et Vetera Nova Spring 2021 • Volume 19, Number 2 The English Edition of the International Theological Journal Co-Editors Matthew Levering, Mundelein Seminary Thomas Joseph White, O.P., Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas 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 Spring 2021 Vol. 19, No. 2 Commentary Contraception: The Tragic Deception. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paul M. Conner, O.P. 321 Symposium on Development of Doctrine Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith: Beyond Antiquarianism and Presentism. John Henry Newman, Vincent of Lérins, and the Criterion of Identity of the Development of Doctrine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reinhard Hütter Saint Thomas and the Development of Doctrine. . . . . . . . Guy Mansini, O.S.B. John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition: Convergences in Contribution to Development Theory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Andrew Meszaros 333 393 423 Articles Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jeremy Bell On Value and Obligation in Practical Reason: Toward a Resolution of the Is–Ought Problem in the Thomistic Moral Tradition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . William Matthew Diem What Is Not Saved Is Not Assumed: Thomas Weinandy, Julian of Eclanum, and Augustine of Hippo on Whether Salvation Requires Christ’s Temptations to Sin.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joshua Evans Gender’s Divine Dignity in Saint Augustine’s Theological Anthropology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . David Vincent Meconi, S.J. Saint Thomas and Joseph Ratzinger / Pope Benedict XVI on the Body and Adoration.. . . . . Kevin E. O’Reilly, O.P. 469 531 563 587 613 Retrieving the Tradition The Philosophy of the Organism: Notes on the Function of Nutrition.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jacques Maritain 633 Book Reviews The Love of God Poured Out: Grace and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit in St. Thomas Aquinas by John M. Meinert. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bernhard Blankenhorn, O.P. 653 The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis by Alan Jacobs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gerald P. Boersma Jesuit Biblical Studies after Trent: Franciscus Toletus and Cornelius A Lapide by Luke Murray.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sam Zeno Conedera, S.J. Thomas Aquinas and His Predecessors: The Philosophers and the Church Fathers in His Works by Leo Elders. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joshua H. Lim Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics, Book One: Theological Epistemology, Part One: The Objective Principles of Theological Knowledge Matthias Joseph Scheeben, translated by Michael J. Miller. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jason C. Paone The University and the Church: Don Briel’s Essays on Education edited by R. Jared Staudt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Philip Rolnick Divine Scripture in Human Understanding: A Systematic Theology of the Christian Bible by Joseph Gordon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Matthew Z. Vale 658 663 667 671 676 680 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 978-1-64585-128-8) 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. Institutional subscriptions, notifications of change of address, and inquiries concerning subscriptions, back issues, and missing copies should be sent to: JHUP Journals Division, PO Box 19966, Baltimore, MD 21211-0966. All materials published in Nova et Vetera are copyrighted by St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology. © Copyright 2021 by St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology. All rights reserved. POSTMASTER: Please send address change to Nova et Vetera, 1468 Parkview Circle, Steubenville, OH 43952. Periodical Postage Paid at Steubenville, OH. This periodical is indexed in the ATLA Catholic Periodical and Literature Index® (CPLI®), a product of the American Theological Library Association, 300 S. Wacker Dr., Suite 2100, Chicago, IL 60606, USA. Email: atla@atla.com, www.atla.com and is indexed and abstracted in the Emerging Sources Citation Index. 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. 19, No. 2 (2021): 321–331 321 Contraception: The Tragic Deception Paul M. Conner, O.P. St. Albert’s Priory Oakland, CA Yes, contraception is a tragic deception. Contra- ception is so subtle. It is tragic for unmarried, and even married, women. It is tragic for men or women who seek the true fulfillment and beauty of married and family life, or for those who seek a “safe” way to enjoy non-marital sexual relationships. It is tragic for families and for a culture made up principally of contracepting couples. It is tragic especially for Christians convinced that using contraception does not damage their marriage or their growth in Christian life. That contraception is an insidious tragedy is the focus of this commentary. But a vast majority of child-bearing couples in the United States reportedly use contraception! Even some Western government leaders are sure that this overwhelming majority proves that contraception is an unqualified good for those who need it.1 Moreover, many women, if not most, believe that it is needed for health reasons. How, therefore, could contraception be tragic? After all, contraception seems a godsend for the poor of the world, those struggling to support their families. It seems to help society struggling to pay health costs, energy costs, and welfare costs. Contraception seems like 1 Former President Barack Obama, for example, strongly championed contraception, as evidenced in the contraception mandate incorporated into the Affordable Care Act in August of 2012. Former President George W. Bush’s impact was at least more conducive to or helpful in opposing contraception, such as in his 2008 regulatory changes that effectively included hormonal contraception (“the pill”) under abortion for the purposes of the “conscience rule” allowing healthcare workers to refrain from providing such services on grounds of religious conscience. See also Carolyn Todd, “Almost Two-Thirds of Women in the U.S. Use Birth Control,” Self, December 20, 2018, and Ann H. Slattery, M.S.L.S., “Miscon(tra)ception, Part 1,” Celebrate Life Magazine, July–August 2009, 44. 322 Paul M. Conner, O.P. a wonderful technological advance that has solved so many problems. Debate must be obsolete. Many people seem to think that the Catholic Church is retrograde on this issue, and that the Church will eventually change the condemnation of contraception of Pope Paul VI in his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae. The Anglican Church led the way for this change among Christian bodies in its Lambeth Conference of 1930, and the Catholic Church, some think, will just have to catch up. Yet, strangely, nearly all Western countries are on a path that can be called social suicide, since none are replacing their populations with children.2 A main factor for this trend of more than fifty years in these countries is the widespread use of contraception. Another factor, of course, is abortion. Even though some Western governments are offering financial incentives for additional children, there are few signs that people in these cultures are willing to forego contraception and abortion, have more children, and save their societies from eventual extinction. Conversely, other religions and cultures, notably Muslims, retain their traditional opposition to unrestricted contraception.3 Such steadfastness, cultural and religious, runs counter to the prevailing secular mindset in Western countries today, making many in those countries assume that contraception is only a religious issue, and therefore on this basis is easily discounted. This commentary intends to investigate the morality of contraception principally from objective standpoints other than those of religion. It will show that sound science and philosophy (applicable to all cultures) alone yield compelling conclusions that the popular view of contraception is in fact a tragic deception. What Is Contraception Morally? Contraception is a choice of action, after sexual intercourse, to keep sperm from fertilizing an egg.4 In a moral sense, it is what a person or As an example, see the details on India from Ila Ananya, “India’s Rolling Out ‘So Harmless’ Birth Control Injections, but Governments Everywhere are Screwing about with Women’s Bodies,” The Ladies Finger!, December 21, 2016 (theladiesfinger.com/governments-and-birth-control). 3 See the third chapter of Pathway to Paradise by Lajna Imailllah (1996) for an Islamic characterization that birth control to avoid the responsibility of raising children nullifies one of the primary reasons for marriage and is opposed to the spirit of Islamic teaching on marriage. 4 Contraception is “the intentional prevention of fertilization of the human ovum, as by special devices, drugs, etc.” Webster’s New World Dictionary (New York: G. and C. Merriam, 1974) (emphasis added). Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary 2 Contraception 323 couple chooses to do with some degree of moral awareness and responsibility. This is the “moral object,” the main determinant of the morality of our actions. It is a means-step toward some goal. The goal may be made up of one or several reasons why they choose to act this way. These reasons are their moral motive, the second moral determinant to any of our actions. It may be true that the couple is in tough circumstances of poverty, health issues, family size, and so on. Their situation of trying circumstances, a third moral determinant, often generates part or all of the motive. Then, one’s motive generates a further choice, to discover a means-step (the moral object) to fulfill it—in this case, either contraception or another anti-reproductive alternative. Finally, the fourth moral determinant completes the moral evaluation of contraception (and of any other action). It is comprised of the results stemming from this action. Technically called “consequences,” they may affect several aspects of a couple’s marriage and their individual persons. Here lies tragedy often in disguise. If foreknown, each of these four elements—what is chosen to be done, why it is chosen, the response to the situation surrounding the choice, and its consequences—is itself a choice of moral responsibility. All four constitute a full moral decision that requires, therefore, this fourfold moral evaluation. They make up the mainly philosophical focus of this article. How Many Ways? But first, it will be helpful to see the varied ways people of our times can contracept. There is a growing array of contraceptive methods in drugstores, hospitals, and clinics. Science is becoming ever more inventive. There are the barrier condoms, diaphragms, and cervical caps. The surgical tubal sterilizations, vasectomies, and hysterectomies are “standard” procedures in most medical facilities. Of course, the chemical “pills,” and their spinoff variety of short-term and long-term injectables, rings, patches, and implants are popular contraceptives. There are sponges and spermicides, the new IUDs (intrauterine devices), and the favorite contraceptive method among the younger set, simple withdrawal. And this list is not exhaustive!5 While having the purpose in common of preventing conception after intercourse, each contraceptive action differs in the consequences it causes, the situation surrounding it, and the reasons it is chosen. 5 uses the language of “voluntary prevention of conception or impregnation.” Andrew F. Flusche, “Sue the Birth Control Companies for Your Health,” Celebrate Life Magazine, January–February 2008, 20–22. 324 Paul M. Conner, O.P. Complete Moral Evaluation Because three elements of a complete moral evaluation of contraception are variables—the motive, the situation, and the consequences—the full moral gravity of each particular decision to use contraception also varies. A given situation, for instance, can be light or very burdensome and may involve much suffering. Sensitive to this when a heavy moral struggle challenges, some writers or counselors give the situation so much weight that they overlook the morality of the chosen means and motive, and in some cases even that of the consequences. For such thinkers a tough situation justifies choosing any means to escape it (as long as it seems like no one is harmed). Rightly has such a heart-felt but seriously incomplete mental evaluation been called “situationist.”6 Other thinkers give such weight to hoped-for outcomes that any means are justified to obtain them. This seriously incomplete moral evaluation has been dubbed “consequentialist.”7 These two truncations of moral thinking are rather modern in origin. The classic truncation is to justify an immoral action by an impressively good goal or end the action achieves. This classic thinking is very prevalent today. But over two thousand years ago, Aristotle warned that the end does not always justify the means. The Situation It is usually helpful to begin a complete moral evaluation of a serious problem by confronting the situation that presses for a decision: does the person or couple deal with their situation in a moral way or take “the easy way out” through an immoral choice? This starting point is helpful, not only because it determines basic morality. It is also helpful because pressing situations often give rise to motives, which as noted above, give rise in turn to means steps (moral objects) aimed at achieving the goal or hoped-for consequences. Serious situations can pressure couples to choose contraception, such as: family size (owing to financial or psychological limitations etc.), health threats (problem pregnancy, transmitting a sexually transmitted disease [STD] etc.), the mother being either too young or old, or a couple not being ready to raise a child or finding it inconvenient to a small or large degree, and so on. But human beings have two wondrous capabilities for handling trying situations morally. The first is to employ our intelligence, imagination, and skills to find a creative solution to each element of the situation. Should Benedict Ashley, O.P., and Kevin O’Rourke, O.P., Health Care Ethics, A Theological Analysis (St. Louis, MO: Catholic Hospital Association, 1978), 157–202. 7 Ashley and O’Rourke, Health Care Ethics, 157–202. 6 Contraception 325 our ingenuity (perhaps with expert assistance) solve that element, we have made a notable moral achievement, as well as lightened the situation. Every element should be approached this way. In individual cases some elements of the harsh situation will be completely eliminated, others only partly resolved, and some unchanged.8 Often there will be “left-over” suffering to deal with. Our second capability of choice does not deny or repress such suffering. A free choice owns the suffering and comes to accept what human ingenuity and technology cannot change. This accepting attitude allows character traits to grow, such as patience, courage, persistence, compassion, and perhaps faith and trust in God’s love and power to resolve on a higher plane what we cannot resolve. In the toughest situations, such growth in character can reach heroic proportions.9 Great good can come from evil situations. And so, these two capabilities allow for moral solutions to pressing situations even though these solutions may take time to occur. Rarely are the moral goals, means steps, and consequences rapid in their effectiveness because at least they involve levels of character growth. Growth takes time. On the other side, the choice of contraception seems to handle the tough situation immediately and so mistakenly determines many people’s choices. Motives Motives alone can also mistakenly determine choices. It is understandable that a tough situation generates a person’s motive to get out of that situation. In this case, such a motive is clearly moral, since any goal that truly benefits a person, such as reducing or eliminating a tough situation, is good. Thus, a goal to regulate family size reasonably, to avoid threats to health, to save a marriage, and so on are examples of good goals, and so are moral motives. By contrast, selfish goals—such as to never have children, to avoid the burden or inconvenience of raising children, to have marital relations only for pleasure, or to prefer a comfortable lifestyle over children—are ultimately harmful to people, and so are immoral motives. Both moral and immoral motives generate moral objects, that is, means-step actions to accomplish the chosen goals. Moral Objects Any form of contraception (the moral object) is an immoral means to either moral or immoral motives. This means-step dehumanizes marital 8 9 Ashley and O’Rourke, Health Care Ethics, 205–8. Ashley and O’Rourke, Health Care Ethics, 205–8. 326 Paul M. Conner, O.P. relations by contradicting both in-built purposes of human sexuality. Common sense knows these purposes to be, first, a union that is unique because total, instead of all other unions between people that are partial to some degree, and, second, new life when biological conditions and divine providence are favorable. Many writers through the ages have considered reproduction the main, or at times, the sole goal of sexual intercourse and marriage. Pope Paul VI “corrected” this trend by asserting in Humanae Vitae that there are two inseparable goals to sexual intercourse and marriage: spousal union and reproduction.10 Tradition had always recognized nuptial union as one of the goods of marriage, but Paul VI’s new emphasis puts this unique union on the same plane of importance as reproduction. After all, validly married couples who are infertile are still capable of total union. Their expression of marital love cannot achieve reproduction (not from their fault), but it can achieve total giving and receiving and thus express the unique marital union. In this unitive purpose we can see how marvelous God’s plan for marriage is. God thought out the only way to make a living likeness of the Trinity in physical creation that is also spiritual creation. We humans, of body and spirit, are the fullness of God’s creation, and marriage is the only combination of body and spirit that images the Three Divine Persons in the One Godhead. Marriage is the only relationship that is a total blend of all that is human—all that is manly creation and all that is womanly creation. Not only must each give all of themselves to enrich the other with their time, talents, efforts, love, resources, and life, but each must open up to receiving that total gift of the other. It is important to realize that total receptivity is a special, rarely easy challenge. Many married people fail at this challenge. Only by mutual total giving and receiving is one whole, the human whole, brought about, imaging the One God in Three Persons.11 This possibility from a good marriage is marriage’s wondrous promise. A married man and woman are not meant to be competitive with each other. They are different—as complementary halves of the human whole. They are meant to complete each other. Each partner experiences and sees life’s events from a different, complementary vantage point. A woman knows about life and all of its daily events in a way that a man does not, and a man knows about life in a way that a woman does not. This is not a matter of right or wrong, but of complementary difference. 10 11 Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae (1968), esp. §§9–10 and 12. Pope John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio (l981), §§31–32; Pontifical Council for the Family, The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality (1995) §10. Contraception 327 Many couples falter in regard to this wondrous unitive promise and purpose of their marriage, even should they have generated and lovingly raised children. For most human beings, it is a daunting endeavor to train one’s mind and will to choose to live each day for the enrichment of one’s spouse rather than for one’s own enrichment. This “training” in loving the other over oneself is why the Church teaches that a married man gets to heaven through his wife and that a wife gets to heaven through her husband. One’s spouse is one’s main Christian ministry! Each half of humanity challenges the other to positive efforts in daily events, and to discover in those events the weaknesses and strengths in oneself. The husband and wife challenge each other to minimize their weaknesses and to grow in their strengths. Each enriches the other from differing, equally human vantage points. Instead of seeing and appreciating progressively through the years that these challenges are enrichment needed for growth, too often today husband and wife register such challenges as some form of critique or competition to stand against. Obviously, though usually surreptitiously, this mindset prohibits total union from developing. Children will unconsciously perceive any such distancing between their mother and father because children have a God-given right to experience the mysterious and wondrous marital union between their parents as it progresses over time. They themselves are meant to create the same in their adult lives. If they do not experience it in their conditioning years, it is very unlikely that they will be able to achieve it later. A child is certainly the main form of new life that human sexuality generates. But new life is also experienced by both the woman who becomes a mother and the man who becomes a father. These new life roles draw out wonderful character traits in the man and woman and increased appreciation and love between them in response to these character traits. These traits enrich as well for both the father and mother their relationships to the child. The new interpersonal bonds constitute the human family. Ultimately, the members of the new family unit can enrich their relationships to their extended family and even to society at large. The family truly is the nuclear social unit of society.12 In recent times and with disastrous results, the Nazi and communist visions denied this truth. It is easy enough to see how the moral object of contraception contradicts this latter in-built purpose of new life, since that is the very aim of the contraceptive choice. Few, however, seem able to see how this choice 12 Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994), §§1652–58. See also The Companion to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), §§1660–61. 328 Paul M. Conner, O.P. also contradicts the in-built purpose of total union between husband and wife. It is not only—and not even mainly—the physical element used to separate the sperm from the egg after sexual intercourse that contradicts this purpose. The much more important distancing between husband and wife occurs on the interpersonal level of their minds and wills, and to varying degrees in different people on the emotional and instinctual levels as well. The contracepting couple chooses what is contradictory to the first in-built purpose of human sexuality. Such choice is the essence of sin. The couple has had to change their attitude from totally giving of themselves to the other and of totally receiving that same total gift to an exchange that is partial and cautious. They certainly are trying not to give their reproductive capabilities to each other. Neither wants to give or receive the newness of fatherhood or motherhood. Neither wants to create or extend a family and all that it entails. Thought to effect this change has been required. Some planning is necessary, and finally, choice of action. Feelings of caution and fear that contraception may not work will also likely enter the couple’s exchange. Each partner is holding back whatever they think will result in reproduction. To be open or closed to total union or the possibility of children are contradictory states of mind and heart. This changed attitude to the meaning and reality of marriage alone makes contraceptive use immoral. I presume that most couples who contracept still wish for total union, although some people may seek only the results of intercourse, such as pleasure, power over the other, release of tensions, and so on. Those who do wish for total union rarely realize that the considerable holding back implied in the contraceptive choice prohibits total union. Their sexual experience is no longer a genuine marital act of complete abandonment and reception of one half of the human race to and from the other. Obviously, and despite the most fervent wishes of a couple, the contraceptive action cannot achieve the marital reality. This result can be subtle and insidious—tragic because usually unrecognized. This contradictory stance about the act of human sexuality is seriously damaging to what human sex is (moral object) and is for (motive). Hence, the immorality of this part of a complete moral evaluation. Consequences The distancing consequence of contraceptive use rather than the unique unifying effect of natural intercourse can be so elusive that the couple does not recognize it until the distance becomes palpable. One or both partners may eventually perceive that their love-making no longer bonds them as it is designed to do and as they wish it will. Unless they return to unin- Contraception 329 hibited marital relations in both spirit and body, the rift caused by using contraception will grow. Habits develop. While contraceptive use is surely not the only cause of the astonishing divorce rate in the United States,13 it is a principal cause, because more sexual exchange than ever has become possible and yet its total unifying potential is not effective. Some women have believed the radical feminist view that, in order to achieve fulfillment and equality with men, women should “make their bodies as much like men as possible.” Using contraception is seen by this view to achieve this goal of gender equality.14 The women who hold this position are blinded to the reality of sexuality. Many couples seem not to realize that the easy availability of contraceptives to render sexual intercourse “safer” in regard to reducing both the transmission of STD’s and pregnancy makes the choice to engage in sexual relations all the more frequent. Contraceptive use develops the tendency to seek sexual relief in stressful situations. Free choice becomes more and more constrained. Moreover, since no form of contraception is 100 percent “safe,” STDs and pregnancies are actually increased, as are abortions in the case of “failed” contraception.15 Other consequences of contraception are not so subtle. In some countries, such as in China, population is controlled by mandating contraceptive use (and by forced abortions and sterilizations).16 Besides diminishing the Chinese population as planned, this governmental control has caused a serious disproportion of males over females. In parts of China as much as 20 percent of young Chinese men cannot find women to marry. In Western cultures, there is no governmental mandate, but expectations that have become customary can have a similar effect (such as when boys are preferred to girls). Also, financial costs to raise and educate children can bring a restrictive effect, leading couples to use contraception after one or two desired children. The power of culture can be overwhelming to whole See Todd, “Almost Two-Thirds of Women in the U.S. Use Birth Control.” Anne M. Maloney, “The Feminine Genius and Its Role in building the Culture of Life,” eJournal of Personalist Feminism 2 (2015): 3. 15 See: Todd, “Almost Two-Thirds of Women in the U.S. Use Birth Control”; Flusche, “Sue the Birth Control Companies”; Judy Brown, “I Read That Breast Cancer Can Be Caused by Taking the Pill and by Abortion, but I Also Read That This Is Not True. What Is the Truth?,” Pro-Life Basics, Celebrate Life Magazine, September–October 2015, 12. 16 See E. Hemminki, Z. Wu, G. Cao, and K. Viisainen, “Illegal Births and Legal Abortions—the Case of China,” Reproductive Health (online), August 11, 2005 (PMC [PubMed Central] ID: PMC1215519). See also Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, §§17 and 23. 13 14 330 Paul M. Conner, O.P. some sensitivity in love-making and to conscientious, truthful evaluation of contraceptive choice. Most people seem unaware of the frightening statistics available for the most popular forms of contraception. Well-founded statistics expose physical health risks. There are the obvious mutilations (and loss of related functions) of surgical methods. Besides commonly experienced side effects of chemical contraceptives, such as headaches, irritability, weight gain, and blood clots, there are other grave issues from the chemical forms of contraception. The “pill” and its derivatives are carcinogenic and may also cause infertility.17 And interestingly, over the past five decades, women on the pill have introduced an excess of estrogen into the water supply of many major Western cities through urination.18 To everyone’s surprise, the men of those areas are suffering from weakened sperm and lowered sperm counts. Then, for those habituated to contraceptives, there are psychological health risks. Also, some women or men in trying situations, even after discontinuing contraception, may permanently fear total abandonment to their spouse or total receptivity of their spouse in sexual relations. Religious sources speak of other risks, those that are spiritual, such as regret and alienation from God. Few people seem to know that so-called “safe sex” is a myth. In regard to “safety” from pregnancy, the failure rate is about 15 percent when condoms are used 100 percent of the time.19 In regard to preventing passage of an STD from one person to another, while the National Institute of Health and the Center for Disease Control have long promoted the message that condoms effectively prevent STDs, even some of their own research reveals that message to be specious.20 This information is required by law in each package of the “the pill.” See Brown’s Pro-life Basics piece (note 17 above) and Todd, “Almost Two-Thirds of Women in the U.S. Use Birth Control.” 18 Aria Bendix, “Birth-Control Pills Could Add 10 million Doses of Hormones to Our Wastewater Every Day. Some of That Estrogen May Wind up in Our Taps,” Business Insider (online), October 24, 2019. 19 See Planned Parenthood (website), For Teens, Ask the Experts, “What Are the Chances of Getting Pregnant with a Condom?” (reply by Attia @Planned Parenthood), June 29, 2020 (plannedparenthood.org/learn/teens/ask-experts/what-arethe-chances-of-getting-pregnant-with-a-condom). See also Emma Court, “More Than Half of Women Who Got an Abortion Last Year Were Using Contraception,” MarketWatch (online), August 11, 2017. 20 See G. Rudd, “Condoms and Sexually Transmitted Diseases,” Annals of Pharmacotherapy 35, no. 9 (September 2001): 985–89, concerning the July 2001 NIH-CDC report titled “Scientific Evidence on Condom Effectiveness for STD Prevention” and how it discredits the “hope” of “safe sex” the institutes advocated. 17 Contraception 331 A free choice to risk the above negative consequences embraces probable harm willingly, and so is an anti-human, immoral choice. This element of the complete moral evaluation alone vitiates morally the decision to use contraception. Conclusion People have been deceived. How else would a large majority of Americans invite into their marital love-making and lives the harms discussed above of each of the four choices of their decision to use contraception? Unknowingly, undoubtedly. No one wants to harm themselves or their marriage and family. They must choose contraception mainly from unawareness of its real effects. The harms, as this article has shown, are of tragic proportions, individually and culturally. This author thinks that for most contracepting couples ignorance of potential harms is more operative at the start of contraceptive use. But the selfish aspect of trying to have sex without children (and for only the satisfying effects of the act) develops over time. Selfishness paralyzes the possibility of the opposite decision. Selfish sexual indulgence blinds insight into what a growing negative experience should N&V clarify. This article has been written to help dispel the deception. Reinhard Hütter, Guy Mansini, OSB, and Andrew Meszaros dedicate their contributions to this Symposium to its original "spiritus rector," Fr. Thomas Joseph White, OP on the occasion of his 50th Birthday Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2021): 333–391 333 Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith: Beyond Antiquarianism and Presentism. John Henry Newman, Vincent of Lérins, and the Criterion of Identity of the Development of Doctrine Reinhard Hütter The Catholic University of America Washington, DC Being incomprehensible, He wished to be comprehended. Pope Leo I, Epistola ad Flavianum Progress [profectus] requires that the subject be enlarged in itself; whereas alteration [permutatio] implies that it is transformed into something else. The intelligence, then, the knowledge, the wisdom, as well of individuals as of all, as well of one man as of the whole Church, ought, in the course of the ages and centuries, to increase and make much and vigorous progress; but yet only in its own kind; that is to say, in the same doctrine, in the same sense, and in the same meaning. —St. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium1 1 “Incomprehensibilis, voluit comprehendi” (Pope Leo I, Epistola ad Flavianum, ch. 4; DH 294). “Siquidem ad profectum pertinent ut in semetipsum unaquaeque res amplificetur; ad permutationem vero, ut aliquid ex alio in aliud transvertatur. Crescat igitur oportet et multum vehementerque proficiat tam singulorum quam omnium, tam unius hominis quam totius Ecclesiae, aetatum et saeculorum gradibus, intelligentia, scientia, sapientia, sed in suo duntaxat genere, in eodem scilicet dogmate, eodem sensu, eademque sententia” (Saint Vincent of Lerins, Commonitorium against Heresies, trans. C. A. Heurtley, Latin-English Bilingual Edition [Mounet Sud, France: Tradibooks, 2008], 110–11 [ch. 23: “On Development in Religious Knowledge”]). An earlier version of the essay was delivered as a lecture at the Thomistic Institute Europe Conference “What is the Development of Doctrine? Aquinas and Newman,” December 7, 2019, at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. I am indebted to Fr. Guy Mansini, OSB, Andrew Meszaros, and Fr. Jared Wicks, S.J., for their helpful comments and corrections, and especially to Thomas Pfau for his inci- 334 Reinhard Hütter Introduction This essay is a theological exercise of being “deep in history,” yet without being historical in the conventional modern sense, that is, without presupposing the normative framework of historicism. It is, rather, an exercise of “Tradition in act,” a contemporary theological consideration from within the doctrinal Tradition of the Catholic faith. “Contemporary” means that it unfolds conscientiously and explicitly in the theological horizon of the Second Vatican Council and its contentious reception in the two generations since its official conclusion on December 7, 1965. “Theological” means that the normative framework of the following considerations is the surpassing and definitive revelation of the triune God in the Incarnation, life, Passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Logos incarnate, the normative source and subject of Catholic theology as conveyed by the inspired Scriptures of the Old and New Testament and as articulated by the Fathers and ecumenical councils of the Catholic Church up to and including most recently the Second Vatican Council.2 The title of the essay—progress, not alteration of the faith—states what I take “Tradition in act” to entail. There are three questions that drive these considerations: (1) What is an authentic development of doctrine, an articulation of progress of the faith? (2) How is it discerned and distinguished from the corruption of doctrine? (3) How is the intelligibility of such an authentic development—it being a progress and not an alteration of the faith—established in correlation to antecedent doctrines? These questions inform the goal, the subject matter, and the mode of argumentation of the essay. First, its goal: instead of advancing yet another theory of the development of doctrine, it aims at contributing to the recovery of the very meaning of an authentic development of doctrine in light of a powerful two-pronged rejection of the reality of Tradition that is living, normed as well as norming, and ongoingly unfolding. 2 sive queries, productive disagreements, and instructive engagements. In his address during the last session of Vatican II, on December 7, 1965, Pope Paul VI refers back to the original mandate that Pope John XXIII gave the council fathers: “‘The greatest concern of the ecumenical council is this: that the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine be guarded and taught more effectively. . . .’ (Discorsi, 1962, p. 583). His great purpose has now been achieved” (English from the Vatican website’s page for Paul VI, speeches, December 7, 1965). In the following, I take the Second Vatican Council to be an authentic development of the prior doctrinal tradition. For one of the best recent cases made for what I take here as a supposition, see Thomas G. Guarino, The Disputed Teachings of Vatican II: Continuity and Reversal in Catholic Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018). Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 335 Second, its subject matter: because “Tradition in act” cannot be exercised in abstraction from what is informed by the Tradition (and thus “traditioned”) and in turn is informing the Tradition (and thus “traditioning”), two eminently traditioned and traditioning theological figures—the one drawing upon the other in significant ways—are playing a central role in this essay. The one is the late fourth- and early fifth-century monk and theologian Saint Vincent of Lérins, and the other the influential nineteenth-century theologian Saint John Henry Newman, just recently canonized, who by broad consensus is understood to have had a profound influence on the Second Vatican Council. It is the theological interpretation of both in their correlation as traditioned and traditioning theological voices that the argument advances. Third, its mode of proceeding: what follows is a cumulative argument for the recovery of an indispensable aspect of Catholic theology that fell largely into disuse after the Second Vatican Council—a mode of argumentation that establishes, case by case and in the way and to the degree possible in each case, the intelligibility of the logical connection between previously defined and subsequently defined doctrines. Establishing such intelligibility is at the heart of the theological labor of the intellectus fidei.3 To jettison the aim of intelligibility in matters of doctrinal development is to jettison the distinction between progress and alteration of the faith as a meaningful one, and this is to jettison the very notion of an authentic development of doctrine. Yet the Catholic Tradition prevents such a relinquishment by the repeated magisterial insistence on what I call Vincent’s “criterion of identity,” stated at the very end of the second epigraph: “. . . yet only in its own kind; that is to say, in the same doctrine, in the same sense, and in the same meaning.” This criterion, I argue, can only be fulfilled by establishing the intelligibility of the logical connection between doctrines that distinguishes progress from alteration of faith, an authentic development from a corruption of doctrine. It is the intellectus fidei that fulfills the criterion of identity discursively, and it can only fulfill it discursively. To think that the discursive labor of the intellectus fidei has become passé in light of the recently discovered “law of historicity” is to commit the historicist fallacy—that the discovery of the radical contingency, that is, historicity of truth claims in their distinct socio-linguistic and socio-cul3 For those familiar with the following distinction, it is obvious that this essay follows the via inventionis and not the via doctrinae. It moves from effects to causes, so to speak; my overall approach is inductive, not deductive. It advances an argument for a recovery of an understanding of theology in which this argument participates only in a preliminary and preparatory way. 336 Reinhard Hütter tural contexts implies per se the contingency or relativity of the truth claims themselves—and thereby to reduce theology to the hermeneutical explication of contemporaneous religious self-consciousness, on the one hand, and to the historical-critical study of facts and artifacts (texts, rites, symbols, and archaeological remains in their respective historical and socio-cultural configurations), on the other hand. The Living Idea of Christianity and Its Two Counterfeits— Antiquarianism and Presentism In the opening pages of his seminal Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, John Henry Newman states: “To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.”4 Transposed from what at present will be regarded as ecumenically offensive into a positive statement, Newman’s adage might best be put thus: To be Catholic is to be deep in history. Lest we misunderstand Newman’s statement, we must immediately realize that the history Newman refers to with his evocative expression “to be deep in history” is the Spirit-guided and Spirit-filled history of salvation that the Church holds in her living memory. It is the central act of the Church’s living faith, the ongoing anamnesis of the risen Christ, the Bridegroom, who guides his bride, the Church by means of the Comforter he promised to send. It is the history of the truth of revelation, Christ Himself, given in surpassing and definitive plenitude to the apostles.5 The Church receives this fullness of revelation from the apostles as a gift that continues giving, an “active principle”6 that unfolds in the mind of the Church. Newman calls it the “idea of Christianity.” This notion plays a pivotal role in Newman’s account of the development of doctrine. Avery Dulles observes that Newman “is using the term ‘idea’ in a rich but fluid sense, somewhat personal to himself.”7 It is therefore useful to clarify Newman’s understanding of “idea” John Henry Cardinal Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine [hereafter, Dev.] (London: Longmans, 1908 [originally 1845; revised 1878]), 8. Joseph Rickaby’s index of Newman’s works in the Longmans Uniform Edition, listed by the standard abbreviations in Newman studies, can be found via the link on the search page of the Newman Reader website for the National Institute for Newman Studies (NINS), at newmanreader.org. 5 For an instructive account of Newman’s understanding of the Spirit-guided Church in history as received and developed by Yves Congar, see Andrew Meszaros, The Prophetic Church: History and Doctrinal Development in John Henry Newman and Yves Congar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), esp. chs. 4–6. 6 Newman, Dev., 36. 7 Avery Dulles, S.J., “From Images to Truth: Newman on Revelation and Faith,” Theological Studies 51 (1990): 252–67, at 253. 4 Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 337 before turning to his notion of the “idea of Christianity.” As part of this clarification, it is necessary to de-synonymize Newman’s use of the notion “idea” from the use of the concept in Kant’s transcendental idealism (ideas as concepts of reason whose object cannot be found in experience) and in Hegel’s absolute idealism (the idea as the objectified unity of the concept with its reality). Consider what is arguably Newman’s clearest statement of what he takes an idea to be: “a view, an indivisible object, which does not admit of more or less, a form, which cannot coalesce with anything else, an intellectual principle, expanding into a consistent harmonious whole.”8 In his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Newman takes “idea” in precisely this sense—as “an intellectual principle expanding into a consistent harmonious whole”—for the notion of idea and of its development grants intelligibility to the complex dynamic of revelation taking hold of human minds and unfolding over the course of time. In an important passage in the opening section of the Essay, Newman articulates the central conceptual role the notion of idea holds in the overall explanatory scheme of the development of doctrine. Moreover, in this passage he clarifies that the idea of Christianity is a “real idea,” that is, an idea that represents an object: There is no one aspect deep enough to exhaust the contents of a real idea, no one term or proposition which will serve to define it; though of course one representation of it is more just and exact than another, and though when an idea is very complex, it is allowable, for the sake of convenience, to consider its distinct aspects as if separate ideas.9 The notion of a real idea has three implications of great pertinence. First, this notion does justice to the complex reality of revelation: while remaining an inexhaustible mystery, revelation at the same time conveys truth that can be apprehended, articulated, and assented in such a way that no further unfolding of the idea will ever overturn the truth of a distinct aspect of This passage is to be found in the original 1852 Discourse V, “General Knowledge Viewed as One Philosophy,” that Newman decided not to include in the final 1873 edition of The Idea of a University. This discourse, and the respective passage can be found in John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University [hereafter, Idea], ed. I. T. Ker with introduction and notes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 419–34, at 423. All further citations from Idea will be from the 1910 edition by Longmans listed in Rickaby’s index (the particular passage here is absent from the Longmans but provided in the Ker edition). 9 Newman, Dev., 35. 8 338 Reinhard Hütter revelation once received and articulated definitively by the Church. The notion of a real idea thereby accounts for two indispensable, conjoined principles that Newman takes to be at the very heart of the theology of the Fathers, principles that entered into the Church’s explicit awareness fully during the Arian crisis of the fourth century—the principle of mystery and the dogmatic principle.10 Second, not every person under the influence of a real idea holds this idea in the same way, depth, and extension as others. It is precisely for this reason that through contemplation, investigation, dialogue, and conflict the idea develops, that is, the idea is ever more fully and deeply received in the minds of those over whom it wields its influence. Third, revelation understood as mystery means that the idea of Christianity remains essentially impervious to all rationalistic attempts of reducing it to a mere “manifestation” that permits complete conceptual resolution into an exhaustive and comprehensive rational account. Conceivably, a sufficiently complex manifestation might for a while constitute a conceptual and logical quandary, yet is, in principle, susceptible to an eventual rational resolution.11 Revelation, on the contrary, received in the mind as a real idea, On the principle of mystery and on the dogmatic principle, see John Henry Newman’s first monograph, originally published in 1833, The Arians of the Fourth Century (London: Longmans, 1908). In his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine Newman understands the dogmatic principle referring to “supernatural truths, irrevocably committed to human language, imperfect because it is human, but definitive and necessary because given from above” (Dev., 325). One of the most important places where Newman articulates the relationship between the principle of mystery and the dogmatic principle is in the last of his Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford, “The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine” (Sermons Preached on Various Occasions [hereafter, O.S.] (London: Burns and Lambert, 1908]), 329–35; see appendix 1 below). 11 Newman submits this rationalistic strategy to a still highly relevant analysis and critique in no. 73 of his Tract for the Times, “On the Introduction of Rationalistic Principles into Revealed Religion,” reprinted in Essays Critical and Historical [hereafter, Ess.], 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1910), 1:30–101. Displaying the coherence of the revealed mysteries in themselves and among each other, refuting claims to their logical impossibility and to their incompatibility with naturally known truths is one thing (and indeed an essential part of the work of Catholic theology); yet quite another thing is the attempt to demonstrate the logical necessity of revealed truths, to interpret them as mere accommodations to the human imagination completely susceptible to their rational elevation to full conceptual intelligibility by the effort of the human mind (whether unaided or aided by grace remains irrelevant). The latter (the rationalist fallacy in sacred theology) remains the constant temptation of thinkers overconfident in the encompassing scope of human intelligence and forgetful of the absolute transcendence and incomprehensibility of God—a temptation to which Christian thinkers in antiquity, the middle ages, and modernity proved to be vulnerable. In the wake of the Enlightenment, 10 Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 339 while always being conducive to being cast into a definite form (dogmatic principle) that enables and encourages definite acts of assent, never can be conceptualized exhaustively and therefore never grasped comprehensively (principle of mystery). Divine revelation received in the world as a real idea is indexed by two factors, human reason and time; they together form, so to speak, the coordinates of the reception of revelation as the idea of Christianity. First, time is the medium of creation and salvation; hence human existence in the world is unavoidably historical, in the order of nature as well as in the order of grace, such that time is also—by necessity of consequence—the medium of revelation. This is, as will become clearer later, the fundamental historicity of all created reality, of human existence individually and collectively, and of the graced order of salvation. It is what I shall in the following call “theological historicity,” as it is originally and paradigmatically articulated through the medium of divine revelation in the Sacred Scriptures in their canonical order comprising protology and eschatology, the beginning and the end of human history. Second, unlike the angelic intellect, human reason is discursive; while certain insights might be instantaneous, their reasoned articulation is unavoidably discursive, characterized by the sequence of before and after and, furthermore, by the defining feature of reasoned consequence or entailment. Accordingly, time is the medium in which not only revelation occurs but in which also its reception occurs— the slow and successive apprehension of a surpassingly complex real idea in its innumerable aspects. Revelation received as idea has therefore three central characteristics: it is comprehensive, living, and real.12 It is comprehensive, that is, it underlies all of its various expressions: “Creeds and dogmas live in the one idea which they are designed to express, and which alone is substantive; and are necessary only because the human mind cannot reflect upon that idea, except piecemeal, cannot use it in its oneness and entireness, nor without this temptation began to have an ever-deeper impact on Catholics—educated lay persons, as well as philosophers, and even theologians—such that the magisterium of the Church had to clarify this matter normatively in Vatican I’s Dei Filius, which remains the Church’s most authoritative and extensive teaching on the relationship of faith and reason, the range of reason, and the nature of the mystery of revelation. Contemporary Catholic theologians who think they can safely leave Dei Filius behind as a magisterial signpost that purportedly has long lost its relevance only open the door again to irrationalism and emotivism on the one side and hyperrationalism on the other. 12 Dulles, “From Images to Truth,” 254. 340 Reinhard Hütter resolving it into a series of aspects and relations.”13 It is living, because “the great idea takes hold of a thousand minds by its living force,” so that it “may rather be said to use the minds of Christians, than to be used by them.”14 It is real because it “represents an object” and “is commensurate with the sum total of its possible aspects.”15 The idea of Christianity is not a mental construct but rather an idea that preexists before it enters the individual mind; this idea is “one truth” and “the mind is below truth, not above it, and is bound not to descant upon it.”16 As comprehensive, living, and real, the idea of Christianity— informed by the principle of mystery and the dogmatic principle—has a single constitutive center, “the image or idea of Christ, which Christ himself, through his preachers and witnesses, imprints on the minds of the faithful.”17 According to Newman, Jesus Christ—during his earthly ministry up to his Passion and death on the Cross as well as after his resurrection— aroused in the apostles’ consciousness of faith a comprehensive intuition of the fullness of revelation. It is this comprehensive idea of Christianity that the Church received from the apostles and that the Church continues to pass on first with many aspects of it remaining implicit, aspects that will only later in face of external pressure, internal disagreement, and everdeeper contemplation of the mystery of faith become explicit in the mind of the Church. Such explication, importantly, does not negate the mystery; on the contrary, the mystery of faith is made explicit qua mystery. By passing from implicit to explicit in mind of the Church, these hitherto implicit aspects of the idea of Christianity enter into the Church’s knowledge of faith. The knowledge of faith is nothing but the cognitive apprehension (not exhaustive conceptual penetration, control, or owner Newman, O.S., 331–32. Newman, O.S., 316–17. 15 Newman, Dev., 34. While the “representationalism” in this phrase is distinctly Lockean, it is far from clear whether Newman has any attachment to Lockean Empiricism and is affected by the problems that plague Locke’s representationalism. While Newman’s language is at points Lockean, the source of his epistemological realism seems ultimately to be Aristotle, whose empiricism is free from the problems characteristic of Locke’s representationalism. While these matters were never fully clarified by Newman—not even in his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent—there is a strong consensus among Newman scholars that Newman was never committed conceptually to any of the central tenets of modern empiricism, be it that of Locke or Hume. For a good introduction to this complex matter, see Laurence Richardson, Newman’s Approach to Knowledge (Leominster, England: Gracewing, 2007), 19–66. 16 Newman, Dev., 357. 17 Dulles, “From Images to Truth,” 254. 13 14 Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 341 ship, but simply holding in the mind) of the various explicit aspects of the idea of Christianity, and such cognitive apprehension can only come about by way of concepts, propositions, and judgments. Any kind of knowledge, even the most basic, is a cognitive apprehension of the real. This is true of ordinary knowledge, of scientific knowledge, and of the knowledge of faith. And it is by way of concepts, propositions, and judgments that human cognitive apprehension of the real occurs. Assents of common sense, of science, and of faith do not terminate in the propositions themselves to which assent is given; rather, such assents terminate in the real— as apprehended by way of concepts, propositions, and judgments. Hence, for assents of faith to terminate in the reality that is revealed, propositions are the indispensable instrument for forming apprehensions to which assents can be made and therefore also for the reception and ever-deeper and more explicit understanding of the idea of Christianity.18 And a syllogism is for Newman nothing but coming to see two propositions as actually one: Mary is the mother of Jesus. Jesus is the Word made flesh, that is, God. Mary is the Mother of God. This means two things: first, there is an irreducible difference between the idea of Christianity itself in its inexhaustible plenitude and the propositions that articulate parts of it: “Particular propositions . . . which are used to express portions of the great idea vouchsafed to us, can never really be confused with the idea itself which all such propositions taken together can but reach, and cannot exceed.”19 Second, the idea of Christianity necessarily issues in distinct doctrinal knowledge by way of which the idea is received relative to human apprehensions: Thomas Aquinas tersely observes that “we do not form propositions, except in order to have knowledge about things through their means” (Summa theologiae [ST] II-II, q. 1, a. 2, ad 2). To conceive of religious “experience” as essentially pre-conceptual or a-linguistic is profoundly misguided. What is in many ways implicit in Newman’s earlier thought, and especially already present in the latter half of his Oxford University Sermons and in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, he worked out explicitly in his 1870 Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent [hereafter, G.A.)] (London: Longmans, 1907). Note that Newman’s distinction in chapter 4 of G.A. between real and notional assent supposes that propositions about matters of fact and existence may be entertained in a real or in a notional manner. When entertained in a notional manner, then the assent to the proposition must be notional, and when entertained in a real manner, then the assent to the proposition must be real. Yet in either way, there is an assent to a proposition. Assents of faith may be very well real assents, but they can never be pre-conceptual or a-linguistic assents. 19 Newman, O.S., 331. 18 342 Reinhard Hütter The notion of doctrinal knowledge absolutely novel, and of simple addition from without, is intolerable to Catholic ears, and never was entertained by anyone who was even approaching to understand our creed. Revelation is all in all in doctrine; the Apostles its sole depository, the inferential method its sole instrument, and ecclesiastical authority its sole sanction. The Divine Voice has spoken once for all, and the only question is about its meaning. . . . Christian Truth is purely of revelation; that revelation we can but explain, we cannot increase, except relatively to our own apprehensions; without it we should have known nothing of its contents, with it we know just as much as its contents, and nothing more. And, as it was given by a divine act independent of man, so will it remain in spite of man.20 It is by way of the Church’s living doctrinal Tradition that revelation continues to bear upon the Church claiming and informing the mind of Christians such that the idea of Christianity continues to unfold “relatively to our apprehensions.” What gives unity and coherence to the idea of Christianity in the Church’s mind is the dogmatic principle that informs the Church’s understanding from the apostolic age to the present time. From early on, Newman explains, the dogmatic principle has been a conviction that truth was one; that it was a gift from without, a sacred trust, an inestimable blessing; that it was to be reverenced, guarded, defended, transmitted; that its absence was a grievous want, and its loss an unutterable calamity. . . . Councils and Popes are the guardians and instruments of the dogmatic principle; they are not the principle themselves; they presuppose the principle; they are summoned by it into action at the call of the principle.21 Insofar as the idea of Christianity is the object of the Church’s progressive growth in insight, it becomes a concrete body of defined teaching. And because the animating principle of the idea of Christianity is God’s living Word in history, Christ, this body of teaching is really one single, albeit Newman, Idea, 223–24. To take this passage from The Idea of a University as some concession that Newman makes to his Catholic Irish audience—a wink to an allegedly scholastic understanding of theology that he himself would not hold— and as uncharacteristic of his own understanding of the development of doctrine is to ignore the central role the “real idea” plays in his Essay. On the contrary, this passage from the Idea captures in a nutshell what is epistemically essential of revelation as a real idea. 21 Newman, Dev., 360. 20 Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 343 surpassingly complex, idea. As Newman explains in the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, “this body of thought, thus laboriously gained, will after all be little more than the proper representative of one idea, being in substance what that idea meant from the first, its complete image as seen in a combination of diversified aspects, with the suggestions and corrections of many minds, and the illustrations of many experiences.”22 The very reality of this developing body of the Church’s doctrinal patrimony—the Church’s ongoing reception of an ever-deeper unfolding of the idea of Christianity in the Church’s mind—has been challenged by two distinct yet not unrelated ideas that became powerful opposing historical forces, each with its own programmatic claim of epochal rupture. These two historical forces represent distinct ways of forfeiting “to be deep in history,” the one by way of idealizing a particular state of the past—we shall call this in the following “antiquarianism”—the other by way of projecting an idealized state of the future onto the present—we shall call this in the following “presentism.”23 Antiquarianism arises with the Protestant Reformation and is in many ways simply identical with it, while presentism emerges in full force only with the Enlightenment and is implemented for the first time in the Europe of the eighteenth century during the so-called “Catholic Enlightenment”—the suppression of the Jesuit Order and the sweeping Josephinist reform program—culminating with logical consequence in the institution of the Culte de la Raison, publicly celebrated on the Fête de la Raison on 20 Brumaire, year II (November 10, 1793), in Notre Dame de Paris, replacing effectively the divine worship due to the Most Holy Trinity with the counterfeit worship of reason.24 Newman, Dev., 38. I understand ecclesial antiquarianism and ecclesial presentism as ideal types, heuristic devices for identifying theologically detrimental attitudes, tendencies, and programs. In concrete lived reality they occur often in mixed forms, are qualified by other factors, and appear in varying degrees of intensity. When I refer in the following to specific theological authors in order to identify the one or the other tendency, these qualifications are to be kept in mind. Identifying the work of theologians in such a way does not entail a denigration of their intellectual labor and achievement but simply an acknowledgment of the normative thrust that informs the overall scope of the argument advanced in the work. 24 In this memorable event, the sad figure of Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Gobel (1727– 1794) took part. Gobel was a French Catholic priest who during the French Revolution took the oath of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, was elected “constitutional” archbishop of Paris, consecrated in 1791 by eight bishops (among them none other than Talleyrand himself ). As constitutional archbishop of Paris, Gobel opposed clerical celibacy. On 17 Brumaire, year II (November 7, 1793), he resigned from his episcopal functions and three days later participated in Notre 22 23 344 Reinhard Hütter Antiquarianism Let us consider, first, antiquarianism, the return to some normative state that is identical with the purportedly pure origin itself of Christianity or that reflects its last authentic expression. One version of antiquarianism may locate the true and original teaching of Jesus in the reconstruction of the “historical Jesus” behind the portraits of Christ painted in the four Gospels; another version may locate it in the Apostle Paul’s original radical message—uncompromised by subsequent “deutero-Pauline” accretions; another again may locate it in the Church of the New Testament canon and the earliest pre-Nicene Church Fathers (usually Saint Irenaeus of Lyon) unencumbered by later doctrinal complications; and other versions may locate it in some authentic tradition that at some identifiable point in history was purportedly abandoned or corrupted in some irreparable way, be it after Chalcedon, or after the completion of the first seven ecumenical councils, or after the Great Schism of 1054, or after the promulgation of the dogma of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council, or after the promulgation of Sacrosanctum Concilium and Dignitatis Humanae at the Second Vatican Council. What exactly this purportedly authentic state of the past is, and when it was allegedly corrupted, depends on whether the antiquarianism is of liberal or evangelical Protestant, of Anglican, of EastDame de Paris in the counterfeit liturgy to la déesse de la Raison. In the spring of 1794 Robespierre replaced the Cult of Reason with his own deist Cult of the Supreme Being. The inventors and supporters of the Cult of Reason were charged with atheism and sent to the guillotine, among them, Gobel (see L. J. Rogier, G. de Berthier de Sauvigny, and J. Hajjar, Geschichte der Kirche, vol. 4, Die Kirche im Zeitalter der Aufklärung: Revolution und Restauration [Einsiedeln: Benziger, 1966], 133ff.) Arguably, the spiritual and intellectual roots of the presentism characteristic of the claim of epochal rupture and the utopian ambitions of the radical Enlightenment reach back to the millennialism of the Italian theologian and apocalyptic thinker Joachim of Fiore (1135–1202). For an extended argument along these lines, see Henri de Lubac’s late magnum opus, La posterité spirituelle de Joachim of Flore (Paris: Cerf, 2014). It would be far from irrelevant to pursue the question whether—and if so, in which way and to which degree—contemporary ecclesial presentism is ultimately indebted to the patrimony of Joachim of Fiore. Henri de Lubac had good reasons to thematize critically two influential works in which Christian eschatology is re-conceived as revolutionary utopianism—Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch’s monumental three-volume The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), originally to be called “Dreams of a Better Life,” and Reformed theologian Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope, trans. James W. Leitch (London: SCM Press, 1967), two works with a lasting, albeit by now somewhat subterranean, influence on contemporary theological presentism. Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 345 ern Orthodox, of Jansenist, of Old Catholic, or of Lefebvrist provenance.25 A certain form of antiquarianism can also be developed in service of a presentist program; this antiquarianism usually puts forward a reconstruction of the “historical Jesus” and his purported “real” agenda (in differentiation from what the four Gospels might project) that in turn serves as a theological warrant for a unique form of presentism.26 For antiquarianism, all developments beyond some allegedly pure origin or some definitively last authentic expression of that origin are doctrinal corruptions, increasing admixtures with distortions and falsehoods that more and more pollute the clear spring water the further it is carried away from its pristine source or its last authentic expression. Return to and union with the origin, or at least with the latest state of its authentic expression, is the ultimate goal of antiquarianism.27 For liberal Protestant antiquarianism, see the classical formulation by Adolf von Harnack, What is Christianity?, published originally in 1900, and for a more recent typical instantiation, Robert Walter Funk, Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium (New York: HarperCollins, 1996). For a sophisticated expression of the evangelical Protestant version, see Friedrich Mildenberger, Biblische Dogmatik: Eine biblische Theologie in dogmatischer Perspektive, 3 vols. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1991–1993), and for a Pauline version of antiquarianism, see Douglas A. Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020). The situation in Eastern Orthodoxy is diverse and complex on this matter: some orthodox theologians permit the notion of a development of doctrine, others reject it; see the informative appendix “The Idea of Doctrinal Development in Eastern Orthodoxy” in Aidan Nichols, O.P., From Newman to Congar: The Idea of Doctrinal Development from the Victorians to the Second Vatican Council (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990), 279–86; see also Andrew Louth, “Is Development of Doctrine a Valid Category for Orthodox Theology?,” in Orthodoxy and Western Culture: A Collection of Essays Honoring Jaroslav Pelikan on His Eightieth Birthday, ed. Valerie Hotchkiss and Patrick Henry (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2005), 45–63, and Daniel J. Lattier, “The Orthodox Rejection of Doctrinal Development,” Pro Ecclesia 20, no. 4 (2011): 389–410. 26 The historical-critical reconstructions of the allegedly authentic historical Jesus behind the Gospel portraits, per se a version of antiquarianism, stand most often in service of some presentist program to be legitimated by the recovery of the original Jesus. This tendency of putting a certain version of antiquarianism in service of a presentist theological agenda can also be observed in strands of Catholic modernism and then again in the use of the historical-critical method in service of a presentist agenda in the post-Conciliar discussion of the 1970s. See for example Edward Schillebeeckx, The Understanding of Faith: Interpretation and Criticism, trans. N. D. Smith (New York: Seabury, 1974), and Jesus: An Experiment in Christology, trans. Hubert Hoskins and Marcelle Manley (New York: Seabury, 1979). 27 Note that the via media that John Henry Newman constructed as the ecclesiological program of Tractarianism grounding a vision of the Anglican Church as 25 346 Reinhard Hütter Presentism Unlike antiquarianism that privileges some idealized fixed state of the past as a norm—the pure origin or some definitively last authentic expression of it—presentism privileges a projected future as norm in light of which the present must be shaped in order for the Church to conform with the norm of the projected future. Presentism holds the Church to be an essentially self-actuating and self-norming body that projects the future and anticipates it as blueprint for designing the Church of the present. To the degree that presentism appeals to the spirit, it seeks to bring the idea of Christianity in conformity with what is taken to be the “spirit of the age” and its characteristic signs of the times to be received as normative divine communications—inspirations—meant to bring a Church, usually perceived as almost hopelessly behind its time, up to date with the overall historical dynamic of a providentially guided progress racing toward an ever-brighter future of universal enlightenment, comprehensive material prosperity in a world of peace and justice, and maximized individual freedom. Characteristically for presentism, the normative source of theological judgment is no longer found in faith and its dogmatic content but is applied, ab extra, to those contents.28 Unsurprisingly, a prominent feature in this progressive future-oriented dynamic is rupture. Rupture is the “spirit”-granted liberation from a past that once was the self-actuation of what is now the Church of the past. Presentism welcomes, encourages, and indeed sets into motion the dynamic, rupture-filled, and spontaneous fluidity of ongoing transformative ecclesial self-actuation—the interminable process of shaking off the shackles of past ecclesial self-actuations and bringing about the self-acauthentically Catholic, that is, as the sole authentic successor to the Church of the Fathers in the West (Protestantism being a distortive reduction and Romanism a corrupting excess), arguably, was nothing but a distinct version of antiquarianism. For a fully annotated edition that meets contemporary scholarly standards, see John Henry Newman, The Via Media of the Anglican Church: Illustrated in Lectures, Letters and Tracts Written between 1830 and 1841, ed. H. D. Weidner with introduction and notes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). 28 For one concrete application of such a subtle, albeit programmatic, presentist view, see Hans-Joachim Sander’s extensive commentary on Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, where he argues that the “signs of the times” originating outside the Church should—in alleged accord with Gaudium et Spes—be accorded a privileged place in shaping the future course of doctrine and pastoral practice (Hans-Joachim Sander, “Theologischer Kommentar zur Pastoralkonstitution über die Kirche in der Welt von heute,” in Herders theologischer Kommentar zum Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil, ed. Bernd Jochen Hilberath and Peter Hünermann, vol. 5 [Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2005], 581–886). Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 347 tuation of the new Church of the present. The notion that differentiates between the outgoing and the incoming Church of the present is “future.” The very shape the future is supposed or desired to take, based on the purportedly collective convictions of the future-oriented part of the outgoing Church of the present, becomes the blueprint for the self-actuation of the new incoming Church of the present and the criterion by which the outgoing Church of the present, now the Church of the past, is purged, corrected, and re-modeled. For presentism the necessity of the constant reform of the Church (ecclesia semper reformanda est) does not arise from the fact that the visible Church is a corpus permixtum, a mixed body, and that its personnel—to use the philosopher Jacques Maritain’s term—are fragile, sinful, and at times corrupt.29 On the contrary, for presentism, the principle ecclesia semper reformanda simply articulates the transformative dynamic of the Church’s ongoing self-actuation. Presentism entertains three interrelated cognitive reservations about doctrine and dogma: first, the eschatological reservation—doctrine and also dogma are penultimate witnesses to and transient approximations of what will be the eschatological truth of revelation; second, the historicist reservation—the conceptuality, linguistic rendition, and propositional intention of doctrines and dogmas are bound to and by the socio-historical and discursive context in which they were formulated and which they address—they are, in short, expressions of thought of and for a particular age and place cast into the passing fashions of then dominant thought forms; and third, the pneumatological-ecclesiological reservation—the she-agent of the Church is empowered to actuate herself anew over against past actuations. Dogmatic definitions are never unequivocally definitive and irreversible. Rather, because contingent on their socio-cultural context of articulation, they remain conditional, that is, always subject to the Church’s new self-actuation and with it to their reinterpretation leading possibly to their eventual reversal. While “continuity” and “discontinuity” are inherently correlated notions characteristic of the dynamic of organic development or homogeneous evolution of a real idea that takes increasingly hold of human minds and thereby develops and undergoes 29 See Jacques Maritain, On the Church of Christ: The Person of the Church and Her Personnel, trans. Joseph W. Evans (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973). As is well known, in this important late work on the Church, Maritain draws the distinction between the Church’s personnel, which is subject to sin and fallible, and the Church’s person, which is in principle inviolate. Characteristically, presentism does not accept this distinction. For presentists, the Church is in constant need of reform because it is simply the sum total of all its members. 348 Reinhard Hütter change, “rupture,” on the contrary (and with it the silent implications of rupture—doctrinal reinterpretation and reversal), is the essential characteristic of the Church conceived as a sovereign spirit-subject that actuates herself again and again. “Rupture,” in other words, is the negative aspect, the liberation from the shackles of the past, of which the free self-actuation is the positive aspect. No self-actuation without rupture. In the wake of the conflict-laden reception of the Second Vatican Council, the post-conciliar agenda of presentism might be best characterized as the ever-deeper and more comprehensive reception into the Catholic Church of what were taken to be the epochal and lasting achievements of the Enlightenment in its earlier as well as later stages, especially the consistent application of the new, all-comprehensive awareness of the comprehensive and radical historicity of all aspects of reality. This is historicist historicity, and the only trans-historical law it acknowledges is the “law of historicity” itself. Presentism endorses this all-embracing “law of historicity”: all reality is, all the way down, temporally inflected and thus characterized by a primordial contingency, particularity, and transiency. The “law of historicity” pertains not only to events, cultures, and institutions but also to the meaning of these realities and to ideas themselves. In short, by embracing the “law of historicity,” for presentism, there are no eternal truths, and for that matter no divine law other than the law of change. Normatively modern presentists would want to stop short of the relativism entailed in radical historicity by conceiving the “law of historicity” to express a single “logos” that unfolds by way of one “grand narrative” from the triune self-constitution of the Absolute and its further self-differentiation into the “other” of the world and its eventual expression in the human mind, culture and language, to the concepts of human thinking culminating in the reality of the Church, the ever new self-actuating community of spirit and increasingly realized freedom.30 Postmodern presentists, by contrast, declare the definitive end of all grand narratives and propose instead multiple local, contextual narratives, subversive of all forms of power discourse and power structures and envision “church” as the spirit-event ever constituting itself as anti-, post-, or trans-hierarchical 30 The most comprehensive vision along these lines in the twentieth century was developed by Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. See especially Le phénomène humain, written in 1930 but published only posthumously in 1955 (The Human Phenomenon, ed. and trans. Sarah Appleton-Weber, foreword by Brian Swimme [Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 1999) and The Divine Milieu, rev. and trans. Siôn Cowell, foreword by Thomas M. King, S.J. (Portland, OR: Sussex Academic, 2004). Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 349 communities of liberated human authenticity and solidarity.31 Applied to the problem of the development of doctrine, Andrew Meszaros aptly characterizes the historicist suppositions of presentism thus: “The Church and her teaching could develop in any direction. ‘Development’ and ‘reform’ are euphemisms for ‘transformation’ and even ‘revolution.’”32 The characteristic trait of presentism is, according to Meszaros, “a conspicuous hesitation, if not outright refusal to name and identify the enduring truths of Christian revelation, or for that matter, the constitutive elements of the Church.”33 At bottom, presentism when following the all-embracing “law of historicity” consistently, that is, in its postmodern modality, has to hold—and indeed does hold—that everything including all historical construals of truth and meaning, and hence of revelation, doctrine, dogma, and so on, are, all the way down, of a transient contingency relative to a plurality of co-temporaneous particular socio-cultural and socio-linguistic contexts replete with distinct and possibly incommensurable values and moral norms. And because of their contingency all the way down, it seems perfectly legitimate to submit these past construals to just another form of contingency—the will of change, the will of reconstruction. Jon D. Levenson calls this characteristic fallacy at the very heart of the presentist program “the venerable liberal . . . argument, that the inevitability of unwilled change legitimates willed change, that the historical reality that the tradition was, de facto, always changing validates, de jure, contemporary efforts to alter it.”34 The unavoidable entailment of a consequent implementation of presentism’s radical historicization of revelation, the Church, dogma, and doctrine is the increasingly explicit acknowledgement that, after all, they are the effect of natural historical processes to which they can be reduced without remainder and that their ongoing justification and maintenance necessarily requires a “neo-logical” transposition from a once allegedly See, e.g.: David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (New York: Seabury, 1975); Johann Baptist Metz, The Emerging Church: The Future of Christianity in a Post-Bourgeois World, trans. Peter Mann (New York: Seabury, 1981); Terrence W. Tilley, Inventing Catholic Tradition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000); Lieven Boeve, Interrupting Tradition: An Essay on Christian Faith in a Postmodern Context (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2003); Boeve, God Interrupts History: Theology in a Time of Upheaval (New York: Continuum, 2007). 32 Meszaros, Prophetic Church, 5. 33 Meszaros, Prophetic Church, 7. 34 Jon D. Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1993), 7. 31 350 Reinhard Hütter divine to a now fully recognized human meaning and purpose—the long overdue complete implementation of the Enlightenment in the Church.35 Counterfeits of an Authentic Development of Doctrine John Henry Newman’s account of an authentic development of doctrine and the entailed theological understanding of history and historical transition unmasks antiquarianism and presentism as what they are: seductive counterfeits that are gravely mistaken theologically about the nature of revelation, the Church, and the nature of doctrine and dogma, each in its own characteristic way, the one denying, the other absolutizing history. At the same time, I would argue, Newman’s understanding of an authentic development of doctrine integrates into a higher synthesis a true insight in each: Without being rooted in the original deposit of faith, without a constant return to revelation received in the Sacred Scriptures and in sacred Tradition, the Church would cease to be apostolic in its doctrinal substance; she would eventually betray the teaching of the Gospel, the depositum fidei. Yet without living constantly in the Christ-centered and Spirit-filled present within an ever-present historical horizon that calls again and again for a fresh proclamation of the Gospel and hence for a fitting articulation of it, the Church would turn into a museum, a vast display of precious architectural, liturgical, and intellectual antiques, a display of cold memories instead of the throbbing, Christ-rooted and Spirit-filled, living Tradition of the Church. Antiquarianism and presentism are counteracted best by a robust understanding of the development of doctrine and the Christologically and pneumatologically informed theology of history that necessarily undergirds it. Such a robust understanding clarifies the meaning of Christ’s promise that “when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13; RSV). If the Spirit sent by Christ indeed guides the Church into all the truth and if the mission of the Spirit indeed is one single divine act encompassing all created time, then this is true—in the Christ-rooted and Spirit-filled Church to be deep in history and to be 35 For one of the most ambitious recent philosophical program legitimizing such a “translation” of the Enlightenment into religion and simultaneously the complete “translation” of the values of Christianity into a fully enlightened secular society within a grand narrative of reason’s emancipation from the tutelage of religion, a “pilgrim’s progress” from the City of God to the City of Man, the city of the new homo deus, see Jürgen Habermas’s late magnum opus, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 1, Die okzidentale Konstellation von Glauben und Wissen., and vol. 2, Vernünftige Freiheit. Spuren des Diskurses über Glauben und Wissen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2019). Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 351 deep in the present are two aspects of the selfsame reality. To put it into a Newmanian way: The present is the fruit of history and history is the root of the present. What connects the one with the other is the development of doctrine. Yet how do we distinguish between authentic developments of doctrine and developments that are actually corruptions of doctrine? How are antiquarian ossifications and, more importantly, presentist fluidifications and transformations of doctrine discerned for what they are—corruptions of doctrine? Quite obviously, not every development is necessarily an authentic development. In order to address this question in light of contemporary forms of antiquarianism and especially of presentism and guided by Newman’s pivotal account of the authentic development of doctrine, we must first recall the teaching of the modern magisterium on the development of doctrine. What Is the Development of Doctrine? Recalling the Recent Teaching of the Magisterium This magisterial teaching can only be ascertained on the background of what the selfsame magisterium understands to be “dogma.” While there does not exist a formal magisterial definition of what, according to the Catholic understanding, a dogma is, the Fathers of the First Vatican Council, in the Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, Dei Filius, advance in their explication of the “object of faith” (objectum fidei) a perspicuous circumscription of dogma: By divine and catholic faith all those things are to be believed which are contained in the Word of God as found in Scripture and Tradition, and which are proposed by the Church as matters to be believed as divinely revealed, whether by her solemn judgment or in her ordinary and universal magisterium.36 Hence, according to this definitional paraphrase—as close to a “metadogma,” a dogma about the nature of dogma, as the magisterium can meaningfully come without committing a theological version of the fallacy of circular reasoning—a dogma is a doctrine of the Church that is proclaimed authoritatively to the faithful by the ordinary and general 36 “Porro fide divina et catholica ea omnia credenda sunt, quae in verbo Dei scripto vel tradito continentur, et ab Ecclesia sive solemni iudicio sive ordinario et universali magisterio tamquam divinitus revelata credenda proponuntur” (DH 3011; emphasis mine). 352 Reinhard Hütter magisterium of the Church or by a papal or conciliar definition as a truth of faith revealed by God. It is only in the post-Tridentine Catholic theology that the magisterium appears explicitly as the guarantor and authority of dogma; during this period Catholic theology as whole becomes reflexively aware of the central role of the magisterium in the formation of dogma. By the eighteenth century, a broad consensus had emerged among virtually all Catholic theologians about the requisite formal and material elements of a dogma, a consensus that found its explicit conciliar expression in the definitional paraphrase of Dei Filius.37 Walter Kasper articulates well what might strike some as astounding: “So we are faced with the initially surprising fact that a term like dogma, which is central to today’s thinking in the Catholic Church, has only been used since the eighteenth century in Catholic theology and only since the nineteenth century in the official language of the Church in the sense that it is used today.”38 Yet what matters is not the initial surprise but the way this fact is received and reflected in contemporary Catholic theology. To take and reject this understanding of dogma as a regrettable or even scandalous departure of the modern, post-Tridentine Roman Catholic Church from an earlier, patristic and primarily doxological and liturgical understanding of dogma, is to embrace antiquarianism. To take and embrace this understanding of dogma as an indication of a rupture with an earlier understanding and the positing of a radically different new understanding reflective of a vision of papal infallibility and a Rome-centered Catholicism advanced by Pope Pius IX and ultramontanist forces that—it being allegedly a rupture—legitimizing another radical rupture from this understanding of dogma of what is now the church of the past, is to embrace presentism. To understand the matter rightly is to appreciate (1) that the Church never was without what now is referred to as “dogma, ” (2) that the definitional paraphrase of Dei Filius is the fruit of a longer process of theological discernment and understanding reflecting and reacting to the doctrinal crisis concomitant with the Protestant Reformation, yet without (3) having to hold that this understanding of dogma necessarily includes all aspects of the wider patristic understanding of the notion of dogma or represents a straightforward explication of what On the emerging explicit understanding of a “living tradition” and the role of the “living magisterium” in this tradition in the Catholic theology of the nineteenth century, see Yves M.-J. Congar, O.P., Tradition and Traditions: An Historical Essay and a Theological Essay, trans. Michael Naseby (pt. 1) and Thomas Rainborough (pt.2) (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 189–221. 38 Walter Kasper, Evangelium und Dogma: Grundlegung der Dogmatik, Gesammelte Schriften 7 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2015), 68. 37 Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 353 was implicit in the patristic and medieval period.39 As much as Nicaea and Chalcedon were the conciliar responses to doctrinal crises in which the conciliar definitions had to do more of a doctrinal specification than simply to make explicit what was implicit in the pre-Nicene or the pre-Chalcedonian Fathers in order to address the specific problematics embedded in the doctrinal crises, so also the Fathers of Vatican I, in order to address the specific doctrinal problematic they saw themselves faced with, had to articulate an understanding of dogma that reflected more a necessary specification of the notion of dogma than an explication of what has been regarded as implicitly present in all periods. To understand the matter rightly is finally to appreciate (4) that even the neo-Scholastic theologians, often unjustly derided for their allegedly ossified timeless concept of dogma, were quite aware of the fact that, according to the understanding authoritatively proposed in Dei Filius, a dogma was far from an exhaustive articulation of the divine truth. The Jesuit expert on theological notes Sixtus Cartechini (1912–1994) could explicitly state: “While a dogmatic formula is infallible and immutable in what it affirms or negates, it nevertheless frequently may be perfected through that by which it expresses more deeply and in a better way the divine mysteries. . . . Thus one and the same revealed truth may be determined to a greater degree in successive times in diverse respects.”40 Hence, since in its content a dogma always remains true and binding, and since no single dogma ever fully expresses the divinum depositum, a dogma always necessarily points beyond itself to the ultimately non-objectifiable, Inquiries into the conceptual history of terms like fides, regula fidei, and articulus fidei make plain that the Church never was without what now is referred to as doctrine and also as “dogma,” at least in embryo. It is the apostle Paul who creates the link between binding doctrine and received apostolic Tradition. The typos didaches (forma doctrinae) is St. Paul’s term (Rom 6:17) that fuses both, the binding doctrine and the apostolic Tradition, as the articulation of the faith that is affirmed at baptism. I do not find the account that Karl Rahner and Karl Lehmann advance persuasive (Mysterium Salutis, vol. 1 [Einsiedeln: Benziger, 1965], 641) and take rather Josef Rupert Geiselmann’s overall assessment still to hold (Handbuch theologischer Grundbegriffe, vol. 1 [Munich: Kösel, 1962], 226). The scholarly most detailed and still most reliable account is found in Georg Söll, Handbuch der Dogmengeschichte, vol. 1/5, Dogma und Dogmenentwicklung, ed. Michael Schmaus, Alois Grillmeier, and Leo Scheffczyk (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1971). 40 Sixtus Cartechini, S.J., De valore notarum theologicarum et de criteriis ad eas dignoscendas (Rome: Gregorian University, 1951), 18: “Formula dogmatica est infallibilis et immutabilis in eo quod affirmat vel negat, sed tamen saepius potest perfici quod plus et melius exprimat divina mysteria. . . . Ita una eademque veritas revelata magis determinatur successu temporis sub diversis respectibus.” 39 354 Reinhard Hütter that is, propositionally and discursively inexhaustible and thus ever greater mystery of God’s salvation. The ongoingly relevant corrective principle to the danger of doctrinal conceptual univocity remains the rule that was formulated at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215): “Between creator and creature there can be noted no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them.”41 This rule has been expressed most recently and most relevantly to our topic under discussion by Pope Benedict XVI in his lecture on “Faith, Reason and the University:” The faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which—as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated—unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, “transcends” knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos.42 In all that follows this fundamental analogical rule of Lateran IV must be kept in mind lest dogma is misunderstood as an exercise of exhaustive conceptual comprehension (a la Hegel) or, in reaction to such a misunderstanding, is rejected in favor of a misplaced radical apophaticism that takes dogma as an anathema, that is, as a pure negation of some distortive constriction of divine revelation, a revelation that in itself remains always and in principle ineffable. Hence, in order to avoid both distortions of dogma, the logos of human conceptual and propositional articulation and discursive ratiocination, unfolding in time, even in the case of an infallible and irreversible dogma, still must always acknowledge its infinite distance vis-à-vis the divine Logos of creation and redemption.43 Lateran IV: “Inter creatorem et creaturam non potest tanta similitude notari, quin inter eos maior sit dissimilitudo notanda” (DS 806). 42 Pope Benedict XVI, Lecture on “Faith, Reason, and the University: Memories and Reflections,” University of Regensburg, September 12, 2006 (see Benedict’s page on the Vatican site, speeches, 2006). 43 Theological discourse in dogmatic theology, when considering the revealed mysteries, therefore relies always on analogical predication. Since dogmatic discourse is essentially cataphatic, the apophatic moment remains an inherent 41 Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 355 With this understanding of dogma in place, we are now in a position to turn to the first important statement of the modern magisterium on the development of doctrine articulated in Dei Filius at the very end of the section in which the above definitional circumscription of dogma is to be found: The doctrine of the faith which God has revealed is put forward not as some philosophical discovery capable of being perfected by human intelligence, but as a divine deposit committed to the spouse of Christ to be faithfully protected and infallibly promulgated. Hence, too, that meaning of the sacred dogmas is ever to be maintained which has once been declared by holy mother church, and there must never be any abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding. May understanding, knowledge, and wisdom increase as ages and centuries roll along, and greatly and vigorously flourish, in each and all, in the individual and in the whole church: but this only in its own proper kind, that is to say, in the same doctrine, the same sense, and the same [meaning] (“ in eodem scilicet dogmate, eodem sensu, eademque sententia”).44 corrective of analogical predication. While the basic fact is uncontroversial for most Catholic theologians, there is a complex discussion over the nature, kind, and extent of analogy in theological discourse between Thomists, Scotists, Suarezians, and those who have fallen under the spell of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, or Wittgenstein—the five most influential modern philosophical ways of denying analogical predication, the first for the sake of securing the univocity of the concept and achieving truth in the system of Wissenschaft, and the last four on the assumption that language is primordially metaphorical. Dei Filius and John Paul II’s encyclical letter Fides et Ratio have clarified—once and for all, one should think—that the philosophical conceptualizations of being, truth, and language advanced by each of them are ill suited for Catholic theology. 44 Vatican I, De Filius: “Neque enim fidei doctrina, quam Deus revelavit, velut philosophicum inventum proposita est humanis ingeniis perficienda, sed tamquam divinum depositum Christi Sponsae tradita, fideliter custodienda et infallibiliter declaranda. Hinc sacrorum quoque dogmatum is sensus perpetuo est retinendus, quem semel declaravit sancta mater Ecclesia, nec umquam ab eo sensu, altioris intelligentiae specie et nomine, recedendum. ‘Crescat igitur et multum vehementerque proficiat, tam singulorum, quam omnium, tam unius hominis, quam totius Ecclesiae, aetatum ac saeculorum gradibus, intelligentia, scientia, sapientia; sed in suo dumtaxat genere, in eodem scilicet dogmate, eodem sensu, eademque sententia (Vine. Lir. Common, n. 28)’” (DH 3020; trans. Norman P. Tanner, S.J., in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils [Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990]). 356 Reinhard Hütter The Fathers of the First Vatican Council emphasize the ongoing identity of doctrine, sense, and meaning between a definitive and irreversible dogma and its ongoing interpretation that aims at an ever-deeper understanding of the mystery the dogma specifies. Needless to say that such a process of growth in understanding, knowledge, and wisdom in the same doctrine, sense, and meaning is only conceivable on the supposition that a universal “law of historicity” that comprises all truth and meaning does not exist. Differently put, the identity of doctrine, sense, and meaning that Dei Filius teaches and the “law of historicity” issuing in the alleged universal historicity of all truth and meaning cannot coexist. They are, in short, incompatible. The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, understanding perfectly well this fundamental incompatibility, yet being also concerned that the deepened awareness of and legitimate insight into the reality of history be appropriately acknowledged, shift the focus from the First Vatican Council’s teaching of the identity of doctrine, sense, and meaning to the pneumatologically funded, theological historicity that characterizes the history of salvation and with it also the Church. The law of this historicity is nothing but the eternal law of God’s providence as it unfolds in this history of creation, redemption, and glorification by way of the integrity of created secondary causality, be it necessary causes or contingent causes, the latter comprising also the causality characteristic of rational free creatures.45 It is for this reason that theological historicity taken in this precise sense is not only fully compatible with the identity of doctrine, sense, and meaning that Dei Filius teaches. Rather, guided by divine providence and conveyed by divine revelation, theological historicity also provides the very horizon in which the identity of doctrine, sense, and meaning can be coherently prescribed and actually followed. Differently put: the given-ness of the divine economy, the history of salvation, as communicated by revelation, constitutes a comprehensive horizon of understanding, of intelligibility, that creates an antecedent expectation of future intelligibility—the very condition for the ongoing intellectus fidei to occur. Bereft of this encompassing horizon and bereft of the supposition of revelation and its ongoing unfolding as a real idea in the mind of the Church, the identity of doctrine, sense, and meaning becomes the wishful thinking of an abstract dogmatism—precisely the way the post-conciliar historicist historiography would 45 “Divine providence works infallibly in all things, and nevertheless, the effects of contingent causes come about contingently, as God moves all things proportionately, each thing according to its mode” (Thomas Aquinas, ST I, q. 22, a. 4; De malo, q. 6). Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 357 tend to critique and eventually deconstruct this identity—as an intrinsically impossible reality. We find a brief but concise formulation of this pneumatologically funded, theological historicity in the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum. The key term under which this historicity is unfolded is traditio or paradosis: This tradition [traditio] which comes from the apostles progresses in the church under the assistance of the holy Spirit. There is growth in understanding of what is handed on, both the words and the realities they signify. This comes about through contemplation and study by believers, who “ponder these things in their hearts” (see Luke 2:19 and 51); through the intimate understanding of spiritual things which they experience; and through the preaching of those who, on succeeding to the office of bishop, receive the sure charism of truth. Thus, as the centuries advance, the church constantly holds its course towards the fullness of God’s truth, until the day when the words of God reach their fulfillment in the church.46 While the Fathers of the First Vatican Council emphasize the ongoing identity of the meaning of doctrine with the original deposit, the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council emphasize the ongoing dynamic explication of doctrine until the very plenitude of divine truth given to the apostles in the deposit of faith has been received into the Church’s mind. Far from being contradictory, the two teachings only differ in emphasis and scope, Vatican I focusing on the identity of doctrine, sense, and meaning in the ongoing growth of understanding, knowledge, and wisdom; Vatican II stressing the complex and manifold dynamics that are integral to this process involving in various ways three distinct but interrelated motors that stimulate this growth of understanding, knowledge, and wisdom. The Fathers of Vatican 46 The Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, §8, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. Volume II: Trent–Vatican II, 974. On this topic, see the two important contributions by Joseph Ratzinger: first his remarks, written for Cardinal Frings, on the first schema of what was to become Dei Verbum, “Bemerkungen zum Schema ‘De fontibus revelationis,’” in Gesammelte Schriften vol. 7/1 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2012), 157–74, trans. Jared Wicks, S.J., in “Six Texts by Prof. Joseph Ratzinger as peritus before and during Vatican Council II,” Gregorianum 89 (2008): 233–311, at 269–85 (“Observations on the Schema De fontibus revelationis”); and his later discussion in Principles of Catholic Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), esp. “Short Formulas of Faith? On the Relationship between Formulas and Interpretation” (122–32). 358 Reinhard Hütter I and Vatican II obviously share the selfsame horizon of theological historicity. This horizon simultaneously and without contradiction in the context of the epistemological focus on revelation, faith, reason affords the Fathers of Vatican I to stress in Dei Filius the identity of doctrine, sense, and meaning. The selfsame horizon of theological historicity, but now with a focus on the dynamic of salvation history itself, affords the Fathers of Vatican II to emphasize in Dei Verbum the existential, spiritual, and evangelical dynamic of the growth in understanding of revelation. It is the shared horizon of theological historicity that makes the different emphases of Vatican I and Vatican II compatible and complementary. Vincent of Lérins’s Commonitorium against Heresies The complete compatibility between the teachings of Vatican I and Vatican II on the authentic development of doctrine becomes more fully transparent when both conciliar statements are read in light of the patristic author from the early fifth century who reflected deeply about the question of doctrinal coherence and development and who arguably stands behind the conciliar teaching of both Vatican Councils (explicitly in the case of Vatican I; implicitly in the case of Vatican II) on this crucial issue—Vincent of Lérins, a Gallic monk, born in Toulouse, who died circa 445 on the island of Lérins, off the coast of Cannes. His most famous work, composed around 434 and published only posthumously, is the Commonitorium against Heresies. During the long period of medieval theology, that is, for almost one thousand years, the Commonitorium was virtually ignored, presumably because of Vincent’s hidden polemic against Saint Augustine. From the time of the early sixteenth century on when the question of the authentic development of doctrine became increasingly virulent in the context of the emerging Protestant Reformation, the Commonitorium became a theological resource in high demand. In 1528, it received a first print edition ever in an anti-heretical collection of sources and subsequently, in the same century went through thirty-five editions and twenty-two translations and thus became an increasingly important patristic point of reference for Catholic but also Anglican theologians.47 In his canon or rule to overcome heresy, Vincent famously states that “in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all (ubique, semper, et ab omnibus).”48 This rule played a major role in Newman’s via 47 48 For an informative account, see Weidner’s introduction to Via Media, xiii–lxxix. Saint Vincent of Lerins, Commonitorium, 18: “In ipsa item Catholica Ecclesia magnopere curandum est ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 359 media, articulated most forcefully in his 1837 Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church.49 Based on Vincent’s canon or rule, Newman critically exposed what he took to be Roman Catholic corruptions of doctrine and embraced a consistent antiquarianism that took the consensus of the first four centuries, the consensus of antiquity, as the ideal state of doctrine that reflected authentically the purity of the scriptural and apostolic origin. In his subsequent 1845 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Newman expunged his previous antiquarianism in an explicit self-critique. Already in his Lectures though, Newman explicitly admits that: “The Rule of Vincent is not of a mathematical or demonstrative character, but moral, and requires practical judgment and good sense to apply it. . . . it admits of various and unequal application in various instances.”50 Only two years after the publication of the Lectures one of Newman’s friends confronted him omnibus creditum est.” See Martin Elze, “Der Begriff des Dogmas in der alten Kirche,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 61 (1964): 421–38, at 438. For the best recent scholarly edition enriched with an extensive historical and interpretive study, see Vinzenz von Lérins, Commonitorium, ed. Michael Fiedrowicz with commentary, trans. Claudia Barthold (Mühlheim: Carthusianus, 2011). 49 John Henry Cardinal Newman, Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, Viewed relative to Romanism and Popular Protestantism (London: Rivington, 1837), 51–52, 54–56, 253, 321–27 (this material appears in Weidner’s edition of Via Media on 99–100, 102–3, 271, and 329–34). Already between 1833 and 1836, Newman published translated sections of Vincent’s Commonitorium in the British Magazine. They can now be found in section IV, “Primitive Christianity,” as ch. 2 under the title “What says Vincent of Lerins?” in Historical Sketches, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, 1908), 375–90. 50 Newman, Lectures, 55–56. It is worth considering Newman’s qualification in full: “The Rule of Vincent is not of a mathematical or demonstrative character, but moral, and requires practical judgment and good sense to apply it. For instance: what is meant by being ‘taught always’? Does it mean in every century, or every year, or every mouth? Does ‘everywhere’ mean in every country, or in every diocese? And does ‘the Consent of Fathers’ require us to produce the direct testimony of every one of them? How many Fathers, how many places, how many instances constitute a fulfilment of the test proposed? It is, then, from the nature of the case, a condition which never can be satisfied as fully as it might have been; it admits of various and unequal application in various instances; and what degree of application is enough must be decided by the same principles which guide us in the conduct of life, which determine us in politics, or trade, or war, which lead us to accept Revelation at all, for which we have but probability to show at most; nay, to believe in the existence of an Intelligent Creator. This character, indeed, of Vincent’s Canon, will but recommend it to the disciples of the School of Butler, from its agreement with the analogy of nature; but it affords a ready loophole for such as do not wish to be persuaded, of which both Protestant and Roman controversialists are not slow to avail themselves” (Lectures, 55–56). 360 Reinhard Hütter with an article published in the Dublin Review by Roman Catholic bishop Nicholas Wiseman. In this article, Wiseman forcefully argued that the principle of catholicity, securus judicat orbis terrarum—the verdict of the whole world is conclusive—was demonstrably integral to the early Church and that it was plainly self-contradictory for Anglicanism, appealing to the Lerinian canon and rule, to insist on antiquity and simultaneously to deny the very catholicity at the heart of the early Church. As Newman vividly recollects in his Apologia, Wiseman’s point struck home and the argument of the Lectures, the theory of the via media, came undone.51 A few years later, in the course of the composition of his 1845 version of his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Newman submits in the very introduction to this work his own Anglican use of the Lerinian canon to an explicit self-critique showing that the way he had used the canon in his Lectures offered indeed no reliable criteria but rather served to justify a position arrived at on other grounds. Acknowledging that the solution Vincent offers with his rule and canon is indeed as difficult as the original problem, Newman ends this self-critique with the conclusion “that, whatever be the proper key for harmonizing the records and documents of the early and later Church, and true as the dictum of Vincentius must be considered in the abstract, and possible as its application might be in his own age, when he might almost ask the primitive centuries for their testimony, it is hardly available now, or effective of any satisfactory result.”52 What became increasingly important for Newman in the course of researching and writing the 1845 version of the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine was Vincent of Lérins’s less well-known but at least equally, if not actually more, important second rule from chapter 23 of the Commonitorium. There Vincent states: Objection: Shall there, then, be no progress [profectus] in Christ’s Church? Answer: Certainly: all possible progress. For what being is there so envious of men, so full of hatred to God, who would seek to forbid it? Yet on condition that it be real progress, not alteration of the faith [sed ita tamen ut vere profectus sit ille fidei, non permutatio]. For progress requires that the subject be enlarged in itself; whereas alteration implies that it is transformed into something else. The See appendix 2 below for the highly instructive account that Newman offers of this event in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua: Being a History of His Religious Opinions [hereafter, Apo.] (London: Longmans, 1908 [originally1865]). 52 Dev., 27. Cf. the extended critique Newman advances in sections 8 through 19 of the introduction (Dev., 11–27). 51 Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 361 [understanding], then, the knowledge, the wisdom, as well of individuals as of all, as well of one man as of the whole Church, ought, in the course of ages and centuries, to increase and make much and vigorous progress; but yet only in its own kind; that is to say, in the same doctrine, in the same sense, and in the same meaning [sed in suo duntaxat genere, in eodem scilicet dogmate, eodem sensu, eademque sententia].53 What makes this second Lerinian rule unique is that it ends with what I shall call in the following the “criterion of identity.” This criterion of identity is an indispensable part of the second rule, because it is only by way of this criterion that Vincent can make a meaningful distinction between real progress (vere profectus) and alteration (permutatio) of the faith. The salient point of Vincent’s criterion is that authentic progress (vere profectus) presupposes both the continuity and substantial identity of the subject.54 Since Vincent is referring here to the material object of the faith, what is believed, and since the object of the faith is made up of the teachings, the doctrines of the faith, Newman’s distinction between an authentic development and a corruption of doctrine maps neatly onto the Lerinian distinction. We shall see later how Newman handles, indeed develops, the criterion of identity. It is important to realize that the Fathers of the First Vatican Council magisterially affirm the criterion of identity of the second Lerinian rule in Dei Filius when they insist on the identity of doctrine, sense, and meaning. Vincent’s second rule makes obvious that neither he nor by implication the Fathers of the First Vatican Council succumb to the temptation of antiquarianism. Thomas Guarino, in his noteworthy book about Vincent, rightly observes that according to the latter, “antiquity itself must always be 53 54 Saint Vincent of Lerins, Commonitorium, 110. That Vincent’s criterion of identity is not some bygone mental construct of Christian late antiquity can easily be ascertained by consulting Hans-Georg Gadamer, who writes insightfully on the underlying distinction in his Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, rev. ed. (New York: Continuum, 2006), 110–11. Interestingly, in order to account for the categorical difference between what Gadamer calls Veränderung (Vincent’s profectus) and what he calls Verwandlung (Vincent’s permutatio), he draws upon the Aristotelian metaphysics of substance and accident and argues that the former signifies an accidental and the latter a substantial change. We will see much later in this essay that Francisco Marin-Sola, O.P., in developing a conceptual account for a homogeneous evolution of dogma, also draws upon the Aristotelian metaphysics of substance and its concomitant categorical distinctions, but develops the differentiation in a much more elaborate and nuanced way than Gadamer. 362 Reinhard Hütter understood within the horizon of legitimate development.”55 Differently put, already Vincent of Lérins presupposes the theological historicity that we find also presupposed in Newman’s understanding of the development of doctrine. This historicity is simply an entailment of the realization that what is implicit in revelation and respectively in the idea of Christianity becomes successively explicit as time expands, as new historical situations need to be faced and heresies addressed, and as the tradition that comes from the apostles is ongoingly proclaimed, taught, and contemplated by the Church. Theological Historicity versus Historicist Historicity Unsurprisingly, theological historicity in Vincent’s and Newman’s sense is categorically different from the “law of historicity” characteristic of the historicism to which the Enlightenment gives rise and which presentism tends to embrace.56 The theological historicity that Vincent and Newman presuppose is nothing but the unfolding divine economy, that is, salvation history, a history, not only informed but established by the surpassing trans-historical transcendence of God, the triune Lord of history and sovereign agent of revelation, Incarnation, and redemption—and the human being, the recipient of the paradosis of revelation, held by divine and Catholic faith, a recipient who qua rational being is able to apprehend and understand truth that transcends as well as penetrates the transiency of time, the vagaries of history, and the contingent particularities of language, culture, and custom. It is, in short, the historicity of the comprehensive, sovereign, and homogeneous divine economy and as such an essentially non-historicist historicity. Historicist historicity, on the contrary, compromises the very meaning of concepts like revelation, faith, church, and even truth and subjects them to the supposition of epochal changes that call for radical hermeneutical transpositions from a bygone into a new epoch and from one socio-cultural locality to another. Especially in its postmodern modality, historicism supposes the fundamental heterogeneity of succes Thomas G. Guarino, Vincent of Lérins and the Development of Christian Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 16. 56 On the complex topic of differentiating between the greatly varying senses of historicity in general, see Gerhard Bauer, “Geschichtlichkeit”: Wege und Irrwege eines Begriffs (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1963), and on the challenging theological task of sorting out the legitimate and unavoidable historicity that characterizes salvation history itself from historicism’s programmatic notion of historicity, see Winfried Schulz, Dogmenentwicklung als Problem der Geschichtlichkeit der Wahrheitserkenntnis: Eine erkenntnistheoretisch-theologische Studie zum Problemkreis der Dogmenentwicklung (Rome: Gregorian University, 1969). 55 Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 363 sive or even simultaneous, contiguous horizons of understanding and interpretation. Put into theological terms, in faithful discipleship to the late Heidegger, it is essentially “polytheistic.” Historicist historicity has an implicit principle—naturalism—and a largely unacknowledged consequence—relativism. The implicit principle of naturalism finds its intellectually most sophisticated expression in the programmatic essay by Ernst Troeltsch in his 1898 “Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology.”57 The principle of naturalism takes the form of understanding scientific laws that govern all physical and historical reality as inflexible principles that determine all conditions and do not allow for exceptions. In consequence, one must presuppose a fundamental similarity among all historical occurrences. It is this underlying principle of naturalism that funds the one principle that gives coherence to Troeltsch’s critical historiography across the wide variety of historical phenomena— the principle of analogy. Historical judgments presuppose an essential similarity between present and past reality. The observation of analogy between similar events of the past gives the possibility of ascribing probability to them and of ascertaining what is not known in the one from what is known in the other. What this principle of analogy entails is obvious: since in the contemporary experience of the vast majority of human beings, it is not the case that people rise bodily from the dead. Hence one has no rational grounds for assuming that such might have happened at any other time in history. Consequently, Christ’s bodily resurrection from the dead cannot have been a historical event in this physical universe. The German philosopher, philologist, and literary critic Friedrich Schlegel captured in a nutshell, by anticipation so to speak, the two correlated principles of naturalism and analogy at the very heart of Troeltsch’s historicist program and by way of his witty aphorism exposes their metaphysical arbitrariness: The two main principles of the so-called historical criticism are the Postulate of Vulgarity and the Axiom of the Average. The Postulate of Vulgarity: everything great, good, and beautiful is improbable because it is extraordinary and, at the very least, suspicious. The Axiom of the Average: as we and our surroundings are, so must have been always and everywhere, because that, after all, is so very natural.58 This essay is to be found in Ernst Troeltsch, Religion in History, trans. James Luther Adams and Walter F. Bense (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1991), 11–32. 58 Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. and ed. Peter Virchow (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 3. 57 364 Reinhard Hütter The largely unacknowledged consequence of historicist historicity is relativism. Despite their sharp distinction between historicism and relativism, Wilhelm Dilthey, Troeltsch, Friedrich Marheinecke, and the sociologist Karl Mannheim admitted as a consequence of historicism the high probability of relativism.59 And this should not come as a surprise. Since, according to historicist historicity, this epoch is the epoch of the full and consequent grasp of the radical historicity of human existence all the way down, one must assume and embrace a primordial plurality of subsequent and even concurrent heterogeneous conceptual frameworks and consequently a notion of truth as relative to these frameworks. To the degree that presentism embraces historicist historicity as a guiding supposition, it has to endorse the historicity of truth. To affirm the historicity of truth is, however, necessarily to reject the criterion of identity. Historicist historicity is, in short, essentially anti-economic and in this sense also anti-theological. By now it will have become obvious that theological historicity and historicist historicity are funded by incommensurable first principles. In theological historicity truth and history are fundamentally united in their first transcendent cause, the provident God. The unfolding of created being, including the unfolding of human history and with it the growth in knowledge and understanding of the human being individually and humanity collectively does entail not only a fundamental historicity of being in the natural order (evolution) and in the order of free human agency (history), but also a historicity of the knowledge of truth (discourse traditions of inquiry). Ontological, historical, and epistemological historicity are indexed to a transcendent protological, soteriological, and eschatological horizon that is not only constitutive of the historical dynamic itself but present most intimately to every moment of history and accessible from every moment of history—by reason, thanks to the discursive logos of the human creature, and by faith, thanks to the incarnate Logos, Jesus Christ. For historicist historicity, history and truth are fundamentally unrelated realities. On the suppositions of historicism one might be able to reconstruct an accurate history, but one can never narrate a true history since history cannot convey or transport a meaning that would transcend 59 For an astute analysis and demonstration of the theoretical inadequacy of philosophical historicism precisely because of the conceptually irresolvable and eventually detrimental problem of relativism, see Carl Page, Philosophical Historicism and the Betrayal of First Philosophy (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). This book should be required reading for presentists who characteristically invoke in intellectually all too facile ways the purportedly obvious inevitability of an intellectually and culturally historicist reading of past and present as the de facto horizon for theology in the twenty-first century. Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 365 its very historicity. When historicism is consistent and follows through on its implications, truth itself is a historical phenomenon encompassed fully by the horizon of absolute historicity. The one exception to the encompassing historicization of truth must, of course, be the universal principle of historicity itself that has to remain absolutely trans-historical in order to account for the historicity of all reality. The defining principle in short cannot be part of the set of all sets that it defines. This is historicism’s insurmountable prōton pseudos, fundamental aporia. Apply the acid of historicist historicity to historicism itself and the mirage suddenly disappears. As soon as historicism itself is historicized, it turns into a temporally situated and historically conditioned ideology. Historicism can only be universalized (and what would be the point of a non-universal historicism!) at the price of its own self-contradiction and eventual self-destruction. For this very reason (as well as others), philosophers have long since abandoned historicism as a philosophically viable position. Yet Catholic theologians committed to the presentist program still are beholden by the purportedly radical challenges historicist historicity seems to pose to Catholic theology and inebriated by the promises the radical application of historicist principles to the Church’s doctrine seems to hold. From the perspective of presentism, Vincent is naively premodern about matters of historicity, as one should expect, and therefore must be dismissed upfront as lacking any relevance, let alone normativity, for the present discussion. Newman does not fare much better, if at all, since—at least according to the hermeneutics of the Newman reception that is dominant among presentists—he is supposed to be a precursor of historicist historicism. Yet even taken as such a precursor, Newman turns out to be still disturbingly unreflective about what historicists would regard to be the necessary entailments of historicist historicity, and therefore Newman’s thought would need to be considerably updated if not transformed in order to acquire any relevance for presentists. Yet it has become plain in the course of these considerations, that any presentist claim whatsoever on Newman ignores the plain fact that Newman would vehemently resist such a historicist updating of his understanding of the development of doctrine.60 As a matter of fact, Newman would regard such a historicist bringing-up-to-date of his thought as nothing but the illegitimate intro60 It is at this point where Newman differs most emphatically from Hegel’s model of historicity, as Thomas Pfau argues persuasively in the greatly informative chapter “Tradition” in The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Christian Theology, ed. Daniel Whistler (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 219–46. 366 Reinhard Hütter duction of historicist principles into essentially theological considerations appropriately informed by revealed religion, indeed as an imposition of principles categorically foreign to the nature of revealed religion, an imposition that would amount to nothing less than one particular version of the rationalist usurpation of revealed religion.61 Newman at Vatican II Newman’s understanding of the development of doctrine became influential at the Second Vatican Council primarily by way to two periti, who— deeply influenced by Newman—embraced and affirmed the theological historicity that Vincent as well as Newman presuppose, yet who at the same time decidedly reject historicist historicity and the ensuing rationalist usurpation of revealed religion—Yves Congar and Joseph Ratzinger. Both theologians were able to receive Newman in the context of a rich harvest of Catholic theological reflection on the development of doctrine that marked the century between the two Vatican Councils. Two catalysts played a central role in what has rightly been described by Guy Mansini as the “development of the development of doctrine”62—the modernist crisis and the ongoing reception of Newman’s path-breaking work on the development of doctrine. Francisco Marín-Sola, O.P., Ambrose Gardeil, O.P., Pierre Rousselot, S.J., Léonce de Grandmaison, S.J., Maurice Blondel, Henri de Lubac, S.J., Karl Rahner, S.J., Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P., and first and foremost Yves Congar, O.P., himself come to mind.63 All of these Newman focused on this problem much more extensively during his Anglican period before and during the Oxford Movement, when he confronted his own former associates, the Oriel Noetics in Oxford, whose evidential theology was a prototypical rationalist usurpation of revealed religion. See paradigmatically his Oxford University Sermon no. 4, “The Usurpations of Reason” (O.S., 54–74), and no. 73, “On the Introduction of Rationalistic Principles into Revealed Religion” (in Tracts Theological and Ecclesiastical [London, Longmans, 1908; originally 1847]; repr. in Ess., 1:30–101). 62 Guy Mansini, OSB, “The Development of the Development of Doctrine in the Twentieth Century,” Angelicum 93 (2016): 785–822. 63 Francisco Marin-Sola, O.P., L’Évolution homogène du Dogme catholique, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Fribourg: Libraire de l’oeuvre de Saint-Paul, 1924); Ambroise Gardeil, O.P., Le Donné révélé et la Théologie, 2nd ed. (Paris: Cerf, 1932); Pierre Rousselot, S.J., “Petite théorie du développement du dogme” (1915), ed. Henri de Lubac, S.J., Recherches de Science Religieuse 53 (1965): 355–90; Léonce de Grandmaison, S.J., Le Dogme chrétien—sa nature—ses formules—son développement (Paris: Beauchesne, 1928); Maurice Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, trans. Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1964); de Lubac, “The Problem of the Development of Dogma” (1948), 61 Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 367 theologians who contributed to a deeper understanding of the development of doctrine in the interval between the First and the Second Vatican Councils were influenced to varying degrees by and drew in different ways upon Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. What accounts for the rupture in the positions of some of these theologians— especially Rahner and Schillebeeckx—between their pre–Vatican II reception of Newman and their post–Vatican II abandonment of Newman is their exchange of a fundamentally theological and primarily Christological and pneumatological frame of reference for a new frame of reference constituted by the all-encompassing law of historicity, the entailed principle of primordial pluralism, and a hermeneutics guided by existential experience and authenticity oriented to universal liberation.64 As central as Newman was before, up to, and during Vatican II, so obsolete and passé did he become in the aftermath of the council when presentist ruptures with the past and departures to new horizons were the call of the day.65 Newman’s Anticipated Lerinian Critique of Post-Conciliar Antiquarianism and—especially—Presentism In light of the explicit reception of the criterion of identity of Vincent’s second rule in Vatican I’s Dei Filius and of the implicit reception of in Theology in History, trans. Anne Eglund Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), 248–80; Karl Rahner, S.J., “The Development of Dogma,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 1, God, Christ, Mary and Grace, trans. Cornelius Ernst, O.P. (Baltimore: Helicon, 1961), 39–77; Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P., “The Development of the Apostolic Faith into the Dogma of the Church,” in Revelation and Theology, vol. 1, trans. N. D. Smith (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967), 57–83; Yves Congar, O.P., La Foi et la Théologie: Le mystère chrétien, théologie dogmatique (Tournai: Desclée, 1962); Congar, Tradition and Traditions. 64 See: Karl Rahner, “Yesterday’s History of Dogma and Theology for Tomorrow,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 18, God and Revelation, trans. Edward Quinn (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 3–34; Rahner, “The Experience of God Today,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 11, Confrontations I, trans. David Bourke (New York: Seabury, 1974), 149–65; Rahner, “The Two Basic Types of Christology,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 13, Theology, Anthropology, Christology, trans. David Bourke (New York: Seabury, 1975), 213–23; Rahner, The Shape of the Church to Come (New York: Seabury, 1974). See also Schillebeeckx, Understanding of Faith, and God the Future of Man, trans. N. D. Smith (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968). 65 For two of the most informative presentations of this rich and complex discussion, see Herbert Hammans, Die neueren katholischen Erklärungen der Dogmenentwicklung (Essen: Ludgerus-Verlag Wingen KG, 1965), and Aidan Nichols, O.P., From Newman to Congar: The Idea of Doctrinal Development from the Victorians to the Second Vatican Council (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990). 368 Reinhard Hütter Newman in Vatican II’s Dei Verbum, the development of doctrine is not simply a historical fact—merely an accident of the Church’s ongoing reception of the deposit of faith, of interest only to historians of dogma as a feature of the Church’s historically extended and socio-culturally embedded reality. It is, rather, first and foremost a reality that is integral to the Church’s life, a reality that the Church has become aware of only slowly, but now holds and teaches explicitly. Hence, neither antiquarianism nor presentism have a legitimate place in the Church’s life and her theological labor. It is quite obvious, in light of the dogmatic evolution that characterizes the Church’s reception of revelation, the depositum fidei, and especially in light of the promulgation of the two Marian dogmas and the dogma of papal infallibility, that antiquarianism never had a legitimate place in the Church’s life and theological labor. The first council of Jerusalem made this already plain. What is, however, much more important to realize in the wake of the Second Vatican Council is that neither does presentism have a legitimate place in the Church’s life and theological labor. Indeed, presentism actively delegitimizes itself: in measuring doctrine by criteria historically extrinsic to the faith, it inverts (and perverts) the core meaning of the faith: namely, to liberate human persons from being ensnared by their contingent historical moment and to achieve spiritual and moral orientation on their world, rather than being engulfed within the historically contingent modes of judgment. Dei Filius, by way of its magisterial insistence on the criterion of identity, delegitimizes presentism. Moreover, neither Newman nor, for that matter, Dei Verbum endorse the kind of historicization of doctrine and dilution of its development into a process of ongoing revisionist or even revolutionary transformation that characterizes the presentist program. In the final analysis, presentism always means supplanting theology with politics. Furthermore, there is every reason to believe that the Fathers at the Second Vatican Council never intended to reverse Dei Filius but, on the contrary, presupposed the doctrine laid down in Dei Filius, as attested by the fact that in Dei Verbum the Vatican II Fathers cite Dei Filius extensively. The “burden of proof ” for alleging that the Second Vatican Council, and especially Dei Verbum, departed from the First Vatican Council, that is, concretely from Dei Filius, thereby opening the doors to a presentist program, lies with the rupturers. As already mentioned earlier, the original 1845 version of Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine was his—at least for his own person—successful endeavor to address and overcome, by way of a theological argumentation built on cumulative historical evidence, the antiquarianism of the his own via media “paper church” from his 1837 Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 369 Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church and his exclusive focus therein on Vincent’s canon or first rule: ubique, semper, et ab omnibus. Because the force of Newman’s cumulative argument in the 1845 version of his Essay was primarily directed against his own previous Tractarian antiquarianism, the modernists George Tyrell, Alfred Loisy, and others, especially in France, fell into the creative misunderstanding of assuming that Newman shared and even offered warrants for their presentist program built upon primarily historicist suppositions.66 To think that Newman’s overcoming of his own antiquarianism necessitates his endorsement of presentism is, of course, a non sequitur. Avery Dulles rightly stresses that “Newman gave no quarter to dogmatic relativism. He argued vigorously for the irreversibility of dogmas, not necessarily in their wording, but in their meaning. His balanced position represents a middle course between a fluid historicism and a rigid dogmatism.”67 Dulles continues to observe: From the very outset Newman opposes the “transformist” view that Christianity is ever in flux and accommodates itself to the times. For him it is axiomatic that the faith of the apostles must perdure. But in order to retain its vitality and ward off new errors, the living Church will sometimes have to articulate its faith in new ways. Granted that development must occur, it must still be asked whether the new formulations are in accord with the ancient faith. I would not include Maurice Blondel in that group. His Letters on History and Dogma are substantially, and at times verbatim, in agreement with Newman’s position from 1845—a plainly non-modernist position. Furthermore, Blondel’s accurate and lucid critique of historicism sets him very clearly apart from the modernists. Finally, the controversy around Blondel has its unique origin and character—quite different from the modernist problematic. Blondel’s polemic of what he calls “extrinsicism” seems to me to be to a large degree misplaced—a caricaturizing counterpolemic against those who on philosophical grounds from a Thomist philosophical point of view criticized his L’Action. Because he draws on his philosophie de l’action to back his account of the inherent vitality of Tradition, there remains a point of controversy and disagreement for those who regard the approach of L’Action as philosophically problematic if not misguided, his philosophical backing for his account of tradition therefore lacking, and the polemic against “extrinsicism” therefore unconvincing and misplaced. Regardless of the position one might hold regarding the assessment of L’Action and Blondel’s polemic against “extrinsicism,” it should be obvious that Blondel can on no legitimate grounds be characterized as a modernist. 67 Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., John Henry Newman (New York: Continuum, 2002), 79. 66 370 Reinhard Hütter To respond to this difficult question he proposed seven notes or tests for authentic development.68 It does not require advanced hermeneutical sophistication to realize that when Dulles penned these lines, he had on his mind first and foremost the presentist program. The difficult question that according to Dulles Newman was facing—whether new formulations are in accord with the ancient faith—was the question Vincent was addressing in his second rule, “in the same doctrine, in the same sense, and in the same meaning.” It is the criterion of identity that checks and obviates the presentist program and that simultaneously serves as the one criterion that helps to address and alleviate legitimate concerns about the corruption of doctrine that, unaddressed, will only give rise to new versions of antiquarianism. For the criterion of identity to be considered valid, one should be able with its help to distinguish between an authentic development and a corruption of doctrine. Yet can it actually fulfill this function? Differently put, how does one distinguish between authentic developments of doctrine and developments that are actually corruptions of doctrine, how to discern antiquarian ossifications and presentist transformations? Newman offers a first important step toward a full answer in the way he specifies Vincent’s second rule by offering seven notes of authentic development, notes that have the fingerprints of Vincent’s second rule all over them. How Is an Authentic Development of Doctrine to be Discerned? As will become patent in the following, Newman’s “tests” or “notes” of an authentic development of doctrine are best to be understood as a sophisticated development of Vincent’s second rule. Remember that in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Newman turns Vincent’s second rule against his (Newman’s) own earlier exclusive use of Vincent’s canon or first rule. Yet in order to make a successful case in which the second rule trumps his own mistaken prior antiquarian use of Vincent’s first rule, Newman has to flesh out, unfold, or in short, develop the second rule into a heuristic web of multiple criteria. And precisely this—the explicative unfolding of Vincent’s second rule—is the point as well as the ongoing relevance of Newman’s “tests” or “notes” of an authentic development of doctrine. In order fully to appreciate the way Newman develops Vincent’s second rule it is necessary to present in full the relevant passage from chapter 23 “On the Development of Religious Knowledge” from the Commonitorium: 68 Dulles, John Henry Newman, 74. Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 371 The growth of religion in the soul must be analogous to the growth of the body, which, though in process of years it is developed and attains its full size, yet remains still the same. . . . In like manner, it behooves Christian doctrine to follow the same laws of progress [ita etiam Christianae Religionis dogma sequatur has decet profectuum leges], so as to be consolidated by years, enlarged by time, refined by age, and yet, withal, to continue uncorrupt and unadulterated, complete and perfect in all the measurement of its parts, and, so to speak, in all its proper members and senses, admitting no change [permutatio], no waste of its distinctive property, no variation in its limits. . . . This, then, is undoubtedly the true and legitimate rule of progress, this the established and most beautiful order of growth, that mature age ever develops in the man those parts and forms which the wisdom of the Creator framed beforehand in the infant. . . . For it is right that those ancient doctrines of heavenly philosophy should, as time goes on, be cared for, smoothed, polished; but not that they should be changed, not that they should be maimed, not that they should be mutilated. They may receive proof, illustration, definiteness; but they must retain withal their completeness, their integrity, the characteristic properties [sed retineat necesse est plenitudinem, integritatem, proprietatem].69 In the only extant study of Vincent’s influence on the formation of Newman’s notes, Thomas O’Loughlin rightly argues “that all of Newman’s notes can already be found in the writings of Vincent of Lérins, and indeed all found in nuce in the precise chapter in which he deals with the question of development.”70 Because authentic developments of doctrine result from the one, real, and living idea of Christianity, all authentic Christian doctrines are, as Newman never tires to stress, “members of one family, and suggestive, or correlative, or confirmatory, or illustrative of each other. One furnishes evidence to another, and all to each of them. . . . You must accept the whole or reject the whole; attenuation does but enfeeble, and amputation mutilate. It is trifling to receive all but something which is as integral as any other portion; and, on the other hand, it is a solemn thing to accept any part, for, before you know where you are, you may be carried on by a 69 70 Saint Vincent of Lerins, Commonitorium, 110–15. Thomas O’Loughlin, “Newman, Vincent of Lerins and Development,” Irish Theological Quarterly 57, no. 2 (1991): 147–66, at 162. 372 Reinhard Hütter stern logical necessity to accept the whole.” 71 Newman’s Explicative Unfolding of the Second Lerinian Rule into Seven Notes of an Authentic Development of Doctrine Newman’s first note is preservation of type, which he illustrates with the help of an analogy from biological life: This is readily suggested by the analogy of physical growth, which is such that the parts and proportions of the developed form, however altered, correspond to those which belong to its rudiments. The adult animal has the same make, as it had on its birth; young birds do not grow into fishes, nor does the child degenerate into the brute, wild or domestic, of which he is by inheritance lord. Vincentius of Lerins adopts this illustration in distinct reference to Christian doctrine: “Let the soul’s religion,” he says, “imitate the law of the body, which, as years go on, develops indeed and opens out its due proportions, and yet remains identically what it was. Small are a baby’s limbs, a youth’s are larger, yet they are the same.” 72 Not only is the illustration itself obviously inspired by Vincent; this first and foundational note is also the prominent place where Newman makes explicit reference to chapter 23 of Vincent’s Commonitorium. Newman’s second note is continuity of principles. It is an entailment of the first note. For in order to preserve its type, the Church must be faithful to its foundational principles. Newman proposes nine such principles: the principle of dogma, the principle of faith, the principle of theology, the sacramental principle, the principle of the spiritual sense of Scripture, the principle of grace, the principle of asceticism, the principle of the malignity of sin, and the principle that matter and the mind are capable of sanctification. In a footnote, he adds a tenth principle, the principle of the development of doctrine.73 Abandon any one of these principles and Christianity will be diminished and even distorted in one or the other respect. Accepting all of these principles and assuring their continuity is essential to the life and vigor of the Church. It is noteworthy that in his list of principles Newman does not include a principle of historicity. Quite obviously, the sacramental principle, the principle of the spiritual sense of Scripture, the principle of grace, and the principle of the malignity of sin Newman, Dev., 93–94. Newman, Dev., 171–72. 73 For the complete list, see Newman, Dev., 325. 71 72 Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 373 presuppose the encompassing horizon of the theological historicity of salvation history. Yet theological historicity is a fact and not a principle. And historicist historicity—historicism’s fundamental principle—is incompatible with the principle of dogma, for the latter is the trans-historical and trans-cultural principle par excellence. The continuity of this principle, as well as its dynamic unfolding, is accounted for by the principle of the development of doctrine. The third note is power of assimilation, which Newman explains pithily thus: “Development is a process of incorporation.” 74 Dulles offers a helpful image to understand this note: “As a healthy organism builds itself up by ingesting food, so the Church takes in what is assimilable in the cultures it meets, and transforms what it appropriates.” 75 Also this note is entailed in the first one, presupposing (as also the second note does) Vincent’s guiding image of the organic growth of a body. The fourth note is logical sequence. Here Newman has in mind the fact that, in retrospect, “the process of development is capable of a logical expression.” 76 “A doctrine . . . professed in its mature years by a philosophy or religion, is likely to be a true development, not a corruption, in proportion as it seems to be the logical issue of its original teaching.” 77 The fourth note is an entailment of the second one, continuity of principles, and of the first principle listed there, the principle of dogma. The fifth note is anticipation of its own future. An ultimate development may be authentic when there is a “definitive anticipation at an early period in the history of the idea to which it belongs.” 78 Also this note is an entailment of the second note, especially of the sacramental principle, the principle of grace, the principle of the malignity of sin, and the principles of asceticism. The sixth note is conservative action on its own past. “A true development . . . may be described as one which is conservative of the course of antecedent developments being really those antecedents and something besides them: it is an addition which illustrates, not obscures, corroborates, not corrects, the body of thought from which it proceeds; and this is its characteristic as contrasted with a corruption.” 79 The sixth note is an indispensable specification of the first note. The preservation of type is secured Newman, Dev., 186–87. Dulles, John Henry Newman, 75. 76 Newman, Dev., 191. 77 Newman, Dev., 195. 78 Newman, Dev., 199. 79 Newman, Dev., 200. 74 75 374 Reinhard Hütter precisely by the conservative action on the past. The seventh note is chronic vigor. By retaining its youthful vigor despite its antiquity, the Church with its development of doctrine may be presumed to be authentic. By contrast, “a corruption, if vigorous, is of brief duration, runs itself out quickly, and ends in death; on the other hand, if it lasts, it fails in vigor and passes into a decay.”80 This last note is a corrective complement to the sixth note. Were conservative action upon the past all-embracing and absolute, the result would be an antiquarian ossification of the Church’s doctrine, a dead and cold traditionalism. Ongoing true reform, ongoing charismatic renewal, and ongoing authentic development of doctrine are signs of the Church’s Spirit-guided life and hence chronic vigor. We might call the seventh note the anti-antiquarian note par excellence. It is against the danger of antiquarianism that Newman famously maintains: It is indeed sometimes said that the stream is clearest near the spring. Whatever use may fairly be made of this image, it does not apply to the history of a philosophy of belief, which on the contrary is more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full. . . . In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.81 At the very end of the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Newman makes a telling statement that shows that he is aware not only of the antiquarianism he overcame in itself, but also of the presentism that emerges as soon as theologians embrace all too uncritically Enlightenment tenets (the liberalism Newman fought all his life) and are bent on engineering the ruptures, reversals, and transformations that the “law of historicity” allegedly calls for. Newman states: “A true development is that which is conservative of its original, and a corruption is that which tends to its destruction.”82 This is about as straightforward an appropriation of Vincent’s second rule as one might wish. Authentic development is a function of the ongoing identity of meaning, of faithfulness to the principles given in the one single and selfsame deposit of faith. It is for this very reason that Newman saw his notes as applicable to the “actual Newman, Dev., 437. Newman, Dev., 40. 82 Newman, Dev., 419. 80 81 Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 375 decisions of authority,”83 that is, to a promulgated teaching. The seven notes of authentic development are not at all meant to help project, predict, or even somehow encourage and bring about future developments. Hence, the development of doctrine, Newman emphasizes, is not an effect of wishing and resolving, or of forced enthusiasm, or of any mechanism of reasoning, or of any mere subtlety of intellect; but comes of its own innate power of expansion within the mind in its season, though with the use of reflection and argument and original thought, more or less as it may happen, with a dependence on the ethical growth of the mind itself, and with a reflex influence upon it.84 Against the danger of presentism, Newman insists that the development of doctrine is not the tool of ongoing change managed by “developers” of doctrine in view of a desired “Church of the future” whose teaching is to be designed in advance by the self-authenticating Church of the present. Such a presentist misconception of the development of doctrine could, according to Newman, lead only to doctrinal corruptions. Rather, Newman reminds his readers that “from the necessity . . . of the case . . . we may fairly conclude that Christian doctrine admits of formal, legitimate, and true developments, that is, of developments contemplated by its divine Author.”85 Newman’s seven notes of an authentic development can only be received rightly, that is, as perpetually pertinent, when understood as Newman’s way of fleshing out Vincent’s second rule. This explicative unfolding, however, must itself be seen in the context of two fundamental theological suppositions—suppositions that every Catholic theologian should hold: first, the dogmatic principle, that a theological dogma is the infallible definition of a revealed truth, and, second, as an entailment, the principle of the Church’s infallibility. Newman formulated these two principles with all desirable clarity in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, and I shall quote him here at length to put in front of the readers’ eyes what is the indispensable normative context for an authentic development of doctrine that Vincent of Lérins, John Henry Newman, the Fathers of the First Vatican Council in Dei Filius, and the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council in Dei Verbum share: Newman, Dev., 78. Newman, Dev., 73–74. 85 Newman, Dev., 74. 83 84 376 Reinhard Hütter I believe the whole revealed dogma as taught by the Apostles, as committed by the Apostles to the Church, and as declared by the Church to me. I receive it, as it is infallibly interpreted by the authority to whom it is thus committed, and (implicitly) as it shall be, in like manner, further interpreted by that same authority till the end of time. I submit, moreover, to the universally received traditions of the Church, in which lies the matter of those new dogmatic definitions which are from time to time made, and which in all times are the clothing and the illustration of the Catholic dogma as already defined. And I submit myself to those other decisions of the Holy See, theological or not, through the organs which it has itself appointed, which, waiving the question of their infallibility, on the lowest ground come to me with a claim to be accepted and obeyed. Also, I consider that, gradually and in the course of ages, Catholic inquiry has taken certain definite shapes, and has thrown itself into the form of a science, with a method and a phraseology of its own, under the intellectual handling of great minds, such as St. Athanasius, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas; and I feel no temptation at all to break in pieces the great legacy of thought thus committed to us for these latter days.86 Antiquarianism and presentism explicitly or implicitly deny these two suppositions. Antiquarianism denies the principle of the Church’s ongoing and uninterrupted infallibility, and presentism denies the dogmatic principle and the normative tradition of faith to which it gives rise, including the authentic development of doctrine as well as the emerging tradition of Catholic theology as a science sui generis. Newman’s Notes—Only the First Step toward an Answer It is arguably the case that with his seven notes Newman offered only the first step toward an answer to the question how an authentic development of doctrine might be distinguished from a corruption of doctrine. It is telling that in the 1845 edition Newman calls these seven criteria “tests,” while in the reworked Catholic edition form 1878, he calls them merely “notes.” Guarino states the matter well: After devoting two thirds of his most famous book, An Essay in the Development of Christian Doctrine, to his notes or tests for distinguishing true developments from a noxious corruption, Newman 86 Newman, Apo., 250–51. Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 377 never returned to the notes for the rest of his life. Why not? Possibly Newman recognized that he needed not just isolated notes but also a stronger accent on ecclesial structures in order to settle the issue of proper development. In other words, the crucial question is this: how does one ascertain that “continuity of type” actually exists over time? Vincent would say that one can be certain of proper development in eodem sensu because of Scripture, the sure foundation of divine truth, as interpreted by the ecumenical councils, theological doctors, the faithful universally, and the bishop of Rome. The Lerinian offers determinate criteria to ensure that proper growth occurs.87 Guarino makes a convincing case that Newman might have realized— especially in light of the promulgation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and the dogma of papal infallibility—that in fact even more determinate criteria than the seven he originally called “tests” might be needed. We find an indication that this is indeed the case when we turn to Newman’s most mature reflections on these matters in the lengthy preface to the third edition of the two-volume re-publication of his Via Media of the Anglican Church issued in 1877. In this important preface he states that while the bishops and the pope occupy the governing or regal office and the faithful, that is, the pastors and people, occupy the priestly office, the theologians occupy the prophetic office in the Church. Newman argues that an authentic development of doctrine can occur only when consentient coherence is eventually achieved—again and again, and sometimes only after a longer period of time—among these three offices, the regal, the priestly, and the prophetic. Furthermore, Newman stresses that theologians occupy a singular role: “Theology is the fundamental and regulating principle of the whole Church system. It is commensurate with Revelation, and Revelation is the initial and essential idea of Christianity.”88 It is for this very reason that Newman famously states: “None but the Schola Theologorum is competent to determine the force of Papal and Synodal utterances, and the exact interpretation of them is a work of time.”89 Guarino astutely observes: “The decisions of councils and popes are authoritative for Newman. However, such statements also mark the Guarino, Vincent of Lérins, 62. John Henry Newman, The Via Media of the Anglican Church, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, 1911 [originally 1837, revised 1877]), xlvii (Weidner edition, 29). 89 John Henry Newman, “Letter to the Duke of Norfolk,” in Difficulties of Anglicans, vol. 2 (London: Longmans, 1910 [originally 1865]), 176. 87 88 378 Reinhard Hütter beginning of sustained reflection wherein theologians determine precisely how and in which exact manner they are in continuity with the prior tradition.”90 And the intimately connected sobering warning he utters in this preface in 1877 has only become more relevant 150 years later. What Newman stated as an acute caution seems presently to be closer to an accurate description of the current state of affairs in Catholic theology: “Religion [is never] in greater danger than when, in consequence of national or international troubles, the Schools of theology have been broken up and ceased to be.”91 To permit the decline, floundering, and eventual closing of the schools of theology or to denigrate the work of dogmatic and speculative theology (and that is, according to Newman, what belongs to the very heart of the Schola Theologorum) turns, I take Newman to imply, theology into the playground of hermeneutical creativity in an exclusively anthropocentric horizon—thereby eventually evacuating the prophetic office of the Church. Theological inquiry, therefore, that does not emerge from the prophetic office of the Church and its essential task of pursuing the intellectus fidei in relationship to the authoritative paradosis of revelation, and that is pursued in isolation from the priestly and the regal offices of the Church, either remains an essentially pre-theological (philological, historical, philosophical) exercise or, if it arrogates to itself the distinguishing mark of “theology” proper, deteriorates into nothing but an ultimately frivolous, exclusively anthropocentric endeavor—instead of speaking of God, speaking of the human in a loud voice.92 The Indispensable Work of the Prophetic Office of Theology for Establishing the Intelligibility of an Authentic Development of Doctrine Newman’s profound reflections in the long preface he penned in 1877, after having been a Catholic for more than thirty years, are a sobering reminder that, even after the theological horizon, the Christological center, and the pneumatological dynamic of the development of doctrine have been reaffirmed by Henri de Lubac and especially by Yves Congar93 in the Guarino, Vincent of Lérins, 72. Newman, Via Media, 1:xlvii (Weidner edition, 29). 92 It is in this context that I gladly quote the famous characterization of Liberal Protestant theology by a Protestant theologian from whose writings I initially learned as a student of Protestant theology what theology was all about: “One cannot speak of God simply by speaking of man in a loud voice” (Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Hourton [London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1935], 195–96). 93 De Lubac, “Problem of the Development of Dogma,” 248–80; Congar, La Foi et 90 91 Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 379 decades leading up to Vatican II, there remains the ongoing indispensable task of establishing the concurrent and retrospective intelligibility of the authentic development of doctrine, the task of determining “precisely how and in which exact manner [the decisions of the councils and popes] are in continuity with the prior tradition.”94 The encompassing horizon of the theological historicity of salvation history will always securely locate the authentic development of doctrine in the order of divine providence and under the mission of the Holy Spirit leading the Church ever deeper into an explicit understanding of the truth of revelation. Ultimately, the continuity between doctrines is the continuity of the unfolding mission of the Holy Spirit. True developments are gifts, disclosures, of the Holy Spirit to the Church. This Hans Urs von Balthasar rightly and beautifully emphasizes in continuity with and development of the thought of his teacher Henri de Lubac.95 At the same time he affirms that the laws of logic are under no circumstances overridden in this ultimately pneumatological dynamic. Not only does von Balthasar’s important concession bar the road toward an enthusiastic pneumatic form of presentism; it rather also shows that a fully theological interpretation of the development of doctrine—affirming the absolute epistemic priority of the theological historicity of salvation history under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and also the importance, if not even priority, of non-rational affective and spiritual apperceptions of certain aspects of the mysteries of faith—cannot ignore the fact that the apprehension, articulation, interpretation, and communication of such apperceptions requires concepts, propositions, and judgments and that the absence of the antecedent, concomitant, and retrospective establishment of the intelligibility of the logical connection between a newly defined teaching and previously defined teachings would, first, expose the magisterium to have left the orbit of the intellectus fidei and submitting instead to voluntarism, authoritarianism, and anti-intellectualism, and secondly, would support the impression that the magisterium, the governing office of the Church, is inherently independent from theology, the prophetic office of the Church. If one were to entertain the counterfactual that the magisterium were to proceed this way, one would realize la Théologie and Tradition and Traditions. On de Lubac, see Nicholas J. Healy Jr., “Henri de Lubac on the Development of Doctrine,” in Ressourcement after Vatican II: Essays in Honor of Joseph Fessio, S.J., ed. Nicholas J. Healy Jr. and Matthew Levering (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2019), 346–65; on Congar, see Meszaros, Prophetic Church. 94 Guarino, Vincent of Lérins, 72. 95 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theologie der Geschichte: Ein Grundriß. Neue Fassung (Einsiedeln: Johannesverlag, 1959), 80–81. 380 Reinhard Hütter that in doing so the magisterium would instantaneously contradict its own prescription laid down in Dei Filius by ignoring to attend to the criterion of identity that specifies Vincent’s second rule by calling for the litmus test that distinguishes a profectus, a legitimate development of doctrine, from a permutatio, a corruption of doctrine. And to attend to the criterion of identity is to display the intelligibility of the logical connection. To override any antecedent and to neglect any retrospective establishment of the logical connection is to jettison the criterion of identity itself, to evacuate the prophetical office of the Church, and to make the magisterium vulnerable to the above charges. The Dominican theologian J. C. M. van der Putte adumbrated the absolute minimum that is required to do justice to the criterion of identity: “All perceptible development and growth must be able to show a logical connection with the previously given doctrine,” with the result that the “homogeneity of the development of dogma demands that every justified theological conclusion should be credible both objectively and subjectively.”96 Nothing less than this theological work will do when it comes to the very heart of the development of doctrine, that is, the homogeneous evolution of dogma. To suppose up front that such theological work is intrinsically impossible or de facto at best a conjecture of no real cognitive value means to open the doors wide to antiquarianism (a mental attitude virtually impossible to hold for a Catholic theologian) or presentism (the presently preferred mental attitude of not a few contemporary Catholic theologians). Hence, Newman’s fourth note (logical sequence) and sixth note (conservative action on the past) turn out to be the two most important notes specifying and thereby securing together Vincent’s second rule. Yet fleshing out these notes in ways that afford the intelligible continuity that Vincent’s second rule requires is the labor that cannot be undertaken without coming to appreciate anew the work that the Spanish Dominican Thomist Francisco Marín-Sola undertook in his Homogeneous Evolution of Catholic Dogma.97 Newman sets a high bar when he states that “the new Schillebeeckx, Revelation and Theology, 66, quoting J. C. M. van der Putte, O.P., De dogmatische waarde von de theologische redeneering (Nijmegen, Netherlands: Centrale Drukkerij N.V., 1948), 252. 97 Even an only superficial familiarity with this monumental work of dogmatic and speculative theology suggests immediately that Marin-Sola’s magnum opus deserves an unrivaled place next to Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. For a brief introduction to the life and work of Marín-Sola, and especially to his magnum opus, his Homogeneous Evolution of Catholic Dogma, see my John Henry Newman on Truth and Its Counterfeits (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2020), 155–66, and also my article “Francisco 96 Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 381 truth which is promulgated, if it is to be called new, must be at least homogeneous, cognate, implicit, viewed relatively to the old truth.”98 Marín-Sola’s is the single work of a Catholic theologian in the twentieth century that comes closest to reaching this bar. Unsurprisingly, the renowned Anglican Church historian Owen Chadwick regards Marín-Sola’s work as “probably the most able, and perhaps the most influential thesis upon the theory of development written during the twentieth century.”99 While The Homogeneous Evolution of Catholic Dogma is informed quite obviously by a different philosophical tradition and theological method than Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, it is crucial to understand that Marín-Sola as well as Newman hold revelation to have cognitive content expressed in propositions that can be apprehended and assented to, and that neither of them gives any quarter to the kind of dogmatic relativism characteristic of a pre-conceptual historicist understanding of revelation. Both Newman and Marín-Sola achieve a level of theological penetration and conceptual sophistication that has not been reached by Catholic theology in the post–Vatican II period. Even the commendable ressourcement in the patristic patrimony can only for so long circumvent and postpone the questions Marín-Sola treated with great profundity and rigor in his theological masterwork. After the more recent flirtations by avowedly late-modern or postmodern Catholic theologians with philosophical historicism and constructivism have exhausted themselves, the opportune time might have arrived for a new generation to tackle again the profound and substantive theological as well as conceptual issues involved in the development of doctrine and in this course rediscover the treasure that Marín-Sola’s work is. To label Marín-Sola’s account as purportedly merely “logical” and to dismiss it due to its alleged lack of “historical consciousness” might be nothing but an all too facile way of ignoring the perennial Marín-Sola, O.P., La evolución homogénea del dogma católico,” in Great Works of Twentieth Century Thomism, ed. Serge-Thomas Bonino, O.P. (Rome: Urbana University Press, 2020), 47–59. Marin-Sola’s magnum opus is easiest available in the last Spanish edition: La evolución homogénea del dogma católico, introduction by Emilio Sauras, O.P., 2nd ed. (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1963 [originally 1952]). The French edition is harder to find: L’Évolution homogène du dogme catholique, 2 vols. (Fribourg: Saint-Paul, 1924). Hardest to find is, unfortunately, the English translation that students of Marin-Sola from Manila provided from the Spanish edition: The Homogeneous Evolution of Catholic Dogma, trans. Antonio T. Piñon, with introduction by Emilio Sauras, O.P. (Manila: Santo Tomás University Press, 1988). 98 Newman, Apo., 253 (emphasis mine). 99 Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman: The Idea of Doctrinal Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 204. 382 Reinhard Hütter challenges he addresses, as well as, possibly, unreflective and unwarranted historicist premises at play in such critique. There obtains a categorical difference between the new awareness of history reflected in the important Spanish Dominican theologian Melchior Cano’s De locis theologicis (1563)—a work that had a deep and lasting impact on Marín-Sola and that he taught regularly—and the principled historicism advanced in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Recall that in his De locis theologicis, Cano, next to the seven loci proprii of theology (Scripture; the oral tradition of Christ and the apostles; the universal Church; the Councils; the Apostolic See; the saints of the early Church; Scholastic theology and canonist thought) identifies three loci alieni of theology: (1) human reason expressed in the sciences, (2) human reason expressed in philosophy and in the history of philosophy, and—last but not least—(3) human history. Not only because of his unique vocation as a friar preacher that led him to work on three continents, Asia, America, and Europe, but also because of his deep familiarity with Cano’s opus magnum and especially its last locus alienus of theology, human history, we should rightly expect that the categorization of the Homogeneous Evolution of Catholic Dogma under “logical theories” of development fails to do justice to the complexity and nuance of his achievement. Marín-Sola is as little a “logicist” in matters of doctrinal development as Newman is a “modernist.” In order, however, to save Marín-Sola’s achievement and the kind of rigor of theological argumentation he exemplifies, it is necessary to develop his project by way of expanding it to include and account for Newman’s insight that cumulative probabilities can produce a certain conclusion and hence establish that “the new truth which is promulgated, if it is to be called new, must be at least homogeneous, cognate, implicit, viewed relatively to the old truth.”100 Developed in a Newmanian way, Marín-Sola’s work remains an indispensable benchmark for working out the distinct ways of logical connection that afford intelligibility to widely diverse cases of an authentic development of doctrine and thereby fulfill the criterion of identity. Yet it remains a regrettable lacuna in his work that he does not account in it for the kind of demonstration Newman privileges, moving from cumulative probabilities to demonstrative certainty. If he had provided in this overall account of legitimate demonstrations of homogeneity of dogma Newman’s path of moving from cumulative probability to demonstrative certainty, Marín-Sola would have achieved two things: first, he would have been able to preempt the criticism that a number of Thomist theologians (first and foremost Ambroise Gardeil, Reginald-Maria Schul100 Newman, Apo., 253 (emphasis mine). Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 383 tes, and Yves Congar) advanced regarding the cogency of the demonstrations Marín-Sola provided in his ten paradigmatic doctrinal cases; second, Marín-Sola would have been able not only to admit the sheer fact that the Church did indeed proceed on the basis of such cumulative probable arguments and in union with the sensus of the entire Church, to such definitions, but rather also to account for this path as one perfectly defensible rational way of establishing that “the new truth which is promulgated, if it is to be called new, must be at least homogeneous, cognate, implicit, viewed relatively to the old truth.”101 To jettison this theological labor of the intellectus fidei as the bygone and allegedly failed efforts of the so-called logical theory of development, as presentists are all too prone to do, is to forget that at the very heart of an argument that affords intelligibility to the continuity between developments and the prior tradition must stand the syllogism. Intelligibility is the achievement of explicit reasoning. The vehicle of explicit reasoning is the proposition; and the vehicle for achieving a demonstration of the intelligible continuity is the syllogism. What kind of case for the intelligibility of the logical connection can be made depends on the individual case and also on whether it is an antecedent or a retrospective argument. Drawing upon Newman, the pre-conciliar Schillebeeckx formulates well the indispensable minimum requirement at stake for the retrospective explicit reasoning: Explicit reasoning . . . is either purposeful, or reflective, technical, and logical thought. In explicit reasoning, implicit reasoning is re-thought in a logical form. It is, in other words, a later logical arrangement of the growth of experiential knowledge. The syllogism, therefore, does not give us a new truth, but exposes the logical structure of the process of development along which we have already come, in our spontaneous experience, to this truth. Although it does not measure up to the wealth of implicit thought, this logical interpretation is nonetheless a homogeneous extension of the implicit preliminary stage.102 101 102 Newman, Apo., 253. Here is the context for the full quote including the characterization of “implicit reasoning:” “Newman called ‘reason’ or ‘reasoning’ the real principle of development, and by this he meant reasoning in the widest sense of the word. He distinguished between two aspects of reasoning in this sense. (1) Implicit reasoning is, according to Newman, spontaneous, non-technical, non-reflective, and unconscious experience as an aspect of the whole of the personal Christian life. This form of reasoning is a slow maturing which is subject to many different influences 384 Reinhard Hütter This form of retrospective explicit reasoning rests upon the dynamic that Marín-Sola characterizes as “evolution through the affective and experimental channel,” his way of integrating Newman’s insights into his overall account. Yet cumulative results of implicit reasoning may also prompt antecedent forms of explicit reasoning advancing an argument for the homogenous development of doctrine before the Church authoritatively declares it as such. I argued earlier that Newman’s reception and development of the Lerinian criterion of identity and Marín-Sola’s work are completely compatible theological strategies of establishing that “the new truth which is promulgated, if it is to be called new, must be at least homogeneous, cognate, implicit, viewed relatively to the old truth.”103 When it comes to the very nature of the arguments that are acceptable as cogent in this regard, I take it that Marín-Sola’s project must be expanded and modified in such a way that it includes explicitly Newman’s insight that cumulative probabilities suffice for a certain conclusion.104 Hence, the argument might achieve its goal, a persuasively argued demonstration of continuity, by way of the cumulative effect of multiple arguments that remain each in itself probable and not strictly demonstrative, that is, by moral implication, or it might reach this goal by way of a straightforward demonstrative syllogism, that is, by virtual implication, or it might reach its goal by way of a simple explication of conceptions, that is, by formal implication. In each case, the argument achieves its goal conceptually, propositionally, and syllogistically—the universal tools of explicit reasoning. Of course, no theory of development can comprise qua theory by way of logical anticipation all possible cases of development under question. Yet at the same time, the exigency of a theological argument that grants intelligibility to a homogeneous development and thus excludes heterogeneous rupture and corruption of doctrine requires one of the three above forms of demonstration. Resignation to the sheer fact of the magisterial act of definition would amount to the acknowledgement that the sole cause of and justifiand whose results are personal and cannot be communicated” (Schillebeeckx, Revelation and Theology, 1:70). The studies collected in his volume were in their Dutch original form written before Vatican II and published as a volume in the Netherlands in 1964, right during the council. 103 Newman, Apo., 253 (emphasis mine). 104 This crucial point forms the crux of Andrew Meszaros’s contribution to this symposium, “Newman and the Thomistic Tradition: Convergences in Contribution to Development Theory.” He makes the case with great lucidity and persuasive force. I am in full agreement with his line of argumentation and with his overall conclusion. Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 385 cation for doctrinal change is a magisterial act of will—a rather disastrous capitulation to voluntarism and the foregoing of doctrinal intelligibility per se—and according to Newman that would ultimately be the foregoing of divine revelation itself.105 This is not a question of retrieving a bygone allegedly “a-historical” neo-Scholastic “logical theory of development”—so called by its presentist critics. It is rather marking the crucial difference between explicit thinking that offers coherent and persuasive theological arguments and the invocation of some general theological motives or the primordial and irreducible plurality of diverse and heterogeneous concept-producing socio-cultural contexts on account of some universal law of historicity that evacuate the criterion of identity. To jettison the former and endorse the latter is to embrace presentism. Yet it is of greatest importance to realize that presentism will always provoke the reaction of antiquarianism. And this is—at the very the least—a grave burden for ecumenical relations, for presentism will rekindle Protestant as well as Eastern Orthodox concerns about a self-actuating, ultimately voluntaristic transformationism of doctrine—a concern that will only fortify the antiquarianism still at play in Protestant communions as well as Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches. This ecumenical perspective on what is at stake in the authentic development of doctrine and in the avoidance of antiquarianism as well as presentism is the apposite moment to turn to Pope Saint John XXIII. Conclusion With regard to the intellectus fidei, a prime consideration must be that divine Truth “proposed to us in the Sacred Scriptures and rightly interpreted by the Church’s teaching” enjoys an innate intelligibility, so logically consistent that it stands as an authentic body of knowledge. The intellectus fidei expounds this truth, not only in grasping the logical and conceptual structure of the propositions in which the Church’s teaching is framed, but also, indeed primarily, in bringing to light the salvific meaning of these propositions for the individual and for humanity. From the sum of these This caveat is stated in light of the fact that magisterial acts that define doctrine do not juridically or formally depend on any antecedent theological demonstration of homogeneous continuity. We know this historically. Yet it is also the case that magisterial acts are assisted by the Holy Spirit. And since the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Logos, we know that every magisterial act is completely logical. Even if the logic might not be immediately apparent at the moment of definition, it is rightly expected to be inherently susceptible to the retrospective discursive labor of the intellectus fidei. 105 386 Reinhard Hütter propositions, the believer comes to know the history of salvation, which culminates in the person of Jesus Christ and in his Paschal Mystery. Believers then share in this mystery by their assent of faith. —Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, §66 It is important to keep in mind that the official Latin text of Pope Saint John XXIII’s opening speech at the Second Vatican Council, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, includes a clear allusion to the criterion of identity of Saint Vincent’s second rule—in the form the Fathers of the First Vatican Council quote it in Dei Filius: For the deposit of faith, that is, the truths contained in our venerable doctrine, is one thing—another thing is the way in which these truths are expressed, however, in the same sense and in the same meaning.106 It has been the argument of this article that the mandate entailed in Pope John’s reference to Vincent of Lérins and to Dei Filius can only be accomplished by consciously avoiding the Scylla of antiquarianism and the Charybdis of presentism. The course to be followed has to be “Tradition in act,” and this course leads from Vincent’s second rule to the full application of Newman’s notes by way of an explicit theological argumentation that displays the logical connection of the development with the prior tradition. It turns out that in order to avoid Scylla and Charybdis, antiquarianism and presentism, and to complete the program that Vincent had formulated and Newman had developed to distinguish an authentic development of doctrine from corruptions of doctrine requires the work that the representatives of the so-called logical theories of development have taken upon themselves, with Putte articulating the indispensable minimalist end of the spectrum and Marín-Sola (enhanced by Newman) reaching for the maximum discursive intelligibility. Only by way of such theological labor of the intellectus fidei is the conservative action on the past accomplished and the criterion of identity of Vincent’s second rule—as fleshed out by Newman’s notes, as prescribed in Dei Filius, and as recalled by Pope 106 Pope St. John XXIII, Address on the Occasion of the Solemn Opening of the Most Holy Council, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, October 11, 1962, §6: “Est enim aliud ipsum depositum Fidei, seu veritates, quae veneranda doctrina nostra continentur, aliud modus, quo eaedem enuntiantur, eodem tamen sensu eademque sententia” (Latin from John XXIII’s web page on the Vatican website, speeches, October 11, 1962). Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 387 John XXIII in Gaudet Mater Ecclesiae—fulfilled. To forego this discursive labor of the intellectus fidei, to declare it to be inherently impossible, or fundamentally undesirable, or ultimately inconsequential, is to eventually decapitate the Church’s prophetic office, to ensconce the voluntaristic dynamic of presentism and thereby encourage the rise of a new version of antiquarianism, be it fundamentalist, traditionalist, or apocalyptic. It is ultimately to ignore that antiquarianism is presentism’s double, and vice versa. Each is parasitical on the threat posed (latently or viscerally) by the other. The safeguard for “Tradition in act” from presentism as well as antiquarianism has been and continues to be the theological labor of the intellectus fidei illuminated, as is the sensus fidei, by the selfsame Spirit of truth whom Christ promised to send, who “will guide you into all the truth” ( John 16:13; RSV). Appendix 1 John Henry Newman on the intricate relationship between the two patristic principles, the principle of mystery and the dogmatic principle articulated in “The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine”:107 20. The Apostle said to the Athenians, “Whom ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you;” and the mind which is habituated to the thought of God, of Christ, of the Holy Spirit, naturally turns, as I have said, with a devout curiosity to the contemplation of the Object of its adoration, and begins to form statements concerning Him before it knows whither, or how far, it will be carried. One proposition necessarily leads to another, and a second to a third; then some limitation is required; and the combination of these opposites occasions some fresh evolutions from the original idea, which indeed can never be said to be entirely exhausted. This process is its development, and results in a series, or rather body of dogmatic statements, till what was at first an impression on the Imagination has become a system or creed in the Reason. 21. Now such impressions are obviously individual and complete above other theological ideas, because they are the impressions of Objects. Ideas and their developments are commonly not identical, the development being but the carrying out of the idea into its consequences. Thus the doctrine of Penance may be called a development of the doctrine of Baptism, yet still is a distinct doctrine; whereas the developments in the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation are mere portions of the 107 Newman, O.S., 329–35. 388 Reinhard Hütter original impression, and modes of representing it. As God is One, so the impression which He gives us of Himself is one; it is not a thing of parts; it is not a system; nor is it any thing imperfect, and needing a counterpart. It is the vision of an object. When we pray, we pray, not to an assemblage of notions, or to a creed, but to One Individual Being; and when we speak of Him we speak of a Person, not of a Law or a Manifestation. This being the case, all our attempts to delineate our impression of Him go to bring out one idea, not two or three or four; not a philosophy, but an individual idea in its separate aspects. 22. This may be fitly compared to the impressions made on us through the senses. Material objects are whole, and individual; and the impressions which they make on the mind, by means of the senses, are of a corresponding nature, complex and manifold in their relations and bearings, but considered in themselves integral and one. And in like manner the ideas which we are granted of Divine Objects under the Gospel, from the nature of the case and because they are ideas, answer to the Originals so far as this, that they are whole, indivisible, substantial, and may be called real, as being images of what is real. Objects which are conveyed to us through the senses, stand out in our minds, as I may say, with dimensions and aspects and influences various, and all of these consistent with one another, and many of them beyond our memory or even knowledge, while we contemplate the objects themselves; thus forcing on us a persuasion of their reality from the spontaneous congruity and coincidence of these accompaniments, as if they could not be creations of our minds, but were the images of external and independent beings. This of course will take place in the case of the sacred ideas which are the objects of our faith. Religious men, according to their measure, have an idea or vision of the Blessed Trinity in Unity, of the Son Incarnate and of His Presence, not as a number of qualities, attributes, and actions, not as the subject of a number of propositions, but as one, and individual, and independent of words, as an impression conveyed through the senses. 23. Particular propositions, then, which are used to express portions of the great idea vouchsafed to us, can never really be confused with the idea itself which all such propositions taken together can but reach, and cannot exceed. As definitions are not intended to go beyond their subject, but to be adequate to it, so the dogmatic statements of the Divine Nature used in our confessions, however multiplied, cannot say more than is implied in the original idea, considered in its completeness, without the risk of heresy. Creeds and dogmas live in the one idea which they are designed to express, Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 389 and which alone is substantive; and are necessary only because the human mind cannot reflect upon that idea, except piecemeal, cannot use it in its oneness and entireness, nor without resolving it into a series of aspects and relations. And in matter of fact these expressions are never equivalent to it; we are able, indeed, to define the creations of our own minds, for they are what we make them and nothing else; but it were as easy to create what is real as to define it; and thus the Catholic dogmas are, after all, but symbols of a divine fact, which, far from being compassed by those very propositions, would not be exhausted, nor fathomed, by a thousand. 24. Now of such sacred ideas and their attendant expressions, I observe: (1.) First, that an impression of this intimate kind seems to be what Scripture means by “knowledge.” “This is life eternal,” says our Saviour, “that they might know Thee the only True God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.” In like manner St. Paul speaks of willingly losing all things, “for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus;” and St. Peter of “the knowledge of Him who hath called us to glory and virtue.” [ John xvii. 3. Phil. iii. 8. 2 Pet. i. 3.] Knowledge is the possession of those living ideas of sacred things, from which alone change of heart or conduct can proceed. This awful vision is what Scripture seems to designate by the phrases “Christ in us,” “Christ dwelling in us by faith,” “Christ formed in us,” and “Christ manifesting Himself unto us.” And though it is faint and doubtful in some minds, and distinct in others, as some remote object in the twilight or in the day, this arises from the circumstances of the particular mind, and does not interfere with the perfection of the gift itself. 25. (2.) This leads me next, however, to observe, that these religious impressions differ from those of material objects, in the mode in which they are made. The senses are direct, immediate, and ordinary informants, and act spontaneously without any will or effort on our part; but no such faculties have been given us, as far as we know, for realizing the Objects of Faith. It is true that inspiration may be a gift of this kind to those who have been favored with it; nor would it be safe to deny to the illuminating grace of Baptism a power, at least of putting the mind into a capacity for receiving impressions; but the former of these is not ordinary, and both are supernatural. The secondary and intelligible means by which we receive the impression of Divine Verities, are, for instance, the habitual and devout perusal of Scripture, which gradually acts upon the mind; again, the gradual influence of intercourse with those who are in themselves in possession of the sacred ideas; again, the study of Dogmatic Theology, which is our present subject; again, a continual round of devotion; or again, sometimes, in minds both 390 Reinhard Hütter fitly disposed and apprehensive, the almost instantaneous operation of a keen faith. This obvious distinction follows between sensible and religious ideas, that we put the latter into language in order to fix, teach, and transmit them, but not the former. No one defines a material object by way of conveying to us what we know so much better by the senses, but we form creeds as a chief mode of perpetuating the impression. 26. (3.) Further, I observe, that though the Christian mind reasons out a series of dogmatic statements, one from another, this it has ever done, and always must do, not from those statements taken in themselves, as logical propositions, but as being itself enlightened and (as if ) inhabited by that sacred impression which is prior to them, which acts as a regulating principle, ever present, upon the reasoning, and without which no one has any warrant to reason at all. Such sentences as “the Word was God,” or “the Only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father,” or “the Word was made flesh,” or “the Holy Ghost which proceedeth from the Father,” are not a mere letter which we may handle by the rules of art at our own will, but august tokens of most simple, ineffable, adorable facts, embraced, enshrined according to its measure in the believing mind. For though the development of an idea is a deduction of proposition from proposition, these propositions are ever formed in and round the idea itself (so to speak), and are in fact one and all only aspects of it. Moreover, this will account both for the mode of arguing from particular texts or single words of Scripture, practised by the early Fathers, and for their fearless decision in practising it; for the great Object of Faith on which they lived both enabled them to appropriate to itself particular passages of Scripture, and became to them a safeguard against heretical deductions from them. Also, it will account for the charge of weak reasoning, commonly brought against those Fathers; for never do we seem so illogical to others as when we are arguing under the continual influence of impressions to which they are insensible. Appendix 2 Newman, from the Apologia: 108 Hardly had I brought my course of reading to a close, when the Dublin Review of that same August was put into my hands, by friends who were more favorable to the cause of Rome than I was myself. There was an Article in it on the “Anglican Claim” by Dr. Wiseman. This was about the middle 108 Newman, Apo., 116–17. Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith 391 of September. It was on the Donatists, with an application to Anglicanism. I read it, and did not see much in it. The Donatist controversy was known to me for some years, as has appeared already. The case was not parallel to that of the Anglican Church. St. Augustine in Africa wrote against the Donatists in Africa. They were a furious party who made a schism within the African Church, and not beyond its limits. It was a case of Altar against Altar, of two occupants of the same See, as that between the Non-jurors in England and the Established Church; not the case of one Church against another, as of Rome against the Oriental Monophysites. But my friend, an anxiously religious man, now, as then, very dear to me, a Protestant still, pointed out the palmary words of St. Augustine, which were contained in one of the extracts made in the Review, and which had escaped my observation. “Securus judicat orbis terrarum.” He repeated these words again and again, and, when he was gone, they kept ringing in my ears. “Securus judicat orbis terrarum;” they were words which went beyond the occasion of the Donatists: they applied to that of the Monophysites. They gave a cogency to the Article, which had escaped me at first. They decided ecclesiastical questions on a simpler rule than that of Antiquity; nay, St. Augustine was one of the prime oracles of Antiquity; here then Antiquity was deciding against itself. What a light was hereby thrown upon every controversy in the Church! not that, for the moment, the multitude may not falter in their judgment,—not that, in the Arian hurricane, Sees more than can be numbered did not bend before its fury, and fall off from St. Athanasius,—not that the crowd of Oriental Bishops did not need to be sustained during the contest by the voice and the eye of St. Leo; but that the deliberate judgment, in which the whole Church at length rests and acquiesces, is an infallible prescription and a final sentence against such portions of it as protest and secede. Who can account for the impressions which are made on him? For a mere sentence, the words of St. Augustine, struck me with a power which I never had felt from any words before. To take a familiar instance, they were like the “Turn again Whittington” of the chime; or, to take a more serious one, they were like the “Tolle, lege,— Tolle, lege,” of the child, which converted St. Augustine himself. “Securus judicat orbis terrarum!” By those great words of the ancient Father, interpreting and summing up the long and varied course of ecclesiastical history, the theory of the Via Media was absolutely pulverized. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2021): 393–422 393 Saint Thomas and the Development of Doctrine Guy Mansini, O.S.B. Ave Maria University Ave Maria, FL Introduction The “development of doctrine” commonly refers to the unfolding of Christian faith into hitherto unformulated and undefined doctrinal propositions. It is the successive unfolding of the one, once and for all given revelation completed by and in Christ and possessed by apostolic faith, into newly articulated doctrines. I take it that the original possession of revelation, the original formulation of faith, was itself propositional, located in the propositions of the Bible, in such dicta as the confession that “Jesus is Lord,” and “he has risen from the dead,” and “he will come again.” Sometimes revelatory propositions summarize a narrative of events, of course, and this is not unimportant, since certain truths about God cannot be manifested except on the basis of a history captured in narrative. For instance, in the Isaian reflection on the Old Testament story of Israel’s exodus from Egypt, her establishment in the Promised Land, the kingdom and then the kingdoms, Jewish exile, and return from exile, there are statements about God’s providence and eternity. The narrative itself is the prior and necessary demonstration of this providence and eternity, without which Isaiah cannot formulate his teaching about them. Evidently, the narrative of the mission of Jesus and its conclusion are the necessary presupposition of what Saint Paul teaches, quite “didactically,” in Galatians and Romans. And there are smaller narrative communications of truth, too: the narrative of Jesus’s calming of the storm on Lake Galilee and the subsequent worship of the disciples is a declaration of his divinity. What is to be noticed, however, is this, that the original possession of revelation and so every initial access to the Realities disclosed by revelation through deed and event—namely, the triune God, the Incarnation, the Eucharist, and so on—this possession is in language. And 394 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. although saving assent to revelation requires the interior assistance of the Holy Spirit, it remains a saving assent to the exterior word of biblical truth (see Rom 10:14–17), the exterior word spoken by apostle and evangelist. The point of departure for the development of doctrine, therefore, is not in the first place some wordless experience, either historical or transcendental, of God and his Christ, but assent in faith to the creed and the reading of Scripture the creed enables and controls. We recognize the phenomenon of development when we see four things. The first thing to see is that there is a “one,” an integral cognitive whole, “revelation” as such “closed with the death of the last apostle.” The second thing to see is a “many” into which this one is unfolded or developed or articulated, which unfolding occurs—third thing to notice—within a temporal expanse in which the “many” are formulated and articulated. Fourth, there is required also our ability—a Christian ability of reason illumined by faith— to discern and verify that it really is the one, integral cognitive whole that is exfoliated into the many subsequent doctrinal propositions. Without the first thing, the one perduring whole of revelation, we have not development but transformation, a self-contradictory plurification of Christian discourse where one age says something different from another. Without the second thing, the many articulations of the one, there is no development but only repetition. Without the third thing, temporal expanse, the question does not arise as to the maintenance of the apostolicity of the Church for us, the maintenance of the truth across time. And without the fourth thing, the ability of reason to recognize that the one really is truly and rightly unfolded in the many, our faith in the apostolicity of the Church turns into fideism. It is a condition of the possibility of genuine development of doctrine that it be able to be recognized as such. This recognition, of course, is magisterial, but it also engages the sensus fidei of all the faithful. Moreover, this ability, while it requires faith, requires also certain auxilia, two auxilia in fact, namely, metaphysical skill and historical learning. There is also a fifth thing ordinarily contained in the idea of the development of doctrine, a function especially of the third and fourth things above—temporal expanse in which the many appear and our ability to affirm them as expressing the one revelation. Together, they imply that it is only the different expressions of some one revealed truth, different expressions and precisions that come later, that enable us to apprehend and appreciate the revealed truth more fully. This means in turn, fifth, that we judge the adequacy of earlier expressions and the theological success of earlier exponents of faith by the measure of the later expressions. Or, as John Henry Cardinal Newman says in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine: Saint Thomas and the Development of Doctrine 395 It is indeed sometimes said that the stream is clearest near the spring. Whatever use may fairly be made of this image, it does not apply to the history of a philosophy or belief, which on the contrary is more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full.1 In other words, the future preserves the past in changing it, and for us to know the past, we have to know what it becomes in the future. So much for an initial attempt to fix what we are speaking of when we say “development of doctrine.” Now, is there a recognition of this fact, and an understanding of its nature, and an awareness of its causes, in Saint Thomas? Saint Thomas and the Development of Doctrine Did Saint Thomas recognize the fact of doctrinal development? The answer to this question is that he did, although some distinguished theologians have denied it. Avery Dulles, for example, held that Thomas’s view that revelation is complete with the death of the last apostle2 and that as to the “essentials of faith,” all is present from the time of Christ,3 effectively precluded a recognition of development.4 The explications of the articles Saint Thomas admits will therefore be something minor and negligible; there can be no recognition of real development according to Dulles, since these explications are statements of what the Church has always already known from the time of the closure of revelation.5 Cristopher Kaczor, on the other hand, finds that all three of the theories or ways of development Dulles treats of—the logical-propositional, the organic-intuitionist, and the situational, where development is a matter of translation—are operative in Saint Thomas.6 John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Longmans, 1909 [originally 1845; rev. 1878]), ch. 1, sect. I, no. 7. 2 See St. Thomas, Summa theologiae [ST] III, q. 64, a. 2, ad 3. Translations from ST will be my own. All other translations (whether primary sources or current scholarship) are mine unless otherwise noted. 3 St. Thomas, In III Sent., d. 25, q. 2, a. 2, sol. 1, ad 5: “Implicit faith is explicated in determinate articles of faith. And this explication has been completed through Christ; whence it is not licit to take away from or to add to his teaching as to the essentials of faith [Fides implicita explicatur in articulis fidei determinatis. Et haec explicatio completa est per Christum; unde eius doctrinae quantum ad essentialia fidei nec diminere nec addere licet].” 4 Avery Dulles, S.J., The Resilient Church (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), 46. 5 Dulles, Resilient Church, 46. 6 Christopher Kaczor, “Thomas Aquinas on the Development of Doctrine,” Theo1 396 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. Kaczor is a more recent expositor of Thomas on development. Dulles, however, reflects a wide-spread opinion in the twentieth century about what Saint Thomas was and was not capable of appreciating. In mid-century, Jean Daniélou flatly denied that Thomas had any notion of history.7 Just because the idea of history is strange to Thomism, we must return to thinkers like Gregory of Nyssa and Irenaeus in order to engage a modern world dominated by the philosophies of Hegel and Henri Bergson. Without an idea of history, of course, the idea of development of doctrine cannot get off the ground. In fact, and a fact easy to verify, the question of whether Saint Thomas recognized doctrinal development can be settled very expeditiously. In the prooemium of the Contra errores Graecorum (1263), Saint Thomas explains why the dicta of the ancient Fathers can seem doubtful to us. The first thing is that the errors that arise about the faith give the holy doctors of the Church an occasion to hand on the things that belong to the faith with greater circumspection in order to avoid the errors that arose. Just so, it is evident that the holy doctors who lived before the error of Arius did not speak so expressly about the unity of the divine essence as later doctors; and the same thing happened with other errors. He illustrates this by comparing the early Augustine on free will with the post-Pelagian Augustine on free will. He concludes: Whence, if there are things to be found in the sayings of the ancient doctors that are not said with as much caution as is maintained by moderns, they are not to be despised or rejected, but neither are these things to be used just as such. Rather, they should be reverently explained.8 logical Studies 62 (2001): 283–302. For the three theories, see Dulles, Resilient Church, 39–53. Much earlier, Marie-Dominique Chenu, O.P., and H.-D. Simonin, O.P., find in St. Thomas the key subjective principle required to explain development, namely, the discursive and so temporal character of human knowing by way of making judgments (propositions) (M.-D. Chenu, “La Raison psychologique du développement du dogme d’après saint Thomas,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 13 [1924]: 44–51; H.-D. Simonin, “La Théologie de la foi et le développement du dogme,” Revue thomiste 14 [1937]: 537–56). 7 See Jean Daniélou, S.J., “Les orientations présentes de la pensée religieuse,” Études 249 (1946): 5–21. 8 The Latin can be found at isidore.co/aquinas/ContraErrGraecorum.htm, along Saint Thomas and the Development of Doctrine 397 Two comments are in order. First, things touching the unity of the divine essence are not minor or negligible matters, but crucially important to the integrity of the apostolic faith. The growth in accuracy of expression over the course of the Arian controversy was not a matter of ornament and decoration, and Saint Thomas recognizes that fact. Second, paraphrasing and commenting on this text from the Contra errores Graecorum, JeanPierre Torrell says: “We can appreciate the orthodoxy of authors before Nicaea or Chalcedon in an adequate way only in the light of the councils that are after them.”9 In other words, we have here as good a recognition of Newman’s remark about the spring and the mouth of the river as we could want. And that is to say that we have here as good a recognition of the fact and importance of development as we could want. We should expect this if, following Torrell, we recognize the importance of Saint Thomas’s grasp of the historical character of human knowledge, both for the individual and for humanity as a whole—reason, after all, is discursive—and recognize that he has a very definite view of the historical character of human existence, with a quite definite view of the God-given shape of this history and its parts. We should expect this also, as Torrell shows again, when we understand his interest in just the issues that make a historian a historian—questions about the authenticity of texts and the hermeneutical challenges of translation, questions of the historical context in which a text is composed. Given such things, we can by no means be surprised at Thomas’s attention to “doctrinal development.”10 We should ourselves be quite un-historical and anachronistic, of course, if we expected his historical achievement in considering the growth of doctrine to look like nineteenth- and twentieth-century treatments of the same. The closest Saint Thomas himself comes to discussing in any detail what we call “development of doctrine” occurs in the first question of the treatise on faith in the Summa theologiae [ST], on the object of faith, at the beginning of the secunda secundae. In the seventh article of question 1, he asks whether the articles of faith grew in number with the passage of time. He answers that there is an order to be found in the articles of faith, just with an English translation, but the translation here is my own. Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., “Saint Thomas et l’histoire: état de la question et pistes de recherches,” Revue thomiste 105 (2005): 355–409, at 401. 10 See Torrell, “Saint Thomas et l’histoire,” 356–81, for his theology of history, and 381–405, for a consideration of his historical interest and expertise. His theology of history can be encapsulated in the some such phrase as the following (my formulation): “from the Trinity to the Trinity (exitus–reditus) through the enormous contingency of the Incarnation” (see esp. 361–363). But there are all the patristic and medieval partitions of history to be considered, as well. 9 398 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. as in the principles of a science, in that some are contained implicitly in others. Hebrews 11:6 says that those who draw close to God “must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.” Implicit in the confession that God exists are “all the things that we believe exist eternally in God,” which would include the Trinity of Persons, and implicit in the confession of God’s providence for those who seek him are the Incarnation and Christ’s Passion. Thus, he concludes, “as to the substance of the articles of faith, there is no growth in them through the passage of time,” which is to say that faith always includes believing that God exists and is provident. But “as to the explication [of the articles], the number of articles has grown.” This recognition of growth in the number of articles is a recognition of growth across the Testaments, from the Old to the New, whereby Christians “explicitly” know more than the children of Israel. No such similar growth is recognized, however, since the time of Christ. If the knowledge of faith has proceeded across the Testaments from what befits childhood to what befits maturity, as the reply to the second objection makes clear, we are now in the time of perfection. So, we now see more distinctly what we are to hope for compared with Old Testament people (ST II-II, q. 1, a. 7, ad 1), and “those who were closer to Christ either before him, like John the Baptist, or after him, like the apostles, knew the mysteries of the faith more fully” (ad 4).11 But this does not say all. When Saint Thomas asks in this same question on the object of faith, in article 9, whether the articles of faith are suitably found in the creed, he answers yes. The sed contra urges that “the universal Church cannot err because it is governed by the Holy Spirit,” and that “the creed is published by the authority of the universal Church,” just as the number of the articles is suitably determined by that same authority (a. 8). However, there are two creeds, the Apostles’ Creed and the Creed of the Fathers (the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed), and some of the arguments that introduce article 9 have their point of departure in this fact. It is objected that it is unfitting that there be many professions of faith, since there is only one faith. Thomas answers that there must be many creeds because of the many heresies, although the creeds differ only in that “in one there is more fully explicated what is contained in another 11 What does “more fully” (plenius) mean? It need not mean a discrete knowledge of all subsequent ecclesial formulations of what belongs to faith. For discussion of apostolic knowledge, see, e.g., Charles Journet, The Church of the Word Incarnate, vol. 1, The Apostolic Hierarchy, trans. A. H. C. Downes (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1955), 132–36. Saint Thomas and the Development of Doctrine 399 implicitly” (a. 9, ad 2). “Implicitly” is evidently used here more narrowly than in saying the Incarnation is implicitly contained in confessing the providence of God (a. 7). Again, it is further objected that since the creed is the rule of faith, the Apostles’ Creed ought to be able to be sung publicly at Mass, as is the Nicene Creed. Thomas answers that the Nicene Creed “is declarative of the Apostles’ Creed,” but that since it was published “in the time of persecution,” it is fitting that it be recited secretly at Prime and at Compline (a. 9, ad 6). So we have here two ways to say how later determinations of truth are related to earlier ones: they may say what the earlier expression says “implicitly” or they may “declare” it more fully. In any case, and even if Saint Thomas does not here embrace the legend according to which the apostles themselves wrote the Apostles’ Creed, it is clear from question 1 that he supposes the Church was from the time of Christ fully in possession of the Catholic faith as a whole.12 It is equally the case, however, if we remember the prooemium of the Contra errores Graecorum, that we are not dealing with minor or indifferent matters in this further declaration and explication of the faith. The last article of question 1 asks whether it belongs to the Roman pontiff to order and publish a new edition of the creed. Saint Thomas answers that it does so belong to the pope, as canon law attests and as is grounded in Christ’s charge to Peter to strengthen the faith of his brothers (Luke 22:32) and the necessity that there be one faith in the Church (1 Cor 1:10). The first and second objections to the article, however, insert the question of papal authority, first, into the history of salvation, and second, into the history of the Church. The first objection argues from article 7 that, since there are no new articles of faith to be expected now that Christ has come, there is no need for a new edition of the creed, and so it does not belong to the Roman pontiff to publish one. Saint Thomas replies that, although the truth of faith is “sufficiently explicated” in the teaching of Christ and the apostles, “perverse men ‘pervert to their own perdition’ (2 Pet 3:16) apostolic doctrine and the other Scriptures.” Therefore, there must be a further “explanation of faith against the errors that arise in the course of time” (temporibus procedentibus). Revelation is complete, but it is delivered to a history in which perverse men will require it to be further 12 For the legend, see Henri de Lubac, The Christian Faith: An Essay on the Structure of the Apostles’ Creed, trans. Richard Arnandez, F.S.C. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), ch. 1 (esp. 21–22, 25, 30–31). The legend is not in Augustine (27–28). 400 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. explained. So, there is need of papal authority so to explain it. The second objection brings things to a fine point. The Council of Ephesus forbade anyone to “profess or re-write or compose” another creed than the Nicene Creed and this was repeated at Chalcedon. Saint Thomas answers that this prescription is aimed at private persons. But Ephesus and Chalcedon did not take away the power to publish a new creed, “not indeed as containing another faith,” but one that “better explained the same faith” (eamdem fidem magis expositam). And this need will arise with the emergence of heresy. So, the sense of the faith can be expressed in multiple ways, better explained over the course of time, given the rise of new heresy. Doctrine finds further expression, new expression, over the course of time. What is this to say if not that it develops? Doctrine therefore has a history. Now, it is precisely this history that Saint Thomas examines in the fourth book of the Summa contra gentiles and to that we turn. Development and the Summa Contra Gentiles What Saint Thomas admits in the ST II-II, q. 1, a. 10, ad 1—namely, that temporibus procedentibus there will be required a more detailed explanation of faith against heretical error—is not much on display in the Summa theologiae. It is not a focus of attention. It is, however, very much on display in the Liber de veritate catholicae fidei contra errores infidelium (Summa contra gentiles[hereafter, simply Contra gentiles; see note]).13 The display of the contrast of error and Catholic truth is pressed into the overall aim of the Contra gentiles, which is to manifest the truth of the Catholic faith and eliminate the errors opposed to it.14 In this fashion, Saint Thomas’s practice can tell us much of what he thought about what we call the development of doctrine. This double aim of manifesting truth and reproving error follows from The Latin can be found in St. Thomas, Liber de veritate Catholicae fidei contra errores infidelium seu Summa contra gentiles, 3 vols., ed. C. Pera, O.P., P. Marc, O.S.B., and P. Caramello (Turin: Marietti, 1961). For English of part I, see Summa Contra Gentiles, Book One: God, trans. Anton C. Pegis (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975); for English of part IV, see Summa Contra Gentiles, Book Four: Salvation, trans. Charles J. O’Neil (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1975). Liber de veritate Catholicae fidei contra errores infidelium is more likely the original title according to René-Antoine Gauthier, O.P., “Introduction,” in Saint Thomas d’Aquin, Somme Contre les Gentils (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1993), 109. For the difference between a summa and a liber, see 146–47 of Gauthier’s introduction. For the remainder of this article, having given the commonly used title for recognition, I will cite the work simply as Contra gentiles, rather than by either genre term. 14 Contra Gentiles I, ch. 2, no. 2 (Marietti no. 9). 13 Saint Thomas and the Development of Doctrine 401 the office of the wise man which Thomas here takes up, for “it belongs to one and the same science . . . to pursue one of two contraries and to oppose the other.”15 It is not for apologetic purposes, therefore, that Saint Thomas concerns himself so much with heretical opinion in book IV but precisely in order to manifest the truth. René-Antoine Gauthier explains as follows. In order to be in full possession of the truth, it is not enough to have accomplished the first task of the wise man, which is to speak the truth; it is also necessary to acquit oneself of the second, which is to show the cause of the opposed error. The task of the wise man is complete only when he shows that the same reason on which his adversary bases his error is in reality in accord with the truth that has been demonstrated.16 So, the aim of the Contra gentiles requires a careful and explicit examination of errors bearing on the Trinitarian and Christological, sacramental theological, and eschatological doctrine of the Catholic faith. Now the history of Trinitarian and Christological error is in fact one history,17 and though preserving the formal distinction between the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, Saint Thomas more rather than less follows the very course of heretical opinion from the fourth century to the seventh in the first half of Contra gentiles IV. As to the Trinity, we move from the adoptionism of Cerinthus and Ebion (first century), which was renewed by Paul of Samosata (third century) and strengthened (Saint Thomas says) by Photinus (fourth century), to Sabellius (third century), and then on to Arius and Eunomius (fourth century). Then comes the question of the Holy Spirit and the subsequent error of Macedonianism (fourth century), and so ends the list of Trinitarian errors, save for the question of the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Son. Contra gentiles I, ch. 1, no. 3 (Marietti no. 6). See also ST I, q. 14, a. 8, corp. (“est eadem scientia oppositorum”), and I-II, q. 54, a. 2, ad 1: “For although things that are contrary in species differ in reality, there is still the same reason for knowing both, because one is known through the other [Quamvis autem contraria specie differant diversitate rerum, tamen eadem ratio est cognoscendi utrumque: quia unum per aliud cognoscitur].” For further references on this point, see the notes to Marietti no. 6 in the Marietti edition. 16 Gauthier, O.P., “Introduction,” 155. Note that the object of “convincing” (convincere) is not some person to be persuaded, but an erroneous opinion to be refuted (150–55). 17 See for instance John Behr, Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2, The Nicene Faith, pt. 1 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004), 2–8. 15 402 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. Turning to the Incarnation, the error of Ebion and Cerinthus, Paul of Samosata, and Photinus, who all deny the divinity of Christ, is reprised, since it bears on the mystery of the Incarnation as well as on that of the Trinity. Then Thomas turns to the humanity of Christ, as did the history of heretical error: touching first on the body of Christ and the mistaken opinions concerning it of the Manichees (third century), Valentinians (second century), and Apollinaris (fourth century); and then on the soul of Christ, and the opinions thereon of Arius and (again) Apollinaris (fourth century), and folding in Origen here from the second century. After the elements of the union have been treated, the union itself is examined, again following the history of the thing: Theodore of Mopsuestia and Nestorius (fifth century), and then Eutyches (mid-fifth century). Then we come to Macarius of Antioch on the human will of Christ (seventh century), which position reduces to the monophysitism of Eutyches. Saint Thomas extends his treatment of the union of divinity and humanity of Christ into the middle ages and the three opinions Peter Lombard recounts in his Sentences, two of which are Nestorian: first, the habitus theory of Peter Abelard (twelfth century) and finally the double supposita account of the Archbishop of Sens (twelfth century?).18 Because Saint Thomas takes up the office of the wise man in the way he does in the Contra gentiles, aiming to manifest the truth and manifest it expressly in reproving error, the order of the Trinitarian theology and Christology in the Contra gentiles is quite different from that of the Summa theologiae. This is worth noting. In the ST I, Saint Thomas proceeds from the priora in se to the priora quoad nos. So, in dealing with the Trinity in the prima pars, he moves from the processions (q. 27) to the relations (q. 28) to the Persons (qq. 29–42) to the missions (q. 43). But in Contra gentiles IV, he moves from the procession of the Son (chs. 2–3) as illumined by the heresies of Photinus (chs. 4 and 9) and Sabellius (chs. 5 and 9) and Arius (chs. 6–8) to that of the Holy Spirit (ch. 15), illumined by Macedonianism (chs. 16–18) and the controversy over the Filioque (chs. 24–25). In ST III, the Christology proceeds from the convenientia of the Incarnation (q. 1), to the union (q. 2), to the Person assuming (q. 3), and then on to the assumed nature (qq. 4–6) and the perfection of the powers of the assumed humanity (qq. 7–15). After considering the consequences of the union (qq. 16–26), we end with the theology of the events of the life of Christ (qq. 27–59). The manifestation It is true that, in speaking of the suitability of the Incarnation (Contra gentiles IV, ch. 50), St. Thomas returns us to the fifth century and the Pelagian denial of original sin. 18 Saint Thomas and the Development of Doctrine 403 of the Catholic truth about the Incarnation in Contra gentiles IV, on the other hand, takes up first the true divinity of Christ (ch. 28), and next the true humanity of Christ (chs. 29–33), and only then the mode of union (chs. 34–38), and ends with a consideration of the convenientia of the Incarnation, what the Summa theologiae had put first. While the Summa theologiae begins each treatise with a partial, imperfect, but fruitful understanding of the mystery—for the Trinity in I, q. 27, aa. 1–3, and for the Incarnation in III, q. 2, a. 2, corp. and ad 3 (looking forward however to q. 17, a. 2)—the Contra gentiles offers this demonstration of the possibility of Trinity (chs. 11–13, 19) after having demonstrated the truth of the processions, just as it offers a demonstration of how to understand the possibility of the Incarnation (ch. 41) only after having demonstrated its truth from Scripture (ch. 39). What are we to conclude from these very different orderings of topics? The order of an achieved science of the truth of some thing, an order that proceeds from causes to effects and from principles to the principled, is different from the order of the manifestation of the truths of that science in history. Development by Way of reading Scripture in the Contra Gentiles Saint Thomas is not a “Denziger theologian.” I mean that he does not manifest the truth of the Catholic faith exclusively or even first of all by calling on the authority of the Church, of pope or council as the case may be. He calls on them as suits his argument and with whom he is arguing, as we shall see. What he calls on in the first place and constantly is Scripture. He betrays here the easy confidence of Catholic faith that Sacred Scripture and the Church speak with one voice, the confidence that God himself, in his own voice and through the inspired word, manifests the truths he wishes all to embrace. Gilles Emery notes the standard way in which Saint Thomas manifests Catholic truth by engaging heretical Trinitarian opinion in the Contra gentiles. There are six steps. First, he summarizes the position. Second, he states the premises from which it proceeds. Third, he lists scriptural authorities whence it allegedly follows. Fourth, he names the persons who hold the position. Fifth, he establishes the contrary truth of the Catholic faith from Scripture. Last, he answers the scriptural arguments put forward by the heretics.19 19 Gilles Emery, O.P., “Le traité de saint Thomas sur la Trinité dans la Somme contre les Gentils,” Revue thomiste 96 (1996): 5–40, at 16. Although I will keep to my own renderings of Emery, there is an English translation of this essay, “The Treatise of 404 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. The pattern is not maintained for the Christology. Generally, we have, first, the name or names of those upholding heretical opinion, second, a statement of the position, and third, the scriptural warrants for the statement of Catholic truth (bk. IV, chs. 28–36: Photinus, Mani, Valentinus, Apollinaris on the body of Christ, Arius and Apollinaris on the soul, Apollinaris on the rational soul of Christ, Theodore and Nestorius on the union of divinity and humanity in Christ, Eutyches on the union, and Marcarius on the one will of Christ). Most of the time, Saint Thomas gives us the scriptural warrants adduced for heterodox opinion. But there is nothing really to adduce for the docetism of the Manicheans (ch. 29). For Photinus, we are directed back to chapter 4. And Saint Thomas groups certain positions together, making for a very economical exposition. For instance, we do not learn the theological premise whence the docetism of the Manicheans proceeds until the similar position of Valentinus is addressed in the following chapter (ch. 30). Nonetheless the vindication of Catholic truth is in each of these chapters predominantly scriptural, with the sole exception of the argument against Eutyches—a mostly though not exclusively metaphysical effort (ch. 35), which contrasts markedly with the very lengthy, very extensive scriptural arguments mounted against Nestorius in the preceding chapter. The implication seems to be that if Nestorianism is an exegetical failure, monophysitism is a philosophical failure. The numbers attest to the overwhelmingly scriptural nature of the argument. The treatment of Arianism, for instance, employs 106 texts by my count. Emery reports the analysis of J. A. Fidalgo Herranze.20 He counts 127 citations from the Old Testament and 335 from the New in chapters 1–26, the Trinity section of book IV. This is roughly a third of the 1,498 biblical references he finds in the entire Contra gentiles. In the Christology section, chapters 27–55, my rough and ready count (and counting repeated uses of the same text) gives 177 citations. This is deceptive, however, in that, for instance, chapter 46, on whether Christ was born of the Holy Spirit, gives no citations of Scripture, but refers us back to chapters 19 and 21, in the treatment of the Trinity, where there are many. On this showing, the development of doctrine is the reading of Sacred Scripture. We feel Nicaea and the First Council of Constantinople in the St. Thomas on the Trinity in the Summa contra Gentiles,” in Gilles Emery, O.P., Trinity in Aquinas, trans. Matthew Levering (Ypsilanti, MI: Sapientia Press, 2003), 71–120, at 86–87. 20 Emery, “Le traité de la Trinité,” 18n55 (“Treatise on the Trinity,” 89n56), sends us to J. A. Fidalgo Herranz, “La SS. Trinidad en la Suma contra los Gentiles: fuentes bíblicas” (PhD diss., Universidad de Navarra, 1980), 145–46. Saint Thomas and the Development of Doctrine 405 background of chapter 7 (Arius) and chapters 17 and 18 (Macedonianism). But they are not mentioned expressly. In chapter 7, there are many arguments that conclude the Son is not a creature; he is said to be “derived from the substance of God” (ex substantia Dei derivatur),21 “true God” (verus Deus),22 and “equal to the Father” (aequalis Patri),23 and Saint Thomas asserts that “there is numerical identity of nature and essence in the Father and the Son [eadem numero est natura et essentia Patris et Filii].”24 But we read no Greek here and are content with saying the Son is eiusdem naturae cum Patre.25 What is express is the teaching of Scripture, hardly changed by the introduction of the formalities of such language as “essence” and “nature,” “equal” and “same.” If we read these two tracts closely, however, we will discover a sort of implicit claim Saint Thomas makes about the logic of dogmatic development disclosed in the history of heresy and the history of the Church’s reading of Scripture. The claim is made, first, in the arrangement of the heresies touching on the divinity, distinction, and generation of the Son. Chapters 4 and 5 give us Photinus and Sabellius and an immediate refutation of each. But the solution of their arguments is not given until chapter 9, after the three chapters on Arianism. Why this arrangement? The introductory lines of chapter 6 present Arianism as a sort of logical next step after Photinus and Sabellius. If the Son of God did not take his origin from Mary, as Photinus wants, and if the Father does become the Son by being born of Mary, perhaps there is a generation of the Son prior to the Incarnation, and so there is Arius. All three are compared in chapter 7. Photinus and Sabellius admit only a human generation of Christ. Arius admits to his generation in another nature. Only the Catholic faith confirms a truly divine and eternal generation. Sabellius confesses the divinity of Christ, while Photinus and Arius do not. But Arius and Photinus hold to the distinction of Christ from the Father.26 Therefore, Thomas concludes, the Catholic faith keeps to the middle road: it holds with Arius and Photinus against Sabellius that the Person of the Father is other than the Person of the Son, that the Son is begotten, but the Father entirely unbegotten; but with Sabellius against Photinus and Contra gentiles IV, ch. 7, no. 5 (Marietti no. 3407). Contra gentiles IV, ch. 7, no. 7 (Marietti no. 3408). 23 Contra gentiles IV, ch. 7, no. 13 (Marietti no. 3414). 24 Contra gentiles IV, ch. 7, no. 20 (Marietti no. 3421). 25 Contra gentiles IV, ch. 7, no. 25 (Marietti no. 3426). 26 Contra gentiles IV, ch. 7, no. 24 (Marietti no. 3425). 21 22 406 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. Arius, it holds that Christ is true and natural God, the same in nature as the Father, although not the same in person. And from this, an indication of the Catholic truth can be gathered. For, as the Philosopher says, even falsehoods give witness against each other, for they stand apart not only from the truth but from one another.27 In chapter 9, furthermore, the point is made that the considerations that refute Arius illumine the erroneous opinions of Photinus and Sabellius. For the distinction of Christ taken as man and Christ taken as divine, a distinction made in confronting Arius,28 provides the key to answer the arguments of Photinus, who denies the divinity of Christ because of the weakness and infirmity of his humanity.29 And the Catholic response to Arius in asserting an identity of nature in two Persons,30 not two gods, gives answer to Sabellius. This structuring of the material tells us that three hundred years of heretical history, from the second century to the fourth, make a kind of logical unit. We do not understand Photinus and Sabellius fully until we understand Arius. In this way, the manifestation of the one Catholic truth takes time, as much time as is needed for the interrelated heresies to work themselves out.31 In this way, we might well say, the history of heresy is more manifest as a history—a more evident succession of changes—than the history of doctrine, where an abiding identity subsists unchanged from the first century. The same thing is true also for the manifestation of the truth of the Incarnation. The question of the union of divinity and humanity in Christ logically follows the consolidation of the truth of his human body and human soul and divinity.32 Even so, Nestorius substantially returns us to the Christology of Photinus.33 And the solution of Eutyches to the question of union returns us either to the docetism of Mani or to Apollinarism.34 Chapter 41, furthermore, opposes the natural union of Arius, Apollinaris, and Eutyches to the accidental union of Nestorius and his medieval followers.35 Once again, we are looking at a patristic trajectory of Contra gentiles IV, ch. 7, no. 25 (Marietti no. 3426). Contra gentiles IV, ch. 8, nos. 4 and 7 (Marietti nos. 3340 and 3431–32). 29 Contra gentiles IV, ch. 4, nos. 5–9 (Marietti nos. 3362–66). 30 Contra gentiles IV, ch. 8, no. 1 (Marietti no. 3427). 31 St. Thomas remarks in Super I Cor 11, lec. 4 (Marietti no. 628; for I Cor 11:19), that God permits the evil of heresy only to draw out good from it. 32 Contra gentiles IV, ch. 34, no. 1 (Marietti no. 3694). 33 Contra gentiles IV, ch. 34, no. 32 (Marietti no. 3724). 34 Contra gentiles IV, ch. 35, no. 8 (Marietti no. 3732e). 35 Contra gentiles IV, ch. 41, no. 1–5 (Marietti nos. 3790 and 3792–93). 27 28 Saint Thomas and the Development of Doctrine 407 at least two hundred years. Scripture unfolds its riches only across time.36 Development by Way of Reading Scripture as the Fathers Read It Saint Thomas is not suggesting anything original when he points out the mutual connections and illuminations of the heresies when they are considered together. This is a received understanding. Relative to the positions of Photinus, Sabellius, and Arius, Saint Hilary of Poitiers remarks that one conquers another and in this way each demonstrates that the Church conquers all.37 In their several assertions and denials, there are points in which each heresy is in the right in defense or attack; and the result is that the truth of our confession is brought into clearer light.38 Saint Hilary and Saint Thomas have the same idea of how to manifest Catholic truth, the same idea that the wise man’s office includes the refutation of error.39 The very title of a work of Vigilius of Thapsis, Dialogue against the Arians, Sabellians, and Photinians, suggests the same point and illustrates it as expressly as does Saint Hilary.40 This fifth-century work, cast as a debate between the heretics just mentioned, both with one another and with Saint Athanasius, is germane to understanding Saint Thomas’s procedure in the Contra gentiles, moreover, since he makes large use of it in the early chapters of the fourth book.41 St. Thomas certainly thinks of the development of heresy from Manichaeus to Apollinaris concerning the humanity of Christ as a unit, the history recounted in Contra gentiles IV, chs. 29–33, for he recapitulates it in his commentary on Matthew, probably later than the Contra gentiles (1269–1270); see Super Matt 1, lec. 1 (Marietti no. 21; for Matt 1:1). 37 St. Hilary of Poitiers, De Trinitae 1.26 and 7.7, trans. E. W. Watson, L. Pulllan, et al., in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers 2nd ser. [NPNF2], vol. 9 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1995). Emery maintains that this is a traditional patristic theme (“Le traité de la Trinité,” 15–16 [“Treatise on the Trinity,” 86]). See also Emery, “Le photinisme et ses précurseurs chez saint Thomas,” Revue thomiste 95 (1995): 371–98, at 384n88. For the Contra gentiles and St. Hilary, see Joseph Wawrykow, “The Summa Contra Gentiles Reconsidered: On the Contributions of the De Trinitate of Hilary of Poitiers,” The Thomist 58 (1994): 617–34. 38 Hilary, De Trinitate 7.7. 39 Contra gentiles I, ch. 2, no. 2 (Marietti no. 9); and see Contra gentiles I, ch. 1, nos. 3–4 (Marietti nos. 6–7). 40 Vigilius Tapensis, Contra Arianos, Sabbelianos, et Photinianos Dialogus (PL, 62:179–238). For the illustration, see 1.12 and 1.15–16. 41 For what follows, see Emery, “Le photinisme,” 383–98. 36 408 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. Saint Thomas employs the Dialogue in characterizing the position of Photinus in chapter 4, in the same chapter for its refutation, and in chapter 5 in characterizing the position of Sabellius. Sometimes he follows it quite carefully, as to text and to interpretation. For instance, part of Saint Thomas’s refutation of Photinus is as follows in chapter 4. Filius Dei dicit, Ioan., 3, 13: Nemo ascendit in caelum nisi qui descendit de caelo, filius hominis qui est in caelo; et iterum, Ioan. 6, 38: Descendi de caelo, non ut faciam voluntatem meam, sed voluntatem eius qui misit me. Apparet ergo eum fuisse antequam de caelo descenderet. [The Son of God says: “No one has ascended into heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the son of man who is in heaven” (John 3:13); and again: “I have come down from heaven not to do my own will but the will of the one who sent me” (John 6:38). It therefore appears that he existed before he came down from heaven].42 And here is Vigilius (Arius is speaking): Domini nostri Jesu Christi vox est in Evangelio dicentis: Nemo ascendit in caelum, nisi qui de caelo descendit, Filius hominis qui est in caelo (Joan. 3, 13). Et iterum: Descendi de caelo, non ut faciam volutatem meam, sed voluntatem ejus qui misit me Patris (Joan. 6, 38). Apparet ergo jam fuisse, qui de caelo descenderat, ut Photinus erubescat. [The voice of our Lord Jesus Christ is saying in the Gospel: “No one has ascended into heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the Son of man who is in heaven” (John 3:13). And again: “I have come down from heaven not to do my own will but the will of the Father who sent me” (John 6:8). It therefore appears that he existed already, he who had descended from heaven, to the shame of Photinus].43 Photinus introduces heretical opinion as to the understanding of the Incarnation, too, since, as Saint Thomas says, where there is no divinity, there is no mystery of the Incarnation.44 Saint Thomas appeals, following Vigilius once again, to the descent and ascent of the Son of God to manifest this Contra gentiles IV, ch. 4, no. 11 (Marietti no. 3425). Vigilius, Contra Arianos, Sabellianos, et Photinianos 1.15 (PL, 62:190D–91A). 44 Contra gentiles IV, ch. 28, no. 3 (Marietti no. 3641). 42 43 Saint Thomas and the Development of Doctrine 409 divinity, as well as to his self-emptying before the Incarnation and subsequent glorification by God after his death (Phil 2:6–7, 9).45 Saint Thomas can rely on Saint Augustine’s De haeresibus for the names of the heretics and some characterization of the heresy, as the notes to the English translation make evident.46 But as we might expect, the influence of Saint Augustine is more extensive than that. This can be verified from the fact that the texts adduced for and against Arianism that appear in the fourth article of the third question of the Super Boetium de Trinitate are all taken up in the Contra gentiles (chs. 6–8). When we look to the Super Boetium, however, there are nine express citations of Augustine and the editors of the Leonine edition supply three more. Augustine’s way of reading the texts then comes over into the Contra gentiles.47 For instance, as to John 14:28—“the Father is greater than I”—we read at chapter 8 of book IV that this is so in virtue of the form of a servant that the Son takes up according to Philippians 2:6–7.48 And that is exactly what we read in Augustine’s De Trinitate 1.14–22.49 Saint Thomas cites Saint Hilary as well as Saint Augustine on John 14:28 in the same article from Super Boetium (ad 1), according to whom the Father is greater in the way a principle is greater than what follows from it, but in such a way as giving all he has to what follows from him and therefore without any implication of inequality.50 It could not surprise us to learn that Saint Thomas reads John 5:19 in the Contra gentiles as declaring that Father and Son possess one power and so are one in nature and essence, just as does Hilary.51 The argument of Photinus from the predestination of Christ to his purely creaturely status which Thomas treats at some length in the Contra gentiles,52 though it is in Vigilius, is also in Hilary.53 Dialogus, 1.15 (PL, 62:191A). See Emery, “Le photinisme,” 387–88. See Heresies in St. Augustine, Arianism and Other Heresies, trans. Roland J. Teske, S.J., The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century [WSA] I/8, ed. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A. (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 1995). 47 Emery, “Le traité de la Trinité,” 17–18 (“Treatise on the Trinity,” 88–9). 48 Contra gentiles IV, ch. 8, no. 9 (Marietti no. 3430a). 49 St. Augustine, De Trinitate 1.14 and 1.22, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P., in WSA I/5, ed. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A. (Brooklyn, NY: New City, 1991). 50 St. Hilary, De Trinitate 9.54. 51 Contra gentiles IV, ch. 8, no. 9 (Marietti no. 3432b), and St. Hilary, De Trinitate 7.18. 52 Contra gentiles IV, ch. 4, no. 4 (Marietti no. 3463). 53 Vigilius, Contra Arianos, Sabellianos, et Photinianos 1.13 (PL, 62:189B–C); Hilary, De synodis 38, in NPNF2, vol. 9. See Emery, “Le photinisme,” 386 and note 100. There is appeal also to this work of Hilary in Contra gentiles, ch. 8, no. 45 46 410 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. Vigilius, Augustine, Hilary—this does not exhaust the patristic background of Saint Thomas’s reading of Scripture, but enough has been said to indicate the very important role the Fathers play for Saint Thomas in the reproof of heresy and the manifestation of the truth of the Catholic faith.54 In the previous section, it was noted that the development of doctrine is the reading of Sacred Scripture across time but we can now say more fully that development is the progressive reception of Scripture by the Fathers in meeting the challenge of heresy. To narrate development is to recast this progressive reception. It is important to note, however, that it is Scripture that is explicitly named by Saint Thomas, and not the Fathers (saving the exception in the next section). The Fathers are authoritative only as readers of Scripture, which has first, preeminent authority in matters of faith. Development as Sealed by the Authority of Council and Pope Saint Thomas confines himself to dealing with the arguments of the heretics on their own, scriptural terms. As has been mentioned, we feel the dogmatic decisions of Nicaea and Constantinople I in the background of Contra gentiles IV, chapter 7, on the procession of the Son, and of chapters 17 and 18, on the Holy Spirit. So also, everyone must think of Ephesus in reading chapter 34, on the error of Nestorius. But the councils are not mentioned explicitly in these chapters. Since Saint Thomas is speaking to Catholics in the Contra gentiles, and not to living heretics, this is not because the earliest heretics would not recognize the authority of the universal Church, which they would not, even as they would not recognize the authority of the exegesis of the orthodox Fathers, who also go unmentioned.55 Rather, it is important for prosecuting his own aim that he refute heretical opinion on scriptural grounds, precisely in order to show that the Catholic faith just is the teaching of Sacred Scripture.56 So in dealing with Trinitarian and Christological heresies in the Contra gentiles, it is not to 16 (Marietti no. 3436). Emery notes the role of St. Ambrose and his De Spiritu Sancto in St. Thomas’s reading of Scripture in chs. 16, 17, and 23 of Contra gentiles IV, treating of the divinity of the Holy Spirit (“Le traité de la Trinité,” 18n54 [“Treatise on the Trinity,” 89n55]). Leo J. Elders, S.V.D., “La présence de saint Ambroise dans les écrits de Thomas d’Aquin,” Nova et Vetera (French) 94 (2019): 77–102, deals only with explicit citations to Ambrose; because of the peculiar character of the Contra gentiles, Ambrose’s influence disappears to ordinary sight, and Elders takes no note of it. 55 See: Contra gentiles IV, ch. 1, no. 10 (Marietti no. 3348); I, ch. 2, no. 3 (Marietti no. 11). 56 This is, Emery says, “the decisive point of his purpose” (“Le traité sur la Trinité,” 20 [“Treatise on the Trinity,” 92: “the specific point he intends to make”]). 54 Saint Thomas and the Development of Doctrine 411 Saint Thomas’s purpose to appeal to conciliar or patristic authority, though both are in the background and inform his own understanding of things. As Emery says, Saint Thomas’s “anti-heretical biblical dossier appears fundamentally as a development of patristic exegesis.”57 And speaking again of Saint Thomas’s teaching on the Trinity in the Contra gentiles (although we would not be mistaken to think of his teaching on the Incarnation, too), he offers an important summary of Saint Thomas’s project: It seems to us that we can say that Thomas proposes here to recast in a personal way, by a scriptural and doctrinal review, the course of the Fathers and the councils. If therefore the heresies are avoided, it is because Scripture teaches something else than them.58 Now of course, Saint Thomas does appeal expressly to the Fathers by name in the Contra gentiles and to the councils in the question of the procession of the Spirit from the Son (chs. 24–25) and, in the Christological section, against Eutyches (ch. 35), and against medieval Christological opinion, to both Ephesus and Chalcedon (chs. 37–38). In fact, and as is well known, Saint Thomas demonstrated a knowledge of conciliar teaching unusual for his day. This has been well researched, especially and recently by Martin Morard. There is in the first place Saint Thomas’s knowledge of the conciliar acts of Ephesus and Chalcedon, available to him in the Collectio Casinensis, so called from a copy in the archives of Monte Cassino.59 What is it a copy of? It is a translation of the acts of the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon made in the sixth century by Rusticus, a deacon of the Roman Church and nephew of Pope Vigilius († 555). Where and in what manuscript Thomas would have read this collection Emery, “Le traité sur la Trinité,” 18 (“The Treatise on the Trinity,” 89: “The biblical arguments presented against heresies seem essentially an extension of patristic exegesis”). 58 Emery, “Le traité sur la Trinité,” 21 (italics original; “Treatise on the Trinity,” 93: “It would seem appropriate at this point to suggest that Thomas is here setting out to provide his own, personal account of Patristic and Conciliar writings based on scriptural and doctrinal sources. If therefore the heresies are dispelled, it is because the doctrines involved are not what Scripture teaches”). And he adds immediately following: “This illustrates very well, in a way peculiar to the Summa contra gentiles, the equivalence proposed in other texts of Thomas between sacred doctrine (theology) and Sacred Scripture.” 59 The Collectio Casinensis can be found in the Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum [ACO], vols. I/3 and II/4, ed. E. Schwartz (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1929 and 1936). 57 412 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. of texts remains uncertain.60 Saint Thomas’s use of it, however, becomes prominent with the Glossa continua in Matthaeum (1263–1264), Contra gentiles IV (1264–1265), Quaestiones disputatae de potentia (1264–1265), and thence into the great Summa.61 There is also his knowledge of the acts of Constantinople II in his Christology and exegesis, also groundbreaking for his time, and this, too, is researched by Morard.62 The balance for Contra gentiles IV is as follows.63 Chapter 24, on the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Son, cites the Collectio once (Ephesus as received at Chalcedon) and Constantinople II once, which citation is a list of Fathers to be followed in matters doctrinal.64 Chapter 25 cites the Collectio once (Chalcedon). Chapter 35, on Eutyches, cites the Collectio once (Chalcedon). Chapter 37, on the habitus theory of union, cites the Collectio once (Chalcedon). And chapter 38, on the homo assumptus theory, cites the Collectio four times, all from Ephesus, three of which are anathematisms from Cyril’s Third Letter to Nestorius (Salvatore nostro), which Thomas understands to be received by Ephesus.65 It is this Martin Morard, “Thomas d’Aquin lecteur des conciles,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 98 (2005): 211–365, at 349–350. 61 See the table in Morard, “Thomas d’Aquin lecteur,” 246. 62 Martin Morard, “Une source de saint Thomas d’Aquin: Le deuxième concile de Constantinople (553),” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 81 (1997): 21–56, at 36. 63 I am not including the three references to the Symbol of Faith, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, that St. Thomas makes in explaining the work of the Holy Spirit in the economy, where St. Thomas cites the creed as giving fitting descriptions of this work. In Contra gentiles IV, ch. 20, nos. 4–5, the Holy Spirit is rightly called Lord (dominum) since the work of the government of the world is fittingly attributed to him as driving and moving things according as he is love (Marietti nos. 3572–73). Again, the Spirit is life giving (vivificantem) by the same reasoning in no. 6 of the same chapter (Marietti no. 3574). And in ch. 21, no. 6, the Spirit is justly said to speak through the prophets on the ground of 1 Cor 14:2, Matt 10:20, and 2 Pet 1:21 (Marietti no. 3578). 64 See Contra gentiles IV, no. 6 (Marietti no. 3611): Athanasius, Hilary, Basil, Gregory the theologian, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, Augustine, Theophilus, John of Constantinople, Cyril, Leo, and Proclus. Thomas has already cited Athanasius, Cyril (from Ephesus), and Didymus for the Filioque at no. 5 (Marietti no. 3609). For Constantinople II and Contra gentiles IV, chs. 24 and 34, see Morard, “Une source,” 22–28. The close association of Theodore of Mopsuestia and Nestorius in chs. 34 argues Thomas’s dependence on Constantinople II. On the gradual recognition in the West of the authority of canons 4, 5, 8, and 9 of the last session, see Morard, “Une source,” 53–54. These canons were important for St. Thomas’s recognition of the heterodoxy of the homo assumptus theory of the Incarnation. 65 In order of easiest accessibility, see the notes to chs. 35, 37, and 38 in the Marietti edition of 1961, and for chs. 24 and 25, see Emery, “Le traité de la Trinité,” 32–34 60 Saint Thomas and the Development of Doctrine 413 knowledge of conciliar teaching from the Collectio that enables Thomas to reject the homo assumptus theory as certainly Nestorian and so certainly heretical. The citation from the Collectio in chapter 25, a text from Chalcedon, has special relevance to our topic. Saint Thomas is answering the charge that the papal teaching of the Filioque violates conciliar prohibition to add anything to the creed.66 Saint Thomas answers as follows. The declaration of the Synod of Chalcedon says that the Fathers gathered at Constantinople corroborated the doctrine of the Synod of Nicea. This they did, “not as though to imply that the doctrine [of Nicea] was something less, but to declare by Scriptural testimonies the understanding of the Holy Spirit of their predecessors against those who attempted to reject that understanding.”67 Earlier doctrine is “corroborated” not by any addition to it, which would be an addition to Catholic faith, which is impossible, since it is one and whole from the time of the apostles, but by spelling out what is “implicit” in it. Just after the above quotation, Thomas maintains that “the procession of the Holy Spirit is implicitly [implicite] contained in the Creed of Constantinople,” for what is understood of the Father must be understood of the Son, and the Spirit proceeds from the Father. We have seen this idea (“Treatise on the Trinity,” 106–14), and see Morard, “Thomas d’Aquin lecteur,” 271–73. See also the earlier work of G. Geenen, “En marge du Concile de Chalcédoine: Les textes du Quatrième Concile dans les oeuvres de Saint Thomas,” Angelicum 29 (1952): 43–59. 66 See the decree of Ephesus in ACO I/3:133: “The Holy Synod decrees that no one is permitted to profess or to write or to compose another creed than the one that has been defined by the holy fathers who gathered at Niceae through the Holy Spirit; but those who dare to compose or profess another creed for those wanting to be turned to the acknowledgment of the truth, whether from the nations or from Judaism or from whatever other heresy, if they should be bishops or clerics, the bishops are to be deposed from the episcopacy and the clerics from the clerical state; but if they are laymen, they are to be anathematized [Decrevit sancta synodus aliam fidem nulli licere proferre vel conscribere vel componere praeter illam quae definita est a sanctis patribus qui Nicaeam per spiritum sanctum convenerunt; illos vero qui audent fidem aliam vel componere vel proferre volentibus converti ad agnitionem veritatis sive ex gentilitate sive ex Iudaismo sive ex alia qualibet haeresi, si episcopi quidem fuerint aut clerici, alienos esse episcopos ab episcopatu et clericos a clero; si vero laici sint, anathematizari” (lns. 11–17). St. Thomas would have seen something similar to this in his version of Rusticus. 67 Contra gentiles IV, ch. 25, no. 4 (Marietti no. 3624). 414 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. before in the summary of the first question of the ST II. What it amounts to is finding conciliar warrant for the development of doctrine, a notable insight. Saint Thomas finishes his response to the accusation that the Latins have made “another” creed by observing that the authority of the pope moreover suffices for this addition for it is by his authority that “all the ancient councils were confirmed.”68 The answer to those who deny the Filioque is a careful construction composed of appeal not only to Scripture, but quite explicitly to the orthodox Fathers, by name, and to conciliar teaching, named and express.69 So also, for medieval Latin Christology (chs. 37 and 38) there is express appeal to the councils. In both cases, however, he is engaging people who certainly do recognize the authority of the universal Church, as well as the authority of patristic exegesis (especially for the question on the Spirit in ch. 24). The methodological strictures of the second chapter of Contra gentiles I, therefore, according to which one argues only by appeal to authorities recognized by one’s interlocutor, are observed. Is chapter 35, where Saint Thomas expressly notes the condemnation of Eutyches by Chalcedon, anomalous? Not really, for Eutyches should have recognized the authority of Chalcedon even as he did the authority of Ephesus and Nicaea. We should remember too that, while Nestorius is shown to be erroneous by a lengthy review of scriptural passages from the New Testament, the argument against Eutyches proceeds mostly by way of reasoning on the meaning of “nature” and the theory of mixtures. There are two questions that arise for us apropos of Saint Thomas’s appeal to conciliar teaching. First, we should ask more exactly what sort of knowledge Thomas thinks the councils gave him, and with what sort of authority. Second, what did his unusually detailed knowledge of conciliar teaching as measured against the ordinary custom of his time teach him about the manifestation of Catholic truth? Since it is the authority of the universal Church, the authority of council and pope is superior to that of the Fathers but inferior to that of Whether papal authority is wholly satisfactorily related to the authority of councils in this fashion is something to take up on another occasion. Morard supposes Thomas’s attention to the procession of the Holy Spirit, the development in fullness of expression from one council to another, and papal authority is related to the prospects of reunion soon to be taken up at Second Council of Lyons (“Thomas lecteur,” 341–42, 352–53). 69 In addition to Scripture and the Tradition of Fathers and councils, there is also a recourse to reason. See the exposition of Emery, “Le traité de la Trinité,” 20–21 (“Treatise on the Trinity,” 93–106). 68 Saint Thomas and the Development of Doctrine 415 Scripture.70 As to the last: Someone might think that that the definition of the aforesaid council [Nicaea] is to be preferred to the authority of the letter of the Old or New Testaments, which is altogether false. It must be understood that through conciliar teaching, a true understanding is received from Sacred Scripture. Only Catholics have this understanding, although the letter of Sacred Scripture is common to Catholics and heretics and Jews.71 “What is this to say,” Morard asks, “if not that the councils are conceived of as places of the ecclesial reception of scriptural Revelation and, therefore, of the emergence of dogma?”72 They are “providential occasions where, under the pressure of errors that must be eradicated,” the teaching authority of the Church truly declares the teaching of Scripture.73 Councils give us the truth of the Scriptures, to which they are strictly subservient. As to the second question, Thomas’s more intimate knowledge of the course of conciliar teaching—never dropping anything, but corroborating by the authority of Scripture what went before and drawing out implications of what had previously been said—this contains, according to Morard, “the seed of a consciousness, if not of development of dogma, at least of the historicity of its explication.” 74 The conciliar argument for development, noted above, we might say, is pregnant with the recognition that historicity and authority are not opposed, but conspire to maintain the Church in the truth of the Gospel. Understanding What Faith Affirms So far, we have been answering the following question with Saint Thomas: Why does the Church teach what she does as Catholic truth? The answer is that she teaches what she does about the Trinity and the Incarnation because that is what Scripture as understood by the Fathers and confirmed by the councils teaches. The manifestation of Catholic truth is therefore in the first place a showing of what it is we must assent to as taught by the word of God, read the way the Fathers read it, especially as in opposition to heretics, and summed up at strategic points by general councils of the Church. Superior to the Church Fathers: ST II-II, q. 10, a. 12; q. 147, a. 3, ad 3. Aquinas, Contra errores Graecorum I, ch. 32. 72 Morard, “Thomas d’Aquin lecteur,” 237. 73 Morard, “Thomas l d’Aquin ecteur,” 237. 74 Morard, “Thomas d’Aquin lecteur,” 238. 70 71 416 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. But the Contra gentiles teaches more than this about the manifestation of Catholic truth. Embedded in the text are certain questions that ask how we ought to understand what truths the Church teaches about the Trinity and the Incarnation. So, following the vindication of the generation of the Son from the Father against Arius in chapter 9, there is chapter 11—“How generation is to be understood in divinity”—preceded by rational arguments against the Incarnation (ch. 10) which are answered (ch. 14) only after a consideration of the Second Person as Wisdom and in his uniqueness (chs. 12 and 13), a consideration parasitic on chapter 11. Chapter 11, which understands the procession of the Son by analogy with the procession of the interior word in human cognition, is therefore strategic.75 Chapter 19 asks how we must understand what is said about the Holy Spirit in Scripture, with the following chapters on the effects of the Holy Spirit in creation and in the economy of salvation parasitic thereon (chs. 20–21).76 The analogy according to which the Spirit is in God the way the beloved is in the beloved dominates half of the treatment of the second procession, just as the analogy of the interior word dominates half of what is devoted to the treatment of the first. Chapter 40, for its part, asks how we must understand what the Church teaches about the Incarnation on the basis of Scripture, summarized in chapter 39, and the understanding is developed by considering the humanity of Jesus as the conjoined instrument of the Word.77 There follows a long consideration about various suitabilities relative to the Incarnation, crowned with a great argument as to the fundamental convenientia of God becoming man in the first place in chapter 54 (with objections before and solutions following in 53 and 55). Again, the history of heresy and the development of doctrine take up about half the treatment of the mystery, and the more metaphysically informed understanding of it the other half. On slow maturation of this analogy in St. Thomas’s Trinitarian theology, see Harm Goris, “Theology and Theory of the Word in Aquinas: Understanding Augustine by Innovating Aristotle,” in Aquinas the Augustinian, ed. Michael Dauphinais, Barry David, and Matthew Levering (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 62–78. And see Emery, “La traité de la Trinité,” 21–27 (“Treatise on the Trinity,” 97–98). 76 See Emery, “La traité de la Trinité,” 28–30 (“Treatise on the Trinity,” 102–6). 77 For the sources of this analogy in St. Thomas, John Damascene, and St. Cyril of Alexandria, see Gilles Emery, O.P., “A Note on St. Thomas and the Eastern Fathers,” Trinity, Church, and the Human Person. Thomistic Essays (Naples, FL: Sapientia Press, 2007), 193–207, at 198–202, and the extended study of Theophil Tschipke, L’humanité du Christ comme instrument de salut de la divinité (Fribourg: Academic Press, 2003). 75 Saint Thomas and the Development of Doctrine 417 These chapters dedicated to understanding fulfill the second duty of a master of sacra doctrina that Saint Thomas lays out in one of his Quodlibetal questions. The first duty is to make known the truth, to remove any doubt about it by appeal to the relevant authorities. This Thomas does in the chapters devoted to establishing Catholic doctrine (chs. 2–3, 15, 27) and refuting heresy (chs. 4–9, 16–18, 23, 28–39). But the chapters referenced just above undertake a second duty, ordered not to removing error but to so instructing the hearers “that they might be led to an understanding of the truth.” And this occurs by an investigation of “the roots of the truth, making the hearers to know how what is said may be true.” If this is omitted, the arc of learning and the desire to know fails to attain its last end. If the master determines the question by authorities alone, the hearer will be sure that things are so, but he will acquire nothing belonging to science or understanding and will go away with an empty mind.78 Even if the understanding be non-demonstrative and imperfect, partial and analogous, as it must be when the questions are of God, answering questions for understanding the mysteries belongs to the manifestation of Catholic truth. For Saint Thomas, Catholic truth is not sufficiently manifested until there is some penetration of its intrinsic intelligibility, some pursuit of what moderns call “systematic theology.” The truth is not sufficiently manifested if we stop with showing merely that it must be affirmed. It is not sufficiently manifested until its splendor is manifested in some initial contemplation of its integral and proportionate parts intelligibly related to one another. If what we have been showing in the previous sections of this essay is Saint Thomas’s understanding of the fact of the development of doctrine and how it develops, we see here at this point the telos of knowing this development and so knowing the necessity of affirming it relative to the authoritative voices, first of Scripture and next of the Fathers and the Church. Its telos is to enable us to pass over to a contemplation of the mysteries themselves, unto conforming ourselves to their own intelligibility and unto the praise of God. Doctrine develops unto the intellectus fidei. This second duty of the master of theology is moreover expressly adverted to in the introduction to the Contra gentiles, where the point of attaining such understanding is specified more fully. For the manifestation 78 Quodlibet IV, q. 9, a. 3 (my translation). 418 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. of truths of faith that exceed reason’s capacity to demonstrate them and that transcend the truths of books I–III, there is another way beyond the appeal to authorities. There are certain likely arguments [rationes verisimiles] that should be brought forth in order to make the divine truth known. This should be done for the training and consolation of the faithful [ad fidelium exercitium et solatium], and not with any idea of refuting those who are adversaries.79 Exercitium, the work of disciplined study, attains to this manifestation at the level of understanding by the discovery of likely arguments, probable reasons, which in turn provide solatium to the faithful—consolation, encouragement, the joy of the wayfarer looking ahead to his homeland. 80 The analogies in book IV of the proceeding word in human cognition (ch. 11), of the presence of the beloved in the human lover (ch. 19), and of the relation of a principal to an instrumental cause (ch. 41) provide just such similitudes of the mysteries of faith. Last, the certitude of the remission of sins and of our hope for the beatific vision for those who become friends with God in Christ makes the Incarnation very conveniens (54). With two comments we can end this section. First, such verisimilitudes of divine reality and probable arguments for divine providence do not alienate theology from Scripture. Rather, the analogy of the human interior word allows Aquinas in chapter 11 to conclude from the Second Person’s status as Word to his reality as Son, and then also as Image, and finally as Wisdom (ch. 12). The analogy provides a way to knit together large pieces of scriptural testimony. It also enables a detailed exegesis within chapter 11 of John 1:1. So also, the understanding of the Holy Spirit as proceeding love governs the roundup of his works in creation and grace (chs. 20–22). The understanding of the humanity of Christ as instrument of his divinity (ch. 41) presides over the contemplation of his deeds and works in chapters 54 and 55. Second, such verisimilitudes and probable reasons serve also in the refutation of heresy, for though they make no demonstration of Catholic truth, they serve to show that arguments to the contrary are but probable, and that unbelievers should not think Catholic truth is impossible (see 79 80 Contra gentiles I, ch. 9, no. 2 (Marietti no. 54). For the sense of exercitium and consolatio here see Gilles Emery, O.P., “Trinitarian Theology as Spiritual Exercise in Augustine and Aquinas,” in Aquinas the Augustinian, 1–40, at 26–27. Saint Thomas and the Development of Doctrine 419 chs. 10, 16, 40, 53). These are the final but necessary steps in the perfect contrast between revealed truth and heretical error.81 They therefore serve in a unique way to further the articulation of Catholic doctrine—to develop it.82 Concluding Remarks (1) For Saint Thomas, conciliar definitions amount to strategic summaries of a long contemplation of revealed mysteries communicated to believers in the Scriptures. The universal Church speaks in general councils, and therefore their authority is unmatched as a declaration of the truth of the Scriptures, of the nature of the mysteries. If formulating the definition is developing a doctrine, then the development of doctrine is in the first place an ecclesial work, an ecclesial utterance. The active subject of development is therefore in some sense the Church herself as a whole. If it takes two or three hundred years for a unit of development to be realized (from Ebion to Sabellius to Arius, say), the abiding subject of developing the expressions of faith responsive to heresy transcends any individual Christian, any individual Father. (2) For Saint Thomas, the conciliar interpretation of Scripture, and so the contemplation of the mysteries whence the definition arises, is carried out on behalf of the Church especially by the Fathers of the Church. His own marshalling of Scripture in the Contra gentiles is a marshalling of Scripture as understood by the Fathers, especially in their rebuttal of heresy, even if he omits the citations he gives in his more regularly composed and constructed university works. No Father speaks with the authority of a general council, of course.83 Still, Saint Thomas constructs his own mirror of scriptural witnesses in which the truth is beheld just as did the councils themselves, marshalling patristic witness, which is to say patristic interpretation of Scripture, unto the manifestation of Catholic truth. This is evident already from the time of Ephesus according to the record of its acts. The very way in which Ephesus makes its decision informs us of this fact, moreover, since it consists simply in the approval of Cyril’s Second letter to Nestorius, a letter whose teaching turns on nothing except on how to read Scripture in the light of previous conciliar and patristic witness, the Creed of Nicaea and so the witness of its holy 318 fathers. See “Trinitarian Theology,” 19, 23–24, 35. Think, for instance, of the introduction of the satisfaction of Christ in Trent’s Decree on Justification. 83 ST I, q. 1, a. 8. 81 82 420 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. Why do the first great readers of Scripture have the authority they do, both for later Fathers and for Saint Thomas? The Fathers enact the obvious truth enunciated by Joseph Ratzinger to the effect that no revelation is made until it is received by faith, no teaching is accomplished unless someone learns, no word is spoken unless it is heard.84 The Fathers, as a whole, are the first hearers of the word completed in Christ. They are therefore the best witnesses for us as to what really was said, taught, revealed by God. That the Fathers function in this way for Saint Thomas is revealed to us most clearly, perhaps, by the Catena aurea, the immense task of correlating the four Gospels with the patristic understanding thereof, verse by verse for each Gospel. The volume on Matthew’s Gospel is contemporaneous with the last book of the Contra gentiles. (3) The patristic reading of Scripture, and so the emergence of doctrinal definitions, takes place only over the course of many years, even centuries as has just been noted, as provoked by and in contrast to heretical readings opposed to themselves and not only to Scripture. The very arrangement of the chapters of the Contra gentiles devoted to the generation of the Son reveals this, as we have seen. That it takes many years to come to a more perfect understanding of Catholic truth in contrast with heretical error is a recognition by Saint Thomas of what we today call the historicity of truth. Which should be no cause for surprise, once we attend to the discursive nature of rational mind which Saint Thomas labored to point out again and again in his treatment of man.85 The distinction between truth and error becomes manifest only in many distinctions between truth and opposing errors, errors that are opposed to themselves as well as to the truth. Making distinctions, however, is a labor immersed in time.86 Of course, it is by faith we know that the fourth- and fifth-century and subsequent expressions of her faith by the Church are expressions of apostolic faith. However, the history of the course of the Church’s response to heresy such as Thomas gives us in the first half of the last book of the Contra gentiles really does serve to display this identity, although it does not display it certainly except to the satisfaction of a historical reason that is an instrument of faith, a servant. Joseph Ratzinger, “Importance of the Fathers for the Structure of Faith,” in Principles of Catholic Theology. Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology, trans. Sister Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1987), 133–52. 85 See, e.g., ST I, q. 85, a. 5. 86 See Robert Sokolowski, “Making Distinctions,” in Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 55–91. 84 Saint Thomas and the Development of Doctrine 421 4. Just because development of doctrine is a matter chiefly of the reading of Scripture, Saint Thomas can be very relaxed about the terms of the conciliar definitions themselves. He does not belabor them, but lets the first building blocks, the basic distinctions by which we constitute the world, emerge naturally (a basic word!) from the reading itself. So words like “essence” and “nature” are introduced in chapter 7, on the generation of the Son. It turns out, lo and behold, that it is easy to sum up the reading of many Scriptures already canvassed with such words. When we need a distinction between a thing and a principle of a thing, between a hypostasis and a nature, that too shows up dutifully but quietly in chapter 39. The point to such an exposition of Catholic truth is to emphasize that we want to hear the Scriptures, we want to hear the word of God, and we do not want the word of the Church, the word she formulates, to usurp the place of God’s word or obscure its primacy. (5) Within Saint Thomas’s reading of the development of doctrine relative to the Trinity and the Incarnation, within the historicity of truth his acknowledgement of the slow reading of Scripture presents to us, there is also a systematic, logical pattern he discerns. Historicity, dependent as it is on matter, does not mean an unintelligible course of things. Historicity is not chaos, and it turns out that there is a sort of order embedded in the historical course of heresy, and so of doctrine. Thus, in treating the Incarnation in the Contra gentiles, Saint Thomas deals first with the natures to be united in the Hypostatic Union, because that reflects the course of historical error: an error first about the divinity of Christ (ch. 28), then about the humanity of Christ (chs. 29 and following), as to his body then as to his soul, and then follows the question of union (34). But this is an ordered sequence, one congruent with the very nature of the mystery, which serves at the same time as a framework for the orderly exposition of sacra doctrina. Saint Thomas reproduces the elements of this order in another sequence in the Summa theologiae, but he sees it also in the very history of heresy and Catholic truth from the second century to the fifth. (6) The history of error does not stop with the age of the Fathers and the first five councils. It continues into Thomas’s own age, and surfaces in medieval opinions about the union of divinity and humanity in Christ. Here, the remedy once given for Nestorianism proves still powerful, but Thomas, because of his knowledge of history, is the first to see this. (7) Last, the telos of knowing the development of doctrine is found in understanding the mysteries. The historically informed presentation of heresy and orthodoxy is crowned by a metaphysically informed contemplation of the mystery, a contemplation that satisfies the desire of the believer not only to know what is so but also to know how it can be so. So to speak, 422 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. the historically informed presentation wants so to be crowned. But also, we would be naïve to think that the understanding of the mystery does not exercise its own influence on the presentation of history and heresy, as we see in how Saint Thomas shapes up the history of Christological heresy in terms of the orthodoxy it subverts in chapters 28–36. ***** Saint Thomas is an attentive student of the development of doctrine. What he pays attention to makes this development both historically and theologically intelligible. What he pays attention to can serve as a lesson as to what N&V we ought to pay attention to also. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2021): 423–468 423 John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition: Convergences in Contribution to Development Theory Andrew Meszaros Pontifical University St. Patrick’s College Maynooth, Ireland Thomist Difficulties: Certain Difficulties Felt by Thomists in John Henry Newman’s Teaching Considered Briefly It is no secret that Catholic theology in the twentieth century, permeated as it was by the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas, struggled at times to embrace John Henry Newman’s. Now that Catholic theology is more diverse (and fragmented), Newman’s thought has succeeded in capturing the minds of post-conciliar theologians without scruple. But for Thomists, the difficulty of assimilating Newman’s thought persists. At a symposium at the Angelicum in Rome, I gave voice to this struggle, but in a style more anecdotal than academic. For its colloquialisms, hyperbole, and length, I apologize: In certain provinces such as religion and those closely related to it, such as metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, Newman claims that “egotism is true modesty.”1 By this he means that he is happy to speak for himself on these matters, and he has a right to do so; but he does not feel the right to “lay down the law,” as it were, for others. He can but speak from his own experiences with the conviction that it might 1 John Henry Newman, Grammar of Assent [hereafter, GA] (London: Longmans, 1909 [originally 1870]), 384. All references to Newman’s works are from the uniform Longmans edition, using the standard abbreviations from Joseph Rickaby’s Index to the Works of John Henry Cardinal Newman (London: Longmans, 1914), which can be found at the Newman Reader website of the National Institute for Newman Studies (newmanreader.org). 424 Andrew Meszaros very well resonate with others. One provides his own account, and the serious and honest listener considers it: egotism is true modesty. Speaking both egotistically and modestly, then, I confess that, as someone who came to know Aristotle before Newman, and whose philosophical and theological inclinations, in grosso modo, follow Saint Thomas, there are some passages in Newman’s writings which I find puzzling and in need of explanation. And I will admit that, if I am in a particularly grumpy mood, there are other famous Newman phrases that I find not only over-quoted, but quite frankly annoying. What is this business about man not being a reasoning animal, but a seeing and feeling one? Or logic being a sorry rhetoric with the multitude?2 What is Newman’s problem with universals? And why do the notional and the abstract receive such derision?3 Why is the imagination so important?4 And it is one thing for Newman to arrive at God differently from, say, the five ways, but whence the uncertainty of the reality of this world?5 And John Henry Newman, Discussions and Arguments [hereafter, DA] (London: Longmans, 1911 [originally 1836–1866; rev. 1872]), 294. 3 E.g., Newman, GA, 277–87, esp. e.g., 280: “Another John is not necessarily rational, because ‘all men are rational,’ for he may be an idiot.” 4 The case of the imagination is a prime example of how Newman’s intellectual pedigree was partially responsible for the skepticism with which his thought was met in Catholic intellectual circles at the turn of the twentieth century and beyond. Newman’s appeal to the imagination (and with it, experience and the real as opposed to the notional) is seen as one of his most significant contributions to theological anthropology and religious epistemology in the modern period. Writing only fifty-seven years after Newman’s death, however, Frank J. Sheed, presenting a basic Thomist epistemology and anthropology, finds fault with his contemporaries’ over-reliance on—or lapsing back into—the imagination: “Thinking is very hard and imagining is very easy and we are very lazy” (Theology and Sanity [London: Sheed & Ward, 1947], 15; see 10–15 for his fuller criticism). This prima facie divergence in attitude between Newman and Sheed can be reconciled ultimately, but not without the requisite work to explain their respective contexts, intentions, and what each means by “imagination.” For a masterful treatment on Newman and the imagination, see Terrence Merrigan, “The Imagination in the Life and Thought of John Henry Newman,” Cahiers Victoriens & Edouardiens 70 (2009): 187–217. The reconciliation might begin with this statement of Newman’s: “In religion the imagination and affections should always be under the control of reason” (GA, 121). 5 Newman’s comments about inferring atheism from looking into the world (Apologia pro Vita Sua [hereafter, Apo.] [London: Longmans, 1908; originally 1865], 241) has been inflated to the point of portraying him as someone who has no time for the traditional (e.g., cosmological) proofs for God’s existence. Newman prefers the argument from conscience to be sure. But he recognizes the other proofs 2 John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition 425 in my more desperate moments, when I speculate about alternative universes, I wonder what Newman’s Essay on Development would look like were it not contaminated with the empiricist grammar of ideas and impressions.6 Thankfully, as I indicated to the symposium participants, I am rarely in a bad mood and I am even more rarely contemplating alternative universes. Though the above consternating Newmanisms can be explained and contextualized to make Newman more palatable for the Thomist, we would do well to entertain the possibility that it is precisely his own as valid (see, e.g., Discourses to Mixed Congregations [hereafter, Mix.] [London: Longmans, 1909; originally 1849], 261–62). See also Adrian J. Boekraad and Henry Tristram, The Argument from Conscience to the Existence of God according to J. H. Newman (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1961). It stands, however, that the general principle of arguing from effects better known to us [manifestior quam sua causa] is not Newman’s way into theistic proofs. In fact, many of his writings indicate that he argues in the opposite direction. See, e.g., Newman’s homily “The Invisible World,” in Parochial and Plain Sermons [hereafter, PPS], 8 vols. (London: Longmans, 1907–1910 [originally 1835–1869]), 4:200–213. Or consider his celebrated line from Apo., 4: “I received it [the doctrine of final perseverance] at once, and believed that the inward conversion of which I was conscious, (and of which I still am more certain than that I have hands and feet,) would last into the next life. . . . I believe that it had some influence on my opinions . . . viz. in isolating me from the objects which surrounded me, in confirming me in my mistrust of the reality of material phenomena, and making me rest in the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator.” All of this is an indication that Newman’s understanding of the relationship between faith and reason and their proper objects is not the same as that of Neo-Scholasticism. 6 Newman’s relationship to empiricism is disputed, but it is safe to say that he has assimilated more than just an empiricist grammar. He can be considered what analytic philosophers today might call an “indirect realist.” Aristotelian Thomists would be, in modern parlance, “direct” or “critical” realists. Newman’s own justification of his argument from conscience also follows this empiricist slant: the reason why we are justified in inferring that God is behind conscience’s (or the moral sense’s) impression of a voice is the same reason why we are justified in positing a real thing behind the impressions with which we are immediately confronted. We do not question the reality of the object behind sense impressions; so too it is reasonable not to question the reality behind the moral sense’s impressions of a call to duty. Newman does not gain a concept from abstracting from a phantasm, but gains a concept through repeated experiences of sense impressions. For the affinities between Newman and Hume, see J. M. Cameron, “The Night Battle: Newman and Empiricism,” Victorian Studies 4 (1960): 99–117. See also Edward Sillem’s chapter “Notes on the Sources of Newman’s Philosophy” in The Philosophical Notebook, vol. 1, General Introduction to the Study of Newman’s Philosophy (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1969–1970), 149–240, esp. 191–203 (on Locke). 426 Andrew Meszaros non-Thomistic, non-Scholastic context that is responsible for some of his greatest contributions. His religious apologetic focuses more on the subjective dispositions of the heart than it does on the metaphysics of causality or the “evidences” of true religion. His reflections on conscience move them far beyond the realm of morals, and into the arena of Christian apologetics and fundamental theology. These are some of the key insights that made Newman so influential in the twentieth century. For more than one hundred years now Newman scholars have been explaining, documenting, contextualizing, and historically reconstructing Newman’s ideas precisely because they could be so easily misunderstood, given their idiosyncrasy. The time of Newman’s own writing coincided with the great retrieval of Scholastic philosophy and theology among Roman Catholics. And the time of Newman’s reception coincided with an ecclesiastical consolidation, sanction, and prescription of this Scholastic tradition. Newman’s writings were altogether different. They were unique in both style and substance.7 For this reason, one seminal part of Newman reception in the twentieth century has been the attempt to reconcile or show the compatibility—and perhaps even complementarity—between Newman and Thomism or the Scholastic tradition more generally.8 This work has been undertaken by figures such as Erich Przywara, Henry F. Davis, and in our own day, Reinhard Hütter.9 On the level of substance, Newman needed to be explained precisely because what he was offering was, in general terms, very different from what was then theologically on offer at universities and seminaries between the time of Newman’s death and the Second Vatican Council. In terms of style, Newman was an occasional writer who, in his most sustained writings on one topic, engaged in the essay, not the treatise; the rhetorical flourish of his prose was quite different from the pedagogically charged textbooks. 8 The category “Thomist” is used here in a wide sense, meaning someone who follows the method of St. Thomas and is indebted to his basic principles and doctrines. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Étienne Gilson, Yves Congar, and Henri de Lubac are all Thomists here. Debates over the finer points involved in a “pure” or “authentic” Thomism is irrelevant to my argument. For the relationship between de Lubac and Aquinas, Francesca Aran Murphy argues that he is a “Blondelian Thomist” (“The Influence of Maurice Blondel,” in T&T Clark Companion to Henri de Lubac, ed. Jordan Hillebert [London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017], 57–91, esp. 79–84). 9 While Newman studies is a vast field, there are relatively few works which have conscientiously attempted to situate Newman in the larger Catholic tradition and, in particular, in relation to Aquinas. See: H. Francis Davis, “Newman and Thomism,” Newman Studien 3 (1957): 157–69; Erich Przywara’s volume introduction, “Einführung in Newmans Wesen und Werk,” in J. H. Kardinal Newman. Christentum. Ein Aufbau, ed. Otto Karrer, vol. 4 (Freiburg: Herder, 1922); Reinhard 7 John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition 427 While one could list more, I enumerate here five contributions of Newman to development theory which more or less converge with the Thomist tradition. The reader might sense these higher and lower degrees of convergence. 1. The necessity of the proposition and its subordination to, but necessary and adequate expression of, its object, or what Newman calls the dogmatic principle.10 2. A personalist understanding of revelation. 3. A theory of real but implicit possession. 4. The recognition that history (and not simply heresy) is a stimulant of development. 5. A critique of Formal Inference or deductive logic in concrete matters. 6. The role of Informal Inference in the ultimate determination of doctrine. In this essay, I will examine all of these except for the first, for numbers 2–6 took more time and effort for Thomist development theorists to assimilate. My goal will be to sketch out the extent to which twentieth-century Thomists (considered on a very wide spectrum) concur with, take on, or assume these characteristics of Newman, regardless of whether they appeal explicitly to him or not. In other words, I hope to map out some significant convergences (and along the way, some divergences as well.) I will first consider Newman and his Scholastic critics, on the one hand, and his unapologetic allies on the other. I will then dwell on different approaches to justifying the Marian dogmas as a case study for Newman’s varying influence on these theologians. In conclusion, I will highlight the perennial utility and relevance of Scholastic approaches to doctrinal development, using Francisco Marín-Sola as a prime example. The presentation will be weaving in and out between various authors and Newman himself. The convergences or appropriations will vary from individual to individual. There is a great diversity among those who consider themselves disciples of Saint Thomas. Unfortunately, there are no easy generalizations here. Hütter, John Henry Newman on Truth and Its Counterfeits: A Guide for Our Times (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2020). 10 John Henry Newman, An Essay on Development of Christian Doctrine [hereafter, Dev.] (London: Longmans, 1909 [originally 1845; rev. 1878]), 325. Cf. Newman, Oxford University Sermons (1826–1843) [hereafter, US], Sermon 15 (London: Longmans, 1909 [originally 1843; rev. 1872]), 331. 428 Andrew Meszaros Newman’s Historical Approach Whatever the familiarity and openness to Newman, Thomist treatments of doctrinal development in the first half of the twentieth century are simply very different from Newman’s. While both sides agree with the general outline of what development is—namely, the explicitation of that which is implicit in the deposit of faith—they go about explaining the way in which that implicit is extracted in different ways. The key difference, to my mind, is the extent to which something other than reflection—whether dialectical or contemplative—plays a role in eliciting the implicit from the deposit. I have in mind here, in particular, history: its circumstances, its culture, its pressures, and the questions that it raises. While Newman’s Essay on Development of Christian Doctrine begins with an assertion about the almost frenzied activity of the human mind, Newman’s practical disposition prevents him from putting too much stake in rational activity as such as an explanation for how Christianity developed into its current form. If the mind’s reflection on the Christian idea is to bear any weight of explanation for development, it bears it only because that reflection is happening in history, in controversy, in response to some challenge or novelty. For Newman, you might be able to give exegetical or theological reasons for why baptisms performed by heretics are valid, but he would insist that no such exegesis or dialectic was actually used to defend it. Newman points out, rather, that it was papal custom to which Pope Stephen († 257) appealed in defending it and that this custom, in turn, is explained by expedience. To put it in more theologically palatable terms, we reasonably have recourse to God’s providence using the very practical threat to Church unity as one of the major factors in Pope Stephen’s judgment, a judgment, however, which defied the overwhelming patristic consensus.11 Something similar holds for how the Church’s doctrine concerning oaths developed. Jesus says, “Swear not at all” (Matt 5:34). Jerome and Augustine defend swearing. Indeed, they defend it with rational discourse or argumentation, but they do so in a historical context that exerts pressure, which explains how they can defend oath-taking over against Tertullian, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Cyprian, Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, and John Chrysostom, among others.12 John Henry Newman, The Via Media of the Anglican Church: Illustrated in Lectures, Letters and Tracts Written between 1830 and 1841 [hereafter, VM], vol. 1 (London: Longmans, 1911 [originally 1837; rev. 1877]), lxxxviii–xcii. 12 Jonathan Michael Gray, Oaths and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 17. See also Kevin Uhalde, Expectations of 11 John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition 429 History for Newman is an incredibly messy process. It is precisely this messiness to which most Scholastic presentations of development do not attend. To take a stark and perhaps an overly simplistic example: for Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, the dogma of papal infallibility is formally implicit in “Thou art Peter” in the same way that the conclusion “Christ died for Solomon” is implied in the prior premise “Christ died for all.”13 Newman would agree that papal infallibility is implicit in Matthew 16:18, but eliciting it from the prior explicit requires much more than exegetical and rational legwork. Newman writes, “St. Peter’s prerogative would remain a mere letter, till the complication of ecclesiastical matters became the cause of ascertaining it.”14 While theological exegesis has its role in ascertaining the dogma’s status as formally implicit, it is history, for Newman—and not the lack of this exegesis—that can better account not only for the absence of any manifestation of such authority in the early centuries, but also for the intra-ecclesial struggle and even turmoil that preceded the full juridical manifestations of papal privilege.15 The development of papal authority is for Newman a fulfilment of a prophecy in which (1) Christ’s words to Peter, (2) practical necessity, and (3) the Christianization of the empire all have real explanatory power.16 The content of papal supremacy was hammered out in its historical development.17 Justice in the Age of Augustine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 77–104 (ch. 3, “Christian Oaths: A Case Study in Practicality over Doctrine”). 13 Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, “L’Assomption est-elle formellement révélée de façon implicite?,” Doctor Communis 1 (1948): 28–63, at 30n. 14 Newman, Dev., 150. 15 I am assuming here a distinction between the implicit status of a doctrine, on the one hand, and the ease with which one can elicit that doctrine. In fairness to Garrigou-Lagrange, by “formally implicit” he does not mean “easy to identify.” But his theological treatment of the matter does not attribute to history any significant explanatory power. 16 Newman, Dev., 148–65. This of course, does not preclude a certain kind of “logic” behind the development. Nor does it imply a sheer historicism whereby a doctrinal “outcome” is determined solely by history. The fact that Newman puts as much stake as he does in the explanatory power of history is also one reason that explains Marín-Sola’s interpretation of Newman’s note of assimilation, which Marín-Sola interprets in a minimalist way; see Francisco Marín-Sola, L’Évolution homogène du Dogme catholique, 2 vols. (Fribourg: Imprimerie et Librairie de l’oeuvre de SaintPaul, 1924), 1:342. 17 Yves Congar, The Meaning of Tradition, trans. A. N. Woodrow (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 44: “The papacy, in the form fixed by centuries of history, is a historical form of a divine institution (that of Peter as supreme pastor and head of the apostolic college), itself already modified by an apostolic initiative (the fact 430 Andrew Meszaros The Scholastic Critiques of Newman One of the first point of Scholastic friction Newman experienced was at the hands of another Anglican convert to Catholicism and later Jesuit, Thomas Morton Harper (1821–1893), known for his works on metaphysics.18 Harper did not take well to Newman’s Grammar of Assent and, in particular, Newman’s discussion of Informal Inference. “Either my inference is formally valid or it is not,” he wrote in The Month. “If it be formally valid, it is ipso facto moulded by logical law; if it is not, it is no inference at all.”19 As I will point out later, it is Newman’s understanding of Informal Inference that is, to my mind, his most significant contribution to development theory. Fifty years later, the Belgian Dominican Marcolinus Maria Tuyaerts (1878–1948) published his work on development, L’Évolution du dogme, in which he argued that strict theological conclusions and only such conclusions are definable.20 Tuyaerts’s summary of Newman’s theory is situated—tellingly—after Adolf von Harnack’s, Auguste Sabatier’s, Anton Günther’s, Alfred Loisy’s, George Tyrrell’s, and finally Maurice Blondel’s. Like the rest of the theories proposed in this company, Newman’s is that Peter had his ‘see’ at Rome).” His most famous work is Thomas Harper, The Metaphysics of the School, 3 vols. (London: MacMillan, 1879–1884). 19 Thomas Harper, “Dr. Newman’s Essay in the Aid of a Grammar of Assent,” The Month 12 (1870): 599–611, 677–92, at 688. 20 Tuyaerts, like other Thomists, makes a distinction between improper theological reasoning and proper theological reasoning, though his and Marín -Sola’s understanding of this distinction seems to differ slightly from Reginald Schultes’s. For Tuyaerts, as for Marín -Sola, improper reasoning (discursus improprius) uses a kind of reasoning that simply analyzes the meaning of a term in one of the premises (based on a nominal distinction), whereas proper reasoning (discursus proprius) ushers in a new idea or real intellectual progress, as it were (based on a conceptual and/or real distinction). Both are dogmatize-able for Tuyaerts and Marín-Sola. But the more controversial second type of reasoning is justified because, as Tuyaerts insists, its conclusion follows necessarily from the premises: “This is the case when the conclusion is contained in the premises by virtue of a necessary connection that it has with them, or concretely, when the conclusion is contained in the premises either as a property in an essence, or as an necessary effect in its cause or vice versa” (M. M. Tuyaerts, L’Évolution du dogme: Étude théologique [Louvain: Imprimerie Nova et Vetera, 1919], 72–73; unless otherwise noted, all translations from non-English titles are my own). Tuyaerts continues in the following pages to insists that theological reasoning proprement dit entails a necessary connection between conclusion and premises, or elsewhere, a necessary dependence of the conclusion on the premises. This insistence on necessity will prove to be a stumbling block for other development theorists such as Newman and Congar. 18 John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition 431 inadequate, as it is not purely dialectical.21 Tuyaerts also attacks the idea that intuition could play any role in doctrinal development.22 In a more oblique attack on Newman, he criticizes Léonce de Grandmaison’s thesis that the Church has the power to discern the truths of the deposit which, to the natural human mind alone, remain but probable.23 In a similar vein, Ambrose Gardeil is also criticized for, like de Grandmaison, asserting that some higher gift of discernment than theological dialectic is necessary to define a new dogma.24 For Tuyaerts, appealing to anything more than strict theological reasoning implies an appeal to a new revelation. Three years after Tuyaerts’s book, a Dominican and professor at the Angelicum, Reginald Maria Schultes, published his lectures as Introductio in historiam dogmatum.25 In that work, Schultes, like his colleague Garrigou-Lagrange, defends the position over against Marín-Sola that only that which is formally implicit—and not virtually implicit—can be defined a dogma.26 In doing so, he summarizes Newman’s thought on doctrinal Tuyaerts, L’Évolution du dogme, 31, 212. Tuyaerts, L’Évolution du dogme, 234. 23 Tuyaerts, L’Évolution du dogme, 168–74. 24 Tuyaerts, L’Évolution du dogme, 174–87. 25 Reginald Maria Schultes, Introductio in historiam dogmatum. Praelectiones habitae in Collegio Pontificio Angelico de Urbe, 1911–1922 (Paris: Lithielleux, 1922). 26 Schultes engages in a dispute with Marín -Sola. For Schultes, that which is formally revealed, as opposed to virtually revealed, can be extracted from the deposit through improper reasoning. He distances himself from Marín-Sola, however, in claiming that a truth formally contained in the deposit can be extracted not merely by verbal/nominal analysis, but also through conceptual distinctions, and in this way, is truly explicative through distinct concepts. In other words, you can reach a formally revealed truth, a conclusion quoad nos tantum, based on distinct concepts. For Marín -Sola, any argumentation rooted in a conceptual distinction—even if referring to the same reality—already places it in the realm of the virtually revealed or a theological conclusion quoad se. Both ultimately agree that doctrinal development is an explicatio fidei. The disagreement between Schultes and Marín-Sola ultimately lies in how they understand theological argumentation. Schultes’s concern is to maintain homogeneity by limiting theological reasoning to that which is explicative of the same, and so he searches for equivalents or identities among the premises’ terms, even if it means using a conceptual distinction. The conclusion that Christ has two wills is formally revealed in—and therefore explicative of— “Christ is true God and true man” because this latter proposition is equivalent to “Christ has both human and divine nature, will, etc.”; “There is also identity between these two propositions” (“Éclaircissements sur l’évolution du dogme,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 12 [1926]: 286–302, at 292). Schultes’s response comes after Marín-Sola’s own chapter-long critical remarks on Schultes’s Introductio in historiam dogmatum in Marín-Sola, L’Évolution homogène, 2:288–348. 21 22 432 Andrew Meszaros development in two paragraphs, acknowledges both its novelty and utility in showing that Catholic doctrinal progress is true and legitimate, but also holds that, due to certain defects regarding the noetic aspect of doctrine, Newman’s theory suffers significantly: in multis deficiat.27 Schultes, like so many Scholastics with him and before him, is nervous about modernism and therefore emphasizes rational argument as the primary factor of doctrinal development. So it comes as no surprise that one of his concluding theses reads: “Revealed doctrines and defined dogmas existed implicitly neither primarily, nor principally, in the life and activity of the faithful.”28 His first corollary explains how Protestant and modernist authors wrongly make pious devotion the origin of certain dogmas. Pious devotion, for Schultes, only prompts the Church to investigate the doctrine which is contained in Scripture and Tradition.29 In his second corollary, Schultes attacks some of Blondel’s statements as incorrect, such as the statement that “dogmas are justifiable neither by historical science alone, nor even by a dialectic that is ingeniously deployed to the texts.” Another problematic Blondelianism is: “A doctrinal tradition is humanly unintelligible if it is not completed by an ascetic tradition, and visa versa.”30 In short, Schultes is attacking Blondel’s theory of implicit knowledge or possession contained in action. Writing already twenty years later in 1940, the Jesuit Charles Boyer echoes a strong logicist theory like that of foregoing theorists like Tuyaerts: “The development of a truth can only follow a logic, and this path, at least at the point of arrival, must be perceptible.” He goes further here: “Appeal Schultes, Introductio, 291: “qua explicatione Newman certe doctrinae de evolutione dogmatum viam novam aperuit, licet explicatio proposita propter defectus doctrinae noeticae praesuppositae in multis deficiat.” 28 Schultes, Introductio, 247: “Doctrinae revelatae et dogmata definita nec primario nec principaliter in vita et actione fidelium implicite extabant.” 29 Schultes, Introductio, 250: “Immerito auctores protestation et modernistae non raro devotionem populi christiani tanquam originem dogmatis inducunt [Protestant and modernist authors not infrequently introduce without cause the devotion of the Christian people as the source of dogma].” 30 Francois Mallet, “Un nouvel entretien avec M. Blondel,” Revue du clergé français 38 (1904): 448, quoted by Schultes, Introductio, 250, where he warns, “Similiter minus recte igitur docetur, traditionem necessario supplendam esse per vitam et actionem Ecclesiae. Neque recte asseritur: ‘Les dogmes ne sont pas [sic] justifiables par la science historique seule (!) ni par la dialectique la plus ingénieusement appliquée aux textes’ vel ‘Une tradition doctrinale est humainement inintelligble, si elle ne se complète par une tradition ascétique, et réciproquement.’” The first sentence comes from Blondel’s “Histoire et dogme,” though the exclamation is Schultes’s addition. 27 John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition 433 ing to life and, in a way, to the irrational—quoad nos—seems to us to be a concession to certain contemporary philosophies.”31 Other Scholastics would have been much more sympathetic to Newman, Marín-Sola being one of them. But before we turn to him, let us proceed to Yves Congar and Henri de Lubac. Newman’s Fuller Reception in Congar and de Lubac De Lubac, I think, summarizes the tension well between the logicists, on the one hand, and newer Newman-inspired theories of those such as de Grandmaison’s, based as they are on Newman: “[One group of theologians speak of ] expediency, analogies, considerations proper to incline the mind, while the others speak in its regard of rigorous reasoning and strict, scientific, fully convincing deductions.”32 Behind these two tendencies is a significant fault line of division, which is whether or not one accepts a theory of implicit possession of some reality that is contained not only in an antecedent explicit conceptual judgment, (such as “Thou art Peter” for papal supremacy, or “the Father and I are one” for the homoousion), but also in, for example, an action, such as worship or ritual. Accordingly, such unconscious or confused knowledge embedded in some activity (coupled, of course, with some explicit knowledge about some things), when aroused, can come to the surface and express itself with more defined or precise concepts. But it is precisely this kind of implicit knowledge that is the hallmark of Newman’s theory of development, expressed in his fifteenth University Sermon in these famous words: “The absence, or partial absence, or incompleteness of dogmatic statements is no proof of the absence of impressions or implicit judgments, in the mind of the Church. Even centuries might pass without the formal expression of a truth, which had Charles Boyer, “Qu’est-ce que la théologie? Réflexions sur une controverse,” Gregorianum 21 (1940): 264–65 (quoted in Henri de Lubac, “The Problem of the Development of Dogma,” in Theology in History, trans. Anne Englund Nash [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996], 248–80, at 255, originally “Le problème du développement du dogme,” Recherches de science religieuse 35 [1938]: 130–60). The question arises, then, for Boyer, whether a dogma such as the Immaculate Conception was defined solely on the basis that it was logically deducible from the deposit of faith. This seems to be de Lubac’s interpretation of Boyer’s position (262). 32 De Lubac, “Problem,” 261. De Lubac places Schultes in the same camp as Boyer and Marín-Sola. There are grounds for this, but as I show, there is significant disagreement between Schultes and Marín-Sola precisely on the question of whether the Immaculate Conception can be deduced from Mary’s divine maternity. 31 434 Andrew Meszaros been all along the secret life of millions of faithful souls.”33 Newman’s thought greatly influenced Blondel, both directly and indirectly. Blondel formulated his theory of the implicit in his famous essay on history and dogma, published in 1904: At every moment when the witness of tradition has need of being invoked to resolve the crises of growth of the Christian people, tradition brings to distinct consciousness elements till then retained in the depths of faith and practice, rather than expressed, stated, and reflected. . . . She has nothing to innovate, because she possesses her God and her all, but she must ceaselessly teach us anew, because she makes something pass from the implicitly lived to the explicitly known.34 This phrase “de l’implicite vécu á l’explicite connu”35 is the arresting phrase that would influence a generation of development theorists like de Lubac and Congar. Newman and Blondel allowed Congar and de Lubac to explain the genesis of explicit conceptual judgments without having to depend too heavily on prior judgments or texts, important as they are. The point here is that, to know something implicitly is not to know that thing based on a more general explicit judgment, say, about God’s existence, his Trinity, or his providence, from whence can be deduced, if you tried, the thing you held earlier only implicitly. Rather, what you knew implicitly you knew precisely because you lived it. If you made a conceptual judgment about it, you would already know it explicitly. For Blondel, implicit knowledge is an implicit possession of a reality that is lived and practiced and, when prompted, can be formulated in an explicit verbal judgment.36 Newman, US, 323. Maurice Blondel, “Histoire et dogme: les lacunes philosophiques de l’exégèse moderne,” La Quinzaine 56 (1904): 145–67, 349–73, and 433–58, at 437. This translation is by William Scott in “The Notion of Tradition in Maurice Blondel,” Theological Studies 27 (1966): 384–400, at 388. 35 Others render it “implicit and ‘enjoyed’ into something explicit and known.” See Maurice Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, trans. Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan (London: Harvill, 1964), 268. 36 One might object that it is nonsensical to claim to know something (i.e., make a judgment) without concepts. I think Blondel and Newman with him are talking about an implicit possession or an experiential knowledge that is fully cognitive in the sense that the experience is proponible, or capable of being expressed conceptually when prompted, and serves as the material for a judgment. Newman uses a phrase like “inward knowledge, as distinct from explicit confession” (US, 323) when he is really referring to an experience that yields to an intuition of reality 33 34 John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition 435 Logicists such as Tuyaerts, Schultes, and Boyer find this problematic. Both De Lubac and Congar (the latter with perhaps more reservations)37 find it helpful.38 But if Blondel’s theory of the implicit is wrong, the figure to whom he is partially indebted for it is also wrong.39 As Schultes alleges, Newman’s theory in multis deficiat! Newman’s theory of the implicit is, in turn, based on his understanding of revelation that involves an “idea” which is “impressed” on the mind by supernatural facts. The Christian idea, for Newman, is not solely a collation of judgments, but more of a principle that seizes, captures, and takes possession of people’s minds, and then stirs them to action. The cognitive judgments contained there are but a part of the idea. Newman’s understanding of revelation, so important for development theory, made a deep impression on theologians such as Congar and de Lubac. I want to discuss here briefly just two key aspects of Newman’s thought that are embraced by Congar and de Lubac and thereby affect their theories of development.40 These two aspects of revelation are (1) (inward knowledge) which, when prompted, can issue in a judgment about some aspect of that reality, and when that judgment is expressed, we have what he calls “explicit confession.” Congar’s largely sympathetic discussion on the point can be found in Tradition and Traditions: An Historical and Theological Essay, trans. Michael Naseby (pt. 1) and Thomas Rainborough (pt.2) (London: Burns and Oates, 1966), 361–66. See also Congar, Meaning of Tradition, 77–81. 37 Congar never thought himself a “Blondelian” in a way that some of the Jesuits in Fourvière would have been. Congar explicitly states, for example, that, unlike Aquinas or Newman, Blondel is not a “source” in his thought. He simply used Blondel’s writings on tradition because he found them useful for his concerns. Congar also “corrects” Blondel, as it were, claiming that Newman had a better grasp of the intellectual character of what was implicitly held. See Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 349–75, esp. 359–68. 38 Congar, for instance, interprets approvingly the same interview with Blondel that Schultes criticized (Yves Congar, O.P., La Foi et la Théologie: Le mystère chrétien, théologie dogmatique [Tournai: Desclée, 1962], 114–15). 39 There are numerous occasions where Blondel appeals to Newman. He also would have absorbed some Newmanian insights through his teacher, Ollé-Laprune. 40 While both Congar and de Lubac read Newman himself, they also are coming to value him according to their own theological fidelities and priorities. Congar’s way into doctrinal development does not bypass completely the Scholastic tradition from Aquinas, through John of St. Thomas, to Marín-Sola. He reads the latter sympathetically, even if he disagrees with him on certain significant points. And Ambrose Gardeil, also sympathetic to Newman, was concerned chiefly with modernism. De Lubac on the other hand, in his appreciation for what all development consists of, is indebted to the historical work of his teacher Jules Lebreton. And he comes to value Newman through the more historical work of de Léonce de Grandmaison who, to be fair, simply knows Newman better than the older 436 Andrew Meszaros a robustly personal understanding of revelation and (2) the implication that implicit knowledge has for our understanding of the knowledge the apostles had. Revelation as Personal and Experiential Newman’s understanding of revelation is deeply personal in the sense that, behind the “Christian idea” that was impressed on the minds of the earliest Christians is the person of Jesus Christ who impressed it upon them. The Christian idea precedes any articles of faith or a worked-out creed, and the person of Christ precedes the Christian idea. Newman writes: Revelation meets us with simple and distinct facts and actions, not with painful induction from existing phenomena, not with generalized laws or metaphysical conjectures, but with Jesus and the Resurrection.41 For Newman Christ and his saving work come first, not only before the Creed, but also before the kerygmatic texts of Scripture from whence so much theology comes. Christ impresses the imaginations of the first Christians, who express that idea in preaching and writing (some of which becomes Scripture) and then begin to formulate a creed. Congar and de Lubac fundamentally agree that what was given to the apostles as the deposit of faith was—before any baptismal creed or body of doctrine was worked out—first and foremost a personal event, or as Newman would say, “a supernatural fact.” De Lubac’s phrase is tout de dogme, or “the whole of dogma,”42 which is the person of Jesus Christ. For the word of God, par excellence, is Christ himself.43 It is in Jesus Christ that all other doctrinal enunciations are implicit: Trinity, Incarnation, baptism, grace, and so on. 44 Dominicans. Both Lebreton and Grandmaison narrate historically more than they argue dialectically. Hence, de Lubac has very little time for logical theories. Between de Lubac and Congar, judging simply by their respective treatments of development and the sources they consult, it is Congar who has more time, patience, respect, and, indeed sympathy for the more traditionally minded Thomists who are grappling with doctrinal development. 41 Newman, Mix., 347. 42 De Lubac, “Problem,” 274 (French original, 157). 43 Henri de Lubac, “Commentaire du préamble et du chapitre I de la Constitution Dei verbum,” in La Révélation divine, Unam Sanctam 70 (Paris: Cerf, 1968), 159–302, at 179–80. 44 Nicholas Healy puts it well when he writes: “Before dogma is something the Church formulates, dogma is something Christ himself is; dogma is first and fore- John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition 437 Congar concurs, but expresses this differently.45 Revelation is the Gospel, or God’s word about himself and about us, in short, about our religious relationship with him that is completed in Jesus Christ. 46 Congar refers to the totality of revelation as le fait du Christ.47 Christ is a fact, something concrete, an event. In this sense, he is echoing Newman’s regard for the concrete over the abstract. This “Gospel is Jesus Christ”;48 it is “the power which works salvation, the manifestation and expression of grace; . . . the new law infused into our hearts at baptism by the Holy Spirit.”49 And, crucially, it is delivered to us, as Congar says, en vrac, loosely, “in bulk,”50 and the Church goes about her business unpacking it. And when she does, what was loose, undetermined, vague, and confused becomes more definite and precise.51 To conceive of revelation as a “supernatural fact” or personal event might lead someone to assume falsely that, in identifying the object of revelation with the person revealing, the secondary propositional content concerning God and his plan of salvation is somehow diminished or obscured.52 Congar’s and de Lubac’s appeal to the primacy of the person of Jesus most Christ himself as incarnate Word and enfleshed truth” (“Henri de Lubac on the Development of Doctrine,” Communio 44 [2017]: 667–89, at 679). 45 It might be said that Congar’s understanding of revelation, though having Christ at its center, still holds with it a “theofinality” in the sense that the center of revelation, Christ, reveals God: “Christ, and all that he brings together in his mystery, is of God and for God. . . . What we are talking about is indeed the religious relationship established between the creature and God in Christ; that to which we refer and ultimately attribute everything we talk about is God. . . . It is God who reveals himself ” (Congar, La Foi, 25). In this way, Congar’s understanding of revelation is fundamentally homogeneous with the Thomistic theological endeavor to examine things sub ratione Dei. See La Foi, 133–36, where Congar discusses the subjectum theologiae according to Aquinas, which is God and everything else insofar as it comes from and goes to God. 46 Congar, La Foi, 23: “This religious relationship of covenant, both personal and cosmic, forms itself in Jesus Christ. . . . Revelation . . . concerns the union of [God and us]: this union, in its most total and universal moment, is Jesus Christ.” See also 24: “The center of Revelation is Jesus Christ.” 47 Congar, La Foi, 45. 48 Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 272. 49 Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 273. 50 Congar, La Foi, 171. 51 See also Ambrose Gardeil, Le donné révélé et la théologie (Paris: Lecoffre and Gabalda, 1910), 152. 52 Unfortunately, there is plenty of evidence of this tendency to justify such an assumption, mistaken as it is. 438 Andrew Meszaros Christ, however, does not mean that revelation is devoid of content, nor that no account is taken of Christ’s explicit and verbal teaching handed down to the apostles. On the contrary, Christ as revealer entails both his words and deeds,53 which, together, make an “impression” on the disciples (to use Newman’s phrase again), and whose transmission requires, on the part of the transmitters, an interpretation of Jesus, his life and work, this “supernatural fact.” This “supernatural fact,” then, involves at the very least some explicitly taught content. But is all the knowledge explicit? On Implicit Knowledge among the Apostles When de Lubac assesses the theory of Marín-Sola, he cannot wrap his head around how so much theological ink and energy can be spilt and spent over Marín-Sola’s theory, when underlying it is a presupposition which, for de Lubac, taints it and like theories entirely.54 This is the presupposition that revelation was complete before the death of the last apostle by way of an infused light that granted the apostles explicit knowledge of divine revelation—a knowledge superior to what the Church enjoys today.55 In general terms, Newman would have agreed with Marín-Sola, but only in his Anglican days. Newman’s theory of the disciplina arcani, articulated in his Arians of the Fourth Century, held that later developments were not real developments, but were doctrines held from the first, but not expressed out of a certain reverence for the mysteries.56 Newman, however, saw the problems such a theory posed and, with his insight into See Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum, §§2, 4, 17. De Lubac, “Problem,” 270–71. 55 Marín-Sola, L’Évolution homogène, 1:55–60, esp. 56. Such a theory, no doubt, raises the serious questions of how such important developments (such as Mary’s Immaculate Conception or papal supremacy, primacy, and infallibility) came to be lost. Why did the apostles not communicate them? Or did they communicate them but then, somehow, the Church failed to transmit them? Congar points out that the notion of a “secret” oral tradition flies in the face of patristic anti-gnostic assertions (e.g., by Irenaeus and Tertullian) that the apostles proclaimed all that they knew (Meaning of Tradition, 38). 56 Newman, Dev., 27. Another very helpful study also draws a comparison between Marín-Sola’s theory and Newman’s disciplina arcani, but does not then go on to show how Newman’s thought changed (Allan B. Wolter, “The Theology of the Immaculate Conception in the Light of ‘Ineffabilis Deus,’” Marian Studies 5 [1950]: 19–72, at 38–42, esp. p. 40). It seems even Newman’s Anglican theory of the disciplina arcani has superior explanatory power about subsequent silences because, unlike Marín-Sola, Newman insists that the knowledge of the apostles was complete, but not as yet in technical terms that would only come about by force of the mischief that was heresy. 53 54 John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition 439 development, substituted for the disciplina arcani a theory about implicit knowledge: The Apostles had the fullness of revealed knowledge, a fullness which they could as little realize to themselves, as the human mind, as such, can have all its thoughts present before it at once. They are elicited according to the occasion. A man of genius cannot go about with his genius in his hand: in an Apostle’s mind great part of his knowledge is from the nature of the case latent or implicit.57 Significantly, Newman is not alleging that all apostolic knowledge is implicit, but only a portion of it. Again, in his Essay on Development, he puts it thus: Thus, the holy Apostles would without words know all the truths concerning the high doctrines of theology, which controversialists after them have piously and charitably reduced to formulae, and developed through argument.58 Newman goes on to describe by example how he imagines this knowledge without words: Justin and Irenaeus might not have had a clear idea about purgatory or original sin, but they had, according to Newman, “an intense feeling” of our sin in nature, and the responsibilities that come with grace.59 This “intense feeling” is the result of what Newman calls “an impression on the Imagination” that later becomes “a system or creed in the Reason.”60 This impression of the Christian is non-verbal, but as Terrence Merrigan reminds us, it is also intelligible and, significantly, proponible. In this sense, it is not a-conceptual simpliciter. It is capable of being articulated when suitable circumstances prompt it.61 Newman’s notion that a Christian “idea” is “impressed” upon the apostolic mind involves a vision of the entire deposit, complete in itself but From John Henry Newman, Letter to Thomas Flanagan on February 15, 1868, in The Theological Papers of John Henry Newman on Biblical Inspiration and on Infallibility, ed. J. Derek Holmes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 151–60, at 158. It is also published in H. M. de Achával, “An Unpublished Paper by Cardinal Newman on the Development of Doctrine,” Gregorianum 39, no. 3 (1958): 585–96. 58 Newman, Dev., 191–2. 59 Newman, Dev., 191–2. 60 Newman, US, 329. 61 Terrence Merrigan, Clear Heads and Holy Hearts: The Religious and Theological Ideal of John Henry Newman (Leuven: Peeters, 1991), 5, 46, 90, 250. 57 440 Andrew Meszaros obscure and hazy, in need of refinement. Significantly, for both de Lubac and Congar, the Gospel is an event, a divine action, a divine message out of which we can make subsequent judgments. But the totality of the Gospel itself is possessed by the Church with a kind of global comprehension. Adhesion to Christ was, to use Jules Lebreton’s words (which de Lubac quotes), “a wholly concrete and wholly living perception,”62 or in Gardeil’s words, a “global intuition of the faith.”63 Behind every apostolic utterance is la realité puissante which it has to express.64 In contrast to Marín-Sola, Congar and de Lubac are in accord with Newman. Revelation was indeed complete with the death of the last apostles, but that perfection, completeness, or integrity involved an implicit possession of truths whose explicitation would have to be elicited throughout the course of history.65 It is worth pointing out that, on the possibility that the apostles knew portions of the revealed deposit only implicitly, other Thomists agree. 66 In fact, while Newman might be happier to attribute more to implicit knowledge than Charles Journet, their respective hypothetical examples concerning apostolic knowledge of the Immaculate Conception are remarkably similar. Journet writes: Their knowledge of the deposit of revelation was not entirely explicit but able to be made explicit [immédiatement explicitable]. Let us De Lubac, “Problem,” 273 (French original, 155). Gardeil, Le donné révélé, 164. 64 Gardeil, Le donné revele, 164. 65 E.g., Congar, Meaning of Tradition, 80. 66 The figure of Charles Journet comes to mind. Journet’s position is weaker than Marín-Sola’s. For, while the former has a robust teaching on the prophetic illumination that the apostles enjoyed of the entire deposit, he allows for the possibility that this was not all explicitly possessed: “Formed by Christ . . . the apostles had . . . an exceptional and supreme knowledge of the mystery of Christ. . . . This is not to say that the apostles carried with them the expressed formulation of all the dogmas that would be promulgated throughout the following ages. . . . Their knowledge of the deposit of revelation was not entirely explicit but able to be made explicit [immédiatement explicitable]” (Charles Journet, The Theology of the Church, trans. Victor Szczurek [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004], 118). Journet also does not shy away from a preconceptual possession of the deposit: “Thus on the one hand that which was contained in the original deposit explicitly is ever kept in mind by the living authority of the Church, while, on the other hand, that which was contained in the original deposit implicitly, still in a preconceptual, unformulated way, obscure, yet forceful and unavoidable, is explained and put forward in a conceptual and formulated way by the living authority of the Church” (What is Dogma?, trans. Mark Pontifex [London: Burns & Oates, 1964], 54; emphasis mine). 62 63 John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition 441 suppose . . . that the Corinthians . . . had asked [Saint Paul] if the Mother of God had contracted original sin: this same question that Julian posed to Saint Augustine and that stumped the African Doctor, the Apostle would not have evaded.67 Newman offers: Had St. Paul been asked whether our Lady’s conception was immaculate, or whether she was born in original sin, is it wrong to say that he would have been puzzled by the words “conception,” “immaculate,” and “original sin”? . . . But if he had been asked, whether or not our Lady had the grace of the Spirit anticipating all sin whatever, including Adam’s imputed sin, I think he would have answered in the affirmative. If he never was asked the question, I should say he had in his mind the decision in 1854 in confusio or implicité.68 The understanding of revelation as a personal event, on the one hand, and allowing for implicit knowledge, on the other, sit well together, for all the implications of the Incarnation can be laid hold of, at least implicitly, through a “global intuition of the faith,” as Gardeil puts it. And given this arrangement, doctrinal development can be understood as the Church’s gradual explication and, indeed, explicitation of the deposit of faith, complete in itself from the beginning but whose full implications were to be unpacked gradually. This stands in contrast to understanding development as a gradual recovery of what was once explicitly known, but later lost—for one reason or another—to subsequent generations. The figures briefly considered in this last section show how differently the salient points of Newman’s theory of development were received in Catholic theology. Having examined Congar and de Lubac’s fundamental agreement on Newman’s understanding of revelation in contrast to some of Newman’s stronger critics, we can now delve into the telling but different approaches to justifying Marian dogmas. Newmanian and Thomistic Approaches to Marian Dogmas In a way similar to Schultes, Boyer, and Tuyaerts, Marín-Sola explicitly distances himself from those theologians who would mitigate the role played by logic in a dogma’s explicitation. Along similar lines, he is not content with placing all the justificatory weight on devotion or the senti67 68 Journet, Theology of the Church, 118. Newman, Letter to Thomas Flanagan, 159. 442 Andrew Meszaros ments of the faithful. While he does not deny that this contributed to the ultimate definition of Pius IX, Marín-Sola insists, rightly I think, on the role played by theological reasoning. He does so, however, in a way that even some of his Thomist peers found problematic. Marín-Sola’s Argument Marín-Sola, for example, disbands himself from those who would either deny that the Immaculate Conception is implicit in Mary’s maternity or admit that it is implicit but can only be elicited from the divine maternity in a way that is merely probable. Any conclusion that is uncertain or probable is not a metaphysical or "theological conclusion.69 For Marín-Sola, the Immaculate Conception can be deduced with a “rigorous theological and conclusive argumentation”70 that yields certainty. In this he agrees completely with his confrere Tuyaerts, whose own, more detailed deduction is entailed by Marín-Sola’s.71 The deductive power with which one can deduce the Immaculate Conception is analogous, for Marín-Sola, to that with which we can deduce Mary’s immunity from all actual sin: 1. Mary is the worthy Mother of God. 2. Any sin, mortal or venial, is incompatible with this worthiness.72 Marín-Sola believes the argument for Mary’s preservation from original sin follows in parallel manner: Marín-Sola, L’Évolution homogène, 1:116–7: “A conclusion can be true or certain in morals, and uncertain or only probable (which is tantamount to not being a real conclusion) in physics; just as a conclusion can be true and certain in physics and uncertain or only probable in metaphysics and theology, which is the same as saying that the conclusion is not really a metaphysical or theological conclusion.” 70 Marín-Sola, L’Évolution homogène, 1:326. This is the same kind of argument he describes earlier as “the theological conclusion understood in its proper and rigorous sense,” which deduces properties from essences or effects from causes. It is the metaphysical-inclusive, not the physical-connective argument (1:39). 71 Tuyaerts, L’Évolution du dogme, 53–54. Tuyaert’s argument is roughly as follows: Mary is the Mother of God. Upon closer examination, however, one can say that Mary, by her maternity, has so intimate a relationship with God that he, who is hatred itself of sin, could not suffer any trace of sin in that which he brought so close to him, and that he was obliged to love without reserve; besides this, the God-man, by virtue of the perfect filial love that he owes his mother, must spare her all real and useless evil, which would be for her a just cause of sorrow. From these we conclude necessarily that Mary had to be preserved not only from actual sin, but also from original. 72 Marín-Sola, L’Évolution homogène, 1:321. 69 John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition 443 1. It is necessary to attribute to Mary, as worthy Mother of God, all grace and holiness, and complete exemption from sin in a way that comports with the honor due to her Son, that is, in a way that safeguards Mary’s redemption by Jesus Christ. 2. [The second premise, from reason, was the one in dispute for centuries, but finally came to a happy result:] Now the exemption of all original fault, provided that Mary contracted a real proximate and personal debitum, is compatible with a true and rigorous preservative redemption effected by Jesus Christ. To restate in more simply: Major: Mary has to be as holy and as full of grace as possible in a way that is compatible with Christ’s universal redemption. Minor: preservation from original sin, understood in the right way, is so compatible. Therefore . . . This is a fantastic argument, but other theologians observe that, despite its profundity, Marín-Sola claims too much for it. Congar has issues with it, as does Schultes. Why? For Schultes, no theologian would claim that the Church actually defined the Immaculate Conception “as being properly a conclusion drawn from the divine maternity.”73 Congar agrees: the Immaculate Conception is not virtually implicit in “Mary is the worthy mother of God” as a metaphysically inclusive conclusion.74 For his part, Gardeil seems impressed by Marín-Sola’s deduction, but concedes that his deduction is—rather than being certain—among the most probable (est des plus vraisemblables).75 Neither Congar nor Schultes, “Éclaircissements,” 293. Schultes hedges a bit. He seems willing to entertain the idea that Mary’s immunity from actual sin (at Trent) might be deducible from the divine maternity (“I admit that this dogma, if it was deduced from the divine maternity . . .”). But that the Immaculate Conception was not revealed in a way other than by deducing it from the divine maternity, “No theologian would dare to assert it.” In his lectures, Schultes admits further that, in order for a doctrine to be definable it is not necessary to have recourse to a strict theological conclusion (Schultes, Introductio, 247). 74 Congar, La Foi, 113. 75 Ambrose Gardeil, “Introduction à la théologie,” Revue des Sciences philosophiques et théologiques 13 (1924): 576–590, at 587. Among other theologians today who do not accept the strict deduction is Leo Cardinal Scheffczyk in his Dogmatik, vol. 1, Grundlagen des Dogmas: Einleitung in die Dogmatik (Aachen: MM Verlag, 1997), 164. 73 444 Andrew Meszaros Schultes, however, elaborate systematically on their dissension.76 76 The precise reasons for the disagreement are somewhat obscure. One can hypothesize about the grounds by looking more closely at Marín-Sola’s argument. MarínSola references St. Thomas’s argument for Mary’s sinlessness, Summa theologiae [ST] III, q. 27, a. 4, which argument can be paraphrased thus: (1) God endows those with the requisite gifts to fulfill whatever office they are chosen for ; (2) God chose Mary to be his mother; (3) Therefore, God made her worthy of that office (see Luke 1) [Thomas continues with a new argument that begins with (3)’s conclusion as a first premise: Mary is the worthy mother of God]; (4) She would not have been worthy had she sinned because of (4.a) the honor (or shame) of the parents reflecting on the child (see Prov 17:6), (4.b) Jesus’s affinity with Mary (he takes his flesh from her) (cf. 2 Cor 6:25), and (4.c) the singular manner in which the Son (Wisdom) dwelt in her (i.e., bodily; see Wis 1:4); (5) therefore [Thomas concludes; “ideo simpliciter fatendum est quod”], Mary committed neither mortal nor venial sin. 3–5 form a valid syllogism. If you accept 3 and 4, then 5 necessarily follows. Crucially, Thomas gives an inductive or cumulative argument to establish 4. The reasons enumerated (4.a–c) attempt to show why such sanctification is due to her office (i.e., being the mother of God) relative to other offices. In what sense is sanctification (or freedom from sin) necessary? Is it an essential property of the divine maternity to be free of sin? Salvation history contains a great many sinners who were nevertheless rendered worthy to fulfill their offices, albeit offices different from God-bearing. For Thomas, Mary is both unique, but also like others God has chosen. The next article (q. 27, a. 5) admits as much: “The Blessed Virgin Mary was nearest to Christ in His humanity: because He received His human nature from her. Therefore, it was due to her to receive a greater fullness of grace than others [ideo prae ceteris maiorem debuit a Christo plenitudinem gratiae obtinere].” Of note is the fact that Thomas does not understand ‘full of grace’ in a maximalist sense, but in a sense that renders the recipient worthy of an office. St. Stephen and others are also “full of grace,” relative to their respective offices (ST III, q. 7, a. 10, ad. 1). As Marín-Sola appeals to Aquinas’s argument and simply extends the argument’s scope to include freedom from original sin, the ultimate question for the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is, “What grace is sufficient for being the Mother of God?” For the Immaculate Conception to qualify as a theological conclusion on Marín-Sola’s terms—that is, as a metaphysical-inclusive deduction (which means deducing either essential properties from essences or effects from causes)—it would presumably have to be the case that being free from all sin (actual and original) is an essential property of divine motherhood. In other words, for Marín-Sola, such a preservation from sin is not only morally or physically necessary, but also metaphysically necessary. Schultes and Congar (among others) disagree. Among other points of critique of Marín-Sola’s theory more generally, on the Immaculate Conception, Congar states that, historically, too many theologians—including the great Mariologists—failed to see such entailment. One could add to this group Pius IX’s commission for inquiry into the dogma. The issue is not the validity of the argument. The issue is with its status as a metaphysical-inclusive theological conclusion. I would venture to say that Mary’s sinlessness is necessary extrinsically (not John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition 445 While historically it might very well have been the case that, as MarínSola narrates it, the second premise, the premise from reason, was the cause of dispute, it is actually the first premise, as Marín-Sola articulates it, which is, I think, in a strict sense, disputable. Now, it is at this point that Newman’s critique of logic or what he calls “formal inference” in the Grammar of Assent, becomes relevant.77 Newman’s Critique of Formal Inference According to Newman, Formal Inference is a verbal reasoning (as opposed to mental) whose scientific form we call “logic.” When an analysis of propositions is put into form, it becomes an Aristotelic syllogism.78 So long as logic keeps to notions and symbols, Newman calls it “safe”: “It has the cogency of mathematical reasoning, and draws its conclusions by a rule as unerring as it is blind.”79 But as soon as one lets the symbol represent a word, and a word a reality, then difficulties begin to emerge. Newman’s critique is multifaceted and much, indeed, can be said about those facets. What is crucial for the argument here, however, is Newman’s insistence that “abstract can only conduct to abstract; but we have need to attain by our reasoning to what is concrete.”80 Whether or not there will be a European war is a concrete question. But can one infer that there will be one with apodictic certainty based on the argument: “All audacious defiances of Turkey on the part of Greece must end in a European war; these intrinsically) by virtue of an external end (i.e., not an efficient cause, but a final cause, which in this case is becoming worthy of divine maternity); and this sinlessness is not absolutely necessary to attain that end, but relatively so (i.e., it is most suitable). In other words, Mary is immaculately conceived with an extrinsic and relative necessity. (For Thomas’s discussion on various kinds of necessity, see ST III, q. 46, aa. 1–3.) 77 Marín-Sola does not register GA’s critique of Formal Inference (or even the GA generally). He instead places particular weight on Newman’s positive words about deduction in his University Discourses on theology (L’Évolution homogène, 1:310– 11). There, however, Newman was not speaking about doctrinal development, but about theology as a university (i.e., scholastic) discipline, or at least how he understood it to be; he explicitly denied that he was ever a theologian in this sense. The implication is that his work on doctrinal development has no pretension to using exclusively a method for theology that he is describing in Dublin, though he assumes that theology thus practiced by the schools is an essential part of the Church’s life and maintenance of the deposit, which has implications for development. 78 Newman, GA, 263. 79 Newman, GA, 266. 80 Newman, GA, 268. 446 Andrew Meszaros present acts of Greece are such: ergo . . . ”?81 Newman’s insight is as old as Aristotle. One cannot have scientia based on probabilities. Questions over particulars cannot be answered by general rules because generalities can yield only probabilities, not necessities. Now, if there ever were a concrete or singular question, whether or not God granted Mary an immunity from original sin is surely one. Another difficulty that comes with applying Formal Inference to concrete situations is the existence of so many assumptions within Formal Inference, whether whole premises or parts of a premise. For Formal Inference to be what it is, all assumptions stand in need of further justification. “We are thrown upon some previous syllogism or syllogisms, in which the assumptions may be proved,” writes Newman. And, then, still farther back, we are thrown upon others again, to prove the new assumptions of that second order of syllogisms. “Where,” asks Newman, “is this process to stop?” And even if we were to get back to “undeniable” premises, the whole process still raises the question of first principles, which, Newman points out, “are self-evident by their respective advocates because they are evident in no other way.”82 Newman’s critique rests on this insight: every reasoning process in the concrete is accompanied by a host of assumptions—subtle ones—that touch on so many aspects of thought, which are traceable “to the sentiments of the age, country, religion, social habits and ideas, of the particular inquirers or disputants.”83 In short, Newman has nothing against logic per se, but he believes that people reason better than they argue. He trusts people’s conclusions more than their ability to justify them by way of a formal, rigorous argumentation. Let us recall Marín-Sola’s first premise—briefly, that Mary has to be as holy as theologically possible. For Marín-Sola, this premise is beyond doubt and discussion.84 It is simply what he calls the “traditional” interpretation of the Gospel’s gratia plena (Luke 1:28). But Newman would point out that this premise is infused with innumerable presuppositions and assumptions. Newman would not (nor would I) dispute the truth of the premise. But I think Marín-Sola’s explanation of it is disputable. It comes down to whether, for the Church, gratia plena means that Mary has to be maximally graced in a way that is compatible with Christ’s universal redemption. One can affirm the providential status of the Vulgate and Newman, GA, 304. Newman, GA, 269–70. 83 Newman, GA, 270. 84 Marín-Sola, L’Évolution homogène, 1:323: “On this principle, there has never been any doubt or discussion.” 81 82 John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition 447 still point out that gratia plena is just one translation of kecharitōmenē, which can mean a variety of things. There is a hermeneutical issue here. The problem is not so much what the first premise alleges, nor even that it is justified as the meaning of gratia plena. The problem is how we get from kecharitōmenē to Mary’s maximal grace. Such a traversal is impossible, for example, without recourse to the spiritual or mystical sense of Scripture,85 which, again, opens up a number of other assumptions about Catholic scriptural interpretation. And such a mystical sense that could get us there not only includes a synthetic and typological reading of other key passages such as Genesis 3 and Revelation 12, but requires a certain level of spiritual insight, devotion, and Christian living. The exegesis of Mary as the New Eve, for example, is not the result of a plain reading of Genesis and Luke, but of some Christian genius or spiritual insight.86 And such an insight, I would suggest, is the result of, among other factors, firstly, a deep love for, devotion to, and gratitude to Our Lady, on the one hand, and on the other, pious reflection on her role in salvation that asks questions like “What honors Mary?” and “What suits Mary?” At this point, it is interesting to note how Garrigou-Lagrange establishes his premises for a different but similar argument—namely, for that of the Assumption. Major: The perfect victory of Christ over the devil includes that over sin and that over death. Minor: Mary was more closely and indissolubly associated than anyone else with Calvary and with the perfect victory of Christ over the devil.87 I do not think Marín-Sola would disagree that such recourse is needed. But I do not think his presentation of the matter addresses the implications that such recourse requires. For his part, Garrigou-Lagrange acknowledges that recourse to three different kinds of tradition is necessary in order to properly interpret certain biblical texts. His example of the second kind of tradition (la tradition declarative) is relevant: this tradition “notably sheds light on that which is said only obscurely in Scripture, for example, the tradition which interprets the words of the Angel of the Lord: Ave gratia plena, . . . seeing therein the immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.” (Garrigou-Lagrange, “L’Assomption,” 32–34). 86 I am not hereby a priori eliminating the possibility of an oral tradition. Newman ventures that the interpretation of the “New Eve” is of apostolic origin. Without rendering any judgment on the matter, this would simply imply that the New Eve interpretation would had to have been revealed then. Whether immediately revealed to the apostles or not, the point is that a naked textual reading of Genesis and the Gospels is not enough to elicit it. 87 Garrigou-Lagrange is helped by the 1854 definition, which articulates this premise 85 448 Andrew Meszaros Hence: Mary was closely and indissolubly associated also to the components of this victory, namely sin and death.88 For Garrigou-Lagrange, it is important that both major and minor premises be revealed.89 The first is rather straightforward to show with an appeal to Paul’s epistles and other key texts from the Gospels.90 The second premise, however, is more complex. He marshals forward eight pieces of evidence: (1) the proto-evangelium; (2) Isaiah 7:4; (3) the gratia plena from Gabriel; (4) the revelation of Elizabeth at the visitation coupled with the Magnificat; (5) Simeon’s prophecy; (6) Mary at the foot of the cross; (7) Mary as the New Eve; and (8) the Immaculate Conception. These, he says, provide an inductive argument to establish the revealed status of the second premise. “How,” Garrigou-Lagrange asks, “do we not admit that this truth is revealed?”91 The admission of an inductive argument and the rhetorical question as to the premise’s revealed status are instructive: Garrigou-Lagrange seems to have established a revealed truth—ipso facto explicit—contained in the deposit of faith by way of an inductive argument, not by way of, say, more foundational deductive argumentation. In addition to illustrating the grounds for Newman’s caution with respect to Formal Inference, Garrigou-Lagrange’s work also begins to show us what all it takes to establish the premises of a syllogism that seeks to explicate what is implicit in the deposit of faith. If a syllogism is to work, the premises have to hold, and for the premises to hold, they not only have to be firmly established, but have to be more certain than the conclusion that you seek to draw from them. Here is where Newman’s critique for him. Ineffabilis Deus: “Sic Sanctissima Virgo, arctissimo et indissolubili vinculo cum Eo coniuncta, una cum Illo et per Illum, sempiternas contra venenosum serpentem inimicitias exercens, ac de ipso plenissime triumphans, illius caput immaculato pede contrivit [So the most holy Virgin, united to Him by an intimate and indissoluble bond, was, with Him and through Him, eternally at enmity with the evil serpent, and triumphing completely over him, crushed his head with her immaculate foot]” (referred to in Garrigou-Lagrange, “L’Assomption,” 5). 88 The syllogism that Marín-Sola sets up for the Immaculate Conception, I think, is more air-tight than Garrigou-Lagrange’s. Does close and indissoluble association with Christ’s victory over death necessitate her resurrection before everyone else’s? 89 Garrigou-Lagrange sides with Schultes against Marín-Sola on the question of the theological conclusion. So the fundamental difference between Garrigou’s and Marín-Sola’s arguments is that, for Garrigou-Lagrange, both premises have to be revealed. Otherwise, the conclusion is not formally revealed and, hence, cannot be definable. 90 Rom 5:8–21; 1 Cor 15: 20–26; Heb 2:14–15; John 1:29; 10:25 91 Garrigou-Lagrange, “L’Assomption,” 58. John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition 449 concerning the justification of premises becomes relevant. Garrigou-Lagrange’s inductive argument acknowledges the kind of exegetical preparation involved in the construction of such a syllogism such that, before he even articulates the syllogism, he dwells on the meaning of Catholic exegesis that seeks out the spiritual or mystical sense of Scripture in addition to the rational exegesis that lays hold of the literal sense. This Catholic exegesis involves, in Garrigou-Lagrange’s words, the Scripture text being “read, meditated, contemplated in the light of faith and divine Tradition.”92 That a spiritual or mystical approach to the Scriptures is a valid mode of biblical interpretation is one major presupposition that a Catholic is happy to grant. The mystical interpretation is, after all, one of Newman’s principles of Christianity that he seeks out in viewing legitimate developments. Newman seconds: “It may be almost laid down as an historical fact, that the mystical interpretation and orthodoxy will stand or fall together.”93 But one still has to adjudicate between various spiritual interpretations. One has to determine which ones have more objective validity, or which ones contribute to an authentic sensus plenior of the text, and of the deposit of faith as a whole, and which ones do not or are irrelevant. Some interpretations stick and gain momentum, while others stagnate. But why have some gained traction and others not? What makes some spiritual interpretations practically canonical in the theological tradition and others mere private piety? And before one evaluates the various spiritual interpretations, Christians (and the Church as a whole) have to actually engage in spiritual reading of the Scriptures. De Lubac’s work on spiritual exegesis has shown, among other things, how spiritual interpretation hinges on the spiritual vitality and ongoing transformation of the Christian reader.94 The genesis Garrigou-Lagrange, “L’Assomption,” 34. Later, he appeals to Aquinas, stating that the full literal meaning (le sens littéral plénier) of these texts is perceivable under the light of infused grace, normally clarified in those souls with sanctifying grace, or those who enjoy the gifts of science, understanding, and wisdom (“L’Assomption,” 60n). He further submits that his argument is “concluant,” but only on condition that the Scripture texts, invoked as they are in light of Tradition, be taken not in an abstract way, but “in their concrete reality and lived out in the living faith of the Church” (“L’Assomption,” 59). 93 Newman, Dev., 344. 94 Lewis Ayres sums up the idea well: “De Lubac’s understanding of Christian attention to the various senses united under the label ‘spiritual’ depends on a robust notion of the soul, its transformation and purification” (“The Soul and the Reading of Scripture: A Note on Henri de Lubac,” Scottish Journal of Theology 62, no. 2 [2008]: 173–190, at 174). 92 450 Andrew Meszaros of the spiritual sense is personal and experiential. It requires grace and supernatural insight. In the end, to establish the meaning of gratia plena as the ground for Mary’s maximal grace is the result of a complex and progressive exercise of theological intellectus. Newman expresses this need for insight when he defends the Immaculate Conception against the attacks from his former fellow Tractarian Edward Bouverie Pusey. There, he complements his mystical reading of Scripture of Mary as the New Eve with an appeal to Christian instinct. That Mary is sinless is attributed by Newman not to Luke 1:28, but to “an instinctive sentiment” on the part of Christians.95 A number of Catholics, writes Newman, “employ themselves in the contemplation of Scripture facts, and bring out before their minds in a tangible form the doctrines involved in them, and give such a substance and colour to the sacred history, as to influence their brethren; and their brethren, though superficial themselves, are drawn by their Catholic instinct to accept conclusions which they could not indeed themselves have elicited, but which, when elicited, they feel to be true.”96 The momentum that a particular interpretation gains can be attributed to what Marín-Sola calls the “enthusiastic sentiment of the faithful,” which involves an “ardent love” of Our Lady.97 The objective criteria by which the Tradition can judge one such interpretation to be valid and indeed vital is limited. Yes, it cannot contradict the literal sense; yes, it cannot contradict revelation; yes, it must cohere with the rest of revelation. But these are limited, negative norms. What ultimately determines whether a spiritual interpretation has traction is its resonance with the Christian life that is judged by a Catholic sense or instinct that is informed by certain assumptions about the world, expectations concerning it, and various experiences whether mystical, liturgical, devotional, missiological, or even artistic.98 The sentiment is expressed in Augustine’s words: “Except the Holy Virgin Mary, concerning whom, for the honour of the Lord, I wish no question to be raised at all, when we are treating of sins.” (Both Newman and Aquinas quote this passage from Augustine’s De natura et gratia, Newman in Differences of Anglicans [hereafter, Diff.], vol. 2 [London: Longmans, 1910, originally 1865–1875], 50, and Aquinas in ST III, q. 27, a. 4. sc). 96 Newman, Diff., 2:53. 97 Marín-Sola, L’Évolution homogène, 1:327–28. 98 Newman, for example, alludes in defense of the Immaculate Conception to a painting of the Virgin and Child in the catacombs of Rome, with the mother’s hands extended in prayer, and the child’s hand blessing. Newman observes: “No representation can more forcibly convey the doctrine of the high dignity of the Mother, and, I will add, of her influence with her Son” (Diff., 2:55). 95 John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition 451 If we consider again Marín-Sola’s first premise—that is, that Mary as worthy Mother of God has to be as holy as possible—much more is at play than the Spaniard’s appeal to Luke 1:28. We also have an affirmation of the validity of the spiritual sense of Scripture, a positive assessment of particular spiritual interpretations, and the existence and genesis of those spiritual interpretations themselves. Each of these depend on such a host of other assumptions, principles, and views about the world that, try as one might, one can only begin to articulate them all, let alone put them all into argumentative form. Thought, according to Newman, is “too keen and manifold, its sources are too remote and hidden, its path too personal, delicate, and circuitous, its subject-matter too various and intricate, to admit of the trammels of any language, of whatever subtlety and of whatever compass.”99 For Newman, these sentiments, affections, principles, and prejudices (in the neutral sense of the term) can only be accounted for by a method of argumentation “more delicate, versatile, and elastic than verbal argumentation.”100 Marín-Sola is aware of this. He acknowledges, for example, that the definition of this dogma is in part attributable to the affections (which already places Marín-Sola outside the strict logicist camp).101 Indeed, it Neman, GA, 284. Newman, GA, 271 101 See again, Marín-Sola, L’Évolution homogène, 1:330–31: “Now when it is about determining or deducing that which is due or not due to a ‘worthy mother,’ the loving Heart [le Coeur aimant] of a son is a better judge than the cold logic of a savant. That is why the Christian sense of ‘children of God,’ that is to say, the filial faith and piety of the Christian people toward Mary their Mother and the Mother of God, was for this dogma the best and the most powerful support [auxiliaire] of speculative logic, as it was and will continue to be for all dogmas which are not solely concerned with the intelligence, but also with the Heart of man.” It is worth noting here that affectivity, according to Marín-Sola, is the greatest aid to logic. He does not see dialectic as one thing and the piety of the faithful as another. Rather, it is precisely one’s piety that aids one in judging rightly about arguments or evidence. Marín-Sola is, furthermore, right in highlighting that the properly theological controversy throughout the middle ages was what helped progress the doctrine to something definable in that it corrected a perhaps all too zealous devotion (“more spontaneous than critical”) that affirmed an absolute immunity from all sin. The first opponents of the doctrine were the ones who highlighted Mary’s debitum, and so took care to make sure that such an immunity from original sin was not an absolute immunity that would have exempted Mary from the need of redemption. Theological controversy and, indeed, argument, played a pivotal role in hammering out the coherence and orthodoxy of the doctrine—an understanding of Mary who was Immaculate, but also redeemed (L’Évolution homogène, 1:323–24). 99 100 452 Andrew Meszaros is precisely the faithful’s ardor towards Our Lady that slowly chisels out Marín-Sola’s own first premise. Simultaneously, however, he insists, over against someone like Schultes and so many others, that the dogma is implicit in the divine maternity in a way that is not probable but certain according to a rigorous formal logic. His syllogism is valid in the technical sense: if you grant Marín-Sola’s premises, his conclusion must follow. Newman’s point, however, is that granting the premises in such a syllogism involves a great deal of personal and spiritual perspicacity, a weighing or assessment of the insights of others, a kind of supernatural intellectus that is very difficult, if not impossible, to get to the bottom of. It is the “illative sense” for Newman that, among other functions, enables the person to discover which first principles to assume and which ones to eschew, what to give more weight to, and to what less. It puts someone in touch with those “primary elements of thought” which, if formalized into verbal argumentation, become too numerous and subtle to control.102 When a logical theorist such as Boyer writes, “we can see quite sufficiently how [the Immaculate Conception] derives from the proto-evangelium,” de Lubac can only shake his head in disbelief. That is why, in a tone falling between irony and derision, de Lubac turns Boyer’s words against him by alluding to all the intangible considerations that are so important to Newman. Yes, we can “see quite sufficiently”—“provided that we adopt certain Christian value judgments, that we reason according to the analogy of faith, and particularly after the event, when we are guided by the unanimous Christian sentiment, itself canonized by the decision of the infallible Magisterium; when we have thereby attained the certitude that none of the objections raised is valid and that no other will ever be presented . . . we see very sufficiently,” indeed! Is this, de Lubac asks, a rigorous demonstration?103 Newman’s critique of Formal Inference draws one’s attention to what all goes into establishing premises for arguments. Marín-Sola’s and Garrigou-Lagrange’s respective treatments of Marian dogmatic developments admit this more or less explicitly. For Newman’s part, the limitations of Formal Inference propel him towards Informal Inference as the best and surest way forward in concrete matters. Informal Inference: Antecedents, Considerations, and the Cumulation of Probabilities Perhaps Newman’s greatest contribution as a philosopher is in epistemol102 103 Newman, GA, 370–75. De Lubac, “Problem,” 262. John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition 453 ogy and, in particular, his account of Informal Inference, or his vindication of certitude on the basis of probabilities—both antecedent and evidentiary. While this way of arguing is not completely new, it is Newman who gives a full account of it and consistently deploys it in his theological argumentation with great effect. While the more immediate source would be Newman’s Oriel colleague, Richard Whately, I have shown in a past essay how, for this mode of reasoning, Newman is indebted to Aristotle’s Rhetoric. And I explain there what can be referred to as Newman’s rhetorical rationality, or a rationality that takes into account the antecedent dispositions of individuals (pathos), an informal argumentation fit for concrete questions (logos), and Newman’s appeal to the man of experience or the prudent man (ethos).104 I focus here on the first two components, which together form the basis of Newman’s argumentation by Informal Inference. Antecedent considerations are, for Newman, those thoughts, prejudices (in a neutral sense), and assumptions that someone carries with himself or herself before being confronted with any evidence concerning a concrete question. They are, in short, presumptions. They are things which dispose someone to be more open or closed to evidence, more susceptible to, or skeptical of, the evidence. Antecedent considerations (e.g., that Peter was a robber and had it out for the old woman, etc.) can enkindle in someone an expectation or anticipation which, when confirmed by evidence (e.g., he had blood on his hands, he was absent at the time of the murder, etc.), is sufficient to convince or persuade someone that something is or is not the case. The higher the antecedent probability that something is the case, the less amount of evidence is needed to satisfy someone who has to make a judgment about the matter.105 Or, as Philip Flangan helpfully summarizes it: arguments based on antecedent considerations do not prove anything, but they do “confirm a proof when evidence is produced, or make a doubt Andrew Meszaros, “The Influence of Aristotelian Rhetoric on J. H. Newman’s Epistemology,” Journal for the History of Modern Theology / Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte 20, no. 2 (2013): 192–225. 105 Newman, GA, 293: “For a syllogism is at least a demonstration, when the premises are granted, but a cumulation of probabilities, over and above their implicit character, will vary both in their number and their separate estimated value, according to the particular intellect which is employed upon it. It follows that what to one intellect is a proof is not so to another, and that the certainty of a proposition does properly consist in the certitude of the mind which contemplates it. And this of course may be said without prejudice to the objective truth or falsehood of propositions, since it does not follow that these propositions on the one hand are not true, and based on right reason, and those on the other not false, and based on false reason, because not all men discriminate them in the same way.” 104 454 Andrew Meszaros ful or probable proof more probable.”106 Now a key part of why antecedent considerations are so important for Newman is that, in concrete matters, the evidences one can provide are tokens or indications that something may have been the case. But each piece of evidence, taken by itself, can prove nothing. Questions of a concrete or contingent nature do not admit of “simple demonstration; but each carries with it a number of independent probable arguments, sufficient, when united, for a reasonable conclusion about itself.”107 If you are confronted with a series of evidences—evidences which not only are expected or anticipated, but also point towards the same outcome—you have good reason to be certain of it. Proof, for Newman, is “the limit of converging probabilities.”108 Arguing from converging probabilities is on full display in Newman’s Essay on Development when, for example, he elicits an expectation that Christian doctrine would develop by giving examples of other great ideas in the world that have developed (e.g., Judaism, democracy, etc.), and then confirming that expectation of doctrinal development with actual examples of it in history. He elicits an expectation and then overwhelms you with bits of evidence. Again, he elicits an expectation that a public revelation requires an infallible authority to interpret it and then meets that expectation with historical evidence of the Church claiming for itself precisely this infallible authority.109 According to Newman, in religious matters, it is the antecedent considerations more than the evidences that actually bear the brunt of the proof.110 If the reverence or the “spontaneous or traditional feeling of Christians”111 towards the Virgin Mary is strong enough, then actually little evidence is needed to convince them that she was immaculately conceived or assumed into heaven. This epistemology of Newman’s is perhaps the least received aspect of Philip Flangan, Newman, Faith, and the Believer (London: Sands, 1946), 69. Newman, GA, 291. 108 Newman, GA, 321. As is often the case in concrete matters, the probabilities and evidences are too complex to weigh them out on paper. They are “too fine to avail separately, too subtle and circuitous to be convertible into syllogisms, too numerous and various for such conversion, even were they convertible” (GA, 288). It is the “illative sense” that weighs it all out and judges. 109 Newman, Dev., 55–98. 110 Newman, US, 188: “Faith . . . is influenced more by what . . . are called [eikota] than by [semeia], less by evidence, more by previously-entertained principles, views, and wishes.” 111 Newman, Dev., 145. 106 107 John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition 455 his thought in the twentieth century, especially among Thomists. Some might reject it outright out of fear of relativism. Others, however, simply might not have been familiar with it or did not think they had any need of it.112 Despite, for example, Marín-Sola’s sympathetic reading of Newman, his dialectical method of proving homogeneity categorically demands a certainty which cannot be based on probability. Marín-Sola acknowledges the existence of what he calls raisonnement sans forme or raisonnement informe (informal reasoning). But by this he means something different from Newman’s informal reasoning. Informal reasoning for Marín-Sola is essentially the pedestrian understanding of an enthymeme, or a syllogism where a premise is suppressed out of spontaneity or for rhetorical reasons. Instead of saying, “all things spiritual are immortal; the human soul is spiritual; therefore, it is mortal,” an informal reasoner would simply state: “the human soul has to be immortal, being spiritual (or since it is spiritual).”113 For Newman, however, this is still Formal Inference, albeit not in technical form. Marín-Sola, furthermore, makes no nod towards such a cumulative argument because he sees the dogma’s vindication in a metaphysically inclusive theological conclusion, not in a probability, cumulative or otherwise.114 The whole point of Newman’s epistemology, however, is that you can be certain on the basis of a series of probable evidences. The Church, in her reasoning, is not beholden to the demands of some higher disembodied “Reason.” Like any other intelligent subject, the Church requires as much evidence as is necessary for her satisfaction. And while some areas This is precisely the objection that logicists level against other, more organic or “vitalist” theories. For someone like Tuyaerts, one cannot arrive at a certitude based on probabilities without the intervention of a new revelation. So if revelation is final, the certitude has to be based on a deduction. See Tuyaerts, L’Évolution du dogme, 84, 173–74, and 191–92. Congar, as a contrasting example, notes the importance of “l’épistémologie newmanienne de l’assentiment” and is aware of his Flemish confrere’s work on the subject, J. H. Walgrave and his Newman: Le développement du dogme (Tournai: Casterman, 1956) (English: Newman the Theologian, trans. A. V. Littledale [New York: Sheed & Ward, 1960]). See Congar, La Foi, 119. 113 Marín-Sola, L’Évolution homogène, 1:285. The premise “all spiritual things are immortal” is suppressed in this enthymeme. 114 For his part, Garrigou-Lagrange seems to agree; see “L’Assomption,” 35: “It is necessary to show that it is not about an opinion which does not move beyond a probability, nor is it a pious belief without a solid foundation, but it is a certain truth taught by the ordinary magisterium of the Church.” The crucial question is whether probability can yield to certainty. Newman says yes. 112 456 Andrew Meszaros of inquiry such as geometry require a proof that conforms to a deductive scientia, other areas, such as ethics or history, oblige themselves only to a looser form of argumentation and take other considerations into account, such as antecedent probabilities. Arguments from suitability or fittingness is precisely one such argument that buttresses antecedent probability in dogmatic questions. Arguments from Suitability Classically, arguments ex convenientia or from suitability or propriety do not prove doctrines, but provide reasons for why such a doctrine—assented to by faith—is coherent, suitable, fitting, proper, or harmonious. We believe—because revealed to us—that Christians who persevere will enjoy eternal beatitude. But this enjoyment of beatitude is also suitable or fitting because, as we observe in nature, Fathers who adopt sons and daughters out of generosity give them a share of their inheritance. Here, something from nature—that is, natural adoption—is used to shed light on or reveal some hidden intelligibility of divine adoption. (One can also use an observation about something revealed to accomplish the same.) But arguments of suitability are deployed with respect not only to doctrines already revealed, but also to hypotheses that are still open for debate. “Given X, Y might not be necessary, but Y is surely fitting.” Here, Scholasticism’s long tradition of argumentum ex convenientia converges with Newman’s Informal Inference, for while the reason for suitability does not prove or necessitate the truth of the hypothesis in question, it raises an expectation or anticipation that it be true. Despite centuries-long precedent for such argumentation, Marín-Sola’s treatment of the Immaculate Conception does not purport to be an argument from suitability. Marín-Sola has no need for such an argument because Mary’s Immaculate Conception, according to him, before it is in any way fitting, is first and foremost implied in her maternity; it follows necessarily from the revealed data. Newman’s vindication of the Immaculate Conception, on the other hand, against his former Tractarian colleague, Pusey, rings out with such arguments of suitability without Newman explicitly revealing his strategy.115 The argument echoes the Scotist dictum: potuit, decuit, ergo fecit 115 Ever the occasional writer, Newman’s thoughts on the Immaculate Conception were written in response to his former friend, colleague, and fellow Tractarian Edward Pusey, who, provoked by an attack by Henry Manning (also by then a convert), wrote a Letter to Keble, called an Eirenicon. There Pusey articulated the Anglican difficulties with Catholic Marian excesses, whether in devotion, or the John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition 457 (“God was able, it was fitting, therefore He did it”).116 Newman begins by establishing historically the very early—and possibly apostolic—origins of the New Eve theme. Given that Mary is the New Eve, is not the Immaculate Conception fitting? Without summarizing the arguments here, one can simply attend to Newman’s language.117 He asks, for example: “If it is really the Blessed Virgin whom Scripture represents as clothed with the sun, crowned with the stars of heaven, and with the moon as her footstool, what height of glory may we not attribute to her?”118 He asks again, “is it any violent inference?” and “is it rash to say that Mary had even a greater grace?”119 Again: “Is it possible to deny that Mary too had this gift?” Well, technically yes, it is possible to deny. But Newman is speaking of a subjective possibility, which is why he writes, “I do not know how to resist this inference.” 120 It is “irresistible” because the Christian who is in love with Our Lady cannot resist it, even if it is conceivable—and therefore resistible in principle—that Mary was not given a higher grace. Later Newman expresses how he does not see why anyone would have a “fair reason for doubting” the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.121 Newman’s rhetorical rationality—or rationality whose goal is persuasion to truth, whether of another or of oneself—is on full display here. He focuses on the person’s subjective disposition and how this affects his ability to be persuaded. For Newman, the doctrine is not “difficult,” nor is it “unnatural.”122 At one point Newman practically echoes Garrigou-Lagrange’s second premise for the Assumption. Given that she is bound so closely to the incarnate Word through her maternity, Newman asks, “is it surprising” that she should be immaculately conceived or assumed into recently defined dogma of the Immaculate Conception. For a sympathetic treatment of Pusey’s account, see David Brown, “Pusey as Consistent and Wise: Some Comparisons with Newman,” Anglican and Episcopal History 71 (2002): 328–49. 116 See René Laurentin, Mary’s Place in the Church (London: Burns & Oates, 1965), 103. 117 Mary is given this privilege, according to Newman, “in order to fit her to become the Mother of her and our Redeemer, to fit her mentally, spiritually for it; so that, by the aid of the first grace, she might so grow in grace, that, when the Angel came and her Lord was at hand, she might be ‘full of grace,’ prepared as far as a creature could be prepared, to receive Him into her bosom” (Diff., 2:49). 118 Newman, Diff., 2:61. 119 Newman, Diff., 2:45. 120 Newman, Diff., 2:46. 121 Newman, Diff., 2:46–47. 122 Newman, Diff., 2:47. 458 Andrew Meszaros heaven?123 The answer is obviously “no, it is not a surprise.” And so when the Church is confronted with evidence of the Assumption in, say, its universal feast which has celebrated it since the seventh century, then the Church is, in Newman’s words, not surprised. It only makes sense. The Scholastic tradition has a long tradition of argumentum ex convenientia.124 Where this tradition converges with Newman’s epistemology is where it plays a role in eliciting expectations and other lines of theological inquiry.125 The commission established by Pius IX to examine the dogma and prepare the 1854 definition admitted, for example, that there was no historical evidence for an explicit belief in Mary’s Immaculate Conception. Furthermore, the bishops who examined Giovanni Perrone’s drafts conceded, for example, that the evidences taken from the Fathers were but “indirect’ proofs,” acknowledging that much of what they had to say had nothing to do with Mary’s conception.126 Tellingly, the commission did not treat the dogma as if it could be formally deduced from a prior theological datum. They used arguments from suitability (or reasons of propriety) and traditional interpretations of key Scripture passages to support the definition.127 Congar on the Assumption On the fifteenth centenary of the Council of Chalcedon, Congar took the opportunity to address the dogma of the Assumption, whose definition he had judged to be inopportune, but whose truth he did not question. After the definition, he defended it, but through an argumentation that one could reasonably classify as Newmanian, even if this was not at all explicitly strategic on his part. Congar’s defense of Catholic Mariology amounted to showing how it cohered with two of Newman’s notes of authentic development. Newman, Diff., 2:63. It is worth noting here that, for Congar, arguments ex convenientia are “considerably the most important part of the arguments in theology and the appropriated realm of that science” (A History of Theology, trans. Hunter Guthrie [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968], 215). 125 For a more in-depth examination of arguments ex convenientia and development theory, see Andrew Meszaros, The Prophetic Church: History and Doctrinal Development in John Henry Newman and Yves Congar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 121–25. 126 Wolter, “Theology of the Immaculate Conception,” 35–36. Wolter depends for his history of the debates in large part on the work of X. Le Bachelet, “Immaculée Conception,” in Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, ed. A. Vacant et al., 15 vols (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1909–72), 7:1202–4. 127 For more on the history, see Wolter’s informative “Theology of the Immaculate Conception.” 123 124 John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition 459 Newman’s sixth note is called “conservative action upon the past.”128 It means essentially that a development is legitimate if it “subserves, illustrates,” and “protects” those doctrines which have come before it.129 A legitimate development shores up its antecedents, making them stronger and more intelligible. Congar argues in his work Christ, Mary, and the Church that all Marian privileges, but in particular the definition of 1950, conserves Chalcedon. Why? Congar writes: In virtue of the wholly unique personal tie with the Redeemer which is hers [Congar is echoing Garrigou-Lagrange’s and Tuyaerts’s premise here], our Lady is seen in this doctrine [of the Assumption] as in actual fact the first fruits of Redemption, and the exemplar and pledge of glorified humanity. She is purely human, and her glorified humanity, a ground of hope that ours will one day be like hers, carries back our understanding to the sacred and glorified humanity of Christ, in the likeness of which hers was victorious over sin and death.130 In this way, claims Congar, the dogma of the Assumption not only confirms or shores up Chalcedon, but in doing so, provides an antidote to monophysitism and the related errors of Appolinarius and monothelitism. All of these errors in the past have in some way diminished the humanity of Christ. A pious tendency still exists whereby Christ’s humanity is reduced to some physical puppet or mechanical instrument in the hands of the eternal Logos. The whole point of Chalcedon, however, is to defend the integrity of Christ’s human nature, which, sanctified by virtue of the Hypostatic Union, is the principle of our own sanctity if we are united to his body.131 Jesus Christ is our head, not by virtue of his divinity, but precisely by virtue of his humanity, because he is the second Adam, because he is like us in all Newman calls it “preservative additions” in the original 1845 edition. Newman, Dev., 202. 130 Yves Congar, Christ, Our Lady, and the Church, trans. Henry St. John (London: Longmans and Green, 1957), 54. 131 See, e.g., Congar, criticizing the opposite position, in Christ, Our Lady, and the Church, 70. Congar is aware of a Mariological tendency that justifies itself by a closet monophysitism that makes Mary the head of humanity because she is purely human whereas Christ is God. Hence, the words of Graham Greene: “The Resurrection of Christ can be regarded as the Resurrection of a god, the Resurrection of Mary foreshadows the Resurrection of each one of us.” The quotation is taken from Graham Greene, “The Assumption of Mary,” Life, October 30, 1950, 50–58, at 58. 128 129 460 Andrew Meszaros things, except sin—perfectly human not only physically, but also spiritually, possessing human intelligence, will, conscience, and freedom.132 It is the sanctification and victory of Christ’s humanity that is the principle of our own sanctification and victory, whose first creaturely exemplar is Mary. The Assumption preserves Chalcedon. In a closely related way, Congar defends not only the Assumption, but Catholic Mariology more generally from its Protestant detractors on Christological grounds. Luther’s Christology is deficient, according to Congar, because he did not take the mediating role of Christ’s humanity seriously. While accepting Chalcedon in theory, Luther, on Congar’s reading, did not dwell on its significance because of his unease with a theology of glory and its speculative nature. At least according to Congar’s interpretation, salvation is conceived by Luther as solely an opus Dei. God redeems us in Christ, and Christ is redeemed in us. Where, then, Congar asks, is the role of the humanity in all this? 133 For Congar, Luther is deficient both in theology and in mediation.134 And it is precisely here where, in Newmanian terms, Luther has violated the second note, continuity of principle—namely, the sacramental or mediatory principle, and the principle of theology.135 One could, as already Congar, Christ, Our Lady, and the Church, 50. The problem of mediation also has its Catholic excesses. E.g., Jesus’s mediatorship is compromised when he must be approached with fear and trembling simply because his humanity belonged to God, while Mary, as pure creature, becomes spiritually more accessible due to her tenderness. Congar discusses this tendency in Christ, Our Lady, and the Church, 68–77. Congar points out that such a tendency does not accord with the thrust of Scripture (not just 1 Tim 2:5, but esp. Hebrews 2). 134 Congar, Christ, Our Lady, and the Church, 19–40, esp. 25–28. See also his article, “Regards et réflexions sur la christologie de Luther,” in Das Konzil von Chalkedon: Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Aloys Grillmeier and Heinrich Bacht, 3 vols. (Würzburg: Echter, 1951), 3:457–86. In response to Congar’s reading, Johannes Zachhuber defends Luther’s Christology on patristic grounds in Luther’s Christological Legacy: Christocentrism and the Chalcedonian Tradition, The Père Marquette Lecture in Theology 48 (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2017), 62–66. The accuracy of Congar’s reading is disputable. What is more important than Congar’s reading of Luther is, for my argument here, the method Congar uses to go about justifying the Assumption: namely, by uncovering deeper theological principles with which it coheres. 135 In the Dev., Newman enumerates a host of principles of Christianity. The principle of dogma, the spiritual or mystical sense of Scripture, the principle of faith, etc. A legitimate development is one that illustrates or expresses one of these principles. For, “principle is a better test of heresy than doctrine” because “heretics are true to their principles” (181). Private judgement is a principle which yields all sorts of doctrines. There are dozens of Catholic principles, but Newman lists only nine. 132 133 John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition 461 mentioned, include in this Newman’s principle of the mystical or spiritual sense of Scripture. Congar’s defense of the Assumption, while appealing to similar themes and texts as, say, Marín-Sola, Garrigou-Lagrange, and Tuyaerts, does not rely on deductive argumentation, illuminating as syllogisms might be. Congar defends the dogma—and by “defend” we mean, “shows its homogeneity with the deposit of faith”—by showing that the dogma manifests Newman’s notes of “conservative action on the past” and “continuity of principle.” These ultimately amount to indications which, in themselves, simply “point” to the conclusion, as it were—not necessarily imply it. Conclusion: The Perennial Relevance of Marín-Sola and Newman Though much more can be said, I have simply presented some convergences between Newman’s thought and some notable Thomist theologians of the twentieth century on the question of doctrinal development. While Thomism is a well-established and time-tested system, if it is open enough, it can benefit from some of Newman’s key insights. Reiterating, they are: 1. An acknowledgment of the role that history plays in doctrinal determinations without falling into a historicism. 2. A theory of implicit possession, applicable to doctrinal development theory by virtue of an understanding of revelation that is personal and experiential. 3. A critique of Formal Inference that lays out its virtues and limitations, while defending the utility and indeed legitimacy of Informal reasoning in concrete matters. By way of conclusion, then, I would say that the reception of Newman by theologians trained and/or steeped in Thomism results in a gradual move away from a logicist theory of development, such as Tuyaerts’s or Boyer’s.136 Marín-Sola takes a significant step forward away from the They include the sacramental principle, which is, in a sense, a principle of mediation and the principle of theology. 136 The problem that is criticized by de Lubac and Congar is not logic, nor is it propositions as such. De Lubac and Congar affirm both. The problem is logicism’s “tendency to reduce doctrinal development to logical deduction from a depositum fidei conceived primarily (or even simply) as an ensemble of contextless propositions” (Healy, “Henri de Lubac,” 679). 462 Andrew Meszaros logicist position, not primarily because he reads Newman more sympathetically (which he certainly does!), but because, by doing so, he affirms without reservation the role that affectivity and connatural knowledge play in the actual development of doctrine.137 Unlike other logicists, Marín-Sola does not dismiss historical study as a seminal part in justifying dogma.138 Nor does he make the theological reasoning itself a criterion for definition; whether theological speculation produces a demonstration or just probability, it is the Church assisted by the Holy Spirit which alone is the sufficient criterion for pope or council to define dogma.139 Marín-Sola is no logicist tout simple.140 But while his theory as a whole cannot be reduced to a logical one, Marín-Sola's methodology—in trying to prove the homogeneity of doctrine—is thoroughly logicist or dialectical insofar as he insists that, in his ten examples, the conclusions follow necessarily from premises. But his logicism is infused with an affectivity that prepares the premises. Many of Marín-Sola’s passing comments reveal the role played by affectivity not only in the actual development of the doctrine in history, but also in establishing the premises as antecedents to a conclusion that follows necessarily, even if many other theologians, including his confreres, disagree about the status of the premises. By the time we get to de Lubac and Congar, Newman’s most controversial teachings are received without demur. They take for granted that the Church can possess something implicitly in a variety of ways, including the activity and praxis of the faithful. Congar, following his Flemish Dominican confrere Jan-Henrik Walgrave, and de Lubac, following his elder mentor de Grandmaison, each express two similar conclusions: first, that the Church is ultimately not beholden to or bound by the argumentation of theologians and that, despite even the value of a Newmanian accumu Garrigou-Lagrange, similarly, states without hesitation that the ordinary magisterium of the Church includes the sense of the faithful (“L’Assomption,” 32–33). Garrigou-Lagrange includes first and foremost, however, the consistent preaching of the episcopate, but also the universal praxis of the Church (e.g., the Feast of the Assumption), and the morally unanimous consensus of the Fathers and theologians. The sense of the faithful is enumerated last. This sense, for Garrigou-Lagrange, depends on the infallibility of the teaching Church, and is simply a manifestation of what has already been taught them by the Church as revealed. The sense of the faithful, for Garrigou-Lagrange, is more an a posteriori token of development rather than a motor of it that propels it forward. 138 Marín-Sola, L’Évolution homogène, 1:16. 139 Marín-Sola, L’Évolution homogène, 1:358, 371–2. 140 I agree with Hütter’s assessment that it is unhelpful and simply inaccurate to place Marín-Sola in the strictly “logicist” camp (John Henry Newman, 163–65). 137 John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition 463 lation of probabilities, the Church’s supernatural capacity to judge is the ultimate and only adequate criteria for judging a hypothetical development whose historical testimony in its favor is ambiguous.141 And secondly, both express their conviction that the Church does not define what it thinks to be a theological conclusion (which many of their confreres believe to be definable). The Church, rather, defines what it believes to be in the deposit of faith, and it comes to this determination through a supernatural judgment that takes multiple indicators into account.142 Despite these two important agreements about development, Congar and de Lubac assume very different postures towards Marín-Sola. It is Congar’s more positive assessment of Marín-Sola that propels us to examine the benefits of Marín-Sola’s approach to development. Unlike de Lubac, Congar’s more positive disposition towards the Thomist tradition enables him to see and use what is beneficial in Scholastic theories such as those of Marín-Sola and others.143 He agrees, for example, with Marín-Sola’s dismantling of the concept of “ecclesiastical faith,” or the way in which the Thomist tradition understands the rela Congar, La Foi, 119–20; de Lubac, “Problem,” 262. There de Lubac quotes de Grandmaison to the effect that there are text, arguments, and reasons for a dogma, and texts, arguments, and reasons against a dogma. On a human level, the question of certain potential dogmas is undetermined or probable, and in need of a higher, supernatural power to discern. Cf. Newman, Apo., 87: “Every creed has texts in its favour, and again texts which run counter to it.” 142 Congar, La Foi, 176. See also de Lubac, “Problem,” 262: “What she seeks to find is not if such a proposition is or is not correctly deduced but if such an assertion is or is not contained in her faith.” 143 There are other instances in which Congar, in ways subtle, distances himself from what he considers to be de Lubac’s aversion towards the Scholastic tradition. See, e.g., the former’s review of de Lubac’s Corpus mysticum re-published in Sainte Église, Unam Sanctam 41 (Paris: Cerf, 1963), 554–60. There, Congar alleges that de Lubac’s historical genealogy of the term involves an unfair presentation of medieval Scholasticism. De Lubac’s presentation reveals that his unease is not solely with so-called Baroque Scholasticism, but with an approach to theology that deploys too readily or confidently the gifts of reason which, for de Lubac, is present already in the early Middle Ages. Congar’s concurrence with de Lubac’s negative assessment of a “rationalistic” presentation of doctrinal development by someone like Charles Boyer is evident from Congar’s silence. Whereas de Lubac feels the need to attack his Jesuit brother, Congar simply ignores him in his major works on the subject such as La Foi and Meaning of Tradition. In those works, Boyer never features. In the more than four hundred pages of Tradition and Traditions, Congar makes reference to hundreds of works by his contemporaries, but Boyer is referenced only once with reference to a work on oral tradition which had come out after Congar had already finished writing the volume (411n1). 141 464 Andrew Meszaros tionship between the object of faith, which is always the First Truth, and the Church which proposes it and, at times, defines it.144 When it comes to development, one can tell that Congar has seriously engaged with Marín-Sola’s two-volume masterpiece on the subject and is in important respects following it. Congar, for example, is happy to follow Marín-Sola in distinguishing between two active ways by which the Church, as an active subject, penetrates the deposit of faith. Echoing Marín-Sola, Congar calls these les voies du développement, or the ways of development: la voie spéculative and la voie affective ou de l’expérience vitale, 145 or the way of theological dialectic or argumentation, on the one hand, and connatural experience or devotion, on the other.146 Marín-Sola’s acknowledgment and elaboration of Thomistic connatural judgment is one token of his sympathetic reception of Newman’s teaching on “natural inference” or, in a theological key, a supernatural inclination towards the truths of the faith. What sets Marín-Sola apart from logicists like Tuyaerts and Boyer is that the Spaniard is not trying to explain by logical deduction how particular doctrines have developed in history, nor does he insist on such proof as a license for magisterial definition. He is simply trying to show the homogeneity of the developed doctrine with the deposit of revelation in the best Congar, La Foi, 45, refers to Marín-Sola, L’Évolution homogène, 1:202–29. Congar also cites Marín-Sola on 50 with respect to the competence of the magisterium in relation to the object of faith (L’Évolution homogène, 1:126–28, 202–6). There is some content in the cited passage which Congar criticizes in other parts of his work, but in the immediate context, his citation is sympathetic. He is encouraging the reader to consult Marín-Sola’s treatment of the matter. Here, Congar also approvingly cites Cajetan’s formulation of the Church as a ministra objecti, as simply mediating the revealed object for our faith. 145 Congar, La Foi, 107. He cites Marín-Sola, L’Évolution homogène, 1:279–341 and 353–92. 146 Similarly, Congar appeals to Marín-Sola and other Thomists when he discusses the three ways by which one perceives the homogeneity of developments with their antecedents. These three ways are theological dialectic, historical inquiry, and the supernatural insight of the Church. Note that theological dialectic as a way of development is different from the theological dialectic considered as a way of perceiving homogeneity. The one is theological argument that actually contributes to a particular development in tempore. The other is theological argument that seeks to justify the development (or proposed development) post factum. An example of the former includes argumentation towards the Trinitarian notions— innascibility, paternity, filiation, common and passive spiration—or the filioque. An example of the latter is basically Marín-Sola’s presentation of ten examples of doctrinal developments, wherein he provides the major and minor premises for each dogmatic conclusion (L’Évolution homogène, 1:299–341, esp. 299–300). 144 John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition 465 way he knows how. His theological argumentation is a way of testing the coherence of developments with their antecedents. Marín-Sola seeks the seminal links of logical entailment; Newman applies seven notes. Not only are Marín-Sola and Newman after the same thing, but their ways overlap in some areas. In particular, Marín-Sola’s theological method is essentially a demonstration of Newman’s fourth and sixth notes (logical sequence and conservative action upon the past, respectively). When Congar defends the Assumption by essentially applying Newman’s sixth note, he does so without putting it into form. Marín-Sola would attempt to do so. Although Congar sides with other Thomists such as Garrigou-Lagrange and Schultes147 on the insufficient status for definability of a proper theological conclusion (where one premise is from reason), Congar appreciates the rigor of Marín-Sola’s dialectical attempts, and so Congar includes him as his primary source for the first of three ways by which one can recognize homogeneity: namely, dialectical argument. Congar does not dismiss it, but simply thinks it can account for the homogeneity of only a few doctrines, so it is inadequate and needs supplementation by the second way, historical inquiry, and the third and final way, the divinely assisted judgment of the magisterium, which alone is proportional to the object about which it judges, and takes into account all the evidence at its disposal, including theological arguments of whatever kind, from a syllogism to an application of Newman’s notes of authentic development. Congar sees in Marín-Sola’s approach not so much an explanation for every instance of dogmatic development, but a rigorous account of, and model for, theological development. This is why, in his La foi et la théologie, Congar is critical of Marín-Sola in the first part dedicated to revelation and faith but praises him in the second part, dedicated to theology and its method. He points out that Marín-Sola’s exposition of dialectic is a sophisticated one that takes into account the dangers of equivocation.148 This coheres well with Congar’s idea that the main task of the speculative theological endeavor is not the deduction of new conclusions,149 but a Cf. Schultes, Introductio, 206–7. To be clear, “illative” here means objectively illative. Something can be formally implied in the deposit, and thereby be extracted in a way that is objectively explicative, but subjectively illative. In this case, it is still definable for Schultes and Garrigou-Lagrange (“L’Assomption,” 60n.). Congar agrees with Schultes and Garrigou-Lagrange: we cannot assent with a divine faith to things which are simply true and somehow, even metaphysically, related to revelation, but only to those things which have been attested to by the Word of God. 148 Congar, La Foi, 169–79, esp. 173. 149 Congar, Bulletin thomiste 5 (1938): 500: “It is to add to the thought of Saint Thomas to assign as an object to theology the deduction of new conclusions on the 147 466 Andrew Meszaros rational construction of the Christian faith which, for Congar, is most definitely a kind of subalternate scientia. In this process of faith seeking understanding, however, one begins with the conclusion and works backwards towards its principles. Putting it into syllogistic form is simply the way of laying hold of higher causes in the divine economy. Many of Marín-Sola’s syllogisms are exemplary in this regard. And if one is only putting into form an argument from propriety or suitability, one is still acquiring a glimpse into divine wisdom. Marín-Sola, in short, shows us how theology can indeed bear the impressio divinae scientiae.150 And his analysis of the metaphysical-inclusive versus the physical-connective syllogism helps the theologian appreciate the depth, but also the limits, of the various relationships he or she is able to identify. He and some of his confreres remind us, then, of not only a certain logical rigor, but also a metaphysical rigor that seems so foreign to contemporary theological habits.151 Let us call to mind the controversies of our day, the ones in which we see ecclesial polarization in broad daylight, and imagine how a heavy dose of rigorous syllogisms and a capacity to see the organic connections between various doctrines could change the tenor and substance of our theological conversations. Today, however, this dispute over the definability of theological conclusions between Marín-Sola, Schultes, and Garrigou-Lagrange does not seem like a pressing problem. Few theologians today are pining for the pope or a council to define rigorously argued theological conclusions. And so few theologians, in turn, are concerned about the exact status of these conclusions. I would go even further. It might seem that this basis of revealed truths, with the aid of principles of reason. We have seen that for Saint Thomas, the scientific quality of theology is not acquired from the deduction of new truths but from the rational construction of the Christian teaching through an attachment of truths—conclusions to some truths—principles” (trans. in de Lubac, “Problem,” 260n). Examples include linking our resurrection to Christ’s own, or linking the universal presence of God to his universal causality, or linking the Spirit’s procession from the Son to the distinction between persons in the Trinity. 150 ST I, q. 1, a. 1, ad 3. 151 The insistence on some real connection between the mysteries on the order of being is what helps explain a neo-Scholastic like Tuyaerts’s dissatisfaction with Newman’s thought. Tuyaerts does not deny, for example, that there are multiple factors (e.g., heresy, political and economic factors, etc.) that contribute to the occasion of doctrinal development on the subjective level, but he rightly insists that, ultimately, these factors fail to show the intrinsic connection between a developed doctrine and its more primitive antecedents (L’Évolution du dogme, 217–20, esp. 219). John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition 467 entire discussion—its style and its content—by Thomists on doctrinal development seems irrelevant today. The theological controversies that envelop the Church today have nothing to do with the transition from a theological conclusion to the definition of a new dogma. They have to do with potential changes to the Church’s inherited practices and disciplines which have novel implications or knock-on effects for how we interpret certain doctrines already defined. In this respect, Newman’s approach to doctrinal development, at least prima facie, seems more contemporary in that, for him, what is developing is an idea that incarnates itself not only in a dogmatic creed, but also in pastoral practices, sacramental disciplines, ministerial offices, and Church structures. Newman’s understanding of development, then, is broad enough to encompass the controversial issues in which questions of continuity and rupture arise today. His notes of authentic development, however, were meant to be applied to a development retrospectively as a confirmation of a hypothesis. Newman’s notes or tests sought to explain development, not embolden it. He never envisioned that his notes would be used to inquire whether or not an as-of-yet-undecided and novel hypothesis is an authentic development or a corruption. That does not mean that they cannot be so applied, but doing so is difficult because Newman’s notes were applied to already-received doctrines that carried with them a positive presumption in their favor which the notes, later, confirmed; the notes enabled Newman to shift the burden of proof onto the one who rejects the development or the ecclesial authority that sanctioned the development.152 In controversy over a disputed question, however, no such presumption exists. Without such presumption, the fulfilment of the notes—when possible to determine—can render a doctrine, at most, in the words of one scholar, “tenable because reasonable.”153 Aside from the notes, Newman had a keen awareness of how the schola theologarum and their theological argumentation played key roles in the ultimate determination of doctrines. In this sense, Marín-Sola, Schultes, Garrigou-Lagrange, and others find renewed relevance, for they are exemplary in their theological reasoning and argumentation. Today, tight and rigorous theological argumentation is important, not Newman, Dev., 78: “They rather serve as answers to objections brought against the actual decisions of authority, than [as] proofs of the correctness of their decisions.” 153 Gerard McCarren, “Development of Doctrine,” in Cambridge Companion to John Henry Newman, ed. Ian Ker and Terrence Merrigan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 118–136, at 129. McCarren usefully draws the reader’s attention to the limited but nevertheless real utility of the notes. 152 468 Andrew Meszaros because the conclusion might become dogma, but because the conclusion is most likely under attack. Putting truths into logical form helps crystallize the higher principles at stake in any particular assertion. With solid logical argumentation, one can better show how, if one denies a conclusion, one is also denying the principles from which it is validly inferred. However, the syllogism bears the greatest fruit when it is exercised in the serene environment in which the understanding sought by faith is pursued for its own sake. Recognizing humans for what they are, Newman predicts that a syllogism dished up for the morally unprepared and negatively disposed will have little effect. Newman also reminds us, then, that, in the heat of N&V controversy, prudentia is just as important as scientia. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2021): 469–530 469 Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition Jeremy Bell Campion College Sydney, Australia Introduction The Catholic Church’s longstanding usury prohibition is today widely considered defunct. In contemporary capitalist societies a certain opprobrium attaches to “usury,” in the popular sense of charging excessive interest on a loan, but lending at interest is otherwise accepted as a normal and necessary feature of economic life. Few within or without the Church (except Muslims) object to “usury” in the original sense of charging even low interest on a loan, absent any title beyond the mere act of lending.1 Recent popes have sometimes condemned “usury,” but it is unclear whether they have used the word in its popular or in its original sense.2 While the The change in the word’s meaning (already well established by the time of Adam Smith) reflects the post-Renaissance change in the common European moral evaluation of lending at interest. The same is true of the change in meaning of “interest” (interesse), which originally referred to penalty for default on, or late payment of, a non-usurious loan. See Joseph Persky, “Retrospectives: From Usury to Interest,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 21, no. 1 (Winter, 2007): 227–30. For convenience, in this essay I will use the term “interest” in the broad contemporary sense of any sum that a borrower agrees to pay in addition to the principal. 2 Both Pope (now emeritus) Benedict XVI and Pope Francis have passionately condemned “usury” in addresses to members of Italy’s Consulta Nazionale Antiusura, without defining the term. The website of the Consulta, whose work both Popes praised highly, defines usury as “the offense committed by someone who, exploiting another individual’s need for money, grants a loan while asking for repayment at an interest rate higher than the so-called ‘threshold rate’ [tasso soglia] allowed by law” (“L’Usura,” consultantiusura.it/usura.html; translation mine). The Consulta evidently understands “usury” in the contemporary sense of charging excessive interest. This suggests that the condemnations of usury in the Popes’ addresses to the 1 470 Jeremy Bell Catechism of the Catholic Church denounces “usurious and avaricious dealings” that lead to “hunger and death,” it nowhere prohibits usury as such.3 The 1983 Code of Canon Law is silent about it. On the whole, John T. Noonan Jr.’s observation in the introduction to his classic 1957 study The Scholastic Analysis of Usury remains valid: “Usury today is a dead issue, and except by a plainly equivocal use of the term, or save in the mouths of a few inveterate haters of the present order, it is not likely to stir to life.”4 Yet the Church has never rescinded its usury prohibition; nor could it do so, given the prohibition’s history.5 The grave sinfulness of usury was clearly and forcefully taught over many centuries by Church Fathers, local and ecumenical councils, Scholastic theologians, and popes,6 often in the face of widespread, flagrant disregard for the teaching on the part of lay Catholics.7 Even if one were to argue that it has never been solemnly Consulta should also be understood in this sense. (This was certainly the view of the Catholic news service Zenit, when reporting the addresses.) If so, it may well be that when Benedict XVI wrote in Caritas in Veritate (2009) that “the weakest members of society should be helped to defend themselves against usury” (§66), he was again using the word in its contemporary sense (English from the version available on his webpage on the Vatican website). 3 Catechism of the Catholic Church [CCC], 2nd edition (Strathfield, Australia: St. Pauls, 2000), §2269. The index to the Catechism defines “usury” simply as “lending money at interest” (p. 856). CCC §2449 mentions a number of provisions in the Mosaic law intended to ease the burdens of the poor and needy, including the “prohibition of loans at interest.” There is no indication here that the prohibition might also belong to the natural law. Moreover, there is no suggestion that lending at interest might be sinful even when the borrower happens to be wealthy. Put differently, there is no suggestion here that usury might be intrinsically unjust. 4 John T. Noonan Jr., The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 1. 5 The theological roots of the prohibition are, of course, biblical. No New Testament passage unambiguously condemns usury, though both in the patristic period and in the Middle Ages Christ’s admonition to “lend freely, hoping nothing thereby” (Luke 6:35) was often taken to support the usury prohibition. Some of the relevant Old Testament texts (e.g., Exod 22:25 and Lev 25:35–37) prohibit lending at interest only to fellow Israelites. However, Ps 14:5 (Septuagint numbering) and Ezek 18:5–9 both contain apparently unrestricted (though only implicit) condemnations of usury. 6 Robert Maloney provides a concise but helpfully detailed presentation of patristic attitudes towards usury in “The Teaching of the Fathers on Usury: An Historical Study on the Development of Christian Thinking,” Vigiliae Christianae 27, no. 4 (1973): 241–65. The Scholastic, conciliar, and papal condemnations are comprehensively documented in Noonan’s Scholastic Analysis. 7 In 1179, more than forty years before the birth of Thomas Aquinas, the Third Lateran Council lamented that “nearly everywhere the crime of usury has become so Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 471 defined in an exercise of the Church’s extraordinary magisterium,8 one could not plausibly deny that usury’s sinfulness has been infallibly taught by the universal and ordinary magisterium. As Elizabeth Anscombe observes, though the Church has largely “fallen silent” about usury, its condemnation of the practice is “unretractable.”9 Noonan himself acknowledged, in 1957, that the sinfulness of usury “was and is a dogma of the Catholic Church.”10 Less than ten years later, however, he had apparently changed his mind. In a series of publications beginning shortly after the close of the Second Vatican Council and spanning nearly four decades, he argued that the modern Church has abandoned the usury prohibition. Moreover, it is clear that he found the Scholastic natural-law arguments in its support unpersuasive. Despite describing his 1957 study as no more than “a simple history” of Scholastic thought about usury and its post-medieval reception,11 he is more than willing to criticize the Scholastics’ arguments. He speaks of their “inconsistencies”12 and firmly rooted that many, omitting other business, practice usury as if it were permitted” (can. 25; English from papalencyclicals.net). Charles R. Geist remarks that, while in the later Middle Ages usury “was being practiced by all and sundry in the commercial revolution in Italy and the rest of Europe,” Churchmen nonetheless still considered it “an execrable sin against humanity” (Beggar Thy Neighbor: A History of Usury and Debt [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013], 58). 8 The most plausible candidate for an infallible definition of usury’s intrinsic sinfulness is the Council of Vienne’s 1311 decree that, “if indeed someone has fallen into the error of presuming to affirm pertinaciously that the practice of usury is not sinful, . . . he is to be punished as a heretic” (can. 29; English from papalencyclicals.net). However, the statement that one who “pertinaciously” affirms that “the practice of usury is not sinful” is to be “punished as a heretic” does not, despite appearances, necessarily mean that the denial of usury’s (intrinsic) sinfulness is formally heretical. For a discussion of the difficulties in interpreting the Council’s seemingly straightforward decree, see Patrick Cleary, The Church and Usury: An Essay on Some Historical and Theological Aspects of Money-Lending (Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, 1914), 74–78. Cleary nonetheless deems it “probable” that the decree “was meant to be definitive” and that it “defines that usury . . . involves injustice” (78). 9 G. E. M. Anscombe, “Philosophers and Economists: Two Philosophers’ Objections to Usury,” in Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics, ed. Mary Geach and Luke Gormally (Charlottesville, VA.: Imprint Academic, 2008), 247–57, at 249. 10 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 2–3 (emphasis mine). On 400 he likewise remarks that “the pure and narrow dogma is the same today as in 1200.” 11 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 6: He continues here: “The study does not attempt to demonstrate either the futility and inconsistency or the wisdom and logic of the scholastic position.” 12 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 145, 205. 472 Jeremy Bell of their analysis of usury “floundering in severe difficulties” by the early modern period.13 He has high praise for Aquinas’s major natural-law argument against usury and even goes so far as to say that no other Scholastic argument “survived the test of time and criticism,”14 yet he claims that the Angelic Doctor abandoned the principles of this argument when discussing contracts other than loans, because “the promptings of natural justice are stronger than his theory.”15 (The implication, of course, is that “natural justice” tells against these principles, hence against the “theory” based on them.) Most tellingly of all, when discussing post-medieval developments, he says that “the later writers cannot bear the piecemeal theory and illogical exceptions that made the early teaching tolerable.”16 Though in 1957 he accepted that the Church had never rescinded its prohibition, he believed that the classic natural-law arguments against usury were either incoherent or else “intolerable” and against “natural justice” when rigorously thought out. The post-medieval theological innovations that he would later claim led the Church to rescind the prohibition were, in fact, attempts to remedy the putative difficulties inherent in “the early teaching.” In short, Noonan came to believe that it was because natural-law objections to usury were at bottom untenable that the Church finally ceased to teach that usury is intrinsically sinful. While a small number of recent Catholic commentators both accept that the usury prohibition has never been rescinded and urge its reasonableness and continuing relevance,17 none has attempted a detailed response to Noonan’s arguments. Since Noonan was unquestionably the preeminent twentieth-century authority on the prohibition’s history, these arguments deserve close attention. My chief goal in this essay is to make good this lacuna in contemporary Catholic efforts to rehabilitate the prohibition. This may seem an exceedingly ambitious task. As M. Cathleen Kaveny observes, “very few of us have the expertise necessary Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 355. Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 358. 15 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 143. 16 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 201. 17 In addition to Anscombe, “Philosophers and Economists,” see: D. Stephen Long and Nancy Ruth Fox, with Tripp Rork, Calculated Futures: Theology, Ethics and Economics (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007); Christopher A. Franks, “The Usury Prohibition and Natural Law: A Reappraisal,” The Thomist 72, no .4 (2008): 625–60; Brian McCall, The Church and the Usurers: Unprofitable Lending for the Modern Economy (Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia, 2013); Thomas Storck, An Economics of Justice and Charity (Kettering, OH.: Angelico, 2017). 13 14 Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 473 independently to evaluate Noonan's historical scholarship.”18 I make no pretense of approaching, let alone equaling, Noonan’s vast erudition. Yet it is possible to criticize some of his arguments while lacking his historical expertise. One of the merits of his 1957 study is that his presentation of sources is sufficiently detailed and impartial to allow for some independent evaluation of his interpretations. In any case, the evidence that bears directly on Noonan’s two most important theses—that the Church has abandoned the usury prohibition, and that Aquinas’s argument for usury’s intrinsic evil is defective—is not, as we shall see, extensive. Moreover, Noonan’s critique of Aquinas stands or falls by its philosophical merits, not by his historical scholarship. While I believe the fundamentals of Aquinas’s usury analysis to be sound, it is not my intention to defend every conclusion he reaches. There is no question that his treatment of extrinsic interest titles is in some respects unduly rigorist. Some topics germane to the usury prohibition are not discussed by him at all. To a considerable extent, the later Scholastic tradition (on which, of course, he exerted an unparalleled influence) supplied the needed developments of his principles, and I accordingly draw freely on these developments, where appropriate. I lack both space and historical competence to examine every important objection that later Scholastics (to say nothing of non-Scholastics) made to his analysis. I confine my attention chiefly to the objections that Noonan deems particularly important. In the first two sections, I seek to show that Noonan’s reasons for maintaining that the Church has abandoned the prohibition are unconvincing. In the third and fourth sections, I defend Aquinas’s natural-law argument for usury’s sinfulness against the major objections raised by Noonan, and also against a radical objection urged by the contemporary Catholic libertarian scholar Thomas Woods. In the fifth section, I briefly consider the moral questions surrounding the census contract, which have an important, though indirect, bearing on the history of the usury prohibition. In the sixth section, I examine the questionable interest title of “risk,” which Noonan and many others regard as a valid and important title, but which Aquinas nowhere discusses. A view common among contemporary theologians and scholars is that, under modern capitalist conditions, extrinsic titles to interest on loans are nearly always present and, hence, the question of usury’s intrinsic sinfulness is largely academic. Noonan himself seems to accept this view. I argue in the final section that Aquinas would certainly disagree, and with good reason. 18 M. Cathleen Kaveny, “Development of Catholic Moral Doctrine: Probing the Subtext,” University of St. Thomas Law Journal 1, no. 1 (2003): 234–52, at 238. 474 Jeremy Bell Noonan on the Status of the Usury Prohibition In 1966, Noonan published a short comparative study of the history of Church teaching on usury and on contraception, in which he made the case that “the eternal gospel of Jesus Christ” does not categorically condemn either practice.19 He took for granted that the Church had rescinded its usury prohibition. Present-day Catholics who believe that the medieval Church was “irrevocably committed” to the sinfulness of usury, he said, would have little choice but to conclude that “either the Church in 1450 or the Church in 1965 was in error.”20 Since no Catholic can accept that the Church has erred in a matter of morals, Noonan offered an explanation for the (alleged) change, consistent with faith in Church infallibility. He invited the reader to consider why the Church had once prohibited usury. The prohibition was intended, he argued, to foster “justice and charity,” to protect “the poor from exploitation,” to encourage “the avaricious to share their wealth,” and to ensure “the proper distribution of capital for the life of the community.” While it served these goals well in “the medieval village economy,” it could not do so in a modern capitalist economy. The rise of capitalism consequently led to its abandonment, “without error by the Church.”21 This explanation turns on the claim, to which Noonan seems to have held fast thereafter,22 that the medieval Church did not regard usury as an intrinsically evil practice, but merely prohibited it in view of its (at that time inevitable) evil consequences. Noonan provides no evidence in support of this claim, and the historical record tells decisively against it. The authoritative, absolute condemnations of usury in the pre-modern period typically made no mention of the practice’s actual or possible consequences. As Noonan’s own study documents in exhaustive detail, nearly all of the medieval theologians and canonists who sought to justify John T. Noonan, “Authority, Usury and Contraception,” CrossCurrents 16, no. 1 (1966): 55–79, at 75. 20 Noonan, “Authority, Usury and Contraception,” 71. Noonan remarks that “traditionalist Catholics” are forced to reach this unwelcome conclusion by “a reading of the documents of the tradition as though the prohibitions stated were identical with dogmatic truths.” The clear implication is that the usury prohibition was not a “dogmatic truth.” Noonan thus tacitly disavows his own, earlier description of Church teaching on usury’s sinfulness as a “dogma.” 21 Noonan, “Authority, Usury and Contraception,” 73. 22 In 1993, Noonan described the usury prohibition as “a moral doctrine dependent on economic conditions that could change,” an apparent allusion to this claim (“Development in Moral Doctrine,” Theological Studies 54 (1993): 662–77, at 663). 19 Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 475 the prohibition urged the intrinsic wickedness of usury,23 not the extrinsic expedience of its suppression.24 Moreover, he tells us, both the early Scholastic analysis of usury and the “most strenuous” papal efforts to suppress the practice coincided with the emergence in Italy of proto-capitalist conditions, under which consequentialist objections would lose much of their force.25 The last authoritative and unambiguous condemnation of usury, Benedict XIV’s Vix Pervenit, appeared in 1745, when the basic institutions of modern capitalism were already well-established. Benedict is clear in this encyclical that usury is sinful, not because of its consequences, but because it violates “the law governing loans”—that is, “the equality of what is given and returned.”26 He stresses that it is sinful even when the borrower is rich and the money is “spent usefully, either to increase one’s fortune, to purchase new estates, or to engage in business transactions.” If, as seems undeniable, the ordinary and universal magisterium once taught the intrinsic sinfulness of usury, the Church could not have abandoned this teaching “without error.” In a 1993 paper on the general subject of development in doctrine, Noonan conceded that the teaching might not have been abandoned. “Formally,” he wrote, “it can be argued that the old usury rule, narrowly construed, still stands: namely, that no profit on a loan may be taken without a just title to that profit.”27 However, he contin Aquinas, for instance, describes usury as “unjust in itself ” (secundum se iniustum) and as “evil simply” (simpliciter malum) in ST II-II, q. 78, a. 1, resp. and ad 2. (Quotations from ST are taken from the translation by the Dominican Fathers of the English Province; all Latin of Aquinas’s work is from corpusthomisticum.org, and if translation is not otherwise attributed, it is my own done from the Latin there.) When Aquinas does consider usury’s consequences, his purpose is not to buttress appeals to divine and natural law with a consequentialist justification of the prohibition, but rather to explain why, despite its intrinsic wickedness, human law permits usury on account of its beneficial consequences. 24 The outstanding exception, Noonan notes, was Pope Innocent IV, who condemned usury above all because of its “evil consequences” (Scholastic Analysis, 49). He admits that, in the thirteenth century, this consequentialist argument was “entirely new.” He adds that it had no influence on later theologians, who “continued to maintain steadfastly that usury was in se and secundum se a sin” (51). 25 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 13. This is not to deny that the further and more radical development of capitalism in the sixteenth century largely explains the modifications in the later Scholastic treatment of usury (to be discussed below), which, Noonan argues, tended to undermine the prohibition. 26 Benedict XIV, Vix Pervenit (1745); English from papalencyclicals.net. 27 Noonan, “Development,” 663 (emphasis mine). He does not say whether he accepts this argument. At the beginning of the paper (662) he declares flatly that the Church had “changed its teaching” on usury (and other subjects). In his response to this paper, Patrick O’Neil does not dispute this claim but rather goes 23 476 Jeremy Bell ued, “in terms of emphasis, of perspective, of practice, the old usury rule has disappeared: the just title to profit is assumed to exist.” A “just title to profit” is an interest title extrinsic to the act of lending. Beginning in the late Middle Ages, theologians came to agree on the justice of two basic extrinsic interest titles: “cessant profit” (lucrum cessans) and “emergent loss” (damnum emergens). A number of commentators plausibly argue that the former title is really only a special case of the latter.28 In brief, if lending money deprives the lender of an opportunity for likely profit or in some other way causes him likely or certain financial loss, he is entitled to ask his debtor not only to repay the principal but to compensate him for this loss.29 Noonan’s 1993 claim, then, was that the usury prohibition has become a dead letter, since, under modern conditions, one can always assume the presence of some just extrinsic interest title.30 He must have been aware that Vix Pervenit earnestly warns Catholics not to assume this.31 Had economic conditions so altered since the encyclical’s promulgation that an assumption unsafe in 1745 had become safe in 1993? Noonan might argue that they had. He might even argue that the Church had long since recognized the fact. In Scholastic Analysis, he refers with apparent approval to “a standard commentary” on the 1917 Code even further than Noonan by speaking of the medieval Church’s “error” about charging interest (“A Response to John T. Noonan Jr. concerning the Development of Catholic Moral Doctrine,” Faith and Reason 22, no. 1–2 [1996]: 1–9, at 4). 28 Bernard Dempsey, Interest and Usury (London: Dennis Dobson, 1948), 171; Odd Langholm, The Aristotelian Analysis of Usury (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1984), 50; Storck, Economics, 114. 29 It almost goes without saying that he might justly charge for administrative and other expenses incurred incidentally in lending. The Fifth Lateran Council, in session 10, expressly acknowledged this in its approving judgment on the montes pietatis, charitable lending institutions that charged only for expenses incidental to lending. 30 His formulation of “the old usury rule” (“no profit on a loan may be taken without a just title to that profit”) implies that, according to this rule, “profit on a loan” may be taken when a “just title” is present. Since the teaching was (and is) that a just title to more than one’s principal must be something extrinsic to the mere act of lending, it is at least potentially misleading to speak in this context of (just) profit “on” a loan. In fact, it is potentially misleading to speak of (just) “profit” at all. Profit is a net gain from commercial activity; the essence of the usury teaching is the sinfulness of seeking gain in lending. Compensation for loss is not the same as net gain (profit). 31 Benedict XIV warns that anyone who supposes that there is always a just title to interest on a loan “will oppose not only the judgment of the Catholic Church on usury, but also common human sense and natural reason” (Vix Pervenit, §5). Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 477 of Canon Law, according to which the code’s canon on usury (no.1735) “states implicitly that in modern times there is always present in . . . a loan [of a fungible thing] some just reason for demanding the legal rate of interest.”32 But this interpretation of canon 1735 is questionable. The canon says that no profit may be made “on the ground of” a loan (the traditional teaching) and adds that it is “not itself illicit to contract for payment of the profit allocated by law, unless it is clear that this is excessive, or even for a higher profit, if a just and adequate title be present.”33 This clearly does not mean that there is always “some just reason” for demanding the legal rate of profit or interest, since it presupposes that the legal rate may sometimes be “excessive.” Furthermore, “not itself illicit” need not mean “itself licit.” A possible interpretation of the canon is that taking the legal rate of interest on a loan is neither intrinsically illicit (“itself illicit”) nor intrinsically licit. Its liceity or illiceity rather depends on the presence or absence of some just (not merely positive) title to more than one’s principal. (It may or may not be the case that, under modern economic conditions, such a title is commonly or even always present; the canon is silent on this point.) When present, a just title may still not allow one to demand as much as the law allows, and the legal rate is then “excessive.” Since this interpretation strictly follows the letter of the canon and is clearly faithful to the traditional usury teaching, it is at least as plausible as the more liberal one that Noonan apparently favors. If it is correct, we cannot conclude that the Church of 1917 had formally dispensed with Benedict XIV’s warning against presuming on the invariable presence of just titles to interest. Even if the more liberal interpretation were correct, and the Church of 1917 had declared this presumption safe, it had in the same breath declared unsafe the presumption that the legal rate of interest is never any higher than natural justice would permit. On either interpretation, it would certainly not be true that the usury prohibition, though technically still in force, had in the Church’s own view lost all practical significance by 1917. To be sure, the claim that some just title to interest on a loan is always, or nearly always, present in modern times had become a common opinion among moral theologians well before Noonan began publishing on the usury prohibition. In his Handbook of Moral Theology (first published in 1921), one of the most popular textbooks of moral theology in the decades before the Second Vatican Council, Father Dominic Prümmer declared T. Bouscaren and A. C. Ellis, Canon Law (Milwaukee, WI: Bruce, 1947), quoted in Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 391. 33 Codex iuris canonici (Rome: Typis poliglottis Vaticanis, 1920), can.1735 (quoted in Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 391, emphasis mine). 32 478 Jeremy Bell without hesitation that “under modern conditions there are nearly always some extrinsic titles . . . to justify the taking of reasonable interest for money lent.”34 Above all, it came to be widely accepted that, since the development of capitalism opens up practically limitless avenues for profitable investment, nearly any loan can be said to carry what is today known as an “opportunity cost.” Hence, nearly any loan can be said to cause “loss” to the lender in the form of lucrum cessans, and he may therefore licitly charge what Prümmer calls “reasonable” interest (i.e., interest proportionate to this loss).35 We shall see later that this line of reasoning, which also has eminent defenders today, is impossible to reconcile with Thomist principles. The Alleged Change in Church Teaching Noonan’s considered view for most of his later career was that the twentieth-century Church had not merely “fallen silent” about the usury prohibition, nor even merely accepted the prohibition’s alleged practical insignificance under modern economic conditions, but had actually abandoned it. When precisely did he think it had done so? He did not address this question in his 1966 study of usury and contraception, and he would answer it in different ways in different subsequent publications. We should firstly consider his 1969 paper “Usury: The Amendment of Papal Teaching by Theologians.”36 This paper describes the responses of theologians (and the laity) to three sixteenth-century papal bulls reaffirming the usury prohibition in the face of novel “theories and practices” that threatened to remove “the prohibition’s rigor from the world of commercial credit.”37 The “practices” in question were certain commercial contracts arguably indistinguishable in substance from loans at usury. The bulls condemned these contracts Dominic Prümmer, Handbook of Moral Theology, 5th ed., trans. Gerald W. Shelton (Cork, Ireland: Mercier, 1956), 340. 35 It is not clear how early twentieth-century theologians like Prümmer could reconcile a belief in the invariable presence of just titles to interest with the (admittedly somewhat obscure) allusion by Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum (1891) to “rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men” (§3; English trans. from the Vatican website). 36 John T. Noonan Jr., “Usury: The Amendment of Papal Teaching by Theologians,” in Change in Official Catholic Moral Teachings, ed. Charles Curran (New York: Paulist Press, 2003), 80–108. The paper was originally published in Contraception: Authority and Dissent, ed. Charles Curran (New York: Herder & Herder, 1969), 41–75. 37 Noonan, “Usury,” 91. 34 Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 479 in the severest terms. (Noonan describes them as “authentic acts of papal teaching authority,” though he stops short of claiming that the popes were speaking ex cathedra.) Nonetheless, with some important exceptions, contemporary theologians disregarded the bulls and defended the contracts. “In practice,” Noonan says, “by 1589 the theological analysis had replaced the papal one.”38 This “theological analysis” rested on principles whose implications “undercut the usury rule.”39 In short: If the question is asked, How and when did the usury prohibition change? the answer is, It changed in the sixteenth century, and it was changed by the theologians, over stubborn papal resistance, defending forms of behavior in which profit was sought in extending credit.40 It is worth stressing that Noonan is not here merely describing the genesis of a novel theological opinion. He is claiming to identify the point at which a Church teaching was revised. Why is he so confident that the usury prohibition “changed” (i.e., was abandoned) in the sixteenth century? Let us suppose he is correct in claiming that a majority of theologians near the end of the sixteenth century endorsed a “theological analysis” that undermined the usury prohibition.41 (We shall see shortly that, on Noonan’s own showing, there is good reason to doubt that this alleged near consensus was lasting.) The emergence over less than twenty years of an imperfect consensus of theologians, in flagrant disregard of the solemn teaching of two contemporaneous popes and in implicit opposition to more than a thousand years of Church tradition, is surely not decisive. Noonan, “Usury,” 103. Noonan, “Usury,” 104. 40 The facts of this sixteenth-century controversy are treated at greater length in Noonan’s original 1957 study (Scholastic Analysis, chapters 10, 11, 13, and 16). Noonan’s concern in this book, as he says in the introduction, was the “history of thought” (5), not the development of Church teaching. This is presumably why he was content in 1957 to relate the acts and statements of popes and theologians, without saying much about their magisterial weight. 41 In his brief history of the usury prohibition in the first half of Interest: An Historical and Analytical Study In Economics and Modern Ethics (Milwaukee, WI.: Marquette University Press, 1959), Thomas F. Divine attaches no special importance to late sixteenth-century theological discussion, and he claims that there was “almost unanimous agreement among Catholic moralists and legists in accepting the fundamental principles of the Scholastic doctrine of usury” until the end of the seventeenth (80), though this may be an exaggeration (see below). 38 39 480 Jeremy Bell Noonan would perhaps argue that the new “theological analysis”42 was not seriously challenged thereafter and that, more than four hundred years later, we can retrospectively see it as a turning point not just in theological discussion but in Church teaching. He claims, without providing evidence, that “the popes . . . formally reconcile[d] themselves to the theologians” in the eighteenth century.43 He must here be alluding to Vix Pervenit, since no other eighteenth-century papal document thematically addressed the subject of usury. Yet this encyclical was robustly traditional. As noted above, it forcefully restated the classic usury prohibition. To be sure, it also acknowledged the “controversies” among theologians and canonists over the possible usuriousness of certain (unspecified) contracts.44 About these contracts, said Benedict, “we . . . shall not decide now.” In Scholastic Analysis, Noonan remarks that, by this “explicit reservation,” “the field of discussion” was left “virtually unchanged.”45 It is indeed striking that Benedict did not confirm the condemnations of his sixteenth-century predecessors. Nonetheless, he did not endorse the novel position of the sixteenth-century theologians who disregarded these condemnations. Far from “formally reconciling” himself to a theological analysis inimical to the usury prohibition, he merely declared that he would not (at that time) determine whether certain contracts did or did not fall under the prohibition. Furthermore, as Noonan’s reference to “the field of discussion” indicates, even in the mid-eighteenth century there was no theological consensus about the modern commercial practices that the sixteenth-century popes had condemned as usurious. The contracts on which Benedict refrained from passing judgment were precisely those about which, he said, “the theologians and canonists lack agreement.” His encyclical was prompted in part by what both Noonan and Patrick Cleary describe as an early eighteenth-century “reaction” against the liberal tendencies characteristic of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.46 This reaction seems to have been effective, since, according to Noonan himself, most The expression “theological analysis” suggests a coherent and comprehensive theory, but it is clear from Noonan’s account that no such theory was developed by the opponents of the three papal bulls. Their responses were, in the main, a mixture of pleas for exceptions to the bulls’ condemnations and more or less ad hoc rationalizations for simply disregarding the bulls. 43 Noonan, “Usury,” 103. 44 Benedict XIV, Vix Pervenit, §6. 45 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 357. 46 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 225; Cleary, Church and Usury, 158. This reaction was spearheaded by the rigorist Pietro Ballerini. His chief liberal opponent was Scipio Maffei, a personal friend of Benedict XIV. 42 Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 481 theologians were in favor of “the old theory” (i.e., the pre-sixteenth-century theory) in the early nineteenth century.47 Noonan claims that the liberalizing sixteenth-century theologians defended the papally condemned commercial contracts by exploiting hidden inconsistencies in “the old theory.”48 The kernel of “the old theory” is the mature usury analysis of Aquinas. The sixteenth-century theologians accepted the principles of this analysis but, according to Noonan, showed that the implications of Aquinas’s principles “undercut the usury rule.” I will consider this claim later, when examining Noonan’s critique of Aquinas’s natural-law case against usury. My present concern is only with Noonan’s claim that the Church has at some time or another changed its teaching about usury. His 1969 thesis that it had abandoned the usury prohibition in the late sixteenth century is, we have now seen, untenable. Later in his career, Noonan argued that it was not in the sixteenth or eighteenth century, but only in the nineteenth, that the Church abandoned the prohibition. Owing in part to the very uncertainty noted (and not removed) by Benedict XIV in Vix Pervenit, between 1822 and 1837 a number of perplexed bishops and other local Church authorities formally sought guidance from Rome. Most of their inquiries were about how to deal with penitents who had, in good faith, made money in ways that were arguably usurious, though defended by some theologians. Responses were given by Pope Pius VIII, the Holy Office, and the Sacred Penitentiary.49 Again and again, inquirers were told that penitents and liberal-minded confessors and preachers whose good faith was not in question were “not to be disturbed,” provided they were prepared to abide by any future decision of the Holy See. This, Noonan intimates in a paper delivered in 1999, left little room for further doubt: “The prohibition, as it had been framed in the twelfth century, was dead.”50 This seems a gross overstatement. To Noonan says that, in the first three or four decades of the nineteenth century, “since all the weight of traditional authority was on its side, it still was generally accepted” (Scholastic Analysis, 382). Confusingly, however, he has earlier said that, at this same period, “many, even among the scholastic authors themselves, [were] inclined to abandon the traditional theory for the new one” (377). Recall his claim in “Usury” that, by the end of the sixteenth century, the “old theory” had been effectively abandoned. Apparently, this abandonment was only temporary. 48 Noonan, “Usury,” 104. 49 The responses are reproduced in Jacques-Paul Migne, Theologiae Cursus Completus (Paris, 1841), 16:1065–83. When I quote below from the original Latin of the responses, I rely on Migne. 50 John T. Noonan Jr., “Experience and the Development of Moral Doctrine,” Catholic Theological Society of America Proceedings 54 (1999): 43–56, at 49. He makes a very similar statement (“The old usury prohibition was dead”) in “Usury,” as noted 47 482 Jeremy Bell begin with, the constantly reiterated qualification (“provided they are prepared to . . .”) indicates the provisional nature of these responses.51 The Roman authorities pointedly refrained from issuing any doctrinal clarification. As Cleary remarks, “it was made clear over and over that no definition of any description was being given.”52 Rather, “the practical point was decided, judgment concerning principles being deferred.” Thomas Divine concurs, saying that the responses “left the solution of the theoretical problem an open question.”53 On the other hand, the Holy Office in 1835 extended Vix Pervenit to the universal Church, thereby forcefully emphasizing the continuing validity of the traditional usury teaching. In his last published book, Noonan speaks more cautiously (if less coherently) of “the partial withdrawal of the teaching [that usury is intrinsically evil] that occurred in the nineteenth century.”54 But the studied avoidance of doctrinal questions in the Roman decrees of the 1820s and 1830s, coupled with the 1835 reaffirmation of the teaching of Vix Pervenit, hardly amounts to a “withdrawal” (partial or otherwise) of the usury prohibition. In Scholastic Analysis, Noonan says that the “correct interpretation” of these decrees is not “easily determined.”55 One doubtful interest title that assumed increasing importance in the course of the inquiries to Rome was “the law of the prince” authorizing modest interest on loans, also called the “civil” or “legal” title. Noonan professes to find it difficult to interpret the significance of the Roman authorities’ responses to inquiries about this title. It was decreed that neither penitents who had made a profit on the strength of the legal title alone nor priests and theologians who taught the validity of this title were to be denied sacramental absolution, provided they were prepared to abide by any future decision of the Holy See. Does it follow, Noonan asks here, that the authorities meant “definitively to approve” the legal title? He claims that at least one contemporary earlier. This inconsistency in dating the “death” of the usury prohibition might suggest that Noonan himself came to recognize the rashness of his 1969 thesis. 51 Noonan disregards this qualification in “Experience.” 52 Cleary, Church and Usury, 175. 53 Divine, Interest, 110. 54 John T. Noonan Jr., A Church That Can and Cannot Change: The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2005), 135 (emphasis mine). He does not here refer specifically to the responses of 1822– 1838, but his later remarks about these responses (141) leaves little room for doubt that he has them in mind. After discussing them briefly, he immediately declares, once again: “The usury prohibition in its old form was dead.” His reversion to this blunt formula is perhaps unsurprising, since the notion of a “partial withdrawal” of a teaching makes little sense. 55 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 381. Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 483 churchman (the bishop of Bellay) answered this question in the affirmative. Yet the excerpt he here quotes from the bishop’s 1838 pastoral letter to his clergy shows the very opposite. The bishop interpreted the decrees as authorizing him to conclude that belief in the validity of the legal title to interest was, in Noonan’s translation, “an opinion, which with a safe conscience, can be held and followed in practice, like many others not defined by the Church.” The expression I have italicized—“not defined”— makes nonsense of the claim that the bishop believed that the Church authorities meant “definitively” to approve the opinion in question. He said no more than that a Catholic might “with a safe conscience” hold this opinion, despite its not having been definitively approved. The precise meaning of the Latin original—nondum definitas—is “not yet defined.” It is reasonable to interpret this as an allusion to the repeated warnings that all Catholics must be prepared to abide by any future decision of the Holy See (a decision that might, of course, be against the legal title). The bishop of Bellay believed it safe to hold the opinion that the legal title is valid only as long as the Holy See had not decided against it and only on condition that one be prepared to abide by a possible future decision against it. It is strange that Noonan should even pose the question of whether the Roman authorities meant “definitively to approve” the legal title, less than half a page after quoting a passage from the second-last decree that begins: “The Sacred Penitentiary wished to define nothing at all about the question, debated by theologians, of the title derived from the law of the prince.”56 The concluding sentence of this quoted passage also seems to leave no possible doubt that Noonan’s question must be answered in the negative: “Those, therefore, who in preaching teach absolutely that it is licit to take profit from a loan by the title of the civil law . . . define by private authority a question which the Holy See did not yet wish to define.”57 Why, then, does Noonan suppose that there is any ambiguity in the decrees regarding the legal title to interest? His discussion of the eleventh decree suggests an answer. This decree, issued in 1831, was in response to questions from the bishop of Viviers. According to Noonan, the bishop sought to know, firstly, “if the past decisions authorized interest on loans to businessmen, apart from the title conferred by the civil law” and, secondly, “if the very existence of civil law regulating interest, ipso facto, without the State’s explicit intention of exercising its prescriptive power, created a just 56 57 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 380 (emphasis mine). Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 380–81 (emphasis mine). In a subordinate clause that Noonan has omitted, the decree describes such preachers as “rashly usurping the part of judge” (partes judicis sibi temere assumentes). 484 Jeremy Bell title to interest.”58 The Holy Office responded by referring the bishop to earlier replies, “thus implicitly indicating an affirmative answer to both questions.” In other words, the Holy Office implicitly approved interest on loans to businessmen under certain conditions and, more importantly, implicitly endorsed the legal title. As we have seen, the Roman authorities generally restricted their responses of the 1820s and 1830s to practical directives and expressly reserved to the Holy See the clarification of doctrinal questions. On Noonan’s presentation, the eleventh decree is an anomaly. Moreover, it seems to mark a startling departure from the rigor of preceding centuries. Positive law alone cannot render a naturally unjust contract just. No theologian offered a serious defense of the legal title to interest until the eighteenth century, and the title found very little support in Rome in the decades after the appearance of Vix Pervenit.59 Cleary quotes the 1793 reply of the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda to a query from the bishop of Quebec regarding the legal title to interest, which opened with the flat declaration that “usury is forbidden both by the natural and divine law, whence it follows that it cannot be rendered lawful by any civil authority or legislation—and this no matter how small the usury may be.”60 Noonan’s presentation of the eleventh decree is, in fact, seriously misleading. The bishop of Viviers had sought clarification of previous decrees whose sole concern was the conduct of confessors. The bishop noted that Pius VIII had issued a decree on August 18, 1830, in which there was no reference to the civil law interest title, but that appended to this decree were responses to queries relating to this title. Pius VIII’s decree stated that confessors were “not to be disturbed” if they did not deny absolution to businessmen who had in good faith made profits on loans and had promised to abide by any future decision of the Holy See. The bishop’s first question, therefore, was whether this decree “must be understood as its words sound, and aside from the title of the law of the prince, about which the Most Eminent Cardinals speak in these responses, so that it is just a matter of a loan made to business men.”61 What is at issue here is not, as Noonan claims, the authorization of interest on business loans, but merely the practice of confessors when dealing with businessmen who had (in good faith) charged interest on loans. The bishop’s second question was Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 379. Cleary, Church and Usury, 165–66. 60 Cleary, Church and Usury, 167. 61 This is the translation in Heinrich Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma, trans. Roy J. Deferrari (Fitzwilliam, NH: Loreto Publications, 2002), no. 1611. 58 59 Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 485 whether “the title from the law of the prince, about which the Eminent Cardinals speak, must be so understood [sic intelligendus sit] that it is enough that the law of the prince declares that it is licit for anyone to agree about a gain made from a loan only, as happens in the civil code of the Franks, without saying that it (the law of the prince) grants the right to receive such gain.” The bishop was not asking whether, in Noonan’s words, the “very existence of civil law regulating interest” creates “a just title to interest.” He merely wished to know how the expression “title from the law of the prince” (titulus ex lege principis), as it occurred in previous responses, was to be correctly understood. As Noonan says, the Holy Office (rather unhelpfully, it would seem) responded to the bishop’s questions by simply referring him to earlier replies—specifically, the replies of August 18, 1830. Since these replies did no more than provisionally authorize a liberal approach to penitents, the eleventh decree does not carry the doctrinal significance that Noonan ascribes to it. Like the other decrees in the series, it avoids doctrinal questions entirely.62 Late in his career, Noonan nonetheless interpreted these decrees as a (partial) “withdrawal” of the usury prohibition. This interpretation derives such plausibility as it has from the Roman authorities’ provisional toleration of the legal title to interest. We have seen that, despite Noonan’s claims to the contrary, the bishop of Bellay did not interpret the decrees as “definitively” approving the legal title, still less as withdrawing the usury prohibition. Is there any reason to think that a majority of contemporary churchmen interpreted them as did the later Noonan? According to the Noonan of 1957, most theologians who addressed the topic of usury in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “showed little enthusiasm” for the legal title.63 Regarding the status of the usury prohibition, Cleary notes that, in the preparations for the First Vatican Council of 1870, there were “three petitions for a definite statement on the question of usury, or failing this, for a definition on the value of the title of the civil law.”64 One of these petitions was signed by twenty American bishops. This seems clear evidence that the earlier decrees were (correctly) taken by most churchmen not to have settled anything. At the same time, it underscores the Noonan concludes his discussion of the responses by saying that “the Holy Office cannot be said positively to favor the civil . . . title” (Scholastic Analysis, 382). Though hardly consistent with his own interpretation of the eleventh decree, this conclusion is accurate. 63 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 388. 64 Cleary, Church and Usury, 176. 62 486 Jeremy Bell uncertainty about the prohibition and its practical ramifications that had become widespread among theologians by the latter half of the nineteenth century. There is, in fact, prima facie evidence in support of Noonan’s claim that the nineteenth -century Church came to endorse the legal title to interest in an 1873 instruction of the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda, which Noonan himself, curiously, does not mention. The Congregation declared that, “even in the absence of other titles such as lucrum cessans, etc., . . . the mere title of the civil law may be taken as being in practice quite sufficient . . . so long as the question remains undefined by the Holy See.”65 This certainly seems to contrast sharply with its trenchant warning to the bishop of Quebec eighty years earlier that usury “cannot be rendered lawful by any civil authority or legislation.” Yet we should not exaggerate the instruction’s significance. To begin with, the Congregation recognized that the question about the legal title to interest “remains undefined by the Holy See.” Furthermore, the words “in practice” suggest that it was not primarily concerned with the theoretical or doctrinal basis for (provisionally) permitting Catholics to take the legal rate of interest on loans. In any case, even if we suppose that the Congregation did intend provisionally to endorse the legal title, we must recall that the 1917 Code of Canon Law (which is presumably more authoritative than the 1873 instruction66) expressly recognizes that the legal rate of interest may be “excessive.” As Noonan remarks, this implies that “the law by itself does not create a right to interest.” In other words, the 1917 Code of Canon Law implicitly rejects the legal title. Noonan does not make a persuasive case that the Church has at any time abandoned the usury prohibition. We must now turn to Aquinas’s natural-law defense of the prohibition, and Noonan’s critique thereof. Aquinas’s Major Argument A capitulary issued during the reign of Charlemagne states that usury occurs “where more is asked than is given.”67 This succinct definition brings into clear relief the medieval view of the transaction’s moral character. To Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 175. Cleary rightly draws attention to the fact that this instruction, unlike the responses of the 1820s and 1830s, makes no mention of any good faith requirement (Church and Usury, 176). 66 Noonan notes that at least one contemporary theologian regarded the canon as “the long-awaited answer of the Holy See to the nineteenth-century inquiries about the lex principis” (Scholastic Analysis, 391). 67 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 15. Noonan calls this “the first medieval definition of usury.” 65 Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 487 demand more in exchange for less is inequitable and hence unjust; this, in brief, is the natural-law objection to usury. It is difficult to dispute the injustice of demanding more in exchange for less. Indeed, the only way in which to do so, without abandoning the very idea of (natural) justice in contracts, is to claim that whatever contractual terms two adults of sound mind freely agree upon are ipso facto “just.”68 If one does not take this radical approach to justice in contracts, the most natural way in which to defend usury is to argue that the capitulary’s definition mischaracterizes the transaction. A lender who demands something above his principal (it may be said) does not in fact “ask more than he gives.” The addition to the principal is rather payment for some good or service, or else compensation for some loss. As noted earlier, the Scholastics did not deny that a lender might justly demand compensation for expenses or losses incurred through lending.69 However, they held that any just title to something above one’s principal must be extrinsic to the act of lending itself. To admit the existence of a just title intrinsic to the act of lending would be to destroy the usury prohibition. The apologist for usury would insist that there exists at least one just title to something above one’s principal that is intrinsic to the act of lending. One obvious candidate title is the use of the money lent during the loan period, which the lender forgoes so that the borrower may enjoy it. The very word “usury” originally meant “payment for the use of money.” When presenting his major argument70 for the sinfulness of usury, Aquinas anticipates the apologist’s likely characterization of usury as (just) “payment for the use of money.” Aquinas seeks to show that it is unjust to charge for the use of money. His argument is premised on a distinction between different kinds of goods. Some goods, he says, are necessarily “consumed” or “destroyed” when used.71 Wheat is “consumed” Thomas Hobbes was one of the first philosophers to articulate this view. In Leviathan, 15:14, he declares: “The value of all things contracted for is measured by the appetite of the contractors, and therefore the just value is that which they be contented to give.” In the same context he speaks contemptuously of the notion that it is unjust “to sell dearer than we buy” or “to give more to a man than he merits” (ed. by J. C. A. Gaskin, Oxford World Classics [1998], 100) 69 Aquinas’s position is apparently more restrictive than that of his successors. I discuss this topic in the final section. 70 “Major argument” is one of Noonan’s descriptions of what is certainly Aquinas’s most famous and influential natural-law argument for the intrinsic sinfulness of usury, presented not only in ST, but also in De malo and elsewhere. I touch on one of his other, earlier anti-usury arguments below. 71 Aquinas, ST, II-II, q. 78, a. 1, resp. 68 488 Jeremy Bell when eaten, and wine is “consumed” when drunk. The use of such goods “consists in their consumption.” More precisely, their primary or proper use consists in their consumption. (They can of course be used in other ways too, some of which do not involve their consumption or destruction. The ancient Romans, for instance, threw wheat [symbolizing fertility] at newly married couples. In his discussion of usury in De malo, q. 13, a. 4, Aquinas speaks of the “proper use” [proprius usus] of wine and wheat [a. 4, resp.] and, more generally, of the “proper and primary use” [proprius et principalis usus] of goods [a. 3, ad 15].72 In the Summa theologiae [ST] II-II, q. 78, a. 1, resp., he similarly speaks of the “proper and primary use of money.”) It follows that to grant someone the (primary or proper) use of wine or wheat is “to grant the thing itself.” Consequently, “to lend things of this kind is to transfer the ownership.” Other goods are not consumed or destroyed when put to their primary or proper uses. To use a house, Aquinas says, is “to dwell in it, not to destroy it.” 73 A man may grant someone else the use of his house for a time, while not transferring the ownership. Use and ownership of goods like houses are separable in a way that use and ownership of goods like wheat and wine are not. When use and ownership are in this way separable, it is permissible to charge for the use of what remains one’s own. Renting a house is an obvious example. However, it is not possible to charge for the use alone of a good whose use consists in its consumption. A winemaker who charges for the (primary or proper) “use” of his wine is simply charging for the wine itself. He is selling the wine. If he wanted “to sell wine separately from the use of the wine,” Aquinas observes, “he would be selling the same thing twice, or he would be selling what does not exist.” In so doing, “he would evidently commit a sin of injustice.” Likewise, Aquinas continues, “he commits an injustice who lends wine or wheat, and asks for double recompense, viz., one, the return of the thing in equal measure, the other, the price of the use, which is called usury.” 74 When quoting from De malo, I use the translation by Richard Regan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 73 All goods admittedly deteriorate over time with use. Aquinas would presumably not object to a landlord demanding that his tenant of twenty years pay for at least some of the maintenance and repairs that such prolonged occupancy would make necessary. Nonetheless, wear and tear is incidental to the use of a house in a way that consumption or destruction is certainly not incidental to the (primary or proper) use of wine or wheat. 74 Since Aquinas is here speaking of selling the use of wheat or wine, he would seemingly regard it as usurious to charge for the use of any loaned good consumptible in 72 Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 489 Money, like wheat and wine, is a good whose primary or proper use consists in its consumption.75 The “consumption” of money does not, of course, mean its destruction, as with wheat or wine; it rather means its alienation in exchange, as a result of which the user loses both use and ownership of the money he has spent. The usurer, according to Aquinas, commits the same sin of injustice as the imaginary winemaker. To take usury for money is either “to sell the same thing twice,” or “to sell what does not exist.” In Noonan’s view, Aquinas does not consistently maintain the thesis that money’s use and ownership are inseparable. The basis for this claim is Aquinas’s brief discussion of the investment partnership or societas in his response to the objection that, since it is “lawful to receive interest for money entrusted to a merchant or craftsman,” it is also “lawful to receive interest for money lent” (ST II, q. 78, a. 2, obj. 5). Aquinas says that, whereas a moneylender “transfers the ownership of the money to the borrower,” “he that entrusts his money to a merchant or craftsman so as to form a kind of society [societas], does not transfer the ownership of his money to them, for it remains his” (a. 3, ad 5). It is thus at the investor’s risk that the merchant speculates with his money or the craftsman “uses it for his craft.” (In the thirteenth century, property insurance did not yet exist.76) Therefore, the investor “may lawfully demand as something belonging to him, part of the profits derived from his money.” Since the investor is said to retain ownership of the money that the merchant or craftsman uses, Noonan does not hesitate to accuse Aquinas of “abandon[ing] his own principle that the use use. On the other hand, he shortly thereafter defines “usury” narrowly as “payment for the use of money lent.” Similarly, in De malo, q. 13, a. 4, resp., which treats expressly of usury, he speaks only of “lending money at interest” (dare pecuniam mutuo ad usuram). Usury on money loans is, of course, by far the most important example of payment for the use of loaned consumptibles. Anscombe notes that the condemnation of usury in Deut 23:19 explicitly mentions a consumptible (grain) other than money (“Philosophers and Economists,” 248). According to Noonan, Aquinas’s contemporaries normally spoke of usury in loans of all things “in number, weight and measure” (Scholastic Analysis, 57). Aquinas was “more careful . . . in distinguishing the limits of the natural law” by holding that usury is only possible in loans of consumptibles. 75 In his reply to obj. 6, Aquinas notes that there are sometimes other uses for money, such as the display of coins. To charge for renting coins for display, which the Romans called renting ad pompam, is not usurious. 76 The earliest known European insurance contracts date from 1343 (David Rowell and Luke B. Connelly, “A History of the Term ‘Moral Hazard,’” The Journal of Risk and Insurance 79, no. 4 [2012]: 1051–75, at 1054). 490 Jeremy Bell and the ownership of money are indistinguishable.” 77 (This is why he says that “the promptings of natural justice” are stronger than the “theory” that Aquinas develops in order to rationalize the usury prohibition.) On the basis of Aquinas’s statement that it is at the investor’s risk that the merchant speculates with his money or the craftsman uses it for his craft, Noonan claims that he here introduces a “new principle”: namely that “ownership . . . is determined by incidence of risk.” 78 The principle that use of a consumptible good is inseparable from ownership thereof entails that use is in this case a criterion of ownership. Having allegedly abandoned this principle, Aquinas is driven (Noonan argues) to posit a different criterion of ownership—one by which an investor in a partnership, unlike a moneylender, retains ownership of his money. Incidence of risk serves this purpose, even though, as Noonan says, nothing in Aquinas’s “formal treatment of ownership” justifies its adoption as a criterion of ownership. Aquinas has “produced the risk criterion ad hoc to distinguish loans from capitalistic partnership.” It seems to me that this “new principle” is a figment of Noonan’s imagination. For reasons to be explained shortly, I think he is mistaken to claim that Aquinas abandons the principle of the inseparability of use and ownership of consumptibles, but even apart from this, his argument rests on a strained reading of the text. Aquinas does not say or imply that ownership is necessarily “determined by incidence of risk,” and he certainly does not formally propose risk as a criterion of ownership. He simply observes that, because the investor retains ownership of his money, the merchant or craftsman uses the money at the investor’s risk. In a world without insurance contracts, this observation is correct.79 Aquinas’s alleged inconsistency regarding the principle that use and ownership of consumptibles are inseparable is related, Noonan argues, to a further inconsistency regarding the very nature of money. In his analysis of usury, Aquinas (allegedly) treats money as naturally “sterile” or unproductive, whereas in his brief discussion of the societas, he treats it as a source Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 143. Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 143. 79 Noonan does not seem to distinguish clearly between the proposition that risk is a criterion of ownership and the proposition that ownership is “determined by incidence of risk.” The first means that risk is a sufficient condition of ownership, which seems unconditionally true. The second means that risk is a necessary and sufficient condition of ownership, which would cease to be true with the advent of insurance. I see no reason for ascribing the second view to Aquinas, though Noonan provides clear evidence that some later thinkers did indeed treat risk as a sufficient and necessary condition of ownership (see, e.g., Scholastic Analysis, 203). 77 78 Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 491 of gain to the investor, hence as a productive good.80 This inconsistency, Noonan adds, “will characterize nearly every scholastic attempt to legitimate the societas while denying the right of money to bring in a return on a loan.” Aquinas’s thesis that use and ownership of money are, to use Noonan’s word, “indistinguishable” needs to be rightly understood. Taken in one way, it is obviously false, and for reasons unrelated to Aquinas’s treatment of the societas. When a child buys a bottle of milk on his mother’s orders, with money she has given him, his use of this money does not mean that he owns it. The natural thing to say is that he is spending his mother’s money. The reason, I suggest, is that he is carrying out her wishes, not his own. In a sense, she is spending the money; the child is, as it were, her instrument. We may then say that use and ownership are indeed “indistinguishable” in this case. In a partly similar way, when a stockbroker invests clients’ money at their behest, there is a clear sense in which the money’s owners—the clients—are the investors. Unlike the child buying milk for his mother, the stockbroker is often required to make his own decisions about how to use clients’ money. But ultimately, he is still only their instrument, however much discretion he has to carry out their wishes in this way or that. The case of the societas is different because, as Noonan himself notes,81 the partners in a societas are joint owners of its assets. When Aquinas says that a man who invests in a societas “does not transfer the ownership of his money to [the merchant or craftsman], for it remains his,” he presumably does not mean that the investor retains sole ownership of the invested money.82 He rather means that the investor does not relinquish ownership, but rather extends it to his partner, on the understanding that the partner will use the money (of which he is now a joint owner) with a view to making a profit.83 If this is correct, then it would follow that the use and ownership of this money are “indistinguishable” in two ways. Firstly, the merchant or craftsman is the (joint) owner of the money he uses. Secondly, in using this money he is in one aspect the instrument of the money’s other joint owner, who may therefore be said to be its (joint) user. As for Noonan’s claim that Aquinas’s analysis of usury presupposes Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 145. Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 134. 82 If this is what he means, then the arrangement he is describing would not be a genuine societas, but rather something comparable to the employment of a stockbroker. 83 This is also John Finnis’s interpretation (Aquinas: Moral, Political and Legal Theory [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998], 205n114). 80 81 492 Jeremy Bell money’s “sterility,” while his treatment of the societas presupposes its “fertility,” we must firstly note that, in his treatment of usury, Aquinas at no point says that money is naturally “sterile” or “unproductive.” In a different context, he includes money under the heading “things that bear no fruit” (rebus quae non fructificant).84 This seems to mean no more than that, since the “primary or proper use” of money is its alienation in exchange, money is not immediately fruitful in the way that seeds or fields are. This is an unexceptionable statement of fact. Aquinas is well aware that money can nonetheless be an indirect source of perfectly licit profit.85 The thesis of money’s “sterility” allegedly underpinning his analysis of usury, on the other hand, is supposed to entail that money cannot be even an indirect source of licit profit. Noonan apparently attributes to Aquinas the view that usury is objectionable on account of the “sterility” of money because, when responding to an objection in question 78 of ST II-II, he cites with approval Aristotle’s statement that “to make money by usury is exceedingly unnatural.”86 The brief discussion of usury in the Politics, in the context of which this statement occurs, is at least one source for the medieval view that it is unnatural for money, a “sterile” good, to “breed” its like. However, Aristotle himself does not make precisely this claim, the meaning of which is in any case not obvious. What Aquinas takes Aristotle to mean when he says that usury is “exceedingly unnatural” is also not obvious, since Aquinas merely quotes this statement, approvingly but without comment.87 Aristotle’s actual objection to usury seems to be contained in his statement that usury is “most reasonably hated” because the usurer’s gains “derive from money itself and not from that for which it was supplied.”88 Money “came into being for the sake of exchange,” but the usurer does not exchange it for other goods and thereby increase his wealth; he rather increases his wealth by exchanging less money for more. Aristotle concludes that this kind of money-making is “exceedingly unnatural.”89 Whatever we make of Aquinas, ST, II-II, q. 61, a. 3, resp. See below. 86 Scholastic Analysis, 53. 87 See note 89, below. 88 Aristotle, Politics 1.10.1258b1–4. I am using the translation by Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 89 Or, in Lord’s translation, “most contrary to nature.” In his Commentary on the Politics, Aquinas says with reference to this passage that usury is “the most contrary to nature, since it is according to nature that money is acquired from natural things, not from money” (In I pol., lec. 8; transl. Richard J. Regan [Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2007]). He does not say that usury is contrary to nature because it is 84 85 Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 493 this argument,90 it is clear that neither the investor nor the non-investing partner in a societas seeks to become wealthier by exchanging less money for more. The non-investing partner spends the investor’s money (which is now also his) in business transactions that he hopes will prove profitable to them both. His profit, if any, certainly does not derive “from money itself,” but (indirectly) from “that for which it was supplied.” If there is a clearly stateable Aristotelian objection to money “breeding” its like, this objection has no application to the societas. There are no grounds for charging Aquinas with holding two inconsistent theories of the nature of money (whatever may be true of the later Scholastics). I have noted that property insurance did not exist in Aquinas’s day. There is no obvious reason to suppose that he would have objected to it, and after its invention in the fourteenth century, no Scholastic theologian did object to it. However, the eventual use of insurance by investors in societates would necessitate a development of the Thomist usury analysis. An investor in a societas may, of course, have his principal insured. He may also request his partner in the societas (the merchant or craftsman) to act as his insurer. Finally, he may contract to forgo part of his share in the anticipated profit from the societas in return for the partner’s insuring both his principal and the remainder of his share in the anticipated profit. In this last case, the partners would enter into a contract with three components: the partnership itself, the insurance of the investor’s principal, and the insurance of a part of the investor’s share in the anticipated profit.91 This not in the nature of money to “breed.” His point seems to be that the “natural” way in which to make money is by selling goods other than money (“natural things”). The precise reason for this is not, indeed, spelled out. Anscombe suggests that Aquinas’s own natural-law argument against usury should be interpreted as an elaboration of what is only implicit in Aristotle’s argument (“Philosophers and Economists,” 248), a suggestion whose merits I cannot discuss here. 90 Langholm is, I think, correct when he says—in agreement with “most scholars,” he claims—that Aristotle’s point is not that usury is “an unnatural use of money because money cannot breed,” but rather that “money should not be made to breed . . . because usury is an unnatural use of money” (Aristotelian Analysis, 62). Langholm adds here that Aristotle “in fact recognized the productivity of money” and “did not think money sterile at all.” Aristotle’s medieval students (including Aquinas) “probably misunderstood” his remark about usury’s “unnaturalness” and accordingly took him to have affirmed an irremediably confused doctrine of money’s natural “sterility.” For the reasons already given, I do not think this is true of Aquinas. 91 This, at least, was how Scholastics desirous of defending the contract analyzed it. Formally, the contract was typically much simpler and, on its face, barely distinguishable from a loan at interest. See Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 270. 494 Jeremy Bell arrangement therefore came to be called the “triple contract.” Each of the three components of the contract, considered in itself, is certainly licit. It could be (and sometimes was) argued that their combination is nonetheless illicit because it is, in Noonan’s words, “virtually indistinguishable from a loan at usury.”92 However, if the investor had openly lent the sum that he in fact invested, he would have forgone the opportunity of sharing in any profit from the projected business venture. He would thus have incurred what both he and his debtor deem a probable loss. (Unless both parties to the triple contract expect the venture to be profitable, the contract would be senseless.) He could, consequently, have licitly demanded from his debtor something in addition to his principal, in compensation for the loss. But this, in turn, would make their arrangement “virtually indistinguishable” from the triple contract. In effect, then, the triple contract seems to be “merely a roundabout way of legitimating lucrum cessans.”93 The development of the triple contract in the later Middle Ages would revolutionize commerce. For the investor, the triple contract is both profitable and (virtually) free of risk. In Noonan’s view, its acceptance by the later Scholastics consequently involved the rejection of “two great pillars 92 93 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 205. Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 229. Surprisingly, in the bull Detestabilis Avaritia (1586), Pope Sixtus V apparently condemned the triple contract. He condemned all agreements by which “it is guaranteed to persons giving money . . . in the name of a partnership that, even if in some fortuitous case some disaster, loss, or lack happens to occur, the principal will always be safe and restored entire by the partner receiving it” (quoted in Noonan, “Usury,” 90.) However, as Noonan acknowledges (101), Sixtus may well not have intended to condemn the triple contract, despite appearances. In Scholastic Analysis, after a brief review of relevant evidence from the late sixteenth century to the eighteenth century, Noonan concludes that “neither by the common opinion of theologians, nor by authority itself was the interpretation supported that [Detestabilis] definitely outlawed the triple contract” (221). This partly explains why most subsequent Catholic theologians have had few qualms about affirming the liceity of the triple contract. Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that they have simply disregarded the surface sense of Detestabilis. In his Compendium theologiae moralis (first published in 1850), which Noonan describes as “a standard theological textbook” (387), the eminent Jesuit Jean-Pierre Gury says that there are two “probable” opinions about the triple contract among theologians. The first denies that the contract is licit, partly because of its (apparent) condemnation in Detestabilis (Compendium theologiae moralis, 4th ed. [Tournai, 1852], no. 919). Noonan claims that, less than twenty years after its promulgation, Detestabilis had been reduced to “an aberrant nullity” (“Usury,” 102) but, since a “standard theological textbook” published more than 250 years after the bull’s promulgation takes its surface sense so seriously, this is clearly a gross exaggeration. Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 495 of the usury theory, the doctrines that an investor must run a risk to make a profit and that money must be considered as unfruitful.”94 This is one reason why, in his paper on the alleged “amendment” of papal teaching on usury by sixteenth-century theologians, he says that the theologians’ new “theological analysis” rested on principles—in this case, those permitting partnerships and insurance—that “undercut the usury prohibition.” In fact, as we have seen, Aquinas’s analysis of usury does not require him to reject either partnerships or insurance, since it does not presuppose that an investor must run a risk to make a profit. He does indeed accept that money is naturally “unfruitful,” but only in the innocuous sense that, unlike seeds or fields, it does not immediately bear fruit. There is no clear evidence that he accepts the (obscure) thesis that it is “unnatural” for money to “breed.” More importantly, it is clear that, if he accepts Aristotle’s objection to making money “from money itself,” as he seems to do, this is perfectly compatible with his acceptance of the societas. While he might indeed have rejected the triple contract, this would not have been due to either his understanding of money or to his analyses of loans and partnerships.95 Selling Time The apologist for usury might agree with Aquinas that the use and ownership of money are inseparable and cannot, therefore, be sold separately. However, he might argue that what the usurer sells is not the use of money merely as such, but rather its use (and ownership) now instead of later. Put differently, the usurer sells the convenience of having (and using) money now instead of later. The institution of money-lending, after all, is based on the assumed ability of most would-be borrowers eventually to acquire the sum they wish to borrow by means other than borrowing (else most debts could not be settled). They seek to borrow this sum only because they want or need it sooner than they could acquire it by other means. The very raison d'être of money-lending is to save borrowers time. Is it not just that they should pay for this convenience? This is not an argument that Aquinas considers in his ex professo treatments of usury. However, his discussion of selling goods for more than their worth in the Summa gives a clue as to how he would respond to it. When the buyer, in virtue of some accidental circumstance affecting him, derives “a great advantage” from the good he buys, the seller has no right, 94 95 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 203. It would rather have been due to his rigorist views on damnum emergens, to be discussed below. 496 Jeremy Bell other things being equal, to charge more than the usual price.96 This is because “the advantage accruing to the buyer is not due to the seller, but to a circumstance affecting the buyer.” An international tourist anxious to reach the airport in time to make his flight home might be prepared to pay an exorbitant cab fare so as not to be stranded in a foreign country, but his driver would have no right to charge him more than the standard rate merely because he is running late. No man, says Aquinas, should “sell what is not his.” Similarly, the convenience to a borrower of having money now instead of later is due to some accidental circumstance affecting him. If the lender exploits this circumstance by charging interest, he “sells what is not his.” Put simply, if crudely, he sells time. The wrongfulness of “selling time” would become a standard Scholastic objection to usury. Aquinas apparently considers usurious any transaction that involves “selling time,” even if no money is formally lent.97 It might be objected that the advantage to borrowers of having money now instead of later is not due to any “accidental” circumstance affecting this or that borrower, but reflects what economists call “time-preference”: the universal human desire (other things being equal) to have things sooner rather than later. Woods finds in the phenomenon of time-preference “the origin and justification for the payment of interest.”98 Like many libertarians, Woods is a devotee of the Austrian school of economics and apparently accepts the Austrian view that time-preference is an irreducible feature of human action.99 It was the Scholastics’ (alleged) failure to take time-preference into account, he suggests, that above all else vitiated their analysis of usury. Since people “prefer a given quantity of a good in the present to the same quantity of the good in the future,” they effectively treat the present and future goods as different goods. They do not Aquinas, ST II-II, q. 77, a. 1, resp. Aquinas does not use the expression “accidental circumstance,” but he does speak of buying and selling “considered as accidentally [per accidens] tending to the advantage of one party.” It will be convenient in what follows to speak of “accidental circumstances” rendering a transaction unusually advantageous to a buyer (or to a borrower). 97 See ST II-II, q. 78, a. 2, ad 7, and his letter to James Viterbo on credit sales, De emptione et venditione ad tempus. 98 Thomas Woods, The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 117. 99 Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, 4th rev. ed. (Little Rock, AR: Fox and Wilkes, 1996), 484. Non-Austrian economists are likelier to seek explanations of time-preference in terms of other (e.g., psychological) phenomena. For a brief discussion of this issue, and for an argument that something like time-preference is recognized by Aristotle, see Langholm, Aristotelian Analysis, 138–44. 96 Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 497 “consider $100 today and $100 ten years from now to be the same good,” even apart from inflation.100 Woods here presupposes the subjectivism about economic value standard among Austrian economists. Two token goods can be said to be of “the same” kind only from the point of view of an economic actor who values each in the same way.101 It is not, then, necessarily true that “more is asked than is given” when a lender charges interest. If neither lender nor borrower treats as equivalent in value a given sum of money today and the same sum in the future, then, as Woods says, “it would appear to be unjust not to pay interest.” Since the (subjective) inequality in value of nominally equal sums at different times is supposed to be a necessary consequence of the phenomenon of time-preference, we are here confronted with a putative interest title intrinsic to the act of lending. If, therefore, Woods’s argument was sound, it would undermine the usury prohibition.102 Woods’s assertion that people do not consider a given quantity of a good in the present and the same quantity of the good in the future “the same good” is untrue in one straightforward sense. A man would not naturally say that $100 currently in his wallet is “a different good” from $100 he expects to receive in a month. More importantly, the proposition that a given quantity of a certain good in the present is “a different good” from the same quantity of the same good in the future is self-contradictory. Woods’s assertion seems to entail that it is impossible even to give a coherent description of the phenomenon of time-preference. His own description of the phenomenon—“man prefers the enjoyment of a good Woods, The Church and the Market, 117–18. Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy and State (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2001), 18–19. Rothbard gives the example of an economic actor who (for whatever reason) considers one pound of butter of better quality than another and says that “the two “butters” are really different goods from the point of view of the actor” (19). 102 Since Woods writes as a Catholic, it is worth noting that he neglects to mention an authoritative, though not per se infallible, magisterial intervention seemingly unfavorable to his argument. The Holy Office in 1679 condemned the proposition that, “since ready cash is more valuable than that to be paid, and since there is no one who does not consider ready cash of greater worth than future cash, a creditor can demand something beyond the principal from the borrower, and for this reason be excused from usury” (Denzinger, no. 1191). The condemned proposition, however, is probably not speaking of what Austrian economists would call time-preference, but rather of preference for ready cash over future cash due to apprehensions regarding uncertain future contingencies. Dempsey remarks that the later Scholastics “readily admitted” the “lesser value of future goods generally, though not universally” (Interest and Usury, 175). 100 101 498 Jeremy Bell in the present to the enjoyment of the same good in the future”103—brings the problem out clearly. It will not do to say that, though the present and future goods are really the same, economic actors “consider” them different. Other difficulties aside, if a man does not consider any token good he might enjoy in the present to be of “the same” kind, in some sense, as any token good he might enjoy in the future, we cannot meaningfully ascribe to him a preference (other things being equal) for present to future enjoyment of goods. He will certainly prefer some future goods to some present ones, and it is only by comparing his preference for future goods of a certain kind and quantity with future goods of the same kind and quantity that his general preference for present to future enjoyment of goods becomes manifest. Woods’s real concern is not with whether people “consider” present and future goods to be in some sense “different goods,” but with the influence of time-preference on exchange. After saying that people “prefer a given quantity of a good in the present to the same quantity of the good in the future,” he adds that “only an increased amount of the good in the future can persuade them to forego a given amount of consumption in the present.”104 People treat present and future goods of the same kind and quantity as “different goods” inasmuch as they will not exchange a given, already present quantity of a good for the same future quantity, but only for a greater quantity. If this were true, however, no one would ever lend money (or anything else) without charging interest. Since, in fact, people do lend without charging interest, Woods’s claim needs to be qualified. We might say this: given the universal human preference for present to future enjoyment, a man who exchanges a given, already present quantity of a good for some future quantity of the same good either will demand that the future quantity be greater or will have some motive for making the exchange apart from the future enjoyment of (the same quantity of) the good. But this is trivial, and the Scholastics who condemned usury would not deny it. Undoubtedly a man who lends money gratis does not do so merely because he looks forward to enjoying his principal again in the future.105 He might act out of solicitude for a friend in need or, when Woods, Church and Market, 117 (emphasis mine). Woods, Church and Market, 117. Stated more precisely, Woods’s claim is that, if people are to forego consumption of a certain quantity of a good in the present in exchange for a certain quantity of the same good in the future, they will only do so if the latter quantity is greater than the former. 105 As well as saying that people treat present and future goods of the same kind and quantity as “different goods,” Woods says that “a good in the present will be valued more than the same quantity of that good in the future” (Church and Market, 103 104 Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 499 lending to a stranger, out of Christian charity. It could be argued, in a Woodsian spirit, that a moneylender deserves remuneration for enabling the borrower to satisfy his preference to enjoy money sooner rather than later, or that he deserves compensation for the frustration of his preference to enjoy money sooner rather than later (or both). In either case we would have an interest title intrinsic to the act of lending. Aquinas would doubtless maintain that this Woodsian argumentation amounts to a rationalization for “selling time,” and would on this account reject both titles. Regarding the first, he might say that it makes no essential difference that the “advantage” of having money sooner rather than later is not “accidental” (in the sense of being due to circumstances peculiar to this borrower or that). Even though time-preference is universal, to sell this advantage is to sell what is not one’s own. Regarding the second, we may usefully consider his discussion of just compensation for lenders. He says that a lender may seek compensation for “the loss he incurs [as an accidental result of lending] of something he ought to have” and adds that, if the borrower “avoids a greater loss than the lender incurs,” he may “repay the lender with what he has gained.”106 The “loss” (damnum) of something one “ought to have” (debet habere) presumably means more than the mere frustration of one’s natural preference to enjoy goods sooner rather than later.107 Aquinas might then say that to demand compensation simply for forgoing present enjoyment is tantamount to treating impatience (however natural) as compensable loss. If this is correct, it would partly reflect an important difference between Aquinas and contemporary economists, Austrian or otherwise. Where contemporary economists speak of “demand,” meaning consumer desire for goods (together with ability and willingness to pay for them), Aquinas speaks of human need (indigentia).108 It is reasonable to interpret this term quite broadly. While we are accustomed to a rough distinction between “needs” and “wants,” indigentia in this context apparently means the lack of means to satisfy any natural human appetite. (Aquinas speaks a little later of a man possessed of grain but “in need” (indiget) of wine, who consequently exchanges grain for wine.) Given this broad use of “need,” it 118). This might misleadingly suggest that a man presently values a given quantity of a certain good more than he will value the same quantity of the same good in the future, which is of course not what Woods means. 106 Aquinas, ST, II-II, q. 78, a. 2, ad 1. 107 I discuss the meaning of this formula at greater length later. 108 Aquinas, In V eth., lec. 9. In the translation by C. I. Litzinger (Notre Dame, IN.: Dumb Ox, 1993), indigentia is sometimes rendered “need” and sometimes “demand.” 500 Jeremy Bell may seem that the difference between Aquinas and contemporary economists is little more than verbal. All “demand” is surely for goods or services that in some way serve to satisfy human appetite.109 However, it is implausible to suggest that human beings need to enjoy goods sooner rather than later, even in Aquinas’s broad sense of “need.”110 Aquinas regards human need not only as the mainspring of exchange but as a “measure” of the equity of exchanges.111 Following Aristotle, he gives the hypothetical example of a farmer and a shoemaker exchanging food for shoes. Since food is more useful than shoes for satisfying human need, exchanging one bushel of wheat for one pair of shoes would be unjust. I shall say more about this thesis of need as the “measure” of equity in exchange in the following section, when considering the relation between Aquinas’s usury analysis and his just-price theory. Here I observe that, if Aquinas is right to identify the satisfaction of indigentia, in contradistinction to the satisfaction of “demand,” both as the final cause of exchange and as the measure of equity in exchange, time-preference alone cannot be a sufficient basis for legitimate interest titles, even apart from the issue of “selling what is not one’s own.” Neither the satisfaction of a borrower’s time-preference nor the frustration of a lender’s is relevant to the justice or injustice of a lending transaction, or indeed of any other exchange. A borrowed good serves to satisfy some natural appetite of the borrower. Thanks to the lender, this appetite is satisfied sooner than it otherwise would have been, but this does not mean that the lender has enabled the borrower to satisfy an additional appetite (for enjoyment sooner rather than later) and thereby earned additional remuneration.112 Similarly, a compensable “loss” is the deprivation of means to satisfy appetite, not merely the postponement of satisfaction.113 Finnis suggests that Aquinas’s “need” is practically equivalent to what contemporary economists call “demand” (Aquinas, 201–2). 110 Very often, of course, people do need specific goods (e.g., medicine, food) sooner rather than later, but this has nothing to do with time-preference as understood by Austrian economists. 111 Aquinas, In V eth., lec. 9. 112 When treating of usury’s injustice in the Sentences commentary, Aquinas considers the objection that one who lends to another “does something advantageous for him” (aliquod commodum ei facit), for which some recompense is fitting. His flat response is that “the benefit of a loan [beneficium mutui] is not more than the money loaned” (In III sent., d. 37, q. 1, a. 6, arg. 2 and ad 2). 113 In ST, II-II, q. 62, a. 8, Aquinas says that it is a sin against justice to delay making “restitution” of what is rightfully another’s (such as wages), since this is “to deprive [the other] of the use of what belongs to him, and to do him an injury.” This might seem a possible basis for claiming that the mere postponement of satisfaction is, or 109 Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 501 Loans, Sales, and the Just Price In the preceding two sections I examined, and rejected, Noonan’s charge that Aquinas’s usury analysis is internally inconsistent and Woods’s argument that the analysis neglects the phenomenon of time-preference. In this section I examine, and reject, Noonan’s further charge that Aquinas’s usury analysis is in tension with his just-price theory. Aquinas’s major argument for the injustice of usury has the strange-sounding corollary that, strictly speaking, money cannot be lent. (More precisely, money cannot be lent if the borrower plans to put it to its primary or proper use.) To grant the use of a good whose use consists in its consumption is necessarily, as Aquinas says, “to transfer the ownership.” This is clearer in the case of wine or wheat than in the case of money. If someone “lends” a bottle of wine, on the understanding that it is to be drunk (put to its proper use), he can demand in return another bottle of wine, perhaps of the same grape and vintage, but not the “lent” wine itself. Likewise, the money paid at a loan’s maturity is not the same money that was originally “lent”; it is only the same quantity of money. The English language nonetheless has no other word than “loan” for this transaction. In Roman law, by contrast, a “loan” of money or of some other good consumable in use was called a mutuum, while a loan of a good not consumable in use was called a commodatum. Roman law recognized that, in a mutuum, but not in a commodatum, ownership is transferred. Aquinas’s mature treatments of usury are intended to show, firstly, that the legal distinction between mutuum and commodatum is founded in the nature of things (viz., in the natural distinction between goods consumable or not consumable in use114) and, secondly, that charging for use in the context of a mutuum is unjust. It is presumably because the money paid at a loan’s maturity is not the can be, a compensable “injury” or “loss.” However, Aquinas specifically refers here to “withhold[ing] the property of another against the owner's will.” This circumstance, absent in the case of a voluntary loan, is apparently a necessary condition for delay in restitution to be an “injury.” 114 In his earliest treatment of usury in the commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, by contrast, he seemingly takes the legal distinction for granted, stating without argument that when money is “lent” (mutuatur), ownership is transferred, which is not the case when a house, for instance, is lent (In III sent., d. 37, q. 1, a. 6, resp.). He goes on to say that it “seems just” to receive payment for the use of a lent good which remains one’s own, but that to receive payment for the use of a “lent” good that is in fact no longer one’s own is nothing other than to receive payment for the use that someone else makes of his own property. To demand such payment is to practice a kind of “extortion” (exactio). 502 Jeremy Bell actual money originally “lent,” but only the same quantity of money, that Aquinas is prepared to speak of “selling the same thing twice,” even though we would not normally say that a moneylender who does not charge interest “sells” a certain quantity of money in exchange for the same quantity (payable at a later date). When treating of Aquinas on usury, John Finnis accordingly goes so far as to say that “a loan of money is strictly speaking a sale of the money, the purchase price being payable at the end of the loan.”115 Aquinas himself says that “money cannot be sold [vendi] for a greater sum than the amount lent, which has to be paid back” (ST II-II, q. 78, a. 2, ad 4), which seems to imply that money can justly be “sold” for a sum equivalent to the amount lent. If a loan of money is truly a sale, then demanding usury would seem to be only a special case of charging an (allegedly) unjust price. Yet Aquinas nowhere characterizes usury as the charging of an unjust price. On the contrary, he formally separates questions relating to just and unjust prices from questions relating to usury. He distinguishes the sin of “cheating,” which “is committed in buying and selling,” from the sin of usury, which “takes place in loans,” and he devotes a distinct quaestio in the Summa to each sin. It is in the quaestio on cheating that he discusses just pricing. There is no suggestion that the treatment of usury is merely an application to a specific case of general principles articulated in the treatment of cheating. Noonan strenuously denies that Aquinas or any other Scholastic treats usury as the charging of an unjust price. The problem of the just price, he says, is treated by the Scholastics “from an entirely different viewpoint than that from which usury is considered.”116 In fact, if the principles of just-price theory had been applied to money-lending, they would have undermined the natural-law arguments against usury. The Scholastic “just price,” he claims, is normally what modern economists call the market price: “the price where demand and supply meet.”117 As we will see shortly, with one important qualification, this seems correct in the case of Aquinas. Since the just price is the market price, Noonan continues, it is “thoroughly variable, neither fixed nor precise,” and “radically subjective.”118 The Scholastics recognized that the market prices of some goods would normally differ at different times. Wheat, for instance, would normally sell for more in summer than in autumn. Since the market price is the just Finnis, Aquinas, 204n111. Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 82. 117 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 85. 118 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 89. 115 116 Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 503 price, selling wheat on credit in autumn for what it will probably be worth in summer is not unjust if the debtor is to pay in summer. But if lending money at interest actually means selling on credit a certain sum of money for a price (nominally) higher than this sum, a usurer might argue that he is not charging an unjust price, since the value of money likewise changes. If he sells the sum when money is more in demand and receives his payment at a later time when money is less in demand, he “give[s] money when its value is high for money when its value is low” and hence “should be able to ask a premium.”119 Since Scholastic just-price theory would undermine the natural-law arguments against usury if applied to money loans, Aquinas and the later Scholastics were compelled, Noonan claims, to deny that money loans are sales. In stark contrast to Finnis, Noonan interprets Aquinas as holding that money cannot be sold. Money is “formally nonvendible.”120 This thesis, Noonan says, is “an essential part” of the Scholastic analysis of usury from Aquinas onwards,121 precisely because it enables the Scholastics to avoid “a formal contradiction between the just price theory and the usury theory.”122 Holding money to be nonvendible, they could regard it as “exempt from the laws [sic] of supply and demand,” hence (normally) of unchanging value. Whereas the exchange value of other goods is determined by market forces, for the Scholastics the value of currency is “fixed by the state.”123 No modern economist would accept that money is “exempt from the law of supply and demand.” If Noonan is right that the usury analysis of Aquinas and his successors was “completely committed to the concept of an unvarying value,”124 it would seem to follow that the Scholastic natural-law arguments against usury are premised on an economic error.125 In order to evaluate Noonan’s charge that Aquinas avoids a contradiction between his usury analysis and his just-price theory only by erroneously holding money to be exempt from market forces, it is necessary firstly to consider Aquinas’s just-price theory in somewhat more detail than Noonan does. I will here sketch what I take to be its rudiments. I noted in the previous section that, for Aquinas, human need is both the final cause Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 93. Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 53. Noonan does not comment on the passages in which Aquinas’s language nonetheless suggests that money loans are sales. 121 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 81. 122 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 94. 123 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 94. 124 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 397. 125 Noonan himself does not explicitly draw this conclusion, but it is not clear how he could avoid it. 119 120 504 Jeremy Bell of exchange and the measure of equity in exchange. To exchange one bushel of wheat for one pair of shoes would be unjust, because food is more useful than shoes for satisfying human need. Aquinas adds that, since producing a bushel of wheat is more burdensome to the farmer than producing one pair of shoes is to the cobbler, to exchange one bushel of wheat for one pair of shoes would be unjust also for this reason.126 He recognizes, of course, that it is impossible to quantify precisely the relative usefulness of different goods for satisfying human need and that there is no necessary correlation between a good’s relative usefulness and the relative burdensomeness of producing it. The purpose of money, he claims, is to ensure something like proportionality in the usefulness of exchanged goods. He does not explain precisely how money is to fulfill this purpose. However, it is not difficult to make the case that a money economy serves to ensure (something like) equity in respect both of the comparative usefulness of different exchanged goods and of the comparative burdensomeness of their production. In general, the more a good satisfies human need, the more “demand” there will be for it—that is, the more money will be spent on it.127 (Since supply will often tend to be correspondingly high, the unit price of the good need not be higher than the unit price of other, less useful goods whose supply is lower.) Again, other things being equal, more burdensome work will tend to receive higher wages than less burdensome work.128 It follows that the market price for any good at any given time will tend to reflect both its usefulness for satisfying human need and the burdensomeness of its production. Hence, the seller will receive in return for it money equivalent in value to goods that are comparably useful and/or burdensome to produce. Aquinas’s remarks thus suggest the thought that an unrestricted free market will tend to yield roughly just outcomes,129 though his general approach certainly does not rule out governmental intervention Aquinas, In V eth., lec. 9. The demand for some goods will naturally be subject to seasonal variability, as noted above. 128 The “burdensomeness” of producing a certain good means, amongst other things, the hours spent on it, the physical and/or intellectual demands of producing it, the costs of producing it, and the dangers of the production process. 129 John Baldwin suggests a development of Thomist thought about the just price along the lines here limned (Medieval Theories of the Just Price: Romanists, Canonists, and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society n.s. 49/4 [Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1959], 78–79). One might raise a question about whether, under modern conditions, market wages will necessarily be just, a topic beyond the purview of this essay. 126 127 Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 505 to forestall or remedy “market failure.” He would therefore be prepared to accept Noonan’s virtual identification of the Scholastic “just price” with the market price, but he would insist that it is need, rather than “demand” in the contemporary sense, that codetermines just prices. It should be clear from this sketch that, whatever may be true of other Scholastics, Aquinas certainly did not treat the problem of the just price from “an entirely different viewpoint” than he treated usury. Though clearly distinct, his treatments of each subject share a common root in the simple thought that a just exchange is an equitable one. Noonan obscures this fact by neglecting to explain why it is that, for Aquinas, the just price is normally the market price. Does Aquinas’s major argument against usury necessarily presuppose that money is “exempt from the law of supply and demand,” as Noonan contends? Since the nub of this argument is the injustice of selling the same thing twice (or of selling something that does not exist), it is far from clear that it does. It is true, of course, that if a mutuum of money or any other good consumptible in use is even to be possible, a non-arbitrary criterion must be available for what is to count as a token good “of the same kind and quantity” as the good whose ownership is transferred. Since the relevant criterion in the case of money is purchasing power, the fact that a currency’s purchasing power may change as a result of changes in supply of or demand for it certainly means that the nominal equivalent of the principal may be less or more than the amount that, at the loan’s maturity, would have the same purchasing power. Though Noonan asserts that Aquinas was “completely committed” to the thesis of money’s “unvarying value,” Aquinas was in fact aware that the purchasing power of money is not constant.130 He does not mention the possibility of changes in purchasing power when discussing usury (perhaps because currencies tended to be more stable in thirteenth-century Europe than they would later become), but his argument against usury can easily be reformulated in such a way as to make good this omission. If a loan of $10,000 is made for one year, during which the rate of inflation is 2 percent, then $10,200 at the time of the loan’s maturity is equivalent, in the morally relevant sense, to the principal. To the extent that changes in purchasing power are measurable, it is just to take them into account when settling mutua—and, to the extent that such changes are predictable, it is just to take them into account when first negotiating the contracts. Noonan gives no reason for doubting that Aquinas would have accepted this development of his argument.131 130 131 Aquinas, In V eth., lec. 9 Some late Scholastics recognized the phenomenon of inflation and nonetheless 506 Jeremy Bell Aquinas does not, then, need to hold that money is “exempt from the law of supply and demand” in order to make his case. Still less does he need to hold that money is “formally nonvendible.” The basis for Noonan’s claim that he nonetheless does hold money to be formally nonvendible is a passage in the Sentences commentary. Aquinas is here presenting an argument for the injustice of usury quite different from the argument premised on the distinction between goods whose use does or does not consist in their consumption.132 He says that, whereas goods other than money have some utility “from themselves,” money does not, but is instead “the measure of utility of other things.”133 Consequently, the utility of the use of money does not have its measure from the used money itself, but from “the things which are measured by money according to the different persons who exchange money for goods.” Hence, “to receive more money for less seems nothing other than to diversify the measure in giving and receiving, which manifestly contains iniquity.” In this argument, Noonan claims, money is “conceived as having one constant, fixed value.” As we have already seen, however, Aquinas accepts that money is not of unvarying value. This is consistent with the claim that the usurer “diversifies the measure in giving and receiving.” As in his mature discussions of usury, Aquinas is assuming for simplicity’s sake that the purchasing power of money remains constant during the loan period. (If in fact the value of money diminishes during this period, a nominal addition to the principal need not “diversify the measure in giving and receiving”; it may instead represent an allowance for a pre-existing “diversification.”) Noonan believes that it follows from money’s being “formally a stable measure” that it “cannot be sold.” The rationale for this inference is unclear to me, and Aquinas nowhere draws it. What, in any case, would it mean to deny that money can be sold? What does it mean to “sell” money? If it means to exchange money for non-monetary goods, then Aquinas would certainly not deny that money can be sold, even if he might object to describing exchange of this kind as “selling” money.134 If to sell money means to saw no difficulty in condemning usury. See Dempsey, Interest and Usury, 156–57. Franks argues that Aquinas “could accept” inflation premiums in loan contracts (“Usury Prohibition and Natural Law,” 640). 132 This is the second anti-usury argument he offers in the commentary, both in In III sent., d. 37, q. 1, a. 6, resp.; see the comments in note 114 above for the first. 133 Quoted in Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 52. 134 To “sell” something ordinarily means “to give it in exchange for money.” Except in the case of currency exchange, to speak of “selling money” is to depart from ordinary linguistic usage. This usage is not arbitrary, since it reflects the unique character of money as a “medium of exchange.” The ordinary language objection Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 507 exchange a given quantity of a certain currency for some quantity of the same currency, then, as we saw earlier, Aquinas himself calls this “selling” money.135 If, finally, to sell money means to exchange a given quantity of a certain currency for some quantity of a different currency, there is again no obvious reason why Aquinas should deny that money can be sold, though he nowhere discusses this kind of transaction. Here it is worth considering certain problems regarding currency exchange. We saw above that, according to the Noonan of 1969, theologians in the late sixteenth century fashioned a novel “theological analysis” that “undercut the usury rule.” One facet of this “analysis” was the allegedly untraditional admission that money was vendible, and currency exchange licit. The (alleged) danger in admitting the liceity of currency exchange lies in the possibility of currency dealers profiting from such exchange. Noonan poses the question: “If money could be purchased at a profit in foreign exchange transactions, why could it not be purchased at a profit in loans?”136 Once the sale of currency is permitted, he claims, this question becomes pressing and threatens to “wreck the usury prohibition completely.” Though he here gives the impression that the question is difficult to answer, it is actually quite easy. The great Renaissance Thomist Cardinal Cajetan supplies the answer in his 1506 treatise De cambiis.137 Following Aristotle and Aquinas, Cajetan declares that the “universal rule for exchanges is that the equality between a thing and another thing is to be preserved, so that, then, an equal is to be given for what has been received, and vice versa.”138 This, of course, is the basis for the usury prohibition. It also means that, in a just currency exchange, “there must be an to talk of “selling money” obviously has no bearing on the substantive question of whether Aquinas’s arguments against usury ignore the reality that market forces bring about changes in the purchasing power of money. For the reasons already given, I do not believe they do. 135 Is it, then, a “sale” or (as ordinary usage would have it) a “loan”? I do not think any substantive issue turns on the answer to this question. What is normally called a “loan” of money differs from other loans in that what is returned is not the loaned good, but only its equivalent. Yet this transaction differs from normal “sales” in that a good of one type is not exchanged for a good of a different type. Provided we are clear about the transaction’s character, it hardly matters whether we call it a loan or a sale. 136 Noonan, “Usury,” 84. 137 In Scholastic Analysis, 313, Noonan describes this text as “the most thorough and influential scholastic treatise on exchange of its age.” 138 Cajetan, De cambiis, ch. 6. I am using the translation in Cajetan, On Exchange and Usury, trans. Patrick T. Brannan (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian’s Library, 2014), 35. 508 Jeremy Bell exchange of coins of equal value.” However, by making multiple currency exchanges, in each of which the coins given and received are of equal value, a currency dealer may nonetheless make a profit, since the value of a currency varies from place to place and from time to time due to forces of supply and demand. It is by anticipating and exploiting such variation that currency dealers seek to make a profit.139 Recognizing these facts, Cajetan says that, since equality “can be observed in several ways in accordance with different coins and places and times, it is . . . possible for profit to come to money changers while equality is preserved.” The difference between this kind of profitable activity and that of the usurer is evident. The exchange dealer profits from a series of equitable exchanges; the usurer profits from an inequitable exchange. To be sure, sixteenth-century exchange dealers also engaged in profitable activities that were not so readily defensible. Some of their operations, Noonan notes, “had the effect of a short-term loan with an interest rate determined by fluctuations in the exchange market.”140 Some, in fact, were unquestionably disguised loans at usury. This was the case with so-called “dry exchange,” a cumbersome arrangement that the eminent economic historian Raymond de Roover bluntly calls “a spurious exchange transaction.”141 In reality, Roover says, it was “a straight loan (and nothing else) from which the lender expected a return.” Noonan likewise says in Scholastic Analysis that the name “exchange” in the case of “dry exchange” was “deliberately used as a cover for a pure loan involving no real exchange sale in any way.”142 It is no wonder, then, that Pius V condemned dry exchange in In Eam.143 By Noonan’s own account, later theologians who “resisted” this bull’s teaching did not seek to defend dry exchange;144 they rather advanced a narrower view of what counted as dry exchange.145 This presum Noonan relates that one of the sixteenth-century controversies surrounding exchange banking concerned the “theoretical ground” for the exchange-bankers’ profits. Pope Pius V, in the bull In Eam (1571), implicitly “rejected the theory that the banker’s profit depended on the supply and demand for money” (Noonan, “Usury,” 90). Subsequent theologians who disregarded this part of the bull’s teaching were surely right to do so, since the dependence of an exchange-banker’s profit on the supply and demand for money is incontestable. 140 Noonan, “Usury,” 84. 141 Raymond de Roover, “What is Dry Exchange? A Contribution to the Study of English Mercantilism,” Journal of Political Economy 52, no.3 (1944): 250–66, at 264. 142 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 177. 143 Noonan, “Usury,” 89. 144 Noonan, “Usury,” 103. 145 Noonan, “Usury,” 100–101. 139 Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 509 ably reflects the unusual complexity and consequent moral obscurity of some of the bankers’ operations. As the staunchly traditional Anscombe remarks when discussing the development of exchange banking, “it is pretty clear that we are at a stage when it is excessively difficult to distinguish, to say what is legitimate and what is not, on the old principles.”146 The Census We have seen that the main ostensible inconsistencies in “the old theory,” which Noonan claims were successfully exploited by sixteenth-century theologians to subvert the usury prohibition, are in truth nonexistent. Aquinas, the chief architect of “the old theory,” would have had no reason to object to the triple contract147 or to (profitable) currency exchange. To defend these practices is not to subvert the usury prohibition. The sixteenth-century theologians also sought to defend certain papally condemned forms of the contract known as a census, which existed in Aquinas’s day but about which he says nothing. As we shall see, to defend these contracts would be to subvert the usury prohibition. Since the census was at one time of considerable economic significance,148 it is worth our while to touch on some of the moral questions surrounding it. A census is “an obligation to pay an annual return from a fruitful good.”149 The owner of the good (e.g., a farm) would typically sell a census on it when he needed to raise money quickly. In three cases, Noonan observes, a census contract becomes “virtually identical with a loan,” namely, when the “fruitful good” is the census seller’s own labor (a “personal” census), when the census seller agrees to pay the “return” even if the fruitful good perishes or otherwise ceases to be fruitful (a “guaranteed” census), and— above all—when the census is redeemable at the census buyer’s request (a “redeemable” census).150 In each case, a census contract can easily become a cloak for usury, and Pius V condemned all three in Cum Onus (1569). Although the liberalizing sixteenth-century theologians sought to evade this condemnation, its prima facie reasonableness is clear. Noonan contends that the theologians defended the condemned contracts (and thereby “undercut the usury rule”) by appealing to a well-es Anscombe, “Philosophers and Economists,” 254. I am here disregarding some of his severer statements about compensable loss, to be discussed later. 148 One indication of this is that the German word for “interest,” Zins, is derived from census. 149 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 155 150 Noonan, “Usury,” 82. 146 147 510 Jeremy Bell tablished Scholastic principle regarding “the sale of rights.” In other words, they turned traditional thought against itself. They used a traditional principle to defend a radically untraditional conclusion. But what precisely was this principle? According to Noonan himself, the medieval Scholastics recognized the liceity of buying or selling “the right to an annual return from some fruitful property like a farm.”151 This principle in no way justifies the specific census contracts condemned in Cum Onus.152 I will not enter into the details of the theological discussion of the census before and after Cum Onus. I note, however, that Cleary, who is in general quite sympathetic to the liberalizing drift in modern Catholic thought about usury153 and has “no doubt” that the triple contract is “lawful,” nonetheless has serious “difficulties” regarding the condemned census contracts.154 The redeemable census seems to him “substantially nothing else than an onerous loan,” and even the census redeemable only by the seller “seems to present its difficulties.”155 Moreover, he adds, if usury is unlawful, a census can only be justified if its base is a fruitful good, of which the census buyer gets “some sort of ownership,” and to a share of whose fruits he is consequently entitled. This seems to imply both that the census base cannot be the seller’s own labor and that the buyer cannot licitly contract for a return that would continue even in the event of the fruitful good’s destruction. In short, the distinctly non-rigorist Cleary sees no way of justifying the personal, guaranteed, or redeemable census. Risk as a Title to Interest? A moneylender cannot foresee the future. In negotiating a loan, he must reckon with the possibilities, however remote, of default. Since he must bear the risk of losing his money, it may seem just that he charge a premium for Noonan, “Usury,” 82 (emphasis mine). In his much more detailed discussion of census theory in Scholastic Analysis, Noonan acknowledges that, in fact, there was “considerable confusion” both in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period regarding “exactly what is sold in a census” (230). It was commonly asserted that what is (licitly) sold is simply “a right to money” (156). For reasons that need not detain us here, this more abstract census analysis does potentially threaten the usury prohibition, if the requirement of an enduring fruitful base is disregarded or abandoned. See 156–58 and 169–70. 153 In his 1957 study, Noonan goes so far as to say that Cleary writes “primarily as an apologist, anxious to justify the Church’s permission of interest today” (Scholastic Analysis, 397), a charge that seems to me unfair, but not wholly unfounded. 154 Cleary, Church and Usury, 194. It is unclear whether the papal condemnation of the contracts weighs with him or not. He does not mention it when discussing his difficulties with the contracts. 155 Cleary, Church and Usury, 195. 151 152 Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 511 bearing this risk. At the very least, it may seem just that he charge a premium in certain instances, when specific risk factors are present (e.g., when the borrower has a poor credit rating). In Anscombe’s view, one cause or consequence of the Catholic Church’s loss of clarity about the usury question was the widespread modern acceptance of risk as a title to interest—a title that she considers a “monstrosity.”156 Neither Aquinas nor, according to Noonan,157 any other early Scholastic discussed it. In the fifteenth century, Saint Bernardine considered and rejected it, on the grounds that “to profit from this risk is to profit from the act of lending alone.”158 His reasoning was in one way surely sound. Since the future is necessarily uncertain, the abstract possibility of default is always present in a loan. “Risk,” in this sense, would be a putative interest title intrinsic to the act of lending. To admit its validity would be to admit, in effect, that a lender may justly seek to “profit from the act of lending alone.” This would destroy the usury prohibition. On the other hand, to charge a premium in specific instances, for specific risk factors, is not necessarily to “profit from the act of lending alone.” In 1645, Jesuit missionaries in China asked the Sacred Congregation of the Propaganda whether Chinese Christians could lend at interest in view of risks associated with lending, and the Congregation replied that these Christians were “not to be disturbed” if they charged interest in view of “a probably imminent danger.”159 Anscombe attaches little weight to this decision,160 but Noonan rightly observes that it represents “the most important approbation” the extrinsic risk title had yet received. If a lender charges a premium based either on the general risk inherent in lending or on the risk specific to a particular case, what precisely is he charging for? For what good or service is he demanding payment, or for Anscombe, “Philosophers and Economists,” 255. Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 129–30. 158 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 130. 159 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 289. 160 Anscombe says that it was made at an “unimportant” meeting of the Congregation, meaning “one whose decisions were not regarded as solemn ones” (“Philosophers and Economists,” 255). Since, as Noonan notes, Pope Innocent X decreed that the decision was to be observed by all missionaries under pain of excommunication latae sententiae, this is questionable. However, the decision certainly does not represent an exercise of the Church’s extraordinary (infallible) magisterium. Noonan notes the argument of the eighteenth-century rigorist Ballerini that the Congregation did not allow a charge for the simple risk of non-repayment, but rather for the risk of expenses that might be incurred in collecting a debt (Scholastic Analysis, 290). He does not express an opinion about this interpretation, but his later description of the Congregation’s decision as “somewhat ambiguous” (292) suggests that he thinks Ballerini’s interpretation defensible. 156 157 512 Jeremy Bell what actual or probable loss to himself is he demanding compensation? These are presumably the questions that Aquinas would put to defenders of the risk title. Offhand, there does not seem to be any good or service associated with the risk of lending apart from the lending itself—and Aquinas holds that the just “payment” for the lending itself, as we have seen, is simply the repayment of the principal. Risk means “risk of loss,” and mere risk of loss is not the same as actual loss. If a given loan is so risky that the lender anticipates probable loss of his principal, it is doubtful that Aquinas would recognize this as a case of compensable loss. (As I will discuss in the next section, he does not allow a lender to demand compensation from the borrower for losses incurred through sheer foolishness.) From a Thomist perspective, then, risk of default initially seems an unpromising candidate for an interest title. However, when discussing the circumstances in which it is licit to resell something for a higher price than one paid for it, Aquinas says that one may do this “on account of the danger [periculum] he incurs in transferring the thing from one place to another, or again in having it carried by another.”161 (Since the seller incurs this “danger” even when he does not transport the merchandise himself, Aquinas presumably has chiefly in mind the danger of the merchandise being lost or damaged, for instance during a hazardous sea voyage.) He thus admits that a seller may at least sometimes charge a premium for incurred risk. If a seller may justly charge only for goods or services rendered or for costs incurred, it would apparently follow that incurred risk is, or may be, a kind of compensable “loss.” Be that as it may, it is anyhow sometimes permissible to charge a premium for risk. It is not immediately obvious why a moneylender who negotiates an unusually risky loan should not charge such a premium. What are we to make of Aquinas’s silence about this possibility? It may be that he considered the case of the lender who risks default importantly different from the case of the seller who has risked his merchandise. The (prospective) seller puts his own property at risk for the sake of the (prospective) buyer and, should the property be lost or damaged en route, the planned sale will not go ahead and the would-be seller will have no claim on anyone to compensation. The moneylender, by contrast, alienates his property. During the period of the loan, nothing that he owns is at risk in connection with the loan. He does not, strictly speaking, put his own property at risk for the sake of the borrower. True, he accepts the risk that his debtor will default, yet, even if this happens, he will retain a legally enforceable claim on the defaulter. This difference between the situations of the would-be seller and the 161 Aquinas, ST II-II, q. 77, a. 4, ad 4. Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 513 moneylender means that the latter can normally take precautionary measures unavailable to the former. The moneylender can demand that the lender insure the loan or else insure it himself (and charge the borrower the insurance premium).162 He can include penalties for late repayment in the loan contract, and he can demand a pledge from the borrower. By taking one or more of these measures he may greatly reduce, if not eliminate, the risk he incurs through lending. If they are available options yet he insists instead on charging a risk premium, this is probably a sign that what he really seeks is not compensation for incurred risk, but profit from lending.163 It could be argued that the lender’s fear of late repayment or non-repayment is a psychic “loss” for which he reasonably demands compensation.164 If this fear is not founded on specific risk factors but simply on the impossibility of foreseeing the future, Aquinas might reply that the lender’s natural fear of the mere possibility of late repayment or non-repayment, like the frustration of his natural preference to enjoy goods sooner rather than later, does not amount to a compensable “loss” of something he “ought to have.” Even if the lender’s fear is based on specific risk factors, it is at best unclear whether Aquinas would recognize it as a compensable loss. Moreover, the lender can normally allay this fear by taking one or more of the precautionary measures discussed in the preceding paragraph. If they are available and he insists instead on a risk premium, he is probably seeking profit from lending, not the allaying of fear. Some of the later Scholastics compared a moneylender’s charge of a premium for specific risk factors with the premium a landlord might charge a notoriously rash or negligent tenant, and with the premium a bailor might charge a bailee about to undertake a dangerous journey with the goods entrusted to him.165 Both of the latter charges, it was assumed, are licit. Even if they are, there is still arguably a relevant difference between these cases and the case of a moneylender who charges a risk premium. Other things being equal, the greater a debtor’s obligations to his creditor, the more likely it is that he will default on these obligations. If a moneylender fears default, there is a certain incongruity in his seeking to As noted earlier, this was not an option in Aquinas’s day, though lenders could demand that borrowers find guarantors for their loans. 163 According to Noonan, all of the late Scholastic defenders of the risk title insisted that the borrower be given a choice between these options (Scholastic Analysis, 293). 164 This argument was made in the seventeenth century by Juan de Lugo (Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 288). 165 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 284–88. 162 514 Jeremy Bell allay this fear by charging his debtor a premium, thereby increasing the risk of default. The landlord and the bailor, by contrast, in no way increase the risk to their property by charging risk premiums. Setting this incongruity aside, however, the liceity of the landlord’s and bailor’s risk premiums strikes me as doubtful. Just as the moneylender can normally have his loan insured, demand a pledge from the borrower, or stipulate penalties for late repayment, so too a landlord or bailor can normally take comparable measures if he has reasonable fears for his property. Another late-Scholastic argument in defense of risk premiums on money loans compared such premiums with the fees charged by loan guarantors. Since the guarantor of a loan assumes the risk of the borrower’s default or insolvency and acts justly in charging a fee for his service, it seems that the lender himself may likewise charge a fee for assuming what is in effect the same risk.166 It is questionable, in fact, whether a guarantor does act justly in charging such a fee.167 Supposing for argument’s sake that he does, a difficulty remains. As the sixteenth-century Dominican Dominic Soto observed, the service performed by the guarantor of a loan is not the mere assumption of risk, but the obligation to repay the loan if the borrower should be unable to do so. If he is called on to fulfill this obligation, he performs a genuine service to both borrower and lender. Aquinas would likely argue that it is the conditional obligation to perform this service that he sells. The lender himself, in the nature of the case, cannot perform the same service. If the borrower defaults on an unsecured loan, the loan cannot be repaid. If there is no service akin to the guarantor’s that the lender can assume a conditional obligation to perform, it is not clear what sellable good the borrower would be buying when he pays a risk premium. A lender can, of course, refrain from taking action against a defaulting borrower. Might he not justly charge a fee at the beginning of the loan for undertaking not to take action in the event of default? Even if the answer is yes, it does not follow that the lender has the right to make this arrangement a condition of lending. While he certainly has the right to secure himself against the risk of loss (e.g., by insisting that the borrower find a guarantor for the loan), he surely does not have the right to insist on forgoing such security and being paid for doing so. The discussion to this point has focused on the occasional lender. The case is arguably different with the habitual lender. The more loans a lender makes, the greater the likelihood that at least some will not be repaid. It This argument was made by the sixteenth-century by Juan de Medina, the first Scholastic to defend the risk title (Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 284). 167 See note 176, below. 166 Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 515 may seem just that a habitual lender charge all of his customers a premium to protect himself against the probable defaults of a minority of them. In this case, surely, the premiums would collectively represent compensation for the (probable, eventual) loss of something he “ought to have.”168 We may compare this with the case of a businessman who charges each of his customers a small premium to protect himself against probable, occasional losses incurred in the course of his normal business activities. This seems unobjectionable. In this case, we would no longer be dealing with an interest title intrinsic to the act of lending. It is accidental to the act of lending that it be performed often or seldom. Admitting that habitual lenders may charge such a premium would not destroy the usury prohibition. The case of the habitual lender, however, presents us with a problem unrelated to the question about risk as an interest title. We must distinguish between professional and non-professional habitual lenders. The latter simply devote an unusual quantity of their money and time to charitable lending, a straightforwardly meritorious activity (if undertaken for the right motives). For obvious reasons, non-professional habitual lenders will be relatively rare. In an advanced capitalist society, their lending activity will be negligible compared with that of professional lenders. But professional lenders clearly “seek profit in lending,” at least in one sense. It is not surprising that, for most of the Middle Ages, it was generally supposed that professional lending is necessarily usurious. If professional lending necessarily violates the usury prohibition, it hardly matters whether habitual lenders violate the prohibition by charging a risk premium. It was only after moral theologians had reconciled themselves to the papally approved charitable lending institutions known as montes pietatis169 that they were prepared to admit the (possible) liceity of making a livelihood from lending.170 The montes, after all, employed staff, just as charitable organizations of any scale do today, and these staff had to be paid. Yet the task of mounting a principled natural-law defense of the montes’ interest charges was fraught with difficulty. Noonan notes that Navarrus, the first Scholastic who attempted the task, argued that a The eighteenth-century Jesuit Francis Zech was the first to defend this practice (Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 291). 169 See note 29 above. 170 Noonan discusses the history of the montes (which did not exist in Aquinas’s time) and of theological arguments regarding their operations in chapter 15 of Scholastic Analysis, upon which the rest of the present discussion draws. Nicola Lorenzo Barile provides a review of more recent scholarship on the montes in “Renaissance Monti di Pietà in Modern Scholarship: Themes, Studies, and Historiographic Trends,” Renaissance and Reformation 35, no. 3 (2012): 85–114. 168 516 Jeremy Bell mons could licitly charge for its self-incurred “obligation to lend.”171 Yet to charge for this obligation in addition to demanding the repayment of the lent money seems indistinguishable from usury. Noonan argues that Navarrus was “exploiting an old inconsistency” in the classic Scholastic analysis of usury. This (alleged) “inconsistency” stemmed from the early Scholastics’ admission that “the mere obligation to loan should be considered to be estimable in money.”172 (The context for this admission was their consideration of the question whether a lender could demand, as a condition of lending, that his debtor later lend to him in return, which question they answered in the negative.) This admission, Noonan suggests, was inconsistent with their insistence that the act of lending itself should be “considered to be worth nothing.” Here, it seems to me, a distinction is necessary. As we have seen, Aquinas is prepared to speak of the moneylender “selling” money. (He does so, in fact, in the passage that Noonan cites as evidence that he accepts that the obligation to loan is “estimable in money.”173) A loan, then, can be said to have a “price”—that is, the equivalent of the amount loaned. The act of lending itself can also be said to have this price, and Aquinas sometimes treats the amount given at the loan’s maturity as payment for the act of lending.174 In one way, then, the act of lending certainly is worth something. In another way, of course, it is indeed “worth nothing,” because it is worth nothing over and above the money lent. Since, in one way, the act of lending is worth something, there need be no inconsistency in Aquinas’s admission that the obligation to lend is likewise worth something.175 However, he would surely not admit that this obligation is worth anything over and above the amount lent in actually discharging this obligation, which is what Navarrus claimed.176 In Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 302. This admission, according to Noonan, is first made by William of Auxerre, and subsequently became standard among the scholastics (including Aquinas); see Scholastic Analysis, 302nn25–27. 173 Aquinas, ST, II-II, q. 78, a. 2, ad 4. 174 In ST, II-II, q. 78, a. 1, ad 5, he says that a lender “may accept repayment for what he has done [eius quod fecit]” and that he is repaid justly if he is given “as much as he lent.” 175 This interpretation is, I admit, somewhat speculative. It seems to me the only way to make sense of what Aquinas says without charging him with grave inconsistency. 176 In the immediately preceding reply (ad 3), Aquinas has seemingly intimated that, quite generally, an “obligation,” unlike a “favor,” can be “priced at a money value.” According to Toon van Houdt, this thesis was accepted by most of the late Scholastic theologians (“‘Lack of money’: A Reappraisal of Lessius’s Contribution to the Scholastic Analysis of Money-lending and Interest-taking,” The European Jour171 172 Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 517 speaking of an “old inconsistency” in the classic usury analysis, Noonan seems (indirectly and implicitly) to acknowledge that Navarrus’s suggestion amounts to an abandonment of the usury prohibition. The suggestion that a lender or lending institution can charge for the obligation to lend would recur in defenses of non-charitable deposit banking. Noonan goes so far as to say that “the fundamental defense of the banks is their right to charge for their obligation to lend.”177 Since, on the face of it, this defense rests on an abandonment of the usury prohibition, it is worth considering it briefly. The “obligation” for which the later Scholastics would claim banks had the right to charge is, specifically, the obligation incurred when a bank engages in credit creation.178 Noonan also calls this “the obligation of being ready to lend.”179 Credit creation is arguably morally objectionable, for reasons that are unrelated to the usury prohibition and that I will touch on later. For present purposes, it is sufficient to remark that payment for readiness to lend may be perfectly licit, if it means payment for labor and costs incidental to the profession of lending. If it means something more than this, it seems no less irreconcilable with the usury prohibition than simple payment for the “obligation to lend” (if this “payment” is not the mere repayment of the loan). If the montes could not charge interest on the basis of their obligation to lend, on what basis could they do so? To charge for their lending as such would have been usurious. On the other hand, charges for costs incidental to lending (including employees’ salaries) could not be relied upon to cover these costs. To make matters worse, charitable donations proved insuffinal of the History of Economic Thought 5, no. 1 [1998]: 1–35, at 6). Houdt claims that these theologians also accepted the liceity of a suretyship bond, by which a guarantor promised to repay a defaulting borrower’s debt and recover his money from the borrower later, in return for a fee. But this fee amounted to payment for incurring the (conditional) obligation to lend, since the money spent on repaying the debt was, in effect, a loan to the defaulting debtor. This seems a clear instance of an obligation to lend having a price over and above the “price” of the loan itself. It is likely that Aquinas would have disagreed with these Scholastics about the right of guarantors to charge a fee for their service. Noonan notes that, while the early Scholastics accepted without qualm that a guarantor could charge for costs incurred in paying a defaulter’s debt, the suggestion that he could charge simply for incurring the obligation to do so was not made until 1400, and was swiftly repudiated by both St. Bernadine and St. Antoninus (Scholastic Analysis, 204). It would certainly seem that allowing such a charge would undermine the usury prohibition. 177 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 338. 178 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 336–38. 179 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 404n22 (emphasis mine). 518 Jeremy Bell cient even for the loans to the poor that the montes were erected to provide, let alone for the associated incidental costs. The montes were consequently forced to accept deposits on which they paid moderate interest, a practice justified on the grounds that the depositors suffered lucrum cessans by lending money to the montes instead of investing it.180 This interest was an additional “incidental expense” of lending, which could consequently be charged to the montes’ customers. In the course of time, many montes began lending at interest to wealthy businessmen, at a rate significantly higher than that at which they themselves paid interest to depositors. The history of the montes illustrates the grave difficulties in erecting a purely charitable (“not-for-profit”) lending institution that will be economically viable.181 When such an institution is driven to lend to wealthy businessmen at relatively high rates of interest, its operations are no longer purely charitable. What just title could it have to this interest? The mere fact that it will use the interest to cover the costs of making loans to the poor does not clear it of usury. (It is not normally just to steal from the rich, even to give to the poor.) Since the businessmen would invest the money they borrow and, let us assume, make a profit, it could be argued that the relevant loan contracts are virtually equivalent to triple contracts. As we shall see in the following section, the later Scholastics held that a loan at interest virtually equivalent to a licit transaction would not violate the usury prohibition, if made in good faith. The institution’s non-charitable lending at interest could then be justified, and the interest used to fund charitable loans and operating expenses. But it is important to note that, in that case, the institution could not factor a risk premium into its interest charges on investment loans. The loan contracts, ex hypothesi, must be treated as virtually equivalent to triple contracts, and the defining feature of a triple contract is that the investor’s capital and profit are both insured. (Someone negotiating an actual triple contract would surely act unjustly if he charged his partner a premium for the risk that the contract obliges the partner himself to bear!) It would follow that the institution could charge risk premiums only (if at all) on its charitable loans. I have argued that the putative interest title “risk” is most plausible See Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 303. For obvious reasons, the popes who approved the practice were anxious to prevent its usurious abuse. According to Noonan, the strict rules they laid down to this end were not kept. 181 Noonan may overestimate the extent to which the montes were in fact “purely charitable” even at their inception. According to Barile, contemporary scholars tend to believe that the montes were “a hybrid of charitable institution and bank from the very beginning” (“Renaissance Monti,” 100). 180 Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 519 in the case of loans made by a habitual lender or lending institution. If, however, habitual lenders or lending institutions can charge risk premiums only (if at all) on charitable loans, the risk title would be, at best, of limited practical significance. Aquinas and Lucrum Cessans Noonan’s critique of Aquinas’s major natural-law argument against usury, I have sought to show, is unsuccessful. The argument is internally consistent, compatible with Aquinas’s just-price theory, and in no way dependent on the dubious theses of the “sterility” and “non-vendibility” of money. I must now, finally, consider the question of whether the usury prohibition has nonetheless become all but irrelevant under advanced capitalism. Are the extrinsic interest titles of damnum emergens and lucrum cessans virtually always present in contemporary loans, as Noonan and others argue? In order to answer this question, we must firstly consider Aquinas’s own treatment of these titles. He seems to recognize some form of the interest title damnum emergens, since he says that someone who, through lending, accidentally incurs a loss of something he “ought to have” may justly demand that his debtor compensate him for this loss. However, he gives no illustration of the kind of “loss” he has in mind. He seems to reject lucrum cessans, since he immediately adds that a lender “cannot enter an agreement for compensation, through the fact that he makes no profit out of his money,” because “he must not sell that which he has not yet and may be prevented in many ways from having.”182 In De malo, he says that a lender may justly claim compensation only for loss due to late repayment. Regarding other losses, he says that “the lender ought to have taken precautions” and that the borrower has no obligation to compensate the lender for losses incurred through his own “stupidity.”183 The apparent tension between the treatments of damnum emergens in the Summa and in De malo suggests that, if we seek a consistent development of Thomist principles bearing on interest titles, we must be prepared to set aside some of Aquinas’s own conclusions. He holds, reasonably, that a lender cannot justly claim compensation for loss due to sheer foolishness. A lender also cannot justly claim compensation for the loss of something that he “has not yet and may be prevented in many ways from having.” The key expression here seems to be “in many ways” (multipliciter). As Christopher Kaczor remarks, while in Aquinas’s day, “the growth of an investment would be highly speculative,” under modern capitalist conditions it may 182 183 Aquinas, ST II-II, q. 78, a. 2, ad 1. Aquinas, De malo, q. 13, a. 4, ad 14. 520 Jeremy Bell be “virtually assured.”184 Since Aquinas also holds that a lender can justly claim compensation for the loss of something he “ought to have,” might he not reasonably allow that someone who forgoes an investment opportunity whose profitability was “virtually assured” in order to lend out of charity can justly demand compensation for lucrum cessans? This, of course, was the eventual consensus view of the later Scholastics. Finnis argues at some length that Aquinas’s “principles of justice in relation to . . . recompense” should at any rate have led him to allow compensation for lucrum cessans, with the proviso that “any charge made for loss of profit from available alternative investment . . . of the funds loaned ought to be discounted to allow for the multiple uncertainties involved in such investment.”185 The implications of admitting lucrum cessans are, in Finnis’s view, far-reaching. Under modern capitalism, he says elsewhere, “the nature of money changes.”186 In addition to being a medium of exchange, “it becomes at least equally capital, a means of sharing in the risks and rewards of productive enterprise in a non-stationary (non-equilibrium) economy.” It would seem to follow that, in principle, any lender might justly demand compensation for lucrum cessans, since he is really lending capital, though Finnis does not explicitly draw this conclusion.187 Certainly, he seems to accept the liceity of contemporary commercial practice quite generally. While he insists that “in all historical circumstances” it is “wrong to charge interest on a loan in virtue of the very making of the loan,” he evinces no Christopher Kaczor, “Moral Theology, Development of Doctrine, and Human Experience,” Josephinum Journal of Theology 10, no. 2 (2003): 194–209, at 204. 185 Finnis, Aquinas, 209 (emphasis original). The full argument runs from 207–9. He goes so far as to say that Aquinas not only should have said this, but “perhaps did mean” it, even though he does not expressly say so in the Summa. Finnis does not seek to reconcile this bold interpretation with Aquinas’s categorical rejection in De malo of compensation for any loss not due to late repayment, though he alludes to the relevant passage (205n115). 186 John Finnis, “Historical Consciousness and Theological Foundations,” in Religion and Public Reasons: Collected Essays, vol. 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 139–62, at 157. This was originally Finnis’s 1992 Gilson Lecture. 187 In Aquinas, Finnis argues specifically for the liceity of trading bonds, on the grounds that the market rate of interest on them reflects what the bondholders “are reasonably presumed to have lost” by investing in bonds rather than shares (207). In effect, a bondholder is in a position comparable to that of the investing party to a triple contract, though Finnis does not put it this way. His purpose in doing so is perhaps to underscore the fact that, under modern conditions, even what appears to be a case of naked profit-seeking on a loan can be justified (by appeal to lucrum cessans). Moreover, the market rate of interest on the kind of loan in question can be assumed to be just. 184 Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 521 concern at the pervasiveness of lending at interest in the contemporary world. Presumably this is because he agrees with Prümmer that there are today “nearly always some extrinsic titles to justify the taking of reasonable interest for money lent.” He would then have little reason to dispute Noonan’s statement that, “in terms of emphasis, of perspective, of practice, the old usury rule has disappeared: the just title to profit is assumed to exist.” He would likely stress that the interest taken must be “reasonable,” and he might fault Noonan for seemingly disregarding the still widespread practice of charging unreasonable (excessive) interest, especially on consumption loans.188 Nonetheless, he would accept Noonan’s main contention that, under modern economic conditions, charging interest as such has in practice ceased to be sinful, since it is always safe to assume the presence of a just title to (reasonable) interest. It could be objected that, even if a just title is present, the lender may be unaware or heedless of the fact. How many bondholders realize that the returns on their bonds can be viewed as compensation for foregone profit? Of those who do, how many take comfort in the thought that this exculpates them from usury? If it is a sin to seek gain in lending, it would seem that a person sins who lends profitably without knowing or caring that there exists some just extrinsic title to his profit. As Noonan documents in chapter 13 of his study, from the sixteenth century onwards an increasing number of theologians held that, absent positive evidence to the contrary, a man who seeks profit should be supposed to have an “implicit intention” to do so honestly. These theologians also held that an “implicit (just) title” to interest might be present in contracts indistinguishable on their face from usurious loans. If a man lends profitably but this transaction can be shown, on analysis, to be virtually equivalent to some non-usurious transaction— as purchasing bonds is, arguably, virtually equivalent to making a triple contract—then his implicit intention to profit honestly suffices to clear him of wrongdoing, even if he is ignorant of this virtual equivalence. This development, Noonan observes, was “absolutely necessary” if large swathes of modern commercial activity were not to violate the usury prohibition.189 The notions of “implicit intention” and “implicit contract” and their As we have seen, the charging of excessive interest is the principal, if not sole, target of recent papal condemnations of “usury.” For a detailed discussion of contemporary “usury” (in this popular sense) from a Catholic perspective, see William M. Woodyard and Chad G. Marzen, “Is Greed Good? A Catholic Perspective on Modern Usury,” Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law 27, no. 1 (2012): 186–228. 189 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 269. 188 522 Jeremy Bell deployment in moral theology raise a host of questions, which I will not address here. Let us assume that a majority of those who today lend at interest wish to profit honestly and, hence, have the implicit intention to profit from lending only if the contracts with their debtors are virtually equivalent to non-usurious contracts. According to Prümmer (and, it seems, according to Kaczor and Finnis as well), nearly all interest even on consumption loans can today be treated as virtually equivalent to compensation for lucrum cessans, since today’s practically boundless scope for profitable investment means that nearly every such loan carries an opportunity cost. It would seem to follow that the vast majority of those who today profit from lending are not ipso facto guilty of usury. (Whether a majority of today’s premiums are, to use Prümmer’s word, “reasonable”— proportionate to probable foregone profit and fairly discounted to allow for uncertainty—is of course a separate question.) Appealing as this argument is, Aquinas would almost certainly reject it. Let us for now consider only consumption loans, on the assumption that investment loans can normally be treated as virtually equivalent to triple contracts. Granted that, under modern conditions, nearly every sum of money that is lent for consumption purposes could have been invested profitably,190 it does not follow that nearly every lender truly incurs a compensable loss. The mere abstract possibility of investing one’s money profitably is an insufficient basis upon which to claim compensation for lucrum cessans. Firstly, not every lender is competent to make reasonable judgments about just which possible investments would likely be profitable. (Even experienced investors often make what turn out to be poor investment decisions.)191 More importantly, even a lender with the requisite knowledge and experience can claim to be forgoing (likely) profit only if, before lending his money, he had intended to invest it. He might not have had any specific investment project in view, but he must at least have had the general intention to invest. On no other grounds could he plausibly claim that, by lending instead, he has incurred the loss of something he “ought to have.” Finnis’s own discussion of Aquinas’s theory of loss leaves little room for doubt that this would be his view. He recognizes two kinds As Storck notes, this is actually an exaggeration, since, in times of depression or recession, low profit expectations mean that businessmen will not normally spend on new investment projects (Economics, 124–25). 191 Individual investors suffer “systematic and economically large losses,” according to Brad M. Barber, Yi-Tsung Lee, Yu-Jane Liu, and Terrance Odean, “Just How Much Do Individual Investors Lose by Trading?,” The Review of Financial Studies 22, no. 2 (2009): 609–32, at 609. 190 Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 523 of situation in which a person can be said to lose something he “ought to have.” The first is when he is deprived of something he already actually has, as when his house is destroyed. The second is when he is “impeded or prevented” from getting what he was “on the way to having” (in via habendi), as when seeds he has sown are dug up before he has reaped the harvest.192 If someone lends money that he had no prior intention of investing, he cannot possibly be said to have been “on the way to having” any investment returns and so cannot justly claim any compensation for forgone profit. It is worth noting that the seventeenth-century Spanish Scholastics, who played a vital role in the development of the doctrines of “implicit intention” and “implicit contracts,”193 also accepted that a lender must have intended to invest the money he lends, if he is to claim compensation for lucrum cessans. Lessius, Molina, and Lugo all held that the money lent must have been, in Bernard Dempsey’s words, “more or less definitely set aside for business purposes, or for the purchase of a productive good.”194 This requirement is intuitively reasonable. However, by the early twentieth century, if not before, even some theologians anxious to defend the traditional principles of usury analysis were prepared to sacrifice it. In a 1903 dissertation setting forth what Noonan describes as “one of the ablest presentations of the old theory every made,” the Belgian theologian Joseph Ernest Van Roey defended “the universal claiming of lucrum cessans” by lenders, on the grounds that “in today’s economy every holder of money can employ it profitably, and to forego money’s use in a loan gives every lender a right to interest.”195 The words I have italicized contain what Aquinas would surely regard as the fallacy in this reasoning. While every holder of money can employ it profitably, not every holder of money has the know-how to do so or actually intends to do so. Consequently, the right to claim compensation for lucrum cessans upon lending is certainly not “universal.” While the precise history of this seemingly indefensible expansion of the lucrum cessans title is not clear to me,196 an important antecedent was the emergence in the seventeenth century of a closely related interest title: Finnis, Aquinas, 208. The discussion is based chiefly on ST II-II, q. 62, a. 4. The examples of the destroyed house and of the seeds dug up before harvest time are Aquinas’s own. 193 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 273–77. 194 Dempsey, Interest and Usury, 172–73. 195 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 389. This is Noonan’s paraphrase. 196 Noonan does not expressly identify any one thinker responsible for it. 192 524 Jeremy Bell “lack of money” (carentia pecuniae). The first Scholastic to take this title seriously was Lessius.197 Despite accepting (as noted above) that a lender must have intended to invest his money in order to claim lucrum cessans, Lessius refused to condemn198 the practice, customary at the Bourse of Antwerp, of allowing any merchant who lent money to charge for the lack of this money during the loan period, “even though there [were] no gain of his that stop[ped] because of his loan.”199 The Antwerp merchants had established a “price” for the lack of money, indexed to the average rate of profit. A merchant could charge this price when lending, even if the lending in no way interfered with his investment plans, on the grounds that “the just price of an article or obligation in any community is that which is put upon it by that community in good faith for the sake of the common good in view of all the circumstances.” Lessius observed that, according to the merchants themselves, “all the exchanges of this time are unjust, if this title is not just.”200 The argument of the Antwerp merchants, as recounted by Lessius, treats “lack of money” as “an article or obligation.” Yet it is clearly neither an “article” (a vendible good) nor an “obligation” (i.e., an obligation to perform some service). It is simply a condition consequent on lending, which is often, but not always, burdensome to the lender. The very idea of establishing a “just price” for something that is not a possible object of an exchange (since it in no way serves to satisfy human indigentia) seems incoherent. On the other hand, it is not difficult to make sense of the merchants’ customary practice. A merchant may have a general intention of investing, yet be presently uncertain what available lines of investment are safest or most profitable. If, while awaiting clearer market signals, he is asked for a consumption loan, he will reasonably demand a premium for lucrum cessans (indexed to the average rate of profit). It may be that subsequent market activity during the period of the loan is such that he would have refrained from investing during this period even if he had not made the loan. Nonetheless, if charging a standard premium for anticipated lucrum cessans has with good reason become an established practice in the mercantile community of which he is a member, he arguably does For a detailed examination of Lessius’s treatment of this title and its historical background, which is intended partly to supplement Noonan’s supposedly “one-sided” account in Scholastic Analysis, see Houdt, “‘Lack of Money.’” 198 In fact, Noonan says, he is inconsistent on this point: though in one place he “formally rejects the title carentia pecunia,” he elsewhere recognizes it as a “probable justification” for de facto loans at interest (Scholastic Analysis, 350–51). 199 Quoted in Dempsey, Interest and Usury, 160. 200 Quoted in Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 351. 197 Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 525 no wrong in collecting his premium anyway. (I say “arguably”; I am not convinced of this.) Some such established practice is apparently what Lessius describes, and wishes to defend. There need be no harm in dubbing the relevant interest title carentia pecuniae. However, it is at best imprecise to speak of the “(just) price” of carentia pecuniae, for reasons given above. Moreover, this way of speaking may encourage the notion that, since the mere lack of money has a price, anyone with money (merchant or not) has an automatic right to charge for it. Some of Lessius’s successors apparently considered this a sound extrapolation from Lessius’s principles.201 In truth, it seems to me, carentia pecuniae is simply a very modest (and still questionable) extension of lucrum cessans. If it is a valid interest title, it is so only for members of a clearly defined community of businessmen, all of whom have at least an habitual intention of investing—as Lessius himself would have agreed.202 We have seen that Aquinas’s principles regarding interest titles, if consistently developed along the lines suggested by Finnis, allow a lender to claim compensation for lucrum cessans as long as the profitability of foregone investment opportunities is “virtually assured.” However, pace Finnis, Aquinas would deny that the right to claim compensation for lucrum cessans is (nearly) universal. This right is restricted to lenders who, before lending, had at least the general or habitual intention to invest the money they instead chose to lend.203 If this is correct, it follows that contemporary professional lenders normally do not have this right, at least when making consumption loans.204 It would be absurd for someone who makes loans for a living to claim that, every time he has made a loan, he was “on the way to having” profits from some investment that he would have made but for this loan. (He might occasionally lend money that he had originally intended to invest—there is nothing, after all, to stop a professional lender from also being an amateur investor—and in this exceptional instance he could perhaps demand compensation for lucrum cessans.) The case is not fundamentally different with a professional lender who is also a professional investor. If he routinely devotes a certain portion of his wealth to lend Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 361. “[Lessius] was discussing not a general proposition but the very limited and special market of the “community of merchants” of the Antwerp Bourse” (Dempsey, Interest and Usury, 166). 203 This is also the view of Storck (Economics, 125). 204 This was the unanimous view of the early Scholastic defenders of the lucrum cessans title (Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 131–32). 201 202 526 Jeremy Bell ing, with a view to making part of his living therefrom, he cannot, as a rule, licitly claim compensation for lucrum cessans from his debtors. (The possible exception, again, would be the rare occasion when he diverts into lending funds originally earmarked for his regular investment activities.) It goes without saying that, if individual professional lenders do not (normally) have the right to claim compensation for lucrum cessans, neither do lending institutions, which are of course responsible for most contemporary lending. Moreover, there would be a serious objection to contemporary banks claiming compensation for lucrum cessans, even if one followed Van Roey in admitting the “universal” right of individual lenders to claim such compensation. In the fractional reserve system that prevails throughout most of the contemporary world, commercial banks are not obliged to draw on savings when lending. Most of the money lent by banks today is rather created “out of thin air,” as Brian McCall bluntly puts it.205 This arrangement is arguably objectionable in more ways than one. The simplest and most radical objection (with which, I must confess, I am inclined to agree) would be that fractional reserve banking is nothing more or less than legalized fraud.206 Another possible objection (with which, again, I am inclined to agree) is that, since money creation leads eventually to inflation, the early recipients of newly created money tend to benefit at the expense of those—a much greater number—whose savings depreciate due to the eventual inflation. (This is an instance of what Father Dempsey somewhat imprecisely calls “institutional usury.”207) For present McCall, Church and Usurers, 32. This seems to be Anscombe’s view, to judge by her statement that modern banking is apparently founded on the “highly successful dishonesty” of late medieval goldsmiths, who practiced what we might call a primitive form of fractional reserve banking. Their receipts for deposited coins circulated as money and they made loans backed by the deposited coins, while also loaning the coins themselves (“Philosophers and Economists,” 254). Interestingly, however, even the more rigorous Scholastics did not condemn early forms of fractional reserve banking. According to Noonan, before the seventeenth century the Scholastics had nothing to say about the already-existing forms of credit creation “out of thin air” (Scholastic Analysis, 172–73). (The montes pietatis did not engage in such credit creation [304], which may partly explain their endemic financial difficulties.) When Molina took note of the practice in the seventeenth century, he did not formally condemn it (338). 207 Dempsey, Interest and Usury, 228. Noonan finds Dempsey’s analysis “suggestive and stimulating,” but denies that it is an authentic development of the Scholastic analysis of usury (Scholastic Analysis, 406). D. Stephen Long offers a detailed and sympathetic discussion of Dempsey’s thought about “institutional usury” in “Bernard Dempsey’s Theological Economics: Usury, Profit and Human Fulfil205 206 Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 527 purposes, however, we need only consider the implications of fractional reserve banking for banks’ interest titles. An individual investor who occasionally makes charitable loans may claim compensation for lucrum cessans partly because, at any given time, he has only so much money. If he makes a charitable loan of $1,000, the amount immediately available to him for investment is $1,000 smaller than it would otherwise have been. This is not true of banks. While reserve and capital requirements place theoretical limits on the amount of money that they can create at any given time, a bank’s choices are not normally constrained, at any given time, simply by the quantity of money it has, or may immediately create. If it makes a consumption loan of $1,000, it cannot claim that the amount of money immediately available to it for investment is $1,000 smaller than it otherwise would have been. McCall and Thomas Storck both argue208 that banks in a fractional reserve system cannot plausibly defend their interest charges by appealing to lucrum cessans. Storck goes so far as to say that “almost all” of the interest charged on loans not based on savings “seems to be nothing but usury.” Professional lenders and lending institutions may well have extrinsic titles to interest on consumption loans, but despite what Van Roey, Prümmer, Finnis, Kaczor, and Noonan himself claim or suggest, lucrum cessans is not normally one of them. On Aquinas’s principles, this seems indisputable. Yet it is the alleged ubiquity of lucrum cessans in advanced capitalist societies that, more than anything else, is supposed to justify contemporary lending at interest. Since professional lending institutions are responsible for the lion’s share of this lending, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that these institutions routinely practice usury. Though unwelcome, this conclusion is not surprising. We saw in the preceding section that, for the early Scholastics, the very idea of professional lending was deeply suspect. Since most professional lenders openly seek profit from lending, it would be mere chance if their returns were no more than they needed to cover the costs incidental to lending.209 (The montes, of course, charged interest ment,” Theological Studies 57 (1996): 690–706. He is apparently inclined to agree with Dempsey that “the capital which financed the modern economy violated the usury proscription because it was based either on confiscation, conquest and exploitation, or credit that had little connection with savings” (704). For a recent, sympathetic discussion of Dempsey’s ideas from a non-Catholic perspective, see Betsy Jane Clary, “Institutional Usury and the Banks,” Review of Social Economy 69, no. 4 (2011): 419–38. 208 McCall, Church and Usurers, 151; Storck, Economics, 128n51. 209 If Noonan is right that the late Scholastics’ “fundamental defense” of non-charitable deposit banking was an appeal to the banks’ supposed right to charge for their 528 Jeremy Bell on charitable loans only to cover such costs, and were consequently able to offer these loans at significantly lower rates than the professional moneylenders.) Granted that investment loans can generally be treated as virtually equivalent to triple contracts, and setting aside the aforementioned difficulties regarding fractional reserve banking, how many professional lenders could honestly claim that the interest they charge on consumption loans (e.g., mortgages) is reducible without remainder to compensation for incidental labor and expenses, plus a risk premium? Conclusion: The Enduring Relevance of the Usury Prohibition Neither in the sixteenth nor in the nineteenth century did the Church cease to teach the intrinsic sinfulness of demanding interest on the mere strength of a loan. However, it cannot be denied that, for at least the last two hundred years, the Catholic faithful have often been unclear about the teaching’s application under modern economic conditions. The late sixteenth century popes’ thundering denunciations of covertly usurious commercial practices gave way to the early nineteenth century Roman authorities’ provisional tolerance of overt interest-taking and studied reticence about its possible theoretical justification, leading ultimately to the near silence of today’s ecclesia docens about the prohibition itself. It is not surprising that most lay Catholics either are unaware of the prohibition or consider it outdated. Aquinas’s natural-law defense of the prohibition is the hard core of what Noonan calls “the Scholastic analysis of usury.” I have argued that Noonan’s criticisms of Aquinas are largely unfounded and that the great saint’s major natural-law argument for the injustice of usury is essentially sound. Furthermore, a consistent development of the principles he adumbrates regarding just compensation shows that his medieval successors were right to recognize both lucrum cessans and damnum emergens as valid extrinsic interest titles. To be sure, the application of Aquinas’s usury analysis to contemporary conditions presents challenges. One reason for the Church’s loss of clarity about usury in modern times is, without doubt, the sheer complexity of post-medieval commercial life. Already in the sixteenth century, it was no straightforward matter to distinguish legitimate profit from usury in the returns of exchange bankers. The dubious qualifications to the prohibition proposed by the later Scholastics and their modern successors—above all, the virtually unlimited expansion of the lucrum cessans title—reflect “obligation to lend,” I have argued that this defense is, in effect, an abandonment of the usury prohibition. Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition 529 well-intentioned efforts to come to terms with increasingly bewildering economic realities. Confronted today with the immense intricacies of a global financial system that, as Betsy Jane Clary remarks, “few people really understand,”210 we may well feel that an analysis whose fundamentals were worked out in the thirteenth century cannot possibly still be relevant. Yet, as I have sought to show, Aquinas’s principles are not especially difficult to apply to contemporary conditions. Moreover, if we accept these principles, we will likely be led to conclude that the usury prohibition has profound, and troubling, implications for contemporary practice, and especially for contemporary banking. At a practical level, we will naturally wish to avoid formal cooperation in practices that are likely usurious, such as working for, or investing in, a bank that makes significant profits from consumption loans. We cannot, of course, simply withdraw from the whole capitalist system. Most lay Catholics in the world’s more prosperous nations will, for instance, need to take out a mortgage. Aquinas argues that, while lending at usury is sinful, borrowing at usury need not be.211 Yet we should not be complacent about our partly unavoidable entanglements in what he would surely deem an unjust system. To whatever extent we realistically can, we should seek to minimize such entanglements. For instance, as Storck suggests, Catholics would do well to invest in, and generally to promote, credit unions instead of commercial banks.212 I have defended a moderately strict Thomist analysis of contemporary commercial life. I do not forget, however, that the Roman responses of the 1820s and 1830s consistently ordered preachers and confessors not to disturb the consciences of Catholics who lent at interest in good faith. With the exception of canon 1735 of the now superseded 1917 Code of Canon Law, these responses are the most recent authoritative directives regarding the usury prohibition. Their warning about “rashly usurping the part of judge” by presuming to define a question not yet defined by the Holy See is one I too must heed. Vix Pervenit, the last formal treatment of the usury prohibition by a pope, expressly refrained from intervening in the disputes then raging between traditionalists like Pietro Ballerini and liberals like Scipio Maffei. It would therefore be rash indeed to aver that a traditionalist, Thomist analysis of modern conditions is obligatory for Catholics today. Nonetheless, pending any future papal definitions, we are certainly free to adopt and defend such an analysis. Those who find it Clary, “Institutional Usury,” 422. Aquinas, ST, II-II, q. 78, a. 4, resp. 212 Storck, Economics, 127–28. He observes that credit unions are the contemporary counterparts of the medieval montes pietatis. 210 211 530 Jeremy Bell persuasive will not share the equanimity of Noonan, Finnis, and others in the face of an economic system that normalizes lending for profit. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2021): 531–562 531 On Value and Obligation in Practical Reason: Toward a Resolution of the Is–Ought Problem in the Thomistic Moral Tradition William Matthew Diem Gettysburg, PA “This brings us to one of the most pointless controversies of modern moral philosophy, . . . How can we move from the descriptive to the normative, from fact to value, from Is to Ought?”1 Introduction Hume’s is –ought2 gap is, in the Thomistic moral tradition, regularly treated as being the same problem as the fact–value gap. The transition between the two is routinely just as swift and little-noted as that which the Scot observed from “is” to “ought” in the ethical discourse of his own day.3 Ralph McInerny, Ethica Thomistica, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 37. 2 David Hume, A Discourse of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), III, pt.1, no. 1: “In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, . . . the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ‘tis necessary that . . . a reason should be given . . . how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it” (469). 3 This identification of the two problems is quite understandable insofar as awareness of the fact–value gap is generally traced to G. E. Moore’s attack on ethical naturalism in his Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), where he himself used his “open question” to challenge the intelligibility of evaluative statements in general, including normative statements; i.e., his challenge concerning evaluative statements includes the specific sort of moral value that is equivalent to “ought.” 1 532 William Matthew Diem Further, these two dichotomies (fact–value and is–ought) are regularly treated as being identical, not only to one another, but also to Aristotle and Aquinas’s distinction between practical and speculative.4 And the question whether (and if so, how) practical (“ought” or normative) knowledge is derived from speculative (“is” or descriptive) knowledge has driven some of the fiercest disputes among the schools of Thomistic theorists of natural law. I intend to show that both of these identifications are wrong and the debate has been misframed. The is–ought gap is not the fact–value gap, and neither of them corresponds neatly to Aquinas’s distinction between the speculative and practical. Conflating value and obligation has resulted in an insoluble problem, but if, as I intend to show, they are both distinct in themselves and treated as such by Aquinas, then the possibility opens of a resolution—within the Thomistic school—to a debate that has, heretofore, proven particularly resistant to consensus. My treatment will proceed in four sections. I intend first to explain and defend the thesis that there is a fact–value gap: the bare understanding of speculative truth does not move an agent to act unless it first touches a desire or natural inclination. I will show that Aquinas is well aware of this gap and respects the distinction between purely factual knowledge and value in his moral psychology. Second, I intend to show that value and 4 For example, McInerny, Ethica Thomistica, 37, quoted as the epigraph of the present essay; see also 48–50. Steven A. Long, The Teleological Grammar of the Moral Act, 2nd ed. (Naples, FL: Sapientia Press, 2015), 72–76, provides a brilliant example. He begins speaking of Hume and the is–ought problem, swiftly moves to a discussion of speculative knowledge of teleology and its relation to practical knowledge and desire, then speaks of the divide between “‘fact” and “value,” before returning to the relation between “ought” and “is,” all of this without any indication that these are distinct questions. See also John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 37 (“Aquinas’s Aristotelian distinction between ‘speculative’ and practical reason corresponds so neatly with the modern . . . distinction which we . . . indicate by contrasting ‘fact’ and ‘norm’ or ‘is’ and ‘ought’”), and in his subsequent treatment of Clarke (whom he contends Hume was originally critiquing in his famous no-is-from-ought passage), he conflates obligation with value or desire: “Clarke’s argument fails to make the transition from is . . . to ought because it fails to advert to any desire or interest of the agent’s that might be satisfied by acting rightly. . . . It fails to consider whether acting fittingly and reasonably is in any aspect of . . . the agent’s well-being or in any way worth while or desirable” (40–41). See also Steven Jensen, Knowing the Natural Law: From Precepts and Inclination to Deriving Oughts, (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015), 1–2: “[David Hume] suggested that it is illegitimate to begin with a statement of fact about the way the world is and to conclude with a value, of what is good or of what should be.” On Value and Obligation in Practical Reason 533 obligation are distinct concepts and therefore the fact–value gap is not the is–ought gap, although—as I will also show—the two are routinely conflated in the contemporary Thomistic dispute over the relation of speculative to practical knowledge. In the third section, I intend to show that Aquinas clearly distinguishes between obligation and value, and in fact, he recognizes two clearly discrete forms of practical reason that answer to these two discrete notions, with each form of practical reason having its own distinct set of principles. Finally, I intend to show in the fourth section that, while conflating value and obligation led to an insoluble problem, conversely, once the notions of value and obligation are clearly distinguished, the is–ought gap poses no particular difficulty and the principal concerns of both sides in the debate can be answered. With these clarifications made, I will suggest a detailed, if tentative, account of precisely how synderesis gives us our first awareness of moral law from a prior speculative understanding. That There is a Fact–Value Gap By “value” I mean to name such desire or care for a thing as is necessary for that thing to motivate deliberate activity. Value—considered as that which is psychologically sufficient to serve as a motive for action—is, at root, a function of appetite or inclination: to value something is to desire it. Since “good” denotes the desirable, it is natural to use the language of goodness when discussing value, but because “good” is an analogous term, there is here a danger of confusion and equivocation, and as will become apparent, it is precisely averting such confusion that makes a discussion of the fact–value gap necessary. I readily admit that there are speculative or purely descriptive senses of “good” which are founded on our apprehension of a thing’s teleology. A thing can be called good in itself, for example, if it is complete in its kind and fulfills its purpose or acts in a way conducive to its natural end; thus we might speak of a spider as good if it is healthy and demonstrates the characteristics and behaviors that are typical of its species. Similarly, one thing can be called good for another if it conduces or contributes to the other’s attaining its telos—thus we might say that it is good for the spider to eat the fly. Nonetheless, I insist, such speculative apprehensions of goodness, rooted in an understanding of teleology, cannot, of themselves, provide a motive for deliberate action and so do not constitute value in the relevant sense. To extend Alisdair MacIntyre’s example from After Virtue,5 knowing that a watch is a good watch, that it 5 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 57–58. See also Peter Geach, “Good and Evil,” Analysis 17 534 William Matthew Diem has what a watch ought to have given its purpose (it is portable, keeps time accurately, and is stylish), does not motivate me unless I already want or desire a watch in some respect (perhaps desiring to amend my chronically tardy life, or desiring to signal my flawless taste to my peers). Likewise, just knowing that it is good for the spider to eat the fly does not, of itself, give me a reason to care whether the spider actually gets the fly, nor does the bare knowledge that this spider is an ideal specimen of its species provide me a motive for any particular action. In a similar way, a speculative account of human nature, including what makes a human a good human, does not move me to act unless I somehow desire to be a “good human,” and a speculative account of what constitute good human acts cannot motivate me to perform such acts unless I already desire to perform good human acts as such, that is, unless I desire to be virtuous. As Peter Geach himself readily concedes, “it ought to be clear that calling a thing a good A does not influence choice unless the one who is choosing happens to want an A.”6 Knowledge must touch desire before it can give rise to act, for an apprehension moves only through an appetite. If my apprehension of some thing is to move me to act, I must experience a desire for that sort of thing. I must care about that sort of thing. Marshal whatever facts you like, but until those facts touch on a desire that I experience, those facts will not constitute, for me, a motive for action. Hence the sort of apprehension of good that moves an agent to act is not a purely speculative apprehension of good, but the good insofar as it actually corresponds to a value of the one it motivates and insofar as it thus touches a prior desire. This first distinction maps directly to a second fundamental distinction: namely, between an observed desire and an experienced desire.7 I (1956): 33–42, for an early use of descriptive good as a defense against ethical non-naturalism, e.g., 34: “‘Good’ like ‘bad’ is essentially an attributive adjective. . . . There is no such thing as being just good or bad, there is only being a good or bad so-and-so.” As McInerny later explained the point, “the only way we can figure out what is meant by calling someone a good philosopher is to go into what it is to be a philosopher” (Ethica Thomistica, 51). 6 Geach, “Good and Evil,” 37. Thus Geach himself accepted the fact–value gap, even as he sought a way around it to defend naturalism. This admission from Geach ought, I think, to be an embarrassment to McInerny, who summarizes the fact– value gap (“there is a gap between fact and value that cannot be closed by citing facts about the valued thing”) and ridiculed those who accept such a gap (“alas we know we are doing philosophy when we find ourselves in such a Wonderland as this”), while on the same page appealing to this very essay of Geach’s for “an effective countering of this dogma” (Ethica Thomistica, 50). 7 If this distinction should stand, it constitutes a rather serious challenge to Jensen, On Value and Obligation in Practical Reason 535 can observe the behavior of an organism and come to understand that it has particular, natural inclinations which move it to act for the sake of various ends. But such observation of inclinations is altogether different from actually experiencing desires for those ends. Observation of desire is apprehensive and belongs to the intellect; experience of desire is rooted in appetite. To experience a desire for a thing is ipso facto to care about it, and that, rather than mere observation of desire, is what allows it to serve as a motive for acting. To observe that something desires water is not the same as being thirsty; even to observe that one’s own nature “desires” water does not necessarily guarantee that one actually wants to drink. This is why both contraception and periodic continence are intelligible: the agents experience a desire for acts per se apt for procreation, and they recognize that this act, which they explicitly desire, is in fact ordered by their biology to a further end which they do not explicitly desire. Thus, although they observe a desire (in the sense of recognizing a teleological order) to reproduce, they do not experience a desire for that end considered in itself. The apprehension of good that corresponds to experienced desire is what can motivate an agent. This is the sort of good that is relevant in the fact–value gap: no set of factual propositions can move me to act without there being some experienced desire that those facts somehow bear upon. Just as no facts about a watch make me want a watch unless those facts are brought into relation with some desire that I actually experience, so neither can speculative facts about my nature and its teleology move me to pursue an object unless they are brought to bear on a desire that I experience.8 Such observations fit perfectly with a number of things that Aquinas says about the practical intellect. Aquinas holds that “that for which there is an appetite, namely the desirable, is the principle of the practical intellect,”9 and he holds that the activity of prudence (which perfects practical reason10) always presupposes some appetite for the end: “Prudence who argues that we learn what is good for us by observing our natural inclinations, in the same way that we learn the natural inclinations, ends, and goods of other things by observing the teleology implicit in their behavior (Knowing the Natural Law, 79–80). 8 One may object that the first case differs from the latter in that there is no natural inclination to own a watch, whereas there are natural inclinations to those things that make one a good human. But that some desires are natural and inescapable, while certainly important to a complete theory of natural law, is irrelevant to the point I am making presently—namely, that speculative knowledge cannot move an agent to act without being joined to an experienced desire. 9 In III de an., lec. 15, no. 4. 10 Summa theologiae [ST] II-II, q. 47, a. 2, corp. 536 William Matthew Diem presupposes the moral virtues, by means of which the appetitive faculty is directed towards good.”11 We do not even deliberate about how to attain an end unless we first will that end.12 Thus practical reason as it is informed by prudence, whose function is to arrange the means to the end, presupposes an actual appetite for the end, whereas, he specifically says, the speculative reason does not move us to act, because it says nothing of pursuit or flight.13 Because practical reason begins with experienced desire—because it starts with something we already care about and value—the practical intellect can directly guide the will: it shares—so to speak—a common language with the will, the language of actual, experienced desire. Its judgments about the means are always immediately and transparently related back to some end actually desired by the appetites; as Aquinas puts it, “since the desirable thing itself, which is the first thing considered by the practical intellect, moves, therefore the practical intellect is said to move, namely because its principle, which is desirable, moves,”14 or again, “if both intellect and appetition are principles with respect to one and the same movement they must, as such, share the same specific nature; since a single effect implies always a single cause of precisely that one effect.”15 That Obligation Is Not Derived from Value In distinguishing the is—ought gap from the fact—value gap, I mean to say that moral obligation can be apprehended by an agent independently of any prior apprehension of desirability, and conversely that an apprehension of a thing’s desirability does not, of itself, entail an obligation to obtain that thing. A number of philosophers have suggested that the is–ought gap can be bridged through an entailment of “ought” by “wants”;16 consider expres ST I, q. 22, a. 1, ad 3. In III de an., lec. 15, no. 4. 13 In III de an., lec. 16, no. 10; In VI eth., lec. 2 and 12; In III de an., lec. 14, nos. 19–20; In III de an., lec. 15, no. 3. Cf. ST I-II, q. 9, a. 1, ad 2. 14 In III de an., lec. 15, no. 4. 15 In III de an., lec. 15, no. 7. 16 Alastair MacIntyre, “Hume on ‘Is’ and ‘Ought,’” Philosophical Review 68 (1959): 451–68, at 462–463; Max Black, “The Gap Between ‘Is’ and ‘Should,’” Philosophical Review 73 (1964): 165–81. See also G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33 (1958): 1–19, at 5, 7, 15, and 18, and Geach, “Good and Evil,” 39: “By what logical step can we pass from the supposedly descriptive sentence ‘adultery is a bad human act’ to the imperative ‘you must not commit adultery’? . . . We must allow in the first place that the question, ‘Why should I’? or ‘Why shouldn’t I’? is a reasonable question, which calls for an answer, . . . and I think the only relevant answer is an appeal to something the questioner wants.” 11 12 On Value and Obligation in Practical Reason 537 sions of the sort, “if you want the job, you ought to apply (because applying is the only reliable means of getting what you want).” While “wants” may entail “ought,” the “ought” it entails is not something most people would recognize as moral obligation—instead it is an “unemphatic,” hypothetical, or prudential “ought.”17 Desiring something is, quite obviously, not the same as being obliged to get it—in fallen nature, the appetites are not necessarily well ordered. Conversely, one may recognize a thing as morally obligatory without finding it desirable in itself. It is because of this disparity between “wants” and (moral) “ought,” between value and obligation, that one can find oneself struggling to do what one full-well knows to be right—a state that is possible precisely because what is known to be right is not necessarily desired to the same degree it is known to be right.18 Indeed this disparity is what makes formal sin psychologically possible: what I want is not necessarily what I am obliged to do, and what I am obliged to do is not necessarily what I most desire. Hence, the apprehension of value and the apprehension of obligation are distinct in actual human experience. The difference between the fact–value gap and the is–ought gap has been previously noticed by Alan Gewirth: The presence of choice and purpose in action, thus gives it a structure such that, from the standpoint of the agent, “I do X for purpose E” entails “X and E are good.” Since the latter statement is a value-judgment, or at least the function of such a judgment, to this extent from the standpoint of the agent the “fact-value” gap, even if not the “is-ought” gap, is already bridged in action.19 Whether Geach’s answer is a good answer or not depends, I think, on details which, he admits with candor and modesty, he has not developed: “On many points (e.g. the relation between desire and good . . .), I certainly do not see clear” (42). 17 See Philippa Foot, “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives,” The Philosophical Review 81 (1972): 305–16; repr. in Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 157–73. 18 It is true, of course, that we frequently describe the moral norms that we recognize as our “moral values,” but this seems to me an imprecise use of the term “value.” If I believe it is morally wrong for a husband to cheat on his wife, this may justify the expression that I consider marital fidelity “a value,” but that does not imply that I am immune to temptations to infidelity, nor even that I, personally, actually desire to be faithful. What it does imply is that I would be a hypocrite to commit adultery. But such hypocrisy is not only possible but quite common among humans. 19 Alan Gewirth, “The ‘Is–Ought’ Problem Resolved,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1973–74): 34–61, at 51. 538 William Matthew Diem Gewirth here notes that deliberate activity is necessarily predicated on some value, which motivates it; as Aquinas says, no one acts but for the sake of an end that is desired.20 But the sort of value that underlies and motivates all deliberate activity is not the same as a moral obligation. Although the very fact that an agent acts demonstrates the presence of value, desire, and inclination, and while the fact of deliberation already bespeaks some consciousness of goods as goods (that is, apprehension of things as able to satisfy those desires), nonetheless the fact of action does not necessarily imply any knowledge of obligation. What we value, care about, and desire is not necessarily virtuous, let alone obligatory.21 That I desire or value something is enough for me to act for its sake, but that I have such a desire—a potential motive for deliberate action—does not entail that that desire is in any sense morally normative or that it bespeaks a moral obligation.22 One might insist that the derivation of obligation from value works if we identify value not with what we in fact desire, but with what we ought to desire; after all, in discussing the natural law Aquinas is more likely to speak of the desirable than the desired. For example, Henry Veatch first summarizes Germain Grisez with apparent approbation—“[the goods to be pursued] are objects of inclination in the sense of being things that we ought to be inclined towards, or should be inclined towards, whether we actually are or not”—before asserting in his own voice, “one may say that good or bonum is defined . . . not as that which simply is desired, but rather as that which is desirable, or ought to be desired,”23 But this does not close the gap for two reasons. First, it is not what one ought to desire but what one actually desires that provides a psychological motive of action. Thus, Aquinas explicitly uses appetibile to describe both the true good (as apprehended by right reason) and apparent good (e.g., as apprehended by the senses against the apprehension of reason). For Aquinas, “the desirable” refers not just to what we ought to desire, but includes all that we actually ST I-II, q. 1, a. 1, corp. See for example, In IV sent., lib. 4, d. 49, q. 1, a. 3, qc 1, ad 4. 22 See a parallel discussion in William Matthew Diem, “Reasons for Acting and the End of Man as Naturally Known: Reconceiving Thomistic Axiology,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 93 (2019): 723–56, esp. 723–25. 23 Henry Veatch, “Natural Law and the ‘Is’–‘Ought’ Question,” Catholic Lawyer 26 (1981): 251–65, at 262–63; see also 264. McInerny also seems to make such a move: “We ought to desire what we desire in the sense that the object of our desire ought to deserve the formality under which it is desired, viz., perfective and fulfilling” (Ethica Thomistica, 37). 20 21 On Value and Obligation in Practical Reason 539 desire, including what we desire wrongly.24 Obviously, if an agent actually desires something, then it is able to be desired, and it is therefore also able to motivate deliberate action. Secondly, the judgment of what one ought to desire—if it is to give rise to moral “ought”—must already be morally normative. So this move only pushes the problem back, failing to bridge the divide between value and obligation as it purported to. A subtler response was offered by Geach, who acknowledges the problem even as he suggests a solution: It can, I think, be shown that an action’s being a good or bad human action is of itself something that touches the agent’s desires. Although calling a thing “a good A” or “a bad A” does not of itself work upon the hearer’s desires, it may be expected to do so if the hearer happens to be choosing an A. Now what a man cannot fail to be choosing is his manner of acting; so to call a manner of acting good or bad cannot but serve to guide action. . . . Calling an action good or bad does not depend for its effect as a suasion upon any individual peculiarities of desire.25 This solution does not get us quite so far as it might at first seem to: we often act for the sake of ends beyond the act itself; action is routinely chosen only as a means to something further,26 and if we are choosing an act as a means, then in wanting a “good act,” what we cannot help but want is an effective (one might say “prudent” or “shrewd”) act—an act that will obtain the end for whose sake we are acting—which is not obviously the same as a morally good act. Of course, we can argue the further point that a truly effective act, a truly prudent act, is an act that brings us to our ultimate and most valued end—the happiness that we all necessarily desire and for whose sake we always act. With yet further argument, we might show that the truly effective act will, as it turns out, always be a morally good act. Certainly such an argument can be made (indeed Aquinas made one very much like it27), but making such an argument amounts to demonstrating In III de an., lec. 15, nos. 9–10. Geach, “Good and Evil,” 40. 26 Admittedly, in some cases the end may itself be a form of activity (e.g., those playing a game may desire the very act of playing as an end and a debater may relish the argument itself ), but even here, the end desired is usually the specific sort of act (e.g., playing the game or arguing), not acting simply. The fact we choose to act does not imply that we desire to perform good human acts as such, that is, in general. 27 ST I-II, q. 55, a. 3, corp. (“virtue implies a perfection of power; . . . every evil is a 24 25 540 William Matthew Diem to a person that, whether he realizes it or not, what he really implicitly wants above all else, what will really satisfy his deepest desires and make him truly happy, is to be virtuous. But the very fact that one must establish this by argument, the fact that one must persuade a person to desire virtue explicitly by showing that only virtue can satisfy man’s deepest desire, proves that the concept of obligation (or of moral uprightness more generally) and the concept of value are distinct: To apprehend something as obligatory or morally right is not the same as apprehending it as fulfilling an experienced desire. Showing that morally good action is—precisely in being morally good—a uniquely effective means of achieving the happiness that one cannot help but desire requires proof: It has to be shown, as Geach himself admits, for it is not immediately obvious to most agents that a truly effective act is precisely the same as a morally good act. To deny this distinction between value and obligation, to hold instead that obligations arise from a prior value, seems to me to be disastrous to the project of ethics. I have already noted that the psychological possibility of sin requires a distinction between value and obligation. As but one further example, without this distinction between “ought” and “wants,” the fourfold distinction of continent, incontinent, virtuous, and vicious collapses.28 In making such a distinction between the notions of “good” (in the sense of “desired by the agent” and therefore a possible motive of deliberate action) and “morally obligatory,” I am cutting across the grain of the contemporary dispute over “is” and “ought” in Aquinas’s natural law theory. Although there is a fierce, decades-long debate among Thomists over whether “ought” is derived from “is,”29 both camps of Thomistic natural lawyers concur in rooting our apprehension of moral “ought” directly in some prior apprehension of value or good. Those who insist that “ought” can be derived from “is” hold that we weakness”), and II-II, q. 145, a. 3, ad 3, explaining Ambrose and Cicero: “Nothing incompatible with honesty can be simply and truly useful, since it follows that it is contrary to man’s last end, which is a good in accordance with reason; although it may perhaps be useful in some respect, with regard to a particular end.” 28 See In III de an., lec., 14, nos. 22–23. 29 The principal parties to this debate are the New Natural Lawyers—John Finnis, Germain Grisez, and their numerous collaborators, including Robert George and Christopher Tollefson—who insist that practical “ought” knowledge cannot be derived from speculative “is” knowledge, and their critics: Veatch, Russell Hittinger, McInerney, Long, Jensen, and others. Although he defends a distinct theory of natural law, Martin Rhonheimer concurs with the New Natural Lawyers in maintaining a sharp distinction between practical and speculative knowledge. On Value and Obligation in Practical Reason 541 begin with a speculative understanding of human nature, of what is perfective of human nature, or of what is the telos of human nature. From this understanding of human nature in general we can, they hold, immediately grasp that those things we understand to be perfective of humans are goods and therefore, too, things that we, as humans, ought to pursue. Thus Robert George summarizes the “neo-scholastic” counterposition to New Natural Law theory: A sound natural law ethics [the critics hold] derives moral norms from methodologically antecedent knowledge of the nature of man and of man’s place in nature. According to this approach, metaphysics—in particular that branch of metaphysics that studies man—precedes ethics. . . . One discovers what one ought to do by understanding the facts about human nature.30 On the other hand, George writes that the New Natural Lawyers, who insist that there is an is–ought gap, reject [the neo-Scholastics’] approach . . . they maintain that it involves “the naturalistic fallacy” of purporting to infer moral norms from facts about human nature. Logically, a valid conclusion cannot introduce something that is not in the premises. . . . [Moral norms] cannot be derived from premises (e.g., facts about human nature) that do not include reasons for action. According to Grisez and others, natural law theory need not—and a credible natural law theory cannot—rely on this logically illicit inference from facts to norms.31 Thus, according to the New Natural Lawyers, moral norms can only be derived from premises that already contain “reasons for action”; these prior reasons for action, the New Natural Lawyers hold, are the basic human goods, which are apprehended by practical reason as self-evidently desirable. Thus, Christopher Tollefsen writes: “Practical reason . . . grasps as self-evidently desirable a number of basic goods . . . described as constitutive aspects of genuine human flourishing. . . . As grasped by practical Robert P. George, “Natural Law and Human Nature,” in Natural Law Theory: Contemporary Essays, ed. Robert George (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 31–4,1 at 32 and 33. He specifically refers to R. Hittinger, L. Weinreb, H. Veatch, R. McInerny. 31 George, “Natural Law and Human Nature,” 32–33. 30 542 William Matthew Diem reason, the basic goods give foundational reasons for action to human agents.”32 What is significant, for present purposes, is not the intermediate steps in the derivation of the first moral norms from the basic goods, but simply the fact that the first moral obligations are (according to the theory) logically derived from “self-evidently desirable,” “basic human goods,” which already present us with “foundational reasons for action,” and which we cannot help but care about. Thus, John Finnis notes that a deduction of “ought” requires advertence to some “desire or interest of the agent’s that might be satisfied by acting rightly,”33 and George notes that, “to conclude to specific moral norms, . . . one’s premises must include reasons for action that are more fundamental than those norms.”34 “We cannot,” he says, “deduce or infer reasons for action from premises that do not include reasons for action. We cannot deduce or infer basic reasons for action from anything.”35 Thus both schools root our apprehension of obligation immediately in a prior apprehension of value or good, in the sense of a potential motive or “reason for action.” This shared commitment is seen most readily in the conflation of the fact–value gap and the is–ought gap; as we already noted, it is commonly presumed that deducing values from facts is equivalent to deducing moral norms from facts—although the parties differ insofar as one accepts such deduction as foundational to ethics and the other rejects it as fallacious. Consider, for example, Long’s retort to Finnis’s insistence that there is an is–ought gap: “If nature is ordered hierarchically toward certain ends, . . . then knowledge of these natural ends will itself contain implicit reasons for action.”36 Or again, consider McInerny’s puzzling assertion that “merely factual desire, such Christopher Tollefson, “The New Natural Law Theory,” Lyceum 10 (2008): 1–17, at 2. 33 Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 40–41. 34 George, “Natural Law and Human Nature,” 41n20. 35 George, “Natural Law and Human Nature,” 38. 36 Steven A. Long, “Through the Analytic Looking Glass,” The Thomist 65 (2001): 259–300, at 268. While one must note that he is merely responding to the objection as formulated by Finnis, my point remains that in recent Thomistic literature moving from “is” to “ought” is routinely understood as equivalent to moving from facts to reasons or motives for acting. I should add that, while I concede that speculative knowledge of the good might elicit desire (or as Long elsewhere puts it, “incite” or “spark” [Teleological Grammar, 73, 75]), still, I insist, first, that eliciting is different from entailing and, second, that desire is different from “ought.” One might locate an antecedent to Long in Geach, “Good and Evil,” 42: “I have argued that the characteristic of being a good or bad human action is of itself bound to influence the agent's desire.” 32 On Value and Obligation in Practical Reason 543 as is required for the Humean problem, does not exist”37 (although Hume’s problem says not a word about desire). This shared presumption is also made clear by their unanimous teaching that a moral obligation is a necessary means to a necessary end (where “necessary end” names something inescapably desired by the agent, e.g., happiness, flourishing, or “integral human fulfillment”).38 This shared assumption is quite natural for at least two reasons. The first is that (as McInerny rightly notes39) the locus classicus of the Thomistic natural law tradition—Summa theologiae [ST] I-II, q. 94, a. 2—essentially enshrines the implication of “ought” by “wants” in the first principle of practical reason and then derives the first “precepts” of the natural law immediately from our natural inclinations to various goods: The first principle of practical reason is . . . “good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided.” . . . 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, and their contraries as evil, and objects of avoidance . . . Wherefore according to the order of natural inclinations, is the order of the precepts of the natural law.40 By identifying those things to which man has a natural inclination we can immediately conclude that those things “are to be pursued,” and the arti McInerny, Ethica Thomistica, 38. Thus Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 45–46: “Aquinas . . . treats obligation as the rational necessity of some means to . . . an end or objective (i.e., a good) of a particular sort. What sort? Primarily . . . the good of a form of life which . . . renders one a fitting subject for a friendship of the being whose friendship is a basic good that in its full realization embraces all aspects of human well-being, a friendship indispensable for every person.” For a recent example of this teaching in neo-Scholastic Thomists, see Jensen, Knowing the Natural Law, 167–74; true, Jensen explicitly denies that the hypothetical “ought” is “derived from the desires of the individual,” but he also holds that “since everyone wants some of the goods of nature, nature can impose a universal hypothetical necessity” (173; emphasis mine). This explanation of obligation has a history; it can be found in, e.g.: Austin Fagothey, Right and Reason, 2nd ed. (Charlotte, NC: TAN Books, 2000), 198–201; Michael Cronin, The Science of Ethics, vol. 1, General Ethics (Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, 1909), 218–19; and Luigi Taparelli, Saggio Teoretico di Drito Naturale Appoggiato sul Fatto, 2nd ed. (Livorno: Vincenzo Mansi, 1851), 91–92. 39 McInerny, Ethica Thomistica, 38. 40 Translation of the Summa theologiae that of the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, second revised edition, 1920. 37 38 544 William Matthew Diem cle appears to identify this judgment with the first moral precepts of the natural law.41 The second reason is that Aquinas says, quite explicitly and on multiple occasions, that the necessity which moral obligation places on the will is the necessity of the end—that is, the hypothetical necessity of willing some means in order to attain some end. Thus he writes: “The other [kind of necessity, the sort that is compatible with voluntariness] arises from the obligation of a ‘command,’ or from the necessity of obtaining an end, when, to wit, a man is unable to achieve the end of virtue without doing some particular thing.”42 And, he explains the power of conscience to bind the will by appeal to the necessity of the end: The other necessity is conditional, on the presupposition, that is, of an end to be attained. In this way, necessity is so imposed on one that, if he does not do a certain thing, he will not receive his reward. . . . [This sort of necessity] can be imposed on the will, so that one must, for example, choose this means if he is to acquire this good, or avoid this evil.43 Hence Aquinas seems to identify moral obligation with the hypothetical necessity derived from our desire for an end, and so the two schools of natural law theorists seem to be well justified in their common teaching that the binding power of obligation is derived from value. We will return to these texts below, but note, for the moment, that these accounts, as different as they are, universally concur in asserting that some apprehension of the agent’s good immediately underlies every apprehension of obligation: we apprehend obligation only because we first apprehended our good as humans. Both sides in the debate take it for granted that obligations are reasons for acting derived from prior a apprehension of what is good and desirable to human agents. The principal difference between the two schools, which gives rise to the dispute, is how they hold that we come to apprehend our goods in the first place: do we deduce them from speculative knowledge of human nature or does practical reason itself simply apprehend them as self-evidently desirable? But if my contention is correct, then this shared point of departure I have elsewhere argued that Aquinas is not, in fact, speaking of the natural law as a moral law here. See William Matthew Diem, “The Analogy of Natural Law: Aquinas on First Precepts,” The Heythrop Journal, forthcoming. 42 ST II-II, q. 58, a. 3, ad 2. Cf. ST I, q. 19, a. 3, corp.; I, q. 82, a. 1. 43 De veritate, q. 17, a. 3, corp.; cf. ST I-II, q. 99, a. 5, corp. 41 On Value and Obligation in Practical Reason 545 must be mistaken, for it conflates value and obligation and treats the is– ought gap as the fact–value gap. I, however, insist that obligation is apprehended independently of any consideration of the agent’s good or end or desire. Thus, for example, the question whether I morally ought or ought not to kidnap and vivisect strangers for the thrill of the experience can be answered without ever considering whether such behavior is good for me or fulfills one of my desires or is conducive to my perfection; such questions are utterly irrelevant to determining its moral rightness.44 Whether an act will satisfy some desire of mine—fulfilling me, and bringing me closer to happiness—will be important in determining whether it is possible for me to choose that act, but that is a distinct, second question, and that second question need not be answered before I can determine whether the act is morally right or wrong in the first place.45 I need not suspend my moral judgment of such heinous acts until I have determined their likelihood of making me happy. The only good one must consider to judge such an act of wanton torture simply wrong is—I insist—the good of the potential victim.46 New Natural Lawyers may retort that, on their account, the goods in question are not specifically my goods, but are general human goods that remain good regardless of who possesses each instance of each good. My reply to this is twofold: First, only my goods—those things for which I have some appetite, inclination, or desire—move me to act. Other persons’ goods, considered as such, do not constitute self-evident reasons for me to act (altruistic behavior is possible when, through love, we identify with the other and therefore come to view and desire the good of the other as our own); The good of another, as such, does not necessarily correspond to any desire I experience. Second, if we consider the quotation from Finnis in note 38 above, it is clear that the good in question is “indispensable” to each agent precisely insofar as it is a good of the individual agent. The point is also clear in Natural Law and Natural Rights, 40–41, quoted in note 4 above. 45 This emphasis on my desires is not to exclude or ignore common goods. While one may have a natural desire for common goods, such goods are motives for me to act only to the extent that I actually have some desire or inclination to them. For example, friendship may move me to seek the other’s good for the other’s sake, but I am so moved only if I already have a desire and inclination for friendship. 46 Determining what, specifically, is good or bad for the other may depend on my knowledge of what is good for me (I do not want to be vivisected, and therefore, in the absence of a relevant distinction between us, it is probably harmful for other humans to be vivisected). In this limited and specific respect my good and my desires may end up being relevant to answering the question of what is right or wrong for me to do. My point, however, survives this concession: I do not need to consider whether vivisecting (actively) will or will not be an effective means to achieving my eudaemonia or fulfillment or happiness to determine whether I ought or ought not vivisect another. Consideration of my good, as such, is not relevant; it is relevant only to the extent that it gives me an insight into the other’s good. 44 546 William Matthew Diem Obligation and Value in Aquinas’s Account of Practical Reason Thus far I have argued, first, that value—such as can serve as a motive for action—cannot be derived from speculative knowledge of fact, and second, that such value is, in principle, distinct from obligation. Although I have suggested along the way that Aquinas concurs with these contentions, we must now consider Aquinas’s treatment of value and obligation in practical reason more systematically. When we turn to Aquinas's treatment of practical reason, we encounter an apparent circle. On the one hand, Aquinas frequently insists that practical reason takes its first principles from the appetites, while on the other hand, he insists just as frequently that the rectitude of the appetites consists in their being conformed to right reason. Thus, the practical intellect seems both to follow and to lead the appetites. For example, he holds that practical intellect follows appetite because the end desired by the appetites stands to the practical intellect as speculative principles stand to the speculative intellect. This is why prudence—or “right reason about things to be done,”47 which perfects the practical intellect—presupposes the other moral virtues, which perfect the appetites.48 It is equally why false prudence (as found, for example, in a “good robber”) is possible: true prudence presupposes the uprightness of desire effected by the other moral virtues, particularly justice.49 This is also the crux of his distinction between prudence and art: prudence presupposes the actual desire for the end, whereas art merely includes knowledge of how to bring about an end without regard for whether that end is desired; thus the one who willingly “sins” against his art more fully possesses the habit of his art than the one who inadvertently sins against his art, though it is the opposite with prudence.50 Hence, practical reason as informed by prudence presupposes appetite. But, showing that reason leads the appetites, he writes, “the end concerns the moral virtues, not as though they appointed the end, but because they tend to the end which is appointed by natural reason,”51 and again, “the proper end of each moral virtue consists precisely in conformity with right reason.”52 ST I-II, q. 57, a. 4, corp. ST I-II, q. 65, a. 1, corp. See also ST I-II, q. 57, a. 4, corp. 49 ST II-II, q. 47, a. 13, esp. ad 2. See also, ST I-II, q. 57, a. 3, ad 2. 50 ST I-II, q. 57, a. 4, corp. See also I-II, q. 57, a. 3, corp., ad 2 and ad 3, and De veritate, q. 2, a. 8, corp. 51 ST II-II, q. 47, a. 6, ad 3 (Emphasis mine). 52 ST II-II, q. 47, a. 7, corp. 47 48 On Value and Obligation in Practical Reason 547 So we are left with a question: Does practical reason lead the appetites or does it follow the appetites? Does practical reason take the ends from the appetites, or does practical reason appoint the ends to the appetites? The apparent circularity, but also the beginning of its resolution, can be seen nicely when he writes that, “reason, as apprehending the end, precedes the appetite for the end: but appetite for the end precedes the reason, as arguing about the choice of the means, which is the concern of prudence.”53 The solution that the text suggests is that there are two different functions of reason in guiding action. The first is in apprehending the end, the second is in arranging the means to that end (which, he says here and elsewhere, is the work of prudence). The intellect’s act of apprehending the end is prior to appetite, but its act of arranging the means to that end follows the appetite for the end. The reason which “appoints the end” to the appetites is, Aquinas explicitly says, synderesis, not prudence: “Natural reason known by the name of ‘synderesis’ appoints the end to moral virtues, . . . but prudence does not do this.”54 Synderesis is the intellectual habit that apprehends the first moral precepts, the first norms of the natural law,55 which norms conscience then applies to individual acts.56 And as we just saw, synderesis appoints the end to the appetites, while prudence presupposes the end desired by the appetites.57 Hence we have two practical functions of reason. One precedes appetite, begins in synderesis, first apprehends moral law, and determines the end of the moral virtues. This is the “right reason” that is the measure of moral good and in comparison to which we determine what is virtuous; this is the practical reasoning whose final judgment is conscience. The other sort of practical reasoning follows appetite, takes the ends desired by the appetites as its principles, and arranges the means to those desired ends, and this is the practical reasoning that is informed by prudence. We can also see this distinction drawn when Aquinas asserts that there are two different sets of principles operative in practical reason—universal and particular—and that only the latter of these is subject to error. ST I-II, q. 58, a. 5, ad 1. He makes a similar point in I-II, q. 19, a. 3, ad 2. ST II-II, q. 47, a. 6, ad 1. But compare this with I-II, q. 66, a. 3, ad 3, where he seems to say otherwise. Though I am here distinguishing two functions of practical reason, as I will note below, in practice, the two functions are closely bound together. 55 De veritate, q. 16, a. 1, corp. 56 De veritate, q. 17, a. 1, ad 1. 57 ST II-II, q. 47, a. 6, ad 1, ad 3. 53 54 548 William Matthew Diem As to universal principles of action, man is rightly disposed by the natural understanding of principles, whereby he understands that he should do no evil. . . . Consequently, as by the habit of natural understanding, . . . man is made to be rightly disposed in regard to the universal principles of action; so, in order that he be rightly disposed with regard to the particular principles of action, viz. the ends, he needs to be perfected by certain habits, whereby it becomes connatural, as it were, to man to judge aright to the end. This is done by moral virtue.58 The universal principles appear to be normative (e.g., “that one should do no evil”), and they are grasped by “natural understanding of principles” (which, I believe, must refer to synderesis). The particular principles of practical reason are the ends themselves that are actually desired by the appetites informed by the moral virtues. Elsewhere he is perfectly clear that, on the one hand, the actually desired ends (the principles of practical reason as it follows appetite and arranges the means to the end) can be evil in those who lack the moral virtues (giving rise to false prudence), while on the other hand, he is equally clear that synderesis (which provides the first principles to practical reason preceding and ruling appetite) is immune from error.59 Thus, we clearly find in Aquinas two distinct functions of “practical reason,” each with its own first principles. The distinction between these two functions of practical reason corresponds perfectly with the distinction I previously drew between value and obligation: The practical reason that leads appetite treats obligation, while the practical reason that follows appetite treats value. Synderesis provides conscience its first moral principles, its most fundamental and general obligations or “ought” statements; it provides us—Aquinas says explicitly— with our first apprehension of the precepts of the natural law whereby we distinguish right from wrong. But that practical reasoning is distinct from the practical reasoning that begins with an object desired by the appetites and arranges the means to it. The practical reason that determines what one (morally) “ought” to do and the practical reason that determines how one (prudentially or shrewdly) “ought” to act in order to achieve what one desires are distinct and discrete. In other words, for Aquinas, moral “ought” (apprehended by synderesis and applied by conscience) and 58 59 ST I-II, q. 58, a. 5, corp. Quodlibet XII, a. 3, corp.; De veritate, q. 16, a. 2, corp.; q. 16, a. 1. Cf.: ST I, q. 79, a. 12, corp.; De malo, q. 3, a. 12, ad 13; q. 16, a. 6, ad sc 6; In II sent., d. 24, q. 2, a. 4, ad 3. On Value and Obligation in Practical Reason 549 prudential or hypothetical “ought”—which tells us how to attain what we desire—are distinct.60 But if obligation and value are distinct and if one can know what one morally ought to do independently of any desire to do it, how can knowledge of obligation guide action? If obligation is not itself a motive for action, how can knowledge of what one ought to do ever provide a reason, let alone an overriding reason, for acting morally? Knowledge of obligation can become a motive for action because man has a natural desire to live reasonably, that is, virtuously. Hence Aquinas notes: “There is in the will a natural appetite for good in accordance with reason. . . . It is therefore evident that all virtues are in us by nature, according to aptitude and inchoation, but not according to perfection,”61 and elsewhere, “there is in every man a natural inclination to act according to reason: and this is to act according to virtue.”62 This inclination is manifested in the phenomenon we call in English the “pangs of conscience” or in what Aquinas calls the “worm of conscience”:63 we experience knowledge of guilt as painful because guilt frustrates a natural desire, namely, the natural desire to live according to reason. Thus, conformity to the dictates of right reason (i.e., to the judgments of conscience) is itself apprehended as desirable (in the sense of being an object of experienced desire and thus having what it takes to motivate deliberate activity). Obeying the judgments of conscience fulfills man’s natural desire to live according to reason, and therefore it can always be taken sub specie boni and become a value that moves the will. The reason we are tempted to identify the is–ought gap and the fact– value gap is that there is a clear and close relationship between these two functions of practical reason. Knowing what I morally ought to do is irrelevant trivia if it cannot move me to act. The whole point of obligation is to direct our voluntary actions, so the suggestion that obligations do For the difficulties in determining the relationship between conscience and prudence, see Pius Mary Noonan, “Auriga et Genetrix: le rôle de la prudence dans le jugement de la conscience,” Revue thomiste 114 (2014): 355–77, 531–68. 61 ST I-II, q. 63, a. 1, corp. The same point is often repeated: e.g., De veritate, q. 16, a. 1, ad 9; ST II-II, q. 47, a. 7, corp.; a. 6, corp. 62 ST I-II, q. 94, a. 3; Remember the general principle from the prior article: “Since, however, good has the nature of an end, and evil, the nature of a contrary, 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, and their contraries as evil, and objects of avoidance.” 63 In IV sent., d. 15, q. 1, a. 3, qc 5, corp.; ST Suppl., q. 67, a. 2. I am aware that this is an analogous use of “conscience,” but I am concerned with the thing not the word. 60 550 William Matthew Diem not of themselves serve as motives of action seems too absurd to merit consideration. But although there is a close relation between them—such that what is judged right by reason is ipso facto also the object of a natural desire—the question of what reason has determined is to be done and the question of whether what is to be done is somehow desirable remain, in principle, distinct. We do not grasp that an act is obligatory because we first grasp that it is somehow desirable. Rather, what reason judges is to be done is also grasped as desirable precisely because it is uniquely reasonable—that is, because reason has determined that it is, unqualifiedly, to be done. We can see this in Aquinas’s treatment of the upright (honestas), which he holds is the same as the virtuous.64 He argues that everything upright is both naturally pleasurable to man65 and naturally desired by man, precisely because the upright is conveniens rationi.66 It is precisely in the logical order that it posits between the apprehension of obligation and the awareness of a relevant natural desire that the theory I am espousing is distinct from the interpretations of natural law I earlier criticized. I hold that we first apprehend what is right and only then do we naturally recognize that what is right is by that fact also desirable. The theories I earlier rejected hold that our apprehension of obligation follows from our prior apprehension of goodness and desirability: we first apprehend a good (as desirable) and from that apprehension we somehow derive an obligation. But I insist that I do not need to consult my desires or my teleology to determine what I am obliged to do or not do.67 The recognition that doing what I am obliged to do satisfies a particularly important natural desire is a logically discrete step that follows on my recognition that the act is obligatory in the first place; the desire does not constitute that obligation as obligatory, it follows on my apprehension of the act as obligatory. Not only can I desire something without being obligated to get it, but I can also be obligated to do something that I do not naturally find desirable considered aside from its being obligatory, reasonable, and virtuous, just as the useful is not necessarily pleasant in itself, aside from its being useful.68 What I have proposed is consistent with how Aquinas describes conscience’s power to bind us in De veritate. After asking whether ST II-II, q. 145, aa. 1–3. ST II-II, q. 145, a. 3, corp. 66 ST II-II, 145, a. 3, ad 1; a. 2, ad 1. 67 Of course, my (natural) desires may be an important source of content, as is clear from the “golden rule.” See note 46 above. 68 In IV sent., d. 49, q. 1, a. 1, qc 4, ad 4; ST II-II, q. 145, a. 3. 64 65 On Value and Obligation in Practical Reason 551 conscience binds, he replies, yes, it binds us: by making us aware of the precept of a ruler, it imposes on the will a necessity from without and so compels us to choose what we do not desire; nonetheless, it binds us only by stipulating a condition for achieving good and avoiding evil.69 Here we find both sides of the problem: we are bound by a lawgiver to do what we do not otherwise wish to do, but the will can only be bound in a conditional or hypothetical sort of way—hence it remains free. On the condition of obtaining what specific end is the will thus bound? What is the good that can only be obtained through obedience to conscience and conformity to law? Moral obligation, he explicitly says elsewhere, binds the will insofar as “a man is unable to achieve the end of virtue without doing some particular thing.” 70 But virtue is nothing else than living in conformity with right reason. We desire to live reasonably, and this desire can only be fulfilled by doing what “reason dictates . . . must be done,” 71 that is, by obeying conscience. Virtue, he quite explicitly says, is natural to us not insofar as man is naturally inclined to each virtuous act, but insofar as man has a general, natural inclination to live according to reason.72 Indeed, Aquinas notes that the first order to which the human will is subject is the order of his own reason, an order that is enforced through the pangs of conscience.73 Our conscience troubles us because we violated the judgment of reason in doing what we knew was wrong; we do not know that something is wrong because we first anticipated that our conscience would trouble us if we were to do it. Thus the link between the two roles of “practical intellect” is found in the rational appetite. One function of the practical intellect guides the will; in apprehending and applying moral norms, it establishes the conditions of fulfilling our natural appetite for living according to reason. The other function of the practical intellect arranges the means to the end desired by the will.74 The intellect apprehends moral norms (initially De veritate, q. 17, a. 3, corp. ST II-II, q. 58, a. 3, ad 2 (emphasis mine). Cf. ST I-II, q. 99, a. 5, corp. 71 ST I-II, q. 99, a. 5, corp. 72 ST I-II, q. 94, a. 3, corp.: “If we speak of virtuous acts, considered in themselves, i.e. in their proper species, thus not all virtuous acts are prescribed by the natural law: for many things are done virtuously, to which nature does not incline at first; but which, through the inquiry of reason, have been found by men to be conducive to well-living.” 73 ST I-II, q. 87, a. 1, corp. 74 Though even here the intellect is guiding the will, although with respect to the means rather than the end. Hence, there is in fact a constant interplay between intellect and will. 69 70 552 William Matthew Diem though synderesis) and, applying these norms, determines which specific acts are and which are not in conformity with right reason (through conscience). Because we have a natural inclination to live according to reason, that which conscience has determined is to be done ipso facto also acquires the speciem boni, so that it can be willed. Of course, this inclination to live according to reason is only one of many natural inclinations,75 and there are many particular things that reason demands of us that we do not naturally desire in themselves.76 It is therefore possible for us to face a moral struggle—to find ourselves torn between competing goods—and even to sin by willfully violating conscience.77 In either case, one can then will to deliberate, making use of reason to arrange the means to the end willed—this is the realm of prudence. Synderesis thus leads prudence,78 but only through the mediation of right appetite. From Speculative to Practical If “practical reason” does not only extend to some one and unified process of reasoning, if instead, there are at least two essentially disparate processes of reasoning that Aquinas labels “practical”—one that precedes and guides the appetite for the end by appointing the end of the moral virtues, and another that follows and is led by the appetite for the end, taking as its principles the ends actually desired by the appetites, and arranging the means to those ends—and if, moreover, each has its own first principles, then the famous Thomistic disputes over the is–ought problem have their origin in a fundamental confusion. Once our distinctions have been drawn, the is–ought problem loses its moment. The reason the is–ought problem was a problem for Thomists was that, as I showed above, we expected our answer to the is–ought gap equally to bridge the fact–value gap. We expected moral norms to touch desire and immediately provide the will with reasons for acting. Our search was destined to fail: if value is in principle distinct from obligation, then there can be no one thing that explains, with equal immediacy, both our recognition of obligation and our apprehension of value. We expected our apprehension of obligation to provide our will with a decisive reason to In III de an., lec. 15, no. 10, where he distinguishes the appetible into apparent good and true good based on whether the appetible is good in the judgment of reason or good only on account of an appetite or phantasm against the judgment of reason. 76 ST I-II, q. 94, a. 3, corp. 77 De veritate, q. 17, a. 1, ad 4. 78 ST II-II, q. 47, a. 6, ad 3. 75 On Value and Obligation in Practical Reason 553 do what is right, when in fact moral obligation is only decisive to the intellect. Indeed, this disparity is the heart of sin and fault: formal sin, violation of conscience, is precisely the refusal of the will to do what the intellect has judge absolutely and unqualifiedly to be done.79 Sin is nothing else than the will’s nolo to intellect’s debeo. To conflate value and obligation is to destroy the notion of sin. But, if value and obligation are two discrete concepts, treated by two fundamentally different intellectual processes, starting from two radically different sets of principles, then the famous difficulties evaporate.80 Once we have made this distinction, what follows is that there is no need to deny that a speculative apprehension can immediately give rise to an apprehension of moral norms: moral norms are not value statements, and so the gap between fact and value need not be overcome in deriving moral norms. Moral norms do not immediately and of themselves provide a motive to the will, neither do they immediately, of themselves touch desire or inclination. And if synderesis need not bridge the fact–value gap in discovering the first moral norms, then it is free to derive “ought” from speculative apprehension. The specific class of apprehensions I have in mind are those that pertain to owing something to someone. As an example,81 the concept of vowing seems to me a speculative notion, and understanding what a vow is appears to me to be manifestly a work of the speculative intellect. At the same time, whether someone, in fact, made a vow or not is straightforwardly Jensen, following Foot, notes this disparity, though he, like early Foot, takes it as a sign of the incoherence of the notion of “moral ought” (Knowing the Natural Law, 151 and 174). 80 Making this distinction is not attacking a straw man. A recent example of this confusion can be seen in Jensen, Knowing the Natural Law, 126–49 (ch. 7), esp. 144, where he takes prudence as essentially exhaustive of practical reason and therefore as the way we come to know obligation. (In light of this, we should hardly be surprised that Jensen concludes that all “ought” statements are hypothetical, unemphatic, or prudential; if we assume that prudence is coextensive with practical reason and that therefore “ought” statements arise from prudence, then naturally we will find only prudential instances of “ought.”) The problem in this approach is that prudence is a function of the practical reason that follows appetite, not the practical reason that guides appetite through apprehension of natural law. In here criticizing Jensen on this point, I equally criticize myself: in my review of Jensen, I followed him in this move; see my review Knowing the Natural Law in Studies in Christian Ethics 29 (2016): 356–59. 81 What follows is inspired by John Searle, “How to Derive Ought from Is,” The Philosophical Review 73 (1964): 43–58, at 44. While inspired by his work, I do not mean to endorse all that Searle has said on this issue. 79 554 William Matthew Diem a question of fact. But, on the other hand, that speculative concept of vowing is meaningless if it does not include the idea of placing oneself under an obligation or, equivalently, of placing oneself in a relationship of owing something to another. If such concepts as obligation and owing are removed from the concept of vowing, then nothing is left in the notion of vowing. Similarly, if one owes something to another, one ought, so far as reason is concerned, to render it to him. The result is that a person who does not understand that (all things being equal) one ought to fulfill one’s vows does not understand what a vow is.82 Of course, knowing what a vow is and knowing that one ought to do what one has vowed do not imply that one wants to fulfill his vows, precisely because the notion of obligation does not of itself imply desire. As another example, consider property. The concept of property, just in itself, seems to me a speculative concept, while holding title to some property is, in principle, a matter of fact. But it is a matter of fact that immediately entails that others have certain duties (not, for example, to interfere with the owner’s use of his property, absent some compelling justification).83 Owning something is meaningless if it does not entail some rights over against other agents with respect to the thing owned. I do not mean to dismiss the complexity of these topics. One may entertain perfectly sound questions about what matters of fact establish a title Of course, one may deny that there are such things as vows, i.e., communicative acts that place the speaker under an obligation; this amounts to rejecting the institution of vowing (see Charles Pigden, “Hume on Is and Ought: Logic, Promises and the Duke of Wellington,” in The Oxford Handbook of Hume, ed. Paul Russell [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016], 401–15, for a summary of these issues). And such a one may even persist in speaking of “vows” in a purely descriptive sense while explicitly denying that they impose any obligation on a person. But such a person is really denying the intelligibility of vowing as a concept. That person’s attitude is precisely to insist that the notion of vowing is incoherent. This is what I mean by saying the person does not understand the term. And although he might well be able to use the word competently, he may also choose to surround it with scare quotes to make clear that he rejects the intelligibility of the concept that the word is meant to express: it is to him a mere label, and he doesn’t actually believe that the person has made a vow. As an analogous example, one might deny the intelligibility of the institution of slavery—holding that it is simply incoherent to believe that a person actually can really be mere property—and yet be able to use the word competently in light of a legal and social institution. 83 See the discussion of speculatively practical knowledge in Reginald 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 with notes, Nova et Vetera (English) 17 (2019): 245–70, at 266–69. 82 On Value and Obligation in Practical Reason 555 to some property, and the answers to such questions may be complicated, contingent, and culturally conditioned. The point, however, is that once we acknowledge that there is such a thing as real, honest-to-God ownership of property, rather than a mere social convention, we can immediately conclude that, in whatever cases that relation of ownership applies (which is, in principle, a question of fact), something is owed to the owner, and what follows from such owing is that (ceteris paribus) it would be unreasonable not to render what is owed him. The point is a tautology: we owe to others what is their own. It is worth noting, here, that if we expand the notion of property to include not just chattels but anything that a person can call his own in some meaningful and objective sense, and if we expand the corresponding notion of owning to the notion of dominium, then we can quickly account for the vast majority of traditional natural rights (like a person’s right to life) and indeed all the precepts of the Decalogue. In fact, I think this derivation of obligation from notions like owing or owning is precisely the reasoning behind Aquinas’s somewhat perplexing example in ST I-II q. 94, a. 4: One cannot assent to the descriptions that this is another’s property and that one holds it in trust without also recognizing that it is due to the owner and that it would be unreasonable (ceteris paribus) not to return it to him. And to recognize that this thing one has is due to the another is nothing else than to recognize that one has a duty, ceteris paribus,84 to return it to him. Most generally, this is the reason that Aquinas repeatedly offers that the first precepts of law must pertain to justice—which renders each his own. Aquinas frequently provides arguments85 that only cohere if the two meanings of debitum (debt and duty) are not distinct meanings but mutually implicative, such that debitum can be used interchangeably to indicate owing (as a debt) and ought (as a duty) without equivocation. Aquinas uses this rich notion of debitum to move immediately from what is owed to someone to what is a moral duty enjoined by law. For example, “the precepts of the decalogue are placed in the Law, as first principles, which need to be known to all from the outset. Wherefore the precepts of the decalogue had to be chiefly about those acts of justice in which the notion of duty [debiti] is manifest.”86 The notion of debitum as due treated To any who might object to the inclusion of ceteris paribus, I would note that the whole point of this article (ST I-II, q. 94, a. 4) is precisely to point out that such ceteris paribus clauses attach to all but to most general moral norms. 85 ST I-II, q. 100, a. 3, ad 3; q. 100, a. 5, ad 1; II-II, q. 140, a. 1, ad 3; q. 56, a. 2, corp.; II-II, q. 122, a. 1, corp. See also the following notes. 86 ST II-II, q. 140, a. 1, ad 3. 84 556 William Matthew Diem by justice is identical to the notion of debitum as duty expressed by law. Again, “justice, more than any other virtue, regards its object under the aspect of something due [rationem debiti], which is a necessary condition for a precept.”87 The notion of “due” that justice treats is the same “due” that is essential to the ratio of precept (i.e., duty or obligation). And again, he writes: “Justice alone, of all the virtues, implies the notion of duty [rationem debiti]. Consequently moral matters are determinable by law in so far as they belong to justice”88 Thus I believe Finnis touches but dismisses the solution to the is–ought problem in his treatment of Hugo Grotius: “Translators of [Grotius] . . . often render debiti as ‘obligatory.’ But this fails to preserve the delicate ambiguity in the thought of Grotius and his sources.”89 As I have pointed out, this equation of “due” and “duty” is not an ambiguity (at least, not in Aquinas); rather, the equivalence of the “two” meanings of debitum is crucial to his theory of law. Finnis continues: “Granted that we can discern right and wrong, due and undue, by reasoning, what makes it obligatory to choose the right and due and to avoid the wrong and undue?” I answer: simply that one who fails to see that he (morally) ought to render what he owes to another has not actually understood what it is to owe something to someone. Owing something to another is, for Aquinas, precisely what it is to be obligated. Once I have judged that I really do owe something to someone, then it becomes unreasonable, “repugnant to right reason,”90 for me to choose to withhold what I owe. To be categorically demanded by reason is all it is for a thing to be obligatory, and to be an absolute condition of acting in accord with right reason is all that is required to impose the hypothetical necessity proper to obligation on the will. That English has severed the etymological connections between “owes” and “ought” and between “due” and “duty” is, from Aquinas’s perspective, an unfortunate corruption. And we can go a step further. If obligation is entailed by such bridge concepts, factual descriptors of relations that entail owing, then we can ST II-II, q. 56, a. 1, ad 1; cf. a. 2, corp. ST I-II, q. 99, a. 5, ad 1. This must be read in the context of the corpus, where Aquinas writes, “The things that have to be done do not come under the precept except in so far as they have the character of a duty [debiti rationem]”). One may wonder how this claim—that the notion of due is essential to law and obligation— is to be reconciled with the earlier example of vowing. In answer, note that a vow is always made to someone, such that to vow is to place oneself in a relation of owing something to another. 89 Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 44. 90 ST I-II, q. 18, a. 5, ad 4; aa. 8–10. 87 88 On Value and Obligation in Practical Reason 557 see why Aquinas seems to identify synderesis, whereby we apprehend first moral principles (specifically, first moral norms), with the speculative habit of understanding. I see no reason to think that understanding the very notion of vowing or the very concept of ownership, or even the notion of owing, is not a task of the speculative intellect. Indeed, Aquinas holds that not only speculative principles but also practical (and evidently moral) principles, such as “one should do evil to no man,” belong to the “understanding which is an intellectual virtue.”91 And in a parallel passage, he says that man takes the universal principles of action from “the understanding of principles, whereby he understands that he should do no evil.”92 (Again, the habit of understanding is a habit of the speculative intellect.)93 Similarly, he justifies calling conscience “the law of understanding” by appeal to its relation to synderesis,94 and he says the judgment of conscience consists in pura cognitione and that it is made by speculando per principia.95 And of the supernatural gift of understanding (which perfects the natural, speculative habit of understanding), he says, “the gift of understanding extends also to certain actions, not as though these were its principal object, but in so far as the rule of our actions is the eternal law, to which the higher reason, which is perfected by the gift of understanding, adheres by contemplating and consulting it.”96 In short, I believe that synderesis and understanding are, if not strictly the same habit, at least distinguished by an all but inconsequential difference. That is, it seems to me that understanding takes on the label “synderesis” and becomes “practical” when it considers notions (like owing, debitum, justice, owning, or vowing) that immediately bear implications about what is reasonable or unreasonable action.97 It is through the understanding of such concepts that synderesis discovers moral law. I am free to suggest that “ought” arises in the speculative intellect in this way because I have maintained the distinction between “ought” and “wants.” If we expect obligation, of itself, to move the will, then one cannot root our apprehension of obligation in speculative knowledge. As we noted at the outset, speculative knowledge alone does not give rise to value and cannot move one to act; but if obligation and value are distinct, the fact– ST II-II, q. 49, a. 2, ad 1. ST I-II, q. 58, a. 5, corp. 93 See ST I-II, q. 57, a. 2, and In VI eth., lec. 5, no. 4. 94 De veritate, q. 17, a. 2, ad 4. 95 De veritate, q. 17, a. 1, ad 4. 96 ST II-II, q. 8, a. 3; see also a. 6. 97 See for example, Yves Simon, A Critique of Moral Knowledge, trans. Ralph McInerny (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 5–7. 91 92 558 William Matthew Diem value gap poses no problem to deriving obligations. An obligation provides the intellect with a reason to perform some act, but it does not necessarily and immediately move the will. Whether I owe something to another and whether it is good for me to give it to him are two different questions. Determining that it would be unreasonable of me not to do something is not precisely the same as recognizing that doing that thing satisfies some appetite that I experience. That I am conscious of having made a vow does not imply that I want to keep it or that I somehow see that it is advantageous to keep it or that I understand that it is perfective of me to keep it. What it does imply is that it would be, ceteris paribus, positively unreasonable of me to refuse to fulfill it, and that is all that is needed for me to find myself obliged to fulfill it. Nonetheless, doing what is reasonable always does answer to one of our natural inclinations. Speculative knowledge can move us to act, because humans do, by nature, experience a desire to live according to reason: “Since the rational soul is the proper form of man, there is in every man a natural inclination to act according to reason: and this is to act according to virtue. Consequently, considered thus, all acts of virtue are prescribed by the natural law: since each one's reason naturally dictates to him to act virtuously.”98 Man, as rational, has a natural inclination to act according to reason, and that is nothing else than to act according to virtue. So fulfilling obligation will always answer to at least one experienced desire, a preeminent desire that should, but does not necessarily, trump other desires. But again, the order is crucial: I first apprehend what is obligatory as obligatory, and, in light of that apprehension, I then also apprehend it as desirable. Indeed, it is only because I have already judged that it is absolutely to be done that I can subsequently grasp that it is of itself always good for me in being uniquely reasonable. Because our apprehension of obligation as such does not directly include the notion of what is perfective of us, this account does not jeopardize the universality of the natural law.99 The sort of speculative knowledge wherein I root the apprehension of obligation is quite plausibly universal— the concept of, for example, ownership is quite common. No knowledge of philosophical anthropology—let alone of natural theology—is required.100 ST I-II, q. 94, a. 3, corp. See for example, Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 48 and 77, where he sketches the problem. 100 I find myself in agreement with both Veatch (“Natural Law,” 258) and Finnis (“Natural Law and the ‘Is’–‘Ought’ Question: An Invitation to Professor Veatch,” Catholic Lawyer 26 [1981]: 266–77, at 270). Veatch observes: “It is no less impos98 99 On Value and Obligation in Practical Reason 559 There is, then, no danger that only philosophers can have accurate knowledge of the first precepts of the natural law. What of the logical problem that nothing can be in the conclusion that was not in its premises? This is not violated by what I am suggesting. The logical autonomy of ethics is maintained, because any syllogistic reasoning about what is right and obligatory starts with per se nota propositions that already include moral predicates. What is shared between the speculative and practical intellects in discovering obligations is only an apprehension of a concept or ratio, like the concept of vowing or the concept of property. It is prior to any syllogism—indeed, prior to any proposition—so the logical rules about what sort of conclusions can be drawn from which sorts of premises do not yet apply. In the first place we grasp general notions (like ownership or vowing), which, in turn, imply general, per se nota norms that can be viewed as conditional in structure, such as that, if someone owns something, then (all else being equal) I ought not interfere with his use of it; said otherwise, I owe it to him not to deprive him of that property. Such a norm is a bridge principle: the protasis (that someone owns something) is a question of fact, while the apostasis (that I ought not interfere with his use of it) is normative.101 Then, conscience can judge whether the descriptive protasis of this general norm is, as a matter of fact, fulfilled in this or that case and draw a normative conclusion: this person does own this thing, therefore I ought not deprive him of its use.102 sible to determine, or even to adequately state what a human being is without making reference to what he ought to be or to that natural end, fulfillment or good, which it is incumbent upon any human being, by nature, to try to be or become,” although as Finnis presses, “does not his view that a full knowledge of human nature involves a knowledge of what is ‘incumbent upon’ human beings suggest that, epistemologically, a knowledge of what is good for human beings, and thus incumbent upon them, is a condition precedent to any full knowledge of human nature[?]” Moral experience (including experience of obligation) is an important datum that precedes any adequate anthropology, not vice versa, in the same way that moral experience must be a given that is better known to us that God’s existence, if a moral proof of God is to be intelligible. 101 This conditional structure is important. I can apprehend the norm prior to knowing the particular cases in which it applies or even whether there are any such cases. Thus, an agnostic or even an atheist can know the general moral norm that if there is a personal God of the sort that classical theists confess, then he owes obedience to that God. 102 We ought, I think, distinguish two similar but distinct rational processes that we might be tempted to call “conscience.” One—which I identify with conscience properly so-called—applies the universal norms of synderesis here and now, determining that this act is or is not reasonable and must or must not be done. The other—which I reckon a work of prudence—takes the cultivation of virtue as an 560 William Matthew Diem The logical law is preserved because, by the time we begin syllogistic reasoning, we already have an “ought” (or at least something that strictly implies an “ought”) in the predicate. The transition from speculative to practical is prior to any proposition, so we are not moving from “is” to “ought.” Rather, we are moving from a speculative apprehension of an abstract concept (like ownership or vowing) to a per se nota principle that has a descriptive subject and a predicate that stipulates conditions for rational behavior (or if we maintain its conditional structure, a factual protasis and a normative apodosis). It is those per se nota bridge principles that, in turn, allow us, in an incontrovertibly valid deduction, to derive an obligation from a judgment of fact. Thus I am not denying the logical autonomy of ethics; I deny only the semantic autonomy of ethics.103 What of Aquinas’s repeated insistence that the will, as free, can only be subject to conditional or hypothetical necessity imposed by the desire for some end? This is not violated on my suggestion: what is right is by that fact categorically to be done in the judgment of the intellect, but the necessity that binds the will is only hypothetical: one must will to do what reason judges right only insofar as one desires to live according to reason. The will is not under an absolute necessity to obey conscience, because the natural desire to live according to reason is only one of many natural desires. As Aquinas notes, virtue is natural to us insofar as we have a natural desire to live reasonably, but we do not have a natural inclination to each act of virtue considered in its species.104 In sum, I suggest that we first apprehend (through the speculative habit of understanding) certain general notions that entail a relationship of owing something to someone. From such notions, we immediately grasp the truth of certain general, per se nota, moral norms (this step seems to me what Aquinas calls “synderesis,” and this is the beginning of practical reason insofar as it guides appetite). We can then take account of various facts, determining that this norm applies here and now; that is, we judge that we are, in fact, in such a relationship that involves owing something to someone (this is the work of conscience), and therefore we can recognize end intended by the agent and then determines how best to attain and guard that virtue. That the two are at least theoretically distinct can be seen in the kinds of judgments they reach: the first will reach absolute (categorical) judgments of what must or must not to be done, while the latter will make prudential (hypothetical) judgments which will often be counsels about how best and most surely to nurture virtue; see, e.g., ST I-II, q. 107, a. 2, and II-II, q. 184, a. 3. 103 For more on the distinction of the claims of logical and semantic autonomy, see Pigden, “Hume on Is and Ought.” 104 ST I-II, q. 94, a. 3, corp. On Value and Obligation in Practical Reason 561 that it would be unreasonable of us not to render what it owed. In other words, conscience judges that we ought to give it to him, that we are bound by reason to give it to him. Whatever reason determines is, without qualification, to be done is then also perceived as good for the agent insofar as we have a natural inclination to live according to reason; what reason determines is categorically to be done necessarily corresponds to an experienced desire. This natural inclination to live according to reason makes it possible for us to will to do something for no other reason than that we believe it is right or reasonable. Thus, the will can will either to obey reason (following the judgment of conscience) or to follow one of our other natural inclinations in defiance of reason (which would constitute formal sin and introduce guilt).105 Once the will has willed either to follow or to defy reason, practical reason can arrange the means to the end willed (this is the work of prudence, the practical intellect that follows appetite for the end). Hence Aquinas explains that prudence is ruled by a prior understanding of what is just and lawful,106 of what we owe to another. But prudence, which takes its principles from the appetites, can only be ruled in this way through that appetitive power which is the will. Our understanding of what is just (grasped by synderesis) guides prudence through the mediation of the rational appetite, which is the seat of the virtue of justice and which is responsive to reason’s apprehension of what is due to another.107 Sin is thus, at root, the willful and selfish refusal to render the other what reason has judged is simply owed to the other, hence Aquinas’s saying that legal justice is a general virtue and injustice is a general vice, in conformity with 1 John 3:4, “all sin is iniquity.”108 Of course, this process may fold over on itself so that these two functions of practical reason regularly end up more tightly intertwined in reality than my neat distinction might at first suggest. In actual deliberation, there is a constant interplay between the reason and will: the means we choose in order to obtain one end can themselves be taken as a more proximate end that we in turn deliberate about attaining. Further, the two functions of practical reason tend to overlap: at each step of arranging means to ends, conscience of moral norms can influence our prudential judgments because prudence can realize that some possible means of attaining one particular end would frustrate us by interfering with our attainment of Described in De veritate, q. 17, a. 1, ad 4. ST II-II, q. 57, a. 1, ad 2. 107 ST II-II, q. 58, a. 4, corp. 108 ST II-II, q. 58, a. 5, ad 3. Bear in mind that iniquitas is from in aequus, meaning literally, injustice or inequality. 105 106 562 William Matthew Diem some other end that we also desire.109 Whether I am right to place our recognition of moral norms in the speculative apprehension of concepts that entail relations of owing is, however, not the principal point.110 What is essential to this discussion is that obligation and value are discrete concepts and that, in Aquinas’s moral psychology, they are treated by different functions of practical reason: the practical reason that leads the appetite for the end (by appointing the end) and the practical reason that follows the appetite for the end (by arranging the means to the end). For this reason, obligation may be categorical to the intellect while being only hypothetical to the will. The fact of sin requires that value and obligation be distinct; it requires that what is decisive to the intellect not necessarily be decisive to the will.111 So long as we fail to distinguish obligation from value, so long as we fail to distinguish moral “ought” as perceived by the intellect from good as desired by the will, we N&V will continue to face an insoluble problem.112 This alertness to various ends is diligence or solicitude, opposed by negligence; see ST II-II, q. 54, and q. 47, a. 9. Prudence takes account of the particular, but it is not myopic: it can attend to a number of disparate, desired goods even as it arranges the means to one particular good. I am hardly prudent if in my pursuit of one good I inadvertently destroy another that I hold dear. 110 The tentative nature of my account of synderesis’s derivation of obligation from speculative understanding deserves to be stressed. I am suggesting a radical shift in our understanding of practical reason; many considerations have yet to be made, and much work—both textual and philosophical—remains to be done before we will be warranted in proposing detailed accounts with confidence. This must be left to a future work. 111 De veritate, q. 17, a. 1, ad 4. 112 I offer my thanks to R. J. Matava for his patient engagement with me on this project. 109 Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2021): 563–586 563 What Is Not Saved Is Not Assumed: Thomas Weinandy, Julian of Eclanum, and Augustine of Hippo on Whether Salvation Requires Christ’s Temptations to Sin Joshua Evans Regis University Denver, CO Toward the end of the last book he ever wrote, Augus- tine of Hippo asks a crucial question that should resonate in today’s Christological debates: “Did . . . that assumption of a human nature which made God and man one person contribute nothing to that man toward the excellence of the righteousness which you say he had from voluntary action?”1 While the question was originally put to Julian of Eclanum, Augustine’s Pelagian archenemy, the question continues to be relevant, in large part because a number of theologians today adopt the same Christological principle advanced by Julian: “A different nature could not furnish an example. . . . Remove the basis of the example, and the basis of the price which he became for us will also be removed.”2 That is, according to both Julian and a number of theologians today, if Jesus had a human nature that was importantly different from our nature, then he was not truly human and we are not truly saved. Recently, some theologians have framed the issue in a quasi-Augustinian manner by arguing that Jesus possessed fallen human nature. While there Augustine of Hippo, Contra Iulianum opus imperfectum [hereafter, Contra Iul. imp.] 4.84, in English as Unfinished Work in Answer to Julian, from Answer to the Pelagians III, trans. Roland J. Teske, S.J., The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century [WSA] I/25 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 1999), 450. 2 Quoted by Augustine in Contra Iulianum [hereafter, Contra Iul.] 5.15.57–58, in English as Against Julian, from Answer to the Pelagians II, trans. Roland J. Teske, S.J., ed. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A., WSA I/24 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 1998), 468. 1 564 Joshua Evans are certainly a number of concerns motivating this trend in Christology, the primary concern is soteriological. The guiding star here is Gregory Nazianzen’s principle, “what is not assumed is not saved.”3 As Gregory argues, “if only half Adam fell, then that which Christ assumes and saves may be half also; but if the whole of his nature fell, it must be united to the whole nature of Him that was begotten, and so be saved as a whole.”4 Those who say Jesus had a fallen human nature are concerned above all to establish that Jesus truly took on our human nature. According to this viewpoint, if Christ did not assume our fallen human nature, then we who inhabit that nature are not saved. One of today’s most notable advocates of the claim that Jesus possessed fallen human nature is Father Thomas Weinandy, who advances the following thesis: “Our salvation is unconditionally dependent upon the Son’s assuming a humanity disfigured by sin and freely acting as a son of Adam.”5 One of the major soteriological concerns of thinkers like Weinandy has to do with Jesus’s role as moral exemplar for the rest of us. Traditional Christology, which suggests Jesus had an importantly different kind of human nature from ours, leads to the following troubling questions: “How could one possibly follow an example set by God? Surely God is able to do what God does because he has powers that far exceed our own. How then could what God does as a precondition to becoming incarnate possibly be imitated by human beings?”6 The advocates of Christ’s fallen human nature seek to avoid the apparent moral divisions between Jesus and us that are built into traditional Christology. According to these advocates, if we The concept, here rephrased, comes from Gregory’s Letter to Cledonius (Letter 101): “If anyone has put his trust in Him as a Man without a human mind, he is really bereft of mind, and quite unworthy of salvation. For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, 2nd ser., vol. 7 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995), 440. 4 Gregory, Letter to Cledonius, 440. 5 Thomas Weinandy, OFM Cap., In the Likeness of Sinful Flesh: An Essay on the Humanity of Christ (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993), 18–19. Weinandy names Edward Irving, Karl Barth, and Hans Urs von Balthasar as advocates of similar views to his own (54–70). Oliver Crisp also names Irving and Barth, along with Colin Gunton, as holding similar views to Weinandy’s (Divinity and Humanity [New York: Cambridge, 2007], 90n1). While Weinandy attempts to show that much of patristic and medieval theology are on his side, Crisp rightly notes that “this is contentious” (Divinity and Humanity, 107n27). 6 Bruce McCormack, “Kenoticism in Modern Christology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Christology, ed. Francesca Aran Murphy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 445. 3 What is Not Saved is Not Assumed 565 attribute Christ’s perfect life to his divinely human personhood, then he would not be truly human and we would not be truly saved. These thinkers rightly recognize that Christology and soteriology stand or fall together. Unlike the ancient Christological debates, there is essentially unanimous agreement today that Christ assumed many elements of what we call fallen human nature: Christ clearly had the ability to undergo hunger, pain, suffering, and death, though he never committed any actual sins. What is in dispute, however, is how we account for Christ’s avoidance of personal, actual sins. Was the human nature of Jesus just like ours, so that Jesus had to actively work to avoid sins just like we do? Or, was the human nature of Jesus importantly different from ours, so that Jesus had the kind of human nature that was unable to sin? The issue of what accounts for Jesus’s ability to avoid sins is a major source of division today in debates over the character of Christ’s human nature. Oliver Crisp has helpfully identified two rival sides in the debate over how Christ was able to avoid sins: “the sinlessness view” and “the impeccability view.” The Sinless Christ is someone who “was capable of sinning, and might have sinned had he chosen to do so, although he did not choose to, and, as a matter of fact, remained sinless throughout his earthly career.” 7 The Sinless Christ shared in every aspect of our nature, but lived that nature better than we live it. The Impeccable Christ, on the other hand, is someone who “was incapable of sin” because of the confluence of human and divine natures in his one person.8 The Impeccable Christ lived better than us precisely because he is very different from us.9 As we will see, each side’s account of Christ’s avoidance of sins is a kind of test case for more general disagreements about the nature of salvation. I will be arguing in favor of the Impeccable Christ position, and my argument will focus on what I understand to be the regrettable implications of the Sinless Christ view and the promising implications of the Impeccable Christ view. To lay out the Sinless Christ position as I understand it, I will first draw on the thought of Father Weinandy. However, Oliver Crisp, God Incarnate: Explorations in Christology (New York: T & T Clark, 2009), 122. 8 Crisp, God Incarnate, 122. 9 In a later essay, Crisp frames the question a bit differently, asking whether Christ had a fallen human nature. In that essay, Crisp uses the words “sinless” and “impeccable” to describe two related viewpoints, and uses the term “sinless” to refer to the claim that Christ had an “unfallen” human nature. Crisp’s change in language is likely meant to reflect the traditional idea that “sinfulness” is expressed in the very idea of possessing a fallen human nature, not just in the claim that one has done discrete bad actions (Divinity and Humanity, 106–11). 7 566 Joshua Evans while I understand Weinandy’s thought to be one of the most important contemporary representations of the Sinless Christ position, I will not focus solely on Weinandy or solely on the contemporary debate. Part of my argument is that the positions of today’s Sinless Christ advocates are prefigured in the thought of Julian of Eclanum, in the context of his dispute with Augustine of Hippo. Julian is a strong advocate of the Sinless Christ position and shows more clearly why so many find the Sinless Christ position compelling. Furthermore, by looking at Julian and Augustine’s debate, we can see more clearly the weaknesses of the Sinless Christ position, which were laid out convincingly in Augustine’s responses to Julian. Engagement with Julian and Augustine, then, will illuminate the contemporary discussion.10 The core claim of this essay is that an Impeccable Christ Christology like Augustine’s has better moral, soteriological, and eschatological implications than the Sinless Christ view advanced by Julian and contemporary thinkers such as Weinandy. The essay is organized into three parts. First, I engage Weinandy’s thesis regarding Christ’s necessarily fallen human nature, because Weinandy offers one of the best expressions of the Sinless Christ view. In the second section I demonstrate the similarities between the contemporary Sinless Christ view and the view of Julian of Eclanum. In the final section I let Augustine offer his responses to Julian and, by extension, to the contemporary Sinless Christ view. Augustine shows us why it is good news to think that Christ has a human nature that is fundamentally better than, because importantly different from, ours. What Is Not Assumed is Not Saved The Sinless Christ model takes as its governing principle the patristic axiom that “what is not assumed is not saved.”11 The Sinless Christ model interprets this principle to mean that Christ must have shared in every aspect of our human nature except for actual sin, if Christ saves us and is our moral exemplar. Since our human nature is fallen, Christ’s human nature must also have been fallen. Weinandy’s thought is a prime example of the Sinless Christ account, and what follows is Weinandy’s thesis: “Only A peer-reviewer of this essay notes rightly that Theodore of Mopsuestia would also be a proper analogue for the contemporary Sinless Christ viewpoint. I choose to focus on Julian here, however, because of Augustine’s direct engagement with Julian’s views. Even so, Julian and Theodore have relevant commonalities: they were, in fact, housemates for a short time during Julian’s anti-Augustine writings ( James J. O’Donnell, Augustine: A New Biography [New York: Ecco, 2005], 282). 11 Weinandy names Gregory’s axiom as the inspiration for “the principle soteriological argument that [Weinandy’s] study embraces and employs” (In the Likeness, 28). 10 What is Not Saved is Not Assumed 567 if Jesus assumed a humanity at one with the fallen race of Adam could his death and Resurrection heal and save that humanity.”12 The theological issue of how to characterize Christ’s human nature is intimately bound up with Saint Paul’s claim that human beings inhabit “sinful flesh” while Jesus was “in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom 8:3; RSV). “Likeness” denotes both similarity and dissimilarity, and as Weinandy frames the issue, the alternatives are to emphasize either the similarity or dissimilarity between our human nature and Christ’s human nature. For Weinandy, the emphasis is on similarity, with “likeness” essentially denoting “correspondence or congruity” between Christ’s flesh and our sinful flesh.13 That is, Weinandy writes, “our sinful condition was made manifest and fully exposed in and through Jesus’s humanity.”14 According to Weinandy, the correspondence between Christ’s flesh and our sinful flesh is necessary to the mystery of salvation and moral transformation: “Our salvation is unconditionally dependent upon the Son’s assuming a humanity disfigured by sin and freely acting as a son of Adam.”15 In other words, “only by the eternal Son’s assumption of our humanity, a humanity that sin defiled and infected, is our humanity healed, renewed, and given immortality.”16 One way in which Weinandy specifies his thesis is by saying that Jesus did not adopt a “generic” form of human nature: “The Word did not just become soma, that is, take upon himself a generic human body and Weinandy, In the Likeness, 28. Weinandy’s claim that Jesus must take on fallen humanity in order to save us seems to be advanced as a claim of necessity, with the accompanying implication that Jesus could not save us without taking on fallen human nature. To the extent that it is a claim of necessity, it is incongruous with some important elements in the theological tradition. For instance, Aquinas, in answering the question of whether the Incarnation was necessary, argues that there are two ways for something to be “necessary” in Summa theologica [ST] III, q. 14, a. 2, resp: “First, when the end cannot be without it; as food is necessary for the preservation of human life. Secondly, when the end is attained better and more conveniently, as a horse is necessary for a journey” (trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province). Aquinas argues here that, because God is omnipotent, it cannot be said that the Incarnation was strictly necessary to attain the end of salvation. The Incarnation was, instead, necessary as the most fitting means given the context. For Aquinas, it is not the case that our salvation could not in principle have been achieved without the Incarnation. 13 Weinandy, In the Likeness, 79. 14 Weinandy, In the Likeness, 80. See also Weinandy, Jesus the Christ (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 2003), 99, and Weinandy, Jesus: Essays in Christology (Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia Press, 2014), 93n9. 15 Weinandy, In the Likeness, 18–19. 16 Weinandy, In the Likeness, 29. 12 568 Joshua Evans life, but rather became sarx, that is took on flesh in all its human frailty and weakness, which are the consequences of sin.”17 To adopt a “generic” human nature would not be salvifically effective: “To be homoousious with us demands more than an ahistorical sameness of species, but a communion with us as we are in reality—brothers and sisters defiled by the sin of Adam.”18 In order to save us, Jesus must adopt the specific kind of human nature we inhabit: “Jesus was born of the fallen human race, and . . . such a condition was absolutely indispensable for our salvation.”19 The Temptations of Christ By saying that “the eternal Son of God functioned from within the confines of a humanity altered by sin and the Fall,” Weinandy specifically means that Jesus “experienced, of necessity, many of the effects of sin which permeate the world and plague human beings—hunger and thirst, sickness and sorrow, temptation and harassment by Satan, being hated and despised, fear and loneliness, even death and separation from God.”20 To be fair, it would be hard to find a theologian who would disagree with the claim that Jesus experienced hunger, thirst, sickness, and sorrow or was the victim of hatred and underwent death.21 What is theologically interesting, however, and what is theologically controversial, is Weinandy’s claim that Jesus’s avoidance of sin is only significant if Jesus experienced temptations to sin. Weinandy’s position is that Jesus must have been tempted to sin if he is truly human, since our human nature is the kind of nature that is tempted to sin: “Jesus’s temptations verify that he genuinely assumed our human condition. Otherwise, he could not sympathize with our weakness, Weinandy, In the Likeness, 130. See also Weinandy, Jesus: Essays in Christology, 44n40. 18 Weinandy, In the Likeness, 35. 19 Weinandy, In the Likeness, 21. 20 Weinandy, In the Likeness, 18. See also Weinandy, Jesus the Christ, 99, where Weinandy argues that Jesus is truly human not only because he “experienced hunger and thirst, sickness and sorrow”; Jesus also experienced “temptation and harassment by Satan.” 21 In a review of Weinandy’s book In the Likeness of Sinful Flesh, John Grabowski rightly raises the concern that “there is a certain tension in the book between the rhetoric it uses and the reality which it seeks to describe” (The Thomist 59 [1995]: 651). Grabowski’s point is that inflated rhetoric sometimes masks rather uncontroversial claims. Grabowski, however, does not acknowledge the significance and controversial character of Weinandy’s claims about the temptations of Jesus, which claims I discuss below. Kelly Kapic raises a similar concern with Weinandy’s rhetoric in “The Son’s Assumption of a Human Nature: A Call for Clarity,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 3, no. 2 (2001): 159–60. 17 What is Not Saved is Not Assumed 569 which is due to sin.”22 Furthermore, Christ’s temptations were essential to his salvific accomplishment: “The Son lived an obedient life under the guidance and power of the Holy Spirit, fending off all temptation, and thus fulfilling all righteousness.”23 Weinandy’s assumptions seem to be that one is not human if one is not able to be tempted to sin, and one’s avoidance of personal sin is not significant if one is not tempted to sin. Weinandy is not satisfied with the traditional claim, exemplified in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, that Jesus experienced only external temptations, but not internal temptations, with internal temptations being those caused by desires within the person. According to Aquinas, internal temptations are caused by concupiscence or the fomes peccati, and Christ was not subject to internal temptations because Christ assumed the kind of human nature in which concupiscence or the fomes peccati was completely absent.24 Aquinas lays out his position in the following passage: As the Apostle says (Hebrews 4:15), Christ wished to be “tempted in all things, without sin.” Now temptation which comes from an enemy can be without sin: because it comes about by merely outward suggestion. But temptation which comes from the flesh cannot be without sin, because such a temptation is caused by pleasure and concupiscence; and, as Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xix), “it is not without sin that the flesh desireth against the spirit.” And hence Christ wished to be tempted by an enemy, but not by the flesh.25 According to Aquinas, Christ’s external temptations never actually drew Christ toward sin, but were rather “tempting” in the sense that the object Weinandy, In the Likeness, 98. Weinandy, In the Likeness, 149. 24 Fomes peccati names the “tinder of sin” or “accelerant of sin,” and as tinder or accelerant, concupiscence is always ready to spread the desire for the less than virtuous. As Aquinas puts it, the fomes peccati consists in the “resistance of the sensitive appetite to reason” (ST III, q. 15, a. 2, ad 1). In other words, the concept fomes peccati names the reality that our initial desires outside of reason (sensitive appetite) are often antithetical to virtue, especially when it comes to initial desires for food, drink, and sex. As the editors of the new English Dominican translation of the Summa put it in their glossary entry on inflammation of sin; fomes peccati: “Man’s passions after original sin are a kind of tinder-box; conditions there are highly inflammable; fire may break out at any moment” (Summa Theologiae, vol. 51, 3a. 27–30, ed. Thomas R. Heath, O.P. [New York: Cambridge, 2006)], 120). According to Thomas, those non-rational desires can be shaped but cannot be made fully virtuous this side of heaven. 25 ST III, q. 41, a. 1, ad 3. 22 23 570 Joshua Evans presented as a temptation could be seen as something to be desired in an unvirtuous way (i.e., “outward suggestion”). The reason Christ did not experience internal temptation has to do with Christ’s perfection of virtue. As Aquinas puts it, the more virtuous one is, the fewer bad desires one has. Because Christ was virtuous to a superlative degree, Christ could not have been drawn to sin through his own internal desires.26 From the perspective of Aquinas, Christ’s truly perfect virtue was incompatible with internal desires—even initial, fleeting ones—for the less than noble. Weinandy notes that the Tradition has long held that Christ did not experience internal temptations caused by concupiscence or the fomes peccati.27 Yet, as Weinandy says, the traditional position seems to entail that “temptations of Jesus . . . pose, however, a unique problem.”28 According to Weinandy, “temptation presupposes enticement. There must be a lure and an attraction.”29 That is, in the case of sinful human beings, “our concupiscence conspires with external stimuli to give rise to temptation.”30 Something must be moving us toward that by which we are tempted. If we were not moved, we would not be tempted. So a temptation that is merely “external” would not seem to be a true temptation. Thus, “Jesus appears to be in a different situation” from us regarding his temptations, since he cannot be moved by internal desire for sin caused by concupiscence.31 If one grant’s Weinandy’s definition of temptation, then the Thomistic claim that Jesus experienced only external temptations seems to lead to a significant theological problem. If Jesus was never moved by internal desires for sin, then, Weinandy wonders, perhaps the temptations of Jesus were just a kind of “play acting”: “Does [the lack of concupiscence] suggest that his temptations were less severe than our own, even to the point of being fictitious?”32 It seems that if Jesus lacks concupiscence then Jesus was never really tempted to sin, and thus Jesus was never really human, ST III, q. 15, a. 2, resp.: “But there belongs to the very nature of the fomes of sin an inclination of the sensual appetite to what is contrary to reason. And hence it is plain that the more perfect the virtues are in any man, the weaker the fomes of sin becomes in him. Hence, since in Christ the virtues were in their highest degree, the fomes of sin was nowise in Him.” 27 Weinandy, In the Likeness, 18, 52n32, 98–99. See also Weinandy, Jesus the Christ, 99. Weinandy, however, does suggest that “the New Testament does not make any distinction between temptations that arise from “outside” and those that originate from “within” a person” (In the Likeness, 99). 28 Weinandy, In the Likeness, 98. 29 Weinandy, In the Likeness, 98. 30 Weinandy, In the Likeness, 98. 31 Weinandy, In the Likeness, 98. 32 Weinandy, In the Likeness, 99. 26 What is Not Saved is Not Assumed 571 since being human requires being tempted to sin. A Thomistic account of Christ’s merely external temptations seems to unwittingly back into a kind of docetic Christology, since it explains away Christ’s temptations by excising an essential element of human nature from Christ’s person. To avoid the apparently problematic conclusion of classic Thomism, Weinandy flips the argument on its head. Weinandy suggests that the absence of concupiscence in Jesus makes Jesus’s temptations even more intense than the temptations of the rest of humanity: “Jesus . . . experienced both the entire allurement of temptation and, because he never conspired with it, endured the undivided assault of Satan’s attack.”33 Jesus’s temptations are more intense than ours because, according to Weinandy, our concupiscence surprisingly mitigates our temptations: “Our minds and hearts are anesthetized and dulled by our concupiscence and personal sin.”34 When a temptation strikes us, “we almost inevitably conspire with the temptation to some degree, teasing it on,” and by going along with the temptation, “we never feel its full impact.”35 Jesus, however, did not “tease on” his temptations, and as a result, his temptations “confronted him with a sharpness and force we do not experience.”36 Although Weinandy does not explain how a person can experience “allurement” without some kind of internal desire, Weinandy is certain that Jesus’s temptations were no “mere play acting”; rather, “Satan tempted and attacked him with a ferocity that we never experience.”37 Weinandy sees Jesus’s obedience through the onslaught of internal (but concupiscence-free) temptations as providing an essential element of Jesus’s salvific accomplishment: “Since Jesus was vulnerable to temptation, suffering and death, God’s power is manifested more in that [Jesus] was ever faithful and thus raised to the highest glory.”38 Had Jesus not experienced temptations, “he could not sympathize with our weakness, which is due to sin.”39 Weinandy’s approach takes seriously the words of Luke’s Gospel that Jesus “grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him” (Luke 2:40). Weinandy’s approach has the virtue of presenting Jesus as truly one of us, but someone who is greater than us because he has stared down the devil through the powers he shares Weinandy, In the Likeness, 99. Weinandy, In the Likeness, 99. 35 Weinandy, In the Likeness, 99. 36 Weinandy, In the Likeness, 99. 37 Weinandy, In the Likeness, 99. 38 Weinandy, In the Likeness, 49. 39 Weinandy, In the Likeness, 98. 33 34 572 Joshua Evans with us: “He conquered temptation as one of us, as a man who freely lived by the indwelling Spirit.”40 His temptations are what rendered his sinlessness significant: “only because Jesus never personally sinned within the confines of our sinful condition did he bring us salvation.”41 Jesus’s salvific accomplishment is made real precisely because Jesus overcame the temptations that we often succumb to, showing us what the power of God is able to do in a human nature fully in tune with God’s grace. In his 2018 book Jesus Becoming Jesus, Weinandy avoids explicit mention of how the temptations of Jesus relate to his fallen nature. While he does devote a short section to the temptations of Jesus, Weinandy’s theological focus there is on the Son’s filial obedience to the Father, rather than on how those temptations connect to the Son’s fallen human nature.42 Yet in the book Weinandy indicates that his earlier work still expresses his views: “For a fuller study of Jesus assuming a humanity from the sinful race of Adam, see my In the Likeness of Sinful Flesh.”43 Moreover, Weinandy’s comments in Jesus Becoming Jesus continue his more general reliance on the thesis of the fallen human nature of Jesus.44 We might wonder how Weinandy, In the Likeness, 100. Weinandy, In the Likeness, 30. 42 Thomas G. Weinandy, OFM, Cap., Jesus Becoming Jesus: A Theological Interpretation of the Synoptic Gospels (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018), 104–9. 43 Weinandy, Jesus Becoming Jesus, 82 n. 9. 44 Consider the following quotes from Weinandy, Jesus Becoming Jesus: “In becoming man, the Son of God assumed the flesh of his father Adam, and in that assumption he took upon himself the sin and the iniquity and the guilt of Adam’s posterity. . . . On the one hand, Jesus, the Son of God, in lovingly assuming humankind’s fallen and sin-marred nature, inherited within his own humanity and so the guilt and punishment that inhered within that humanity [sic]. On the other hand, by living a holy life without sin, Jesus, as the Spirit-filled Father’s Son, was concurrently empowered, within his very suffering of humankind’s sinful condemnation and deadly punishment, to transfigure or convert that punishment into an act of sacrificial love” (353); “Because Jesus places the saving of the ‘good’ thief within the context of Adam’s sin within the Garden of Eden, he is revealing that he, as the Father’s Suffering Servant/Son, is assuming the sinful history of all humankind; that is, in assuming humankind’s sinful nature, he has assumed, taken into his very humanity, the totality of humankind’s sin” (371); “This dying and rising is the passing over of Jesus’ putting to death his fallen humanity inherited from Adam and his rising into his new glorious humanity as the new Adam, becoming the father of a new humanity within a transformed new Creation” (261); “In freely offering himself in love to his Father on behalf of humankind, Jesus will put to death the sin-enslaved humanity that he inherited from Adam and in doing so free humankind of its sin-enslaved will and its sin-darkened mind” (346). Regarding Jesus’ baptism, Weinandy describes the act as “the putting to death of 40 41 What is Not Saved is Not Assumed 573 Weinandy will treat the connection between the fallen nature of Jesus and the temptation to sin in the two follow-up volumes he has planned.45 Julian on the Sinless Christ Weinandy makes a powerful case on behalf of the Sinless Christ position. While one approach at this point would be to engage Weinandy’s thought directly, I think another fruitful method for advancing the discussion is to turn to that ancient dispute between Augustine and Julian. Julian makes quite similar claims to those of the Sinless Christ camp, and his claims are based on similar presumptions about the nature of true humanity and the meaning of salvation. Julian’s views bolster the case for the Sinless Christ Christology, while Augustine’s responses to Julian draw out the inadequacies of the Sinless Christ view. Julian of Eclanum was an Italian bishop in the fifth-century Roman Empire.46 As the most eloquent defender of what has been called Pelagianism, Julian emphasizes the goodness of human nature and the possibility of the will to naturally achieve the fullness of virtue without grace assisting the will.47 Julian is adamant that Christ assumed all elements of human nature, including, perhaps most significantly for our purposes here, the ability to be tempted to sin. What Weinandy and the Tradition call elements of fallen human nature—vulnerability to hunger, pain, temptation, suffering, death, and so on—Julian will simply say are elements his sinful humanity inherited from Adam and the raising up, as the new Adam, of a new, re-created holy humanity that is free from sin and death” (83). Relatedly, a footnote on the nature of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s virginity seems to assume Weinandy’s earlier views: “First, if Jesus, as the New Adam, assumed a humanity of the sinful race of the first Adam and thereby experienced the effects of that fallen humanity—such as pain, suffering, and death—is it not proper that Mary . . . equally experience pain, suffering, and death? . . .The ultimate issue is this: if Jesus was not immune from the effects of Adam’s sin in becoming man, then Mary, from whom he received his humanity, ought not be immune from the effects of Eve’s sin” (36n3). 45 Weinandy, Jesus Becoming Jesus, xxi. 46 Julian and Augustine were theological arch-enemies for over a decade, between 418 and 430. For a review of what is at stake in their debate, see Gerald Bonner, “The Nature of the Pelagian Crisis,” in Tolle Lege: Essays on Augustine and on Medieval Philosophy in Honor of Roland J. Teske, S.J., ed. Richard C. Taylor, David Twetten, and Michael Wreen (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2011), 61–80; and Mathijs Lamberigts, “Julian of Eclanum: A Plea for a Good Creator,” Augustiniana 38 (1988): 5–24. 47 Pelagians, most notably, did not believe in fallen human nature. On this point Weinandy is very far from the Pelagians, since Weinandy’s thesis is that Jesus assumed fallen human nature. 574 Joshua Evans of human nature (Julian does not believe in the fall). While Weinandy and Julian may disagree about the original cause of these elements, they agree that Jesus is not a savior if he does not assume these elements as part of his human nature. Furthermore, Julian argues that Christ would not have been truly human if he was not truly tempted to sin. Like Weinandy, Julian rejects the claim that Jesus was not really tempted because his human nature was importantly different from ours. Julian’s claims about the goodness of human nature and Julian’s rejection of the concept of fallen human nature are rooted in fundamental claims about God’s role as creator. Julian believes God has designed creation just how it is supposed to be and that the integrity of creation is the same today as it was when Adam was first created.48 For Julian, there is no such thing as fallen human nature, precisely because God is so good that he created human nature exactly how God wanted it to be created: “Human beings . . . were formed in every respect so that no one can imagine them made better.”49 Julian argues that the so-called “consequences of original sin” are in fact just part of God’s design of creation: “Everything, then, which human beings have as part of their nature they have obtained as necessary, because they could not be other than they were made to be.”50 Thus both the good and seemingly bad elements of human nature all come from God: “From God’s wisdom they received in their bodies beautiful parts and shameful parts so that they might learn in themselves both modesty and confidence.”51 For Julian, the essence of human nature is found in human nature as it is expressed in history. Julian’s account of goodness and necessity impacts his moral theology, See Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 5.15: “God who made everything very good established no creature such that in that kind which has been made it is shown that it could have been made either more suitably or more in accord with reason. Endowed equally with wisdom and omnipotence, he would, of course, not have created anything that a mere human being could have rightly criticized. . . . All elements in absolutely all creatures which are found to be natural were made in the very best way so that any supposed improvement in them is found to be stupid and sacrilegious” (p. 530). 49 Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 5.15: “So too, human beings which were included above in the genus of walking animals were formed in every respect so that no one can imagine them made better. From God’s wisdom they received in their bodies beautiful parts and shameful parts so that they might learn in themselves both modesty and confidence lest they should be thought ugly if they were completely clothed or become lazy and negligent if they were always completely unclothed” (p. 530). 50 Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 5.49 (p. 573). 51 Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 5.15 (p. 530). 48 What is Not Saved is Not Assumed 575 especially on the issue of free will. According to Julian, the capacity for willing is a necessary part of human nature, but any act of willing is only possible, not necessary.52 Julian defines free will in the following way: “It consists in the fact that it is possible for human beings either to turn their will to a serious sin or to hold it back from a serious sin without any of the unavoidable compulsion found in natural things.”53 Since one’s will is never determined, the potential to sin is an essential element of human freedom: according to Julian, “free choice could not exist unless it had the possibility of sinning.”54 The necessity of freedom entails the possibility of sin. One is not human if one is not the kind of being who can sin.55 With this view of the necessary possibility of sin as a precondition for human freedom, it is no surprise that Julian accuses Augustine of holding a docetic view of Christ. Augustine is adamant that Christ was not able to sin, since Christ did not have concupiscence. Julian’s response is to say that a Christ without concupiscence is a “cadaver,” a human body without a true human soul, a puppet whose strings are pulled by God.56 According Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 5.47 (p. 572). Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 3.109 (p. 335). Teske suggests in his translation introduction that “Julian comes close to what contemporaries label as a libertarian view of free will” (p. 25). 54 Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 5.47 (p. 572). 55 Julian of course recognizes that infants, for instance, are not able to will good or evil. In fact, is it because of this that he thinks infants are not guilty of sin (and therefore he rejects Augustine’s notion of original sin); see Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 2.24 and 5.63. Julian is certainly able to account for the humanity of infants even if they cannot use their free will. 56 Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 4.47 (p. 426). Part of the disagreement between Augustine and Julian may be that Julian has an idiosyncratic account of concupiscence. Julian defines concupiscence in the following way: the genus of concupiscence is the “fire of life” (ignis vitalis), and the species of concupiscence is “the movement of the genitals.” He goes on to define the mode and excess of concupiscence (“its genus lies in the fire of life, its species in the movement of the genitals, its moderation in the marital act, and its excess in the intemperance of fornication [huius genus esse in igne vitali, speciem in motu genitali, modum in opere coniugali, excessum in intemperantia fornicandi]” (Contra Iul. 3.13.26 [p. 353]; Latin found in PL 44). Julian will go on to say that “the origin of concupiscence is correctly determined to lie in the fire of life, and with that understood, one must attribute the concupiscence of the flesh to that fire through which the life of the flesh is maintained” (Contra Iul. 3.13.27). It is this concupiscence “which stimulates the expectation of taste and of the eyes” (Contra Iul. imp. 4.26). In response to Augustine’s conviction that Christ could not have had concupiscence, Julian concludes that Augustine “want[s] Christ’s body to be without senses of both the eyes and of inner organs” (Contra Iul. imp. 4.46). To Augustine, this conclusion is a complete non sequitur, since he totally rejects Julian’s classification of concupis52 53 576 Joshua Evans to Julian, to say that Christ lacked concupiscence is by implication to say that Christ lacked the fullness of human nature. This claim is essentially connected to Julian’s account of free will: without concupiscence, Augustine’s Christ “could not experience the desire for sins.”57 If Augustine’s docetic Christ could not experience true temptation, then that Christ is not a true savior. Julian hammers home his point: Why would it have been worthy of praise to scorn the enticements of the senses if by a gift of nature he was incapable of them? What is admirable in controlling his eyes, if by the help of his flesh they do not wander? What is great about withdrawing the nose from tempting odors, when it is not able to perceive them? What is admirable about the daily maintenance of a strict frugality at meals, if he could not feel their enticements? What difficulty, finally, would there have been in the fast extended to the fortieth day, if hunger could not bother him? What respect would the discipline of the ears deserve for only listening to decent words, if he suffered a natural deafness for indecent ones? But what is the glory of chastity if he lacked virility rather than will power, and if what he was thought to accomplish by the strength of his mind came from the weakness of his members? . . . As someone more fortunate by birth, not by virtue, he cence. But for Julian, concupiscence is at the root of all the body’s sensations, and somehow this relates to his classification of the genus of concupiscence as the “fire of life.” Julian was influenced by Aristotle, and so what might be in the background of Julian’s thought is Aristotle’s theory of the relation of “vital heat” to the relation between the soul and body. One book on Aristotle seems to suggest there may be a connection. Gad Freudenthal writes about Aristotle’s concept of vital heat, “these functions—namely informing matter, i.e. producing and endowing with persistence the homoeomerous parts in the living body and effectuating sexual generation—Aristotle considers in his physiological theory to be brought about by vital heat. . . . Aristotle . . . construes vital heat as formative: where vital heat acts on suitable matter, it endows it with forms; it warms and at the same time also informs. Specifically, in Aristotle’s theory, vital heat is the physiological agent bringing about plant and animal reproduction. . . . Aristotle had a theory according to which the cohesion of inanimate substances depends upon heat which inheres in them. . . . [Furthermore,] vital heat is involved in determining the perceptive and intellective capacities of living beings (the uniquely human nous alone excepted)” (Aristotle’s Theory of Material Substance: Heat and Pneuma, Form and Soul [Oxford: Clarendon, 1995], 3–4). Whether this line of thinking helpfully illuminates Julian’s account of concupiscence, it is likely that Julian thinks concupiscence has a more general role in the human body than merely causing desire. 57 Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 4.48 (p. 426). What is Not Saved is Not Assumed 577 would have lost not only trophies won by his actions, but would have also been pressed with charges of fraud if he said to mortals: Strive for the patience of him who feels nothing, and come through true crosses to the virtues of a false body that suffers nothing. . . . Certainly nothing more irreligious, nothing more wicked can be thought up than these lies.58 Because temptation is necessary for true human freedom, a Jesus who could not be tempted would be merely a simulacrum of a human being. To avoid Augustine’s allegedly docetic Christology, Julian suggests that “we are emphatically taught by clear testimony that the righteousness of the man he assumed came, not from the difference of his nature, but from his voluntary action.”59 From Julian’s perspective, Christ’s true humanity entails both Christ’s true temptations and Christ’s true virtue: “I proclaim that all holiness remained in him because of the goodness of his mind, not because of a defect of his flesh” (i.e., lacking concupiscence).60 Were Christ unable to be tempted, he would not be truly human and would not be our moral exemplar: “Whom would he have presented to human beings for their imitation, if the nature of a strange flesh set him apart and if the difference of his substance undermined the severity of his teaching?”61 Without the concupiscence necessary for moral virtue to be meaningful, Christ is just an alien actor in a human play. 62 Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 4.49–50 (p. 427–29). Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 4.84 (p. 449). 60 Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 4.54 (p. 432). 61 Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 4.86 (p. 451). 62 Julian’s argument has found more than a few followers, and James Wetzel articulates the case in Julian’s favor: “It makes a certain amount of home-spun sense to imagine Christ as a moral exemplar, someone who, in his humanity, has the same basic nature as other human beings, but who has worked that basic nature heroically. Augustine, by contrast, seems to insist perversely on an unintelligible difference in humanities: Christ has a human nature, but not a human nature that any other human being can hope to share fully” (“Response III—The Humanity of God,” Augustinian Studies 36, no.1 [2005]: 219–26, at 221). It is not clear whether Wetzel would endorse Julian’s views. Teske is sympathetic to Julian’s Christology: “Julian certainly seems to have a strong argument when he claims that the Augustinian Christ cannot be a credible teacher or model of chastity if he had none of the urges and inclinations of other males. Hence, Julian presents us with a Christ who is, in some ways, a much more attractive teacher and example of the virtues, and especially of chastity, than the Christ of Augustine” (Roland Teske, S.J., “St. Augustine on the Humanity of Christ and Temptation,” in Augustine of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete, and Theologian: A Second Collection of Essays [Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2009], 233). 58 59 578 Joshua Evans Clearly someone like Weinandy would reject Julian’s claims about the natural integrity of human nature: Weinandy believes in fallen human nature. But what Julian and those who today advocate a Sinless Christ Christology share is the commitment to the claim that a Christ who was not truly tempted is not truly human and not a moral exemplar for us. Christ must share in all aspects of our nature if he is to be our savior, and our human nature sets the definition of what it means to be truly human. A Jesus who is differently human is a Jesus who is not human. Furthermore, Christ’s possession of our nature and its temptations made it possible for Jesus to be the perfect example of virtue precisely because his virtue was tested and he passed the test. This is a very strong case for the salvific importance of Christ’s tempted human nature, and in the rest of the essay, I let Augustine show us why this case does not succeed. What is Not Saved is Not Assumed As Christopher Beeley has recently shown us, patristic theologians tend to emphasize the close connections between salvation, Incarnation, and human transformation, and those connections are traditionally organized under the heading of divinization: “The divinizing purpose of the Incarnation is a constant refrain in patristic Christology. . . . Christ’s saving work restores the created process of divinization which will be fulfilled in the age to come, and salvation is the restoration of our creationary-eschatological trajectory of divinization. Christ’s identity as God-made-man thus repairs the breach between humanity and God.”63 If we take the concept of divinization in its general sense, as another name for the process of our “creationary-eschatological” transformation, then it is fair to say that an emphasis on divinization is especially apparent in Augustine’s later works.64 Christopher A. Beeley, “Christ and Human Flourishing in Patristic Theology,” Pro Ecclesia 25, no. 2 (2016): 137–38. See also Khaled Anatolios, “The Soteriological Grammar of Concilar Christology,” The Thomist 78 (2014): 165–88. Anatolios argues that the four traditional Christological councils advance a kind of normative soteriological “grammatical system” in which the core claim is that salvation is “nothing less than the deification of our humanity” (187). Those who would say there is an inherent tension in the Chalcedonian understanding of the two natures of Christ, such that our salvation is imperiled the more Christ’s human nature is impacted by the divine nature, mistakenly overemphasize the purity of the two natures to the neglect of “the supreme mystery that human nature was united with the divine nature in a single hypostasis without impairment to the integrity of either nature. It is the integrity of the two natures within their union in Christ, not the integrity of the natures as such, that has any value with reference to the good news of Jesus Christ” (179). 64 The most significant recent contribution to the literature on Augustine’s employ63 What is Not Saved is Not Assumed 579 For Augustine, salvation in Christ is essentially a process of transformation, wherein the regrettable elements of human nature—especially our propensity to temptation—are purified as our nature becomes more truly human by being more closely united to God through the Spirit, and we are prepared to be the kind of creatures who can enjoy life together with God eternally. If the governing principle for the Sinless Christ view is “what is not assumed is not saved,” I think it is fair to say a related but distinct principle is at the foundation of Augustine’s thought: “What is not saved is not assumed.” While the Sinless Christ view emphasizes that Christ is truly “Adam,” Augustine emphasizes that, in the words of Gaudium et Spes §22, Christ is the novissimus Adam, the ever-new Adam, someone who is more truly human than the rest of us: “God, therefore, assumed our nature, that is, the rational soul and the flesh of Christ the man, and he assumed it in a singularly marvelous and marvelously singular manner.”65 Augustine wants us to recognize the singularly marvelous singularity that is Emmanuel, God with us. To be divinized is to be Jesus Christ. Augustine’s divinely human Christ fits neatly within the broader Augustinian understanding of the teleological orientation of human nature. For Augustine, human beings are good but corruptible because they lack the perfection God has planned for them. God’s nature is “unchangeable and immutable.” 66 Creation, on the other hand, “is mutable because it is not the nature of God.”67 This “mutability” did not originally devolve into corruption because of the integrating grace of the ment of the concept of divinization is David Meconi’s book The One Christ. Meconi aims to show that divinization is at the heart of Augustine’s theology, and especially Augustine’s soteriology, with the salvific goal being human incorporation into the life of Christ through corporate union with Christ (totus Christus); see David Vincent Meconi, SJ, The One Christ: St. Augustine’s Theology of Deification (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013). In a review of Meconi’s book, Jonathan Teubner rightly points out that Meconi does not adequately connect the investigation of Augustine’s views of deification to Augustine’s eschatology (Review of The One Christ: Saint Augustine’s Theology of Deification, by David Meconi, Reviews in Religion and Theology 21, no. 2 [2014]: 245–46). 65 De correptione et gratia 30, in Answer to the Pelagians IV: To the Monks of Hadrumetum and Provence, trans. Roland J. Teske, S.J., ed. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A., WSA I/26 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1998), 129. 66 Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 5.42 (p. 567). See also 5.44 (p. 569), 5.25 (p. 549), and 5.60 (p. 585). 67 Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 5.25 (p. 549). 580 Joshua Evans Garden of Eden, sacramentally provided through the Tree of Life.68 While there were no tensions between Adam’s body and soul, even the integrating grace provided in the garden did not make Adam perfect, for Adam himself would have been elevated into a life in which his body would be informed not just by his soul, but by the Spirit.69 That is, Adam would have experienced what we call resurrection, though he would not have needed to die first. While Adam was originally able to not die if he did not sin, Adam, if he had remained obedient, would have moved to a state in which he would “not be able to die” and would “no longer be able to sin.” 70 That is, even the original Adam did not experience human nature in its fullest sense. Without the perfect integration of a Spirit-informed personhood (body and soul) that cannot sin and cannot die, Adam lacks what he needs to be human in the truest sense. From Augustine’s perspective, the process of teleological transformation of human nature is built into God’s original plan for creation. Augustine’s claims about the fall are a consequence of this broader vision for human nature. The Augustinian concept of original sin is not primarily a genealogical theory, but a teleological theory. Whatever the “cause” of our lack of perfection that plays out in disordered desires, sin, and death, the significance of the “consequences of original sin” is found in the contrast between us now and the future selves we hope to become. Adam lost the integrating grace that made him provisionally rightly ordered, and as a result of the loss of that grace, human nature has descended into disorder.71 The purpose of salvation is to bring us closer to the original perfection of human nature that God has always planned: “For the first grace brought it about that the man had righteousness if he had willed to; the second, therefore, is more powerful, for it makes one even to will so strongly and to love with such ardor that by the will of the spirit one conquers the pleasure of the flesh which has contrary desires.” 72 See Augustine, De civitate Dei 13.20: “This condition was granted them by the wondrous grace of God, by means of the tree of life which stood in the midst of Paradise along with the forbidden tree” (The City of God Against the Pagans, ed. and trans. R. W. Dyson [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 567). On the centrality of the Tree of Life, which Augustine thinks was a real tree, see: De genesi ad litteram 8.4.8, 8.5.11, 9.3.6, and 11.32.42; De civ. 13.23 (p. 570); Contra Iul. imp. 6.30 (p. 690); Contra Iul. 4.14.69 (p. 419). 69 Augustine, De gen. litt. 9.3.6 and 9.10.18; Contra Iul. imp. 6.30 (p. 691) and 6.39 (p. 710–11); De civ. 13.20 (p. 566). 70 Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 6.30 (p. 691). 71 Augustine, De civ. 13.13 (p. 555). 72 Augustine, De corrept. 31 (p. 130). 68 What is Not Saved is Not Assumed 581 This transformation will find its perfection in the resurrection: “Those men who belong to the grace of God . . . will be so endued with spiritual bodies that they will never again sin or die.” 73 From the Augustinian perspective, the advocates of a Sinless Christ judge Christ’s humanity according to a standard set by a fundamentally shortsighted account of human nature. Julian expresses the basic principle of the Sinless Christ advocates: “A different nature could not furnish an example. . . . Remove the basis of the example, and the basis of the price which he became for us will also be removed.” 74 Augustine, rather than taking our nature as the standard for true humanity, invites us to marvel at the way Christ’s human nature shows us the inadequacies of our own: “The nature of Christ as man was not different from our nature, though it was different from our defect. He was born as human without defect unlike all other human beings.” 75 To lack our defects is not to have a truncated or “generic” human nature, but to have a better human nature. To be divinely human is not to be less than human, but to be more than merely human: “With regard to that life by which we ought to imitate Christ, the fact that each of us is a human being, while he is God, contributes very much to the difference [between Christ and us]. After all, a human being cannot be as righteous as the man who is also God.” 76 Christ comes not to share in our disharmony and disintegration, but rather to model for us how we might someday experience the full harmony and integration that Christ experiences: “With this example of perfection set before us, each imitator ought to aim at this: to strive and to long not to have at all the desires of the flesh which the apostle forbids us to carry out. For in that way we can by daily progress lessen those desires which we will not have at all when salvation is complete.” 77 To think that Christ has to share in our struggles in order to save us is like thinking a doctor has to be infected with an illness in order to cure it in someone else.78 Because Christ is the model of perfect humanity, he need not—indeed cannot—be internally tempted to sin. Augustine is certain that Christ did not have bad desires or internal temptations in any sense: “The flesh of Christ . . . had nothing that was unsubdued, nor did it in any way resist Augustine, De civ. 12.24 (p. 580). Quoted by Augustine in Contra Iul. 5.15.57–58 (p. 468). 75 Augustine, Contra Iul. 5.15.57 (p. 468). 76 Augustine, Contra Iul. 5.15.47 (p. 468). 77 Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 4.57 (p. 435). 78 Crisp uses a similar image in Divinity and Humanity, 107. 73 74 582 Joshua Evans the spirit so that the spirit had to subdue it.” 79 While Christ chose to assume mortality, he did not assume the disharmony between flesh and spirit.80 While Weinandy and Julian seem to think that Christ cannot be our savior unless he undergoes the same temptations we face, Augustine adopts precisely the opposite assumption: “If Christ had in his nature this concupiscence which is not something good, he would not have healed it in ours.”81 Disordered desires and temptations do not express human nature, but reveal a lack of human nature in its truest sense. 82 It is because of Christ’s harmony that he is able to be a model of perfection for us: “In order to offer us an example by his suffering, he endured no evils of his own, but bore those of others; on our behalf he endured suffering, but not evil desires.”83 Now that the broader perspective of Augustine’s argument is in place, we can better understand his objections to Julian’s account of the Sinless Christ. Those objections touch on the soteriological, moral, and eschatological implications of Julian’s argument. The first problem is that the Sinless Christ account renders Christ a heroic but inessential figure in our salvation. A Christology like Julian’s that rejects any significant difference in Christ’s human nature seems to be a kind of adoptionism: if Christ is able to save us because of the powers he shares with us, we might as well have saved ourselves. Julian’s Christology suggests, as Augustine points out, that there could be many Christs, and Jesus of Nazareth “turns out to be the only one because of the laziness of the human will, though there could have been more, if human beings had willed it.”84 If Christ’s salvific powers are based in qualities we also possess, then Christ won trophies for his actions only because we did not try hard enough. Julian’s Christ is no longer named Emmanuel, but rather Eudaimon, the Virtuous Man. The second problem Augustine highlights is that Julian’s Christology Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 4.57 (p. 435). Augustine, Contra Iul. 5.15.54 (p. 467). 81 Augustine, Contra Iul. 5.15.58 (p. 468). 82 One challenge to my reading of Augustine comes from Dominic Keech in his book The Anti-Pelagian Christology of Augustine of Hippo, 396–430 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Keech argues that Augustine falls prey to similar problems that plague Apollinarianism. The core premise of Keech’s criticism tracks the same premise adopted by the advocates of Sinless-Christ Christology: “Augustine’s word appears . . . to undermine and deconstruct the humanity assumed, where humanity is defined as essentially sinful in bondage to the flesh” (183). Keech’s presumption is that to be human is to be fallen, so Christ must adopt fallen human nature in every respect if he is to be truly human. 83 Augustine, Contra Iul. 5.15.55 (p. 467). 84 Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 4.84 (p. 450). 79 80 What is Not Saved is Not Assumed 583 is rooted in a false understanding of virtue. Julian claims that virtue is not virtue unless it is able to overcome obstacles and temptations: “This good which is called virtue could not have had its special character, unless it were voluntary. But it would not have been voluntary if it had had the necessity for the good. . . . In order, then, that responsibility for the good might be established, the possibility of evil was admitted.”85 This principle suggests that Christ must have been tempted, since he is the pinnacle of virtue: “What is admirable in controlling his eyes, if by the help of his flesh they do not wander?”86 The presumption that one cannot be virtuous without undergoing temptation suggests that at least the possibility of temptation, and perhaps even actual temptation, is essential to virtue. One could reasonably conclude, as Augustine points out, that the most virtuous must be those who have overcome the most significant temptations. The logic of Julian’s account seems to entail, as Augustine says, that “Christ ought to have been most filled with desires in his flesh, just as he was the greatest of all human beings in his virtue.”87 Virtue in Julian’s system is fundamentally will power, and Augustine seems to be right that, according to Julian’s logic, one demonstrates more will power the more one is tempted. The presumption that Christ’s temptations are essential to his true virtue fundamentally conflicts with Augustine’s claim that virtue integrates one’s experience of the world. If sin is evil, then the desire for sin is also evil, and even the initial impulse or temptation toward those desires and their corresponding actions is also fundamentally problematic.88 While Julian assumes that sin is merely a bad act of the will from which one could have refrained, Augustine has a more expansive notion of sin and virtue. To be without “sin,” to be truly virtuous on Augustine’s account, is to be without any temptations or desires for the irrational or the less than noble: “In that final peace . . . our nature will be healed by immortality and incorruption. Then, it will have no vices, and nothing at all, in ourselves or in any other, will be in conflict with any one of us. Thus, there will be no Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 4.61 (p. 587). Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 4.49 (p. 427). 87 Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 4.49 (p. 428). As we have seen, Weinandy draws exactly the conclusion that Augustine argues against: “Temptation confronted [ Jesus] with a sharpness and force that we do not experience” (Weinandy, In the Likeness, 99). Although Weinandy attempts to hold on to the traditional claim that Jesus did not experience the fomes peccati, it is difficult to see much room between his and Julian’s claims about the necessity and extremity of temptation for the true humanity of Jesus. 88 Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 4.41 (p. 420). 85 86 584 Joshua Evans need for reason to govern the vices, because there will be no vices.”89 For Augustine, if it is good to conquer one’s bad desires, it is even better to not have bad desires and to not even have the impulse toward those desires.90 This is what Augustine means by the distinction between being able to not sin (posse non peccare) and being unable to sin (non posse peccare): “It is, after all, a lesser good to be able not to sin, but a greater one not to be able to sin.”91 We are rightly jealous of Christ’s human nature, because he lives out what we hope for: “Here we receive through the pledge of the Spirit the strength to both fight and to win, but there we shall enjoy ineffable and everlasting peace without any external or internal enemy.”92 For Augustine, human flourishing is not overcoming struggle to win trophies. Human flourishing is immortality, and “immortality is integration: our whole being . . . integrated according to the love by which Christ became incarnate.”93 For Augustine, the salvation begun in baptism will not be complete until we experience this integration fully.94 The soul “grows in holiness, after all, when it lessens more and more those carnal desires to which it does not consent.”95 The life of grace now is the beginning of this process of salvific integration: “Now [grace] completely renews human beings in setting them free from absolutely all their sins, but not in setting them free from all their evils and from the corruption of mortality with which the body now weighs down the mind.”96 But, in the future, “grace makes human beings completely new when it brings them to the immortality of the body and to full happiness.”97 Perhaps the most troubling implication of the Sinless Christ model of Christology is that it obscures the meaning of the Resurrection. If salvation requires God to become incarnate in the same “enfeebled” nature we inhabit, then it is not clear how the Resurrection is in continuity with human nature. If an Impeccable Jesus does not seem to be truly human, De civ. 13.27 (p. 963). Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 4.49 (p. 428). 91 Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 5.58 (p. 581). 92 Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 2.40 (p. 223). 93 John Cavadini, “Ideology and Solidarity in Augustine’s City of God,” in Augustine’s City of God: A Critical Guide, ed. James Wetzel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 99. 94 See Augustine Contra Iul. 6.13.40: “But there remains that which grace must make perfect in this whole structure, as long as the flesh has desires opposed to the spirit so that it arouses sinful impulses which must be reined in” (p. 502; italics removed). 95 Augustine, Contra Iul. 6.14.41 (p. 502). 96 Augustine, Contra Iul. 6.13.40 (p. 501). 97 Augustine, Contra Iul. 6.13.40 (p. 501). 89 90 What is Not Saved is Not Assumed 585 how is the resurrected Jesus truly human? On the logic of the Sinless Christ model, resurrected human nature involves merely an “ahistorical sameness of species,” since who we are now will no longer be who we are then, because our essentially enfeebled nature will have been completely done away with. On this view, if the ability to be tempted to sin is essential to our nature, then to eradicate our temptations to sin—and our more fundamental tendency to corruption ending in death—is to do away with our essential nature. The logic of the Sinless Christ model implicitly projects our tempted and disordered nature forward into eternal life, much in the same way Julian unwittingly projected death and disorder back into the Garden of Eden, suggesting that God designed those evils into our nature.98 The claim that an impeccable Jesus is a theological problem is falsely premised on the implicit assumption that salvation has very little to do with the integration of the Resurrection. For Augustine, the divinely human virtue of Jesus is not something to balk at or question. The perfect virtue of Jesus is something that should cause our own hearts to burn within us (Luke 24:32). The perfect virtue of Jesus offers a preview of what we hope to become in the end: “God will rule man, and the soul will rule the body; and the delight and effortlessness with which we obey in that final peace will be as great as our happiness in living and reigning. There, for each and every man, this condition will be eternal, and its eternity will be assured; and so the peace of this blessedness, or the blessedness of this peace, will be the Supreme Good.”99 Conclusion The argument of this essay has been that the Sinless Christ Christology advanced by thinkers such as Weinandy is prefigured by Julian of Eclanum and shown to be inadequate by Augustine. As we have seen, the general problem with a Sinless Christ Christology, with its assumption that temptation is essential to true human nature, is that it fundamentally neglects the process of divinization at the heart of Christian soteriology. More specifically, a Sinless Christ Christology makes Christ a heroic but inessential figure in our salvation, turns virtue and freedom into mere willpower contingent on the ability to sin, and renders the Resurrection an act of violence to human nature. One of Augustine’s constant objections to Julian’s theology is that Julian roots all the regrettable elements of human nature in the Garden of Eden. See, for example, Augustine, Contra Iul. imp. 3.154 (p. 353–54). 99 De civ. 19.27 (p. 964). 98 586 Joshua Evans Understanding Christ as impeccable, on the other hand, is a way of recognizing the teleological trajectory of human nature that is at the core of Christianity. Certainly there are many interesting issues to think through regarding how Christ lived out his human nature, especially how he experienced the passions in a way that was both truly human and yet truly reflective of his distinctive nature.100 But what we should not forget is that Christ is a person constituted by the confluence of full humanity and full divinity, and this confluence provides him a humanity that anticipates N&V the salvific transformation we all hope for.101 A peer-reviewer notes that some readers may be concerned that Augustine’s Christology seems to sacrifice Christ’s true humanity, whereas, for example, the Alexandrian school seems to preserve both Christ’s divinity and true experience of the fullness of humanity. Augustine is certainly not opposed to the claim that Christ underwent much of the effects of “fallen human nature.” Yet Augustine’s emphasis is that we must see human nature in its fullest perspective, taking into account the eschatological perfection of our nature and the existential meaning of sin, rather than seeing our merely fallen nature as the only way to be truly human and sin merely as bad acts from which we could have refrained. This focus on bigger-picture issues leads him to emphasize the ways in which Christ’s human nature gives us a glimpse of how our nature will be transformed. On the distinctive views of the Alexandrian school, the reviewer points to the following text from Cyril of Alexandria, which is worthy of consideration: Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on John, vol. 2, trans. David R. Maxwell, Ancient Christian Texts (Downer’s Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015), 105–6. 101 For further thoughts on the relation between moral theology, contemporary Christology, and Augustine’s dispute with Julian—along with recent papal reflections on the intersection between Christology and moral theology—see my recent article, Joshua M. Evans, “Morality, Human Nature, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus,” The Journal of Moral Theology 6, no. 2 (2017): 70–86. 100 Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2021): 587–612 587 Gender’s Divine Dignity in Saint Augustine’s Theological Anthropology David Vincent Meconi, S.J. Saint Louis University Saint Louis, MO Introduction It all started with Bishop Julian, the leading presbyter of Eclanum (ca. 385–455), a rather important Catholic see near Benevento in the Campania region of modern-day Italy. While Augustine of Hippo had his detractors and disparagers his whole life long, Julian was the first to denounce his thoughts on marriage and human sexuality as a residual Manichaeism rendering his theology of embodiment and conjugality as something pernicious and contrary to the mind of Christ. Yet, even though Augustine successfully responded to these accusations at length, these fifth-century incriminations are recklessly still hurled today.1 Most recently, a former Roman Catholic priest by the name of James Carroll gained the cover 1 The work most obviously aimed at countering Julian’s accusations is Augustine’s Unfinished Work in Answer to Julian [hereafter, Contra Iul.], trans., Roland Teske, S.J., in Answer to the Pelagians III, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century [WSA] I/25 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 1999). All citations from Augustine will come from the very fine WSA series. See also here, Augustine’s five treatises explicitly on the virtues of sexuality and its various expressions in the Christian life: The Excellence of Marriage [De bono coniugali], Holy Virginity [De sancta virginitate], The Excellence of Widowhood [De bono viduitatis], Adulterous Marriages [De coniugiis adulterinus], and Continence [De continentia], trans. Ray Kearney, in Marriage and Virginity, WSA I/9 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 1999). An original version of this paper was delivered at a gathering of the Thomistic Institute at the Dominican House of Studies in the spring of 2019; I am very grateful to Dr. Yvonne Klein who wrote her dissertation on Augustine and his theology of femininity, and from whom I have learned what is truly important. 588 David Vincent Meconi, S.J. of The Atlantic for unleashing on Augustine and even tracing the filth of contemporary clerical abuse back to the bishop of Hippo’s supposed misogyny and “repression of desire.” In a derisory and colossally careless synopsis, Carroll states that the Church’s preference for celibacy over marital love was brought about by Augustine’s theology of sex, derived from his reading of the Adam and Eve story in Genesis. Augustine painted the original act of disobedience as a sexual sin, which led to blaming a woman for the fatal seduction—and thus for all human suffering down through the generations. This amounted to a major revision of the egalitarian assumptions and practices of the early Christian movement. It also put sexuality, and anything related to it, under a cloud, and ultimately under a tight regime. The repression of desire drove normal erotic urges into a social and psychological netherworld.2 Of course, Carroll is not unique in his reading of Augustine in this area. In reducing this great doctor of the Church to convenient sound bites, many moderns have seen in Augustine the model of misogyny and the paragon of patriarchy. Many feminist theologians, for example, have focused in on Augustine’s insistence that Eve is brought about for no other reason than to enable the human species to continue. Studying Augustine’s treatment of the Genesis narrative, Margaret Miles writes that Augustine sees Eve, “the prototype and figure of ‘woman’ as designed and ‘built’ for procreation, limited in rationality, and dangerous to men.”3 From a danger to the sign of enslavement, as Elaine Pagels blames Augustine for using the Adam and Eve story to teach the natural and only true state of life for the human person is one of bondage and slavery—humans to God, and women to men.4 In a similar indictment, Rosemary Radford Ruether once taught that, “for Augustine, patriarchy is the natural order of society, reflecting the innate inferiority of women, their lack of capacity for headship, and their subjugation to the male as the representative of the ‘image of God.’”5 Even psychotherapists rely on Augustine’s theology to find the origins of all suppression. In a glib James Carroll, “Abolish the Priesthood,” The Atlantic, June 2019, 74–84, at 79. Margaret R. Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006), 97. 4 Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York: Random House, 1988), 150. 5 Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia & God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 186. 2 3 Gender’s Divine Dignity in Saint Augustine’s Theological Anthropolog y 589 and (of course) uncited sentence, the Jungian guru Edward Whitmont once wrote that “St. Augustine declared that women have no souls.”6 Such comments—and we all know there are many—have in their crosshairs Augustine’s perceived theology of women. As well-tilled and as raked-over as this Augustinian soil has been, scholars remain divided on the status he affords women qua women, and when we turn to what Augustine himself has to say about the sexes, we quickly realize that women are divinely and eternally intended and, in one way, needed by God to redeem humankind. The purpose of this essay, then, is to understand Augustine’s theology of gender and his theological anthropology of women in particular. Given today’s discourse on gender identity and its supposed fluidity and diversity, Julian’s and Carroll’s incriminations will certainly again be leveled against those who stand in the mainstream of the Christian Tradition, and so it is essential to understand Augustine on his own terms and in his own words. In so doing, it is clear that what Augustine has to say about sex, gender, and the purpose of human sexuality may seem simple to some, and downright insulting to others, especially in these areas: (1) having heard of some persons with both male and female genitalia, Augustine nonetheless holds that the divinely intended way of being fully human is as male or female; (2) he also teaches that such a binary expression of humanity is mainly for the sake of children while also intended for other purposes, like taming the fallen libido—especially in men—as well as in its reflection of Christ’s spousal union with his Church (proles, fides, sacramentum)7; and (3) that the irrevocable and unalterable nature of gender is integral to how the Father wanted to save the world, through the masculinity of his Son and the femininity of his Son’s Mother. As such, we shall see how Augustine saw femininity, in both body and soul, as a needed component of salvation history and, accordingly, how this femininity equipped women to serve as models of virtue and even spiritual guides to the wayward. Finally, Augustine never wavered in his understanding that as a divinely intended good, a woman’s body would last forever and shine gloriously in the final resurrection. Therefore, let us lay all of this out in four main sections. The first will be Augustine’s protology and the creation of Eve as one emerging from Adam. Here we read that he is a fairly typical man of antiquity, Eve’s main Edward C. Whitmont, The Return of the Goddess (New York: Crossroads, 1989), 124. 7 Augustine, De bono conuig. 2.2–8.7 (Latin in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum [CSEL], 41:188–97). For more on this, see Patout Burns, “Marital Fidelity as a remedium concupiscentiae: An Augustinian Proposal,” Augustinian Studies 44, no. 1 (2013): 1–35. 6 590 David Vincent Meconi, S.J. contribution to creation being her ability to bear and nurture life, causa pariendi. The second section brings us into the economy of Christian salvation and God’s choosing to be born of a woman, thereby recognizing and thus honoring both sexes in the world’s redemption. The third section uncovers Augustine’s appreciation for feminine wisdom and how he can therefore recommend women of virtue to help guide other members of the Church, regardless of their status or public office. Fourthly and finally, we move to the world’s end to understand Augustine’s unquestionable belief in the resurrection of the female body. What today sounds to us clear and certain doctrine was not something held by all the Churchmen of Augustine’s day. Before we turn to these four areas, let us first look briefly at the history of sexual differentiation as found in the world in which the bishop of Hippo lived, worked, thought, and wrote, the Platonic and neo-Platonic milieu in which most Christian teaching was (to some degree) formed. In so doing, Augustine’s brilliance, fidelity to scriptural truths, and sensitivity toward all will be even more appreciated. One of the first sustained examinations into the origin and nature of sexual difference is found, as is so in many important human matters, in the works of Plato. In the Symposium, Plato’s dialogue on the essence of beauty and human eros which takes place in an evening of drinking, with a bit of double entendre, innuendo, and not a few choice lines, the great playwright Aristophanes is imagined conversing with the militarily charged politico Alcibiades, as well as the great philosopher Socrates. In his encomium to eros, Aristophanes treats the history of gender and the problem of embodiment as the fifth-century BC Greek mind saw it. Aristophanes avers that: Our nature was not what is now, but very different. There were three kinds of humans, that’s my first point—not two as there are now, male and female. In addition to these, there was a third, a combination of these two; its name survives, though the kind itself has vanished. At that time, you see, the word androgynous really meant something: a form made up of male and female elements, though now there’s nothing but the word, and that’s used as an insult. My second point is that the shape of each human being was completely round, with back and sides in a circle; they had four hands each, as many legs as hands, and two faces, exactly alike, on a rounded neck. Between the two faces, which were on opposite sides, was one head with four ears. There were two sets of sexual organs, and everything else was the way you’d imagine it from what I’ve told you. . . . In strength and power, therefore, they Gender’s Divine Dignity in Saint Augustine’s Theological Anthropolog y 591 were terrible, and they had great ambitions. They made an attempt on the gods. 8 Reminiscent of elements found in the Jewish account of the Tower of Babel (Gen 11:1–9), the human race became swollen with its own successes and enamored by its own greatness, taking what should have been a matter of divine thanks into divine rebellion. Unlike other classical etiological myths, however, Plato’s story explains not the diversity of languages or the origins of the known globe’s diverse races, but the very primal difference of gender. Here the distinction between male and female is not a gift from above but is actually an inspired punishment, a penitential reprimand resulting in a divinely mandated difference. Now the gods and goddesses of Hellenistic pantheon not only doubled their sacrifices, they ensured that now ruptured men and women would no longer be heavenly-minded but would instead spend their essential energies in the sexual searching for his or her other half. Centuries later, as Plotinus († 270) attempted to resurrect the key tenets of Platonism and translate them into his own henology, his main disciple Porphyry (ca. 234–305) took a sort of sabbatical toward the end of his life. From this time of leisure, Porphyry wanted to exhort his wife Marcella to continue her study of philosophy in his absence. He therefore guided Marcella through the purpose of philosophy in typical Platonic fashion, to be stripped of all earthly things that weigh down the soul. The chains of corporeality and the weight of physical sensation are to be shunned by a mind made cathartic through contemplation. But in an illuminating turn, we come to read that the female sex is part of this earthly distraction and decay: For God listens only to those who are not weighed down by alien things, and guards those who are purified from corruption. Consider it a great help towards the blessed life if the captive in the thralldom of nature takes his captor captive. For we are bound in the chains that nature has cast around us, by the belly, the throat and the other members and parts of the body, and by the use of these and the pleasant sensations that arise therefrom and the fears they occasion. But if we rise superior to their witchcraft, and avoid the snares laid by them, we lead our captor captive. Neither trouble yourself much whether you are male or female in body, nor look on 8 Plato, Symposium 189d–190b, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1989) 25–26. 592 David Vincent Meconi, S.J. thyself as a woman, for I did not approach you as such. Flee all that is womanish in the soul, as though you had a man’s body about you. For what is born from a virgin soul and a pure mind is most blessed, since imperishable springs from imperishable. But what the body produces is held corrupt by all the gods.9 Of course, such “gender-bending” is not limited to Greek paganism. There are rabbinic interpretations of Genesis 1:27 wherein Adam is primally both man and woman before God intervenes yet again and brings Eve away from him separately. Both Eusebius of Caesarea and Basil of Ancyra suggest this might be an accurate reading of Genesis.10 The Apostle Paul informs the Galatians that being male or female should not be an ultimate concern (see Gal 3:28), or recall how in the heat of battle, the Carthaginian martyr Perpetua recounts: “My clothes were stripped off, and suddenly I was a man [et sum facta masculus].”11 Yet in the early Church any transformational imagery having to do with gender is precisely just that: imagery. It is symbolic or metaphorical of an office, either dominical or ecclesial. For instance, in Perpetua’s case of having become masculus, she does so only insofar as she is conformed to Christ in her soul and in her bravery. She is still referred to as a woman (illam), still no doubt daughter (Filia, pax tecum), and now even recognized as the wife of Christ (matrona Christi) and God’s own beloved (Dei delicata); while she now bears the graced office of another Christ, her female body clearly remains and is revered as such.12 Conversely, all the baptized are called—men and women alike—to be the Bride of Christ, but this is the office of the Church in whom all are saved by receiving the great Bridegroom in an eternal embrace. Admittedly, while there were some exemplary Catholic thinkers who mitigated the beauty of Eve’s femininity, who (like Augustine) called all women to be uiriliter in their faith, and even some contemporary Churchmen of his day who wondered Porphyry, Letter to Marcella 33, trans. Alice Zimmern, in Porphyry, the Philosopher, to his Wife Marcella (London: George Redway, 1896), 77 (slightly adjusted). 10 See Basil of Ancyra’s Liber de uera uirginitatis integritate 3 (PG, 30:367B–C). With so much attention to gender today, scholars have uncovered places in the Christian tradition where such a reading seems to appear—e.g., Eusebius of Caesarea’s Praeparatio euangelica 12.12 (PG, 21:972B–D), as well as the conversation throughout Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (London: Faber & Faber, 1988). 11 The Martyrdom of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas 10, trans. Herbert Musurill, in The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford University Press, 1979), 119. 12 Martyrdom of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas 10 (p. 119). 9 Gender’s Divine Dignity in Saint Augustine’s Theological Anthropolog y 593 if the female body would be resurrected as female on the last day, Augustine’s appreciation for the diversity of gender is theologically powerful and fruitful. Let us now look at those places where gender is of concern to him. These come in three parts: the narrative of Genesis, the economy of salvation as worked through our Lady’s fiat, and the resurrection and restoration of the glorified body at the end of time. Creation of Women Understanding Augustine on the creation of Eve and the inherent feminine dignity he affords women in general, three aspects of this thought should be highlighted. The first is how Augustine reads the creation of woman from the side of man as a sign of the organic unity the Father intended for the human race on the natural level, and the same unity which would be not only restored but even divinized in the Incarnation of his Son, the New Adam (see Rom 5). If the unity of the human race is the first and foundational intent in Eve’s genesis, the next is her unique role in bearing life and continuing the human race. God brings about not another man as an antidote to Adam’s loneliness (see Gen 2:18), but a woman. Why so? She alone can provide more than the friendship all solitary individuals desire; she alone can give Adam both a complementarity and a fecundity that no second vir could. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need to appreciate Augustine’s estimation of Eve as an imago Dei. Whereas some scholars deny that Augustine accords Eve status as a divine image and likeness, he actually stands apart from much of the patristic tradition in reading Saint Paul’s supposed reduction of Eve as only an image of a man (see 1 Cor 11:7) in light of Genesis’s insistence that she is a man’s coequal partner and companion in imaging the divine. Whereas some in the Christian tradition have been highly critical of Genesis’s description of Eve’s coming forth from the side of Adam as a story of subordination and inferiority, Augustine instead here discerns the unique unity of the human race. Unlike other creatures who are created in pairs of male and female for the sole sake of propagation, the first woman’s originating out of the first man is not primarily about the continuation of the human race but about its organic unity. After a beautiful litany cataloging the different creatures brought about, some solitary (e.g., Augustine names eagles, kites, lions, and wolves) and others more communal-minded (e.g., doves, starlings, deer), Augustine turns to the unique status of humanity: In this case [God] created one single individual, but not so that man would be left alone, bereft of human society. Rather, God’s purpose 594 David Vincent Meconi, S.J. was that the unity of human society and the bond of human intimacy would be all the more strongly commended to human beings if they were linked to one another not only by likeness of nature but also by the sense of kinship. In fact, he did not even create the woman who was to be united with the man in the same way that he chose to create the man himself; instead he created her out of that man, so that the human race might be wholly derived from just one man [ex homine uno].13 As we shall see next, Augustine does hold that woman is distinguished from man for the sake of procreation, but even before this, Eve’s entire manner of being created has to do with her symbolizing the unity of persons the Trinity intended in bringing other persons about. In Eve’s new presence on earth, Adam hence discovers his other-centeredness, and in this communion, the human person deeply realizes how, alone, the self is incomplete and moribund. Or, as John Cavadini has so well said, “there is a prelapsarian eschatology implied in the creation of human beings from one homo, and the creation of Eve, in turn from that one homo. It is precisely the creation of Eve from Adam that signifies the distinctiveness of human solidarity. Thus, in this way, it is originally spousal. . . . It does not signify the domination of either spouse.”14 While the denigrating effects of the Fall may have vitiated this intended unity and intimacy, in the beginning Eve symbolizes the equality and tenderness God desired by bringing her from Adam’s side. In a passage rich with possibility in understanding Augustine’s theology of Eve, he argues that, in her appearance on earth, God intended to show us “the great benefit and power of friendship” (uim quoque amicitiae). That is why “God wished to produce all persons out of one, so that they would be held together in their social relationships not only by similarity of race, but also by the bond of kindship. The first natural bond of human society, therefore, is that of husband and wife.”15 It is important to stress Augustine, De civitate Dei 12.22, trans. William Babcock, in City of God 11–22, WSA I/7 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2013), 62 (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina [CCSL] 48: 380). 14 John C. Cavadini, “Spousal Vision: Text and History in the Theology of Augustine,” Augustinian Studies 43, no. 1-2 (2012): 127–48, at 138. 15 Augustine, De bono coniug. 1.1 (p. 33). For more on Augustine and other authors of his world on this image, see Catherine Coneybeare, “The Creation of Eve,” Augustinian Studies 49, no. 2 (2018): 181–98. Coneybeare is excellent not only in her appreciation for the depths of Augustine’s reflections here but providing texts of his contemporaries to show how counterculturally rich the Bishop of Hippo remains. 13 Gender’s Divine Dignity in Saint Augustine’s Theological Anthropolog y 595 this aspect of Augustine’s thought: the foundational and primary role of Eve is to create the bond (uiniculum) for which each person is created. In this she is the initial presence by whom Adam begins to realize that he is made in the image and likeness of another—not Eve, of course, but she is the one in whom Adam first senses his completion is heterotelic. Through maturation and experience, both of these other-centered human persons will have to learn (with cosmically deleterious effects) that their end is not one another but the triune God; but in the beginning, Eve is the one creature who brings about that harmony and relationality for which all of humanity was created. In stressing this first aspect of Augustine’s theological anthropology, we can move to his second feature of Eve’s reason for existing with less worry over the feminist critique that Augustine reduces Eve simply to a needed agent in continuing the human race. Setting the question of the dignity and beauty of motherhood aside, we should remember that Eve has a presence even before her needed role as collaborating with Adam in procreation. As we have seen, Eve first represents how the natural completion of humanity (homo) is brought about, but she is also brought about as she is as woman for a succeeding subsequent role, for the continuing and nurturing of the human race. It is precisely she who is needed in order that the human race may fulfill the first ever command from God, to increase and multiply. In his thorough commentary De Genesi ad litteram, Augustine thus writes: If the question is asked, though, for what purpose it was necessary for this help to be made, no more likely answer suggests itself than that it was for the sake of procreating children—in the same sort of way as the earth is a help to the seed, so that the plant may be born of each of them. This, after all, is what was said at the first establishment of things: Male and female he made them, and God blessed them, saying: Increase and multiply and fill the earth and lord it over it (Gen 1:27–28).16 Here Augustine is very much a man of his age, reflecting the prevailing values of the society in which he lived and thought. He holds that perhaps Adam would find in another vir a more suitable intellectual companion and colleague, but woman is uniquely needed and thus designed for the procreation of new life. 16 De Genesi ad litteram 9.3.5, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P., in On Genesis, WSA I/13 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2002), 378. 596 David Vincent Meconi, S.J. This is why Augustine does not shy away from the inherent bodily distinctions between male and female, drawing our attention primarily to Eve’s forma et distinctio membrorum: And so the woman, being made for the man, from the man, in that sex and shape and distinction of parts by which females are known, gave birth to Cain and Abel and all their brothers and sisters, from whom all human beings would be born. Among them she also gave birth to Seth, through whom we come to Abraham and the people of Israel and the nation now so widely known among all the nations, and to all nations through the sons of Noah. To doubt this is to undermine the foundations of everything we believe, something therefore the faithful should put entirely out of their minds. So then, when you ask what help that sex was made to provide the man with, the only thing that occurs to me after carefully considering everything to the best of my ability is that it was for the sake of having children, so that the earth might be filled from their stock.17 On this point, Eve’s unique ability to bear life should not reduce her to this, as Augustine’s treatises on consecrated virginity and his homilies on unmarried martyrs attest. David Hunter has rightly recognized that Eve’s procreative ability “is placed from the start squarely into a social framework, that is, the bonding of society (connexio societatis) in the natural good of friendship. Marriage and sexual intercourse, leading to the propagation of children, are regarded as goods necessary for the greater good of friendship (amicitia), that is, the ‘friendly association’ (societas amicalis) which is a great good in the human race.”18 In other words, Eve’s ability to bear life may be a great good but it is not the greatest good, that being the intercommunion of persons in both the world and ultimately in God’s Church. In emphasizing Eve’s unparalleled ability to bring about life, Augustine has been accused of detracting from her divinely imaged status, bringing us to our third point when examining Augustine’s theological anthropology of Eve in particular. A generation or two ago, Radford Ruether wrote that, “in relation to man Eve stands for the body vis-a-vis the male spirit. Moreover, Augustine persists in calling this latter [her body] her nature. . . 17 18 De Gen. litt. 9.11 and 9.19 (p. 386). David G. Hunter, “Sex, Marriage and Celibacy,” Augustinian Studies 25 (1994): 153–77, at 160. Gender’s Divine Dignity in Saint Augustine’s Theological Anthropolog y 597 . Augustine defines the male as alone, the full image of God.”19 What Ruether and a large number of feminist scholars have missed is that Augustine holds easily and dogmatically not only that Eve is unquestionably as equal a divine image and likeness as Adam, but also that Eve is an indispensable part to the fullness of Adam’s own humanity. Far from the misogynist many moderns want to meet in the bishop of Hippo, Augustine is in fact the first Christian author to interpret 1 Corinthians 11:7—that man is an imago Dei but woman is made in the image of man—allegorically. He is the first in the great Christian Tradition to reconcile that teaching of Genesis 1:27 with 1 Corinthians 11:7 and Paul’s insistence that woman should cover her head because, while man is in the image of God, she is the glory of man. Unlike Philo, who argued Adam represents nous (mind) while Eve is wholly sensuality, aisthesis; or unlike even the great Ambrose, who suggests in his commentary on Noah’s ark that Adam is that part of us who is rational and contemplative while Eve is to be aligned with the external and the beastly.20 At De Trinitate 12, however, Augustine provides posterity with a most amazing theological solution in how to read Scripture consistently and accurately. Far from being the misogynist many moderns want to see in the bishop of Hippo, he instead looks at the disciplinary mandate of 1 Corinthians 11:7 in light of the creation story of Adam in Even in Genesis 1. He then begins to lay out his argument, that every human person possesses a “kind of conscious activity, [and] while it is carried on with sensible things and with what the consciousness has imbibed from them through the senses of the body, it is nonetheless not without its share in reason, and so it is not common to man and beast.”21 That is, the human soul, created for a heavenly life but made to live in this world of time and space, is uniquely poised with two distinct but related activities, one that is necessary to make our way in the world of sensible things and the other which participates in eternal ratio. The former Augustine calls scientia, the latter sapientia. As Adam and Eve perfectly complemented one another to make up one couple, sapientia and scientia need one another so the pilgrim can make his or her way in this world of transient and material goods in such a way so as to achieve our heavenly homeland. In this way, Augustine overlooks the silliness of the question whether Eve is a divine image, for Rosemary Radford Ruether, Virginal Feminism in the Fathers of the Church (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 156. 20 See Ambrose, De Noe et arca 92. 21 Augustine, De Trinitate 12.2, trans. Edmund Hill, in The Trinity, WSA I/5 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2015), 410 (emphasis mine). 19 598 David Vincent Meconi, S.J. Genesis unequivocally states so; what he so innovatively and faithfully accomplishes is to recast Paul’s apparent subordination of woman from the ontological to the epistemological. That is, in Augustine’s view, Paul is clearly not talking about men and women per se, but the two aspects of the human soul, the scientific and the sapiential. For, Augustine a little later asks: “Is there anyone who would exclude females from this association, seeing that together with us men they are fellow heirs of grace?”22 In fact, at one point Augustine actually worries if Adam would retain his status as a divine image if Eve left his side: “Now what are we to say to this? If the woman in her own person completes the Trinity, why is the man still called the image of God when she has been extracted from his side?”23 In paralleling Adam with sapientia and Eve with scientia, the human couple is complete; the human anima is complete. However, is Augustine misogynistic in giving Adam the eternal role and Eve the earthly form of knowledge? In his estimation, no. Why not? In his experience, Adam’s body proves more unchanging, not blessed or burdened, with the ability to undergo the changes in bearing life, not experiencing the monthly changes involved in the ability to menstruate, lactate, and all the many ways the female body must develop in order to bring about and care for an infinite other. And where Augustine detects difference, he looks for order. The order is provided in Paul’s teaching that women cover their physical heads because a spiritual covering would make absolutely no sense; for internally and eternally, men and women are unquestionably and equally created divine images and likenesses. The difference comes in their bodily status, and it is here that Augustine’s Platonism comes into play: to be real is to be immutable, to have worth and value and integrity means to be united to that which is unchanging. Due to the inherent mutability of a woman’s body and not her soul, the bishop insists that a head covering achieves two outcomes: it reminds a woman that she is much more than her bodily changes and it helps men not reduce women to their bodies. Women are to veil in liturgy not because they are lascivious objects, “representing the shameful, sinful carnality which put the barrier between God and humanity in the first place,” as Kim Power in Veiled Desire argues.24 Instead, let us listen to Augustine’s own words: “Well, it is only because woman differs from the man in the sex of her body that her bodily covering could suitably be used to symbolize that part of the reason which Augustine, De Trin. 12.12 (p. 422). Augustine, De Trin. 12.9 (p. 418). 24 Kim Power, Veiled Desire (New York: Continuum, 1996), 154. 22 23 Gender’s Divine Dignity in Saint Augustine’s Theological Anthropolog y 599 is diverted to the management of temporal affairs, signifying that the mind of man [homo] does not remain the image of God except in the part which adheres to the eternal ideas to contemplate or consult them: and it is clear that females have this as well as males.”25 This stress on the complementarity of man and woman comes through not just in Augustine’s theological treatises, but it is a point he needs to get across to the average Christian seated in his parish, living in the world. That is why in Sermon 262 he again advances the veil by signaling the dignity of women and inverting the doxa in Paul, now calling the woman the glory of man: What, after all, can “and over all the earth your glory” mean, but over all the earth your Church, over all the earth your wife, over all the earth your bride, your beloved, your dove, your consort? She is your glory. “The man indeed,” says the apostle, “ought not to veil his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of the man.” If the woman is the glory of the man, the Church is the glory of Christ.26 Our bishop is not afraid to invert scriptural images if the overall theology is consistent with the story of Scripture.27 Are husband and wife not the glory of one another; are not all created persons equally glorious before the Father? For there is no doubt in Augustine’s mind that woman qua woman is created toward the image and likeness of God just as fully as the man. Too, he well understands that the difference from the man that woman manifests is due primarily to the fact that she is needed to bear and bring about new life for the continuation of the human race, and that it is in Eve’s body that she is most “other” from Adam. In this line of argument, Augustine is implicitly committing himself to Augustine, De Trin. 12.12 (p. 422–23). Augustine, Sermon 262, no. 5, trans. Edmund Hill, in Sermons Volume 7, WSA IIII/7 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 1993), 214 (emphasis mine). 27 One of the more significant inversions Augustine takes upon himself but actually attributes to Scripture is his cavalier gloss on 1 John 4:8, arguing that if God is love then love is God. For more on this, see: T. J. van Bavel, “The Double Face of Love in St. Augustine—The Daring Inversion: Love is God,” Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum 26, no. 3 (1986): 69–80; Roland Teske, S.J., “Augustine’s Inversion of 1 John 4:8,” Augustinian Studies 39, no. 1 (2008): 49–60; Raymond Canning, The Unity of Love For God and Neighbor in St. Augustine (Heverlee-Leuven: Augustinian Historical Institute, 1993); David Meconi, On Self-Harm, Narcissism, Atonement and the Vulnerable Christ (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019): 148–53. 25 26 600 David Vincent Meconi, S.J. the position that being either male or female exhausts how God intended human gender to be expressed. Any gender outside of these two options is not possibly “fluid,” nor is sexual identity able to be determined by the created will, regardless how insistent. This is obviously to wade into a twenty-first-century debate, and while such a conversation would surely sound alien to the ears of a fifth-century bishop, Augustine did know of people who did not fit easily into the binary expression of either male or female.28 Be that as it may, let us now move to how this primal and loving complementarity between man and woman is consecrated by the advent of Jesus Christ, God-made-man, born of a woman. Woman and the Story of Christian Salvation Augustine’s most usual treatment when looking at the particular significance of gender in the Christian story is to delineate clearly the masculinity of Jesus from the femininity of our Lady. Both are obviously good and intended by God but in becoming man and being born of woman; the second person of the Trinity aims to incorporate both genders into his salvific descent. For example, in Sermon 190 the people of Hippo hear: But the fact is, God himself created both sexes, male and female; and that’s why he wished to honor each sex in his birth, having come to liberate each of them. You know, of course, about the first man’s fall, how the serpent didn’t dare speak to the man, but made use of the woman’s services to bring him down. Through the weaker, he gained hold of the stronger; and by infiltrating through one of them he triumphed over both. In order, therefore, to make it impossible for us with a show of righteous, horrified indignation, to put all the blame for our death on the woman, and to believe that she is irredeemably damned; that’s why the Lord, who came to seek what was lost, (Lk 19:10) wished to do something for each sex by honoring them both, because both had got lost. In neither sex, then, should we wrong the creator; the birth of the Lord encouraged each to hope 28 At De civ. 16.8, Augustine catalogs various unusual situations of human existence, what he calls “monstrous births” (“monstrosis . . . partubus”). Included here are the “very rare” cases of people being born with signs of both male and female genitalia, those whom he calls androgyni or hermaphroditi. He first raises the possibility that perhaps God the great Craftsman formed these people so in a wisdom much above our own; but then concludes that (1) perhaps these stories are untrue, (2) perhaps these races are not human, or (3) if they are, they are certainly children of the first Adam (“. . . omnino nulla sunt; aut si sunt, homines non sunt; aut ex Adam sunt, si homines sunt”). Gender’s Divine Dignity in Saint Augustine’s Theological Anthropolog y 601 for salvation. The male sex is honored in the flesh of Christ; the female is honored in the mother of Christ.29 Augustine clearly has not escaped a sort of ancient reproach, blaming Eve’s weakness for the Fall; but he is nothing short of adamant that this does not put all the blame on her and that this primal act of disobedience is by no means to be translated into her damnation. In fact, we are forbidden to “wrong the creator,” to blame God, for either sex, as both being divinely intended and needed. Given the neat corollaries upon which Augustine insists when thinking this way, it may not surprise to hear that at other times this application of men being honored through Christ and women through Mary takes on a recapitulative tone: “Let men rejoice, let women rejoice. Christ has been born a man; he has been born of a woman; and each sex has been honored. Now therefore, let everyone, having been condemned in the first man, pass over to the second. It was a woman who sold us death; a woman who bore us life.”30 While Augustine does not shy away from pointing to Eve’s role in disobeying God, she nonetheless remains God’s beloved daughter, and so the Father devises a plan in which Eve can now redeem not only herself but the entire race by allowing the Son of God to be born of her. In so doing, God shows the world how beautiful the process of human conception and birth really is, pointing especially at the female womb and how it is not the place where defilement occurs. In Sermon 51 (dated around 418) we thus hear: So then in order to do this, our Lord Jesus Christ became a son of man by being born of course of a woman. But supposing he hadn’t been born of the virgin Mary, would he have been any the less so? . . . You say, “Why should he choose a woman in order to get born?” The answer you get is, “Why should he avoid a woman in order to get born?” Suppose I am not able to show why he should choose to be born of a woman; you must still show me what he ought to avoid in a woman. But really we have been through it all before; if he had avoided a woman's womb, it would rather have indicated that he could be defiled by it. But in fact, the more undefiled he was in his own proper being, the less reason he had Augustine, Sermon 190, no. 2, trans. Edmund Hill, in Sermons Volume 6, WSA III/6 (Hyde Park, NY: 1993), 39. 30 Augustine, Sermon 184, no. 2, trans. Edmund Hill, in WSA III/6, 18. 29 602 David Vincent Meconi, S.J. to shrink from a bodily womb, as though he could be defiled by it. But instead, by being born of a woman, he would bring home to us a point of great significance.31 So, notice Augustine’s pedagogy here: God chose to be born of a woman to reveal to us some mystery, namely the dignity of human motherhood from conception to birth. If God names this, what is perhaps the quintessence of human corporeality, something not only metaphysically good but even making it personally necessary for him to save the human race, how could any mortal find such an event loathsome? Augustine thus continues: After all, brothers, I too am perfectly ready to admit that if the Lord had wanted to become man without being born of woman, it would have been something quite easy for his sovereign majesty to achieve. Just as he was able to be born of a woman without a man, so he could have been born without even a woman. But what he is showing us here is that in neither of its sexes need humanity despair of itself. Human beings, of course, are divided by sex into males and females. So if, while appearing as a man—and I agree he had to be that— he had not been born of a woman, women would have despaired of themselves, remembering their first sin, how it was through a woman that the first man was ensnared, and would have thought that there was absolutely no hope for them in Christ. So he came as a man to select his preference for the male sex [praelegere sexum virilum], and he was born of a woman to comfort the female sex.32 Augustine rarely entertains the possibility of God’s acting other than what he reads in Scripture and lives enacted in the Church, but here he admits that perhaps the Son of God could have somehow become human without being born of a woman. However, this option is judged to be unbefitting and contrary to God’s perfect goodness. God chose to complement his becoming a man (vir) with his need to be born of a woman. In so doing, both sexes are again granted their original paradisiacal dignity, irreducibly different but necessarily complementary. This is the theological anthropology behind a wonderful insight by the Anglican divine Eric Mascall († 1991). He pointed out that, while masculinity may see its apex assumed to a divine person, we human persons must Augustine, Sermon 51, no. 3, trans. Edmund Hill, in Sermons Volume 3, WSA III/3 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2001), 21. 32 Augustine, Sermon 51, no. 3 (p. 21–22). 31 Gender’s Divine Dignity in Saint Augustine’s Theological Anthropolog y 603 look to the femininity of Mary to see our greatest fulfillment: It was male human nature the Son of God united to His divine person; it was a female human person who was chosen to be His mother. On the other hand, no male human person was chosen to be the Messiah, . . . and no female human nature was assumed by a divine person. Thus from one point of view the Incarnation exalts the male above the female while from another point of view it exalts the female sex above the male. In no woman has human nature been raised to the dignity which it possesses in Jesus of Nazareth, but in no male human person has there been given the dignity comparable to that which Mary enjoys as the Mother of God.33 This is how Augustine can highlight the interplay between Jesus and Mary, that both men and women can see the fullness of their engendered selves. By not only gazing upon but appropriating the Gospel story and the life offered us through its Church’s sacraments, men and women can finally know the salvific meaning of their very own bodies. Augustine accordingly continues in Sermon 51: It’s as though he made them a little speech and said, “To show you that it’s not any creature of God’s that is bad, but that it’s crooked pleasures that distort them, in the beginning when I made man, I made them male and female. I don’t reject and condemn any creature that I have made. Here I am, born a man, born of a woman. So I don’t reject any creature I have made, but I reject and condemn sins, which I didn’t make. Let each sex take note of its proper honor, and each confess its iniquity, and each hope for salvation.”34 In the Christ event, the ultimate dignity of each sex is revealed. Before the fallen corruptions inaugurated by sin, in the beginning, God willed that there be two and only two genders: “I made them male and female. I don’t reject and condemn anything I have made,” Augustine reminds us. This binary essentialism is consecrated at the Annunciation: incarnate as a man and born of a woman, this babe in Bethlehem shows the world how the Father intended sex, gender, the body, human relationships, and the family to be. We have seen that for Augustine this divine design is neither the result 33 34 Eric Mascall, “The Ministry of Women,” Theology 57, no. 413 (1954): 428. Augustine, Sermon 51, no. 3 (p. 22). 604 David Vincent Meconi, S.J. of punishment nor something temporary and ephemeral. Men as men and women as women shall rise on the last day and their unique differences will sparkle throughout all eternity, giving praise to their Creator who makes all things good and who resurrects all things new. Let us now turn to the third section and the resurrected body which will perdure forever more. Feminine Wisdom and Ability to Guide Spiritually In his theology of creation, salvation, and eschatology, Augustine never wavers that the female sex is intended and even needed by God. Eve was God’s gambit in opening Adam up to his need for personal intimacy, and the first Eve’s ability to receive and bring forth life was part of God’s plan both to propagate the human race and to redeem it in the Second Eve. But this is not a gift which is merely biological; women also are able to help men grow in virtue. More than once will the bishop of Hippo hold up everyday women as living examples of what men should be. While he never doubts that a woman’s primary role is to bear children and that a husband’s superiority over his wife is divinely intended, he also stresses a mutual servitude—looking at 1 Corinthians 7:4—and even argues that the strength of the women martyrs far outmans the lukewarm Christian’s. He thus instructs the men of Chusa: You are told, You shall not commit adultery, that is, do not go to any other woman except your wife. But what you do is demand this duty from your wife, while declining to pay this duty to your wife. And while you ought to lead your wife in virtue (chastity is a virtue, you know), you collapse under one assault of lust. You want your wife to conquer; you yourself lie there, conquered. And while you are the head of your wife, she goes ahead of you to God, she whose head you are.35 At least in this essential virtue of chastity, Augustine is explicit that women outrun men in self-mastery. In fact, it seems that, at least in this instance, wives are burdened leading their husbands, and we hear Augustine chide the men and exhort them to be the head Saint Paul instructs them to be in Ephesians 5. The bishop reveres such a woman with the highest of praise—“Illa enim casta et sancta femina et uere christiana”—and therefore recommends that 35 Sermon 9, no. 3, trans. Edmund Hill, in Sermons Volume 1, WSA III/1 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2001), 261. Gender’s Divine Dignity in Saint Augustine’s Theological Anthropolog y 605 men listen to their wives when it comes to what is essential to true virtue. This is why a bit later in this same homily, we learn: Christ speaks in the hearts of good women, he speaks inside where the husband doesn’t hear him, because he doesn’t deserve to if he is that sort of man. So he speaks inwardly and consoles his daughter with words like this, “Are you distressed about your husband’s wrongful behavior, what he has done to you? Grieve, but don’t imitate him and behave badly yourself, but let him imitate you in behaving well. Insofar as he behaves badly, don’t regard him as your head, but me.” After all, if he is the head even insofar as he behaves badly, the body is going to follow its head, and both go head over heels to their ruin. To avoid following her bad head, let her hold fast to the head of the Church, Christ.36 Is Augustine then saying that women are typically more capable of hearing Christ’s voice? At least when it comes to tempering sexual urges, Augustine does insist that women are naturally Christ’s brides and therefore perhaps more clearly conformed to such nuptial intimacy. If we here draw from Cavadini’s work once again, we come to see how Augustine’s refusal to equate passions with emotions allows him to see that the sexual urge is a natural—albeit fallen—movement (motus) of the human soul and not therefore something that cannot be consecrated to Christ. Sexual passion bears bad fruit only if it is fruit of a bad tree, Cavadini here drawing from City of God 14.13—but, he shows, if the “will is right, that is, fixed in love of God, in charity, then, the emotions will be right.” 37 As Cavadini makes clear, sexual urges are in and of themselves morally neutral, necessary movements for the good and beneficial continuation of the human race. But lust has tainted men more than women, evidenced by the lack of control of a man’s sexual organ, the fact that we cover such parts, and the obvious custom of moving children from the place and time of engaging in the very act that brought each of them about in the first place.38 Lust, as Cavadini argues, is the result of an enslaved (because fallen) imagination, a desire for a pleasure apart from the Creator of pleasure: “This causes shame because, paradoxically, it belies the mythos of self-sufficiency to which pride is committed. It is the sole external indi Sermon 9, no. 11 (p. 269). John C. Cavadini, “Feeling Right: Augustine on the Passions and Sexual Desire,” Augustinian Studies 36:1 (2005) 195–217, at 201. 38 Augustine, De civ. 14.15–17. 36 37 606 David Vincent Meconi, S.J. cator or sign that the claim to self-sufficiency, to sovereignty, is a lie.”39 Is it Eve’s natural state of being the sign of other-centeredness that allows her to be more faithful, more sensitive to the lies and sins against otherness, primarily sexual sins? Augustine never makes this claim directly, but it can certainly be a faithful reading of his instructions to husbands against lusting for their wives. This is no doubt why we hear women being held up not simply as masters of the intellect, as in the case with Monica in the early dialogues, but more importantly as chaste and faithful heralds of the Gospel: Man was ensnared through a woman administering poison; let man be restored through a woman administering salvation. Let woman compensate for the sin of the man ensnared through her by giving birth to the Christ. That too is why women were the first to tell the apostles about God rising from the dead. A woman brought the news of death to her man in paradise; and women too brought the news of salvation to men in the Church. The apostles were to carry the news of Christ’s resurrection to the nations; the news was brought to the apostles by women. Nobody, therefore, should belittle Christ for being born of a woman, the sex that could not defile him as liberator, the sex to which he owed a testimonial as creator.40 It seems that women as ecclesiae look more ardently for Christ because they historically were the first to lose him in Eve. It is this sort of natural affinity to the bride of Christ that enables Augustine to recommend women as spiritual directors to even bishops. In a fascinating episode of his life, Bishop Augustine had appointed a young man, whom he had trained in his monastery, by the name of Antoninus, to become the bishop of Fussala, a small but important see in Numidia, about forty miles away from Hippo Regius. Fussala was in need of a Catholic leader since the Donatist proscription of 412 resulted in many former Catholics returning to the Church. A combination of this young man’s abilities and a shortage of capable candidates at the time forced Augustine to consecrate Antoninus a bishop when Augustine’s original choice had recused himself at the last moment; the only problem was that Antoninus was only a bit over twenty years old, requiring the suspending of canonical norms. 39 40 Cavadini, “Feeling Right,” 204. Augustine, Sermon 51, no. 3 (p. 22). For more on this episode in Augustine’s life, see Neil B. McLynn, “Administrator: Augustine in His Diocese,” in A Companion to Augustine, ed. Mark Vessey (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 310–22, at 318–21. Gender’s Divine Dignity in Saint Augustine’s Theological Anthropolog y 607 Thereafter, puffed up with his own successes, Antoninus proceeded to plunder the assets of the church of Fussala so badly that the people demanded his removal. In 421 Augustine called for a local tribunal to depose Antoninus, even calling in Pope Celestine for his advice in such a delicate matter.41 Toward the end of 422, Augustine turned to a holy laywoman he believed would be able to get through to Antoninus. In Epistle 20, the bishop of Hippo implored this wise, older woman named Fabiola to assist Antonius, as only she can. Her years and her femininity were perhaps precisely the way this young priest would return to the ecclesial fidelity and episcopal vocation to which God has called him. This is a most enduring missive, Fabiola’s missive being addressed to her as Dominae religiosissimae et praestantissimae—a most religious and excellent Lady. This letter offers a unique insight into Augustine’s willingness to let “leadership” be found not in office but in charism. Throughout the letter Fabiola’s femininity is sought out as the way Antoninus might perhaps listen to the Lord’s own voice. She has already welcomed this wayward son into her home and has cared for his basic needs, and has thus earned the right to be heard and listened to, even by a bishop. Augustine therefore writes: Let him hear this from you, I beg, and do not keep from him whatever the Lord gives you to say to the man over whose soundness of heart I desire to rejoice. After all, you have in relation to him such an age that you can properly show him the affection of a mother. For, unless he is living under God’s very great anger, he does not disdain in you the advice of his own mother. I know that you have risen with Christ so that you seek the things that are above, not those on earth (Col 3:1); do not, then, be afraid to give the advice of a believer to a bishop who is seeking the things of earth. You are in fact seeking God in this world; he is seeking this world in the Church.42 Holiness is obviously a matter not of ecclesial power but of personal surrender and fidelity, and this Fabiola has well over her Church leaders. But she has it in a maternal and therefore accessible way, a gift of counsel that enables her to enter the lives and souls of others in ways that are not open to priests or bishops. See Augustine’s Letter 209, to Celestine, an illuminating instance of the interaction of pope and local bishops and how to adjudicate ecclesial disputes on the local level. 42 Augustine, Letter 20*, no. 28, trans. Roland Teske, in Letters Volume 4, WSA II/4 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2005), 311. 41 608 David Vincent Meconi, S.J. The Female Body, Redeemed and Resurrected Finally, it is fitting to end with what Augustine saw in the end, never wavering from his commitment to the view that the two genders divinely created at the beginning would also be God’s glory in eternity as well. It is an Augustinian mainstay that God chooses to mend rather than end any part of his good creation and the engendered body is no different. He therefore can teach: In eternal life we shall all be equal. For while we shall sparkle [ fulgebunt] in different ways according to our various deserts, some more, some less, as far as eternal life is concerned, it will be the same for all. . . . There will be a different kind of sparkle for the chaste fidelity of couples, and for the untouched virginity of the single. . . . Yet as regards living forever, this person won’t live more than that one, nor that one than this one. After all, they will live without end, every one of them alike, while they each live in their own proper kind of glory.43 The “sparkle” each of our lives both receives from and redounds back to God is how each creature realizes his or her unique and unrepeatable dignity. Each of us, male or female, married or virgin, return to God a personalized gift from the graces he originally imparted to each of us. Or as Augustine preaches on the Feast of the martyr Saint Lawrence in 417, picking up on a beautiful trope of the diversity of Christian vocations being a garden, “including not only the roses of martyrs, but also the lilies of the virgins, and the ivy of married people, and the violets of the widows.”44 There is no state of life, there is no gender, in which anyone is somehow outside a holy vocation, but each in his or her own way. Furthermore, while Augustine does not mention gender explicitly in his language of this “great exchange,” it is implied: the humanity offered to the Son of God is at once what makes his death and our true life possible. Or as he tells his congregation around 412: “We had nothing of our own by which we could really live, and he had Augustine, Sermon 87, no. 6, trans. Edmund Hill, in WSA III/3, 410. See also Sermon 96, no. 9: “The integrity of virgins has its place there; the continence of widows has its place there; the modesty of the married has its place there; adultery has no place there” (trans. Edmund Hill, in Sermons Volume 4, WSA III/4 [Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2001], 33–34). 44 Augustine, Sermon 304, no. 2, trans. Edmund Hill, in Sermons Volume 8, WSA III/8 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2001), 317. 43 Gender’s Divine Dignity in Saint Augustine’s Theological Anthropolog y 609 nothing of his very own by which he could really die. Accordingly, he struck a wonderful bargain with us, a mutual give and take: ours was what he died by; his was what we might live by.”45 Or again, at the concluding line of a sermon delivered on the Feast of the Ascension in 417: “What a marvelous exchange [o magna mutatio]! Live by what is his, because he died with what is yours.”46 It is the interplay between divinity and humanity that makes the union of God and man possible; it was the “yes,” fiat mihi, of a woman that allows the mutual participation of God in humanity and humanity in God. Yet, worried that a false reading of Ephesians 4:13 and the complete manhood in which we shall all rise may expunge the womanhood of half of God’s celestial Church, Augustine vigorously defends the resurrection of woman and the female body. At the end of time, we are informed that, while some people do hold that all resurrected bodies will return to the original Adamic male, Augustine is far from that view. Since femininity is a divinely willed counterpart to masculinity, both will be preserved for eternity. He writes: All faults will be removed from those bodies, but their nature will be preserved. And female sex is not a fault but rather a matter of nature, and it will then be exempt from intercourse and childbirth. The female organs will still be present. Now, however, they will be accommodated not to their former use but to a new beauty which will not excite the lustful desire of the beholder, for there will be no lust. Instead they will evoke praise for the wisdom and compassion of God, who both created what was not and freed what he created from corruption.47 It is indisputable that Augustine understands that the man is no more part of God’s intended creation, no more of a divine image and likeness, and no more a resurrected gender than woman. Here Augustine also admits that each sex has its own peculiar patterns of iniquity. However, note carefully that, while the female body may occasion the particularly masculine sin of lust, Augustine never blames the woman qua woman for the wandering eyes of men. In fact, men must learn to gaze upon her beauty rightly if they are ever to appreciate it fully. So, while it is true that from both the world in which he lived and the life Augustine, Sermon 218C, no. 1, trans. Edmund Hill, in WSA III/6, 194. Augustine, Sermon 265D, trans. Edmund Hill, in WSA III/7:259. 47 De civ. 22.17 (p. 526). 45 46 610 David Vincent Meconi, S.J. in which he lived it, Augustine seems never to disconnect the female body from the demon of lust, such passages on the new heaven and the new earth make it clear that he does not blame the woman’s body, but rather the lascivious man’s fallen desire. What God had created in the beginning will be consummated at the end, Adam and Eve becoming the redeemed forerunners of Christ and his Church, the harmonious union of male and female which saves the world. Conclusion Augustine’s theology and pastoral concerns bespeak a man whose experience with woman may have affected his candor and care, but which has also shown him the unique gifts and insight of women. He looks for ways to correct misogynistic readings of Scripture and ways to correct the Christian tradition that preceded him. He is no doubt a bishop who understands the power of the women in his parish and how they in fact lead their husbands in what is most essential in the Christian life. Some of his positions may border on the stereotypical to many of us today, for example in thinking women are more naturally chaste and given to the virtue of purity than men, but his experience and interactions with the people of North Africa seems to confirm and sustain his message and approach. This essay has set out to show how Augustine understood male and female as God-given ways of being fully human. He has heard of and may have even interacted with those he calls androgyni and hermaphroditi, and while he does not have much to say about their state in life, he does insist that they are images and likenesses of God worthy of full human dignity and the respect of all with whom they come into contact. The norm for Augustine, against much of today’s movements, is a body either inceptive or receptive of life. The gender manifested in male and female is precisely for that, for the ongoing creation of the human race. Even without sin, man and woman would experience that fruitful desire for sexual union, albeit without the spiritual lust and bodily pain which can often arise from human intercourse. The creation of the human person as either man or woman is for Augustine therefore the first real gift to the human, the first real way of being human, either male or female. Too, in the story of Christian salvation, each gender has an essentially unique and un-exchangeable role to play: God is born as a man from a woman. Neither gender is above the other qua gender, and as reliant as Mary is upon her God for all that she is, the Son of God is similarly wholly dependent upon her to be who he is as human and as our vulnerable savior. As God, he did not have the capacity to be slain and sacrificed, while fallen humankind did not have that which is required for everlasting life Gender’s Divine Dignity in Saint Augustine’s Theological Anthropolog y 611 and unalloyed joy. So, “in the fullness of time” (Gal 4:4), the Son of God comes to be born as a male human only through the free assent of a female human, and in this divinely designed drama involving male and female, the salvation of the world begins and continues. It is a salvation effected only by the cooperation of God the Father and the Church our Mother. The Christian story is thus an interplay between the masculine and the feminine; the Church is not a “single sex” family, but the loving harmony between God our Father and the Church our Mother, a lesson the Donatists especially needed to learn: If any, though, have cut themselves off from the Church by the division of schism, even though they may seem to themselves to be holding on to the Father, they are most perniciously forsaking their mother, while those who relinquish both Christian faith and mother Church [ fidem christianam et matrem eccleisam] are deserting both parents. Hold on to your Father, hold on to your mother. You are a little child; stick to your mother [inhaere matri]. You are a little child, suck your mother’s milk, and she will bring you, nourished on milk, to the table of the Father.48 Never one to shy away from the unique gifts of women, Augustine draws from fairly erotic imagery to describe the work of the Church, to bear children, to wash, feed, and teach God’s sons and daughters. This is a femininity that is also continued personally for all time: the human body is created and will therefore be redeemed as engendered, both male and female. Augustine is clearly neither a corporeally suspicious gnostic nor a Christian overly influenced by terribly oriental readings of Scripture: the man Jesus Christ is born of a woman in order to unite himself to a receptive bride, the Church, where the pristine masculinity and femininity will be redeemed and live joyfully precisely as male or female. What takes away from each gender will of course be removed and the fullness of what it means to be a man or woman will never shine as brightly as there where all things will realize their perfection. As such, Augustine’s theology of gender in general, and his theology of womanhood and marriage in particular, is far from the problem of today’s 48 Augustine, Sermon 198, no. 2, trans. Edmund Hill, in Sermons Volume 11 (Newly Discovered), WSA III/11 (Hyde Park NY: New City, 2001), 212. This sermon is among a group not discovered until 1990, found by François Dobleau in a fifteenth-century Carthusian manuscript now preserved in the state library in Mainz; in that collection it lists as Dobleau no. 26 and Mainz no. 62. 612 David Vincent Meconi, S.J. Church, as some like Carroll and others aver. Rather, what the bishop of Hippo has to say about God’s love, humanity’s “sparkle,” and the beauty of an eternal nuptiality between the two is a corrective to today’s confusion about the supposed inconsequentiality (or even toxicity) of being gifted eternally as either a man or a woman. It is here that salvation occurs, between the freely-uttered “yes” of a woman and the sacred flesh of her male Son. Augustine’s honesty in looking at the complementary interplay between male or female also guides the contemporary mind into rightly understanding the Church’s teaching on the beauty, as well as the burdens of the sacraments of Holy Matrimony of Holy Orders and the engendered dignity of being made in the image and likeness of the triune God. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2021): 613–632 613 Saint Thomas and Joseph Ratzinger / Pope Benedict XVI on the Body and Adoration Kevin E. O’Reilly, O.P. Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas Rome, Italy The argument put forward in this brief article is straight- forward. In brief, both Saint Thomas and Joseph Ratzinger / Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI espouse the logic of hylomorphic anthropology, that is to say, the understanding that we are body–soul unities, as well as a participatory metaphysics. With regard to their respective views on the role of the body in adoration, therefore, there is a striking similarity. For both theologians, human worship of God is necessarily embodied worship. This view, moreover, extends to the role of the cosmos in worship, since the cosmos assumes a symbolic significance precisely on account of the fact that embodied existence is spatially and temporally determined by it. The hylomorphic liturgical anthropology of both theologians stands in stark contrast to the dualistic liturgical anthropology that has become dominant in the West in our own time. Ratzinger/Benedict of course offers a critique of these contemporary liturgical trends. If Thomas were alive today, his critique would arguably be substantially the same as that of the Pope Emeritus. Since what is at stake in the case of the celebration of the Mass is the penetration and shaping of the soul by the Word, there is good reason for attempts at renewal to range Thomas and Benedict side by side against those forces that undermine the majesty and mystery of Catholic liturgical worship. In order to make this argument, however, a brief account of hylomorphic anthropology is in order. This account is drawn from the teaching of Saint Thomas, since Ratzinger/Benedict, to my knowledge, offers no systematic treatment of this subject. While hylomorphic anthropology is a philosophical construal of human nature, Aristotelian-Thomistic in its provenance, it has 614 Kevin E. O’Reilly, O.P. nevertheless been adopted by the Church’s magisterium. Most recently John Paul II, in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor, emphasized this point, referring to “the Church’s teachings on the unity of the human person, whose rational soul is per se et essentialiter the form of his body.”1 “The spiritual and immortal soul,” John Paul II continues, “is the principle of unity of the human being, whereby it exists as a whole—corpore et anima unus—as a person.”2 Having clarified the concept of hylomorphic anthropology, the article will then turn to an exposition of the thought both of Saint Thomas and of Ratzinger/Benedict on adoration. Both theologians consider bodily gestures to be a physical manifestation of an internal attitude. By the same token, bodily gestures such as prostration and kneeling for their part cultivate a spirit of adoration. Both Thomas and Benedict deal with the issue of orientation in the liturgy. Their agreement in this regard, which is grounded in the Church’s ancient Tradition, is the fruit of an understanding that we are psychosomatically constituted. Our worship can therefore never be purely spiritual and thus prescind from space and time. A brief account of the contemporary liturgical situation, however, shows it to be Cartesian in its dynamics. In other words, it cultivates a kind of liturgical practice that is disembodied (inasmuch as this is possible for human beings). The overwhelming creativity that one encounters at times in the liturgy and which constitutes a break with Tradition is the fruit of this philosophy. There is therefore good reason to engage with the reflections of Thomas and Benedict concerning the body and adoration. Saint Thomas’s Hylomorphic Anthropology3 1 2 3 Pope John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor (1993), §48. See also §86, which refers the reader to the Council of Vienne’s constitution Fidei Catholicae, and the Fifth Lateran Council’s bull Apostolici Regiminis. John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, §48. The views of Joseph Ratzinger / Pope Benedict XVI on matters eschatological with respect to the relationship between body and soul lie beyond the confines of this article. For a treatment of this issue, see Patrick J. Fletcher, Resurrection Realism (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014). The material of this section is drawn from my article “On the Alleged Physicalism of St. Thomas Aquinas at S.Theol., I-II, 94, 2,” Angelicum 88 (2011): 233–36. For a very fine treatment of Thomas’s hylomorphic anthropology, see Giles Emery, O.P., “The Unity of Man, Body and Soul, in St. Thomas Aquinas,” in Trinity, Church, and the Human Person: Thomistic Essays (Naples, FL: Sapientia Press, 2007), 209–35. For a contemporary Thomistic philosophy of the body that engages various streams of contemporary thought, see G. J. McAleer, Ecstatic Morality and Sexual Politics: A Catholic and Antitotalitarian Theory of the Body (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). For a superlative neo-Aristotelian treatment of the logic of human embodiment, see Leon R. Kass, The Hungry Soul: Eating and Saint Thomas and Ratzinger / Benedict XVI on the Body and Adoration 615 Thomas’s understanding of the human body is inseparable from his teaching concerning the intellectual soul as man’s sole substantial form.4 “The soul is the very nature of the body,”5 he proclaims provocatively in his commentary on the Sentences, thereby emphasizing the intrinsic and intimate connection that obtains between soul and body. We can well assert that the body’s actuality derives from the intellectual soul, an assertion that is in accord with Thomas’s metaphysical teaching to the effect that matter “has actual existence by the substantial form, which makes it to exist absolutely.”6 Completely ruled out in this view is the possibility of experiencing one’s body from within as though it were a “thing” separate from one’s true self. Marie-Joseph Nicolas expresses well Thomas’s understanding of the human body when he describes it as “the expressive field of the soul.”7 It is the visible and material index of an invisible and immaterial principle. The body is so united to the intellectual soul that it constitutes the soul’s somatic manifestation.8 The body is the exterior face of this being whose interior principle is the soul.9 A radical consequence follows from conceiving the intellectual soul as the root principle which issues forth into all the various expressions, both rational and somatic, of our human nature: human rationality and human embodiment can in no way be divorced from one another.10 This point has implications for how we understand bodily actions. The body is not something separate from one’s true self and so cannot be regarded as some kind of corporeal instrument at the behest of the rational soul. A bodily action is thus not some kind of effect on the basis of which we can infer some the Perfecting of Our Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Kass concludes his study with a consideration of the Old Testament dietary laws. 4 Bernardo C. Bazán, “La corporalité selon saint Thomas,” Revue Philosophique de Louvain 81 (1983): 369–409. 5 Aquinas, In I sent., d. 3, q. 2, a. 3, ad 1: “Anima enim est natura ipsius corporis.” 6 Aquinas, Summa theologiae, [ST] I, q. 76, a. 6. 7 Marie-Joseph Nicolas, “Le corps humain,” Revue thomiste 79 (1979): 357–58: “The human body can of course be validly regarded as an object—as when a surgeon operates on it” (translations of Nicolas are my own). 8 See Nicolas, “Le corps humain,” 358. 9 Nicolas, “Le corps humain,” 377. 10 See David Berger, Thomas Aquinas and the Liturgy (Naples, FL: Sapientia Press, 2004), 54: “The Doctor Angelicus therefore emphasizes in the most definite manner the body’s, that is, matter’s integral affiliation to the human person. It is this affiliation that naturally ennobles the body to prepare it for ascension into the kingdom of grace.” Berger shows how man, on account of the psychosomatic structure of his being, is for St. Thomas “a liturgical being, which means that the liturgy as sensual expression of religion is connatural to man” (56). 616 Kevin E. O’Reilly, O.P. rational intention that ultimately causes it and which logically precedes it. An intention does of course logically precede an act, but it is the intention nevertheless of an agent who is psychosomatically constituted. Rationality in effect suffuses the bodily act itself and is to be read in it rather than from it. A bodily act is therefore not simply an index of reason’s operation, but rather is literally its embodiment. The hylomorphic anthropology that I have briefly delineated is immediately called into service by Thomas in the second of three articles that he devotes to adoration in Summa theologiae [ST] II-II, q. 84. As one probes his treatment of the bodily gestures that constitute and speak, as it were, the somatic language of spiritual adoration, it becomes clear that these bodily gestures for their part enkindle an attitude of subjection to God in humility. There obtains, in other words, a dynamic reciprocal interaction between body and soul. Embodiment means, moreover, that adoration is spatially and temporally constituted. The ancient tradition of facing the east in adoration of God proves to be in harmony with the logical demands of human nature constituted as a psychosomatic unity. Saint Thomas on the Body and Adoration The Word of God in Scripture provides the fundamental direction to Thomas’s reflection. Thus, in the sed contra of ST II-II, q. 84, a. 2, he quotes Exodus 20:5—“Thou shalt not adore them, nor serve them.” A gloss on this verse introduces the notion of the worship in both body and soul: “Thou shalt neither worship them in mind, nor adore them outwardly” (nec affectu colas, nec specie adores). As he embarks on his response Thomas in the first instance invokes the support John Damascene in unpacking the significance of Exodus 20:5 and the gloss thereon: “As Damascene says (De Fide Orth. iv, 12), since we are composed of a twofold nature, intellectual and sensible, we offer God a twofold adoration [duplicem adorationem]; namely, a spiritual adoration, consisting in the internal devotion of the mind; and a bodily adoration, which consists in an exterior humbling of the body.” Even a brief acquaintance with Thomas’s anthropology alerts us to the fact that this duplex adoratio does not refer to two different acts—one internal and spiritual, the other external and physical—but rather to a single composite act comprising two aspects. Devotion, that is to say, “the will to give oneself readily to things concerning the service of God,”11 expresses itself in the humbling of the body. The logic of devotion in a being that is psychosomatically constituted is manifested in a visibly humbled body. Even in their dealings with other human beings, Thomas 11 ST II-II, q. 82, a. 1. Saint Thomas and Ratzinger / Benedict XVI on the Body and Adoration 617 tells us in a question devoted to the virtue of humility, “fearing and respectful persons are especially wont to lower the eyes, as though not daring to compare themselves with others.”12 The concept of logikē latreia (the worship of the mind) therefore ought not to be understood in dualistic terms: it is not the worship of a disembodied mind. It ought to be understood nevertheless that the internal spiritual act enjoys a certain primacy over its external corporeal expression. This qualification comes into focus in the light cast by John 4:23, where the Lord Jesus says that “the true adorers shall adore the Father in spirit and in truth.” It might seem, on the basis of these words, that adoration does not in fact denote an act of the body at all.13 Nevertheless, Thomas argues in accord with the demands of hylomorphic anthropology, “even bodily adoration is done in spirit, in so far as it proceeds from and is directed to spiritual devotion.”14 The analogy of language helps to clarify further the relationship between the internal and external dimensions of human adoration: “Just as prayer is primarily in the mind, and secondarily expressed in words, as stated above (q. 83, a. 12), so too adoration consists chiefly in an interior reverence of God, but secondarily in certain bodily signs of humility.”15 Bodily signs of humility in effect constitute the body language of humility. Examples of this body language are genuflection and prostration: to genuflect signifies our weakness in comparison to God, while to prostrate ourselves is in effect to profess that of ourselves we are nothing.16 Notwithstanding this primacy that the mind enjoys with respect to the body, the direction of influence between mind and body in not unidirectional. In other words, it is not simply the case that the mind as it were speaks through bodily gestures. It too in turn is stirred by sensible signs to reach out to God.17 Indeed, the primary importance of the mind with respect to the body necessarily entails that “in all acts of latria that which is without is referred to that which is within as being of greater import.”18 It turns out therefore that not only are bodily gestures such as genuflection and prostration physical signs of the mind’s subjection to God in humility, but they in turn “incite our affections to submit to God, since it is connatural to us to proceed from the sensible to the intelligible.”19 While humility 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 ST II-II, q. 161, a. 2, ad 1. See ST II-II, q. 84, a. 2, obj. 1. ST II-II, q. 84, a. 2, ad 1. ST II-II, q. 84, a. 2, ad 2. See ST II-II, q. 84, a. 2, ad 2. See ST II-II, q. 84, a. 2, ad 3. ST II-II, q. 84, a. 2. ST II-II, q. 84, a. 2. 618 Kevin E. O’Reilly, O.P. is in the appetite as moderating it, one ought to bear in mind the dynamic interaction between reason and affectivity (the will and the passions). This dynamic interaction means that affectivity possesses a certain epistemic import.20 The logic of human embodiment thus entails not only that gestures such as genuflection and prostration are somatic manifestations of the mind’s subjection to God; they in turn, by means of the affections which they arouse, conduce to the mind’s subjection to God, wherein its perfections consists.21 As embodied souls our existence necessarily unfolds within the bounds of the spatio-temporal horizons of this material universe. The spatial constitution of human adoration of God—that is to say, the fact that adoration requires a definite place—is a consequence of the logic of human embodiment. This logic along with another text of Scripture furnishes the interpretative key for a correct understanding of John 4:21, where Christ says to the Samaritan women: “The hour cometh, when you shall neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, adore the Father.”22 This teaching might seem to indicate that no definite place is necessary for adoration. The significance of the Lord’s words however concerns to the rites of the Jews and of the Samaritans who adored in Jerusalem and on Mount Garazim respectively. They point to the fact that with the coming of “the spiritual truth of the Gospel,” both these rites ceased. Malachi 1:11, moreover, dispels any lingering doubts as to the veracity of this interpretation that is directed against an absolute spiritualization of adoration. Accord- 20 21 22 On this point, which is too involved to be adequately elaborated in the context of this article, see: Kevin E. O’Reilly, “The Vision of Virtue and Knowledge of the Natural Law in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas,’ Nova et Vetera (English) 5 (2007): 41–65; O’Reilly, The Hermeneutics of Knowing and Loving in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas (Leuven: Peeters, 2013), 80–107; Reinhard Hütter, “The Directedness of Reasoning and the Metaphysics of Creation,” in Reason and the Reasons of Faith, ed. Paul J. Griffiths and Reinhard Hütter (New York: T&T Clark International),160–93. For a treatment of the dynamic interaction between reason and the passions, see Elizabeth Uffenheimer-Lippens, “Rationalized Passion and Passionate Rationality: Thomas Aquinas on the Relation between Reason and the Passions,” Review of Metaphysics 56 (2003): 525–58. See ST II-II, q. 81, a. 7: “We pay God honor and reverence, not for His sake (because He is of Himself full of glory to which no creature can add anything), but for our own sake, because by the very fact that we revere and honor God, our mind is subjected to Him; wherein its perfection consists, since a thing is perfected by being subjected to its superior, for instance the body is perfected by being quickened by the soul, and the air by being enlightened by the sun.” ST II-II, q. 84, a. 3. Saint Thomas and Ratzinger / Benedict XVI on the Body and Adoration 619 ing to this text “a sacrifice is offered to God in every place.”23 Bodily signs are fitting because they are proportioned to the exigencies of human nature as psychosomatically constituted, on account of which constitution “it is connatural to us to proceed from the sensible to the intelligible.”24 On this basis Thomas argues for the fittingness of adoring towards the east. The first reason that he offers is cosmic in its scope: “The Divine majesty is indicated in the movement of the heavens which is from the east.”25 Neither Scripture nor any source from the Tradition is explicitly invoked here but underlying Thomas’s reason is the doctrine of creation and his participatory view of reality—that is to say, his understanding of the created universe as participating according to its finite mode in God’s uncreated being. Also operative is his theory of analogy. As an effect of God’s creative causality, the universe reflects in an analogous way something of the divine being just as any effect tells us something about its cause.26 Continuing with his explanation, Thomas says that revelation serves to throw further light on the fittingness of facing towards the east in adoration.27 According to the Septuagint version of Genesis 2:8, Paradise was located in the east. Orientation towards the east signifies our desire to return to Paradise. Protological considerations in effect give rise to an eschatological attitude on the part of the adorer. The final reason adduced by Thomas, once again based on revelation in Scripture, focuses on matters eschatological. Thomas discerns “a certain fittingness in adoring towards the east,”28 on account of Christ, who is “the light of the world.”29 The reference at Zechariah 6:12 to “the Orient”30 is interpreted Christologically by Thomas in the light of this reference to Christ as “the light of the ST II-II, q. 84, a. 3, ad 1. ST II-II, q. 84, a. 2. 25 ST II-II, q. 84, a. 3, ad 3. 26 See ST I, q. 93, a. 6. 27 See Br. Evagrius Hayden, O.S.B., “Convertere, Israël, ad Dominum Deum Tuum!: Whether the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass Ought To Be Celebrated towards the East”: “From the inspired testimony of Sacred Scripture we also have several passages that indicate the preeminence of worshiping towards the east. These are of two kinds, either they indicate that Christ departs into and returns from the east, or else that certain geographical locations are to be found in the east that are known for the eminent nobility of their symbolism” (2015, PDF online, p. 11; reviewed by Peter Kwasnieski at newliturgicalmovement.org, November 16, 2015). Hayden illustrates the use the Fathers in general made of these passages. 28 ST II-II, q. 84, a. 3, ad 3. 29 ST II-II, q. 84, a. 3, ad 3. This quotation is from John 8:12 and 9:5. 30 ST II-II, q. 84, a. 3, ad 3. 23 24 620 Kevin E. O’Reilly, O.P. world,” as also is Psalm 67:34, where Thomas understands Christ to be the one “who mounteth above the heaven of heavens to the east.”31 He is therefore expected to return from the east, as Matthew 24:27 confirms: “As lightning cometh out of the east, and appeareth even into the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.”32 The words of Ratzinger/Benedict coincide with and express well the idea that Thomas highlights here: “The fact that we find Christ in the symbol of the rising sun [or, as in the last example, lightning] is the indication of a Christology defined eschatologically. Praying toward the east means going to meet the coming Christ.”33 These words, ultimately grounded in a hylomorphic anthropology and in agreement with Thomas’s conviction concerning orientation in (liturgical) adoration, provide a suitable pivot to a consideration of the treatment of the body and liturgy by the Pope Emeritus. His comments concerning the use of the word proskynein—“the classical word for adoration on one’s knees”—present us with an explicit appeal to hylomorphic anthropology. Similar to what we have seen in the case of Saint Thomas, Ratzinger/Benedict arguably appreciates the significance of human embodiment not only with respect to bodily gestures as an external index of the soul’s adoration of God but also with regard to the epistemic import of these gestures. He concurs with the Angelic Doctor, moreover, in clearly discerning the cosmic foundation of liturgy in his reflections concerning the eastward orientation of those participating in the liturgy. The cosmic nature of liturgy cannot be thought apart from human nature as a body–soul unity. Indeed, when the light of revelation is cast on creation, one can discern the Christological form of this orientation. Joseph Ratzinger / Benedict XVI on Bodily Gesture as an Expression of a Spiritual Act As he introduces the notion of proskynein, Ratzinger/Benedict lingers exegetically on two texts, namely Matthew 14:33 and John 9:35–38. Since the fundamental point that emerges from both discussions is identical, it suffices for our purposes to outline his comments on the first passage, which occur in the account of how, following the multiplication of the loaves, Jesus sends the disciples to the other side of the lake and dismisses the crowds while he himself goes up the mountain to pray. The boat in 31 32 33 ST II-II, q. 84, a. 3, ad 3. Thomas here espouses a common patristic interpretation. ST II-II, q. 84, a. 3, ad 3. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 69. Saint Thomas and Ratzinger / Benedict XVI on the Body and Adoration 621 which the disciples are traversing the lake is tossed about by the waves on account of the wind and Jesus comes towards them, walking on the water. During the episode that follows, Peter gets out of the boat and begins to walk on the water towards Jesus, but becoming frightened, he begins to sink and is saved by the Lord. After they get into the boat, the wind dies down. The Greek text continues: hoi de en tō ploiō prosekunēsan autō. Benedict points to two possible and complimentary translations of these words. Thus, for example, the Knox version reads: “And the ship’s crew came and said, falling at his feet, ‘Thou art indeed the Son of God’.” The Revised Standard Version, for its part, translates the sentence thus: “[The disciples] in the boat worshipped [Jesus], saying . . .” Benedict’s reaction to these two different translations is actually Aristotelian-Thomistic in its impulse: “The Knox version brings out the bodily expression, while the RSV shows what is happening interiorly. It is perfectly clear from the structure of the narrative that the gesture of acknowledging Jesus as the Son of God is an act of worship.”34 A little further on Benedict again emphasizes the inseparability of the bodily and spiritual meanings that are communicated by the verb proskynein: “The bodily gesture itself is the bearer of the spiritual meaning, which is precisely that of worship. Without the worship, the bodily gesture would be meaningless, while the spiritual act must of its very nature, because of the psychosomatic unity of man, express itself in the bodily gesture.”35 The word proskynein communicates two meanings that in fact constitute a synthetic unity. When either of these two meanings is absent, the significance of the act that it denotes is vitiated. On the one hand, an act of kneeling that is merely external—that is to say, divorced from any interior attitude—proves to be meaningless. On the other hand, attempts to offer purely spiritual worship that prescinds from any kind of material expression evaporate, for “what is purely spiritual is inappropriate to the nature of man.”36 Worship, in fact, is “one of those fundamental acts that affect the whole man.”37 Elsewhere, in the Feast of Faith, drawing on Josef Pieper, the great interpreter of Saint Thomas, Benedict writes that bodily gestures of adoration “bring together the ‘outside’ and the ‘inside’ in a reciprocal relationship which is equally important for both.”38 Benedict, 34 35 36 37 38 Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 189. Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy,190. Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 191. Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 191. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Feast of Faith, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 74. Benedict refers to Josef Pieper, “Das Gedächtnis des 622 Kevin E. O’Reilly, O.P. like Thomas, appreciates the epistemic significance of bodily gestures. Thus, in commenting on Philippians 2:6–11, he clearly regards bending the knee at the name of Jesus as a way of putting on the mind of Christ, for “in bending the knee we signify that we are imitating and adopting the attitude of him who, though he was ‘in the form of God,’ yet ‘humbled himself unto death.’”39 Bodily gesture is in effect a form of language. Bending the knee at the name of Jesus, for example, “attains the status of a confession of faith in Christ.”40 Indeed, “words could not replace such a confession.”41 This confession, moreover, is biblically well grounded, as the quotations adduced indicate. As Tracey Rowland comments, in Ratzinger’s/Benedict’s estimation, “Christians should kneel, and parish and diocesan liturgical ‘experts’ who say anything to the contrary seem to have overlooked the scriptural basis for this practice.”42 For Benedict as much as for Thomas, moreover, the idea that there can be no such thing as purely spiritual worship necessarily entails a cosmic dimension that in the light of the Incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Savior is imbued with a Christological significance. On the subject of bending the knee at the name of Christ, he writes the Church “is entering into the cosmic gesture, paying homage to the Victor and thereby going over to the Victor’s side.”43 Facing the east is another dimension of the cosmic nature of the liturgy. 44 In taking up the issue of Christians facing the east when they worship, Benedict once again expresses a conviction that is at one with what we have seen in Thomas: “This is not a case of Christians worshipping the sun but of the cosmos speaking of Christ.”45 As in the case of Thomas, Benedict thus espouses the ancient tradi- 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Leibes: Von der errinernden Kräft des Geschichtlich-Konkreten,” in Kirche aus lebendigen Steinen, ed. Walter Seidel (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald, 1975), 68–83. Ratzinger, Feast of Faith, 75. Ratzinger, Feast of Faith, 75. Ratzinger, Feast of Faith, 75. Tracey Rowland, Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 138. Ratzinger, Feast of Faith, 74–5. Ratzinger/Benedict cites Josef Aandreas Jungmann and Erik Peterson as sources for his thinking on facing eastward in prayer; see (quoted in Ratzinger, Feast of Faith, 140n1) Jungmann, Review of Der Standort des Liturgen am christlichen Altar vor dem Jahre 1000, 2 vols. (Bonn: Peter Hanstein, 1965), by Otto Nußbaum, Zeitschrift für Kirche und Theologie 88 (1966): 445–50, and Peterson, “Die geschichtliche Bedeutung der jüdischen Gebetsrichtung” and “Das Kreuz und die Gebetsrichtung nach Osten,” in Frühkirche, Judentum und Gnosis (Freiburg: Herder, 1959), 1–14 and 15–35, respectively. Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 68. Saint Thomas and Ratzinger / Benedict XVI on the Body and Adoration 623 tion that ascribes a Christological significance to orientation. Prayer that engages us as psychosomatically constituted beings receives a Christological form by virtue of turning to the east in the direction of the rising sun. Time and, by implication, the virtue of hope are also brought into play, since this orientation bespeaks the future New Heaven and New Earth. In effect, argues Benedict, an eastern orientation symbolizes the direction in which the pilgrim journeys, a direction that has been “shown us by the life, Passion, and Resurrection of Christ.”46 Indeed, Benedict shows how “[even] the symbolism of the Cross merges with that of the east.”47 In this regard he quotes two scriptural texts that might have been linked in order to impart an added emphasis to the eastern direction for prayer. The first text is Revelation 1:7 in which Saint John says: “Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, everyone who pierced him; and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. Even so. Amen.” John 1:17, which quotes Zechariah 12:10, acquires a whole new meaning in this context: “They shall look on him whom they have pierced.” The second text is Matthew 24:30, where the Lord says: “Then [on the last day] will appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn [cf. Zech 12:10], and they will see the Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven [cf. Dan 7:13] with power and glory.” Ratzinger remarks succinctly on the implications that flow from the juxtaposition of these two texts: “The sign of the Son of Man, of the Pierced One, is the Cross, which has now become the sign of victory of the Risen One.”48 Scott Hahn draws out well the implications of Benedict’s reflections on Christ and his Cross: “True worship is once again made possible—the worship for which humanity was made in the beginning; the worship that unites flesh and blood, body and soul, spirit and matter, heaven and earth.”49 A final point that Benedict adds with regard to turning to the east in prayer concerns the relationship between creation and salvation. This 46 47 48 49 Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 69. Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 69. For an elaboration of this point see Peterson, “Das Kreuz.” Ratzinger/Benedict himself writes: “With regard to the eastward-facing position of the celebration prior to the Council, one cannot talk of celebrating ‘toward’ the altar, let alone ‘toward the holy of holies,’ but it can be said that the Mass was celebrated facing the image of the cross, which embodied in itself the whole theology of the oriens” (Feast of Faith, 141). Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 69. For a further elaboration of the idea that the Mass, celebrated facing the image of the cross, “embodied in itself the whole theology of the oriens,” see Ratzinger, Feast of Faith, 139–142. Scott Hahn, Covenant and Communion: The Biblical Theology of Pope Benedict XVI (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2009), 164. 624 Kevin E. O’Reilly, O.P. orientation “signifies that cosmos and saving history belong together.”50 Clearly the symbolic significance of the cosmos can be only properly understood by man in his psychosomatic unity in the light of the Word through whom it has been created. Man’s instantiation in space and time as a result of the corporeal aspect of his being and the significance that space and time therefore assume in his worship of God mean that the liturgy is necessarily cosmic in nature. As Benedict puts it: “The theme of creation is embedded in Christian prayer.”51 In order to highlight the significance of the striking convergence of our two theologians with respect to adoration, not just in terms of general positions taken but with respect to various details, the next section briefly outlines the present liturgical situation which, among other things, is arguably the fruit of a dualistic anthropology. The thought of René Descartes is an obvious port of call, since it distills and communicates various ideas that continue to exert their influence even in our postmodern era. Ratzinger/ Benedict has of course commented critically on the abuses and departure from Tradition that have attended the turn to the (liturgical) subject and the privatization of liturgy—and therefore the destruction thereof—that has become all too common in our times. The Pope Emeritus, it ought to be noted, expresses the same kind of concerns as are held by Thomists— not surprisingly, in the light of the similarity between the teachings of Saint Thomas and Pope Benedict XXI on the body and adoration.52 The Fruits of Dualistic Anthropology: the Present Liturgical Situation In contrast to the hylomorphic anthropology both of Thomas and of Benedict, Descartes argues that each one of us is essentially a mind that inhabits a body. In his view mind and body are ontologically distinct entities. In other words, my body is not part of who I am. I am my mind or a thinking thing (res cogitans), as Descartes intimates in his most famous assertion: cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). Thinking, according to his later thought, is moreover a form of willing. As Michael Allen Gillespie remarks Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 69. Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 70. 52 See. e.g., Johnathan Robinson, “Changing the Subject: The Liturgy as an Object of Experience,” The Thomist 75 (2011): 365–91, at 365: “Examples from ordinary parish life show that something has gone seriously wrong with how many Catholics today understand the liturgical life of the Church.” While Robinson offers rich insights into the present liturgical situation and suggestions for ways to recover a sense of the objective givenness of the liturgy, he nevertheless fails to pinpoint an operational anthropological dualism as a crucial part of the problem to be solved. 50 51 Saint Thomas and Ratzinger / Benedict XVI on the Body and Adoration 625 concerning his mature works, “thinking in all of its forms is . . . understood to be crucially bound up with and dependent upon the will.”53 Descartes in fact accords freewill a quasi-divine status, “in itself the noblest thing we can have since it makes us in a way equal to God and seems to exempt us from being his subjects.”54 For Descartes, the material universe is mechanistic. As a result everything external to the mind, including the human body, is devoid of intrinsic value. As Susan R. Bordo explains, “The body is pure res extensa— unconscious, extended stuff, brute materiality.”55 Bodily gestures can thus no longer be instances of embodied rationality. The Cartesian subject, moreover, “the whole nature or essence of which is to think,” and which is therefore disembodied, has “no need of any place.”56 While Descartes does not pronounce on the subject, presumably the kind of worship offered by the human subject as conceived by him would be purely spiritual—that is to say, not alone disembodied but also unconstrained by place (and, for that matter, time also). Another notable aspect of his anthropology is the understanding of the human subject as a radically autonomous being. A final characteristic of Descartes is his rejection of the authority one might ascribe to sources outside of the self. Thus, at the very outset of the first meditation in his Meditations, he writes: “I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.”57 Preceding tradition is 53 54 55 56 57 Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism Before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 41. René Descartes, Letter to Queen Christina of Sweden on November 20, 1647, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 3, The Correspondence, trans. John Cottingham et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 326. Descartes adds here: “And so its correct use is the greatest of all goods we possess; indeed there is nothing that is more our own or that matters more to us. From all this it follows that nothing but free will can produce our greatest happiness.” See also Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. John Cottingham et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 384. There Descartes writes that free will “renders us in a certain way like God by making us masters of ourselves, provided we do not lose the rights it gives us through timidity.” Susan R. Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 93. Descartes, Discourse on Method, pt. 4 (no. 33), trans. John Cottingham in Philosophical Writings, 1:127. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, trans. John Cottingham et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 12. 626 Kevin E. O’Reilly, O.P. accordingly denied any authority whatsoever. According to the spirit of his philosophy we do not accept truths on trust, but rather generate them for ourselves—each one individually—in a process of reasoning on the basis of clear and distinct ideas. While the rejection of authority is not directly predicated on a rejection of embodiment as partly constitutive of personal identity, this rejection nevertheless means that the mind transcends the temporal dimension of being. Hence the logic of rejecting tradition in any shape or form. It is not difficult to see the dynamics of this kind of philosophy in Ratzinger’s description of contemporary liturgical dynamics. The priest— not God—becomes the focus of the liturgy. Indeed, his creativity sustains the whole liturgical enterprise. Different people from among the faithful are assigned all kinds of liturgical roles, while the liturgy is planned by groups of people who offer their own “creative” contributions. I would add that a mechanistic view of reality has facilitated this egocentric liturgical creativity. In its extreme expression, this creativity treats the liturgy as if it were simply an arbitrary collection of elements that can be substituted and changed according to the whims of priests and the faithful. According to Ratzinger/Benedict the characteristics of contemporary liturgical creativity are: “arbitrariness as the necessary form of the rejection of each previously given form or norm; unrepeatability because in repetition there would already be dependence; and artificiality, since the result must be a pure creation of humans.”58 In other words, the liturgy becomes an instrument of the will’s creative impulses independent of Tradition. This will is not bound by reason, by law, or by any necessity.59 Its nature, as Gillespie puts it, is “self-assertion and mastery.”60 This view is far removed from that according to which the Eucharistic liturgy is understood to be the most exalted context in which Tradition has been transmitted to us and which nobody, not even a priest, has the authority to interfere with. Since the totality of the Church is realized in each celebration of the Eucharist, as Maximilian Heinrich Heim writes, “the liturgy becomes the existential expression of the Church, to which the personal, what is one’s own, has to surrender.”61 The liturgical rites, which 58 59 60 61 Benedict XVI, A New Song for the Lord Faith in Christ and Liturgy Today (New York: Crossroad, 1996). See Gillespie, Nihilism, 53. Gillespie, Nihilism, 52. Maximilian Heinrich Heim, Joseph Ratzinger: Life in the Church and Living Theology, Fundamentals of Ecclesiology with Reference to Lumen Gentium, trans. Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 518. Saint Thomas and Ratzinger / Benedict XVI on the Body and Adoration 627 constitute the privileged locus for the transmission of the Word, are something that the priest ought to receive and to observe in a spirit of humility. As Benedict observes in his Sacramentum Caritatis, “faithful adherence to the liturgical norms in all their richness”62 has sustained the belief of all believers. 63 Indeed, in the Church’s ancient Tradition, Christian forma62 63 Pope Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis (2007), §38. For a critique of Benedict’s vision on this and on other points, see Mariusz Biliniewicz, The Liturgical Vision of Benedict XVI: A Theological Inquiry (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013), 245–77. With respect to the present point concerning the liturgy as a gift, Biliniewicz writes: “It could be claimed that Ratzinger’s understanding of the liturgy as a gift is influenced by his Platonic, descending theology which leads him to an overly static vision of the liturgy. When one reads in his memoirs that liturgy was to him ‘a reality that no one had simply thought up, a reality that no official authority or great individual had created’ and that it comes to us ‘from the depths of the millenia and, ultimately, of eternity,’ one could wonder if this is just a literary metaphor or if it is not yet another sign of an underlying Platonism which sees the blueprint of the liturgy ‘somewhere there’ and wants to impose this blueprint ‘over here,’ i.e. within history” (246). It is not possible to respond at length to this comment within the confines of this article. One might note however that the author seems to presuppose that what is in effect a participatory metaphysics (“an underlying Platonism”) is in fact wrong. That presupposition is certainly robustly rejected not only by scholars sympathetic to Platonic modes of thinking but also, of course, by Thomists. Secondly, although Biliniewicz does not argue that a participatory view of reality in general and of liturgy in particular is incompatible with historical instantiation, this compatibility needs to be highlighted. The scriptural foundations of Benedict’s liturgical thought ought also to be emphasized. In this regard it is particularly pertinent that Ratzinger/Benedict devotes much of the first chapter of Spirit of the Liturgy to Israel’s exodus experience, the goal of which “is shown to be worship, which can only take place according to God’s measure” (16). In other words, his thinking in this regard is clearly inspired by the testimony of Scripture. The manner in which God ought to be worshipped, he writes, “contains its measure within itself, that is, can only be ordered by the measure of revelation, in dependency on God” (16). The second chapter moves from the Old Testament to the New Testament. In brief: “In virtue of Jesus’s Cross and Resurrection, the Eucharist is the meeting point of all the lines that lead from the Old Covenant, indeed from the whole of man’s religious history. Here at last is right worship, ever longed for and yet surpassing our powers: adoration ‘in spirit and truth’” (47). The Mass has its origin in the historical sacrifice of Christ, as Benedict XVI asserts: “This true sacrifice [“the exodus of the Cross”], which transforms us all into sacrifice, that is to say, unites us to God, is indeed fixed and founded on an historical event, but is not situated as a thing in the past behind us—on the contrary, it becomes contemporary and accessible to us in the community of the believing and praying Church, in its sacrament: that is what is meant by the 'sacrifice of the Mass'” (The Essential Pope Benedict XVI: His Central Writings and Speeches [San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007], 152–53 [emphasis added]; quoted in Hahn, Covenant and 628 Kevin E. O’Reilly, O.P. tion had an experiential character and the celebration of the Eucharist formed the core of that experience. The intellectus fidei, the understanding of the faith, has a primordial relationship to the celebration of the liturgy according to the mind of the Church. This understanding of the liturgy as something that we receive in the Tradition and that itself is the locus par excellence for the communication of Tradition is scarcely either intelligible or tolerable for the Cartesian liturgical subject. Catherine Pickstock writes of Descartes that his “system for the attainment of certitude (conceived as a punctum) challenges the prior significance of memory as a means which inseparably links knowledge, tradition, and the transcendent.”64 It is no surprise that Tradition was a victim of the emergence of totalizing reason, since, as already intimated, this reason, precisely as disembodied, is necessarily atemporal. It is no surprise, moreover, that Cartesian dualism has no truck with the spatial embeddedness of human nature in this world. Thus, as Pickstock remarks, the Cartesian subject is “ideally unconstrained by place or time.”65 Anthropological dualism, albeit combined with the loss of a participatory construal of reality, has also undermined the capacity of man to appreciate the significance of symbols, for it cultivates a disembodied spirituality, whereas symbols are physically instantiated realities. Anthropological dualism moreover lies at the base of the idea that this-worldly reality furnishes raw material that human beings can freely manipulate inasmuch as they possibly can. The implications of this dualism are, I contend, what Ratzinger characterizes as “a widespread dissolution of the rite, which must now be replaced by the ‘creativity’ of the community.”66 The seriousness of this development becomes apparent in an argument that Stratford Caldecott attributes to the anthropologist Mary Douglas: “Contempt for ritual forms leads to the privatisation of religious experience and thereby 64 65 66 Communion, 179). Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 71. Pickstock, After Writing, 72. Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 163. Elsewhere, Ratzinger/Benedict writes that the creativity of the group is understood in terms of an Enlightenment construal of freedom as predicated on autonomy and emancipation (A New Song for the Lord Faith in Christ and Liturgy Today [New York: Crossroad, 1996], 151). The notion of creativity operative here, he continues, “is the direct opposite of the objectivity and positivity that belong to the essence of Church liturgy. The group is only free if it constantly reinvents itself. . . . A liturgy that deserves the name is radically opposed to this.” Saint Thomas and Ratzinger / Benedict XVI on the Body and Adoration 629 to secular humanism.”67 In other words, a dualistic approach to liturgical worship not only undermines adoration of God but also conduces to the exclusion of God from the rest of human life. The rupture with Tradition along with the death of a symbolic imagination that have been bequeathed by anthropological dualism have found expression in the contemporary art and architecture that surrounds, attends and—in the case of architecture—at times even constrains and shapes the celebration of the Church’s liturgy. In many instances traditional architectural language has been eschewed in order to elevate the role of the assembly and to avoid any hint of hierarchy. Along with other recent practices, modern architecture has helped to confuse the roles of priests and laity and has arguably induced a false humility on the part of priests. The following paragraph from Ratzinger/Benedict shows forth the irony intrinsic to this state of affairs: There is the touching story told by Eusebius in his history of the Church as a tradition going back to Hegesippus in the second century. Apparently, St. James, the “brother of the Lord,” the first bishop of Jerusalem and “head” of the Jewish Christian Church, had a kind of callous on his knees, because he was always on his knees worshipping God and begging forgiveness for his people (2, 23, 6). Again, there is story that comes from the sayings of the Desert Fathers, according to which the devil was compelled by God to show himself to a certain Abba Apollo. He looked black and ugly, with frighteningly thin limbs, but, most strikingly, he had no knees. 68 Benedict’s comment on this episode is succinct, but it powerfully shows forth the implications of embodiment in all its aspects with respect to adoration: “The inability to kneel is seen as the very essence of the diabolical.”69 Conclusion Caldecott perceptively notes that many seemingly unrelated problems 67 68 69 Stratford Caldecott, “Liturgy and Trinity: Towards an Anthropology of Liturgy,” in Looking Again at the Question of the Liturgy with Cardinal Ratzinger: Proceedings of the 2001 Fontgombault Liturgical Conference, ed. Alcuin Reid, O.S.B. (Hampshire, England: Saint Michael’s Abbey Press, 2003), 39. Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 193. Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 193. 630 Kevin E. O’Reilly, O.P. that beset the Church share a common cause—namely, anthropological dualism.70 One encounters, on the one hand, a clerical domination of the laity and, on the other hand, a relationship between clergy and laity that eliminates any sense of the transcendent. With regard to the former, one can find “a poisonous cocktail of clericalism, aestheticism and misogyny.”71 The latter can be observed in in “politically correct” liturgies “devoted to themes of justice and peace: everyone sitting in a circle, praying for the homeless and passing the consecrated chalice from hand to hand, with the priest improvising parts of the eucharistic prayer in order to make it more relevant and friendly.”72 Both of these dualistic liturgical anthropologies have served to undermine the apostolic faith that we receive by means of both Scripture and Tradition as interpreted by the magisterium. In this regard it ought to be noted that the most privileged context for the transmission of the Word of God by means of Tradition is liturgy, especially Eucharistic liturgy.73 It is to be noted also that Saint Paul subscribes to the view that human persons are embodied beings even though he did not express this view in hylomorphic terms.74 The interpenetration of body and soul that I have intimated 70 71 72 73 74 On this point, see Caldecott, “Liturgy and Trinity,” 46–48. Caldecott, “Liturgy and Trinity,” 46. Caldecott, “Liturgy and Trinity,” 47. See Yves Congar, O.P., quotes Dom Guéranger’s Institutions liturgiques: “It is in the liturgy that the Spirit who inspired the Scriptures speaks again; the liturgy is tradition itself at the highest degree of power and solemnity.” Congar adds here that “no finer expression of the truth could be found” (The Meaning of Tradition, trans. A. N. Woodrow [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004], 134) and proceeds to examine this truth from “the three most decisive aspects presented by tradition: as a means other than writing of transmitting everything in a ways that is profoundly educative; as a means, in some cases, of transmitting something not contained formally in Scripture; and as an interpretation of holy Scriptures that really brings home their meaning.” See also Matthew Levering, Engaging the Doctrine of Revelation: The Mediation of the Gospel through Church and Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014), 59–85. Levering concludes in the very final sentence of this chapter: “It can be no surprise, then, that it is preeminently in the eucharistic liturgy, where the Church shares in Christ’s gift of himself, that we hear Scripture as it is truly meant by God to be heard” (85). See James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 41–78, for an outline of Paul’s anthropology. For Paul, embodiment is “a dimension of our very existence” (78). I do not intend to claim that Paul’s anthropology in this respect is identical with Aristotelian-Thomistic hylomorphism. Certainly, however, they are compatible. Indeed, hylomorphic anthropology can be regarded as the best philosophical expression of the scriptural understanding of man. Saint Thomas and Ratzinger / Benedict XVI on the Body and Adoration 631 in this article is in a way articulated by Ignatius of Antioch, although, once again, he does not employ hylomorphic categories to express his thought. Nevertheless, as Gregory Vall comments, “man’s own composition as a creature of ‘flesh and spirit’ is at the forefront of Ignatius’s thinking as he works out the ‘fleshly and spiritual’ implications of redemption at various levels.”75 Maximus the Confessor’s anthropology, while neither Platonic or Aristotelian, has, in the words of Marius Portaru, “clearly more in common in its overall aspect and structure with Aristotle.”76 It arguably undergirds Maximus’s view that the liturgy is, as Thomas Cattoi puts it, “an itinerary of inner and outer transformation, where fragmentation is replaced by ordered harmony, and where the transfiguration of the inner life of the individual overflows into the gradual deification of the cosmos as a whole.”77 Cattoi continues: “Maximus’ dazzling intellectual virtuosity, as he unveils the net of correspondences between inner and cosmic transformation, bestows extraordinary dignity on even the most seemingly insignificant liturgical action, each of which appears pregnant with extraordinary salvific potential.”78 While neither Thomas nor Benedict draws explicitly on any of these Fathers of the Church, Thomas does quote Damascene, as we saw at the outset of our treatment of his thought concerning adoration. Damascene writes that “we are composed of a visible and an invisible nature, of an intellectual nature and a sensitive one.”79 We therefore offer “a twofold worship to the Creator.”80 This assertion is in fact made as an explanation as to why Christians worship faces towards the east. After adducing various scriptural texts in support of this custom while we await the Lord’s return, Damascene then concludes that “this is, moreover, the unwritten tradition of the Apostles, for they have handed many things down to us unwritten.”81 Since Thomas quotes from an earlier part of the text just 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 Gregory Vall, Learning Christ: Ignatius of Antioch and the Mystery of Redemption (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 120. Marius Portaru, “Classical Philosophical Influences: Aristotle and Platonism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor, ed. Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 142. Thomas Cattoi, “Liturgy as Cosmic Transformation,” in Allen and Neil, Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor, 417. Cattoi, “Liturgy,” 417. John Damascene, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, in The Fathers of the Church, vol. 37, Saint John of Damascus: Writings, trans. Frederic H. Chase Jr. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1958), 352. John Damascene, Exact Exposition, 352. John Damascene, Exact Exposition, 353–54. 632 Kevin E. O’Reilly, O.P. cited, he was doubtless familiar with and appropriated this teaching. His own teaching indicates as much. Thomas could not have foreseen the kind of departures from the liturgical Tradition, predicated upon a hylomorphic anthropology, that we all too often witness in our own times. He therefore does not comment thereupon, although he clearly recognizes the epistemic impact of bodily gestures. One could argue on the basis of his anthropology and psychology that the other factors that attend liturgical worship such as place, orientation, architecture, images, and music, necessarily shape the worldview of those who gather to worship—and even end up destroying its meaning of and their desire to worship. 82 Ratzinger/Benedict, as we have seen, does offer a critique of what has come to pass in the last few decades in the Roman Rite. Although his thought is lacking with regard to an explicit formulation of hylomorphic anthropology and a psychology founded on this view of the human person as a psychosomatic unity, his phenomenological observations informed by his acute reading of Scripture show his sensibilities with respect to worship to be of the same order as those of Saint Thomas. While there are indeed differences between the theologies of Thomas and Ratzinger/Benedict, it is important not to allow oneself to be blinded to the fundamental convergence between them, particularly when cooperation is of paramount importance in moving praxis to a healthier place, one that is faithful to the Tradition that clearly unites these two theologians. When one properly understands the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as the privileged site of Sacred Tradition for the transmission of the Word and when one appreciates the idea that the most exalted form of participation is active receptivity, then the need for a widespread hylomorphic liturgical consciousness cannot be overstated: rather than violently shaping what is received in Tradition in accordance with the logic of the Cartesian ego, this anthropology—officially espoused by the Church and reaching back to apostolic times, allows the liturgical subject—corpore et anima unus—to be fashioned ever anew by the Word. A return to a greater emphasis on kneeling and facing the east would, I believe, bear what to many would seem like unexpected fruit in terms of Catholic faith and morals in general, given the impact of such physically instantiated phenomena on human consciousness. N&V 82 For a sustained argument to this effect, see Kevin E. O’Reilly, O.P., “Aesthetics, Hermeneutics, and the Liturgical Transmission of the Word,” Angelicum 93 (2016): 631–54. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2021): 633–651 633 The Philosophy of the Organism: Notes on the Function of Nutrition Jacques Maritain Translation and Comments by Matthew K. Minerd Ss. Cyril and Methodius Seminary Pittsburgh, PA Translator’s Introduction In this introduction, I merely wish to provide a few opening comments concerning this obscure article by Maritain, extracted from a natural philosophy course and published originally in the Revue thomiste in 1937.1 It may seem strange to the reader that Nova et Vetera would choose to reproduce an article on the philosophy of nutritive activity, especially given that said article was written over eighty years ago. Is not such a text, at best, a dated product of a by-gone (neo-)Scholastic age? Is it of anything more than passing historical interest? The reproach is understandable, but the methodology deployed by Maritain in the article prevents the critique from being correct. As the reader will see, in the text presented here, Maritain clearly draws upon the science of his day in considering the phenomena of nutrition and morphogenesis. However, he does not, one could say, phenomenally consider those phenomena. Put in more precise philosophical vocabulary, we may say that the objective light under which these phenomena are scrutinized is that of natural philosophy, not the particular empirical sciences in their early-twentieth-century state of development. His interest is with how the phenomena reveal something pertaining to mobile being as such. In contrast to the positive scientist, he is 1 The text used for this translation is taken from Jacques Maritain, “Philosophie de l’organisme: Notes sur la fonction de nutrition,” Oeuvres complètes, vol. 6 (Fribourg: Éditions universitaires, 1984), 981–1000, and originally appeared under the same title in Revue thomiste 43 (1937): 263–75. 634 Jacques Maritain here concerned with the very ontological constitution of mobile being. Adopting a device used by F.-X. Maquart,2 we could say that the concern here is mobile being (or, sensible being), accenting the ultimate formal perspective and concern of the philosopher: “being under the conditions of poverty and division which affect it in that universe which is the material universe, being viewed from the outlook of the mystery peculiar to becoming.”3 Thus, this brief article provides a kind of “example in actu exercito” of how Maritain differentiates, within the first degree of abstraction, an empiriological-scientific investigation from one that is ontological-sapiential.4 This is not the place to explain, let alone defend, Maritain on this point,5 and I would be remiss if I did not note that there are weighty voices of dissent against what Maritain claims regarding these matters.6 Still, despite intra-Thomistic dissent on the matter, I am of the opinion that Maritain’s subtle deployment of Cajetan’s distinction between the ratio formalis obiecti ut res and the ratio formalis obiecti ut obiectum provides a capital tool for the analysis of issues surrounding the differentiation of the F.-X. Maquart, Elementa philosophiae, vol. 1 (Paris: Andreas Blot, 1937), 36–37. Jacques Maritain, The Philosophy of Nature, trans. Imelda C. Byrne (New York: Philosophical Library, 1951), 120. 4 For interesting recent discussions about the constituting of facts at various levels of abstraction, see: Michael D. Torre, “Yves R. Simon, Disciple of Maritain: The Idea of Fact and the Difference Between Science and Philosophy,” in Facts are Stubborn Things: Thomistic Perspectives in the Philosophies of Nature and Science, ed. Matthew K. Minerd (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press and the American Maritain Association, 2021), 19–39; John C. Cahalan, “Thomism’s Conceptual Structure and Modern Science,” in Minerd, Facts are Stubborn Things, 40–68. For a similarly interesting application of this same noetic discussion, though applied to the distinction between faith and theology, see Michel Labourdette, “La théologie, intelligence de la foi,” Revue thomiste 46 (1946): 11–12 and 30–34. 5 On this distinction, see Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge, trans. Gerald Phelan et al. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 23–72, 215–224, and esp. 145–214; Maritain, Science and Wisdom, trans. Bernard Wall (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1944), 34–69; Maritain, Philosophy of Nature, 45–60, 73–156. Also, see the essay included in the last volume, Yves R. Simon, “Maritain's Philosophy of Sciences,” 157–182. Also see Matthew K. Minerd, “Wisdom Be Attentive: The Noetic Structure of Sapiential Knowledge,” Nova et Vetera (English) 18, no. 4 (2020): 1134–35. 6 For a recent and insightful article addressing this issue, as regards the critiques registered by the so-called Laval school of Thomism, see John G. Brungardt, “Charles De Koninck and the Sapiential Character of Natural Philosophy,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 90, no. 1 (2016): 1–24; also see Catherine Peters, “Dianoesis and Perinoesis in the Natural Sciences,” in Minerd, Facts are Stubborn Things, 69–79. 2 3 The Philosophy of the Organism: Notes on the Function of Nutrition 635 sciences.7 The present article is merely offered as a “laboratory” for seeing how that claim plays out. Below, the reader will see how Maritain utilizes scientific observations from thinkers who clearly have a mechanistic bias, all the while putting their data to good Aristotelian use. As he says on several occasions, so long as their explanations stay upon the plane of phenomena, such explanations have their own scientific and explanatory value. That is, such empiriological analysis has its own scientific consistency within a body of demonstration pertaining primarily to the phenomenal order.8 Of course, a metaphysic is implicit within such empiriological forms of scientific knowledge, and this gives birth to the temptation for the scientist to openly express his or her often-implicit mechanistic biases. Still, as Maritain states in reflecting on the descriptions of life provided by the scientific sources that he cites: “Even if one holds a mechanistic philosophy, the act of describing a vital process requires one to employ a language that is in no way mechanistic.” Empiriological analysis hides the true ontological foundations of science, though the true metaphysic remains there in a muted, material manner. They have not formally been subjected to the light of philosophical analysis. The situation is somewhat akin to the metaphysic that is hidden in the data of common sense. Prior to being scrutinized, common human experience is not sapiential knowledge in act. That is, common sense as such does not formally attempt to subordinate the knowledge thus attained to first principles (and, above all, to the principle of non-contradiction). However, as the mind’s first grasp on human experience of reality, common sense stands in potency toward being actualized for philosophical knowledge. It is a sine qua non source of such wisdom.9 Be that as it may, Maritain’s distinction between ontological analysis and empiriological analysis remains controversial. Hence, I hope that the See Maritain, Philosophy of Nature, 138–40. Again, the reader should consult the texts cited above in note 4. 9 This was the long-held position of Maritain’s great master, Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, whose Sens commun is dedicated to a long study of this theme. While I am of the opinion that one must push the analysis back even further (for common sense is a mixture of speculative, technical, moral, and logical notions), Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange’s work remains a Thomistic classic. Indeed, late in his life, Maritain commended it highly. See Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Thomistic Common Sense: The Philosophy of Being and the Development of Doctrine, trans. Matthew K. Minerd (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2021). For Maritain’s remarks, see Jacques Maritain, The Peasant of the Garonne: An Old Layman Questions Himself about the Present Time, trans. Michael Cuddihy and Elizabeth Hughes (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968), 136n7. 7 8 636 Jacques Maritain opponents of this outlook will find interest in another thematic point in this article, one of greater interest for all Thomistic camps. Implicitly, the article helps to provide an example of how natural philosophy engages the philosopher in participatively metaphysical10 reflections that lead the philosopher along the first steps toward fully metaphysical speculation. Thomists are not Wolffians, so natural philosophy is the necessary first sapiential stage needed for developing a sane metaphysics.11 It is in natural philosophy that we first encounter the four causes, act and potency, and immanent action, and only by a kind of “second step” do we then form the analogical notions pertaining to metaphysical insight.12 Thus, in his comments on the “ontological self-extension” that occurs in the vegetative processes of nutrition and morphogenesis, Maritain reflects on vital assimilation, which provides the first analogate (quoad nos) for our analogical awareness of vital assimilation more broadly. Such natural-philosophical reflections pave the way for further reflection on the nature of knowledge, as well as the very nature of life, an analogous notion that stretches upward On this point, which must not at all be confused with a kind of “covert Wolffianism,” see Maritain, Degrees, 189–190; Maritain, Philosophy of Nature, 155–56; see also Jacques Maritain, “No Knowledge Without Intuitivity,” in Untrammeled Approaches trans. Bernard Doering, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1997), 338. 11 In addition to Maritain’s remarks throughout the texts cited above, also see Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, The Order of Things: The Realism of the Principle of Finality, trans. Matthew K. Minerd (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2020), 225–50. 12 Early in his career, Yves Simon strongly cautioned against referring to vegetative activity as immanent activity (despite the fact that many Thomists have done so). He comments that vegetative activity, like the agent intellect’s production of the intelligible species, is primarily the production of a terminus, not a qualitative enrichment. However, this observation seems problematic, for the agent intellect’s activity, while indeed playing a very important role in the virtually productive activity involved in intellection, nonetheless has its entire raison d’être in its subordination to the formally immanent activity of intellection. Neither abstraction, nor the possible intellect’s own speaking of the internal word (always under the illumination of the agent intellect), are ultimately dissociable from their role as providing the presupposed supports for the act of intellection, which itself is indeed a formally immanent activity. (Note that Simon does clearly affirm this important Thomist point concerning the relationship between virtual and formal productivity in intellection.) I would argue that something similar, though at an analogically lower level, is operative in vegetative action as well, calling for a softening of an observation like that made by Simon. This is, however, the subject of a much longer discussion. For Simon’s remark, see Yves R. Simon, An Introduction to Metaphysics of Knowledge, trans. Vukan Kuic and Richard J. Thompson (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990), 83n46. 10 The Philosophy of the Organism: Notes on the Function of Nutrition 637 to God, who is indeed Life—and that, supremely, Life Itself, Eternally and Essentially. Thus, the article presented here offers something akin to an extended reflection by Maritain on a “natural mystery,” namely the transition from brute matter to life. When the crystal grows, we are faced only with a phenomenon of the same being integrated into the same: a quantitative extension of the same formal capacities. In the case of nutrition and, more brilliantly still, in morphogenesis, we are faced with a higher organism integrating a lower being into the ontological structure of the higher one. Here, in the activity of life, we touch upon the first analogical fringes of a simpliciter simplex perfection, concerning which I will allow Father Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange to pronounce the final words: When we raise our view from brute matter to plant life, we find that there is a superior sort of obscurity involved in defining life, for life as such is an absolute perfection (simpliciter simplex) attributable, analogically and in its proper sense, to God, angel, man, animal, and plant. Life is not a genus but, instead, is above every genus. It is an analogue, something difficulty to define, for this definition must be able to be applied in its proper sense proportionally to God, who is Life Itself, and to a blade of grass, which properly speaking is something living.13 The Philosophy of the Organism: Notes on the Function of Nutrition14 In this lecture, we are concerned with the third great and fundamental fact of organic life, namely, the living thing’s characteristic property of Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, The Sense of Mystery: Clarity and Obscurity in the Intellectual Life, trans. Matthew K. Minerd (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2017), 113–14. Regarding the content of Maritain’s lecture, I would also recommend that the reader consider a parallel reading of the recent work by Ambrose Little, O.P., “Are You What You Eat or Something More?,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 92, no. 1 (2018): 1–20. Also see Leon Kass, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 17–56. I would like to thank Jack Cahalan and David Capan for looking over this article and providing helpful editorial feedback. Likewise, I owe Brett Kendall a debt of gratitude for his careful and always excellent copy editing. 14 These pages are the stenography of a lesson taken from a course on the philosophy of the organism. The style has all the defects of unaltered transcribed oral explications. Please excuse these defects, which it was impossible to correct without rewriting the whole piece. (Note by Maritain.) 13 638 Jacques Maritain self-movement. Hitherto [in earlier lectures], we examined this fundamental fact only in an external manner. Now, I would like to reflect more deeply upon it and to attempt to analyze vegetative activity in its essential functions, in order to see if we here find, in the course of analyzing such functions, the notion of self-movement. You likely know that biologists recognize three orders of phenomena as bearing witness to vegetative life: assimilation, morphogenesis, and reproduction. Today, we will occupy ourselves with the first great function, namely the general function of nutrition, which the ancients, understandably, held to be the fundamental and basic function of vegetative life. The living organism appropriates to itself the properties of surrounding materials, as well as the latter’s physicochemical energies. Now, this appropriation takes place in a wholly bodily manner, that is, by fashioning into the living thing’s own substance the very substance where these energies are found. It is here that we find the first degree of appropriation or of vital assimilation, one that is still wholly bodily. Higher on the ontological scale, we will once more find a case of assimilation; however, on this new level, it will be a question of cognitive assimilation through sensation or intellection. In these latter two cases, one and the same form is involved, though now dematerialized. In knowledge, the same object’s form will be assimilated by the subject, though in a completely different manner.15 At the vegetative degree of life, we are in the presence of perpetual transformations of substances. Modern science designates such transformations by means of the term “metabolism.” As the scientists tell us, they are at one and the same time ectropic and entropic, assimilative and disassimilative, nutritive and respirative, and so forth. From this perspective, the physiologist [Ewald] Hering wrote that, physiologically speaking, 15 [Trans. note: Namely, in an intentional or objective manner. On this point, see Austin Woodbury, Natural Philosophy (The John N. Deely and Anthony F. Russell Collection, St. Vincent College Library, Latrobe, PA), no. 630 (p. 500, slightly altered): “Knowledge is to be defined as ‘having something in oneself formally and not materially,’ meaning both ‘according to its form’ and ‘after the manner of form,’ that is, not subjectively, and therefore, neither physically, nor compositively but, rather, objectively and therefore supra-physically, incompositively, and ‘not materially,’ or immaterially. Thus, it may be said that to know is to communicate immaterially in the very form of something, namely, of the known. Accordingly, knowledge may equivalently be defined, ‘Having [a] form in oneself immaterially or objectively.’” Also, see Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, “Cognoscens quodammodo fit vel est aliud a se (On the Nature of Knowledge as Union with the Other as Other),” Philosophizing in Faith: Essays on the Beginning and End of Wisdom, ed. and trans. Matthew K. Minerd (Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2019), 63–78.] The Philosophy of the Organism: Notes on the Function of Nutrition 639 the essential characteristic by which the living substance differs from the non-living substance consists in its organic exchanges. That is, it differs in the chemical processes that take place within the substance in question, processes whose effects are twofold. On the one hand, there is the formation of the materials that the substance gets rid of as something that is foreign to it, these materials being either accumulated in its immediate environment, or cast off into the current of its humoral system. On the other hand (and always as part of the same processes), the living substance simultaneously absorbs nutritive materials, assimilates them, and makes an integral part of itself from them. Such is the empiriological description that the scientist can propose to us concerning this range of phenomena. Thus, on the one hand, this metabolism bears witness to the incessant production of wastes, a production that is even more important in animals than in plants, that is, a destruction of materials, whether of materials that are exploited or those of the organic substance itself (a destruction that above all takes place because of the organism’s respiration, which destroys the endothermic composites of matter so as to produce the heat needed for life). On the other hand, it also bears witness to the simultaneous construction of new substances from a heterogenous mélange of inorganic substances: hydrates from carbon, fats, lipids, albuminoid substances, and so forth. Thus, the organism fabricates three principal kinds of materials. First, there are the materials for exploitation, that is, the materials necessary for the production of its internal work. Thus, in particular, the green plant assimilates carbonic acid and produces starches, thanks to chlorophyll, which enables it to transform light energy into chemical energy. Thus, the green plant appears to be charged with an important task within the universe: the preparation of organic substances from mineral substances. Indeed, from this perspective, we can say that animals are dependent upon plants, so that, in the final analysis, all the energy placed in play in the nutritive process of the living world derives from the plant world and from the sun. Second, and of greater interest to us here, is the fact that the organism produces the materials for construction. It does this for two reasons: (1) so that it may replace those materials that are destroyed during the phase of dissimilation; (2) so that it may construct the organism itself, on the basis of its egg, given each organism develops itself and constructs itself, an activity which presupposes significant substantial growth, all beginning with the fertilized or activated egg. Finally, and thirdly, the organism also produces a third category of substances, which we come to know as organic catalysts, or ferments, 640 Jacques Maritain which are also called enzymes. They are, as it were, the tools, the intrinsically non-living chemical instruments which are used by the living being. The formation and excretion of these ferments are produced from the protoplasm, in conformity with the necessities of the given moment. Here, allow two remarks in particular. The first: all of the nutritional activity, admittedly just described rather summarily, ultimately depends upon morphogenesis. As Hans André has observed, in the process of assimilation, chemical transformations appear as being ruled by invisible directives, so that the material exchanges appear to be subordinated to the requirements of the construction of the form. In this, we encounter an idea to which we will need to return, namely that of the existence of functions and complexes that are subordinated to one another.16 In sociology, we can ask whether the economic order ought to be superordinate in relation to the political order, or vice versa. In other words, which of these two orders stands above to the other? Now, in biology, we see that nutrition (the economic order of organic life) is subordinated to morphogenesis. In other words, the latter stands above assimilation, with nutrition being at once the absolutely fundamental function of the living organism and, nonetheless, its lowliest function as well. Our second remark—and here we arrive at our main subject in this lecture—concerns the organism’s fabrication, not of the materials for exploitation, but of the very materials for construction. Here, we must note that we are witness to the veritable production of a substance that is new in relation to the food, though nonetheless produced from this very food. What is quite remarkable, indeed something that should astonish us greatly, if we were not so accustomed to experiencing this phenomenon, is the fact that this new substance is the same as that of the living thing. Therefore, quite precisely speaking, we find ourselves faced with the production of a new part of the same substance, that is, with what the Scholastics call the conversion of the food received into the very substance of that which is fed, into the substance of the living subject, conversio alimenti intussuscepti in sustantiam aliti. On this point, Aristotle had a very important formula that anticipated many of the discoveries of modern science. You can find it in De anima 2.4, where he says that the food is subject to that which is fed and not that which is fed to the food, just as the architect is not the patient in relation to the matter, but the latter in relation to him: “Further, food is acted upon by what is nourished by it, not the other way around, as timber is worked by a carpenter and not conversely; there is a change in 16 [Trans. note: Although this is somewhat treated in this article, perhaps it was given fuller treatment in the remainder of Maritain’s course.] The Philosophy of the Organism: Notes on the Function of Nutrition 641 the carpenter but it is merely a change from not-working to working.”17 Now, yes, it is quite certain that the foods we take in has some kind of reaction on our bodies. However, what Aristotle means is that the influence of the food on that which is fed falls within the order of material causality, and if, on the contrary, we consider things from the perspective of formal and efficient causality, then we must say that the food is not what acts on that which is fed, but rather that which is fed is what acts on the food. This is so, first, because the living being chooses it, a choice adapted to the maintenance of life in the fed subject, and then because the living being submits it to a whole series of chemical processes, breaking it down through a series of transformations, thereupon reconstructing this substance on a new level. Here we can cite an interesting passage from Georges Bohn in his book Chemistry and Life: The cell works in stages. Little by little, it breaks down the substance under consideration, transforming the latter into its ultimate products, and it is only when the latter is reduced to its simplest, most indifferent fragments that the work of synthesis begins. Sometimes, moreover, the cell only makes use of the freed energy. However, when the substance introduced is destined to become an integral part of the cell, the latter, after having decomposed the former, then proceeds to its “reconstruction from the bottom up,” and the foreign substance is found to have acquired, in its least details, the cell’s own structure and character. In all this work of breaking down and subsequent reconstruction, enzymes [ ferments] play an essential role. On the one hand, they render possible the dislocation of the foreign substance. On the other hand, they “aid” the cell in maintaining its own constitution. Let us pass on to multi-cellular beings, which are more elevated in their organization. Here, we find the division of work. The cells that constitute the walls of the digestive tract are the only ones in contact with the substances that have entered the organism from the outside and that serve to nourish it. Now, even the latter cells do not enter into immediate relations with the substances that will be absorbed. Before penetrating into the intestinal cells, these substances are assailed by the enzymes of the digestive tract and 17 [Trans. note: Taken from Aristotle, On the Soul, trans. J. A. Smith, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 416a35–b2. In the original, Maritain cites the text in Greek. It is here provided in English, with slightly more context.] 642 Jacques Maritain decomposed into their simplest and most-indifferent constituents. Thus, destruction always comes first. The alimentary substances begin by being deprived of the characteristics that are particular to them and that distinguish them, both chemically and physically, from the intestinal cell, and it is only at this moment that the latter takes them up so as to rebuild them following plans that are new and proper to them.18 Even if one holds a mechanistic philosophy, the act of describing a vital process requires one to employ a language that is in no way mechanistic. Food substances, thus taken up by the cells of the intestinal walls, are delivered to the organism’s circulation, to its chyme and blood, and will be assimilated by other parts of the whole organism. Thus, we can see, in striking fashion, the activity exercised by a living body on the very food by which it nourishes itself. It breaks it down, destroys it, and then reconstructs it. However, when it does this, it does so on a new level, refashioning this food in order to restore itself. As we have indicated, all of these activities are a series of chemical processes, but note well that they are ruled in dependence on the functions of the living being. You see here the essential difference between the way that a crystal grows and the way that the living cell nourishes itself. In the former case, you have a simple aggregation or juxtaposition of parts, following a continuous progression. In the formation of crystals, you assist the reciprocal attraction of molecules, which move themselves in the liquid of the solution only when the latter reaches a certain degree of saturation so as simply to superimpose one group upon another. Crystal formation simply involves a process of depositing, whereas assimilation consists in radically different processes. Assimilation is an active process, first, of breaking down and, then, of synthesis and reconstruction. In this regard, the biologist Arthur Thomson has written: “Organic growth occurs at the expense of different materials. We can even speak in a radically different manner of the materials from which the substance composes itself in view of growth. It implies an active assimilation rather than a passive juxtaposition, as occurs in the case of crystal growth.”19 In order to contrast these two kinds of growth, it is often said that life involves a process of intussusception, which is contrasted to the juxtaposition of particles upon other preexisting layers that takes place in the Georges Bohn and Anna Drzewina, La Chimie et la Vie (Paris: Flammarion, 1925), 71–72. 19 See Eugenio Rigano, Qu’est-ce que la vie? [Paris, Alcan, 1926], 10–11. 18 The Philosophy of the Organism: Notes on the Function of Nutrition 643 case of crystals. The word in question, “intussusception,” designates the fact that the particles resulting from the transformation of the food are transported into the very interior of the microstructure of the living being. It is true that this is an important difference, but it does not say enough. This word does not characterize the proper mystery of assimilation, for the outcome of all the work that I have just described is the ontological extension of the very substance of the living thing, which is, as we saw in an earlier lecture, a single, individual substance. (As soon as we recall the fact that a living being is a single individual substance, and not merely a collection of juxtaposed molecules, then the fact of assimilation no longer has a merely empiriological value but, rather, takes on its full ontological scope.) It is not only a question of new particles actively constructed, under the regulation of the superordinated functions of the living being, coming to penetrate to the interior of the micro-organization of the cell. The biologists’ descriptions generally stop here. However, we must add that the particles thus newly and actively formed by the organism are not molecules of individual micelles that would be joined, even by intussusception, to a system of other molecules or individual micelles. These particles become the simple parts of one and the same individual substance, of one and the same preexisting ontological individual, and this is what is essential to the notion of assimilation. Thus, we find ourselves faced with a wholly unique form of vital incorporation. The living protoplasm produces a new part of itself inside itself, making it come into existence, on the basis of food materials. The most exact word that should be used to characterize this process, a word employed by Fr. Gredt,20 is the word “aggeneration” (ad-generatio): production in existence, the generation of a new substance in relation to the materials from which it arises, a new substance which is joined to a preexisting individual substance as an integral part of the latter. It is here that we find something absolutely new in comparison with the entire inorganic (or, non-living) world. And it is something that the light of philosophy enables us to see very clearly from the moment that we employ philosophical and ontological terms such as substance, individual, and specific difference so as to interpret the experimental descriptions. (In our earlier lectures, we showed that it is wholly legitimate to use such terms in relation to living organisms.) Philosophy relies on these two previously established facts: the specific difference between substances, between the food substance and the living subject substance; the individual and 20 [Trans. note: See Joseph Gredt, Elementa philosophae aristotelico-thomisticae, 13th ed., ed. Eucharius Zenzen, vol. 1 (Barcelona: Herder, 1961), nos. 442–47 (pp. 370–72).] 644 Jacques Maritain substantial unity of the living organism. Thus, we must conclude that the process of assimilation, such as it is described by scientists, is precisely what we have said it is: aggeneration, the production in existence of a new substance that is a part of the preexisting substance of the living organism, ontologically extending itself. And what is remarkable, methodologically speaking, is that, if we do not appeal to this philosophical elaboration of properly ontological concepts, the same material details, made up of scientific facts and information, will remain under our eyes without taking on the ontological meaning just discussed. This is why we can make use of experimental testimony offered by mechanist or monist scientists in order to establish [ontological] facts that prove something wholly opposed to mechanism and monism, though on the condition that these facts are understood philosophically. Thus, Jacques Loeb wrote that: The essential difference separating living matter from non-living matter consists in the fact that the living cell synthesizes its complex specific materials from simple, indifferent or non-specific composites, which it borrows from the surrounding environment, whereas the crystal only adds one set of molecules to the other molecules that it finds in its super-saturated solution. This synthetic power of transforming little “building blocks” into complex composites, specific for each organism, constitutes the “secret of life,” or rather, one of the secrets thereof.21 Only, if you do not analyze this fact in light of certain philosophical concepts can you believe that, one day or another, you will be able to resolve this secret of life into mechanistic terms. By contrast, if you first cast a philosophical light on these matters, you will understand that it necessarily belongs to another order. Le Dantec, a great theorist of materialism, likewise states that assimilation is the fundamental characteristic that essentially distinguishes living organisms from non-living beings. However, as we said above, as soon as we recall the fact that a living body is a single, individual substance, and not only a collection of juxtaposed molecules, then the fact of assimilation takes on a value that is not only experimental and empiriological but, beyond that, one that is ontological. Now, we must attend the school of the philosophers if we wish to hear tell of this ontological value. It is an exam21 See Rigano, Qu’est-ce que la vie?, 11. The Philosophy of the Organism: Notes on the Function of Nutrition 645 ple of what we said [above]: the experimental fact must be placed under the light of philosophy so as to yield its philosophical value. You must have formed the philosophical notion of individual substance, unum per se, which presupposes the notions of essence, existence, and unity, and if you do not hold all these philosophical notions in mind, you will not extract from the fact of assimilation the intelligible content we are discussing now. The proof of this is that Le Dantec constantly insisted that assimilation is the distinctive mark of the living organism. He affirmed the very thing that is the proper character of the living organism in opposition to non-living matter is assimilation, even though he interpreted this only as marking out a difference on one and the same level. To his eyes, the living organism was perfectly reducible to a constellation of physiochemical factors. The difference remained wholly within the domain of chemistry. He had discovered this fact in the experimental order; however, he had illuminated with the light of empirical knowledge or of a materialistic philosophy, thus preventing him from extracting from this fact the intelligible philosophical content contained therein. For him, it was a purely descriptive characteristic that did not imply an essential ontological difference. All he noted was one chemical behavior in relation to another, equally chemical behavior. In the same way, we can distinguish an organic composite (e.g., cellulose) from a mineral composite. Loeb recognized that “the constant synthesis of specific materials from simple composites having a non-specific character constitutes the principal characteristic by which living matter differs from non-living matter.”22 He says (using a curiously equivocal formula) that living organisms can be defined as chemical machines that compose themselves principally from colloidal materials and that possess the property of preserving and reproducing themselves by their own means. By expressing himself in this way, Loeb believed that he had reduced everything to physicochemical processes. By declaring that this chemical machine has the property of preserving and reproducing itself through its own means, he has said nothing. He has simply posed the question. But, if we admit that the chemical machine in question is an individual substance (which, if one reasons things through correctly, will need to be declared to be endowed with an immanent activity, precisely on account of which it preserves and reproduces itself by its own means), then this formula becomes perfectly acceptable. However, in such a case, we will have given it an ontological meaning that was precisely precluded by its author’s own original thought. 22 Rigano, Qu’est-ce que la vie?, 12. 646 Jacques Maritain Let us note again that, in the inorganic world, new substances are formed by the transitive action of bodies interacting with each other. Similarly, in the case of nutrition and assimilation, we indeed have a case of the living substance exercising a transitive action on the food, doing so by means of ferments or of enzymes. However, the terminus of this action is what we just called aggeneration, the ontological extension, the self-production of the living substance itself, which from the food in question brings into existence a part of itself that did not exist. Clearly, it is a process of activity of self upon self, passing by transitive activity exercised on the food, thus returning back to the subject, bringing into existence a new part of its own, individual substance. We can say that nutrition is the self-productive function of the living substance. Here indeed is the immanent action which we have spoken of as being an ontological characteristic of life. As I recalled [in an earlier lecture], Heidenhain proposed the theory of protomeres, in which he saw the minimal particles of micro-organization. He thought that these protomeres, by being increased through substantial self-production, would rhythmically divide themselves in accord with the so-called nucleo-plasmic relation. (The mass of the nucleus over the mass of the protoplasm is a constant). We will return to this latter point as regards morphogenesis. Each of the smallest particles of the microstructure of the living being would thus increase by self-division. Whatever the case may be, you see that, once the foods have been introduced within the cell, we must distinguish, within the cell itself: (1) a potential complex, the non-living food matter having been prepared, with everything ready to be assimilated; (2) an actual complex which actualizes and determines the former by transforming it into the same substance as the living being, an assimilating complex. In this way, the metabolic process has the property (which has no analogue in natural inorganic processes, setting aside the case of what can be made by way of human art) of maintaining itself in a state of stationary equilibrium or of tending to get itself back into this state.23 Here, we have a secondary characteristic that derives from this immanent, much more characteristic, activity. Now, this characteristic of stationary equilibrium is much less profound and typical than the immanent activity just spoken of, for it can be artificially imitated. Rigano himself notes this point when he writes: Certainly, the steam engine that puts into motion the machine tools of a workshop is a mechanical system in a state of dynamic, 23 Rigano, Qu’est-ce que la vie?, 13. The Philosophy of the Organism: Notes on the Function of Nutrition 647 stationary equilibrium, that is, a system whose modalities of movement do not change with time. But the technician knows that it took the fantastic discoveries of regulative valves for the pressure in the boiler, of regulators for the centrifugal force so as to regulate the influx of vapor into the distribution box, and of flying weights which by their inertial force equalize the movement impressed on them by the piston before one could realize this stationary state so necessary for the good functioning of the machine tools. Similarly, the water that travels through the channel that brings it to the turbine is in the state of stationary hydrodynamic equilibrium, but this is solely thanks to the appropriate locks that maintain the constancy of its flow. The pressure boiler itself is also in a state of stationary thermodynamic equilibrium, but this is only thanks to the aforementioned safety valves, which precisely maintain the constancy of the pressure. And if the flame of a candle, which many have wished to compare to the torch of life, maintains itself in a state of stationary chemico-dynamic equilibrium, it owes this fact to the wick that was fabricated by man in such a way precisely as to maintain the constancy of the inflow of the melted wax along this wick.24 We do not find any example of a similar stationary system in non-living nature. Nonetheless, human art imitates it in the construction of machines. However, human art will never enable one to bring about the ontological extension of an individual substance, ontologically extending itself by transforming other substances into new parts of itself. No machine can imitate this process. It is here that we find the most profound trait of the assimilative function. Here, indeed, we truly find an essential discriminating characteristic of life. It appears to us as a factual witness to immanent activity. And once again, it has its full meaning only if you regard it not merely as an empiriological fact, but as having an ontological value thanks to the critical preliminary establishment of certain philosophical facts (a task that we took up in the first part of this course). Now, we can verify this conclusion that the living organism is endowed with an immanent activity, an activity of self on self, self-movement, by considering it in comparison with the two other great categories of vegetative phenomena, namely the those that are related to morphogenesis (i.e., growth) and those that are related to reproduction. In what concerns morphogenesis, we are faced with the second great category of facts of the 24 Rigano, Qu’est-ce que la vie?, 15–16. 648 Jacques Maritain vegetative order. Let us note that what modern thinkers call “morphogenesis,” the ancients called “growth,” aúxēsis. They defined it as that kind of movement by which the living thing passes from a lesser quantity to a greater one, motus a minore ad majorem quantitatem. In my opinion, the term “morphogenesis” seems more fitting and more characteristic than does the word “growth,” which is related only to the growth of quantity or volume, to size, whereas the very word morphogenesis implies the production and construction of the form. In any case, note well that the movement of growth spoken of by Aristotle in his theory of four kinds of movement is indeed par excellence the movement in question. It is the movement of growth such as you find it in the living being, a movement that is wholly original, the morphogenetic movement following upon nutrition. It is not the simple growth of volume that you can encounter in the inorganic world. You will find interesting remarks on growth in lesson 9 of Saint Thomas’s commentary on Aristotle’s De anima 2. Before coming to that, I would like to cite for you a passage drawn from the book La Vie creatrice des formes by great embryologist Albert Brachet. This passage emphasizes very well the characteristic importance of the morphogenic function. It is at this moment that life begins to manifest itself in all its creative power. The morphogenetic period is that wherein the organism, so to speak, constructs itself from all the pieces, by activating the actions and reactions which have it as their originating source and subject, by allowing all the energies that it contains to blossom forth, by implementing, in view of one and the same end, the matters that come to it from the egg and those that it constantly assimilates to itself through nutrition. The life of an adult being is simple in comparison to that of an embryo at work. The former can strive only to assure the normal functioning of its capacities, to repair what happens to vex the organism, and to regress toward the fatal terminus that is death. It is essentially conservative in nature: The life of the seed also assures the functions necessary for its maintenance. It nourishes itself, respires, and so forth. But all this can only enable the accomplishment of its proper task which, far from being conservative, is constructive, under infinite modalities of appearance and of complexity. This takes on a striking image when we think that the central nervous system of the superior animals and of man proceeds entirely from the development, favored by the environment, of the preliminary sketches and localized unformed matter in the cytoplasm of The Philosophy of the Organism: Notes on the Function of Nutrition 649 the activated egg. Indeed, these sketches are the necessary germ without which none of the brain, which is so extraordinarily consistent, would be formed, nor would any of its intimate structure, which is so infinitely delicate that a century of work has not yet enabled us to know it in its entirety. And what is true of the organ itself is also true of the function that it exercises, for it has no other raison d’ être than its implementation. However frightfully complex the mental or merely nervous functions may be, they also have their primary origin in the germinal localizations of the egg, and the particular characteristics that they have in each individual will be the blossoming forth of a characteristic of the same order as was possessed by the ovular sketch and that results perhaps simply from a particular ordering of some molecules. Such is the case for all the systems of organs, as for the acquisition of all external forms that life will take on.25 Brachet saw quite clearly what is striking and original in this morphogenic function. Now, in Saint Thomas’s comments on the relevant passage in Aristotle, he notes, following Aristotle, that what, from the perspective of assimilation, is called food, serving in the preservation of the organism, is the same thing that also serves in growth and that consequently is employed by morphogenesis. In fact, food is what is in potency to an animated body. Now, an animated body is simultaneously something having a quantity and size, and likewise a determinate supposit and substance. Now, if we consider the living body as a given subject having a volume and dimension, then food, as such, is the material element serving in growth and, dicitur augmentativum, is called augmentative, auxētikón. However, inasmuch as the living body is a given supposit or a determinate, individual substance, then food properly has the meaning or function of food, for it serves in preserving the substance of the fed thing. This means that, if you consider things from the perspective of material causality, there is not a distinction (other than a rationate one, a distinctio rationis) between the materials that concur in nutrition and those that concur in growth. However, if your perspective no longer is material causality, but instead is formal causality, what is formal in the function, then you will perceive that the growth function is specifically distinct from that the activity of assimilation. Aristotle already had noted that the growth of fire, for example, is unlimited, so long as there is something combustible, whereas 25 Albert Brachet, La Vie créatrice des Formes (Paris: Alcan, 1927), 117–18. 650 Jacques Maritain by contrast, in all organic formations of nature, there is a limit and proportion in relation to size and growth. It is this element of limit, of proportion, of form, and of a structural plan that makes for the formal difference of the function considered. Brachet notes it quite exactly in the book that I just cited. He teaches that three notions are joined in the morphology of the living thing: the notion of organization, that of form, and that of specific size. He writes: The notion of organization, whatever perspective that is taken when defining it, intrinsically implies another notion, one that itself is also wholly fundamental for the analysis of life, namely, that of form. If we likewise take into account the fact that in nature each species of being, even the simplest, has, if not its own proper chemical formula, then, at least, a composition and consequently a specific distribution of materials, we will thus arrive at the conclusion that it also has its particular external and internal form. In other words, each one has its own specific morphology. The added complexity of the organism entails the added complexity of forms, and when, in superior animals, cells group together into organs, the latter have their own proper form and topography. Thus, the whole takes on an external appearance, determined by its content and able to present infinitely varied details. Therefore, organization and form are two inseparable notions that work together in the midst of their various complexities. They have their origin in life itself, which creates and models them. They are both the expression of its activity. But, living beings do not have only an organization and a morphology. Another very general and very important characteristic is that they also have a specific size. The power to grow, that is, the power to form more living materials than it destroys, is a commonplace property of everything that lives, but what is particular is that this power is limited. Each animal species has, among the characteristics that distinguish it, a size whose limits hover around a mean that is easy to establish if we consider an adequate number of individuals.26 Now, by speaking thus, Brachet, expresses himself, on the experimental 26 Brachet, La Vie, 8–10: “Obviously, we set aside here the case of certain animals whose growth is indefinite in appearance, like certain worms for example, for this is not a question of a true individual growth, but rather of proliferation by budding.” The Philosophy of the Organism: Notes on the Function of Nutrition 651 plane, in a wholly Aristotelian manner. Moreover, this phenomenon of having definite organismic limits [cette limitation] is a characteristic that is much more susceptible to being sensually experienced in the animal world than in the plant world. We already noted [in an earlier lecture] that an animal is above all a closed form, whereas plants remain open. In sum, let us say that growth not only involves the material augmentation of volume, but also involves a given form and configuration that is built and determined from within, so that if we were to introduce into the notion of growth this characteristic element—namely, that the form is built up and delimited from within—we could designate growth as being the synthesis or extensive construction of the somatic form of the organism, a construction by which it attains its full existence in grandeur and power.27 Thus, it should be immediately clear that, if we define the growth function or morphogenesis in this way—that is, if we define it by self-construction, the self-edification of the form—we are led to the idea of motion of self by self, of activity of self on self, of immanent activity, and at the same time, we define growth in a way that ought to appear unacceptable or scandalous to every mechanistic science. This is why materialist or mechanist biology has a tendency to misunderstand the originality of the function of morphogenesis in relation to nutrition, reducing growth or morphogenesis to nutrition or assimilation, where, at least at first sight, this new kind of activity, this motion of self by self, is less apparent, whereas in morphogenesis, it shines forth much more clearly. N&V 27 See Hans André, “La Typologie des plantes,” Cahier de Philosophie de la Nature 2 (1929): 63: “The organism of the plant is not only specific from the perspective of substance but also is such from the perspective of dimension and figure. Like nutrition (or, the function productive of the substance), so too does growth (the function productive of the form) fall to immanent action in the strict sense of the term. Aristotle characterizes the difference between organic growth and inorganic growth by means of a lovely comparison. ‘The growth of fire,’ he says, ‘is unlimited inasmuch as there is something of the combustible. By contrast, in all the (organic) formations of nature, there exists a limit and a production of size and of growth.’ If we were to introduce into the notion of growth this characteristic element, namely that the form is built up and delimited from within, we could designate growth as being the synthesis or extensive construction of the somatic form of the organism, a construction by which it attains its full existence in grandeur and power.” Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2021): 653–684 653 Book Reviews The Love of God Poured Out: Grace and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit in St. Thomas Aquinas by John M. Meinert (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2018), 296 pp. A gifted young lay scholar has given us an important monograph on Aquinas’s doctrine of grace. Drawing inspiration from Servais Pinckaers, John Meinert offers a strong argument that Aquinas envisions a constant activity of the Spirit in his seven gifts. The heart of the author’s argument is found in the identification of the Spirit’s movement in the gifts with actual grace (or auxilium). Around this central theme, Meinert weaves a detailed analysis of Aquinas on key terms such as instinctus and auxilium that spans a broad array of Thomas’s texts and commentators. Meinert primarily situates his work within twentieth-century debates on Aquinas’s theology of the seven gifts and his doctrine of grace. That is, he is not interested in relating Thomas to his sources and contemporaries. Meinert’s aim is essentially speculative, namely, to draw out more clearly the place of the Spirit in the whole life of grace by his motion through the seven gifts. Meinert’s grasp of the great twentieth-century figures impresses: it is a delight to see such intense engagement with much-ignored masters such as Iacobus Ramirez and Marie-Michel Labourdette. The author’s preferred style is a paraphrase of Aquinas followed by analysis, with abundant quotes of relevant texts of Thomas in the footnotes, usually in English translation. This methodological choice has its advantages (the text is more readable with so few long citations) but also disadvantages (the author’s key exegetical moves are easily overlooked by the reader, and the texts are not always properly contextualized). Meinert draws extensively upon the Summa theologiae [ST] and the Pauline commentaries of Thomas, thus keeping an appropriate focus on the mature works that cover issues wherein Aquinas’s thought evolved greatly. An author/subject index completes the work, though the index itself seems to be somewhat incomplete (e.g., the entries on operative and cooperative grace). The first chapter lays out the state of the discussion in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Thomistic literature: it bears the clear marks of a dissertation. The author surveys Labourdette, Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Ramirez, Bernard Lonergan, and Joseph Wawrykow. The author treats the 654 Book Reviews division of actual and habitual grace, the necessity of grace, merit, the distinction of the infused virtues and gifts, the need for the gifts and their intrinsic connection. Most of the theologians covered in this survey were active in the early and mid-twentieth century: it is striking how much of this discussion has faded away, despite the recent renewal in Thomistic theology, where much attention has been devoted to the doctrine of God, the Trinity, Christology, and the virtues, but not to grace. The heart of the book is found in chapter 2, which seeks to illumine Aquinas’s teaching on the seven gifts through his doctrine of actual grace (or supernatural auxilium). Here, Meinert especially wants to show that an act of charity accompanies every act of the gifts, and that the operations of the infused virtues always come with the Spirit’s motion in one of the seven gifts. Meinert gives a lengthy treatment of how the gifts are really distinct from the infused virtues. He then presents his main exegetical argument that Thomas holds for the perpetual need for the Spirit’s motion in the spiritual life. The author also shows how the gifts enable human freedom under divine motion, why the gifts both heal and elevate, and how they relate to operating and cooperating grace, and finally explains how the virtues excel the gifts (and in what way the gifts excel the virtues). The chapter includes an illuminating survey of Aquinas’s use of the key term instinctus (89–98). Meinert’s main thesis largely stands or falls with this chapter, so I will give it the most attention in my analysis below. Chapter 3 strives to illumine Thomas’s doctrine of grace via his theology of the Spirit’s gifts. The first main section offers very solid overviews of different kinds of auxilium or divine motion in Aquinas and why they are needed. The author then connects the Spirit’s movement in the gifts with the grace of perseverance. He also sets forth several ways in which the doctrine of the gifts illumines the distinction that Aquinas makes between different kinds of supernatural auxilium, as well as the division of habitual grace. The chapter concludes with a study of merit in light of the gifts. Chapter 4 seeks to bring the results of the analyses in chapters 2 and 3 to bear on the Thomistic debates presented in chapter 1. Here too, the book bears the marks of a dissertation, as the author shows the extent of his work’s originality. Meinert’s central and bold claim is to identify Aquinas’s supernatural auxilium (at work in the lives of believers) with the Spirit’s motion in the gifts. He supports his position with numerous provocative speculative arguments and textual analyses. Meinert refers to Aquinas’s explanation of Romans 8:14 in his Commentary on Romans (95–96, 105–9). In fact, the passage may well refer to the Spirit’s movement in our hearts by charity, and not the gifts (or perhaps both): the text remains ambiguous. This part Book Reviews 655 of Meinert’s exegesis is important, as he points out: “Why does Aquinas use instinctus in relation to the gifts? I think the key lies in Aquinas’s Commentary on the Romans. The text bears quoting in full [and cites paragraph no. 635, on Romans 8:14]” (95–96). The author’s identification of the auxilium with the Spirit’s motion via the seven gifts partly depends on this reading of this passage, which he fairly confidently identifies as a teaching on the seven gifts (105). Meinert seeks to strengthen his argument by citing a rich passage from the Commentary on the Gospel of John, chapter 14, where Thomas discusses the Spirit’s gift (singular; see paragraph no. 1916). Yet here, Aquinas hardly identifies the Spirit’s motion in the gifts with all (post-justification) supernatural auxilium (106–9). The term “gift” never even appears in the plural. Meinert soon returns to the same paragraph of the John commentary with another citation: “It is the same Holy Spirit who inspired the prophets and other sacred authors and who moves the saints to act. As we read: ‘moved by the Holy Spirit holy men of God spoke’ (2 Pet 1:21); and ‘For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God’ (Rom 8:14)’” (108). Meinert perceives a clear identification of all the saints’ acts with the Spirit’s motion via the seven gifts. The exegesis does not hold. Next, the author points to several verbal and conceptual overlaps between Thomas’s description of auxilium in ST I-II, q. 109, a. 9, and q. 68, yet overlap need not mean full identity (109–13). Furthermore, q. 109, a. 9, presents concupiscence (the flesh–spirit tension) and lack of foresight in life as the two main reasons for which we need a divine motion or supernatural auxilium. It is striking that, for Aquinas, none of the seven gifts directly aids temperance (only indirectly so). Hence, the text would seem to treat a supernatural auxilium that includes but also goes beyond the Spirit’s motion in the seven gifts. Overall, Meinert opposes the standard reading in the twentieth-century Thomistic school, which sees the Spirit’s motion in the gifts as one important sub-set of auxilium, an interpretation that can easily account for the conceptual and verbal overlap that he signals. Perhaps the most compelling text of Aquinas that would seem to support Meinert’s thesis is ST I-II, q. 68, a. 2. The answer to objection 2 is striking. Thomas states that the infused virtues cannot perfect the believer in such a way that he does not always need the Spirit’s promptings. The question is how strictly Thomas should be read here: does “always” remain “often” or “in daily life,” or does it mean in every single operation of the infused virtues? The Thomistic tradition tends to take the first approach, Meinert the second. He also points to the corpus of the same article. Here Thomas states that the we only possess the theological virtues in an imperfect way, so that we need the Spirit’s help to reach our supernatural 656 Book Reviews end (100–102, 110–18). But does this mean that any operation of those virtues must be moved by the Spirit via the gifts, or that such operations do not suffice to reach the end of the spiritual life? This question leads me to doubt Meinert’s confident conclusion. Finally, Meinert appeals to Aquinas’s exposition of Romans 1:9 in his Commentary on Romans, but here too, the author seems to read into the text (119). A pattern emerges: the author tends to stretch the texts of Aquinas beyond what they actually say. Indeed, when he does offer key citations, he spends too little time with the details of the text and does not seem to take alternate readings seriously. What we have here, in fact, is too little historical work and too much speculative theology. Strikingly, Meinert’s monograph never considers a doctrinal objection to his position; that is, he does not explain how every act of the infused virtue is accompanied by its complementary gift. For example, if the infused virtues are never operative without the Spirit’s gifts, then an act of faith apparently requires its complementary gifts to be actualized, in this case, the gifts of understanding and knowledge (maybe both, or at least one of them?). But can this make sense for all acts of faith? The gift of understanding grants a deeper awareness of the vast distance between our way of conceptualizing divine realities and the realities themselves, so that we come to a deeper knowledge of “what God is not” (II-II, q. 8). The concepts in question are derived from public revelation and man’s use of reason. Why would this gift be necessary for an act of faith in the historicity of Christ’s miracles, or the acceptance of his parables as true? Why can imperfect yet authentic acts of faith in these things not occur without the Spirit’s motion in the gift of understanding? I regularly teach the seven gifts to undergraduate theology students, and I cannot imagine how I would explain why the gift of understanding (or knowledge) must be actualized in every single act of faith. One could think of other examples: why does every act of hope have to include an act of fear of the Lord, one that only the Spirit moving in the gifts can bring about? Another objection comes to mind: if Aquinas truly thought that the Spirit always moves in the gifts when the infused virtues are enacted, what part of revelation caused him to arrive at such a strong doctrinal conclusion? The Pauline language of the sons of God being led by the Spirit of God hardly suffices, since the Spirit moves in various ways. Meinert would respond by citing ST I-II, q. 68, a. 2. Yet it still remains unclear why the imperfect possession of the infused virtues renders impossible an imperfect virtuous act without the Spirit’s motion via the seven gifts. That this motion is needed for perfect acts of virtue is clear. But if the acquired virtues can be imperfectly possessed and actualized by us as secondary, Book Reviews 657 principal causes, why not some operations of the infused virtues as well? A final doctrinal objection to Meinert’s central claim should be mentioned: if the infused virtues cannot operate without the Spirit’s movement in the gifts and a gift of actual charity, then the Spirit’s motion would appear to follow our free decision. That is, we can enact faith, hope, and charity whenever we choose (hence the traditional pious language of “making acts of love” during one’s meditation). While the Spirit may well elevate those acts beyond our present habitual capacity, Meinert’s proposal would seem to grant the believer a certain control over the Spirit’s movement. Here, the classical Thomistic approach (as represented by Ambroise Gardeil and Garrigou-Lagrange, among others; see 30–32) seems more sound: certain virtuous acts remain within our reach according to our free decision (always presuming the presence of natural and supernatural auxilium as God’s primary causality of human operations), while more fervent acts of virtue are provoked in us in unforeseeable ways, as the Spirit moves through the gifts. For Thomas, the gifts as habitus are instrumental causes through which the Spirit moves as principal cause. Aquinas generally does not use the language of instrumental action when referring to daily acts of the infused virtues (acts made possible by the supernatural auxilium of cooperative grace, so that the Spirit remains the primary cause of every act, but not the principal cause of every act). All that being said, it should be clear that the present work’s strengths outshine its weaknesses. The links between the doctrines of the seven gifts (ST I-II, q. 68) and actual grace (qq. 109–14) clearly need to be drawn, and Meinert generally does so in a deeply insightful and accurate way. For example, he beautifully links the grace of perseverance with the virtue of fortitude and its accompanying gift (176–87). Finally, the work’s speculative character stands out as one of its strengths, for the author has clearly entered into the mind of Aquinas and the Thomistic tradition, as he revives a somewhat forgotten Scholastic conversation on the daily workings of grace. Given the density and highly metaphysical nature of the arguments, it seems that the book’s audience will primarily consist of professors and doctoral students. Meinert presumes a good grasp of Aquinas’s philosophy and a general grasp of his doctrine of grace. The work N&V requires a slow reading, and it is well worth the effort. Bernhard Blankenhorn, O.P. Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas Rome 658 Book Reviews The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis by Alan Jacobs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 256 pp. The Year of Our Lord 1943 is a remarkable and unconven- tional book. The volume focuses on Christian intellectual life in the year that saw the major reversal of fortunes in the Second World War. At this point the victory of the Allied forces was increasingly recognized as sure. This is the context in which Alan Jacobs tells the story of how prominent Christian intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic envisioned the cultural reconstruction of Western civilization after the war. The subtitle of the book, Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis, articulates this common postwar aspiration. The five central dramatis personae that Jacobs casts for his drama are (1) Jacques Maritain, the influential Thomist theologian and personalist philosopher whose presence looms large in twentieth-century Catholic political and ecclesial life, (2) T. S. Eliot, arguably the greatest poet of the twentieth century, whose writing on literature, education, and cultural life offer a traditionalist Anglican voice to the project of Christian humanism, (3) C. S. Lewis, the tireless Christian apologist who became the public voice of evangelical Anglican Christianity during the war and remained so until his death in 1963, (4) W. H. Auden, the English poet who during the war settled in America and whose jarring poetry is a scathing denunciation of postwar bourgeois sentiment, and (5) Simone Weil, who, in her short and anguished life, produced aphoristic, staccato-like philosophy—the amalgam of both her mysticism and political activism. Alongside these central figures, Jacobs invites many other contemporaneous acclaimed “Christian humanists” to make a brief appearance on stage. Already during the last two years of the war, the political and military leaders, captains of industry, jurists, and engineers of the allied forces began preparations for the reconstruction of life after the war. Jacobs’s drama focuses on a series of thinkers less concerned with practical postwar considerations than “with a renewal of Christian thought and practice, especially in the schools of the Western world” (xii). These Christian humanists shared the conviction that a sufficient degree of responsibility for the horrors of the previous decade lay at the feet of an educational system indifferent to a Christian vision of the human person. An authentically human education was vital, therefore, to reconstruct a civilization from the ashes of totalitarian violence. At the outset, Jacobs narrates the history of two intellectual societies, each on one side of the Atlantic, founded to debate the relation between faith and the social order. The Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion, established in 1940 at Jewish Theological Seminary in New York Book Reviews 659 by its president Louis Finkelstein, gave formal expression to a concern, harbored by many educators, that positivism (in the sciences) and pragmatism (in the world beyond the laboratory) were morally vacuous, endemic to American education, and woefully ill-equipped to educate a democratic citizenry at war with a totalitarian regime. The conviction that eternal realities—justice, truth, goodness, and beauty—can be known and rationally defended was more important to America’s war effort than the state of her munitions and battalions. On the other side of the Atlantic a similar gathering met in London, convened by J. H. Oldham; they gave themselves the name “Oldham’s Moot.” This conversation, which ran from 1938 to 1947, included cultural avatars such as T. S. Eliot, Karl Mannheim, Alec Vidler, Christopher Dawson, Walter Moberly, and John Middleton Murry. The question of the definition of “culture” and, more particularly, the place of Christian faith in such culture animated the discussions at Oldham’s Moot. Jacques Maritain played a decisive role in advancing a particular Catholic version of “Christian humanism.” Catholic humanism was envisioned as a response to the humanism first advanced in the Renaissance and culminating in its vicious expression in the Enlightenment. For Maritain, the tale of modern humanism is a narrative of decline, in which an anthropocentric, stunted humanism took root, displacing authentic humanism, falsely imagining “human nature as closed in upon itself or absolutely self-sufficient” (42). The result was a “truncated humanity, a sad parody, almost, of what humans ought to be and can be.” By contrast, Maritain sought to advance an “integral humanism” constructed on a Thomistic anthropology, in which the human person and culture are open to the transcendent and intelligible by way of a supernatural teleology. The war years saw Reinhold Niebuhr become a popular advocate for a “Christian realism”—a muscular Christianity, not afraid to admit and engage with sin in the world. Rather than retreat from an often messy, secular reality, Niebuhr maintained that Christians must redeem the time; they are called to robust engagement in political, military, and economic arenas. Jacobs contrasts Niebuhr’s vision of Christian life from that proposed by the players in his drama. Jacobs focuses (especially) on how W. H. Auden and C. S. Lewis insisted on the transcendent orientation of the Christian faith, on the primacy of its otherworldly, eternal dimensions, and the necessity of Christians giving priority to the contemplation of such eternal realities. If our citizenship is truly in heaven, maintained Auden and Lewis, this requires that we “decenter the world of politics— not to ignore it, but to shift it toward the periphery, to see it as among the second rather than the first things” (56). Auden asked a pointed rhetorical 660 Book Reviews question of Niebuhr: “The question is: does he believe that the contemplative life is the highest and most exhausting of vocations, that the church is saved by the saints, or doesn’t he?” (55). Likewise, Lewis insisted that the pursuit of learning has the same value in wartime as it does in peacetime: “The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice” (58). In marked contrast to Niebuhr, both Auden and Lewis counseled a sustained advertence to eternity even (or perhaps especially) in the chaos of war. The relation of the Christian faith to power is a major theme of the book. The diverse advocates of a new Christian humanism shared an unease with the use of temporal power to secure spiritual ends. They called for a rejection of the “contract with force” and a renegotiation of the terms of relation with state power and privilege. Charles Norris Cochrane’s hugely influential Christianity and Classical Culture (1940) had ominous contemporary implications, according to Auden. The “Christian empire” of Theodosius sought to instantiate things of the spirit by power politics; in the contemporary context, that danger seemed particularly acute once again. In a review for the New Republic, Auden wrote, “Mr. Cochrane’s terrifying description of the ‘Christian’ empire under Theodosius should discourage such hopes of using Christianity as a spiritual benzedrine for the earthly city” (79). It is a mistake, maintained Auden, to construct the social cohesion required to combat the idolatrous unity of totalitarianism on the edifice of a bourgeois established religion. Woven into the modern “contract with force” is a technocratic worldview—an idealization of power that seeks to harness nature’s power in order to control other people. Nazi Germany was paradigmatic for such a despotic technocratic regime. Churchill warned that unless England stood strong in the face of Nazi aggression, the world “will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the light of perverted science.” A common English trope during the war was to identify the Nazis as “masters of new and unprecedentedly dangerous technologies,” to which the only authentic resistance was moral—the “forces of character.” Lewis’s (and J. R. R. Tolkien’s) recurring castigation of the philosophy latent in modern science is representative. Modern science and ancient magic share a common genetic code; they are twins—“one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve” (132–33): “Both seek knowledge for the sake of power” (133). Modern science (culminating in technocratic totalitarian regimes) is principally about force, about the control of the many by the few. In the conclusion to The Abolition of Man, Lewis wrote: “What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a Book Reviews 661 power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument” (134). The concluding chapters of the book concern how these protagonists of Christian humanism understood education and the formation of culture. They shared an antipathy to government-run education systems, whose universal mandates were concocted from on high by “educational experts.” The philosophic ills (the use of force and the desire to control) that plague modern science and culminate in the technocratic tyrannies of the twentieth century equally infect liberal and instrumentalist visions of education. A more authentically human vision of education must be envisioned. Maritain’s appeal for a personalist philosophy to underwrite education was representative: “The prime goal of education is the conquest of internal and spiritual freedom to be achieved by the individual person, or, in other words, his liberation through knowledge, and wisdom, good will, and love” (126). A prepackaged, statist conception of education as vocational preparation is woefully insufficient, maintained Maritain. Indeed, it “leaves in human life nothing but relationships of force, or at best those of pleasure, and necessarily ends up in a philosophy of domination. A technocratic society is but a totalitarian one” (131). A human education, one that is authentically liberating, cannot be conceived apart from the mediating institutions that mold the young in wisdom: family, church, political affiliations, and, most importantly, “the saints and martyrs [who] are the true educators of mankind” (130). In a similar vein, Lewis held that a human education is a moral education: “The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likable, disgusting and hateful” (137). As such, the real aim of education is the shaping of loves according to what Augustine would call a normative ordo amoris. In his influential essay, “The Social Function of Poetry,” Eliot sounded a similar note: poetry serves to shape the affections of a culture. As such, the unifying feature informing the pedagogy of Lewis, Maritain, Weil, and Eliot is the Augustinian quest to discover an authentic ordo amoris: “The necessity of seeking the ordo amoris, of training the emotional responses before training the rational ones” (182). The book concludes with a delightful engagement with Auden’s comical poem “Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times.” Auden narrates the battle for the soul of the modern university as a war between “the sons of Hermes” and “Apollo’s children.” Hermes is the god of arts and letters; his offspring dream, interpret, and contemplate. Apollo, the god of reason and order, spawns a love for pragmatism and power, for utility and 662 Book Reviews administrative bureaucracy. Auden first read his poem at Harvard in 1946, and it is a none-too-veiled denunciation of the direction the university had taken during the war years. The president of Harvard, James Bryant Conant, wanted a university useful to the industrial, military, and governmental needs of a nation at war. To that end, he demoted the humanities, prioritized the useful sciences, and cultivated technological research. With President Conant, Auden recognized Apollo taking his seat of power at the university, seeking to extend his totalitarian technocratic reach: And when he occupies a college, Truth is replaced by Useful Knowledge; He pays particular Attention to Commercial Thought, Public Relations, Hygiene, Sport, In his curricula.1 The sons of Hermes, entrusted with advancing genuine human education, necessarily dread “his threat / To organize us.” The situation is dire, but Auden is hopeful: “Zeus willing, we, the un-political, / Shall beat him yet.” To resist Apollo’s parasitical rule of the university, the sons of Hermes compose, recite, and obey a “Hermetic Decalogue”: Thou shalt not do as the dean pleases, Thou shalt not write thy doctor’s thesis On education, Thou shalt not worship projects nor Shalt thou or thine bow down before Administration. Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon World-Affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit With statisticians nor commit A social science. Thou shalt not be on friendly terms With guys in advertising firms, 1 W. H. Auden, "Under which lyre," in Collected Poems (New York: Random House, 1976), 261. Book Reviews 663 Jacobs presents “Under Which Lyre” as a hilarious but prescient poem about a perennial pestilence of the modern university. The Year of Our Lord 1943 has an idiosyncratic but delightful structure: diverse figures flow in and out of a drama held together by a year (1943) and a common theme (Christian humanism). Jacobs’s tale relates the effort of five Christian intellectuals to construct a new Christian humanism in the wake of the catastrophic Second World War. The relevance of their project nearly eighty years later is evident. The philosophic challenges latent in modern science identified by Maritain, Eliot, Lewis, Auden, and Weil remain with us. And the accompanying technocratic and pragmatic vision of education is less questioned now than when they wrote. But their vision for an authentic human education, one that prioritizes the knowledge and love of eternal realities, that seeks spiritual freedom and shapes the ordo amoris of the student to respond well to the given structures of the N&V universe, holds out direction and hope. Gerald P. Boersma Ave Maria University Ave Maria, FL Jesuit Biblical Studies after Trent: Franciscus Toletus and Cornelius A Lapide by Luke Murray (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019), 218 pp. “In the field of biblical hermeneutics, one area which scholarship has neglected is Catholic biblical scholarship during the late sixteenth century” (17). With this observation Luke Murray begins Jesuit Biblical Studies after Trent, a significant contribution to a field that deserves greater attention. The book acquaints the reader with the biblical thought of two Jesuits, situating them within the theological issues of the period, and offers an entrée into future work on the topic. Murray identifies a number of grounds for the neglect and occasional criticism of Catholic exegesis after Trent: excessive deference to the hierarchical Church, partisan defense of the Vulgate, and the priority of polemical concerns. A notable exception to this general pattern is the nineteenth-century Catholic theologian Matthias Scheeben, who heaped praise upon the early modern exegetes (17–19). Murray steers a middle way between these positions, pointing out the strengths and value of early-modern Jesuit biblical scholarship while avoiding Scheeben’s effusiveness. 664 Book Reviews Jesuit Biblical Studies is divided into four chapters. The first offers general observations on the Jesuit contribution to biblical exegesis in the decades during and after Trent. Murray dedicates a chapter each to the life and work of Franciscus Toletus and Cornelius A Lapide, followed by one chapter comparing their respective commentaries on John 17. Each of the first three chapters dedicates considerable space to reviewing secondary literature. Murray identifies several priorities of Jesuit biblical scholarship in the sixteenth century. One of these was defending the Vulgate, although the earliest members of the order differed somewhat on how to do this (49). Another feature was the effort to integrate Scholastic theology, especially the thought of Thomas Aquinas, with knowledge of the biblical languages and other aspects of humanist education. A third feature was interest in the Church Fathers, which was related to the ad fontes impulse of the age, but without opposition to Scholasticism. One helpful feature of Jesuit Biblical Studies is its presentation of the Thomistic framework that Jesuit exegetes took from the Angelic Doctor himself and commentators like Domingo De Soto and Thomas de Vio Cajetan. Aquinas viewed biblical inspiration as a category of prophecy, which is a gratuitous grace of knowledge that bestows understanding of divine realities that transcend what human beings can know by their own natural powers (75–76). The commentators drew out more explicitly the distinctions between different kinds of intellectual lights, locating the light of prophecy (lumen propheticum) between the light of faith (lumen fidei) and the light of glory (lumen gloriae) that the blessed enjoy. A crucial point for the understanding of biblical inspiration in the sixteenth century is that followers of Thomas posited the need not only for the intellectual light of prophecy to illuminate the sacred author’s mind, but also for new or reformulated intellectual species that the inspired mind had to judge. On this theory, God can allow the species to come from the prophet’s natural experience, or infuse the species himself, or infuse the knowledge directly. This opened up the question of how much of the content in any given instance of prophetic inspiration came from the writer’s own knowledge, and how much directly from God; biblical theologians could disagree on the respective weight attributed to each. The role of natural experience provided, in any case, a theoretical justification for studying the historical context and original languages of Scripture (80). Murray sees a parallel between the issues at stake in biblical inspiration, on the one hand, and the de auxiliis controversy over grace, free will, and justification, on the other. Some scholars, like Domingo Bañez, held that each and every letter of Scripture was directly inspired or dictated by God, Book Reviews 665 and this position was closely related to the notion of physical pre-motion behind his understanding of justification. Other scholars, by contrast, allowed more freedom to the human author to use his natural talents in understanding and communicating God’s message. The Jesuit Leonardus Lessius was one of these, and this position had its analogue in his “Molinist” approach to justification, with its greater emphasis on human freedom and agency. Where do Toletus and A Lapide line up on these questions? Murray notes that there is a textual issue with Toletus that bears upon the matter: three paragraphs that may be later additions to his discussion of inspiration. These have more of a Bañezian flavor and may be interpolations, because otherwise Toletus’s thought seems closer to that of Lessius and his teaching on sufficient grace has a slight Molinist twist (89, 163). There is ambiguity in A Lapide’s thought on inspiration, which sought a nuanced understanding of “dictation” that could incorporate the legitimate insights of both perspectives (122, 131). He emphasizes predestination more than Toletus and was thus closer to Bañez on these issues, although he also clearly affirms human freedom and moral responsibility (174, 183). Toletus made contributions to both textual editing and the understanding of the senses of Scripture. He was appointed to help revise the Vulgate by Sixtus V, but the Pope did not heed the advice of his editors, and the final edition left much to be desired. Under the successors of Sixtus, Toletus and the other members of the commission finally produced the Sixto-Clementine edition in 1592. Like most Catholic exegetes of the period, Toletus affirmed the multiple sub-categories of spiritual senses in Scripture, but he also held that there could be multiple literal senses. He gives numerous reasons for this, including the multiplicity of translations and variant readings in use in the Church. But he thinks that the multiple literal senses are ultimately according to the intention of the Holy Spirit, rather than the human author (96–98). A Lapide was more prolific and prolix than Toletus, authoring a commentary on the whole Bible, which a quiet life largely free from controversy enabled him to do. While eschewing private judgment, A Lapide believed that everyone should study Scripture (141). He provided an account of inspiration and canonicity that sought to integrate God’s direct work with the sacred author with the Church’s external authority and liturgical life. A Lapide saw a greater unity between the literal and spiritual senses than most other writers and spoke of the “genuine sense” of Scripture, which is the meaning intended by the Holy Spirit as primary author. Finding it, however, requires placing oneself in the human author’s milieu and studying his context and audience (125). Thus A Lapide, while 666 Book Reviews describing the human authors as instruments or organs, is attentive to their variety, and says that the Spirit is like a flute player who adapts himself to different instruments (131). A Lapide brought a strong Christological perspective to the study of Scripture as well as an encyclopedic knowledge of patristic sources and familiarity with contemporary authors. His favorite Father, based on the number of times he cites him, is Augustine, followed by Jerome for the Old Testament and Chrysostom for the New (143). Borrowing from Henri de Lubac, Murray describes A Lapide’s approach as “typological exegesis,” which marked a transition from a strict fourfold sense of Scripture to a more spiritual approach that sought to elucidate the meaning intended by the Spirit and the eternal realities of the faith (154). Chapter 4 offers a concrete and comparative illustration of these Jesuits’ exegetical principles in action by examining their respective commentaries on John 17. This brings to the fore a notable feature of early-modern Catholic biblical scholarship: its weaving together of exegetical and dogmatic issues. Neither Jesuit blushes at bringing to bear the unity of Scripture, the definitions of ecumenical councils, or even liturgical sources to explain particular verses. This tendency is one ground for the frequent dismissal of early-modern Catholic exegesis, but in this respect Murray observes and explicates more than he evaluates. John 17 is also an important locus for the respective views of Toletus and A Lapide on grace and predestination, demonstrating how each sought to integrate patristic sources in light of the controversies of the day. Murray helpfully provides some tables that offer a sense of how often each Jesuit cited particular Fathers and notes their preference for those who affirmed their own positions. Toletus, for example, is wont to cite Basil and Cyril of Alexandria in support of his Molinist tendencies (180). It may be beneficial to this relatively uncharted scholarly field to observe some similarities and differences between Toletus and A Lapide, on the one hand, and one of the earliest Jesuit biblical theologians, Alfonso Salmeron, on the other. Salmeron was one of the founding members of the Society of Jesus and made his name as a preacher and theologian at the Council of Trent. He had no evident intent to become a published theologian, but composed at the behest of General Borgia sixteen volumes of commentary on the New Testament. Although his work did not see the light of day until the turn of the seventeenth century (about fifteen years after his death), the material dates to decades earlier, mostly reflecting the issues that had dominated theology from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the Council of Trent. A Lapide knew Salmeron’s commentaries and cites them occasionally, Book Reviews 667 and their works have many features in common: interest in the original languages along with a defense of the Vulgate; encyclopedic knowledge of the Fathers and other theologians; a Christocentric approach and use of typological exegesis; a strong interest in history; regard for the Church’s liturgy and practice as a source of theology. While Murray highlights A Lapide’s indebtedness to Toletus, he owed something to Salmeron as well. Jesuit Biblical Studies has a few flaws. While the literature review is quite valuable, it takes up too much space in the main text and could have been condensed. The presence of typos and an occasional stray wording indicates that the copy editing was not altogether careful. These shortcomings, however, detract little from a valuable book on a topic about which too little is known. One would like to see someday a more comprehensive and comparative look at Jesuit biblical studies after Trent, one that would account for Salmeron, Juan de Maldonado, and Benedict Pereira, along with better-known authors like Robert Bellarmine or Peter Canisius. We N&V can hope that Murray has more to offer on this topic. Sam Zeno Conedera, S.J. Saint Louis University St. Louis, MO Thomas Aquinas and His Predecessors: The Philosophers and the Church Fathers in His Works by Leo Elders (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2018), xv + 382 pp. Scholars have long recognized Thomas’s extensive reliance upon an array of thinkers, from Aristotle to Avicenna and Averroes in the realm of philosophy, or from Saint Augustine to John Damascene in the realm of theology. And while a number of important studies have explored Thomas’s relation to individual thinkers or schools of thought, none have attempted to survey comprehensively all his major philosophical and theological influences in a single volume. Thanks to the late Father Leo Elders, who carefully examines thousands of quotations culled from the entirety of Thomas’s work, students of Saint Thomas now have just such a resource. In Thomas Aquinas and His Predecessors, Elders shows concretely how Thomas engaged various philosophical and theological authorities throughout the span of his intellectual career. In doing so Elders provides Thomist scholarship with an invaluable resource. His study not 668 Book Reviews only reveals Thomas’s reliance on others, but also highlights his unique and synthetic creativity. Elders centers his study strictly upon Aquinas’s own references, observations, and critical notes (x). He does not delve into the texts of the thinkers treated by Saint Thomas, but approaches them only as they appear in the corpus of the Common Doctor. Thus, one should not expect to find anything like a historical study of Thomas’s predecessors themselves. Nevertheless, each chapter begins with a summary introduction that includes a brief historical survey of the thinker in question, the focus of each chapter remains principally on St. Thomas’s appropriation of and engagement with his predecessors. After each introduction, Elders catalogues Saint Thomas’s various summaries, quotations, and interactions with a given thinker or text. Elders’s work, which is surely the result of years of assiduous note-taking, in many ways recalls the medieval florilegia. Each chapter summarizes an extensive amount of research and provides the reader with a first-hand, though necessarily abbreviated, glimpse at how Thomas engaged with his sources. These appear as paraphrases (with sources in the footnotes) rather than as direct quotations. In fact, Elders seldom quotes Thomas’s own words, and rarely adds any comments of his own. The book is divided into sixteen chapters that are ordered chronologically. The first five chapters deal with Plato, Aristotle (in two chapters), the Stoics, and a chapter on gnosticism and neo-Platonism. Chapters 6–11 delve into the Fathers of the Church: Augustine, Jerome, John Chrysostom, and Pope Gregory the Great, with a chapter on two treatises of Boethius and another on Pseudo-Dionysius. Chapters 12–16 treat important medieval texts and thinkers that are more explicitly philosophical in nature (the Liber de causis, Avicenna, Averroes, and a chapter on Avicebron and Maimonides); Elders also includes a chapter on John Damascene and Anselm of Canterbury. Each chapter is self-contained and may be read on its own. Reading the book cover-to-cover, however, is also beneficial, as it provides an overarching sense of Saint Thomas’s engagement with the vast array of both philosophical and theological authorities in his works. At the introduction to each chapter, Elders provides a brief historical overview of the thinker in question and notes the possible texts to which Saint Thomas would have had access. Elders also frequently notes the number of times a thinker is mentioned or quoted as an indication of his relative importance in Thomas’s corpus. Thus, for instance, we are told that the Stoici are mentioned ninety-five times (73); Averroes is mentioned ninety times by name and more than three hundred times as “the Book Reviews 669 Commentator” (309); Maimonides, more than eighty times (337). When appropriate, Elders also specifies places within Thomas’s work where a given thinker is cited. Thus, we are told that Gregory the Great is quoted 479 times in the secunda pars of the Summa theologiae (205), highlighting the importance of his authority in Thomas’s teaching on the virtues; conversely, Elders informs us that Thomas only refers to Jerome a few times in his treatise on the sacraments (140). Occasionally, Elders will include lists of maxims or principles that Thomas borrows from different thinkers. Since Elders only treats thinkers and texts as they arise in Thomas’s work, the scope of each chapter varies largely based upon how much Thomas himself engages with them. Arguably the most interesting chapters are those pertaining to Thomas’s use of the thinkers of the medieval Arabic and Jewish philosophical traditions. Since Thomas frequently summarizes the philosophical views of his Arabic and Jewish predecessors, Elders’s review of these accounts often includes a synopsis of Thomas’s own summary. In such instances, the reader is able to gain a significantly better sense of Thomas’s engagement. For example, in recounting Thomas’s debate with Averroes on the question of the possible intellect, Elders cites Thomas’s own account of Averroes’s teaching: “Averroes argues as follows to establish his theory: for an immaterial intellect it would be impossible to be individualized, because it is without matter. Therefore it cannot be particular for each human being. If it were proper to every human being, the cognitive species would also be individualized in us, but in reality they are universal concepts” (318). Though dense, this summary nevertheless provides the reader with sufficient background information to understand the significance of Saint Thomas’s response to Averroes. For better or for worse, this type of summary represents an exception to most of Elders’s work throughout the book. This is due to Elders’s penchant for adhering closely to the text. In the same chapter on Averroes, Elders describes how Averroes thought that air contributed to the natural movement of light and heavy bodies on account of a natural necessity. We are told neither the meaning of Averroes’s view nor its significance. Elders simply adds, “but, says Thomas, this is erroneous” (329). Without any comment, Elders moves on to the next topic. This is characteristic of many of his summaries. The absence of further analysis may pose a hindrance to the uninitiated. Elders’s study also reflects how Thomas’s use of the Church Fathers is different in nature from his use of philosophers. While Thomas typically refers to the latter in matters of reason, he appeals to the former in matters of faith (see ST I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2). As mentioned above, Elders highlights particular places where Thomas borrows extensively from a given thinker. Thus, for example, we learn that Thomas relies heavily on Saint Gregory 670 Book Reviews the Great on the question of vices and sin. In fact, Saint Gregory is Thomas’s most important source on this question (208). Here, too, however, the sheer volume of information comes at a cost. Significant differences are often mentioned without any explicative commentary. For example, Elders tells us that John Chrysostom does not attribute judiciary power to Christ as man but only as he is God. To this Elders simply adds: “Thomas corrects these words: Christ has this power in so far as he is the head of redeemed humanity” (170). This is a remarkable difference. Yet, Elders says no more on the matter. We can say of Elders’s study what he himself wrote of Saint Thomas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “For the attentive reader the commentary is a mine of information” (59). Elders’s study provides an indispensable resource for anyone seeking a greater understanding of Saint Thomas’s thought. Furthermore, it provides a useful starting point for research into Thomas’s engagement with his sources. On account of the breadth and density of the material covered, Elders does not often provide overarching narratives, nor does he show the reader how all the myriad pieces fit together. As a result, the reader is unlikely to draw any definite conclusions from the study without spending a great deal more time with the primary texts. Elders’s extensive notes provide a handy guide to those willing to pursue matters further. Finally, an overview of the work as a whole offers a portrait, rooted in so many texts, of Thomas’s engagement with his most important intellectual predecessors. It is fitting to conclude with Elders’s final assessment: “The final conclusion which imposes itself after the following detailed survey is that St. Thomas studied and evaluated the doctrine of these authors with perfect objectivity, grasped the essential elements, and examined the extent of their being well-founded and true” (xi). Given Elders’s erudition, one does not doubt this claim. Nevertheless, the final conclusion will likely impose itself only on the reader who goes beyond Elders’s important survey to the text of Thomas himself. In this regard, Elders’s book warmly invites the disciple of Saint Thomas to learn immediately at the feet of the Common Doctor. N&V Joshua H. Lim Thomas Aquinas College Santa Paula, CA Book Reviews 671 Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics, Book One: Theological Epistemology, Part One: The Objective Principles of Theological Knowledge by Matthias Joseph Scheeben, translated by Michael J. Miller (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2019), xi + 426 pp. Spurred by the wake of the First Vatican Council, the German theologian Matthias Joseph Scheeben set to work on his Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics, a project that he hoped would yield an up-to-date resource of unparalleled comprehensiveness for the study of dogmatic theology. After nearly twenty years and more than three thousand pages of output, Scheeben’s work on the Handbook and his life were brought to a premature close. Nevertheless, the three large tomes that he had completed and published prior to his death stand as both the magnum opus of his career and a masterpiece of modern Catholic theology. Martin Grabmann certainly echoed the judgment of many when he identified Scheeben as the greatest dogmatic theologian of the nineteenth century (“and recent times”) and described his Handbook as “the deepest, and the meatiest, dogmatic work in the German language.”1 Where enthusiasm for Scheeben has been notably absent among American and English-speaking theologians, moreover, this arguably owes something to the fact that no full English translation of the Handbook has ever been available—that is, until now. Scheeben’s monumental Handbook is now on offer by Emmaus Academic in the English language thanks to the similarly immense efforts and talents of Michael J. Miller, who has been translating it for more than three years, and David Augustine, a doctoral candidate and Scheeben specialist at the Catholic University of America, who rigorously proofreads and prepares the indices and bibliographies for the English volumes. The work here under review is the first volume (1.1) of this English translation, whose content corresponds to the first half of the first treatise of the Handbook, originally published in 1873. “Theological Epistemology” is the titular subject of this first treatise, whose pride of place in the Handbook likely owes much to the profile that its fundamental-theological topics had very recently received from the Council. In any case, this first treatise is not the sort of “ground-clearing” epistemology of Cartesian heritage that prefaces and establishes the possibility of whatever philosophy or theology it introduces. In investi. Martin Grabmann, “Scheebens theologisches Lebenswerk,” included in M. J. Scheeben, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Freiburg: Herder, 1941), xxxi (translation mine). See also Cyril Vollert, “Matthias Joseph Scheeben and the Revival of Theology,” Theological Studies 6, no. 4 (1945): 453–88. 1 672 Book Reviews gating the sources, nature, and structure of faith, Scheeben’s epistemology addresses the question of how, and not whether, faith constitutes an act of true and legitimate knowledge. The treatise’s basic two-part division follows the distinction between the knowing subject and the object known, and inverting the priority of modern epistemology, Scheeben follows Saint Thomas in giving first place in the treatise to the “objective principles” of faith. More than an homage to the Angelic Doctor, this ordering reflects Scheeben’s conviction that the more important half of the causal explanation of faith lies entirely outside the agency and psychology of the believer. Thus, while volume 1.2 analyzes the subjective acts of volition, assent, and apprehension that faith entails, 1.1 (the volume of this review) investigates the nature of the objects that elicit them—namely, the divine truths to which the believer assents and the means by which these truths reach and authoritatively confront us with the force of a summons from a supreme lord enjoining and evoking the assent of faith in us. With Saint Thomas, Scheeben accepted the Aristotelian principle that acts are specified by their objects. By implication, we cannot understand the nature of the act of faith without first understanding the nature of its object. The fundamental or “primordial” object and principle of faith, moreover, is divine revelation, and thus, in the first of the book’s five chapters, Scheeben examines the nature, modes, purpose, and history of divine revelation, identifies mystery as its characteristic content, and develops a taxonomy of the kinds of truths that belong to or relate to it in one way or another. Divine revelation is the logical centerpiece of this book, as of Scheeben’s theological epistemology as a whole; nevertheless, the topic to which he devotes the bulk of its 389 pages is the Church’s teaching body and its role as the agent of revelation’s transmission and proclamation. And just as the nature of faith is defined by the nature of divine revelation as its object, in a similar way the nature of the magisterium is what it is as a consequence both of the way that God chose to make himself known and of the purposes of that revelation. Chapter 2, arguably the most important chapter of the book (and its second lengthiest), thus expounds the magisterium—its hierarchical organization and head; its relation to the believing body of the Church, its apostolic heritage, its prerogatives and charisms—all as so many implications of its defining role as the complement of divine revelation. That revelation should need some such complement in the first place owes to the fact that God has revealed himself in particular historical moments, events, and persons rather than in the immediate here and now of every Book Reviews 673 human being—a fact elaborated at some length in the diachronic-historical survey of revelation at the close of chapter 1. Some specially authorized teaching body is needed if revelation is to move integrally beyond its historical debut and into every time, place, idiom, and culture thereafter. Still, the task of the mediator of revelation is more than that of a translator and curator, and a divine revelation cannot be reduced to a mere content that need only be disseminated somehow. Revelation is the sovereign word of the King of Kings and a mandate summoning every heart and mind to the obedience of faith. The live, authoritative voice and Person of revelation, though no longer present immediately, are thus no more dispensable than its contents—the events, words, deeds, and doctrines that the teaching body of the Church preserves and presents to all the world. If it is truly to mediate this sovereign word in its integrity and with its essential imperative force, the mediator of revelation must also bear, vicariously, the authority and personal presence of Christ as the apostles did. And so it does in fact, as Scheeben argues, drawing on scriptural and patristic sources to demonstrate that the apostolic commission was understood both to have entailed this kind of authority and to have passed from the apostles to their episcopal successors. Chapters 3 and 4 elaborate the mediatory role of the teaching body of the Church in relation to Sacred Scripture and the material content of ecclesial Tradition. Scripture and Tradition possess each its own dignity as distinct but radically interdependent media of divine revelation, and each relies, in its own way, on the ministry of the teaching office. Scripture is the preeminent record of revelation, inspired, as Scheeben carefully explains, in such a way that we can rightly ascribe authorship to God without thereby subtracting anything from the agency of its human authors. Nevertheless, we could never have known of the unity and supernatural character of these various ancient books if the apostles and their episcopal successors had not promulgated them as Sacred Scripture. The status of Scripture, in turn, attests the divine commission and prior authority of the teaching office in virtue of whose testimony the Church has received it as the word of God. Beyond this formal dependence on the teaching apostolate, Scripture (the Gospels in particular) stands in a relation of material dependence upon the oral tradition of the apostles and their successors. The New Testament is a written subset of the apostolic teaching that was otherwise passed down by the Church and its magisterium, by the guidance of the Spirit, through the various modes and media of ecclesial Tradition. Chapter 4 identifies these modes and media, elaborates the principles that govern ecclesial Tradition as a collaboration of human and divine 674 Book Reviews agency, and explains how the substance of the apostolic oral Tradition has lived on in its integrity through every age in the Church’s preaching, belief, and practice, under the unfailing guidance of the Spirit. In light of this study of the actual operation of Sacred Tradition—a study aided in no small measure by his extensive familiarity with this same Tradition—Scheeben explains the precise sense and application of the criteria (universitas, antiquitas, and consensio) of Saint Vincent’s famous canon of catholicity. Here as throughout the book Scheeben emphasizes the significance of the magisterium and especially that of its supreme pontiff in his jurisdictional capacity. Consequently, catholicity is ultimately not a measure of the aggregate witness of the Church’s individual members. To identify the mind or spirit of the Church with a mere aggregate or simple majority in this way would suggest that the Church’s members stood in no more integral a relation to one another than do the members of a heap. The governing metaphor, by contrast, in Scheeben’s construal of the Church and the interrelation of its members is that of a living organism; consequently, although every member and organ is implicated in the Church’s total life and integrity, they are not all equally essential to that life, constitutive of it, or representative of it. Just as and just because the apostles were the heart and soul of the Church in the first century, so also their episcopal heirs thereafter constitute its organic core. And just as Saint Peter was then the foundation stone of the Church and the fundamental bearer of the promise and charism of the Spirit of Truth, so also the heirs of his see inherit his foundational office along with the abiding presence of the Spirit who preserves his judgments from error, thereby lending them their supernatural authority. Chapter 5 studies these judgments of the pope and magisterium along with the other ordinary modes by which the teaching body of the Church asserts the word of God in one authoritative voice, thereby constituting the believing Church as one body under the headship of Christ. Here Scheeben characteristically elaborates a typology of dogmatic pronouncements that is helpful in its thoroughness, if somewhat tedious and outdated at points. Perhaps more noteworthy is Scheeben’s discussion of the authority and infallibility of the pope in relation to that of the quorum of other bishops present at an ecumenical council. Although the decisions of such councils derive their authority and infallibility preeminently from the pope as head of the teaching body, Scheeben argues, the contribution of the other bishops is neither superfluous nor merely auxiliary. Scheeben closes this final chapter with a discussion of the development of dogma and a brief Denzinger-style survey of the most important official teachings of the Church. Surveys of this kind are a programmatic Book Reviews 675 feature of the Handbook’s argumentation and an often-valuable resource for researchers seeking historical overview and bibliography pertinent to a specific question or topic. Especially in the sections where he addresses a question that is in some way unsettled, Scheeben canvases the most important voices on the matter, from the authoritative teachings of the Scriptures, magisterial pronouncements, and early fathers, to the sophisticated and sublime insights of medieval and modern scholars and mystics. And juxtaposing these as well as Scheeben’s own position, of course, is a lineup of contemporary theological foils (most prominently, Jansenists, Gallicans, and Protestants) and the partisans of a number of disputes that have since lost much of their urgency. In general, the book is very navigable for research and episodic reading thanks to its hierarchical organization and Scheeben’s use of two type sizes in the body to distinguish his primary line of argumentation (in large type) from secondary elaborations and excurses (in small type). Additionally, two new indexes (one for scriptural passages and another for subjects and persons) and a bibliography complement the English translation and make it even more research-friendly than its German antecedent. Research utility and navigability come, however, at a significant cost to the volume’s general readability: staccato transitions from subtopic to subtopic make some chapters read like encyclopedia content, and the body is quite cluttered with citations and sometimes bewildering layers of organizational scaffolding. The average sentence is a similarly over-engineered sprawl of nested subordinate clauses and other incorrigible artifacts of German syntax and neo-Scholastic diction. None of this, of course, implies any reproach to Mr. Miller, whose translation rightly privileges clarity and fidelity to the subtlety of Scheeben’s original thought and expression. Nor for that matter need it count as a reproach to Scheeben himself. At least some of the book’s inaccessibility is to be expected of any work with its compendious aspiration and recondite subject matter. Nevertheless, such a challenging book is not for everyone, and I mean this not only in the sense that it represents an intellectual hurdle demanding a reader with a special, intellectual fitness. The book is challenging, furthermore, in the sense that many of its American and European readers today will find its sensibilities, as well as many of its overarching theses, disagreeable. Some, will find in it an excessively polemical tone and a preoccupation with theological truth that is insufficiently nuanced with pragmatic concerns about, say, ecumenical and pastoral implications. Others will certainly complain about its “ultramontanist” and “authoritarian” leanings. Along such lines, the twentieth-century American theologian John Courtney Murray complained that Scheeben, 676 Book Reviews captive to the preoccupations of his time, had made too much of the obediential character of faith. “It was not Scheeben’s fault,” Murray dismissively remarked, “that he lived in the nineteenth century.”2 Beyond the theological and philosophical preparation and the patience and precision of mind that this book certainly demands, the reader seeking to access its full value, I suggest, must be at least as acute in his awareness of the century that he inhabits as a reader, as he is of the century to which N&V the work in question belongs. Jason C. Paone Catholic University of America Washington, DC The University and the Church: Don Briel’s Essays on Education edited by R. Jared Staudt, (Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2019), xxxvi + 250 pp. Almost all academics have thoughts about the nature of the university, its flaws and its possibilities. But Don Briel (1947–2018) was unique: he looked deeply at the best of what had been written about Catholic education, perspicaciously analyzed its current state, and then, with astonishing effectiveness, implemented his visionary plan. The University and the Church: Don Briel’s Essays on Education lays out Briel’s “Foundational Principles” (part 1) and his understanding of “The Church’s Vision of Higher Education” (part 2), and concludes with “Catholic Studies and the Renewal of the University,” his personal account of and reflections on the university programs he actually initiated (part 3). George Weigel notes in his foreword: “The essays in this volume are more than a memorial to a great educator, a good man, and a faithful disciple. They are a template for the ongoing reform and development of Catholic higher education” (iii). In chapter 1, “Wanted: A Ground for the Imagination,” Briel juxtaposes two moral responses to the experience of the world: Martha Nussbaum’s call for tolerance in light of “the radical individuality of all concrete experience,” and by contrast, his own view that “the fundamental mystery of all experience of the world evoked by the religious imagination is humility” (6). Briel then applauds authors (Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, 2 John Courtney Murray, “The Root of Faith: The Doctrine of M. J. Scheeben,” Theological Studies 9 no. 1 (1948): 20–46, at 46. Book Reviews 677 and others), who, with the humility to let God be God, can then see the world in a clearer light. Briel’s foundational principles of education are in large part drawn from John Henry Newman and Christopher Dawson. From Newman, Briel learned that the non-Christian bent of modernity is not primarily a matter of rationality. With Newman, Briel considered “the rejection of Christianity to arise from a fault of the heart, not of the intellect; that unbelief arises, not from mere error of reasoning, but either from pride or from sensuality” (15, citing Newman, Letters and Diaries). Briel would later apply this insight in the specific ways that he formed his seminal programs in Catholic Studies, first at the University of St. Thomas (St. Paul, MN), and later in programs across the country and internationally. He clearly grasped that students, faculty, and administrators needed something that addressed the whole person. A superior argument would not be sufficient. Briel found a way forward in Newman’s distinction between a university and a college. For Newman, “the university is committed to the exploration and disputation of various theories and thus embodies . . . ‘the element of advance,’ or progress, whereas the college, focused on the formation of mind and character of the student, promotes a certain ‘stability,’ thus situating students in a living tradition” (200). In the preface, David Deavel nicely summarizes this crucial distinction: “The university principle, found particularly in the lecture hall, promotes the unity of knowledge and the relationship between faith and reason, while the college principle involves both personal formation and an attention to study. Both principles require the presence of the Church to survive” (x). Briel’s great accomplishment was to take Newman’s nineteenth-century ruminations, readjust them for our own time and problems, and bring them to life. Briel’s vision was bold, but it was also doable. Prudently, he recognized that, while a large or even a mid-size Catholic university could not adopt Newman’s ideas whole cloth, “a creative minority”—a program or department within the university—could do so (224). And so, in cooperation with colleagues from several departments, Briel initiated the Catholic Studies program at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1993. The practical beauty of Briel’s endeavor is that it can be achieved within existing Catholic universities as well as secular state universities. Briel’s chapter “Renewing the University in a Tragic Culture” reports on important instances of programs in both kind of settings, programs that have taken root in the United States and elsewhere in North America, South America, Europe, and Africa (138). Briel perceptively saw that these programs were “at once potent and modest” (138). The modesty comes from the very achievable, bottom-up, 678 Book Reviews small beginning. A carefully crafted proposal submitted to already existing university governing structures can get things started. The potency of the program is a bit like Jesus’s mustard seed: its very small beginnings lead to something substantially greater. Once started, the Catholic Studies program will first grow, if it is going to succeed, by the attractiveness of its subject matter and faculty, and then will further grow by the attractiveness that students exert on other students. Once established, the crucial development of students living together in dorms or in designated houses consolidates, deepens, and expands the program, as do associated social and recreational programs. Perhaps most of all, faculty, staff, and students worshiping together repeatedly opens the endeavor to the joy of participating in an incarnational vision. Living together in communities in search of both faith and reason is an adaptation of Newman’s understanding of the college—the communio personarum—that lies at the heart of the venture. This personal, relational possibility is revitalizing for adult leaders, and it is a priceless gift for Catholic students trying to negotiate their way through the difficult transition of university life. Briel laid out nine general characteristics of the program (138–40). (1) Interdisciplinary in nature, it is designed to form a habit of mind in students that includes wonder when encountering great things. (2) Ecclesial in nature, it acknowledges that the Catholic intellectual tradition cannot be sustained except in an ongoing “dynamic tension with the authority of the Church” (139). (3) The programs are not solely focused on texts; they invite students into a communio personarum, a fellowship of Catholic minds and hearts, both past and present. Moreover, they extend to “lectures, book discussions, films, retreats, service projects, pilgrimages, liturgies, and social events” (139). (4) Featuring carefully designed study-abroad programs and leadership-formation programs and fostering students to become witnesses in the university and the broader world, the program is aimed at the intellectual and spiritual development of the whole person. (5) Reaching beyond the humanities and social sciences, Catholic Studies attempts to become a leaven within the greater university, by the formation of “future lawyers, physicians, teachers, engineers, social workers, and business people” (139). (6) Perceiving a possible threat, Briel sought programs that “are academically rigorous, overcoming the temptation to pietism, and to see the Catholic faith as an emotive rather than intellectual claim” (139). (7) The program fosters vocation, both for the priesthood and in lay vocations. (8) It aims to form a community of friendship, with bonds of communion among students and faculty. (9) It seeks to form an apostolic corps for the evangelization of the culture. In writing this review, I can attest that Briel’s nine characteristics of Book Reviews 679 a Catholic Studies program are not merely whimsical desiderata. As a member of the St. Thomas faculty who is not formally part of Catholic Studies, I have frequently taught and gotten to know students in the Catholic Studies program. The brightest, highest achieving, and most intellectually engaged students in my courses are quite commonly Catholic Studies students. And to the degree that one can assess such things, they also seem to be among the happiest and most stable. Beyond the University of St. Thomas, Briel’s visionary program is now in over eighty locations in the United States and overseas (140). The eleven collected essays of Don Briel are each of a very high quality. Each essay captures insights from great figures like Newman, Christopher Dawson, Pope Saint John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and a range of others. Anyone interested in Catholic higher education might profit from a close reading of these essays and the very fine introductory material by George Weigel, David Deavel, and R. Jared Staudt. Deavel did not exaggerate in calling Briel “an unforgettable figure,” but the book is not an encomium for Briel. It is rather a clear articulation of foundational principles for Catholic higher education and an utterly engaging report of how Briel and others brought them to life. The book is realistic about current problems, but it is also deeply hopeful. After all, Briel’s vision was implemented and continues to succeed in remarkable ways. Michael Polanyi once noted that, whatever one’s limitations or mistakes, making “a move in the right direction” can open up a new world of discovery for others.1 Don Briel made a very good move in the right direction, one that was both theoretical and thoroughly practical, and, to the best of his ability to discern it, based on God’s guidance. The University and the Church encapsulates the apostolic thought and action that have thus far proved so successful. This volume will become an invaluable resource for N&V those wishing to contribute their own efforts. Philip Rolnick University of St. Thomas St. Paul, MN 1 Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 310. 680 Book Reviews Divine Scripture in Human Understanding: A Systematic Theology of the Christian Bible by Joseph Gordon (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), xiii + 442 pp. Joseph Gordon’s ambitious book promises a “constructive systematic account of the nature and purpose of Christian Scripture.” It “articulates the intelligibility of Scripture and locates it within the work of the Triune God in history and within human cultural history,” including the highly variegated material history of the Bible (8). It is much more than a book on doctrines surrounding Scripture (unity, authority, inspiration, inerrancy, etc.), although its interventions there are valuable. A systematic theology of Scripture demands, Gordon says, that Scripture be understood within a comprehensive vision of the divine economy (a “rule of faith”), a theological anthropology, and detailed knowledge of the Bible’s material history. Tall orders each, but Gordon delivers on all three, giving both general systematic accounts of admirable sweep and adjudications on many particular questions. The book began as Gordon’s Marquette dissertation under Father Robert Doran (whose The Trinity in History is influential throughout) and D. Stephen Long. The book belongs to the Lonerganian project but draws from many wells—ressourcement giant Henri de Lubac is Gordon’s other great muse, alongside Irenaeus, Origen, and Augustine— and has nothing cliquish about it. Lonerganian terminology is explained at an introductory level and applied to a bevy of Scripture-specific problems Lonergan never treated. It makes a happy addition to Notre Dame Press’s already lush Reading the Scriptures series, edited by Gary Anderson, Matthew Levering, and Robert Wilken. Scripture is located within the “broadest” possible theological location, the creating and redeeming work of the Triune God in history: an “all-encompassing,” “threefold personal self-communication of divinity to humanity,” in which Scripture serves as a privileged useful “instrument” for transforming human persons into the image of the Son, in the Spirit (96; 30, 113–16, 209, 212, 227, 248–60; see 2 Tim 3:16–17). Correlated to the Trinity’s work transforming persons is a fundamental anthropology which is basically Lonergan’s, but it is wonderfully enriched by many others, especially de Lubac’s programmatic insight (revived by Lewis Ayres) that, for the ancients, Scripture’s divine intention was its efficacy for soulcraft, for remaking the psyche and re-ordering it to spirit (116–22). But in that case, we will only understand Scripture’s divine intention if we have a psychology—a philosophical anthropology of “the soul,” or interiority—fully adequate to the data of human life, and to the theological commitment that the telos of human beings is beatific vision (122; cf. 247). Book Reviews 681 Gordon proposes Lonergan’s cognitional theory as this adequate psychology, and sets it within familiar Lonerganian anthropological accounts of self-transcendence, meaning, language, value, and the prospects for human self-transcendence in history under the observed conditions of sin and finitude (122–66). A “systematic theology,” on Lonergan’s understanding, has to be “at the level of our time,” especially our awareness of the historicity and subjective mediation of all knowledge and meaning (30). We know the Bible is not a self-interpreting subject who “speaks” autonomously (39; 27–31). The Bible cannot be “de-peopled;” there is no biblical message just “out there” on the page, unmediated by the interests, judgments, decisions of human beings—just as there is no “criterion of objectivity” external to the processes of understanding and judgment (39, 28). The unified, authoritative Bible is not an unambiguous datum “out there” for inspection, so we could simply “‘take a look’ at Scripture to see ‘what it says’” (30). Gordon holds on Christian faith “that Scripture is inspired and . . . mediates divine revelation in the very particularity of its words. . . . [But] the judgment that it is possible to ‘let Scripture speak for itself ’” is untenable (28).1 Sola Scriptura varieties that construe the Bible’s authoritative statements as self-attesting data “out there” are defunct. “Our only access to the texts as intelligible is our own subjective constitution made up of our own experiences, our own linguistic apparatus, our own horizons of understandings, judgments, decisions . . . memories, and . . . imaginations;” as Lonergan says, “there is nothing ‘out there’ except spatially ordered marks,” marks we can only interpret by appealing to criteria of coherence and intelligibility which go beyond whatever is “out there” (109). That is not to say there are no criteria of objectivity; it is only to say, on Lonergan’s maxim, that “genuine objectivity is the fruit of authentic subjectivity. It is to be attained only by attaining authentic subjectivity,” not by appealing to the mythology of de-peopled data or criteria “out there.”2 To pick up any available instantiation of the Bible is, Gordon says, to encounter the judgments and decisions of countless transmitters, translators, scholars, scribes, redactors, and authors, from an astonishing diversity of historical and cultural locations. The contents of the Bible—both the “That Christian Scripture is truthful, unified, and authoritative for Christian faith, thought, and praxis, is non-negotiable within the horizon of Christian faith. It is a constitutive judgment of the present work” (263). 2 Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology, vol. 14 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, ed. Robert M. Doran and John D. Dadosky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 273 (cited on Gordon’s 20 and 143.) 1 682 Book Reviews canon and individual texts’ contents—have been determined by the judgments and decisions of Christian communities. A unified, authoritative, divinely inspired Bible is not a datum, not an “already-out-there-now-real,” primitively lying around. Christians have claimed that scriptural texts (these texts and not others; this textual variant and not others) are the preeminent Word of God not because their unity and inspiration were available for inspection as data, nor because texts circulated with incontrovertible apostolic attribution (219–20), and so on—but because Christians made the intelligent, responsible judgment that these texts were uniquely efficacious in the Triune God’s ongoing transformation of human beings in the historical missions of the Son and Spirit. “Revelation is . . . the entry of divine meaning into history,” and since it is a meaning, it is available as something intelligently grasped by subjects, not as a self-attesting datum (149, 109). Several things follow. First, since the Bible is not “a static deposit of . . . [already-]out-there-now-real completely perspicuous revealed propositions about reality,” we can only understand Scripture from within a horizon of prior theological judgments about the character and scope of the Trinity’s work in history—namely, a “rule of faith” (35). These judgments are both informed by and inform our reading of Scripture. Gordon devotes chapter 2 to Irenaeus’s, Origen’s, and Augustine’s regulae fidei, and from them draws normative guidelines for a contemporary rule of faith. Chapter 3 articulates this rule with admirable scope and ambition. A rule should be ecclesial, narrative, and open to development and technical specification (just as Church councils developed technical terminologies and distinctions to settle questions—homoousios, hypostasis, etc.). It should be “realist,” meaning not mere narrative recital, nor grammatical rules in a reductive sense, but an articulation of Christian judgments about the actuality of the Trinity’s work “in the history that is” (74–75, 82). A contemporary rule adequate to Scripture’s witness should hold a free creatio ex nihilo by a noncompetitively transcendent God who exercises “irresistible efficient causality” in all created events (it is God who reduces potency to act in every event), though secondary causes “have their own relative freedom and efficacy” (80–93). These classical positions are not Hellenistic distortions of biblical testimony, but are “trajector[ies] internal to the larger canonical witness” (91).3 In short, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed is a fully adequate contemporary rule of faith (81–82, 215). The chapter’s end affirms sanctifying grace as sanans et elevans (culminat3 Quoting Gary Anderson, Christian Doctrine and the Old Testament: Theology in the Service of Biblical Exegesis (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2017), 58. Book Reviews 683 ing in “cruciform” deification), and sketches a theology of the missions of Son and Spirit (94–107). Secondly, since we are aware of the historicity and subjective mediation of all meanings, we need not think that Scripture’s complex material transmission (via the decisions of countless human beings) is embarrassing for, or competitive with, a theological understanding of the Bible. Since the Trinity’s economy is coextensive with the single “history which is,” the material details of Scripture’s historical transmission are fully part of this providential economy. Since theological judgments are judgments about this real and single historical work of salvation, we will have “a responsible understanding of what . . . precisely . . . the Triune God has given us in Christian Scripture” only by attending to this material transmission—to “what Scripture has been” in this providential history (82, 198, 173). Gordon surveys this material history in a fascinating fifth chapter, which both intervenes on specialist issues and gives non-specialists a comprehensive introduction to theological questions and answers provoked by the history of book technologies attested in the Bible’s transmission history. Christians’ judgments about Scripture’s authority, inspiration, and unity are reflected in the status they attributed to scriptural texts in use, Gordon says. So the history of this use, registrable in material evidence, is a prime locus for understanding what Christians have meant by Scripture’s unity, inspiration, and authority (263). Divine providence has prevented Christians from ever attaining indefectible certainty about scriptural texts’ historical transmissions, authorship, and origins. But “the fact that the Triune God has not preserved the [‘original’ texts of Scripture, nor an unchanging canonical list]—whether wholesale or merely in a single historical tradition—is theologically instructive” (194). The contents of scriptural texts, the canon’s make-up, affirmation of Scripture’s inspired authority—none of these determinations are rooted in “some already-back-there-then un-interpreted set of canonical autographs” (171). Scripture has always been determined by the rational judgments and responsible decisions of human beings undergoing transformation by the Spirit in Christian communities. Even today we should speak of “the ongoing determination of Scripture” (171). Scripture is shown to be unified, authoritative, and inspired not by extrinsic features like having been named such by an ecclesial community, but by “its translators, readers, and hearers [being] transformed in accordance with the divine intentions of its author, the Triune God, who has caused it to be written and to whom it testifies” (172). Scripture is shown to be Scripture when it remains preeminently useful in our cruciform deification (205–8). At the same time, Scripture refers to a plenitudinous historical res—“the 684 Book Reviews recapitulation of all things in Jesus Christ in . . . history” (252–53; cf. 79, 105). If a primary criterion for Scripture is usefulness, then equally important is texts’ efficacy in witnessing to the past and ongoing divine works in history. The rule of faith articulates an understanding of this work, and on this basis the Church judges which texts adequately witness to this res. This has consequences for canon. Christian history shows that the de facto criterion for canon has been communities’ judgments about texts’ continual efficacy in the Trinity’s work transforming subjects, rather than extrinsic criteria like apostolicity or antiquity (195–205, 219–20). In our judgments about canon, we “unconsciously,” and rightly, defer to the authority of the community passing down precisely these texts as preeminently efficacious in Christian transformation (206–7). Canonization formalizes a tradition’s “performative” judgments about usefulness (see 172). Gordon’s judgments encourage irenic ecumenism on canon. “The historical variegation of [Christian Scripture’s] actual material instantiations . . . makes it impossible to . . . locate the unity, authority, and divine origins and characteristics of Christian Scripture exclusively in any single historical instantiation of the text or in any single textual tradition of transmission” (205–6). The criteria for contents and canonicity are not extrinsic (apostolicity, antiquity), but indexed to texts’ perennial usefulness. And since the Bible has, as a matter of divine providence, been diversely instantiated even within single Churches, then, Gordon concludes, the Triune God has never left a Christian community without a Bible adequate for God’s redemptive work (206). On this view, the Catholic Church and Orthodox Churches should not see slimmed-down Protestant Bibles as deficient for God’s providential purposes. At the same time, sixteenth-century Protestant arguments for cutting apocrypha are implicitly undercut, since they appeal to extrinsic criteria for canon (antiquity, Hebraic purity from Hellenism), rather than the real criteria—usefulness in deification and effective witness to the res of God’s historical work. Gordon’s approach defaults toward more ample, not more restrictive, senses of canon. If there is one major topic absent from this richly compendious systematics, it is Scripture’s spiritual (or allegorical) meaning. But Gordon says he will treat this in a planned future volume, one that promises to be N&V as deep, wide, and rewarding as this one (367n153, 369n179). Matthew Z. Vale University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN