently to gnome. However, Cajetan limits the role of equity to the cases in which the law becomes harmful. See ST II-II, q. 51, a. 2, ad 2. Where Should We Place the Treatise on Conscience in Moral Theolog y? 1039 There is no good counsel involved either in taking counsel (or, deliberating) for an evil end, or in discovering evil means for arriving at a good end—akin to how, in speculative matters, one fails in one’s reasoning either by coming to a false conclusion or by arriving at a true conclusion on the basis of false premises because one has not made use of a suitable middle term [in one’s reasoning]. And therefore, each of the aforementioned cases are contrary to the notion of euboulia.35 By emphasizing these different roles, one could entitle the first part of the second plan laid out above, “On euboulia in the formation of right conscience,” and the second part, “On synesis and gnome in the formation of certain conscience.” In the third part, counsel and judgment will be of nearly equal importance: “On euboulia and synesis in the formation of conscience that is simultaneously right and certain.” ***** Of the two methods syncretized in the two tables that we laid out above, our preferences, quite frankly, stand with the second. First of all, it respects the excellent ordering of the treatise on prudence as it was conceived of by Saint Thomas. It would be a shame to break up this marvelous unity or even to cast the slightest shadow over it. Moreover, it helps to emphasize the perfect unity of the teaching concerning the formation of conscience by synthesizing it into a single whole. Moreover, Saint Thomas always treats the annexed virtues, their acts, and the sins opposed to them after having treated the cardinal virtue. It is quite astonishing that he made an exception for prudence and did not raise specific questions for the virtues that are connected to it. The second method attempts to fill in this lacuna, all the while remaining within the general framework of the Summa theologiae. This is also the method that N&V we have adopted for our students.36 35 36 ST II-II, q. 52, a. 1, ad 1; see also q. 55, a. 3, ad 2. Trans. note: As always, I owe a debt of gratitude to the editors at Nova et Vetera, whose careful eyes are always such a great help in the process of reworking and editing translations. Likewise, thanks go to Mr. David Capan, who kindly helped in the editing of this article with a spirit of true generosity. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2020): 1041–1077 1041 Book Reviews Do Not Resist the Spirit’s Call: Francisco Marin-Sola on Sufficient Grace by Michael D. Torre (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013), xxxiv + 404 pp. Dr. Michael Torre , former president of the American Maritain Association (2012–2016) and professor of philosophy at the University of San Francisco, has done a great service for Catholic theology in the English-speaking world by: (1) translating three pivotal articles written on “the Thomist system regarding the divine motion” by the largely (unfortunately!) forgotten Spanish Thomist Francisco Marin-Sola, O.P.; (2) arguing effectively in favor of such while providing a detailed review of all the theologians and philosophers who have utilized or critiqued Marin-Sola’s work on grace in one form or another; and (3) sharing his encyclopedic knowledge of the context of Marin-Sola’s articles, both historical, theological, and polemical. The structure of the book is simple: (1) introduction to Marin-Sola’s life and work; (2) a chapter comprising the three articles themselves (in English); (3) a chapter on the reception of these articles by other theologians and philosophers since their publication in the 1920s, called “Conclusion;” (4) an afterword on how Aquinas understood the salvific will of God, utilizing the particular Dominican tradition of which Marin-Sola’s work formed the capstone, and bringing it into congruence with modern magisterial developments; and (5) a set of appendices, one of which is a translated compilation of selections from Marin-Sola’s unpublished Concordia Tomista (equivalent to some 1500 pages), which were already made available in the original Spanish in the 2009 published version of Torre’s dissertation, God’s Permission of Sin: Negative or Conditioned Decree? A Defense of the Doctrine of Francisco Marin-Sola, O.P., based on the Principles of Thomas Aquinas (Fribourg Academic Press), which Reinhard Hütter reviews in The Thomist 76 (2012; pp. 305–11 in no. 2). Although I am sure he would dispute this, Torre’s own original contributions to the volume are almost as significant as the articles themselves written by Marin-Sola. Not only is the context he provides indispensable, but also perhaps most impressive is the extremely thorough chapter on the reception of Marin-Sola’s theses and his own recapitula- 1042 Book Reviews tion of the Dominican tradition leading up to the controversy in tandem with more recent magisterial teaching on the salvific will of God, not to mention the appendix that details the vast swath of Thomists cited by Marin-Sola with invaluable annotations. Hence, it is impossible to give an adequate summary of this work in a few pages due to the extreme complexity and depth of the topic—this is probably why Marin-Sola has been so neglected (most of his work concerned this issue, with the notable exception of his also very laudable work, La evolución homogénea del dogma católico), and why Torre has not yet received the recognition he deserves for this mammoth scholarly accomplishment. Most theologians steer clear of the vexed questions surrounding the (in) famous de auxiliis controversy because they either assume the debates are intractable or fear entering them would require dedicating their entire careers to the topic. The Dominican professor at Fribourg, successor to Norberto del Prado, O.P. (a theologian of grace on whom Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., relied heavily), was courageous enough, indeed, to take on Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, the longtime chair of dogmatic and mystical theology at Rome’s University of St. Thomas Aquinas (the Angelicum) on this key issue. Torre has demonstrated in an article published in Nova et Vetera 4, no. 1 (2006): 55–94 that Jacques Maritain’s more well-known treatment of this topic was largely indebted to Marin-Sola via correspondence with Charles Journet. Michael Torre’s research in this arena is simply unparalleled. Hopefully, this volume will encourage others to consider Marin-Sola’s arguments against the understanding of praemotio physica with respect to moral evil in terms of infallible antecedent permissive decrees. The fundamental arguments of this volume are: (1) there is no metaphysical or Thomistic exegetical ground for consigning sufficient grace to inevitable extrinsic inefficacy, but rather much reason to assert the reality of impedible divine motion and the true sufficiency (i.e., fallible efficacy) of “sufficient grace;” and (2) there were Thomist commentators before Cajetan and especially in response to the Jansenist controversy who understood Aquinas in the same manner as Marin-Sola, who sought to explicate this interpretation against the pre-Jansenist articulation of Bañez (in line with Cajetan) stridently defended, even if slightly mollified, by Thomists of his time like Garrigou-Lagrange. Torre expands especially on the latter as “the way of Gonet,” as opposed to “the way of Bañez” (62). The two ways diverge on the nature of the divine permission of moral evil because they understand sufficient grace differently. According to the “way of Gonet” defended by Marin-Sola and Torre, only the grace of justification need be infallibly efficacious, but the imperfect preparatory graces leading to justification and subsequent Book Reviews 1043 actual graces may be impedible motions, that is, efficacious on the condition that they are not resisted, a negative condition that is within the range of fallen human freedom, the ultimate source of moral evils. Some Thomists are particularly concerned about the implications of this line of interpretation (which they would call revisionist) for Aquinas’s doctrine of divine simplicity. But it is no more difficult for Marin-Sola or Torre to reconcile their position with divine simplicity than it is for Garrigou-Lagrange to reconcile the distinction between divine mercy and justice with the same doctrine or the latter with the non-necessary de facto choice of God to be a Creator (as he does beautifully in his 1914 Dieu, Son Existence et Sa Nature: Solution Thomiste des Antinomies Agnostiques [Paris: Beauchesne]), or to reconcile with divine simplicity the Incarnation of only one divine person alone or even the very distinction of relatio between three divine persons identical to one divine essence. None of this is to undermine divine simplicity, but to admit that it is a challenge for human reason to unify this truth of natural theology with the truths of divine revelation. Maritain addresses the question of divine suffering that relates to this doctrine of divine permission that he defends in his famed essay (“Quelques réflexions sur le savoir théologique,” Revue thomiste 69 [1969]: 5–27). Others may be concerned with the potential implications for spiritual theology. I am certainly no expert in that field (although I suffered through four years of novitiate and religious life in the now largely defunct Legion of Christ), but I do not see how one who believes God plans every moral evil is better equipped to entrust one’s life to the Lord than one who believes moral evil is always (or almost always) introduced by finite creatures acting “outside of” the provident realm of pure goodness. Put differently, one who believes that every evil must “cross the Master’s desk” is as well equipped not to demand anything from the Creator (or to presume upon his goodness) as one who believes that God is not reluctant, as it were, to permit moral evils. In fact, it would seem one who thinks God abandons human beings to their own inevitably deficient devices prior to any demerit on their part professes a God who does not wish to exercise his infinite love toward them (except insofar as punishing them for their inevitable faults could qualify as love). How is it spiritually healthier to believe that God plans out every evil that occurs in my life and in world history than to believe that he merely permits moral evils by not preventing them from being committed (for a greater good in the end)? It is hard enough to understand why God does not prevent certain evils. Good metaphysics does not contradict the revelation of an infinitely loving Father, and equally, divine revelation does not require a metaphysics of symmetry 1044 Book Reviews between the lines of good and evil, as Marin-Sola and Torre make clear. While Marin-Sola’s answer to the perplexing problem of reconciling infallible divine foreknowledge with non-infallible permission of each particular moral evil and divine simplicity is satisfactory to my eyes, there is always the possibility of improving upon the articulation, or at least addressing the issue from slightly different angles, as various figures from Maritain to Lonergan (see 237–38), to William Most, Robert Joseph Matava, Harm J. M. J. Goris, W. Matthews Grant, Brian Shanley, O.P., Michal Paluch, O.P. and others have attempted already, not to mention Torre himself in this volume (especially in the afterword). Accordingly, slight differences from Torre and Marin-Sola himself—even Torre diverges from Marin-Sola on limbo, for example—are valid for Thomists who are nonetheless opposed to the Bañezian (or Cajetanian) account on this question. Particularly eye-opening for me was the very well substantiated claim that there has long been a lesser-known school of Thomistic interpretation regarding sufficient grace and the related notions of the antecedent– consequent will distinction and the manner in which God permits moral evils, especially since the Jansenist controversy, but also to some extent evident in commentators prior to and contemporaneous with Cajetan (e.g., Capreolus and Sylvester Ferrara). But regardless of where Aquinas ultimately landed on the question, it does not matter as much as does the truth itself. I think there is still some work to be done not merely in Aquinas’s own potential historical development on this issue (e.g., is his later position significantly different from his earlier one, as Cajetan argues, or is it substantially the same on this question, as Ferrariensis argues?), but more so on how precisely to draw the diverse lines of interpretation that developed before and after the Jansenist controversy (particularly with respect to the nature of concupiscence), which perdure to this day, and perhaps also how to adjudicate the significance of the differences in the living figures I have named. With all that said, Torre’s marvelous volume is well worth its cost for anyone who desires to be a scholar (or student) in N&V the theology of grace. Joshua R. Brotherton Independent Researcher Fort Lauderdale, FL Book Reviews 1045 Women, Enlightenment and Catholicism: A Transnational Biographical History, edited by Ulrich Lehner (London: Routledge, 2018), xi + 248 pp. Ulrich Lehner , one of the premiere historians of early modern Catholicism, brings together biographical essays of sixteen extraordinary women of the European Catholic Enlightenment. Over the last half-century, historians have amply demonstrated the existence and vitality of an eighteenth-century Catholic Enlightenment that fused the dogmatic and spiritual traditions of Roman Catholicism with the values and methodologies of the moderate and religious Enlightenments. It now falls to scholars to fill in a number of lacunae in the historiography of the Catholic Enlightenment. While some of the great female Catholic rulers of this era, such as the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa (1717–1780), have received a great deal of attention, the story of the Catholic Enlightenment is often narrated too exclusively as one of modernizing statesmen, reforming bishops, and scholarly male religious. An impressive group of scholars have gifted us with a new point of departure for the study of Catholic women and the Enlightenment. Lehner’s introduction situates these contributions in the historiography of the Catholic Enlightenment and gender studies. While research on women and the Enlightenment has “dramatically increased” in the last two decades, “women who were to a varying degree committed to their Catholic faith and the trends of the Catholic Enlightenment have . . . not gained much attention” (1). This neglect is all the more surprising since many of these women were famous during their lifetimes and some left very strong literary marks well into the nineteenth century. While all sixteen of these short studies are of great value, I will expand upon several in what follows (while at least mentioning all). I have tried to select essays which give a good sense of the overall thrust of this project and of the vitality and diversity of women’s contributions to the Catholic Enlightenment. These sixteen women are organized, roughly, into five geographical/linguistic regions: France, the Iberian peninsula, the Italian states, the German-speaking lands, and Britain. Carolina Armenteros highlights the playwright, pedagogical theorist, and educator of royal children Félicité de Genlis (1746–1830) as “the French Catholic Enlightenment’s foremost woman representative” (8). In her best-known work, the educational manual Adelaide and Theodore, de Genlis offered an “exceedingly erudite educational method that was an exact opposite of Rousseau’s” (13). A friend of Voltaire, Rousseau, and d’Alembert, de Genlis broke with the philosophes over her “unwavering 1046 Book Reviews habit of defending Christianity and attacking ‘false philosophy’” (9). Because of this, while de Genlis had an enthusiastic public following, certain circles of enlightened French elites were less enthusiastic about her work. Nevertheless, de Genlis’s scholarship on education was “secretly indebted” to Rousseau and she risked reducing religion to social utility and propagating a quasi-deism (13). De Genlis, famous in her day, should be remembered for “eclips[ing] previous educational methods” and contributing “influential pedagogical approaches” which endured well into the nineteenth century (13). Alicia C. Montoya and Therese Taylor also contribute essays (respectively) on French women: Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711–1780), also a pedagogue, and Adélaïde d’Orléans (1698– 1743), the Abbess of Chelles. It should be noted that, in a study of 254 catalogues of private libraries sold by auction before 1800, the works of Leprince de Beaumont appeared second in frequency only to Voltaire (32). Moving south to the Iberian peninsula, Mónica Bolufer profiles the contributions of the Aragonese noblewoman Josefa Amar y Borbón (1749–1833), whose life and work opens “a window into the world of the Spanish Catholic Enlightenment” (50). Amar y Borbón, author of the 1786 Discourse in Defense of Women’s Talent, approached enlightenment from a practical, proto-feminist, and religious perspective. As with other Spanish enlighteners, the influences on Amar y Borbón cannot be reduced to a “passive assimilation” of foreign (particularly French) influences, but were grounded in “solid autochthonous roots” (53). Amar y Borbón’s views on rational devotion, social utility, and egalitarianism were rooted in Catholic and Spanish thinkers like the remarkable Benedictine scholar Benito Jerónimo Feijoo (1676–1764). Indeed, a consistent mark of the Spanish Catholic Enlightenment, which is also made apparent in other essays in this volume, was a civic commitment to the practical improvement of society at all levels (73–74). Marìa Gertrudis Hore (1742–1801), a Spanish nun and poet of Irish parentage, is studied by Elizabeth Franklin Lewis. Catherine M. Jaffe contributes a study of Marìa Lorenza de los Rìos y Loyo (1761–1821), and Raquel Bello and Elias Torres round out Iberian subjects with an essay on the Portuguese countess of Vimieiro, Teresa de Mello Breyner (1739–1798?). Two famous scholars from the Italian states are then considered. Rebecca Messbarger explores the relationship between faith and science in the work of the anatomist Anna Morandi Manzolini (1714–1774). Paula Findlen highlights the remarkable professora Laura Bassi (1711–78), perhaps, with the possible exception of the mathematician and mystic Maria Gaetana Agnesi of Milan, the most famous female Catholic enlight- Book Reviews 1047 ener. Both Morandi and Bassi were daughters of Bologna, the second city of the Papal States, which, under Archbishop Prospero Lambertini (1675–1758; Pope Benedict XIV from 1740 to 1758) boasted a rich culture of enlightened Catholic scholarship. The physicist Bassi was a cultured, learned, and deeply pious Italian in the mid-eighteenth-century mold of Lambertini and the scholar-priest Ludovico Muratori. She was also a devoted mother and one of the first European women to ever occupy a chaired professorship. Four essays concern women from the German-speaking territories and Habsburg lands. The mix of cross-confessional Christianity with social action promoted by the sisters Maria Eleonora Sporck (1687–1717) and Anna Katharina Swéerts-Sporck (1689–1754) is explored by Veronika Čapská. Anke Gilleir introduces the enlightened Austrian Caroline Pichler (1769–1843), a novelist whose work was, in part, a counter to Edward Gibbon. Pichler’s life was marked by the tumult of the aggressive Erastianism of Emperor Joseph II, the French Revolution, and the age of Restoration. Pichler’s deep ambivalence with Joseph’s project and its legacy highlights an enlightened voice critiquing the religious legacy of perhaps the most aggressive “enlightened despot” of the eighteenth century. Ute Kueppers-Braun chronicles the life of the princess-abbess of Essen, Maria Kunigunde of Saxony (1740–1826). Daughter of the King of Poland and sister to Elector Clemens Wezenslaus, archbishop of Trier (with whom she lived happily for much of her life), Kunigunde was a remarkably active enlightened reformer in her own right. In the tradition of imperial abbesses (Fürstäbtissinnen), she was invested by pope and emperor with temporal authority in her small territory. A victim of misogynistic historiography, her accomplishments are too little-known. Andreas Oberdorf ’s chapter on Amalia von Gallitzin (1748–1806) is an investigation of an important figure and also illuminates the transnational character of Catholic enlightenment. Gallitzin, daughter of a Prussian field marshal and wife of a Russian prince, was an active contributor to the Kreis von Münster (Circle of Münster), a loose network of enlightened reformers. Her son, Demetrius, spent his career in America. Under the enlightened bishop John Carroll, Demetrius was ordained a priest for the nascent American Catholic Church. Moving to the persecuted Catholicism of the British Isles, Michael Tomko profiles the thought of Elizabeth Inchbald (1753–1821), who occupied a political and intellectual place in between revolutionary Jacobinism and “Cisalpinism” (a patriotic, establishment form of English Catholicism). Much to the benefit of many future readers, a stutter pushed the beautiful young Inchbald from the stage to the desk. After a career as 1048 Book Reviews a brilliant novelist and playwright, Inchbald (maddeningly) burned her memoirs, page by page, at the recommendation of Bishop William Poynter. Anna Battigelli’s portrait of the convert Jane Barker (1652–1732) will be of great interest to students of Jacobitism (that is, supporters of the Catholic Stuart line against the reigning Protestant Hanoverians) and those interested in the fascinating debates which raged in English and French political and religious life in this period. In a counter-intuitive historical twist, explored recently in Gabriel Glickman’s masterful monograph The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745, Jacobites were at the forefront of discussions of freedom of conscience and the acceptance of de facto religious pluralism in a tolerant public sphere. Barker, a romance writer who was “close to being the poet laureate of the exiled Stuarts” (204; Battigelli citing Paul Korshin), was one of the most important English appropriators of the thought of François Fénelon (1651–1715), one of the intellectual and spiritual giants of French Catholicism in this period. Finally, in a fascinating essay, Agnieszka Whelan introduces Izabela Czartoryska (1745–1835), a learned Polish aristocrat whose engagement in gardening cultivated a sacred, religious place for local peasants and advanced “the ideas and aesthetic principles of the Enlightenment” (216). This collection will no doubt be the first port of call for scholars and students of women Catholic enlighteners. One of the exciting elements of the volume is that one is left with a sense that many future paths have been opened up for more sustained consideration of women in the Catholic Enlightenment. What was the place of women, especially educated, enlightened women, in the exciting and internecine debates that rocked the eighteenth-century Church: the suppression of the all-male Society of Jesus? The controversies over “effeminate” and “novel” devotions like the Sacred Heart? The statist and pseudo-rationalist Erastian phenomena? Was there any enduring appeal of Jansenism to eighteenth-century women, a movement so shaped by female theological learning and resistance to ecclesial and state tyranny at least until the destruction of PortRoyal by Louis XIV in 1711? Did female Catholic enlighteners, especially women religious, have networks comparable to the many enlightened networks of male religious? Those who are intrigued by these questions, and by the story of Catholic women of great faith and learning will find in this volume an enjoyable and immensely useful launching point. N&V Shaun Blanchard Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University Baton Rouge, LA Book Reviews 1049 Kardinal Leo Scheffczyk (1920–2005): Das Vermächtnis seines Denkens für die Gegenwart, mit wissenschaftlichem Gesamtverzeichnis seiner Schriften, edited by Johannes Nebel, F.S.O (Regensburg: Pustet, 2017), 416 pp. Spanish translation without Scheffczyk’s bibliography: Cardenal Leo Scheffczyk (1920–2005): el Legado de su Pensiamento para la Actualidad, edited by Johannes Nebel, translated by José Ramón Villa (Pamplona: EUNSA, 2017), 295 pp. Without Leo Scheffczyk (1920–2005)—the student of the significant Munich dogmatician Michael Schmaus and along with the later cardinals Yves Congar and Alois Grillmeier editor of the multi-volume standard reference work Handbuch der Dogmengeschichte—German-language Catholic theology is unimaginable in the second half of the twentieth century. In addition, he was co-editor of the six-volume and unsurpassed Marienlexikon. His bibliography lists more than two thousand titles, partially translated into twelve languages. Now a conference volume is available, carefully edited by Johannes Nebel, F.S.O, with nine papers on various aspects of Scheffczyk’s extensive oeuvre, which were delivered at an international symposium on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Scheffczyk’s death (2015) in Thalbach Monastery, Austria. Scheffczyk’s former student and now Augsburg emeritus dogmatics ordinary Anton Ziegenaus spoke about Scheffczyk’s understanding of history as constantly sustained by God’s salvific will and therefore always a potential locus of divine truth (23–33; all references to the original German edition). The dogma spoken into history ennobles humankind— pace Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Rahner. The highest possible reason for this is the Incarnation of the Son of God as the “culmination point of history and revelation; the fullness of time (Gal 4:4).” Due to his comprehensive knowledge of the history of dogma, Scheffczyk succeeds in making the Christian dogma formulated in time, but standing above time, understandable for today. It is ultimately “God’s Spirit” who makes this possible through sacramental mediation. Thus, Scheffczyk is able to protect the personal dimension of faith from Rahner’s transcendental Thomism or Teilhard’s evolutionism. In material continuation of Ziegenaus’s lecture, the contribution of Imre v. Gaál (Chicago; this reviewer) (34–55) roots Scheffczyk’s thinking in his first work, his 1952 dissertation on the historiographical achievement in 1050 Book Reviews the sweeping History of the Religion of Jesus Christ (1806–18) by Friedrich Leopold Count zu Stolberg. Since history is ultimately always participation in the divine, there can be no autonomous immanence—on this point he parallels de Lubac. This explains both the theologian Scheffczyk’s deep optimism and his skepticism against any appropriation of the mysteries of faith through rigid systemic thinking (pace Rahner). Stolberg’s historical context between Enlightenment and Romanticism sharpens Scheffczyk’s own view of contemporary events (according to Hauke) and enables him to develop a theology that is actually “classical,” à la John Henry Newman, Matthias Scheeben, Yves Congar, or Dumitru Stăniloae. With ample philosophical accentuations, the Protestant theologian Harald Seubert (Basel, Switzerland) spoke about Scheffczyk’s repeatedly translated key work Katholische Glaubenswelt: Wahrheit und Gestalt (The Universe of Faith. Truth and Form; published first in 1977) (56–78). In agreement with the Anselmic axiom fides quaerens intellectum, Scheffczyk is concerned with the integration of theology and metaphysics, thus contrasting the Catholic et . . . et with the Reformatory solus. Seubert sums up: “According to Scheffczyk, the structural moment of the [Catholic] universal is suited to unite the modern pluralities that otherwise threaten to stand either in relativistic indifference or in splinter-like and divisive conflict to one another” (63; all English translations are original to this review). Scheffczyk’s teaching on the Blessed Trinity is—at times critically— presented by Thomas Marschler, successor to Ziegenaus in the dogmatic chair in Augsburg (79–106). In particular, Scheffczyk’s Der Gott der Offenbarung (The God of Revelation) is discussed. With profound knowledge of neo-Scholasticism, he shows how Scheffczyk, entirely in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council (Optatam Totius §16), follows a three-step approach when presenting dogmatic contents: exegetical findings first, followed by a presentation of the historical development, and thereupon speculative penetration. Completely d’accord with Dei Verbum, revelation is perceived as “self-communication of a personal God” (83). Rahner’s apparent conflation of the economic and immanent Trinity is corrected by Scheffczyk through further differentiations. He clearly distances himself from a functional understanding of God à la Moltmann, Barth, and the death theology of God. Ultimately, the liveliness of a triune God a se is indispensable for asserting the dignity of the human person. Mary is the unsurpassable paradigm for a successful relationship between man and the Blessed Trinity. Parallels to Schmaus and Johann Auer are drawn. The congeniality with the most important theologian of the nineteenth century, Matthias Scheeben, is shown. Marschler states: “Scheffczyk is Book Reviews 1051 thus a representative of a type of Catholic dogmatics in the 20th century that translates tradition into a new synthesis.” (103). The Freiburg (Germany) dogmatician Helmut Hoping reflects on Scheffczyk’s Christology (107–20). The point d’appui is Bultmann’s attempt to mythologize the birth of Jesus and Scheffczyk’s rejection of his position and those of Hans Küng and Edward Schillebeeckx as well. Scheffczyk emphasizes the irreducible intertwinedness of “Christology from below” and “Christology from above” (109). With Walter Kasper Scheffczyk argues, so Hoping summarizes, “Jesus was not a god walking on earth, who would have clothed himself with the livery of a human body, but a true man” (110). On this point he also agreed with his Protestant Munich colleague Wolfhart Pannenberg. God acts mediante natura, via secondary causes. Therefore, the dogmas of Nicaea and Chalcedon do not contradict the laws of nature. The resurrection of Christ does not experience a plausibility crisis through the natural sciences. The doctrine of grace experienced a period of neglect in the time between 1970 and 2010. Ursula Lievenbrück (Augsburg) competently explains how Scheffczyk took up the cudgels for the theological dimension of faith in this time (121–47), although this topic did not stand in the foreground of his writings. In dialogue with Scheeben, de Lubac, Rahner, and von Balthasar (Apokatastasis), Scheffczyk overcame the narrow manualistic understanding of grace; now personalized, grace is perceived “communicating divine love” (124). It is “the power that deeply affects man, touches his personal center and heals and elevates his innermost being” (126) which leads to the vision of God—according to Scheffczyk. New and groundbreaking is Scheffczyk’s view of the “interaction of grace and freedom” (145), thereby echoing the charitological treatises of his teacher Schmaus and Regensburg colleague Johann Auer: of supernatural gratia sanctificans and natural gratia sanans. Lievenbrück apprehends Scheffczyk’s proximity to the neo-Scholastic understanding of grace as a weakness. However, she confuses method and presentation with content. Actually, on this point, Scheffczyk is not inspired by Joseph Pohle or others like him, but by the speculative and original Scheeben. The longest contribution comes from the Scheffczyk student and dogmatician Manfred Hauke (Lugano, Switzerland) (148–85). The Mariologist Hauke explains why Scheffczyk is the doyen of German-speaking Mariology. About 20 percent of the writings of this theologian are dedicated to Mariology, including his 1959 habilitation on Marian devotion during the Carolingian period, which “established Scheffczyk’s fame as a Mariologist and dogma historian” (151). His final volume of Katholische Dogmatik sets standards in this discipline. Hauke describes knowledge- 1052 Book Reviews ably the genesis of the six-volume Marian encyclopedia Marienlexikon (1988–1994). He also shows how Scheffczyk draws from the Mariology of Petrus Canisius. Against Rahner, he successfully takes exception with an “anthropocentric levelling of the Marian truth” (160). The Ekklesia is essentially Marian: the Marian and Petrine principles determine and enable each other. Scheffczyk is attached to the title Coredemptrix, but does not deepen it. In a balanced way Scheffczyk opts for Mary as Mother of God and companion of the Redeemer as “the Mariological fundamental principle.” In a stylistically successful way Veit Neumann (St. Pölten, Austria) sheds light on the literary interests of the theologian Scheffczyk in the context of the grace–nature problématique (186–207). He read Georges Bernanos, François Mauriac, Ernst Jünger, Graham Greene, Feodor Dostoyevsky, Gertrud von Le Fort, and Dick Ouwendijk. In 1951 Scheffczyk gave a lecture entitled “Georges Bernanos: The Reality and the Mystery of Grace” in Königstein (near Frankfurt). On that occasion, he criticized that Bernanos did not integrate “the Catholic et . . . et” into his novel Diary of a Country Priest. Also in Königstein, he gave a lecture in 1952 on “The priestly Figure in modern Literature.” Scheffczyk’s language is presented as exemplary. The editor, Father Johannes Nebel (Thalbach, Austria), writes the last paper about the personality of Scheffczyk in relation to his theology in a sensitive and knowledgeable way. Character traits appear which are normative for every priest and theologian. Notably in the 1980s, the Germanist and theologian von Balthasar considered Scheffczyk the most important German-speaking dogmatician of his time. His character was shaped by his Catholic faith, more precisely by his Upper Silesian parents (miners), by the Jesuit-led youth movement Neudeutschlandbund, and by Breslau Seminary (now Wroclaw, Poland). He must have had a charisma that successfully united “leadership and solidarity” (217). Thus he became class president and Obersenior (key student representative) in the seminary. This combination of “character formation and faith orientation” logically led to the priestly gift of magnanimous surrender of self to Christ. In an epoch that (also) put the individual (theologian) in the foreground, Scheffczyk exemplified “self-denial in the service of Catholic universality” (225). This can also be seen in the “‘purity’ of [his] linguistic articulation” (231) long before his time as a renowned theologian. To underscore this, Nebel quotes from three poems written by Scheffczyk in 1939, 1943, and 1944. A special feature of this volume is Scheffczyk’s exhaustive bibliography, meticulously compiled by Nebel (241–416), which is systematically and chronologically ordered. All previous bibliographies are thus obsolete— Book Reviews 1053 even that compiled by the German, otherwise stellar Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon! This volume is indispensable for everyone who wants to become familiar with the thinking and work of this important Catholic theologian. The reviewer looks forward to the next Scheffczyk symposium in N&V Lugano, Switzerland in 2020. Fr. Emery de Gaál Mundelein Seminary Mundelein, IL A Saint for East and West: Maximus the Confessor’s Contribution to Eastern and Western Christian Theology, edited by Daniel Haynes (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2019), xxv + 281 pp. This book takes as a supposition that the contentious essence–energy problems between Gregory Palamas and Thomas Aquinas have reached an impasse in modern ecumenical discussion. In an effort to overcome that impasse, the book recommends turning to Maximus the Confessor as a common patristic source in which Christians of different stripes can recognize themselves and each other, behind and prior to the challenging theological differences between East and West that sharpened in the post-Photian and post-Schism period. The ecumenical significance of Maximus for Greek and Latin Christianity is rightly placed at the center of the collection. Still, the shadow of the Palamite controversy looms over many of its essays and appears to have been a part of the impetus for the volume. A number of contributions are implicitly or explicitly devoted to concepts that refer back to Palamas: participation, divine energy, metaphysics, and Maximus’s theory of the logoi. Along the way, Maximus is also brought to bear on other issues of ecumenical import (the papacy, the Filioque, and the concept of the natural and of human nature) and broad issues in moral theology (like the concept of the will and the imitation of Christ). The essays make various and not wholly consonant use of Maximus, which is to be expected from a cast of authors of different ecclesial backgrounds. Given the different uses of Maximus in the volume, I find it useful to distinguish the essays into two groups: those whose interest in Maximus appears subordinate to later receptions of his thought or to the author’s own modern attempt to forge a path forward; and those whose interest in Maximus I take to be primarily 1054 Book Reviews in understanding him as he would have us understand him. Adrian Guiu’s essay (chapter 1) focuses on Eriugena’s reception of Maximus’s thought regarding the neo-Platonic exitus–reditus. Guiu commendably demonstrates a great deal of care in presenting each of these thinkers accurately, especially when it comes to their differing conceptions of the central mediating cosmic reality in bringing about the reditus. For Eriugena, it is the human intellect; for Maximus, however, is it the incarnate Logos (28–29). Guiu, in my estimation, gives Eriugena’s difference from Maximus on this point a relatively easy pass. I would have liked to see more critical examination of the anthropological and Christological stakes in this difference. Does the human mind, in fact, overcome all the “divisions” in the world, including that between created and uncreated (5–6)? Maximus would surely say no; only a Christological solution can adequately address this aspect of the reditus. Yet Guiu does not challenge Eriugena with a question at the heart of Maximus’s theological vision. Adam Cooper (chapter 5) reviews various well-explored areas of Maximus’s Christology in good detail and accuracy. He is rightly concerned with the concept of the will and of natural desire that came to a climax in the dyothelite controversies. He brings to bear the action theory of Livio Melina (86–87), attempting to resolve the tension of Jesus’s Gethsemane prayer by means of an analysis of filial relation (100). Cooper wants to avoid a solution to Jesus’s prayer that places a struggle between Jesus’s humanity and his divinity (89), yet I am increasingly convinced that the concepts of instinct and impulse that predominate academic discussion in this area (95–96; or “initial motions” on 94) are insufficient to either comprehend Maximus or resolve his claim that nothing natural resists God. Melina may help clarify, but resolution requires new parameters for discussion (which I note at the end). Luis Granados (chapter 7) considers Maximus’s pneumatology in relation to his Christology. The matter is well-worth consideration, as Maximus’s pneumatology (apart from the Filioque) has not attracted a great deal of attention in recent scholarship. Granados’s thesis presses into contentious ground in Maximian studies, as he stakes out a position in favor of a “progressive” deification of Christ’s humanity. This position is often formulated as a way to encourage an imitatio Christi in Christ’s followers, yet it runs into challenges in conceptualizing Christ’s virtue. Such is the case for Granados as well: he speaks of Christ walking “toward” God’s likeness (126), progressing “toward” virtue (127), and needing exercise to “attain the different virtues” (129). I would ask of Granados’s account: prior to this walking, progress, and exercise, would Maximus maintain that Christ is in fact virtuous? If he was somehow lacking in virtue at some Book Reviews 1055 earlier point in his life, how did Maximus (and how do we) maintain the imitatio Christi at all? Christophe Erismann (chapter 3) does strong work in his articulation of the way that Maximus’s view of universals fits into broader contemporary Aristotelian and neo-Platonic discussion. His article has much to commend it in setting the philosophical scene for Maximus’s speculations. However, I worry that a certain anachronism is found in Erismann’s identification of Maximus as a “philosopher” (50). One notices Erismann’s hesitancy in this regard when he becomes circumspect about exactly how Maximus came to be aware of the relevant philosophical issues, especially universal deletion (59). Did Maximus read Aristotle or other neo-Platonic commentators? (54). Does it matter that Maximus’s awareness of universal deletion seems to rise directly from its presentation in Nemesius’s On the Nature of Man (ch. 43) and in the context (both in Maximus and Nemesius) of a reductio ad absurdum of Aristotelian claims, whose proponents are identified as the “outsider philosophers”? Maximus’s ecclesial and monastic culture did not easily assign authority to non-Christian thinkers, and I suspect Maximus himself would have paused over a copy of the Metaphysics circulating under its author’s name. Joshua Lollar’s essay (discussed below) clears some of this air. The final and most important (or perhaps egregious?) example of the first group is the contribution of John Milbank (chapter 10), whose sprawling essay (nearly one fifth of the volume) roams across centuries of neo-Platonic and Christian reflection on the pattern of exitus–reditus in order to arrive at a reading of Aquinas as more Byzantine—allowing greater participation in the divine—than Palamas (191). Along the way, Milbank enlists Maximus briefly as a champion of his cause (four mentions in total: 162; 172; 175; 184–87), but I left those portions of the essay with a much clearer sense of what Milbank thinks than what Maximus may have meant. In particular, Milbank tends to construe Maximus’s logoi as created beings (162; 186), which stands, to say the least, in contrast to the way the logoi are discussed and construed in a number (all?) of the relevant essays in the volume (for example: 60; 207; 212). Methodologically, the shortcoming of Milbank’s approach (and of Guiu’s and Erismann’s essays) is his apparent willingness to speak of metaphysics as a category separable from theology—and specifically from Christology—in Maximus’s thought. If Milbank is correct that participation in God is imitation of God (193–95), he can hardly convey Maximus’s approach to this issue without invoking the imitation of Christ along the way. Yet Christology appears in his essay only briefly in relation to Augustine and never in relation to Maximus. In contrast, most of the essays in my second division place Maximus’s 1056 Book Reviews metaphysics in explicit relation to his central theological categories (like askesis, Christology, and Eucharistic participation). These linkages are indispensable to an accurate (and ultimately fully useful) account of Maximus’s thought, no matter how various philosophical and ecclesial loyalties might narrowly benefit from a more denuded presentation of Maximus. The interdependence of Maximus’s philosophical and theological thought is made explicit in Andrew Louth’s excellent introduction (xxi) and in Lollar’s essay (chapter 14), where his analysis of the Ambigua to John leaves little doubt that Maximus recognizes no distinct field of study that would constitute philosophy over against theology or vice versa (247). Maximus’s analysis of the Transfiguration is directly opposed to such a division, seeing the world and Scripture as parallel and equal ways in an approach to union with the divine. While Lollar’s analysis renders Maximus somewhat ecumenically ambiguous, Nikolaos Loudovikos’s introduction to his essay (chapter 11) eloquently defends this “deep-dive” approach to Maximus (and all of historical and ecumenical theology): it is only by understanding Maximus and Aquinas rightly in their own modes of thought that we have a chance of understanding our (hopefully convergent) appropriations of the past in the present and in the future (204–6). Edward Siecienski’s contribution (chapter 2) is simultaneously explicitly focused on issues of ecumenical concern yet careful not to superimpose later theological trends onto Maximus’s work. In so doing, he challenges Easterners and Westerners alike with a careful reading of Maximus’s relatively terse commentary on the Filioque (32–40) and papal primacy (40–43). Instantiating the method proposed by Loudovikos, Siecienski provides a sense of the complexity of historical judgements about doctrine (43–49). In the West, his essay would almost surely have to be met with a careful reading of Newman’s theory of doctrinal development. Near the end of the volume, a trilogy of essays offer what I would categorize as reflections on Maximus’s Eucharistic and Christocentric ontology, brought into conversation with the issues of participation that run throughout the volume. Loudovikos recommends an ad fontes to Thomas’s sources, arguing that Maximus’s theological categories help Aquinas say better what Aquinas already wishes to say. In Loudovikos’s argument, Maximus’s Eucharistic ontology “completes” Aquinas’s conception of participation (216). Torstein T. Tollefsen (chapter 12) reads Maximus’s conception of participation in explicitly Chalcedonian and Christological terms. His relatively brief essay offers useful Maximian reflection on the classic image of iron heated by fire as a metaphor for union with the divine (230), while keeping Maximus’s Christological center in view (228). And Vladimir Cvetković (chapter 13) arranges Maximus’s view of participa- Book Reviews 1057 tion around a biblical salvation-history motif (234: a characteristically Maximian structuring of ontology around Scripture) in which the Eucharist becomes the icon of our eschatological participation in the Logos in heaven (244). In each of these essays, Maximus’s idiom and voice shine through clearly. Further, these essays allow the reader to begin to imagine how theologians and philosophers might continue to imitate Maximus today. Finally, I close with an emphatic nod toward Louth’s introduction to the volume and the theological center of Maximus’s thought to which it points: the ascetic and Christological issues that undergird Maximus’s reflection on human nature (xxii). As already noted in relation to Cooper’s and Granados’s essays, modern academic literature often has a hard time maintaining Maximus’s consistently optimistic account of the logos of human existence while also accounting for the role of ascetic struggle in his anthropology and Christology. If human nature is fundamentally good and oriented toward God, how is it that one (let alone Christ) could possibly be required to struggle against its inclinations (as Christ appears to do in Gethsemane)? Other essays also wrestle indirectly with this difficult question. First, Rowan Williams’s essay (chapter 9) argues for an intrinsic link between Maximus’s ontology and askesis: even though natural contemplation is superior to the practical life, Maximus will not let us have the former without the latter. Further, askesis is bound to the struggle against passion, which Williams construes in his essay in the negative Stoic sense (145). But, I would interject, passion is not univocally evil in Maximus’s thought: otherwise, how could Maximus describe Christ’s assumption of passion in such positive terms? Though Williams certainly had no intentions of broaching this broader question, he has not fully inhabited here the thick web of askesis and human nature of which Maximus speaks in relation to Christ. Second, David Bradshaw (chapter 6) gives wonderfully insightful commentary on Maximus’s conception of Christ’s human will, including an analysis of Maximus’s careful negotiation of intellectualist and voluntarist strains of thought in moral theology. Yet Bradshaw’s interesting suggestion of a “democratic” form of choice that indwells the human will (114) will does not fully satisfy: what “voices” are heard in such a democracy and what kind of “vote” do they take? Hints of Maximus’s answers to these questions appear in the essay by Kallistos Ware (chapter 4) and, less directly, in Louth’s introduction. Ware’s essay focuses on Maximus’s conception of the imitation of Christ. In the course of his argument, he considers the phenomenon of human temptation with special regard to Christ’s exemplary experience of tempta- 1058 Book Reviews tion (73–74). But Ware’s analysis does not stay within the anthropological bounds otherwise prescribed in the volume. That is, Ware does not lean solely on instinct, impulse, passion, and will to understand how Christ was tempted. No: for Ware (as for Maximus), Christ’s temptation was (and our temptation is) a confrontation with the devil (73–74). This recognition brings us to an important insight: the demonological is irreducible in understanding Maximus’s idiom on a wide array of theological issues raised throughout the volume and even in Louth’s introductory exhortation on Maximus’s conception of nature. While Louth does not acknowledge the demonological component of Maximus’s askesis, anthropology, and Christology, the demonological is nonetheless buried in his analysis. Crucially, it is implied in Louth’s euphemistic use of the word “deceit” drawn from Maximus’s corpus: “It is only because of a deceit lodged in the soul that disciplined training and toil is necessary” (xxiii). Yet if human nature is oriented toward the divine as Louth insists, what is this embedded deceit and where does it come from? In my estimation, only reference to Maximus’s demonology suffices to fully unravel this knot in his view of human nature. The ripples from this fact radiate throughout Maximus’s corpus: back through passion, will, imitation, and nature and on to metaphysics, ontology, providence, and participation. As uncomfortable as Maximus’s realistic and practical view of the demonic may be in a modern demythologized cosmology, ignoring it will do no favors philosophically, theologically, or ecumenically in either the East or the West. The way forward requires an honest accounting of and a serious wrestling with these demons of the ascetic tradition. N&V Benjamin E. Heidgerken St. Paul Seminary at the University of St. Thomas and St. Olaf College Bloomington, MN God Visible: Patristic Christology Reconsidered by Brian E. Daley, S.J. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), xvii + 294 pp. We who make our living in Christology know that the work of Aloys Grillmeier, S.J., remains indispensable for understanding the Christology of the Church Fathers. As Brian Daley, S.J., reminds us, Grillmeier aimed to get both the history and theology of the Fathers right, especially the theology of the council of Chalcedon (5). These objec- Book Reviews 1059 tives—and the erudition with which he met them—make him a teacher of perennial value for theologians who wish to do Christology in step with the Fathers and early conciliar teaching. Daley, Grillmeier’s student, lauds his teacher’s achievements; his book under review here, a heavily revised version of the 2002 Martin D’Arcy Lectures at Oxford, should be read as extending Grillmeier’s analysis. But he thinks Grillmeier’s work has limitations. Its main weakness is its interpretive grid. Grillmeier is famous for arguing in the first volume of Christ and Christian Tradition that patristic Christology begins with “Word-flesh” Christology and culminates in the “Word-man” Christology affirmed at Chalcedon. As a result, he tends to evaluate the Fathers—even pre-Chalcedonian ones—by whether their writings meet the conditions for the full reality of the two natures in Christ. His chief litmus test for this was to determine whether the Fathers made Christ’s human soul a “theological factor.” Daley argues that Grillmeier imposed a Chalcedonian grid on the Fathers, which led him to overlook what the Fathers were concerned about in many cases (8). Daley tells us that Chalcedon is not the pinnacle of patristic Christology, but a “way station: one of several” in its development (22). For the teaching of Chalcedon was not universally and unambiguously received. Furthermore, to regard Chalcedon this way will have negative effects on theology: it will “narrow and distort reflection on the Mystery of Christ into an exercise in paradoxical metaphysics, an attempt simply to affirm that in Christ the infinite and the finite . . . are together a single individual—the wholly asymmetrical realms in and through which a single subject acts” (23). Daley does not spurn metaphysical teaching on Christ: far from it. But the balance of two natures in Christ “is not the whole of the Mystery” (23). If we read patristic Christology through the lens of the ontological lexicon of the Chalcedonian definition, we will surely miss a good deal of what the Fathers were concerned about. The solution, then, is to examine the patristic teaching on Christ “apart from the lens of the Chalcedonian definition, as well as through it” (24). In other words, we should let the Fathers’ concerns guide our reading of their Christologies, without adopting the Chalcedonian definition as our only guiding hermeneutical principle. But Daley does not attempt to upend his mentor’s work: reading the Fathers through the lens of the Chalcedonian definition is still beneficial. In this book, Daley complements Grillmeier’s work with an account of patristic Christology that attends more closely to some of the themes the Fathers emphasized. Some of these themes are surprising. Chapter 2, for example, focuses on second-century Christian texts that cut against the modern critique 1060 Book Reviews that claims that second-century Christian teaching was thoroughly supersessionist. Some of these have been underexamined in Christology: The Odes of Solomon (ca. 100), a recently discovered set of Syriac poems, the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, The Ascension of Isaiah (an early apocalyptic text), Melito of Sardis’s On Pascha, and the Apologies of Justin Martyr. For Daley, these texts are committed to the claim that Jesus reveals the God of Israel and that he fulfills his promise to Israel as foretold in the Hebrew Bible (63). Chapter 3 is devoted to Irenaeus and Origen. Daley differs from Grillmeier clearly here. In his chapter on Origen, Grillmeier points out that Origen is not concerned with the ontological constitution of Christ. But he goes on to argue that Origen’s Platonism kept him from striking a proper balance between divinity and humanity.1 Daley deletes this Chalcedonian schema from his analysis of Origen. He attempts to show, instead, that Irenaeus and Origen are more concerned with how Christ reveals God to the human being (66). Both attend to Christ’s central role in the biblical narrative of creation, fall, and redemption, and how he brings about salvation as the universal Savior of humanity mediated through the life of the Church and the sacraments. Scriptural exegesis and the life of prayer are the matrix for personal contact with Christ, and this is the most important thing Christology has to offer us (69, 91). Daley moves to the fourth-century Trinitarian controversy in chapter 4. He argues that the Arian controversy was a crisis in how to understand divine mediation, that is, how God is related to the world and whether the Logos could be the subject of such a mediation while remaining fully divine (97). Arius, Marcellus of Ancyra, Eusebius of Caesarea, and Athanasius are the central figures of analysis. Interestingly, Daley defends Athanasius against Grillmeier’s critique. For Grillmeier, Athanasius has a questionable Christology because he does not sufficiently mark off divine activity from human activity in Christ. Thus, the Logos thoroughly controls his humanity as its instrument (organon), overwhelming it (121–22).2 Daley argues that asking Athanasius to conform to Chalcedonian standards this way misses his central concern: The Logos has become flesh to reveal God 1 2 Aloys Grillmeier, S.J., Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 1, From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (451), trans. John Bowden, 2nd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1975), 141, 147. Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, 1:311–314. For another helpful rejoinder to Grillmeier along similar lines, see Khaled Anatolios, “The Body as Instrument: A Reevaluation of Athanasius’ Logos-Sarx Christology,” Coptic Church Review 18, no. 3 (1997), 78–84. Book Reviews 1061 to us. This central concern is why Athanasius speaks of Christ’s flesh as an instrument: it is the means by which the Logos reveals himself to us (122). Chapter 5 examines the Christological controversies that escalated in the late fourth century with Apollinarius and his critics, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa. For Gregory of Nazianzus, the Word creates “communion” between divinity and humanity and paradoxically maintains both kinds of being in their full integrity in him. By transforming humanity in himself, the Logos brings humanity to its intended eschatological goal. Chapter 6 offers a concise survey of Augustine’s Christology. Daley covers well-trodden themes like the mediatorship of Christ, deification, and the basis for deification in Christ’s “exchange of opposites,” where Christ takes on the form of a servant to free us from pride and sin (168). Daley adds an intriguing discussion of Augustine’s lesser-known Epistle 219 (to Leporius), where we see Augustine briefly address the ontological structure of Christ’s person (156–58). Chapter 7 considers the well-known scholarly distinction between the schools of Alexandria and Antioch. Grillmeier famously attributed “Word-flesh” Christology to the former and “Word-man” to the latter. Some of this is true, Daley argues, but the evidence presents a bit more complicated picture. He expounds the Christologies of Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Nestorius, and Cyril and argues they are concerned with answering more fundamental theological questions, like the relation of God to creatures, than pinning down the metaphysics of the Incarnation (195–98). Chapter 8 covers major themes in post-Chalcedonian theology. Some of this material will be familiar to those who know Daley’s work on Leontius of Byzantium and Maximus the Confessor. These theologians and John of Damascus are the central characters of this chapter. For them, Jesus Christ not only reveals God, but he also reveals the way God saves human beings. Maximus’s famous distinction between logos and tropos in his opuscula is significant here: The Logos takes on the logos of human flesh, or human nature and its natural principles, so that his personal way (tropos) of existing and acting as man reveals his filial identity as the eternal Son, which also reveals the way we are saved in him (215–18). Christ displays in himself the goal for which God has intended all of us who belong to him. He is the beginning of the new creation and the first fruits of our redemption. Because we belong to him, we share in his divine life by participation. This chapter alone is worth the price of the book. It contributes to a growing body of scholarship on Leontius, Maximus, and John, and should be read by theologians who are trying to understand better what the hypo- 1062 Book Reviews static union entails concerning the Logos’s way of being and acting in the world and its effects on us. Chapter 9 examines the competing Christologies of the iconoclastic controversies of the eighth and ninth centuries. The chapter moves in chronological order, beginning with the polemics of Eusebius of Caesarea and Epiphanius against icons in the fourth century through John of Damascus, Constantine V’s eschewal of icons, the teaching of Nicaea II, and the iconodule arguments of Theodore of Stoudios. An epilogue follows. There Daley reflects on the nature of Christology, the metaphysics of the Incarnation, and the ongoing significance of conciliar statements in forming a Christology today. This book bears some striking implications for contemporary Christology. I will mention one. Daley argues that, for the Fathers, everything about the life of Jesus Christ was saving; that is, there is no central event in his life of utmost importance that saves us, but rather “his very person that constitutes his saving meaning” (279). As readers of this journal may recall, Thomas Aquinas argues that all of what Christ did and suffered is saving because his humanity was an instrument of his divinity (Summa theologiae III, q. 48, a. 6, corp.). Daley’s insight here can help us appreciate anew the genius of St. Thomas’s retrieval of the Fathers in his Christology Daley’s book displays the virtues of a scholar who has carefully and patiently labored over these ancient texts for many years. It is astonishingly comprehensive and erudite, managing to cover a wide variety of patristic texts while remaining relentlessly focused on the Christological concerns of the Fathers. Daley writes with his characteristic lucidity and economy, a virtue that makes this book stand out and will likely contribute to its enduring value. I expect it will be regarded as just as indispensable for understanding patristic Christology as Christ in Christian Tradition. J. David Moser Southern Methodist University Dallas, TX N&V Hope and Christian Ethics by David Elliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 276 pp. The theological virtue of hope is currently undergoing something of a revival in the field of Christian ethics. After a long period of relative neglect, largely due to anxieties about its supposed otherworld- Book Reviews 1063 liness, theologians and religious ethicists have in recent years resumed the task of developing an account of Christian hope that is particularly suited to address our contemporary situation, marked as it is by waning trust in political, economic, and religious institutions and a growing anxiety about present and future global crises. Viewed by some as providing “crucial grounds for Christian humanism”1 and by others as engendering the solidarity needed to sustain democratic political life,2 hope has been the focus of a growing number of projects that seek to bring the insights of the Christian moral tradition to bear on present concerns.3 David Elliot makes a distinctive and important contribution to this conversation in the way that he employs Aquinas’s account of the infused theological virtue of hope and its corresponding vices of despair and presumption as a framework for his discussion. His book powerfully demonstrates that Aquinas’s account need not be detached from its metaphysical and theological context in order to be made serviceable for contemporary work. On the contrary, it is precisely those metaphysical and theological claims undergirding Aquinas’s discussion that Elliot finds useful for developing a “textured account of the hopeful life” that offers a resolute and penetrating response to contemporary challenges (2). The book’s main argument is that far from undermining our temporal commitments and social identities, hope in God’s eschatological fulfillment of human longing empowers us to pursue earthly projects without giving in to the cynicism and dejection that so often arise in the face of tragedy and injustice. By providing meaning and purpose to our lives beyond the achievement of any particular temporal goal, eschatological hope can support us when such goals are rendered unattainable due to sickness, poverty, suffering, and death. However, Elliot insightfully argues that such hope is not exclusively focused on our eschatological perfection, but may also be directed to temporal goals as proximate ends that are referred to God as their ultimate end. Hope can therefore contribute to happiness in this life as well as the next by motivating and sustaining earthly activities that bring about genuine social goods. Though heavily indebted to Aquinas, this argument is developed in conversation with a wide array of thinkers, ranging from Western theo1 2 3 Dominic Doyle, The Promise of Christian Humanism: Thomas Aquinas on Hope (New York: Crossroad, 2012), 38. Michael Lamb, “Aquinas and the Virtues of Hope: Theological and Democratic,” Journal of Religious Ethics 44, no. 2 ( June 2016): 300–332. There are also dissenting voices. See, for example, Miguel A. De La Torre, Embracing Hopelessness (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2017). 1064 Book Reviews logical giants such as Gregory the Great and Dante to English literary geniuses such as Dickens and Graham Greene. Elliot’s familiarity with not only the relevant theological and philosophical sources, but many literary and liturgical ones as well adds an impressive depth to this carefully argued book. Especially noteworthy is his critical engagement with other contemporary scholars working in the field of religious ethics who are for various reasons skeptical of the kind of eschatological hope he seeks to uphold. Elliot negotiates these conflicts with equanimity, using them to advance his argument without lapsing into dogmatic appeals to Saint Thomas. Although the book began as a doctoral dissertation, it has since been “heavily reworked” (xiii) and reads as an exceptionally well-crafted piece of theological ethics. Following a brief introduction in which he lays out the argument and plan of the book, Elliot turns in the first chapter to consider what reason there is to care about theological hope in the first place, especially if one is not already disposed to believe in the provident and loving God who is its object. Elliot argues that such hope should be of interest not only to Christians but to everyone because of how it helps resolve a recurring crisis of the human condition, which he calls the “eudaimonia gap.” As the name suggests, this crisis consists of our inability to overcome certain obstacles to attaining happiness in the present life, resulting in “a depressing gap between the kind of happiness that we want and the kind we can reliably get” (5). There are both negative and positive sides to the eudaimonia gap. Negatively, our pursuit of happiness in this life is often thwarted by various threats to our physical and psychological well-being, as well as to our most cherished relationships and life projects. Earthly existence exposes us to a variety of ills that can seriously—and in some cases permanently—limit our capacity to live a fulfilling life. However, even when we are relieved from such ills, Elliot contends that our desire for happiness still exceeds even the most fulfilling activities that earthly existence has to offer. Thus, the positive side of the eudaimonia gap consists of our inability to secure a permanent and lasting happiness in which our desire for the good can exhaust itself without remainder. While the first chapter focuses primarily on the negative side of the eudaimonia gap, the positive side (examined in greater detail in chapter 3) is equally important because it “helps show that hope is attractive even apart from impediments to happiness” (45). Elliot intends this opening chapter to function as a kind of hook for curious readers who may be wary of the theological and metaphysical baggage that his account of eschatological hope will require them to take on. Drawing on debates in various schools of ancient and modern moral philosophy, Elliot shows how secular philosophers have themselves often Book Reviews 1065 acknowledged the eudaimonia gap, and in some cases even admitted the attractiveness of something like theological hope as a way of overcoming it. However, in the absence of belief in a God who can guarantee the possibility of happiness beyond that which is attainable in this life, Elliot notes that such acknowledgement of the eudaimonia gap by secular philosophers “tends towards melancholy resignation” that threatens to undermine our moral motivation (5). It may seem that Elliot is here adopting an apologetic strategy reminiscent of book 19 of the City of God, where Augustine argues for the superiority of eschatological happiness over against a multitude of deficient philosophical views. However, as Elliot makes clear, his argument is not meant to prove the inadequacy of any ethic devoid of the theological virtue of hope. Rather, it merely aims to show how such a virtue would help resolve a deficiency that secular philosophers themselves admit cannot be addressed adequately by human means. Far from demonstrating the truth of his account of eschatological hope, which Elliot thinks can be established only on theological grounds, the presence of the eudaimonia gap shows only why nonbelievers should be “disposed favourably to consider supporting reasons” for a view they might otherwise have considered inconsequential (42). In other words, an honest acknowledgement of the inevitable limitations and precariousness of earthly happiness might lead one who is otherwise indisposed to accept eschatological hope to see why its possibility would be not simply “curious news” but “good news” to believer and nonbeliever alike (43). In the second and longest chapter of the book, Elliot lays out the basic structure of Aquinas’s account of theological hope. This includes sections discussing the distinctive functions of habitual and actual grace, the twofold object of hope, the relation between hope and charity, and what Elliot calls hope’s “moral entourage,” namely, the gift of fear and the vices of despair and presumption. The chapter also contains extensive analysis of Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope and Timothy Jackson’s Love Disconsoled. Elliot critiques Moltmann for his presentation of a “developing and disempowered God” who “cannot ensure that the eschaton ends happily rather than tragically” (6). Rather than strengthen hope by encouraging activism, Elliot argues that such a perspective instead undermines it by calling into question whether the eudaimonia gap will ever be entirely overcome. Moreover, by making revolutionary social change the paradigmatic act of hope, Moltmann seems to make hope inaccessible to certain vulnerable and disempowered groups who may be able to exercise only “spiritual and ascetic agency” (52). Elliot thus finds Moltmann’s theology of hope deficient in comparison with that of Aquinas, whose understand- 1066 Book Reviews ing of God as the final and efficient cause of hope successfully avoids these problems. On Aquinas’s view, God is the final cause of hope insofar as what hope seeks is the eternal enjoyment of God himself; whereas God is efficient cause insofar as his assistance (i.e., the grace of auxilium) provides the indispensable means for attaining such beatitude (63). In the concluding section of the chapter, Elliot aptly defends this view against Jackson’s criticism that “hope taints charity with mercantile motives” (8), arguing persuasively that the opposition between hope and charity assumed by this view has no basis in Aquinas’s account. After developing some of his earlier claims about the positive side of the eudaimonia gap in chapter 3, Elliot goes on in chapters 4–6 to discuss various threats to the hopeful life that must be overcome by the Christian wayfarer. The first of these is the vice of presumption, which Elliot (following Aquinas) argues comes in two forms. One involves a refusal to seek God’s help and forgiveness, resulting in a quasi-Pelagian self-reliance that masks an underlying self-righteousness. Elliot provocatively suggests that this type of presumption informs Jeffrey Stout’s account in Democracy and Tradition of a kind of secular piety that consists in the grateful acknowledgement of “the sources of one’s existence and progress through life” (9). In contrast with Aquinas’s acknowledgement of our radical dependence on habitual and actual grace to elevate and heal us, Stout contends that “deference and dependence shown towards God are unnecessary and detrimental to piety’s fitting and virtuous expression” (117). The other form of presumption consists of the refusal to repent or improve one’s behavior because one believes that salvation is easy or guaranteed, a view that Elliot finds expressed in the contemporary religious attitude of “moralistic therapeutic deism” (125–26). Again following Aquinas, Elliot argues that the antidote to these two forms of presumption is nothing other than the gift of fear, which as Elliot helpfully explains is not necessarily focused on divine punishment, but is ideally “expressed through recoiling from the sins that might separate us from God, and by entrusting ourselves to God for the grace needed to do just that” (132). In the fifth and sixth chapters, Elliot turns to the second threat to the hopeful life, namely, the vice of despair. It is here that Elliot begins to develop a line of argumentation continued throughout the rest of the book regarding what kind of imperfect beatitude hope makes possible in our earthly life. Elliot is intent on showing that hope is “invested in earthly projects and cannot adopt Stoic apathy to insulate us from human vulnerability and tragedy” (139). He thus seeks to distance his account from that of John Bowlin, who he argues overlooks Aquinas’s acknowledgement of the ongoing susceptibility of the hopeful to the temptations of sloth and Book Reviews 1067 despair in the face of suffering. On Elliot’s view, hope does not serenely accept the existence of the eudaimonia gap, but rather “motivates the effort to overcome impediments to happiness in this world in preparation for the fully unimpeded happiness of the next” (142). While acknowledging that the eudaimonia gap can be completely overcome only in the next life, Elliot contends that we nevertheless have good reason to “engage in costly and difficult border skirmishes with [it], seeking to improve individual and social happiness where we may” (142). In this way, hope suppresses the temptation to view beatitude as an impossible future arduous good and thus despair of ever achieving it. However, as Elliot goes on to argue in the sixth chapter, there is also a more subtle form of despair that “denies that happiness is a future arduous good” (167). This despair is a kind of worldliness that involves absorption in temporal projects that consume our attention and diminish our interest in spiritual goods. Hope combats this threat to attaining beatitude not by disparaging the goodness of such projects, but by freeing us from our undue preoccupation with them, which has its source not in a correct appreciation of their value but in one’s avarice and pride. When pursued with the poverty of spirit appropriate to the hopeful life, such projects can serve as proximate ends that are further directed to eternal beatitude. In the seventh and final chapter, Elliot completes the argument he began in the previous two as he seeks to show that eschatological hope does not subvert but rather reinforces our identification with and commitment to our earthly communities. On Elliot’s view, eschatological hope entails neither our alienation from human society in the present life, nor the destruction of our temporal social identities in the next. Rather, he maintains that “we wayfarers are dual citizens bound in piety to honour our native homeland” (181). As Elliot explains, this piety need not be self-aggrandizing, but may take the form of social criticism and thus serve as an act of fraternal correction (179). Elliot’s goal is thus not to idolize national identity, but simply to point out that, as social beings, we have a stake in the virtue and happiness of any community of which we are a part, including our patria (197). Furthermore, Elliot suggests that “social reform at its best may not just move towards the perfect friendship of the beatified communion of saints, but constitute a foretaste or premonition of it” (199). Nevertheless, hope for a just society as a proximate end ordered to eternal beatitude “does not require the belief that things will get better, only the belief that important things can get better” (198). Thus, while hope may legitimately pursue social goods, it does not entail a facile optimism about their achievement. This book deserves serious attention from anyone working in the fields 1068 Book Reviews of Christian ethics or moral theology, and will be essential reading for anyone interested in Aquinas’s virtue ethics or the topic of hope more broadly. Particular sections of the book will also be relevant to moral philosophers and other theorists concerned with how Christian faith can motivate social justice. Throughout the book, Elliot is quite disciplined in limiting his exploration of theological hope to those topics which form the basis of Aquinas’s account. This makes for a compact and well-integrated study that nevertheless develops these topics to a degree that far surpasses Aquinas. However, this reader found himself wishing at various points that Elliot would have ventured further beyond the path forged by Aquinas to address questions that are perhaps more specific to our present situation. For example, Elliot’s claim that eschatological hope may invest itself in earthly projects as long as these projects are directed to eternal beatitude invites further investigation into what kinds of earthly projects hope can legitimately pursue. Presumably, the mere intention to attain beatitude is not sufficient for making the pursuit of various social ideals an act of the virtue of hope, since it is always possible that these are only apparent and not genuine goods. It therefore would have been interesting for Elliot to examine how hope works in conjunction with infused justice and prudence to determine what kinds of temporal projects should be pursued. Of course, such a discussion would go beyond the specific task Elliot sets for himself in the book, which he accomplishes with deftness and style. Elliot has done everyone a great service by restoring the neglected virtue of hope to its place among the theological virtues, and his book will likely N&V become a touchstone of Christian virtue ethics for years to come. Nicholas Ogle University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers by Jean Daniélou, S.J., translated by Wulstan Hibberd, O.S.B., with new introduction by Michael Heintz (Ex Fontibus, 2018), 346 pp. Jean Daniélou’s Sacramentum futuri, first published in French in 1950, then released in English a decade later as From Shadows to Reality, is a landmark of the twentieth-century recovery of interest in the spiritual exegesis of the Fathers. Nearly seventy years later, it remains valuable and often remarkably fresh, and Ex Fontibus has done us a great service in making it once again available and affordable. It should be noted that the Book Reviews 1069 text of the 2018 edition is identical to the original 1960 English translation and thus retains a handful of typographical errors, mainly but not exclusively in Greek. This edition, however, includes a new introduction by Michael Heintz (ix–xxvi). Heintz provides an excellent overview of Daniélou himself, his view of typology, and the work’s continued relevance for ongoing debates about Catholic biblical interpretation. Among its best features is a detailed summary of Daniélou’s “Qu’est-ce que la typologie?” This brief and infrequently read 1951 essay crystallizes Daniélou’s convictions about typology’s essential characteristics and thus furnishes useful background for the reader of From Shadows to Reality. Daniélou’s main purpose in From Shadows to Reality, stated forthrightly in his foreword, is to establish continuity between the New Testament’s own typological exegesis and that of the early Church. The volume is divided into five “books,” each dedicated to a narrative complex drawn from the Hexateuch (Gen–Josh): (1) Adam and paradise; (2) Noah and the flood; (3) the Isaac cycle; (4) Moses and the exodus; and (5) the Joshua cycle. For each of these, with some variation, Daniélou reviews the typological use of the unit within Scripture itself, explores the continuation and expansion of this typological interpretation in the Fathers of the second to the fourth centuries, then presents the “allegorical” distortions that crop up in (usually) Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Ambrose. In the final lines of the book’s conclusion, Daniélou announces victory and indeed sharpens his claim. Despite “diversities and deviations,” the “agreement of all schools upon the fundamental types” is so strong that it “proves that we are face to face with something which is part and parcel of the deposit of Revelation” (288). In other words, Daniélou argues, quite persuasively, that typology is intrinsic to Christian theology, and indeed to the Christian faith as such. Daniélou writes early in the book that “the essence of typology . . . is to show how past events are a figure of events to come” (12). This crisp definition maps nicely onto 1 Corinthians 10:11, a verse Daniélou viewed as programmatic for patristic typology (see Heintz’s remarks on xvii–xviii). (The verse appeared as an epigraph in the French original but was omitted from the English translation. Its restoration to the title page of the 2018 edition is a very nice touch.) Referring to the experiences of the Israelites of the exodus, Paul says that “these things happened to them as an example (typikōs), but they were written down for our instruction, upon whom the end of the ages has come.” In keeping with Paul’s “these things happened,” Daniélou insists that typology is rooted in historical events, persons, and institutions, and not solely in a sort of divine literary genius. In a manner that seems almost calculated to discomfit latter-day proponents 1070 Book Reviews of patristic exegesis who regard it as a way of circumventing the difficulties presented by historical criticism, Daniélou unabashedly declares the Fathers’ commitment to the historical reality of the biblical accounts. Where modern readers might feel most squeamish, Daniélou shows the Fathers’ resolve. For instance, when considering the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib, Hilary of Poitiers “holds fast to the historicity of events, for the essence of typology lies in showing that it is history itself which is figurative rather than in replacing history by allegory” (52). Even Origen, who admittedly denies a historical Garden, “does not dream of contesting the historicity of the [building of Noah’s ark]” (105). These historical realities are “types” because they prefigure future realities. As 1 Corinthians 10:11 has it, they refer somehow to “the end of the ages.” This helps explain the original title, Sacramentum futuri, a phrase Daniélou appears to have borrowed from Hilary (254). Daniélou shows that the Old Testament itself evinces a typological view of history. The prophets intimate that the inauguration of the messianic age will restore paradise, recapitulate the flood, and enact a new and greater exodus, and so these historical realities come to be recognized as types of eschatological realities. Christian typology perpetuates this eschatological tradition but brings something new as well. On the one hand, while Christians believe Jesus of Nazareth to have been the Messiah of Israel’s God, they admit that the present age persists. The eschatological thread thus remains intact in Christian hope for the Parousia, at which the Old Testament types will be definitively fulfilled. On the other hand, as Paul teaches, “the end of the ages” has already begun with Jesus’s resurrection. The eschaton is present to Christians in mystery already hodie, today. Daniélou insightfully observes: “This To-day [sic] is the very essence of Christianity” (16). The hodie of Christ means that typology is no longer merely eschatological: antitypes are also to be sought and found in the life of Christ. That life is present not only in the historical life of Jesus but also in his body, the Church, and so Daniélou further subdivides typological threads into the “Christological” and the “ecclesial,” or “sacramental” or “mystical”—that is, the types are fulfilled in Christ’s triple advent: “in the flesh, in our souls, and in glory” (277). This threefold typology constitutes what Daniélou regards as the “normal” or “common tradition” of the Church. Unfortunately, it is not impervious to corruption, which comes in two forms. On the one hand, there is a Palestinian Jewish typology that sees the types as already fulfilled in the Old Testament and that will lead to the Antiochene underselling of Christological interpretation. Daniélou detects this here and there in Justin Martyr and Jerome, but he shows little concern over it. Far more serious is the Alexandrian error of “allegory,” which Daniélou sharply Book Reviews 1071 distinguishes from “typology.” Allegory is a foreign contaminant: “It is the presentation of philosophy and Christian morality under Biblical imagery analogous to the Stoic presentation of morality in a Homeric dress” (61). Daniélou lays some blame on Gnosticism, but the chief culprit is undoubtedly Philo, who philosophized and moralized every detail of the Pentateuch. Daniélou concedes that Philo’s “inspiration is truly biblical,” for he was a “devout and believing” Jew, but still, “he set out his biblical theology in an allegorical form, borrowed from Hellenistic culture” (202). Clement, Origen, and Ambrose are the main carriers who bring the infection into the Church. Daniélou remains confident that the cancer of allegory can be cleanly removed and the purity of normative typology restored. As is well known, Daniélou’s simple opposition of typology and allegory was contested by his former teacher Henri de Lubac, who today seems to have had the better of the argument. (Those interested in the debate and its Nachleben can profitably consult the bibliography Heintz provides in note 42 (xxiii). Hans Boersma’s treatment in his 2009 Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology is especially to be commended.) Rather than exhaustively retreading this well-traveled road, I raise three issues, by no means original to me, that both highlight the lasting value of From Shadows to Reality and gesture at its limitations. First, Daniélou is right to emphasize that the Fathers see typology as a function of divine authorship, not only of biblical words, but of salvation-historical realities. God’s historical activity—the unfolding of the divine oikonomia—is the central premise of patristic typology. At the same time, is it not equally true that the Fathers firmly believed in verbal inspiration as well, and thought it had important interpretative consequences? It is not clear that From Shadows to Reality attends sufficiently to the divine authorship of Scripture. The words of Scripture and the realities they represent are not so easily separated in patristic interpretation. Is it possible that recognizing that these inspired words grant us unmatched access to the divine plan makes room for the kind of “Alexandrian” attention to detail and lexical cross-referencing that Daniélou wants to shoo out the door along with Philo? Second, the reader sometimes suspects that Daniélou assumes a more restricted scope for “exegesis” than the Fathers would have recognized. What counts as “interpretation,” and what is it for? Daniélou does not entertain such questions in From Shadows to Reality. In one place he notes: “For Philo, the Bible is not merely a source of doctrine, but also of spiritual nourishment” (216). This is a provocative admission, but Daniélou does not pursue it, perhaps understandably in view of his concern to secure typology’s place in the deposit of faith, with its public, doctrinal, and 1072 Book Reviews liturgical implications. But the Fathers themselves are far more expansive in what they expect the Bible to supply. Scripture is not merely an object of interpretation; it is a lens through which we are invited to reinterpret the world, and a mirror in which we can permit the Spirit to reinterpret us. Third, one might ask what Daniélou’s typological, salvation-historical interconnections finally add up to. For Daniélou, part of the answer is the ability “to see in history the fulfilment of the divine plan, baffling from our human point of view, yet offering a coherence and inner harmony which allows man’s faith to rest therein as upon an immovable rock” (165). In another book, Daniélou presents this as a unique feature of Christianity: “The great non-Christian religions know of an eternal world over against the world of time; but they know nothing of an irruption of one into the other, giving substance and form to the flux of time, making it into history.”1 Daniélou does recognize that the eternal has truly irrupted into time, that God has made his own Trinitarian life available to human beings for their healing and elevation. This belongs largely to the “sacramental” or “mystical” thread of typology. What Daniélou does not seem to grapple with is how wide an opening this creates for “allegory.” In a telling passage, Daniélou excuses Origen’s interpretation of Rahab as a type of the soul: “Basically, this exegesis legitimately continues the typology of the Church: the microcosm of each soul reproduces the macrocosm of the Church” (253). The reader might wonder why this is “legitimate” but Ambrose’s consideration of the Christian soul renovated by grace as a “paradise of virtues” is not—except that the latter can be traced to Philo’s influence, while the former cannot (see 239). Much of what Daniélou rejects as “allegory” might be seen just as easily as a description of the magnalia Dei being realized in the individual believer. Again, I raise these questions not as negative judgments on Daniélou’s work but as illustrations precisely of its value for sparking clearer thought and conversation about the contours of patristic biblical interpretation and its significance for today. From Shadows to Reality, in my view, gets far more right than it gets wrong. But, just as importantly, even where it gets things wrong, it does so in a way that provokes deeper reflection. It is indispensable for those beginning their study of patristic exegesis, and it remains an invaluable conversation partner for even the most seasoned N&V students of the Fathers. John Sehorn Augustine Institute Graduate School of Theology Denver, CO Jean Daniélou, Lord of History: Reflections on the Inner Meaning of History, trans. Nigel Abercrombie (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1958), 109. 1 Book Reviews 1073 T&T Clark Companion to Henri de Lubac, edited by Jordan Hillebert (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), xix + 492 pp. The T&T Clark Companion to Henri de Lubac is an excellent, wide-rang- ing study of the many aspects of de Lubac’s theological thinking, important influences on his work, and his relation to various forms of Christian thought and life. In addition to a foreword by Rowan Williams, the volume comprises nineteen essays grouped into three major sections. The essays in part 1, “Henri de Lubac in Context,” consider significant theological, philosophical, and historical influences on de Lubac. In chapter 1, Jordan Hillebert provides a helpful introduction to de Lubac’s life and thought (as well as the volume proper) by deftly integrating his theological contributions and important influences on his thought into a biographical account of de Lubac’s life. Tracey Rowland (chapter 2) discusses de Lubac in relation to his contentious relationship with neo-Scholastic/Thomistic thinkers past and present. To do so, Rowland uses John Milbank’s helpful framing of the contrast as between “classical” and “romantic” orthodoxy (47) and competing accounts of the origins of modern secularism.1 She lays out the differences between these two visions of theological contents and approaches and situates them in light of twentieth-century politics (both European and ecclesiastical). Francesa Aran Murphy’s wide-ranging essay (chapter 3) considers Maurice Blondel as a major philosophical influence on de Lubac. While many elements of de Lubac’s theology are indebted to Blondel, particularly important is Blondel’s philosophical anthropology and theory of human action. Indeed, she speaks of de Lubac’s account of the natural desire for God as “a transposition into theological terms of Blondel’s anthropology” (66). Jacob Wood (chapter 4) treats de Lubac in relation to the broader ressourcement movement. He does so by tracing the development of the ressourcement impulse in the theology and politics of post-revolutionary France in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wood calls attention to the influence of the Aegidian tradition of Augustinianism as being especially important for de Lubac. In an outstanding contribution, Aaron Riches (chapter 5) explicates de Lubac’s relationship to Vatican II (before, during, and after the Council). He documents how many of de Lubac’s theological contributions which appeared prior to the Council came to shape conciliar teachings. Riches also draws extensively on de Lubac’s journals to show his subtle role in the Council proceedings. Furthermore, 1 Rowland (47, n. 60) cites John Milbank, “The New Divide: Classical versus Romantic Orthodoxy,” Modern Theology 26 (2010): 26–38. 1074 Book Reviews Riches admirably shows the development and character of de Lubac’s resistance to the so-called “para-council” (147), showing the intriguing parallels between pre-conciliar integralists and post-conciliar progressives. Part 2, “Key Themes in the Theology of Henri de Lubac,” focuses on the theological and historical contributions of de Lubac himself, with each chapter treating a different concern in his writings. Gemma Simmonds (chapter 6) treats de Lubac’s sacramental ecclesiology and its implications for the Christian theology of transformation and mission. Attending largely, though not exclusively to Corpus Mysticum and Catholicism, Simmonds plots the interconnections which de Lubac discerns between Christ, the Church, and the sacraments. She thus articulates the heart of de Lubac’s vision on these matters: “The mission of the Church is to be the social embodiment of grace, restoring and completing the unity of the whole human race lost by sin” (167). Nicholas J. Healy Jr. (chapter 7) takes up the complex and controversial topic of nature and grace. Healy explicates de Lubac’s account of nature and grace and its various implications by attending to de Lubac’s own writings as well as those of Thomas Aquinas. He charitably engages with some critics (past and present) of de Lubac’s theory, and he helpfully clarifies the contrasting theories by reflecting on marriage as a test case. De Lubac’s writings on biblical exegesis are the topic of Kevin Hughes’s essay (Chapter 8). Proceeding through de Lubac’s essays, his book on Origen, and Medieval Exegesis, Hughes articulates the essential points of what de Lubac does (and does not) argue with respect to pre-modern Christian exegesis. For de Lubac, Hughes writes, the tradition of spiritual exegesis is of enduring importance because it constitutes “the principle and shape of Christian theological hermeneutics” (206). Especially illuminating are the connections which Hughes discerns between de Lubac’s writings on biblical exegesis, his works on nature and grace, and his resistance to Nazism. Patrick Gardner (chapter 9) examines de Lubac’s ongoing engagement with atheistic humanism. Gardner sets forth the substance of de Lubac’s critique of atheistic humanism and explores how de Lubac’s theological anthropology serves in part as a constructive (and more satisfactory) alternative to the atheistic vision of the human person. David Grumett (chapter 10) considers de Lubac’s writings on religion and the relationships between non-Christian religions and Christianity. Grummet argues that de Lubac resists reductionist accounts of religion’s origins as well as theories which hold a “transcendent unity,” binding all religions together (253). Rather, as he does with mysticism, de Lubac thinks that religion is an analogous category. Grummet goes on to explore de Lubac’s thinking as regards the theology of religions and Christian Book Reviews 1075 missions, the possibility of salvation for non-Christians, the unique relationship between Christianity and Judaism, de Lubac’s work to oppose Nazism and anti-Semitism, and the prospects of his work for contemporary Christian–Muslim relations. D. Stephen Long (chapter 11) takes up de Lubac’s thinking on the relationship between theology and philosophy under the heading of “theological epistemology” (269). He argues that de Lubac sets human reasoning—and philosophy specifically—within the theological horizon of the divine economy. Accordingly, de Lubac does not take philosophical reasoning as a methodological starting point and allow it to dictate terms for theology. This methodological move informs both his critique of natura pura as well as his claim that only in God do human reasoning, life, and culture find their perfection and authenticity (284, 287). Cyril O’Regan (chapter 12) discusses de Lubac’s theological thinking about history with attention to the interaction between his ecclesiology and eschatology. For de Lubac, the Church is an extension of the mystery of Christ, on route to its eschatological destiny. O’Regan also charts the essential elements in de Lubac’s genealogy of Joachimite theology with its immanentization of eschatology. He identifies where de Lubac discerns evidence of Joachimite infection in both modern secularism and sectors of contemporary Christian theology. De Lubac’s overarching interest in Christian mysticism is mapped in the essay of Bryan C. Hollon (chapter 13). Rather than seeing mysticism as a uniform, cross-cultural phenomenon, de Lubac affirms the existence of a distinctly Christian form of mysticism. Rather than a generic form of human experience, Christian mysticism is a grace, grounded in the Trinity and ecclesial participation and sensitive to the course of lived life. Hollon also shows the mystical dimensions of de Lubac’s theological account of nature and grace as well as his account of the fourfold sense of Scripture. As de Lubac never wrote a focused work of Christology, Noel O’Sullivan (chapter 14) collates the various Christological elements given across de Lubac’s works in an effort to synthesize a basic account of de Lubac’s Christological thinking. He does this, for instance, by comparing parallel passages in Surnaturel and Augustinianism and Modern Theology, showing the introduction of more explicitly Christological language in his later works. O’Sullivan also makes use of some of de Lubac’s unpublished, archived work on the figure of Christ. For de Lubac, O’Sullivan argues, the Incarnation is redemptive because it is “primarily revelatory”: “Christ came not as restorer of lost innocence but to reveal and be Love incarnate, . . . [and his salvific death] transforms us from within through love” (347). Part 3, “A Theological Legacy,” contains five essays which discuss de 1076 Book Reviews Lubac’s relation to various Christian traditions and topics. Jean-Yves Lacoste (chapter 15) reflects on the nature–grace debate in light of the arc of modern philosophy. He argues that nature and grace are “correlative terms connected by a strictly theological grammar” (355). But the debates over natura pura shift the argumentative ground and categories by allowing philosophy to define nature apart from theological input. What emerges is an account of nature set solely within philosophy’s own horizons, which theology was expected to adopt (354–55). He then counterposes de Lubac’s (Augustinian) account of the natural desire for God, wherein human nature is desirous of an end beyond its reach: “Our sense of the present is dependent on a future beyond our control, but not beyond our desire, which is why we cannot enclose our being within its immanent teleologies” (366). In his admirably charitable and well-structured piece, Kenneth Oakes (chapter 16) combs through de Lubac’s writings to give an account of his interaction with Protestantism and individual Protestant thinkers. Oakes observes that de Lubac was primarily interested in intra-Catholic matters, and so his engagement with Protestants is neither direct nor extensive. De Lubac’s engagement with Protestant thinkers appears mostly in his various genealogies. While de Lubac is sometimes critical of Protestant figures on disputed doctrinal matters, he can also be appreciative and laudatory of Protestant voices, especially when they help remind and teach Catholics of what it is to be fully and authentically themselves (382). Simon Oliver (chapter 17) provides a lucid, informative discussion of the relationship between de Lubac and Radical Orthodoxy. As Oliver explains, Radical Orthodoxy gives a privileged place to de Lubac, for the movement sees itself as deeply indebted to his theology. Oliver sketches the basic sensibilities of Radical Orthodoxy and charts some ways in which it converges with de Lubac’s thinking as well as places where the two diverge. Radical Orthodoxy, Oliver argues, extends de Lubac’s thinking by integrating it robustly into a participatory ontology of creation and teasing out its implications for a broad array of areas (e.g., politics, society, and human intellectual endeavors). De Lubac and political theology is the topic of Joseph S. Flipper’s essay (chapter 18). According to Flipper, “De Lubac’s overarching theo-political concern was to discern the vocation of the Church in present history in light of the ultimate calling of humanity” (427). He goes on to explore four different ways in which politics and theology interact in de Lubac’s work: the impact of World War II and the Vichy government on de Lubac’s writings against Nazism and anti-Semitism; the political implications of the nature–grace debate; a brief consideration of the works of D. L. Schindler, Book Reviews 1077 Bryan Hollon, and John Milbank, all of whom recognize and variously develop de Lubac’s account of the supernatural for the Church’s role in society; the potential of de Lubac’s ecclesiology as the context and catalyst for the transforming of society from within. In the final chapter, Nicholas M. Healy (chapter 19) considers de Lubac and Christian spirituality. The Christian life, according to de Lubac, is a progressive movement of the believer into the love of God. Drawing on de Lubac’s essay “Tripartite Anthropology,” Healy articulates this movement as progression through three “domains” (448): the religious (where people learn the articles of faith and obedience of life); the moral (the ongoing transformation of life through the assimilation of faith and practice); the spiritual/mystical (the movement toward deeper union with God within the historical form of the Christian life). Healy closes with some reflections on how de Lubac’s thinking can contribute to issues related to the decline in Church membership, as well as some areas in which de Lubac’s thinking can be critiqued. This volume is an outstanding and very important contribution. The essays variously place de Lubac and his works in context, provide rich analyses of his theological contributions, and comment on de Lubac’s relation to various groups and trends. Especially helpful are the ways in which authors draw thematic connections between separate works of de Lubac as regards a particular topic (e.g., the interrelation between his analyses of atheistic humanism and his theological anthropology). Other authors (e.g., Hollon, O’Sullivan, and Oakes) provide the valuable service of bringing together de Lubac’s remarks on topics like mysticism, Christology, and Protestantism which are scattered across his various writings. Moreover, the essays are uniformly learned, readable, and charitable in tone. While many of the essays deal with the theological positions which de Lubac himself critiques (esp. regarding nature and grace), the volume does not contain a rejoinder contribution which sets forth critiques of de Lubac’s theology. A single treatment which sets forth why some take issue with de Lubac’s theological claims would help fill out the larger theological and ecclesiastical picture. Moreover, given de Lubac’s work to make the Greek Fathers more widely known in Western circles through means such as Sources Chrétiennes, an essay on the relationship between de Lubac and Eastern Orthodoxy would have been a welcome addition to part 3. Regardless, this is a very thorough and even-handed study of de Lubac’s theology and an extremely helpful resource for all who engage the thought of this important Catholic theologian. N&V William M. Wright IV Duquesne University Pittsburgh, PA