et Vetera Nova Fall 2022 • Volume 20, Number 4 The English Edition of the International Theological Journal Co-Editors Matthew Levering, Mundelein Seminary Thomas Joseph White, O.P., Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas Associate Editors Holly Taylor Coolman, Providence College Gilles Emery, O.P., University of Fribourg Paul Gondreau, Providence College Scott W. Hahn, Franciscan University of Steubenville Thomas S. Hibbs, Baylor University 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., Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas Board of Advisors Anthony Akinwale, O.P., Dominican Institute, Ibadan, Nigeria Khaled Anatolios, University of Notre Dame Robert Barron, Bishop of Winona-Rochester John Betz, University of Notre Dame Bernhard Blankenhorn, O.P., Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas Christopher O. Blum, Augustine Institute Stephen Brock, University of Chicago 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, Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology 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 Fall 2022 Vol. 20, No. 4 Tract for the Times Tract 7: Seven Last Words for Our Times. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anonymous 995 Articles The Ethics of Surgical Interventions for Body Integrity Identity Disorder and Gender Dysphoria. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, O.P. 1003 When Our Fathers Fall: A Thomistic-Confucian Approach to Lay Moral Correction of Clergy.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joshua R. Brown 1025 Thomists at War: Pierre Mandonnet, Étienne Gilson, and the Contested Relationship between Aquinas’s and Dante’s Thought (1879–2021) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . George Corbett 1053 Mary as the Exemplar of the Body’s Poverty. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Angela Franks 1097 St. Thomas Aquinas’s Appeal to St. John the Baptist as a Benchmark of Spiritual Greatness.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . John Baptist Ku, O.P. 1119 Knowing God from the Things That Have Been Made. Guy Mansini, O.S.B . 1149 Teleology in Natural Theology and Theology of Nature: Classical Theism, Science-Oriented Panentheism, and Process Theism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. 1179 Symposium on Faith and Reason God, the Absolute Wise Man, and the Study of Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Clemens Cavallin 1207 Vetera Novis Augere et Perficere: Thomas Aquinas and Christian–Muslim Dialogue.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joseph Ellul, O.P. 1231 What Has Metaphysics to Do with Wisdom?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . John Haldane 1249 The Summa Contra Gentiles and Aquinas’s Way to God.. . . . . . . Gaven Kerr 1273 The Intellectual Ethics of Revealed Truth: A Thomistic Approach. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Roger Pouivet 1289 Why Can’t a First Mover Be Accidentally Moveable? Bolstering Aquinas’s Case for Divine Immutability in the Face of Objections from Theistic Personalists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mats Wahlberg 1305 Review Essay Contradiction and Legislation Regarding the Right to Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kevin L. Flannery, S.J. 1323 Book Reviews John Henry Newman and the Development of Doctrine: Encountering Change, Looking for Continuity by Stephen Morgan. . . . . . . . . . . . . Reinhard Hütter 1335 John Henry Newman’s Theology of History: Historical Consciousness, Theological “Imaginaries”, and the Development of Tradition by Christopher Cimorelli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reinhard Hütter 1339 Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? Historical and Theological Reflections by Matthew Levering. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Brant Pitre 1347 The Apocalypse of Wisdom: Louis Bouyer’s Theological Recovery of the Cosmos by Keith Lemna. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aaron Williams 1353 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 978-1-64585-264-3) 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 2022 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. 20, No. 4 (2022): 995–1002 995 Tract 7: Seven Last Words for Our Times Meditation on the Seven Last Words of Christ presents a devotion of long-standing tradition. From the time Catholic missionaries in the New World organized this Good Friday exercise, preaching on the words Christ spoke from the Cross has become a staple of Holy Week Catholic piety. More recently, Catholics in the United States will associate this devotional practice with the preaching of Fulton J. Sheen. For many years, Bishop Sheen filled the Church of St. Agnes in midtown Manhattan with believers eager to hear his reflections on the Seven Last Words. Sheen’s preaching was biblically informed. The four Evangelists report seven final utterances that Christ spoke on the Cross. Each occupies a special place in the Catholic imagination, as they introduce believers successively into the core mysteries of the Catholic faith. A man’s final words sum up his mission. From Christ’s last words, Christians through the ages have received his saving instruction. Today, Christ’s final words delivered from the Cross carry special meaning. In the light of the present situation of the Church and the world, we are persuaded to acknowledge how much we need his consoling teaching. In particular, we come to recognize how much we need Christ’s words that instruct on salvific suffering, the cost of redemption, and the triumph of the divine wisdom. Today’s Christians need Christ’s saving teaching to transcend the difficulties we face. Indeed, we need his Seven Last Words. The First Word: “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” “When they came to the place called the Skull, they crucified him and the criminals there, one on his right, the other on his left. Then 996 Anonymous Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.’” —Luke 23:33–341 It should come as no surprise to us that the first of the Seven Last Words speaks of forgiveness. Christ’s plea for the forgiveness of his executioners prompts us to consider the connection between Calvary and the Holy Mass. At every Mass, the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross is made present on the altar. Christ pleads forgiveness for his enemies, whereas at Mass we beg forgiveness for our own sins. The Mass—the re-presentation of Calvary— begins then by seeking forgiveness. With every Kyrie we recall this first of Christ’s last words. The sacrifice of the Cross enacts reconciliation for the world. Reconciliation is impossible without forgiveness. In praying for his enemies, Christ in fact prays for all sinners. This explains why Catholics are urged to put aside hardness of heart. The divine mercy looks for hearts open to repentance. Sin, on the other hand, stands opposed to mercy. Indeed, the divine mercy always makes it possible for us to begin again. This cry for forgiveness follows the moral instruction that Christ gives in the Sermon on the Mount. Forgive those who persecute you. Love your enemies. Be instruments of peace. When Christ begs forgiveness for us, he creates for himself a people of forgiveness. The same Lord in fact tells us to live the Our Father— “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” (Matt 6:12). Divine forgiveness places us within the logic of God. He is rich in mercy. For some people, suffering appears limitless. Some even wonder whether there will be an end to their sadness. With Christ’s cry for forgiveness, we come to know the limit God places on evil. Love is stronger than death. Because of forgiveness, evil never brings closure to human life. Further, Christ’s executioners thought they were fulfilling their obligations as agents of the state. Confusion had entered their judgment. Christ cites this confusion as a reason for God to forgive them. Something similar happens for us. We who are weak and confused also need God’s mercy. We stand in need of God’s redemption. How consoling, then, for us to hear the words, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). The Second Word: “Today you will be with me in Paradise.” 1 All Scripture quotations are taken from the New American Bible Revised Edition as found on the website of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Seven Last Words for Our Times 997 “Now one of the criminals hanging there reviled Jesus, saying, ‘Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us.’ The other, however, rebuking him, said in reply, ‘Have you no fear of God, for you are subject to the same condemnation? And indeed, we have been condemned justly, for the sentence we received corresponds to our crimes, but this man has done nothing criminal.’ Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ He replied to him, ‘Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”—Luke 23:39–43 The words of Christ to the Good Thief penetrate the Christian imagination. The Lord’s promise—“today you will be with me in paradise”—reveals both the truth of his identity and the victory he will achieve. The exchange with the Good Thief instructs us about the God who saves. With this second last word we learn one thing for certain: the Lord knows the true nature of his mission. Were he confused or misled or otherwise ignorant about what he is doing, Christ would never have announced: “Today you will be with me in paradise.” If he were not really God, he would be unable to utter this last word. This exchange with the Good Thief confirms the full truth of the Lord’s identity: He is the God of heaven who has taken on a human face. In his humanity, he enjoys, at every instant, the grace of the beatific vision. This explains why Christ could promise paradise to the Good Thief. The promise made to the repentant thief urges us to maintain the same bold confidence in what Christ does for the world. The Lord’s crucifixion lasted some three hours. This fact gives rise to a question: what did the Son of God made man think about that first Good Friday afternoon? The answer is simple: he thought about all of us. Thanks to his possession of the beatific vision—illustrated by the Lord’s promise of salvation to the Good Thief—Christ was not ignorant of the reason he died. He knew us and our sins. He knew every suffering and tragedy. He knew then of every plague which would scourge the face of the earth. He knew of every fear and anxiety which would grip the globe. He knew of every scandal, every impurity, and every detraction that would mar even his holy Church. Especially in our present moment, it can happen that people feel alone. They feel isolated by pandemic threats and ecclesial uncertainty. Loneliness can beget a deep suffering. With this last word, the Lord Jesus tells us we will never be alone. He knows everything. Everything you think about and dream about and worry about and cry about—all this the Lord knows. He reminds us today that he will bring us, like the Good Thief, also to paradise with him. Christ alone can pronounce the words “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). 998 Anonymous The Third Word: “Behold your mother.” “When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple there whom he loved, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, behold, your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Behold, your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his home.”—John 19:26–27 Throughout history, the words of Christ to the beloved disciple offer Christian believers an abiding consolation. The Lord entrusts his mother to Saint John the Beloved, and by extension to each of us. Here at the Cross, Mary becomes a mother to every Christian. No matter the spiritual trouble that befalls us, Our Lady opens wide her arms to receive us back. Nothing can deter her maternal mediation from embracing the worst sinners. From the day of our baptism when we were united to Mary’s son, we too can claim a share in her motherhood. When the Lord confides Mary to John, he solves the practical concern of who will look after his mother and ours. This committal answers a question that sometimes presses on us urgently. What do we do in times of distress? To whom do we turn when it seems like the world is crashing in upon us? To whom do we turn when the Church faces unfair criticism, hostile persecution, and spiritual diffidence among her members? Whatever the challenges that befall us, the remedy proves simple. Heed the Lord’s instruction: “Behold your Mother.” Throughout the ages, Christians’ devotion to the Mother of God has sustained them in distress. Indeed, the Church invokes Our Lady as Help of Christians. Because of her Immaculate Conception, Mary shows us that God’s grace precedes our every move. Frequent and even constant meditation on Our Lady’s graces assures us that God takes care of us in every circumstance of life, even when the cross weighs heavily. So, the Church also invokes Mary as Comforter of the Afflicted and Refuge of Sinners. When we turn to Mary, especially by recourse to the Holy Rosary, we come to grasp the logic of the Incarnation. The world revolves around the Annunciation. God is not distant from us. He has not abandoned us to our own devices. God is not silent, even in the face of evil. The mystery of Christ taking flesh in the womb of Mary demonstrates that God draws close to us. Because Christ is like us in all things but sin, he comes into the world through a woman. And on the Cross, he shows his goodness by sharing this woman with us. It happens that Christian believers, and even non-believers, are sometimes tempted to doubt God’s love for the world. Some even wonder about his existence. When this happens, Our Lady Seven Last Words for Our Times 999 stands out as a shining beacon. As so many images of Our Lady display, Mary holds up her son as if to say, “here he is.” In Bethlehem, she swaddles the infant Christ. At Cana, she points out the public Christ. And on Calvary, she holds the dead Christ. This final holding reminds us that the Lord has taken on our sufferings. So, in every distress, Christians do well to fulfill the Lord’s command, “Behold your Mother” ( John 19:27). The Fourth Word: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” “From noon onward, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. And about three o’clock Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’”—Matthew 27:45–46 This plaintive last word reveals the full depth of what Christ did to accomplish our salvation. These words of the twenty-second psalm stand as a great expression of the suffering of Israel. As his listeners would have recognized, this psalm concludes with words that express the psalmist’s certain knowledge of redemption. The psalmist expresses an unwavering hope that God will save Israel. The Church, of course, makes this psalm her own. She knows that the sufferings of the people of Israel—like her own—can include feelings of abandonment. Still, she knows that God never abandons his people. To understand this fourth word of Christ one should recognize that the Psalter is Israel’s spiritual book. As the Old Testament makes clear, Israel comes forth as a community of persons. Indeed, the Psalms pray with a corporate voice. Individualistic spiritualities remain foreign to them. No psalm shows much concern for how such and such an event affects the individual or how he or she feels about a particular experience. Instead, the person who prays the Psalms prays in the name of the whole nation. The Book of Psalms belongs to a formed community. The Fathers of the Church tell us that to pray the Psalms unites us with the sentiments and the sufferings of all people. In other words, the Psalms express all human experience and every human emotion. Even today, the Church places the Psalms on the lips of every priest and consecrated person, every nun and monk, and others who take on the duty to pray the Psalms daily. Further, every Catholic who participates in the Mass prays the Psalms. One therefore may opine that the Psalms stand close to the heart of Christian prayer. The Christian believer is not surprised then to hear psalm verses coming from the mouth of the dying Christ. 1000 Anonymous On Calvary, the Son of God takes to himself every human suffering, every heartache and anguish, every pain and torture, every loss and death. On his Cross, the Lord of glory offers his submission to sin’s terrors to the heavenly Father, who receives it as satisfaction for us. This satisfaction, as the choice of Psalms indicates, sanctifies the sufferings of men and women throughout the ages. When Christ says, “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me,” he speaks for the people of all time. These include those who lived before Christ, beginning with Adam, and all those who will be born until the end of the world. Christ’s death brings consolation to a fallen race. This means that, when we are moved to exclaim, “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me,” whatever causes our distress should never lead to despair. Instead, as the end of this psalm indicates: “The generation to come will be told of the Lord, that they may proclaim to a people yet unborn the deliverance you have brought” (Ps 22:32). The Fifth Word: “I thirst.” “After this, aware that everything was now finished, in order that the scripture might be fulfilled, Jesus said, ‘I thirst.’ There was a vessel filled with common wine. So, they put a sponge soaked in wine on a sprig of hyssop and put it up to his mouth.”—John 19:28–29 The work of the Missionaries of Charity spans the globe. The members of this religious community founded by Mother Teresa of Calcutta are known for their distinctive white habit and blue-rimmed sari. Every convent of theirs appears the same. There are no pews—the floor suffices. They boast of no expensive art, for simplicity reigns. One thing that appears everywhere—upon which Mother Teresa insisted—are the two words written beside the Cross. We find engraved in each chapel of the Missionaries of Charity the words “I thirst.” Mother Teresa has made these last words of Christ sound throughout the world. “I thirst” reveals Christ’s thirst for souls. Mother Teresa believed that this cry of Christ exposes a deep truth about God and his love for us. The God who made the universe thirsts for our souls. He wants us to be united with him. Indeed, he wants for every person of every time and place to experience his love. Christ’s thirst for souls is satisfied each time a person comes to know him and to love him. So much then do these words belong beside the Cross. On the Cross Christ shows his great thirst for souls. He is willing to pay any price to redeem mankind. “I thirst for you,” says the Lord of glory. “I want to embrace both your heart and mind. Why? I want you to be Seven Last Words for Our Times 1001 with me for eternity.” God’s answer to human suffering is not to remove it, but to embrace it. In Christ, he takes it on himself. His divine thirst is not quenched with spiced wine or vinegar, but with souls eager to grow in love. Poor sinners satisfy Christ’s thirst when we trust in his love for us. When Christ cries out in thirst, he really instructs us: “Offer me your love every day.” Realize his love for you as he says, “I thirst” ( John 19:28). The Sixth Word: “It is finished.” “When Jesus had taken the wine, he said, ‘It is finished.’ And bowing his head, he handed over the spirit.”—John 19:30 This final word of Christ as recorded in St. John’s Gospel raises a question: What is finished on Calvary? In order to know what Christ accomplishes on Calvary, we must pay close attention to authentic Catholic teaching. Even some Christians miss the point. They erroneously believe, for example, that the Cross of Christ offers one optional path to redemption. Others labor under an illusion that human beings can devise their own path to salvation. The Church, however, teaches otherwise. Each Sunday she emphatically proclaims that only the sacrifice of Christ makes heaven possible for a fallen human race. Only the Lord Jesus can make such a promise. “It is finished” translates into “a new life has begun.” Today, many people fail to realize they stand in need of a redeemer. Some wrongly claim independence from God and his saving work. The recent pandemic may have served as a wake-up call. We have all witnessed how fragile human life can become. The contingency of the created world has been made manifest. Our dependency on life-saving treatments points to a higher dependence. To put it otherwise, we cannot heal our bodies by ourselves. Neither can we save ourselves by ourselves. Only Christ’s blood poured out and his body broken opens heaven’s gate. His self-giving love completes the work of salvation. Only on Calvary—and there alone—is accomplished human redemption, is achieved our restoration, and truth to tell, is solved the mystery of human existence. Thus, the Church prays: “By your Cross and Resurrection you have set us free.” On Calvary, Christ proclaims that sin and death are defeated even as the blood and water that flows from his side supplies new life to the world. Indeed, here on Calvary, “It is finished” ( John 19:30). The Seventh Word: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” 1002 Anonymous “Then the veil of the temple was torn down the middle. Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit’; and when he had said this, he breathed his last.”—Luke 23:45–46 This seventh word of Christ opens up the inner life of the Trinity. In his humanity the eternal Son of God commits himself wholly to the heavenly Father. Because he knows the effect of his Passion, Christ confidently turns to his loving and merciful Father. In this self-commendation, Christ gives an example to each of us. So, no matter what circumstances threaten us, we usefully make the words of Christ our own: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” We place our trust in God. We acknowledge in faith his saving plan and so we abandon ourselves to his divine providence. The difficult lesson each Catholic much learn is that, whatever challenges face the Church or the world, their resolution lies only in accord with the divine wisdom. This seventh word of Christ on the Cross offers a profound consolation. When we say, “Into your hands Father,” we commit everything to God. We commend ourselves, our sufferings, our sadnesses, and our anxieties about both the Church and the world, we offer them all to the divine wisdom and mercy. In response to every challenge the Church faces—whether from infidelity, doctrinal confusion, or liturgical dispute—we do well first to recall this final word of Christ. Like Christ, we give over everything to God. The unity of Christ’s human will with that of his heavenly Father strengthens us. Specifically, Christ gives us the grace to hand over our own lives in their entirety to the love and mercy of God. This grace comes to the rescue especially for those facing the moment of death. Christ renders possible this grace for us as he declares, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:45). Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2022): 1003–1024 1003 The Ethics of Surgical Interventions for Body Integrity Identity Disorder and Gender Dysphoria Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, O.P. University of Santo Tomas Manila, Philippines Introduction On May 20, 2009, Fox News featured a report that described the life of a man named “John” who had spent his life struggling with Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID).1 In a phone interview, John admitted that he remembers wanting to amputate his leg when he was between seven and eleven years of age, by sticking his leg under the rear wheel of a bus. He never went through with it but continued to experience an intense desire to amputate his healthy limb for the following fifty-plus years. Described for the first time in 1977 as apotemnophilia, BIID was originally thought to be a psychological disorder characterized by sexual arousal associated with the desire to be an amputee. However, it was renamed when Dr. Michael First, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, proposed that the primary motivation behind the condition was an issue of identity rather than of sexual desire.2 This proposal is controversial.3 Despite much 1 2 3 Jessica Mulvihill Moran and Karlie Pouliot, “Determined to Amputate: One Man’s Struggle with Body Integrity Identity Disorder,” Fox News, May 20, 2009, foxnews. com/story/2009/05/20/determined-to-amputate-one-man-struggle-with-bodyintegrity-identity-disorder.html. For discussion, see: M. B. First, “Desire for Amputation of a Limb: Paraphilia, Psychosis, or a New Type of Identity Disorder,” Psychological Medicine 35, no. 6 (2005): 919–28; M. B. First and C. E. Fisher, “Body Integrity Identity Disorder: The Persistent Desire to Acquire a Physical Disability,” Psychopathology 45, no. 1 (2012): 3–14. For example, for an alternative account that maintains that this condition is still related to sexual desire, see E. Kasten, “Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID): Interrogation of Patients and Theories for Explanation” [German], Fortshritte der Neurologie 1004 Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, O.P. debate, BIID was not included in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), which was published on May 18, 2013. In this essay, we will consider the ethics of surgical interventions for BIID and Gender Dysphoria (GD).4 We begin with a discussion of the principle of totality that distinguishes ethical from unethical modifications of the body. We will refer specifically to the latter category of surgical interventions as “mutilations,” though the Catholic moral tradition’s use of the term is itself ambiguous.5 This is followed by an extensive moral discussion of (1) amputations of healthy limbs for patients struggling with BIID and (2) sex reassignment surgeries for those who identify themselves as transgender persons. I will propose that an ethical argument can be made to justify the former but not the latter. The Principle of Totality Because of the goodness of the human body, its integrity is a good that has to be protected and preserved. The ethical principle that is used to judge the morality of bodily interventions that impinge upon this bodily integrity is the principle of totality.6 It was articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa theologiae as follows: Since a member is part of the whole human body, it is for the sake of the whole, as the imperfect for the perfect. Hence a member of the human body is to be disposed of according as it is expedient for the body. . . . If, however, the member be decayed and therefore a source of corruption to the whole body, then it is lawful with the consent 4 5 6 Psychiatrie 77, no. 1 (2009): 16–24. For an argument that BIID should still be considered a mental disorder in itself, see Peter Brugger, Markus Christen, Lena Jellestad, and Jürgen Hänggi, “Limb Amputation and Other Disability Desires as a Medical Condition,” Lancet Psychiatry 3, no. 12 (2016): 1176–86. This essay is based on the chapter on bodily modifications in the second edition of my Biomedicine and Beatitude: An Introduction to Catholic Bioethics (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2021). For discussion, see Gerald A. Kelly, S.J., “The Morality of Mutilation: Towards a Revision of the Treatise,” Theological Studies 17, no. 3 (1956): 322–44. For the discussion of the history of the principle of totality in this section, I am indebted to the following magisterial essays authored by Gerald A. Kelly, S.J.: “Pope Pius XII and the Principle of Totality,” Theological Studies 16, no. 3 (1955): 373–96; “The Principle of Totality,” Linacre Quarterly 23, no. 3 (1956): 70–76. The Ethics of Surgical Interventions 1005 of the owner of the member, to cut away the member for the welfare of the whole body.7 Over the centuries, Catholic moral theologians appealed to the principle of totality to justify three different scenarios that involved the sacrifice of a bodily organ for the sake of the whole human organism. The first case involves a diseased organ that has to be removed to save the life of the soldier wounded on the battlefield—say a gangrenous, decaying limb as in the example of Aquinas. The second case involves the healthy foot of a man who is trapped on a railroad track that has to be amputated to save his life from a collision with a train, and the third case involves the healthy limb of an individual that has to be amputated in response to a tyrant who orders him to cut off his own hand or lose his head to the executioners instead. In these cases, the sacrifice of the part would be morally permitted as a necessary means of preserving the life of the individual. As Fr. Gerald Kelly, S.J., points out, this final case is particularly significant because it involves a healthy limb whose very presence—and not its diseased or trapped condition—becomes a source of vital harm for the organism.8 How does one justify the principle of totality? In 1944, Pope Pius XII explained it this way: “Man’s power over his members and organs is a direct—though not unlimited—power; because these are parts which go to make up his physical being. Their association in the one being has for goal only the well-being of the whole physical organism, and hence it is clear that each of these organs and members can be sacrificed if it puts the whole organism in danger, a danger which cannot in any other way be averted.”9 In other words, by their very nature, individual organs of the human body are ordered to the health and well-being of the organism. As such they can be sacrificed for the good of the whole, because this would be in accord with their natural end. Pope Pius XII then articulated the scope of the principle of totality in an address to the 26th Congress of the Italian Society of Urologists in 1953 by listing three conditions that must be met in order to justify a surgical procedure that removes some bodily part of the patient. These physicians were concerned about whether or not the surgical removal of a male patient’s testicles to treat his cancer of the prostate could be morally 7 8 9 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae II-II, q. 65, a. 1. Kelly, “Principle of Totality,” 70. Pope Pius XII, “Allocution to the Italian Medical-biological Union of St. Luke, November 12, 1944,” in The Human Body: Papal Teaching, selected and arranged by the Monks of Solesmes (Boston, MA: St. Paul Editions, 1960), 51–65, at 55. 1006 Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, O.P. justified. Medically, it is known that both testicles are sources of testosterone that drive the growth of the prostate tumor. The Pope responded to them by articulating three necessary conditions that must be present to justify a surgical procedure using the principle of totality: Three conditions govern the moral licitness of a surgical operation that causes anatomical or functional mutilation: first, that the continued presence or functioning of a particular organ within the whole organism is causing serious damage or constitutes a menace to it; next, this damage must be remediable or at least can be measurably lessened by the mutilation in question, and the operation’s efficacy in this regard should be well assured; finally, one must be reasonably certain that the negative effect, that is, the mutilation and its consequences, will be compensated for by the positive effect: elimination of danger to the whole organism, easing of pain, and so forth. The decisive point rests not in the fact that the organ which is amputated or paralyzed be itself infected, but that its continued presence or functioning cause either directly or indirectly a serious menace for the whole body.10 With these three necessary conditions in mind, the Pope taught that the surgical removal of a male prostate cancer patient’s healthy testicles can be justified with the principle of totality. First, the continued functioning of the testicles puts the patient’s life in jeopardy by hastening the spread of the prostate tumor that could kill him. Next, there is robust medical evidence that shows that their removal substantially mitigates this risk. Finally, the proportionate good of preserving the man’s life is great in comparison not only to the loss of his testicles and his prostate, but also to his experiencing the infertility, incontinence, and impotence that could follow. In sum, the principle of totality has been used to morally justify all the medical interventions that have modified the body in order to preserve the health and well-being of the patient. These include not only the act of surgically cutting open and wounding a patient—which in a non-medical context could be condemned as a gravely immoral attack on the bodily integrity of a person—but also the removal of his organs and other body parts. As we will discuss at great length in this essay, however, there are 10 See Pope Pius XII, “Allocution to Delegates at the 26th Congress of Urology, October 8, 1953,” in Monks of Solesmes, Human Body: Papal Teaching, 277–81, at 277–78. For discussion, see the essay by John Haas, “The Totality and Integrity of the Body,” Ethics & Medics 20, no. 1 (1995): 1–3. The Ethics of Surgical Interventions 1007 controversial medical procedures whose moral justification is disputed precisely because it is not clear if the principle of totality applies in a particular case. Any bodily modifications that are not morally justifiable would be considered mutilations, properly so called, because they attack the good that is the integrity of the human body. As such they would have to be morally condemned. Indeed, in his moral encyclical Veritatis Splendor, Pope St. John Paul II included mutilation in a list of actions that are “incapable of being ordered” to God.11 They are intrinsically evil (intrinsece malum). Surgical Interventions for Body Integrity Identity Disorder As I described in the opening vignette, BIID is a condition where patients believe that there is an incongruity between their physical body shape and their internal body scheme, resulting in an intense desire to be either amputated or paralyzed. It is exceedingly rare, with only one hundred to two hundred or so reported cases in the scientific literature, including a handful of cases from Japan and China.12 One study of fifty-four BIID patients in the Netherlands has revealed that severe psychiatric conditions co-presenting with BIID is unusual, though depressive symptoms and mood disorders can be present. 13 The authors of the study noted that this could be explained by the enormous distress experienced by BIID patients. The Dutch study also reported that the main rationale given by BIID patients for body modification through amputation is “to feel complete” or “to feel satisfied outside.” Though there is one report that suggests that BIID patients may have altered somatosensory processing in the premotor cortex,14 and another paper that suggests that they have structural brain abnormalities,15 the exact cause of BIID remains unknown. Notably, it has been compared to 11 12 13 14 15 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor (1993), §80. Rianne M. Blom, Nienke Vulink, Sija van der Wal, Takashi Nakamae, Zhonglin Tan, Eske Derks, and Damiaan Denys, “Body Integrity Identity Disorder Crosses Culture: Case Reports in the Japanese and Chinese Literature,” Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment 12 (2016): 1419–23. Rianne M. Blom, Raoul C. Hennekam, and Damiaan Denys, “Body Integrity Identity Disorder,” PLoS ONE 7, no. 4 (2012): e34702. M. T. van Dijk et al., “Neural Basis of Limb Ownership in Individuals with Body Integrity Identity Disorder,” PLoS ONE 8, no. 8 (2013): e72212. Rianne M. Blom et al., “The Desire for Amputation or Paralyzation: Evidence for Structural Brain Anomalies in Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID),” PLoS ONE 11, no. 11 (2016): e0165789. 1008 Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, O.P. clinical scenarios where stroke patients who have suffered a hemorrhage in the parietal cortex ask their nurse to remove “that strange leg” from their bed.16 Regardless of its etiology, BIID raises the question of whether or not a surgical intervention—specifically the amputation of a healthy limb or limbs—can be morally justified to treat this condition. Since there has been no official Church teaching on the treatment of this medical condition, in my view, we must begin by determining if the amputation of the healthy limb even alleviates the sometimes-extreme psychological distress experienced by BIID patients. Despite its small size and reliance on patient self-reporting, the Dutch study of fifty-four BIID patients already cited above reveals that amputation of the healthy body part appears to result in remission of BIID.17 Every single BIID patient who had had a limb amputated—there were seven instances of this in the study—reported a substantial improvement in his or her quality of life. In contrast, only 35 percent of the patients who had undergone some sort of therapy reported that it had helped them. Psychotherapy was supportive, but it did not alleviate the symptoms of BIID. In light of the scant medical evidence, can the principle of totality justify the surgical amputation of a healthy limb to alleviate the mental distress associated with BIID? Recall that the first condition articulated by Pope Pius XII for properly applying this principle to evaluate a surgical procedure is that the continued presence or functioning of a particular organ within the whole organism—in the case of BIID, the healthy but apparently “alienated” limb—constitutes a menace to the individual. For some BIID patients, especially those patients who experience such extreme mental distress that they are driven repeatedly to self-amputate, putting their life into immediate jeopardy, this condition could apply. Next, according to the Pope, the damage to the human patient—in this case, the extreme mental distress that places his life at immediate risk through self-mutilation—must be remediable, or at least possibly lessened measurably by the mutilation in question. The limited and short-term data from the Dutch study suggests that this second condition would be met, since amputation of the healthy limb leads to a substantial improvement in the quality of life of the BIID patient. Some may object because this Dutch study has a very small sample size, but this is not surprising given the extreme rarity of BIID. It is the only study of its kind and so we have 16 17 For a review, see Giuseppe Vallar and Roberta Ronchi, “Somatoparaphrenia: A Body Delusion: A Review of the Neuropsychological Literature,” Experimental Brain Research 192, no. 3 (2009): 533–51. See Blom, Hennekam, and Denys, “Body Integrity Identity Disorder.” The Ethics of Surgical Interventions 1009 to temper our ethical judgments, knowing that more robust evidence is not available at this time. Finally, according to the Holy Father, one must be reasonably certain that the negative effect (the mutilation and its consequences) will be compensated for by the positive effect, including the elimination of danger to the whole organism or the easing of pain. Once again, the Dutch study appears to affirm that there is a proportionate good in the substantially improved well-being of the self-mutilating BIID patient and the preservation of his life, that would compensate for the physical evil of amputating his limb. Therefore, it would seem that we can justify the amputation of a healthy limb of a BIID patient with the principle of totality, as a last-resort treatment for those few individuals whose mental distress is so extreme that it puts their physical well-being and life at substantial risk because of repeated self-harm.18 At least two objections can be raised against my proposal. First, an interlocutor could argue that it is unreasonable to treat a psychiatric condition with a bodily intervention, especially the surgical amputation of a healthy limb. Are we not confirming the patient in his delusion that the limb is not properly an integral part of his body? If so, we would be perpetuating a lie, which we cannot do if we are called to live a life of virtue. In response, I have proposed that the amputation of a healthy limb has to be a treatment of last resort for BIID patients who find their mental distress so overwhelming that they are at significant risk for self-harm. It is chosen as a means to alleviate this extreme mental distress—the fear and repugnance the Catholic moral tradition has called vehemens horror, directed in this particular instance at an “alienated’” limb—in order to preserve the patient’s life and well-being. It cannot and should not be used to treat every case of BIID. Thus, the surgical amputation is not an act that affirms the false belief that the “alienated” limb does not belong to the patient. Rather, it is a medical procedure that affirms that the healthy limb 18 Robert Song has made a similar argument in his “Body Integrity Identity Disorder and the Ethics of Mutilation,” Studies in Christian Ethics 26, no. 4 (2013): 487–503. E. Christian Brugger has made a parallel argument justifying the surgical removal of healthy limbs if the procedure helped individuals struggling with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) to resolve their mental distress. These are patients who excessively obsess about a perceived flaw of one of their limbs or body parts. See Brugger, “Catholic Hospitals and Sex Reassignment Surgery: A Reply to Bayley and Gremmels,” National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 16, no. 4 (2016): 587–97. Note that, in light of the recent scientific and medical studies described above, I have altered my position on the ethical permissibility of amputation in extreme cases of BIID where the lives of patients are in immediate jeopardy because of self-harm. See my earlier essay, “Requests for Elective Amputation,” Ethics & Medics 36, no. 2 (2011): 1–2. 1010 Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, O.P. is the object of life-threatening mental distress that has to be remedied to preserve the well-being and life of the patient. The case is best compared to the healthy limb of a prisoner that is amputated in response to a tyrant who orders him to cut off his own hand or lose his head to the executioners instead. Recall that the Catholic moral tradition found that this classic case could be morally justified with the principle of totality. Second, a critic, especially one working within the tradition of secular bioethics, could argue that my proposal unjustly limits the autonomy of the BIID patient. Instead, my interlocutor would argue that we should respect every competent patient’s decisions rather than refuse them, even when these call for extreme body modifications.19 Thus, Oxford bioethicist Julian Savulescu argues that “whether an individual’s decision is ultimately respected (by doctors, family and friends) turns on whether that individual is competent or incompetent, not on whether the decision is rational or irrational.”20 Here we hear echoes of John Stuart Mill’s harm principle that affirms that the free citizens in a liberal society should be free to act in whatever way they wish unless their actions cause harm to another person. In response, the capacity to choose freely is indeed a great good deserving of respect because it emerges from our natures as rational and free creatures. However, autonomy and the freedom to determine oneself are not absolute goods that can, in themselves, morally justify human action, even if they do not directly injure another. Murderers or adulterers or thieves who freely choose to kill or to betray or to steal not only harm another person but also harm the common good by making themselves vicious individuals. Rather, actions are good because they realize some individual or communal perfection. As we already discussed above, amputating a healthy limb without a proportionate good that would justify the procedure according to the principle of totality would be an unjust attack on the integrity of the human body, which is a great good for the individual. Such an act would harm the common good in two ways, even if it did not directly injure another. First, it would make the BIID patient a vicious person who has mutilated himself, and second, it would encourage vicious acts in others who would be led to think (falsely) that they could do whatever they wished with and to their bodies. 19 20 For one example of this argument, see Julian Savulescu, “Autonomy, the Good Life, and Controversial Choices,” in The Blackwell Guide to Medical Ethics, ed. Rosamond Rhodes, Leslie P. Francis, and Anita Silvers (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 17–37. Savulescu, “Autonomy,” 27. The Ethics of Surgical Interventions 1011 Surgical Interventions for Gender Dysphoria On June 1, 2015, the Olympian athlete Bruce Jenner, who had won the gold medal for the decathlon in the 1976 games in Montreal, announced on Twitter that he had changed his name to Caitlyn Jenner because this was “her true self.” He also appeared on the front cover of Vanity Fair as a woman.21 No one with such a high profile had ever self-identified as a transgender person before, and the event has since become a flash point in the culture wars over the nature of sex and gender in many Western societies.22 How do we understand the clinical case that is Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner? According to the American Psychological Association, an individual’s gender identity is “a person’s deeply-felt, inherent sense of being a boy, a man, or a male; a girl, a woman, or a female, or an alternative gender (e.g., gender queer, gender nonconforming, gender neutral) that may or may not correspond to a person’s sex assigned at birth or to a person’s primary or secondary sex characteristics.”23 It has to be distinguished from an individual’s sex, which refers to the physical, biological, and anatomical dimensions of being a male individual or a female individual of the human species, Homo sapiens, and from an individual’s gender role, which the European Institute for Gender Equality defines as the “social and behavioural norms which, within a specific culture, are widely considered to be socially appropriate for individuals of a specific sex.”24 Defining gender role in this way acknowledges the impact of cultural expectations on how men and women are supposed to behave in a particular society. A Japanese man has a different gender role, not only from a Japanese woman, but also from an American or a Filipino man. The fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-IV, was published in 1994 by the American Psychiatric 21 22 23 24 Nick Allen, “Bruce Jenner Introduces Herself as Caitlyn in First Picture on Vanity Fair Cover,” The Telegraph, June 1, 2015, telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/ usa/11644319/Bruce-Jenner-introduces-herself-as-Caitlyn-in-first-picture-on-VanityFair-cover.html. For discussions of the culture wars over gender identity and sex reassignment surgeries, see: Frank Browning, The Fate of Gender (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016); Ryan T. Anderson, When Harry Became Sally (New York: Encounter, 2018); Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2020). American Psychological Association, “Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming People,” The American Psychologist 70, no. 9 (2015):832–64, at 834. European Institute for Gender Equality, “Gender Roles,” eige.europa.eu/rdc/thesaurus/ terms/1209. 1012 Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, O.P. Association (APA) and included a psychological diagnosis for “gender identity disorder” that centered on the experience of persistent and pervasive cross-gender self-identification.25 Nearly twenty years later, in 2013, the fifth edition, the DSM-V, replaced “gender identity disorder” with the novel diagnostic term, “gender dysphoria,” which highlights the psychological distress or dysphoria experienced by some individuals who struggle with their gender identity rather than their feelings of gender incongruence.26 This shift in the DSM-V represents a change in the APA’s earlier view that a patient’s experience of gender incongruence constituted a mental disorder. Instead, according to the revisionist account found in the DSM-V, the experience of gender incongruence becomes a psychiatric issue only if it is accompanied by psychological distress. The gender incongruence itself, according to the DSM-V, is not a problem. Nonetheless, regardless of how we understand the condition, according to one review of the literature, the prevalence of a self-reported transgender identity in children, adolescents, and adults ranges from 0.5 percent to 1.3 percent.27 GD remains a condition of unknown etiology. The current scientific consensus for the development of gender identity is that it “is a multifactorial process involving both prenatal and postnatal variables. Psychosexual development is influenced by multiple factors such as exposure to androgens, sex chromosome genes, social circumstances and family dynamics.”28 Thus, as we will discuss in greater detail below, in my view, it is likely that GD will be linked to biological, psychological, and social factors. GD needs to be distinguished from Disorders of Sex Development (DSD), also called “intersex conditions,” where a person is born with ambiguous reproductive and/or sexual anatomy that is neither male nor female, and from homosexuality, where an individual is attracted to persons of the same sex. Instead, a transgendered individual feels that he is not a man, even if he is male, or that she is not a woman, even if she is female. For these persons, their gender identity does not correspond to their biological sex. They often explain that they feel trapped in a body that is the wrong sex. 25 26 27 28 American Psychiatric Association, “Gender Identity Disorder,” Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1994), nos. 302.6 and 302.85 (p. 537). American Psychiatric Association, “Gender Dysphoria,” Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed. (Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association, 2013), 452. Kenneth J. Zucker, “Epidemiology of Gender Dysphoria and Transgender Identity,” Sexual Health 14, no. 5 (2017): 404–411. Gönül Öçal, “Current Concepts in Disorders of Sexual Development,” Journal of Clinical Research in Pediatric Endocrinology 3, no. 3 (2011): 105–14, at 111. The Ethics of Surgical Interventions 1013 Jason Cromwell, who was born a girl, describes his experience as follows: “I didn’t ‘desire to be’ but rather I was a boy, if only in my mind.”29 Most transgendered adults trace their experience of gender incongruence to their childhood.30 However, there is one report that suggests that only 37 percent of children who were referred to a Dutch clinic for GD actually persisted and became transgendered adolescents.31 This finding coheres with earlier studies that had revealed that most children (80 percent or more) who experience GD desist and resolve their gender identity disorder before they become adolescents.32 At this time, it is unclear why these young desisters are able to reconcile their gender identity with their biological sex while the persisters cannot. Tragically, GD is associated with high suicide rates, especially among young people.33 Though most instances of GD manifest in childhood, one study from Brown University has now described teenagers and young adults who report experiencing GD without any pre-pubertal symptoms.34 The data suggests that this atypical presentation of the condition—called rapid-onset GD—may spread through groups of friends and may be a harmful coping mechanism like taking drugs, consuming alcohol, or self-cutting. It is not clear how this form of GD is related, if it is, to the early-onset GD that first appears in childhood. Finally, we have to acknowledge, as my pastoral experience has confirmed, that different individuals experience and manage their GD in different ways. For example, some men with GD may be able to cope with their psychological distress simply by wearing women’s panties underneath their men’s trousers and shorts every day. Others may choose to dress in 29 30 31 32 33 34 Jason Cromwell, Transmen and FTMs: Identities, Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 145 (emphasis original). T. O. Nieder et al., “Age of Onset and Sexual Orientation in Transsexual Males and Females,” The Journal of Sexual Medicine 8, no. 3 (2011): 783–91. Thomas D. Steensma et al., “Factors Associated with Desistence and Persistence of Childhood Gender Dysphoria: A Quantitative Follow-Up Study,” Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 52, no. 6 (2013): 582–90. For discussion, see Thomas D. Steensma and Peggy T. Cohen-Kettenis, “More Than Two Developmental Pathways in Children with Gender Dysphoria?” Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 54, no. 2 (2015): 147–48. Russell B. Toomey, Amy K. Syversten, and Maura Shramko, “Transgender Adolescent Suicide Behavior,” Pediatrics 142, no. 4 (2018): e20174218 Lisa Littman, “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria in Adolescents and Young Adults: A Study of Parental Reports,” PLoS ONE 13, no. 8 (2018): e0202330. Also see Littman, “The Use of Methodologies in Littman (2018) is Consistent with the Use of Methodologies in Other Studies Contributing to the Field of Gender Dysphoria Research: Response to Restar (2019),” Archives of Sexual Behavior 49, no. 1 (2020): 67–77. 1014 Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, O.P. women’s attire for one weekend, and only for one weekend, once a year during an escape vacation in Las Vegas. This is enough for them to live out their lives in peace. However, still others may decide that the only way that they can properly manage their GD is by choosing to undergo transitioning, the process whereby they change their physical appearance so that it coheres better, not with their biological sex, but with the gender identity that they experience as a given. This process involves surgical modifications of the body, including cosmetic interventions that alter the form of the face and the body; “top” surgeries that involve mastectomies for female-to-male transgendered persons and breast augmentation for their male-to-female transgendered counterparts; and “bottom” surgeries that require reconstructing the urinary and reproductive structures of transgendered patients so they resemble those of their chosen gender identity rather than those of their biological sex. These surgical procedures would be supplemented with lifelong hormonal treatments that alter the secondary sexual characteristics of the transgendered patient. Are the surgical procedures involved in gender transitioning morally justifiable? The Catholic Church has not yet made a definitive statement regarding these procedures.35 Nonetheless, the majority of Catholic moralists oppose these surgical interventions because they see them as bodily mutilations that cannot be justified by the principle of totality.36 They argue 35 36 Notably, the Charter for Healthcare Workers published by the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers in 1995 stated the following: “The physical integrity of a person cannot be impaired to cure an illness of psychic or spiritual origin. . . . And this is why the principle of totality cannot be correctly taken as a criterion for legitimatizing anti-procreative sterilization, therapeutic abortion and transsexual medicine and surgery” (§145; available on the Vatican website). However, the new edition of the Charter published in 2016 makes no mention of gender transitioning surgery. See Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers, New Charter for Health Care Workers, trans. The National Catholic Bioethics Center (Philadelphia: The National Catholic Bioethics Center, 2017). For recent examples, see the following essays: Richard P. Fitzgibbons, Philip M. Sutton, and Dale O’Leary, “The Psychopathology of ‘Sex Reassignment’ Surgery,” National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 9, no. 1 (2004): 97–125; Benedict M. Guevin, O.S.B., “Sex Reassignment Surgery for Transsexuals,” National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 5, no. 4 (2005): 719–34; Guevin, “Augmentation Mammaplasty for Male-to-Female Transsexuals: A Case Study for Catholic Hospitals,” National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 9, no. 3 (2009): 453–58; Christopher Gross, “Karol Wojtyła on Sex Reassignment Surgery,” National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 9, no. 4 (2009): 711–23; Nicholas Tonti-Filippini, “Sex Reassignment and Catholic Schools,” National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12, no. 1 (2012): 85–97; Tad Pacholczyk, “Changing My Body To ‘Match’ My ‘Identity’?,” Making sense of Biothetics Column 121, The National Bioethics Center, July The Ethics of Surgical Interventions 1015 that the removal of healthy tissues and sexual organs during gender transitioning are illicit because they are neither diseased nor life-threatening. They also point out that some gender-transitioning procedures—and they mean here especially, “bottom” surgeries—could never be justified because they are acts of sterilization that remove normal tissue that is required for procreation. Sterilization is morally illicit because it undermines the integrity of the gift of self, for here the spouse not only withholds his fertility from his wife but also refuses to accept her fertility, and vice versa. Finally, several of these scholars argue that gender transitioning is morally unjustifiable because it involves the rejection of the God-given personhood that is manifested through our sexuality. For all these scholars, all the surgical procedures involved in gender transitioning are intrinsically evil. They could never be morally justified in any circumstance. In contrast, a handful of faithful Catholic moral theologians are exploring the possibility that the surgical procedures associated with gender transitioning may be justifiable in certain cases.37 In their view, these interventions would not be intrinsically evil. I will summarize one recent proposal here to illustrate the general structure of these arguments. Citing the example of Pope Pius XII’s use of the principle of totality to justify the removal of a cancer patient’s healthy testicles to prevent his prostate tumor from killing him we described above, Becket Gremmels notes that the removal of healthy organs can be justified if these organs are life-threatening, even if it sterilizes him.38 The sterilization would be a foreseen but unintended side effect justifiable by the principle of double 37 38 30, 2015, https://www.ncbcenter.org/making-sense-of-bioethics-cms/column-121changing-my-body-to-match-my-identity; Moira McQueen, “Catholic Teaching on Transgender (Gender Dysphoria),” Bioethics Matters 14, no. 1 (2016): 1–4; Brugger, “Catholic Hospitals and Sex Reassignment Surgery”; Travis Stephens, “The Principle of Totality Does Not Justify Sex Reassignment Surgery,” Ethics & Medics 41, no. 11 (2016): 1–2; John F. Brehany, “Pope Pius XII and Justifications for Sex Reassignment Surgery,” 24, no. 4 (2016): 18–21. Additionally, see National Catholic Bioethics Center, “Brief Statement on Transgenderism,” National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 16, no. 4 (2016): 599–603. For recent examples, see the following essays: Carol Bayley, “Transgender Persons and Catholic Healthcare,” Health Care Ethics USA 24, no. 1 (2016): 1–5; Becket Gremmels, “Sex Reassignment Surgery and the Catholic Moral Tradition: Insight from Pope Pius XII on the Principle of Totality,” Health Care Ethics USA 24, no. 1 (2016): 6–10; Gremmels, “More Insight from Pius XII, a Reply to Brugger and Brehany, and a Clarification,” Health Care Ethics USA 24, no. 4 (2016): 7–17; David Albert Jones, “Gender Reassignment Surgery: A Catholic Bioethical Analysis,” Theological Studies 79, no. 2 (2018): 314–38. Gremmels, “Sex Reassignment Surgery,” 8. 1016 Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, O.P. effect. He then proposes that the removal of a transgendered individual’s sex organs and other tissues, even if they are healthy, is morally licit because these organs were causing the patient mental distress that was so extreme that they threatened the spiritual well-being of “the whole person.”39 In this scenario, a surgical intervention could be justifiable if it were known that these procedures could remedy and alleviate the threat to the spiritual good of the whole transgendered patient. As Gremmels explains it, citing other Catholic moral theologians who have proposed this view in the twentieth century, this is an account of the principle of totality that does not see the whole of the patient only a bodily reality, but expands “totality” to encompass a personal good that includes the physiological, psychological, and spiritual aspects of the patient that are all necessary for his personal well-being. If the surgical procedures involved in gender transitioning do in fact promote this good of the whole person, then in Gremmels’ view, they could possibly be justified by the principle of totality. In my view, we have to consider four points as we think through this disputed question. First, I think that it is important to emphasize that these surgical interventions cannot change a person’s sex. Sex is a biological characteristic of every single cell of the human body, and it cannot be altered by the superficial alteration of select body parts. It is also clear that there is scientific data that reveals that biological factors influence, mold, and inform the gender-specific behaviors that we observe early in childhood.40 In other words, some dimensions of an individual’s gender role are shaped by his or her biological sex. This should not be surprising, since it is known that male and female monkeys have toy preferences similar to those seen in boys and girls, suggesting that appeals to socialization alone cannot explain these sexual dimorphic characteristics in humans.41 Clearly, then, a person’s sex is part of his human nature. It is something that is given and received. It is not, as Pope Benedict XVI explained, “a social role that we choose for ourselves.”42 Therefore, the surgical procedures involved in gender transitioning do not change sex. They are attempts to conform the form of the body to the transgendered individual’s gender identity as he understands it. 39 40 41 42 Gemmels, “More Insights,” 9. V. L. Pasterski et al., “Prenatal Hormones and Postnatal Socialization by Parents as Determinants of Male-Typical Toy Play in Girls with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia,” Child Development 76, no. 1 (2005): 264–78. Janice M. Hassett, Erin R. Siebert, and Kim Wallen, “Sex Differences in Rhesus Monkey Toy Preferences Parallel Those of Children,” Hormones and Behavior 54, no. 3 (2008): 359–64. Benedict XVI, Christmas Greetings to the Roman Curia, December 21, 2012. The Ethics of Surgical Interventions 1017 Second, I do not think that it is correct to say that a transgendered individual is a male soul in a female body or a female soul in a male body. Classically understood, the human soul as the substantial form of the human body is neither sexed nor gendered. Rather, it is the human body informed by the human soul as an integral whole that is male or female. To claim otherwise—to claim that the human soul is either male or female— would be to affirm that human males and females belong to different kinds because they have different kinds of souls. How then do we explain the experience of the apparently mismatched gender-identity and biological sex reported by transgender persons? One way, I think, is to consider the tragic story of David Reimer, who was born Bruce Reimer, on August 22, 1965. David was born male but was raised a girl after a penile amputation during a botched circumcision. Between nine and eleven years of age, David came to the realization that he was not a girl, and he transitioned to living as a male at age fifteen. He committed suicide several decades later after suffering years of severe depression, financial instability, and a troubled marriage. How did David Reimer “know” that he was born a boy? It is clear from the publicly available evidence that his family and everyone around him had treated him and had raised him as a girl.43 I would propose that he “knew” that he was a boy because he had a normal male brain. This would explain how he “knew” he was a boy. Human brains are sexed in the same way that our genitalia are sexed.44 In my view, this suggests that David’s gender identity—how he understood himself as a boy rather than as a girl despite the cultural and social disinformation that he had received throughout his childhood—has a biological basis. But if this proposal is true, and I think that it has much explanatory power, then it is reasonable to posit that the biological processes that inform one’s gender identity in a way that it conforms to one’s biological sex could go awry. This is the very nature of biological processes. They are always prone to mutation and malfunction. If David Reimer could “know” that he was a boy, then he could also have failed to “know” his gender identity had his brain not been correctly sexed. Though this is an area of active research with much we still 43 44 For details, see John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006). J. Sacher et al., “Sexual Dimorphism in the Human Brain: Evidence from Neuroimaging,” Magnetic Resonance Imaging 32, no. 3 (2013): 366–75. Also see Margaret M. McCarthy, Bridget M. Nugent, and Kathryn M. Lenz, “Neuroimmunology and Neuroepigenetics in the Establishment of Sex Differences in the Brain,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 18, no. 8 (2017): 471–84. 1018 Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, O.P. do not understand,45 I will not be surprised if a neurological cause will be identified to explain the incongruence experienced by some. I emphasize that this will be for only some transgendered individuals with early-onset GD. According to this account, a transgendered person would not have a sexually mismatched body and soul, but a sexually mismatched body and brain. I doubt that a similar thing can be said about rapid onset GD, which appears to have a social etiology. Third, returning now to the surgical procedures associated with gender transitioning, I agree with those scholars who point out that the surgical removal of healthy tissues and organs, even if they are healthy, can be justified by the principle of totality as long as this protects and promotes the well-being of the patient. This is the first criterion of Pope Pius XII for the scope of the principle of totality. As we saw above, this position has long been embraced by Catholic moralists who justify the amputation of the healthy limb of a prisoner that is severed in response to a tyrant who orders him to cut off his own hand or lose his head to the executioners instead. Whether or not an organ or a limb is healthy should not be the point of the ethical dispute. Rather we should determine whether or not that organ or limb, in the words of Pope Pius XII already cited above, “is causing serious damage or constitutes a menace” to the human patient. In response, it is not clear if GD can be attributed to a single organ or a limb. The surgical procedures involved in gender transitioning seek to remold the entire patient’s body so that it more resembles the bodily form that reveals the gender identity that he believes is truly his own. For the male-to-female transgendered person, for example, these include facial feminization surgery, breast augmentation surgery, hip augmentation surgery, vocal surgery, removal of the Adam’s apple, and vaginoplasty. Thus, it is impossible to point to any one bodily part that is causing serious damage or constitutes a menace to the GD patient. However, as Gremmels has noted, there is a precedent in the Catholic moral tradition for interpreting the “totality” of the principle of totality as encompassing not only his biological and bodily integrity, but in addition, also his psychological, emotional, and spiritual well-being. This would be a totality read in the context not of the human organism, but of the human person. It is a minority theological position, but it remains a plausible interpretation of the principle of totality that would expand its scope. Appealing to this theological argument, a Catholic bioethicist could claim 45 Charles E. Roselli, “Neurobiology of Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation,” Journal of Neuroendocrinology 30, no. 7 (2018): e12562. The Ethics of Surgical Interventions 1019 that the surgeries involved with gender transitioning would be justifiable if they were in fact able to alleviate the mental distress experienced by transgendered individuals, especially in those extreme cases where GD individuals have already tried to take their own lives. These then would be surgeries that involve the sacrifice of many bodily parts for the sake of the psychological well-being of the total patient. This argument would obtain, however, only if these surgeries did in fact enhance the well-being of the patient. Finally, we conclude with the second and third criteria proposed by Pope Pius XII for the scope of the principle of totality. Recall that, for a surgical intervention to be morally justifiable, in the words of the Pope, “this damage [to the well-being of the patient] must be remediable or at least can be measurably lessened by the mutilation in question, and the operation’s efficacy in this regard should be well assured.”46 Do the bodily modifications associated with gender transitioning fulfill these criteria? Do they alleviate the extreme mental distress associated with GD? In my view, this is the most important ethical question to raise regarding these surgical procedures. Many Catholic bioethicists have noted that it is unclear if the surgical procedures to facilitate gender transitioning would meet the threshold of these two criteria of the principle of totality. One systematic review and meta-analysis concluded that around 80 percent of those interviewed in twenty-eight independent studies reported subjective improvement in terms of GD, quality of life, and psychological symptoms, though the same review acknowledged that there are many studies in the medical literature 46 To anticipate an objection, some critics may propose that the criteria described by the pope do not apply for GD because the mutilations associated with gender transitioning do not actually treat GD. In response, I make the following explicit comparison. First, in some patients, prostate tumor micrometastases, if allowed to grow, will interfere with vital organ function, killing the patient. Removal of the healthy testicles prevents the prostate tumor micrometastases from interfering with vital organ function, by mitigating tumor cell growth, preserving the life of the patient. The tumor micrometastases remain in the body but their lethal effects are mitigated. (We know the tumor cells remain because, if these cells mutate, and become testosterone independent, then the tumor micrometastases will relapse, which we see in some fraction of patients.) Next, to compare: In some patients, GD triggered by self-hate of the sexed body, if allowed to persist, will lead to self-harm, killing the patient. Removal of the healthy sexed organs prevents the GD from triggering self-harm, by mitigating the self-hate of the sexed body, preserving the life of the patient. The GD remains but its lethal effects are mitigated. I propose that, if one thinks that Pius XII’s criteria apply in the first scenario, then they should also apply to the second scenario. In both cases, you have mitigated the lethal effects of a pathology though the presenting condition remains. 1020 Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, O.P. that also report high rates of psychiatric deterioration and suicide after gender reassignment.47 However, the authors admitted that the evidence for their conclusions “is of very low quality due to the serious methodological limitations of included studies.” One particular challenge is that many of the studies that were reviewed relied on patient self-reports to determine if the individual has benefitted from gender reassignment. It is difficult to ensure that patients are accurately describing themselves: Can patients who have spent years anticipating health and well-being after gender reassignment be expected to self-report after surgery that they are experiencing disappointment and regret? In light of these methodological concerns, a population-based matched cohort study of all the patients in Sweden who underwent gender reassignment surgery between 1973 and 2003 is significant.48 Using publicly available national registries in Sweden rather than patient self-reports, this robust study was able to capture and analyze an entire population of transgendered patients without exception to determine the long-term medical consequences of the surgical procedure. Do these surgical interventions enhance the physiological and psychological well-being of patients with GD? It appears that they do not: The study found substantially higher rates of overall mortality, death from cardiovascular disease and suicide, suicide attempts, and psychiatric hospitalizations in sex-reassigned transsexual individuals compared to a healthy control population. This highlights that post-surgical transsexuals are a risk group that need long-term psychiatric and somatic follow-up. Even though surgery and hormonal therapy alleviates gender dysphoria, it is apparently not sufficient to remedy the high rates of morbidity and mortality found among transsexual persons.49 Though the Swedish authors claimed that their study “does not, however, address whether sex reassignment is an effective treatment or not,” I think that their data speaks for itself. Though it is only one study, it is a robust one, unlike so many of the other studies that interrogate this question, and 47 48 49 M. H. Murad et al., “Hormonal Therapy and Sex Reassignment: A Systematic Review and Meta‐Analysis of Quality of Life and Psychosocial Outcomes,” Clinical Endocrinology 72, no. 2 (2010): 214–31. C. Dhejne et al., “Long-Term Follow-Up of Transsexual Persons Undergoing Sex Reassignment Surgery: Cohort Study in Sweden,” PLoS ONE 6, no. 2 (2011): e16885. Dhejne et al., “Long-Term Follow-Up,” e16885. The Ethics of Surgical Interventions 1021 the numbers reveal that gender-reassignment surgeries do not substantially improve the overall well-being of transgendered patients.50 It certainly does not eliminate the risk of self-harm and suicide. It is striking that one transgendered individual has admitted publicly in a New York Times op-ed that she does not expect her gender-reassignment surgery to make her happy.51 Tragically, her expectations are corroborated by the best medical studies available. BIID, GD, and the Common Good The ethical analysis of surgical interventions to treat both BIID and GD described above focus on their impact on the individual good of the patient. To recapitulate the argument made earlier, there appears to be some medical evidence that suggests that these surgical interventions can ameliorate the mental distress experienced in the former condition but not in the latter. As such those surgical amputations used to treat BIID could possibly be justified while those for GD cannot. At this time, however, I also think that it is important to briefly consider the impact of these proposed surgical treatments on the common good of society. The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes the common good as “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.”52 The human person has a natural order and finality. This finality is revealed in each person’s body, which is created either male or female in a manner that is ordered both towards the good of the individual who is called to enter into communion with a person of the opposite sex, and towards the common good of society that is structured to preserve itself through human procreation. In order to sustain the viability of human 50 51 52 A more recent study from Sweden has suggested that gender reassignment surgery does improve the mental health outcomes of patients: Richard Bränström and John E. Pachankis, “Reduction in Mental Health Treatment Utilization Among Transgender Individuals After Gender-Affirming Surgeries: A Total Population Study,” The American Journal of Psychiatry 177, no. 8 (2019): 727–34. However, this study has been criticized—convincingly, in my view—by Mark Regnerus, who demonstrates the weakness of the study’s conclusions: “New Data Show ‘Gender-Affirming’ Surgery Doesn’t Really Improve Mental Health, So Why Are the Study’s Authors Saying It Does?,” Public Discourse, November 13, 2019, thepublicdiscourse.com/2019/11/58371/. Andrea Long Chu, “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy,” The New York Times, November 24, 2018, nytimes.com/2018/11/24/opinion/sunday/vaginoplastytransgender-medicine.html. Catechism of the Catholic Church §1906. 1022 Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, O.P. communities, men and women must be able to identify and to find each other in order to create human families that engender the children needed as future members of society. The social conditions that catalyze the formation of these human families is part of the common good. Another difference between surgical interventions that are used to alleviate BIID from those used to try to alleviate GD is that the former have no impact on the common good while the latter do. Gender reassignment surgeries not only radically undermine the fundamental ordering of the body that is created male or female so that the human person can enter into communion with another person of the opposite sex, but also attack the ordering that is in place so that human society can preserve itself through human procreation. To put it another way, gender reassignment surgeries and the gender ideology from which they flow destabilize the conceptual and relational structures needed for human societies to more fully and more easily form the families needed to ensure the long-term viability of our communities. This uniquely distinguishes them from the many other surgical interventions that alter the human body’s form and function, all of which solely impact the individual good of the patient, and maybe, the good of his family members and loved ones who care for him. As such, gender reassignment surgeries can also be rejected because of their negative impact on the common good. Conclusion I have proposed that surgical interventions could be justified in some cases of Body Integrity Identity Disorder. The amputation of a healthy limb has to be a treatment of last resort for BIID patients who find their mental distress so overwhelming that they are at significant risk for self-harm. In contrast, the medical evidence suggests that gender reassignment surgery cannot be morally justified by the principle of totality, whether this is understood to be either the physical or the personal totality of the patient, because the benefits of the procedure are not proportionate to the significant harms involved. In the long-term, it does not appear to alleviate the profound mental distress associated with Gender Dysphoria. Instead, transgendered individuals should receive the psychiatric, social, and pastoral care that they will need to shoulder the heavy burden that is the profound suffering that comes with GD. And though this challenge may appear to be unbearable at first, transgendered individuals, especially those who profess to be Christian, need to be told that in Christ, all things are possible, for it is he whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light (see The Ethics of Surgical Interventions 1023 Matt 11:30). Finally, the Church too must live up to her vocation to be a sign of God’s compassion and mercy in the world by working to mitigate and to remove the social stigma and profound shame associated with this condition. Transgendered individuals must know that they are loved. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2022): 1025–1052 1025 When Our Fathers Fall: A Thomistic-Confucian Approach to Lay Moral Correction of Clergy Joshua R . Brown Mount St. Mary’s University Emmitsburg, MD In this article, I seek to draw upon the resources of Thomas Aquinas and early Confucian philosophy in order to answer the following question: what are the responsibilities of lay Catholics to our priests and bishops as regards their personal moral rectification? This justifiably provokes two questions in reaction: why is this question worth pursuing, and why pursue it via a comparative reading of Aquinas and Confucian philosophy? As to the first of these, the question I pose here is a specification of the larger responsibilities that fall to Christians according to the Scriptures. Galatians 5:1–2 puts the matter this way: “Brothers, even if a person is caught in some transgression, you who are spiritual should correct that one in a gentle spirit, looking to yourself, so that you may also not be tempted. Bear one another’s burdens and so you will fulfill the law of Christ.”1 In the theological tradition, “bearing one another’s burdens” has been neatly and aptly represented in the principle of fraternal correction. The question I am focused on here, then, is how is fraternal correction properly offered from laity to clerics. Ultimately, articulating the shape or form of virtuous lay correction of clergy is actually a rather knotty problem. This is because the manner of the relationship between laity and clergy is not simply understood in terms 1 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of Scripture are taken from the New American Bible Revised Edition (NABRE). Unless otherwise attributed, all other translations are my own, and all citations of Chinese texts in this article refer to text divisions according to the Chinese Text Project, ed. Donald Sturgeon (ctext.org). 1026 Joshua R. Brown of the bonds of Christian fraternity. Certainly, all Christians are brothers and sisters in Christ, for through His grace we have been adopted into the inheritance of the Kingdom of God as children of God (see Eph 5:1–5; 1 John 3:1–3). Yet the Church also recognizes that priests and bishops possess not simply a fraternal but also a paternal relationship to laity. As St. Paul again puts it to the church in Corinth, “I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel. Therefore, I urge you, be imitators of me” (1 Cor 4:15–16). I propose here that, although fraternal correction is a still useful concept for understanding how laity can morally correct clergy, it has an obvious weakness in that it corresponds to a particular relational analogy, that of fraternity, within which the difference in authority is not as great as the parent–child bond. Thus, fraternal correction is exceptionally useful for understanding how relationships with more or less equal rank of authority can function in terms of moral remonstration, such as how a lay Christian might fraternally correct another lay Christian, or a cleric fraternally correct a cleric. However, when it comes to clergy–laity relations, the shape of fraternal correction is far less clear, for there is a just and genuine disparity between them in the order of ecclesial, magisterial authority underlying the relationship, even if there is equality in other important respects. I argue here that lay responsibilities for correcting clergy can be fruitfully understood in terms of filial remonstration as understood by the Confucian philosophical tradition. Of course, there is one tremendous dissimilarity between Confucian views on the responsibilities for filial remonstration and those pertaining to the laity–clergy relationship: the former occur within and flow from the natural foundation of the parent– child bond, while the latter are not based on blood relations and natural duties. Yet, the same can be said about the language of fraternal correction, which draws upon the analogous duties of blood-kin applied to the spiritual fraternity of the Christian life. And so, it must be admitted that although the father–child relationship is used only analogously to describe the priest–laity relationship, it also accurately depicts the reality of that relationship. As John Paul II observed, priestly celibacy entails “a singular sharing in God’s fatherhood and in the fruitfulness of the Church.”2 The call of the priest to the celibate life is thus a call to fatherhood, indeed, a call to imitate and participate in the paternity of the triune God in a special and spiritual way. It seems clear that only a materialistic conception of things that denies the spiritual its proper weight and importance can deny 2 John Paul II, Pastores Dabo Vobis (1992), §29. When Our Fathers Fall 1027 the significance and justice with which the priest and bishop are known as true “fathers” for the faithful. This is especially so because even biological fathers do not create physical life for their children, but transmit what has been given to them in the execution of God’s providential ordering of existence. So too, Catholic clergy do not originate the life of grace and salvation, but play an indissoluble role in transmitting and guarding the life in the Spirit for Christians, even as they require care and development of this life for themselves as well.3 Indeed, it might be argued that a recovery of the paternal nature of priesthood would be of great help in our age of clerical abuses, ecclesial mistrust, and the increasingly popular conception of the Church as a “sacrament factory.” For, in our age in the West, it seems the priest and bishop often see themselves as administrators of social contracts rather than fathers pining for their children’s flourishing. Perhaps recovering the image of the priest as father would help cultivate the kinds of courageous household leaders we need so desperately. Yet this is clearly beyond the scope of my argument here. I mean to say only that we really should be able to take the paternal character of the priest and bishop seriously, and that in consequence means that the paternal character of the priesthood can helpfully clarify lay responsibilities towards those who are called to be our fathers in spiritual matters. Hence, I believe the Confucian tradition provides a helpful resource for thinking about lay responsibilities towards priests, as it reflects upon the natural duties of children to offer moral correction for their parents. Although Aquinas’s reflections on fraternal correction are rich in detail and very helpful for producing guidelines for virtuous correction of clergy, 3 My appeal to a paternal conception of the priesthood should not be taken to undermine or distract from the universal priesthood of the Church or the spiritual cultivation needed by the individual priest. Yves Congar helpfully provides a way to connect the two themes, describing the priesthood of all believers in terms of the sacrifice of one’s self to God (A Gospel Priesthood, trans. P. J. Hepburne-Scott [New York: Herder and Herder, 1967], 90–95). For priests, Congar observes, there must be this continuous act of self-sacrifice of “building the Church in ourselves,” and through this sacrifice “we are only the stewards of good which God has placed in the world, which is his property, for the good of all mankind, which is his family” (94). The conception of the universal Christian sacrifice of self helpfully highlights the way the priest really is a spiritual father, as a steward of what has been given to him. Furthermore, as those blessed to be earthly fathers know experientially, it is only in this kind of sacrifice of self that fathers can take up this role of paternity in being stewards of God’s gifts to us. Thus, the priest’s imperfection and need for spiritual cultivation does not contradict his paternity, but rather reinforces it in a beautiful manner. 1028 Joshua R. Brown Aquinas himself says nothing about moral difficulties for the lay Christian vis-à-vis the filial relationship with clergy. Chinese Confucianism, on the other hand, gives tremendous attention to negotiating the moral difficulties of children in correcting the moral waywardness of their parents. Recently, it has become popular to draw on Confucian approaches to ethics to emphasize how the diverse social relationships and roles we play towards others help to define the nature of virtuous activity in these different circumstances.4 Traditionally, classical Confucianism focuses on the Five Relationships (wu lun; 五倫) that are the primary moral roles humans must virtuously negotiate: those between husband and wife, between father and son, between older brother and younger brother, between ruler and minister, and between friends.5 In Confucianism, all but the last of these are construed as superior–subordinate relationships (literally “high and low”; shang-xia; 上下). With regard to the father–son bond, the Confucian tradition is unequivocal that sons owe their fathers moral remonstration (jian; 諫), as an expression of, and never a departure from, the filial attitude of love and reverence owed to their fathers (i.e., being xiao; 孝). I argue here that the Confucian emphasis on maintaining filial virtue in the midst of moral correction provides helpful resources to lay Christians 4 5 See, e.g.: Roger T. Ames, Confucian Role Ethics (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2011); A. T. Nuyen, “Confucian Ethics as Role-Based Ethics,” International Philosophical Quarterly 47, no. 3 (September 2007): 315–28; Jung H. Lee, “An Ethics of Propriety: Ritual, Roles, and Dependence in Early Confucianism,” Asian Philosophy 23, no. 2 (2013): 153–165; Daniel J. Stephens, “Confucian Ethics and the Practical Value of Roles,” Philosophy East and West 68, no. 3 (2018): 909–28. Ames in particular has emphasized describing Confucianism as “role ethic” over and against considering it as a form of virtue ethics. Stephen C. Angle, who has defended at length the interpretation of Confucianism as a virtue ethic, has published an illustrative critique of Ames’s vision of role ethics (Angle, “Building Bridges to Distant Shores: Pragmatic Problems with Confucian Role Ethics,” in Appreciating the Chinese Difference: Engaging Roger T. Ames on Methods, Issues, and Roles, ed. James Behuniak Jr. [Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2018], 156–82). For what it is worth, my own interpretation of Confucianism is far more in line with Angle than Ames. I insist on the terminology of “role ethics” because I think there is value in the robust Confucian attention to how our social (and especially familial) roles help to concretely define virtuous acts. For other noteworthy critiques of the role ethic perspective, see John Ramsey, “Mengzi’s Externalist Solution to the Role Dilemma,” Asian Philosophy 25, no.2 (May 2015): 188–206, and Henry Rosemont Jr., “Role Ethics: Problems and Promise,” in Behuniak Jr., Appreciating the Chinese Difference, 229–248. Classically, this list is taken from the Mengzi, 3A:4, wherein the relationships are listed, though not labeled as the “Five Relationships.” When Our Fathers Fall 1029 for understanding how we might virtuously correct our spiritual fathers. While Aquinas provides clarity about the responsibilities Christians owe one another under the law of grace and charity and helpful general guidelines for correcting superiors, the Confucian tradition provides a way to heighten and clarify how lay Catholics can enact our properly filial agency when we seek to correct our priests and bishops due to sin. Therefore, this article proceeds in three distinct steps. The first two sections construct the conceptual apparatus of fraternal correction according to Aquinas and filial remonstration in Confucianism, respectively. The third and final section synthesizes these concepts in order to provide concrete moral guidelines for how laity can offer virtuous moral correction to clergy that serves this particular bond. Before turning to construct my account of lay correction of clergy, two clarifications are in order. The first regards the scope of my argument: here my focus is on what we might call the private sin of clerics relevant to their holiness and pursuit of righteousness. This is due in large part to guidelines I take from Aquinas. As I detail below, Aquinas sees fraternal correction as attempting to correct another out of charity for his/her own sake, and not as a means to secure or protect the common good, which is a matter of justice. Therefore, the kind of correction I mean here is when a clergyman falls into sin that impedes his holiness, such as becoming slothful, gluttonous, or lustful. When these sins concern the common good (as in the case of the sexual abuse crisis), the moral problem is entirely different, since it falls under justice rather than charity, and what I offer here is of limited relevance. Finally, I should like to make one last clarification. I have attempted in the following to make the proper analogous adjustments that are required when applying practices from a natural kinship bond to the spiritual life of the Church. I believe I have done so appropriately, but wish to stress again that I think it both important and valuable to draw upon remonstration as a complement to fraternal correction, which is also a moral action that is only analogously applied to the spiritual life. It might be the case that what I offer here would ultimately require a more comprehensive theological account of the priest qua father. At the least, I hope the reflections here show the fruitfulness of such a task, and perhaps inspire others to undertake it. 1030 Joshua R. Brown Fraternal Correction in Aquinas Because I seek to expand upon Aquinas’s concept of fraternal correction, it is condign to begin with this concept on Aquinas’s own terms. Fraternal correction is a deeply biblical idea, especially in the theology of the Apostle Paul (see citations above), as well as a traditional idea, particularly in Augustine.6 In the Middle Ages, theologians developed a more sophisticated and programmatic account of fraternal correction.7 Aquinas’s own understanding of fraternal correction was heavily indebted to the Franciscan theologian Alexander of Hales. Indeed, Takashi Shogimen has even argued that Aquinas’s reflections on fraternal correction are set firmly within the framework provided by Alexander.8 Given the size of the task I have set myself to read Aquinas’s reflections on fraternal correction alongside early Confucian texts, I will dispense with a discussion of precisely how Aquinas draws upon these sources, and focus instead on Aquinas’s own understanding of fraternal correction. At the very least, his own thought on the concept developed over time. In his commentary on Lombard’s Sentences, Aquinas initially focuses on fraternal reproving (correptio), primarily discussing the relationship between punishments and authority within hierarchical communities.9 Aquinas distinguishes between different kinds of admonishment, each of which is concerned with helping the brother maintain the path of rectitude. 6 7 8 9 Gregory S. Moule, Corporate Jurisdiction, Academic Heresy, and Fraternal Correction at the University of Paris, 1200–1400 (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 241–42, and 282–83. Moule identifies Matt 18:15–22 (and not merely 18:15–18) as a key verse that inspired medieval considerations of fraternal correction, in addition to Rom 1:32. However, as Moule also notes, the Matthean text presented “by its very nature . . . an idealized situation, one that did not always occur in practice. Thus, medieval theologians had to clarify the application of these texts to particular circumstances” (245). Moule, Corporate Jurisdiction, 247. Moule notes that Peter Lombard did not include a specific treatment on fraternal correction in the Sentences. See Takashi Shogimen, “From Disobedience to Toleration: William of Ockham and the Medieval Discourse on Fraternal Correction,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 52, no. 4 (2001): 599–622, esp. 601–6. See In IV sent., d. 19, q. 2. All translations of Aquinas are my own unless otherwise noted. I would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewer at Nova et Vetera for pointing out that most religious orders have fraternal correction discussed as an explicit responsibility within their constitutions. See, for example, chapter 8 of the General Constitutions General Statutes of the Order of Friars Minor (ofm.org/wp-content/ uploads/2016/12/CGSG2016EN.pdf ). This underscores that for Aquinas, fraternal correction was not an abstract idea, but part of the concrete life of a fraternal religious order. When Our Fathers Fall 1031 Eventually, Aquinas identifies “correction” (corrigere) as responding to a brother’s departure from the right way of life in order to lead him once again to rectitude.10 Aquinas further distinguishes two ways of helping restore another to rectitude. The first is through fear of shame or hatred of the sin itself, showing another the ugliness of his sin.11 The second is through “fear and hatred of sadness” (per timorem et odium tristis), resulting in the brother’s retreat from sin due to fear of punishments or damnation.12 Significantly, Aquinas argues that the second mode of correction pertaining to punishments can be exercised only by prelates, because only superiors possess the requisite authority to inflict punishment.13 In his mature reflections in the Summa theologiae [ST], Aquinas maintains attention on correction as a form of punishment and the question of competent authority, but he largely treats such punishment as a matter of justice rather than charity. Consequently, Aquinas distinguishes between fraternal correction as a matter of charity and fraternal correction as a matter of justice. Note that Aquinas holds that this former type of correction— showing a brother the ugliness of his sin—can be practiced by confrères and does not require authority.14 In the ST, Aquinas discusses fraternal correction as a sub-virtue of charity.15 He thus prioritizes the demonstration of sin as more proper to fraternal correction than punishment, though the latter is charitable when the corrector is a superior charged with care for the wrongdoer’s soul. In emphasizing fraternal correction as a form of charity in the ST, Aquinas asserts fraternal correction as a demand of charity on all Christians, and not primarily part of a superior’s duties to subordinates.16 Ultimately, correction is a responsibility of all Christians for one another. However, virtues are practiced amidst concrete circumstances, which greatly impact fraternal correction. There are clearly forms of correction Aquinas thinks 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 In IV sent., q. 19, a. 2, a. 1, corp. In IV sent., q. 19, a. 2, a. 1, corp. In IV sent., q. 19, a. 2, a. 1, corp. In IV sent., q. 19, a. 2, a. 1, corp. In IV sent., q. 19, a. 2, a. 1, corp. For an excellent overview of charity in Aquinas, see Christopher J. Malloy, Aquinas on Beatific Charity and the Problem of Love (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2019). Shogimen, “From Disobedience to Toleration,” 603. Shogimen argues here that Aquinas thus refined Alexander’s distinction between correction ex officio and ex caritate: “Aquinas linked the distinction to the nature of the error that is to be corrected. . . . In other words, whether the error has any impact on the common good determines the appropriate type of correction.” 1032 Joshua R. Brown are appropriately enacted only by superiors. Therefore, not all modes of reproving are appropriate to charitable fraternal correction. Thankfully, Aquinas addresses this issue explicitly, producing helpful guidelines. First, Aquinas says that “the correction of a wrongdoer [deliquentis] is a certain remedy that should be applied against the sin of another person.”17 Thus, correction is a remedy with sin as its patient. We must also bear in mind that a person’s sin is harmful in two ways, both to himself (because it is doing evil) and to others as injury, scandal, disruption of the common good, or promotion of injustice.18 Eventually, Aquinas concludes that rectifying the harm of sin affecting others falls under justice.19 Therefore, since fraternal correction is ordered by charity rather than justice, it is “ordered to the emendation of the wrongdoer.”20 Aquinas explains that, when we seek to remove a person’s evil, we are seeking the person’s good, which pertains to charity more than any other virtue.21 The key is our intention. If one seeks to remove the evil in a person primarily for maintaining justice, it would be an act of justice. But when we seek to remove the evil a person does inasmuch as it diminishes their flourishing (as all evil does), we do so out of charity. Consequently, fraternal correction is primarily an act of charity for sinners wherein the corrector wills the sinner’s flourishing and his/her turning from evil. When the corrector wills to ameliorate the effects of evil on others, this is an act of justice in support of the common good. Moreover, charitable correction means willing the good of those who perpetuate even grave evils and seeking their conversion to the good. Inasmuch as we will the good of a sinful brother in Christ, charity binds us to seek to remove the evil from the brother’s life and work for his return to the good. This is of tremendous importance for thinking about how laity might practice fraternal correction towards clerics. In explaining why fraternal correction (which is a form of counsel) does not fall under the virtue of prudence, Aquinas says, “whenever we act rightly through prudence to attain the end of another moral virtue, . . . the act is principally of that virtue that is ordered to that end (we seek).”22 Whenever the end we seek is an end of charity, all the virtues needed to bring about that end produce acts of charity. Similarly, all acts that seek to obtain the end of a certain 17 18 19 20 21 22 Summa theologiae [ST] II-II, q. 33, a. 1, resp. ST II-II, q. 33, a. 1, resp. See ST II-II, q. 33, a. 1, resp. and ad 1. ST II-II, q. 33, a. 1, resp. ST II-II, q. 33, a. 1, resp. ST II-II, q. 33, a. 1, ad 2. When Our Fathers Fall 1033 virtue are ordered by and to that virtue.23 Put concretely, the one who seeks to correct the brother out of fraternal correction should be motivated by charity, and thus all acts that accomplish this correction should conform to the order of charity. It is not fraternal correction, strictly speaking, to rectify a wrongdoer in uncharitable ways. Does Aquinas then specify what form(s) fraternal correction takes as an act of charity? Article 2 of question 33 in the secunda secundae of the ST deals with whether fraternal correction is a precept of the divine law. For Aquinas it is, but it is a kind of positive law. Negative laws name evils which should be avoided at all times, but positive laws name virtuous deeds that are virtuous only when the performed the right way in the right circumstances.24 Hence fraternal correction must admit of a certain variety of forms in order to be virtuous. Aquinas identifies three basic circumstances structuring virtuous fraternal correction: (1) the likely effectiveness of the correction, (2) the relationship and status of both the corrector and wrongdoer, and (3) the mode of correction.25 Aquinas teaches that omitting fraternal correction can be either virtuous or sinful. If one omits correcting another “out of charity,” this can be virtuous. If I believe that my correction is untimely or will make matters worse, I can virtuously refrain from correcting him or her. However, if I fail to correct a brother or sister due to fear of others or when it is clear that my intervention might help him or her withdraw from evil, then I sin against charity.26 The second circumstance is the relationship and status of those involved in the correction. Given the theme of this article, Aquinas’s comments regarding how subordinates or inferiors should correct superiors warrant special attention. ST II-II, q. 33, a. 3, poses the question of whether it is at all virtuous for subordinates to correct their superiors, and Aquinas argues it is. The key in his account is the distinction between correction as an act of justice and fraternal correction as an act of charity. Subordinates are not authorized qua subordinates to correct superiors according to justice, since 23 24 25 26 Commenting on charity’s dependence upon the infused virtue of prudence, Michael Sherwin, O.P., writes: “Charity’s act is measured according to the real value of the objects of its love, but this ordered measure is placed in charity’s acts by human reason elevated by the infused virtue of prudence” (By Knowledge & By Love: Charity and Knowledge in the Moral Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas [Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005], 178). ST II-II, q. 33, a. 2, resp. ST II-II, q. 33, a. 2, resp. ST II-II, q. 33, a. 2, ad 3. 1034 Joshua R. Brown subordinates cannot justly punish their superiors.27 However, inasmuch as fraternal correction is an act of charity seeking to amend the wrongdoing of the brother, Aquinas says this is the responsibility of all to one another. In sum, subordinates do not possess the authority to correct superiors under justice, but they can correct superiors under charity. Significantly, Aquinas sees that fraternal correction of superiors in charity is possible because subordinates can still possess “healthy judgment of reason” (sanum rationis iudicium).28 The healthy rational faculty enables a person to discern and correct the wrongdoing of another. This is a subtly important point in Aquinas’s account of fraternal correction, for it means the corrector is responsible for ensuring he/she possesses a “healthy judgment of reason.” Aquinas does not in the context of question 33 say how a person can determine if he/she possesses a healthy judgment of reason, but it is not difficult to derive his answer. The cultivation of virtue in general would be key, in addition to obeying precepts of the divine and natural laws.29 However, this raises a unique moral problem inasmuch as the magisterium is the authentic interpreter of the divine law transmitted through Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition. In ecclesial matters, the superior–subordinate relationship does not concern merely earthly authority. Superiors are distinguished by their magisterial authority, especially as regards laity. Consequently, in the ecclesial setting, subordinates depend upon superiors as one source of clarity about the divine and natural law. This creates the paradoxical situation that a subordinate who seeks to correct a superior must ensure his/her judgment of reason is “healthy” based on clarifications offered by the superior he/she wishes to correct. Fortunately, this complication is ameliorated in the broader theological context. For the superior is not the primary authority of the divine and natural law. The divine law is primarily known through Scripture and Sacred Tradition, and the natural law known through reason. Consequently, the authority of the superior is not sui generis or absolute, but is itself subordinate to the authority of revelation and natural reason as endowed in human beings by God.30 And this means that the subordinate 27 28 29 30 ST II-II, q. 33, a. 3, resp. ST II-II, q. 33, a. 3, ad 2. See ST II-II q. 91; see also Matthew Levering, Christ’s Fulfillment of Torah and Temple: Salvation According to Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 15–30. While not speaking about natural law, the above claim regarding the divine law is clear in the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei When Our Fathers Fall 1035 can also determine the health of his/her judgment of reason by means of Scripture, Tradition, and natural reason (with emphasis on the first) in order to offer correction. Of course, when the subordinate offers correction he/she might have made an incorrect judgment and misapprehended a superior’s actions for evil when it was not. But this can happen even with a healthy judgment of reason. The key is that those seeking to offer correction seek to maintain a healthy judgment. Maintaining a healthy reason would seem to include a humility to be shown how one has interpreted something incorrectly. In addition to a healthy reason, Aquinas also notes the corrector needs moral virtue. Importantly, Aquinas freely admits that sin does not completely remove healthy judgment of reason, especially concerning matters not pertaining to the corrector’s own sin, and thus a sinner can have the necessary capacity and judgment to accurately see and admonish the sin of another.31 However, sin does reduce one’s effectiveness as a corrector in three ways. First, when a person has sinned gravely and attempts to correct a lesser sin in his brother, the sin of the corrector can render him “unworthy” to correct another. Second, if the corrector’s sin is well known, then her attempt to correct another can lead to scandal, because it would suggest the correction is not practiced out of charity, but rather ostentation. Third is that the corrector might slip into a sense of moral superiority and fail to correct with due humility. This is especially difficult to avoid because Aquinas notes that, in making the correction, the corrector who has sinned not only proves the sinfulness of his brother’s deeds but also shows the corrector himself is condemnable on account of his evil deeds.32 The fourth article of the question on fraternal correction is most important for the current analysis because it asks whether we are obligated to correct prelates. Again, Aquinas distinguishes correction given in charity without punishment from correction in the order of justice involving punishment.33 In the ST, Aquinas maintains that punishment is appropri- 31 32 33 Verbum, §10: “This teaching office is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully in accord with a divine commission and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it draws from this one deposit of faith everything which it presents for belief as divinely revealed.” ST II-II, q. 33, a. 5, resp. ST II-II, q. 33, a. 3, resp. ST II-II, q. 33, a. 4, resp. 1036 Joshua R. Brown ately exercised only by prelates, and so laity cannot correct in that way.34 However, fraternal correction as an act of charity is universal, and thus can and should be offered to superiors should they fall into sin.35 That said, Aquinas recognizes that the subordinate’s correction of a superior is fraught with practical difficulties, and he offers advice on how to virtuously correct prelates. First, Aquinas says that, when correcting a prelate, a subordinate ought to “adhere to a manner congruent to the situation.”36 Aquinas seems to mean “congruent” as the kind of decorum proper to the subordinate–superior relationship: he says the subordinate should not be “impudent and harsh,” but correct his prelate with “gentleness and reverence.”37 Additionally, Aquinas defines “inordinate” correction as occurring when a subordinate “irreverently scolds” or “speaks disparagingly” of his prelate.38 Aquinas additionally counsels that is not typically proper to fraternal correction to reprove another in public unless you are an equal, and hence “he who is not an equal can admonish privately and reverently.”39 There is an important proviso to Aquinas’s advice regarding public correction. When discussing whether fraternal correction requires private admonition to precede public denunciation, Aquinas argues that, “if they are public sins, not only should the remedy be applied to he who has sinned that he may become better, but also to others who were aware of it, so that they may not be scandalized.”40 Additionally, Aquinas notes that a sinner can sin in secret but still harm others, such as in a plan of sedition or committing to heretical teachings.41 Would Aquinas conclude that, in a situation in which a subordinate finds his or her prelate is guilty of 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 That is, a layperson cannot punish a prelate inasmuch as she is his subordinate. Qua layperson, one does not possess the authority to laicize or remove a bishop, for example. However, if a layperson is also a magistrate or official of the justice system, he/she possesses a different competence of authority that legitimately can be used to exact punitive measures against someone who happens to be his/her ecclesiastical superior, since the cleric’s authority does not extend to the sphere of civil justice. ST II-II, q. 33, a. 4, resp. Specifically, Aquinas emphasizes that the act proceeding from a habit or power (in this case, charity) extends to whatever is contained under the object of the power of that habit. Since charity is love of God and all others for God’s own sake, prelates are not omitted as proper objects of charity, and thus not fraternal correction when it proceeds from charity, as opposed to justice. ST II-II, q. 33, a. 4, resp. ST II-II, q. 33, a. 4, resp. ST II-II, q. 33, a. 4, ad 1. ST II-II, q. 33, a. 4, ad 2. ST II-II, q. 33, a. 7, resp. ST II-II, q. 33, a. 7, resp. When Our Fathers Fall 1037 public sins or sins that will harm others, the subordinate ought to breach the “private and reverent admonishment” principle we saw above? The answer seems to depend on the circumstances, because sins concerning the common good ultimately fall under justice. Subordinates do not possess the authority to coercively punish prelates, but are competent to denounce prelates’ sins publicly. So, under the aegis of justice, the subordinate might be able to virtuously publicly admonish the prelate in the case of public sins that cause scandal or private sins that greatly affect the common good. At the same time, Aquinas might urge caution against publicly admonishing prelates even for just reasons. For one, the subordinate is still not equal with the prelate. Therefore, it seems prudent that a subordinate enlists one equal to the prelate to admonish him in public, if it is needed. This is not always possible, but it is in the context of the laity–clergy relationship. Another reason Aquinas provides for being hesitant to admonish a prelate in public is “so that he may keep his good name.”42 Aquinas gives three reasons for why this is important. First, often the only thing keeping a person from greater sin is fear of dishonor, and so once he is dishonored, he is more likely to sin worse than before. Second, dishonoring one prelate may also dishonor those with whom he is associated. Third, making one man’s private sin public may induce others to the same sin.43 Significantly, Aquinas recognizes that the concern for reputation is not an absolute good, and a good conscience takes precedence over a good name.44 Still, the act of fraternal correction involves a healthy respect for another and the effect of his/her dishonor on others as part of the decision of how to admonish the wrongdoer. Ultimately, this concern for reputation must be understood in light of charity. When we love another for God’s sake, we love also when they are praised for the good they do, since they stand as an example and promotion of virtue conducive to loving God. If a fellow Christian departs from the path of rectitude in a private way, this does not cancel out either the virtue he/she has genuinely performed or the laudable celebration of that virtue by others. Our goal in charity is to help our brother or sister become more perfect in his/her virtue, and not “expose” them as hypocrites, and so on. Therefore, out of charity, it is preferable to correct privately rather than in public, so as to help our brother or sister the opportunity to return 42 43 44 ST II-II, q. 33, a. 7, resp. ST II-II, q. 33, a. 7, resp. ST II-II, q. 33, a. 7, resp. 1038 Joshua R. Brown to virtue. This is especially true with clergy: I cannot in charity relish the dishonor of my superior, because then his moral authority in good things is weakened. If this can be avoided without compromising justice, then it seems the best way forward is to admonish a prelate in private. Filial Remonstration in Early Confucianism While Aquinas certainly has a clearly helpful account of how subordinates can offer fraternal correction to superiors based in the virtue of charity, it is also apparent that his account is not specifically formulated with laity in mind. For laity, the problem of remonstrating with ecclesial superiors is not simply a fraternal matter, though as I said above, certainly all Christians are brothers and sisters in Christ. There is also a way that laypersons relate to clergy in a filial relationship. Hence, knowing how to correct a clergyman as a layperson without diminishing the proper reverence and honor can be difficult. Sadly, in our age, where nearly all human relationships are reduced to the libido dominandi, many Catholics (including many Catholic theologians) do not treat the power disparity between clergy and laity as good and worth preserving in moral interactions between the two. Unlike postmodern Western culture, the Confucian tradition provides resources for negotiating moral correction in ways that support and preserve the proper authority and reverence inherent in filial bonds. For this reason, the Confucian reflection on filial remonstration proves a helpful complement to the concept of fraternal correction for the purpose of understanding how laity can virtuously admonish delinquent clerics while not disrupting the nature of and goods found within the laity–clergy bond. This section will build toward an eventual synthesis between fraternal correction and filial remonstration (jian) by developing the latter in the terms laid out by the Confucian tradition.45 Notably, jian is a more precise verb than the Latin correctio as a form of moral correction. As the radical to the graph 諫 suggests, jian primarily signifies verbal forms of remonstration.46 Unlike the Latin correctio, which can be implemented via 45 46 Though focused on neither filial remonstration per se nor early China, the best study in English that examines the broader context of Chinese thought on filial virtue is without doubt Keith N. Knapp, Selfless Offspring: Filial Children and Social Order in Medieval China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005). Another helpful contextual resource (though not containing an essay examining filial remonstration itself ) is Filial Piety in Chinese Thought and History, ed. Alan K. L. Chan and Sor-hoon Tan (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004). The word yan (言) means “to speak” or “words” and often indicates words associated When Our Fathers Fall 1039 punishment and therefore requires distinctions on Aquinas’s part between correction ex caritate and ex iustitiae, the Chinese jian excludes punishment of superiors by subordinates.47 Punishments (xing; 刑) are a different kind of action, and are typically understood to be fixed by law, and thus properly authorized superiors. In the Confucian tradition, jian is most often discussed in the context of the ruler–minister relationship, concerning the minister’s duties to remonstrate with a wayward ruler. The father–son relationship was a less common context to discuss the morality of remonstration, but still significant. The relational context of remonstration is important for early Confucianism because of the goods involved in remonstration. With the father–son relationship, for example, the child seeking to correct a parent undertakes a different task from the reproving minister. For the child must seek the remonstration in such a way as to guard the intrinsic goods of the father–son relationship in the act of remonstration.48 Therefore, in the Confucian tradition, filial remonstration is inherent to being a virtuous son, to possessing the fullness of filial virtue (xiao), to performing those deeds necessary to be virtuous as a son (or daughter by extension).49 At the same time, the idea of filial virtue is not isolated from the general cultivation of moral virtue and rectitude. In fact, the Confucian tradition presupposes that those who remonstrate should themselves be sure to cultivate moral virtue.50 For example, in the Da Dai Liji, we find the following passage: “The filial piety of the moral gentleman is like this: he offers remonstration by means of his own rectification.”51 There are two important aspects of this passage that show how moral rectification 47 48 49 50 51 with types of speech when used as a radical form, as it does in 諫. The Chinese term for punishments (xing; 刑) denotes typically legal forms of punishment that superiors (especially rulers) can render to subordinates, but not the reverse. For a helpful Confucian account of the father–son relationship and how it shapes the moral imagination, see Tu Wei-Ming, “Self-hood and Otherness: The Father–Son Relation in Confucian Thought,” in Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 113–30. Technically, Tu’s reflections are indicative of a perspective scholars refer to as “New Confucianism” rather than the Classical tradition, but they are illuminating nonetheless. The concept of xiao in early Confucianism and more broadly early Chinese thought is complex. For helpful overviews, see Philip J. Ivanhoe, “Filial Piety as a Virtue,” in Chan and Tan, Filial Piety in Chinese Thought and Tradition, 189–202, and Joshua R. Brown, Balthasar in Light of Early Confucianism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), 42–100. This is a classic theme in the Confucian tradition more broadly; see Mengzi, 2A:2.7. Da Dai Liji, Zengzi Ben Xiao, 5. 1040 Joshua R. Brown precedes virtuous remonstration. Most explicitly, the passage argues that rectification is the proper instrument through which remonstration is offered. Unless a son knows the moral dao and is himself rectified, he cannot correct his parents. Second, the Confucian tradition sees filial and ministerial remonstration as aspects of the path to being a “moral gentleman” (junzi; 君子). Filial remonstration is therefore a virtuous activity flowing out of a son’s rectified heart-mind, whereby he enacts his filial obligations to his parents when the latter fall into moral error. Here I should note that, by “filial obligation,” I mean that early Confucianism argues that sons have an inherent responsibility to care for the moral rectification of their parents. But this is not typically presented as a kind of reciprocity argument in which children owe their parents moral correction because of the formation they themselves received. Rather, the responsibility arises out of the demands of the love by which one loves his or her parents—it is a responsibility of affection and devotion (and for this reason, applicable to the priest–laity relation). Since the need to care for parents’ rectification flows from filial love, a major Confucian concern is to discern the proper practice of remonstration. For example, the Baihutong lists five different types of remonstration based on different virtues that should be practiced in different contexts.52 The main question, then, is not whether, but how one practices virtuous filial remonstration. The Xiaojing provides one influential concrete description of the practice of filial remonstration. In this text, the disciple Zengzi asks Confucius, “if a son simply follows [cong; 從] whatever his father commands, can this be called filial piety?”53 Here the verb cong suggests mere obeisance and compliance on the part of children, and thus Zengzi asks if such compliance is equivalent to filial virtue. The Confucian tradition by-and-large rejects such a reduction of filial piety and argues, instead, that xiao must include being willing to “contend” (zheng; 爭) with parents when they are in the wrong.54 52 53 54 Baihutong, Juan Si, Jian zheng, 11. The text does not technically specify five “kinds,” “classes,” or “types” of jian. Rather it simply says there are five jian (you wu jian; 有五 諫). The text seems to treat what follows as different strategies for remonstration, but it is unclear if all are seen as equally valid and important. Xiaojing, 15. Xiaojing, 15. The Xiaojing embraces contending (zheng) with parents as part of filial remonstration, though below in the essay I show that contentiousness is seen by some Confucian authors as inappropriate filial remonstration. In other words, esteeming filial jian as contending with parents is not a universally accepted standard in When Our Fathers Fall 1041 Upon this interpretation, filial remonstration is considered a form of filial service (shi; 事) to parents, because through it, the son seeks his parent’s good. This is explicit in one Zengzian chapter of the Da Dai Liji.55 Here we find someone asks Zengzi if there is a proper way to serve parents. Zengzi replies, There is: love and reverence [ai er jing; 愛而敬]. If your father and mother’s actions concord with the dao, then follow/obey them. If your parents are not in accordance with the dao, then remonstrate with them. If you remonstrate to no avail, treat them like they are from yourself. To follow without remonstrating [when needed], this is not xiao; to remonstrate without following [when proper], this is not xiao either.56 This passage clearly shows how remonstration is related to loving and honoring parents. As true love concerns desiring the good of the beloved, true love for parents means desiring they do what is right and avoid the wrong. According to Zengzi, filial virtue is not identifiable with courage to remonstrate or complaisance per se, but the ability to accurately discern and properly respond to the parent’s deeds with whichever act is needed. Notably, for early Confucians, wrongdoing was not merely the offense of social mores, but a departure from flourishing. Though addressing ministerial remonstration, the Han scholar Liu Xiang nicely articulates this perspective: “When the ruler has faults, this is the sprouting bud of great danger and death. If one observes his ruler’s great mistakes and does not remonstrate with him, this means he is being flippant [qing; 輕] about his ruler’s danger and death.”57 In the political context, it is self-evident that a ruler’s mistakes can engender great danger for him, as they can incite rebellions, weaken the state, and genuinely bring about his downfall. However, parents who fall into moral disorder also place themselves in great danger. In early China, one prominent example of parents gone wrong is when they 55 56 57 Confucianism, but the more essential point of not being complacent when parents do wrong is. Notably, the Chinese scholar Luo Xinhui holds the opinion that ten chapters in the Da Dai Liji which contain “Zengzi” in their titles are indeed the remnants of an earlier eponymous book attributed to Zengzi. For discussion, see Luo Xinhui, 罗新慧, Zengzi Yanjiu: Fu “Da Dai Liji” “Zengzi” Shi Pian Zhu Yi曾子研究：附《大戴礼记》“曾 子”十篇注译 (Beijing: Shangwu Yinshuguan, 2013). Da Dai Liji, Zengzi Shi Fumu, 1. Liu Xiang, Shuo Yuan, Zheng jian, 1. 1042 Joshua R. Brown became criminals—especially thieves or murderers—and therefore became subject to harsh punishments from the state. And so, even in the most practical sense, it was clear for early Confucians that inappropriate conduct was dangerous for parents and a departure from flourishing. Additionally, in the early Chinese context, protecting one’s parents from errors was a sign of love and reverence not only for one’s own parents, but one’s ancestral lineage as well. Early Chinese society was clan-based, wherein one’s reputation (ming; 名) impacted the reputation of the entire lineage. In such a society, protecting a parent (usually the father) from error would benefit not only the parent’s own pursuit of flourishing, but also the honor and reputation of the clan.58 All this is significant because (like Aquinas) early Confucians held that the form of filial remonstration should follow upon the reasons for which remonstration is performed—the love and reverence for parents. As a general rule of thumb, early Confucians argue that filial remonstration must be conducted in a manner that both preserves and enacts filial love and reverence for parents. Filial reverence (jing; 敬) is more easily discerned in Confucian arguments about proper remonstration. Essentially, early Confucians see reverential remonstration as correction of parents that is guided by the rules of ritual propriety governing the father–son relationship more broadly, and the act of filial remonstration in particular. The reason this distinction between the broad and particular rules of ritual propriety for remonstration is necessary is that it is unclear that certain claims about the proper ritual components of remonstration were in fact understood as normative for early Confucians. At the very least, early Confucians attempted to articulate filial remonstration according to the dictates of filial ritual propriety. Some texts, such as the Nei ze chapter of the Liji, even attempted to clarify the ritual dictates of filial remonstration in particular. The Nei ze says that, “when a parent commits an error, the son should remonstrate with them with humility and a harmonious expression, and speak with a gentle voice.”59 For early Confucianism, aspects of interpersonal interactions and relationships such as posture, facial expression, and tone are key components of ritual propriety—these features signal proper comportment that can communicate either reverence or irreverence. These are ostensibly filial analogs to the main ritual component of ministerial remonstration, which 58 59 For a helpful discussion, see K. C. Chang, Art, Myth, and Ritual: The Path to Political Authority in Ancient China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 9–32. Liji, Nei ze, 18. When Our Fathers Fall 1043 consists of approaching and withdrawing (jin tui; 進退) from one’s ruler with due reverence and humility.60 Another aspect of remonstration falling under the reverential component concerns the way the correction is verbally communicated. In the Nei ze, filial remonstration is said to require a “gentle voice” (rou sheng; 柔 聲). Similar arguments can be found throughout the Confucian tradition that avoiding harshness is essential to filial remonstration. One passage attributed to Zengzi argues that filial remonstration should be “subtle” (wei; 微).61 In part, the need to remonstrate subtly reflects the broader linguistic norms of Chinese culture, in which it is often considered rude to be overly explicit. Additionally, the exhortation for subtle remonstration likely expresses a concern that a son not “broadcast” his father’s mistake(s) too publicly and explicitly so that others may overhear and shame him or the clan. Another Zengzian passage shows a similar concern when it says filial remonstration should never involve “contentious argument” (zheng bian; 爭辯).62 This teaching seems to exclude a kind of hasty escalation in intensity of remonstration such that it becomes “contentious,” as well as engaging in a back-and-forth debate with one’s father. Undoubtedly the concern against contentious argument does not mean the Confucian tradition thinks the son ought to cease remonstration when it is unsuccessful. Rather, the point is that remonstrating with an angry father is ineffective and will lead to enmity between father and son. Thus, the son should cease his remonstration before it becomes a contentious argument, taking up the cause later when his father is more conducive to correction. One clear reason the Confucian tradition gives for why a humble appearance, gentle voice, subtle words, and avoiding contentious argument matter for filial remonstration is the goal to honor one’s parent through correction. An oft-repeated warning is that, “when your parents are at fault remonstrate with them, but do not be rebellious [bu ni; 不逆].”63 In the context of the family, the meaning of “rebellion” is not obvious. On the one hand, it could be taken to mean disobedience (see Analects 4.18), which would obviously conflict with the ends of remonstration in the first place.64 On the other hand, rebellion could signify alienation between 60 61 62 63 64 See Baihutong, Juan si, Jianzheng, 11. Da Dai Liji, Zengzi Li Xiao, 3. Da Dai Liji, Zengzi Shi Fumu, 1. Da Dai Liji, Zengzi Da Xiao, 6. For an interesting and classic discussion in sinology that interprets filial disobedience in terms of moral actualization and post-conventional morality, see Heiner Roetz, 1044 Joshua R. Brown father and son that essentially renders the son unable to serve his father in ways his filial duties require. At the very least, filial remonstration is meant to eventually strengthen and not endanger the father–son bond. The fact that early Confucians suggested caution on the part of remonstrating children in order to not endanger the father–son relationship points to the foundation of filial remonstration in love. A fuller account of how filial love informs filial remonstration is apparent in the Confucians concern for indefatigable remonstration. As I suggested above, when faced with a parent who does not listen or accept remonstration, Confucian texts do not recommend the son abandon his remonstration. Rather, the son is exhorted to try again unceasingly as long as it is possible. This advice takes several interesting forms. One of the most prominent forms focuses on the strength or commitment of the son needed in order to maintain remonstration. Both Confucius and Zengzi are attributed a teaching that filial children should remonstrate “without growing weary” (bu juan; 不倦) of the task.65 With this approach, the emphasis lies on how sons ought not despair when their remonstration is not effective, since there would be a temptation to abandon their fathers. Rather, they should persist in this work because their love for their fathers does not grow weary (at least it should not for virtuous sons). The Baihutong offers a somewhat idiosyncratic yet illuminating approach to the theme of maintaining remonstration. This text employs the correlative cosmology framework prominent in Han China to discuss the natural “models” (fa; 法) for remonstration. Here we find that a remonstrating son cannot abandon (bu qu; 不去) his father, for “they are one body divided into two” (yi ti er fen; 一體而分).66 The father and son are then compared to the natural models of the elements Wood (the son) and Fire (the father).67 If the son were to abandon his father, it would be like Wood leaving Fire—it would soon be extinguished. In this way, the Baihutong suggests that the father–son relation is based in and expressive of the correlates governing the cosmos, and therefore it is necessary to maintain it. 65 66 67 Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age: A Reconstruction under the Aspect of the Breakthrough toward Postconventional Thinking (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 56–66. Da Dai Liji, Zengzi Li Xiao, 3. The same teaching is attributed to Confucius in Liji, Fang Ji, 18. Baihutong, Juan si, Jianzheng, 10. Typical of Han-era texts, this passage discusses the father–son relationship in terms of the correlational cosmology of the Five Phases (wu xing; 五行). When Our Fathers Fall 1045 Finally, another important aspect of Confucian discussion of maintaining remonstration concerns how to properly respond to parents who are not only unconvinced by correction, but become violent. To reiterate, early Confucians saw filial remonstration as a form of service primarily given by adult sons. In early China, the social arrangement of clans and households meant that fathers were typically considered the patriarchs until they died.68 Thus the father still held paternal authority over even adult children and had the necessary authority to punish even adult children. In short, just as a minister’s remonstration with his ruler could bring about deleterious effects for the former and cost him his life, so too remonstrating with his father opened a son to punishment and harm. The Neize chapter of the Liji stresses that the son should never abandon remonstration with his father, particularly when it endangers the common good. The text is so adamant in this perspective that it says that, “even if the parent becomes angry, displeased, and flogs the son until he bleeds, the son should not give in to hatred and resentment, but let reverence and filial devotion arise in him all the more.”69 It is worth emphasizing that, in this passage, the proper response to parental lack of virtue through violence is not responding in kind, but turning even more to filial reverence and devotion. In other words, even when one’s filial correction is resisted, rejected, and returned with violence, children should return to the principles that animate their correction in the first place: love and honor for their parents. Some Practical Results In this concluding section of the article, I seek to show how the complementary reading of Aquinas and early Confucianism produces concrete moral suggestions for the lay correction of clergy in the Catholic context. Although the natural kinship bond of father–son does not entirely apply to the priest–laity relationship, there is an analogy in that laypersons love and care for clergy e spiritual fathers who have a legitimate and important role as a paternal authority in our lives. And so, while what I offer here is far from exhaustive, I think it nonetheless succeeds in providing concrete guidance to the virtuous performance of lay fraternal and filial correction. First and foremost, there is a point of agreement between Aquinas 68 69 For broader context of the family life in classical China and Han China, see Mu-chou Poo, Daily Life in Ancient China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 68–73, and Michael Loewe, Everyday Life in Early Imperial China during the Han Period 202 BC–AD 220 (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2005), 54–63. Liji, Nei ze, 18. 1046 Joshua R. Brown and early Confucianism worth emphasizing. Both Aquinas and early Confucianism argue that correction or remonstration has to be enacted in accordance with the principle of love that animates it. Consequently, when laity face the prospect of correcting clergy, we must first be very clear with ourselves about our motivations. If our main motivation is anger or taking joy in being able to correct the immoral actions of a clergyman, we ought not move forward with correction. Of course, the principle of correcting in love does not remove all obstacles or resolve all questions. Whereas Aquinas says that correcting a brother for the sake of justice and the common good should be done by a proper authority, the Confucian tradition teaches sons should remonstrate with parents even when the common good is threatened, though they lack the authority to punish their parents.70 At the very least, what this should point out to us is that, when a layperson remonstrates with a priest, we cannot do so as competent authorities (at least ecclesially) that can use punishment as a means of correcting our superior. Rather, we can select only those forms of remonstration appropriate to our “filial” position. This is to say that lay correction of a prelate must flow from the principle of filial love, seeking the good of one’s superiors and their flourishing. Here the Confucian emphasis on filial love shows its fruitfulness for Christian reflection on this matter. Just like the Confucian filial son, Catholic laity must seek to remonstrate with clergy in ways that maintain filial love for them. At the very least, laity must love wayward clergy qua our superiors and will that they flourish in that role. Rather than seeking to use remonstration as a means of gaining power in an imbalanced relationship or becoming obstinate before our superior, lay remonstration must seek to help the clergyman become a superior whose commands can be obeyed joyfully and promptly. The concern to ground lay correction of clergy in the principle of both Christian and filial love permeates the entire task of remonstration, and so as I move to more practical considerations of lay correction, it is fitting to use this principle as a canon of virtue. One aspect that in some sense must 70 My thanks to the blind peer reviewer from Nova et Vetera who identified this problem in my argument. I believe this disagreement between Aquinas and the Confucian tradition may signal a deeper complication to explore on this issue. It raises the question of to what degree Aquinas intends to distinguish acting for charity from acting for justice, and how those distinguished ends (or the analogous correlates) are treated in the Confucian tradition. Suffice it to say, I lack the space here to address this problem to the extent it deserves; my solution above is a practical one that seems correct to me, but is admittedly not a perfect resolution to the problem. When Our Fathers Fall 1047 accompany the process of lay correction is also seen in both Aquinas and early Confucianism. The one who seeks to correct another—especially a superior—must not only do so for the right reasons (Christian and filial love), but also must cultivate in his or her own life a pursuit of virtue. The Confucian tradition stresses this is necessary in order to rightly see how a parent has fallen away from what is right; only by seeking virtue more generally can we have the means to discern and defend what is truly right for our parent. This essentially corresponds to Aquinas’s argument that the corrector must possess a “healthy judgment of reason.” Though it is also worth recalling Aquinas emphasizes that he who has a poor history of pursuing virtue should often not remonstrate, since it may likely be either ineffective or a cause of scandal. Consequently, before offering correction to a clergyman, one must first determine if he or she is the appropriate person to offer such correction. On the one hand, the remonstrator must first examine his or her own conscience and determine the intention of the correction to be offered. Is it love, justice, or something un-virtuous? If correction corresponds more to justice than love, it is likely the case that the layperson should seek another means to address the problem of concern because the layperson lacks the ecclesial authority to deal with a superior in matters of justice. Additionally, the remonstrator must examine his or her own life of virtue. Does she possess sufficient moral virtue to accurately recognize the lack of virtue in the clergyman? Has the remonstrator sinned in such a way that can obscure his vision about what the clergyman has done? Is the remonstrator guilty of a sin that would cause great scandal were she to attempt to correct the clergyman of his shortcoming? Depending on the circumstance, it may be right for the layperson either to conclude that correction is not necessary or to seek to enlist another layperson or clergyperson in order to help either ascertain the veracity of her perception of a priest’s or bishop’s sin, or to help bring the correction itself. For the purpose of this article, let us assume a layperson has examined herself and concluded she can and should virtuously correct a cleric. Aquinas and early Confucianism show that there are two important aspects of how one should remonstrate with a superior. First, Aquinas wisely advises that remonstration should occur in private if possible, advice we also saw present in early Confucian texts. The goal of remonstration is to expose sin to the sinner, not to expose another’s sin to public awareness as such. As Aquinas saw so well, on the one hand, this is for the sake of the sinner’s return to rectification: public shame can often be one of the few external limits for indulging in sin, and publicizing another’s sin may well 1048 Joshua R. Brown cause him to give himself more fully to sin rather than seek righteousness. But additionally, the public exposing of a superior’s sins has a deleterious effect on the community because the superior then can lose his moral authority, even regarding matters not related to the sin he himself has committed. Put differently, public correction of a clergyman can actually cause the clergyman to lose his functional status as a genuine superior. Now this is not to say that clergy do not deserve to lose their moral authority in certain situations. I simply mean that, if our goal is to correct a clergyman whom we love as superior, then we cannot seek to inordinately expose his sin to the public eye. Recall that, for Aquinas, this is true for fraternal correction except in matters that affect the public good. But this is trickier because such circumstances relate less to charity and more to justice. Therefore, Aquinas would likely say that, whenever possible, if virtue and concern for the common good requires public correction, it should be offered by an equal or a superior, not a subordinate. At the very least, such correction would allow the public reputation of the clergy in general to maintain a good name and not fall into undue disrepute on the part of the wrong-doer. In addition to privacy, early Confucianism emphasizes the need for remonstration to be performed with proper comportment. The filial son correcting his father must still show forth the principle of love and respect for his father as he offers his correction. In one sense, this clearly depends upon cultural values of comportment. In early China, for example, reverence was often communicated through physical postures such as bowing, or how one sat at the table that would look very different from analogous “polite” postures in the twenty-first-century United States. Thus, the Confucian point is that the son’s mannerisms and conduct in remonstration should conform to the standards of ritual propriety expected of him. In terms of physical comportment, lay remonstration with priests and clergy can draw upon both cultural and ecclesial norms that help to maintain and communicate filial reverence in the act of remonstration. For example, it seems condign that, when remonstrating, subordinates should not stand while a superior sits if possible. Additionally, the remonstrator should resist certain admonitory gestures such as wagging the finger or furrowing the brow too harshly. Such gestures and postures imply superiority and authority that are inapplicable to laity vis-à-vis superiors and can encourage the remonstrator to offer correction in un-virtuous ways. Early Confucianism also emphasizes correcting one’s father with “gentle speech.” This seems to mean at least two things. First, that the son should choose very carefully words that will effectively point out his father’s When Our Fathers Fall 1049 wrongdoing, but without being too explicit or condemnatory (e.g., the “subtle words” in Zengzi’s advice). Second, the son should deliver his words in an attitude of humility and an appropriate tone of voice, such as with “gentle sounds.” This is analogous to Aquinas’s advice that one should not remonstrate in an “impudent and harsh” way, but “with gentleness and reverence.” In the context of lay correction of clergy, the rule of gentle speech makes good sense for two reasons. The first is practical: correcting a priest or bishop in a harsh or impudent way will make the wrongdoer less conducive to correction and provide him reasons to dismiss the correction as inauthentic. A clergyman may well perceive harsh correction as an indication of the layperson’s resistance to ecclesial authority or become so offended by the correction that he focuses on the wrong done to him rather than the wrong he has done. The second reason the rule of gentle speech makes sense is due to the connection with charity and filial love. Addressing a cleric with harshness and impudence undermines the reverence and love of clergy that is supposed to animate lay correction in the first place. The subordinate and son must still be a subordinate and son even when correcting his superior—we do not exchange places just because the superior has fallen into evil in some regard. Indeed, according to Confucianism, correction is a task my subordinate position requires of me qua subordinate. Hence, I should not undermine or abandon the proper attitudes and demeanor of my role in order to offer correction. A final practical guideline for lay remonstration with clergy concerns what to do when remonstration fails. Sadly, it is much easier to persist in sin than virtue. Even if I have offered correction for the right reasons and in the right way, I still may find my efforts come to no avail with my clergyman. What then can be done? The Confucian tradition helpfully shows that, from the view of filial love, the son cannot abandon his purpose to correct his father, but must prudentially seek to remonstrate when it might be effective so as to save his father from error. Ultimately, this is due to the principle of love: if we seek the amendment of our superior for the superior’s own good (ex caritate), then we cannot fall away after one attempt. If the remonstration does not go well (e.g., the clergyman becomes angry), it is helpful to let him calm down for a time rather than persist immediately in the correction. However, one should nonetheless return to the task of correction when it is prudent to do so. This is especially the case in the ecclesial context because of the kind of filial love laypersons have for clergy. As we saw above, the Baihutong states that the natural father and son are “one body in two parts” and that, 1050 Joshua R. Brown just like Wood is with Fire, if Fire leaves Wood, it is extinguished. In the Church established by Christ, clergy are essential to lay discipleship: the magisterium helps laity to know how to interpret divine revelation well, to know what practices and rituals are proper and conducive to salvation, and to organize a sustainable community among the faithful. To abandon a pastor to his sin is, in a very real respect, to leave Christians without a good that is essential to the faith. Such abandonment also deprives the pastor of what he needs to be faithful to his ordination: the proper moral authority to guide and support his flock. Hence, laity should not merely attend another parish or diocese in the case of a priest or bishop who sins. When such decisions are premature (i.e., not a last resort), they are forms of genuinely abandoning one’s priest to his own sin, which endangers not only him but also one’s fellow parishioners. And this in turn harms in some way (though not absolutely) the relationships necessary to flourish as Christians. Ultimately, of course, the remonstration with a priest or bishop is not the same as remonstration with a father. So, what should be done in the case of the persistent refusal of a clergyman to accept correction in the faith and turn away from evil? It seems to me that there are two clear paths for laypersons to follow. The first is preferable. When possible, the layperson should communicate the concerns to someone who is equal or superior to the wrongdoer under consideration in hopes that he can be induced to righteousness by the authority of another. The second possibility is that the layperson exposes the priest or bishop’s sin to the public eye. The second seems to be just only if the sin persists in such a manner or develops in such a way as to genuinely threaten the common good of the Church or the community more broadly. For example, if I were to discover my priest had been viewing internet pornography in the office, this would clearly be the matter of a private sin for which I should offer him filial correction as persistently as possible. However, such private sin can begin to affect the common good in several ways. For one, the longer the priest persists in this sin, the more likely it becomes that other parishioners will become aware of his habit. This would harm the common good both by the power of rumor and scandal and by causing some parishioners to perhaps view pornography as not as grave a sin as Church teaching insists it is. Additionally, the priest might become obstinate and use the pulpit as a means to upbraid those who attempt to correct him, or even begin to offer casuistic sermons that obscure Church teaching on pornography. In this situation, correction ex caritate should likely give way to correction ex officio and the matter should be reported When Our Fathers Fall 1051 to the priest’s superiors. However, should that prove ineffectual or if the matter must be dealt with immediately (for example, if the priest in question tells a room of young men it is virtuous to experiment with pornography and masturbation), then the layperson can, in the name of justice, publicly remonstrate with the priest. However, such remonstration would fall more under the virtue of justice than charity, and thus not be most properly an act of fraternal correction. As a final summary word, it is self-evident at this point that a morally virtuous lay correction of clergy cannot carry only one form. For, both secular and ecclesial cultural norms impact the manner of correction and its ability to safeguard a filial attitude such that the form of filial correction in its particulars will be distinctive for each cultural context. At the same time, it is also clear that the lay correction of clergy should always be performed out of Christian love for clerics and should be an example and expression of such love. For lay Christians there is both a fraternal aspect to Christian love of clergy and a filial one, and we must strive to honor and express both in our attempts to aid our wayward priests whom we love, and for whom we will the good of happiness. Therefore, the virtuous correction of clergy requires constant reflection upon whether and how a laypersons actions are expressive of and faithful to the unique Christian love laity owe clergy, which is at once fraternal and filial. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2022): 1053–1096 1053 Thomists at War: Pierre Mandonnet, Étienne Gilson, and the Contested Relationship between Aquinas’s and Dante’s Thought (1879–2021)*2 George Corbett University of St Andrews St Andrews, Scotland At the turn of 1921, the French Dominican Pierre Mandonnet (1858– 1936) helped to launch a new historical institute for Thomistic Studies at the Dominican study house of Le Saulchoir in Belgium. One of the pressing purposes of the foundation of the Institut historique d’études thomistes was to provide a properly historical approach to Aquinas’s doctrine which would defend its integrity and authority, and refute the alarming assertations of those outside the Dominican order who were, on the view of its founders, abusing the historical method to undermine the true sense of Aquinas’s thought.13The founders singled out Étienne Gilson (1884–1978), whose Le Thomisme, introduction au système de saint Thomas * 1 I am grateful to the Aquinas Institute and the Thomistic Institute, Blackfriars, Oxford, for inviting me to give a lecture on Aquinas and Dante in 2021. As will become apparent, I was mindful of a series of anniversaries: the 800th anniversary of St. Dominic’s death and of the first establishment of the Blackfriars in Oxford (in 1221); the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death (in 1321); and the 100th anniversary of the launch of the Institut historique d’études thomistes at the Dominican study house of Le Saulchoir in Belgium, and of the Oxford Dominican priory on its current site (in 1921). I am also grateful to Simon Gilson, Patricia Kelly, and the peer reviewer and the copy editor of Nova et Vetera, for their constructive suggestions. Antoine Leomonnyer, “Memorandum,” Archives O.P., Paris, III-L-545, cited in André Duval, “Au origines de l’ ‘Institut historique d’études Thomistes’ du Saulchoir [1920 et ss]: Notes et Documents,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 75, no. 3 (1991): 423–48, at 433. 1054 George Corbett was published a couple of years earlier (in 1919); according to Mandonnet, Gilson’s volume distorted the very nature and pedagogy of Thomist philosophy.2 Mandonnet and Gilson would become principal antagonists in the famous debates about Aquinas’s thought in the 1920s and 1930s. Less known, however, are their parallel skirmishes in the field of Dante studies. In this article, I suggest that we need to consider the battles in Thomism and Dante studies together, as part of a wider intellectual war that would question the very nature of Catholic theology and philosophy. I first survey the main battlefield—the debates about Aquinas’s thought—with specific reference to the controversies in the 1920s and 1930s about Gilson’s “Christian philosophy” and about Marie-Dominique Chenu (1895– 1990)’s Une école de théologie. In the second part, I turn to the skirmishes in the field of Dante studies between scholars such as, on the one hand, the French Dominicans Mandonnet and Joachim Berthier (1848–1924), who presented Dante as an essentially Thomist and Catholic poet, and, on the other hand, the lay historians Gilson and Bruno Nardi (1884–1968), who deconstructed the “myth of the Thomist Dante” and saw a fundamental disharmony between Aquinas’s and Dante’s thought, a view which profoundly influenced post-war Dante scholarship to the present day. In light of this intellectual history, in the third part, I reappraise constructively eight alleged points of divergence between Aquinas’s and Dante’s thought. I demonstrate that these key points of apparent divergence—as on the natural desire for the beatific vision, on the doctrine of two final ends for man, or on the relationships between philosophy and theology and between nature and grace—have as much to do with these scholars’ interpretations of Aquinas’s works as with their interpretations of Dante. Mandonnet, Gilson, and a Civil War in Thomism The Institut historique d’études thomistes: Maintaining the “Authority” and “Integrity” of Aquinas’s Doctrine Having entered the Dominican order in 1882, Mandonnet was professor of history at the University of Fribourg from 1891 to 1918; on retirement, he continued to research and teach at Le Saulchoir.3 Author of significant research on Siger of Brabant and St. Dominic, he collaborated on the critical edition of Aquinas’s works commissioned by Pope Leo XIII as 2 3 Pierre Mandonnet, O.P., Review of Étienne Gilson, Le Thomisme: Introduction au système de S. Thomas d’Aquin (1923), Bulletin thomiste 1 (1924–1926): 132–36. Le Saulchoir was the Dominican house of studies for the French province, in exile in Belgium between 1904 and 1939 due to the laws separating church and state. Thomists at War 1055 editor, for example, of Aquinas’s commentary on the Sentences and was one of three founders of the Revue thomiste in 1893.4 At Le Saulchoir, Mandonnet was also instrumental in the founding and mission of the Institut historique d’études thomistes from its inception in 1921 to his death in early 1936.5 One of “the giants of medieval studies,” and founder (also in 1921) and honorary president of the Société Thomiste (which published the Bulletin Thomiste beginning in 1924), Mandonnet’s name became “synonymous with fundamental research into the thought and writings of Thomas Aquinas.”6 For Mandonnet, the historical method facilitated a greater penetration into the thought of Aquinas and his contemporaries, and historical research, in this way, enriched and complemented the institutional teaching of Thomism as Scholastic theology and a perennial philosophy.7 But, like other founders of the institute, Mandonnet believed 4 5 6 7 See R. F. Bennett, “Pierre Mandonnet, O.P., and Dominican Studies,” History 24, no. 95 (1939): 193–205. On Siger, see Pierre Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et l’averroïsme latin au XIIIme siècle: Étude critique et documents inédits (Fribourg: Librairie de l’Université, 1899). Mandonnet subsequently brought out a second revised edition in two volumes: Siger de Brabant et l’averroïsme latin au XIIIme siècle, pt. 1, Étude critique (Leuven: Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1911), with the second volume an edition of selected texts used for his study, Siger de Brabant et l’averroïsme latin au XIIIme siècle, pt. 2, Textes inédits (Louvain: Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1908). Mandonnet’s study of St. Dominic, revised and edited after his death, has been translated into English: St. Dominic and His Work, 2 vols., trans. Mary Benedicta Larkin, O.P. (St Louis: Herder, 1944). An example of his scholarship on Aquinas is Des écrits authentiques de S. Thomas d’Aquin (Fribourg: L’oeuvre de Saint-Paul, 1910). Leomonnyer wrote in a memorandum: “For the organization and implementation of these courses, the institute would benefit from the exceptional experience and competence of Mandonnet who, in turn, would find useful collaborators for his own work and research projects amongst the younger fathers” (cited in Duval, “Au origines,” 433). Unless otherwise attributed, English translations throughout this article are my own. Mandonnet was specifically entrusted with a course on the development of Aquinas’s thought. See also Bennett, “Pierre Mandonnet,” 193–94. See Ralph McInerny, Praeambula fidei: Thomism and the God of the Philosophers (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 108; 91. This is clear, for example, from the ratio studiorum prepared by Ambroise Gardeil and Leomonnyer: the study of philosophy and theology is the standard curriculum sine qua non, to be taught according to the doctrine of Aquinas “who, under the supreme authority of the Holy Church and after the documents of the Faith, is the rule and final object of all our studies. The same applies to all other schools outside the order” (cited in Duval, “Au origines,” 432–33). The specialization in historical studies is referenced as complementary, and is not intended as a substitute or alternative mode of formation (433: “The Studium generale of the province of France may legitimately aspire to organize these complementary courses in Patristic theology and the historical sciences”). The prophetic concern that historical studies would come to take too central 1056 George Corbett that some recent scholars were using the historical method to undermine Aquinas’s doctrine, and thus by extension Catholic theology and philosophy. Gilson was one of three scholars singled out for criticism by Antoine Leomonnyer (1872–1932), the Dominican regent of studies at Le Saulchoir since September 1911, the others being the physicist and historian of medieval science Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) and Jean Durantel, whose Saint Thomas et le Pseudo-Denis, like Gilson’s Le Thomisme, had been published in 1919.8 Professor of ecclesiastical history at Le Saulchoir (1904–1014), and subsequently Mandonnet’s successor at Fribourg (1916–1937), the Dominican Mannès Jacquin (1872–1956), in his 1920 review of scholarship in medieval studies over the previous seven years, had found Durantel, Gilson, and Duhem particularly wanting in their interpretation of Aquinas.9 Durantel’s otherwise “remarkable” work on Aquinas contained a “radical flaw,” a fundamental misreading of Aquinas’s understanding of being, while Durantel’s understanding of creation is “more Neoplatonic than Thomist.”10 Leomonnyer appears to have found this exaggerated emphasis on neo-Platonism and Plotinus alarming in Gilson as well: “less brilliant” but a “surer guide” than Durantel, Gilson’s contentious thesis of the spirit of Christian philosophy is nonetheless 8 9 10 a place is, nonetheless, already registered at this early stage in the planning (434). In relation to philosophy, Mandonnet himself differentiates between three complementary forms of introduction: (1) pedagogical, (2) historical, and (3) critical. The first includes a clear definition of the proper object or field of philosophy, the division and subdivision of its parts, the logical order of their study, the method proper to each part, and finally the doctrinal content of each science. The second includes accounts of the texts, contexts, and intellectual issues informing Aquinas’s thought; how, with the material at his disposal and in relation to disparate views, Aquinas organized his own thought; the relationship between Aquinas’s thought and that of his contemporaries; and finally the historical reception and fate of Thomist doctrines. The third addresses comparatively the systematic ideas of leading modern philosophers with those of Aquinas, demonstrating that a true account of the philosophical method and of our faculties of knowledge is to be drawn from Aquinas (Mandonnet, Review of Gilson, Le Thomisme, 133–34). See Duval, “Au origines,” 433. See Mannès Jacquin, “Philosophie Médiévale,” in the “Bulletin d’histoire de la philosophie,” section of Revue de sciences philosophiques et théologiques 9, no. 4 (1920): 620–38. As Duval notes, the specific allusion to Duhem, Durantel, and Gilson suggests that Leomonnyer had read Jacquin’s review, or had discussed these works with him. On Jean Durantel, Saint Thomas et le Pseudo-Denis (Paris: F. Alcan, 1919), see Jacquin, “Philosophie Médiévale,” 626–32. Thomists at War 1057 already evident in germ.11 Duhem meanwhile was berated by Jacquin for an intellectual myopia: overly concerned with the disparate sources of Aquinas’s thought, he failed to appreciate Aquinas’s power of synthesis.12 In 1921, Gilson was still only in his mid-thirties, and “although the resurgence of Thomism [in the 1920s] exercised an immense influence over Gilson, he was not really party to its development.” Nonetheless, with his publications and his prominent and influential role in the national universities, Gilson would become an extremely influential “non-scholastic Thomist” and historian of the medieval period as a whole.13 And yet Leomonnyer, Jacquin, and Mandonnet were right to be aware of the potential threat posed by Gilson to at least their tradition of Thomism. For Gilson, the teachers of early-twentieth-century Catholic philosophy and theology misunderstood central features of their preferred primary authority, Aquinas. Furthermore, the relationship between Aquinas’s thought and Thomism was less one of organic development than of fundamental divergence: “At the beginning of the twentieth century, in Western Europe, in the teaching of Catholic schools and among scholastics who considered themselves Thomists, the true meaning of the philosophy of Saint Thomas had been lost. . . . The truth of the case is that, ever since the end of the thirteenth century, which was the century of Saint Thomas himself, this evil has been endemic to the teaching of Christian philosophy.”14 In short, Thomists, and Dominican Thomists in particular, failed to understand Thomas’s thought. Reflecting back at the beginning of the twenty-first century on the debates of the 1920s and 1930s, Ralph McInerny highlights Gilson’s “generalized attack on the Dominican Order, the great 11 12 13 14 On Étienne Gilson, Le Thomisme: Introduction de saint Thomas d’Aquin (Strasbourg: A. Vix, 1920), see Jacquin, “Philosophie Médiévale,” 632–34. On Pierre Duhem, Le systèm du monde: Histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon a Copernic (Paris: Hermann, 1917), see Jacquin, “Philosophie Médiévale,” 634–36. See Laurence K. Shook, Étienne Gilson (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984), 116. Shook situates the “high-powered Institut Historique d’Études Thomistes” at Saulchoir within a broader Catholic revival in Thomist and neo-Scholastic research in the 1920s, noting also, for example, the parallel establishment in 1921 of the Albertus Magnus Akademie in Cologne. Shook comments: “Gilson’s contribution to the thomist renaissance lay in the momentum provided by his books and by his presence as a defender of St. Thomas within the national universities. Significantly, when the Bulletin thomiste reviewed his work along with that of his students Gouhier and Koyré, it entitled the review “Le thomisme et les non-scholastiques” (2[1925]: 317). Gilson was probably pleased by the distinction” (115–16). Étienne Gilson, The Philosopher and Theology, trans. by Cécile Gilson (Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2020), 135. 1058 George Corbett commentators, and the école thomiste as it existed both prior to and after Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris. . . . The history of Thomism will become a history of misunderstanding and misinterpretation. Cajetan, John of St. Thomas, Sylvester of Ferrara, Capreolus—off with their heads! As for his contemporaries, Garrigou-Lagrange is demonized by Gilson.”15 Mandonnet’s Defense of Thomist Philosophy against Gilson’s “Christian Philosophy” The Dominican Mandonnet’s defense of the sacred vine of Thomism against the thorns of Gilson is particularly evident in the famous controversies about “Christian philosophy” in the 1920s and 1930s. In the first volume of the Bulletin Thomiste (1924), the organ of the Société Thomiste of which he was president, Mandonnet reviewed the second revised edition (1923) of Gilson’s Le Thomisme: introduction au système de S. Thomas d’Aquin (first published in 1921), as well as its first English edition, translated by Edward Bullough and published as The Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (1924).16 Mandonnet’s review embodies in miniature a founding purpose of the Institut historique: namely, to demonstrate—in relation to Aquinas’s own works and by the same historical method—why some historians “outside the Dominican order,” such as Gilson, in appealing to the “primitive Aquinas,” actually mistake and misrepresent his doctrine, undermining also, thereby, the Catholic philosophical and theological curriculum of the present day. In his review, Mandonnet welcomes Gilson’s modifications of certain judgments in the first edition of Le Thomisme, “of which he himself had seen the inconsistency,” and he also states his preference for the English 15 16 McInerny, Praeambula fidei, 40; 53. For example, in relation to Gilson’s polemical attack on Cajetan’s interpretation of Aquinas, McInerny comments that it is “painfully clear that [Gilson] is out to make a case against Cajetan and fairness to the great commentator will not characterize his criticisms. . . . It is embarrassing to read this needling and ambiguous attack on one of the giants of the Thomistic school [Cajetan]. But of course it is this school that Gilson will ultimately repudiate.” McInerny notes, for example, that “Gilson would say of the thought of Garrigou-Lagrange that ‘it is the very negation of that of St. Thomas’ (L’être et l’essence [Paris: 1948], 176)” (121n22). McInerny concludes, not unreasonably, that “the effect of [Gilson’s] scorched earth policy is to turn our attention more and more to the one operating the flamethrower. It is just possible that the man who finds everyone else wanting has himself misunderstood Thomas. It is possible that those he criticizes got it right and that he got it wrong” (53). Mandonnet, Review of Gilson, Le Thomisme; Étienne Gilson, Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Edward Bullough (Cambridge: Heffer, 1924). Thomists at War 1059 title over the French: “Thomism” and “the system of Aquinas” are ambiguous, as they may refer either to the discipline of theology or to that of philosophy, while what Gilson is apparently attempting to provide, albeit in summary fashion, according to Mandonnet, is a pedagogical introduction, or rather “initiation,” into “the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas.” But—and here lies Mandonnet’s more serious reservation about a “fundamental question”—Gilson does so back to front, erroneously deducing from the order of Aquinas’s synthesis of theology in the Summa theologiae the order for what might have been, had he provided one, Aquinas’s synthesis of philosophy, or Summa philosophiae.17 For Mandonnet, this is plain wrong: Aquinas frequently spells out in his Aristotelian (and purely philosophical) commentaries the correct ordering of philosophical study—(1) logic; (2) mathematics; (3) natural philosophy; (4) ethics; and finally (5) metaphysics—as well as the pedagogical and conceptual principles which underpin such an ordering, such as that, in the progress of human learning, it is appropriate to move from what is easier to what is more difficult.18 Pedagogically, by placing first metaphysics and theodicy, which exceed the intellectual capacity of many students, Gilson is leading them into confusion and error.19 Conceptually, Gilson is ignoring Aquinas’s explicit prescription that philosophers and theologians proceed in opposite directions: philosophers move from the study of creation to the Creator; theologians move from the study of God to the knowledge of creatures.20 By transporting the theological order into philosophy, Gilson fundamentally undermines, moreover, the truth content of philosophy by presenting it as a deduction from a given a priori: the existence of God and his attributes.21 Moreover, while from creation one can come to knowledge of 17 18 19 20 21 Mandonnet, Review of Gilson, Le Thomisme, 134. Mandonnet, Review of Gilson, Le Thomisme, 135. In substantiating this view, Mandonnet cites Sent. Eth. VI, lec. 7 and Super librum de causis expositio, lec. 1. Mandonnet, Review of Gilson, Le Thomisme, 134, 136. Mandonnet, Review of Gilson, Le Thomisme, 134, 135. Mandonnet cites Summa contra gentiles [SCG] II, ch. 4, n. 6. See Francesca Aran Murphy, Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), 61: Mandonnet argues “that ‘transporting’ the theological order into philosophy turns the arguments for the existence of God into a priori deductions.” See also, on this point, Murphy, “Gilson and Chenu: The Structure of the Summa and the Shape of Dominican Life,” New Blackfriars 85, no. 997 (2004): 290–303, at 295: “Gilson offended the sensibilities of contemporary Thomists by beginning his book on Thomas with God, rather than cosmology or logic. And he stuck to it, despite a stern admonition from a Thomist journal that he would do better to present Saint Thomas the other way up. That came from the Dominican Pierre 1060 George Corbett the Creator, the existence of God does not imply, as the neo-Platonists wrongly thought, God’s creation of the world. Mandonnet therefore berates Gilson’s attempt to situate Aquinas’s philosophy as effectively internal to, and dependent upon, his theology: as, in Gilson’s terminology, a “Christian philosophy.” Mandonnet also disagrees strongly with Gilson’s insinuation that Aquinas’s philosophy cannot be defended critically: while Gilson claims that Aquinas’s “philosophy is not a critical philosophy,” Mandonnet counters that it does, in fact, “presuppose a critical point of view, very conscious, very solid, and perfectly scientific.”22 Mandonnet also strongly critiques Gilson’s confusion of the theological and philosophical orders in La philosophie de saint Bonaventure (1923), which he reviewed in 1926.23 The “fundamental idea” of Gilson’s volume (which, Mandonnet claims, runs against the scholarly consensus) is that, “in Saint Bonaventure, we encounter not only a philosophy, but also a systematic and unified philosophy.”24 However, for Mandonnet, there was no such thing—properly speaking—as “the philosophy of St. Bonaventure,” a criticism which must have been rather galling for Gilson, as it was the very title of his study.25 As Laurence Shook comments, “Mandonnet had long taken Bonaventure to be a neo-Platonic Augustinian who, in his failure to distinguish the object of theology from the object of philosophy, was not a philosopher at all.”26 For Bonaventure, “philosophy inevitably requires faith, and nature grace,” and Gilson “presents the philosophy of Bonaventure by suspending it from his theology, his 22 23 24 25 26 Mandonnet, who thought that Gilson must be deducing the world of the senses from God, by putting God first. . . . Mandonnet defended the philosophical exposition of the Summae on the grounds that Thomas conceived it ‘natural’ for human knowledge to progress from ‘posterior analytics,’ to sense knowledge to ethics to the metaphysical.” Mandonnet, Review of Gilson, Le Thomisme, 134. Pierre Mandonnet, “L’Augustinisme Bonaventurien,” Bulletin Thomiste 3 (1926): 48–54. Mandonnet first briefly reviews Leonard de Carvalho e Castro, Saint Bonaventure, Le Docteur Franciscain (Paris: Beauchesne, 1923), and Boniface Luyckx, La doctrine de la connaissance chez saint Bonaventure (Münster: 1923), before turning at more length to Gilson’s La philosophie de saint Bonaventure (Paris: Vrin, 1924). Shook also references this review (which he dates to 1924) in Étienne Gilson, 198. Mandonnet, “L’Augustinisme Bonaventurien,” 52. Gilson may even have seen his subsequent Dante et la philosophie (1939), a booklength deconstruction of Mandonnet’s presentation of Dante as a theologian in Dante le théologien (1935), as fitting scholarly retribution for Mandonnet’s deconstruction of Gilson’s presentation of Bonaventure as a philosopher in La philosophie de saint Bonaventure in his review of 1926. Shook, Étienne Gilson, 127–28. Thomists at War 1061 mysticism, and, indeed, from the final beatitude of man.”27 Although Gilson ostensibly represents Bonaventure as a philosopher, then, Bonaventure is not a philosopher at all, but solely an Augustinian theologian.28 As Shook notes, Gilson’s “presentation of Bonaventure as an anti-Thomist Christian philosopher . . . was unacceptable,” and Mandonnet insists that, if there were to be a model for a Christian philosopher, it would be St. Thomas. The controversy about Christian philosophy came to a head at a famous debate of the Société Thomiste in 1933 in which Mandonnet and Gilson locked horns as principal antagonists. As McInerny relates, “the morning [of 11 September, 1933] ends with these two great historians having established themselves as opposite poles on the question before them.”29 For Mandonnet, a Christian may be a philosopher but the unity is in the subject alone—to think or argue from faith is to do theology; to argue from reason (and the natural world) is to do philosophy—there may be, in an individual, a de facto union of philosophy and faith, but de iure [by right] there is not. For Mandonnet, then, Gilson’s historical recovery of (and advocacy for) a “Christian philosophy” is an essentially retrograde step to the state of medieval thought prior to Aquinas, and to the kind of confusion between theology and philosophy that Mandonnet identified in Bonaventure. As McInerny puts it, “[Christian philosophy] involves neglecting the profound work realized by Thomas in discriminating reason and faith and clarifying their interrelations. And it would effectively cut Christian philosophers off from the rest of the thinking world.”30 Mandonnet’s fellow Le Saulchoir Dominican Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges (1863–1948), author of a two-volume study of Aquinas’s philosophy in 1910, similarly distinguishes the order of discovery from the order of demonstration: “The influence of Christianity can be assigned to the order of discovery; but in the order of demonstration, either the argument is good or it isn’t.”31 For Gilson, by contrast, the Christian faith had a material effect on philosophy not only in the order of discovery but in the order of demonstration, such that philosophy (in this tradition) is objectively dependent 27 28 29 30 31 Mandonnet, “L’Augustinisme Bonaventurien,” 52. Mandonnet, “L’Augustinisme Bonaventurien,” 52. See McInerny, Praeambula fidei, 96. McInerny, Praeambula fidei, 103. McInerny, Praeambula fidei, 105. In Gilson’s view, Sertillanges is just another example, albeit an “outstanding example,” of Thomists failing to understand “the authentic meaning” of Aquinas (see Gilson, The Philosopher and Theology, 134). 1062 George Corbett on the Christian faith.32 Gilson “believed that Christian theologians . . . had created a philosophy that was Christian both in its form and in its content.” Gilson’s doctoral work had led him to the conviction that, in the early modern period, Descartes—but also later enlightenment philosophers such as Malebranche, Leibniz, and Kant—had built philosophies dependent upon their, more or less explicitly acknowledged, Christian faith. Gilson then applied this question—“were not many modern philosophers also guilty of building their philosophies on some degree of faith”—to medieval as well as modern philosophical speculation.33 Developing his notion of “Christian philosophy” for the Gifford Lectures (1931–1932) at Aberdeen’s then “militantly Protestant university,” Gilson’s approach, despite its positive immediate reception by Protestants and some Catholics, threatened both “the autonomy of neoscholastic philosophy” and “the autonomy of Protestant theology.”34 It would subsequently lead to the relativism of Thomist (classical-realist, or Aristotelian) philosophy as a mere competing tradition of philosophy, as, for example, in the subsequent Gifford Lectures (1988) of Alistair MacIntyre (published as Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry in 1990).35 Chenu’s Gilsonian Programme for Le Saulchoir and Its Rebuttal While Gilson and Mandonnet remained essentially fixed in their opposing camps in the “Christian philosophy” debates of the 1920s and 32 33 34 35 See Shook, Étienne Gilson, 199. Shook, Étienne Gilson, 202. Shook, Étienne Gilson, 203. Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990). Even within Thomism, MacIntyre sketches a dubious “line of descent” and “progress”: “The greatest names in this line of descent are those of Grabmann, Mandonnet, Gilson, van Steenberghen, and Weisheipl, a list in which those who appear later have sometimes had to correct as well as to supplement their predecessors’ scholarship, but in which a real progress appears” (77). Intriguingly, MacIntyre here also suggests that the resolution to the inevitable conflict between his three rival versions of moral enquiry might be provided by Dante: “So the encyclopaedic, the genealogical, and the Thomistic tradition-constituted standpoints confront one another not only as rival moral theories but also as projects for constructing rival forms of moral narrative. Is there a way in which one of these rivals might prevail over the others? One possible answer was supplied by Dante: that narrative prevails over its rivals which is able to include its rivals within it, not only to retell their stories as episodes within its story, but to tell the story of the telling of their stories as such episodes.” For a critique of MacIntyre’s appropriation of Dante, as of the Thomist tradition as a whole, see George Corbett, “MacIntyre, Dante and Modernity,” New Blackfriars 96, no. 1063 (2015): 345–60. Thomists at War 1063 1930s, one notable conversion, as Francesca Murphy notes, was that of Marie-Dominique Chenu, O.P. (1895–1990), Mandonnet’s junior colleague and “disciple in the historical method,” to whom he had handed over the presidency of the Société Thomiste in 1932, but who came to embrace Gilson’s understanding of and approach to Aquinas.36 Although in his review of the third edition of Le Thomisme (1927), Chenu apparently defended the Le Saulchoir position of Mandonnet that Aquinas “composed a ‘pure philosophy,’ ‘autonomous’ from faith,”37 by the conclusion of the September 1933 debate, Chenu was squarely in Gilson’s camp: “At the last ‘Christian philosophy’ debate, Chenu and Yves Congar literally sat down alongside Gilson.”38 Chenu ultimately came to see Gilson’s Le Thomisme as “the working tool of his whole generation:” Gilson understood well, Chenu comments, “that the philosophy of Saint Thomas was internal to his theology. It was then that I struck up a friendship with Gilson that never wavered”; from then on, he notes, “we were always on the same path.”39 It was Chenu, indeed, who advocated in the mid-1920s for Gilson’s closer involvement at Le Saulchoir, dismissing the concerns of Mandonnet and Jacques Maritain about Gilson’s orthodoxy as the “little rivalries of Thomism” and “not a cause for concern.”40 And, despite himself being denounced directly to Pope Pius XI in 1932 for residual modernism by two of his students, alongside three other lectors at Le Saulchoir (and 36 37 38 39 40 Chenu remained president for over fifty years, from 1932 to 1984 (see Adriano Oliva, “La Société thomiste,” Commissio Leonina, April 4, 2014, commissio-leonina.org/ 2014/04/la-societe-thomiste/). See Murphy, “Gilson and Chenu,” 295n29. See also Marie-Dominique Chenu, Review of Étienne Gilson, Le Thomisme: Introduction au système de S. Thomas d’Aquin, Bulletin thomiste, 1928, 242–45, at 245: “St Thomas was a Christian teacher, but his philosophy is a pure philosophy: he affirmed its autonomy, fixed the method, and explicitly set out its plan of study.” Chenu also specifically refers to Gilson’s own responses to Mandonnet’s critiques in the third edition (see, e.g., 243n1). Murphy, “Gilson and Chenu,” 296. See Jacques Duquesne interroge le Père Chenu: “Un théologien en liberté” (Paris: Le Centurion, 1975), 50. In his letter to Gilson of 1923, Chenu offered to put Gilson in touch with the lay Dominican Edward Bullough, whom he had recently met in Cambridge, and who would subsequently invite Gilson to Cambridge and translate Le Thomisme for an English readership (Murphy, “Gilson and Chenu,” 295n28). Bullough references Étienne Gilson’s lecture in Cambridge on “L’Esprit de la Renaissance et St. Thomas d’Aquin,” in Edward Bullough, Italian Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 45. Chenu, cited in Duval, “Au origines,” 443. Despite some misgivings as to his orthodoxy, Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange (1877–1964) nonetheless remained in favor of a further relationship with Gilson (446). 1064 George Corbett despite the confidential enquiry by the Holy Office which followed), Chenu’s appointments as master of theology the very same year (aged just 37) and as regent of studies the following enabled him to pursue his own Gilsonian agenda.41 Nonetheless, it was only after the deaths of the three Dominicans he consistently referred to as his masters—Ambroise Gardeil (†1931), Leomonnyer (†1932), and Mandonnet (†1936)—that Chenu would launch his contentious history of, and manifesto for, Le Saulchoir as, in effect, an alternative “school of theology.” On March 7, 1936, the feast day of St. Thomas, Chenu gave the speech which he subsequently developed into Une école de théologie: le Saulchoir, published at the end of 1937.42 Strongly influenced by Gilson, Chenu’s new programme was not just an alternative proposal to the Dominican school in Rome, but arguably to the deep convictions of his predecessors, including Mandonnet, and many of his contemporaries at Le Saulchoir.43 Chenu adopted Gilson’s 41 42 43 See Étienne Fouilloux, “Première alerte sur le Saulchoir (1932),” Revue des sciences philosophique et théologiques 96, no. 1 (2012): 93–105, and “L’affaire Chenu 1937– 1943,” Revue des sciences philosophique et théologiques 98, no. 2 (2014): 261–352. I am very grateful to Patricia Kelly for sharing with me her English translation of these two articles, which are forthcoming in Étienne Fouilloux, Le Saulchoir on trial (1932–1943), trans. by Patricia Kelly (Adelaide, Australia: ATF). Page references to Fouilloux are to the French edition while citations are, with grateful permission, from Kelly’s forthcoming translation. In the 1920s, Réginald Omez, O.P., characterized Gilson’s aim in seeking close relations with Saulchoir as to direct its studies specifically towards the history of “primitive Thomism”: “It appears that Gilson wants to establish closer ties with the Dominican community at Le Saulchoir; he seems to want to direct their studies particularly towards the history of primitive Thomism” (cited in Duval, “Au origines,”446). Fouilloux, “L’affaire Chenu,” 263. Marie-Dominique Chenu, Une école de théologie: Le Saulchoir (Kain-Lez-Tournai, France: Le Saulchoir, 1937); see also the Italian edition, with an introduction by Giuseppe Alberigo and foreword by Chenu, Le Saulchoir una scuola di theologia, trans. Natale Federico Reviglio (Monferrato: Marietti, 1982), as well as the updated French edition, with a series of essays, Une école de théologie: le Saulchoir, avec les études de Giuseppe Alberigo, Étienne Fouilloux, Jean Ladnère et JeanPierre Jossua (Paris: Cerf, 1985). The third chapter of Chenu’s book, “Theology,” is set within its broader context, with English translations of other important contributions to the debate, in Patricia Kelly, Ressourcement Theology: A Sourcebook (London: T&T Clark, 2021). Fergus Kerr comments: “To what extent Le Saulchoir ever was, even in 1937, ‘une ecole,’ as if all the Dominicans on the teaching staff at the time had a single vision, is disputable. Some of his colleagues, at least, were infuriated by Chenu’s magisterial exposition of what they stood for, collectively. Moreover, in retrospect, Une école de théologie was needlessly polemical. For example, Chenu derided the curricula at Thomists at War 1065 scandalous claim that the Enlightenment rationalism of “the German Lutheran theologian Christian Wolff (1679–1754)” had infiltrated the Thomism of the Angelicum, and of Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange in particular.44 He also adopted Gilsons’s Bergsonian creative evolutionism and the conviction that the theologian’s “‘given’ is not in the nature of things, it is events. . . . The real world is here, and not [in] the philosophical abstraction.”45 And, just as Gilson eroded the distinction dear to the traditional Thomist school between philosophy and theology with his novel understanding of “Christian philosophy,” so Chenu undermined the place of Aquinas’s philosophy in the training of theologians: two of the ten propositions Chenu was asked to accept in Rome, for example, concerned the autonomy of philosophy and theology and the necessity for the theologian of philosophical study.46 As Fergus Kerr puts it, “in effect, Chenu was 44 45 46 seminaries and colleges (no doubt including the Angelicum): neoscholastic philosophy and theology textbooks were pervaded by ‘Wolffian rationalism.’ He peppered his text with insults” (“Marie-Dominique Chenu,” in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians [Oxford: Blackwell, 2007], 17–33, at 23). Kerr postulates that the views of three influential Dominicans in Rome—Garrigou-Lagrange, Mariano Cordovani (1883–1950), and Michael Browne (1887–1982)—were “certainly representative of the majority of Chenu’s fellow Dominicans at the time” (20). See also the letter of Martin Gillet to Chenu (2 February, 1939), cited in Fouilloux, “L’affaire Chenu,” 298: “There are credible rumours that the Dominicans are divided, with the younger fathers abandoning Thomist positions, wanting to modernise philosophy, theology, dogma and . . . St Thomas himself of course; that positive theology must supplant speculative theology, the problem must expel scholasticism.” Fouilloux asks: “Was it only Chenu and his methodology which were the targets, or Le Saulchoir as a whole, where very different opinions on this methodology co-existed more or less happily?” (329). See Kerr, “Marie-Dominique Chenu,” 30–31, citing, on this question, Richard Peddicord, The Sacred Monster of Thomism: An Introduction to the Life and Legacy of Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange (South Bend, IN: St. Austin’s Press, 2005), 103n70. Murphy, “Gilson and Chenu,” 297. Murphy cites Marie-Dominique Chenu, “Position de la théologie,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques (1935), reprinted in La parole de Dieu: La foi dans l’intelligence (Paris: Cerf, 1964), 128. Proposition 8 reads, “Although St. Thomas was properly a theologian, he was also properly a philosopher; consequently in its intelligibility and truth his philosophy does not depend on his theology, and it enunciates absolute, not merely relative truths”; proposition 9 states, “it is especially necessary for the theologian in the scientific process to apply the metaphysics of St. Thomas and diligently attend to the rules of dialectic” (McInerny, Praeambula fidei, 110–11). For the broader context, see McInerny’s chapter “The Chenu Case” (108–25). Although Fergus Kerr dismisses the propositions Chenu was compelled to sign as “poppycock . . . symptomatic of the theological pathology of those days” (19), he does at least acknowledge the arched polemicism of Chenu’s Une école: “The message of Chenu’s manifesto lies, most provocatively, in the layout: the chapter on philosophy comes after the one on theology. In effect, Thomas Aquinas is to 1066 George Corbett denying the need to master Thomistic philosophy before being allowed to enter into Aquinas’s work as a whole. Older colleagues at Le Saulchoir, as well as Garrigou-Lagrange, were dismayed at what seemed to them neglect of speculative theology in favour of (‘mere’) historical scholarship, the slippery slope to relativistic notions of truth and thus to modernism.”47 Ironically, then, the institute established in 1921 to provide a properly historical approach to Aquinas’s thought which would enrich, complement, and defend the integrity and authority of Thomism, and that would refute the alarming views of the “non-Scholastic” Gilson and others who were undermining it, was taken over by Chenu, himself a Gilsonian convert. Thenceforth, and until Chenu’s dismissal in 1942, the Institute and Le Saulchoir came under the dominant influence of Gilson.48 Notably, when Chenu was deposed as regent in 1942, one of the first measures introduced by Fr. Paul Philippe, O.P.—the “visitor” and new regent of studies at Le Saulchoir who had been tasked, as Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange’s effective deputy and replacement, with the investigation which had deposed Chenu—was that “university professors, such as Gilson, cannot inform us on particular points: they must not become our masters.”49 And Martin Gillet, who had perhaps imprudently raised Chenu at such a comparatively young age to master of theology and regent of studies, would compose in 1942 a 103-page encyclical on the “teaching of St. Thomas at the present 47 48 49 be read as a theologian from the outset. There is no need to be able to defend the Twenty-four Theses before one is allowed to pass into theological studies” (24). Moreover, theological systems are relativized by Chenu to historically conditioned spiritualities: “A theology worthy of the name is a spirituality, which finds the rational instruments adequate to its religious experience” (cited in Kerr, 24). As Kerr comments, “Thomist theology would be the expression of Dominican spirituality, Scotism that of Franciscan spirituality, Molinism that of Ignatian spirituality” (15). Kerr, “Marie-Dominique Chenu,” 19. Fouilloux, “L’affaire Chenu,” 265; see also 268: “the return to the medieval substrate based on the authority of the university professor Étienne Gilson”; “It was this programme, laid out in an occasional booklet with a tiny print run, which would be seen as a manifesto. Chenu was clearly subordinating philosophy to theology, granting theology a modest role which was clearly distinguished from the dogma from which, according to him, it drew its reformable formulations. He also pleaded for an inductive approach starting from the personal history of humanity (a theology worthy of the name was ‘a spirituality which has found rational tools appropriate to its religious experience’) or their shared history (theology as a gathering of ‘theological “tropes” in action’ provided by current events). Such a discussion of methodology ran deliberately counter to a scholastic definition of theology with its speculative and deductive nature.” The measure was stated in Paul Philippe’s opening lesson of the 1942–1943 academic year (Fouilloux, “L’affaire Chenu,” 330). Thomists at War 1067 moment,” reminding Dominicans that, while it was necessary to cultivate positive theology, “it is not enough to be a good historian to be a good theologian. Theology needs history, but history is not sufficient.”50 We have therefore seen that Mandonnet and Gilson—although both committed to the historical method—disagreed in fundamental ways about Aquinas’s thought and about the nature of Catholic theology and philosophy. Gilson’s approach influenced much twentieth-century Catholic thought, whether as developed by Chenu at Le Saulchoir in terms of an alternative curriculum for theology (the “new theology,” as it was termed by its adversaries), or, in a different context, in the writings of Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) on the relationship between the natural and the supernatural orders, as in Surnaturel.51 Likewise, Gilson came to be influenced by both Chenu and de Lubac in his subsequent polemics regarding Mandonnet’s interpretations of both Aquinas and Dante.52 Although there is increasing interest in and reappraisal of these early-twentieth-century debates about Aquinas’s thought, scholars have not heretofore considered the parallel disagreements in the 1920s and 1930s about Dante.53 And yet, as we shall see, Mandonnet’s and Gilson’s irreconcilable interpretations 50 51 52 53 Fouilloux, “L’affaire Chenu,” 335. Henri de Lubac, Surnaturel (Paris: Aubier, 1946); de Lubac, Le mystère du surnaturel (Paris: Aubier, 1965). In Praeambula fidei, McInerny discusses the interrelated friendships of Gilson, Chenu, and de Lubac and the mutual influences on their respective works, drawing attention also to the unedifying personal motives between their attacks on their predecessors and teachers: “And what prompted Marie-Dominique Chenu to spend most of his essay on Dominican education trashing the tradition in which he stands? That personal grievance of an extraordinary kind is in the background is an unavoidable realization when we consider the running commentary de Lubac gives on the nineteen letters Gilson wrote him over the space of some two decades, from 1956 to 1975” (125). See also Fouilloux, “L’affaire Chenu,” 323–24. On the Christian philosophy debates, see, for example, the “Bibliography of Works on the Christian Philosophy Debates and Their Issues” in Reason Fulfilled by Revelation: The 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates in France, ed. and trans. by Gregory B. Sadler (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 283–312. The extant scholarship on Gilson’s Dante tends to take his view of Dante as authoritative. See, for example, Roberto Di Ceglie, “Dante Alighieri e la filosofia Christiana nell’interpretazione di Étienne Gilson,” Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scholastica 97, no. 4 (2005): 627–49: “a great historian of philosophy, recognized almost universally as the most authoritative with regard to the medieval period” (627–28). Di Ceglie also approvingly cites Inos Beffi: “To Gilson is given ‘the merit not only to have expertly initiated the rediscovery of medieval philosophy, but to have contributed decisively to returning its history back to the appropriate levels of scientific and academic rigour’” (631). But this assessment (which is normative in the scholarship) fails to situate adequately Gilson’s apparent 1068 George Corbett of Dante provide a privileged insight into their conflicting approaches to Aquinas’s thought and to Catholic philosophy and theology as a whole. Mandonnet, Gilson, and a Civil War in Dante Studies Pierre Mandonnet, Joachim Berthier, and the Thomist Dante Having published short articles on Dante throughout his academic life, Mandonnet published Dante le théologien in 1935, shortly before his death on January 4, 1936.54 Mandonnet’s dual interest in Aquinas and Dante paralleled that of a Dominican colleague at Fribourg ten years his senior, Joachim Joseph Berthier, O.P. (1848–1924).55 An accomplished medieval historian and Thomist, Berthier translated Dante’s Commedia into French and published a two-volume edition of the Inferno in Italian “with scholastic commentary” in 1892, as well as a series of articles on the poet.56As Ruedi Imbach notes, Berthier and Mandonnet’s labors testify to a “new Catholic impulsion to Dante Studies,” symbolically given papal approval 54 55 56 “rediscovery” of medieval thought within the context of an earlier generation of scholars, including the Dominicans Berthier and Mandonnet. Pierre Mandonnet, Dante le théologien: introduction a l’intelligence de la vie, des œuvres et de l'art de Dante Alighieri (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1935). I am currently working with Patricia Kelly on the first English edition and translation of Mandonnet’s Dante le théologien (forthcoming in the Studia Traditionis Theologiae series with Brill). In citing this text here, page numbers refer to the original 1935 French edition, while English translations are, with grateful permission of Patricia Kelly, from our new edition and translation of the work. Berthier entered the Dominican order in 1871. From 1890 to 1905, he was the principal collaborator of Georges Python (1856–1927), founder of the University of Fribourg, in creating a faculty of theology. From 1890 to 1891, he was the dean of the faculty of theology, and from 1891 to 1892, he was rector of the University. From 1907 to 1920, he lived again in Rome, notably as consultant of the Sacred Congregation of Studies. For Berthier’s Dante scholarship, see especially Dante Alighieri: La Divine Comédie: traduction littérale avec notes par Joachim-Joseph Berthier, O.P., réédition de la version de 1924 souls la direction de Ruedi Imbach (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2018); and La Divina Comedia di Dante con commenti secondo la scholastica del P. Gioachino Berthier, Inferno [hereafter, Inferno], vols. 1–2 (Fribourg: Libreria dell’Università, 1892). For a list of Berthier’s Thomist works, see “In Memoriam R.P. Mag. Fr. Joachim Ios. Berthier, OP,” Angelicum 2, no. 3 (1925): 343–45. In L’étude de la somme théologique de Saint Thomas d’Aquin (Fribourg: Librairie de l’université, 1893), Berthier underlines that, just as the great poet Dante chose Virgil as his guide, so theologians should choose St. Thomas: “Dante, the great poet, chose Virgil, also a great poet, to be his guide on his journey through the kingdom of all sins; we, theologians, choose St Thomas to be our guide on an analogous journey” (156). Thomists at War 1069 by the removal of Dante’s Monarchia from the index of prohibited books in 1881 (where it had remained since 1554), and which paralleled the renaissance in Thomistic Studies instigated by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris in 1879.57 The representation of Dante as a Thomist and the conviction that Dante’s principal theological and philosophical authority was Aquinas accompanied (and perhaps partly underpinned) the Leonine revival of Dante studies alongside Thomism.58 Thus, Berthier dedicated his commentary on the Inferno to Pope Leo XIII, “eminent patron of Thomistic and Dante studies,” and inserted, on its title page, an image of St. Thomas (in his teaching chair) with Dante standing next to him listening.59 Although Dante was nine when Aquinas died, the intended signification of this visual representation is not altogether fanciful. In the Convivio, after all, Dante represents himself as listening to the wise, relating how he went to the disputations of the schools of the religious (the Dominicans at Santa Maria Novella and the Franciscans at Santa Croce); he also explicitly singles out Aquinas, modelling himself “on the good friar Thomas Aquinas, who entitled one of his works, written to refute the arguments of all those who deviate from our faith, Against the Gentiles” (Convivio 4.30.3). Moreover, in the Commedia, Dante affords St. Thomas the place of preeminence amongst the lovers of wisdom in the heaven of the sun, and Dante-pilgrim listens to more of St. Thomas’s words in the poem than of any other character, save Virgil and Beatrice.60 In these ways, Dante arguably invited his readers to gloss his poem with Aquinas, and his first commentators dutifully obliged, quoting liberally from both the Summa theologiae and the Summa contra gentiles, as well as drawing on Aquinas’s other writings, including his Aristotelian and biblical commentaries.61 57 58 59 60 61 I am deeply grateful to Ruedi Imbach for a copy of his unpublished lecture “Dante à Fribourg,” as well as for his revised edition of Berthier’s translation of the poem. For a succinct history of the reception of Dante through Aquinas from the first commentators to the Leonine revival in the late nineteenth century, see Simon Gilson, “Dante and Christian Aristotelianism,” in Reviewing Dante’s Theology, ed. Claire E. Honess and Mathew Treherne, 2 vols. (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013), 1:66–109, at 66–86. See Berthier, Inferno: ‘‘mecenate insigne degli studi Tomistici e Danteschi.” Underneath the image of Aquinas and Dante are cited Dante’s words from the Convivio “dal buono Frate Tommaso” (Conv. 4.30); and, alongside it, the entry for Dante in a Dominican Encyclopedia: “Dante . . . in whose works learning and knowledge of many things, and especially of Scholasticism, are undoubtedly shown.” See Mandonnet, Dante, 266. See also S. Gilson, “Dante and Christian Aristotelianism,” 239–42. See S. Gilson, “Dante and Christian Aristotelianism,” 66–67. Gilson here highlights, 1070 George Corbett In presenting Aquinas as Dante’s principal authority in theology and philosophy, Berthier and Mandonnet could thereby draw on a venerable and majority tradition in the commentary on Dante’s Commedia as a whole.62 The canonization of the Thomist Dante in the early twentieth century is illustrated by Pope Benedict XV’s encyclical on Dante, In Preaclara Summorum, published on the sixth centenary of Dante’s death in 1921: Dante lived in an age which inherited the most glorious fruits of philosophical and theological teaching and thought, and handed them on to the succeeding ages with the imprint of the strict scholastic method. Amid the various currents of thought diffused then too among learned men Dante ranged himself as disciple of that Prince of the school so distinguished for angelic temper of intellect, Saint Thomas Aquinas. From him he gained nearly all his philosophical and theological knowledge, and while he did not neglect any branch of human learning, at the same time he drank deeply at the founts of Sacred Scripture and the Fathers. Thus he learned almost all that could be known in his time, and nourished specially by Christian knowledge, it was on that field of religion he drew when he set himself to treat in verse of things so vast and deep.63 The encyclical notes disapprovingly, however, the deleterious effects of the teaching of those not “disposed to the truths of the Faith as they should be.”64 The encyclical’s aspirations and concerns for Dante are expressed in more detail and depth in the combined special issue of the Rivista di Filosofia Neoscholastica and the Rivista Scuola Catholica on Dante published later the same year.65 As with the Dominicans who founded the 62 63 64 65 for example, Jacomo della Lana’s commentary (1324–1328), with “well over eighty quotations [from Aquinas], and, by one estimate, over 380 direct and indirect references to Aquinas in total,” Jacomo’s commentary affording a “revealing insight into the early reception of Aquinas in a layman qualified in arts and theology.” Berthier, “Introduzione,” no. 17, in Inferno, 2:xxxviii. Pope Benedict XV, Encyclical Letter on Dante to Professors and Students of Literature and Learning in the Catholic World In Praeclara Summorum, §4. Benedict XV, In Praeclara Summorum, §10. The encyclical calls instead for teaching which draws students to the “vital nourishment” of Dante’s poem, which is its very purpose, such that Dante may be for them “the teacher of Christian doctrine.” See Scritti vari pubblicati in occasione del sesto centenario della morte di Dante Alighieri (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1921), vii: “We are currently witnessing many and various distortions of Dante’s thought. Our great poet is betrayed by the supporters of alien Thomists at War 1071 Institut historique d’études thomistes to defend the integrity and authority of Aquinas’s doctrine, so scholars in this issue, including the Jesuit Giovanni Busnelli (1866–1944) and the Dominican Mariano Cordovani (1883–1950) adopt the historical and scientific method in order to recover the true doctrine of Dante and the true purpose of his poem: to lead people from sin and ignorance to perfection of life and knowledge of God.66 They also defend, through historical research, what they see as the profound harmony between the thought of Dante and Aquinas.67 In Dante le théologien (1935), Mandonnet similarly addresses critically the “universally established custom” of placing Dante’s theories in parallel with those of Aquinas. Mandonnet underlines that such correspondences, however fruitful, do not imply a formal Thomism, because St. Thomas is not simply a “great leader of a school,” but above all “the representative of Catholic teaching,” and thus St. Thomas finds “common ground with all the great theologians,” and his primary achievement was “to better order this teaching, and evidence it more perfectly.”68 Moreover, Mandonnet distinguishes the sources from the shape of Dante’s thought. While Mandonnet notes that Dante, as a layman and an impoverished exile, may 66 67 68 philosophical, social and political doctrines, and each one attributes to Dante his own doctrine.” See, especially, Giovanni Busnelli’s “Le più recenti pubblicazioni Danteschi,” 179–86, at 186: “We see the signs and evidence of this lack of sound instruction in the Christian faith not only among state school students, but even amongst professors and Dantisti who, when they interpret religious topics in the Divine Comedy, fall into erroneous expressions and false concepts, witnessing thereby to the serious damage which atheist programmes of public instruction have caused, and continue to inflict upon, the culture of society.” A protagonist in the Chenu affair, Mariano Cordovani, O.P., berates the tendencies of Italians to know Dante only through the Ugolino and Francesca episodes, and of Dantisti to know the whole poem with all its parallels in the various historical contexts but, nonetheless, to ignore what is most important: God “And yet it is altogether indisputable that the entire poem is a great effort by Dante to rise to God through wisdom and virtue, a magisterium to guide all humanity to salvation, and a purifying fire from the abyss to the empyrean. That which Dantisti consider least in Dante is precisely the knowledge of, and longing for, God: and our Catholic celebration of the great Father Alighieri would be in vain were we not to react strongly against this unworthy process of reduction and distortion of the greatest soul to have ever arisen in Italy” (“Le vie di Dio nella filosofia di Dante,” in the Scritti vari combined issue, 21– 41, at 21). On Cordovani’s important role in the condemnation of Chenu’s views, see, for example, Alberigo’s introduction, “Cristianismo come storia e teologia confessante,” in Chenu’s Le Saulchoir una scuola (1982 ed.), ix–xxx, at xix–xxiii. See, for example, Giovanni Busnelli, “La cosmogonia Dantesca e le sue fonti,” in the Scritti vari combined issue, 42–84. Mandonnet, Dante le théologien, 263–64. 1072 George Corbett have had to search for solutions to certain problems in whatever theological sources were at hand, he nonetheless maintains that, where possible, Dante drew on Aquinas’s works and, where this was not possible, “conformed his thought to the one who was, in his eyes, his master.” Although there may be differences here or there on questions of secondary importance, Mandonnet insists that Dante follows Aquinas on key points of contested doctrine in the thirteenth century,69 and that “the commentators are therefore on the right tracks who compare the doctrine of the great theologian and of the great poet to shed light on both.”70 Étienne Gilson, Bruno Nardi, and the “Myth of the Thomist Dante” It is the “universal opinion among Dante scholars that Dante faithfully followed the teachings of St. Thomas” against which Étienne Gilson reacted polemically.71 In doing so, he followed the lead of the Italian scholar and ex-priest Bruno Nardi (1884–1968), his exact contemporary, with whom he would forge an enduring friendship.72 Both Nardi and Gilson situated their own arguments about Dante as specific refutations of those of Mandonnet and, more generally, as attacking what they saw as the clerical “myth of the Thomist Dante.”73 Nardi’s doctoral dissertation, “Siger de Brabant dans la Divine Comédie et le sources de la philosophie de Dante” (1911), was prompted by Mandonnet’s Siger de Brabant et l’averroïsme au XIIIme siècle (1899).74 69 70 71 72 73 74 Mandonnet, Dante le théologien, 264. See also 277: “If Dante conformed his thought to that of his master in the major and specific points of Thomas’s doctrine, it is because Dante had studied it attentively. This gives us reason to believe that it is also principally through the same channel that Dante received, at least in large part, the knowledge of the common teaching of Catholic theology.” Mandonnet, Dante le théologien, 277. Mandonnet, Dante le théologien, 246. See Étienne Gilson’s Letters to Bruno Nardi, ed. Peter Dronke (Florence: SISMEL and Galluzzo, 1998). Nardi’s account of Dante may also have been partially influenced by his own autobiography, as an ardent nationalist, and an anticlerical and anti-Thomist former priest who, on account of this, had been denied university positions. See Paolo Falzone’s entry “Bruno Nardi” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 77 (Rome: Institute of the Italian Encyclopedia, 2012). Dronke comments: “the Vatican had blocked Nardi’s appointment to a university Chair till quite late in life. . . . Nardi’s whole conception of medieval philosophy, defending its originalities and diversities with polemical wit and matchless learning, must have been a thorn in the flesh of the Vatican, which clung for its official philosophy to a simplified, and dogmaticised version of Thomism” (Dronke, Étienne Gilson’s Letters, xi). Nardi’s dissertation was first published in the Rivista di filosofia neoscholastica 3 (1911): Thomists at War 1073 Mandonnet’s study underlines the exceptional place assigned by Dante to Siger of Brabant, its title page featuring the relevant tercet about Siger in the heaven of Christian wisdom: “This is the eternal light of Sigieri who, reading in the Vico de li Strami, demonstrated enviable truths” (Paradiso 10.136–38).75 Explicitly opposing the hypothesis that Dante was ironically subverting the Dominicans by elevating Siger in this way,76 Mandonnet argues that Dante desired to place examples of philosophers who were not also theologians in the heaven of the wise (a proscription which limited the choice), and Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia are his examples of masters who were exclusively philosophers.77 On Mandonnet’s view, Dante places Siger in the heaven of the wise as a representative of philosophy, and as a defender of the autonomy of philosophy from theology, and of the arts faculty from the theology faculty—his enviable truths (invidiosi veri) referring to some of his philosophical theses attacked by Bishop Tempier in the condemnation of 1277.78 In the general respect of defending the relative autonomy of philosophy and the textbooks of Aristotle, Siger is on the 75 76 77 78 187–95 and 526–45, and Rivista di filosofia neoscholastica 4 (1912): 73–80 and 225–239. It was also published in a single volume as Sigieri di Brabante nella “Divina Commedia” e le fonti della filosofia di Dante (Lucca, 1912). Subsequent references are to the latter edition. “essa è la luce etterna di Sigieri, / che, leggendo nel Vico de li Strami, / silogizzò invidïosi veri.” See Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant, pt. 1, Étude critique, 289. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant, pt. 1, Étude critique, 294: “We know without a shadow of a doubt that Siger’s troubles were the consequence of the condemnations of March 7, 1277, of which the Dominicans were not the craftsmen but rather the victims.” Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant, pt. 1, Étude critique, 306: “Having wished to place in Paradise a representative of philosophy, that is, of the profane sciences, Dante had to choose a renowned cleric who had not also been a theologian. Due to this proscription, the choice was necessarily very limited.” Mandonnet’s interpretation is picked up by Berthier in his comment to Paradiso 10.136: “Siger of Brabant, renowned philosopher. It is rather the Aristotelian school that Dante presents to us in this first round” (Dante Alighieri: La Divine Comédie, 768). Mandonnet demonstrates that the early commentators were wrong to interpret invidiosi veri as identifying Siger with sophistry (and also highlights their misidentification of Siger with the legend of Serlo de Wiltonia); instead, these “enviable truths” refer specifically to the Parisian debates, and reflect badly on the accusing party (i.e., Tempier et al.). See Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant, pt. 1, Étude critique, 267: “It is clear that Dante alludes here to the malevolence which Siger attracted due to his teaching in Paris, which relates it to the condemnation of 1277.” See also 290: “As to the truths syllogized by Siger which would have made people envious, we can affirm, given what we know of his doctrines, that it was not his exercises in sophistry as such but rather his doctrines themselves and, above all, those doctrines that led to the condemnation of 1277 which caused antipathy towards him.” 1074 George Corbett same side of the debate as St. Thomas, St. Albert the Great, and the Dominicans as a whole.79 Hypothesizing that Dante probably had little knowledge of the specific Averroist doctrines of Siger of Brabant that he documents in his study,80 Mandonnet strongly opposes the attempt by “Dante amateurs” to use subsequent historical knowledge of Siger as a favored argument for an emphasis on Dante as a heretic or heterodox thinker.81 By contrast, Nardi develops as the argument of his doctoral thesis what Mandonnet had dismissed as the “amateur” reading of Siger. Where Mandonnet downplays Dante’s knowledge of Siger’s Averroist theses documented in his study, the doctoral student Nardi emphasizes them as central to Dante’s syncretist thought. On Nardi’s view, Dante’s celebration of Siger in the heaven of the wise implies his particular intellectual sympathy for these Latin Averroist theses.82 Siger does not stand for the general autonomy of philosophy from theology, but rather for the more specific division within the Aristotelian philosophers themselves, between the Latin Averroists and the Thomists, a division which Dante—in his original poetic synthesis—would eventually overcome.83 Deriving from 79 80 81 82 83 Kenelm Foster, “Tomasso d’Aquino,” in Enciclopedia Dantesca [ED], dir. Umberto Bosco, ed. Giorgio Petrocchi, 6 vols. (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970– 78), 5:626–49, at 630b: “As for the problem of the substantial difference between theology and philosophy, and of the autonomy of the latter, [Dante] tends to side with the Dominicans, and it cannot be ruled out that this may be one of the reasons for the exaltation of Siger of Brabant.” Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant, pt. 1, Étude critique, 301. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant, pt. 1, Étude critique, 301: “Now that we know the specific doctrines of Siger, the amateurs of Dante studies—who have endeavoured to discover a heretic in the author of the Divine Comedy—would have one of their best arguments to support their thesis, and would explain the presence of the celebrated Averroist amongst the great theologians of Dante’s Paradise as if nothing could be more natural.” An especially contested example is Dante’s apparent allusion to Averroes’s theory on the unicity of the possible intellect in Monarchia 1.3.19. In De reprobatione Monarchiae composita a Dante (ca. 1329), the papal Dominican Guido Vernani, O.P. (ca. 1290–1345) was the first to interpret Dante’s delineation of a distinctive earthly goal for humanity-taken-as-a-whole as implying the Averroist position on the unity of the potential intellect. With regard to Mon. 1.3.9, and the Averroist doctrine of the unicity of the potential intellect, see George Corbett, Dante and Epicurus: A Dualistic Vision of Secular and Spiritual Fulfilment (Oxford: Legenda, 2013), 51–58 and 61–63 (nn. 47,48, and 60). See also Anthony K. Cassell, The Monarchia Controversy: An Historical Study (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 8–14. Bruno Nardi, Sigieri di Brabante, 11: “If one finds Siger of Brabant in Dante’s Paradise, it is because—in the spirit of the poet—the Averroism of the master of the ‘vico degli strami’ [street of straw] was not an element to be thrown out; instead, it came to be Thomists at War 1075 Mandonnet a picture of the world of Latin Averroism that Siger inhabited, Nardi makes this the backdrop for his understanding of Dante’s own early philosophical culture. Nardi’s substitution is reflected in the second part of his dissertation’s title: Nardi’s “Siger of Brabant in the Divine Comedy and the Sources of Dante’s philosophy” replaces Mandonnet’s “Siger of Brabant and thirteenth-century Averroism.” As Paolo Falzone highlights, this conviction underpins Nardi’s presentation of Dante’s intellectual trajectory as a “convert” from “a period of life in which he sympathised with those Arabic-Aristotelian views, of which Siger of Brabant was the famous champion” (an intellectual sympathy which caused “the frightening chasm he was digging within his mind [between] the philosopher’s exigencies [and] the aspirations of the believer”) to the reorientation of “his philosophical opinions towards their theological reinterpretation in a new, and original Christian synthesis,” with the abandonment of the Convivio and the writing of the Commedia.84 If Nardi’s lifelong approach to Dante was stimulated by his attempted refutation of Mandonnet’s scholarship on Siger, what Kenelm Foster (1910–1986) called Gilson’s “brilliant raid into Dante territory” with Dante et la philosophie (1939)—subsequently translated into English as Dante the Philosopher (1946)—was nothing other than a book-length refutation of Mandonnet’s Dante le théologien (1935), not translated into English, and typically referred to (if at all) in English-language scholarship through Gilson’s caricature.85 In two letters to Nardi in 1937, Gilson 84 85 absorbed and reworked, alongside other elements, into a body of doctrine that constitutes his philosophy.” On Nardi’s doctoral dissertation, see especially Paolo Falzone, “Bruno Nardi’s Louvain Dissertation (1911) and the Uneasy Character of Dante’s Philosophy,” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 75 (2013): 357–73. See Nardi, Sigieri di Brabante, 67–70. The English translation (by Andrea Robiglio) is cited from Falzone, “Bruno Nardi’s Louvain Dissertation.” As Falzone comments, “throughout his long and laborious career, Nardi essentially remained devoted to this youthful reconstruction of Dante’s thought,” a reconstruction which—at a critical distance—shows just how “deeply Nardi was indebted to an idealistic prejudice according to which there is clear progress in philosophy and, therefore, also in Dante’s thinking. . . . Nardi’s analysis gained both depth and precision, but remained consistent with the approach of his Louvain dissertation. Throughout the research conducted throughout twenty consecutive years—as collected in two volumes of essays, Saggi di filosofia dantesca (1930) and Dante e la cultura medievale (1942)—the intellectual profile of the Florentine Poet, as it had been sketched at Louvain, was articulated in a tripartite form fated to last until the end of Nardi’s scholarship” (362–63). Falzone adds that ‘‘today it is honestly impossible to accept Nardi’s scheme of the three phases of Dante’s philosophical development.” See Gilson, Dante the Philosopher, ix: “In the forefront was the fundamental thesis 1076 George Corbett berates Mandonnet for completely ignoring Nardi’s Siger de Brabant (1911) in his Dante le théologien (1935); like John the Baptist, Nardi has preached in the desert, and Gilson must save Nardi’s important insights by bringing them to a wider audience and readdressing the problem of Dante the theologian, contra Mandonnet.86 Indeed, Gilson’s letter to Nardi of June 17, 1937, contains the seed of Dante et la philosophie (1939): “I do not believe that Dante is a Thomist, or an Averroist: he was Dante. But he holds in theology Thomist doctrines, and in philosophy Averroist doctrines, and it is clear as day that his conception of the relationship between philosophy and theology is characteristic of Christian Averroism.”87 Following Nardi, Gilson presents Dante as a thinker strongly influenced by Latin Averroism in his early maturity (they both erroneously date Dante’s Convivio and Monarchia to this period) who then, due to an intellectual conversion, provided an original (and not Thomistic) synthesis in the Commedia.88 86 87 88 upheld by Father Mandonnet in his Dante le théologien. Accordingly, the reader will find it discussed with an insistence which, I fear, will be to some unpleasing. And yet anyone who has read this book knows very well that all the parts hang together and that the closely-knit fabric of its reasoning must be unravelled stitch by stitch if it is not desired that a portion which yields in one direction should still be sustained by the countless threads that link it to the remainder.” Like Mandonnet, Gilson had a lifelong love of Dante and published various short articles on his work. Like Mandonnet also, Gilson’s last published book was on Dante: Dante et Béatrice: études dantesques (1974). During the anniversary year of 1965, Gilson prepared three original papers published as “Trois études dantesques”: “Dante’s Mirabile Visione”; “What is a Shade?”; and “Poetry and Theology in The Divine Comedy” (Shook, Étienne Gilson, 372). Gilson, Letter to Bruno Nardi, June 17, 1937, in Dronke, Étienne Gilson’s Letters to Bruno Nardi, 4: “As for the Thomism of Dante, I never believed in it either. . . . I may return to this one day because the ‘Dante theologian’ of Mandonnet, who completely ignores your work, proves that you have preached in the desert.” In a second letter the following month ( July 8, 1937), Gilson informs Nardi of his proposal to readdress the problem of Dante theologian in a year or so, assuring him that he will draw upon and honor his excellent work in this regard: “I plan to take up the problem of ‘Dante theologian’ in a year or two. I will then be sure to refer and pay tribute to your excellent work” (5). Dronke, Étienne Gilson’s Letters to Bruno Nardi, 4. For Gilson, Siger’s place in Dante’s heaven of the sun is symbolic of Dante’s understanding of the mutual independence of philosophy and theology (implicit, in his view, in Latin Averroism), and evidence that this philosophical separatism was part of Dante’s political thought, i.e., about the relative autonomy of the Holy Roman Empire (Dante the Philosopher, 257–76). Thomists at War 1077 The 1930s Debates about Dante and the Subsequent Influence of Gilson and Nardi In an appendix to Dante et la philosophie, Gilson comments that the “serenity” of his and Nardi’s view of the Latin Averroism of Dante and Siger, and hence of their relationship to Aquinas’s thought, “was unexpectedly shattered” by a “thunderbolt” from the cleric and historian Fernand van Steenberghen (1904–1993).89 The thunderbolt in question was van Steenberghen’s 1931 attribution of an anonymous treatise Questiones de anima to Siger, an attribution which, if true, demonstrated that, in light of Aquinas’s critique, Siger had realized the error of his Averroist position on the unity of the intellect and conformed to the Thomist one.90 It followed that Dante might have known about Siger’s intellectual conversion to the Thomist position and consequently celebrated him at least in part for this (rather than as a Latin Averroist) in Paradiso 10. This revisionary view is compatible with Mandonnet’s general contention that Dante places Siger in the heaven of wisdom specifically as a philosopher, but rather than Dante being unaware of Siger’s Averroistic philosophical theses (Mandonnet’s 1899 hypothesis), he is instead aware of Siger’s conversion from these to Thomistic ones (van Steenberghen’s 1931/1938 hypothesis). As the Jesuit scholar Giovanni Busnelli (1866–1944) put it in 1932, Dante’s tercets about Siger “take on a definitely and profoundly true meaning, because they imply that Thomas Aquinas (who eulogizes him in heaven) knew of Siger’s renunciation of an exaggerated form of Averroism in favour of the true Aristotelian doctrine as he himself interpreted it.”91 As Gilson commented, “the idea of Siger of Brabant as a convert to Thomism that emerged from [van Steenberghen’s] book was precisely what Father Busnelli was waiting for to enable him to crush Signor Bruno Nardi,”92 and it would “destroy the thesis I uphold.”93 Gilson avowed that he only became acquainted with van Steenberghen’s Les oeuvres et la 89 90 91 92 93 Gilson, Dante the Philosopher, 319. Van Steenberghen had taken the same side as Mandonnet, against Gilson, in the famous “Christian philosophy” debates of the early 1930s (see, for example, Sadler, “Bibliography,” in Reason Fulfilled by Revelation, 27–28). Fernand van Steenberghen, Siger de Brabant d’après ses œuvres inédites, vol. 1, Les oeuvres inédites (Louvain: Institut Supérieur de Philosophie de l’Université, 1931). Giovanni Busnelli, S.J., La Civiltà cattolica 3 (1932): 132 (cited in Gilson, Dante the Philosopher, 319). Gilson, Dante the Philosopher, 319. Gilson, Dante the Philosopher, 317. Gilson further acknowledges “too great an interest in deeming [van Steenberghen’s conclusions] open to question to be able to discuss them without being suspected of prejudice.” 1078 George Corbett doctrine de Siger de Brabant (1938) after he had completed Dante et la philosophie (1939). His claim that this represented a “new approach to the problem” of which he was previously unaware is, however, disingenuous.94 Van Steenberghen’s new approach was already evident from his Siger de Brabant d’après ses œuvres inédites (1931), and as is evident from Gilson’s 1937 correspondence with Nardi, the implications of van Steenberghen’s 1931 volume (and the immediate controversy that it caused) were a key context, and motive, for him writing Dante et la philosophie in the first place (rather than a potentially inconvenient afterthought). Thus, in the June 1937 letter, Gilson highlights his particular gratitude to Nardi for his rebuttal of van Steenberghen’s thesis, in his 1936 “Il preteso tomismo di Sigieri di Brabante,” with which he substantially agreed. Furthermore, Gilson’s overall judgment in this 1937 letter (prior to writing Dante et la philosophie) is substantially equivalent to that in the appendix to the book: first, that the attribution of Questiones de anima to Siger is disputable; second, that no one has ever reversed their views without more explanation; and third, that there is no documentary evidence that Siger’s adversaries gloated about his volte face from Averroism to Thomism (which, Gilson wryly remarks, is as implausible as if M. Alfred Loisy had recanted his biblical exegesis but, because modernism had been condemned, no one had thought to mention it).95 In writing Dante et la philosophie, then, Gilson was entering the fray against the clerical Thomists (principally Mandonnet, but also van Steenberghen, Busnelli et al.) and coming to the aid of Nardi at a critical juncture in an evolving debate. When the clerical scholars seemed to have found their ultimate proof that “a Thomist [Dante] glorifies a Thomist,” Gilson sought to argue that Nardi’s sustained critique of the Thomist Dante as a myth should not be finally crushed, but as in fact transpired, should emerge victorious.96 Indeed, the opinions and scholarship of Nardi and Gilson would go on to underpin the subsequent twentieth- and twenty-first-century reception of Dante’s philosophy and theology, and of the relationship between Aquinas’s and Dante’s thought. The most influential postwar North American Dante scholar, Charles Singleton (1909–1985), simply noted that “one surely thinks of Étienne Gilson and Bruno Nardi as our Masters in this, in medieval philosophy,” while the English Dominican Foster, the 94 95 96 Gilson, Dante the Philosopher, 317: ‘‘I keenly regret that I only became acquainted with this work after I had completed my own’’ (see also 259n1). See Gilson, Letter to Bruno Nardi (17 June 17, 1937), in Dronke, Étienne Gilson’s Letters to Bruno Nardi, 3–4, and Gilson, Dante the Philosopher, 319–27. Gilson, Dante the Philosopher, 317 Thomists at War 1079 postwar authority on Dante’s theology in English and Italian scholarship,97 explicitly situated his understanding of the status questionis in opposition to Mandonnet and as following the “pioneering labours of Bruno Nardi and Gilson’s brilliant book [Dante et la philosophie].”98 Whether mediated by Foster or not, Nardi’s and Gilson’s subsequent influence on the 97 98 In addition to his entry “Tommaso d’Aquino” cited above, Foster was entrusted with the most important theological entries in the six-volume Enciclopedia Dantesca, on Christ, God, Theology, the Gospel, and the Summa contra gentiles: “Cristo” (2:262– 69); “Dio” (2:452–57); “Teologia” (5:564–68); “Vangelo” (5:874–77); “Summa contra Gentiles” (5:479–80). Kenelm Foster, The Two Dantes and Other Studies (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1977), 56 (and n. 1); Foster, “Tomasso d’Aquino,” 626–49. Foster specifically singles out J. H. Whitfield’s review of Gilson’s Dante et la philosophie in Modern Language Review 41, no. 3 (1946): 334–35, which is “notable as the first tribute by an English Italianist to Gilson’s brilliant raid into Dante territory, the effect of which had been delayed by the war” (“Dante Studies in England, 1921–1964,” Italian Studies 20, no. 3 [1965]: 1–16). Foster was first introduced to Dante by Edward Bullough, who followed the “Thomist Dante” tradition, citing favorably Mandonnet, Berthier, Busnelli, et al. (see Edward Bullough, “Dante, the Poet of St. Thomas,” in St. Thomas Aquinas: Papers from the Summer School of Catholic Studies held at Cambridge, August 4–9, ed. C. Lattey [Cambridge: Heffer & Sons, 1924], 247–84). However, Foster turned strongly against this Thomist approach to Dante, aligning himself with Nardi and Gilson, and opposing (and strongly so) the work of Mandonnet. Foster’s intellectual trajectory was unusual for an English Dominican of his time: he also reacted strongly against the “purely Catholic diet of Aristotle (dubbed an honorary Papist), Aquinas and Père [Reginald Garrigou] Lagrange, as their intellectual beau ideal for a Friar Preacher” taught at Hawkesyard Dominican priory (Aiden Nichols, “Kenelm Foster,” in Dominican Gallery: Portrait of a Culture [Leominster: Gracewing, 1997], 304–341, at 304–5), and he was not chosen, as would have been expected for a Dominican of his obvious intelligence (he had previously graduated with a first and the offer of a fellowship from Cambridge), to proceed to a theological degree and a teaching career in the order. As Bede Bailey, O.P., a fellow Dominican who knew him well, put it: “Both at Hawkesyard and Blackfriars, Oxford, Kenelm was thought to be not properly docile in his approach to his studies. . . . So when the time came for the students to be divided into intellectual sheep and goats—those who would proceed to theological degrees and those who would not—he found himself among the goats” (Bede Bailey, O.P., “In Memoriam Kenelm Foster OP: 1910–1986,” New Blackfriars 67, no. 789 [1986], 138–40, at 139). Instead, Foster studied for a doctorate in the Modern and Medieval Languages Faculty at Cambridge, going on to lecture in Italian Studies for thirty years (1948–1978), and remaining torn, it seems, between his double vocations as a Dominican Thomist and an Italianist; Bailey commented that Foster “learned and cultured, an artist and a poet,” identified with the Catholic poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, “perhaps sharing the poet’s tension between his religion and artistry,” a tension Foster memorably applied, of course, to Dante in The Two Dantes (“In Memoriam,” 139). 1080 George Corbett understanding of the relationship between Aquinas’s and Dante’s thought was and is widespread and persistent. For example, three reappraisals of the relationship between Aquinas and Dante were published in 2013 alone, all of which uphold the thesis and foundational approach of Nardi, Gilson, and Foster. Simon Gilson’s nuanced account of the complex history of the question addresses the developments since the mid-twentieth century in historical scholarship on both Aquinas and Dante, according to which both authors emerge as more eclectic in their use of sources.99 He nonetheless reaffirms the scholarly consensuses that: (1) “the view of Aquinas as the principal or exclusive influence on Dante’s theological and philosophical forma mentis,” albeit “once widely-held, [is] now discredited,” and “it is quite impossible to ignore the divergences between them: these are numerous and often of considerable philosophical and theological magnitude;” (2) “Bruno Nardi [is] still widely regarded as the pre-eminent historian of Dante’s philosophical and theological thought,” with accompanying praise for “his vast erudition and polemical zeal against what he saw as the ‘leggenda del tomismo dantesco’;” and (3) Étienne Gilson, “another pre-eminent historian of medieval theology,” provided a “balanced judgement on Dante’s philosophical and 99 With regard to developments in scholarship on Aquinas’s and Dante’s thought, see, for example, S. Gilson, “Dante and Christian Aristotelianism,” 79–82 (including nn. 38–43 and 48)—see esp. 75–76: “We ought also to recognise that the study of Aquinas’s own philosophical and theological culture has developed notably since the time of the disputes between Nardi and Busnelli. . . . The significance of the Dante Aquinas relationship has been further complicated, and, in some quarters, subject to radical revision, by several major studies that have revealed not only the complexity and multiplicity of Dante’s theological interests, but also his strong concern with affective, non-rationalist currents and thinkers.” In an indicative bibliography (76–77, nn. 30–33), Gilson rightly singles out the work of Zygmunt G. Barański as having presented the “greatest challenge, not simply to Aquinas’s presence in Dante, but to the entire tradition of late medieval neo-Aristotelianism as a chiave di lettura for the poem” (77). Barański traces the genealogy of his own approach from its “cautious point of departure in late nineteenth-century positivist and historicist research, before spectacularly dashing forward, thanks to the seminal contributions of Bruno Nardi, Étienne Gilson, Kenelm Foster, and Cesare Vasoli” (“‘With such vigilance! With such effort!’ Studying Dante ‘Subjectively,’” Italian Culture 33, no. 1 [2015]: 55–69, at 60). Barański’s position is, however, even more radical than theirs, disputing as it does the very “critically entrenched image, of Dante the ‘philosopher’ and ‘theologian’” itself, and the governing assumption that Dante had much in common “with the professional theologians and philosophers of his day” at all (60–61). In Barański’s view, Dante’s approach is better considered as “sapiential,” and opposed to the “rationalistic” approach of the schools (see, especially, Dante e i segni: saggi per una storia intellettuale di Dante Alighieri [Naples: Liguori, 2000]). Thomists at War 1081 theological views,” with praise of Dante et la philosophie as a “classic work” which “offers a magisterial—and witty—critique of Mandonnet’s excesses in reading Dante as a Thomist, taking care to point out the many areas of opposition between Dante and Aquinas.”100 Christopher Ryan similarly comments that, “for all Dante’s espousal of Aquinas as among the most cherished of his auctores, the differences between them are as great as the similarities, one of the great achievements of the twentieth century in the area of Dante scholarship being the retrieval of Dante from Thomas, or, more exactly, from Thomism,” and Ryan attributes this achievement principally to Nardi, Gilson, and Foster.101 Following suit, John Took claims that “perhaps the single most important accomplishment of twentieth-century Dante scholarship—certainly in the area of philosophy and theology—was the separating out of Dantean and Thomist spirituality,” an accomplishment Took also specifically attributes to Nardi, Gilson, and Foster in turn, concluding that, “well before the end of the century, then, the myth of Dante’s Thomism . . . has as a result of these and of similar interventions been put to rest.”102 Thomistic and Dantean Theses: A Twenty-First-Century Reappraisal In accepting Gilson and Nardi as authoritative and reliable guides to Aquinas, Dante scholars have typically followed their analyses of the divergences between Aquinas’s and Dante’s thought, and hence their dismissal of the “Thomist Dante” as a “myth.” However, as we have seen, Aquinas is not a stable or self-evident point of comparison because his own thought is subject to highly varying interpretations. In light of the reception history analyzed above and with particular reference to Mandonnet’s Dante le théologien, I thus reappraise and re-examine, in this third and final section, eight key Dantean theses that Nardi, Gilson, and Foster considered especially irreconcilable with the thought of Aquinas. 100 101 102 S. Gilson, “Dante and Christian Aristotelianism,” 70–73. In 2013, John Took published his posthumous revision of Christopher Ryan’s reappraisal of the Aquinas and Dante relationship, which had remained incomplete at the time of Ryan’s death in 2004. See Christopher Ryan, Dante and Aquinas: A Study of Nature and Grace in the “Comedy,” revised by John Took with introduction (London: Ubiquity, 2013), 3–4. John Took, “Between Philology and Friendship: Dante and Aquinas Revisited,” in Conversations with Kenelm: Essays on the Theology of the “Commedia” (London: Ubiquity Press, 2013), 1–47, at 1–2. 1082 George Corbett The Natural Desire for the Beatific Vision For Nardi, Gilson, and Foster, Dante’s most evident non-Thomistic thesis is that man does not have a natural desire for the beatific vision. To support this view, they cite Dante’s Convivio 3.15—“[What God is] is not something we naturally desire to know”—and for contrast, section 4 of chapter 30 in Aquinas’s Summa contra gentiles III: “The natural desire to know does not rest in that knowledge of God whereby we know merely that He is.”103 There are two issues here: one about their interpretation of Dante and the other about their interpretation of Aquinas. With regard to Convivio 3.15.7–10, they ignore the procedural point that, in this passage, Dante is approaching the question philosophically (not theologically), and is responding to a specific objection to the earthly happiness (the life of philosophical contemplation) he is describing: how can (philosophical) wisdom make a man happy if there are objects of the intellect which he knows exist, but which he cannot know perfectly (i.e., know their essence). Dante argues as follows: (1) natural desire is proportioned to the capacity of the agent desiring; (2) nature would be in vain if an agent, in desiring its perfection, were to desire its imperfection; (3) knowledge of God’s essence (not that God exists but what and who God is) is not proportionate to human nature, and is only naturally proportionate to God; therefore (4) we do not naturally desire the beatific vision (i.e., to see God face to face). The second issue is that they take Aquinas’s position on this question to be self-evident (whereas, in fact, it was one of the most contentious problems in the history of twentieth-century Catholic thought104), and 103 104 Foster, “Tommaso d’Aquino,” 626a–49a. See also Falzone, “Nardi’s Louvain Dissertation,” 370–72 (“This thesis is clearly opposed to Aquinas’ solution; it contrasts with those of other theologians as well”), and Luca Bianchi, “Moral Philosophy,” in Dante in Context, ed. Zygmunt G. Barański and Lino Pertile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 159–72, at 170: “This statement provides decisive evidence against the ‘legend’ of Dante’s Thomism, since it is clearly at odds with the basic tenets of Aquinas’ ethics and anthropology.” See especially Lawrence Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas Aquinas and His Interpreters (Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia Press, 2010), and Steven A. Long, Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). For further contributions to the ongoing twenty-first century discussion, see also Long, “On the Possibility of a Purely Natural End for Man,” The Thomist 64, no. 2 (2000): 211–37; Stephen Wang, “Aquinas on Human Happiness and the Natural Desire for God,” New Blackfriars 88, no. 1015 (2007): 322–34; Christopher Malloy, “De Lubac on Natural Desire: Difficulties and Antitheses,” Nova et Vetera (English) 9, no. 3 (2011): 567–624; Patrick Gardner, “Thomas and Dante on the Duo Ultima Hominis,” The Thomist 75, no. 3 (2011): 415–59; Long, “Creation ad imaginem Dei: The Obediential Potency of the Human Person to Grace and Glory,” Thomists at War 1083 they quote, as evidence for it, two passages—from Aquinas’s Summa theologiae and Summa contra gentiles—where Aquinas is approaching the same question theologically.105 In De veritate, by contrast, Aquinas speaks of the beatific vision as exceeding “the proportion of human nature because the natural powers are not sufficient for attaining, or thinking, or desiring it,” a position in harmony with Dante’s philosophical position in the Convivio.106 As the historian Frederick Copleston (1907–1994) comments, in De veritate, St. Thomas “does not admit a natural desire in the strict sense for the vision of God, and it seems only reasonable to suppose that when in the Summa Theologica and Summa contra Gentiles he speaks of a natural desire for the vision of God, he is not speaking strictly as a philosopher, but as a theologian and philosopher combined, that is, presupposing the supernatural order and interpreting the data of experience in the light of that presupposition.”107 105 106 107 Nova et Vetera (English) 14, no. 4 (2015): 1175–92; Jacob W. Wood, “Henri de Lubac, Humani Generis, and the Natural Desire for a Supernatural End,” Nova et Vetera (English) 15, no. 4 (2017): 1209–41; and David L. Augustine, “Extrinsicism?: Revisiting the Preconciliar Theology of Nature and Grace,” Nova et Vetera (English) 18, no. 3 (2020): 791–816. Foster, “Tomasso d’Aquino,” 646a. See also Foster, “Dante’s vision of God,” in The Two Dantes, 66–85. In terms of the twentieth-century debates, Foster cites only one article on this issue: Antonius Finili, “Natural Desire,” Dominican Studies 1, no. 4 (1948), 313–59. On Finili’s place in the debates of the 1920s, see also Feingold, Natural Desire, 356–69. Aquinas, De veritate, q. 14, a. 2 (cited in Long, “On the Possibility,” 211). See also Long, “Creation,” 1185–92. De veritate, q. 14, a. 3. See Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, vol. 2, Augustine to Scotus (London: Search Press, 1950), 405: “In the De Veritate (q. 27, a. 2) St. Thomas says that man, according to his nature, has a natural appetite for aliqua contemplatio divinorum, such as it is possible for a man to obtain by the power of nature, and that the inclination of his desire towards the supernatural and gratuitous end (the vision of God) is the work of grace.” That we know through Christian revelation that God has in fact, in history, become incarnate and thereby raised up human nature by grace to participate in the beatific vision does not necessarily imply, for Aquinas, that human nature would have been in vain were God not to have done so (otherwise, and this is one of the many problematic implications of de Lubac’s position, it seems that God had to become incarnate). See also Long, “On the Possibility,” 231: “But in a state wherein nature is not further ordered, the end proportioned to human nature remains a true felicity, a genuine end. One grants that this felicity would be imperfect because mobile. No finite good can perfectly quell the will, and apart from revelation all knowledge of God is causal knowledge proceeding from creaturely effects. Still, natural felicity is imperfect only relative to an end utterly disproportionate to human nature that we cannot even raise to desire apart from grace.” 1084 George Corbett In this regard, McInerny highlights Cajetan’s distinction between two ways of considering man’s desire for the beatific vision: (1) as pertaining to man’s nature, it is not natural; (2) as pertaining to man ordered to a supernatural end, it is natural. Aquinas’s passage in De veritate should be understood in the first sense (as should Dante’s passage in Convivio 3.15), whereas the passages in the Summa theologiae and Summa contra gentiles should be understood in the second sense.108 Rather than a necessary and “certain” contradiction between Aquinas and Dante, then, what is at stake here are two rival interpretations of Aquinas’s thought, as well as, on the part of Nardi, Gilson, Foster, and others, an interpretative failure to account for the procedural distinction, common to this period, between speaking philosophically and speaking theologically. Gilson considered “absolutely perfect” de Lubac’s thesis in Le mystère du surnaturel (1965) that, according to Aquinas, man has a natural desire for the beatific vision (in both senses), a desire only grace can accomplish.109 However, de Lubac (and Gilson) were reacting against the mainstream Thomist tradition of the time, according to which “man is made for a natural happiness in such a way that if he is called to the vision of God, as he is, such a grace can only be superadded. The theory thus denies that man [in the first sense] has a natural desire for supernatural beatitude ‘the aspiration for which is due to a grace specifically Christian.’”110 Dante’s Imperialist Political Theology Étienne Gilson highlights the striking contrast between Dante’s and Aquinas’s political thought. Dante affirms that the pope is “the Sovereign Pontiff, vicar of Our Lord Jesus Christ and Peter’s successor, to whom we owe what is the due, not of Christ, but of Peter”; by contrast, Aquinas states that he is “the Sovereign Priest Peter’s successor, the Vicar of Christ, the Roman Pontiff, to whom all the kings of the Christian people owe submission, as to Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself.”111 In doing so, however, Gilson is only reiterating what Berthier and Mandonnet had both underlined as a non-Thomistic element in Dante’s thought. Thus Berthier considered wildly idealistic, dangerous in its time, and clearly erroneous Dante’s 108 109 110 111 McInerny, Praeambula fidei, 84. McInerny, Praeambula fidei, 79. McInerny, Praeambula fidei, 72. See also Long, Natura Pura. However, Wood argues that de Lubac’s understanding is not, nonetheless, “an historical novum,” but instead was a “foundational commitment of the Thomism of the Aegidian tradition, which was established by Giles of Rome” (“Henri de Lubac,” 1210). Dante, Monarchia 3.3; Aquinas, De regimine principum 1.14. Thomists at War 1085 practical application of the twofold end of man (natural and supernatural) to support his imperialist argument for the complete temporal sovereignty of a Holy Roman Emperor in Monarchia, and thought the Dominican Guido Vernani (and the Church as a whole) quite right to refute and condemn this thesis shortly after Dante’s death in 1328.112 Mandonnet similarly contextualizes Dante’s imperialist utopianism, excusing it with reference to the political passions, unjust exile, and disappointments of Dante and his time.113 The removal of Dante’s Monarchia from the Index in 1881 was in no way a belated recognition that Dante’s political vision had, in fact, been correct. Nonetheless, times had moved on, and the Church arguably did not want to dampen, by this censure, the enthusiasm for Dante as the Christian poet of the Commedia. Notwithstanding Dante’s heterodox political vision, it is the theological and philosophical doctrines of the Commedia overall, then, that Mandonnet and Berthier consider sound, and in general harmony with Aquinas’s teaching. Dante’s “Division of Human Life under ‘Two Final Ends’ (duo ultima)” According to Gilson, Nardi, and Foster, not only Dante’s imperial political theology but the ethical theory of the duo ultima (the two ends of man) that underpins it sets him at odds with Aquinas’s own moral thought: “Dante’s dualism, and the temporal final goal which it implies, are excluded in advance by St. Thomas.”114 Gilson claims that “not only—as far as we know—did St. Thomas never speak of duo ultima, nor, in this sense, of duplex finis, but his doctrine excludes even the possibility of their existence.”115 Once again, the issue concerns the selection of one passage in Aquinas’s works without regard to others and the failure to distinguish between the 112 113 114 115 Berthier, “Introduzione,” no. 7, in Inferno, 2:xxiii–xxiv. See Berthier, VII: “In that book Dante erred in many places, induced to such error both by the sophistry of the Bolognese jurists, who followed Raniero in teaching these Roman-German doctrines, as well as by his own disgust for the democracy which had caused him so much suffering in his native Florence. For our purposes, it would be useless to discuss the arguments adopted by the poet, especially given that everyone today understands them to be great utopias, which could only be realized in a perfect world.” For an analysis of Guido Vernarni’s critique of Dante’s positions, see also Corbett, Dante and Epicurus, 51–56. See Mandonnet, Review of Gilson, Le Thomisme, 134. Mandonnet also remarks that Dante’s haughty spirit and moral intransigence made him manifestly unsuitable for public life and, in exiling him, Florence actually worked to Dante’s glory by shielding him from the fruitless unrest of the forum, and enabling him to concentrate on his studies during his long years of solitude. Gilson, Dante the Philosopher, 195n2. Gilson, Dante the Philosopher, 194n2. 1086 George Corbett procedural approaches of them both. While Gilson relies on a citation from Aquinas’s Summa contra gentiles to imply a single ultimate end, in De veritate Aquinas articulates, in a different context, a twofold ultimate end to man.116 McInerny paraphrases the key passage as follows: There is, Thomas observes, a twofold ultimate end of man, the ultimate end being what first engages the will; one such end is proportioned to human nature and man’s natural powers suffice for attaining it (this is the happiness of which philosophers speak, whether contemplative, which lies in the activity of wisdom, or active, which consists first in the act of prudence and consequently in the acts of the other virtues). But there is another good that is disproportionate to human nature and our natural powers do not suffice for the attaining of it, either for knowing it or for desiring it. It is promised by the divine liberality alone.117 While Thomists traditionally differentiate between man’s natural and his supernatural end, twentieth-century followers of de Lubac—who refute this distinction in Aquinas—typically ignore or downplay evidence such as this to the contrary.118 Crucially, Gilson mistakenly appears to hold that the doctrine of a duplex finis implies that the natural end is complete from the perspective of revelation and the supernatural end thereby revealed. Gilson affirms that “all [Aquinas’s] energies are bent on proving that man’s final goal, as conceived by natural reason, is prescribed as a stepping-stone, and is subordinate, to that goal of whose attainment Revelation shows us the possibility.”119 However, for Aquinas and Dante, the natural end is not a stepping stone, as if a man were to reach his natural end and then jump from this to his supernatural end; instead, the natural and supernatural ends are ways of conceiving man’s ultimate end in terms of (1) his nature alone and (2) his nature elevated by grace.120 116 117 118 119 120 Gilson, Dante the Philosopher, 194n2. McInerny, Praeambula fidei, 20. Thus, as Gardner notes, Bradley “mentions the passage most stubbornly inhospitable to his thesis (De Verit., q. 14, a. 3) only in passing to trump it with other texts” (“Thomas and Dante on the Duo ultima hominis,” 417n5). See also Denis J. M. Bradley, Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good: Reason and Human Happiness in Aquinas’s Moral Science (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 398. Gilson, Dante the Philosopher, 194n2. In De veritate, Aquinas also underlines that beatitude, the vision of the divine essence, is beyond the power of the human intellect, which must be raised by the light of glory Thomists at War 1087 Therefore, although Dante’s heterodox political vision was undoubtedly opposed to that of Aquinas, the extent to which the underpinning theory of the duo ultima is opposed to Aquinas, and to a lay and worldly (laico e mondano) aspect of Dante’s thought (as for Nardi, Gilson and Foster), depends on the particular interpretation of Aquinas’s thought itself.121 As Patrick Gardner has argued more recently, “behind very different political applications lies an instructive agreement in principle” between Aquinas and Dante: this very “distinction between two ultimate ends or goods for man.”122 The Relationship between Philosophy and Theology For Gilson, Nardi was right to deduce a heterodox approach to philosophy as a strict consequence of Dante’s doctrine of the duo ultima: “Nardi, with great shrewdness, has seen and pointed out that there is disagreement here between Dante and St. Thomas, and that this difference implies another, regarding the nature of philosophy itself. . . . I am convinced that he is entirely right on this point, and even that what he says is an incontestable and obvious historical fact.”123 However, Gilson’s and Nardi’s identification of difference on this point between Aquinas and Dante follows, again, from their own particular and highly contentious interpretations of Aquinas’s thought. Gilson’s interpretation of Dante’s trajectory (from the “dualism” between philosophy and theology in the prose works to the alleged Christian synthesis of the Commedia) is, in essence, a cultural mapping onto Dante of his wider agenda for twentieth-century “Christian 121 122 123 (the lumen gloriae) to see God, the first truth, and all things in Him (q. 10, a. 11, ad. 7). Referencing this passage, as well as passages from the Summa theologiae, Mandonnet sees no difference of opinion between Aquinas and Dante in their approach to a temporal beatitude in this life, and the beatitude of the future life (see Mandonnet, Dante le théologien, 216–17). Foster, “Tommaso d’Aquino,” 647b. See Gardner, “Thomas and Dante on the Duo Ultima Hominis,” 419. Gardner argues that Dante’s distinction between man as corruptible and man as incorruptible is common enough in principle: man (a composition of soul and body) is mortal (death is simply the division of a man’s soul and body), whereas man’s soul is immortal (and will be reunited with its body at the resurrection); in light of this, man has a natural and temporal end, a temporal beatitude as a man (composite of soul and body), and an eternal beatitude in virtue of his immortal soul (the beatific vision of man’s soul, and with the general resurrection, of man body and soul). See also Jason Aleksander, “Dante’s Understanding of the Two Ends of Human Desire and the Relationship between Philosophy and Theology,” The Journal of Religion 91, no. 2 (2011): 158–87. Gilson, Dante the Philosopher, 194n2 (Gilson cites Nardi, Saggi di filosofia dantesca, 282 and 304–5). 1088 George Corbett philosophy,” and, with Chenu, for a “new school” and “new curriculum” of theology. By contrast, Mandonnet and Berthier maintain the traditional Thomist position that Catholic theology does not admit of intrinsic change and includes within it a philosophy (subject to the dictates of reason, conforming to the Faith, and therefore in se immutable). To Dante’s sacred poem, both heaven and earth have set their hand (“’l poema sacro, / al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra”), and in continuity with the early commentators, Mandonnet and Berthier interpret these lines to indicate that Dante distinguishes between, and draws upon, both philosophy (which derives its principles from below) and Christian revelation (which derives its principles from above).124 That St. Thomas wrote philosophical works (such as his long commentaries on Aristotle’s Ethics, Physics, Metaphysics, and On the Soul) as well as theological works which draw on this philosophy (most notably, the Summa contra gentiles and the Summa theologiae) does not imply that he was less a Christian in writing the former (or, indeed, that there were two Thomases, one an Aristotelian philosopher and the other a Christian theologian). Rather, philosophy is an important field of knowledge in its own right, as well as being the handmaid of theology (ancilla theologiae), part of the doctrine which makes up (and, in the Scholastic curriculum, prepared for the study of ) theology. Nor, then, does Dante’s procedural emphasis on philosophy in the Convivio necessarily imply, as it did for Nardi, Gilson, and Foster, an intellectual conversion for him to write the Commedia.125 Mandonnet affirms, indeed, that the great achievement of thirteenth-​ century theology was to place “every field of intellectual endeavour then known in contact with the revealed order.” Theology is, then, a “universal science which the Commedia holds all together: everything in the revealed order and in the purely human order, in faith and in science in the domain of thought; in grace and in nature, in the order of reality.”126 Dante’s epic is the “poem of human destiny in light of Christian teaching,” the theme 124 125 126 Dante, Paradiso 25.1–2; Mandonnet, Dante le théologien, 258. Foster is perplexed that in the Convivio the “influence of divine grace in the human soul and body in the present life—a central issue for Christian ethics—is entirely ignored” (Foster, Two Dantes, 239). From Mandonnet’s perspective, however, this is simply concomitant to the work being principally philosophical. Mandonnet, Dante le théologien, 255; 258. Mandonnet notes that the very “breadth and variety of [the Commedia’s] subject matter” has led critics to locate Dante as “primarily philosophical, moral, historical, or even political,” a tendency based on a fundamental misunderstanding of “what theology was for Dante’s contemporaries and for Dante himself ” (254). Thomists at War 1089 “of the great thirteenth-century works of theology, about man’s fall, restoration, and return to God.”127 The natural and supernatural orders, the orders of nature and of grace, are nonetheless distinct and irreducible in themselves.128 It is for this reason that, with regard to speculative knowledge, Mandonnet identifies Dante’s Virgil with philosophy, while he identifies Dante’s Beatrice specifically with revealed truth, faith, and the light of glory.129 In the Commedia, it is Dante’s Aquinas who represents, for Mandonnet, Christian theology (which brings together the truths of reason and Christian revelation into a formal synthesis).130 Thus, where Foster in particular saw the dichotomy between Virgil and Beatrice as setting Dante at antipodes with Aquinas and creating a deeply problematic tension in the poem between “Two Dantes,” Mandonnet understands Dante’s Virgil and Beatrice as his poetic solution to the challenge of representing, in the speculative order of knowledge, the Thomistic autonomy of truths from reason and from revelation, truths which find—in Christian theology (in Aquinas’s Summa theologiae as in Dante’s Commedia)—their integration, without thereby losing their distinction. The Relationship between Nature and Grace For Foster, nature must in some sense surrender its autonomy in a Christian synthesis. By contrast, Virgil (and Dante’s limbo of the virtuous pagans as a whole) seems to embody a kind of human perfectibility without healing grace (gratia sanans), which Foster finds incompatible with Aquinas’s thought and theologically unacceptable.131 For Mandonnet, in an individual Christian, grace clearly builds on nature and transforms it; nonetheless, at a conceptual level, the natural order retains its distinction. In Dante’s Commedia, this is represented by the action of both Beatrice (the order of grace) and Virgil (the order of nature) on the Christian pilgrim Dante. 127 128 129 130 131 Mandonnet, Dante le théologien, 254. Mandonnet, Dante le théologien, 259. Mandonnet adds that one could thus extract the subject matter of philosophy and theology from the poem, placing it within the traditional division of these two disciplines; in doing so, Mandonnet claims, one would see how Dante had almost exhausted the essential truths of these sciences, whether directly or through allusion (Mandonnet, Dante le théologien, 261). Mandonnet, Dante le théologien, 266. Foster, Two Dantes, 248–49: “a ‘nature’ whose contact with God (through grace) is minimal, but whose intrinsic excellence, on its own level and for the duration of life on earth can, in principle, be complete. And this completeness in human excellence, if achieved, would be self-achieved. Grace as sanans, as healing the wound of sin, would not, in principle, be needed.” 1090 George Corbett Crucially, however, the issue here is principally a hermeneutical one, and only secondarily an issue of dogmatic theology. Underpinning Foster’s claim of divergence between Aquinas’s and Dante’s thought is his assumption that the literal sense of Dante’s poem is true, or intended to be interpreted as such. This highly questionable assumption pervaded postwar Dante criticism, whether the Commedia was understood as a mystical vision (Nardi), figural fulfilment (Erich Auerbach), or according to the allegory of the theologians (Singleton).132 From the hermeneutical perspective of the allegory of the poets sustained by Berthier and Mandonnet, by contrast, Dante’s imaginative creation of a limbo of the virtuous pagans, which so vexed Foster and subsequent critics, is not intended as dogmatic eschatology at all (i.e., to imply that such a state actually exists for pagans in the afterlife). Rather, what is primary is not the fictional sign, but the truth signified: the happiness of this life (beatitudo huius vitae), the kind of (albeit limited) earthly happiness attainable by the teaching of the philosophers. Man’s natural end (natural beatitude)—praising and contemplating God without suffering but without seeing him face to face—would be, according to Aquinas’s theological hypothesis, the eternal destiny of unbaptized infants in limbo. However, in Dante’s fiction, man’s natural end (represented in limbo) is seen from the perspective of man’s supernatural end, and hence the virtuous pagans “live in desire without hope.”133 Pagan Virtue and Pagan Salvation Foster’s hermeneutical commitment to the truth of the literal sense of the Commedia also leads him to consider Dante’s teaching on pagan virtue and salvation as at odds with Aquinas’s thought: that Dante actually believed that (1) an individual pagan could be morally impeccable and (2) an individual pagan, without some exceptional miracle, is necessarily damned. For Mandonnet, by contrast, what is at stake here are Dante’s 132 133 On the problematic issue of twentieth-century hermeneutical approaches to the Commedia, see George Corbett, “Interpreting Dante’s Commedia: Competing Perspectives,” Biblioteca Dantesca 4 (2021): 1–32. In his commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics, Aquinas clarifies that the temporal beatitude of philosophical contemplation spoken of by Aristotle is qualified: “Such men are happy as men, for in this life subject to mutability, perfect happiness cannot be attained” (see Feingold, Natural Desire, 361n175); the natural final beatitude must be satisfied after this life, but from a theological perspective, this need not have involved the beatific vision (seeing God face to face), as the theological hypothesis of the beatitude of the unbaptized infants underlines. However, from the perspective of the afterlife, this qualified temporal beatitude of the pagans (intended as a limited happiness in this life) is, of course, deficient. Thomists at War 1091 competing doctrinal and poetic demands in writing the Commedia. As poet, Dante seeks a beautiful theological form and must sustain the rules of poetic allegory and verisimilitude; as teacher, he seeks to sacrifice nothing essential in communicating doctrine.134 Crucially, though, conflicts between these competing demands are inevitable; in such cases, the tension is resolved through mutual concessions, with sometimes the doctrinal and sometimes the poetic claim ceding precedence. In this instance, Virgil’s doctrinal significance (the natural order) necessitates, at the level of the poetic fiction, his location in limbo (as morally impeccable and spiritually damned). Had Dante chosen as his signifier of the natural order an abstract (and historically non-existent) lady such as Boethius’s Lady Philosophy, the problem of an individual virtuous pagan’s apparent damnation, at the level of the fiction, would not have arisen.135 Nonetheless, according to the allegory of the poets, it had been customary from the earliest commentators to interpret this strange section of limbo only according to its figurative or doctrinal sense (poetice), and not literally as dogmatic theology (theologice).136 The dogmatic truths here reside only in the signified and not in the signifier: theologically, the relative autonomy of philosophical truth, the moral law, and the human arts (as preeminently of poetry); morally, the necessity of belief in Christ for salvation, such that a living nonbeliever already exists in a moral Hell (living in desire, without hope).137 Given what Dante would have known about their lives, it is highly implausible that he would have believed that the historical Virgil and the other adult inhabitants of limbo literally did not sin in their earthly lives. The heterodox view of moral impeccability goes against common sense and was explicitly ruled out as shameless presumption and mistaken blundering by Augustine, and as a simple impossibility 134 135 136 137 Mandonnet, Dante le théologien, 243. There were, of course, many advantages for Dante in deploying Virgil typologically; moreover, at the level of the fictional journey, Virgil’s apparent damnation provides one of the most important narrative dramas and tension points of the poem. See, for example, Guido da Pisa, gloss to Inferno 4.82–84: “But our faith does not hold that in Limbo there are any souls except innocent children. . . . The poet, however, in this part . . . . is not speaking theologically but rather poetically.” Mandonnet, Dante le théologien, 128. The moral message underpinning the tragic fate of the pagan is particularly aimed at unbelievers. As Francesco da Buti puts it: “Every unbeliever in this life is without hope. Since faith generates hope, he who does not have the true faith does not have true hope. And the unbelievers of the world still give testimony to this—who live in continual desire for beatitude and yet cannot have true hope for it because they do not have true faith” (cited, with reference to the broader question, in Corbett, “The Limbus Gentilium Virtuosum,” in Dante and Epicurus, 123–29). 1092 George Corbett by Aquinas.138 In terms of pagan salvation, Dante finally makes clear, in the heavens of Jupiter and Saturn, that the destiny of particular pagans is known to God alone. Interpreting the Commedia according to the allegory of the poets (as was prevalent until the early twentieth century), and bearing in mind Dante’s sometimes competing doctrinal and poetic demands, the dogmatic theology hidden under the fiction of Dante’s poem is not necessarily opposed, then, to Aquinas’s teaching at all. Prime Matter A paradigmatic example given by Nardi, Gilson, and Foster for maintaining that “Dante’s universe was not the Thomist one” is a very short passage about prime matter in Paradiso 29: “Form and matter, both joined and entirely pure, came forth into unflawed being, like three arrows from a bow with three strings.”139 In relation to this passage, Mandonnet underlines again the exegetical principle of competing doctrinal and poetic demands: critics who approach the Commedia from the perspective of doctrine must not forget that we are dealing also with a poet.140 Both Nardi (anti-Thomist) and Busnelli (Nardi’s early Thomist opponent), on Mandonnet’s view, fell into this trap.141 Mandonnet acknowledges that “the way in which Dante expresses himself on the subject of prime matter in canto 29 of Paradiso could lead one to believe that he is following Augustine’s theory, a theory which allows for a potential existence of matter independent of substantial form.”142 Nonetheless, Dante’s use of the technical Aristotelian and Thomist expression pura potenza (Paradiso 29.34), a concept which excludes actuality, precludes this interpretation; and, following Busnelli, he references also a parallel passage in Aquinas’s Compendium theologiae.143 138 139 140 141 142 143 Augustine, Contra Iulianum haeresis Pelegiannae defensorem 4.3.26, and Aquinas, De veritate, q. 24, a. 12, ad 2. Paradiso 29.22–24. As evidence of Dante’s debt to Avicenna, Nardi cites, among other things, Dante’s doubt in Paradiso 19.22–24 about the existence of prime matter in God (Nardi, Dante e la cultura medievale: nuovi saggi di filosofia dantesca [Bari: B. Laterza, 1942], 248–53). See Foster, Two Dantes, 57. Mandonnet, Dante le théologien, 246. Mandonnet nonetheless emphasizes that “I do not believe that Nardi’s thesis as a whole is justified, and I think Fr Giovanni Busnelli SJ is right to oppose Nardi in the study he devoted to this matter, entitled, ‘Dantean cosmogony and its sources’” (Mandonnet, Dante le théologien, 246, including n. 28). Mandonnet, Dante le théologien, 247. Busnelli, “La Cosmogonia Dantesta,” in the Scritti vari combined issue, 42–84, at 45–46: “And Aquinas applies this way of conceiving ‘form and matter, both joined and entirely pure’ to all sensible things and intelligible entities with these other words, Thomists at War 1093 However, and crucially, Mandonnet maintains that the reason for Dante’s formulation was poetic rather than doctrinal. Dante imprints the central mystery of the Christian faith, that God is one substance in three persons, onto the entire fabric of the Commedia from the macro level— one poem in three canticles narrates one vision of the afterlife through three realms, with each of the three main protagonists (Dante, Virgil, and Beatrice) having three offices—to the micro level—the arrangement of terzine (each with three lines). It is to apply the governing poetic principle of one-in-threeness, in Mandonnet’s view, that Dante presents the categories of object resulting from the creative act of the triune God under three headings.144 As a general principle, then, Mandonnet warns against the fallacy of simply extracting theological or philosophical doctrines from Dante’s Commedia without considering the possible poetic or formal reasons in their particular contexts: “Many textual particularities,” he claims, “may be understood and justified in the mutual requirements of poetry and doctrine which, depending on the circumstances, had to give way one to the other.”145 The Identity of Essence and Existence in God, and their Distinction in Creatures As with the key positive differences between Aquinas’s and Dante’s thought, moreover, so with the negative ones. Gilson claims that the distinction between essence and existence in creatures, and their identity in God ipsum esse subsistens, is the most original aspect of Aquinas’s thought. He also states that “the Thomistic school, the Dominican order, and especially Cardinal Cajetan” had failed to recognize this fact. However, as McInerny points out, the “Thomist who would make the real distinction [between essence and existence] unique or original to Thomas must face the considerable difficulty that Thomas does not agree with him. He himself attributes knowledge of this distinction to Aristotle, Boethius, others.”146 If this distinction is not, pace Gilson, the key innovation of 144 145 146 which appear copied by Dante: ‘In sensible things, act, that is, form, is found to be the highest; pure potency, or matter, is found to be the lowest; and the composition of form and matter holds a place midway between the two.’” Mandonnet, Dante le théologien, 247–48. Mandonnet, Dante le théologien, 252. McInerny, Praeambula fidei, 167 (in the prologue to his third part, “Thomism and Philosophical Theology”). See also, in Praeambula fidei, the chapters “Gilson’s Attack on Cajetan” (39–68) and “The Alleged Forgetfulness of Esse” (126–55; particularly see 141). 1094 George Corbett Aquinas’s thought, the claim that Dante does not particularly prioritize or emphasize this doctrine does not imply, as it did for Gilson and his followers such as Foster, that there is a clear divergence between Aquinas and Dante in this negative respect either. Conclusion In one (albeit simplified) narrative of twentieth-century Catholic thought, celebrated historians such as Étienne Gilson and Marie-Dominique Chenu rescued St. Thomas from the Thomists. In this narrative, for example, the censorship of Chenu in the late 1930s is typically attributed to the alleged ahistoricism, and even small-mindedness, of Thomists, with particular venom reserved for the “sacred monster of Thomism” in Rome, the Dominican Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange.147 Despite such setbacks, Gilson and Chenu would eventually triumph, exerting a profound influence on Aquinas studies and medieval scholarship, not least by collaborating together in establishing the influential institutes of medieval studies in Toronto and Ottawa, while many of their principal adversaries, such as Mandonnet, lie largely forgotten.148 This article seeks to contribute to a growing recovery of the rather disparaged or silenced voices in early-twentieth-century Catholic thought. As I have suggested, there were good reasons why the founders of the Institut historique d’études thomistes were concerned by the “alarming assertions” about Aquinas emanating from Gilson and others, while the very title of their institute (and the composition of its early members) belies any simplistic equation of Scholasticism with ahistoricism. Furthermore, it may be no coincidence that Chenu published his now-celebrated account of Le Saulchoir only shortly after the death of Mandonnet. What have become, in some circles, foundational premises of Aquinas’s thought were highly contestable at the time, and it is worthwhile reappraising why this was so and, dare we say it, what the truth of the matter actually is. 147 148 Kerr, for example, approvingly cites Walter Kasper’s triumphalist account of the apparent defeat of neo-Scholasticism: “‘There is no doubt that the outstanding event in the Catholic theology of our century is the surmounting of neo-scholasticism,’ so Walter Kasper declared, in 1987. Anyone who began ordination studies in 1957, as I did, would agree” (Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians, vii). See also Paul Philibert, “M-D Chenu: Situating Theology in History,” in Thomas F. O’Meara and Paul Philibert, Scanning the Signs of the Times: French Dominicans in the Twentieth Century (Adelaide, Australia: ATF Theology, 2013), 19–41. On Chenu’s influence, see, for example, O’Meara and Philibert, Scanning the Times, xi–xx and 19–41. Thomists at War 1095 The early-twentieth-century battles about the true sense of Aquinas’s doctrine were anything but academic. The principal protagonists knew full well that at stake was the very nature of Catholic theology and philosophy, as the debates about Christian philosophy or the new theological curriculum of Chenu exemplify in the 1920s and 1930s. While such debates about Aquinas’s thought are receiving renewed attention, scholars have not heretofore examined comparatively the parallel debates in the field of Dante studies, debates which offer privileged insights into their adversaries’ competing understandings of Aquinas’s thought, as well as of Catholic theology and philosophy as a whole. After all, Gilson saw himself as rescuing not just Aquinas but also Dante from the clerical Thomists. While Mandonnet defended critically what had become the “universally established custom” of placing Aquinas’s theories in parallel with those of Dante, Nardi and Gilson explicitly sought to dismantle what they saw as the “myth of the Thomist Dante,” setting their own interpretations in polemical opposition to Mandonnet and other clerical Thomists specifically, as well as against the majority tradition in Dante commentary from the early fourteenth century. Nonetheless, especially mediated by Foster, it was the view of Nardi and Gilson on the relationship between Aquinas’s and Dante’s thought which subsequently prevailed in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In reappraising this relationship, I have intentionally focused on those Dantean theses that Nardi, Gilson, and Foster considered especially irreconcilable with Aquinas. On one point, there is no doubt: Dante’s imperial utopianism is clearly opposed to Aquinas’s political thought; however, no Thomist (and certainly not Mandonnet) pretended otherwise. On the natural desire for the beatific vision and the distinction between two ultimate ends for man, however, Aquinas and Dante are necessarily in disagreement only if one selects a single passage of Aquinas without regard to others and if one fails to distinguish the procedural relativism, common to both Aquinas and Dante, of arguing in some places philosophically, but in others theologically and philosophically. What is at stake, in these two instances, then, are competing understandings of Aquinas’s doctrine, with Gilson’s interpretation of Aquinas aligning with de Lubac’s controversial thesis in Le mystère du surnaturel. Likewise, Gilson’s contentious understanding of Christian philosophy arguably underlies his critique of the autonomy of philosophy in Dante’s thought; by contrast, for Mandonnet, the autonomy of truths from reason and from revelation is constitutive of Thomism properly understood, and both Aquinas’s Summa theologiae and Dante’s Commedia, as works of theology, integrate these truths into 1096 George Corbett a formal synthesis. In this instance as well, how we understand Aquinas is the key to the divergence or not with the thought of Dante. When it comes to the salvation of pagans or the creation of prime matter, Aquinas’s doctrine is not in dispute; instead, what matters is, first, the hermeneutic approach we adopt in interpreting the Commedia and, second, whether we account sufficiently for Dante’s competing doctrinal and poetic demands in composing the poem. If one interprets the literal sense of the poem as dogmatic theology, the status of virtuous pagans (Inferno 4) is heterodox, as is the status of the neutral souls (Inferno 3) and the souls in Ante-Purgatory (Purgatoria 1–9), to give two other examples; if one interprets the dogmatic theology in these passages as only the sense or senses signified, the divergence between Aquinas’s and Dante’s thought substantially disappears. Although underlining the potential variety and limitations of Dante’s sources, Mandonnet consistently maintained that—on major points of contested doctrine—Dante typically follows the shape of Aquinas’s thought. For the last hundred or so years, however, the “Thomist Dante” has been discredited as a myth, as Nardi and Gilson intended. The consequent perception of Dante as a heterodox thinker, out of step with Aquinas, has perhaps contributed to the decrease of scholarship on Dante by Thomists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, at least when compared to the intensity of Dante scholarship by Thomists in the Leonine renaissance. This article invites scholars (and especially Thomists) to re-examine the relationship between Aquinas’s and Dante’s thought again in light of contemporary scholarship on both these authors; it also invites scholars to reappraise the foundational scholarship of Nardi, Gilson, Foster, and their followers in relation to their now less-studied adversaries, such as Berthier, Busnelli, and Mandonnet. In doing so, we may hope to establish where the true sense of Aquinas’s and Dante’s doctrines might lie. Ultimately, the Dominicans Mandonnet and Berthier were less concerned about the sources of Dante’s doctrine, and more concerned about what Dante’s doctrine was and whether it was true. It is in this latter respect that they perceived a general harmony between Dante’s thought, Thomism, and—at a time when it was threatened from within and without—Catholic philosophy and theology. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2022): 1097–1118 1097 Mary as the Exemplar of the Body’s Poverty Angela Franks St. John’s Seminary Boston, MA Recent Mariology Following the trajectory of Mariology and Marian devotion for the last century or so is enough to give one whiplash. On the one hand, the declaration of the doctrine of Mary’s Assumption in 1950 by Pope Pius XII represents a strand of Mariology that emphasizes her divinely granted prerogatives and glory. In popular piety, this dogmatic emphasis was mirrored by devotional practices that stressed Mary’s mediatorial power.1 On the other hand, many theologians were concerned that such teaching and practice obscured the centrality of Christ, the Church, and the liturgy in Christian life.2 One could see the placing of Mary within chapter 8 of Lumen Gentium less than fifteen years after the declaration of the Assumption as a rebalancing of Mariology. Lumen Gentium (LG) resituated Mary within the doctrine of the Church, echoing patristic equations of Our Lady with the Church.3 One unintended effect of the conciliar move, however, was to make devotion to Mary seem unnecessary, despite the efforts of 1 2 3 For a pre-modern example, one can cite Rupert of Deutz (†1130): Mary vis-à-vis the Church is “the most exalted, the greatest, the preeminent part, the most elect part” (Commentaria in Apocalypsim 1.8.12, quoted in Mauro Gagliardi, Truth Is a Synthesis: Catholic Dogmatic Theology [Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2020], 483n4). For memories of such reactions among his seminary teachers in the 1940s and 1950s, see Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Milestones: Memoirs 1927 – 1977, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998), 58–59. The fathers of the Second Vatican Council were able to utilize the work of Hugo Rahner on this question, in Our Lady and the Church (1961), which has since been translated into English by Sebastian Bullough, O.P. (Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2019). 1098 Angela Franks post-conciliar popes to encourage Marian piety—in particular, John Paul II, with his Marian motto Totus Tuus. John Paul II is in many ways an exemplar of conciliar Marian devotion. His Mariology integrates Mary into ecclesiology by emphasizing her role as the paradigmatic follower of Christ.4 This discipleship is, he is careful to say, due to her maternal role and the extraordinary graces that followed from it.5 But these graces did not eliminate her need to follow her son closely; rather, they made such discipleship possible. This interplay between Mary’s need and the unique graces granted to meet that need is perhaps clearest in John Paul II’s presentation of Mary’s faith.6 This attitude of faith is “central” to John Paul II’s presentation of Mary in the encyclical Redemptoris Mater (RM), according to Joseph Ratzinger.7 Because of her faith, which is based on the prior action of God in her life (§38, quoting LG §60), she is due “a wealth of praise” that “is more than ever necessary today” (RM §34). In John Paul II, the seeming either–or of twentieth-century Mariology is dissolved, but through the introduction of a causal relationship between the two. In other words, 4 5 6 7 John Paul II, General Audience of August 6, 1997, §4: “After saying that Mary is a ‘type of the Church,’ the Council adds that she is her ‘outstanding model,’ an example of perfection to be followed and imitated. Indeed, Mary is an ‘outstanding model’ because her perfection surpasses that of all the other members of the Church” (quoted in Gagliardi, Truth Is a Synthesis, 490n16). Thus he maintains both a “Christotypical” and “ecclesiotypical” Mariology (see Gagliardi, Truth Is a Synthesis, 482, especially the long footnote 2, and 529). See John Paul II, Encyclical Letter on the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Life of the Pilgrim Church Redemptoris Mater (1987), §4: Vatican II presents Mary as “the Mother of God in the mystery of Christ and of the Church.” See Manfred Hauke, Introduction to Mariology, trans. Richard Chonak (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2021), 116–21, on the mostly discarded search for a foundational principle of Mariology. For a recollection of the conciliar debates, see Joseph Ratzinger, “Thoughts on the Place of Marian Doctrine and Piety in Faith and Theology as a Whole,” in Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Mary: The Church at the Source, trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 19–36. He cites as a “clear summary of the Church’s doctrine” the statement from Lumen Gentium §58: Mary “advanced in her pilgrimage of faith, and loyally persevered in her union with her Son unto the Cross” (RM §6). Joseph Ratzinger, “The Sign of the Woman,” trans. Lothar Krauth, in Mary: God’s Yes to Man; John Paul’s Encyclical Redemptoris Mater (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 7–40, at 24. Faith is “a kind of ‘key’ which unlocks for us the innermost reality of Mary,” John Paul II himself says (RM §19; emphasis original). Hans Urs von Balthasar comments: “Perhaps never before in Mariology has [Mary’s faith been made prominent] with such decisiveness” (“Commentary,” trans. Lothar Krauth, in Mary: God’s Yes to Man, 159–79, at 165). Mary as the Exemplar of the Body’s Poverty 1099 Mary’s poverty—her need for and receptivity to God—is what makes her able to be rich, to be worthy of a wealth of praise. Perhaps surprisingly, John Paul II’s presentation of Mary as transparent to the mystery of Christ echoes his theology of the body. There, he repeats a hylomorphic maxim: “The body reveals the person.” In this revelation, the poverty and the wealth of the body coincide. The body is of great dignity: it can reveal the person. But it is also poor, because it does not reveal itself but rather is transparent to the inner personal mystery. In this, it resembles Mary. This essay will pick up the trail laid down by John Paul II by examining Mary under the rubric of her poverty. Her poverty, I will argue, is exemplary for the poverty of the body, and neither Mary nor the body can be understood properly without understanding poverty. In this essay, I will explore these topics by looking at the Mariology of John Paul II and Hans Urs von Balthasar, before turning to what this Mariology means for the body and for creation in general. Mary’s Poverty Redemptoris Mater presents Mary as a model of pilgrim faith, one who “goes before” us on the pilgrimage (RM §§5–6 and 25–28). Mary’s reliance upon faith places her among the anawim, the poor of the Lord. John Paul II quotes §55 of Lumen Gentium to note that Mary “stands out among the poor and humble of the Lord, who confidently await and receive salvation from him” (RM §§8 and 11). As the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Joseph Ratzinger wrote around the time of the Marian encyclical, she is “totally dependent upon God and completely directed towards him, and at the side of her Son, she is the most perfect image of freedom and of the liberation of humanity and of the universe.”8 Thus, both John Paul II and Ratzinger equate Mary’s poverty with her dependency on God, a dependency that is simultaneously humanity’s true liberation. The Ignatian tradition describes this kind of human poverty as “indifference” or “disponibility.” It is detachment from the things of the world, to be sure, but for a positive reason: a readiness to be an instrument of God’s will. Balthasar writes: “Faith as lived by Mary is total, trusting self-surrender of mind and body to God; it is absence of understanding; it is uncalculating obedience; it is self-effacing, living humility; but it is 8 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation (1986), §97, quoted in RM §37. 1100 Angela Franks also acceptance of responsibility to do God’s bidding.”9 This disponibility prepares her for the concrete contours of her poverty, which consists of a fiat stance. Mary’s soul magnifies nothing but the Lord—certainly not herself. For this reason, Gerard Manley Hopkins could compare Mary to “the air we breathe,” who “this one work has to do— / Let all God’s glory through.”10 Mary is transparent to God in a way analogous to how air is transparent to light. Her fundamental attitude is to let God’s will be done in her. Mary lets it be done to her in a threefold way, according to Balthasar: she is given away to Joseph, she is given away to the Spirit, and she is barren. First, she is given away to Joseph. Rather than giving herself to God “by any autonomous gesture of self-dedication,” she is handed over to a human spouse in a moment that anticipates the handing-over of Jesus to his spouse the Church in his Paschal mystery. Second, she is given over to the Spirit, which is, Balthasar writes, “a natural self-giving arising from a long-accepted availability.”11 The third poverty might surprise us: Mary’s barrenness. Strictly speaking, we cannot know the physical state of Mary’s fertility, but Balthasar surmises from the other scriptural instances of miraculous conceptions that Mary is the type to the antitypes of Sarah, Hannah, and Elizabeth. Mary “is poor because she is fruitless, unfecundate”—barren. “And, into this thrice-poor womb,” Balthasar concludes, “God, through his Spirit, placed the seed of his Word, so that Mary would fulfill all the paradoxical promises that assert that ‘the barren woman has borne seven’ (I Sam 2:5f.; Is 54:1; Ps 113:9).”12 Indeed, for Balthasar, Mary’s barrenness outstrips theirs because her fiat outstrips theirs. “Mary’s virginity, which goes beyond the sterility of those Old Testament women who were made fruitful by the power of God, is of such poverty that it takes the ‘last place,’ behind the sterility and barrenness of all sin.”13 Mary does this, nevertheless, only through the creaturely instruments she has been given: a soul, a womb. She has, like all human beings, been given the gifts that pertain to humanity. Further, she has been given the extraordinary graces she needs for her mission, beginning with the grace 9 10 11 12 13 Balthasar, “Commentary,” 168. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Virgin Mary Compared to the Air We Breathe” (1883), hopkinspoetry.com/poem/the-blessed-virgin/. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 4, The Action [TD4], trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 358. Balthasar, TD4, 358. Balthasar, TD4, 360. Mary as the Exemplar of the Body’s Poverty 1101 of the Immaculate Conception. Mary’s poverty comes about in seeing all these gifts as precisely that, gifts that she has been given by her gracious Lord.14 The Immaculate Conception highlights this truth, for what would she be without that greatest gift at the very beginning of her life? And what did she do to “deserve” it, when she did not even exist outside of the loving knowledge of God? Mary’s exclamation of gratitude in Luke 1:47 to God, her savior, is pregnant with her recognition of her own lowliness (1:48) and the greatness of God in raising such a lowly, hungry servant (1:52–54) to such improbable heights.15 Mary’s threefold poverty at the time of the Annunciation is not the end of her poverty, but rather the beginning of it. Her poverty deepens in proportion to the fullness of what she has received: the mysterious time of the hidden life, ten elevenths (if tradition can be trusted) of Jesus’s earthly life. We can only imagine the intimacy within the Holy Family’s home between husband, mother, and son. And yet it is an intimacy that preserves the mystery of Jesus’s person. We see this in the few moments that are revealed to us, the presentation of Jesus in the temple and his being found there some twelve years later. In both accounts, Mary is given access to a mystery that she can only contemplate, not comprehend: the mystery of the sword and the sign of contradiction (2:34–35), and the mystery of Jesus’s belonging more to his heavenly Father than to her (2:49). In the latter case, we are told explicitly that Mary and Joseph “did not understand” (2:50). This difficulty in understanding is compared by John Paul II to “a sort of ‘night of faith’ . . . a kind of ‘veil’ through which one has to draw near to the Invisible One and to live in intimacy with the mystery” (RM §17). And such, he argues here, was the experience of the hidden years: intimacy with mystery, full of joy, and yet at a certain necessary remove from the theandric core of her son. This existential poverty of being “kept at a distance,” as Balthasar says, is deepened when the Son leaves Nazareth definitively.16 He did not become incarnate to stay with Mary, but to be handed over to sinners. “And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour?’ But it was for this that I came to this hour” ( John 12:27; cf. 18:37). In a move of mutual self-abnegation, he leaves Mary, the human person most disposed to understand him. She 14 15 16 See RM §§7–12, esp. §9: “She is and remains perfectly open to this ‘gift from above’ (cf. James 1:17).” Later he calls the “gift from above” a “new self-giving of God” (§36). Unless otherwise noted, all biblical translations are from the NRSV. Balthasar, TD4, 358. See also RM §20: “Now, when Jesus left Nazareth and began his public life throughout Palestine, he was completely and exclusively ‘concerned with his Father’s business’ (cf. Lk 2:49)” (emphasis original). 1102 Angela Franks is not one of his inner circle of twelve, but one who must stand outside, begging for scraps of his attention, merged into the crowd. While he was still speaking to the crowds, his mother and his brothers were standing outside, wanting to speak to him. Someone told him, “Look, your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.” But to the one who had told him this, Jesus replied, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” And pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” (Matt 12:46–50; cf. parallel in Luke 11:28) Catholic apologists have pointed out, and rightly so, that Matthew 12:50 returns Mary to her maternal position, as the one who most completely spoke fiat in response to God. But this defense can also miss the degree to which Jesus has deliberately put her, along with her natural maternal prerogatives, at a remove, just as all natural human relations (good as they are) are relativized by him (parallel in Luke 14:26). From Mary’s perspective, the practice of handing over her child to the Father, ritualized in the presentation in the temple, is now enacted in earnest, as she must release her son into his public life, death, and resurrection. He belongs not to her but to sinners (Matt 9:13; Rom 8:32; 1 Tim 1:15)—or, rather, he belongs to her only insofar as she was saved from sin utterly gratuitously, from the first moment of her existence. Thus she must release him out of Nazareth into Capernaum and Calvary: “Freely you have received, freely give” (Matt 10:8). Balthasar calls this “the poverty of the dispossessed womb.”17 John Paul II refers to it, especially the experience of Calvary, as “perhaps the deepest ‘kenosis’ of faith in human history” (RM §18; emphasis original). At this point, we must pause and take stock of an objection. Does Mary’s poverty really function as a model for Christians? Or is Mary’s poverty simply an example of a misogynistic ecclesial agenda that elevates women only when they are pliable, powerless, and poor?18 Such complaints, while 17 18 Balthasar, TD4, 358. See, e.g., Katie M. Grimes, “Theology of Whose Body? Sexual Complementarity, Intersex Conditions, and La Virgen de Guadalupe,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 32, no. 1 (2016): 75–93. Grimes’s point concerning Our Lady of Guadalupe’s assertive action vis-à-vis Juan Diego as manifesting atypical gender roles is well-taken. Grimes does not, however, adequately defend the idea that John Paul II would forbid culturally atypical gender roles on principle, nor does the picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe Mary as the Exemplar of the Body’s Poverty 1103 understandable, overlook the Christological model for Mary’s poverty, about which I will speak shortly. For now, it is important to remember that Mary’s poverty is an openness to be filled up by God alone. Here Mary’s virginity becomes especially important.19 When her poverty is seen in light of her virginity, its lesson cannot be a literal argument for a female poverty with no recourse but to look to male wealth for relief. Indeed, it is a measure of her greatness and superiority that Joseph was not accorded such a comprehensive participation in Jesus’s poverty as Mary.20 This truth emphasizes the greater degree of faith that was asked of Mary. Thus, while Mary’s poverty is comprehensive, this is not a denigration, but an elevation, for her reliance upon God is all the greater. Although the Virgin certainly also relied upon Joseph, her soul magnified the Lord (Luke 1:46)—not Joseph. In this way, Mary’s poverty is truly exemplary for all Christians who submit their wills to God and reciprocally to one another. “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Eph 5:21; 1 Cor 7:4). Christ’s Poverty Of course, Jesus does not ask anything of his mother that he does not himself carry out. “Though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Cor 8:9). Jesus too is dispossessed of tribe, home, and family in order to carry out his universal saving mission. He is rejected by his hometown (Luke 4:24, 28–30) and his own people (“Crucify him!”; parallel in John 18:40). He has nowhere to lay his head (Matt 8:20). He lives off his prayer to the Father (Matt 4:4; John 4:32, 34). His apostles misunderstand him more often than not, and the religious authorities are overtly hostile. The distancing of Mary reaches its height on Golgotha, where Jesus redirects her maternal love toward John ( John 19:26–27), and though him, toward the entire Church, made up of sinners.21 Much as he rejects the relief proffered in the wine, he refuses to receive the solace of family 19 20 21 appear inconsistent with what is revealed in Scripture about Mary, as I describe it here. RM §39: “It can be said that this consent to motherhood is above all a result of her total self-giving to God in virginity” (emphasis original). For example, his likely early death meant that he could not participate in Jesus’s crucifixion to the degree that Mary did. Further, according to Scripture, Joseph was accorded three angelic visitations (albeit all in dreams: Matt 1:20; 2:13; 2:19), while we only know of one to Mary (Luke 1:26–38). The beloved disciple “took her into his own” (eis ta idia), as John Paul II emphasizes in RM §45n130; see John 1:11. Ratzinger also interprets this handing-over as a participation in Christ’s rejection (Ratzinger, “Place of Marian Doctrine and Piety,” 35). 1104 Angela Franks love. He dies motherless and seemingly Father-less (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” [Matt 27:46]), tasting not the drugged wine but the bitter draught of sin’s alienation as we experience it. Mary’s participation in this is to watch her beloved child die while unable to relieve his suffering. They both are handed over to sinners and to suffering.22 This reality of handing-over (traditio in Latin) expresses the totality of Jesus’s saving mission (1 Cor 11:23), where passivity and activity meet. In his Passion and Eucharist, the Son’s activity is especially expressed in a disponible and seemingly “total passivity of the Servant.”23 But this passivity is the result of the prior free decision to make “an asham sacrifice” of his body, the “sacrifice” or “offering for sin” of the Suffering Servant (Isa 53:10; Heb 10:10).24 The acceptance of the passivity of the Passion shows Jesus free choice to be poor and helpless. Yet Jesus’s poverty has an eternal model that points to poverty’s positive reality: a disponibility to the Father’s will, a disponibility that constitutes his kingdom, on earth as in heaven (Matt 6:10). “Through him the will of the Lord shall prosper” (Isa 53:10). Thus, this “poverty,” expressed most jarringly and profoundly in the merciless stripping of his beaten body at the time of crucifixion, is also his “glory,” as the Gospel of John tirelessly proclaims (17:4–5; see also Isa 52:13; Rom 5:3; 8:17; Eph 3:13; Rev 5:12).25 The coincidence of poverty and wealth (glory) transcends the economic sphere. The Son’s economic traditio is the expression of the eternal traditio—“God’s primordial tradition,” as Balthasar puts it—of the Father to the Son: “All things have been handed over to me by my Father” (Matt 11:27).26 The economic translation of this eternal traditio becomes 22 23 24 25 26 RM §18: “Through this faith Mary is perfectly united with Christ in his self-emptying.” Jean-Pierre Batut, “The Kenotic Decision of the Son and the Filial Obedience of the Christian,” Communio 42, no. 3 (2015): 363–80, at 364 (emphasis original). See Batut, “Kenotic Decision,” 364, 369–70. Of readiness, Balthasar writes that it is “no pure passivity but rather is that readiness that goes beyond active and passive,” as seen in both Mary’s and Christ’s Eucharistic surrender (“Spirit and Institution,” in Explorations in Theology, vol. 4, Spirit and Institution, trans. Edward T. Oakes, S.J. [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995], 209–44, at 225–26; cf. “Beyond Contemplation and Action?,” 299–307 in the same volume). See RM §41, on Mary’s queenship: “She fully obtained that ‘state of royal freedom’ proper to Christ’s disciples: to serve means to reign!” He continues by noting the “glory” of Christ’s obedience unto death and resurrection. See Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Tradition,” in Explorations in Theology, vol. 5, Man is Created, trans. Adrian J. Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2014), 356–73, at 364. I develop this point in “Liquidity: Man, the Triune God, and the Eucharistic Christ,” Mary as the Exemplar of the Body’s Poverty 1105 crucifixion, in such a way that the Son’s mission to save entails a traditio into the hands of sinners (Luke 9:24). The divine Son is eternal and subsisting filial receptivity, pointing beyond the earthly negativity of poverty to its divine and fully actual basis. I will discuss this point further below. At this point, we can conclude that Mary’s poverty is normative for all Christians because it is rooted in Christ’s poverty. Because of his own “absolute” poverty and vulnerability, he can do what “is humanly speaking irresponsible: he can make others dependent exclusively upon himself, and thereby expose them to complete poverty, in order to give them in return the absolute promise of God as responding gift and guarantee (Mt 19:29, par.).”27 Thus, Mary’s poverty is not a feminine aberration, but rather exemplary for Christian life. But what does any of this have to do with the body? Let us turn to that topic now. The Body’s Marian Poverty Ratzinger notes that the apocryphal second-century Gospel of the Egyptians puts these words into Jesus’s mouth: “I have come to abolish the works of woman.”28 Ratzinger explains: “Gnostic exegesis is characterized by its identification of everything female with all that is mere matter, negative, worthless, and therefore not admissible into the salvific message of the Bible.”29 While extreme, Gnosticism did not invent the linking of the female with the material and their mutual downgrading; we see it in both 27 28 29 Communio 46, no. 3–4 (2019): 585–619. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 7: Theology: The New Covenant, trans. Brian McNeil, C.R. V., ed. John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 133–34. Ratzinger, “Sign of the Woman,” 14, quoting from E. Hennecke and W. Schneemelcher, Neutestamentliche Apokryphen, vol. 1, Evangelien (Tübingen: Mohr, 1959), 109–17, at 109. He adds: “In modern times, and for different reasons, there evolved a less radical, yet not less effective, elimination of everything female from the Bible’s message” (17). Ratzinger, “Sign of the Woman,” 16. Elsewhere, Ratzinger laments that, “in today’s intellectual climate, only the masculine principle counts,” which principle he equates with “relying . . . solely on one’s own abilities” (“My Word Shall Not Return to Me Empty!,” in Balthasar and Ratzinger, Mary: The Church at the Source, 13–18, at 16). 1106 Angela Franks Plato and Aristotle.30 And the negative valence of matter is also found, in differing ways, in these and most other ancient and late-antique thinkers. Matter, the body, potency, and the female are on the one side, in contrast to the superior realities of form, the soul, actuality, and the male on the other side. But with Christianity, as John Paul II says, “the body entered theology, . . . I would say, through the main door.”31 The Christian revolution in thought and life upset the established cosmic hierarchies, although it did not simply reject them. The truth of the equality of all humanity from the perspective of salvation (neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female [Gal 3:28]) was accepted by all who remained within Christian orthodoxy. This democratization of salvation had a leveling effect on anthropology, even if it did not eliminate misogyny.32 The much more recent discovery of the equal genetic contribution of mother and father to their offspring showed the Aristotelian biology of a purely passive maternal principle in generation to be faulty. Thus, we can conclude that any straightforward identification of the female with potency is false. Today a renewed Aristotelian anthropology, based on better biology than Aristotle’s own, has affirmed the equal agency of both man and woman, grounded in the equal possession of the human (and 30 31 32 For Plato, see Timeaeus 48e–53c (where the universal and maternal receptacle of form is understood by analogy to the gold that receives different forms; see 50a–b). For Aristotle, see On the Generation of Animals 1.2.716a5–7. See also 1.2.716a14–16: “In the macrocosm also, men think of the earth as female and a mother, but address heaven and the sun and other like entities as progenitors and fathers” (trans. A. Platt in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 1, Bollingen Series 71/2 [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984], 1111–218, at 1112). For commentary, see Prudence Allen, R.S.M., The Concept of Woman, vol. 1, The Aristotelian Revolution, 750 BC – AD 1250 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985), 57–60 and 83–103. John Paul II’s theology of the body audience talks are taken from Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body [ToB], ed. Michael Waldstein with introduction (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2006), 23.4, 221 (for ToB, the first number is that assigned in the volume to the particular audience, the second is the section within it, and the third is Waldstein’s p. number[s]). See, generally, Allen, The Concept of Woman, 1:213–412. For Augustine, as representative of patristic thinking, see David Vincent Meconi, S.J., “Gender’s Divine Dignity in Saint Augustine’s Theological Anthropology,” Nova et Vetera (English) 19, no. 2 (2021): 587–612. Mary as the Exemplar of the Body’s Poverty 1107 unsexed) faculties of intellect and will.33 In this sense, men and women are equally “actual.”34 Yet it is nevertheless unsurprising that the connection between potency and the female was made. Philosopher and playwright Fabrice Hadjadj speaks of the ordinary miracle that is the female body: Why the feminine? The masculine can be understood: it is a body full of itself, that makes things with its hands outside of itself. But 33 34 Diverse examples include: John Finley, “The Metaphysics of Gender: A Thomistic Approach,” The Thomist 79, no. 4 (2015): 585–614; Timothy Fortin, “Finding Form: Defining Human Sexual Difference,” Nova et Vetera (English) 15, no. 2 (2017): 397–431; Melissa Moschella, “Personal Identity and Gender: A Revised Aristotelian Approach,” in Gender Identities in a Globalized World, ed. A. M. González and V. J. Seidler (New York: Humanity Books, 2008), 75–108; Sarah Borden Sharkey, An Aristotelian Feminism (New York: Springer, 2016). The consistency of this conviction has been called into question by critics, in particular those criticizing Balthasar’s theology of man and woman, a theology that argues both for the equality of men and women and also for an active–receptive distinction. A summary is given in Michele M. Schumacher, A Trinitarian Anthropology: Adrienne von Speyr and Hans Urs von Balthasar in Dialogue with Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014), 250–62, using Corinne Crammer, “One Sex or Two? Balthasar’s Theology of the Sexes,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, ed. Edward T. Oakes and David Moss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 93–112; Tina Beattie, “A Man and Three Women—Hans, Adrienne, Mary and Luce,” New Blackfriars 79, no. 927 (1998): 97–105; David Moss and Lucy Gardner, “Difference—the Immaculate Concept? The Laws of Sexual Difference in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar,” Modern Theology 14, no. 3 (1998): 377–401; Moss and Gardner, “Something Like Time; Something Like the Sexes: An Essay in Reception,” in Balthasar at the End of Modernity, ed. Lucy Gardner, David Moss, Benjamin Quash, and Graham Ward (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), 69–137 (among others). In addition to the texts she mentions, there can be added Linn Marie Tonstead, “Sexual Difference and Trinitarian Death: Cross, Kenosis, and Hierarchy in the Theo-Drama,” Modern Theology 26, no. 4 (2010): 603–31. Schumacher notes that the comparison of a feminine and/or Marian principle to the Church long predates twentieth-century thought, as Hugo Rahner had demonstrated (see n. 3 above); she cites Scriptural examples and the Catechism of the Catholic Church §§757, 766, and 772 (256n60). In addition to Schumacher’s response, there can be mentioned that by Aristotle Papanikolaou, “Person, Kenosis, and Abuse: Hans Urs von Balthasar and Feminist Theologies in Conversation,” Modern Theology 19, no. 1 (2003): 41–65 (also concerning the wider feminist discussion on kenosis), and Jennifer Newsome Martin, “The ‘Whence’ and ‘Whither’ of Balthasar’s Gendered Theology: Rehabilitating Kenosis for Feminist Theology,” Modern Theology 31, no. 2 (2015): 211–34. A Wojtyłian defense of man and woman as a Trinitarian image is in Michael Maria Waldstein, Glory of the Logos in the Flesh: Saint John Paul’s Theology of the Body (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2021), 594–671. 1108 Angela Franks the feminine is a body that is naturally surrendered, with its hollow in the middle, a hollow inside of which is engendered . . . not something but someone, obscurely, without needing one’s hands.35 The feminine hollow, the abiding presence of an absence, is deeply mysterious. By its very mystery, which is a simple truth of nature, it hints of the goodness of all the other aspects that go along with the traditionally female side of the cosmic line: matter, the body, potency. The reevaluation of such humble realities springs from the Christian incarnational impulse: again, through the Incarnation, the body entered theology through the main door. “Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 18:4).36 What does this reevaluation tell us? It is not as though Christianity simply upended the hierarchies to elevate matter over soul and potency over act. That overturning has been attempted in post-Christian materialism, but it has led only to an unbalanced primacy of the body and of matter that neither can bear. (I will speak more about this shortly.) The Christian faith retains the priority of soul over body and, in Catholic philosophia perennis at least, of act over potency. What the Christian reevaluation shows us, nevertheless, is the relative goodness of matter, the body, and potency in God’s creative design. In all of these realities, there is, metaphorically speaking, a “hollow in the middle”—a hollow that is a space prepared for fruitfulness.37 Matter, in Thomistic metaphysics, is not a thing that exists. Nor is it, however, absolute non-being. Nor should matter’s non-being be understood in terms of pure privation. Matter, on its own, does lack form, and hence actuality, which is certainly a privation. For a rigidly neo-Platonic metaphysics, the lack of actuality was enough to condemn it to being equivalent to evil.38 Rigid neo-Platonism succumbs to the Parmenidean 35 36 37 38 Fabrice Hadjadj, The Resurrection: Experience Life in the Risen Christ, trans. Michael J. Miller (New York: Magnificat, 2016), 56. See also Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae [ST] III, q. 40, a. 3, ad 3, on the connection between poverty and humility. This is true, therefore, also of the male human being. John Paul II emphasizes that the second creation story shows us that Adam had a special responsibility to receive the gift of the woman (ToB, 17:6, 197; 33:2, 261). His original solitude constituted the poverty that was the “basis” of his reception of her as a gift (ToB, 9:3, 164; see also 5:5, 149). E.g., Plotinus, Enneads 1.8, trans. George Boys-Stones, et. al., ed. Lloyd P. Gerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 108–23. Thomas expresses this Platonic/Parmenidean conviction as an objection in ST I, q. 5, a. 3, obj. 3. For an interpretation of Plotinus that brings him closer to the Aristotelian tradition I am Mary as the Exemplar of the Body’s Poverty 1109 temptation to equate form with being and being with goodness, and so to identify matter with absolute non-being, and hence evil. Thomas’s evaluation of this temptation, by contrast, led him to postulate the relative (not absolute) non-being of matter.39 Matter, then, should not be viewed as the pure privation of being and of goodness.40 But what can we say about matter if the language of pure privation is inadequate? What does matter have that is “positive,” if it, by definition, is not actual? The language of potency, rather than that of pure privation, provides the necessary reorientation.41 Matter is in potency to form. It is not merely a lack of form; it is not like a stone that lacks humanity. No amount of form-ation can turn the stone into a child (outside of divine creativity; see Matt 3:9), because the stone is not in potency to being a child. Matter, however, is in potency to form, meaning that it has the receptive capacity for form-ation.42 Indeed, matter is nothing other than this receptive capacity for form. Rachel Coleman puts it poetically by saying that matter is “pure desire”—that is, “pure receptivity”—for form and actuality. Here she echoes Thomas: prime matter “does participate to a certain extent in goodness, viz. by its relation to, or aptitude for, goodness. Consequently, to be desirable is not its property, but rather to desire.”43 Matter is, in other words, pure desire or receptivity for the Good.44 39 40 41 42 43 44 describing, see Christian Schäfer, “Matter in Plotinus’s Normative Ontology,” Phronesis 49, no. 3 (2004): 266–294. See John F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being, Monographs of the Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy 1 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 177–96, 309–11. See also the enlightening commentary on Wippel and on other Thomistic scholars by Rachel M. Coleman, “Matter as an Image of the Good: Ferdinand Ulrich’s Metaphysics of Creation” (PhD diss., The Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Catholic University of America, 2019), 17–70. Hence, as Adrian J. Walker notes: “Indeed, for Thomas, matter is in a state of privation only relatively to some determinate form that it could have and, in fact, will have once the relevant process of change has taken place. Privation, in this context, is not a lamentable defect, but the good emptiness entailed by a positive readiness to receive” (personal communication, 10/13/2021). As Wippel explains, prime matter is neither “sheer nothingness” nor “reducible to privation. On the contrary, it is a real intrinsic principle [of pure potency] which must be present in every corporeal being” (Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 317). Of course, the stone’s lack of humanity is due to its formation as a particular substance that is stony, not human. Prime matter, which is not a substance, lacks any form. ST I, q. 5, a. 3, ad 3, English Dominican Fathers trans., at newadvent.org/summa (modified and emphasis added). Coleman, Matter as an Image of the Good, 194. 1110 Angela Franks This receptivity for the Good is a quality shared by all created being. First, all creatures are a mixture of potency and act, so the receptive element of potency is present among all.45 Further, creation is a relation to the Creator that simultaneously establishes the creature.46 Receptivity to God’s creative wisdom and power is part of our creaturely structure.47 Unlike God, who is his existence, created being (esse commune) does not subsist.48 Individual substances (things) subsist, but not being, which exists only in things. Contrary to the fears of some philosophers and theologians such as Martin Heidegger and Karl Barth, the esse commune shared by creatures can never be on par with God, who is subsisting being. Ferdinand Ulrich argues that this fundamental non-divine quality of created being’s non-subsistence—that is, its poverty—is precisely also a wealth that reflects the Creator’s liberality.49 Because esse commune is not God (it does not subsist), it has been created as truly other than God. This fact shows the Creator’s generosity: out of love, he creates something truly new: creatures that are not an extension of himself but rather realities that exist with a certain limited autonomy–—or, as John Paul II put it, a “participated theonomy.”50 This genuine otherness simultaneously gives creation the capacity to reflect God; an image can be an image only if it is distinct from the original. Thus, creation’s mirroring capacity is due to 45 46 47 48 49 50 This is true of all creatures, including angels, which are immaterial; thus, potency is a broader category than matter. See ST I, q. 50, a. 2, ad 3. See Thomas Aquinas, De potentia Dei, q. 3, a. 3, resp. (creation as a relation to the Creator) and ad 3 (qua being, this relation is subsequent to the created subject as an accident, but qua God’s act, the relation is prior to the subject as constituting the latter). See also: John Paul II, ToB, 13:2–4, 182–83 (creation as giving that entails a giver, a receiver, the relation between them, and the gift); Coleman, “Matter as an Image of the Good,” 166–67; Kenneth Schmitz, The Gift: Creation, The Aquinas Lecture, 1982 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1982), esp. 31–35. See the profound reflections in Adrian J. Walker, “Godlike Instruments: Notes Toward the Regeneration of Science,” Nova et Vetera (English) 19, no. 4 (2021): 1345–97. De pot., q. 1, a. 1: “Esse signifies something complete and simple but not subsisting” (trans. min). This sentence is foundational for the metaphysics of Ferdinand Ulrich in Homo Abyssus, trans. D. C. Schindler (Washington, DC: Humanum Academic Press, 2018), esp. 28–30. See also: D. C. Schindler, “The Perfection of Being, Manifest in the Finite Creature,” in A Companion to Ferdinand Ulrich’s Homo Abyssus (Washington, DC: Humanum Academic Press, 2019), 21–48; Rachel M. Coleman, “Thinking the ‘Nothing’ of Being: Ferdinand Ulrich on Transnihilation,” Communio 46, no. 1 (2019): 182–98. Ulrich, Homo Abyssus, 50. See Coleman, “Matter as an Image of the Good,” 176. For “participated theonomy,” see John Paul II, Encyclical Letter regarding Certain Fundamental Questions of the Church’s Moral Teaching, Veritatis Splendor (1993), §41. Mary as the Exemplar of the Body’s Poverty 1111 its finitude—that is, its non-divinity.51 The Marian profile of the Catholic analogical affirmation of the simultaneous poverty and wealth of created being—a similarity with a greater dissimilarity to God—is perhaps what led Erich Przywara to respond as he did to the metaphysical doubter Barth. As Barth reported, “in response to my question he confirmed that instead of analogia entis one could possibly . . . say Mary!”52 Let us unpack this further by asking how the poverty of being might resemble God. Recall the active passivity of Christ, exemplified in the Passion. These qualities can be found analogously in the eternal Trinitarian life. In speaking about the subsisting relations of the persons of the Trinity, Thomas Aquinas utilizes the analogy of relations of action.53 As Gilles Emery puts it, “action effectively involves a subject acting plus a terminus for the action, its recipient.”54 This terminus is not strictly speaking passive, because, as Thomas says, there is no potency or matter in God.55 But there is something of which passivity is the analogue: personal receptivity to the divine nature.56 This receptivity shapes the Son’s personal action. Emery notes that the “action” within the Trinity is only notionally distinct from 51 52 53 54 55 56 The only other possibility for something to image God is if there is genuine otherness within the divine nature. This is, of course, the case, such that the Son is also the perfect Image of the Father. The Son’s divine imaging of the Father is perfect, unlike finite creaturely imaging. Finitude does, however, provide the only other condition for otherness that can image God, namely, genuine otherness outside of the divine nature. Further, the multiplicity of creation is the only way the one goodness of God can be expressed by finite things. ST I, q. 47, a. 1, is the locus classicus for this truth. Karl Barth, letter to Eduard Thurneysen, in Briefwechsel Barth-Thurneysen, vol. 2 (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1974), 654, cited in John R. Betz, “Translator’s Introduction,” Analogia Entis: Metaphysics; Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans. John R. Betz and David Bentley Hart, Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 1–115, at 22. See ST I, q. 28, a. 4, De pot., q. 7, a. 9, and the texts and discussion in Gilles Emery, O.P., The Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Francesca Aran Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 53–55. Emery, Trinitarian Theology, 55. De pot., q. 1, a. 1; q. 8, a. 1, and throughout. This passivity is expressed in the Scholastic language to designate the procession of the Spirit as “passive spiration.” For more on the receptivity of the Son translated into economic “passivity,” see Angela Franks, “The Mission and Person of Christ and the Christian in Hans Urs von Balthasar,” in The Center is Jesus Christ Himself: Essays on Revelation, Salvation, and Evangelization in Honor of Robert P. Imbelli, ed. Andrew Meszaros (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2021), 272–99, at 276–85. 1112 Angela Franks the processions or relations that characterize each person.57 This signifies that, while the source of being and action is the divine essence, the modes of being and of action are personal, shaped by each person’s respective relations.58 We can say of the Son that he “exists in the eternal reception of his being from the Father, and the way he acts conforms to this, that is, he eternally receives his action from the Father.”59 Or, as expressed by Christ, “I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise” ( John 5:19). Let us sum up. The Son has a filial mode of being, which is fundamentally receptive. This receptivity is economically translated into a kind of poverty, in which he receives all things from the Father. But this poverty is simultaneously the Son’s personal wealth: “For were he from himself, he would not be the Son.”60 The poverty of creaturely being—its non-subsistent and dependent qualities, as well as the potency in material creation—here have a distant echo in the divine. The eternal Trinitarian relations provide the deepest reason for the analogous positivity of creaturely potency and poverty.61 57 58 59 60 61 Emery, Trinitarian Theology, 74–75. He quotes In I sent., d. 20, q. 1, a. 1, ad 1: “Generation signifies the relation to the manner of an operation. . . . And it is through one and the same action that the Father begets and the Son is born, but this action finds out two distinct relations in the Father and the Son” (75). He comments: “To be begotten is an action” (75n110). Emery later summarizes: “The modes of action of the Son and Holy Spirit take their distinct stamp from their relationship to the Father” (167; see also 349–55). See Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles [SCG] IV, ch. 8: “Since in God to act is the same as to be, and action is identified with essence, as we have proved above, so the Son is said to be unable to act from himself, but to act with the Father, even as he cannot be from himself, but only from the Father” (trans. Laurence Shapcote, O.P., and revised by the Aquinas Institute, in Summa Contra Gentiles, Books III–IV, Latin/English Edition of the Works of St. Thomas Aquinas 12 [Steubenville, OH: Aquinas Institute and Emmaus Academic, 2018], 350). For the relations of origin as relations of action and passion: “But in all relations based on action and passion, one of them is always subject and unequal in power, except only in relations of origin [as in the Trinity], where no inferiority is indicated” (SCG IV, ch. 24, [p. 399]). Emery, Trinitarian Theology, 351. SCG IV, ch. 8 [p. 350]. For recent scholarly assessments and critiques of this and related ideas, see: Joshua R. Brotherton, “Trinitarian Suffering and Divine Receptivity after Balthasar,” The Thomist 82, no. 2 (2018): 189–234; John R. Betz, “The Humility of God: On a Disputed Question in Trinitarian Theology,” Nova et Vetera (English) 17, no. 3 (2019): 769–810. See also Angela Franks, “Thomistic-Balthasarian Comments on Thomas Joseph White, O.P., The Incarnate Lord,” Nova et Vetera (English) 20, no. 2 (2022): 575–600. Mary as the Exemplar of the Body’s Poverty 1113 But what does this have to do with the body? What is the wealth of the body? And in what way is it Marian? Let us return to the theology of the body. There John Paul II argues that the body’s role in the complex of the person is revelatory: the body reveals the person.62 The person is embodied, yet the person can transcend her body (albeit in a provisional way), as the soul that subsists after death reveals.63 So the body, while personal, is not simply the whole reality of the person.64 What the human body can do, however—and only the human body, because it is the body of a person—is reveal God’s eternal triune life. In fact, according to John Paul II, this is the very purpose for which God created the human body. This purpose means that the body functions as a “primordial” sacrament.65 Thus, in this [pre-lapsarian] dimension, a primordial sacrament is constituted, understood as a sign that efficaciously transmits in the visible world the invisible mystery hidden in God from eternity. And this is the mystery of Truth and Love, the mystery of divine life, in which man really participates. . . . The body, in fact, and only the body, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden from eternity in God, and thus to be a sign of it.66 John Paul II wishes to emphasize that it is a revelatory fact that the human being acts, in a personal way, through his body. This body, therefore, “permits him to be the author of genuinely human activity.”67 What is “genuinely human activity,” however? He has in mind the activity of a thoughtful and responsible person using his or her spiritual powers. Ultimately, however, what fulfills persons is generosity. As Gaudium et Spes states, the human person is fulfilled only through a sincere gift of self (§24). 62 63 64 65 66 67 John Paul II, ToB, 7:2, 154; 9:4, 164 ST I, q. 75, a. 2. Indeed, this fundamentally “aesthetic” quality of the body as the expression of the interior person is common to all material things, which reveal the truth of their substances by means of their exterior accidents. See Angela Franks, “Deleuze, Balthasar, and John Paul II on the Aesthetics of the Body,” Theological Studies 81, no. 3 (2020): 649–670. John Paul II, ToB, 19:4, 203 (italics original). For more on the philosophical background to this statement, see Angela Franks, “Thinking the Embodied Person with Karol Wojtyła,” Nova et Vetera (English) 16, no. 1 (2018): 141–71. John Paul II, ToB, 6:3, 152; 7:2, 154. 1114 Angela Franks Thus, what the natural body speaks, as it speaks the person, is that we are made for self-gift (the “spousal meaning of the body).”68 This natural, revelatory reality is raised to be truly revelatory in the incarnate Son, where the corporeal expression of being as wealth and poverty becomes the temporal expression of the Trinitarian archetype. In Christ, the person whom his body reveals is divine. “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col 2:9). Jesus fulfills the spousal meaning of the body in making a Eucharistic gift of himself to his spouse, the Church, a gift imaged in Christian marriage.69 The self-gift latent in the body is fulfilled supernaturally in the resurrected body, when the spousal meaning of the body as self-gift is transformed into a “virginal meaning” of the body as total self-gift to God.70 Only Christianity “has found in the flesh, in the mortal, eucharistic, mystical, resurrecting flesh, the unsurpassable end of the ways of God.”71 To return to our main theme and summarize: the body is poor, because it does not reveal itself. Its revelatory powers are all bent, like a window, or like the air, upon making visible the person. Recall Hopkins’s comparison of Mary to the air: Mary “this one work has to do— / Let all God’s glory through.” Mary is, according to Ratzinger, “the living Veronica’s veil.” She “makes her body, her very self, into the place of God’s presence,”72 for the seed that is God’s Word to bear fruit in her womb. “Light is sown for the just” (Ps 97:11; cf. Mark 4:14).73 Analogously, as the human body makes visible the truth and love of a person, it thereby images God in a unique way within the material world through its very being and even more perfectly when the person freely gives himself in love. Rejoicing in the Marian Poverty of the Body Since almost the first moments of our existence, we have not rejoiced in our human poverty, but rather have sought to banish it in favor of divine richness. The opposite of Marian poverty is the sinner’s grasping at equality 68 69 70 71 72 73 John Paul II, ToB, 14:5–16.2, 183–91. Balthasar argues similarly that the transitory and generative nature of flesh shows its intrinsic orientation to “self-divestiture” (TheoLogic, vol. 2, Truth of God [TL2], trans. Adrian J. Walker [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004], 224–34). John Paul II, ToB, 89:5–91:4, 474–81; ToB, 93:1–102:8, 487–529. John Paul II, ToB, 66:1–79:9, 387–401. Hans Urs von Balthasar, TL2, 221. Ratzinger, “Sign of the Woman,” 25. Trans. Robert Alter in The Hebrew Bible: A Translation and Commentary, vol. 3: The Writings (New York: Norton, 2019), 231. Mary as the Exemplar of the Body’s Poverty 1115 with God.74 Yet, as Adam learned, this attempt at self-enrichment was the deepest poverty of all, as it banished him from the riches that had been given to him. Adam negated the grandeur of what he is, the imago Dei, in an attempt to be the original rather than the image. By its very definition, filiation can only be received, not forced. Balthasar contrasts the receptive poverty of Mary with the pride of sinful humanity, which attempts “to fructify itself,” and he warns that, ironically, these attempts “are doomed to sterility.”75 The body has been particularly caught up in the sinner’s fruitless attempts to enrich himself. What is poor claims to be rich and self-created. This dynamic is applied to the body when we try to separate it from its personal core. For this way of thinking, “acts, gestures, the visual body, the clothed body, the various physical attributes usually associated with gender, express nothing.”76 This isolation of the body from the person results in confusion, for what is a border absent the land it individuates? I have called the resulting obfuscation a “totemism” of the body, in that the body functions like a totem in Freud’s description.77 As a totem, the body is taken to identify who we are, it fascinates us endlessly, it distracts us from our real, spiritual problems, and it is sacrificed when it does not provide us with the happiness we expect from it. This forgetfulness of the person appears to be an enrichment of the body; yet without its transparency to the person, the body is closed off from its source of wealth. 74 75 76 77 See Batut, “Kenotic Decision,” 377–80. Balthasar, TD4, 361. A few pages earlier he describes Mary’s poverty as “open,” and it “embraces and envelops the ‘closed’ and negative poverty of all sinners. She is in solidarity with them all in their poverty, but, behind them and in them, she is the only one able to receive the seed of God, eucharistically multiplied—thousands-fold—in her womb” (358). See also Hans Urs von Balthasar, “The Marian Mold of the Church,” in Balthasar and Ratzinger, Mary: The Church at the Source, 125–44, at 126: “Contemporary man secretly, or even avowedly, longs to be an absolute beginning in his own freedom, hence, in the end, to owe no one thanks for himself.” Cf. TL2, 230–31, and Joseph Ratzinger, “In the Beginning . . .”: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall, trans. Boniface Ramsey, O.P., Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 64–71. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 270–82, at 281. See Angela Franks, “A Wojtyłian Reading of Performativity and the Self in Judith Butler,” Christian Bioethics 26, no. 3 (2020): 221–42. Angela Franks, “The Body as Totem in the Asexual Revolution,” Church Life Journal (University of Notre Dame McGrath Institute), January 21, 2021, churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-body-as-totem-in-the-asexual-revolution/. 1116 Angela Franks In contrast, God’s wealth is simultaneous with his “poverty.” He does not grasp (Phil 2:6), but surrenders his wealth to the other, as does the father in the parable of the prodigal son. “To other creatures he has given relatively small gifts, but to us his inheritance, because we are sons; but ‘if sons, then heirs’” (Rom 8:17).78 For Balthasar, this economic self-gift is continuous with who God is eternally. God’s eternal fatherhood is simultaneous with “the giving away of everything the Father is, including his entire Godhead. . . . It is a giving-away that, in the Father’s act of generation—which lasts for all eternity—leaves the latter’s womb ‘empty’: in God, poverty and wealth (that is, wealth of giving) are one and the same (F. Ulrich).”79 He is, as Jean-Pierre Batut states, “a Father who is everything but has nothing.”80 The Son is the perfect image of this Father, and so too are his adopted sons and daughters meant to be: those who find their wealth in receiving everything the Father has to give—which is his entire self. But this wealth can be found only to the degree that, as Dorothy Day understood, we are “willing to call nothing ‘mine,’ not even my very rationality and memory and will.”81 The empty and dispossessed womb of Mary can be seen, in this way, as a filial image of the Father’s simultaneous poverty and wealth. While it sounds utterly destructive, this filial poverty is the only path for the human person that does not end in nihilism. As creatures, we are constituted by God’s pulling us out of nothingness: the creature “is saved from falling into nothing at each instant precisely by the creative hand of God.”82 The irony of denying this truth—the irony of “self-creation”—is that we let go of the hand that pulls us up out of the nihil. If we instead accept our nothingness, we are capable of receiving the gift of existence and thereby flourishing. Ulrich plays on the German word for “incarnation” (Menschwerdung, literally, “becoming man”) by arguing that all men need to become what they are.83 Christ, who became man through his self-surrender (Phil 2:6), is 78 79 80 81 82 83 Thomas Aquinas, Expositio in orationem dominicam (trans. mine). Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 3, Dramatis Personae: Persons in Christ, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 518. Batut, “Kenotic Decision,” 376. See also ST I, q. 3, and q. 28, a. 2: anything that God “has” is actually identical to his essence, i.e., who he is. As summarized by Larry Chapp, “The Precarity of Love: Dorothy Day on Poverty,” Communio 42, no. 3 (2015): 381–93, at 389–90. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Logic, vol. 1, Truth of the World, trans. Adrian J. Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001), 251. Augustine could therefore say of the body of Christ to the body of Christ: “Be what you see, and receive what you are!” (Sermon 272; trans. mine, from Latin available at Mary as the Exemplar of the Body’s Poverty 1117 our model. Analogously, man comes to himself by receiving himself (Matt 16:25 and parallel; Rev 2:17) from God, a truth simultaneous with that of creation.84 “Henceforth man no longer has any choice except between the [nihilistic] kenosis into nothingness of self-affirmation and the [filial] kenosis of Christ.”85 In this process, Mary is, as Adrienne von Speyr says, the “mediatrix of self-surrender.”86 This play of receptivity and actualization is not unique to man, although only he within the visible world can do is in a rational and free way. I have argued that being itself is marked by a poverty that is simultaneously a wealth. Being can only be received from God. The human body testifies in particular to the truth of the poverty and wealth of creation. Because it does not speak of itself, the body is fully transparent to be the expression of the person and of God’s Truth and Love. But the embodied person is made to be an intelligent and free protagonist within the rich poverty, or poor wealth, of being. In this, he or she is an imago of the divine Imago, the Son (Rom 8:29), whose receptivity to the Father constitutes his person. Hence there is a deep connection, in the divine plan, between the poverty of the body and the Virgin Mother with her disponible fiat. The nature of the body, with all its glorious poverty, shines forth most fully in Mary: because she wished only to glorify God, she let all his glory through.87 Hopkins describes for us the fruitfulness that continues through Mary in her sons and daughters in the Church. 84 85 86 87 earlychurchtexts.com/main/augustine/sermon_272_eucharist.shtml). See Ferdinand Ulrich, Atheismus und Menschwerdung, 2nd ed. (Freiburg: Johannes, 1975), 16–23, trans. Rachel M. Coleman as “The Personal Unity of Glory and Poverty in Freedom as Love,” Communio 42, no. 3 (2015): 558–63. Batut, “Kenotic Decision,” 377. Adrienne von Speyr, Handmaid of the Lord, trans. E. A. Nelson (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1985), 170. See Schumacher, Trinitarian Anthropology, 149–56. I am indebted to Adrian J. Walker for helping me to formulate these thoughts. A thorough treatment of the topic would note how poverty is closely connected to obedience (the poverty of will) and chastity (the priority of God). When tied to obedience and chastity, poverty can be truly and virginally fruitful. See Balthasar, TD4, 361: “Deep down, man’s attempt to banish God from finitude in order to avoid receiving (and conceiving) from him, his endeavor to bring forth fruit on his own, is undergirded and sustained by the ‘wisdom of the poor,’ that wisdom which was ‘the first of God’s acts’ and which, in creation, has always said Yes to being made fruitful by God and his Word, . . . [the] divine-human Son who, by means of his Eucharist, embodies the miracle of divine omnipotence and universal fruitfulness and makes it a reality in the Father’s entire creation. Here, finally falling silent, the Word is empowered to make his whole body into God’s seed; thus the Word finally and definitively becomes flesh in the Virgin Mother, Mary-Ecclesia.” 1118 Angela Franks Of her flesh he took flesh: He does take fresh and fresh, Though much the mystery how, Not flesh but spirit now And makes, O marvellous! New Nazareths in us, Where she shall yet conceive Him, morning, noon, and eve; New Bethlems, and he born There, evening, noon, and morn Bethlem or Nazareth, Men here may draw like breath More Christ and baffle death The breathing-in of Christ into our emptiness does not destroy our selves, Hopkins sees, but rather fulfills them. Our selves depend upon divine riches to become what they are intended to be. A Christian “who, born so, comes to be / New self and nobler me / In each one and each one / More makes, when all is done, / Both God’s and Mary’s Son.” This Christological enrichment is the goal of Mary’s poverty and the plan of the Creator.88 88 This essay was delivered as the fourteenth annual Theotokos Lecture given at Marquette University on November 30, 2021, and published as Mary as the Exemplar of the Body’s Poverty (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2021). Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2022): 1119–1148 1119 St. Thomas Aquinas’s Appeal to St. John the Baptist as a Benchmark of Spiritual Greatness John Baptist Ku, O.P. Dominican House of Studies Washington, DC When we think of sources of St. Thomas Aquinas’s speculative theology, we rightly recall teachings given in Scripture—such as that sin came into the world through one man (Rom 5:12) or that all that the Father has belongs also to the Son ( John 16:15)—as well as teachings, based on Scripture, imparted by Church councils or Fathers, such as that Christ is one person with two natures1 or that the human nature of Christ is an instrument of his divinity.2 In the project of faith seeking understanding, these teachings lead expeditiously to distinctions and clarifications concerning person and nature, habit and action, primary and instrumental causality, intellect and will, faith and reason, and the like. However, the saints themselves too serve as a source for Aquinas’s speculative theological reflection. Though they admittedly constitute a less abundant source than scriptural, conciliar, or patristic teaching, the saints’ contribution to Aquinas’s theology merits our attention. For instance, in “Jean-Baptiste: figure du prêcheur chez Thomas d’Aquin,” Jean-Pierre Torrell observes that Aquinas’s research into the Fathers of the Church for the Catena aurea bore considerable influence on his subsequent works, and Torrell documents how Aquinas’s treatment of John the Baptist is a precise case that shows this influence.3 More recent 1 2 3 Council of Chalcedon (451). John Damascene, De fide orthodoxa 3.15. Jean-Pierre Torrell, “Jean-Baptiste Figure du Prêcheur chez Thomas d’Aquin,” in Recherches Thomasiennes (Paris: Vrin, 2000), 336–56, at 336. 1120 John Baptist Ku, O.P. scholarship has, fortunately, taken note of the saints’ contribution to Aquinas’s theology—in the figures of St. Benedict and the virgin martyrs.4 This article will therefore examine St. John the Baptist as just such a source of Aquinas’s speculative theology. Aquinas appeals to St. John as a benchmark of spiritual greatness against which to situate other figures: Christ, angels, Mary, apostles, prophets, evangelists, priests, and the people of God. By examining these cases, we will not only observe the Angelic Doctor’s appreciation of the saints as our teachers, as examples to be imitated, and as proofs of God’s love in transformative grace; we will also witness aspects of the Dominican master’s theological method, that is, in his manner of interpreting Scripture and his application of reason to scriptural data to make arguments and draw conclusions.5 For instance, in his treatment of the least in the kingdom of heaven, Scripture will definitively confirm what theological reasoning can determine concerning the knowledge of those with the beatific vision. Furthermore, his exposition on the Blessed Virgin will reveal that he reads the Bible as a whole with one divine author, in support of traditional interpretations.6 However, he is not naive about diverse human authorship and the literal versus the spiritual senses 4 5 6 See Andrew Hofer, “St. Thomas Aquinas on St. Benedict,” The American Benedictine Review 71, no. 4 (2020): 410–34, and Innocent Smith, “St. Thomas Aquinas and the Early Christian Virgin Martyrs,” Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 4 (2019): 5–36. A more extended treatment of medieval hagiography, the development of the articulation of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, and Aquinas’s teaching on the literal and spiritual senses of Scripture are beyond the scope of this article. For more on those topics, see: Medieval Hagiography, ed. Thomas Head (New York: Routledge, 2001); Christiaan W. Kappes, The Immaculate Conception: Why Thomas Aquinas Denied, While John Duns Scotus, Gregory Palamas, and Mark Eugenicus Professed the Absolute Immaculate Existence of Mary (New Bedford, MA: Academy of the Immaculate, 2014); Pedro Lumbreras, Saint Thomas and the Immaculate Conception (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1923); Hugolinus Storff, The Immaculate Conception: The Teaching of St. Thomas, St. Bonaventure and Bl. J. Duns Scotus on the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary (San Francisco: St. Francis Press, 1925); Piotr Roszak, Reading Sacred Scripture with Thomas Aquinas: Hermeneutical Tools, Theological Questions and New Perspectives, ed. Piotr Roszak and Jörgen Vijgen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015); Stephen E. Fowl, Reading Scripture with the Church: Toward a Hermeneutic for Theological Interpretation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 35–50; Aquinas on Scripture: An Introduction to His Biblical Commentaries, ed. Thomas Weinandy, Daniel Keating, and John Yocum (London: T&T Clark, 2005). Here I hope merely to sketch out for the reader Thomas’s deployment of John the Baptist as a spiritual benchmark. See, for instance, John P. Yocum, “Aquinas’ Literal Exposition on Job,” in Weinandy, Keating, and Yocum, Aquinas on Scripture, 27. St. Thomas Aquinas’s Appeal to St. John the Baptist 1121 of Scripture,7 and his methodology unveils his explicit conviction that Scripture must be the basis of theological claims.8 My presentation will unfold in five sections. After (1) a glance at some of Aquinas’s comments on the authority of various sources of theology so as to situate our conversation about the saints as a source of theology, I will review Aquinas’s enlistment of John the Baptist as a standard by which to establish: (2) three simple points about Christians and Christ—that all of the articles of faith must be accepted, that prepubescent children can enter religious life, and that Christ’s baptism manifests divine power—(3) the superiority of angels to wayfarers, among whom John the Baptist is the greatest, followed by apostles, prophets, and evangelists; (4) the eminence of John the Baptist and a ranking, in order, of God, angels, John the Baptist, prophets, priests, and then God’s people; and (5) the holiness of Mary the Mother of God. The Authority of Various Sources of Theology In just a few lines in the Summa theologiae, Aquinas identifies the roles of reason and authority in theology. On one hand, “it is most proper” to theology to offer “proofs from authority,” since theology’s “principles are known through revelation”—making theological arguments dependent on “the authority of those making the revelation.” But on the other hand, theology “also uses human reason, not to prove faith . . . but to make clear things that are handed on in this teaching.” This deployment of reason in the service of theology should come as no surprise, because “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it” so that “natural reason should serve faith.” Thus, theology “uses the authority of the philosophers where they could know the truth through natural reason.”9 But the philosophers are the weakest authorities for theology, which “uses this kind of authority as extraneous and probable arguments.” Divine revelation and the Fathers of the Church are theology’s proper authorities, where “the authority of the canonical Scriptures [is used] to argue 7 8 9 See Summa theologiae [ST] I, q. 1, a. 10, for instance. All translations are my own (see corpusthomisticum.org for the Latin originals used; ST translations use the text from vols. 4–12 of the Leonine edition; a full listing of the volumes of the Leonine edition can also be found on the Corpus Thomisticum website; where Leonine ed. volumes for works are still in praeparatione, the volumes in the other editions as stated at Corpus Thomisticum have been listed). See ST I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2, for example. ST I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2. 1122 John Baptist Ku, O.P. from necessity,” and the authority of the Fathers of the Church to argue “with probable certainty.”10 Reason is a handmaiden to revelation, then, in producing the science of theology. Scripture is an inerrant source of revelation that outranks the Fathers, who are proper authorities but are capable only of supplying probable proofs for argumentation. For this reason, biblical saints, like John the Baptist, are of special theological interest to Aquinas as figures that can contribute necessary arguments. This appeal to the authority of divine revelation along with the application of reason in order to draw out arguments concerning dogmatic or moral teachings is familiar to any student of medieval theology. However, it is also present in Aquinas’s examination of the saints who are mentioned in Scripture, as we will see in our consideration of Aquinas’s treatment of St. John the Baptist. John as a Benchmark for Christians and for Christ Aquinas turns to St. John the Baptist as a sort of spiritual benchmark by which to show what is possible and what is necessary for persons in view of divine grace, and to rank certain figures in terms of spiritual greatness. John the Baptist is particularly suited to this role because Jesus has taught us that no one born of woman is greater than John the Baptist and yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than John (Matt 11:11; Luke 7:28); thus, John stands as a definitive point of comparison between these two realms. Moreover, according to a traditional interpretation, which Aquinas accepts, Luke indicates that John was sanctified while still in his mother’s womb when Mary visited Elizabeth (Luke 1:41); this datum extends the reach of conclusions that the Angelic Doctor is able to draw. In this section, we will consider Thomas’s application of the Baptist-standard to Christ and to Christians to make three simple points— one about Christ and two about Christians. Regarding Christians, first, John can serve as a threshold to show us what articles of the Creed we are obligated to accept, since on one hand he is the greatest among us and was the closest to Christ, but on the other hand he sent his disciples to ask Christ whether he was the promised messiah—perhaps expressing doubt;11 and we lesser folk would not be expected to believe more than John did. 10 11 ST I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2. ST II-II, q. 2, a. 7, obj. 2: “Moreover, it is certain that John the Baptist was among the leaders [maioribus], and was the closest to Christ—of whom the Lord says in Matt 11[v. 11] that ‘among those born of women no one greater [maior] than he has arisen.’ But John the Baptist seems not to have known the mystery of Christ explicitly, since St. Thomas Aquinas’s Appeal to St. John the Baptist 1123 Thus, if John did not believe in the (future) suffering of Christ, we would not be obligated to believe in it either. Aquinas rejects the notion that John doubted the future suffering of Jesus but allows that he could have doubted “whether Christ would descend into hell in his own person.”12 Why could he have doubted this? Because, explains Aquinas, no one was obligated to believe it before its fulfillment. Now, Jesus had not yet undergone his Passion either, so why would anyone be obligated to believe that he would suffer? Peter, significantly, even argued against the idea (Matt 16:23; Mark 8:33). Thomas asserts that John knew of the Lord’s Passion, “since the other prophets had foretold this before, as is especially clear in Isaiah 53.”13 By contrast, there was no explicit prophecy that he would descend into hell. John showed his understanding of Christ’s Passion when “he himself said, ‘Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world’ [ John 1:29], foretelling his future immolation.”14 And when John asked, “are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?” (Matt 11:3), he did not doubt that Jesus was the Messiah, but asked “out of piety” and for the purpose of “teaching the disciples,” whom he had sent to Christ to pose this question.15 Indeed, he manifested explicit faith in Christ’s coming in the flesh when he proclaimed, “I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God” ( John 1:34).16 So, in the final analysis, we are not dispensed from any of the articles of the Creed, because if John doubted anything, it was only that Christ would descend into hell in his own person—but we, unlike John, live after the fulfillment of Christ’s descent into hell. Even so, we see that, for Aquinas, John operates as a benchmark for believers: if he had not believed in any particular article of the creed, we who are below the greatest born of woman would be excused from believing in it as well. Regarding the second point about Christians, John, along with St. Benedict, shows that it is possible for children to enter religious life before puberty—with their parents’ consent: 12 13 14 15 16 he asked Christ, as we read in Matt 11[v. 3], ‘Are you he who is to come, or should we await another?’” ST II-II, q. 2, a. 7, ad 2. ST II-II, q. 2, a. 7, ad 2. And we could add Ps 22 and Wis 2, among others. ST II-II, q. 2, a. 7, ad 2. ST II-II, q. 2, a. 7, ad 2. ST II-II, q. 2, a. 7, ad 2; De veritate, q. 14, a. 11, ad 6 (Leonine ed. vol. 22); and Super Matt 11, lec. 1 (Marietti ed., 1951). See also In III sent., d. 25, q. 2, a. 2, qla. 3, obj. and ad 1 (Parma ed. vols. 6–7). 1124 John Baptist Ku, O.P. Nevertheless, although they cannot be professed before the age of puberty, they can, with the consent of their parents, be received into religion to be educated there—as we read in Luke 1[v. 80] of John the Baptist that the child grew and was strengthened in spirit, and was in the deserts.17 Here Aquinas deploys John as an example of what is humanly possible and even spiritually advantageous. As John was able to grow and become strong in spirit by living from his childhood in the desert, so can other children. This was not a hypothetical question: one of these other children who followed in the Baptist’s path was none other than Thomas Aquinas, who at the ripe old age of five or six went to live at a Benedictine monastery with his nurse.18 Although the child John’s early departure for the desert shows that more ordinary children may embrace religious life, we should not imagine that all are capable of the intensity and perfection of the Baptist’s life of solitude—as Aquinas clarifies in his commentary on Aristotle’s Politics. In reflecting on the fact that it is man’s nature to be political, that is to live and participate in society, Aquinas observes that those who are not political are so either because they are better than others (godlike, according to Aristotle’s categories of moral character) or worse than others (brutish). St. John the Baptist and St. Anthony were examples of the godlike: But if someone is such that he is not political on account of nature, either he must be depraved, as when this happens from the corruption of human nature, or else he is better than man, namely, insofar as he has a more perfect nature than other men commonly have, so that he can be self-sufficient by himself without the society of men—which nature was in John the Baptist and blessed Anthony the hermit.19 We should have suspected that the greatest born of woman would enjoy such an elevated state of human perfection. 17 18 19 ST II-II, q. 189, a. 5, corp. See also: the sermon Exiit Qui Seminat, pt. 2 (Leonine ed. vol. 44/1); Contra doctrinam retrahentium a religione, ch. 3 and ch. 13, corp. (Leonine ed. vol. 41C); Super Matt 20, lec. 1; Quodlibet V, q. 11, a. 1, ad obj. (Leonine ed. vol. 25/2). See Jean-Pierre Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, The Person and His Work, trans. Robert Royal (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 5. In I pol., lec. 1, no. 27 (Leonine ed. vol. 48). St. Thomas Aquinas’s Appeal to St. John the Baptist 1125 With respect to Christ, John offers a standard against which to contrast the effects of baptism so as to reveal something about the baptizer. John’s baptism was only a sign, while Christ’s confers grace.20 Only God can be the principal cause of the forgiveness of sins and grace in the soul. The fact that John’s baptism could not forgive sin or give grace, yet Christ’s baptism can do both, points to Christ’s divinity. God the Son worked through his humanity to produce effects far beyond what the greatest born of woman was capable of. For Aquinas, here John serves as a benchmark to expose the divine power of his slightly younger cousin. John as a Benchmark Establishing the Superiority of Angels to Wayfarers In this third section, I will consider specific examples of Aquinas’s appeal to St. John as a benchmark based on Matthew 11:11 / Luke 7:28, where Jesus asserts that, “truly, . . . among those born of women there has risen no one greater than John the Baptist,” yet “he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than [ John].” Drawing on his different comparisons from various works, we can discern that, for Thomas, angels are superior to wayfarers—who of course can only be humans; and among humans—as wayfarers—we have the order of: John the Baptist, possibly John the Apostle, apostles and prophets, and then evangelists. The blessed include angels and men, but during John’s lifetime—before the death and resurrection of Jesus—only the angels would have been in heaven.21 In examining this verse in Scripture about John the Baptist’s greatness, Thomas never brings Mary into the comparison. He compares John and Mary rather in the context of being sanctified in the womb, as we shall see below. The Angelic Doctor takes it for granted that more grace was bestowed on the Virgin Mother of God than on any other saint,22 and simply does not mention her or Jesus as obvious exceptions to the assertion that John is the greatest of anyone born of woman. His argument that 20 21 22 ST III, qq. 38 and 69; In IV sent., d. 2, q. 2, a. 2, and d. 5, q. 2, a. 3, qla. 2, expos. text.; Super Ioan 1, lec. 13–14 (Marietti ed., 1952). ST III, q. 49, a. 5, corp. ST III, q. 27, a. 1, corp.: “For it is reasonably believed that she who gave birth to ‘the Only-Begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth’ [see John 1:14] received greater privileges of grace than all others, whence we read in Luke 1[:28] that the angel said to her ‘Hail, full of grace’” (see below in the section on “Mary’s Sanctification in the Womb” for the fuller quotation). See also ST III, q. 27, a. 2, obj. 1: “More grace was bestowed on the Virgin Mother of God than on any one of the saints.” 1126 John Baptist Ku, O.P. the lowest blessed is higher than the greatest mere wayfarer (really Mary, not John) still holds. Because Christ had the beatific vision even while a wayfarer, he was never below anyone at any time.23 In four of his works, Aquinas draws on the articulation of John’s place in Matthew 11:11 / Luke 7:28 to establish that the lowest angel is above all wayfarers. The central issue in all of these cases is the superiority of the angels’ knowledge of God. This will include the consequent consideration of angelic versus human speech about God, and whether angels can be taught about God by wayfarers in any way. It will be concerning our speech about God where the Angelic Doctor will take the occasion to indicate an order among different classes of wayfarers: apostles, prophets, and evangelists. The Summa theologiae will contribute four cases for us to examine, and the commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, and Dionysius’s On the Divine Names, will each supply one. We now proceed to these seven passages. The first passage appears in the commentary on the Sentences (the Scriptum): where he considers whether angels learned of the Incarnation through men, Thomas sets John the Baptist before us as a standard for the greatest of anyone born of woman, in order to establish the superior place of angels according to nature: According to condition of status, any angel is absolutely greater than any human wayfarer, whence Matthew 11:11 says that “he who is lesser [minor] in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he,” namely, John the Baptist, than whom nevertheless no one greater among those born of women has arisen. But as far as the cause is concerned, it can be said that some man is relatively greater than some angel insofar as through the grace that he has, he merits a level higher than certain angels.24 We are immediately confronted here with a distinction between being greater by condition of status and being greater, only relatively, by grace. As Thomas clarifies later in the Summa, any angel (even the least in the kingdom of heaven) is actually greater than any wayfarer (even the greatest born of woman), although a wayfarer may be virtually greater than an 23 24 Christ alone was a beatified wayfarer. See, for instance, ST I, q. 62, a. 9, ad 3; II-II, q. 174, a. 5, ad 3; and III, q. 7, a. 8, ad 3. In II sent., d. 11, q. 2, a. 4, ad 2. St. Thomas Aquinas’s Appeal to St. John the Baptist 1127 angel in that the wayfarer could have more charity through grace than the lowest angel, so that when the wayfarer enters the kingdom of heaven, he will be greater.25 Thus, in the Scriptum, “greater by condition of status” can be interpreted as actually greater and “relatively greater by grace” as virtually greater. In the Scriptum, Thomas’s point is that angels are never taught by humans about God. Angels can learn about certain effects of a mystery as it unfolds through human actions, but here God would be teaching them through human activity.26 For Aquinas, no wayfarer teaches any angel; and the scriptural revelation about John the Baptist confirms this. Now, Aquinas might seem to have provided an imperfect analysis here, since he establishes that the angels are superior in knowledge but he concludes that they are greater simply—not only in knowledge. That is, he determines that they are not only relatively greater—in intelligence, for instance—but actually greater. However, for Aquinas, this is the right criterion for ranking, because men and angels can be said to be created in the image of God on account of their rationality. Man is not in God’s image on account of his body, but rather his intellect;27 man is most his mind.28 Revealed as the greatest born of woman, John serves as a divinely established benchmark to ground this theological conclusion. In our second passage of this section, Aquinas restates his position about the angels’ intellectual superiority in the first part of the Summa theologiae, where he sorts out the angels’ hierarchy: The lower (minor) angel is higher than the highest man of our hierarchy, according to Matthew 11: “He who is lesser in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he”—namely, John the Baptist, than whom no one greater among those born of women has arisen. Whence the lower angel of the heavenly hierarchy can not only cleanse but also illuminate and perfect, and in a higher way than the orders of our hierarchy can.29 25 26 27 28 29 ST I, q. 117, a. 2, ad 3: “Some men, even in the state of a wayfarer, are greater than some angels—however, not in act but in virtue, insofar namely as they have charity of such strength [virtutis] that they can merit a greater level of beatitude than certain angels have: as we could say that the seed of a great tree is virtually greater than a small tree, although it is actually much smaller.” In II sent., d. 11, q. 2, a. 4, corp.; ST I, q. 117, a. 2, ad 1. ST I, q. 3, a. 1, ad 2. ST I-II, q. 29, a. 4, corp. ST I, q. 108, a. 2, ad 3. 1128 John Baptist Ku, O.P. Our third passage is found a few questions later in the Summa, where Thomas adds the clarification that man cannot teach angels: But it is manifest that in the same way in which inferior angels are subject to superior angels, the highest men are subject even to the lowest angels. This is clear from what our Lord says in Matthew 11: “No one has arisen among those born of women greater than John the Baptist; yet he who is lesser in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” Therefore angels are never enlightened by men about divine things.30 As was the case in the Scriptum, the authority that Aquinas relies on here for his doctrine is the revelation that John is the greatest born of woman but below the least in the kingdom of God. In two objections from questions in the Summa theologiae dealing with oaths and dulia, this same Scripture passage appears, making the same point, here in service of objections that will ultimately be dismissed. One of these is our fourth passage, where concerning oaths, the objection argues: Moreover, in this world no living man is of such dignity as is an angel, for Matthew 11 says that “he who is lesser in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he,” namely, John the Baptist while he was living in the world. But it is fitting to an angel to swear, for it says in Revelation 10 that the angel “swore by Him who lives for ever and ever.” Therefore no man ought to be excused from swearing, on account of dignity.31 In reply to this objection, Thomas observes that the angel does not swear on account of a defect in his credibility—which would indicate that less credible man should then swear—but because his message “proceeds from God’s infallible disposition.” In the second of these objections, our fifth text, where he treats dulia, Aquinas quotes Matthew 11:11 more loosely, supplying “John the Baptist” for “he”:32 30 31 32 ST I, q. 117, a. 2, corp. ST II-II, q. 89, a. 10, obj. 4. The Leonine critical edition has Ioanne Baptista (“than John the Baptist”) instead of illo (“than he”). St. Thomas Aquinas’s Appeal to St. John the Baptist 1129 It seems that honor is not properly owed to superiors. For an angel is superior to any human wayfarer, according to Matthew 11: “He who is lesser in the kingdom of heaven is greater than John the Baptist.” But an angel prohibited John [the Apostle] from honoring him when John wanted to, as is clear at the end of the Book of Revelation. Therefore honor is not owed to superiors.33 Aquinas offers two possible answers to the objection. First, the angel did not mean to decline honor altogether, but only the adoration of latria. Second, at the risk of undermining his own principle of ordering, the Angelic Doctor opines that perhaps the angel did not regard himself as superior, because Christ had made John the Apostle equal to the angels. While Thomas might appear to suggest here that the John of Revelation is John the Baptist, not John the Apostle, that idea is explicitly ruled out in De Veritate, q. 13, a. 2, ad 9, where Thomas writes that, in the Book of Revelation, it is John the Apostle who is lifted out of his senses to an imaginary vision. Although these two objections in the Summa do not consider the angels’ intellectual superiority, Aquinas’s analysis here is consistent with the cases we examined above in appealing to John the Baptist as a benchmark in the order of spiritual beings. Our sixth passage comes from the commentary on Ephesians, where the Dominican master clarifies that perhaps fallen angels could be taught by men, here invoking the Gospel of Luke: Therefore it is not fitting from any perspective to say that the blessed who are in heaven are taught by a wayfarer, however perfect. For although among those born of women there has arisen none greater than John the Baptist, nevertheless “he who is lesser in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he,” as Luke 7:28 says. But to say that demons are taught by men is plausible.34 Although no human intellect can compare to an angelic intellect on the natural level, considered absolutely, mere wayfarers could receive revelations from God about divine mysteries and teach them to demons, who could be ignorant of them. By contrast, the blessed—whether angelic or 33 34 ST II-II, q. 103, a. 2, obj. 1. Super Eph 3, lec. 3 (Marietti ed., 1953: vol. 2 of 2 of Super Epistolas S. Pauli Lectura, containing commentaries on the whole Pauline corpus). 1130 John Baptist Ku, O.P. human—see the divine essence immediately, and thus they simply cannot be taught about God by any wayfarer. Our seventh passage, on angels’ superiority to wayfarers, occurs in Thomas’s commentary on Dionysius’s On the Divine Names where Dionysius ponders the limitation of our ability to speak accurately of God. Here Thomas places the best theologians below the lowest angel by invoking John the Baptist as the benchmark given in Matthew 11:11: The most excellent theologians among us fall short of the lowest of the angels, as Matthew 11 says that “he who is lesser in the kingdom of heaven is greater than” John the Baptist.35 Aquinas specifies further that these excellent “theologians philosophizing about divine things [are], namely, prophets and apostles, or even their assistants who produced the canonical Scriptures, like Luke and Mark.”36 He does not specify any order of rank between prophets and apostles here, but he does hint that, after angels and John the Baptist, prophets and apostles outrank evangelists. In two of his scriptural commentaries, as we shall see below,37 Thomas asserts that New Testament figures outrank Old Testament patriarchs and that the apostles were preserved from mortal sin after Pentecost, which would place the apostles ahead of prophets. Here the dignity of rank is based on speech about God—which follows upon knowledge. Thus, we find this verse of Scripture again invoked in connection to superiority of knowledge. And again, John serves as the standard to establish the order of angels, St. John, apostles and prophets, and then evangelists. John’s Eminence as an Angelus yet Still Below the Least in the Kingdom of Heaven In his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Thomas invokes the verses immediately preceding the key verse we examined just above to work out the order among God, angels, John the Baptist, prophets, priests, and God’s 35 36 37 In de divinis nominibus, ch. 13, lec. 4 (Marietti ed., 1950; Corpus Thomisticum reproduces this edition’s erroneous Roman numeral II but without the printed edition’s interpolated correction; there is no critical edition of this work). In de divinis Nominibus, ch. 13, lec. 4. See the sections below on “John’s Eminence as an Angelus yet Still below the Least in the Kingdom of Heaven” and “The Ramification of John’s Sanctification in the Womb on Mary’s Sanctification” below. St. Thomas Aquinas’s Appeal to St. John the Baptist 1131 people.38 To explain John’s position within this ranking, Thomas focuses on the word angelus, angel or messenger, in Matthew 11:9–10: “Why then did you go out? To see a prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet.39 This is he of whom it is written, ‘Behold, I send my messenger [angelus] before your face, who shall prepare your way before you.’” John is more than a prophet; he is the Lord’s angelus (Matt 11:9–10). In view of this revelation, Aquinas ranks John, the human angel, above normal prophets on account of the immediacy of John’s vision of the God-man and the role John had in going before the Lord to prepare his way. To elucidate this order, Aquinas additionally specifies the place of priests and the people, giving us the ranking of God, angels, John the Baptist, prophets, priests, and then the people: Therefore [Matthew] says, “I said that he is more than a prophet,” about whom we find in Malachi 3:1: “Behold, I send my messenger (angelus), who will prepare your way before you, etc.” In this source, John’s excelling qualities are indicated: first, because he calls him an angel. For an angel is higher than a prophet, because as a priest is midway between a prophet and the people, so a prophet is between angels and priests. But an angel is between God and prophets. Hence Zechariah says: “The angel who spoke in me” (1:9). “Angel” is the name of an office, not of a nature; hence John is called an angel on account of his office. For there is a difference between an angel and a prophet, since angels see manifestly—whence it is said below in 18:10: “For I say to you that their angels always see the face of my Father, who is in heaven.” Angels always see the face of God, but prophets do not. Hence, as angels always see the face of the Father, so John saw Christ in a special way; and because of this special way, [Malachi] says “my.” He also says, “before my face.” When a king goes out, many go before him, but the more familiar ones go before his face. So, John is said to be more honorable, because he was sent 38 39 Torrell avers that, as regards idea that the prophet is between the angel and the priest, and the priest is between the prophet and the people, John the Baptist is a unique case, and “there is no reason to think that Thomas is seeking to propose here a theology of ministry” (“Jean-Baptiste Figure,” 353). This just reflects an “occasional view.” Aquinas gives three reasons why John is more than a prophet. First, prophets foretell the future, but John showed the present also, as when he pointed out the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world ( John 1:29); second, he was the forerunner of the Messiah, which is why he is called the Baptist; and third, he prophesied even while in the womb (Super Matt 11, lec. 1). 1132 John Baptist Ku, O.P. before his face—for, the closer, the more honorable. Similarly, he prepared the way because he baptized. Hence he says, “who will prepare the way before you.”40 Thomas plays on the broader and narrower denotations of the term “angel.” On one hand, in the broader sense, it simply means messenger, and thus it applies to John perfectly without the implication that he is a separated substance. Such an application is perfectly logical, because “‘angel’ is the name of an office, not a nature,” as Aquinas observes, quoting St. Gregory the Great.41 But on the other hand, “an angel is between God and the prophets,” and “angels always see the face of God, but prophets do not.” Furthermore, as we noted above, angels are never taught by wayfarers about divine things, because angels are (intellectually) superior. So, even if the term designates an office and not a nature, it is regularly—if not almost exclusively—used to refer to separated substances. Aquinas draws these two senses together in attributing them to John, to place John above the rest of the prophets, who were not as close to Christ as John was: “As angels always see the face of the Father, so John saw Christ in a special way,” which the other prophets did not. Aquinas follows up on this comment by explaining that Malachi, whom Matthew quotes, says “my angel” and speaks of the Lord’s sending John “before my face” to indicate the intimacy that John had with Christ.42 For “many go before [the king], but the more familiar ones go before his face.”43 40 41 42 43 Super Mattheum 11, lec. 1. Thomas does not attribute the idea of priests being between prophets and the people to any authority, and he mentions it in only one other place in his corpus: In IV sent., d. 25, q. 2, a. 1, qla. 1, obj. 1. When Thomas appeals to this quotation in In II sent., d. 9, q. 1, a. 4, ad 2, he attributes it to Gregory by name. Thomas reiterates the idea that John’s closeness to Christ makes him more than a prophet, in his commentary on the Gospel of John: “When John is asked whether he is a prophet, why does he respond that he is not a prophet? . . . One answer is that John is not simply a prophet but more than a prophet. For the other prophets only foretold far off future things—as we read in Habakkuk, ‘if it should delay, wait for it’—but John announced the present Christ, as if pointing his finger, as when he says later on in the Gospel: ‘Behold, the Lamb of God.’ And therefore, the Lord says in Matthew 11:9 that he is more than a prophet” (Super Ioan 1, lec. 12). Regarding John’s intimacy with Christ, Torrell notes that Aquinas forcefully emphasizes that Jesus did not only go to John to be baptized but that he visited him regularly: “He was accustomed to come to John frequently before he was baptized” (Super Ioan 1, lec. 9; quoted in “Jean-Baptiste Figure,” 339). Furthermore, Aquinas beautifully develops the image of John as the best man: “For Christ is the groom of the Church, but John is the friend and best man of the groom. Now, the duty of the best man is to St. Thomas Aquinas’s Appeal to St. John the Baptist 1133 It might seem curious that Aquinas would quote Malachi instead of Matthew—who reports Jesus’s quotation of Malachi for the express purpose of applying his prophetic words to John—but Aquinas has a reason. Interestingly, Matthew—or better, Jesus—changes the pronoun from “my face” in Malachi to “your face,” making it sound like it is the Father speaking to the Son through this prophecy, instead of the Lord simply speaking to the people about sending his messenger to prepare for his coming. But Aquinas wishes to emphasize the connection between “my angel” and “[being sent] before my face” to indicate John’s closeness to Christ. John is sent before the face of Christ the King “to prepare the way before [him],” which John did “because he baptized.” Thus, a question of speculative theology concerning angels and prophets is answered authoritatively with the help of Scripture, and in this case, John the Baptist provides a convenient yardstick. Here Thomas ties together passages from Malachi and Zechariah, as well as another from Matthew, because they all employ the term angelus; while not naive about sources behind texts and weaknesses of translations, the Dominican master read Scripture as a coherent revelation with one primary author.44 Admittedly, today many might not adopt his method of scriptural argumentation, but it is not so far from how the scriptural authors themselves argue. In any case, it should be clear that, for Aquinas, Scripture is the normative authority, which makes scriptural saints a source for theology.45 Naturally, in his commentary on Matthew, Thomas offers his most extended treatment of the verse that asserts that John is the greatest among 44 45 deliver the bride to the groom, and, by speaking, to deliver the agreements. But the duty of the groom is to be silent, as if because of respect, and to make arrangements as he wills for the bride he now possesses. Thus, the disciples are delivered to Christ by John as if espoused through faith. John speaks, Christ is silent; but once he has received them, Christ instructs them carefully” (Super Ioan 1, lec, 15). For instance, Aquinas was the first to identify the author of the Book of Causes, long attributed to Aristotle, as an Arabic philosopher who borrowed from Proclus (see Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1:222). Also, in the introduction to his commentary on the Psalms, Aquinas speaks of three translations of the Psalter, an old one that was corrupted over time by copyists, a correction of this version by Jerome, and a second version corrected by Jerome against the Septuagint. Although not all of the details he reports are accurate, he was correct in identifying three versions, where two were corrections by Jerome, one closer to the Greek and one based on the Hebrew. Torrell (“Jean-Baptiste Figure,” 344) describes Aquinas’s exegetical style as concerned with the smallest literal details but above all attentive to their theological significance, and to demonstrate this, he adduces the explanations of several Fathers of the Church regarding John the Baptist’s revelation that “among you stands one whom you do not know” (“Jean-Baptiste Figure,” 344). 1134 John Baptist Ku, O.P. those born of woman.46 When we come to the key verse itself, Thomas asserts that the evangelist “shows that he [ John the Baptist] is excelling among earthly beings” and “lesser among heavenly beings.”47 And he explains that Matthew writes, “no one greater has arisen among those born of women,” because “whoever can attain the state of grace arises.”48 Aquinas then explains that John is not greater by nature, but on account of the vocation he received from God. This is different, observes the Angelic Doctor, from the situation of angels. Being immaterial, each angel must be individuated not by matter, but by its form, or act of being; thus, each angel is its own species. And therefore, each angel is by nature distinct in greatness; they are naturally arranged in a hierarchy. Humans, by contrast, all have the same nature and are by nature equal. It is God’s gift of grace to each human being that distinguishes greatness: Therefore, according to the first point [whether John excelled among all humans], I say that the argument—that he than whom no other is greater is the greatest—would have merit concerning angels, where there is order; but among men it is not true, because among men there is no order according to nature but only according to grace. Similarly, if he is said to be greater than all the fathers of the Old Testament, it is not unfitting, for he is greater and more excellent who has been chosen for a greater office. For Abraham is greater among the patriarchs with respect to proving one’s faith, but Moses is greater with respect to the office of prophecy, as it says in Deuteronomy 34:10: “Since then there has not arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses.” All of these were precursors of the Lord, but none was of such excellence or favor. Therefore, he was chosen for a greater office: “He will be great in the presence of the Lord” (Luke 1:15).49 Aquinas places great weight on the effect of grace here. He maintains that, according to nature, all men are equal, even though clearly some have more natural ability than others. Thus, although St. John the Baptist and St. Anthony qualify as the godlike (according to Aristotle’s categories of 46 47 48 49 Aquinas wrote commentaries on the Gospels of John and of Matthew. The commentary on Matthew stands in for all three synoptic Gospels. To the ancients and medievals, Matthew enjoyed a certain primacy. For instance, St. Dominic was known to carry with him the epistles of Paul and the Gospel of Matthew. Super Matt 11, lec. 1. Super Matt 11, lec. 1. Super Matt 11, lec. 1. St. Thomas Aquinas’s Appeal to St. John the Baptist 1135 moral character) in being able to adopt a life of the most intense solitude without society, which we noted above,50 that does not suffice to make them “greater” than other humans. By contrast, grace distinguishes men in greatness to such a degree that Aquinas compares this distinction to difference in species—which we find among angels. The Angelic Doctor manifests great respect for the Baptist here. While among the precursors of the Lord Jesus, Abraham was greater in a certain respect (i.e., faith), and Moses was greater in another respect (i.e., prophecy); John simply excelled them and was more favored: “Therefore, he was chosen for a greater office” and would be “great in the presence of the Lord.” Aquinas next reprises his explanation from the prima pars of the Summa, which we quote above, concerning the comparison of the least in the kingdom of God to the greatest wayfarers.51 The blessed, whether human or angelic, are higher than any wayfarer at this moment; but a current wayfarer could well be greater than any particular blessed once the wayfarer himself becomes a blessed: [One explanation of this verse is] that by “kingdom of heaven” the order of the blessed is understood, and he who is lesser among them is greater than any wayfarer. . . . And this is to be understood of actual greatness; for the one who has the beatific vision is actually greater. [But this is not the case] according to virtual greatness, as one small herb is said to be greater in power, although another is greater in size.52 Thus, John was below the least in the kingdom of heaven while a wayfarer, but once in the kingdom himself, John was clearly no longer the least. Aquinas includes another analogy for grasping the application of this verse to the Baptist, albeit with a confusing example. He notes that one can be in a higher state of life but lower in merit than a particular individual in a lower state of life. Thus, as Thomas outlines just above, John can be in a lower state as a wayfarer but in fact have more merit—which will ultimately give him a higher place as a comprehensor. This, says Aquinas, gives John a middle place. 50 51 52 See the section on “The Authority of Various Sources of Theology” above. See the section on “John as a Benchmark Establishing the Superiority of Angels to Wayfarers” above. The First Part of the Summa was completed in 1268—the year that he left Rome and returned to Paris for his second regency—and the commentary on Matthew was begun in 1269. Super Matt 11, lec. 1. 1136 John Baptist Ku, O.P. The confusing example Thomas will proffer is his illustration of how an Old Testament patriarch can be superior to certain New Testament figures, with the case of Abraham’s marriage being better than John’s celibacy—a fact Thomas accepts on the authority of a Father of the Church, St. Augustine of Hippo. So, was Abraham greater as a wayfarer than John was as a wayfarer? No. That thesis would contradict what Aquinas clearly articulates later in this very passage, as well as in a number of other places about John that we have already reviewed. We can only conclude that this is a clumsy example simply evidencing the general principle that one can be in an objectively lower state but actually be higher according to the more definitive criterion of merit. For instance, some Old Testament patriarchs are greater than some New Testament figures, a married person could be greater than a particular consecrated celibate, and a wayfarer could be virtually greater than a given comprehensor: Or it can otherwise be explained that someone is said to be greater in two ways: either as to merit—and thus many patriarchs are greater than some the New Testament figures, as Augustine says that John’s celibacy is not preferred to Abraham’s marriage—or by comparing one state to another, as virgins are better than the married, but nevertheless not every virgin is better than every married person. Hence John has the dignity of being on a certain boundary, because he is greater than wayfarers but less than comprehensors, and so he holds a middle place.53 John is not even classified among wayfarers; he is above them. This middle place signifies another boundary, according to Aquinas, namely, the boundary between the Old and New Testaments: “But from the days of John the Baptist until now, etc.” Here he is commended regarding the distinction between the Old Testament and the New Testament. And John’s excellence is noted, because he is the beginning of the New Testament and the end of the Old Testament. Therefore [Matthew] said that “he who is lesser in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he,” and this pertains to the fact that he is the beginning of the New Testament.54 53 54 Super Matt 11, lec. 1. Super Matt 11, lec. 1. St. Thomas Aquinas’s Appeal to St. John the Baptist 1137 This is a unique grace, given to the Baptist. In this section, we learned that, for Aquinas, spiritual greatness among men is determined by grace, not nature. For, according to nature, all men are equal. And a certain individual in a less perfect state of life could be greater than a given individual in a more perfect state of life, on account of excelling in grace. More importantly for our consideration of sources for theology, we have seen that Thomas can appeal to the biblical saint John the Baptist to establish a ranking of office: God, angels, John the Baptist, prophets, priests, and then God’s people. Incorporating Thomas’s conclusions from the previous section yields this order: God, angels, John the Baptist, apostles, prophets, evangelists, priests, and the people. For Aquinas, scriptural data about saints can serve as a source of speculative theology; Holy Writ confirms what can be known by reason alone and reveals to us mysteries that human reason could never discover. The Ramification of John’s Sanctification in the Womb on Mary’s Sanctification In this section, after a brief introductory detour to document scriptural verses that Thomas applies to Mary in connection with her purity and fullness of grace, we will consider the consequences of John’s sanctification in the womb for Mary, the mother of God—followed by a glance at a relevant tangent about the apostles’ sanctification. The point of the detour will be to demonstrate Aquinas’s reliance on a biblical saint as an elucidating source for theology. Mary’s Holiness, Stainlessness, Strength in Grace, and Purity in the Bible Aquinas finds the affirmation of Mary’s holiness, stainlessness, strength in grace, and purity in at least seven verses in the Scriptures. The key verse that establishes Mary’s unrivaled holiness—apart from that of her Son—is Luke 1:28: “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you!” Thomas makes explicit reference to this verse in connection with Mary’s singular gift of grace in the Summa theologiae and in his 1273 Lenten sermon On the Hail Mary.55 Luke 1:48 (“[the Lord] has looked with favor on his lowly handmaid”) and Sirach 24:25 (“In me is all grace of the way and of the truth, in me is all hope of life and of virtue”) appear in the Dominican master’s 55 ST III, q. 7, a. 10; Expositio de Ave Maria, a. 1, corp. (Marietti ed., 1954; also in Omnia Opera, vol. 27, opusculum VI [Paris: Vives, 1875], 198–202). 1138 John Baptist Ku, O.P. sermon Germinet Terra to make the same point.56 And in his commentary on Ephesians, Thomas associates the Virgin’s singular dignity and grace with Romans 8:23: “We ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit.”57 In his sermon On the Hail Mary, Thomas invokes Song of Songs 4:7—“You are all fair, my love; there is no flaw in you”—to express Mary’s stainlessness.58 And in his commentary on Isaiah, Aquinas observes that Mary is called a rock on account of the strength of her grace, applying Sirach 26:24 to her: “As everlasting foundations upon a solid rock, so the commandments of God in the heart of a holy woman.”59 On account of her purity, in the Summa theologiae and the disputed question De veritate, Aquinas links the Mother of God to the loftiest characterizations of the feminine figure of divine wisdom in the Book of Wisdom: “For she is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her” (Wis 7:25).60 Aquinas’s approach here clearly deviates from a historical-critical method of examining Scripture. However, these passages should leave no doubt that, for the Common Doctor, Scripture is normative of hagiography. The lives of the saints exemplify Scripture, and Scripture speaks prophetically and poetically about them.61 The Bible and hagiography go together. We now turn to Thomas’s treatment of John the Baptist’s sanctification in the womb and its theological implications for the Blessed Virgin. Mary’s Sanctification in the Womb John’s serving as a measure for ranking excellence, which we have covered above, has a significant consequence for Mary, the mother of Jesus. Because Mary is the purest of all saints, if John was sanctified in the womb, it should not be doubted of Mary: The Blessed Virgin was sanctified in the womb before her birth, which can be gathered from the fact that above all other saints she was purer from sin . . . as the mother chosen by divine wisdom, in whom “nothing impure invades,” as is said in Wisdom 7. Thus since 56 57 58 59 60 61 Germinet Terra, pt. 2 (Leonine ed. vol. 44/1). Super Eph 1, lec. 3. Expositio de Ave Maria, a. 1, corp. Super Isa 16 (Leonine ed. vol. 28). De veritate, q. 24, a. 9, ad 2. Super Ioan 18, lec. 4: “Thus, sacred Scripture ought to be understood as Christ and other saints lived it.” St. Thomas Aquinas’s Appeal to St. John the Baptist 1139 a purity is found to be in certain saints whereby they were cleansed of sin in the womb before birth—like John the Baptist of whom we read in Luke 1:15, “and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, from his mother’s womb,” and like Jeremiah, of whom we read in Jeremiah 1:5, “Before you came forth from the womb, I sanctified you”’—it ought not to be doubted that this was conferred on the much more excellent Mother of God.62 This argument from the Scriptum is repeated in the Summa theologiae and the Compendium theologiae; thus it is a position that the Angelic Doctor had from the beginning to the end of his career.63 In the question from the Summa, we find Aquinas invoking a Father of the Church with an explicit reference to making arguments from reason in defense of Tradition where Scripture is silent: Nothing is handed down in the canonical Scriptures concerning the sanctification of the Blessed Mary, namely, that she was sanctified in the womb; there is not even mention of her birth. But as Augustine argues reasonably, concerning the assumption of the Virgin, that she was assumed bodily into heaven, although Scripture does not hand this teaching down, so can we argue reasonably that she was sanctified in the womb. For it is reasonably believed that she who gave birth to “the Only-Begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth,” received greater privileges of grace than all others—whence we read in Luke 1 that the angel said to her, “Hail, full of grace.”64 62 63 64 In III sent., d. 3, q. 1, a. 1, qla. 3, corp. ST III, q. 27, a. 1, corp.: “But we find that this was granted in a privileged manner to certain others to be sanctified in the womb, such as Jeremiah, to whom it was said [ Jeremiah 1]: ‘Before you came forth from the womb, I sanctified you,’ and such as John the Baptist, of whom it was said [Luke 1]: ‘He will be filled with the Holy Spirit from his mother’s womb.’ Thus it is reasonably believed that the Blessed Virgin was sanctified in the womb before she was born.” Compendium theologiae I, ch. 224, corp.: “For some are cleansed of original sin after birth, as are those sanctified in baptism. But we read that others were sanctified even in the wombs of their mothers by a certain privilege of grace—as about Jeremiah, Jeremiah 1:5 says, ‘Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you came forth from the womb, I sanctified you,’ and about John the Baptist, the angel says: ‘He shall be filled with the Holy Spirit from his mother’s womb.’ But it ought not be believed that what was granted to Christ’s precursor and to the prophet was denied to his own mother. And therefore it is believed that she was sanctified in the womb, namely, before she was born” (Leonine ed. vol. 42). ST III, q. 27, a. 1, corp. 1140 John Baptist Ku, O.P. If Augustine, who should be accepted as one who teaches with probable authority,65 can conclude without explicit scriptural data that the Virgin Mary was assumed into heaven, then it seems like a much more modest claim to assert that she was sanctified in the womb. After all, lesser saints like John and Jeremiah were sanctified in the womb, and they did not “[give] birth to the Only-Begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth” and were not greeted by an angel with the salutation “Hail, full of grace.” Moreover, it is believed, we learn from Aquinas, that John’s and Jeremiah’s mothers were also sanctified, on account of their sons. Much more then would Mary, the mother of God, be sanctified—and more perfectly—for all of these sanctifications were ordered to Christ’s most holy conception: As God did not bind his power to natural things so that he could not act beyond them—since he willed to act in miraculous deeds— so he did not bind his power to the sacraments so that he could not sanctify something without ministers of the sacraments. And therefore we read that he sanctified some outside of the common law as if miraculously in the wombs of their mothers—those chiefly who were ordered more immediately to [Christ’s] most holy conception. And therefore it is believed that the mother was sanctified, both of John the Baptist, who gave testimony to him while in the womb, and of Jeremiah, who predicted his own conception by direct prophecy: “a new thing,” he said, “will the Lord do upon the earth. A woman will surround a man” ( Jer 31:22). And therefore there was an ampler sanctification in the Blessed Virgin, in whom the tinder to sin was weakened to such a degree or extinguished that she was never inclined to actual sin; but in the others tinder inclined to venial but not mortal sin. And sanctification was in John the Baptist more visibly than in Jeremiah whose [ John’s] interior sanctification came by a certain leaping into the knowledge of men, because it was said, “the infant leapt in her womb” (Luke 1:41), as a step toward Christ is a step of sanctification.66 Thomas finds that, as Mary compares to the prophets’ mothers, so does she compare to the prophets themselves. John the Baptist’s and Jeremiah’s 65 66 See the section above on “The Authority of Various Sources of Theology” and ST I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2. In IV sent., d. 6, q. 1, a. 1, qla. 2, corp. St. Thomas Aquinas’s Appeal to St. John the Baptist 1141 sanctifications are superior to the sanctification of an ordinary baptism, and Mary’s sanctification is more necessary and superior to theirs: The sanctification of the Blessed Virgin was more excellent than the sanctifications of others. For, in the sanctification that comes through the common law in the sacraments, sin is taken away, but tinder inclining to mortal and venial sin remains. But in those sanctified in the womb, tinder inclining to mortal sin does not remain but the inclination of tinder toward venial sin does remain, as is clear in Jeremiah and John, who had actual venial sin but not mortal. But in the Blessed Virgin, the inclination of tinder was removed altogether, both with respect to venial sin and to mortal sin.67 Indeed, her sanctification is so efficacious that it radiated out to protect others from lusting after her: And what is more (as it is said), the grace of sanctification not only suppressed illicit movements in her but also had effectiveness in others, so that although she was physically beautiful, she could be coveted by no one at any time.68 This is a powerful grace. This is to be full of grace. This is to be like Christ, her Son, who did not become unclean by coming into contact with the unclean, but rather made them clean. In reply to objections that Mary and John were sanctified before they had souls, Thomas appeals to Scripture, which reveals that God sanctified John “not before he was formed but before he came forth from the womb.”69 It would be easy to rule out this objection philosophically 67 68 69 In III sent., d. 3, q. 1, a. 2, qla. 1, ad 4. Thomas confirms this opinion in ST III, q. 27, a. 6, ad 1: “The blessed Virgin, who was chosen by God to be his mother, obtained an ampler grace of sanctification than John the Baptist and Jeremiah, who were chosen as special prefigures of the sanctification of Christ. A sign of this is that it was granted to the Blessed Virgin that she would thenceforth not sin mortally or venially, while it is believed to have been granted to the others who were sanctified that they thenceforth not sin mortally, by divine grace protecting them.” In ST III, q. 27, a. 6, corp., Aquinas also notes that only Mary, John, and Jeremiah were sanctified in the womb. In III sent., d. 3, q. 1, a. 2, qla. 1, ad 4. ST III, q. 27, a. 2, ad 1. Thomas handles the same objection in In III sent., d. 3, q. 1, a. 1, qla. 2, ad 1. On a related point, Aquinas states in ST III, q. 27, a. 6, corp. that John did not enjoy the use of reason while in the womb. This suggests that neither would the Holy Innocents have had the use of reason (see In IV sent., d. 49, q. 5, a. 3, qla. 2, 1142 John Baptist Ku, O.P. by arguing from the Aristotelian-Thomistic hylomorphic account of substances. Namely, before a body is ensouled, it is not a body—that is, it is not anyone’s body—but simply matter, an aggregate of substances that is apt to be informed by a soul. But here the Angelic Doctor simply enlists the authority of Scripture. These objections call to mind the potentially controversial point that the Common Doctor of the Church rejected the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which was later solemnly and infallibly declared by Pope Pius IX ex cathedra: The sanctification of the Blessed Virgin could not appropriately be before the infusion of the soul, because she was not yet capable of receiving grace, and neither in the instant itself of infusion, as then she would be preserved by the grace infused in her so that she would not incur original guilt. For Christ has this singularly in human nature so that he does not need redemption, because he is our head. But it is fitting to all to be redeemed through him, and this cannot be if another soul is found that was never infected by the original stain. And therefore this is conceded neither to the Blessed Virgin nor to anyone besides Christ.70 The Angelic Doctor’s reasoning is transparent here. As a descendent of fallen Adam and Eve, Mary needed a savior, and therefore she could not have been conceived simply without sin. The articulation Thomas was missing was that her preservation from sin altogether would be effected through Christ, so that Mary would indeed need to be saved no less than the rest of us. On this point, we find a compelling defense of Aquinas in Aquinas himself on account of his sublimely coherent epistemology. In ST I, q. 32, he explains under what conditions one may innocently hold an erroneous position that has not yet been ruled out by the Church: 70 ad 12). And that raises the question whether they were martyrs in the fullest sense, e.g., whether they had halos. Thomas notes that John was a true martyr: “The prophets were not killed because they refused to deny the faith, but because they proclaimed the truth. John the Baptist was killed because he proclaimed the truth, and he was a martyr” (Super Matt 5, commentary on v. 10); “he suffered death not for refusing to deny the faith, but for reprimanding adultery” (ST II-II, q. 124, a. 5, corp.). In III sent., d. 3, q. 1, a. 1, qla. 2, corp. St. Thomas Aquinas’s Appeal to St. John the Baptist 1143 Something pertains to faith in two ways. In one way, directly, such as those things that are divinely handed on to us primarily, such as that God is one and three, that the Son of God became incarnate, and this kind of thing; and to opine a falsehood about these of itself introduces heresy, especially if obstinate opinions are held. But [in the second way], those things indirectly pertain to the faith, from which something contrary to the faith follows, such as if someone said that Samuel was not the son of Elkanah, for it would follow from this that divine Scripture is false. Concerning things of this kind, therefore, someone may opine a falsehood without danger of heresy before it is considered or determined that something contrary to the faith follows from this, and especially if he does not adhere to it obstinately. But after it is manifest, and particularly if it is determined by the Church that something contrary to the faith follows from it, to err on the matter would not be without heresy. And on account of this, many things are now considered heretical that were not so considered before, on account of the fact that what follows from them is now more manifest.71 Thus, it is not difficult to imagine that, had the Church defined the Immaculate Conception in Thomas’s time, this obedient friar who truly believed in Christ and his Church would have had no difficulty accepting it. Moreover, it could be argued that Thomas’s rejection of this doctrine is oblique and undeveloped. Examining Aquinas’s opinion in the context of his understanding of original sin, redemption, and ensoulment forty or eighty days after conception, Basil Cole and Francis Belanger arrive at this assessment: There is thus some justification for saying that Thomas never really treats of the immaculate conception, if one means by this that he did not directly, in a self-consciously central argument, address whether Mary was sanctified from the first moment of her existence as a human person.72 71 72 ST I, q. 32, a. 4, corp. (emphasis mine). Basil Cole and Francis Belanger, “The Immaculate Conception, St. Thomas and Bl. Pius IX,” Nova et Vetera (English) 4, no. 3 (2006): 473–494, at 481. 1144 John Baptist Ku, O.P. The Apostles’ Sanctification On a relevant tangent, in the De malo, Thomas asserts that, while not sanctified in the womb, the apostles too enjoyed freedom from mortal sin: We can say that there is a state in which there could not be mortal sin but venial sin, as in those sanctified in the womb—namely, in Jeremiah and John the Baptist—and in the apostles, of whom it is said, “I have strengthened his pillars,” who are believed to have been strengthened through grace so that they could not sin mortally but only venially.73 Aquinas’s phrasing here could make it sound like he is including the apostles among those sanctified in the womb. But he dismisses that idea explicitly in ST III, q. 27, a. 6, obj. and ad 2, where he explains that, while some saints may have been closer to Christ than John the Baptist and Jeremiah in certain respects, they were not closer as regards their prefiguring of Christ’s sanctification—and he notes that “we do not read anywhere that [the apostles] were sanctified in the womb.”74 Furthermore, in his commentary on Galatians, Aquinas confirms that this freedom from mortal sin came after the apostles’ conversion at Pentecost: It ought to be said that, after the grace of the Holy Spirit, the apostles in no way sinned mortally, and they had this gift through divine power which had confirmed them [according to] Psalm 74:4: “I have strengthened his pillars.”75 Thomas does not mention Pentecost by name here; however, in an objection in the Summa, he invokes Luke 24:49: “And behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you; but stay in the city, until you are clothed with power from on high”: For it should not be believed that, after having received the Holy Spirit, the apostles would have sinned mortally, for by his fullness, they “were clothed with power from on high” as is said in the last chapter of Luke.76 73 74 75 76 De malo, q. 7, a. 7, ad 8 (Leonine ed. vol. 23). ST III, q. 27, a. 6, obj. 2. Super Gal 2, lec. 3 (vol. 1 of 2 of Super Epistolas S. Pauli Lectura, Marietti ed., 1953). ST I-II, q. 103, a. 4, obj. 1. St. Thomas Aquinas’s Appeal to St. John the Baptist 1145 Thus, Judas Iscariot did not benefit from this grace; and there is no difficulty admitting that the apostles’ abandonment of Christ at the Cross, and Peter’s denial in particular, are not merely venial sins. And if Aquinas includes Paul, whom he calls “the Apostle,” in this group, then, according to the same principle, this elevated sanctified state would naturally have to have come after Paul’s personal conversion. This grace was thus given to them much later than it was given to John the Baptist and Jeremiah; and it is not as full a grace as the Blessed Virgin received. The apostles’ condition fills out the spectrum of human possibilities within the Church. We have Mary, who was sanctified in the womb and preserved even from the inclination to venial sin. We have John the Baptist and Jeremiah, who were sanctified in the womb and preserved from the inclination to mortal sin, but not to venial sin. We have the apostles, who were sanctified as adults at Pentecost and preserved from the inclination to mortal sin. And then there are the rest of us, who have received “the sanctification that comes through the common law in the sacraments [which] takes away sin, but [leaves] tinder inclining to mortal and venial sin.”77 Whereas Aquinas does not distinguish the status of apostles from prophets in his commentary on Dionysius’s On the Divine Names, and only hints at the apostles’ superiority as New Testament figures in his commentary on Matthew, here we approach a confirmation of their superiority: the Holy Spirit did not descend visibly on the prophets as a group, having been sent by the risen Christ, giving birth to the Church, preserving them from all mortal sin. In this section, we explored the ramifications of the doctrine of John’s sanctification in the womb for the articulation of Our Lady’s special prerogative. We demonstrated Aquinas’s reliance on Scripture as an elucidating source of Mary’s hagiography and unpacked his argument that, since the mother of God was greater in grace than John the Baptist, who was sanctified in the womb, she too must have been sanctified in the womb. Whereas John and Jeremiah were preserved from mortal sin after their sanctifications, Mary was even preserved from venial sin as well. We also recalled the Common Doctor’s understanding of our theological certainty and articulation to suggest that the Dominican Master would have had little difficulty accepting the affirmation of Mary’s immaculate conception had it been taught definitively in his time. And finally, by way of contrast, 77 In III sent., d. 3, q. 1, a. 2, qla. 1, ad 4. See the quotation in main text at note 67 above for the fuller text. 1146 John Baptist Ku, O.P. we reviewed Aquinas’s teaching on the status of the apostles, who were sanctified at Pentecost and preserved from mortal sin thereafter. Conclusion Although the lives of the saints understandably receive less recognition as source for Aquinas’s speculative theology than scriptural, conciliar, or patristic teaching, the saints’ contribution as a source should not be overlooked. This article therefore examined St. John the Baptist as just such a source of speculative theology for St. Thomas. We read in the Bible that no one born of woman is greater than John the Baptist and yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than John (Matt 11:11; Luke 7:28), and also, according to Thomas’s interpretation, that John was sanctified by the Holy Spirit while still in his mother’s womb (Luke 1:41). With these data of revelation, Aquinas is able to use John as a benchmark against which to assess various figures in a hierarchy of greatness. My presentation comprised five sections. After (1) a glance at some of Aquinas’s comments on the authority of various sources of theology to situate the conversation about saints as a source of theology, I reviewed Aquinas’s enlistment of John the Baptist as a standard by which to establish: (2) three simple points about Christians and Christ (that all of the articles of faith must be accepted, that prepubescent children can enter religious life, and that Christ’s baptism manifests divine power); (3) the superiority of angels to wayfarers, among whom John the Baptist is the greatest, followed by apostles, prophets, and evangelists; (4) the eminence of John the Baptist and a ranking, in order, of God, angels, John the Baptist, prophets, priests, and then God’s people; and (5) the holiness of Mary the Mother of God. Thomas establishes that the lowest in heaven, an angel, is higher than the greatest wayfarer, a human. Angels, who see God face to face, are not taught anything about God by wayfarers. Among wayfarers, we have a hierarchy according to grace: the Virgin Mary, John the Baptist, apostles, prophets, evangelists, priests, and then the people of God. Since the Blessed Virgin Mary is more full of grace than John, and John was sanctified in his mother’s womb, Thomas argues that Mary was sanctified in her mother’s womb also. After John the Baptist and Jeremiah were sanctified, they were protected from falling into mortal sin and committed only venial sins; this was true of the apostles too, but they were sanctified at Pentecost, not in their mothers’ wombs. After her sanctification in St. Anne’s womb, however, Mary was protected from falling even into venial sin. St. Thomas Aquinas’s Appeal to St. John the Baptist 1147 By probing these cases, we not only observed the Angelic Doctor’s appreciation of the saints as our teachers, as examples to be imitated, and as proofs of God’s love in transformative grace; we also noted aspects of his theological method in his manner of interpreting Scripture and his application of reason to scriptural data to make arguments and draw conclusions. For instance, in Aquinas’s exposition on of the least in the kingdom of heaven, Scripture definitively confirms what theological reasoning can determine concerning the knowledge of those with the beatific vision and the sanctification of newly conceived children. Furthermore, his exposition on the Blessed Virgin reveals that he reads the Bible as a whole with one divine author, in support of traditional interpretations. All of this indicates the importance of biblical saints as a source for Thomas’s speculative theology—and in particular of St. John the Baptist, who can serve as a benchmark against which other saints are measured. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2022): 1149–1178 1149 Knowing God from the Things That Have Been Made Guy Mansini, O.S.B. Ave Maria University Ave Maria, FL Sacred Scripture teaches that God can be known in two ways. God can be known by the natural light of reason from the things that have been made (see Rom 1:19–20). Second, God’s existence can be known by supernatural faith. As Hebrew 11:6 teaches, “without faith it is impossible to please him,” and “whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.” That what Hebrews speaks of is a supernatural faith is clear from the fact that it illustrates this faith by adverting to the friends of God in the Old Testament who were promised a “homeland,” a “better country” (11:14, 16), the “heavenly Jerusalem” in which everyone is a firstborn son cleansed by the blood of Jesus (12:22– 24). Here, God is apprehended as inviting us to communion of life with him, an end surpassing the proportion of our nature. This is not to say that the first way of knowing God is not also “religious.” When the First Vatican Council teaches in its Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, Dei Filius, that God can be known “from the consideration of created things, by the natural power of human reason [naturali humanae lumine],” it teaches that God is known as “the source and end of all things [principium et finem]” (ch. 2).1 Knowing him as our end, however, is knowing that we have certain duties in justice in his regard, as was understood at the Council.2 But this natural knowledge of God and of the natural law that bids us acknowledge him in worship is by no means 1 2 Translations of Dei Filius are from, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman Tanner, S.J., vol. 2, Trent to Vatican II (London: Sheed and Ward, 1990). Marcel Chossat, S.J., “Dieu (connaissance naturelle de),” in Dictionnaire de théologie catholique [DTC], 15 vols. (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1907–1951), 4:824. 1150 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. the knowledge that we are called to be friends with God and, as our final end, know God face to face, as the Council makes evident. So, the Council quite rightly and properly first declares the Church’s faith in this God who reveals himself to us, and says that the apostolic and Roman Church “believes and acknowledges that there is one true and living God” (ch. 1). As to the other knowledge, the Council merely “holds and teaches [tenet et docet]” that God can be known by the natural light (ch. 2), and this is quite distinct from the fact that it “believes and acknowledges [credit et confitetur]” that God exists (ch. 1), the God who calls us to a supernatural end, which calling can itself be known only by faith (ch. 2). The natural knowledge is asserted as a truth belonging to the secondary object of ecclesial teaching authority, things that follow from what is revealed and are to be “held”; the supernatural knowledge of God is asserted as a truth belonging to the primary object of ecclesial teaching authority, things in the deposit of faith itself which are to be believed.3 If there are these two ways of coming to know God, by faith and by reason, what is their relation to one another? It is sometimes supposed that one must first know God by reason before coming to know him by faith, but the Council by no means asserts this, nor do Catholic theologians.4 What can be maintained is that one must be able to know God by reason in order for faith in revelation to be coherent.5 This is why the Council troubles itself to teach something that touches immediately only on our natural knowledge. But what of the other way round? What of the dependence of the natural knowledge on the supernatural knowledge of God? Is it the case that God must have revealed himself supernaturally in order for us to come to a natural knowledge of him? This is sometimes granted, and it is recognized that revelation is necessary in our present state, post-fall and post-redemption, to come to the natural knowledge of God.6 The argument of this paper, however, is that this is true across 3 4 5 6 See Ioachim Salaverri, S.J., “De ecclesia,” in Sacrae Theologiae Summa, vol. 1 (Madrid: BAC, 1958), nos. 909–13. Jean-Hervé Nicolas, O.P., Synthèse dogmatique, complément: de l’Univers à la Trinité (Paris: Beauchesne, 1993), no. 45.1. See also St. Thomas, Summa theologiae [ST] I, q. 2, a. 2, ad 1; Summa contra gentiles [SCG] I, ch. 4. Guy Mansini, O.S.B., Fundamental Theology (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018), 151–56; Thomas Joseph White, O.P., Wisdom in the Face of Modernity: A Study in Thomistic Natural Theology (Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia Press, 2009), 252–54. White, Wisdom in the Face of Modernity, 283n103: “In the concrete historical order, in order to recognize God as one’s true final end even naturally, some kind of supernatural grace of God (that itself implies—but is not limited to—the gift of supernatural faith) Knowing God from the Things That Have Been Made 1151 the board, and would be true even in some (never in fact instantiated) state of “pure nature.”7 This may sound counter-intuitive, at the least, and perhaps obviously false and wrong-headed, given the way the teaching of the Council is ordinarily received. But it is, in fact, the case, as this paper maintains: coming to know God by reason depends on first having come to know him by faith. In this way, the paper takes up what Robert Sokolowski has long ago pointed out in The God of Faith and Reason.8 More fully, this paper argues that, in addition to the philosophical, phenomenological explanation of this fact, which will be rehearsed in the third section (“The State of Fallen Man: A Philosophical Consideration”), there is also an important statement in Sacred Scripture of the dependence of our natural knowledge of God on the supernatural knowledge of him, a statement too often ignored in expositions of the natural knowledge of God. This will be taken up in the second section, concerning Scripture on man’s knowledge of God (“The State of Fallen Man: Theological, Magisterial, Scriptural Considerations”). We begin, however, with a brief word on the importance of what may be called the theological historicity of human nature. Same Nature, Different States Attention to the various states of man takes his historicity seriously, his theological historicity, accordingly as it is impacted by the word and action of God and man’s response thereto. Human nature is one and remains the same whether before the fall or after, whether redeemed or in glory. But the exercise of man’s faculties—which are, once again, the same in every state—is historically conditioned in such a way that the scope of these faculties, including what it is they can accomplish even naturally, is severely 7 8 is necessary.” White argues by parity of reason from the necessity of supernatural grace to love God above all things in our present condition, something of which we were naturally capable prior to the fall. Which conclusion might seem to but does not in fact sustain an argument for the impossibility of God not calling us to a strictly supernatural end, and which conclusion raises the question of the nature of the revelation of what we can naturally know of God that God would be morally required to make even did he not call us to a strictly supernatural end, an issue touched on by Pius XII in Humani Generis (1950), §3. Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 114–15. That Sokolowski’s position is “absurd” is maintained by Joseph Trabbic, “By Revelation Alone? Some Objections to Robert Sokolowski’s ‘Christian Distinction,’“ Heythrop Journal 59 (2018): 456–67, at 459, who however invokes the authority not of the Council, but of St. Thomas. 1152 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. impacted. So, as is well known, St. Thomas recognizes that, although man is naturally capable of loving God above all things, he cannot in fact do this in the state of fallen nature.9 It should therefore not really surprise us that there are similar states of affairs in the order of knowledge, including most especially the knowledge of God. In man’s first state, the state of original justice, he is endowed with sanctifying grace and the preternatural gifts. Sanctifying grace enables Adam to love God in the power of God’s own love of himself and all other things. As it is ordinarily understood, it brings with it the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. The preternatural gifts, in addition to immortality and the integrity by which human passions are subordinate to reason, include the gift of knowledge. In this state, therefore, man knows the existence of God by being made in his image,10 and by concourse with God in the garden accordingly as friends spend time together in each other’s company (Gen 2:19, 3:8), and by seeing him in the things that have been made.11 Seeing God in the things that have been made is more direct than knowing him from the things that have been made. The former is seeing God mirrored in his intelligible effects in things. The latter is a matter of first knowing sensible things and then coming discursively to know him as the cause of these things (as with the Five Ways). Just in itself, it is an unassisted exercise of the natural light. This is the knowledge referred to in Romans 1:19–20.12 9 10 11 12 ST I-II, q. 109, a. 3. Gen 1:26–27; Psalm 8; St. Athanasius, De Incarnatione 12; St. Augustine, De civitate Dei 16.2. Being made in the image of God ought probably to be cashed out as enabling both a natural and a supernatural knowledge of God. It connotes a supernatural knowledge of God accordingly as it can be understood as stating that man is the adoptive son of God and so, from the beginning, in covenant relation with God. See John Bergsma and Brant Pitre, A Catholic Introduction to the Bible, vol. 1, The Old Testament (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2018), 98. But the image specified in Gen 1:26 and 28 as meaning man’s having dominion over the beasts of the earth and being fecund seems to be something belonging to man’s nature. ST I, q. 94, a. 1, corp. and ad 3. The definition of the Council, it should be noted, does not limit the natural knowledge of God to a posteriori and discursive deployments of reason. See Marcel Chossat, “Dieu (connaisance naturelle de),” in DTC, 4:839, 844, 846–47. See also Fergus Kerr, O.P., “Knowing God by Reason Alone: What Vatican I Never Said,” New Blackfriars 91 (2010): 215–28, at 219–20. Knowing God from the Things That Have Been Made 1153 The State of Fallen Man: Theological, Magisterial, Scriptural Considerations Fallen man no longer knows God in things as did Adam in his first state. We are distracted by sensible things and preoccupied with them.13 One of the consequences of original sin is ignorance. Fallen man can still know God from the things God has made, but soon loses the proximate capacity so to do. This loss is seemingly attested to by the cultural history of the Mediterranean world, by the magical practices condemned by Augustine and the Fathers, religious practices in which demons are worshipped.14 There is also, second, the cultural history of those people in Africa and the Americas and Australia who recognize sky gods and high gods, a cultural history thoroughly known to moderns, where the first god is some creator who later often retires and leaves the foreground of religious imagination and practice to fertility deities.15 It can be difficult to characterize the status and nature of such creators, and what their retirement means.16 But religiously, we seem to be far from the Book.17 Third, there is the philosophical history of the ancient world, to which there is abundant ancient witness, although the knowledge of divinity there attained to is also difficult to characterize.18 13 14 15 16 17 18 ST I, q. 94, a. 1, corp. See Augustine, De civitate Dei 10.19–11 and 10.27. See St. Thomas, ST II-II, q. 94, on idolatry. Article 4 discusses the responsibility for idolatry on the part of man and of demons; article 1 reports various opinions as to the origin of idolatry. See for instance Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (London: Sheed and Ward, 1958), ch. 2, “The Sky and Sky Gods,” which includes a treatment of the God of the Israelites (93–96). Eliade, Patterns, 109: these gods “are creators, good, eternal (‘old’); they are founders of the established order and guardians of the laws.” These findings recall the hypothesis of Fr. Wilhelm Schmidt of an original revelation, for discussion of which see Yves de Montcheuil, “Le fait religieux, le besoin religieux,” in Apologétique: nos raisons de croire, réponses aux objections, ed. Maurice Brillant, M. Nédoncelle, and M. Coppens (Paris: Bloud & Gay, 1948), 25–75, at 35–36, and E. Mangin, “Nature et origine de la religion,” 76–138 in Brillant, Nédoncelle, and Coppens, Apologétique, 76–138, at 96–100. Joseph Ratzinger supposes that, certainly from the time of Solomon, the personal God of Abraham “had been identified with the high god, the creator, who is known to all religions,” but who was not in these religions worshipped as the one engaged in fulfilling man’s needs (Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions, trans. Henry Taylor [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004], 148). For a brief review of Graeco-Roman philosophical teaching on the divine for comparison with Christian doctrines, see Robert M. Grant, Gods and the One God (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986), ch. 6. 1154 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. Today, it is not uncommon to deny that Aristotle and Plato and Plotinus characterized the divinity they spoke of in a way easily harmonized with the biblical characterizations of God. Catholic Theological Tradition Catholic theological tradition as a whole, however, is much inclined to impute a natural knowledge of God to ancient pagans, and indeed to man in general. According to Marcel Chossat, “the Fathers have often insisted on the spontaneous, natural knowledge [of God] common to all men, even to pagans.”19 The Scholastics distinguish a knowledge spontaneous and obscure from a knowledge clear but confused.20 The first is a function of the ordination of our faculties to the true, to the good, to being, to beatitude (see Catechism of the Catholic Church [CCC] §27). Chossat enlists Alexander of Hales, St. Albert, St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas, Duns Scotus, and Henry of Ghent for this view. This knowledge is indeed obscure: “It does not attain … to a precise idea that distinguishes God from other beings,” and so “it does not by itself exclude monism, pantheism, polytheism.”21 For a knowledge that sustains religious life, there must be an illation to a more determinate notion of God (CCC §28). This more determinate notion is in fact taken to have been possessed by the pagans. Chossat writes: “Nothing was more frequent in the literature of ancient paganism, Greek and Roman, than the designation of God under the names of the principle of things, of the architect of the universe,” and this is to be found in Xenophon and Plato. For their part, the Fathers appeal often enough to the argument from contingency “when it is a matter of proving to the pagans that they have the idea of the true God.”22 The consensus of the Fathers is thus that pagans “have some knowledge of a God unique and provident,”23 while the Scholastics agree that this idea “was less perfect than the idea of God that Christians have by revelation.”24 19 20 21 22 23 24 M. Chossat, “Dieu (son existence),” in DTC, 4:876. He references Tertullian, Irenaeus, Cyprian, Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, Cyril of Alexandria, Jerome, and Prosper of Aquitaine. See Chossat, “Dieu (son existence),” 4:875: A clear idea is yet “confused” “if the object is there distinguished from every other [only] by extrinsic denominations;” it is clear and distinct “if it attains in a clear way the intrinsic nature of the object.” Chossat, “Dieu (son existence),” 4:878. Chossat, “Dieu (son existence),” 4:880. These include Minucius Felix, Theophilus of Antioch, Athanasius, Augustine, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil, and John Damascene. Chosssat, “Dieu (son existence),” 4:880. Chosssat, “Dieu (son existence),” 4:882. Knowing God from the Things That Have Been Made 1155 So we come to a delicate point. How perfect must this idea be in order to be an idea of God? Pagans, including Plato and Aristotle, understand God as the best thing in existence, and as in some way serving as a principle for what is not divine. Augustine says of “Platonists” that God is “maker of all created things, the light by which things are known, and the good in reference to which things are to be done.”25 St. Thomas is taken to recognize that Aristotle conceived of the God of the twelfth book of the Metaphysics as a creator who creates matter, and so as a creator who creates ex nihilo.26 Apart from thinking that God creates ex nihilo, however, one understands him to be part of a whole greater than and inclusive both of himself and of what is not God, even if he has the high duty of putting forms into matter, and even if he moves all things by being the most desirous thing.27 Magisterial Teaching When Vatican I teaches that God can be known as the first cause and last end of the things that have been made, it is not teaching that God is here necessarily known as the Creator in the strict sense, who causes the whole 25 26 27 Augustine, De civitate Dei 8.9, in The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 253. But he is not at this point a clear witness to the native capacity and scope of the philosophical mind, since he thinks it likely that Plato learned of the transcending and immutable being of God from discussion with the Jews and from Exod 3:14, see De civitate Dei 8.11 (pp. 256–57). Augustine grants Plato could not have met Jeremiah or read the LXX (pp. 255–56), as he had earlier supposed in the De doctrina christiana 2.43, but thinks the argument remains strong based on the text and content of Plato’s teaching. Mark Johnson, “Did St. Thomas Attribute a Doctrine of Creation to Aristotle?” The New Scholasticism 63 (1989): 129–55, and Lawrence Dewan, “St. Thomas, Aristotle, Creation,” Dionysius 15 (1991): 81–90. And see Jan Aertsen’s account of the historical question in Nature and Creature: Thomas Aquinas’s Way of Thought (Leyden: Brill, 1998), 200–209. Ralph McInerny vigorously defends the view that St. Thomas correctly interprets the twelfth book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics as concluding to the existence of a creator (Praeambula Fidei: Thomism and the God of the Philosophers [Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006], 245–82). The interpretation of ST I, q. 44, a. 2, now common supposes the aliqui who know God as the Creator of matter and so as the Creator ex nihilo refers not to Plato and Aristotle but to people like Avicenna; see Robert Dobie, Thinking Through Revelation (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2019), 166n13. A very satisfactory discussion of the texts Johnson adduces and that distinguishes God as causa essendi and God as Creator ex nihilo can be found in John F. Wippel, “Aquinas on Creation and the Preambles of Faith,” in Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas III (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2021), 142–73, esp. 157 and 165–69. Neither does Plotinus think that God creates, since what is not the One comes from the One, inexhaustible as he may be. 1156 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. of the being of what he causes, and without relying on any preexistent matter.28 Concordantly with this, theologians hold that the idea of God attained by natural reason can be “very vulgar,” compassing no more than the idea of a supreme being who is to be worshipped and adored, or “more cultivated,” recognizing this being as the author and governor of the world, or “an explicit concept of a necessary being who exists a se.”29 Sokolowski is concerned with God understood in this latter sense, where the necessity of God is beyond that of any this-worldly necessity that we encounter in our experience, and who could exist even without any world from which he was distinct on the supposition that he chose not to create at all, and where creation is therefore absolutely unconditioned—ex nihilo. It is a question of whether God so conceived in this way can be known independently of revelation, as Thomists generally think. And that question is left open by the Vatican I. Of course, that God does in fact create the world ex nihilo is defined by the Council (Dei Filius, ch. 1, can. 5). But that this can be known with certitude by the natural light from the things that have been made, and that this can be known easily—those things are not defined. So, the fact that Sokolowski calls the distinction between the Creator who freely creates from nothing and the world that he freely creates the Christian distinction is by no means reproved by the Council. Naming it the Christian distinction is by no means evidently improper as measured by the teaching of the Council. On the other hand, the propriety of calling it the Christian distinction is not always evident to every Christian, and that is what this paper is about. If thinking of God as the Creator who freely creates, and so if distinguishing him from all else in such a way that that very distinction is not constitutive of his identity (since he therefore does not need not to be other things in order to be himself )—if we build that into our idea of God, such that, without that note, we will say that we are not thinking of the Christian God, then it is fairly easy to conclude that no one outside of the scope of revelation ever thought of this, ever thought this truly of the true God. On the other hand, if one is content to think that thinking of the first and highest principle of things is to think of God, then lots of pagans 28 29 Chossat, “Dieu (connaissance naturelle de),” 4:837. Rather, the Council uses “Creator,” as does Wis 13:5, which all know does not of itself imply creation ex nihilo. See also Joseph M. Dalmau, S.J., “De Deo uno et trino,” Sacrae Theologiae Summa, vol. 2 (Madrid: BAC, 1958), no. 3. Dalmau, “De Deo uno et trino,” no. 2. For St. Thomas on the vulgar knowledge of God, see SCG III, ch. 38: the relatively immediate knowledge available to all men that there is someone who orders the world is, however, subject to many errors. Knowing God from the Things That Have Been Made 1157 thought of God. Or, as we might put it, they were certainly thinking of “divinity” in some largely and loosely conceived way. It is moreover fairly easy to come to this conclusion once one realizes that the notion of creation ex nihilo, expressly conceived, is not itself hammered out until the second century after Christ. It is indeed implicit in the Scriptures, since it follows from the all-sufficient power of God’s speaking, of his saying “let there be,” in the first creation account. Expressly, however, the notion is worked out over against the Greek idea that the first principle makes things out of a pre-existent matter.30 Thus, this notion does not even exist in its explicit form prior to the Christian knowledge of God. And while it is worked out over against the presupposition of an eternal matter, it is worked out in virtue of the distinctively Christian confession of the Incarnation and resurrection of Christ: it is the unconditioned omnipotence of God that these works presuppose that leads to the denial that God’s power depends on a preexistent material.31 That it is in fact the resurrection of Christ that puts the Christian mind in motion to the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and thence to a conception of the transcendence of God unknown to pagan philosophy should make us cautious in claiming how easy it is to come to the natural knowledge of God as Creator stricte dicta apart from the invitation that revelation gives the philosopher to think a philosophic thought he had not previously entertained.32 Scripture on the Loss and the Maintenance of the Knowledge of God The loss of the knowledge of God as Creator is evident both from the point of view of the reader of the Old Testament from the first chapter of Genesis onward and from the point of view of the people in the Old Testament— the people in the story, from the point of view especially of the righteous descendants of Adam. This loss is first attested by the increasing forgetfulness of God reported from Genesis 3 onward, especially remarked in 6:1–8, where the sons of God, the Sethites, marry the daughters of Cain.33 Second, it is indicated by the fact of the emergence of pagan gods, whose 30 31 32 33 Gerhard May, Creatio Ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of “Creation out of Nothing” in Early Christian Thought, trans. A. S. Worrall (Aberdeen: T & T Clark, 1994), 149–50 (the role of Tatian), 160–63 (the role of Theophilus of Antioch). For the role of Justin Martyr in this, see May, Creatio Ex Nihilo, 127–29. For the understanding of which last argument from the resurrection of Christ, it is helpful to consult St. Thomas, ST I, q. 18, aa. 2 and 3: if death, the non-living, does not constrain the power of God, neither does non-being, in that vivere is the form of the esse of living things. Bergsma and Pitre, Catholic Introduction, 1:115. 1158 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. worship shows up as it were incidentally and accidentally, but for all that the more tellingly, in Genesis 31, where Rachel steals the household gods of Laban (vv. 19, 30–32). Household gods? Where did they come from? Their presence attests a sort of cultic ignorance of the existence and rights of God. Joshua 24:2 is more explicit about other gods in patriarchal times. Joshua addresses the people and says: “Your fathers lived of old beyond the Euphrates, Terah, the father of Abraham and of Nahor; and they served other gods” (see also 24:14–15). The question is not a historical-critical one at this point, asking from what tradition or under what conditions and when the acknowledgment of pagan gods entered the text of the Pentateuch and Joshua as we have it today. We are reading things as the finished surface of the text gives us to construe the religious history of man from his creation forward. That is, we are reading accordingly as the text, accordingly as the word of God, reveals the theological truth of this history to us.34 In the third place, there are the early chapters of Exodus. The pharaoh in Abraham’s time seems to know God (Genesis 13:17–18); and the pharaoh in Joseph’s time knows God (Genesis 41:38–39). But the pharaoh in Moses’s time does not—he knows neither Joseph nor Joseph’s God (Exod 1:8, 5:2). Fourth, there is the Book of Wisdom, quite explicit about the human ignorance of God (13:1–9). Fifth, there is the Letter to the Romans, chapters 1 and following, which recapitulates the reaching of Wisdom. To advert to the cultural and philosophical and scriptural attestation of this loss is not to deny the correlative important thesis that there have always existed men who knew and worshipped the true God, the true God understood according to the word of revelation itself recorded in the Old Testament. It is, rather, to bring this correlative thesis to prominence by its contrasting partner. Both the loss of God and the faithfulness to God detailed in the Old Testament enable a scriptural, which is to say revealed, assessment of the relation of the natural knowledge of God to God’s supernatural revelation of himself. The teaching that there have always existed men who knew and worshipped the true God has very strong and even obvious scriptural 34 Supposing we were reading the pieces of the Old Testament in the order of their composition, where Gen 1–2 could well show up after the history of the patriarchs and the national history of 1 and 2 Sam and 1 and 2 Kgs, there might be a better display of the “stages of manifestation” of God’s otherness to the world; of which stages see Sokolowski, God of Faith and Reason, 127–30. And see below, the section “A Philosophical Consideration of Man’s Knowledge of God.” Knowing God from the Things That Have Been Made 1159 warrants. In the first place, let us be clear that it is not to be supposed that Adam does not know that the God who walks with him in the garden is the God who made him, since he arranges Adam’s life, speaks with him, provides a partner meet for him. This is a God in covenant relation with Adam and Eve. It is noteworthy that Enoch, who walked with God (Gen 5:24), was born within the lifespan of Adam. St. Thomas remarks that there was no idolatry in the first age of man, from Adam to Noah, “on account of the recent memory of the creation of the world, from which there still flourished a knowledge of the one God in the mind of men.”35 The lifespan of Shem, the son of Noah, overlaps Abraham’s lifespan.36 Moreover, Shem is traditionally identified with Melchizedek,37 and blesses Abraham when they meet after Abraham rescues Lot (Gen 14:18–20). When God speaks to Abraham in Genesis 12, the reader must suppose that Abraham knows who is speaking to him. Further, when God reveals his name to Moses in Exodus 3:14, this is the name by which men have called on the Lord since Genesis 4:26.38 From the surface of the text, as it were, reading straight through from Genesis to Exodus, it is clear that Moses already knows what the name of God is; but he needs to find out if whoever it is who is speaking to him from the bush is that very God. The teaching that there have always been men who knew and worshipped the true God is affirmed by St. Augustine in The City of God on the biblical evidence.39 It is to be noted that this thesis is a doctrine of faith; it is not supported by reason except remotely by the demonstration of the de iure possibility innate to man of knowing God from the things that have been made, the de facto and proximate possibility of which in every moral condition of man and for all individuals, however, has never been asserted by the Church, as has been mentioned (see CCC §§37–38).40 Precisely as a teaching of faith, the continuing knowledge of God within the abiding context of true worship of him indicates to us what is necessary for the preservation of the knowledge of God in the world. It is to be contrasted with the corresponding biblical assertion of our having forgotten God outlined above in the first part of this section. 35 36 37 38 39 40 ST II-II, q. 94, a. 4, ad 2. St. Augustine discusses the life spans of the antediluvian patriarchs in De civitate Dei 15.9–14. Bergsma and Pitre, Catholic Introduction, 1:153–54. “Lord” does duty for “He who is” in the Hebrew. See its use in Gen 14:22; 15:2, 7–8; 28:13. Augustine, De civitate Dei 16.1–12. See Chossat, “Dieu (connaissance naturelle de),” 4:827–28. 1160 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. Moreover, we ought to understand the loss of the knowledge of God recorded in the Old Testament as at least the loss of the proximate capacity to know God from the things that have been made. We need to introduce this idea of “capacity” here, for otherwise the loss of the knowledge of God will appear merely as a brute fact. We would be saying that it just happened to be the case that man ceased to know God. But there can be no brute facts when it comes to questions of the knowledge of the Exemplar, God, achieved by the Image of that Exemplar, man. Such facts are about the most intelligible thing in existence, God, and the orientation by nature and grace to God of the most intelligible thing in our experience, ourselves. Here, at any rate, we need an explanation of the loss of the human knowledge of God, and we point to this need by characterizing man’s fallen state as having lost the proximate capacity for knowing God from the things that have been made. We must characterize it as a proximate capacity of course, and one historically constituted, given the dogmatic teachings of Scripture and Tradition that bear on this capacity as in some way to be thought of as radically constituting the nature of man. To be sure, whatever explanation we give of the loss of man’s proximate capacity to know God must not be divorced from the moral and historical explanation of man’s forgetfulness of God recorded in the Bible. This, too, is supremely relevant to thinking about the natural knowledge of God. This moral explanation of the fact of the loss of the knowledge of God is given in Wisdom 13–15 and in Romans (see Rom 1:21— “their senseless minds were darkened”).41 The explanation amounts to this: the ignorance of God detailed above is truly an ignorance, but it is a guilty ignorance; it is due to man’s sinful turning away from God, the God who first revealed himself to Adam, the God who maintains the knowledge of himself in the righteous descendants of Adam down to Abraham, and in the descendants of Abraham who make covenant with God at Sinai. This guilt, moreover, should be appreciated for what it is, a sort of mega-guilt that violates not simply this, that, or the other covenant commandment. It is more even than violating the first commandment, where such violation nonetheless does not obliterate the knowledge of God. For here, by contrast, the violation does obliterate that knowledge. The violation thus strikes at the very condition of the covenant as a whole. It is especially and rightly the object of God’s wrath (Rom 1:18; 2:8; Rev 9:20–21; 16:1). 41 See St. Thomas, Commentary on the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans, trans. F. R. Larcher, O.P., Latin/English Edition of the Works of St. Thomas Aquinas 37 (Lander, WY: Aquinas Institute, 2012), nos. 126–36. Knowing God from the Things That Have Been Made 1161 What the Bible Thus Shows Us What the Bible, the Old Testament, shows us relative to the knowledge of God can therefore be stated as follows. One can stay in covenantal, graceful relation with God, and then of course the existence of the God who spoke to our ancestors will therefore also be evident from the things that have been made. For, after all, the heavens declare the glory of God to the Psalmist (Psalm 19:1) and to all those who worship with him.42 “Glory,” of course, is just the showing of God as God—the heavens declare to us God as God, God as the first cause and last end of man. Or one can sinfully turn away from the revealed God of the covenant, from the God who reveals himself to man from the beginning, and then one loses the ability to know him from the things that have been made. As it were, what St. Paul gives with one hand in Romans, he takes away with the other. Man is innately capable of knowing God from the things that have been made; he is guiltily incapable of exercising this knowledge outside of maintaining covenant relations with God, outside of obeying the commandments, outside of living uprightly. Man curved in on himself does not lift his eyes to the heaven of heavens. He is upright, and can look up, only given grace, the grace that comes with the revelation of God as the maker of heaven and earth. We may therefore well agree that sun and moon and sea and the things therein all declare that they are not God but have been made, just as St. Augustine says.43 But our ears are stopped up—the ears of sinful man. It is only by first hearing the word of revelation, the direct and personal word of the Creator, that we can then hear what the creatures say to us of their own nature, speaking to our nature. This is a teaching of Scripture so important and so evident that ignorance of it is as astonishing as is fallen man’s ignorance of God. The State of Fallen Man: A Philosophical Consideration Man’s ignorance of God just in itself, and notwithstanding the explanation Scripture gives of it, remains astonishing. It is a wonder. Philosophy begins, it has been said, with wonder. Christian philosophy begins, let us say, with wonder over such things as the ignorance of God that seems so contrary to man’s nature. 42 43 See also Psalms 8; 104; 135:6–7; 136:4–9, 148. Augustine, Confessiones 10.6. 1162 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. A Philosophical Consideration of Man’s Ignorance of God There is a philosophical explanation or illumination of the fact of the loss of the proximate potency of coming to know God from the things that have been made in man’s fallen condition, a loss that Scripture reports and that we seem to experience anew in our own age. Moreover, it is not only good to have a philosophical explanation of this fact. There needs to be a philosophical explanation of this fact. We touched on this just above. If man’s ancient ignorance of God is a fact, it is surely a fact of supreme importance for understanding the relation of the God who is known by faith to the same God as known by reason. Christian philosophy must come to the aid of faith and contribute to an understanding of this fact, and not leave it as a fact whose explanation is purely moral, an explanation unrelated to the epistemological prospects of man’s natural appetite to know. For, if we leave it with a purely moral explanation, and given the fact that God wills all men to be saved, and given that this entails an availability of grace beyond the visible confines of the Church, then we should expect to see many successful exercises of the ability to come to the natural knowledge of God. If we do not, must there not be some account of this fact? The point of departure of this philosophical explanation is the nature of man’s intellect. The common understanding of the fall, of course, is that, once man is despoiled of the preternatural gifts, we are left in a state where our nature is unaided, un-augmented, in the exercise of our faculties, intellective and appetitive, or if it is augmented, as with the supposition of grace given outside the Church, then it is augmented anonymously. But as to the intellect and what the intellect can come to know and name, we are not in the realm of anonymity. Rather, we are in the realm where it is the very business of man to name things, and so make them present. As, then, to the nature of the human intellect, we are taught that its natural object is being.44 While this is so, however, being first meets the human intellect in the form of the abstract quiddity of material things.45 Because of this double truth, when man comes naturally to inquire about being qua being, the answers to his questions will be analogically formulated.46 44 45 46 ST I, q. 5, a. 2, ST I, q. 84, a. 7; q. 85, aa. 1 and 8; q. 88, a. 3. For a careful discussion of the object of the intellect, see Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, De Revelatione per Ecclesiam Catholicam Proposita, 4th ed., vol. 1 (Rome: Fr. Ferrari, 1945), 353–359: the proper object is “the intelligible being of sensible things or the essence of the sensible thing [ens intelligibile rerum sensibilium seu essentia rei sensibilis]” (354). But the adequate object of the intellect is “being according to the full breadth of being, and not only insofar as it is knowable in the mirror of sensible Knowing God from the Things That Have Been Made 1163 Now another way of saying that the proper object of the human intellect is the quiddity of material things is to say that the distinctions men make are in the first place distinctions between things within the material world. That our intellectual appetite extends at the limit to thinking about being qua being requires as well the distinctions (1) of being qua being from being qua material and (2) of being qua being from being qua separable from matter. Neither of these distinctions, however, are the distinction between the God of Christians and the world, nor do they lead up to making that distinction. This is because worldly distinctions, even the distinctions that come with metaphysics, are distinctions between things that have to not be what they are distinct from in order to be themselves. A cat has not to be a porpoise in order to be a cat, and vice versa.47 Gabriel has not to be Michael in order to be himself, and more basically, angels have not to be material in order to be themselves. In this way, separated substances are thought together with material substances. They are thought together because one exists only as not being the other. God, however, does not have not to be the world in order to be himself. He exists in undiminished glory and goodness whether the world exists or not, while the world, on the other hand, must not be God in order to be the world. This distinction, therefore, is asymmetric and altogether unique compared to other distinctions. Making the symmetrical distinctions according to which we navigate our course in the world does not prepare us or teach us to make this altogether strange, asymmetrical distinction. Who could teach us how to make it? Ancient philosophy does not make this distinction. Thus, Aristotle’s god is within being qua being and not the principle of its existence.48 The 47 48 things [ens secundum latitudinem entis, et non solum prout est cognoscibile in speculo sensibilium]” (355). God, deitas, does not fall outside this adequate object (357–58). It is very telling, however, that Garrigou-Lagrange grants that the argument that includes God within the adequate object is not apodictic, but merely probable (359). The argument is a sign, but not a demonstration, of the obediential potency of the intellect for grace and glory (359). For a denial that that God’s “pure actuality” is included in the transcendental reach of the intellect, see White, Wisdom in the Face of Modernity, 164–65. Sokolowski, God of Faith and Reason, 32–33, 107; Sokolowski, Presence and Absence: A Philosophical Investigation of Language and Being (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1978), last chapter; and see generally Sokolowski, “Making Distinctions,” in Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions. Fourteen Essays in Phenomenology (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1992), 55–91. On the nature of the first unmoved mover for Aristotle, see Giovanni Reale, A History of Ancient Philosophy., vol. 2, Plato and Aristotle, trans. John Catan, 5th ed. (Albany: 1164 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. One/Good of Platonism is beyond being, it is true, but not in the way God is, and the Demiurge does not create ex nihilo.49 Further, the One/Good in Plotinus’s telling is beyond being but must necessarily express itself in the beings that emanate from it. It is necessarily a part of a greater whole even if what it is not emanates from it according to Plotinus, and if we do not want to characterize this kind of Platonism as a pantheism. But God is not necessarily a part of anything. Neither Aristotle’s self-thinking thought nor the One/Good can be conceived of without what is not them also being thought.50 But God is that than which nothing greater can be thought, and this implies that he can be thought of and can be without the thought or existence of anything else. It may be argued that we must think what God is not in order to think God. But God need not think what he is not in order to think himself. This is simply an implication of his transcendence and the freedom with which he creates the world. An important and terminal move of natural reason, re-articulated in first philosophy, is to fashion the idea of the world itself, to come to the idea of all things as a whole. Once this idea is reached, it is absolutely foreign subsequently to ask whether there is anything outside this whole. The world is something complete; the world is something final. It is against the very direction of the mind forming the idea of the world to think whether, beyond what is final, there is something else. To ask about something transcending the world would require the philosophic act that formulates the idea of a whole to contradict its own direction of thought. It is not a natural question. Just so, the world is eternal for Aristotle;51 his god is part of the world, though perhaps the best part, the way the leader of an army is the best part of the army, but still a part,52 like the forty-seven or maybe fifty-five other unmoved movers;53 his god is thus included in being qua being, and so theology is no separate science from first philosophy.54 49 50 51 52 53 54 State University of New York Press, 1990), 288–92. Sokolowski observes that “‘existing,’ or esse, is for Aristotle not a theme for thought, and indeed it becomes a theme for thought only within the special historical tradition of Christian belief ” (God of Faith and Reason, 43). See the discussion of Plato in Reale, Plato and Aristotle, 99–115. The One-Good does not create the indefinite Dyad or the Receptacle (106). The two ultimate principles are coeval. Sokolowski remarks the greater difficulty of distinguishing Christianity from Platonism rather than from Aristotle in (God of Faith and Reason, 49–50). Or, if we do want to characterize Plotinian Platonism as a pantheism, then God turns out to be the only thing that can be thought. Aristotle, Physics 8.1–2. Aristotle, Metaphysics 12.10. Aristotle, Metaphysics 12.8. Aristotle, Metaphysics 6.1. Knowing God from the Things That Have Been Made 1165 Indeed, it is sometimes said that the basic question of metaphysics is why is there anything at all? But that is false. This question, too, is not natural. This is a question that is asked only after the idea of the Creator has been introduced into the Western mind. Neither Aristotle nor Plato nor Plotinus asked the question Martin Heidegger said was the origin of metaphysics.55 Heidegger’s understanding of metaphysics is, then, a wholly Christian understanding, in the sense that his project cannot be conceived except on this side of the fact of revelation. That is, the onto-theological characterization of metaphysics and the idea that this metaphysics is the result of the event of the revelation of Being that destines man to dominate and be dominated by technology cannot be undertaken except on this side of revelation.56 (And that is the reason his attempt to keep theology and philosophy in air-tight compartments is untenable.) A Philosophical Consideration of Man’s Knowledge of God If we should not expect man to come naturally to the idea of God as Creator and Lord, what would bring him to that conception? We can say “revelation,” to be sure, but that does not say enough. We have to imagine the way this revelation might occur. Here, there is another important philosophical consideration to make relative to grasping distinctions. Distinctions emerge from our lived engagement with the world.57 The first time someone today sees a broad axe, he is likely to say something to the effect that it is a funny looking hatchet. But someone who knows—in his hands—the difference between limbing small trees or dressing a fishing rod from a limb, on the one hand, and notching logs for a cabin, on the other, knows exactly what he is seeing; he has already distinguished hatchets from broad axes. This works also for distinguishing local gods and spirits. The river sometimes dances in the spring rush and at other times is angry and floods, but there is no relation between these encounters with the river and how the winds and sometimes cyclones determine my life and work. The river god is not the wind god. They are distinct. But God is not in the world, and we have no natural engagement with 55 56 57 Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 1. For the alleged inability of Jews and Christians to ask this question, see 6. See Martin Heidegger, “The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” in Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1969 [German original, 1957]). Aristotle, Posterior analytics 2.19. 1166 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. him as we do with trees and stones, timber and quarry. We never stumble into or over him as we move about in the world. Just because he is not a part of the world, he cannot enter our minds as parts of the world do. He has rather to take the initiative. He has to speak and act within the world. And this is how the distinction between the God who creates all that is not him and the world is established. In the Bible, of course, we find a record of man’s experience of God—of Israel’s experience of God—in history. God is originally and immediately and personally present to man. He is originally present to man at man’s origins; that is to say, he is present to the very first human beings, Adam and Eve. He is immediately present to man in that he forms the first human being by his hands and breathes the breath of life into him from his own breath and in that, by his own hand, he fashions Eve from Adam’s rib. He is personally present to man from the very outset of his creation in that he speaks to him and walks with Adam and Eve in the garden. We, the readers of Genesis, know who God is from the first chapter: he is the Creator of heaven and earth. And we presumed above that the obvious way to take the text is to suppose that Adam and Eve know who God is as well. And after all, Adam is established in Eden as in a temple, unto the worship of God.58 And again, God is in charge of life and death—he breathes life into Adam and he is master of the Tree of Life—which is to say he is in charge of being. And he is called “Lord”—He Who Is—from Genesis 4:26 onward. Suppose, however, that we bracket the first eleven chapters of Genesis and begin with Abraham.59 Genesis 12 inaugurates a long series of very extraordinary, very intimate relations between God and the patriarchs and then the people of Israel. We perceive in this series certain disclosures in the very way God deals with Abraham and Israel, disclosures that provide the experiential requirement for making sense of the Christian distinction.60 So, to Abraham, he shows himself master of all places in that he promises what land he will give to him, and he shows himself master of time, in that the promise looks to a future God is in charge of. He is a holy God, and just 58 59 60 Bergsma and Pitre, Introduction to the Old Testament, 1:102–3. That is, suppose with some scholars that there is a so-called Priestly strain or source of the Pentateuch, a collection of material later than the stories of the patriarchs beginning with Abraham, which for some scholars is a narrative that combines material from the northern and southern kingdoms, Israel and Judah (“EJ”). For such a dating of the material in chapter 1 of Genesis, see for instance Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 325. For some of what follows, see Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance, 144–54. Knowing God from the Things That Have Been Made 1167 in his dealings with Sodom and Gomorrah. With Abraham, he is master of life, promising descendants innumerable as the stars, but very closely and personally, he is master of life in the birth and sacrifice of Isaac. The Lord’s mastery of time and place is writ large and unmistakably in the history of Israel, especially in the exile to foreign lands that are not foreign to the Lord’s power, and in Israel’s return, in which foreign kings like Cyrus are God’s instruments. Exile and return concentrate the mind of Israel, and lead some scholars to conjecture that Jewish monotheism is therein perfected. But there must first be established her mind before it can be concentrated. All these dealings that begin with Abraham and continue with Moses and David and the prophets—these experiences of God in history—prepare us for making a distinction between God and the world not like that of distinguishing one god from the world of which that god is a part. At the start of the long history with Israel, a history that makes what was no people a people (Hos 1:23), there is the revelation of the divine name to Moses. It is noteworthy that when God names himself with the metaphysically pregnant “I am who am,” he identifies himself to Moses as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Exod 3:6), recalling the prior experience with the patriarchs, the nest in which that egg can hatch. This name, “I am who am,” is related to the Hebrew behind “Lord,” but spoken when it is, before the deliverance from Egypt, before the settlement of the promised land, it will acquire a significance it could not previously have had, if we are still keeping bracketed the first chapters of Genesis. In this light, what is first, both temporally and epistemically, is a covenant life in which the “Christian distinction” is embedded and lived before it can come to expression in words. Only so can the distinction be appreciated and received in its express form.61 There has first to be God’s promise; he has first to be feared by those who break his command; there has first to be repentance before him; he has first to show himself master of the historical course of nations; he has first to show himself as the master of nature so as to be master of history, and there has first to be his praise in the 61 So, Biblical scholars inform us, there is first monolatry before there is monotheism. See: Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 185–91; André Lemaire, The Birth of Monotheism: The Rise and Disappearance of Yahwism (Washington, DC: Biblical Archeological Society, 2007), 133–34. Michael Dodds, O.P., takes note of these historical reconstructions in The One Creator God in Thomas Aquinas & Contemporary Theology (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2020), appendix 2 (“The Emergence of Monotheism”). 1168 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. Psalms before the formulation of the transcendence of God in Isaiah can come to expression (e.g.: 40:25; 44:24; 45:18–19; 55:8–11). Then comes a reflective grasp of natural theology as in Job62 and in the Book of Wisdom. The Book of Wisdom undertakes to teach us the possibility of coming to know God naturally from the world. And why does it bother to teach us this? Because it is not a possibility we otherwise would have thought of apart from revelation. The word of God has to put the things that have been made into the right audial space before we can hear the words that the things that have been made speak to us as Augustine heard them. On the basis of this long history of Israel’s engagement with God, there is also the most original expression of the Christian distinction in Christ himself, in whom it is “brought forward in the life and teaching of Christ.”63 The Scriptures themselves do not formulate the distinction in metaphysical terms; they do not say that “God could be all that he is had the world not existed.”64 But when we express in metaphysical terms what is accomplished in creation and redemption, then we find the formulations of Anselm and Aquinas. How can it be that the Son of God becomes man without ceasing to be God and without damaging the humanity of Christ as the Council of Chalcedon teaches? It must be that what the Son of God is as God is not defined by what he is not: he can therefore become other than divine, he can become human, without ceasing to be what he is.65 And it must further be the case that what he becomes is nothing but a participation in his intelligibility and goodness, something always already known by God as a divine idea in the Godhead.66 This very same context of a life lived in obedience to the commandments, a life knowledgeable of God’s punishments and rewards, a life cognizant of God’s universal control of history, a life acknowledging his mastery of life and death, a life given over to prayer and praise of God, a life verified in the life of Israel and then the Church, but preeminently in the life of Christ himself—that is the context in which Anselm formulates his argument for the existence of God, Aquinas his Five Ways, and Duns Scotus his De primo principio. In this light, there can be appreciated the propriety of calling the distinction the Christian distinction, since it is 62 63 64 65 66 Even Job, the pagan outlier, is no exception to this primacy of experience. God does not speak out of the whirlwind declaring his creative power and sovereignty except to a man who lives a life dedicated to God and in which the worship of God is architectonic. Sokolowski, God of Faith and Reason, 23. Sokolowski, God of Faith and Reason, 122. Sokolowski, God of Faith and Reason, 35–37. Sokolowski, God of Faith and Reason, 43–45. Knowing God from the Things That Have Been Made 1169 Christ himself who lives it as a man most fully and completely, and insofar as the formulation of the dogma of creation ex nihilo depends signally on what God has done in Christ, as was noted above. The Upshot for Fallen Man Fallen man forsakes the realm where the distinction makes sense and so does not know God. He is “without God” as St. Paul says (Eph 2:12). This is also a deliverance of history, as indicated above. The philosophical explanation tries to account not only for the fact that, in a condition untouched by divine gifts, man not only remains in sin, but also for the fact that, absent a prior revelation of God’s existence bequeathed by revelation, we are not naturally set up actually to know God from the things that have been made. That is to say that we are set up actually to know God from the things that have been made only given a prior knowledge of God’s existence by revelation, only if we have been taught by God. This account appeals to our discursive knowledge of the things of the world as what we first and properly know and focuses on how ordinary distinctions are made (cats from porpoises) and how metaphysics, the highest science, is conceived, as dealing with being qua being. Of course, according to the Bible, there was a prior revelation of God, from the first creation of the human race. So we were set up in fact from the beginning actually to know God from the things that have been made. But now, we are not so set up, because of sinful ignorance. And so, our “natural” ignorance of God—natural in the sense of a proximate inability to know a non-natural thing, God—is now a guilty ignorance. The moral explanation in Scripture of the fact that fallen man is without God and does not know him means that fallen man is guilty for not knowing God from the things that have been made. The philosophical explanation explains why we should not expect man to know God from the things that have been made absent revelation. The situation is exactly parallel to how it is we should characterize death. Is it natural? Or is it a punishment? It is both. Granted the preternatural gift of immortality, the death Adam died in accord with his created nature, which by nature is not immortal, is both natural and a punishment. So also, the proximate incapacity of fallen man to know God from the things that have been made is both natural, granted the natural orientation of our intellect, and a punishment for turning away from God. The language is indeed difficult to manage. We speak dogmatically of a natural knowledge of God, of a natural capacity to come to know God from the things that have been made. But of course God is not a natural thing, and so we are saying dogmatically that there is a natural capacity to 1170 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. come to know something that is not a natural thing. It should therefore not surprise us that there are non-natural conditions that must be met for the engagement of our natural capacity to come to know God.67 The exercise of the natural capacity will produce a thoroughly natural knowledge, a true knowledge that the conclusion of the argument expresses, and by way of an argument that invokes no revealed premises.68 But the exercise has non-natural, historical conditions of its actualization. The argument or arguments (say, the Five Ways) invoke no revealed premises, but they suppose the fact of revelation which introduces the very idea of God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived, as pure Act, and so on.69 Return to Magisterial and Theological Tradition How does what has been argued so far about coming to know the Christian distinction measure up to prior magisterial and theological tradition? It was pointed out above that Vatican I by no means proscribes Sokolowski’s construal of our natural knowledge of God and the conditions of its exercise. Still, he seems on the surface to be at odds with Catholic theological tradition (see above, the first subsection under the second main section, “The State of Fallen Man: Theological, Magisterial, Scriptural Considerations”). This is in fact not the case. Sokolowski frankly and forthrightly acknowledges pagan knowledge of divinity, and in such a way that this knowledge is integral to appreciating the actual course of revelation. “The Old Testament establishes that there is only one God, in contrast to the many gods of the gentiles, and clearly forbids any image of God, in contrast to the 67 68 69 Another analogous state of affairs is that the natural virtue of religion of which St. Thomas speaks in ST II-II, q. 81, and which cultivates one of the primary inclinations of nature listed in I-II, q. 94, a. 2, is not rightly exercised apart from grace; see Thomas Joseph White, O.P., “Sacraments and Philosophy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology, ed. Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 575–89, at 577, 579. Sokolowski, God of Faith and Reason, 108. Trabbic seems not to get this point in “By Revelation Alone?,” 463. I think he also confuses arguing for the existence of God and arguing for the Christian distinction. The existence of God may be a conclusion of an argument, but distinctions are not established by argument. They are products of nous or intellectus. This may look like the traditionalism or semi-traditionalism of the nineteenth century, but it is not, for they make a historical assumption of continuity good for all men between the original revelation and our epistemic prospects for knowing God today. See Gerald A. McCool, Catholic Theology in the Nineteenth Century: The Quest for a Unitary Method (New York: Seabury, 1977), chapter 2 (“French Traditionalism”). Knowing God from the Things That Have Been Made 1171 idolatries of other peoples.”70 Pagan divinity thus serves as a foil against which the God of Israel stands out in his uniqueness. Again: The God of the Old Testament is not unrelated to what the pagans worship. When the Jewish writers speak of God, they speak of “the same thing” that the gentiles speak of with their god and gods, except that the Jews consider themselves to be speaking truly while the others are in error. The others worship false gods, or they worship God falsely. The God of the Old Testament is the truth of what the pagans anticipate when they think they respond to the divine.71 The pagans somehow know God, but with just that admixture of error Vatican I teaches is difficult to avoid. The pagans somehow know true things about the divine, and this must be so if Christians and pagans can have a real disagreement about the divine, as both St. Thomas and Sokolowski are aware. St. Thomas states: Neither the Catholic nor the pagan knows the very nature of God insofar as it exists in itself. But both know it according to some idea of causality or excellence or negation. . . . And in this way, the gentile can mean the same thing when he says “the idol is God” as does the Catholic when he says “the idol is not God.”72 They cannot disagree about the idol unless there is some agreement as to what the divine nature is. The pagan idea may be vulgar or more cultivated, as was pointed out above, but it must be an idea of God, even if not the very idea captured in the “Christian distinction.” And correlatively at this point, Sokolowski, commenting on the Old Testament as the context for Christian revelation says the following: The New Testament could not have arisen under the aegis of Zeus or Vishnu. However, once the New Covenant is established, does it not appear to enjoy a new, more direct relationship to natural religion [than that of the Old Covenant]? St. Paul when speaking to the Athenians in the Areopagus, could not say that he is there to tell them about the “true Zeus” or the “authentic Apollo,” but he was 70 71 72 Sokolowski, God of Faith and Reason, 124. Sokolowski, God of Faith and Reason, 125. ST I, q. 13, a. 10, ad 5 (trans. mine). 1172 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. able to proclaim to them the God for whom they had an altar but not yet a name (Acts 17:23).73 The natural knowability of God is thus presupposed to Paul’s dealings with the Greeks in Acts 14 and Acts 17. This, indeed, is the very point of Paul’s teaching according to Henri Bouillard. Within idolatry itself, [Scripture] discerns the presence of an original apprehension of God by man. There is room, then, to distinguish between the formal, unformulated idea of God and the historical representation of divinity. The first is present in every man; it belongs to the constitutive elements of his reason; it is man himself insofar as God creates him in his image. It is from this intuition of God that arise the historical representations, even when perverted, and even if they express God inadequately. It is this very idea which permits man to recognize eventually his error.74 It is the very affirmation of this constitutional availability of the idea of God to every man in virtue of the natural light that is the concern of Vatican I, because such knowledge is a “transcendental condition” of the act of supernatural faith.75 The State of Man in the Regime of Faith and Christ’s Redemption The re-introduction of an adequate idea of God into the world past man’s guilty forgetfulness of God is, as we have seen once again, a work of revelation, a work that stretches from Abraham to Christ. Once it is introduced into the world by God’s speaking and once it is recorded in Scripture (Genesis, Job, Psalm 103, Deutero-Isaiah, Wisdom, John 1, Romans, Colossians 1, Hebrews 1), then the proximate capacity to know God from the things that have been made is restored. So, the Fathers know God in this way, the theologians know God in this way, and many ordinary Christians know God in this way. Theologians are bound to know God in this way, because it is part of the project of making evident the coherence of faith. And as was said above, 73 74 75 Robert Sokolowski, Eucharistic Presence: A Study in the Theology of Disclosure (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994), 160. Henri Bouillard, The Knowledge of God, trans. Samuel D. Femiano (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), 30–31. See also the summary statement on 59. Bouillard, Knowledge of God, 24–40. Knowing God from the Things That Have Been Made 1173 we must be able to know God apart from revelation for revelation to make sense.76 We must be able to verify the existence of the speaker of revelation apart from revelation for a reasonable assent to revelation. Hence the fittingness of question 2 of Summa theologiae [ST] I, knowing that God exists by the natural light, relative to question 1 of ST II-II and following, the treatise on faith. The relation at issue is a symmetrical relation. We need to know God from revelation in order to exercise the natural capacity to know him from the things that have been made, and we have to be able know him from the things that have been made in order for faith in revelation to be reasonable. Arguments for the existence of God therefore remain a necessary part of a complete apologetics. Since the completion of revelation, and since the idea of God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived or as subsistent esse and so on has been introduced again into the world and established in human intellectual history in such a way that it is hard to think of it as being erased once again, it is possible for non-believers also to come to the knowledge of God from the things that have been made, and to construct some non-Christian, post-Christian metaphysics that includes God. This has in fact occurred. Even the insipiens understands what Anselm means when he says “id quo maius cogitari nequit.” The revelation of the incarnate Word means that the little words that the things that have been made speak cannot be silenced. But this implies nothing about an original capacity to know God from the things that have been made absent a prior revelation. The historical conditions of the different states of human nature really do differ and really do condition the exercise of our faculties. Notwithstanding what has just been said, it is also to be noted that, in the contemporary age, the halls of ivy are not thick with natural theologians who by the natural light know God as the first cause and last end of all things. The possibility of coming to know God from the things that have been made is less and less actualized in a post-Christian world. For coming to such knowledge is ever bound to certain extra-philosophic conditions. The account of man’s refusal to know God from the things that have been made, the account given in Romans and Wisdom, means that ordinarily there must be some interior grace liberating man from his passions and his selfishness in order to come to such knowledge. Why is this necessary? Coming to know God is coming to know that the natural law really is a law legislated by the maker of heaven and earth. Therefore, the failure to keep it humbles us before God and frightens us accordingly as we suppose 76 Mansini, Fundamental Theology, 151–56. 1174 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. he punishes infractions of it. There is, consequently, sufficient motive for fallen man always to postpone thinking about God, about whether he exists, and always to find the proofs insufficient. There are also two other factors. First, there is the matter of past sin. Whatever resolution I make relative to my future conduct upon knowing the God who makes heaven and earth, I have no sure course to take to make up for past fault and find forgiveness. Second, there is the inability of fallen man, apart from revelation, to imagine his personal destiny before God. Apart from the promise of the resurrection of the body, it is difficult, as St. Thomas notes, to sustain the immortality of the soul.77 But a destiny that does not include some abiding relation of knowledge and love to God seems unsatisfactory, to say the least, and ignorance or uncertainty about it does not conduce either to the worship of God or to obedience to the moral law. When we add up these factors—the necessity of grace, the problem of past sin, the mystery of death—it is evident why St. Paul is careful to include the possibility of repentance and the promise of resurrection when he announces to the Athenians on the Areopagus the news that the unknown God for whom they have an altar is the creator of heaven and earth (Acts 17).78 But in our age, the cultural and common knowledge of what Christianity claims about both sin and the resurrection of the flesh is increasingly less common and less real than it was even seventy years ago. So, it can be suggested, the package deal that St. Paul proposed at Athens ought to be re-packaged today in addressing those who are ignorant of or despise Christianity. Balance Sheet: Natural Knowledge of God in the Various States of Man “Making the Christian distinction between God and the world is a more elementary activity than carrying out the traditional arguments for the existence of God.”79 This more elementary activity is originally an activ77 78 79 St. Thomas, Super 1 Cor15, lec. 2, no. 924 (on 15:19): “If the resurrection of the body be denied, it is not easy, rather, it will be hard to maintain the immortality of the soul” (my trans.). That the soul be without a body is both per accidens and contrary to nature, and such a thing cannot be thought to perdure infinitely. On the unity of the content of Paul’s speech on the Areopagus, see Guy Mansini, “Acts 17 and the Integral Structure of Christian Hope,” Logos 24 (2021): 89–107. Sokolowski, God of Faith and Reason, 108. Knowing God from the Things That Have Been Made 1175 ity of revelation such that without it we cannot carry out the traditional arguments for the existence of God. This seems to entail the following discrete situations within which to consider the knowledge of God. (1) If George (a hypothetical man) were created puris in naturalibus, he would possess no proximate capacity to know God naturally from the things that have been made. This is because the proximate capacity depends on the ability to think of the world as a contingent thing. But the untutored mind does not ask why there is anything rather than nothing. The untutored mind thinks of the world as the meta-necessary and eternal stage within whose bounds the necessities and contingencies of our common experience are encountered, and as itself something that in itself is just there. The original sense of being is gerundial, just as the participle suggests: “it is raining”; “it is being.” The “it” is a dummy subject: nobody and nothing is raining, and nobody and nothing does anything to make being be.80 The question of the necessity or contingency of being does not arise. (2) If George (still hypothetical) were created puris in naturalibus, and if God revealed himself to George as creator, which Pius XII says it would be morally necessary for God to do even in the absence of our being called to a strictly supernatural end,81 then George’s mind would be tutored, and his natural capacity to know God from the things that have been made would be proximate, and the exercise of this natural capacity would be, one supposes, common. (3) Adam, created in grace, possesses the proximate capacity to know God from the things that have been made, because he knows that the world is not eternal and that it is not necessary. His mind, in other words is tutored. And though he knows God personally insofar as he, Adam, is the dative of God’s revelation of himself to him, and though he knows God preternaturally in the things that have been made, he can also, if he wants, know God naturally from the things that have been made. (4) Adam, fallen, continues to know God personally and insofar as he is still the dative of God’s revelation to him; he no longer knows God preternaturally in the things that have been made; but he and his immediate descendants can know God naturally from the things that have been made. (5) Once the descendants of Adam become ever more wicked, they become ever more forgetful of God and the service due him, and they make gods who will serve them in the concupiscence of their flesh, the 80 81 Sokolowski, Presence and Absence, 17–21, 167–72. Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, §§2–3. 1176 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. concupiscence of their eyes for riches, and the pride of their life which is power (the Book of Wisdom and Romans). This forgetfulness does not put the descendants of Adam in the moral condition of George, for they are not only spoliati in gratuitis but also vulnerati in naturalibus. This forgetfulness does however return them to the epistemic condition of George, such that they no longer have the proximate capacity to know God as creator from the things that have been made as their first cause and last end. Moreover, having lost this proximate capacity is something for which they are guilty in the same way they are guilty with the guilt of Original Sin for not being created in grace—an inherited guilt. (6) Some of the descendants of Adam are chosen to enter into a covenant relation with God, within which guilt both original and personal can be forgiven, and within which the world is once again known to be something temporally finite and contingent. So they can once again know God by the natural light of reason from the things that have been made. Moreover, they need to be able to know God from the things that have been made, and to exercise this capacity even if only quite informally, which does not amount to much, at least according to Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange,82 in order for the act of faith by which they receive revelation to be reasonable. There is nothing circular about this state of epistemic affairs as is sometimes alleged; there is nothing circular about the exercise of the natural knowledge of God depending on revelation.83 It is like a geometry professor who gives his students some theorem, and whose assignment is to find a demonstration of it. (7) The restoration of the knowledge of God as Creator to God’s covenant partners, however, is in fact a long classroom exercise within the classroom of the world, where these covenant partners, by dint of both past revelation and their ongoing revelatory experience of God as active in history, come to know him as master of all natural necessities and contingencies, as providential governor of human freedom, and as a good than which no greater good can be conceived. This restoration is not finished except with the Incarnation, by Christ. We know this for many reasons but also because the idea of God as Creator ex nihilo is not formulated by Christian minds until the second century AD. (8) The restoration is finished in two ways by Christ, both of which 82 83 Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., Thomistic Common Sense: The Philosophy of Being and the Development of Doctrine, trans. Matthew K. Minerd (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic Press, 2021), 107–9. See Guy Mansini, O.S.B, “Why Revelation Gives Shelter to Metaphysics,” Nova et Vetera (English)18, no. 4 (2020): 1089–101. Knowing God from the Things That Have Been Made 1177 together restore the proximate capacity to know God naturally from the things that have been made. First, it is finished by his resurrection from the dead, which implies a divine omnipotence that is absolute, and that therefore depends on no preexistent matter for the work of creation. Second, it is finished by the revelation of the Trinity, which informs us that the distinction of the world from God is not the first distinction ever to be established. Rather, the distinction of the world from God presupposes the distinctions of the divine persons from one another, such that the processions of Word and Spirit are themselves causes of the created world. This is important: it means that the distinction of the world from God is not a first thing, not the first distinction, and so does not add any such thing as “distinctiveness” itself to reality. God does not need the world to be himself, to be himself in being distinct from it; also, God does not need the world even for the good things that distinction and distinctiveness are, for these are realized eternally in the Trinity. This knowledge adds to the appreciation of the freedom with which God creates the world and human beings—it is not out of a sort of Hegelian neediness that he said “Let us make man.” (9) Now, as St. Paul told Festus and King Agrippa, the things concerning Christ were not “done in a corner.” Christ makes the distinction that he brings to perfect articulation public. It is now at large in the world, and has in the providence of God escaped the boundaries of the Church. The epistemic condition given by God to Adam for the capacity to know God from the things that have been made is now proximate again, and this is so for Christians and non-believers alike. Therefore, it is possible for men in mortal sin and without grace and without faith to come to know God from the things that have been made as first cause and last end. It is rare, because of the moral resistance of fallen man to come to know the God before whom he must repent. But it happens. Even if we suppose it happens only with actual grace moving the will, the exercise of the mind in coming to know God from the things made remains natural. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2022): 1179–1206 1179 Teleology in Natural Theology and Theology of Nature: Classical Theism, Science-Oriented Panentheism, and Process Theism Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas Rome, Italy Introduction The world is full of teleological dimensions. When we search for them, we can easily see that virtually any of the main aspects of our world can be taken as a particular case of teleology. Although this holds especially for living beings, the physicochemical world also exhibits many directional features that acquire a special meaning when seen as necessary conditions for the existence of living beings. Directionality indicates the existence of tendencies toward goals, which is the hallmark of natural teleology. . . . It is not difficult to find examples of directionality and cooperativity. If we begin with the most elementary components of the world, we find out that subatomic particles and the four basic interactions behave according to well-known specific patterns and collaborate to build up successive levels of organization—atoms, molecules, macromolecules, and the bigger inorganic and organic beings. The entire construction of our world is the result of the deployment of tendencies that collaborate to make up unitary systems.1 If Mariano Artigas is right in his assertion—and many seem to agree that he is2—it seems reasonable to ask about the ways in which the notion of 1 2 Mariano Artigas, The Mind of the Universe: Understanding Science and Religion (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation, 2000), 129. See, e.g.: Francisco José Ayala, “Teleological Explanations in Evolutionary Biology,” in 1180 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. teleology may inspire theology, especially in the context of the ongoing dialogue between science and theology. We may think about at least two possible answers to this question, in reference to two related, yet distinctive strategies pursued in theological reflection, (1) the approach of natural theology and (2) the approach of theology of nature. What brings them together is their close attention to nature and our attempts to understand it. Avoiding theological and spiritual escapism and dismissive detachment from nature and natural phenomena, both natural theology and theology of nature point toward their ultimate grounding in God. While doing so, both approaches strive to remain free from the errors of panpsychism, vitalism, and pantheism, thus enabling nature to be natural, available to a thorough and meaningful analysis and description at the level of the research pursued by natural sciences and philosophy of nature and of science. What differentiates these theological approaches are their starting and ending points. Natural theology departs from the observation of natural phenomena. In a search for their ultimate explanation, in reference to philosophy of nature and metaphysics, it arrives at the theological conclusion that only the existence of God offers a satisfying and conclusive answer to the human search for understanding and meaning of the reality that surrounds us. Consequently, one may say that natural phenomena, or at least some of their most fundamental aspects such as teleology, can be used as a basis for arguing in favor of the existence of God. The advantage of such an approach—notes Ian Barbour—is that “it starts from scientific data on which we might expect agreement despite cultural and religious differences.”3 However, taken alone, it may reduce the notion of God to the God of philosophers, the unmoved mover, 3 Nature’s Purposes: Analyses of Function and Design in Biology, ed. Colin Allen, Marc Bekoff, and George Lauder (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 29–49; David J. Bartholomew, God, Chance and Purpose: Can God Have It Both Ways? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Michael Denton, Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe (New York: Free Press, 1998); Arthur Peacocke, “God’s Action in the Real World,” Zygon 26 (1991): 455–76; William R. Stoeger, “The Immanent Directionality of the Evolutionary Process, and Its Relation to Teleology,” in Evolutionary and Molecular Biology: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, ed. Robert J. Russell, William R. Stoeger, and Francisco José Ayala (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory; Berkeley, CA: Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 1998), 163–90. Ian G. Barbour, When Science Meets Religion: Enemies, Strangers, or Partners? (New York: HarperOne, 2000), 30. See also 28–34 for a more detailed analysis of the strategies of natural theology and theology of nature. Teleolog y in Natural Theolog y and Theolog y of Nature 1181 or even a deistic Creator, remote and not engaged in his relation to the created reality. Moreover, although we know many examples of people who actually did go through a conversion and discovered the existence of God following the path of natural theology, one might ask whether at least some of the arguments developed within it do not presuppose God’s existence as rhetorical exercises for the expression of religious faith, compromising thus its principal commitment. In contrast to natural theology, theology of nature begins with a firm belief in God, based on historical revelation—codified in the Scriptures and reflected upon within theological Tradition—and religious experience (personal and communal). It applies this perspective as an explanatory tool, providing a definitive answer to the questions of origin and ultimate fulfillment of natural phenomena observed in the universe. Hence, while it would be rather strange to claim that the existence of God proves the existence of the natural world—which is better known to us (quoad nos) than the principles of theology—we may still argue that, from the point of view of theology of nature, our knowledge of God and our relation toward him as the Creator enable us to discover a deeper, theological meaning of natural phenomena, including those which may not be directly available for the empirical research, such as teleology. The advantage of theology of nature lies in its departure point. The explanatory potential of the revelation of God in his relation to the contingent universe enables us to develop an analogously far-reaching notion of the ultimate meaning of things that surround us. However, taken alone, this approach may alienate some Christians who hesitate to engage in critical analysis of the reveled Truth, received Tradition, and personal and communal religious experience. Such analysis is necessary nonetheless to understand the mystery of God and his creation more deeply, in accordance with the tradition of faith seeking understanding. Keeping in mind similarities and differences, as well as strong and weak points of these approaches, I argue that both are valid and important for the overall endeavor of theology, and for theology engaged in a dialogue with natural science in particular. Hence, concentrating on the topic of teleology, I will refer to both natural theology and a Christian theology of nature. My goals in this paper are the following. First, in line with the tradition of Thomistic natural theology, I will clearly distinguish between the argument from teleology and the argument from design. Second, approaching teleology from the same perspective of natural theology, I will explore the explanatory potential of Aquinas’s fifth way, which I claim enables us to say much more about God than a simple assertion that all 1182 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. natural things are ordered to him as an end. Third, I will show the way in which a distinctively Christian theology of nature, as defined above, may actually enrich our reflection on teleology. Finally, I will ask about the role of teleology within two influential projects in contemporary science– theology dialogue: science-oriented panentheism and process theism. As an introduction to these four key points, I will begin with a short presentation of Aristotle’s understanding of teleology and chance. Aristotle’s Notion of Teleology Reflecting upon the phenomenon of teleology (goal-directedness), Aristotle sees it, first of all, as a natural phenomenon. He lists it as one of the four causes, metaphysical yet naturalistic categories indispensable for explaining what particular things and organisms are, what their active and passive dispositions are, and why they act and react in a given way. Defining goal or τέλος (telos = end, hence “teleology” = goal-directedness), he sees it as “that for the sake of which” a thing is done, or a good that is proper for a being and that can be attained. In the Physics, when discussing the ways we can call something a cause, we find him saying: . . . again in the sense of end or “that for the sake of which” a thing is done, e.g. health is the cause of walking about. (“Why is he walking about?” we say. “To be healthy,” and, having said that, we think we have assigned the cause.) The same is true also of all the intermediate steps which are brought about through the action of something else as means towards the end, e.g. reduction of flesh, purging, drugs, or surgical instruments are means towards health. All these things are “for the sake of ” the end, though they differ from one another in that some are activities, others instruments. (2.3.194b 32–95a 2)4 This statement is profound for at least three reasons. (1) First, it defines goal-directedness primarily as an intrinsic feature of an entity, even if it includes using external instruments (as surgical instruments serving human health in Aristotle’s example). As such, teleology is better understood in reference to one of the terms Aristotle uses to describe the formal principle of a given being, which makes it to be what it is. Apart from terms such 4 Quotes of the Physics are trans. Gaye, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, 213–394 (New York: Modern Library, 2001). See also Metaphysics 5.1.1013a 33–b 2. Teleolog y in Natural Theolog y and Theolog y of Nature 1183 as παράδειγμα (paradeigma; “paradigm”; “archetype”; “pattern”; “model”; “characteristics of the type”), μορφή (morphē; “shape”), εἶδος (eidos; “form”), and ὁ λόγος τοῦ τί ἦν εἶναι (ho logos tou ti ēn einai; “statement [definition] of the essence”), he describes form, on several occasions in terms of ἐντελέχεια (entelecheia), which relates formal to final causation and denotes form as actualized in the final state of a being.5 Teleology is then nothing else but an intrinsic tendency of a given entity to be fully actualized in its essence, meaning (in a metaphorical and somewhat colloquial expression) to express its own identity and live its own life to the full. Commenting on this term, Fran O’Rourke says: “It is form (μορφή), therefore, which is nature (φύσις [physis]). It is form as ἐντελέχεια which is the τέλος [telos] of γένεσις [genesis], that is, of the coming-to-be of φύσις. In its state of completion, φύσις is synonymous with ἐντελέχεια, the fulfillment of εἶδος.”6 (2) Moreover, Aristotle’s definition of finality implicitly suggests that teleology—which is usually associated with, and often wrongly limited to, conscious human decisions—should be extended to other living and nonliving entities. Indeed, as notes David Bostock, in Meteorologica 4.12.389b 25–90a 21, “Aristotle does explicitly say that the elements, and the inorganic compounds that are formed from them, are ‘for the sake of something,’ equating this with the view that they have a ‘function’ (ἔργον [ergon]) which in turn is a power (δύναμις [dynamis]) to act or be acted upon.”7 This “function” does not need to be necessarily known nor intended by a conscious agent. That is why Aristotle delineates in Physics 2.8.199b 26–27 that “it is absurd to suppose that purpose is not present because we do not observe the agent deliberating.” (3) Finally, it becomes apparent that teleology has a normative import, 5 6 7 See Metaphysics 9.8.1050a 21–23: “For the action is the end, and the actuality is the action. And so even the word ‘actuality’ [ενέργεια, energeia] is derived from ‘action’ [ἔργον, ergon], and points to the complete reality [ἐντελέχεια, entelecheia]”; quotes from the Metaphysics are trans. W. D. Ross in McKeon, Basic Works of Aristotle, 681–926. As Joe Sachs notes, “Aristotle invents the word by combining enteles [ἐντελής] (complete, full-grown) with echein ([ἐχειν] = hexis, to be a certain way by the continuing effort of holding on in that condition), while at the same time punning on endelecheia [ἐνδελέχεια] (persistence) by inserting telos [τέλος] (completion). This is a three-ring circus of a word, at the heart of everything in Aristotle’s thinking, including the definition of motion” (Aristotle’s Physics: A Guided Study [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995], 245). Fran O’Rourke, “Aristotle and the Metaphysics of Evolution,” The Review of Metaphysics 58 (2004), 3–59, at 17. David Bostock, Space, Time, Matter, and Form: Essays on Aristotle’s “Physics” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 71. 1184 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. observed not only in humans (to take Aristotle’s example, being healthy is good for a human being) and lower animals and plants (we can imagine them taking various actions to achieve what is good for them), but also in the case of inanimate entities (Aquinas finds intrinsic goodness in each thing being what it is). In other words, as Mark Bedau notes, teleology is “value-centered,” and this fact cannot be neutralized by relating it, in a Humean way, to minds and their designs (the mental approach), or by explaining it in terms of goal-directedness of natural systems (the systems approach), or by rationalizing it in reference to causal histories of teleological phenomena (the etiological approach). Bedau successfully shows that all three ways of striving to eliminate teleology’s reference to value end up reorienting the conversation back to the value approach.8 Naturally, the evaluative element of teleology thus understood—that is, understood as the proper good of a given entity—need not consist in any moral good. Nor does it have to confer an important or the best good. Quite the opposite, it is enough for it to refer to some good: “moral or non-moral or even immoral, important or insignificant, and intrinsic or merely instrumental.”9 The good in question is always related to what kind of thing a given entity is (its formal principle). Thus, even if properly classified and named in philosophical investigation performed by conscious beings, it is, nonetheless, real and intrinsic to the entity in question, independently of the operation of any human mind. Aristotle on Teleology and Chance As a source of regularity and order in observed reality, teleology is often opposed to chance. However, the classical approach helps us realize that the relationship between these two fundamental categories is more nuanced. With regards to chance, Aristotle considers it to be, first of all, an ontological aspect of reality and not merely an epistemological unexpectedness of certain occurrences due to the limitations of human understanding. He sees it as a kind of event that (ontologically) demands the agency/intentionality of nature or human will, since it appears to “happen for an end,” but no such agency is involved in its occurrence. To explain its nature, Aristotle introduces the distinction between per 8 9 See Mark Bedau, “Where’s the Good in Teleology?,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52, no. 4 (1992): 781–806, at 783–87. See also Bedau’s response to the criticism of the value analysis of teleology as viciously circular and spurious in reference to the cases of supposedly value-free teleology (793–94). Bedau, “Where’s the Good in Teleology?,” 791. Teleolog y in Natural Theolog y and Theolog y of Nature 1185 se (καθ᾿ αὑτὸ αἴτιον, kath’ hauto aition) and per accidens (κατὰ συμβεβηκὸς, kata symbebēkos) causes, or incidental causes. He sees per se causes as fundamental and essential efficient causes that come from nature (φύσις, physis) or intellect (νοῦς, nous). As such, they are naturally related to the formal and final causality of a given agent. In other words, an efficient cause is acting per se when its activity is performed by an agent, in accord with the agent’s substantial form, to produce its proper effect (see Physics 2.7.198a 23–26). The character of the second, per accidens (accidental) type of causes, on the other hand, can be explained in reference to Aristotle’s metaphysics of substance. Just as an accident (accidental formal feature) of an entity has no existence of its own, but is rooted in its substantial formal features, similarly an accidental cause must be related to a per se cause (see Physics 2.3.195a 26–34 and 2.5.196b 24–29). Keeping this distinction in mind, Aristotle defines chance as an unusual incidental (per accidens) cause, which is inherently unpredictable, although it still falls in the category of events that “happen for the sake of something” (since it refers and is related to such occurrences). Thus, chance events are in a way posterior, since their occurrence and analysis require always a reference to per se causes of a given causal situation. Consequently, trying to specify its ultimate nature, Aristotle states that “chance is an incidental cause. But strictly it is not the cause—without qualification—of anything.” (Physics 2.5.197a 12–14). And yet, because it is distinguished as a unique type of occurrence which is not primary, and which yet is inherently related to nature (φύσις, physis) and intellect (νοῦς, nous), chance needs to be defined in reference to per se formal and final causality rather than blind material necessity. This tells us that delineating it in a stark opposition to these causes is an unjustified simplification.10 To give an example, when riding on my bicycle through the downtown, I met my friend walking to the store. While my intention was to get out of the city to take a break, my friend’s intention was to get to the store and do some shopping. Our intentions (final causes), our actions (efficient causes), and the essence of each one of us (hylomorphic union of primary matter and substantial form) were per se causes of our activities but not of our accidental encounter. In other words, tracing back per se causes of our activities does not eliminate the chance character of our encounter, making it to be inevitable (predetermined). The accidental nature of our meeting 10 See Physics 2.6.198a 8–13: “No incidental cause can be prior to a cause per se. Spontaneity and chance, therefore, are posterior to intelligence and nature. Hence, however true it may be that the heavens are due to spontaneity, it will still be true that intelligence and nature will be prior causes of this all and of many things in it besides.” 1186 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. was something real, in addition to per se causes of our actions. Moreover, it could not transpire without these causes. Hence, one might say that, in a way, it was ontologically parasitic upon them. Consequently, we may say that the need of reference to per se causes in the case of chance occurrences protects Aristotelian metaphysics not only from blind material necessity—defined as “tychism” (from the Greek τύχη, tychē),11 attributing everything to chance—but also from absolute determinism, which sees chance simply as lack of human knowledge of causes.12 This fact has a significant influence on Aristotle’s philosophy of nature and his understanding of necessary occurrences in the physical world. Necessity as such is for him never absolute, but always suppositional. Things happen in accordance with causal patterns, but on the supposition that nothing interferes with given causal occurrences. In other words, what we observe in nature is a nomological necessity governing relations between metaphysically contingent entities and the processes they enter. The Distinction between the Arguments from Teleology and from Design Based on Aristotle’s view of teleology, we might consider it to be one of the most fundamental aspects of nature, available for the analysis of natural science and philosophy of nature and of science. As such, it became one of the crucial points of departure for Aquinas’s natural theology. Indeed, he based on teleology the last of his famous “five ways,” the five arguments for God’s existence developed in Summa theologiae [ST] I, q. 2, a. 3: The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, 11 12 Note that Aristotle has actually two terms for chance: τύχη (tychē), meaning luck or fortune (chance occurrences in causal situations related to human deliberating), and the more general term τὸ αὐτόματον (to automaton), meaning chance (chance occurrences in causal situations related to an entity acting for its natural end [teleology]). See John Dudley, Aristotle’s Concept of Chance: Accidents, Cause, Necessity, and Determinism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 323: “For Aristotle it is not legitimate to view the present condition of the world as the outcome of the interaction of chains of necessary causes, as many contemporary scientists and philosophers would hold. For Aristotle the human intellect can only trace back one chain of causes at a time, and will always have to stop the process when it reaches a free choice or a [sc. unusual] accidental cause, both of which introduce contingency into chains of causes, since the effect of free choices and [sc. unusual] accidents on the course of events is inherently unpredictable.” Teleolog y in Natural Theolog y and Theolog y of Nature 1187 and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly [ex intentione], do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.13 The literature on all five ways of Aquinas has a long tradition.14 Leaving aside the vivid discussion which scrutinizes their logical structure and asks about their argumentative power,15 as well as the detailed analysis of 13 14 15 Quotes from ST are taken from the Dominican Fathers translation (New York: Benziger Bros., 1946). The other four ways argue from motion, efficient causality, contingency of things, and grades of perfection of things. Jules Baisnée provides a list of passages in other works of Aquinas parallel to the fifth way (In I sent., d. 1, q. 1; De veritate q. 5, a. 2; Summa contra gentiles [SCG] I, ch. 13 [we will say more about this argument below]; ch. 44; De potentia, q. 3, a. 6; In XII metaphys., lec. 12; Super Ioan, prologue; In symbolum apostolorum, a. 1) and claims that this is, in fact, the most common argument for God’s existence found in Aquinas’s corpus (“St. Thomas Aquinas’s Proofs of the Existence of God Presented in Their Chronological Order,” in Philosophical Studies in Honor of the Very Reverend Ignatius Smith, O.P., ed. John K. Ryan [Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1952], 19–64, at 62–64). For a more recent comprehensive analysis of all five ways see: Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Dieu, son existence et sa nature: solution thomiste des antinomies agnostiques (Paris: G. Beauchesne, 1914), ch. 3; Étienne Gilson, Le thomisme: Introduction au système de Saint Thomas d’Aquin, 5th ed., revised and expanded (Paris: J. Vrin, 1944); A. Kenny, The Five Ways: Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Proofs of God’s Existence (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969); J. Owens, St. Thomas Aquinas on the existence of God: The Collected Papers of J. Owens, ed. John R. Catan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980); Thomas Joseph White, Wisdom in the Face of Modernity: A Study in Thomistic Natural Theology (Naples, FL: Ave Maria University, 2009), 234–45; Edward Feser, Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 62–120; Timothy Pawl, “The Five Ways,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas, ed. Brian Davies and Eleonore Stump (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 115–31; John F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 442–500; Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), ch. 4; Serge-Thomas Bonino, Dieu, “celui qui est” (de Deo ut uno) (Paris: Parole et Silence, 2016), ch. 5; Robert Arp, Revisiting Aquinas’ Proofs for the Existence of God (Leiden: Brill, 2016). For an excellent introduction to all Aquinas’s arguments for God’s existence, see Baisnée, “St. Thomas Aquinas’s Proofs,” 29–64. The question at stake for many is whether the five ways are demonstrative arguments that can be accepted as proofs for God’s existence. In the second article of the same 1188 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. the possible objections raised against each of the five arguments,16 I will concentrate primarily on the content of the argument presented in the fifth way. Before turning to it, however, I want to emphasize its distinctiveness from the argument from design, which requires the existence of a supreme 16 question Aquinas distinguishes between, on the one hand, a demonstration of a reasoned fact (propter quid demonstration) that moves from knowledge of a cause to knowledge of its effect and, on the other, demonstration of the fact (demonstration quia) that moves in opposite direction, i.e., from knowledge of an effect to knowledge of its cause. He adds that a demonstrative argument for God’s existence is possible only under the second scheme. Wippel notes that another vexing issue refers to the nature of the syllogism used in each of five ways and that Aquinas himself acknowledges in Summa theologiae [ST] I, q. 2, a. 2, obj. 2, ad 2, that “the middle term in a demonstration is a thing’s quiddity. But when it comes to God we cannot know what he is but only what he is not. Therefore [it seems that] we cannot demonstrate that God exists. In his response [to this counterargument] Thomas notes that when a demonstration moves from our knowledge of an effect to knowledge of its cause, we must put the effect in the place of the definition of the cause if we are to prove that the cause exists. This is especially true when we are dealing with God. In order to prove that something exists we need only use as a middle term a nominal definition of that which is to be demonstrated [a definition explaining the meaning of a given term], not a real (or quidditative) definition [a definition explaining the real nature (quid rei) of a thing]. This follows, continues Thomas, because the question ‘What is it?’ comes after the question ‘Is it?’ But we apply names to God from what we discover in his effects. Therefore, in demonstrating his existence from an effect we may use as a middle term that which the name God signifies, that is, some purely nominal definition” (Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 443). Whether Aquinas’s explanation justifies classifying his five ways as demonstrative arguments remains an open question, the analysis of which goes beyond the scope of our interest in this article. Concerning the fifth way, there are at least four major objections that have been raised against it. (1) Perhaps the operation of natural bodies can be explained in reference to material, formal, and efficient causation. (2) Or maybe it can be accounted for by appealing to chance. (3) Still another critical approach might acknowledge that finality is real but not that it is required to be grounded in God. Finally, (4) if God is still necessary in this equation, grounding the normative aspect of teleology in him raises the old question of evil present in the created universe. In response to (1), taking generation as an example, Aquinas argues in ch. 3 of De principiis naturae that, while matter, form, and privation might be considered as its principles, they are still insufficient to explain it. An actualizing agent is needed. However, once we introduce an agent, we must realize that, as such, it always acts for an end. Having said that, Aquinas reminds us that not only voluntary agents tend toward an end (intendit finis), but also natural (i.e., involuntary) ones. Wippel notes that Aquinas develops a similar argument in ST I-II, q. 1, a. 2. Concerning (2), we have already seen that according to Aristotle (and Aquinas follows him) chance, though ontologically real, is a per accidens cause, which is intrinsically related to per se material, formal, efficient, and final causes, decisive for operation of entities participating in chance occurrences. Facing (3) Aquinas does not Teleolog y in Natural Theolog y and Theolog y of Nature 1189 designer. Unfortunately, these two arguments are often confused and treated as one and the same argument.17 First of all, it seems that through his major works Aquinas does not present us with a clearly formulated argument from design. The closest he gets to framing such proof is the concluding section in Summa contra gentiles [SCG] I, ch. 13, no. 35, where he states: Contrary and discordant things cannot, always or for the most part, be parts of one order except under someone’s government, which enables all and each to tend to a definite end. But in the world we find that things of diverse natures come together under one order, and this not rarely or by chance, but always or for the most part. There must therefore be some being by whose providence the world is governed. This we call God.18 On the one hand, it is true that, even if we find in this argument a passing reference to an end or a final cause, what stands in its center is the notion of an order coming out of parts, which repeatedly shows in nature. On 17 18 question the validity of the explanation at the level of secondary causes, but he denies its sufficiency, as it always refers to things that can change (mutabilia) or fail (defectibilia). Finally, in response to (4), we might turn, together with Aquinas, to the classical Augustinian theorem stating that God would not have allowed for evil unless his goodness and omnipotence were able to bring good out of it. See Wippel, Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 480–85. See, for example, Pawl, “Five Ways,” 125 (commenting on the fifth way, he juxtaposes chance and design and speaks about “the designer [who] directs the actions of the noncognizant beings to act for an end”), or Kenneth Einar Himma’s entry on “Design Arguments for the Existence of God” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in which, in reference to the fifth way, he states: “Perhaps the earliest philosophically rigorous version of the design argument owes to St. Thomas Aquinas” (iep.utm.edu/ design). Similar is the approach of Del Ratzsch and Jeffrey Kopersky, who state that “Theistic arguments [departing from exquisiteness of structure, function, or interconnectedness], in their various logical forms, share a focus on plan, purpose, intention, and design, and are thus classified as teleological arguments (or, frequently, as arguments from or to design)” (Del Ratzsch and Jeffrey Koperski, “Teleological Arguments for God’s Existence,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, last revised June 19, 2019, plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleological-arguments). It is possible that one of the reasons for the confusion of teleology and design is the term “designedly,” which the standard translation of the Fathers of the English Dominican Province uses for ex intentione in the translation of Aquinas’s fifth way (see above). Quotes from the Summa contra gentiles are taken from On the Truth of the Catholic Faith: Summa Contra Gentiles, 4 vols., trans. Anton C. Pegis et al. (Garden City, NY: Image, 1955–1957). 1190 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. the other hand, however, we should not be too quick in classifying it as an argument from design, since “order” and “design” are not equivalent terms. Quite to the contrary, only the latter presupposes the existence and causal activity of a conscious designer. Hence, to meet the requirements of the argument from design, Aquinas would have to introduce one more proposition that order observed in nature is an outcome or a sign of a design and replace the conclusion referring to the categories of “providence” and “government” with the one saying: “There must therefore be some being by whose designing activity different parts in the created reality come together to form order.” Otherwise, his argument in here remains closer to the one from providence and governance, developed in De veritate, q. 5, a. 2. Moreover, and this is crucial within the context of the contemporary debate concerning the relation between religion and science, even if we agree to treat Aquinas’s argument from SCG I, ch. 13, no. 35, as the argument from design, we must not forget that, within his system of philosophy and theology, the designer does not need to perform his designing action directly. Quite to the contrary, Aquinas would most likely contend that he does it as the first and principal cause, working through secondary and instrumental causation of creatures. This radically distinguishes Thomism from the position of Intelligent Design (ID), which defines causal agency of the intelligent designer univocally in terms of a direct intervention (i.e., an activity of a transcendent cause among contingent causes) and states that its main argument falls within the scope of natural science (in reference to the contemporary division of scientific disciplines, Aquinas’s argument has undoubtedly a philosophical/theological nature).19 Finally, specialists unanimously acknowledge that the argument from design, as presented in SCG I, ch. 13, no. 35, is less developed from the philosophical standpoint, and for this reason it should not be regarded as equal to Aquinas’s major ways of demonstrating God’s existence. Consequently, it needs to be clearly distinguished from the argument from teleology, to which we should now return.20 19 20 A number of supporters of ID are disappointed by the fact that, with some rare exceptions, Thomists are not enthusiastic about the content and the logic of their argument (see, for example, the section “Thomism and Intelligent Design” in Logan Paul Gage, “Can a Thomist Be a Darwinist?,” in God and Evolution, ed. Jay W. Richards [Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2010], 196–201). In the light of our analysis, the reasons for the skepticism about ID in the Thomistic circles become apparent. See: Wippel, Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 434; Norman Kretzmann, The Metaphysics of Theism: Aquinas’s Natural Theology in Summa Contra Gentiles I (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 84, 88–89. Teleolog y in Natural Theolog y and Theolog y of Nature 1191 Teleology within the Perspective of “Natural Theology” A careful analysis of Aquinas’s fifth way (see above) inspires various thinkers to support one of its two major interpretative traditions. The first one of them (1) claims that the way Aquinas proceeds in this, and all other ways, makes his arguments perfect examples of the reasoning characteristic for natural theology. Its goal and ambition is to prove that, by the power of reason, reflecting upon nature, one can discover the existence of God as the first principle of all contingent beings—this much and not more. It does not tell us anything more about God’s nature.21 The other interpretative tradition (2) claims something opposite. Those who follow it believe that, following this and other ways of Aquinas, one may not only prove the existence but also discover some crucial attributes of Christian God, such as his omniscience, omnipotence, and ultimate goodness.22 Speaking of these two interpretative traditions, Timothy Pawl claims that the first one is predominant and in principle more adequate. He argues that Aquinas himself sees the concept of God discovered through his five ways as rudimentary, since in the following articles we find him “questioning whether God has a body, . . . is perfect, good, infinite, immutable, eternal, and even whether there is just one God.”23 Hence, further truths about God come later, on the way of reasoning enlightened by revelation and faith. However, despite the predominance of (1) and Pawl’s arguments in its favor, I want to argue that, in the case of the fifth way, (2) is actually more relevant. I will try to show it in reference to Aristotle’s notion of teleology discussed above and the text of the fifth way (brought in the former section). First, we have seen that Aristotle’s notion of teleology introduces a dynamic aspect to his definition of the essence of a given thing or organism. He states that “the ‘what’ [essence] and ‘that for the sake of which’ [οὗ ἕνεκα, hou heneka] are one” (Physics 2.7.198a 25). This inspires him to coin a new term, ἐντελέχεια (entelecheia), which denotes form as actualized in the final state of the development of a being. Consequently, if 21 22 23 See Denys Turner, “On Denying the Right God: Aquinas on Atheism and Idolatry,” Modern Theology 20, no. 1 (2004): 141–61, at 152: “For Thomas the proofs prove an unknowable God, known to exist and known to be unknowable from the unutterable mystery that there is anything at all.” See: Elliott Sober, Core Questions in Philosophy (New York: Macmillan Library Reference, 1991), 36–56 (lectures 4–5); John R. Wilcox, “The Five Ways and the Oneness of God,” The Thomist 62, no. 2 (1998): 245–68. Pawl, “Five Ways,” 115. 1192 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. teleology “drives” things and organisms to achieve the highest level of actuality available for them, to express their own identity and live their own life “to the full,” we must acknowledge that God, who is the source of goal-directedness in his creatures, is not only the highest metaphysical principle but also a being that is actualized to the highest possible degree, a being that is most alive, that is Life itself. Moreover, in his formulation of the fifth way Aquinas tacitly states that, at the end of the day, all intrinsic teleology relates beings to knowledge and intelligence. The fact that he says that only about natural, most likely inanimate bodies does not mean his rule is not applicable to conscious beings: their goal-directedness relates them to still higher (divine) knowledge and intelligence. By saying it, Aquinas asserts indirectly that God, as the transcendental source of teleology, must have knowledge and intelligence, and have them in highest possible degree: he must be omniscient and infinitely surpass all other intelligent beings. Another important aspect of Aristotle’s notion of teleology that is echoed in Aquinas’s fifth way is its normative import. If goal-directedness in things and organisms is oriented toward what is good for them (metaphysically speaking), then God as the source of teleology must be utterly good; he must be Good itself. Moreover, some interpreters claim that, when he states that contingent beings aim for what is best (id quod est optimum), Aquinas has in mind not only goodness of particular parts or wholes, at various levels of the complexity of matter, but also the goodness of the universe as a whole. Engaging this argument in the context of natural theology, we may conclude that God, who desires the goodness of the universe as a whole (taken as one), must himself be one and totally simple. Finally, we must not ignore the notion of chance in its relation to order and regularity observed in nature. Carefully analyzed by Aristotle, this topic is also alluded to by Aquinas in his fifth way, when he speaks about things acting for an end “always, or nearly always, in the same way.” What may stand in their way is either per se causation of some other entities or per accidens quasi-causal character of chance occurrences. Because the latter are an integral part of the ontological make-up of the universe, we must conclude that God is not only the author of both regularity and chance but also the principle of their interplay in dynamically changing reality. I believe that the analysis presented here shows the richness of the interpretative potential of natural theology. Departing from the argument for the existence of God as the first (ultimate) principle of the contingent reality—which defines its principal undertaking—it enables us to make a meaningful inference into a number of divine attributes, before Teleolog y in Natural Theolog y and Theolog y of Nature 1193 introducing knowledge that comes from revelation. It is true in particular in reference to the phenomenon of teleology and Aquinas’s fifth way that takes it as its starting point. Teleology within the Perspective of “Theology of Nature” Thinking about teleology from the perspective of theology of nature, we discover at first that, just as the human mind reflecting upon goal-directedness observed in nature is capable of discovering God as its source, the same human intellect, enlightened by the revealed truth, realizes that all created contingent beings “flow” from God and must be directed toward him. Hence, following Aquinas’s theology of nature, in reference to the normative aspect of the phenomenon of goal-directedness, we can join him in his conclusion, stating that “everything is . . . called good from the divine goodness, as from the first exemplary effective and final principle of all goodness.”24 Consequently, we acknowledge that: All things, by desiring their own perfection, desire God Himself, inasmuch as the perfections of all things are so many similitudes of the divine being. . . . And so of those things which desire God, some know Him as He is Himself, and this is proper to the rational creature; others know some participation of His goodness, and this belongs also to sensible knowledge; others have a natural desire without knowledge, as being directed to their ends by a higher intelligence.25 Aquinas writes elsewhere to the same effect: All things desire God as their end, when they desire some good thing, whether this desire be intellectual or sensible, or natural, i.e. without knowledge; because nothing is good and desirable except forasmuch as it participates in the likeness to God.26 24 25 26 ST I, q. 6, a. 4, corp. See also a. 1, corp. and ad 2; q. 105, a. 2, ad 2 (“God moves as the object of desire and apprehension”); I-II, q. 109, a. 6, corp.; In I sent., d. 34, q. 1, a. 2 corp. ST I, q. 6, a. 1, ad 2. ST I, q. 44, a. 4, ad 3. See also q. 105, a. 5, corp.: “Thus then does God work in every worker, according to these three things. First as an end. For since every operation is for the sake of some good, real or apparent; and nothing is good either really or apparently, except in as far as it participates in a likeness to the Supreme Good, which is God; it 1194 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. But we may go still further. Based on the revealed tradition, we learn that, just as the original sin of the first parents harmed the entire created reality (Gen 3:17), the eschatological consummation of the history of salvation at the second coming of Jesus Christ will bring its final renewal and transformation (Rev 21:1–8). Characterizing the present state of nature, St. Paul speaks about its groaning for restoration, which finds expression in our conscious longing for the final completion of the rebirth of the human nature. Through it, the entire creation will be reestablished in the dignity given to it by God at the moment of creatio ex nihilo, the dignity that has been disgraced by human sin: For creation awaits with eager expectation the revelation of the children of God; for creation was made subject to futility, not of its own accord but because of the one who subjected it, in hope that creation itself would be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now. (Rom 8:19–22) In this context, we can think about intrinsic teleology of each created entity as an expression of its groaning for the fulfillment in God. In other words, flowing from God, yet ontologically radically distinct from him, created beings strive to achieve the maximal level of actuality and goodness available to them. Their intrinsic teleology is thus oriented toward the highest possible resemblance of the perfection and goodness of God. I claim that this enables us to analogically extend the classical theological scheme of exitus and reditus—traditionally referred to humanity—to the entire creation. This proposition finds support in Aquinas, who notes that “the end of all things [by which he seems to understand the totality of the universe] is some extrinsic good,” which is “outside [extrinsic to] the universe” (ST I, q. 103, a. 2, corp.).27 Once again, the longing for this end finds expression in the phenomenon of teleology embedded in creatures.28 27 28 follows that God Himself is the cause of every operation as its end.” See also: Étienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940), 75; Corey L. Barnes, “Natural Final Causality and Providence in Aquinas,” New Blackfriars 95 (2014): 349–61. That Aquinas is thinking here about the end of the universe as a whole becomes clear from the title of the article, as well as the last sentence of the respondeo, in which he speaks about “the end of the whole universe” (finis totius universi). Hence, the term “the end of all things” (finis rerum) in the earlier part of the same passage should be interpreted as referring to the entire universe as well. The eschatological perspective delineated here, in reference to the classical philosophy and theology, finds its new expressions in contemporary theology, and in the Teleolog y in Natural Theolog y and Theolog y of Nature 1195 I believe that the reflection from the perspective of theology of nature offered here complements and deepens the one offered by natural theology. By combining them together we can achieve a more thorough and coherent theological interpretation of the meaning of goal-directedness observed in the universe. As such, it remains an attractive proposition for the science–theology dialogue, especially in the context of the recent rediscovery and ongoing debate on teleology in both natural science and philosophy of science. Teleology in Science-Oriented Panentheism and Process Theism One might justifiably assume that the theological recognition of the importance of natural teleology and its grounding in the Creator God—delineated in reference to the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of philosophy and theology—reflects a more general approach to this topic among theologians, including those engaged in dialogue between theology and science. However, that this might not always be the case can be seen in reference to at least two contemporary and highly influential theological projects, both of which were developed in reference to natural science: science-oriented panentheism and process theism. Before analyzing each one of them we should note that for the most part they follow the approach of theology of nature. However, their understanding of its strategy varies from the one defined here. Instead of applying the perspective of faith as an explanatory tool, providing a definitive theological answer to the questions of origin and ultimate fulfillment of natural phenomena observed in the universe, science-oriented panentheism and process theism open to natural science holding that “some science–theology dialogue in particular. Here we may think about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s vision as developed in The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper, 1959)— with its explanatory potential, as well as many scientific, philosophical, and theological problems it raises—or some ideas concerning eschatology expressed by Karl Rahner in Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity (New York: Crossroad, 1978). Another important point of reference is the scientific, philosophical, and theological analysis concerning fine tuning, anthropic coincidences, and anthropic principle—which refers to teleology on the cosmic scale. For a concise evaluation of Teilhard de Chardin and Rahner, in reference to John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler’s The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), see Robert J. Russell, Cosmology from Alpha to Omega: The Creative Mutual Interaction of Theology and Science (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2008), ch. 9. On anthropic principle, see Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti, “Anthropic Principle,” Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion & Science, 2005, doi.org/10.17421/2037-2329-2005-GT-1. 1196 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. traditional [theological] doctrines need to be reformulated in the light of current science.”29 Although a similar approach is not entirely absent from the tradition of classical theism—as one of the most fundamental explications of its identity as faith seeking understanding—its contemporary proponents would be hesitant to make it a principal aspect of their definition of theology of nature.30 Science-Oriented Panentheism Panentheism is one of the prominent versions of theism rooted in some ancient non-Christian and Christian traditions, suggesting that everything is in God (pan-en-Theos), who at the same time transcends the created and contingent reality. Recommended as forging a middle path between classical theism and pantheism, panentheism gained much popularity in the last century. For the purpose of the present conversation, I will put aside the complexity of the analysis of its historical and contemporary versions, some major difficulties concerning a precise qualification of the key preposition “in” (en) in its definition, the controversy around its suggestion of mitigating omni-attributes of God (such as omnipotence and omniscience), and doubts whether it manages to find a proper balance between divine transcendence and immanence (allegedly making it an attractive alternative to classical theism—accused of exaggerating divine transcendence at the cost of divine immanence).31 What interests me here is the question concerning the notion of teleology in a particular version of panentheism developed by theologians (and scientists) engaged in the science–theology dialogue. 29 30 31 Barbour, When Science Meets Religion, 31. Michael Dodds notes: “For Aquinas, theology’s use of science cannot result in a reformulation of the truth that God has revealed, but may change one’s interpretation of it. Accepting the truth of Scripture as the ‘given,’ theology may turn to human reason, including empirical science, not to critique or modify that truth, but in order to penetrate its depth: ‘Sacred doctrine makes use even of human reason, not, indeed, to prove faith . . . but to make clear other things that are put forward in this doctrine. . . . Hence sacred doctrine makes use also of the authority of philosophers in those questions in which they were able to know the truth by natural reason’ [ST I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2]. Theology’s use of science cannot change revealed truth, but it may help the theologian to understand it more deeply” (“Thomas Aquinas Vis-à-Vis Natural Theology, Theology of Nature, and Religious Naturalism,” Theology and Science 15, no. 3 [2017]: 266–75, at 269). I discuss all these issues in detail in Mariusz Tabaczek, Divine Action and Emergence: An Alternative to Panentheism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), and “The Image of God in Western (Christian) Panentheism: A Critical Evaluation from the Point of View of Classical Theism,” Sophia (forthcoming; published online 2021, doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00848-2, awaiting print assignment). Teleolog y in Natural Theolog y and Theolog y of Nature 1197 Among the most prominent representatives of this movement, we find Barbour, Philip Clayton, Paul Davies, and Arthur Peacocke.32 Focusing their research on the philosophical and theological implications of quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity, the big bang theory, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, evolutionary biology, and genetics, they all state that God created the universe with a very precise set of laws that combine uniformity and randomness, through which he continues the work of creation. In other words, God chose not to determine the universe in detail, but instead to give a vital, cocreative role to nature. This role comes into play through an interplay of chance and order.33 Peacocke writes: 32 33 Emphasizing the importance of panentheism in the science–theology dialogue, David Nikkel goes as far as to say that “the raison d’être of panentheism was to re-balance transcendence and immanence in light of modern scientific knowledge. Rejecting what its originators considered the neglect of divine immanence in classical theism and deism, it attempted to affirm a strong divine interest and presence in the world but without supernatural intervention that controverted natural laws” (“Affirming God as Panentheistic and Embodied,” Sophia 55, no. 3 [2016]: 285–95, at 296). One of the important aspects and consequences of the panentheists’ understanding of God’s immanence is their interpretation of creatio continua in terms of the ongoing creative action of God, which he shares with the creatures. Davies speaks of a God who decided to “give a vital, cocreative role to nature itself ” (“Teleology without Teleology: Purpose through Emergent Complexity,” in In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World, ed. Philip Clayton and Arthur Robert Peacocke [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004], 95–108, at 104). Clayton suggests we should consider God as the “‘co-creator’ with finite agents” (“Emergence from Quantum Physics to Religion: A Critical Appraisal,” in The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion, ed. Philip Clayton and Paul Davies [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006], 303–22, at 307). Peacocke, similarly, speaks of God continuously creating through the processes of the natural order, working from inside the universe. He thinks that “creation goes on all the time and is not just a one-off event” (Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming—Natural, Divine, and Human [Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1993], 170). He sees God as “creating at every moment of the world’s existence through perpetually giving creativity to the very stuff of the world” (Arthur Peacocke, “Articulating God’s Presence in and to the World Unveiled by the Sciences,” in Clayton and Peacocke, In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being, 137–55, at 144). Such claims are rather problematic from the point of view of the tradition of classical theism. If we define creation as bringing entities into existence ex nihilo, we must acknowledge that such an act requires an infinite power. Hence, notes Aquinas, only God can create (see ST I, q. 45, a. 5, corp.). Consequently, the incessant processes of changes in nature described by panentheists should be perceived as important aspects of God’s governance (gubernatio) of the created universe, rather than creation (creatio ex nihilo). The same classical theological tradition acknowledges that creation finds its logical continuation in God’s keeping all created things in existence (conservatio a nihilo), which may, properly 1198 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. It has become increasingly apparent that it is chance operating within a lawlike framework that is the basis of the inherent creativity of the natural order, its ability to generate new forms, patterns and organizations of matter and energy. . . . It is the combination of the two which makes possible an ordered universe capable of developing within itself new models of existence. The interplay of chance and law is creative.34 Barbour: Randomness at one level leads to dynamic patterns at another level. In some cases the new order can be predicted by considering the average or statistical behavior of the myriad components.35 And Davies: The development of complexity is not just an outworking of the laws of nature; it also depends on the kind of radical chance permitted by, and yet transcending the determination of, these very laws.36 While these assertions are by all means adequate and plausible, we must note that, in explaining the notion of order (or necessity), the advocates of science-oriented panentheism constrain themselves, in most cases, to its definition in terms of the laws of nature: “The laws of physics produce order.”37 However, once we realize (following William Stoeger and many others) that the laws of nature are epistemological descriptions rather than ontological prescriptions, we must acknowledge that the order in the 34 35 36 37 speaking, be called creatio continua. But if creatures participate both in God’s governance and in God’s keeping things in existence causally, they do so acting as secondary and instrumental causes under the primary and principal causality of God, and not as sharing (univocally) in the creative action of God per se. See Mariusz Tabaczek, “Pantheism and Panentheism,” in T&T Clark Handbook of the Doctrine of Creation, ed. Jason Goroncy (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, forthcoming). Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age, 65. Barbour, When Science Meets Religion, 104–5. Davies, “Teleology without Teleology,” 95. Davies, “Teleology without Teleology,” 105. I believe Davies is thinking here about the laws of nature as discovered and described in physics. John Polkinghorne speaks about “the lawful regularity of physical process” as the source of necessity and law in nature ( J. C. Polkinghorne, Science and Theology: An Introduction [Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1998], 39). Teleolog y in Natural Theolog y and Theolog y of Nature 1199 universe, observable in empirical science, needs a metaphysical grounding.38 What seems to be lacking in the science-oriented panentheism is a foundation similar or alternative to the one expressed in reference to classical categories of substantial form, intrinsic teleology (goal-directedness), and the normative notion of a good proper to a given entity. This affects its otherwise accurate theological conclusion portraying God as the ground and source of both order and chance, as can be seen in Peacocke: One might say that the potential of the “being” of the world is made manifest in the “becoming” that the operation of chance makes actual. Hence we infer God is the ultimate ground and source of both law (“necessity”) and “chance.”39 Likewise in Barbour: Both law and chance are part of God’s design. . . . This approach is consistent with the idea of divine purpose, though not with the idea of a precise predetermined plan.40 And in Davies: We may exploit the chess analogy and suggest that God, on the one hand, acts by selecting from the set of all possible laws of nature those laws that encourage or facilitate rich and interesting patterns of behavior. . . . On the other hand, the details of the actual evolution of the universe are left open to the “whims” of the players (including chance operating at the quantum or chaos level, the actions of human minds, etc.).41 38 39 40 41 See William R. Stoeger, “Contemporary Physics and the Ontological Status of the Laws of Nature,” in Quantum Mechanics: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, ed. Robert J. Russell et al. (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory; Berkeley, CA: Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 2001), 208: “Although the laws of nature reveal and describe fundamental patterns of behavior and regularities in the world, we cannot consider them the source of those regularities, much less attribute to them the physical necessity these regularities seem to manifest. Nor can we ascribe to them an existence independent of the reality whose behavior they describe. Instead I claim that they are imperfect abstract descriptions of physical phenomena, not prescriptions dictating or enforcing behavior. Thus, a Platonic interpretation of these laws is unjustified.” Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age, 119. Barbour, When Science Meets Religion, 73. See also 164–66. Davies, “Teleology without Teleology,” 100. 1200 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. The weak point of these assertions is that their authors do not specify in what way God is the ground and source of order and chance. In this regard they differ significantly from the classical position which sees the origin of the above-mentioned, clearly defined grounding metaphysical categories in the pure actuality and ultimate goodness of God, who is both the source and the final end of all that is. Moreover, it is worth noting that the very term “teleology” is rather avoided by the advocates of science-oriented panentheism. A clear reason for this may be found in Barbour and even more explicitly in Davies. They both associate teleology with a particular kind of “design” arguments which assume direct special divine interventions in nature and are often identified as “God of the gaps” type of reasoning. With this idea of goal-directedness in mind, Davies states: In the earlier divine teleological schemes of pre-Darwinian Christianity, God directly selected a final outcome (e.g., the existence of “Man”) and simply engineered the end product by supernatural manipulation. By contrast, the concept I am discussing is “teleology without teleology.” God selects very special laws that guarantee a trend toward greater richness, diversity, and complexity through spontaneous self-organization, but the final outcome in all details is open and left to chance. The creativity of nature mimics pre-Darwinian teleology, but does not require the violation or suspension of physical laws.42 In the light of what was said so far, it becomes apparent that Davies’s notion of the “earlier divine teleological schemes” refers to the notion of teleology that has little to do with the one offered by Aristotle and analyzed theologically by Aquinas. It most likely refers to William Paley’s argument from design, which in its refurbished version is fostered by the contemporary proponents of ID (see above). Moreover, apart from his distorted view of teleology, Davies’s own proposition of “teleology without teleology” seems to define—if not identify or even replace—goal-directedness with laws of nature. I find his approach vulnerable to Stoeger’s criticism of hypostasizing these laws and assigning to them causal nature (powers).43 42 43 Davies, “Teleology without Teleology,” 105–6. In his When Science Meets Religion, Barbour identifies teleology with the “design argument,” which he understands in ways similar to Davies (see 9–10, 28–30). The view he presents in his other books is similar. Davies says that laws of nature “permit the universe . . . to originate,” or that the laws of physics “produce order,” or that they “can themselves be regarded as expressions of Teleolog y in Natural Theolog y and Theolog y of Nature 1201 One more reason for skepticism about the teleological language within the circles of the contemporary science-oriented panentheism might be implicitly grounded in its principal theological manifesto. We have seen that, in the classical theological reflection on teleology, created entities, flowing from God yet ontologically radically distinct from him, strive to achieve the maximal level of actuality available to them. Their intrinsic teleology is thus oriented toward the highest possible resemblance of the perfection of God. Similar to the grades of goodness proper to them, they are leaning toward God as Goodness itself. This enables us to analogically extend the classical theological scheme of exitus and reditus to the entire creation. However, such an approach becomes difficult, if not entirely implausible, in panentheism, which assumes that all things are already in God (pan-en-Theos). If this is the case, then there is little space left for teleological development that would bring creatures closer to divine perfection and goodness. Leaving aside the challenge of specifying the meaning of en in panentheism—which is one of the vexing issues concerning its definition—a panentheist might argue that her God still transcends the universe, which makes the notion of teleology at least potentially theologically fruitful in her version of theism. However, we do not find panentheists engaging in this type of argumentation. Rather, it seems that their central theological commitment of placing creation “in” God encourages them to ignore or abandon the notion of teleology.44 44 God” and his divine agency (“Teleology without Teleology,” 103, 105, 108). Evaluating some recent definitions of panentheism, Raphael Lataster and Purushottama Bilimoria refer to its Eastern formulations and suggest to “consider panentheism to be a type of pantheistic model of the divine” (“Panentheism(s): What It Is and Is Not,” Journal of World Philosophies 3, no. 2 [2018]: 49–64, at 51). Bringing this assertion to its logical conclusion, they add that “To the panentheist, the ‘stuff ’ of the universe is quite literally the ‘stuff ’ of the deity” (53). Consequently, “Only the divine can tell us what to do, but we are the divine! And unlike the poor [classical] theists, who are told that they are imperfect and must take action to get closer to the deity, we need do nothing, and we need feel no guilt. For we know that we are god. And we are what we are meant to be, at any moment in time. We do not wage destructive wars based on who worships the correct god. For we are all god” (52). One might say that the version of panentheism suggested by Lataster and Bilimoria is quite radical and thus marginal. However, speaking of the origin of the universe, they claim their adversary (Benedikt Paul Göcke) ignores “numerous—and more mainstream, as well as etymologically appropriate—panentheistic models where creatio is ex deo rather than ex nihilo, and similarly overlooks panentheistic models entailing no creation at all” (55). 1202 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. Process Theism The second highly influential theological project advanced in reference to natural science that requires our attention is process theism. Initiated by Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, it was further developed by John Cobb, David Griffin, and many other theologians who favored Whitehead’s idea of stability through change. Among them we find Barbour and Clayton. Leaving aside explanation of the complex metaphysical background of process theism, we need to refer to the fundamental ontological commitments of process philosophy on which it is founded. This will enable us to evaluate the role of teleology in theology based on Whitehead’s project.45 Whitehead sees the universe as an organic complex—rather than a dualism of “mind and mechanism”—constituted of basic events, “bits of experience,” “actual occasions,” “puffs of existence,” that realize and actualize themselves (or “concresce”) in one instant of time, to pass away or “perish” in the next instant. The enduring objects of our experience, such as atoms, molecules, material objects, and living creatures, including human beings, are nothing more than organized “societies of actual occasions.” Hence, it becomes clear that “process,” rather than “substance” or “being,” stands for the basic ontological category in Whitehead’s system. Despite his insistence on each “actual occasion” as a self-creating and self-actualizing individual, seeking the “satisfaction” or “enjoyment” of its own existence, Whitehead notes that actual occasions are related in space and time to other realities in their immediate environment. They “prehend” both past actualities and possible future actualizations, which is 45 As an introduction to process philosophy and theology, see: Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: New American library, 1950); Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: Macmillan, 1926); Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1979); Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948); Hartshorne, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984); Joseph A. Bracken, Christianity and Process Thought: Spirituality for a Changing World (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2006); William A. Christian, An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959); John B. Cobb and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1976); Explorations in Whitehead’s Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Ford and George Louis Kline (New York: Fordham University Press, 1983); Palmyre M. F. Oomen, “God’s Power and Almightiness in Whitehead’s Thought,” Open Theology 1 (2015): 277–92; Clark H. Pinnock, Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God’s Openness (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2001); Mariusz Tabaczek, Divine Action and Emergence, 126–32. Teleolog y in Natural Theolog y and Theolog y of Nature 1203 decisive for their dipolar nature. As they are neither mind nor matter taken separately, occasions of experience are implicitly both physical and mental. Whitehead’s ontological manifesto definitely makes space for goal-​ directedness. Although in his Process and Reality the term teleology occurs only once,46 it becomes clear that the tendency of actual occasions towards self-actualization has a teleological character. However, since each one of them has a mental or experiential pole (dimension), it becomes questionable whether Whitehead upholds the classical distinction between intrinsic teleology in inanimate, animate, and conscious beings. Concerning process theology, we shall look first at God. As is commonly known, Whitehead famously states that “God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles. . . . He is their chief exemplification.”47 Faithful to this rule, he places God among other actual occasions. What distinguishes him is the nontemporal aspect of his nature, in which God prehends not only all actual occasions, but also all eternal objects—possible kinds (ways) of existence that actual occasions can actualize (transcendental points of reference). Moreover, unlike other actual occasions, God does not perish. However, since he exists among actual occasions, God changes, and teleology applies to him as well. Consequently, Whitehead speaks about three aspects (phases of dialectical development) of God’s nature: “primordial,” unchangeable and eternal but, in some way, impersonal and not fully actual; “consequent,” reflecting and affected by the world of atomic actual occasions and reaching thus a fully personal and actual stage of development; and “superjective,” achieving highest satisfaction qualifying the transcendent creativity in the various temporal instances.48 The teleological concept of God’s nature fits the basic commitment of process theology, which sees him as both “maximally absolute” and “maximally relative,” or “surrelative.” But this is possible only at a price. Understood as such, God ceases to explain the teleology of other actual occasions and their societies. Rather, he shares it with them, participating in the reality in which “the ultimate is termed ‘creativity.’” As such, “God is its primordial, non-temporal accident.”49 Consequently, bringing their 46 47 48 49 See Whitehead, Process and Reality, 214. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 343. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 87–88, 343, 345. One might object that in the case of God—within the Whiteheadian system—we are dealing with a truncated version of teleology, i.e., goal-directedness without a goal. For, if God and the world ever reached an end/fulfillment, they would cease to be, since being consists in becoming/process. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 7, 21, 31. 1204 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. version of theism to its logical conclusions, at least some process theists follow Whitehead and reject the notion of God as Creator ex nihilo of the universe, which in the process metaphysics is simply everlasting: “God does not create the world, he saves it: or, more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.”50 However, one might push back, saying that we should not forget that the God of process theism “conceptually feels” which possibilities best fit each actual occasion, makes them available for prehension, and exerts a “pull,” an attraction towards eternal ideas, which can be seen as a type of final causation inspired by him. “He is the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire,” which strives to attract each actual occasion to appropriate his “initial aim” as its own “subjective aim.”51 Although true, within the Whiteheadian system, this fact still does not make God the ultimate source of the teleology of actual occasions. Because actual entities share with him the characteristic of self-causation, they can transcend all other actual entities, including God.52 All God can do is propose which eternal objects each actual entity should prehend in the future and give to each of them an objective immortality in his consequent nature. As such, God remains “the outcome of creativity, the foundation of order, and the goad towards novelty.”53 Consequently, even if teleology expressed in self-actualization of atomic actual occasions, including God, seems to play a significant role in process theism, it seems to remain metaphysically ungrounded.54 50 51 52 53 54 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 345. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 344. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 222. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 88. Another major challenge faced by process theism in reference to teleology on a grand scale is theodicy. A processual universe is devoid of eschatological hope, as one cannot be sure that God’s love will eventually and ultimately conquer evil. As Niels Henrik Gregersen points out, in process theism “there seems [to be] no redemption possible for the tragically un[ful]filled aspirations of life, nor for the problem of the horrendous evils of wickedness. . . . A soteriological deficit is obvious” (“Three Varieties of Panentheism,” in Clayton and Peacocke, In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being, 19–35, at 32–33). Teleolog y in Natural Theolog y and Theolog y of Nature 1205 Conclusion A contemporary philosopher of biology, Denis Walsh, in his chapter on teleology in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Biology, makes a striking observation: The “Aristotelian purge” was seen as a pivotal achievement of early modern science. As a consequence of the scientific revolution, the natural sciences learned to live without teleology. Current evolutionary biology, I contend, demonstrates that quite the opposite lesson needs now to be learned. The understanding of how evolution can be adaptive requires us to incorporate teleology—issuing from the goal-directed, adaptive plasticity of organisms—as a legitimate scientific form of explanation. The natural sciences must, once again, learn to live with teleology.55 If Walsh is right, then a new possibility emerges in the science–theology dialogue. Its reflection on God and divine action in reference to quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity, the big bang theory, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, and various sub-disciplines of biology in particular (e.g., evolutionary biology, molecular biology, and systems biology) may be enriched by reference to the natural phenomenon of teleology. I hope to have shown that, when clearly distinguished from Paley’s argument from design and its contemporary version developed by the proponents of ID, the classical notion of teleology becomes a promising and fruitful 55 Denis Walsh, “Teleology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Biology, ed. Michael Ruse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 113–37, at 133. Walsh recognizes the immanent character of Aristotle’s teleology (in opposition to its transcendental Platonic version). He finds an irreducible example of it in the adaptiveness and phenotypic plasticity of organisms, manifested in their self-organizing goal-directedness and capacity to make compensatory changes to form or physiology during their lifetime (e.g., acclimatization or immune response). On the level of evolutionary changes, lineages undergo selection to thus become ever more suited to the conditions of their environment. Walsh shows that the Darwinian process of iterated mutations and selection does not provide a satisfactory explanation for adaptive evolution. A careful observer notices that the explanatory role of phenotypic plasticity brings back a genuine Aristotelian teleology. It gives a reason why organisms of the one species resemble one another, despite genetic variations and environmental influences. It also illuminates Aristotle’s idea of hypothetical necessity, by showing that alterations to development are hypothetically necessary for the continued existence of an organism in its environment (128–32). 1206 Mariusz Tabaczek, O.P. inspiration for both natural theology and theology of nature. The analysis of highly influential projects of science-oriented panentheism and process theism shows that they do not seem to pay enough attention to teleology. Hence, a further research is needed that will reinvigorate the classical theological reflection on teleology, contextualize it in reference to contemporary science, and engage it in a conversation with other schools of theology participating in the ongoing dialogue among science, philosophy, and theology. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2022): 1207–1230 1207 God, the Absolute Wise Man, and the Study of Religion Clemens Cavallin NLA University College Bergen, Norway The Absolute Wise Man In the beginning of the Summa contra gentiles [SCG], Thomas Aquinas remarks that, according to the Philosopher (that is, Aristotle), the wise man orders “things rightly and governs them well.”1 To do this, the wise man needs to pay attention to the proper goal of his activity, that is, the good toward which he is to order things. This means that there can be wise politicians, carpenters, and philologists; but Aquinas has primarily in mind “the absolute wise man” (simpliciter sapiens), who queries both the origin of the universe and its end: God. Moreover, not only does the absolute wise man contemplate the nature of God, the ultimate source and truth of the universe, but as even the highest theoretical wisdom (in the Aristotelean sense of sophia) has a practical, ordering dimension, it is also proper for such a person to teach truth and oppose falsehood—in other words, to be a teacher.2 Toward the end of the first chapter of SCG, “The Office of the Wise 1 2 Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles [SCG] I, ch. 1 (Summa Contra Gentiles: Book One: God, trans. Anton C. Pegis [London: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014]). See also Summa Theologiae [ST] II–II, q. 45, a. 3, on the gift of wisdom, and I, q. 1, a. 6, on whether sacred doctrine is the same as wisdom. See Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.2.982a: “For the wise man should not be instructed but should instruct, and it is not he who should obey another, but rather the less wise should obey him” (trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred [London: Penguin, 2004]). The tension is between sophia and phronesis, theoretical and practical wisdom, which are distinct from each other and yet integrated. See, for example, Jason Baehr, “Two Types of Wisdom,” Acta Analytica 27, no. 2 (2012): 81–97. 1208 Clemens Cavallin Man,” Aquinas returns to his introductory quote from Proverbs 8:7: “My mouth shall meditate truth, and my lips shall hate impiety.” Aquinas interprets impiety (impietas) as “falsehood against the divine truth,” and its opposite, piety (pietas), he writes, is another word for religion.3 The absolute wise person is, therefore, in the business of ordering religion toward its proper goal, God as the origin and end of the universe. As a result, besides the mistaken views of heretics, the Christian wise man, according to Aquinas, has to oppose the errors of Jews, gentiles, and Muslims, that is, all non-Christian religions. In refuting the latter two, he has to use natural reason, as they accept neither the Old nor the New Testament.4 And this philosophical task is the fundamental errand of SCG. Moreover, the quest for and ordering of knowledge in relation to ultimate wisdom brings with it a joyous union of “man to God in friendship,” as God, the creator, made everything in wisdom, as ordered to himself, the Supreme Being and Truth.5 To pursue wisdom thus divinizes man. However, my goal in this article is not primarily to deepen our understanding of the Thomist spirituality of higher wisdom, but to probe the possibility of a Catholic “religious studies” endeavor inspired by Aquinas’s approach in SCG I. My main question is, therefore, whether the office of the wise man is compatible with (or at least complementary to) the idea and practice of religious studies. Or if a Catholic approach to religious studies must do without absolute wisdom and settle for a lower-level goal such as ordering the relations between the diverse religious traditions of global society with the goal of harmonious coexistence? In that case, the spirituality of the scholar turns from divinization to humanization, but in what way would such studies be Catholic? A Catholic “religious studies” is here understood as different from theology of religions, and more generally from dogmatic theology.6 Theology of religions is concerned with questions such as the possible salvific role of non-Christian religions, with how to understand the principle of extra ecclesiam nulla salus (“no salvation outside the Church”) and 3 4 5 6 SCG I, ch. 1, no. 4. SCG I, ch. 2, no. 3: “We must, therefore, have recourse to the natural reason, to which all men are forced to give their assent. However, it is true, in divine matters the natural reason has its failings.” SCG I, ch. 2, no. 1. For a helpful Catholic theological overview, which, however, does not address the place of religious studies, see Catholic Engagement with World Religions: A Comprehensive Study, ed. Karl J. Becker and Ilaria Morali (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2010). God, the Absolute Wise Man, and the Study of Religion 1209 the trichotomy of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism.7 The main concern of religious studies is not such evaluations, but rather the details of the history of religions and the contemporary diversity and changes of religion and spirituality. The theoretical thrust of religious studies aims at understanding the natural inclination for religion and its manifold manifestations (beliefs, rituals, and myths). It is also distinct from natural theology (for example as found in SCG), as the latter deals with the possibility and scope of rational knowledge of the divine. Moreover, religious studies as a field differs from that of Catholic studies, which has Catholicism itself as the object of study and which combines perspectives from religious studies and theology, often with the aim of cultivating the Catholic identity of a college or university.8 Moreover, the interreligious-dialogue active component of interreligious studies is more limited in scope, concentrating on the goal of peaceful coexistence. 9 And, in a similar way, the hermeneutical reflections of comparative theology are more specialized (theological texts) and dialogue-oriented.10 For religious studies, the nature of religion and all of its manifestations, both good and bad, are important; understanding and critique carry equal weight. It is not primarily an arena for communication between religious organizations and traditions; it pays attention also to spiritualties and religious mentalities that flourishes outside, between, and within institutions. I am aware that restricting the nature of Catholic religious studies in the manner above (chipping away most knowledge interests important to Catholic centers of higher education) might actually end up in an ideal with no real-life counterpart. The common situation is a decisive split, on the one hand, between religious studies pursued as if all religions are 7 8 9 10 In the Catholic Church, the watershed moment was the Second Vatican Council and foremost the declaration Nostra Aetate; see Loe-Joo Tan, “The Catholic Theology of Religions: A Survey of pre-Vatican II and Conciliar Attitudes Towards Other Religions,” Scottish Journal of Theology 67, no. 3 (2014): 285–303. James L. Heft, “Almost No Generalizations: Reflections on Catholic Studies,” Catholic Education 12, no. 3 (2009): 368–83. For a definition of interreligious studies, see Paul Hedges, “Editorial Introduction: Interreligious Studies,” Journal of the Academic Study of Religion 27, no. 2 (2014): 127–31, at 128, who remarks that, “while not necessarily engaged in activism, it often is, and does not see a clear boundary between the scholar and the practitioner.” For a characterization of comparative theology, see the text “What is Comparative Theology?” on the theology department’s webpage at Boston College, bc.edu/ bc-web/schools/mcas/departments/theology/areas-of-study/comparative-theology/ what-is-comparative-theology.html. 1210 Clemens Cavallin equally valid human attempts relating to the ultimate, the transcendent, or the holy, and on the other hand, disciplines of Catholic theology taking the revealed nature of Scripture and the divine mission of the Church as premises.11 Even if this would be the case, I think religious studies as an approach contributes a perspective on the modern world which is of great value also for colleges and universities with a strong Catholic identity. Merely adding a consideration of world religions and of interreligious dialogue to the theological disciplines and the liberal arts is not enough for understanding and being able to navigate the contemporary world of religion and spirituality. A more ambitious venture is needed that also considers, for example, the spiritual aspects of modernity, religious terrorism, esotericism, modern yoga, and New Age spirituality. Still, to incorporate contemporary religious studies into the larger Catholic intellectual project without attention to fundamental Catholic principles runs the risk of secularizing also theology.12 Wisdom, both theoretical and practical, is therefore of the essence. Naturalism and the Study of Religion One defining feature of most contemporary religious studies is the disregard of absolute wisdom, in the sense of stretching toward an ultimate 11 12 This means that religious studies (historian of religions) professors employed at Catholic universities mostly adopt theoretical stances in conflict with or neglecting Catholic doctrine as a matter of principle. See, for example, Charles B. Jones, associate professor of religion and culture at Catholic University of America, who, in an article on religious diversity, adopts a phenomenological perspective and writes: “Therefore, humankind will never arrive at one Truth about Reality or one universally agreed-upon construal of Reality” (“The Necessity of Religious Diversity,” Studies in Religion 28, no. 4 [1999]: 403–17). Ann Taves, for example, makes a distinction between teaching Catholic studies at a Catholic university and Catholic studies within religious studies, but she puts forward the possibility of switching between the roles and positions of theology and religious studies, between a confessional insider perspective and that of a non-confessional outsider perspective: “Taking a non-essentialist stance relative to traditionL [lineage] and traditionT [things handed down] means understanding tradition and tradition as historically constructed products of contestation rather than as guarantors of truth revealed at the beginning and handed down over time” (“Catholic Studies and Religious Studies: Reflections on the Concept of Tradition,” in The Catholic Studies Reader, ed. James T. Fisher and Margaret M. McGuiness [New York: Fordham University Press, 2011], 117). Instead of switching between roles and an a priori negation of the Catholic tradition as handing down truth, what I am investigating in this article is a form of religious studies that is well integrated into the Catholic intellectual project, while upholding its particular focus and methods. God, the Absolute Wise Man, and the Study of Religion 1211 spiritual origin and goal of human life. Instead, scholars of religious studies investigate in detail particular myths, rituals, and social functions of religious organizations; that is, religious studies as a discipline wants to settle more mundane questions than those dominant in natural and dogmatic theology. The popularity of interdisciplinary approaches such as “material religion,” “lived religion,” and “everyday religion” illustrates well this tendency of directing the analytical gaze toward the earth and not the Empyrean heaven.13 This is quite different from the earlier openness toward epiphanies of transcendence (the holy or the sacred) and is connected with (or at least parallel to) the waning since the 1990s of the phenomenology of religion, especially as it was practiced by the influential Rumanian historian of religions Mircea Eliade (1907–1986). Moreover, not only is the focus currently on human religiosity understood as culture, but the main research paradigms of religious studies reject, as a matter of principle, explanations transcending the material world. In other words, their foundation is naturalism. Of course, the understanding of naturalism and what role it should play varies.14 Still, naturalism currently dominates in religious studies, owing to the present strength of a strict understanding of naturalism modeled on natural science promoted by the cognitive study of religion and the antagonistic, but similarly “mundane,” concerns of power and equality in critical culture studies, linked to emancipatory agendas. Sometimes, the naturalism operative in religious studies is explicitly ontological; sometimes, it is more modestly formulated as a methodological principle. In the first case, it rests on the belief that only material substances exist. A transcendent God is only a human construction with no spiritual referent, as are major and minor deities, ancestors, souls, and demons.15 In the case of methodological naturalism (atheism or agnosticism),16 the 13 14 15 16 See, e.g.: David Chidester, Religion: Material Dynamics (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018); Nancy T. Ammerman, Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Ammerman, “Lived Religion as an Emerging Field: An Assessment of its Contours and Frontiers” Nordic Journal of Religion and Society 29, no. 2 (2016): 83–99. As shown by the articles in the anthology edited by Jason Blum, The Question of Methodological Naturalism (Leiden: Brill, 2018). See, e.g., Stewart Guthrie’s theory of religion as a form of anthropomorphism, which he describes as similar to saying: “The clothes have no emperor. It is commonsensical yet discomfiting” (Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion [Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1993], 5). See also Guthrie, “Religion: What Is It?,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 35, no. 4 (1996): 412–19. Stephen Bullivant and Lois Lee define methodological atheism as suspending 1212 Clemens Cavallin method of religious studies does not explicitly negate the actual existence of spiritual beings, but the fundamental assumption is that we at least cannot have any clear knowledge of the gods or their actions. And, if the they do exist, they probably do not interfere in the human world in any significant way. The result is, therefore, the same: one studies religions as wholly manmade and as operating solely within a material universe. Even a metaphysically agnostic position must, as Craig Martin argues, operate according to some ontology, or stay at the level of mere description and paraphrase.17 Maybe, there is a supernatural surplus remaining after all scholarly work, but about that, the methodological naturalist insists, we cannot know; we can only believe. For Aquinas’s project in SCG, such a rejection of metaphysics is devastating, which he acknowledges: “For, if we do not demonstrate that God exists, all consideration of divine things is necessarily suppressed.”18 What then remains is fideism, an irrational leap of faith, and the logical arguments of the summa cannot be more than a play with words. The opposition between the office of the absolute wise man and the scholar of religious studies, therefore, seems radical and unsurmountable. The Secular Wisdom of Religious Studies In order to explore the possibility of a Catholic religious studies—despite the chasm separating naturalism and supernaturalism—I think we need to approach it (as Aquinas did with natural theology) from the perspective 17 18 “metaphysical questions by treating all metaphysical positions as equally possible” (A Dictionary of Atheism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016], s.v. “Methodological Atheism”). This makes first a definition of metaphysics crucial, which puts a limit on the suspension of ontological judgment; and second it is doubtful whether it is even methodologically feasible to treat all possible worlds as simultaneously equally possible (materialism, idealism, monism, Aztek theism, etc.). Somehow, the researcher needs to settle at least for a likely possible world. Michael Cantrell, on the other hand, in a reference to Ninian Smart, describes methodological agnosticism as “a normative suspension of judgment as to the ultimate reality of the sacred” (“Must a Scholar of Religion Be Methodologically Atheistic or Agnostic?,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 84, no. 2 [2016]: 373–400, at 388). Here, the notion of “sacred” and “ultimate” need defining, as, presumably, the sacred is not necessarily supernatural, and “ultimate” pushes the ontological question as far away as possible. Cantrell also mentions recent alternatives as methodological ludism, reciprocal illumination, and ontological pluralism. Craig Martin, “Incapacitating Scholarship: Or, Why Methodological Agnosticism is Impossible,” in Blum, Question of Methodological Naturalism, 53–73. SCG I, ch. 9. God, the Absolute Wise Man, and the Study of Religion 1213 of wisdom. Even if there are scholars, such as Donald Wiebe, who argue that religious studies should be a purely descriptive and explanatory science, only laying bare the unvarnished truth of religions; religious studies (history of religions, comparative religion) has always been part of attempts at regulating social life toward its proper ultimate good (as variously imagined).19 In fact, I would like to make a case for the position of Aquinas that the theoretical understanding of religion is part of the practical business of ordering piety in accordance with the truths discovered, or presumed a priori. To make religious belief irrational is also to deny it influence on the rational ordering of society. To begin with, studies of religion are founded and financed based on certain knowledge interests, either of the secular state or of organizations in civil society (for example, churches), and they often serve to educate teachers or religious specialists. Moreover, the knowledge produced is used for (and the scholars themselves active as experts in) the regulation of religion in the public sphere. Despite the study of religion being part of larger value based social institutions, one may maintain that this does not rule out that it, like physics or chemistry, can have a purely truth centered core, which should be the same (as regards methods and theories) irrespective of ideological interests. But an important difference between physics and religious studies is that declaring the material of physics to be matter (or energy) does not violate the beliefs of a majority of human beings; while, on the other hand, to understand and treat religion as if no supernatural entities exist, does. The physical world will continue to function in the same manner irrespective of different physical theories. In the case of religion and society, this is highly unlikely, as it concerns human behavior and its ultimate goal. To deny rationality to religious beliefs (and thereby to the practices they inform) is also to undermine them and, at least implicitly, to propose that the rational ordering of society should not proceed in accordance with such beliefs. If supernatural entities are beyond the reach of human rationality, and all revelations can be satisfactorily explained by natural causes, then this 19 For example, in 2006, Wiebe expressed his disappointment over the fact that the majority of religious studies scholars in Canada “still function in terms of the traditional conception of the role of the college and university which involved the formation of the good citizen, which requires addressing questions about the purpose and meaning of human life, and inculcating moral virtues and spiritual values that will prepare students for public service” (“The Learned Practice of Religion: A Review of the History of Religious Studies in Canada and Its Portent for the Future,” Studies in Religion 35, no. 3–4 [2006]: 475–501, at 495). 1214 Clemens Cavallin has profound consequences for the affirmation of truth and the rejection of false beliefs, that is, the ordering that is an integral part of teaching. To say otherwise would be to accept lies (for example, denying the influence of the DNA code on human biology and psychology; or affirming that Christianity originated in Norway) as ordering principles of social life, and therefore also ultimately those of universities, as they are not isolated islands, but organic parts of larger systems of higher education. The study of religion, therefore, inescapably proceeds from value-saturated knowledge interests and has consequences for religions, as astronomy has for astrology. If one presumes that the highest rationally justified entity no longer is God, but society (which even a methodological agnosticism presumes), then the knowledge expanded and reflected upon by religious studies is part of the wisdom of a society worshipping (showing piety toward) itself. One of the most famous examples is the theory of religion formulated by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), who was born into a Jewish family and was expected to carry on a long line of rabbis, but who lost his faith and instead became a champion of secular science. In his influential book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), he writes: “The sacred principle is nothing more or less than society transfigured and personified. . . . It is real only in so far as it has a place in human consciousness.”20 In other words, what the scholar of religious studies (in this case, more precisely, sociology of religion) analyzes are actually civil religions embellished by supernatural mythology. Durkheim was an explicit ontological naturalist: he did not merely make epistemological statements regarding our knowledge of the gods; he denied their existence. This position is sometimes called “sociological reductionism,” reducing or translating statements about supernatural entities into social facts.21 By such a translation, religion remains rational— not according to its myths and dogmas, but according to its underlying social function. From the nineteenth century, scholars created a quickly expanding pool of knowledge about the bewildering diversity of historical and contemporary religions, which they thought science had falsified; but beneath it, they thought, was something genuinely human, which needed to be spelled out for the benefit of modern society. This is an argument with many variants. Some made religion rational by translating it into a moral code; another 20 21 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London: George Allen, 1915 [originally 1912]), 347. For a discussion (and defense) of reductionism, see Robert A. Segal, “In Defense of Reductionism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 51, no. 1 (1983): 97–124. God, the Absolute Wise Man, and the Study of Religion 1215 understood it as manifesting underlying psychological mechanisms or group survival instincts. All of these underlying causes of religion are rational in that they serve the higher good of the group itself. In other words, religious beliefs and rituals hide and distort their true foundation, and therefore it was the task of science to expose their mistaken truth claims. The anticipated gradual withering away of religions, nevertheless, worried Durkheim and other pioneering scholars of the study of religion. Something, they thought, needed to take the place of religion and fulfill its specific unifying function for society, thereby integrating individuals into a collective. Otherwise, the citizens, when waking up from the illusion of supernaturalism, might reject the moral community necessary for societal cohesion. Someone, therefore, would have to formulate a new form of highest wisdom, combining scientific truth with values, to integrate a mass of individuals into a people, a nation, and ultimately a unified humanity. This line of thought began already in eighteenth century with, among others, Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), and during the French revolution, radicals such as Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) and Antoine-François Momoro (1756–1794) experimented with practical applications (the cult of reason and then that of the Supreme Being). The impetus was toward a religion in which the people or humanity worshipped itself, either directly or indirectly through its representative: the revolutionary movement, party, or the great leader. Robespierre famously said: Since my schooldays I’ve been a fairly lukewarm Catholic: I have never been a lukewarm defender of humanity. This makes me even more attached to the moral and political ideas which I have suggested. If God did not exist we would have had to invent him.22 Durkheim, therefore, speculated about the coming truly modern religion: There is something eternal in religion which is destined to survive all the particular symbols in which religious thought has successively enveloped itself. . . . In a word, the old gods are growing old or already dead and others are not yet born. . . . A day will come when our societies will know again those hours of creative effervescence, 22 Quoted in Jonathan Smyth, Robespierre and the Festival of the Supreme Being: The Search for a Republican Morality (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2016), 15. 1216 Clemens Cavallin in the course of which new ideas arise and new formulae are found which serve for a while as a guide to humanity.23 In an earlier text, he was more explicit: The human person . . . is considered as sacred, in what one might call the ritual sense of the word. It has something of that transcendental majesty which the churches of all times have given to their Gods. . . . This is why man has become a god for man, and it is why he can no longer turn to other gods without being untrue to himself. And just as each of us embodies something of humanity, so each individual mind has within it something of the divine, and thereby finds itself marked by a characteristic which renders it sacred and inviolable to others. The whole of individualism lies here. That is what makes it into the doctrine that is currently necessary.24 This cult of man, of humanity, or the individual, was, Durkheim believed, “the only system of beliefs which can ensure the moral unity of the country.”25 Importantly, religious studies as a school of thought was born, and has since lived, in the shadow of this dream of a radically modern worldview that will give birth to a universal moral and ritual community supplanting the traditional, dogmatic, theist religions. Sometimes, this took hard forms such as Marxist materialism, which tried to expose and eradicate supernaturalism and religion all together. Sometimes, it came, as with Durkheim, in softer forms, as the ideal of a global religion of human fraternity resting on a set of hallow values derived from the inherent dignity of the human person. In the liberal democracies of the West, the expectation is presently that religious studies will contribute to the latter vision by investigating the fabric of religious plurality with a view to mutual tolerance, and at the same 23 24 25 Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 427. Émile Durkheim, L’individualisme et les intellectuels, trans. Steven Lukes in “Durkheim’s ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals,’” Political Studies 17, no. 1 (1969): 14–33, at 21 and 26. Lukes, “Durkheim’s ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals,’” 25. See also the earlier attempt at a religion of humanity formulated by Auguste Comte (1798–1857); see Andrew Wernick, Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity: The Post-theistic Program of French Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). God, the Absolute Wise Man, and the Study of Religion 1217 time highlight the moral unity underlying the complex systems of dogma and colorful ritual traditions.26 In current introductory textbooks, the future of religion is, therefore, sometimes portrayed as that of non-dogmatic spiritualties flourishing after the decline of institutionalized religion—a vision similar to that of Durkheim. It is a variation on the secularization theme, but when religion withers away, globalized spiritualties gain ground. For example, Religions in the Modern World, a fairly standard overview of religions, ends not with a prognosis of irrevocable secularization, but with an essay by Paul Heelas titled “The Spiritual Revolution: From ‘Religion’ to ‘Spirituality.’” In it he writes: Looking to the future, . . . it can reasonably safely be predicted that the spiritual revolution will continue apace. . . . The declining realm of institutionalized religion as a whole will be increasingly “taken over” by theistic spiritualties of life. 27 The final sentence of the book is the (rhetorical?) question: “A worldwide spiritual revolution?” Another example is Religion and Globalization: World Religions in Historical Perspective by John L. Esposito, Darrell Fasching, and Todd Lewis. The introductions of religions in the book are set into a framework proposing a postmodern religious attitude fitting for the globalized world. We are, they write, living in a time of radical relativism, standing on the 26 27 However, in Western Europe, the harder form of secularism (which presently is most strikingly operative in China) is gaining ground especially in the battle against Islamist radicalization. The result is a shrinking of the scope of religious freedom. A clear signal of this change was the speech of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, on October 2, 2020, on Islamist separatism in France. Macron announced changes to the law of 1905, separating church and state (“La République en actes: discours du Président de la République sur le thème de la lutte contre les séparatismes,” www. elysee.fr/emmanuel-macron/2020/10/02/la-republique-en-actes-discours-du-president-de-la-republique-sur-le-theme-de-la-lutte-contre-les-separatismes). In his vison of a strengthened laicism, education plays a central role, including the training of imams and the formation of Muslim theologians and intellectuals. See also the move in Sweden to prohibit new religious schools, even if this comes into conflict with human rights (“Nya regler för skolor med konfessionell inriktning SOU 2019:64,” January 8, 2020, regeringen.se/remisser/2020/02/remiss-sou-201964-nyaregler-for-skolor-med-konfessionell-inriktning). Paul Heelas, “The Spiritual Revolution: From ‘Religion’ to ‘Spirituality,’” in Religions in the Modern World, ed. Linda Woodhead, Paul Fletcher, Hiroko Kawanami, and David Smith (New York: Routledge, 2002), 357–77, at 373–74. 1218 Clemens Cavallin threshold of a truly postmodern era.28 In distinction to fundamentalists and modernists, the authors state, postmodernists value plurality and pass over into the faiths of others, partaking of their “spiritual wisdom,” then return enriched to their own traditions.29 The hero of the “postmodern option” is Mahatma Gandhi and his “new age spiritual practice.”30 Religion and Globalization proposes Gandhi, together with Martin Luther King and Leo Tolstoy, as models of a postmodern spirituality and ethics that transform postmodern relativism and eclecticism into the opportunity to follow a new spiritual and ethical path—“the way of all the earth”—the sharing of spiritual insight and ethical wisdom across religions and cultures in an age of globalization.31 And the students are invited “to embark on a similar journey through the world’s religions today.”32 The model might sound attractive in its openness, but a nonsystematic sharing of wisdom over religious boundaries cannot in itself guarantee the desired understanding and tolerance necessary for global peace. It presumes a more basic ethical level, which postmodern relativism denies. A global moral community requires an agreement on some fundamental ethical principles, either as rationally justified (for example, natural law) or in a contractual form. This is important, as religions otherwise might share their worst practices as human sacrifices, religious warfare, and caste systems. Usually, as for Esposito, Fasching, and Lewis, the implicit moral framework is, therefore, a variant on social liberalism based on a radical openness to the Other and an affirmation of the inherent value of the human individual. The foremost question for religions in a post-metaphysical world is, thus, unsurprisingly, that of a global ethics, not salvation.33 If previously religious 28 29 30 31 32 33 John L. Esposito, Darrell Fasching, and Todd Lewis, Religion and Globalization: World Religions in Historical Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 7. Esposito et al., Religion and Globalization, 551. Esposito et al., Religion and Globalization, 551. Esposito et al., Religion and Globalization, 550. Esposito et al., Religion and Globalization, 33. See, for example, the foundation for a global ethic (Weltethos [weltethos.org]), initiated by the controversial Catholic theologian Hans Küng, who also wrote the draft of the declaration “The Global Ethic,” which was ratified by the 1993 Parliament of World Religions (on the centenary of the first meeting in Chicago in 1893). Even if the declaration bases itself on a presumed ethical consensus among religions, there is God, the Absolute Wise Man, and the Study of Religion 1219 cosmologies and engaging narratives (myths) anchored the central moral values of different peoples, now religions are expected to affirm a universal ethical code of hospitality, friendship, and understanding. The implicit frame is a secular, liberal, world society and its understanding of life and morality. In this openness toward different religions, their affirmations of something transcending the natural world are domesticated by a relativism as regards spiritual truth and tempered by the expectation that a new form of religion, more adapted to the new era, will soon emerge. The Spiritual Wisdom of Religious Studies Even if many forms of religious studies are explicitly atheist or strictly methodologically naturalist, as have been recent strands of cognitive studies of religion,34 there have been and still are traditions of supernatural wisdom, particularly within comparative religion and history of religions. The important point to understand when constructing a Catholic religious studies endeavor is that these are also thoroughly modern and, therefore, fit nicely (despite clashes) with the vision of a religion of humanity, with an added spiritual and (perhaps) ritual dimension. Most positions within religious studies that are open to transcendence do not focus on human reason, but on pre-rational traits supposedly common to all religions. Instead of dogmas, the interest is, typically, in interior mystical experiences interpreted as evidence of a unitary spiritual substrate behind the bewildering plurality of rituals, texts, and prayers. Consequently, such forms of natural religion rely (as the empirical sciences) on human experiences and not (at least explicitly) on metaphysics. This is important to keep in mind, as it harmonizes well with the focus on the human person, the subject of experience, and the idea (of, for example, Durkheim) that there is a vital reality behind all the exuberant mythology of theism. 34 no indication that justice extends into a life after death. The focus is exclusively on the earth and the transformation of “individual and collective consciousness,” increasing “awareness by disciplining our minds, by meditation, by prayer, or by positive thinking,” with the goal of “socially beneficial, peace-fostering, and nature-friendly ways of life” (quote originally from parlaimentofreligions.org version of Küng’s work, which is no longer easily found online, but was published as A Global Ethic for Global Politics and Economics in 1998 by Oxford University Press). For an overview of the cognitive study of religion, see Jason D. Slone and William W. McCorkle, The Cognitive Science of Religion: A Methodological Introduction to Key Empirical Studies (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). 1220 Clemens Cavallin The openness to transcendence within religious studies comes in two major versions: the esoteric and the modernist Christian. The wisdom of the Theosophical Society (founded in 1875 in New York) and similar movements rests on the premise that all religions contain hidden grains of spiritual knowledge and that, with a comparative method (and access to unique revelations), one can recover this lost ancient wisdom. It is, therefore, no surprise that Western esotericism was a crucial inspiration for the first World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 initiated by the Swedenborgian, Charles Bonney (1831–1903). The guiding idea was that of an experiential unity behind the plurality of outer dogmatic forms, a basis that provided a bridge between the spiritualties of the East and the West, opening up for the later New Age movement. In 1895, when looking back to the World Parliament two years earlier, Bonney wrote: In a certain high and representative sense, the Parliament of Religions was an exemplification of monism in religion. For it showed that with all the differences in the forms of religion, there is, nevertheless, something underlying them all, which constitutes an incorruptible and indestructible bond of brotherhood, which, like a golden cord, binds all the races of men in one grand fraternity of love and service.35 This idea of a spiritual and ethical brotherhood resurfaces now and then within the study of mysticism in the form of “perennialism” (the positing of a type of transcultural mystical experience), for example, the notion of a “pure consciousness event formulated by Robert Forman: A pure consciousness event may [be] defined as follows: the subject is awake, conscious, but without an object or content for consciousness—no thoughts, emotions, sensations, or awareness of any external phenomena. There is an utter blank. There is not even the thought that “I am experiencing X” or “Oh, now I am having an extraordinary experience.” Yet neither is the subject sleeping, for he may afterwards confidently report that he was not asleep. Because this state differs so markedly from ordinary experiences, 35 Charles C. Bonney, “The World’s Parliament of Religions,” The Monist 5, no. 3 (1895): 321–44, at 323. God, the Absolute Wise Man, and the Study of Religion 1221 we may not want to call it an experience: let us call it the pure consciousness event.36 Perennialist forms of religious studies are parallel with nineteenth-century reformulations of Asian religious traditions of which a prominent example is the monism of neo-advaita Vedanta. It was informed by Western idealism that, in its turn, was mediated by transcendentalism, unitarianism, and variants of esotericism.37 In harmony with Durkheim’s idealized sacred individual, the transcendent principle is a deified modern subject, a cosmic Self, who constructs both individuality and the world. The goal is to rest in the self-awareness of pure subjectivity. For example, on the final pages of his textbook Comparing Religions, Jeffrey Kripal (1962–), professor of philosophy and religious thought at Rice University, indicates his own understanding of religion and mysticism as ultimately relying on the Self. It is a principle behind all experiences, which constructs a human person in the interaction with a human body. Kripal suggests that the brain functions like a filter channeling the absolute Self: It seems more likely that the human personality is created from the interaction of the energy of consciousness and the biological TV that is a human being. It is as if the cosmos evolved a biological organism to broadcast and watch itself.38 And, as usual, the final lines of the book point to the future spirituality: We might imagine a future form of consciousness becoming aware not of just more and more culture and more and more cognition, but of consciousness itself.39 36 37 38 39 Robert K. C. Forman, “Pure Consciousness Events and Mysticism,” Sophia 25 (1986): 49–58, at 49. Elizabeth De Michelis, A History of Modern Yoga: Patañjali and Western Esotericism (London: Continuum, 2004); Kay Koppedrayer, “Hybrid Constructions: Swami Vivekananda's Presentation of Hinduism at the World’s Parliament of Religions, 1893,” Religious Studies and Theology 23, no.1 (2004): 7–34. Jeffrey J. Kripal, Comparing Religions: Coming to Terms (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 391. Kripal, Comparing Religions, 392. 1222 Clemens Cavallin A similar perennialist premise informed some earlier forms of comparative religion (often under the name “phenomenology of religion”) that emerged within the post-Kantian world of liberal Protestantism. The Lutheran theologian and scholar of comparative religion Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) famously formulated such a unitary principle in his book The Idea of the Holy, published in 1917.40 According to his friend Nathan Söderblom (1866–1931), the archbishop of the Lutheran state church of Sweden and historian of religions, Otto made the “Holy” primary (or the “Numinous” as he named it—an impersonal divine power), and the idea of a personal god secondary. According to Otto, the human response in relation to this completely different reality is awe: fear (“daemonic dread”) mingled with fascination. Such transformative experiences constitute the origin of religion and are present in all religions, especially in their mystical traditions, forming a fundamental revelation underlying all dogmas. Although Otto acknowledges Christian ideas about God, and at different places inserts passages extolling the superior nature of Christianity, the focus is on human emotional reactions; and the characterization of the “Divine” does not proceed much beyond that of an irrational power. In an earlier book, where he defends religious belief against naturalism, Otto writes: It is only in exaltation, in quiet enthusiasm, that religious feelings can come to life and become pervasive, and religious truth can only become a possession available for everyday use in proportion as it is possible to make this non-secular and exalted state of mind permanent.41 Knowledge of God My reason for bringing up different wisdom discourses that have influenced religious studies—the secular humanist, esoteric, and Christian modernist—was to show that Aquinas’s understanding of truth as naturally involving teaching (with its affirmations and denials) and an ordering of human life also applies to religious studies. The principal challenge for 40 41 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1924 [originally1917]). Rudolf Otto, Naturalism and Religion, trans. J. Arthur Thomson (London: Williams & Norgate, 1907 [originally 1904]), 13. God, the Absolute Wise Man, and the Study of Religion 1223 a Catholic religious studies is, therefore, not to reconcile a value-neutral scientific study with a normative theological one, but to take a stand vis-à-vis the rejection of metaphysics and the ensuing relativism as regards knowledge of the divine and fundamental moral principles. In its different forms (ontological or methodological), naturalism gives rise to particular modern forms of wisdom: sometimes materialist, sometimes spiritual, but with common characteristics. This means that a Catholic religious studies cannot simply import theories and methods from its secular analogue in order to complement Catholic theology in its systematization and interpretation of divine revelation. Thomas Aquinas acknowledged that “some truths about God exceed all the ability of the human reason,” but he maintained, “there are some truths which the natural reason also is able to reach.”42 This provides a foundation for rational critique of belief and puts a limit on the sharing between religions, as it judges some ideas of the divine to be false, and therefore in need of correction. Such a natural knowledge of God also functions as a safeguard against Christian theology retreating under pressure from the natural sciences and technology into an understanding of God as a completely mysterious, irrational power. Moreover, instead of the implicit liberal ethics presumed by most versions of religious studies, Aquinas argues (though not in SCG) that there are fundamental moral principles knowable by human reason, that is, natural law. This ought to be then, if we follow Aquinas, the ethical foundation for a conversation about and between religions.43 The disturbing alternative is otherwise that, after having acknowledged the inevitable value-oriented nature of religious studies, one must admit there is no rational way of knowing which these values should be. They are then simply the outcome of choice (and ultimately rest on power and preferences). An example of such a position is the following defense of “critical religion” by Warren Goldstein in a response to the critique by Russel McCutcheon.44 To criticize, to critique, is to hold humans and their actions to a higher set of ideals, which are ultimately based on values (whatever they may be), values of truth, equality, freedom, democracy, and justice, among others. These values are historically situated and 42 43 44 SCG I, ch. 3. See instead ST I–II, q. 91, a. 2. Russell T. McCutcheon, Fabricating Religion: Fanfare for the Common E.G. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018), ch. 6. 1224 Clemens Cavallin contingent; they therefore are contested and subject to revision, but understandings of them evolve as societies develop, thus they are potentially emancipatory.45 If all values are contingent, then so is also emancipation, which is here put forward as a transhistorical ideal, fulfilling much the same function of ultimate goal as salvation in Christian theology. Instead, a Thomist position insists that the good, as a transcendental, is coextensive with being. The reach of our knowledge, therefore, gives rise to variants of wisdom, because “no one tends with desire and zeal toward something that is not already known to him.”46 If we either deny the existence of the supernatural or claim that it is completely beyond the reach of human reason, then, as a matter of course, individuals and society will order their lives toward what we actually know. This means that a Catholic religious studies will be animated by a quite different wisdom compared with secular forms of religious studies, even if it does not use revelation as a primary source for its arguments. Nevertheless, one could claim that this optimism regarding human rationality (in natural theology and natural law) applies only to a Thomist position and not to a Catholic one as such. In response, we must acknowledge that the Catholic Church has affirmed at its highest dogmatic level the possibility of rational knowledge of God. The First Vatican Council (1868–1870) declared: The same holy mother church holds and teaches that God, the source and end of all things, can be known with certainty from the consideration of created things, by the natural power of human reason: ever since the creation of the world, his invisible nature has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made (Rom 1:20).47 This 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church appeals to this statement by Vatican I shortly after teaching: 45 46 47 Warren Goldstein, “What Makes Critical Religion Critical? A Response to Russell McCutcheon Critical Research on Religion,” Critical Research on Religion 8, no. 1 (2020): 73–86, at 84. SCG I, ch. 5, no. 2. First Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, De Filius, ch. 2, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman Tanner, vol. 2, From Trent to Vatican II (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 804–11. God, the Absolute Wise Man, and the Study of Religion 1225 The world, and man, attest that they contain within themselves neither their first principle nor their final end, but rather that they participate in Being itself, which alone is without origin or end. Thus, in different ways, man can come to know that there exists a reality which is the first cause and final end of all things, a reality “that everyone calls God.”48 In probing the idea of a Catholic religious studies, we therefore cannot reject the so-called “preambles of faith” without having to question also the teaching authority of the Church.49 The Non-Contradiction of Truth Even if a Catholic study of religions, as religious studies in general, does not directly argue from a divine revelation of truths unavailable to unaided human reason, it cannot contradict those proposed as dogma by the Church and stay Catholic in a strong sense. In SCG I, ch. 7, Aquinas writes: Since, therefore, only the false is opposed to the true, as is clearly evident from an examination of their definitions, it is impossible that the truth of faith should be opposed to those principles that the human reason knows naturally. In other words, what is true in a study of religions cannot be false in dogmatic theology, and vice versa; either the first or the second must change. That theological opinions change, for example, in a theology of religions, is no principal problem—for example, by adjusting to the expanding knowledge of the world’s religions both in history and in the contemporary world. However, what the Catholic Church has declared solemnly as binding on the conscience of Catholics cannot be contradicted without undermining the Catholicity of that form of religious studies. The Catholic ideal of a harmonious unity between natural and revealed knowledge, between nature and grace, is, of course, not a goal toward which a secular study of religion strives—as it would make it confessional 48 49 Catechism of the Catholic Church (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1994), §34 (the concluding formula quoted from ST I, q. 2, a. 3). For a defense of the praeambula fidei, see Ralph McInerny, Praeambula Fidei: Thomism and the God of the Philosophers (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006). 1226 Clemens Cavallin and blunt its critical edge—while, on the other hand, this ideal provides a Catholic religious studies with its particular character and mission. However, even a document as Theology Today: Perspectives, Principles and Criteria, released in 2011 by the papal International Theological Commission, does not include a consideration of the possibility of a Catholic religious studies. Instead, it portrays religious studies as essentially an outside perspective: Religious sciences/studies deal with texts, institutions and phenomena of the Christian tradition, but by the nature of their methodological principles they do so from outside, regardless of the question as to the truth of what they study; for them, the Church and its faith are simply objects for research like other objects.50 Indeed, even if the International Theological Commission acknowledges that religious studies are presently “integrated into the fabric of theological methods,” it states that: There remains, however, an essential difference between theology and religious sciences/studies: theology has the truth of God as its subject and reflects on its subject with faith and in the light of God, while religious sciences/studies have religious phenomena as their subject and approach them with cultural interests, methodologically prescinding from the truth of the Christian faith.51 However, to integrate approaches that consider faith as “simply objects for research” into Catholic theology undermines the wisdom that is essential to theology and emphasized in Theology Today. It is this which makes a Catholic religious studies necessary, even if, from the perspective of the International Theological Commission, it might sound like a contradiction in terms. On the other hand, in the following paragraph, the commission sharply criticizes the rejection of theology from the sciences, and it reserves for theology the role of liberating the sciences from “anti-theological elements acquired under the influence of rationalism.” However, upholding at the same time that rationalism is part of the basic program of religious studies, and affirming that, to a large extent, it has been integrated 50 51 International Theological Commission, Theology Today: Perspectives, Principles and Criteria (2011), §83. International Theological Commission, Theology Today, §83. God, the Absolute Wise Man, and the Study of Religion 1227 into the work of theology, such a liberation must also be a task within theology itself. And a variant of religious studies inspired by Aquinas’s work is precisely a discipline who has rejected rationalism and its hard limitation of rationality. Conclusion When looking at religious studies from the perspective of wisdom, inspired by Thomas Aquinas’s presentation of the office of the wise man, the particular nature of a Catholic religious studies becomes both clearer and more difficult. Two very distinct types of wisdom arise from the difference between, on the one hand, a modernist epistemology, dominant in religious studies, in which the divine is considered beyond the grasp of human rationality (or glimpsed through mystical experiences as an irrational force or pure subjectivity), and on the other hand, the Catholic insistence on a set of truths available to human reason in relation to the divinity. The first is oriented toward human society (national and global) as its highest good, while the second directs both studies and society toward God, thereby opening them up for divinization as an integral aspect of scholarship. Even the most neutral, objective, and secular of contemporary religious studies is, then, by necessity, a form of “absolute” wisdom, despite its goal being contingent, fluid, and ever changing. The true and the good are intertwined concerns that cannot be separated easily, since the limits of reason affirm or deny rationality to religious beliefs and actions, something which has important consequences for the ordering of piety and society. By both upholding the principle of non-contradiction (unity of knowledge) and deferring from contradicting the truths of Christian revelation, a Catholic religious studies strives toward harmony not only with natural theology but also with Church teachings. This makes necessary a conversation with various theological disciplines, but also with relevant disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. A tall order by any means. Religious studies in its Catholic version is, however, not a subspecies of the theology of religions, at least not in a simple way, even if there are overlapping concerns. A Catholic study of religion has to investigate also the long history of religious beliefs and practices (both good and evil), their permutations in relation to modernity, and the present situation of religion and globalization, and probe the deeper basis for rituals and myths, both by empirical research and by the construction of falsifiable theories. One 1228 Clemens Cavallin cannot, therefore, deduce the results of Catholic religious studies from the principles of dogmatic theology. A Catholic religious studies is theological in the sense of being part of a larger theological venture; but its focus on the rich world of religions and spiritualities, and the task of knowing this in detail and with adequate theoretical depth, provides it with a distinct character. Similarly, an empirical psychology that acknowledges the existence of the soul and the working of divine grace fulfills a unique role vis-à-vis theological anthropology. Thomas Aquinas’s integration of Aristotelean philosophy and science into his theological system can be an inspiration for the development of a genuinely Catholic religious studies. But it has to struggle with being true, at the same time, to the natural knowledge of the divine, to the task of painstaking research into the history and nature of religions, and to the divine revelation of which the Catholic Church is the caretaker. With the clarification of what a truly Catholic religious studies would be like comes also an understanding of the difficulty involved in its realization. In the high Middle Ages, when Aquinas wrote the Summa contra gentiles, the overarching wisdom of society was Christian, and thereby supernaturally oriented. The university, even if at times rocked by theological disputes, was an institution within this wider social reality. Today, on the other hand, religious studies is set within the context of multireligious secular(izing) societies and globalization. The guiding (liberal or totalitarian) wisdom traditions of this world build on the relativization of religious truth claims. This transforms religions into lifestyle choices subordinated to the goal of social coherence and unity, of brotherhood and fraternity, resting on a common moral platform necessary for peaceful coexistence— or national strength. Due to its fundamental principles, a Catholic religious studies inevitably disturbs such a vision exalting solidarity and social coherence as “absolute.” Its present countercultural nature, therefore, makes it a rare phenomenon, as also Catholic universities to a large degree have embraced a post-metaphysical foundation for the study of religions. Even when universities specialize in Catholic theology, the resources and commitment necessary for a comparative and theoretically strong discipline of religious studies (with its historical, philological, and cultural studies components) make the theology endeavor mostly a low priority in comparison with interreligious studies and its application in interreligious dialogue. Religious studies focuses on religion itself (not only on interactions between religious traditions) and sees critique as an integral part of scholarship. For example, it lifts developments as the parallel phenomena of God, the Absolute Wise Man, and the Study of Religion 1229 increasing de-Christianization and the growth of alternative spiritualties in Western societies, including the overwhelming presence of the latter in popular culture. It discusses religious radicalization and terrorism, besides social integration. In this way, it is as disruptive as constructive. The twofold wisdom of a teacher includes, after all, both affirmation and denial, animated as much by love of truth as by “hatred” of falsehood and lies. And it is in this intersection between the contemplative concern of absolute wisdom and the practical wisdom of ordering human society and religion that the work of religious studies has to be carried out. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2022): 1231–1248 1231 Vetera Novis Augere et Perficere: Thomas Aquinas and Christian–Muslim Dialogue Joseph Ellul, O.P. Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas Rome, Italy Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical letter Aeterni Patris, issued on August 4, 1879, sought to address many issues that were challenging nineteenth-century Catholic scholarship and academic life. In proposing the thought of Thomas Aquinas as a model of Catholic teaching, the Pope intended, in his own words, “to strengthen and complete the old by aid of the new,”1 not only by reviving the study of the works and teachings of the Angelic Doctor, especially in the realm of philosophy, but also to uphold as perennial his method of engaging with his contemporaries within and without the Catholic faith.2 It is within this context that we are called upon to reflect upon this appeal: “vetera novis augere et perficere.” The thirteenth century was indeed a time of intellectual upheaval, following the introduction of Aristotle and, later on, the translations into Latin of the Arabic commentaries on Aristotle by Ibn Rušd (Lat. Averröes; d. 1198). This event was met within the ecclesiastical world with apprehension, if not outright fear. Neo-Platonic philosophy and its interpretation by Ibn Sīnā (Lat. Avicenna; d. 1037) was already perfectly acceptable to Mediaeval Christian scholars. The latter was in fact considered an essential tool for understanding the illuminationist thought of St. Augustine. Étienne Gilson even spoke of Augustinisme avicennisant (Avicennized 1 2 Aeterni Patris (1879), §24. It was the same pope who a year later, through a brief entitled Cum Hoc Sit promulgated on August 4, 1880, declared Aquinas “Patron of Catholic Schools and Universities.” 1232 Joseph Ellul, O.P. Augustinianism).3 The problem was Aristotle and his renowned commentator Ibn Rušd: a pagan commented on by an infidel. One must also note, however, that mediaeval Western intellectuals and institutions were able to encounter and adapt the Islamic legacy, because they already possessed a sufficient scientific base (with of course the contribution of translations of Greek together with Latin works) with which to understand, assimilate, and build upon this new knowledge that appeared from the East. In sum, mediaeval Christendom created living, vibrant societies, constantly searching, always discovering something new. In dealing with the specific (and delicate) subject of Aquinas’s dialogue with Islamic thought, it would be necessary to reflect in particular upon two key works of his: the Liber de Veritate Catholicae Fidei contra Errores Infidelium (A Book on the Truth of the Catholic Faith against the Errors of Unbelievers),4 popularly known as the Summa contra gentiles [SCG], together with his De rationibus fidei contra Saracenos, Græcos et Armenos ad Cantorem Antiochenum, better known simply as De rationibus fidei. At this point it would be necessary to articulate the term “Islamic thought.” Of itself it should not be identified with Islam as a religion. Rather, it should be considered as embracing classical Greek philosophy as interpreted by the Neo-Platonic movement and disseminated through Oriental Christian and Jewish schools of thought. Islamic civilization absorbed these teachings and built its own proper edifice upon these foundations. A Model for Interreligious Dialogue? Proposing Thomas Aquinas as a model for engagement with Islamic thought may also raise a few eyebrows. Hence, it would be appropriate to pose an essential question: “What type of dialogue existed in mediaeval times?” One should begin with an a priori exclusion of dialogue as it is understood today, given the fact that there existed neither the motive nor the means to implement it. In fact mediaeval society was aware of only three religions: the pagan, which had been replaced by Christianity; the Jewish, founded upon the precepts of the First Covenant which “Christ fulfilled by his actions and 3 4 Étienne Gilson, “Pourquoi Saint Thomas a critique Saint Augustin,” Les archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 1 (1926): 5–126. This is the earliest title given to this work. See René-Antoine Gauthier, Somme contre les gentils (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1993). Thomas Aquinas and Christian–Muslim Dialogue 1233 by his teaching”5 and which was also believed to prefigure the everlasting New Covenant sealed by Jesus on the Cross; and finally, the Christian, which believed in Jesus as the final revelation of God to humanity.6 With such a vision in mind it is obvious that any doctrine that is not situated within these parameters, or which proposes some form of belief or conduct which was different from, if not contrary to, the Christian vision of God, the cosmos, and society, would be considered as heretical and its promoter an impostor.7 When Islam made its appearance in the Christian world, it carried with it a book that it considered of divine provenance, and therefore sacred, and which included narratives parallel to those present in the Bible, some of which were similar and some very different. The book also included a denial of the two fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith dating back to the first centuries of Christianity—the Trinity and the Incarnation— although one has to add here that the Trinity that is being rejected is by no means that espoused by the Christian faith.8 Therefore, it was obvious 5 6 7 8 Summa theologiae [ST] I-II, q. 107, a. 2, corp. All citations of the ST are taken from St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Blackfriars Latin–English ed., with notes and introductions, 61 vols. (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode; and New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964–1980). The Letter to the Hebrews states in fact: “In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the ages” (Heb. 1:1–2). Scripture quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version, 2nd Catholic ed. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006). Richard Fletcher, The Cross and the Crescent: Christianity and Islam from Muhammad to the Reformation (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 158. It is necessary to recall that every single Muslim is conscious of this exclusive right of God to be worshipped by his creatures (Qurʾan 51:56; the Qurʾan will henceforth be abbreviated as “Q.” in citations), which implies an outright rejection of all “association” (širk; see Q. 4:48.116) and, therefore, of all idolatry. In discussing the Christian belief in the Trinity, the Qurʾan refers to three (talāta) as a cardinal number indicating three things or individuals, and therefore a triad: “Those people who say that God is the third of three are defying [the truth]: there is only One God. If they do not stop what they are saying, a painful punishment will afflict those of them who persist” (Q. 5:73). One is further led by the Qurʾan to understand that the Christian exposition of the Trinity denotes God (as father), Jesus (as son), and Mary (as mother, thereby implying that she is God’s consort), thereby giving the impression that what Christians believe involves God in the carnal generation of a son through a human mother: “When God says, ‘Jesus, son of Mary, did you say to people, “Take me and my mother as two gods alongside God”?’ he will say, ‘May you be exalted! I would never say what I had no right to say—if I had said any such thing You would have known it: You know all that is within me, though I do not know what is within You. You alone have full knowledge of things 1234 Joseph Ellul, O.P. that Islam was initially considered a heresy and its prophet (whose second claim to notoriety was that of having practiced polygamy) a lustful and ambitious deceiver or even the antichrist.9 Hence mediaeval Christendom’s hostility toward Islam as a religion. It is therefore no small wonder that Dante’s encyclopaedic masterpiece La Divina Commedia went on to place Muḥammad in the eighth circle of hell in the company of those who sow discord (Inferno, canto 28, lns. 22–26). Furthermore, it is necessary to underline the fact that in those times the existence and dissemination of heresy was not understood as an exercise in freedom of expression, but rather as the cause of social upheaval that could threaten political, social, and cultural harmony, which was expected to mirror the harmony of the celestial realm. Aquinas was undoubtedly a scholar of his times, and the way he expressed himself with reference to Muslims from a purely religious point of view would today be considered shocking and unacceptable. A cursory glance at what Thomas has to say in his SCG and in De rationibus fidei about Islam and Muḥammad can be disheartening to those who choose to take the path of Muslim–Christian dialogue. Certainly, his position concerning Muḥammad in chapter 6 of SCG I is, to say the least, brutal. But this is just one aspect of his multifaceted scholarship. We need to recall that the mediaeval thinker was also a person who had a passion for knowledge; he was always prepared to initiate an exchange of ideas in order to arrive at the truth. Saint Thomas Aquinas was one of the major proponents 9 unseen—I told them only what you commanded me to: “Worship God, my Lord and your Lord.” I was a witness over them during my time among them. Ever since You took my soul, You alone have been the watcher over them: You are witness to all things”’” (Q. 5:116). It is quite possible that contemporary Christian fringe groups thought in terms of a Trinity of God the Father, God the Mother, and God the Son. Already, in the fourth century, pre-Islamic Arabia had been described by Eusebius of Caesarea as Arabia haeresium ferax (“Arabia, a land fertile in heresies”). Whereas for the Qurʾan Christians remain “People of the Book” (Ahl al-Kitāb), there always remains a certain hesitation as to whether they should be deemed monotheists (see, for example, Q. 2:62; 3:110–15; 4:55; 5:69.82), unbelievers (kuffār; see Q. 5:17.72–73; 9:30), or associators (mušrikūn; see 5:72). The same hesitation is to be found amongst Muslim exegetes. The renowned mediaeval Muslim exegete Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1209) recognizes that no Christian of his time believes that the Trinity includes Mary; to his mind, this was perhaps the belief of a sect which has disappeared. Concerning the denial of the Incarnation, see Q. 4:171; 5:72; 19:35–37; see also Q. 9:30. The above-quoted verses of the Qurʾan in English are taken from The Qurʾan: An English Translation, by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). See W. Montgomery Watt, The Influence of Islam on Medieval Europe, Islamic Surveys 9 (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 1972), 73. Thomas Aquinas and Christian–Muslim Dialogue 1235 of such discourse, and it is precisely within this context that we discover in him a man of dialogue, not only with the philosophical currents of his time, but also with the religious, including Islam. The main concern of Aquinas was that of learning from them in his search for the truth. In this respect he epitomized the mediaeval respect for learning, with its conviction that “truth was where one found it.” Thus, in the words of David Burrell, “he was more inclined to examine the arguments of thinkers than their faith, trusting in the image of the creator in us all to search out traces of the divine handiwork.”10 The Summa contra gentiles: Some Preliminary Considerations Our point of departure, however must be the period and the circumstances within which the SCG was written. According to Marie-Dominique Chenu, in the 1250s Arab-Islamic culture was already considered “the strongest exponent of ancient Greek science and philosophy; it represented both a threat and a temptation for the Latin West.” To his mind, the missionary effort triggered by the Reconquista almost two centuries after the event thus “evolved into a new style because Islam showed itself to be not only a military menace, but also a culturally superior civilization.”11 As already stated above, the works of Aristotle that were meticulously commented by Ibn Rušd opened up for Christian scholars “a scientific view of the universe apart from the Bible’s religious imagery,”12 a view that necessitated an urgent response on their part. Thus, the Christian missionary spirit could not be separated from the learning that was being disseminated in the intellectual milieu of the time. Consequently, the SCG “saw itself as rather a defence of the whole corpus of Christian thought in the face of the Arab-Greek scientific conception of the universe that was henceforth to be a part of the Western mentality.”13 Here, of course, Chenu is speaking of engagement with Islamic thought. Burrell suggests that Aquinas’s own geographic and social origins could well have predisposed him to a closer relationship with thinkers representing the Islamic world than his contemporaries, in Paris at least, could 10 11 12 13 David B. Burrell, C.S.C., “Thomas Aquinas and Islam,” in Aquinas in Dialogue: Thomas for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Jim Fodor and Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 68. Marie-Dominique Chenu, Aquinas and His Role in Theology, trans. Paul Philibert, O.P. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2002), 65. Chenu, Aquinas, 65. Chenu, Aquinas, 66. 1236 Joseph Ellul, O.P. be presumed to have had. For his provenance from Aquino in the region of Naples, itself part of the kingdom of Sicily, reflected a face of Europe more open to the Islamic world.14 This is corroborated by the fact that, following his initial education with the Benedictines in the monastery of Montecassino, he continued his studies at the University of Naples, which had just been established by Emperor Frederick II, a distant relative of his; this was prior to his entering the Order of Preachers. Furthermore, in his later years, when his Dominican province asked him to direct a theological studium, Aquinas expressly chose Naples for its strategic location.15 Cyrille Michon appears to corroborate Chenu’s assertion when he states that “Aquinas is in dialogue with Averröes and Maimonides16 through large parts of Contra gentiles I–III, while he engages in further debates with pagan philosophers (about God’s immateriality at Book I ch. 20, about the intellect in Book II, and implicitly about conceptions of happiness in Book III).”17 Therefore, “the objective of Contra gentiles I–III is quite clear: reason alone, correct philosophy, including and based on correct reading and interpretation of Aristotle, leads to a large part of the catholic faith and sometimes establishes truths that are proper to it.”18 These two affirmations lead him to conclude that “the whole of the Contra gentiles appears as a massive argument or a body of arguments for the truth of the catholic faith. Most of them (I–III) take as premises naturally knowable truths (both empirical and rational ones), but those of Book IV rely on revelation and defend its correct interpretation and articulate conclusions drawn from it.”19 Furthermore, Michon draws a very interesting distinction between the goal of the Summa theologiae [ST] and that of the SCG. Whereas the aim of the first “is not so much to settle disputes over the truth as to reach understanding,” the aim of the second is that of “making the truths of faith 14 15 16 17 18 19 Burrell, “Thomas Aquinas and Islam,” 65. Burrell, “Thomas Aquinas and Islam,” 65. Here it is useful to refer to what has been judiciously pointed out by Mark Jordan as one of the fundamental differences in approach between Aquinas and the rabbi from Cordoba, in that “Maimonides writes obscurely for the just; Thomas writes publicly for a community of believers” (“The Protreptic of Against the Gentiles,” in Debates in Medieval Philosophy: Essential Readings and Contemporary Responses, ed. Jeffrey Hause [New York: Routledge, 2014], 248–70, at 259). Cyrille Michon, “To Make the Truth Known: The Aim and Structure of the Contra Gentiles,” in Hause, Debates in Medieval Philosophy, 271–84, at 280. Michon, “To Make the Truth Known,” 280. Michon, “To Make the Truth Known,” 281. This is confirmed by what Aquinas himself states in the Summa contra gentiles [SCG] I, ch. 9, no. 3. Thomas Aquinas and Christian–Muslim Dialogue 1237 understood. What is reached is not so much truth, the truth of faith per se, but the intellectus fidei.”20 He therefore concludes: They both synthesize the Christian doctrine, but one aims at making the truth known [SCG], the other [ST] at making it understood. The first one relies as much as possible on natural knowledge and philosophy and is philosophy made theology, the second proceeds only through rational arguments and is theology made philosophy or, better, philosophy of faith.21 That having been said, one must take caution in categorizing the first three books as philosophical and the fourth as theological. In the world of Aquinas, philosophy was not as independent a science as it became in the wake of the nominalist movement. As Matthew Kostelecky has rightly affirmed, the first part of this work (i.e., the first three books) “proceeds according to a theological method while restricting itself to the way of reason.” This modus procedendi leads to what he describes as “tensions that result from restricting the human truths about God to the natural capacities of the intellect within an explicitly theological endeavour.”22 In spite of what might have been the reason behind its composition, the SCG speaks to a vast audience of scholars and intellectuals hailing from a variety of cultures, religions, and schools of philosophy throughout the ages. Approaching the Summa contra gentiles It can be safely assumed that Aquinas began writing the SCG some time prior to June 1259 when both he and Albert the Great were present at the Dominican General Chapter at Valenciennes. It was probably completed and revised by the autumn of 1265, just as Thomas was about to embark upon the ST.23 The main focus of Aquinas in the SCG is on truth and error in general. Taking his cue from the Fathers of the Church, he addresses three classes of interlocutors: 20 21 22 23 Michon, “To Make the Truth Known,” 281–82. Michon, “To Make the Truth Known,” 283. Matthew Kostelecky, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa contra Gentiles: A Mirror of Human Nature (Leuven: Peeters, 2013), 5. Brian Davies, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles: A Guide and Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 8–9. See Gauthier, Somme Contre les Gentils. 1238 Joseph Ellul, O.P. 1. Heretics, that is to say, those who claim to be Christian but do not in fact embrace Orthodox beliefs; 2. Jews, to and through whom the Old Testament was revealed, but who, contrary to Christian belief, do not acknowledge its Christological culmination; 3. Muslims and pagans who, though religious, acknowledge neither the Old nor the New Testament in their canonical form.24 As for the relevance of Aquinas, especially through his SCG, as a methodological guide in our quest for a fresh and renewed encounter with Islamic thought, the late Joseph Kenny has left us this interesting observation: The arguments used in the Christian summas and the Muslim books of kalām25 are highly philosophical, but guided by what each tradition holds as revelation. They are at the same time books of apologetic theology and philosophy of religion. . . . [The] first three of the four volumes [of the SCG] build carefully the shared vision held by Christians and Muslims alike. They bring supportive insight from Christian reflection which has been foundational for the development of Western culture. In the present developments of interchange between East and West these insights attained by reason in a context of deep faith can constitute a veritable treasure chest for Islamic thinkers as they build toward the future.26 Kostelecky is correct in assuming that the SCG “is directed to one goal: an elucidation of the human knowledge of God.”27 But he also went on to state that its investigation about God “is also an inquiry into the nature of the human being who investigates God,”28 thereby corroborating what he 24 25 26 27 28 SCG I, ch. 2, no. 3. Kalām is Muslim theology broadly speaking. Joseph Kenny, Christian-Islamic Preambles of Faith: An Exercise in the Philosophy of Religion or Kalām for Our Day, Modelled after Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, Books I–III (Washington, DC: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1999), v. Kostelecky, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa contra Gentiles, 1. Kostelecky, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa contra Gentiles, 217. Thomas Aquinas and Christian–Muslim Dialogue 1239 had already affirmed earlier that “Thomas’s understanding of human nature is itself manifested in his account of the operation and power of the human intellect to know God (the intellect’s most perfect object).”29 The one who embarks upon such a mission is regarded by Thomas as being a “wise man.” In the SCG the term “wise” (sapientes) is attributed to those “who order things rightly and govern them well”30 (qui res directe ordinant et eas bene gubernant). However, the appellation “absolutely wise man” (nomen autem simpliciter sapientis) is “reserved for him whose consideration is directed to the end of the universe, which is also the origin of the universe.” In this perspective, truth becomes “the ultimate end of the whole universe, and the consideration of the wise man aims principally at truth.”31 That truth of Thomas is, of course, Jesus Christ, whose own words he quotes from John 18:37 (“For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice”). He further elucidates his thought by first detailing his terminus ad quem. The wise man has a twofold office: To meditate and speak forth of the divine truth, which is truth in person (wisdom touches on this in the words my mouth shall meditate truth) and to refute error (which wisdom touches upon in the words and my lips shall hate impiety).32 By impiety is here meant falsehood against the divine truth.33 He later explains his rationale as to his assuming the mission of the wise man, this being that “among all human pursuits, the pursuit of wisdom is more perfect, more noble, more useful, and more full of joy.”34 In fulfilling such a mission, Aquinas would be making extensive use of sources that were not necessarily Christian. Certainly, Sacred Scripture and the Fathers of the Church figure prominently in this work, and they did play a significant role in shaping his thoughts. There is, however, another element which is equally important, and that is his abundant use of the Aristotelian corpus together with the works of Islamic philosophers such as the eclectic Ibn Sīnā and “the Commentator” par excellence of Aristotle, namely Ibn Rušd. Here I wish to make a very brief digression whose purpose will become 29 30 31 32 33 34 Kostelecky, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa contra Gentiles, 1. SCG I, ch. 1, no. 1. SCG I, ch. 1, no. 2. See Prov 8:7. SCG I, ch. 1, no. 4. SCG I, ch. 1, no. 4. 1240 Joseph Ellul, O.P. clear as we proceed. Some sixty years before Thomas embarked upon the SCG, Ibn Rušd had formulated a very interesting description of philosophy in the robust defense of the study of philosophy and logic, which he penned under the title Kitāb Faṣl al-Maqāl (Decisive Treatise) He described it as “nothing more than reflection upon existing things and consideration of them insofar as they are an indication of the Artisan—I mean insofar as they are artefacts, for existing things indicate the Artisan only through cognizance35 of the art in them, and the more complete cognizance of the art in them is, the more complete is cognizance of the Artisan,”36 that is, God, as the Creator.37 Falsafa thus becomes theodicy, aiming to prove the existence of the Creator and to provide a better understanding of God. In all this, it is necessary to point out that the full title of Ibn Rušd’s treatise is Kitāb Faṣl al-Maqāl wa taqrīr mā bayn al-Šarīʿa wa ‘l-Ḥikma min al-ittiṣāl (The Book of the Decisive Treatise Determining the Connection between Šarīʿa and Wisdom). The title applies the term ḥikma (Wisdom) to philosophy. One of the ninety-nine Most Beautiful Names of God is in fact Al-Ḥakīm (the All-Wise).38 He is therefore implying that philosophy flows from divine wisdom. The fundamental difference between the approach taken by Ibn Rušd and that of Aquinas lies in the fact that the former was fighting for the survival of philosophy in the Islamic world,39 whereas when Thomas 35 36 37 38 39 Here the translator is rendering into English the term maʿrifa found in the original text. Averröes, The Book of the Decisive Treatise Determining the Connection between the Law and Wisdom and Epistle Dedicatory, trans. Charles E. Butterworth with introduction and notes (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2008), 1. It is interesting to note that Aquinas applies the same analogy in his commentary on the second book of the Sentences of Peter Lombard, wherein he discusses the act of creation through the Word at In II sent., q. 1, d. 12, a. 5: “But activity is called an act of the thing, even if it does not pass into the external, as understanding is an activity of intellect and can be without motion; hence the Philosopher says in Ethics 7 that God takes enjoyment from one simple operation, but in this way God acts eternally in the Word, as the artisan fashions the forms of artificial things” (trans. from isidore.co/ aquinas/english/Sentences2.htm). See also In I sent., q. 2, d. 36, a. 1, corp. See: Q. 31:27; 46:2; 57:1; 66:2. The Faṣl al-Maqāl is presented as an official fatwa or juridical decision determining the canonical status of philosophy. In fact, the status quæstionis posed by Ibn Rušd at the beginning of his work reads as follows: “Now, the goal of this statement is for us to investigate, from the perspective of Law-based reflection (al-naẓar al-šarʿī), whether reflection upon philosophy and the sciences of logic is permitted (mubāḥ), prohibited (maḥżūr), or commanded (maʾmūr bihi) – and this as a recommendation (ʿalā ğihat al-nadab) or as an obligation (ʿalā ğihat al-wuğūb) – by the Law (bī ’l-šarʿ)” (Averröes, The Book of the Decisive Treatise, 1). Thomas Aquinas and Christian–Muslim Dialogue 1241 Aquinas is posing the question in the ST of “Whether, besides philosophy, any further doctrine is required?,”40 he is implying that the existence of philosophy in Latin Christendom was a statement of fact. His question is whether another science is necessary besides philosophy. He therefore advances the argument in favor of reason enlightened by revelation. The De rationibus fidei If we are to consider the method of Aquinas as a basis for a renewed engagement with Islamic thought in our times, then it is necessary to read the SCG in conjunction with the other work which he penned toward the end of this one or almost immediately after its completion, which is his short treatise entitled De rationibus fidei contra Saracenos, Graecos et Armenos ad Cantorem Antiochenum.41 This opusculum was written during Aquinas’s sojourn at Orvieto and directed at a much more limited audience. It is of itself a short work and was intended to reply to the objections and criticisms to the fundamental principles of the Catholic faith put forward mainly by some Muslim authorities. These objections were brought to the attention of Thomas by a “cantor,” probably an official of the Church at Antioch, by way of a letter in which he sought advice as to how one could give clear, concise, and convincing replies.42 The period in which Thomas lived was marked by separation from and 40 41 42 Aquinas, ST I, q. 1, a. 1. For a translation of the text into English see De rationibus fidei contra Saracenos, Graecos et Armenos ad Cantorem Antiochenum, trans. Joseph Kenny, O.P., as “Reasons for the Faith against Muslim Objections,” Islamochristiana 22 (1996): 31–52. The translation was based on the 1968 Leonine edition of the work, vol. 40/B. Given the presence of so many religions within its territory, the city of Antioch, like the region of Al-Andalus (Spain), became a venue of regular disputes between Christian and Muslim interlocutors. Its population included Latin, Orthodox, and Armenian Christians, as well as indigenous Muslims. That being said, the situation in Antioch during the time in which the cantor to whom the treatise is addressed wrote the letter was indeed precarious. The city was already for quite some time under siege from the Mamluks under the leadership of the fearsome Baybars. This fact alone rendered the Muslim inhabitants bolder and more hopeful that the city would shortly fall into their hands. The Orthodox (that is to say, the Greeks) on the other hand were, to say the least, distrustful of the Latins, owing to the humiliations suffered by their co-religionists at Constantinople, when it fell into the hands of the Latin armies headed by the Venetians during the Fourth Crusade. The Armenians, for their part, were attempting to forge a secret alliance with the Mongols, who were settled in northern Syria and in neighboring Iraq, in the event of Antioch falling into the hands of Baybars, as it in fact did in May 1268, resulting in the ferocious slaughter of the entire Christian population. 1242 Joseph Ellul, O.P. relative ignorance of the Muslim religion. He himself admitted that he was not versed in its doctrines.43 The only exception concerned the situation of Christians in Muslim territories which is clearly reflected in the comprehensive replies to the questions posed by the “Cantor of Antioch,” in order to be better equipped when facing the objections raised against Christian doctrine on the part of Muslim scholars. The objections listed by the cantor are quoted in the introduction to the text. To these objections Aquinas furnishes replies which he divides into ten chapters, two of which define the correct method to be undertaken as regards dialogue. Another addresses the objection raised by the Greeks and the Armenians, whereas the remaining seven address the objections raised by the Muslims. Aquinas considers the questions posed as central to the Christian faith; the two fundamental dogmas being the confession of the Trinity and the mystery of the Incarnation that led to the salvific suffering and death of Jesus Christ. These fundamental beliefs lead to the articulation of Christian hope in life everlasting and in divine grace that assists man in his journey toward salvation. As Burrell remarks, in this short treatise, Thomas does not demonstrate any wish whatsoever to engage in polemics. Instead, he takes the opportunity to present a brief summary of Christian doctrine concerning those points identified by the cantor as being of particular importance to Muslims. He does not respond directly to the Muslim interlocutor. What he does is to furnish the cantor with a series of strategies in order to formulate an instructive and robust response that would take as a starting point the objections raised by Muslims in order to come up with an insightful presentation of the heritage of the Christian faith.44 In undertaking this task, Thomas teaches us that, by taking as a point of departure the objections moved by Muslims, one might find better ways to come up with a clearer exposition of the principles of the Christian faith. The chapters of this brief treatise are so structured because they are centred upon the exhortation of St. Peter (1 Pet 3:15): “Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the faith and the hope that is in you [Parati semper ad satisfactionem omni poscenti vos rationem de ea quae in vobis est fide et spe].” This text is quoted by Thomas in the first chapter of the treatise. Contrary to the original Greek 43 44 See SCG I, ch. 2. This succinct description captures the modus procedendi of St. Thomas wherein apologetics becomes also dialogue (see Burrell, “Thomas Aquinas and Islam,” 82). Thomas Aquinas and Christian–Muslim Dialogue 1243 text of the New Testament, which mentions only hope, the version which he uses adds to it the virtue of faith. As Gilles Emery has observed, the version chosen by Thomas serves a particular purpose, given that for him the Christian faith is contained above all in the confession of the Trinity and in the glorification of the Cross. These two articles of faith contain the entire body of Christian doctrine.45 He is concerned with placing particular emphasis on the Cross, which appears to have been the object of sarcasm among the Muslim interlocutors in Antioch. Furthermore, he wanted to demonstrate that faith in the humanity of Christ is inextricably linked to the profession of faith in the Cross. And here one must turn to the time-tested practice of analogy applied both by Thomas and by the Fathers of the Oriental churches. Aquinas applies this method many times in the De rationibus fidei when he conveys the meaning of what Christians believe about the intra-Trinitarian relationship (word-intellect, chs. 3–4), the Incarnation (soul-body, chs. 5–6), the suffering and death of Jesus on the Cross (dignity of the one receiving the injury, ch. 7), and divine predestination (the point and the line, ch. 10). Thomas Aquinas and Contemporary Interreligious Dialogue From what has already been stated above, it is evident that the approach adopted by Aquinas in what concerns disputations with fellow scholars depended upon their beliefs and level of engagement. He refers to this approach in both the above-mentioned SCG I, chapter 2 (no. 3), and in chapter 2 of De rationibus fidei, as well as in the third article of question 9 of Quodlibetales IV, which Thomas wrote after having finished both of these works. In the last we are presented with his most comprehensive approach to the matter, one in which he expresses himself with the utmost clarity: Each act should be performed in a way conducive to its end. Now, debates aim at one of two ends. Some debates aim to remove doubt about whether this or that is the case. In theological debates of this kind, most use should be made of the authority accepted by both parties to the debate. In a debate with Jews, for example, appeal should be made to the 45 See Saint Thomas d’Aquin: Les raisons de la foi, Les Articles de la foi, et Les sacrements de l’Église, Introduction, trans. Gilles Emery with notes [French] (Paris: Cerf, 1999), 21–22. 1244 Joseph Ellul, O.P. authority of the Old Testament. With Manicheans (who reject the Old Testament), only the New Testament should be used as an authority. With schismatics like the Greeks (who accept the Old and New Testament but not the teaching of our saints), we have to debate them using the authority of the Old and New Testament and the teachers they accept. With those who accept no authority, however, we have to rely on natural reason alone to convince them.46 Other debates involve masters at schools, and are not about correcting errors, but about instructing the audience and helping them understand the truth they already believe. In this case, reason should be used to get at the heart of the truth and enable them to know just how it is true. If the master settles the question by mere authority instead, the audience will certainly be assured that this or that is the case, but they will not acquire any knowledge or understanding of it, thus going away empty.47 It is obvious that the method adopted by St. Thomas sought first and foremost a common ground upon which a healthy debate could take place. Where Sacred Scripture (or part of it) was acknowledged by all those involved, then this could form a basis for discussion. Where Sacred Scripture was in no way accepted, then the sole use of natural reason was the only way forward. As stated already, Thomas had already espoused the same approach in the two previously mentioned works. Here perhaps it would be appropriate to discuss the meaning of the term “natural reason,” which he uses in these contexts in all three works. According to Brian Davies, this term denotes “philosophical insight” or “philosophy” or just “reason.” In fact, in the words of Davies, Aquinas “is referring to what we can figure out on our own by trying to think well and clearly and without recourse to anything that we might take to be divine revelation. More specifically, however, he is thinking of reason as able to demonstrate certain truths,” meaning that “he is going to try to demonstrate certain things about God, while adding that he will also be arguing that what he has demonstrated accords with orthodox Christian teaching.”48 46 47 48 As we have seen above, this category refers to Muslims and pagans. Thomas Aquinas’s Quodlibetal Questions, trans. Turner Nevitt and Brian Davies with introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 753–54. Davies, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles, 11–12. Davies explains here that, in the mind of Aquinas, orthodox Christian teaching is “found in the Bible, in creeds such as the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed, and in the teachings of church councils prior to his time.” Thomas Aquinas and Christian–Muslim Dialogue 1245 But then Thomas includes something else: instruction directed at helping others “understand the truth they already believe.” Here he advises the use of reason as a means for articulating divine teaching, thereby aiding the faithful toward deepening their faith. This is in fact the rationale suggested by the SCG and De rationibus fidei, to say nothing of the monumental ST. What remains to be considered is whether and, if so, how such a plan is relevant today in the ever-evolving debate between Christian and Muslim scholarship. Certainly, in such encounters, one does not seek a winner or a loser. The principal and ultimate aim is that of achieving clarity of presentation through clarity in communication. Aquinas was occupied with removing misunderstandings about what both parties might hold to be true and about what they assume to be the fundamental beliefs of the other. It is incumbent upon all those involved to pose precise questions but also to provide clear answers. Undoubtedly, a level of agreement, albeit limited, can be achieved; one must, however, accept that much disagreement will occur. These cannot be brushed aside; they have to be accepted as an integral part of our human nature. However, such disagreement must be stated clearly and accurately by all parties involved. Here it is paramount that Christian scholars offer the right understanding of what the Christian faith holds about the two fundamental dogmas upon which it stands: the Trinity (which, as stated above, is flatly denied by the Qurʾan, due to its erroneous interpretation of the dogma) and the Incarnation.49 Taking their cue from Thomas (and from the Fathers of the Church before him), Christian scholars are called upon to articulate the meaning of such dogmas in order to distinguish truth from falsity in the way they are understood. It involves understanding what an intelligent Muslim scholar thinks about what he or she knows regarding the Christian faith. It also involves responding to such concerns by applying concepts that he or she would understand. However, it is also imperative to note another common thread that flows through all three above-mentioned works. Aquinas succeeds in formulating a robust defense of Christian dogma in the wake of criticism leveled by non-Catholic and non-Christian scholars, while sustaining a heightened awareness of the necessity to deepen one’s Christian faith in the face of such challenges. He embraces the Dominican tradition in and through which study and contemplation become interchangeable. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has exquisitely portrayed this indissoluble bond 49 See note 8 above. 1246 Joseph Ellul, O.P. in the life and works of Thomas when referring to the perennial validity of the ST: In this reflection, in meeting the true questions of his time, that are also often our own questions, St. Thomas, also by employing the method and thought of the ancient philosophers, and of Aristotle in particular, thus arrives at precise, lucid and pertinent formulations of the truths of faith in which truth is a gift of faith, shines out and becomes accessible to us, for our reflection. However, this effort of the human mind Aquinas reminds us with his own life is always illumined by prayer, by the light that comes from on high. Only those who live with God and with his mysteries can also understand what they say to us.50 One must neither lose sight of the fact that Christian–Muslim encounters are essentially encounters involving believers. It is obvious that our knowledge of Islam as a religion and of the roots of its fundamental teachings has notably developed since the thirteenth century. And even during that period, the term “unbeliever” was not equivalent to “non-believer.” It simply meant somebody who denied the core beliefs of the other, without denying belief in the divine. Whereas the passion of Thomas for the truth could in no way have been quashed or compromised, the methodology that he adopted was one of dialogue. His abiding principle was that one must consider not who said what, but what was being said. Such a maxim spurred him on to confront and refute all opposition against the use of pagan and non-Christian authors. He was open to the truth from wherever it arrived, precisely because, following the glossa of Ambrosiaster,51 he was convinced that “every truth, by whomever it may be said, is from the Holy Spirit in the sense that he imparts the natural light and that he moves the mind to understand and utter the truth.”52 Thomas Aquinas paves the way for our journey when he affirms that “the good for man lies in knowing the truth, and his sovereign good lies, 50 51 52 Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience of June 23, 2010. See PL, 17:245. ST I-II, q. 109, a. 1. Aquinas reiterates this same concept when he stated that no spirit can be “so darkened as not to participate in some way in the divine light. In fact, every known truth from any source is totally due to this ‘light which shines in the darkness,’ since every truth, no matter who utters it, comes from the Holy Spirit” (Super Ioan 1, lec. 3, Mareitti no. 103 [commenting on v. 5; trans. mine]). Thomas Aquinas and Christian–Muslim Dialogue 1247 not in knowing any sort of truth, but the perfect knowledge of the supreme truth, as Aristotle shows.”53 In today’s world and in the present circumstances, one might take Aquinas’s statement a step further and argue also for the need to honor human dignity in order to seek such Truth. This point was recently highlighted by Archbishop Ivan Jurkovič, Apostolic Nuncio and Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva, at the presentation of the book The Promotion of Intercultural and Interreligious Dialogue as an Instrument for Peace and Fraternity that took place in Jedda (Saudi Arabia).54 In his speech delivered during the event he affirmed that: Human beings are created in the image and likeness of God in their moral, spiritual, and intellectual and bodily composition. They are part of His plan and, therefore, must not be deprived in any way either of their humanity, which is the source of one’s dignity, or of their right to seek and express Truth. While human dignity is the premise that allows a dialogue among different cultures (also non-religious ones), the pursuit of Truth permits an authentic encounter between various religions confessions.55 Aquinas’s engagement with Muslim scholars offers supportive insight for Christian reflection which has for centuries laid the foundations for Western culture in general and European culture in particular. Today we are all the more aware of living in a multi-religious society that is constantly confronting and challenging the hitherto uncontested dogmas of secularist culture. In the present culture of globalization, the insights of Aquinas still constitute an invitation to clarify our positions as Christians and Muslims within our respective communities and a willingness to look forward toward a dialogue of cooperation rather than conflict. 53 54 55 ST II-II, q. 167, a. 1, ad 1. Cf. Aristotle, Ethics10.7.1177a13 through 10.8.1178b27. The event took place on November 22, 2020. Catholic News Agency, “Vatican diplomat: ‘Pursuit of Truth’ necessary for inter-religious dialogue,” Catholic Sentinel, November 26, 2020, sentinel.org/Content/News/PopeFrancis-and-Vatican/Article/Vatican-diplomat-Pursuit-of-Truth-necessary-for-interreligious-dialogue-/2/61/41266. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2022): 1249–1272 1249 What Has Metaphysics to Do with Wisdom? John Haldane University of St Andrews St Andrews, Scotland Australian Catholic University Melbourne, Australia There are two loci of ambiguity in the title of the symposium from which this essay derives—“Is Belief in God Reasonable? Aquinas’s Summa contra gentiles in a Contemporary Context.”1 The first concerns the opening question, “is belief in God reasonable?” and the second the closing clause “in a contemporary context.” I observe this not in the spirit of pedantry, but because I want to consider certain interpretations of what is at issue, ones which may be different from those of other contributors but which are relevant to Aquinas’s circumstances and interests and to ours. So far as the Summa contra gentiles [SCG] is concerned, I will touch mainly on issues discussed by Thomas at the outset of book I, in chapters 1–15, which deal with philosophical knowledge of first principles and arguments to the existence of God. First, however, the general issue of reasonable belief. I Concerning the first locus of ambiguity, the question of the reasonability of belief in God is multiply interpretable. It may be treated as relative to a subject’s other beliefs and attitudes, where that subject e may be an individual or a group. Given that S believes p and q (and these can each be conjunctions of any number of propositions), is it reasonable for S to believe r? This aspect of relative credibility is itself ambiguous because it 1 Thomistic Institute Angelicum, Rome, December 5, 2020. 1250 John Haldane can be viewed narrowly, without regard to the status of those antecedent beliefs and attitudes, or broadly, as also asking whether those are themselves reasonable. In a court setting, for example, it may be asked whether it was reasonable for someone to have believed (or done) something given their antecedent beliefs, but it may well be countered that this is an insufficient standard of reasonability, since the prior attitudes may be incredible, or credible but irresponsibly held. The issue of reasonable belief, foresight and foreseeability are common courtroom examples. In these respects, then, it may be granted by someone A, who holds that believing in God is not reasonable, that it was nevertheless reasonable for S to do so given S’s antecedent beliefs. This need not be a matter of condescension, however, since A may grant that the prior beliefs were themselves reasonable for S to hold, and would also have been reasonable by some more objective standard prevailing at the time or in the circumstances. A “rationalist” objector may counter, however, that this is all beside the point, since the question to consider is not the relative, but the absolute one: is belief in God reasonable? Full stop. I agree that there is nothing to be gained by unconstrained relativizing, but if “absolutism” is the implied contrast, it is over-stated. First, if reasonability is related to having (or having access to) reasons, and to the “quality” of those reasons, then some degree of relativity is entailed, and the only standard of reasonability that can be applied is a contextual one. To ask simpliciter whether it is reasonable to believe p carries an unacknowledged implicit reference either to something such as prevailing commonly held beliefs and associated normal cognitive processes or to an idealized thinker with access to relevant proofs or evidence. On further consideration, however, the latter, somewhat like Adam Smith’s “impartial spectator” in ethics,2 tends just to be a more abstract version of the contextually reasonable thinker. There is perhaps a step beyond this, namely to the Omniscient Reasoner (OR) but it is a sophistical move, since it amounts to saying that a belief is reasonable if and only if it would be held by someone who knows everything relevant to its justification. which given that we cannot know antecedently the range of relevant considerations, is for us an inapplicably high standard. There is also some irony in asking if OR would judge belief in God Reasonable since OR would be God or at least God-like in respect of being all-knowing. 2 See Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pt. I, sec. I, ch. 5 (“Of the Amiable and Respectable Virtues”). What Has Metaphysics to Do with Wisdom? 1251 II The other respect in which the question “is belief in God reasonable?” is ambiguous (in this first of the two areas ambiguity noted at the outset) is that, while it may be asking if there are sufficient reasons to believe that there is a God,3 it may instead be asking whether it is reasonable other than by reference to reasons. By way of analogy, consider the question: is belief in the existence of gold in some region reasonable? How might our subject S come to have a belief that there is gold there? There are three broad possibilities: 1. S inferred it from information about the terrain, the color of the soil, the underlying geology, and so on; 2. S derived it from the testimony of someone else; 3. S observed it. The first course is a clear example of believing something on the basis of inferential reasons; the second is somewhat different, since one may simply defer to the testifier with or without supporting reasons for doing so; the third need not involve supporting reasons at all. To say, “I believe there is gold there because I saw it,” suggests a relation between two distinct cognitive states, perception (seeing) and holding true (believing), but this is somewhat misleading. For, consider the actual occasion of observing the gold, seeing that there is gold before one. The content of this state is not (or need not be) that of a belief based on perceptual evidence; it is just that of the perception itself, a perceptual belief that there is gold there. This is not at any inferential or testimonial distance from the (purported) fact; it is a cognitive encounter with it. Belief on the basis of testimony need not be based on inferential reasons either. If someone tells you that Latin has no definite or indefinite article (no “the,” “a,” or “an”), one may believe that directly, without any inference of the form “this man is an expert; experts should be believed; this expert says that p; therefore I should believe that p; therefore p.” One may simply believe it having no reason not to. This need not be credulity, and in educational contexts it is often an epistemic necessity, as Aquinas indicates in describing docility as a virtue on the part of a student.4 3 4 Leaving to one side questions about the reasonability of believing God to have this or that attribute. Summa theologiae [ST] II-II, q. 49, a. 3. Quotations from ST are based on the literal translations by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 2nd. rev. ed. (London: 1252 John Haldane So, in response to the question “is belief in the existence of gold in some place reasonable?,” there seem to be three kinds of positive answers: “yes” based on inferential reasoning; “yes” based on testimony; and “yes” based on observation. And the last of these is not a case of giving reasons from which the belief is derived—as might, but need not, be so in the testimony case, where one’s reason was that the testifier had said that he had observed it and where some reasoning from that fact to the conclusion of the sort mentioned is carried out. Rather, the belief is the retained observational content, not an inference from it. Assuming that there are no reasons to think that the observer’s vision was faulty, against which counter-reasons might have to be cited, we have in the observation case (and perhaps in the testimonial one) reasonable belief without reasons. This is not paradoxical, let alone directly contradictory, when we appreciate, as the example enables us to do, that “reasonable” can mean either (1) based on acceptable reasons or (2) being in accord with reason.5 Believing what you see, which in the immediate case is believing perceptually, is in accord reason, because if it were not, then perception could not be a source of knowledge, nor could testimony or a posteriori reasoning. What we have thus far, then, is that whether belief in X is reasonable depends disjunctively upon three sorts of conditions: 1. One has inferential reasons that rationally support believing in X. 2. One has testimony that X, and either there are reasons for believing the testifier or, even though there are no independent reasons for believing him, it is nevertheless in accord with reason to do so. 3. One has experience of X and no reason to doubt the reliability of that, in which case, again, it is reasonable to do so. Bringing all of this to bear on the question of belief in God, we can see that there are three potentially reasonable openings to this: inference, testimony and observation. And beyond those there are combinations of them. Pure rationalists say it is reasonable to believe in God only if conceptual or other a priori metaphysical arguments can be given in its favor; pure empiricists that it is reasonable only if sense experience directly supports such belief; and pure testimonialists (if there were such) would assert that it is reasonable only if suitably placed testifiers witness to it.6 A 5 6 Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, 1920–1922). See in this connection Aquinas’s duplex veritatis modus (Summa contra gentiles [SCG] I, ch. 3, no. 2, and section V below). Pure testimonialism is arguably incoherent, since reasoning (even when it is defective) What Has Metaphysics to Do with Wisdom? 1253 pluralist, however, may draw on all of these and say that belief in God is reasonable if warranted by some combination of rational inference, direct or related testimony, and observation (and perhaps other considerations besides, such as pragmatic efficiency and efficacy). Add to this the idea that these varieties of considerations should interrelate coherently and we get “pluralistic holism.” III I said there is a second locus of ambiguity in the general title, this concerning the clause “in a contemporary context.” Grammatically what that qualifies is not the question “is belief in God reasonable?” but “Aquinas’s Summa contra gentiles.” The two, however, are thematically linked, since the aim is to address the reasonability question via consideration of this text as it might be seen and drawn upon in a contemporary context. The ambiguity, then, derives from the fact that there are two relevant interpretations of “in a contemporary context.” The first is what one might term “the prevailing culture,” which perhaps is too deratiocinated and chaotic to be dignified by the term zeitgeist. In this connection we need hardly contemplate introducing themes from the SCG into that contemporary context unless in a very elementary and piecemeal fashion, in part because of the catastrophic loss of general knowledge of religious ideas or even interest in them. And it is not clear how that might be done or how it could have any uptake. I am not saying that it cannot, but that it needs much more thought and practice. As regards pursuing the issue of the reasonability of belief in God aided by some Thomistic notions and arguments, this faces similar challenges, but in addition the fact that the prevailing culture is increasingly disposed to consider belief in God as not just unwarranted (other perhaps than as a private preoccupation in the “whatever floats your boat” mode), but obsessive, weird, and associated with bigotry and intolerance. I say this not in a spirit of despair, but only to remind us of how very great is the challenge of engaging the contemporary culture. Just to illustrate by reference to the association of religious belief with intolerance, this is connected to an unwitting or perhaps manipulated shift in the understanding of toleration from forbearance to approbation to celebration, to such an extent that someone who fails in respect of the and experience (even when non-veridical) are intrinsic to human thought and agency; also there have to be some starting points where originating testifiers draw upon experience or reasoning. But that is not to say that testimonial cognition reduces to experience or inference. Think of a child learning its original language from a teacher. 1254 John Haldane second and third is intolerant. There is philosophical work to be done here but it is of the nature of an analytic and critical propaedeutic to any future presentation of natural theology, or indeed of serious, coherent public discussion of ethics and politics. The second sense of “contemporary context” pertains to the academic world. Apart from within broadly Thomistic circles and fields of non-aligned Aquinian scholarship, where the SCG is approached as a common object of study, the forum into which Thomas and his writings are likely to be brought is that of mainstream philosophy of religion of the sort that began to take its present shape more than half a half-a-century ago in the work of such figures as William Alston, Dewi Phillips, Terence Penelhum, Alvin Plantinga, William Rowe and others. This has a well-established agenda of topics, taxonomy of arguments, and lexicon of terms all of which draw upon broader features of analytic philosophy, especially philosophical logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics. These fields of study tend to be pursued according to certain paradigms and to be governed by certain broad assumptions. These include methodological (and increasingly, substantive) naturalism, evidentialism, scientific realism, physicalism, event causalism, compatibilism (about determinism and freedom), and atheism.7 While one can engage in philosophy of religion without being a theist and even while sharing these generally inhospitable assumptions, it naturally tends to be the case that the incidence of religious believers is much higher in this area than in any other field of professional academic philosophy, which in general, and increasingly, is atheistic within both the analytic and continental traditions. This has, I think, two observable effects. Either contributors try to avoid considerations and modes of thought liable to be thought inapt for the defense of the rationality of belief in God, or else they try to conform to the prevailing paradigms, stylistically and to some degree substantially, in the effort to secure a hearing and (what is not the same thing) to have their work accepted. Neither effect must needs be bad, but the tendency is either to fail to engage or else to overlook other ways of approaching the issues. IV Next, consider a radically different perspective. My title “What has Metaphysics to do with Wisdom?” may call to mind a famous question posed 7 See in this connection David Bourget and David J. Chalmers, “What do philosophers believe?,” Philosophical Studies 170, no. 3 (2014): 465–500. What Has Metaphysics to Do with Wisdom? 1255 by Tertullian: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” This is usually quoted in isolation and without reference to its source, so let me provide the context. It comes in chapter 7 of the polemical work De praescriptione haereticorum (On the Prescription of Heretics), headed “The Connection between Deflections from Christian Faith and the Old System of Pagan Philosophy.” Tertullian, who we should recall is often regarded as the first Latin Christian theologian and is no naive philistine, writes referring to and quoting the “apostle” Paul as follows: Whence spring those “fables and endless genealogies,” and “unprofitable questions,” and “words which spread like a cancer?” From all these, when the apostle would restrain us, he expressly names philosophy as that which he would have us be on our guard against. Writing to the Colossians, he says, “See that no one beguile you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, and contrary to the wisdom of the Holy Ghost.” He had been at Athens and had in his interviews (with its philosophers) become acquainted with that human wisdom which pretends to know the truth, whilst it only corrupts it, and is itself divided into its own manifold heresies, by the variety of its mutually repugnant sects. What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? What between heretics and Christians? Our instruction comes from “the porch of Solomon” [a cloister on the east of the temple court in Jerusalem where teaching went on—a Jewish “Areopagus”], who had himself taught that “the Lord should be sought in simplicity of heart. Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition! We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the gospel! With our faith, we desire no further belief. For this is our palmary faith, that there is nothing which we ought to believe besides. 8 The words of Solomon are from Wisdom 1 which continues: “For he is found by them that tempt him not; and he sheweth himself to them that have faith in him.” Elsewhere Tertullian quotes Paul from 1 Corinthians 27 railing against the wisdom of the philosophers,9 but the reference here 8 9 Tertullian, De praescriptione haereticorum, trans P. Holmes, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3, ed. A. Roberts, J. Donaldson, and A. Cleveland (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature, 1885). Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem 5.19 (trans. Holmes, ed. Roberts, Donaldson, and 1256 John Haldane in De praescriptione haereticorum, is to Paul’s visit to Athens as recounted in Acts 17:16–34, where having been in argument with Epicureans and Stoics, he is invited to present his “philosophy” on the Areopagus hill. Acts tells us that Paul related the Christian message including the resurrection of Jesus, at which point the mockery began. Nonetheless, it is said he made some converts, of whom two are named: a woman Damaris and a man Dionysius, the Areopagite. In general women were not admitted in the philosophical schools, the exception being the Stoics, so Damaris may have been a follower of Stoicism, and conceivably the wife of Dionysius, as stated in early Georgian translations of Acts and in a letter of St. Ambrose, and as suggested by Raphael in his 1515 tapestry drawing Paul Preaching at Athens.10 There is an irony here that may subvert the invocation of Paul contra the philosophers, or at any rate moderate it. At first sight, it may seem a clash of faith against reason. On this account the conversion of Damaris and Dionysius (who according to Eusebius later became bishop of Athens) was a turning of them away from philosophy towards Christian faith and mention of it is intended as evidence that the Gospel is mightier than the dialogue. But, on the basis of fable in the first case and misidentification in the second, both figures were later honored by Christians as religious philosophers. Indeed, it was the acceptance that the author was the Pauline convert that bestowed such prestige on the Corpus Dionysiacum which drew commentaries from Grosseteste, Albertus Magnus, and Aquinas, who mentions Dionysius over fifteen hundred times. A further point is that, notwithstanding his denunciation of worldly wisdom, Paul’s own hostility to philosophy may be ambiguous, for as the English philosopher C. E. M. Joad never tired of saying, “it depends what you mean by . . .” in this case “philosophy.” In his Areopagus address Paul says: The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of Heaven and earth, . . . he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. . . . [God] did this so that they would search and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For “In him we live and move and have 10 Cleveland, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3). On traditions about Damaris, see J. W. Childers, “A Reluctant Bride: Finding a Life for Damaris of Athens (Acts 17: 34),” in Renewing Tradition, ed. M. W. Hamilton, T. H. Olbricht, and J. Peterson, Princeton Theological Monograph Series 65 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 207–35. What Has Metaphysics to Do with Wisdom? 1257 our being”; as even some of your own poets have said, “For we too are his offspring.” (Acts 17: 24–28)11 Here he is quoting two philosopher-poets Epimendes (from his Cretica) and Aratus (from his Phenomena). Paul’s relation to Stoic thought is a matter of scholarly debate, but that school of philosophy was well represented in the “university” city of Tarsus, and there is a parallel between what Paul writes in Romans 1: 18 and a tradition within Stoicism of natural theology. Compare Paul in the Romans passage: For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. with the beginning of a section of Cicero’s dialogue On the Nature of the Gods: The first point, then, says Lucilius, I think needs no discourse to prove it; for what can be so plain and evident, when we behold the heavens and contemplate the celestial bodies, as the existence of some supreme, divine intelligence, by which all these things are governed? 12 What follow immediately are a series of five or six arguments given by Balbus for a Providential deity: from common consent, from miracles, from order in nature, from mind, from degrees of being, and from tradition. Cicero’s dialogue was written about a hundred years before Paul’s epistle and he is likely to have been familiar with the Stoic “theological” tradition which it records. At some point in the fourth century, a forger composed a series of letters between Paul and the Spanish-Roman Stoic Seneca. They are referred to by St. Jerome and, like the Dionysian texts, were only finally dis-attributed in the 1400s. The point of these observations being that, notwithstanding Paul’s repudiation of philosophy and celebration of Holy wisdom, and Tertullian’s amplification of these 11 12 Biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006). Cicero, De natura deorum 2.2, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 1258 John Haldane attitudes, the relation between faith and reason in the apostolic period was not unambiguously hostile. What was in line for attack is human vanity and the idea that by means of human thought the mysteries of reality and of the meaning of human life might be solved and ultimate wisdom secured. Early Greek-speaking Christians knew that academic philosophy aspired to understand reality and human purpose and had no reason to repudiate those desires. What troubled them was that they were convinced that the way, the truth, and the life had been revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, and that, instead of accepting this secure revelation, the academicians continued with their vain and fruitless disputes: sophisters entangled in webs of their own making. The author of the prologue of John’s Gospel addresses philosophically literate Hellenic Jews in Alexandria and Antioch when he writes: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him: and without him was made nothing that was made.” Our “Word,” Thomas’s Verbum, was Logos for the Greek speakers, and it is a providentially Janus-faced and far-seeing concept. The prologue looks on the Hebrew side towards Genesis 1 (“In the beginning God created heaven, and earth”), Proverbs 8:27 (“When he established the heavens, I was there”), and the personification of Wisdom in Sirach 24:3 (“I came forth from the mouth of the Most High, and covered the earth like a mist”), and on the other side it looks to Greek philosophy, where it features in contemporary Stoic cosmology but also goes back into the middle of the previous millennium to the utterances of Heraclitus: “Therefore it is necessary to follow that which is for all; but although the Logos [i.e., the “account”] is for all many live as if they had a private understanding [of the truth]. Listening not to me but to the Logos it is wise to agree that all things are one”13 Earlier I said that Tertullian’s Jerusalem–Athens account of Paul’s engagement with the philosophers made it look like a clash between faith and reason, but in light of the foregoing and in terms of my earlier analysis, it might better be represented as a difference between two kinds of purportedly reasonable belief: faith expressive of immediate experience and/or of received testimony in contrast to rationally-inferred theory “metaphysics.” In his account of Jesus’s calling of his first apostles, Matthew (4:18–22) is bracingly brief: 13 See fragments 198 and 199 in G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 188. What Has Metaphysics to Do with Wisdom? 1259 As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him. I do not think this is to be understood as a short summary of a longer process of discourse, reasoning-giving, and deliberation. Matthew is telling us that for Simon Peter and for Andrew, to see was to believe, to which I will add and that their believing was reasonable; it was in accord with reason. V Against the background of points introduced and developed in the previous sections, I turn to the SCG.14 Aquinas begins with a discussion of the function of the wise man. In general terms, this is to achieve understanding, placing things in their right order by noting how one activity may be subservient to the end of another. Wisdom absolutely (simpliciter) involves tracing this sequence of ends to the highest level, which being a final end is also a cause of the existence and activities of secondary beings. The word “metaphysics” (metaphysica) occurs about eighty times throughout the SCG, but in all but two instances, it is simply in reference to Aristotle’s work of that title. One exception is where he mentions “logic and metaphysics” as being the only sciences that have concepts (intelligible species) as their objects of study (SCG II, ch. 75, no. 7). The other, more directly relevant to the present subject, is when early on he identifies wisdom absolutely as the knowledge of the Highest Cause and of its role in relation to dependent beings and their operations. He terms the pursuit of this through natural reason “metaphysics” (SCG I, ch. 4, no. 3). This follows his description of the quest for the highest wisdom as “the most perfect, sublime, useful, and agreeable of all pursuits” because of the value of its end (SCG I, ch. 2, no. 1). In practicing this field of study, however, the wise man has both to seek the highest truth and to counter error regarding it. Here Aquinas introduces the idea of a twofold mode of truth, duplex veritatis modus, regarding the divine: for some truths about God transcend reason and can be known only by revelation, such as that the divine is a 14 All quotations of the SCG are trans. Anton C. Pegis (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975). 1260 John Haldane Trinity of persons, while others are attainable through the exercise of natural reason, such as that God exists and is One, “and these [latter] have been demonstrated by the philosophers” (SCG I, ch. 3, no. 2). So there are two kinds of ignorance and error to be dealt with: those concerning the truths of revelation, and those regarding the truths of reason. Notwithstanding the claimed provability of the existence and singularity of a First Cause, now identified with God, Aquinas also sees a limit to this kind of natural theology or metaphysics in consequence of the nature of the human intellect and its dependence on sense experience as a source of its concepts. His discussion of this is brief because he only wants to make the general point. Since it is important to my analysis and argument, however, I quote the full section (SCG I, ch. 3, no. 3), italicizing, numbering, and separating important elements: That there are certain truths about God that totally exceed man’s ability is clearly evident. Since, indeed, the principle of all knowledge that the intellect perceives about something is the understanding of the very substance of that being (for according to the Philosopher [Aristotle] “what a thing is” is the principle of demonstration), it is necessary that the way in which we understand the substance of a thing determines the way in which we know what belongs to it. Hence, [I] if the human intellect comprehends the substance of some thing [rei substantiam], such as that of a stone or of a triangle, no intelligible characteristic belonging to that thing surpasses the grasp of the human reason. But this does not happen to us in the case of God. For the human intellect is not able to reach a comprehension of the divine substance through its natural power. [II] For, according to its manner of knowing in the present life, the intellect depends on the senses for the origin of knowledge; and so those things that do not fall under the senses cannot be grasped by the human intellect except insofar as the knowledge of them is gathered from sensible things. [III] Now, sensible things cannot lead the human intellect to the point of seeing in them the nature of the divine substance; for sensible things are effects that fall short of the power of their cause. What Has Metaphysics to Do with Wisdom? 1261 [IV] Yet, beginning with sensible things, our intellect is led to the point of knowing about God that He exists, and other such characteristics that must be attributed to the First Principle. There are, consequently, some intelligible truths about God that are open to the human reason; but there are others that absolutely surpass its power. Two general aspects of Aquinas’s account of human cognition are relevant to this and what follows.15 First, our knowledge of existents is in general inferential, proceeding from effects to causes. More specifically, we begin with incidental features and proceed from these to proper accidents from which we infer the natures of the substances to which they belong and whose essences they express (though they are not strictly part of them).16 The non-contingent character of the relation between propria and essences makes this second inference something different from the first, but since they hold “for the most part” (ut in pluribus), it is not one of entailment but some kind of partly a priori induction. The second relevant and related aspect of human cognition is that knowledge of natures is rooted in sense experience, since our conceptions are formed by abstraction from this. Again there is a staged process here. First, the exterior senses “receive” singular sensible forms: particular instances of specific colors sounds, odors, and so on (sensibilia propria) and of shape, size and motion (sensibilia communia). Second, interior senses, including the common sense (sensus communis) and the imagination (phantasia), work to integrate, conjoin and disjoin, and retain these forms, and a further “sense,” or more perspicuously a cognitive function, the cogitative power (vis cogitativa) constructs generalized perceptual forms (phantasms) from these, in which the underlying principles of unity are closer to being expressed. Finally, the intellect in its concept-forming mode (intellectus agens) abstracts the intelligible universal from this prepared percept, and in its retaining and 15 16 For discussion of his theory of human cognition see ST I, qq. 78–79, and from the commentaries on Aristotle: In II de anima, lecs. 5–11; In III de anima, lecs. 1–8; In de sensu et sensato. See, for example, De ente et essentia, ch. 5: “For even in the case of sensible things, the essential differences themselves are not known; whence they are signified through accidental differences which rise out of the essential ones, as a cause is signified through its effect; this is what is done when biped, for example, is given as the difference of man. But the proper accidents of immaterial substances are unknown to us; whence their differences cannot be signified by us either through themselves or through accidental differences” (trans. A. Maurer [Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1968]). Compare this with Aquinas, In I analyt. post., lec. 13. 1262 John Haldane exercising mode (intellectus possibilis) deploys these in acts of first and second intention, such as (1) judging that something is a cat and (2) judging that cats are mammals. The limitation of natural theology or metaphysics so far as Aquinas is concerned is due to the gap between that from which inferences proceed— namely, the observable effects of the First Cause—and the essence of the latter: “For sensible things are effects that fall short of the power of their cause.” Here, however, there are ambiguities, first, between a general and a particular reading of this limitation principle, and second with regard to the source and nature of it. As regards the first issue, if sensible effects fall short of the power of their cause, then all attempts to specify something based on the observation of accidents, even proper accidents, will be subject to, if not void for, under-determination. In the first of the italicized parts of the section just quoted Aquinas writes that, “if the human intellect comprehends the substance of some thing no intelligible characteristic belonging to that thing surpasses the grasp of the human reason,” but note that this is a conditional and that in the next but one section he writes: The same thing, moreover, appears quite clearly from the defect that we experience every day in our knowledge of things. We do not know a great many of the properties of sensible things, and in most cases we are not able to discover fully the natures of those properties that we apprehend by the sense. Much more is it the case, therefore, that human reason is not equal to the task of investigating all the intelligible characteristics of that most excellent substance. (SCG I, ch. 3, no. 5; emphasis mine). Here the point is put in terms of properties, but elsewhere, in his exposition of the Creed, it is made in relation to the natures of substances themselves: But our manner of knowing is so weak that no philosopher could perfectly investigate the nature of even one little fly. We even read that a certain philosopher spent thirty years in solitude in order to know the nature of the bee. If, therefore, our intellect is so weak, it is foolish to be willing to believe concerning God only that which man can know by himself alone.17 17 Aquinas, In symbolum apostolorum, prologue, in Exposition on the Apostle’s Creed, trans. J.B. Collins (New York: Wagner, 1939). The reference may be to Philiscus of Thasos, What Has Metaphysics to Do with Wisdom? 1263 What is the nature of this weakness? In the SCG he says: “We may easily see the same point from the gradation of intellects. Consider the case of two persons of whom one has a more penetrating intellectual grasp of a thing than does the other. He who has the superior intellect understands many things that the other cannot grasp at all” (SCG I, ch. 3, no. 4). This suggests a contingent variability in the power of human minds to know things from their sensible effects, rather than an in-principle limit due to the gap between effects and causes (in this case accidents, properties, and natures). Thomas wavers somewhat between claiming that we rarely know the essences of natural things and that we never do, but on balance his view seems to be that, while it is possible for us to proceed from sensibles to a grasp of the intelligible natures underlying, them it is very difficult to do so, and only very few succeed, and then only very rarely. If that is the truth of the matter, then the correct interpretation of the limitation principle would seem to be as restricted to the case of our attempting to infer the nature of God from his effects in creation. But now we cannot say that this is due simply to human cognitive weakness or to the fact that there is a gap to be crossed from effect to cause, for the previous reconciliation implies that this is sometimes successfully traversed. Rather, if we cannot know the nature of God by inference from observation of things, this must be because sensible effects fall short of the power of their divine cause. Now, however, one might wonder about angelic knowledge of natures, and of the divine nature in particular, which, lacking bodies and hence sense experience, they cannot infer from sensible effects. In book II of the SCG, Thomas discusses how separated substances have knowledge other than from sensible things: The object of a higher power must itself be higher. . . . Hence, the object of a separate substance cannot be a thing existing outside the soul, as that from which it derives its knowledge immediately; nor can it be a phantasm. . . . But in the order of knowable objects, nothing is higher than a phantasm save what is intelligible in act. Separate substances, then, do not derive intellectual knowledge from sensibles, but understand things which are intelligible through themselves. (SCG II, ch. 96, no. 3) And two chapters later he writes: who Pliny reports lived in the desert tending swarms of bees and was also known by the epithet “Agrius” (“wild man”). 1264 John Haldane If separate substances understand those things which are intelligible through themselves, and if separate substances are intelligible through themselves, . . . then it follows that separate substances have separate substances as the proper objects of their understanding. Each of them, therefore, knows both itself and others. . . . It has been demonstrated that all the principal parts of the universe are created immediately by God. Hence, one of them is not caused by another. Now, each of the separate substances is a principal part of the universe, . . . since each of them has the nature of a species all its own, which is nobler than that of any corporeal things. Therefore, one separate substance is not caused by another, but all are immediately from God. . . . [So] each of the separate substances knows God, by its natural knowledge, after the manner of its substance; and through this knowledge they are like God as their cause. (SCG II, ch. 98, nos.1, 6, 7) Since angels know natures directly, including their own (by having them), and know that their natures are those of principal parts and hence are caused directly by God, their knowledge of God, though mediated by that self-understanding, seems non-inductive and a matter of acquaintance or entailment. This, however, remains insufficient for them to know the divine nature as is explained in Summa theologiae [ST] I, q. 56, a. 3, in answer to the question “Whether an angel knows God by his own natural principles”: The angels can have some knowledge of God by their own principles, [for] a thing is known in three ways: first, by the presence of its essence in the knower as an angel knows himself, second, by the presence of its similitude in the cognitive power which knows it. Third, when the image of the object known is not drawn directly from the object itself, but from something in which it appears, as when we behold a man in a mirror. Knowledge of God by which He is seen through His essence is akin to the first; and such knowledge cannot be had by any creature from its natural principles. The third way comprises the knowledge whereby we know God while we are on earth, by His likeness reflected in creatures. . . . But the knowledge, whereby according to his natural principles the angel knows God, stands midway between these two; and is likened to that knowledge whereby a thing is seen through the species abstracted from it. For since God’s image is impressed on the very nature of the angel in his What Has Metaphysics to Do with Wisdom? 1265 essence, the angel knows God inasmuch as he is the image of God. Yet he does not behold God’s essence; because no created likeness is sufficient to represent the Divine essence. So, not even angels know the nature of God, and their ignorance is due not to the gaps between sensibles and intelligibles, but to that between effects and causes, of which the former as originally referred to is an instance. In the angelic case, however, the gap is between two spiritual natures, one created and the other uncreated, one finite and the other infinite, one a likeness and the other the reality itself. VI It might seem as if this has been a rather circuitous exploration of a familiar claim that God transcends understanding. First, however, the latter is more often said than explained, and here we have an explanation in terms of Aquinas’s cognitive psychology and theory of embodied and separate intellects. Second, ambiguities have been identified and clarified, if not altogether resolved. Third, issues have been raised which bear upon the limits of natural theology. By Thomas’s own account, reason cannot arrive at a direct account of the intrinsic nature of God, but it can prove that God exists (SCG I, ch. 13), and by the method of remotion (via remotionis) “have some knowledge of it by knowing what it is not” (ch. 14). Here I am concerned only with the existential proofs and with those only in general terms. Rejecting claims that there cannot be a demonstration of God’s existence because it either is a directly self-evident truth or transcends the power of reason, Thomas prepares the ground by reflecting on the method of reasoning from effect to cause: “Although God transcends all sensible things and the sense itself, His effects, on which the demonstration proving His existence is based, are nevertheless sensible things. And thus, the origin of our knowledge in the sense[s] applies also to those things that transcend the sense[s]” (SCG I, ch. 12, no. 9). Several proofs of Aristotelian origins are then provided, of which the first and most familiar is that from observed motion (motus) or change in quality, quantity, or location (ch. 13, no. 3): 1. Some things are in process of change. 2. Everything that is changed is changed by another. 3. An infinity of changed changers is impossible. 1266 John Haldane 4. Therefore, there must be a first unchanged and unchanging cause of change. Others appeal to notions of whole and partial change, of a difference in kind between external and internal movement, of potentiality and actuality, of univocal and equivocal causes, of the character of an ordered causal series (causis efficientibus ordinatis), of degrees of truth and being, and of discordance within an order. I shall not present or evaluate any of these beyond saying that none is without interest, that some are hard to interpret, and that a few have real force. My general point is that none, I believe, meet the standard that Aquinas set himself when he envisaged providing a demonstration of the existence of God. A demonstratio in Aquinas’s Aristotelian logic (discussed at some length in his Commentary on the Posterior Analytics) is a deductive argument whose premises are self-evident, and thereby known to be true with certainty. Because the mode of inference is deductive, the certain truth of the premises is transmitted to that of the conclusion, which itself is thereby indubitable. The key notion in this conception of demonstrative proof is self-evidence. Nowhere does Aquinas address the character of self-evidence as an issue in its own right, but he refers to it in relation to knowledge of first principles of speculative and practical philosophy and in as a condition of demonstration, and here (and in ST I, q. 2) with regard to proofs of the existence of God: Those propositions are said to be self-evident that are known immediately upon the knowledge of their terms. Thus, as soon as you know the nature of a whole and the nature of a part, you know immediately that every whole is greater than its part. (SCG I, ch. 10, no. 2) But then he goes on to introduce a distinction within the category of the self-evident: Distinguish between that which is self-evident in an absolute sense and that which is self-evident in relation to us. For assuredly that God exists is, absolutely speaking, self-evident, since what God is is His own being. Yet, because we are not able to conceive in our minds that which God is, that God exists remains unknown in relation to us. So, too, that every whole is greater than its part is, absolutely speaking, self-evident; but it would perforce be unknown to one who could not conceive the nature of a whole. What Has Metaphysics to Do with Wisdom? 1267 There are at least two ways on interpreting these passages. According to the first, self-evidence is a wholly epistemic/analytic notion: “P is self-evident if and only if, knowing the meaning of the terms in which it is formulated, one can thereby and directly recognise its truth.” In this interpretation, the distinction between the absolute and the relative senses is that between cases in which the meanings determine the truth but are not known, and ones in which they determine the truth and are known; and whether they are or are not known, or knowable, is a function of the capacity of cognitive subjects. What is graspable by one individual or group may not be comprehended by another.18 On the second interpretation, the distinction is between epistemic and ontic necessities. Put another way, propositions self-evident to us are ones knowable a priori (via the meanings of the terms), while propositions self-evident in themselves are not knowable a priori, but the referents of the terms are necessarily connected (with identity being the limiting but not only case of such ontic necessity). It seems to me that here and elsewhere Aquinas moves between these two conceptions; at any rate I find it difficult to settle on a single interpretation.19 This ambiguity or opacity is a problem so far as it bears on the question of whether an argument has the status of a demonstration. Furthermore even on the wholly epistemic interpretation, which is what would be wanted for a proof, there is a problem due to the theoretical character of the terms involved and in Aquinas’s mundane illustration of self-evidence. “As soon as you know what a whole is and what a part is [quid est totum et quid est pars] you know immediately that every whole is greater than its part [omne totum est maius sua parte].” Supposing, however, we distinguish qualitative and quantitative measures of greatness and we have two instances of qualitatively equal greatness, does it follow that the union 18 19 In support of this interpretation, see what he says in In I analyt. post., lec. 36: “Of all the propositions of any science, the universal propositions are the common propositions, such as ‘Every whole is greater than its part.’ Hence these are absolutely the principles of demonstrations and self-evident to all. But the proposition, ‘Man is an animal,’ or ‘The isosceles is a triangle,’ is not a principle of demonstration throughout the science but only for some particular demonstrations; hence such propositions are not self-evident to all” (Commentary on Posterior Analytics trans. Fabian R. Larcher [Albany, NY.: Magi, 1970]) For an extended discussion, see M. V. Dougherty, “Thomas Aquinas on the Manifold Senses of Self-Evidence,” Review of Metaphysics 59, no. 3 (2006): 601–30, who suggests that “self-evident in relation to us” is a generic categorization to be read more specifically with regard to different kinds of cases distinguished by the intellectual capacities required for their recognition. 1268 John Haldane of these is (qualitatively) greater than each of the instances taken singly? Not obviously so, for “more of the quality” does not entail “qualitatively more.” Here it might be replied that it is clear that, in this context, Aquinas intends by pars and maius quantitative measures. What then of the case of the infinite sequence consisting of every odd term in the infinite sequence of every natural number? The former is a part of the latter but is equinumerous, and hence quantitatively not smaller than it. Or in the same vein, what of the infinite set whose members are themselves infinite sets? Moving from quantitative issues but remaining with the idea of epistemic self-evidence, consider the proposition “parallel lines cannot meet.” This seems true by definition of the terms: parallel lines are straight lines in a plane that do not intersect at any point. In hyperbolic geometry, however, geodesics (shortest paths between points) are parallel if they do not intersect in the plane but converge to a common point at infinity. The upshots of these considerations are, first, that it may be indeterminate whether a premise is in fact epistemically self-evident, and second, where it is epistemically self-evident that may be only relative to a given but not exclusive conception of the meaning of the terms, hence in another way it again lacks determinate self-evidence. These points bear upon the possibility of clear and unqualified demonstrative argument, but it might be countered that they do not trouble Aquinas’s project, since the premises he employs are untouched by them, being epistemically self-evident (so not opaque) and conceptually non-relative (so not qualified). But there are two reasons why this may not be so: one internal to his own epistemology and semantics; the other more general. Recall the brief summary of his account of cognition: sensible species being received in the external sense organs, conjoined and synthesized by the internal senses so as to provide phantasms from which the active intellect forms concepts by actualizing the intelligible species “within” them. I noted also that, for Aquinas, logic and metaphysics take as their starting points these empirical concepts, extracting or making more abstract and general formal notions “intentions” from them. This is the source of such ideas as those of cause, change, effect, form, matter, substance, property, privation, place, time, individuality, identity, unity, actuality, potentiality, and so on through the vocabulary of De principiis naturae, the commentaries on the works of Aristotle, De ente et essentia, the ST, and the SCG. Along with this, recall his oft-expressed principle that “something is received according to the manner or condition of the recipient” (ST I, q. 75, a. 5; III, q. 5), a special instance of which is that “knowledge is according to the mode of the one who knows; for the thing known is in What Has Metaphysics to Do with Wisdom? 1269 the knower according to the mode of the knower” (ST I, q. 14, a. 1, ad 3). This has three significant and related implications. First, absent a kind of transcendental argument, which Aquinas does not entertain let alone develop (showing that central logical and metaphysical concepts, in exclusive conceptions of them, are necessary to have any other concepts), even the most general ideas that we form are dependent on the contingencies of the modes and circumstances of human experience. Second, what count as “objects” for experience and how they are configured in relation to one another, and what the principles of individuation and identity are by which we distinguish and re-cognize them are conditioned by our sensory systems, cognitive architecture, and broader psychology. Third, what is self-evident under one conception may not be so under another, and which conception we have formed of say “change” or “causation” or “potentiality” may be a reflection of contingent features of our experience, rather than of the necessary structure of reality. These considerations lead to the general point that many of our terms are “theoretical,” rather than directly or derivatively observational, in a particular sense of that expression, namely that their meaning is given by the set of generalizations in which they feature. Whether those generalizations are a posteriori or a priori is another matter, though some must be a priori, or else there would be a vicious regress. This does not, however, require that they be innate, but rather that the means by which we come by them is not that described in the Aquinian scheme summarized earlier. The alternative to empiricism and rationalism about the source of basic concepts and of the conceptual structures of which they are a part is acquisition through language. To be taught the word “change” or “part” or “whole” or “series” is to be taught fragments of a set of interconnected theories, and their meanings are relative to those, as in the abstract case of “parallel” lines. What all of this means, I suggest, is that there cannot be demonstrations simpliciter as Aquinas conceives of them, or put another way, any purported demonstration is secundum quid relative to a given conceptual framework and cannot presume to hold for other non-excludable interpretations of its terms. To assert otherwise, as in arguing from a Euclidian interpretation of “parallel” as if it were the only one, would be to commit the fallacy a dicto secundum quid ad dictum simpliciter. Earlier I quoted Aquinas writing that, “if the human intellect comprehends the substance of some thing such as that of a stone or of a triangle, no intelligible characteristic belonging to that thing surpasses the grasp of the human reason.” He might well have felt greater confidence about our ability to comprehend the nature of geometrical figures than the essence of stones, because in the former case, 1270 John Haldane nominal definition (quid nominis) and real definition (quid rei) coincide.20 In his Posterior Analytics commentary, Aquinas repeats Euclid’s theorem (Elements I, proposition 32) that, “in any triangle the sum of the three interior angles of the triangle equals two right angles,” and this would be part of the figure’s essential definition, a priori self-evident. But as with parallel lines, this definition of triangle is theory-relative, for in spherical geometry, the total of angles in a triangle is not equal to 180 degrees. It might be replied that the original status of certain propositions as self-evidently true can be preserved so long as they are correctly indexed to different conceptions, in this case of Euclidian figure, of hyperbolic figure, and so on. The issue, however, is that Aquinas needs conceptions of cause, change, actuality, potentiality, part, whole, series, and so on having relevant features for the purpose of first-cause demonstrations, and he needs to show not just that these conceptions are analytically coherent, but that they represent the way things actually are. I am not suggesting that this is impossible (and earlier suggested the route of providing a transcendental argument), but that the work of advancing a demonstration has not begun until that task has been completed. VII Where does this leave us so far as concerns the questions of whether belief in God is reasonable and of the role of the type of arguments advanced in the Summa contra gentiles in answering that? Their merit is that they gather concepts that we have need of in thinking about the world and in thinking about such thinking, and suggest that plausible applications of these give reason to believe that placing things in their right order shows how one thing or feature or aspect may be dependent upon another, and that this order ascends to a highest level: an end that is also a cause of the activities of secondary beings and of their existence. Insofar as that merits the description “metaphysics,” it corresponds to what Thomas described as Wisdom simpliciter. In part because of the limitations and obstacles I have described, however, and because of what it leaves out which is also relevant to the question of the existence of God, it would be a mistake to think that the role of philosophy in establishing the reasonableness of belief in God 20 This terminology is not Aquinas’s, but is introduced by Cajetan in his commentary on Aquinas’s On Being and Essence where he writes that, “just as real essence is a thing’s ‘what it is,’ so the nominal essence is the ‘what it is’ of a name” (Super Librum de Ente et Essentia Sancti Thomae [Bergomi: Typis Comini Venturae, 1590], 290 [trans. mine]). What Has Metaphysics to Do with Wisdom? 1271 depends upon success in the metaphysical project of demonstrating the existence of a First Cause, as Thomas appears to suppose. At one point he writes: “Almost all of philosophy is directed towards the knowledge of God, and that is why metaphysics, which deals with divine things, is the last part of philosophy to be learned” (SCG I, ch. 4). By “philosophy” here he means reflections upon and studies of the natures of things, which would include what we now regard as natural and social sciences, but also ethics and politics (and aesthetics). The claim that these are directed towards knowing God is neither an identification of their working assumptions nor a religious piety. Rather, it combines belief (1) that all activity is teleological in character, (2) that the ends of activities are goods, (3) that these goods are convergent, and (4) that the explanation of this is that they are part of a comprehensive system of substances, created, sustained and directed by God. Reasons for believing the latter may be quite diverse, and none need require, but may be reinforced by direct metaphysical arguments for the existence of a First Cause. They may draw upon personal observation and experience more broadly, the testimony of others, analogical and aspectual reasoning (“think of it like this”), inferences to the best explanation, and other sorts of belief-forming processes. Sections I and II above considered the contextual character of the reasonability of belief and the distinction between being “based-on” and “being in-accord-with” reason. Section IV explored the disjoining and conjoining of faith and reason in the minds of Tertullian, Paul, and the author of John’s Gospel. Applying these to the situation arrived at through sections V and VI, in which aspects of Aquinas’s ideas about demonstrative argument, concept origination and formation, and the limits of understanding were explored, suggests the conclusion that the better part of wisdom is to recognize that, while metaphysics has its place, it would be a mistake to rest too heavily upon it. Not only because it might not bear the weight of belief, but because that weight can be more broadly distributed across observation, testimony, and other kinds of reasoning, not singly, nor only aggregatively, but in the manner of interrelated coherence that I earlier termed “pluralistic holism.” Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2022): 1273–1288 1273 The Summa Contra Gentiles and Aquinas’s Way to God Gaven Kerr St. Patrick’s College Maynooth Maynooth, Ireland There is to be found in Aquinas’s writings a way to God which is his own and most personal. This way to God is the way from existence (esse) and arrives at God as pure existence itself, the fount of all being, without which nothing would be. It is deployed in several contexts ranging from the De ente et essentia to the Summa theologiae [ST]. Yet, in the Summa contra gentiles [SCG], it is peculiarly absent. The proofs of God’s existence which Aquinas offers in the latter are almost exclusively drawn from Aristotle, and they do not exhibit any of the refined metaphysical thinking about esse that characterizes Thomas’s thinking about God in other works.1 For a work that is intended to be both apologetical in nature and explicitly philosophical from the outset, this is strange. Thomas is always at home in his own metaphysics of esse, and he deploys it with ease and finesse especially when demonstrating God’s existence and discussing the divine nature. But in the SCG his proofs of God’s existence and the subsequent reasoning about the divine nature are awkward and, one could even say, clumsy. Why did he not just dispense with the Aristotelian thinking on motion and movers and all the clarifications that involves? Why not simply stick with his own favored account of act and potency interpreted in terms of the metaphysics of esse? In the current paper I wish to address these issues. I shall begin with an account of what I take to be Aquinas’s way to God and why I think it is 1 For the purposes of this article I will narrow my focus to the proofs of God offered in Summa contra gentiles [SCG] I, ch. 13. I grant that a further proof of God is offered in ch. 15 on the basis of necessity and contingency, and which anticipates the third way of Summa theologiae [ST] I, q. 2, a. 3. 1274 Gaven Kerr his way to God. Having done that, I will then address the issue as to why this way to God does not appear in the SCG reasoning, but slowly emerges only after God’s existence has been demonstrated. I shall conclude that the apologetical and consciously philosophical nature of the SCG offer us an insight into why Thomas did not lean on his metaphysics of esse in his (initial) discussions of God there. Aquinas’s Way to God Aquinas famously argues that there is a distinction between essence and esse in things. The context of this distinction is that of universal hylemorphism, which holds that in all composite things there are two principles: a principle of potency and a principle of actuality. In traditional Aristotelian fashion, defenders of universal hylemorphism held that the principle of actuality in a thing is its form, whereas the principle of potency is its matter.2 All things other than God are composed of matter and form, since all things other than God have some element of potency. But to locate the potentiality of anything other than God in the matter of the thing creates a problem when it comes to separated substances (angels) and the immaterial rational soul. Such substances (or components of substances in the case of the rational soul) are taken to be separated from matter and all material conditions. Nonetheless they are created and thereby dependent on God, so they must have some potentiality. So how do we attribute matter—that is, potency—to separate substances? According to defenders of universal hylemorphism, the answer is to distinguish between corporeal matter and incorporeal matter. The former is the kind of physical matter that we typically take to be the matter of things, whereas the latter is a kind of non-physical matter which the separate substances possess. Thus, it is not proper to say that such substances are 2 The representative defender of universal hylemorphism is Solomon Ibn Gabriol, known to Aquinas as Avicebron. Aquinas cites Avicebron’s Fons Vitae as the origin of this view, see De ente et essentia, ch. 4. See also: In II sent., d. 3, au. 1, a. 1; ST I, q. 50, a. 2; Quaestio disputata de anima, a. 6; Quaestio disputata de spiritualibus creaturis, a. 3; De substantiis separatis, chs. 5–8. For a discussion of Avicebron’s universal hylemorphism, see Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, “Jewish Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philosophy, ed. A. S. McGrade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 121–46, at 126–28 (on Ibn Gabriol and universal hylemorphism). For a more general discussion of its presence and influence in theology in the thirteenth century, see John Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1981), 275–77. The Summa Contra Gentiles and Aquinas’s Way to God 1275 immaterial, but rather that whilst material they are incorporeal. Universal hylemorphism has the advantage that it neatly distinguishes all things from God by isolating a principle of potency (matter) which all things other than God have. Nevertheless, universal hylemorphism presents problems of its own, not least the thorny one of making intelligible just what exactly a real (as opposed to conceptual) kind of matter is that is incorporeal. Aquinas for his part rejected universal hylemorphism from his earliest writings.3 He holds that it is precisely because separated substances are separated from all material conditions that they are taken to be separated. Regardless of the cogency of such a response, Thomas is left with the challenge of accounting for the potency of creatures without appeal to the traditional Aristotelian dichotomy of matter and form. Aquinas cannot affirm that separate substances are pure actuality, for then they would be no different from God; so there must be an element of potency in them (and all creatures), and this is the potency that they have for esse.4 Accordingly, anything that in any way exists other than God does so because it has esse. Creatures are then characterized precisely as creatures because they have esse not in virtue of what they are but because of a distinct cause from which they derive esse. So it is not in virtue of being composites of matter and form that creatures are beings at all; rather it is in virtue of their esse.5 This dependence on esse as the mark of creaturehood is something that Thomas adverts to in his interpretation of philosophical engagement with the doctrine of creation. In two texts, one from the De potentia Dei and the other from the ST, Aquinas looks at the history of philosophical reflection on creation and observes that there was an upward trajectory from consideration of things in terms of their matter, to the distinction of matter and 3 4 5 See for instance De ente et essentia, ch. 4. For a historical overview of the different accounts of matter which played a role in the formation of Aquinas’s thought, see M.-D. Roland-Gosselin, Le De Ente et Essentia de s. Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1948),6–103; see also 120–21 (on Thomas’s rejection of universal hylemorphism). De ente et essentia, ch. 3. Here follows immediately Aquinas’s argumentation for distinction of essence and esse. I shall not on this occasion endeavor to unpack this central theme of Aquinas’s metaphysical thought. For a good historical presentation, see ch. 5 of John Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2000); For my own contributions to this area of Thomist scholarship, see chs. 1–3 of Aquinas’s Way to God: The Proof in De Ente et Essentia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Aquinas, In II sent., d. 1, q. 1, a. 2. The same definition can be found in: SCG II, ch. 17; De potentia Dei, q. 3, a. 1; ST I, q. 45, a. 1; De substantis separatis, ch. 10, no. 56. 1276 Gaven Kerr form, to the recognition of beings in terms of their very being without which they would be nothing—in terms of their esse. Aquinas concludes that it is only when we arrive at a consideration of creatures in terms of their esse that we in turn can think about a primary cause of such, without which there would be nothing, and hence no creator.6 The point to bear in mind in all of this is that, for Aquinas, dependence for esse is the distinctive mark of being created, such that a thing is a creature insofar as it is dependent for its esse. Now, this does not yet indicate that there is a creator from which esse is derived; rather, it establishes only that a thing is a creature; systematically speaking we can affirm the latter whilst remaining uncommitted on the existence or otherwise of a creator.7 What all of this is intended to establish is that we have a robust characterization of creatures precisely as creatures in terms of their dependence for esse. This then will give us a clue as to Aquinas’s way to God; for when we turn to Aquinas’s logic of demonstration, what he says there connects with what he says about the creaturehood of creatures, such that the only logically demonstrative proof of God is one that involves existential act as its starting point. In several places Aquinas discusses the logic of demonstration and applies it to God.8 This logic is based on the traditional Aristotelian demonstrative syllogism, and when considering God’s existence, Thomas notes a problem. The demonstrative syllogism involves a middle term which serves to connect the major and minor terms in the conclusion. The middle term itself is taken to tell us something about the essence of the minor term and its subjectivity to the major term. Accordingly, to conclude a demonstrative syllogism, something must be known about the essence of the subject of the conclusion.9 6 7 8 9 See De potentia Dei, q. 3, a. 5, and ST I, q. 44, a. 2. I discuss these passages in greater depth in chapter 1 of Aquinas and the Metaphysics of Creation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). It is true that in ST Thomas reasons this way about creatures after he has established the existence of God as a primary cause. On the other hand, in De potentia Dei he offers three proofs of the existence of God, proofs that he attributes to Plato, Aristotle, and Avicenna (all involving esse), after he has reasoned as such about the metaphysical constitution of creatures. Thus, systematically speaking we can characterize a creature as dependent for its esse without being committed to there being a primary cause of esse. Of course, such a characterization of creatures raises the question of whether or not there is such a primary cause. ST I q. 2, a. 2, and SCG I, ch. 12. ST I q. 2, a. 2, obj. 2. For more on the middle term of a demonstration see In II analyt. post., lec. 1. The Summa Contra Gentiles and Aquinas’s Way to God 1277 So for example, in the classic Socrates syllogism: All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. The middle (man/men) tells us something about the essence of Socrates, and since from the first premise we know something about men, which is what Socrates is, we in turn are led to know the same thing about Socrates: he is mortal. The problem when it comes to demonstrating God’s existence is that we do not know and cannot know God’s essence; indeed, systematically speaking, at this point we do not know even that God exists. Thus, we are without a middle term. So how can we demonstrate God’s existence? Aquinas’s solution is to distinguish between a demonstration propter quid and a demonstration quia. The former reasons from something known about the nature of a cause to its effect, and so reasons to something about the cause in the conclusion. This was the nature of the Socrates syllogism. However, a quia demonstration reasons from something known about the nature of the effect to something in turn known about the cause. And this is a quia demonstration; it is quia insofar as the effect is such because of its cause.10 In this respect, Aquinas uses the example of the twinkling of the heavenly bodies, and he holds that we can reason from the lack of twinkle of the heavenly bodies to their nearness to us. The heavenly bodies are known to be near because of their lack of twinkle. On the other hand, if we already knew that the heavenly bodies are near, we could reason from their nearness to us to their lack of twinkle, in which case we would be holding that the heavenly bodies do not twinkle on account of (propter quid) their nearness to us.11 When it comes to God then, we cannot have a propter quid demonstration of his existence, since we cannot know his essence as a middle for demonstration. However, we can have a quia demonstration, since we can know something about creatures which will serve as a middle, permitting us to infer that creatures are such because there is some primary cause. Aquinas then is clear that we can engage in causal reasoning for God’s 10 11 ST I, q. 2, a. 2. For the division of demonstrations quia and propter quid see In I analyt. post., lecs. 23–25, particularly no. 195 in lec. 23. For discussion, see: Rudi te Velde, Aquinas on God: The “Divine Science” of the Summa Theologiae (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 42–47; Joseph Owens, “The ‘Analytics’ and Thomistic Metaphysical Procedure,” Mediaeval Studies 26, no. 1 (1964): 83–108, at secs. 3–4; David Twetten, “Clearing a Way for Aquinas: How the Proof from Motion Concludes to God,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 70 (1996): 259–78, at sec. 3; Twetten, “To Which ‘God’ Must a Proof of God’s Existence Conclude for Aquinas?,” in Laudemos Viros Gloriosos: Essays in Honour of Armand Maurer, CSB, ed. R. E. Houser (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 146–84, at sec. 4. See In I analyt. post., lec. 23, nos. 197–98, for this particular example. 1278 Gaven Kerr existence beginning with something known about creatures to an affirmation of a primary cause. Given all of this, in order to demonstrate God’s existence, we must isolate some feature of creatures by which they are the very creatures that they are and explore whether or not that will justify an affirmation of a primary cause. We have already seen that creatures are characterized as creatures (and independently of any question of a creator) from their dependence for esse. A creature is something rather than nothing precisely because it has esse. Its having and being thereby dependent for esse is knowable independently of knowing anything about God’s existence. Consequently, the dependent characteristic by means of which we will mount a quia demonstration of God’s existence will be the dependent character of esse in any creature.12 From the dependent character of esse in a thing, then, Aquinas can reason from such to a primary cause. This reasoning generally involves a consideration of per se ordered series such that members of such series do not have the causality of the series in virtue of what they are. Accordingly, unless there is a cause for the causality that the members of the series possess, there will be no causal series in question.13 The key point here is that the members of per se ordered series participate in the causality granted to them by the primary cause, which primary cause is primary precisely because it can originate the causality in the series in virtue of what it is. Accordingly, given that composites of essence and esse do not possess esse in virtue of what they are, unless there is some primary cause for such esse, such things will not have esse, and thereby will be nothing. But, given that we do have composites of essence and esse, there must be some primary-cause participation which grants the esse of such essence– esse composites and which itself does not merely have esse, but insofar as it is capable of originating esse in such a per se causal series its essence, is its esse—it is pure esse itself. Furthermore, this primary cause is not only primary relative to the causal property of that one per se series; it is absolutely primary insofar as the causality of which it is the primary cause is an absolute causality. This is because esse is the condition for any other causality; for esse is the act of all acts, the perfection of all perfections. Any actuality that can be found 12 13 See In I sent., d. 3. For an account of the metaphysics of per se ordered series, see my articles “Essentially Ordered Series Reconsidered,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 86, no. 4 (2012): 155–74, and “Essentially Ordered Series Reconsidered Once Again,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 91, no. 2 (2017): 541–55. The Summa Contra Gentiles and Aquinas’s Way to God 1279 in anything is ultimately derivable from esse, in which case there is no actuality which escapes the causality of esse. Therefore, there is nothing which escapes the causal influence of the primary cause. But if that is the case, then there is nothing that does not have its being from this primary cause, in which case it is the absolute primary cause of all that is.14 From this standpoint, Aquinas has a very robust conception of the primary cause as pure esse itself; in being such, the primary cause is without any passive potency, in which case there is no distinction of components (no composition) therein. This is because whatever is composed is composed of act and potency, but given that the primary cause is pure act, it cannot be so composed. This means that the primary cause is utterly simple. Not only that, but the primary cause is also utterly unique, since insofar as it is utterly simple, there is no distinction between the individual that the primary cause is and the nature that it has. Rather, it is identical with its nature. Accordingly, there is nothing that it is like to be the primary cause except being the primary cause, in which case it does not have a nature that is shared. Anything other than it is caused to be by it. Hence, the primary cause is an absolutely simple, unique creator of all that is. Armed with this conception of the primary cause, Aquinas is in a position to deduce the traditional attributes of classical theism: eternity, immutability, goodness, omniscience, omnipotence, and so on. I shall not go through his demonstrations of these attributes, but I will point out that the attributes are derived from an appreciation of what the primary cause must be like in virtue of being the primary cause that it is, pure esse itself. Hence, the divine attributes are not features that are applied to the primary cause from outside as it were; they do not signify accidents that the primary cause has. Rather, each divine attribute is revelatory of the being of God as primary cause, and whilst distinct for us in signification, they all refer to the same thing, which is God as pure esse itself. Aquinas’s case for classical theism depends on his way to God as beginning from the caused nature of esse in creatures to the affirmation of a primary cause that is pure esse itself. Accordingly, Aquinas’s classical theism stems from his metaphysics of esse and proceeds naturally from that metaphysics. Many of the arguments for the existence of God found throughout his works deploy the metaphysics of esse and per se ordered series in one form or another, so that for example even if we begin with a consideration of motion, causality, modality and so on, such are taken to be revelatory of 14 For a systematic defense of this way to God, see my book Aquinas’s Way to God. 1280 Gaven Kerr dependence for esse and lead us to infer a primary cause which in being pure esse itself is the primary cause of motion, causality, modality and so on.15 One could painstakingly go through each of Aquinas’s arguments for God’s existence to see how they can be subject to the existential interpretation that I am here advocating. I do not deny that in some cases this would be a worthy and worthwhile enterprise, such as a study of the metaphysical backdrop of the five ways as yielding an existential interpretation. However, what I want to address in this paper is an obvious and immediate counterexample to the thesis I propose: the proofs in the SCG. This work is one of Aquinas’s major theological syntheses. It is not a short treatise, a set of disputed questions, or a commentary. Therein he is not constrained by space, subject matter, or the text on which he is commenting; rather in the SCG, as with the ST, Thomas is free to develop his argumentation as he personally sees things. But the metaphysics of esse is strikingly absent from his proofs of God in chapter 13 of SCG I. Indeed, the proofs of God in the SCG are peculiarly divorced from any metaphysical context, despite Thomas’s insistence elsewhere that God’s existence is demonstrable only in first philosophy or metaphysics.16 15 16 One can see this way to God appear in the demonstrations from De ente et essentia, ch. 4, In I sent., d. 3, De potentia Dei, q. 3, a. 5 (the ways from esse attributed to Plato, Aristotle, and Avicenna), and, on my reading of them, the five ways. To date I have argued that the second and the fifth ways deploy Aquinas’s metaphysics of esse and reasoning pertaining to per se ordered series; see my “The Relevance of Aquinas’s Uncaused Cause Argument Today,” in Revisiting Aquinas’ Proofs for the Existence of God, ed. Robert Arp (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 71–86, and “Design Arguments and Aquinas’s Fifth Way,” The Thomist 82, no. 3 (2018): 447–71. Joseph Owens has argued that esse is the metaphysical backdrop to all of the five ways, and he has argued that, with regard to the argument from motion, unless motion is interpreted in terms of existential act, the argument fails to arrive at an absolute primary cause; see his essays “Aquinas and the Five Ways,” “Immobility and Existence for Aquinas,” “Actuality in the Prima Via,” and “The Conclusion of the Prima Via,” all in St. Thomas Aquinas on the Existence of God: The Collected Papers of Joseph Owens, ed. John R. Catan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980), and his “Aquinas and the Proof from the ‘Physics,’” Mediaeval Studies 28 (1966): 119–50. Recently John Knasas has argued in a manner similar to myself that Aquinas’s way to God is based on his metaphysics of esse, and whilst he and I are in agreement that that metaphysics is visible in the five ways, he and I disagree that it is to be found in the proofs from the SCG. See John Knasas, Thomistic Existentialism and Cosmological Reasoning (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2019), and “Thomistic Existentialism and the Proofs Ex Motu at Contra Gentiles I, C. 13,” The Thomist 59, no. 4 (1995): 591–615. For details see In III Boetium de Trinitate, q. 5, aa. 1 and 4; for translation see The Division and Methods of the Sciences, trans. Armand Maurer (Toronto: The Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1953). Note in particular a. 4, corp. 4. See also In The Summa Contra Gentiles and Aquinas’s Way to God 1281 Are we constrained then to say that Thomas was an eclectic thinker who churned out as many arguments as he could find with no systematic constraint? Or can we affirm a systematic approach to the demonstration of God’s existence (as I have suggested we can) and explain away the anomalous nature of the demonstrations in the SCG? In the remainder of this paper, I will argue for the second disjunct.17 The Summa contra gentiles Just like he does in the ST, Aquinas offers a quintet of arguments for demonstration of the existence of God in the SCG. However, unlike the ST (which is later), the SCG does not offer neat and efficient demonstrations for each argument. Rather, the Summa contra gentiles offers Aquinas’s lengthiest and most sustained presentation of demonstrations for God’s existence to be found in his entire corpus. The arguments offered therein are by far the most complex and drawn out that can be found in the writings of Aquinas on God’s existence. According to Thomas, these are the proofs by which the philosophers and Catholic doctors have established the existence of God.18 In chapter 13 of the first book, we are offered two arguments from motion taken from Aristotle’s Physics, one argument on the order of efficient causes, one argument on the convertibility of being and truth, and a final argument drawn from John Damascene and based on finality. Thomas’s attention in this chapter is focused primarily on the first two ways which defend the proof of motion from Aristotle.19 The text of the 17 18 19 metaphys., proem. See also In I phys., lec. 1, nos. 1–3. Thomas’s position here is contrary to that of Averroës, who believed that God’s existence could be established in physics; see Wippel, Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 13–14. My procedure here stands in contrast to that of Knasas. Whilst he recognizes that Thomas does not appear to conduct the arguments in the SCG in a metaphysical fashion, he argues that that is merely an appearance and that the metaphysics is under the surface. This is because elsewhere Thomas holds that even matter and motion can be considered under the communem rationem entis. In my view, Knasas’s reading forces the arguments into an unfitting mold, since nowhere does the SCG deploy explicitly metaphysical reasoning; hence Knasas is reading into the text. By contrast, his suggested mold would be more fitting for the first way of ST, since this argument does deploy explicitly metaphysical reasoning, in which case it can be read metaphysically. Aquinas, SCG, I, ch. 13. Owens presents a survey of the argument from motion and its appearance in Aquinas’s thought in “Conclusion of the Prima Via,” sec. 4. For Aquinas’s commentary on the proof as it appears in Aristotle’s Physics see In VII phys., lec. 2, and In VIII phys., lect. 9. 1282 Gaven Kerr first two ways from motion takes up most of chapter 13. Therein Thomas sets himself the task of presenting the Aristotelian proofs and either (1) justifying the premises (first way) or (2) justifying the conclusion that the prime mover is wholly immobile (second way). These first two ways run to just over 2,200 Latin words, whereas the last three ways run to just over 260 words.20 Given the disproportionate amount of space he devotes to them, Thomas clearly took it to be of some importance to defend these first two ways. When we look at his defense, we notice that the Aristotelian proofs from motion are not straightforward. This is either because the premises are disputed, as in the first way, or because the conclusion requires some finessing to get us to a wholly immobile first mover, as in the second way. Either way, the proofs require a lot of work to be deployed for the business that Thomas wants to them to do. This contrasts with all of the other proofs of God offered in Aquinas’s works, especially the first way from motion of the ST Furthermore, one striking feature of the proofs of God from the SCG, not just the proofs from motion, is that they are not metaphysical proofs, nor does metaphysical reasoning play a significant role. Rather, they are physical proofs wherein the operative characteristics leading to a conclusion are those drawn from physics or what we today would call philosophy of nature. By contrast, the reasoning of the later five ways in ST (and many of his other proofs besides) is carried by metaphysical considerations pertaining to act and potency in motion, causality, modality, and so on. Aside from one out of three defenses of Aristotle’s motion principle, and perhaps one out of three defenses of a denial of an infinite series of ordered movers, metaphysical considerations are strikingly absent from the proofs in the SCG.21 20 21 Based on the electronic text of the Index Thomisticus, the word count for the first two ways is 2,281, whereas the word count for the following three ways is 268. And for a further comparison, the five ways of the ST come in at 773 words altogether. That means that the space Thomas devotes to just the first two ways of the SCG is about 8.5 times the space devoted to the remaining three ways, and almost three times the space given over to the five ways as a whole in the ST. The two metaphysical proofs from SCG I, ch. 13: “[Motion principle:] Nothing is at once in act and in potency with respect to the same thing. But everything that is moved is, as such, in potency; for motion is the act of the existing thing in potency qua potency. All that moves then is in act as such, because nothing acts unless it is in act. Therefore nothing is both mover and moved with respect to the same motion. And thus nothing moves itself ”; “[Denial of an infinite regress of ordered movers:] That which moves instrumentally cannot move unless there is something that moves principally. The Summa Contra Gentiles and Aquinas’s Way to God 1283 The pivotal realities by means of which Thomas seeks to demonstrate God as the primary cause of all things are physical realities in the sense of realities whose study pertains to that of physics or philosophy of nature. Accordingly, such realities are within the genus of ens mobile. As I see things, Thomas’s mode of procedure here stands in contrast not only to what he writes elsewhere, but also to what he writes in the SCG itself. For, in chapter 4 of book I, he states that it is metaphysics that deals with divine things. And more importantly, in chapter 12, immediately preceding the proofs of God, Thomas offers the now familiar reasons for the demonstrability of God’s existence. Such a demonstration is not one which proceeds from a knowledge of God’s essence, propter quid; rather such a demonstration must proceed from a knowledge of effects to a knowledge of God’s existence as the cause of such effects, per quia demonstrations. However, the effects that Thomas considers in chapter 13 are effects drawn from mobile being, and so they are incapable of getting us any further than a first mover of mobile being. The latter is not necessarily God, and in his second way Thomas recognizes this; for, as noted, in the second way Thomas takes some time to defend the view that the first mover is immobile, and he does so only by augmenting the proof from physics with a proof which draws on considerations in metaphysics.22 So whilst the early chapters of the SCG and Thomas’s procedure elsewhere point to the need for a metaphysical proof of God, the proofs themselves are certainly not metaphysical.23 The lack of metaphysical argumentation is even more striking when we turn to a work contemporaneous with the first book of the SCG, and that is the commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius. In this commentary, Thomas treats us to an articulation of the divisions and methods of the sciences. Therein he argues that God’s existence is established in first philosophy (metaphysics) as the source of all being, whereas God’s 22 23 But if one should proceed to infinity in movers and things moved, all movers will be as instrumental movers, and because they will be moved movers, there will be nothing that is the principal mover. Therefore, nothing will be moved” (trans. mine). SCG I, ch. 13: “But because God is not a part of something that is self-moving, Aristotle in his Metaphysics proceeds from the mover that is a part of something self-moving to another mover that is wholly separate, which is God. For since everything that moves itself is moved by appetite, it must be that the mover that is a part of something self-moving moves on account of an appetite for something desirable. The latter is higher in moving, for the one desiring is a kind of moved mover, but what is desirable is a mover wholly unmoved. There must therefore be a primary mover wholly separate and immobile, which is God.” See also Knasas, “Thomistic Existentialism and the Proofs Ex Motu,” sec. II. 1284 Gaven Kerr revealed nature is considered in theology proper.24 It is further interesting to note that the commentary on the De Trinitate was written on the same parchment and made use of the same Parisian ink as a substantial portion of SCG I, including chapter 13.25 Hence, in a text contemporaneous with that chapter, written in the same geographical context and same teaching period, and indeed even written with the same stationary, Thomas affirms that the approach to God is metaphysical (De Trinitate), and then in the SCG he abandons the metaphysical way and offers physical demonstrations, taking up the metaphysical way once again only in other works. Is there an explanation for this change in attitude? I think it is fair to say that Aquinas is somewhat ill at ease with the proofs of God in the SCG; this is especially true when it comes to the proofs from motion. He goes out of his way to address disputes about the premises or conclusions, and he does not appear to exhibit the confidence (or elegance) of the later five ways of the ST. I think the reason for this is not because of any deficiency on Thomas’s part, but because of a deficiency with the proofs themselves. Why would Thomas choose proofs that are problematic and that he has to take some time and energy to fix? I think the context of the SCG indicates that Thomas was not simply concerned with establishing the truth of the matter—something that he could have done by appeal to the caused character of existential act and a denial of an infinite series of ordered causes, as he does quite deftly in other works. Rather, Thomas’s concern here is to convince either Aristotelians or those in substantial agreement with Aristotle of the existence of some absolute primary cause. This is clear from the opening lines of chapter 13, that these ways are how the philosophers and Catholic doctors have proved God’s existence. The only proof from a Catholic theologian is the final way from teleology attributed to John Damascene, whereas the first four proofs are all Aristotelian in nature. This speaks to the context of the SCG as a whole in which Thomas states that he wishes to show the truth of the Catholic faith and set aside errors opposed to it (ch. 2). Furthermore, when it comes to the errors he wishes to set aside, he mentions Jews, Muslims, and pagans, who do not accept the authority of Sacred Scripture, and so who must be convinced by appeal to natural reason (ch. 2). Whilst a systematically theological work, the SCG has a significant 24 25 See n. 16 above. Jean-Pierre Torrell, St. Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, The Person and his Work, trans. Robert Royal (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 101. The Summa Contra Gentiles and Aquinas’s Way to God 1285 apologetical context wherein non-Catholics are being led to the truth of the Catholic faith.26 In the context of those who do not accept Sacred Scripture, they must be led by natural reason. And so appeal must be made to those authorities of natural reason that such thinkers would take seriously; this would no doubt involve to Aristotle and the Aristotelian commentators. This explains the Aristotelian context of the proofs from chapter 13 of SCG I and Thomas’s obvious difficulty with them, when in other contexts he prefers to proceed on the basis of metaphysical considerations pertaining to existential act. Even though Thomas begins from an Aristotelian context in motion or more generally in physical realities, he does not remain there. We do see his existential metaphysics gradually creep into the SCG once he has established the eternity of God and the fact that there is no passive potency in him. After this, Thomas is free to think of God, free from passive potency, as pure act. And thence he begins to pick up the pace and enter into reasoning and argumentation with which we are more familiar and he is more comfortable (by the time he gets to book II, Thomas speaks freely of esse in the articulation of his metaphysics of creation). So not only is there a significant apologetical context to the SCG, we also see Thomas here as a significant apologist. For he eschews an easy beginning in the metaphysical context with which he is most familiar, rather seeking a common ground with those who would disagree with him. Whilst in other contexts he may begin and remain with the metaphysics of existential act as the neatest, most convincing, and profound philosophy of God, here in the SCG, Aquinas leaves the metaphysical high ground and appeals to the more physical considerations with which other, non-Catholic Aristotelians would be sympathetic. But such a retreat is only so that he along with his interlocutors may take the high ground once again wherein God is considered as pure existence itself, and all the classical implications that flow from that. Conclusion By way of conclusion, I wish to reflect on what Thomas’s procedure in the Summa contra gentiles can teach us today when considering demonstrations of God’s existence. I think the perplexity of the proofs of God in the 26 Whilst the Dominican missionary context of the SCG is disputed, Torrell is sympathetic to the view that there is an apostolic and apologetical dimension to it (Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, 104–7). 1286 Gaven Kerr SCG lies in the fact that therein Thomas was setting out proofs that would convince others, rather than simply offering proofs that get to the truth of the matter. We Thomists of a contemporary vintage must do the same. We must of course figure out what systematically speaking is the truth of the matter, however, we cannot avoid co-operation with other philosophers and sharing with them the fruits of our contemplation. Whilst the SCG deployed physical proofs for God’s existence, and that because of its apologetical context, it would be fruitless to employ such physical proofs within a contemporary philosophical setting. This is not only because the physics of Aristotle requires some subtle reasoning in its defense (just as it did in Thomas’s day), but also because a proof from physics establishing a first mover is so far removed from God that it would take significantly more argumentation to show that such a prime mover is God (indeed more argumentation than even Thomas had to offer in the thirteenth century to convince other Aristotelians). Not only that, but deploying a physical proof of God in a contemporary context would require a knowledge of contemporary physics significantly more specialized and finer-grained than what was required for the same in the thirteenth century. Whilst a knowledge of Aristotle’s physics requires some significant personal investment on behalf of the researcher, it does not require the specialisms required for knowledge of contemporary physics. So, the contemporary defender of philosophical theism would be quite hampered in attempting to offer a proof of God from physics. And this is aside from the more systematic point that a proof of a primary cause of all that is within the context of physics is impossible, since such a proof can get us to only a primary cause of mobile being, not a primary cause of being per se. By contrast, whilst one must specialize in philosophy to pursue a proof from metaphysics, one need not specialize in the various specialisms requiring several years of training, as one would for developing a proof from contemporary physics. Furthermore, whilst the non-philosopher may find the metaphysical demonstration of God quite perplexing, it does not jar with his common-sense intuitions concerning the contrast between being and non-being, the causality involved in typical examples of per se causal series, the fact that the medium-sized dry goods of everyday experience do not exist essentially, and so on. These are all features of Aquinas’s way to God which reflect his own profound metaphysics of esse, yet can be intuitively grasped without the need for a systematic education in that metaphysics. Moreover, a proof of God based on the metaphysics of esse abstracts from developments in the natural sciences, since whatever those The Summa Contra Gentiles and Aquinas’s Way to God 1287 developments may be, they will presuppose the actual existence of the realities with which they deal. Hence a proof of God which springboards from a consideration of the metaphysics of esse can incorporate any natural scientific framework. Accordingly, I submit that the metaphysical proof of God based on esse, which is Thomas’s own and personal favorite, is quite promising from a contemporary apologetical context (and is more than promising from a systematically philosophical context). If contemporary Thomists are to follow Thomas’s example in the SCG, then it will not involve defending his defense of the physical proofs to the letter, but adopting his spirit of presenting the most convincing proof of God. I believe that a very strong case can be made for the truth of Aquinas’s demonstration of God from esse; any objections to this proof are either wrong or based on a misunderstanding. But beyond that, I also believe that, for the reasons outlined in the previous paragraph, the proof of God from esse is the best proof from an apologetical point of view. And so in presenting a rigorously philosophical proof of God to a contemporary audience that seeks to convince unbelievers, the best approach to take is to adopt Aquinas’s way to God.27 27 This paper was originally presented at a conference on the reasonability of belief in God with particular focus on the SCG, organized by the Thomistic Institute Angelicum. I wish to thank Prof. Thomas Joseph White and all the staff at the Thomistic Institute for organizing this conference, and to my fellow speakers and audience members for their participation and feedback. I also wish to thank Prof. Matthew Levering for helping me to bring this paper to publication. And finally I wish to thank God, the unique and subsistent act of being from Whom all that is comes to be. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2022): 1289–1304 1289 The Intellectual Ethics of Revealed Truth: A Thomistic Approach Roger Pouivet University of Lorraine Nancy, France I At the beginning of the Summa contra gentiles [SCG], Thomas Aquinas says that “we must first show what way is open to us in order that we may make known the truth which is our object” (SCG I, ch., 3, no. 1).1 To question ourselves in this way is to do what we, today, call epistemology. So, in my opinion, in the first chapters of the SCG, Aquinas examines questions belonging to the so-called “Epistemology of religious beliefs.”2 Aquinas wonders how we may have the right to claim that God exists and what his attributes are, and to believe the revealed truths. So understood, epistemology of religious beliefs is part of what I will call “intellectual ethics.” It is less about beliefs themselves—to know whether or not they are justified—than about believers, about persons and their intellectual virtues. Do they have a blameless and even a superior intellectual life? Or, are they immoral in having received their religious beliefs in the way that they did? In particular, it raises as a central question whether it is consistent with intellectual virtue for a person to receive beliefs by revelation, that is in the name of God. Is it possible to receive truths from the divine external source and donor, through the biblical text itself, or even through those who are purportedly in charge of manifesting the Word of God, and be an epistemologically virtuous, irreproachable person? 1 2 All quotes of Summa contra gentiles [SCG] are from Saint Thomas Aquinas, On the Truth of the Catholic Faith, Summa contra Gentiles, trans. Anton C. Pegis, F.R.S.C. (New York: Image, 1955). See Roger Pouivet, Épistémologie des croyances religieuses (Paris: Cerf, 2013). 1290 Roger Pouivet My hypothesis is that the opening chapters of the SCG may be viewed as a step into the field of intellectual ethics examining the acquisition of religious beliefs from the perspective of intellectual virtue and defending the legitimacy of certain intellectual attitudes. II Let us distinguish two accounts of epistemology. What we may call an “epistemology of justification” deals with the norms or rules whose observance ensures the justification of our beliefs and the legitimacy of our claims to knowledge. It does not concern itself with the norms of behavior of a seeker after knowledge, but rather with the question whether what someone believes or claims is backed by evidence; and it debates what does or does not count as evidence and which are the rules by means of which evidence may support, or fail to support, beliefs or knowledge claims. Such an epistemology likewise concerns itself with the reflective control that we exert over our beliefs. In the second account, epistemology explores intellectual virtues as qualities of character. Our epistemic life is laudable when our acquisition of beliefs depends upon these virtues. However, in the perspective that we find in Aquinas, virtues are not understood simply as skills (or competences) that ensure that we arrive at beliefs that are justified by evidence, in the usual meanings given to that term. So, this second account of which I speak here differs from so-called “virtue reliabilism,” for which, ultimately, virtues are simply faculties functioning properly for the maximization of our knowledge.3 An “epistemology of intellectual virtues” in a Thomistic approach addresses the question of what a “good epistemic life” is. So, it is not intended to define justification or knowledge to indicate what are the right rules (as in an epistemology of justification) to control beliefs, or even not what are the right procedures (as in an epistemology of skills) to acquire beliefs. In epistemology of the first type, the main epistemic commandment to persons is to believe only on the basis of sufficient evidence. It is essential that this evidence be recognized internally, through an examination of the reasons to believe. Any defense of the legitimacy of revealed beliefs or of any claim to know through revelation will prove, on this basis, utterly 3 “Virtue reliabilism” or “virtue theoretic epistemology” is the sort of position advanced by Ernest Sosa or John Greco. It may be considered to be a form of intellectual ethics, but it is not the form that I here hypothesize may be extracted from the SCG. The Intellectual Ethics of Revealed Truth 1291 implausible, and so epistemically blameworthy. Revealed beliefs suppose our complete intellectual dependence upon an external source. We are not in the position to exert any internal control. The standard of such control would itself be received from the same source, and not grounded in our own epistemological initiative. So, in modern epistemology, the primacy of the rule of evidence has led to religious beliefs being deemed to be intrinsically irrational. As I read the first nine chapters of the SCG, Saint Thomas offers, as I have indicated, another epistemology, close to that which I presented above as the “second type”: an epistemology framed in terms of intellectual virtues. Our belief that God exists and in divine revelation presupposes that there is an appropriate mode of apprehending the Gospel truth which is not governed by the rule of evidence, but which is, however, fully legitimate from an epistemological point of view. In order to appreciate this, we would have to highlight an epistemology based upon the value of certain virtuous epistemic attitudes, and not upon epistemic norms that are independent of people and of who these people are. We can understand the beginning of the SCG as setting up an epistemology of this sort. I am therefore not claiming that Aquinas was a virtue epistemologist on the contemporary model.4 Historically, that would not make much sense. I am saying only that, with what we now call virtue epistemology in mind, it may be easier for us to understand what Aquinas proposes in these chapters. III The canonical formulation of the evidentialist principle was given by William Clifford: “It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence.”5 So, our legitimate beliefs and knowledge result from empirical data or analytically true propositions, as logical empiricists said in the 1930s. Evidentialism as Clifford formulates it is a norm of intellectual ethics. Notably, Clifford’s famous article “The Ethics of Belief ” especially targets religious beliefs and pretends to show that they are immoral. It is required of the believer to prove that he maintains his beliefs without his judgment being vitiated, which can consist 4 5 See my “Was Thomas Aquinas A Virtue Epistemologist?,” in Analytically Oriented Thomas, ed. Miroslaw Szatkowski (Neunkirchen-Seelscheid: Editiones Scholasticae, 2016). Originally published in Contemporary Review, 1877; reprinted in William K. Clifford, Lectures and Essays, ed. Leslie Stephen and Frederick Pollock (London: Macmillan, 1886). 1292 Roger Pouivet only of putting forward convincing arguments or evidence in their favor. But the religious believer, because his judgment is vitiated by his belief, is quite incapable of that. So, the religious believer is morally blameworthy. Shame on him! The reason for this condemnation is that the religious believer arrives at a proposition, represented as true, by his own intellectual means. Therefore, no truth is actually given—there is no evidence for that proposition; and especially no truth results from a grace given to creatures who receive it directly (such as the apostles in the Gospel or those who heard the Sermon on the Mount) or through testimony (for instance, those who hear and read the Gospel). It is held to be epistemologically and morally mandatory that our beliefs result from an epistemic control exerted on a proposition regarding which one examines his right to accept it as true. What can be accepted as true is only what a person can hold to be true after an inspection carried out according to the epistemological standards laid down by philosophers, such as Clifford’s principle, or those formulated by René Descartes in the second part of the Discourse on Method, or John Locke’s requirement in his Essay concerning Human Understanding that belief must be proportionate to the available evidence. To show that proper epistemic control exerted on our beliefs is incompatible with the immediate revelation of a truth, it is possible to argue in the following way. Suppose this rule: “Accept as true any proposition that is revealed.” This would assume a distinctly human capacity to identify a proposition as revealed, a standard of authentic revelation. This standard could be, for example, the recognized status of the one who claims this truth: he is a prophet, he is the Son of God, he speaks with the authority of the orthodox Church. But to be plausible, this standard itself presupposes that the rule of evidence has been respected; for example, if someone speaks in the name of God, his entitlement to do so must be supported by sufficient evidence. Evidence may not itself be a revealed truth. So, an unrevealed truth, acquired according the rule of evidence, is necessarily the condition of acceptance of any revealed truth. That we must have evidence in favor of the standard according to which a proposition is revealed shows that it is not enough that it is claimed to be revealed to be accepted as such. It is acceptable as revealed, and thus as a truth, only on the basis of evidence in which revelation necessarily plays no role. In the two following quotations from the Essay,6 Locke appears to me to be reasoning in the manner just described: 6 John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding (London: Thomas Basset, 1690). The Intellectual Ethics of Revealed Truth 1293 Whatsoever truth we come to the clear discovery of, from the knowledge and contemplation of our own ideas, will always be certainer to us than those which are conveyed to us by traditional revelation. For the knowledge we have that this revelation came at first from GOD can never be so sure as the knowledge we have from the clear distinct perception of the agreement or disagreement of our own ideas. (bk. IV, ch. 18, no. 4) Whatever GOD hath revealed is certainly true: no doubt can be made of it. This is the proper object of faith; but whether it be a divine revelation or no, reason must judge, which can never permit the mind to reject a greater evidence to embrace what is less evident, nor allow it to entertain probability in opposition to knowledge and certainty. (bk. IV, ch. 18, no. 10) Modern justificatory epistemology, as exemplified here in Locke’s comments on revelation, is then incompatible with the straightforward possibility of revealed truths taken at face value. Revealed truth has always to satisfy a standard of belief to validate it. And this standard must be independent of all revealed origin. Its source is in our own ability of evidential control. Does this mean that modern epistemology is incompatible with the very fact of being a Christian? Certainly, Locke’s intention is not to say that it is. Locke even intended to consolidate the Christian religion on a more secure basis. So modern epistemology was not invented by him (or by others, including Descartes, Hume, and Kant) to counter Christianity. But is gets turned into a war machine against Christianity if it is claimed that it is epistemologically vicious to believe in revelation without having sufficient evidence that the revelation is authentic, and that we never have such evidence about revealed truths. If Christian beliefs cannot satisfy the rule of evidence in demonstrating the authenticity of revelation (i.e., its derivation from an authentic source), then they are in a terrible position. The only solution for the Christian believer would be to believe without, or even against, pertinent evidence. For, to be a Christian, you have to recognize certain revealed truths as revealed and known as truths in the name of God because they are revealed. You have then to believe them true without satisfying the rule of evidence. This is not optional or accidental for a Christian. It seems even to be constitutive of Christian faith. Christ declares this in John 18:37: “It is for this that I was born, and that I came into the world, to bear witness to the truth,” a passage that Thomas quotes in SCG I, chapter 3, precisely at his very beginning. If modern 1294 Roger Pouivet epistemology cannot tolerate such a mode of access to truth through revelation, in certain cases merely because someone utters it—most especially if that someone is Jesus Christ, or God himself—then there are three possibilities: (1) we have to renounce Christianity in the name of evidentialism; (2) we have to reject evidentialism in the name of Christianity; (3) we must be fideists. The fideist solution (3) consists in asserting that religious belief, at least as faith, is not supposed to be justifiable by reasons, or even that it consists in ignoring reasons. This may be understood as a reaction to the impossibility of founding religious beliefs, and especially revealed ones, upon evidence. The fideist attitude as an answer to modern epistemology has not been systematic, of course. But among Christian philosophers, the critique of natural theology, and even of philosophical theology, has been constant since Locke.7 Concerning (2), if it is immoral to reject evidentialism, as Clifford suggests, then to believe that a proposition is true because it is revealed, without sufficient evidence in the authenticity of the revelation, would be intellectually vicious.8 On any such view, (2) would be a promotion of intellectual immorality. IV Does Thomas offer an argument that can respond to a critique of the epistemological irresponsibility and intellectual immorality of religious beliefs? In particular, can he dispute what is presented in modern times as the irresponsibility and immorality of the claim to have received a truth by revelation? Regarding “divine things,” Thomas distinguishes between two kinds of truths. Natural reason suffices for the first kind. Man comes, by the sole effort of his reason, to know that God exists and to know some of 7 8 The important development of a phenomenology of religion (in France in particular, with Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, and many others today) could also be the result of the evidentialist critique; it would make more sense to think of religious engagement in terms of the subjective experience we have rather than in terms of objective requirements which beliefs must respect. So, it would be the whole program of an epistemology of religious beliefs, focused on the question of their legitimacy, that would have to be to canceled for the benefit of a philosophical investigation of what it is like to have religious experience. What then is important is the phenomenal description of our religious conscience and epistemological and ethical investigations. Indeed, Clifford claims more: for him it would be simply immoral, not merely an intellectual offence. The Intellectual Ethics of Revealed Truth 1295 his properties: eternity, immateriality, simplicity, perfection, goodness, uniqueness, infinity, omniscience. The other sort of truths “go beyond any enterprise of reason” (SCG I, ch. 9, no. 1). One of the examples given by Thomas is thus “that God is triune and one.” The epistemological doctrine is so summarized: “There are therefore in God intelligible truths which are accessible to human reason, but there are others which absolutely exceed its force” (ch. 3, no. 3). All truths are in God: some are accessible by reason, others only by revelation. This distinction between two kinds of truths determines the division between the main two parts of the SCG. The first part consists of books I–III and concerns the truths of religion that reason can achieve by itself. Book IV then turns to revealed truths. But Aquinas does not mean to say that these truths are not rational. Reason proceeds first from the bottom— the empirical apprehension of reality—upwards to the knowledge of God as creator and providence. Then, reason receives the truths from above. But we have not to take advantage of this distinction between what we know by reason and what we know by revelation to assume a duality of truth. These are therefore the same truths which we come to know by reason, if we are able, and in any case, by revelation—and for some of us, only by revelation. There are said to be “two kinds of truth” only in the sense of there being truths that we apprehend in two different ways; truth itself is the same in both cases. Thus, truth, in metaphysics and rational theology, on the one hand, and in revelation and revealed theology, on the other, is truth in one and the same sense. As Thomas puts it: “I say: ‘two kinds of truth in divine things,’ placing myself not on the side of God, who is the one and simple truth, but on the side of our knowledge, which relates to various ways to divine realities” (SCG, I, ch. 9, no. 1). The truths of metaphysics and rational theology may be demonstrated against a reasoning opponent. Let us suppose he denies the existence of God, or that he questions his eternity. Reason can be persuasive against such denials, by means of arguments in good standing. By contrast, in the truths of revelation and revealed theology, the doubter recognizes the authority of Sacred Scripture, and the way to convince him lies in demonstrating which truths are actually revealed. Thus, as Thomas says, the difference between the two kinds of truth does not exist on God’s side. It is a difference that concerns only intellectual debate. First, it concerns the ways in which we can apprehend truth. Second, it concerns how we can defend truth. And third, we must also consider the opponent against whom one defends truth. Is it someone who does not recognize the authority of the Old Testament? An unbeliever? Or someone who does not accept some religious truths but who nevertheless 1296 Roger Pouivet shares a large part of the Bible (for instance, the Old Testament) with Christians, recognizing its authority? That Christian philosophers are able to apprehend certain important religious truths by natural reason makes them different from those who are unable even to understand the arguments of rational theology. Christian philosophers are also importantly different from those who might be able to understand truth but who are deprived of the time necessary for metaphysical speculation, being too much busy with temporal affairs. Some others, who might have the time, are simply lazy, because one needs intellectual drive to apply your reason to difficult metaphysical and theological matters. Acquiring those religious truths that reason can bring us to presupposes certain virtues, both intellectual and moral. It is these human qualities that are called upon in the contemplative life. This is why the SCG opens with this quote: “My mouth shall meditate truth, and my lips shall hate impiety” (Prov 8:7). The examination of truth commensurate with reason, as opposed to the acceptance of truth only in the name of God, is thus a matter of wisdom. The speculative courage that moves one to look for reasons for fundamental truths about divine things is exactly what underpins the best life—the life of contemplation—for beings such as we are. Concerning the truths to which reason cannot lead us, one also needs a spiritual effort sustained by the virtues of the mind: it requires a disposition to hear the voice of God, mainly in the Old and New Testaments, and the virtue of trust, without which one can learn nothing through testimony. Why is the first chapter of the SCG devoted to “the office of the wise man”? It is because we have to determine how the desire to know divine things is to be ordered, conducted in the best way. This is typically a matter of intellectual ethics. For some truths, the desire must be ordered by the virtues of wisdom (knowledge of the highest causes of reality), science (systematic demonstrative knowledge), and understanding (capacity to grasp the first principles of demonstration). For certain other truths, the desire must be ordered by the welcoming of revelation and testimony through an appropriate relationship with the Sacred Scripture. Other virtues are called upon as well: an understanding which supposes the virtue of studiosity (as a part of the virtue of temperance). It supposes also the capacity to listen to the word of God and the love of Truth, which is yet another virtue. The truths that we access by reason and by listening to the word are equally gifts of God. The difference between them is epistemological, not ontological. Our ways of apprehending truths are linked to our intellectual attitudes, which are, in part, related to our social lives. Do we have the time The Intellectual Ethics of Revealed Truth 1297 needed to pursue wisdom and to discern the word of God? Do we have the virtues of mind that make us sensible to the gift of the Holy Spirit, without which the reasons for faith and even what one should believe in faith— which is revealed—would escape us? On the basis of such considerations, one can understand better, it seems to me, this famous passage: There is, then, in man a threefold knowledge of things divine. Of these, the first is that in which man, by the natural light of reason, ascends to a knowledge of God through creatures. The second is that by which the divine truth exceeding the human intellect descends on us in the manner of revelation, not, however, as something made clear to be seen, but as something spoken in words to be believed. The third is that by which the human mind will be elevated to gaze perfectly upon the things revealed. (SCG IV, ch. 1, no. 5) The final sentence pertains to the condition of our intellectual life after bodily death, in eternal life. That aspect of Thomas’s account will not be considered in this paper. But the significance of the greater part of this passage should by now have been made pretty clear. V An objection to my reading of the Summa contra gentiles would be that my interpretation takes us quite far from the letter of the texts. In the first three books of the SCG, Aquinas discusses arguments whose merits must be controlled, but he says nothing about the virtues to be exercised in this operation. And in the fourth part, where he discusses truths that reason cannot itself account for—revealed truths—he does not present this as a question of virtues. But let us take a closer look. Thomas affirms, as I have already said, that, in the first place, the truths about God to which natural reason arrives are offered to men as objects of faith and, in the second place, that the truths which reason reaches are not of a nature different from those that are revealed—it is the modality of access that differs, as we noted earlier. Therefore, the philosopher, when he accepts the first truths, does not normally depend upon controlling his judgment antecedently through rational argument. He does not await the arguments of reason about the truths to be believed. It was the same for Bertrand Russell: he did not wait until he had finished Principia Mathematica to believe that 2 + 2 = 4! He believed it and later offered an account 1298 Roger Pouivet of the legitimacy of his belief. The philosopher does not have to summon the truths about the things of God to appear before of the tribunal of reason. His job is not to determine whether we have the right to have the beliefs that we hold. He is not looking for the data that might lead him to say to God: “Well, that’s credible. I can accept to believe that.” The philosopher receives a “supernatural inspiration,” as Aquinas says (SCG I, ch. 4, no. 1). He does not entertain faith while he aims to justify it on the basis of arguments. On the contrary, he argues from faith. That is the venerable tradition of fides quaerens intellectum and credo ut intelligam inherited from Saint Augustine and Saint Anselm. The legitimacy of our belief in the truths of the faith and our assurance of knowing them do not therefore rest on the prerequisite of epistemological control. Rather, it presupposes a triply appropriate intellectual attitude: first, appropriate to who we are, rational beings who perfect themselves in their intellectual lives; second, appropriate to the kind of truths to be known, whether or not they can be attained by reason; thirdly, appropriate to interlocutors, according to whether they share or name with us the Sacred Text, and whether they share it in part or not at all. At the start of the SCG, Thomas in no way proposes a set of epistemological rules to be observed in the inquiry. What he proposes does not resemble at all Descartes’s Rules for the Direction of the Mind, or the Discourse on the Method! There are no rules, principles, or deontological claims. But Aquinas makes explicit the conditions of intellectual ethics about divine things and God as Truth. He describes the kind of attitude, wisdom, that should be adopted. We must not to be boorish; we have to move away from occupations that would distract us from the contemplative life; we have to overcome laziness or what he also calls, in the Summa theologiae [ST] II-II, question 35, acedia. There, he says, that “spiritual good is a good of every truth, sorrow about spiritual good is evil in itself.” We have not “to walk as also the Gentiles walk in the vanity of their mind, having, their understanding darkened,” says Aquinas (SCG I, ch. 4, no. 3) by quoting the Epistle to the Ephesians (4:17–18); we have to be wise, and it is possible only by receiving the gift of wisdom. We are able to arrive at the inquiry concerning the aforementioned truth only on the basis of a great deal of labor spent in study. Now, those who wish to undergo such a labor for the mere love of knowledge are few, even though God has inserted into the minds of men a natural appetite for knowledge. (SCG I, ch. 4, no. 3). The Intellectual Ethics of Revealed Truth 1299 Those who enter into the inquiry realize, in the virtue of studiosity (see ST II-II, q. 166), their nature which includes a natural desire to understand and to know. This studious inquiry therefore does not aim to justify Christian beliefs, or to ground them rationally, as if such truths were waiting to be justified and grounded by us. Inquiry correctly managed makes us better through understanding arguments, but that is because of the character of the truths we thereby gain access to. The very exercise of reason is so difficult in dealing with such truths that we would never comprehend their rational support without starting from them, as something given to us. VI I now borrow a distinction made by Roderick Chisholm, that between methodist epistemology9 and particularist epistemology, although I use it in my own way and not in Chisholm’s.10 The methodist epistemology asserts that determining what we are warranted in believing or claiming to know presupposes the prior formulation of epistemic criteria or rules. Beliefs satisfying the prescribed criteria or satisfying the defined rules are justified. This epistemology is ambitious: we can discover all the genuine epistemic and cognitive content that enters our minds by methodically following these rules. It is for the philosopher to discern and formulate the laws of thought. The Clifford Principle is an example of such an epistemic criterion or rule. The particularist epistemology is modest. By examining our beliefs, we can make the norms of their rationality explicit. We are rational by nature, even though we are fallible—because our reason is weak, especially when it comes to divine things that lie so far beyond it. But this does not mean that the alleged beliefs and knowledge concerning divine things are illegitimate until they are brought before the Tribunal of reason. Beliefs are legitimate as long as nothing militates heavily against them. In that case, it would be intellectually vicious to pretend they are innocent. We must reject a belief because it is wrong, not because it does not satisfy a principle such as Clifford’s or meet certain other deontological requirements. What matters then in the formation of beliefs is a virtue like the desire of truth, or what could also be called an epistemic sensibility. The obstacles to a good intellectual life are intellectual pride, temerity, confusion, obsessive thoughts, 9 10 “Methodist” is not at all related to Methodism as a Protestant confession, but to the notion of “method,” as in the Discourse on the Method. Roderick Chisholm, “The Problem of Criterion,” in The Foundations of Knowing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 61–75. 1300 Roger Pouivet and other epistemic vices, not the absence of epistemic control according to some previously determined criteria. Chisholm distinguishes two questions, A and B: A: What do we know? What is the extent of our knowledge? B: How are we to decide whether we know? What are the criteria of knowledge?” And he says: Going back to our questions A and B, we may summarize . . . three possible views as follows: there is skepticism (you cannot answer either question without presupposing an answer to the other, and therefore the questions cannot be answered at all); there is “methodism” (you begin with an answer to B); and there is “particularism” (you begin with an answer to A). I suggest that the third possibility is the most reasonable.11 In my opinion, Thomas is particularist. He adopts an epistemology which, starting from beliefs, examines the reasons we have for having them, but does not search for their justification according to some philosophically mandated epistemic criteria. There is not a kind of epistemic extra-territoriality of the philosopher in charge of controlling the warrant for beliefs in terms of his own formulas for rational justification. This attitude of Descartes, Locke, and the majority of modern philosophers is not accepted by Aquinas in connection with religious beliefs. But is this not epistemological lightness on the part of Aquinas? Is it not an epistemologically culpable laxity? Is it not “foolishness”? Is it not about following fables of ignorant people (indoctas), as Aquinas himself formulates this imagined reproach (SCG I, ch. 6)? Not at all. We are able, according to the conditions of an appropriate intellectual attitude such as I have characterized, to achieve religious truth by reason. This does not amount to justifying them, but to understanding them as best we can. And doing so, the kind of reasonableness that it supposes—wisdom—realizes our nature at its best, since our nature is rational. Concerning revealed truth, it is no less rational than for unrevealed truth; rather, it is even more rational. That there are things the knowledge of which we cannot bring under natural reason shows that, among divine things, there are some that 11 Chisholm, “Problem of Criterion,” 69. The Intellectual Ethics of Revealed Truth 1301 are still more divine than those the belief in which we can support with natural reason. This is indeed the case with the Trinity. What has been passed on to us in the words of sacred Scripture may be taken as principles, so to say; thus, the things in those writings passed on to us in a hidden fashion we may endeavor to grasp mentally in some way or other, defending them from the attacks of the infidels. Nonetheless, that no presumption of knowing perfectly may be present, points of this kind must be proved from sacred Scripture, but not from natural reason. For all that, one must show that such things are not opposed to natural reason, in order to defend them from infidel attack. This was also the method fixed upon in the beginning of this work. (SCG IV, ch. 1, no. 10) Thomas indicates that some men, at the very beginnings of Christianity, were so divinely inspired “. . . that simple and untutored persons, filled with the gift of the Holy Spirit, come to possess instantaneously the highest wisdom and the readiest eloquence” (SCG I, ch. 6, no. 1). They were followed, “without the violent assault of arms or the promise of pleasures and (what is most wonderful of all) in the midst of the tyranny of the persecutors, (by) an innumerable throng of people, both simple and most learned, who flocked to the Christian faith” (ch. 6, no. 1) This account of the formation of Christian beliefs by the intervention of the Holy Spirit would certainly not satisfy the methodist and evidentialist epistemologist. But Thomas, being a particularist, is humble even concerning such beliefs, which are not guilty before the tribunal of reason even if they have not been shown to satisfy some externally specified epistemological criteria. Aquinas intends to show that the Christian does not believe absurdities and is not epistemologically guilty when he claims to have received revealed truth. What is needed for receiving such truths by a rational creature, whether a brave simple person or one of the wise, is simply intellectually virtuous attitudes, which are, for Aquinas, simply common-sensical. VII Could it not be objected that, as he is interpreted here, Thomas chooses a convenient epistemology at will, because it helps him to justify unjustifiable beliefs? Would it not greatly facilitate the task in the epistemology of religious beliefs to resort, as Thomas does, to a so-called epistemology 1302 Roger Pouivet of virtues? Is this not simply a way of ensuring, at little epistemological expense, an overly easy path to purported “knowledge”? Must we think, in response to such questions, that we have no choice: that epistemology is necessarily what the moderns have proposed? That we must accept the necessity of finding norms for the control of beliefs, norms that we must respect if we are to be considered epistemologically virtuous believers? We will of course be reminded that, historically, methodists (and skeptics) prevailed over particularists. We will be told that to claim that we may legitimately start from what we believe, or pretend to know, in order to determine the true extent of our knowledge is to beg the epistemological question, and that epistemology must come first. The Summa contra gentiles would then have to begin, like Descartes’ Meditations, by setting aside all beliefs until a preliminary criterion of their legitimacy is settled. However, for Thomas, as I have tried to explain, Christian beliefs do not wait for reasons to maintain them. Christian faith is even, by its very nature, a reason to be confident in our rationality. The truths of natural reason are not opposed to the truths of the Christian faith: faith, as virtue, is the fullest realization of our nature, of our rationality. This is why certain divine truths can be reached by reason, and also why we do not stop being rational beings, or stop living fully rational lives, when we confidently receive the gift of revelation. Now, although the truth of the Christian faith which we have discussed surpasses the capacity of the reason, nevertheless that truth that the human reason is naturally endowed to know cannot be opposed to the truth of the Christian faith. For that with which the human reason is naturally endowed is clearly most true; so much so, that it is impossible for us to think of such truths as false. Nor is it permissible to believe as false that which we hold by faith, since this is confirmed in a way that is so clearly divine. Since, therefore, only the false is opposed to the true, as is clearly evident from an examination of their definitions, it is impossible that the truth of faith should be opposed to those principles that the human reason knows naturally. (SCG I, ch. 7, no. 1) The work of the sage is therefore, on this account, to make explicit the two kinds of truths which are given. It is not to set up, like the modern philosopher, criteria which would be the epistemological preconditions of truth. If we read Aquinas as starting from the modern The Intellectual Ethics of Revealed Truth 1303 epistemological project, we misunderstand him radically; and we also see only shortcomings. Thomas says: And so, in the name of the divine Mercy, I have the confidence to embark upon the work of a wise man, even though this may surpass my powers, and I have set myself the task of making known, as far as my limited powers will allow, the truth that the Catholic faith professes, and of setting aside the errors that are opposed to it. To use the words of Hilary: “I am aware that I owe this to God as the chief duty of my life, that my every word and sense may speak of Him.” (SCG, I, ch. 2, no. 2) Unacceptable as it may be to moderns, it is crucial to understand that Aquinas is speaking from the truth. He receives it, and meditates on it in two ways, by argument (in the first three books of the SCG) and by interpretation (in the fourth book). It is not a question of exercising control according to epistemological standards that the philosopher establishes, according to an ethics of control, but of upholding the truth according to an ethics of intellectual virtues. The only method for truth is to live a good intellectual life, whereby we realize our rational nature at its best. In Aquinas’s religious epistemology, “no opinion or belief is implanted in man by God which is contrary to man’s natural knowledge” (SCG I, ch. 7, no. 4).12 The difficulty for a contemporary reader of the initial three parts of the SCG, and also of the first chapter of its fourth part, is to free his mind, as he reads, of the epistemological model which has been dominant in modernity. Modern epistemology appeals, as is evident in Clifford, to the notion of epistemic responsibility. We must be intellectually responsible for our beliefs. But the difference with Aquinas is that for him epistemic responsibility is a matter of ordered receptivity to truth, and therefore an epistemic particularism. It is not an a priori control of reasoning, and therefore not a question of “method” in the sense of Descartes and his followers. The following passage from the once-famous book by Father Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life, indicates, in flowery writing, what it is really a question of a Thomistic particularist: 12 On this topic, see Roger Pouivet, L’éthique intellectuelle, une épistémologie des vertus (Paris: Vrin, 2020). 1304 Roger Pouivet Responsiveness of the soul to the ineffable spring, its filial and loving dispositions, lay it open to receive light after light, and ever-increasing fervor and rectitude. Truth, when loved and realized as a life, shows itself to be a first principle; one’s vision is according to what one is; one participates in truth by participating in the Spirit through whom it exists.13 13 Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges, O.P., trans. M. Ryan (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1960), 24. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2022): 1305–1322 1305 Why Can’t a First Mover Be Accidentally Moveable? Bolstering Aquinas’s Case for Divine Immutability in the Face of Objections from Theistic Personalists Mats Wahlberg Umeå University Umeå, Sweden Introduction In his book An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, Brian Davies coined the term “theistic personalism” in order to have a name for a kind of monotheism that is quite widespread, but that differs significantly from the “classical theism” of the Church Fathers, the great medieval theologians, and the Reformers.1 Theistic personalists claim that the personal nature of the biblical God cannot be reconciled with some of the core tenets of classical theism, in particular the doctrines of divine immutability, timelessness, and simplicity. Although personalists typically agree with the classical tradition that God exists necessarily and is the ultimate explanatory principle, they also claim that he is changeable and metaphysically composed. God’s attributes or properties are distinct from each other and from God himself, and God can be causally affected by events in the created world. Some of the most influential figures within contemporary analytic philosophy of religion—thinkers like Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, and William Lane Craig—defend personalism of various shades. Within contemporary systematic theology, theistic personalism is also 1 Brian Davies, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 1–22. Thanks to Fr. Thomas Joseph White for the invitation to give this paper at the conference “Is Belief in God Reasonable?: Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles in a Contemporary Context” at the Angelicum in Rome, December 4–5, 2020. Thanks also to the participants in the Scandinavian Thomistic Seminar for fruitful discussions of an earlier draft. 1306 Mats Wahlberg dominant. The long-standing tendency to contrast (unfavorably) a “Hellenistic,” “static” conception of God with a “biblical,” “dynamic” conception is evidence of this, as is the common tendency to historicize God’s being along Hegelian lines. Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Robert Jenson, Eberhart Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann, and many other theologians have rejected core elements of classical theism, such as God’s immutability and impassibility. It is fair to say that most contemporary theologians regard the idea that God suffers alongside his creation as almost axiomatically true, and this view entails that God can change.2 In book I of the Summa contra gentiles [SCG], St. Thomas Aquinas attempts to build a philosophical case for classical theism. He starts with two Aristotelian arguments from motion, presented in chapter 13, whereby he claims to establish that there is an immutable First Mover. Taking himself to have proved this, Aquinas then systematically unfolds the other doctrines of classical theism, using divine immutability as a key premise. In chapter 14, St. Thomas describes his modus operandi: “In order to proceed by the way of remotion about knowledge of God, let us take as principle that which is already manifest by what we have said above, namely that God is altogether unchangeable [quod Deus sit omnino immobilis].”3 Prima facie, this seems to be a promising method. If divine changelessness can be proved at the outset from the mere fact that there is motion, then the road to classical theism lies open. Given divine immutability, it readily follows that God lacks beginning and end, and perhaps also that God is eternal in the sense of being altogether timeless, as Aquinas argues in chapter 15. At the very least it follows that God lacks passive potentiality, since change is the actualization of some potential (ch. 16). From the lack of potentiality, furthermore, it follows that God is pure act, and from this it follows that he lacks any kind of composition whatsoever, so he is altogether simple. This is basically how Aquinas argues in SCG I. The success of Aquinas’s case for classical theism depends, however, on whether the crucial premise of divine immutability can be proved without reliance on any of the other divine attributes that I have just mentioned. Theistic personalists claim that 2 3 James F. Keating and Thomas Joseph White, “Introduction: Divine Impassibility in Contemporary Theology,” in Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering, ed. James F. Keating and Thomas Joseph White (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 1–25; Ronald Goetz, “The Suffering God: The Rise of a New Orthodoxy,” Christian Century 103, no. 13 (1986): 385–89. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles [SCG], trans. Laurence Shapcote, vol. I (Steubenville. OH: Emmaus Academic, 2018). Bolstering Aquinas’s Case for Divine Immutability 1307 this cannot be done, and that the controversial divine attributes of classical theism can be proved only in a circular way, relying on one attribute (such as divine simplicity) in order to prove another (such as divine immutability), and vice versa. In this article, I will try to show that this accusation is false, and that God’s changelessness can be demonstrated without assuming divine simplicity, eternity, or any other divine attribute that is at issue between classical theists and personalists. Immutability can, if this is true, function as the cornerstone in a case for classical theism, in the way that Aquinas suggests. In what follows, I will do two things. First, I will evaluate Aquinas’s most promising argument from motion, taking into consideration the kind of critique and concerns that theistic personalists in the analytic tradition bring to the table. Second, I will suggest an alternative Thomistic way of arguing for divine changelessness—a way that might be persuasive in the eyes of theistic personalists. The Argument from Motion In chapter 13 of SCG I, Aquinas presents five arguments for God’s existence. Two of them are Aristotelian arguments from motion that conclude with an immutable or unchangeable First Mover. Norman Kretzmann, in his influential book about SCG I, calls these arguments G1 and G2, respectively.4 G2 is somewhat enigmatic and generally considered to have significant weaknesses, while G1 is a more elaborate version of the First Way in the Summa theologiae [ST]. If there is a sound argument from motion in Aquinas’s corpus, it is likely to be some version of the First Way/ G1. My purpose here is not to analyze any of these arguments in detail. Instead, I will take a birds-eye view of their basic structure in order to highlight a problem that many commentators see with arguments from motion in general. I will then point to a couple of possible solutions to this problem. This is the argument in a nutshell: 1. Something is in motion (in a process of change). 2. Whatever is in motion is moved by another. 3. An essentially ordered series of movers does not regress infinitely. 4 Norman Kretzmann, The Metaphysics of Theism: Aquinas’s Natural Theology in Summa Contra Gentiles I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), ch. 2. 1308 Mats Wahlberg 4. Therefore, there is a first immovable mover (primum movens immobile).5 Premise 1, if taken in its natural sense, is hard to deny. Premise 2 is equivalent to the claim that, strictly speaking, nothing is moved by itself. What we normally refer to as cases of self-movement—for example an animal that moves around—are in reality cases of one part of a thing moving another part. “Part” must here be understood in the broad sense of metaphysical part. Since a potency is a different metaphysical part of a thing compared to any of the thing’s “actualities” (its actual properties), premise 2 boils down to the claim that no potency can actualize itself (assuming that motion is the actualization of a potency). This claim seems eminently reasonable.6 Premise 3 says that a series of essentially moved movers7—movers that cannot move unless they are moved themselves by some logically prior mover—must have a first member that can move without being moved by a prior mover. Unless there is a first mover whose power to move is intrinsic to it (not derived from another mover), no member of the series would move.8 I believe that all the premises, if rightly understood, can be successfully defended. In the present context, however, I will not attempt to justify this claim.9 Instead I will focus on what I take to be the most significant challenge against the argument from motion: the claim that the conclusion does not follow from the premises—that the argument is invalid. This claim seems, prima facie, to be very plausible, as we will now see. Suppose that we grant that all three premises of the argument from 5 6 7 8 9 The versions of this argument in SCG I, ch. 13, and in Summa theologiae [ST] I, q. 2, a. 3, corp., have the same premises. (Summa theologiae, trans. Laurence Shapcote [Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2012]). For a strong defense, see David S. Oderberg, “‘Whatever is Changing is Being Changed by Something Else’: A Reappraisal of Premise One of the First Way,” in Mind, Method, and Morality: Essays in Honour of Anthony Kenny, ed. John Cottingham and Peter Hacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 140–64. In Aquinas’s term, movers that are moved per se. For a strong defense, see Gaven Kerr, “Essentially Ordered Series Reconsidered,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 86, no. 4 (2012): 155–74. The literature on the First Way is extensive. For good overviews of the debate, see John F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 444–58 (and 413–31 for the versions of the argument from motion in SCG I, ch. 13); Anthony Kenny, The Five Ways: St Thomas Aquinas’ Proofs of God’s Existence (New York: Routledge, 2003), ch. 2. Bolstering Aquinas’s Case for Divine Immutability 1309 motion are true. Then, for any series of essentially ordered movers, there must be a First Mover that is not dependent on anything else for its power to move. The First Mover, in other words, must be able to move without being moved. Furthermore, since we have granted that premise 2 is true, it follows that nothing can move itself, in the strict sense. So the First Mover cannot move itself, neither directly nor indirectly. This means that the First Mover cannot start a chain of movers that eventually circles back and moves the First Mover itself accidentally, since that would be a form of (indirect) self-movement, which violates premise 2. Since all power to move ultimately comes from the First Mover, it might seem that the First Mover cannot be moved at all—that it is wholly unchangeable. However, and this is the main problem: there seems to be nothing in the argument that excludes there being another mover that is first in a different chain of movers. The uniqueness of the First Mover has not been proved. This means that our First Mover could possibly be accidentally moved by another First Mover, or by a chain of dependent movers animated by another First Mover. This possibility suggests that the argument is invalid. It does not seem to follow from the premises that a First Mover is immovable or unchangeable.10 It does not even seem to follow that such a mover is actually unchanged. All that seems to follow is that there must be one or several things that can move other things in virtue of their own underived causal power. Scott MacDonald responds to this problem by saying that the argument from motion is “parasitic” on some other theistic argument. Although the argument from motion cannot by itself yield an immovable mover, it can do so if it is combined with the Third Way or some other contingency argument, which proves the existence of a being that is necessary of itself.11 I do not have space to discuss MacDonald’s view here, but it is not obvious that appeal to the Third Way solves the present problem. Perhaps a necessary being can also be mutable, as theistic personalists normally assume. However, many Thomists claim that the argument from motion, if rightly understood, is more potent than MacDonald thinks, and certainly more potent than my brief presentation here has indicated. In order to see 10 11 Many commentators have reached this conclusion. See, for example, Kenny, The Five Ways, 33; Scott MacDonald, “Aquinas’s Parasitic Cosmological Argument,” Medieval Philosophy & Theology 1 (1991): 119–55, at 146–47; Timothy Pawl, “The Five Ways,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas, ed. Brian Davies and Eleonore Stump (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 115–34, at 118. MacDonald, “Aquinas’s Parasitic Cosmological Argument.” 1310 Mats Wahlberg the argument’s true power, we must attend to the metaphysics of potency and act. There are many different schools of metaphysical or existential interpretations of the argument from motion, and in the present context, I will have to limit the discussion to what I take to be a very convincing recent example of this general approach.12 Edward Feser reminds us that motion or change, for Aquinas, involves the actualization of a potency. In order to fully explain the occurrence in the world of motion or change in a narrow sense—namely local motion, qualitative change, and quantitative change—it must also be explained why the substances that change exist, how their potential for existence gets actualized.13 Since there cannot be an infinite regress of “actualized actualizers”—things that get their own existence actualized by something else—we must at some point arrive at an “unactualized actualizer,” something that is capable of actualizing the potential for existence of other things, without first having to have its own potential for existence actualized.14 According to Feser, only a being that is wholly actual (actus purus) is capable of ending such a regress of actualized actualizers. Therefore, if the occurrence of change in the world—that is, the actualization of any potential—is to be explained, a purely actual being must exist.15 Such a being, since it is pure actuality, is necessarily unique, and by definition has no potentiality. It is hence wholly immoveable—omnino immobilis. There is one step in Feser’s argumentation that needs critical attention, however, namely his move from the claim: (1) “An unactualized actualizer exists” to (2) “A purely actual actualizer exists.” I agree with Feser that the First Way and argument G1 in SCG I demonstrate the existence of an unactualized actualizer (claim 1), since only 12 13 14 15 Edward Feser, Aquinas (London: Oneworld, 2009), 65–81; Feser, “Existential Inertia and the Five Ways,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 85, no. 2 (2011): 237–67. For other examples of “existential” interpretations, see: Joseph Owens, “Actuality in the ‘Prima Via’ of St Thomas,” Mediaeval Studies 29 (1967): 26–46; Owens, “Aquinas and the Five Ways,” The Monist 58, no. 1 (1974): 16–35; Étienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), ch. 3, no. 1. Wippel interprets the argument in a similar way (Metaphysical Thought, 446). I have taken the term “unactualized actualizer” from Edward Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017), 27. Cf. also Aquinas’s very brief argument in SCG I, ch. 16. Bolstering Aquinas’s Case for Divine Immutability 1311 such a being can end a regress of actualized actualizers. An unactualized actualizer, however, is simply a being that exists without a cause of its existence—what theistic personalists would call a necessary being, something that exists of its own power and hence cannot fail to exist. It is unclear, however, why such a being could not have some potentiality, and hence be accidentally moveable. In other words, it is unclear why the unactualized actualizer should be identified with a purely actual actualizer, which is something that lacks potentiality altogether. Although Feser addresses this problem and reasons about it, he seems to view the step from claim 1 to claim 2 as relatively uncontroversial. An unactualized actualizer, he writes, “doesn’t have any potential for existence that needs to be actualized in the first place. It just is actual. . . . Indeed, you might say that it doesn’t merely have actuality, . . . but that it just is pure actuality itself.”16 In a similar vein, Joseph Owens, interpreting actuality as identical to existence, writes: “Can the actuality of the primary [mover], be anything other than existence itself ? Will it not have to be existence that is not brought into actuality by anything else? Will it not be existence that is there of itself ?”17 For Owens, an unactualized actualizer or “primary mover” can easily be identified with “pure existential actuality.”18 Although I think that both Feser and Owens are right in their conclusions—namely, that an unactualized actualizer or first mover must be pure actuality—I think they underestimate the controversial status of this claim and the amount of argumentation that is required to demonstrate it. Theistic personalists usually accept that God is an “unactualized actualizer” in the sense of a being that does not need to have its potential for existence actualized, since it exists necessarily of itself. So they accept what I above referred to as claim 1. However, they nevertheless reject claim 2—that the unactualized actualizer is pure act. In order to justify the latter claim, some additional argumentation seems to be needed. I will now suggest what I take to be the most natural Thomistic way to bridge the gap between claims 1 and 2. Let us hereafter call the unactualized actualizer “First Mover” (FM). Now, suppose that the FM has some potentiality. This entails that there is a distinction between FM and its actuality, since FM is (ex hypothesi) partly 16 17 18 Feser, Five Proofs, 27. Owens, “Actuality,” 27–28. Owens, “Actuality,” 36. 1312 Mats Wahlberg constituted by something that is not actuality—namely, potentiality. FM’s actuality, in other words, is not identical to its essence. In order to demonstrate that this cannot be the case, and that FM’s actuality must be identical to its essence, we need the following Causal Principle, which we find in Aquinas: (CP): “Things in themselves different cannot unite unless something causes them to unite.”19 Given this principle, we can reason as follows: If FM’s actuality is something distinct or different from FM itself or its essence, there must be a cause that unites them, according to our CP. In other words, there must be a cause that gives FM whatever actuality it has. But this cause cannot be FM itself, since it cannot possibly cause anything unless it already has some actuality. However, the cause of its actuality cannot be something external to FM either, since that would mean that FM is dependent for its actuality on something else, which means that FM is not, contrary to hypothesis, the First Mover or unactualized actualizer. Hence, the assumption that a First Mover is distinct from its own actuality contradicts CP. This means that FM cannot be distinct from its actuality. It must simply be actuality—pure act. We can summarize this argument in the following way: Bridge Argument 1 1. If the First Mover (FM) is not pure act, there is a distinction or difference between FM and its actuality. 2. “Things in themselves different cannot unite unless something causes them to unite” (CP). 3. But there can be no cause that unites FM and its actuality. 4. Hence, there can be no distinction or difference between FM and its actuality. 5. So FM is pure act. This argument follows Aquinas’s reasoning in De ente et essentia, where he shows that there must be something whose essence is identical to existence itself.20 Existence and actuality are closely related concepts, and if we 19 20 ST I, q. 3, a. 7, corp. See also Louis De Raeymaeker, The Philosophy of Being: A Synthesis of Metaphysics (St. Louis: Herder, 1954), 255. For an excellent defense, see Gaven Kerr, Aquinas’s Way to God: The Proof in De Ente et Essentia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Bolstering Aquinas’s Case for Divine Immutability 1313 substitute existence for actuality in the above argument, what we have is a version of the so-called “existential argument” from De ente et essentia. Following Étienne Gilson and Owens, many Thomists see the argument from motion and, indeed, all the Five Ways as particular applications of Aquinas’s metaphysical reasoning about essence and existence in De ente et essentia.21 If this view is correct, we might say that the argument I have suggested here—Bridge Argument 1—is an implicit part of the argument from motion. For clarity, however, I think it should be spelt out as a separate argumentative step that requires appeal to a specific causal principle, the one stated in premise 2. Unfortunately, few if any theistic personalists would accept this causal principle. Since theistic personalists reject the doctrine of divine simplicity, they assume that God has some properties that are non-identical to God himself, but without which he would not exist, such as his omniscience and omnipotence. Analytic philosophers call properties of this kind “essential properties.” Now, personalists accept that God could not have caused his own essential properties, since he could not exist without them. They also accept that no external cause could be responsible for those properties, since that would mean that God’s existence, per impossibile, would depend on an external cause. What is the explanation, then, of the fact that God has the essential properties that he has, according to personalists? Most personalists would say that there need not be any explanation of this fact, since God possesses his essential properties by necessity, and necessary facts (they claim) do not require an explanation. Hence, personalists will reject Aquinas’s CP, the proposition that “things in themselves different cannot unite unless something causes them to unite.” Personalists can, with some plausibility, hold that this principle is true only of things or properties that are contingently united.22 Since God’s essential properties necessarily belong to God, they can be united in God without a cause. This view allows personalists to claim that there need not be any cause of God’s actuality or existence, despite the fact that God, according to their view, is not identical to pure actuality or to existence itself. This reasoning appeals to brute, inscrutable necessities, and Aquinas’s view of the matter is undoubtedly more intellectually satisfying. For Aquinas, God’s necessary existence is not an inscrutable necessity, but is 21 22 Gilson, Christian Philosophy, 81–83; Owens, “Aquinas.” Even Alexander Pruss, perhaps the foremost contemporary defender of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), claims only that all contingent facts have an explanation (The Principle of Sufficient Reason: A Reassessment [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006]). 1314 Mats Wahlberg explained by the fact that God and existence are identical. Nevertheless, in the context of the conversation between classical theists and theistic personalists, we cannot expect that personalists should accept a principle—Aquinas’s CP—that flatly contradicts their basic conception of God and requires them immediately to accept divine simplicity and the identity of essence and existence in God. For the purpose of convincing theistic personalists of divine immutability, we therefore need another argument that bridges the gap between an unactualized actualizer—or a necessary being—and a being that lacks all potentiality. In what follows, I will suggest such an argument. A Bridge Argument Aimed at Theistic Personalists My argument can be seen as an explication of the following remarks by Aquinas: That which of itself must necessarily exist can in no way have possible existence, since whatever of itself must necessarily exist has no cause, whereas whatever has possible existence has a cause. . . . Now God, in himself, must necessarily exist. Therefore, he can in no way have possible existence. Therefore, no potency is to be found in his substance.23 When Aquinas says that a necessary being of this kind “can in no way have possible existence,” I take him to mean that such a being cannot have any contingent features or properties. It must be necessary through and through. If the necessary being would have some contingent feature, then that feature must have a cause, and Aquinas claims that it cannot have a cause because the necessary being is, as such, uncaused. However, a theistic personalist might grant that any contingent property that the necessary being has requires a cause, but claim that the cause could be the necessary being itself. Remember that we cannot, in this context, presuppose the doctrine of divine simplicity, so we must grant the possibility that the necessary being is metaphysically composed, which means that one aspect of it could cause changes in another aspect. Suppose, for example, that the necessary being is some kind of mind and has free will. Then perhaps it could cause itself to have a contingent property in the form of a new, particular thought. Moreover, for all we know at this stage, there could be several 23 SCG I, ch. 16. Bolstering Aquinas’s Case for Divine Immutability 1315 necessary beings that could cause changes in each other. Hence—argues the theistic personalist—we have no reason to believe that the necessary being must be immutable. In what follows, I will attempt to show why the alleged possibilities pointed out by the theistic personalist do not, in fact, exist. Besides the premise that a necessary being exists—a claim theistic personalists accept— my argument also needs a causal principle that theistic personalists could accept. I will work with the following principle, which is perhaps better called a “Principle of Sufficient Reason” (PSR), and which is restricted to contingent properties: (PSR): “For any object O and any contingent, positive features(s) F that O has or has had, the fact that O has or has had F has a causal explanation.” I cannot defend this principle here, but I believe that Alexander Pruss has convincingly defended a considerably stronger principle in his book The Principle of Sufficient Reason: “Every contingent proposition has an explanation.”24 In the present context, I will presume that Pruss’ case holds water, or that my weaker PSR can be defended by Pruss’ arguments even if these arguments are insufficient to establish his own, stronger principle. For the sake of simplicity, I will hereafter state my PSR in the following abbreviated way: (PSR-abbr): “Every contingent-feature-fact has a causal explanation.” A “contingent-feature-fact” is a fact to the effect that a thing has or at some point had a certain contingent feature or features. The abbreviated formulation is hence to be understood as meaning exactly the same thing as the more complicated formulation, that there is a causal explanation of why a thing has or has had the contingent features it has or has had. I will now give an informal presentation of the argument, and afterwards a formal summary. The starting point of the argument is the existence of a necessary being, in the sense of a being that cannot fail to exist—in Aquinas’s words, a being that is “necessary of itself ” (per seipsum necessarium).25 The exis24 25 Pruss, Principle of Sufficient Reason. SCG I, ch. 15. It is often remarked that Aquinas’s concept of “necessary being” is 1316 Mats Wahlberg tence of such a being might be established either by some contingency argument—for example, Aquinas’s Third Way, his neat contingency argument in SCG I, ch. 16, or some Leibnizian contingency argument—or it might be established by means of the argument from motion. As we have seen, the First Way, if successful, establishes at least the existence of an “unactualized actualizer,” which is a being that exists necessarily of itself. As already mentioned, the existence of such a being is typically not an issue of contention between classical theists and theistic personalists. What is at issue in the present context is whether this being is immutable or not, and it is unclear whether the First Way or G1 can establish immutability. Now, suppose—for reductio—that the necessary being (NB) is mutable (changeable). Then it follows that it has some potency. I will here talk about NB’s potencies as features of NB. This might seem a bit strange, since potencies are not among the actual properties that a thing has. However, a potency is still a real feature of a thing. My table, for example, is such that it could be set on fire, while the lake across the road lacks this feature (unless it is covered with oil or something like that). Instead of “potencies,” we could equally well speak of dispositions, and dispositions are, according to a common view, real features of things. Perhaps dispositions or potencies are (as some would claim) reducible to other, more basic features or states, but those more basic features or states must then, like dispositions or potencies, be contingent, as I will shortly argue. Now, the purported fact that the necessary being (NB) has some potencies could be a necessary fact—perhaps everything that exists has some potency, and necessarily so. However, even though it may be a necessary radically different from Leibniz’s corresponding concept (see for example Patterson Brown, “St. Thomas’ Doctrine of Necessary Being,” The Philosophical Review 73, no. 1 [1964]: 76–90). While this is certainly true, it is much less clear that Leibniz’s concept of a necessary being is substantially different from Aquinas’s concept of a being that is necessary of itself (per seipsum necessarium). Brown argues that, if Aquinas by a being that is per seipsum necessarium had meant the same thing as Leibniz means by a necessary being—a being that exists in all possible worlds—then Aquinas would have been committed to acknowledge that the existence of such a being can be known a priori (by the ontological argument). Since Aquinas denies a priori knowledge of God’s existence and claims that God is per seipsum necessarium, Brown concludes that Aquinas’s concept of a being that is per seipsum necssarium must be different from Leibniz’s concept of a necessary being. However, this is an unwarranted conclusion. Aquinas can maintain that God exists in all possible worlds and still consistently deny that his existence can be known a priori. There are, as Saul Kripke pointed out, necessary a posteriori truths (Naming and Necessity [Oxford: Wiley, 1981]). See J. William Forgie, “The Cosmological and Ontological Arguments: How Saint Thomas Solved the Kantian Problem,” Religious Studies 31, no. 1 (1995): 89–100. Bolstering Aquinas’s Case for Divine Immutability 1317 fact that NB has some potencies or other, it cannot be a necessary fact that it has this or that particular potency, such as that NB is potentially F, where F is a property that NB lacks but could possibly have. To say that NB necessarily is potentially F is incoherent, since a potency by definition can be reduced to actuality. And when a (passive) potency is reduced to actuality, it no longer exists. So having some particular potency cannot be a necessary feature of NB—a feature that it could not fail to have. Hence, any potency that NB has is a contingent feature of NB. Now, our PSR dictates that “every contingent-feature-fact has a causal explanation.” This principle, of course, also applies to features that are potencies. It is true that potencies are not caused directly, since a thing has the potencies it has by virtue of having certain actual properties—my table, for example, is burnable by virtue of being made of wood. This means that a thing is caused to have certain potencies by being caused to have certain actual properties. In the present context, this complication is irrelevant, and I will for simplicity’s sake speak of potencies being caused, or having causal explanations. As I said earlier, prima facie it seems possible for NB to cause itself to have some contingent feature, so let us assume that NB itself is the cause that explains why it has some particular potency. A cause, however, needs a preexisting potency to actualize—this is what causation is. Fire can cause my table to burn only given a preexisting potency for burning in the table. This means that a causal explanation of why NB has some particular potency at time T presupposes that NB already had some other potency at some earlier time, T minus 1. If NB was not in some state of potentiality at T minus 1, it could not have caused itself to be in a different state of potentiality at time T, since causation is the actualization of a potency. However, this means that any causal explanation of why NB has some particular potency presupposes that NB at an earlier time already had some other potency, which in turn must be causally explained, which explanation in turn presupposes an even earlier potency, and so on. Since the necessary being has always existed—this is in the nature of a necessary being—the regress of previous states of potentiality will be infinite, so we will never reach a first such state. We can summarize this reasoning thus: 1. If NB is changeable, it has some particular potency. 2. A particular potency is a contingent feature. 3. Every contingent-feature-fact has a cause (PSR-abbr). 4. If something causes NB to have some particular potency P, then 1318 Mats Wahlberg NB must previously have been in some other state of potency P1 (since causation is the actualization of a potency). 5. If something causes NB to have potency P1, then NB must previously have been in some other state of potency P2, and so on, ad infinitum. 6. Hence, if NB is changeable (if it has potency), it is the subject of an infinite regress of previous states of potency. Is an infinite regress of this kind a problem for those who believe in a changeable God, a God with potency? It could be argued, with David Hume, that it is not. Every member of the infinite-regress chain is explained in terms of a previous member, and so on to infinity, and since every member is explained, there is nothing more in need of explanation. However, pace Hume, there is at least one more fact in need of explanation: the fact that the infinite chain has the members it has rather than some other members (or kind of members). An analogy can make this clear. Suppose we have an infinite chain of chickens and eggs that have caused each other since eternity. Hume would say that every chicken is explained by a previous egg, and every egg by a previous chicken, and there is nothing more to explain. Surely, however, there is at least one “Big Fact” left unexplained by this Humean explanation: Why does the chain consist of chickens and eggs, rather than, say, by humans begetting each other from eternity? Even though every chicken is explained by a previous egg and vice versa, we have no explanation of why we are confronted by an infinite chain of chickens and eggs, in particular. It seems, then, that something very important remains to be explained.26 I will now apply this insight to the problem at hand, and try to show that an infinite regress of contingent states of potency in NB violates our PSR. As we recall, the PSR says that “every contingent-feature-fact has a causal explanation.” Now consider what I will call the “Big-Contingent-Feature-Fact,” which is the fact that NB has or has had those very contingent features that it has or has ever had. All the potencies that NB has or has had are, as we have seen, contingent features of NB, and they are therefore all included in the Big-Contingent-Feature-Fact. This Big Fact, moreover, is itself a contingent fact, because, if NB had failed to have even one of the contingent features that it has or has had throughout its infinite history, then the 26 See Joshua Rasmussen, “Cosmological Arguments from Contingency,” Philosophy Compass 5, no. 9 (2010): 806–19, at 812; Pruss, Principle of Sufficient Reason, 42–44. Bolstering Aquinas’s Case for Divine Immutability 1319 Big-Contingent-Feature-Fact would not have obtained. In other words, it would not have been true that NB has had all those contingent features that it has actually had. Against this background, we can reason as follows:27 Bridge Argument 2 1. If NB is changeable, then it has some particular potency or potencies. 2. Any potency that NB has is a contingent feature of NB. 3. The Big-Contingent-Feature-Fact—the fact that NB has (or has had) those very contingent features that it has or has ever had— has a causal explanation (PSR). 4. A causal explanation of the Big-Contingent-Feature-Fact cannot presuppose any of the features included in the Big-​Contingent-​ Feature-Fact itself, on pain of being viciously circular.28 5. Any causal explanation of NB’s potencies presupposes some prior potency, which the explanation does not account for. 6. Every potency that NB has or has ever had is a contingent feature of NB, and therefore included in the Big-Contingent-Feature-Fact. 7. Hence, any causal explanation of the Big-Contingent-​Feature-​ Fact is viciously circular (from 4, 5, and 6). 8. Hence, there is no causal explanation of the Big-Contingent-Feature-Fact (since a circular explanation is no explanation at all). 9. However, 8 contradicts 3 (the PSR). 10. Hence, NB is not changeable. This might seem a bit complicated. Basically, however, the argument merely applies my previous reasoning about chickens and eggs to the infinite regress of prior potencies in NB. What is the explanation of the “Big-Chickens-and Eggs-Fact” that chickens and eggs have generated each other since eternity? Just saying that each chicken was caused by a previous egg and vice versa from eternity does not explain why the infinite chain consists of chickens and eggs in particular. It is the same with the 27 28 The following argument is inspired by Rasmussen, “Cosmological Arguments,” 811–12. This follows from the fact that all features included in the Big-Contingent-Feature-Fact are contingent, and so none of them is self-explanatory. To assume the existence of any contingent part of the Big-Contingent-Feature-Fact when trying to explain that fact, would be to assume something that must be explained, and hence to beg the question. 1320 Mats Wahlberg Big-Contingent-Feature-Fact about NB, the fact that NB has been in an infinite number of particular states of potentiality. Although the states of potentiality that make up the infinite regress in NB do not cause each other, like the chickens and eggs do, they still condition each other, since every new potency can come about only given a previous potency. However, the fact that every state of potency can be explained in terms of a previous state of potency (plus a cause that actualizes it) does not give us an answer to the following question: Why has NB been in this infinite set of states rather than some other infinite set? Non-necessary or mundane beings have a cause of their existence, and the contingent features that they display throughout their finite histories—such as their potencies—can ultimately be explained by reference to the cause that brought them into being. However, a necessary being by definition has no cause of its existence.29 If it has potencies or other contingent features, they must be explained by reference to some cause that modifies or changes a being that is always already there. God could of course create potencies and other contingent features ex nihilo, but if he is to make such features inhere in himself, he will have to modify himself, and this presupposes that he already is in potency. This means that it is impossible to causally account for all of God’s potencies, if he has any. Yet, potencies are contingent and therefore must be causally accounted for. It follows that the idea that God or a necessary being has potency must be rejected as irrational. A necessary being is necessarily immutable, as Aquinas points out. Conclusion I have, in conversation with theistic personalism, paid critical attention to a controversial step in Aquinas’s arguments from motion: his identification of the First Mover with pure actuality or actus purus. I have suggested two bridge arguments that can potentially justify this identification and the divine immutability that it entails. The first one was this: Bridge Argument 1 1. If the First Mover (FM) is not pure act, there is a distinction or difference between FM and its actuality. 2. Causal Principle (CP): “Things in themselves different cannot unite unless something causes them to unite.” 29 By a “necessary being” I here mean a being that is necessary of itself (per seipsum necessarium). Bolstering Aquinas’s Case for Divine Immutability 1321 3. But there can be no cause that unites FM and its actuality (since FM would then not be the First Mover). 4. Hence, there can be no distinction or difference between FM and its actuality. 5. So FM is pure act. Perhaps this argument can be seen as an implicit part of the argument from motion. However, in the contemporary context, it should be made explicit as a separate argumentative step. The drawback with Bridge Argument 1 is that nobody who is suspicious of the doctrine of divine simplicity will accept premise 2, Aquinas’s Causal Principle. This principle entails that everything that is not wholly simple must have a cause, but God by definition cannot have a cause, so accepting the premise means accepting that God either does not exist or is wholly simple. Bridge Argument 1, therefore, demonstrates divine immutability in a way that implicitly presupposes divine simplicity. In the interest of establishing divine immutability independently of divine simplicity, I therefore suggested another bridge argument: Bridge Argument 2 1. If NB is changeable, then it has some particular potency or potencies. 2. Any potency that NB has is a contingent feature of NB. 3. The Big-Contingent-Feature-Fact—the fact that NB has (or has had) those very contingent features that it has or has ever had— has a causal explanation (PSR). 4. A causal explanation of the Big-Contingent-Feature-Fact cannot presuppose any of the features included in the Big-​Contingent-​ Feature-Fact itself, on pain of being viciously circular. 5. Any causal explanation of NB’s potencies presupposes some prior potency, which the explanation does not account for. 6. Every potency that NB has or has ever had is a contingent feature of NB, and therefore included in the Big-ContingentFeature-Fact. 7. Hence, any causal explanation of the Big-​Contingent-​Feature-​ Fact is viciously circular (from 4, 5, and 6). 8. Hence, there is no causal explanation of the Big-Contingent-Feature-Fact (since a circular or question-​ begging explanation is no explanation at all). 1322 Mats Wahlberg 9. However, 8 contradicts 3 (the PSR). 10. Hence, NB is not changeable. This argument, which I see as an elaboration of the reasoning by Aquinas that I quoted earlier, argues from a necessary being to an immutable being. The existence of a necessary being is a premise that classical theists and (most) theistic personalists both accept, and this premise can be established either by some contingency argument or by an appropriate version of the argument from motion, interpreted along existentialist lines. The version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason that the bridge argument requires should be acceptable to theistic personalists, since this principle assumes only that contingent properties or features need an explanation. Bridge Argument 2 is therefore dialectically more helpful than Bridge Argument 1 when it comes to convincing theistic personalists of God's immutability. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2022): 1323–1334 1323 Contradiction and Legislation Regarding the Right to Life Kevin L. Flannery, S.J. Gregorian University Rome, Italy Unborn Human Life and Fundamental Rights: Leading Constitutional Cases under Scrutiny. Edited by Pilar Zambrano and William Saunders, with concluding reflections by John Finnis. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019. The most fundamental principle of law is the principle of non-contradiction. This is Thomas Aquinas’s position in the seminal article on the natural law, Summa theologiae I-II, question 94, article 2, where, citing Aristotle, he formulates the principle as, “One should not simultaneously affirm and negate.” Later in the same article, Thomas offers a practical formulation of the same principle, “Good is to be done and pursued and evil avoided”; but in law, since it is contained in propositions (affirmations and negations) as distinct from ideas regarding the pursuit of goods, the prior formulation is the more immediately relevant of the two. The book under review is important in that, by going through the legal history regarding abortion and related issues in a number of different countries—the United States, Canada, Italy, Spain, Poland, Ireland (Eire), Costa Rica, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Peru—it causes to emerge any number of times the realization that legislation and judicial decisions in favor of abortion “rights” invariably infect a legal system with contradictions and inconsistencies of various sorts. The present essay is, therefore, not your typical book review. Its objective is simply to list some of the legal contradictions and inconsistencies identified by the book’s various authors as they describe the legal status of the unborn in their respective nations. 1324 Kevin L. Flannery, S.J. William Saunders’s very clear and comprehensive first chapter is entitled, “Judicial Interference in the Protection of Human Life in the United States: Actions and Consequences.” In it, he describes, among other things, the Human Cloning Prohibition Act passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2003, which prohibited “any person or entity, public or private” from performing human cloning (23). He speaks also of a bill proposed in the U.S. Senate once the Human Cloning Prohibition Act had passed in the House of Representatives. This Senate bill (which was entitle, “The Human Cloning Ban and Stem Cell Research Protection Act”) would have prohibited “any person or other legal entity” from conducting human cloning, even while allowing nuclear transplantation, which it defines as “transferring the nucleus of a human somatic cell into an oocyte from which the nucleus . . . ha[s] been . . . removed or rendered inert.” The problem here, as Saunders explains, is that this latter definition “is the very definition of cloning” (25). In other words, in the same year, two pieces of legislation were considered in the Congress of the United States, both purporting to ban human cloning, one of which would have permitted what the other described (correctly) as human cloning and so prohibited. In the second chapter, “Whither United States Abortion Law?” by Gerard V. Bradley, discussed, among other things, is the inconsistency between the United States Supreme Court’s pro-abortion decision Roe v. Wade and various laws, both state and federal, prohibiting feticide. Bradley says of the 2004 federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act that, “in pertinent part it says that ‘whoever’ ‘causes the death of or bodily injury to,’ a ‘child who is in utero’ is guilty of an offense apart from any accompanying offense against the woman carrying the child.” The penalty for such an act is the same as would be imposed if the act were inflicted upon the unborn child’s mother: if, for instance, the mother was killed. “A child in utero,” reports Bradley, “is defined as a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb’” (37). The problem here is that prosecutable under this law are acts identical with those performed legally by abortionists. Bradley mentions two cases in which a woman’s male partner—in one case the woman’s husband— effected by stealth the abortion of her child. In one case, the male purchased abortion pills and affixed to their container a pharmacy label indicating that it contained a common antibiotic; in the other, the husband obtained the same type of pills (Misoprostol), ground them into a powder, and put the powder into his wife’s food and drink. In both cases, writes Bradley, “an unborn child’s father effectively performed an abortion by the same means and for the same sorts of reasons that the child’s mother could have chosen Contradiction and Legislation Regarding the Right to Life 1325 to abort as a matter of right” (38). There is a way of pushing aside this inconsistency: one can invoke the principle that a woman has the “right” to control her own body. But that solution does not address the combined facts that (1) the males in these two cases were prosecuted for the murder of a human person and (2) the basis of the supposed right invoked depends on decisions (such as Roe v. Wade) which decline to consider the question whether the embryo is a human person. In chapter 3, “Canada’s Abortion Jurisprudence: The Creep of Procedural Rights and the Reinterpretation of Liberty,” Dwight Newman points to a lack of consistency in the philosophical presuppositions of decisions by the Supreme Court of Canada related to the rights of the unborn and other issues. In 1982 Canada adopted a written constitutional bill of rights called the “Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.” This charter makes no mention of abortion, although its section 7 has been used to ground a right to abortion. It reads: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice” (56; emphasis added). Legally, argues Newman, it would be possible to place limits on the liberty mentioned in section 7 by invoking the charter’s section 1, which states that the charter “guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” Unfortunately, however, with respect to abortion, section 7 has been used as the basis for the claim that no limits whatsoever might be imposed upon a woman’s liberty with respect to abortion. Section 1—at least up until the present day—has been ignored. Newman sees in this emphasis on the freedom mentioned in section 7 a certain “atomization” of society: an over-emphasis on the individual. Newman also demonstrates that, when this inviolability of a woman’s freedom proves inconvenient in view of other political or legal goals, it is shunted aside. He considers a Supreme Court case (Canada v. Bedford, 2013) in which were struck down a number of laws against prostitution. The basis of the decision, which was very much in line with Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin’s characteristic jurisprudence, was the inviolable freedom of prostitutes. And yet, when confronted by the argument that “the harms from the law were not caused by the law or the state but by choices made by individuals involved in prostitution,” Chief Justice McLachlin argued that “because of financial desperation, drug addictions, mental illness, or compulsion from pimps,” the prostitutes are not truly choosing to engage in prostitution. Writes Newman: 1326 Kevin L. Flannery, S.J. Although there is much truth in this statement, it suggests that Chief Justice McLachlin seeks simultaneously to justify respect for personal decisions on assumptions of individual freedom and its normative force and to justify ignoring certain effects of individual “choices” based on assumptions of a more social scientific model of the person. (66; emphasis added) In other words, when it proves convenient, the chief justice moves away from her characteristic atomistic understanding of society and towards one in which, for instance, limits could be placed on prostitution in the best interest of the larger society in which individual freedoms are exercised. In chapter 4, “To Be and Not to Be: The Uncertain Identity of Unborn Children in Italian Case Law,” Salvatore Amato considers, among other laws, what he calls the Abortion Act (of 1978) and the Assisted Fertilisation Act (of 2004). Article 1 of the former does say that the state “recognizes the social value of maternity and protects human life from its beginning,” but leaves unaddressed the question of when human life begins (whether, for instance, at conception, or implantation, or birth). In effect, the Abortion Act provides no real protection to the life of the embryo or the fetus. On the other hand, article 14 of the Assisted Fertilisation Act prohibits “cryopreservation and the destruction of the embryos,” although in the same breath it says that this prohibition must take into consideration the Abortion Act. Amato notes that this combination of laws leads to the paradox that the embryo, a life which is about to develop, can never be destroyed, whilst the foetus, a life which is already considerably formed, can be destroyed under certain conditions. Taking this interpretation to the extreme, a woman would be obliged to undergo the implantation of the embryos, even against her will, but could subsequently ask for the authorization to have an abortion. (79) Chapter 5, “Leading cases from the Spanish Constitutional Court concerning the Legal Status of Unborn Human Life,” is written by Angel J. Gómez Montoro. In it, he begins with some elements of Spanish law that go some way toward protecting the lives of the unborn. The Spanish Constitution, adopted in 1978, states in section 15 that “everyone has the right to life and to physical and moral integrity.” In the deliberations leading up to the Constitution’s adoption, deliberately rejected was wording that would have spoken rather of the right of the person to life and so on, because that would have allowed room for declaring the embryo or the Contradiction and Legislation Regarding the Right to Life 1327 fetus not yet a human person (84). Moreover, in deciding a case in 1985 (STC 53/1985), the Constitutional Court of Spain stated that human life begins with gestation and that gestation results in “a tertium existentially distinct from the mother” (89). In the late 1990s, however, the Constitutional Court issued rulings having to do with in vitro fertilization and the use of embryonic organs and tissues that are at the very least difficult to reconcile with the former decisions. In two of these rulings (STC 212/1996 and STC 116/1999), the idea emerges that the “pre-embryo”—that is to say, the pre-implantation embryo—is “non-viable” (102). The non-viability of an embryo is, therefore, understood as depending on the decision to implant it or not. Writes Gómez Montoro: “Τhe decision does not clarify whether viability is a strictly biological term (incapacity to continue the process of cell division), or is also extended to other sorts of conditions (i.e., the withdrawal [sic] or inability of the progenitors to continue)” (104). In chapter 6, “The Emergence of the Right to Life in Polish Constitutional Law,” Jerzy M. Ferenz and Aleksander Stępkowski draw a contrast between (1) the principle, “one of the darkest relics of communist rule in democratic Poland” and yet still in force today, that “women are never to be prosecuted for abortion, regardless of the stage of development of the child, the mother’s motives, or any other circumstances” (116) and (2) the Constitutional Tribunal’s anticipatory interpretation, issued on May 28, 1997, of article 38 of the Constitution of Poland, which, after a mandated vacatio legis, came into effect on the October 17th of the same year. The main idea informing the Tribunal’s interpretation was what Ferenz and Stępkowski refer to as “the Rechtsstaat principle,” which they understand as asserting (as they put it) “the state under the rule of law” (118). In accordance with this principle, the Tribunal declared that human life must be protected regardless of its stage of development, that the health of unborn children must be protected, and that abortion for “social causes” (in effect, abortion on demand) is to be prohibited (122). Because, however, of the continued effect of the communist-inspired principle, which survives especially in a parliamentary act of August 30, 1996, Polish law, they say, “still is protecting unborn human life in a far from perfect way. There are some contradictions within statutory enactments, which introduce much inconsistency into the existing law” (128–29). As examples of such contradictory enactments, Ferenz and Stępkowski mention the “absolute impunity of the mother killing her baby before delivery” and the recognition of the “right” of a person with health insurance “to abortion performed free of charge in public hospitals” (129n52). 1328 Kevin L. Flannery, S.J. The central thesis of William Binchy’s chapter 7, “The Unborn Children and the Irish Constitution, Including Analysis of the Role of the European Court of Human Rights,” is that, even before the 2018 repeal of the Irish Constitution’s eighth amendment, which had acknowledged “the right to life of the unborn,” the Irish Supreme Court undermined its effectiveness by means of decisions quite incompatible with the intended sense of that amendment. Binchy mentions two cases: Attorney General v. X, decided in1992, and Roche v. Roche, decided in 2010. The former case concerned a fourteen-year-old girl who “became pregnant as a result of sexual abuse by a man in his forties, a friend of her family” (137). The girl and her parents decided that the girl should go to England to have an abortion. A High Court judge issued an injunction against this proposal, but the Irish Supreme Court lifted the injunction. Arguments in the case concerned the wording of the article—article 40.3.3—that had been included in the Constitution by way of the eighth amendment: “The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect and, so far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.” It was claimed that the life of the young girl was threatened because, if she did not have the abortion, she might commit suicide. Although, as Binchy indicates, in article 40.3.3 the right of the fetus and the right of the mother are spoken of as equal, arguments made during the trial assumed that they were anything but. One justice spoke of the mother’s right to life as “a right to a life in being,” as distinct from the fetus’s right which was a “right . . . to a life contingent— contingent on survival in the womb until successful delivery” (139–40). The other case, Roche v. Roche, concerned assisted human reproduction, and so the right to life of the human embryo. Although the Constitution’s article 40.3.3 makes no mention of abortion, the Supreme Court held in Roche v. Roche that “the voters, when approving of the eighth amendment, had focused on abortion and had not sought to extend its protection to unimplanted embryos.” Binchy rejects this reasoning: “To restrict its protection to the context of pregnancy seemed unwarranted by (the articles’) language and contrary to any philosophical or normative coherence” (142). Juan Cianciardo’s chapter 8, “The Specification of the Right to Life of the Unborn in the Inter-American Human Rights System,” is about the 2012 case Artavia Murillo et al. v. Costa Rica, in which Costa Rica was forced by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to alter its law regarding in vitro fertilization. The chapter’s main argument is that “the Contradiction and Legislation Regarding the Right to Life 1329 normative framework used by the Court to solve the case gave rise to a number of logically valid alternative solutions” to the legal difficulty that it had identified. Among the options available to the Court were several which recognized that embryos have a right to life from fertilization. The Court chose none of these, but maintained rather, on grounds inadequate both legally and philosophically, that “embryos are not human beings until implantation, and are not persons at any moment over the course of their existence as embryos.” “This contestable metaphysical concept of the person,” writes Cianciardo, “laden with highly debatable assumptions, was stated by the Court immediately after declaring solemnly that it would not do so” (180). Cianciardo is referring to paragraphs 185 and 186 of the Court’s judgment. Paragraph 185 acknowledges that “some opinions view a fertilized egg as a complete human life” and that these opinions “may be associated with concepts that confer certain metaphysical attributes on embryos.” The Court then states that to employ such concepts in its decision “would imply imposing specific types of beliefs on others who do not share them.” But in paragraph 186, it states that “the scientific evidence agrees in making a difference between two complementary and essential moments of embryonic development: fertilization and implantation.” It then argues that it is only after the second “moment” that conception can be said to have occurred. Pilar Zambrano’s chapter 9, “A Moral Reading of Argentine Constitutional Case Law on the Right to Life before Birth,” is a very philosophical consideration of the question of how the language of foundational documents such as constitutions ought to be interpreted. With respect to the right to life, at issue are terms such as “human being” and “person”—and even sometimes the syntax of sentences (192–93). Towards the beginning of the chapter, Zambrano recommends what she calls “the ‘one-step moral reading’ interpretive methodology” (185), which she associates with the Oxford philosopher of law Ronald Dworkin. This methodology allows an interpretation to appeal to other legal documents such as international conventions. Zambrano also draws a distinction between a “loose monist system” and a “plain monist system”—the term “monist” being a reference to “one-step” interpretation. Within a loose monist system, a nation would be bound by the meanings of terms and phrases in international conventions only to the extent that it has explicitly consented to those meanings. Within a plain monist system, a nation “would also be bound by the interpretative practice jointly developed by other relevant officials of international human rights law” (194). Zambrano maintains that the Supreme Court of Argentina adopted a plain monist system in deciding three cases: 1330 Kevin L. Flannery, S.J. Tanus (2001), Portal de Belén (2002), and F.A.L. (2012). In the first two cases, the effects were not deleterious for the lives of the unborn; in the third, F.A.L., they were. Regarding F.A.L., says Zambrano, the Supreme Court “did not straightforwardly deny that the State is obliged to protect the nasciturus (unborn) as a subject of rights. Nevertheless, it warned that neither does the nasciturus remain entitled to an absolute right to life, nor is the state obliged to use the weight of criminal law in securing this (relative) right.” The ruling in this case is incompatible with the two earlier cases, Tanus and Portal de Belén, which were decided during what Zambrano calls “the pro-life era (2001–2012).” Towards the end of the chapter, referencing the realist logic/epistemology of Saul Kripke and Hillary Putnam, which gives reference priority over meaning, Zambrano expresses reservations regarding Dworkin’s one-step interpretive methodology—at least in as much as it might be used in order to determine the meaning of terms, such as “human being” and “embryo” as employed in ordinary discourse. Chapter 10, “Commentary on the Constitutional Court of Chile’s Decision concerning the So-called ‘Morning After Pill,’” by Alejandro Miranda and Sebastián Contreras, is unique in this book in that it features no contradictions infecting the Chilean legal system itself. No mention is made of a 2017 decision allowing abortion in certain circumstances. (See in the present volume John Finnis’s “Concluding Reflections” [263].) Miranda and Contreras do speak of certain individuals who, arguing in favor or the morning after pill, pushed a bizarre reading of article 19 of the Chilean Constitution, which states in part that the Constitution “guarantees to all persons . . . the right to life and to the physical and psychological integrity of the person. The law protects the life of the unborn.” These individuals argued that the Constitution is here “making a distinction between (i) persons, who would be already born human individuals, and (ii) unborn human individuals, which would not yet be persons” (211). The Chilean Supreme Court rejected this interpretation. Miranda and Contreras make a couple of suggestions with a view to rendering more coherent the Court’s interpretation of the Chilean Constitution regarding the morning after pill. For instance, faced with what it regarded as legitimate doubt as to whether the morning after pill is abortifacient, the Court invoked the principle that “one should follow the interpretation which is most favorable to the rights and guarantees inherent to the human being” (215). Miranda and Contreras argue that, in some cases where doubt regarding possible loss of life is a factor, one might risk the possible loss of life of another. They posit a case in which a Contradiction and Legislation Regarding the Right to Life 1331 man is hunting and sees a small white object so obscured by a bush that he does not know whether it is a rabbit or a child. Such a man is obliged not to shoot. “But the situation is different if the hunter needs the rabbit to feed his son who is starving to death and knows that in the place where he is hunting the object is very likely not a child” (216). They draw a parallel with the use of the morning after pill in the case of rape and, in this regard, quote a 1999 article by John Finnis: If a procedure such as the administration of the “post-coital pill” is undertaken for the purpose only of preventing conception after rape but involves some risk of causing abortion as a side effect (because it is not known at what stage in her cycle the woman is), there can be no universal judgment that the adoption of such a procedure is unjust to the unborn. (217; emphasis in the original) Chapter 11, “The Right to Life in the Context of Mexican Legal Experience: From the Constitution to the Jurisprudence,” by Hugo S. Ramírez García and José María Soberanes Díez, offers a glimpse into the fragmented state of Mexican legislation regarding the rights of the unborn. This fragmentation is largely the result of the federalist character of the United Mexican States—each of the thirty-two states, including now Mexico City, with its own constitution. According to the authors, eighteen of these states have decided to “recognize in their own constitutions the right to life as of the moment of conception” (228). The chapter considers, however, primarily the legal status of the unborn not at the state but at the level of the federation itself, in particular, as contained in a number of decisions by the Mexican Supreme Court of Justice, whose jurisdiction with respect to state law is subject to various limitations. The result of this is what the authors speak of as “an ambiguous situation” even at the federal level. They draw a distinction between “law in books” and “law in action.” At the level of “law in books,” they say, “the right to the inviolability of human life is clearly recognized”; as a consequence, “there are good reasons to maintain that it is a truly universal right that includes all members of human kind, regardless of their condition or stage of biological development.” At the level, however, of “law in action,” there is a lack of clarity in the way that rules are applied. As a result of this, “the country is legally divided towards this relevant issue. In some local legal spaces, the protection of the right to life is broader and more inclusive, while in other spaces it is extremely limited and precarious” (231–32). Chapter 12, “Legal Status of Unborn Human Life: A Case from Peru,” 1332 Kevin L. Flannery, S.J. by Luis Castillo Córdova, addresses directly the issue of whether, with respect to human rights, a just system of law can contain contradictions. Making use of a system of analysis invented by the German philosopher Robert Alexy, Castillo Córdova reformulates the norms implicit in a 2009 judgment by the Peruvian Constitutional Court against the free distribution of the morning after pill in public health centers. (That judgment has since been reversed.) Having completed this reformulation, Castillo Córdova then uses Alexy’s own methodology of resolving what he (Alexy) regards as conflicts among rights. In the 2009 case, the conflicting rights would be the right of women to reproductive self-determination and the right of the unborn to life, understood as beginning with conception. (This last specification is important, since some defenders of the morning after pill maintain that human life begins not at conception but at implantation of the embryo in the uterus.) Alexy’s methodology involves a “balancing” of the supposedly conflicting rights in an effort to determine which has preference. “Applying a balancing test to this case,” says Castillo Córdova, “will thus, either result in a technical tie between both rights, or in a slight victory for the right to life of the unborn child” (250). Castillo Córdova characterizes this result as “fuzzy” and proposes an alternative way of determining what would be the correct—the just—judgment. This alternative approach assumes that a constitution is in itself a complex but coherent unity: If the Constitution is seen, not as a set of unrelated norms, but as a unique norm (principle of unity) with different coherent, non-contradictory sections (principle of systematicity), this means that, if the essential or constitutional content of the right to life has been sufficiently explained, the constitutional or essential content of the right of women to reproductive self-determination cannot logically be in contradiction with the right to life. (250) Citing Aristotle, Castillo Córdova calls this alternative approach “teleological.” It presumes that the final purpose of a constitution is to frame “the social conditions for the Good, which is perfection for the human being or, what is the same, the satisfaction of all her essential needs (i.e., those that spring from her essence).” Adopting this approach, says Castillo Córdova, we can conclude that “creating any kind of risk to unborn life is beyond the proper limits of the right of women to reproductive self-determination” (250–52). The book finishes with the aforementioned contribution by Finnis Contradiction and Legislation Regarding the Right to Life 1333 entitled “Unborn Human Life and Fundamental Rights: Concluding Reflections.” These very philosophical concluding reflections do not focus upon contradictions in the legal systems treated in the book; they consider rather primarily one of the major causes of these contradictions: judicial overreach. Finnis says that such overreach is most evident when legislation that is overturned “was not merely in force at the time of the adoption of the constitution or charter of rights, but peacefully and uncontroversially in force” (260). He also criticizes “conservative judges willing to defend laws restricting abortion” but who “have relied on arguments about the usurpation of judicial power, or about the impropriety of overriding the authority of state/provincial legislatures” rather than basing themselves upon “a proper juridical assessment of the boundaries of the key juridical category person” (263, emphasis original). (The name of United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia comes to mind.) At one point, Finnis criticizes legal systems that speak of respecting the right to life of both mother and unborn child and prohibit killing the unborn except in order to save the life of the mother. “For even though the law of many Christian nations has been framed in that sort of way,” he writes, “the formula implies that it is sometimes right to choose precisely to kill as a means to a (good) end. And when one chooses something (e.g., to kill) as a means, one is intending that (e.g., intending to kill)” (258). Within a couple of paragraphs, he argues that “it is neither homicidal nor unjust to perform a craniotomy in order to make it possible to remove an unborn child from the birth canal to save the life of the mother, even if the procedure immediately kills the child by crushing and emptying its skull” (258–59). Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2022): 1335–1359 1335 Book Reviews John Henry Newman and the Development of Doctrine: Encountering Change, Looking for Continuity by Stephen Morgan. Foreword by Ian Ker (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2021), xvi + 315 pp. St. John Henry Newman was controversial during much of his lifetime—as an Anglican as well as a Catholic. Nothing has changed since. There has been an eagerness to silence his voice, and with it the challenge of his theological insights then, and there is such an eagerness to do so also now—in ways more or less subtle. There are historians whose chosen object of study happens to be the Victorian Newman in the Victorian age and who take the immanent frame they tacitly presuppose as normative horizon and their assumed attitude of scientific detachment as indispensable precondition for historical objectivity, and who dismiss all interpretations of Newman that happen to display signs of substantive agreement with his insights and tenets as “Newman hagiographies” lacking the allegedly requisite scientific distance from their object of investigation. This principle of critical detachment would, of course, entail that Platonists are disqualified from investigating reliably Plato’s thought, and the same would obtain presumably for Aristotelians regarding Aristotle, for Thomists regarding Thomas Aquinas, for Marxists regarding Karl Marx, for Foucaultians regarding Foucault, and so on and so forth—and last but not least, for historians committed to the immanent frame and historicist tenets regarding their interpretations of Troeltsch and Mannheim. Such an assumption, when consistently applied, carries itself, of course, sooner or later ad absurdum, but the derogatory denomination “Newman hagiography” survives and is conveniently attachable to whatever interpretation one likes to disqualify as scholarly serious and academically reputable work on Newman. Next to the “unmaskers” of “Newman hagiographies” there are those Newman scholars of a primarily evangelical and Anglican provenance eager to demonstrate that Newman’s self-characterization, primarily 1336 Book Reviews in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, is at best an ex post facto retro-projection, and hence an inherently unreliable, if not an intentional, re-composition of his intellectual past meant to be deceptive and hence bordering on the mendacious—in short, a renewal of Kingsley’s charge. Things are not necessarily better on the Catholic side—since Orestes Brownson’s attack, there continue notions, popular among Catholic traditionalists as well as Lefebvrists, that Newman’s theory of the development of doctrine, if not outright modernist, is at best crypto-modernist, a view sadly encouraged by Catholic neo-modernists who instrumentalize Newman’s account as a justification for interpreting “change” as an interminable but allegedly unavoidable sequence of ruptures and “development” as the intentional activity of progressive developers of doctrine establishing an ongoing praxis of pre-projected desired transmutations of faith, doctrine, and practice. It takes so-called “Newman hagiographers” to set the record straight and to save Newman’s ongoingly pertinent and indeed salutary insights from multiple distortions and instrumentalizations, let alone attempts of effectively silencing Newman by way of a more or less subtle character assassination. It requires painstaking archival work and a close, careful, and comprehensive reading of Newman’s published letters, diary entries, and works (in their original unrevised versions) as well as letters and works of his interlocutors and collaborators in the Oxford Movement to set the record straight, to unearth Newman’s authentic voice, and first and foremost, to acquit him of the charge of systematic disingenuity, if not duplicity, in putting together his own account of the development of his religious opinions. John Henry Newman and the Development of Doctrine comprises, next to an introduction and a conclusion, four substantive chapters of about equal length: the first covering the years up to 1833, with a focus on Newman’s first monograph, The Arians of the Fourth Century; the second considering the period from 1833 to 1838, with a focus on the Oxford Movement, the Tracts for the Times, and the Via Media; the third covering the period from 1839 to 1842, with a focus on Tract 90 and its aftermath; the fourth and final chapter advancing close readings of the last Oxford University Sermon, “The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine,” and the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, with a close eye upon Newman’s correspondence during these years. Stephen Morgan makes a persuasive cumulative case that in the Essay Newman addressed at length a question that had posed for him a considerable difficulty and for which he offered various hypotheses over the course of time until his fully fleshed-out account from 1845 provided a solution that entailed Book Reviews 1337 momentous consequences for Newman. Furthermore, Morgan establishes beyond reasonable doubt Newman’s reliability as a source of the development of his own theological opinions. All in all, Morgan, a permanent deacon of the Diocese of Portsmouth, England, and now rector of the University of St. Joseph in Macao, India, turns out to be a more rigorous historian and a more perceptive and nuanced reader of the textual evidence than the despisers of the alleged “Newman hagiographers.” At the same time, Morgan has produced an eminently readable book—which is in and of itself a commendable achievement. Morgan’s monograph, the revised version of a doctoral dissertation completed at the University of Oxford, is an important contribution to what is now called “Newman Studies.” His reconstruction of Newman’s intellectual and theological path as an Anglican toward the first full book-length articulation of his theory of doctrinal development in the 1845 version of his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine is not only an indispensable study of the Anglican Newman, but according to the judgment of this reader, a definitive one. Its careful and rigorous archival and documentary work and the astute dialectical engagement of alternative interpretations (persuasively identified as misinterpretations) sets a very high bar for successful future counter positions. Morgan advances a reading of Newman’s own development of thought (largely consistent with Newman’s own recollection) that will be hard, if not impossible, to unsaddle on the basis of what would have to amount to a superior textual evidence and a more comprehensive and consistent interpretation than the one executed by Morgan. Yet it is, however, precisely Morgan’s successful historical and hermeneutical work that raises the larger question—e poi? The problem is the following: There simply does not exist a gradual transition from a historical reconstruction of Newman’s thought to a contemporary constructive theological deployment of Newman’s theory of the development of doctrine. The latter, the theological deployment of Newman’s theory, rather requires from the beginning an approach categorically different from the historical reconstruction and interpretation of Newman’s own thought—a conceptual, normative approach in the very interpretation of history that antecedently transcends historicist suppositions, in short, an approach identical with or analogous to the one Newman himself employed. Dogmatic or systematic theologians as well as Catholic philosophers who were influenced by Newman—Blondel, Marin-Sola, Przywara, Congar, Rahner, Ratzinger, and Lonergan, to name the most obvious ones—knew this very well. While historical “Newman Studies” help us to 1338 Book Reviews understand Newman ever better in his theological, intellectual, historical, and socio-cultural context, they are methodologically unfit to address, let alone answer, the question—e poi? For the strict historicists among Newman scholars, this is not a problem at all, but rather a sign that they remain on the high and dry path of rigorous historical scholarship. Yet, for alleged “Newman hagiographers” who are not just interested in an interminable Newman archaeology, but rather in a Newman ressourcement, the matter presents itself differently. Morgan puts the finger on the problem when, in his conclusion, he raises weighty contemporary theological issues that open the question of the authentic development of doctrine versus the corruption of doctrine, issues that quite directly suggest that: “What is certain is that the church urgently needs a theology of development that commands widespread agreement: one which does not rely entirely on an overblown, creeping extension of the dogma of papal infallibility. To settle for such an argument from authority would, indeed, be the ‘nothing else than shooting Niagara’ that Newman so feared would follow the definition of that dogma at Vatican I” (275). There obtains a categorical difference between appealing to Newman’s theory of development and advancing “a theology of development that commands widespread agreement” (presumably as influenced by Newman or in the spirit of Newman’s own theory). This is the interior limit any Newman ressourcement faces. The contemporary, heavily historically bent, if not outright historicist commitment of much of “Newman Studies” might (at best) help prepare the former, the appeal to Newman’s own account, yet arguably blocks the way to the latter, the advancement, because the methodological commitments of much of “Newman Studies” implies an allegedly insurmountable historicist horizon. Theologically normative questions fall outside of this horizon. Yet, notably, Newman himself was passionately interested in theologically normative and conceptually relevant issues, in strategies of persuasive argumentation that arise from a non-historicist interpretation of historical facts; he was, in short, interested ultimately in that kind of discursive work that is intrinsic to any dogmatic theology (executed with an apologetic and controversialist temper) in general and to a theology of the development of doctrine in particular. To put it bluntly: Newman himself would never have been interested in much of contemporary “Newman Studies.” Yet to be also very clear: this is not Morgan’s problem. Rather, the very achievement of his book and the astute formulation of his conclusion forces the question—e poi?—and thereby brings the aporia of much of contemporary “Newman Studies” (with the possible exception of Book Reviews 1339 the so-called a-historical “Newman hagiographers” focused on a Newman ressourcement) to the fore. Morgan establishes a definitive reading of Newman’s Anglican path to his 1845 theory of development—and for that, a brilliantly written one— that this reviewer regards as a “must-read” for everyone who is seriously interested in Newman’s theology in general, and especially in the emergence of the theory of development of doctrine during his Anglican period. His conclusion states a normative task that Newman would have been able to address, but that the methodological strictures of much of contemporary Newman Studies make proponents of the latter in principle unprepared to tackle. Would that students of Newman begin to pay attention to this very problem. If “Newman Studies” continue to ignore this problem, they will become, unwittingly, the undertakers of Newman’s living theological voice, turning him into an ever more excellently prepared mummy that is granted a privileged place in the ever-growing post-Christian museum of Christian artifacts from a bygone age. It is precisely the contrast between the historical excellence of Morgan’s book and the normative nature of its conclusion that raises the question in all desirable sharpness. We are indebted to Morgan not only for the remarkable achievement of his book but rather also for confronting us so clearly with the question—e poi? Newman did indeed have an answer, but what about those ensconced in historical Newman Studies? Reinhard Hütter The Catholic University of America Washington, DC John Henry Newman’s Theology of History: Historical Consciousness, Theological “Imaginaries”, and the Development of Tradition by Christopher Cimorelli (Leuven: Peeters, 2017), xii + 356. There is no end of books on John Henry Newman, and this is a good thing, because Newman’s importance is not waning, but—arguably— increasing. Christopher Cimorelli’s study, the adapted version of a doctoral dissertation completed at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, under the directorship of the noted Newman scholar Terrence Merrigan, appeared in print in 2017. This book is of ongoing relevance, for at least three reasons. (1) No other work since then has replaced or improved upon Cimorelli’s close reading and exacting interpretation of Newman’s first 1340 Book Reviews monograph, The Arians of the Fourth Century. (2) There exists no other study on Newman’s theology of history in correlation to his development of doctrine of similar depth. (3) Cimorelli has recently become director of the National Institute for Newman Studies (NINS) in Pittsburgh. It is to be expected that the programmatic thrust of this work will inform to some degree the research agenda and the overall theological approach taken at the NINS under his leadership. Cimorelli’s book does two things in one: it fills an urgent need in Newman studies, and based on Newman’s thought about history, it makes an important—albeit not unproblematic—contribution to the ongoing discussion regarding the development of doctrine by advancing a new theory of the development of tradition. This makes the book fall into two parts of unequal length, the second shorter constructive part being conjoined to the first longer interpretive part, an investigation of Newman’s view of history as a whole, ecclesiastical history, the nature of historical research, and its significance for theology. In the first chapter, Cimorelli treats lucidly and briefly the religious and socio-political context within which the Oxford Movement arose and in which Newman’s self-perception as a historian developed. The central topic of the chapter is a succinct analysis of the religious epistemology of the Oxford Movement, based on the connection between ethos and religious knowledge taken to be embodied in the life and teaching of the early Church, the normative instantiation of orthodoxy and moral temper, and thus a model for the intended reform of the Church of England. Cimorelli argues persuasively that “the Tractarian ethos was . . . a way of life, a way of seeing the fallen world, and it directly involved the exercise of the human will in the maintenance of the moral disposition from which one views and judges the world” (37). This religious epistemology informed Newman’s Parochial and Plain Sermons and became increasingly articulated in an explicit way in his Oxford University Sermons. In the second chapter, Cimorelli reconstructs Newman’s self-perception as an ecclesial historian and the theological and theoretical method Newman develops, in which historical inquiry has a particular nature that is characterized by the dynamic confluence of three constitutive elements: evidence, antecedent probabilities, and antecedent considerations. The judgments the historian has inevitably to make regarding the method and the resources of a particular historical inquiry are irreducibly personal, because the antecedent considerations that guide these judgments will vary from historian to historian. Because historical evidence is imperfect, such considerations are valid and indeed indispensable. Cimorelli’s analysis is Book Reviews 1341 perceptive and valuable; regrettably, too few contemporary Church historians reflect on these epistemological and hermeneutical matters pertaining to historiography in general and Church history in particular with sufficient depth and rigor. The central insights of Newman’s view are still pertinent. His hermeneutical considerations are truly critical because they do justice to the specific nature of historical investigation. Compared to Newman’s hermeneutics, the use by many ecclesial historians of the historical-critical method comes across as theologically quite uncritical and unreflective. To put it differently: Cimorelli’s able analysis makes Newman a strikingly relevant interlocutor in a contemporary discussion about the nature of an ecclesiastical history and a history of doctrine and dogma that is fully appropriate for and non-reductive to its subject matter. Chapter 3, the interpretive core of the book, comprises a close reading and critical analysis of Newman’s first monograph in which his historical method is showcased, The Arians of the Fourth Century. Cimorelli identifies three historical theories Newman employs and astutely analyzes the way these theories inform Newman’s presuppositions on the basis of which, in turn, he forms historical judgments. There is, first, the disciplina arcani, an early catechetical model based on stages of disclosure of the received mysteries. There is, second, the principle of the Economy with the Incarnation itself as the prime and paradigmatic instantiation of this principle that, in light of human finitude, fragility, and sin, names the pervasive divine pedagogy according to which salvation history unfolds. There is, third, the theory of Alexandrian orthodoxy versus Antiochene heterodoxy that serves as a hermeneutic of heresy. This chapter is an astute and instructive interpretation of The Arians of the Fourth Century, a “first” in the sprawling corpus of Newman studies and a “must read” for every serious student of Newman’s first monograph. Despite Cimorelli’s tendency to mitigate the radical implications of Newman’s Arians for understanding the nature of a properly theologically informed historiography of dogma and heresy, his analysis lays bare the ongoing relevance of Newman’s thought for any theologically critical historiography that does not antecedently capitulate to the allegedly scientific norms of historicism. The fourth chapter serves as a “bridge” chapter in preparation of the constructive capstone, the fifth chapter. The strategic move of the fourth chapter is the deployment of Charles Taylor’s concept of “social imaginaries:” “Imaginaries are dynamic aspects of human consciousness, constituted by theory and practice, and are constantly developing” (175). Cimorelli then adumbrates Newman’s imaginary of the “historical church” which was provisional, a work-in-progress. Cimorelli argues 1342 Book Reviews that Newman “was in search of the ‘real’ church, both in antiquity and in nineteenth-century England, and the historical record was to have a normative say in this regard. Newman did not realize how dangerous were the waters in which he swam” (183). The search for the “real church” had momentous consequences for Newman. What follows is a close study of the development of this imaginary on Newman’s way to Catholicism. The early theories (disciplina arcani, the Economy, the hermeneutics of heresy based on the Alexandrian orthodoxy versus the Antiochene heterodoxy) are step-by-step left behind. The theory of the Via Media replaces them only to come itself to naught eventually in the context of Newman’s closer study of monophysitism—this is a story familiar to readers of Newman’s Apologia, but it is a story accurately narrated and astutely analyzed by Cimorelli based on a close reading of key-texts from this period. The attack on Roman infallibility in Newman’s On the Prophetical Office of the Church and especially the concluding reflection on the indispensable constructive role of prejudice for action in the present as well as for the interpretation of historical events in his astute discussion of Newman’s The Miracles of Scripture are the highlights of this chapter. Cimorelli demonstrates persuasively that Newman’s critical engagement of skeptical historiography, and especially the latter’s hidden and philosophically unwarranted presuppositions, is still highly relevant. Overall, the chapter’s strength rests in Cimorelli’s keen display of what for Newman Church history and historical theology are and what they are able to achieve on the other side of simply submitting to the normative prejudices of epistemic skepticism and historicism. However, while the concept of “social imaginary” helps explain much, at the same time it also “tames” Newman considerably by putting a critical distance between his normative claims and the heuristic grid—the concept of the “imaginary”—of the interpreter. This way the power of Newman’s approach in going against the grain of what twentieth-century historicist historiography simply presumes as “givens” becomes in a very subtle way mitigated and toned down. Sometimes one wonders whether Cimorelli is not at points hesitant to draw out, let alone endorse, the full implications of some of Newman’s positions and their critical import for what has become a rather uncritical contemporary embrace of the tacit suppositions of historical criticism. Despite this reservation regarding the domesticating effect of the deployment of the “imaginary,” this is a rich chapter narrating crisply what the Newman of the Oxford Movement discarded eventually and what continued to be of ongoing relevance for the Catholic Newman and even for contemporary Catholic historical theology. With the end of the fourth chapter also ends Cimorelli’s close interpretive Book Reviews 1343 reading of Newman’s works. It is at this point that a notable development of the nature of Cimorelli’s study itself becomes explicit: it develops from an investigation of Arians in its religious, socio-cultural, and ecclesial context to an interpretation of the epistemological, hermeneutical, and theological principles that inform Arians and develops further as Newman moves deeper and wider in his study of patristic theology and history. With his fifth chapter, Cimorelli’s approach (as explicitly announced, and hence transparently owned) turns from an exercise in historical theology into an exercise in systematic theology—that is, in light of the antecedents of his study, into a constructive Catholic theological reception and transposition of Newman’s account of the development of doctrine. This is the most ambitious chapter of the book in which the constructive thrust dominates with the historical flanks left wide open. Cimorelli intends the chapter to be “an original theological contribution to Newman studies, as well as to Roman Catholic dogmatic theology” (242). The fifth chapter falls accordingly into three parts: (1) a narrative account of the Roman Catholic Church’s embrace of historical consciousness, (2) a focused reading of Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, and (3) the construction of a relational-developmental model of tradition, intended as a contribution in an ongoing post–Vatican II discussion over the nature of doctrine and its development. The narrative account of the Roman Catholic Church’s embrace of historical consciousness and the move from an allegedly exclusively propositional to a propositional-historical model of doctrinal development with Vatican II, when compared with the nuanced and careful interpretation and analysis of Newman’s Anglican period, lacks noticeably in hermeneutical sophistication, first-hand knowledge and command of the subject-matter, and discursive suppleness. Cimorelli relies for his narrative account on three theological authorities from the 1970s and 1980s: Avery Dulles’s Models of Revelation, Gerald McCool’s monograph on nineteenth-century Scholasticism, and Mark Schoof ’s overview of Catholic theology from 1800 to 1970. The presentations, evaluations, and criticisms of these works are not argued, and thereby established, but simply antecedently assumed as descriptively and normatively correct. Nowhere in these pages does Cimorelli betray any first-hand knowledge of those theologians who held, interpreted, and defended the position under critique, often with remarkable sophistication and often by learning from and drawing upon Newman in one or the other way. One misses any encounter with Ambroise Gardeil, Léonce de Grandmaison, Francisco Marin-Sola, or Yves Congar, to mention just a few. The Church’s new historical awareness that is posited is, in the quotation 1344 Book Reviews from Schoof, that “revelation is really determined by history” (254). What Cimorelli means by “revelation determined by history” he states at a much later point clearly: “As historians attempt to shed more light on events from the past, they come across new evidence, which may prompt the revision of existing theories and hypotheses, and perhaps even one’s antecedent considerations. The very movement of history itself facilitates a shift in the constellation of Christian self-understanding. The study of the past, in particular, examines remote periods from new vantage points, and thus must be said to play a particularly strong role in ‘developing’ Christianity” (310). To say the least, a full unfolding of the implications of this claim means the reception and transposition of Newman’s theology of history within a normative framework of an encompassing historicity that is virtually impossible to differentiate from historicist historicity. The constant displacement of vantage points that were once upon a time new with presently new vantage points (to be replaced by future ones) leads in the context of a consciousness of encompassing historicity to an interminable process of re-interpreting the received history guided by the ever-new self-understanding of Christianity in light of ever newly emerging vantage points—hence: revelation determined by history. “Revelation being determined by history” becomes the interpretive axiom in light of which Cimorelli reads a particular hotly debated sentence from Dei Verbum §8: “This tradition which comes from the Apostles develop in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit. For there is a growth in the understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down. This happens through the contemplation and study made by believers, who treasure these things in their hearts (see Luke, 2:19, 51) through a penetrating understanding of the spiritual realities which they experience.” This sentence interpreted in light of the axiom of the newly gained historical consciousness, “revelation being determined by history,” becomes the normative framework that, according to Cimorelli, draws its inspiration from Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine and that has its warrant in a reading of the Essay that is already guided by the antecedent assumption that revelation is determined by history. This reconstruction of Newman’s Essay forms in turn the basis for a critical reading of the post-conciliar interpretation of doctrine advanced by the encyclical Fides et Ratio and in two other key documents, one from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Mysterium Ecclesiae) and the other from the International Theological Commission (The Interpretation of Dogma). Instead of reading these magisterial and quasi-magisterial statements as the beginning clarifications of, and hence as contributions to, the Book Reviews 1345 development of Tradition, Cimorelli, based on his normative framework, reads them as largely failing in doing full justice to the above section from Dei Verbum as interpreted by Schoof. What is notably absent from Cimorelli’s interpretation of Newman’s Essay is the kind of careful, close, and nuanced reading that characterizes his interpretation of Arians. What is also missing is a reading of the Essay in light of the Grammar of Assent. It is in the latter where Newman shows that every act of assent occurs in some relationship to a proposition. If receiving divine revelation entails assent to it, then propositions are indispensable for the assent to occur. Yet such a realization would have created a substantial problem for the relational-developmental model of Tradition that Cimorelli proposes, a proposal that Cimorelli clearly states as being inspired by Newman’s reflections on the subject of doctrinal development, but not explicitly held by Newman. His construal is based on three premises: first, the fact that Vatican II endorsed the ecclesial hypothesis articulated by Newman, namely that the ongoing development of Tradition is safeguarded by the infallible teaching authority; second, the need to embrace the full implications of this view, namely the participative, relational, and narrative dimensions of the development of tradition; third, the existence of untapped resources in Newman’s thought to draw out these underemphasized elements. Cimorelli’s central claim is that “Newman’s method requires the willingness to keep historical, ecclesial hypotheses ‘open’ to challenges from history itself ” (242). Cimorelli’s reading of the Essay, guided by this claim, becomes his discrimen to contrast, on the one hand, a “propositional-historical model” of revelation and development that focuses on the propositions of the Church and the magisterium’s leading, if not exclusive, role in maintaining a dynamic Tradition with, on the other, what he regards as a superior model that he sometimes claims as complementary, yet at other times as a substitution. This is a relational-developmental model according to which truth is co-constituted by the active participation of the faithful in the present context. (Here the largely subterranean influence of Lieven Boeve’s Interrupting Tradition becomes visible.) Cimorelli conceives of doctrines as “narrative-linguistic icons” that are fundamentally relational and have their authentic Sitz im Leben in the liturgy, paradigmatically in the doxology of the Creed. Instead of a linear development of doctrine, which Cimorelli sees at work in the propositional-historical model, he proposes a much more complex interactive model (informed by George Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic model of doctrine and Nicholas Lash’s apophatic reservation regarding doctrinal statements) in which the faithful 1346 Book Reviews (and this means primarily the laity), not just as active liturgical participants but as agents of interpretation and re-interpretation of the faith (now in light of a new determinative historical consciousness), play a crucial role as possibly the decisive motor of development. Hence, the central issue that drives Cimorelli’s model is the active participation of the laity, not only in the liturgy, but consequently, based on the Schoofian reading of Dei Verbum §8, in their active role in the development of tradition—in marked contrast with a dynamic of Tradition in which the magisterium is seen not only as the arbiter but also as the dominant, if not the sole, motor of the development of doctrine. Cimorelli’s model is well worth serious consideration and scrutinization. The issue that seems most obviously to remain open for discussion is a claim drawn from Newman and submitted to a post-modernizing transposition in the spirit of Lieven Boeve. What in Newman is the “risk of corruption from intercourse with the world around,” becomes in Cimorelli a “participation in the present, undetermined, and ultimately ‘open’ moment” that “necessitates a risk on the part of the Christians, a risk that must be boldly ‘encountered’ if the Christian idea is to remain in continuity [not identity!] with itself, by developing when it must” (292). This is a puzzling claim, especially when one takes into consideration the liturgical habituation of the faithful constantly informed by the “narrative-linguistic icons” that stands at the heard of Cimorelli’s model, for in such a scenario the present moment is never undetermined and “ultimately open,” but always already profoundly illuminated and thus qualified by the distinct explication of the Christian idea along the lines Newman conceived. The risk of corruption conceived by Newman is something completely different from the risk that is purportedly given with and in the radical openness and indetermination of the present moment. The former is the exclusively negative risk of discontinuity, of betrayal, of abandonment, the latter is the purported ongoing positive risk and the entailed mandate of an ever-new constitution of Christianity, at least co-constituted by a laity that is informed by the liturgy and at the same time, as it seems, increasingly by the new historical consciousness. The decisive motor, that develops Tradition, according to this model, seems to be the laity that continuously lives in the undetermined openness of the present moment yet is simultaneously informed by the liturgy and the “narrative-relational icons” of the developing Tradition. In the creative encounter between the latter and the present moment in which history presents unpredictable new vantage points, the faithful co-constitute truth; that is, they develop a new understanding of the Christian idea (the other part of the co-constitution being presumably Book Reviews 1347 the informing liturgy with its “narrative-relational icons”) in light of which the earlier history of Christianity will need to be re-interpreted. This is, of course, an ongoing dynamic of interminable co-constitution and reinterpretation. One wonders to what degree “rupture” is unavoidably an inbuilt component of this understanding of the development of Tradition. Just considering these seemingly inescapable entailments of the proposed model, the least one has to observe is that they can be sustained only on a maximalist reading of Dei Verbum §8 that has at best tenuous grounds in Newman’s Essay, that can be reconciled with Newman’s Grammar of Assent only if the model is understood to complement and not to replace the propositional-historical model of development, and that seems to stand in considerable tension with Newman’s On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, a text conspicuously absent from this book (a work that, presumably after Dei Verbum §8, is of merely historical interest). Cimorelli’s important book deserves ongoing attention: its first major part as an excellent study of Newman’s theology of history with a focus on The Arians of the Fourth Century, and its second shorter part precisely because of its controversial constructive claims inspired by a reading of Newman’s Essay (as well as his “Letter to Flanagan”) that gives rise to serious questions. Only a deeper engagement of the second part by way of a dialectical testing of the proposed model of the development of tradition will eventually show whether it turns out to be a position that will stand its ground or a counter-position that will not carry through. For posing this challenge so clearly, we stand in Cimorelli’s debt. Reinhard Hütter The Catholic University of America Washington, DC Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? Historical and Theological Reflections by Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 272 pp. In his book Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? Historical and Theological Reflections, Matthew Levering writes “to make the case” that there is “good reason” to believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus (1). In this self-described work of “theological apologetics” (211), Levering argues from a threefold foundation for the credibility of Jesus’s resurrection: (1) “the New Testament evidence,” considered from the perspective of historical investigation; (2) the “sheer strangeness” of the apostolic claim that 1348 Book Reviews Jesus was “resurrected” and not just resuscitated or exalted into heaven as an immortal soul; (3) and the intrinsic credibility of the “supreme love” revealed through his death and resurrection (2–4). As this threefold foundation makes clear, Levering draws together both “historical and theological reasons for believing that Jesus’ Resurrection happened” (4). In chapter 1, Levering contends that, while “faith does not stand or fall upon the results of historical research, those who insist that the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection has nothing to do with the domain of historical investigation are mistaken” (30). To this end, he offers a survey of three figures: (1) the Belgian Dominican theologian Edward Schillebeeckx; (2) the American Protestant biblical scholar Dale C. Allison Jr.; and (3) the Anglican bishop and biblical theologian N. T. Wright. Levering exposes the serious flaws of contemporary attempts to reduce the resurrection claims of early Christians to hallucinations or visions of someone who has recently died. In particular, Levering finds compelling Wright’s argument that the bodily resurrection of Jesus provides “the best historical explanation” of the early Christian claim that what first-century Jews expected to happen to everyone at the end of time had in fact happened to only one person—Jesus of Nazareth—in the middle of time. From a strictly historical point of view, claims that the disciples were merely moved by grace to a new experience Jesus being “alive” or that they simply experienced hallucinatory visions of Jesus after his death fail to explain the “radical change of eschatology” that took place in the early Church (56). In chapter 2, Levering explores the question of whether “the Church’s mediation is truly effective in enabling us to share in the apostolic communion with the risen Jesus” (63). He first offers a sympathetic overview of the Protestant biblical scholar Richard Bauckham’s book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2003; 2nd ed., 2017), in which he claims that the Gospels rest largely on “eyewitness testimony” (87–88). According to Levering, Bauckham’s historical arguments show that “the ongoing presence of eyewitnesses provides a reason for not being skeptical about the major events of Jesus’ life as reported by the Gospels, including his Resurrection” (89). At the same time, Levering insists that eyewitness memory is only one “mode of historical remembrance” utilized by the Church; in addition, Jesus also “willed that the historical remembrance of his Resurrection be an ecclesial reality” (90)—that is, a liturgical act of “remembrance” that takes place above all in the Eucharistic liturgy. In chapter 3, Levering aims to shed light on “the role of the Old Testament in aiding the discernment of the historical credibility of Jesus’s Resurrection” (91). This chapter presents a stark contrast to contemporary Book Reviews 1349 studies of the resurrection that begin (and end) with the New Testament data. In it, Levering surveys the work of three contemporary scholars— Dale Allison, N. T. Wright, and the Jewish scholar Jon Levenson—and puts them in conversation with Thomas Aquinas’s thirteenth-century commentary on the account of Jesus’s resurrection in John 20–21. As this chapter amply demonstrates, it is “precisely in the scriptural history that the Creator God has guided, that we come to know that given such a God and such a history, Jesus’ Resurrection is believable” (112). According to Levering, “the entire Old Testament” (113) is a necessary prolegomenon for understanding what it even means to say that Jesus has been raised in the first place, much less why such a thing might be true. In chapter 4, Levering makes the remarkable claim that “it is significant, for the credibility of the Resurrection, that the authors of the New Testament insisted upon the strangest and least likely claim, namely, Jesus’ bodily Resurrection to glorious life” (114). To this end, he presents an informative survey of contemporary “spiritualizations of Jesus’ risen body” by theologians such as Peter Carnley (Anglican) and biblical scholars such as John Barclay (Protestant), Gerhard Lohfink (Catholic), Gerd Lüdemann (atheist), and Geza Vermes ( Jewish). Levering argues that such attempts to spiritualize the risen body of Jesus fail to do justice to the New Testament claim that bodily resurrection of Jesus was unique. As Levering puts it: “According to the New Testament, something happened to the dead Jesus that had never happened to anyone else and that could not be expected to happen to Jesus’ followers prior to the final judgment” (124). That is why Paul’s proclamation of resurrection in Athens was explicitly described as “strange” (Greek xenos; see Acts 17:20) and led Paul to be regarded by some as “mad” (26:24). Levering shows how both Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century and John of Damascus in the eighth century recognized the uniqueness of Jesus’s resurrection and argued against similar attempts in their own time to negate this strangeness by spiritualizing the risen body of Jesus. In chapter 5, Levering surveys the role of reason and faith in accepting the truth of the resurrection in the works of three twentieth-century Catholic writers: (1) the American priest theologian Joseph C. Fenton; (2) the French Jesuit Pierre Rousselot; and (3) the Canadian Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan. In the course of his chapter, Levering points out the weaknesses of both an overemphasis on the power of human reason to demonstrate the truth of the resurrection as well as tendency to minimize the role of historical reasoning in showing the overall credibility of faith. To help resolve the quandary of the relationship between the roles 1350 Book Reviews of human reason and supernatural faith, Levering points to Rousselot’s insistence that, “in intellectual acts, there is more of a place for love” than is often assumed by both advocates and critics of apologetic argumentation (153). As Rousselot puts it: “In the act of faith love needs knowledge as knowledge needs love. Love, the free homage to the supreme Good, gives us new eyes” (154). In light of this insight, Levering contends that both the “cumulative probabilities” of historical reasoning and a focus on “how love colors our outlook” regarding judgments of truth play important roles in “an apologetic defense of Christian truth” (163). In chapter 6, one of the most significant in the book, Levering argues that “a contemplative attitude toward Scripture’s portraits of Jesus” can help one appreciate the credibility of the resurrection claim (166). In contrast to the reductive approaches of contemporary resurrection skeptics such as Reza Aslan (Muslim) and Bart Ehrman (atheist), Levering briefly surveys the thoughts of Thomas Aquinas, Joseph Ratzinger, and Hans Urs von Balthasar regarding what he calls “The Apologetics of Love” (177). Taking as axiomatic von Balthasar’s declaration that “Love alone is credible” (181), Levering contends that any contemporary case for the credibility of the resurrection needs to recognize that “the truth of Christian claims will only be perceived when one contemplates in its wholeness the radical divine Love that is revealed in Christ” (170). In other words, it is not enough to show that the resurrection happened; one must show why it happened and how it reveals the infinite, saving love of the Creator God for humanity. In chapter 7, Levering takes up the “pressing question” of why, if Jesus was really raised from the dead, he did not remain on earth and “manifest his risen flesh to each generation,” so that everyone might believe (184)? Drawing on the writings of theologians and biblical scholars such as Douglas Farrow, Michael Morales, and Brant Pitre, Levering provides biblically based answers for why it is that “the risen Jesus does not remain on earth” (205). In particular, he shows that if the risen Jesus had stayed on earth with human beings, “his presence could only have confused us, because our final destiny is not the present world but the new creation” (208). Taken as a whole, Levering’s book manifests a number of noteworthy strengths. First and foremost, his survey of interlocutors is sympathetic wherever possible and critical wherever necessary. He never caricatures or mischaracterizes the views he is summarizing and critiquing. If anything, he seems to go out of his way to highlight the reasonableness of the questions being raised by those viewpoints to which he seems least sympathetic. In other words, Levering is consistently both charitable and critical. As Book Reviews 1351 such, the book presents a model of scholarly discourse—especially on so neuralgic and controversial a question as the credibility of the resurrection. Moreover, Levering’s contribution is far above boiler-plate apologetics. Indeed, he makes several fresh contributions to the debate over Jesus’s resurrection. In particular, Levering argument from the “strangeness” of Jesus’s resurrection is distinctive and compelling. He argues convincingly that, “when efforts are made to reduce the strangeness of the risen Jesus”— as has been done, in ancient, medieval, and modern times—“it turns out that strangeness stands at the very core of the proclamation” (138). After reading Levering, one wonders if contemporary Christian efforts at evangelization have placed enough emphasis on this “troubling strangeness” of the good news of the resurrection as a “crucial sign of its credibility” (138–39). Indeed, Levering’s study suggests that we must not let the desire to inculturate the Gospel do away with this intrinsic strangeness—a strangeness for which the apostles and martyrs bled and died. Likewise, Levering’s startling contention that “love”—and not just reason and faith—plays a key role in rendering the resurrection believable is a major contribution to the conversation about the credibility of the resurrection and is arguably (in this author’s view) the pearl of great price buried in the field of this book. Finally, in terms of its overall objective, the book achieves the end its sets for itself: to show that there is “good reason” to believe in the resurrection of Jesus (1). In particular, Levering does an excellent job of steering a path between the Scylla of unhistorical fideism and the Charybdis of rationalistic historicism. Levering makes a compelling case for a via media: “Only by faith can a person know fully or properly what Jesus’ Resurrection is (namely, the resurrection of the incarnate Son and Savior); but I think that reason, even outside of faith, can arrive at the rational judgment that Jesus rose from the dead” (155). Indeed, one who reads this book with an open mind (and heart) should walk away empowered to see that “faith in Jesus’ Resurrection is not a blind leap”; rather, when we take seriously the arguments from history and see them within “the broader horizon of love, these cumulative probabilities suffice for us to be able prudently to make the supernatural assent of faith” (165). With that said, the study does have some weaknesses. For one thing, if the voices that Levering so deftly brings into conversation with one another regarding the credibility of the resurrection are notably ecumenical, they are also overwhelmingly modern: Edward Schillebeeckx (Catholic), Dale Allison (Protestant), N. T. Wright (Anglican), Richard Bauckham (Evangelical), Joseph Ratzinger (Catholic), Jon Levenson ( Jewish). Indeed, it 1352 Book Reviews was precisely when Levering brings Byzantine figures like John of Damascus and medieval figures like Thomas Aquinas into the conversation that the reader experiences something of a widening of purview that makes it clear—and this is important—that the question of the credibility of the resurrection is not a peculiarly modern problem. As Levering himself recognizes, it is not only in modern times that “an actual resurrection of a bodily corpse struck many people as not credible” (136). Of course, Levering is well aware of the fact that challenges to the credibility of the resurrection reach back into ancient times with the works of Celsus and Origen of Alexandria (e.g., 9). However, Levering never really brings these ancient voices into the conversation. One cannot help but wonder what they might have contributed. This is especially true of Origen, whose work Against Celsus remains one of the most extensive and systematic response to questions regarding the credibility and truth of the resurrection ever penned. In addition, although Levering recognizes the central role that “the fulfillment of Jewish Scripture” played as motive of credibility in early Christian proclamation of the truth of Jesus’s resurrection (9), he does not devote much time to showing exactly which Old Testament passages are most credibly interpreted as prefiguring or prophesying that Jesus would be “raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures” (see 1 Cor 15:4). This leaves the overall case for credibility considerably weakened, and somewhat out of step with how the living Tradition of the Church has addressed it over the centuries. For example, although Levering’s discussion of Aquinas’s commentary on John 20–21 clearly shows that the resurrection is, in general, the kind of thing the God of the Old Testament would be expected to do (see 92), it does not quite arrive at showing that the resurrection of Jesus in particular is something that God did in fact do. This might have been achieved, however, by a discussion of how Aquinas interprets the witness of the Old Testament in his discussion of the resurrection of Christ in Summa theologiae III, questions. 53–55. There Aquinas asks and answers some of the very eschatological questions raised by Levering, such as: why Christ does not manifest his resurrection to all human beings (q. 55, a. 1); why he does not continue to live with his disciples after the resurrection (a. 3); whether “proofs” of the resurrection are necessary in a matter of faith (a. 5), and whether these proofs of his resurrection are manifested sufficiently (a. 6). In a work of theological apologetics, these classic answers of Aquinas to perennial questions might have been more appropriate and illuminating than a survey of his catena of Old Testament texts in his commentary on the Gospel of John. Nevertheless, despite these gaps, Levering has given us an up-to-date, Book Reviews 1353 remarkably learned, and rigorously argued monograph that impressively achieves its aim of presenting a reasonable and beautiful case for the historical and theological truth of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Brant Pitre Augustine Institute Denver, CO The Apocalypse of Wisdom: Louis Bouyer’s Theological Recovery of the Cosmos by Keith Lemna (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico, 2019), xxx + 488 pp. Keith Lemna has done the theological world a great service. In The Apocalypse of Wisdom: Louis Bouyer’s Theological Recovery of the Cosmos, he offers the English-speaking world for the first time a monograph on the thought of the Oratorian Louis Bouyer. Bouyer is undoubtedly one of the theological giants of the twentieth century. Born in Paris in 1913, he was ordained a Lutheran pastor in 1936. After only three years as a Lutheran clergyman, he was received into the Catholic Church at the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Wandrille. Then ordained as an Oratorian priest in 1944, he taught from 1946 to 1962 at the Institut Catholique de Paris and abroad for the three decades following.1 He is most well-known for his work on the liturgy both before and after the Second Vatican Council. With fifty books to his name, including a nine-part synthesis on Christian doctrine, the breadth of his theological vision and work is astounding. In France he is considered one of the four preeminent theologians of the post-World War II era, and his theological contemporaries in Europe, such as Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger / Benedict XVI, always held the Oratorian in high regard.2 Yet, in the English-speaking world, much of his work has gone without comment.3 Thankfully, into the void steps this excellent work by Lemna. 1 2 3 For autobiographical details of Bouyer’s life and a who’s who history of twentieth-century Catholicism, especially French Catholicism, see Louis Bouyer, The Memoirs of Louis Bouyer, trans. John Pepino (Kettering, OH: Angelico, 2015). Jean-Robert Armogathe, “Obituary for Louis Bouyer,” trans. Adrian Walker, Communio 31 (2004): 688–89; Rodney Howsare, Balthasar: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: T&T Clark, 2009), 33; Joseph Ratzinger, Milestones: Memoirs 1927–1977, trans. Erasmo Leiva Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press), 143. In his forward to Bouyer’s autobiography, Peter Kwasniewski writes: “Considering 1354 Book Reviews Anyone familiar with the Bouyerian corpus knows the challenge of approaching it. With its vast array of subject matter, ranging from biblical to liturgical to historical to spiritual to speculative theology, one wonders whether there is any one thread woven throughout the varied strands, a single theme around which the whole sprawling corpus can be understood. In fact, there is, and Lemna has deftly identified it. For Bouyer, the fundamental question of theology is the world’s relation to God.4 The structure of the first six books of his nine-part treatise on systematic theology attest to the priority of the question with the first three works addressing the question of the world, or the economy of creation and salvation, and the latter three works addressing the question of God, or theology properly speaking: the doctrine of the Trinitarian God. Interestingly, though Bouyer’s work on theological cosmology, Cosmos, is the third book in the series, it was, in fact, the last of the six to be written. In this sense, as Lemna points out, “Cosmos is a capstone monograph . . . summarizing in important ways the decisive first six volumes” (xiv). Theological cosmology fully illuminates the God–world relation as Bouyer sees it, and since this relation sits at the heart of his thought, Cosmos is for Bouyer both his “most personal, as well as most speculative work” and indeed, “opens up the meaning of his other writings” beyond the dogmatic sphere (25). One could, then, scarcely choose a better entry point into the wide theological world of this “mind with a very special character,” as Joseph Ratzinger saw him.5 The Apocalypse of Wisdom is an expansive commentary on Bouyer’s cosmology at the heart of which is a liturgical, even nuptial, vision of the whole of creation known and loved in the mind of God from all eternity, as the uncreated Wisdom of God. In creation God freely gives existence to the world ex nihilo, so that it might return to him in a liturgical song of praise and thanksgiving, as the Bride of his eternal Son, the eschatological and cosmic Church, created wisdom now made glorious and radiant through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. As Lemna puts it, “Bouyer shows that cosmology should be a pursuit of wisdom, but that Wisdom is ultimately a gift revealed or uncovered by means of apokalypsis in the re-creative interventions of the divine Word and Holy Spirit in history” (xvii). The wisdom of man seeking a unified vision of the whole of reality 4 5 that he was a highly influential theologian, a scholar of great stature, and a friend of other famous theologians in the Church of the twentieth century, it is strange how little attention has been paid in recent years to Fr. Louis Bouyer (1913–2004)” (in Memoirs, 1). Louis Bouyer, Le métier de théologien (Geneva: Ad Solem, 2005), 210. Ratzinger, Milestones, 143; quoted by Lemna, Apocalypse of Wisdom, 5. Book Reviews 1355 through poetic imagination and philosophical reflection naturally opens up and necessarily gives way to the Wisdom of God revealed in Jesus Christ, who redeems, fulfills, and unites the mythical and sapiential, the spiritual and the material in the Incarnation of the eternal Word. Like Cosmos itself, The Apocalypse of Wisdom is split into two parts. Part 1, “Cosmology in History,” follows the first seventeen chapters of Bouyer’s work laying out a genealogical phenomenology and positive theology of creation, a theological reading of the development of cosmology from ancient mythology to modern science all under the light of revelation. Part 2, “Exitus–Reditus,” traces the final five chapters of Cosmos, explicating in a sophiological key the Oratorian’s metaphysical and theological vision. Where the phenomenological portion provides a sketch of the history of cosmology in Western civilization, the speculative reflections or retrospections, as Bouyer puts it, provide a specifically philosophical–theological synthesis. It should be noted, as can be seen from chapter count alone, that the phenomenological portion of Cosmos is significantly longer than the speculative, but Lemna, for his part, gives equal attention to both with each taking up essentially half of the commentary. This move is to be appreciated for a couple reasons. First, Bouyer has at times been accused of being insufficiently metaphysical. Whether this assessment is correct or not—and it is clear Lemna does not think it is so—any sympathetic commentator must draw out in detail the assumptions and implications of the Oratorian’s philosophical theology, at least if its metaphysical depth is to be seen. Second, this depth is reached in so few pages within Cosmos itself that there is the real need to carefully explicate its vision, which Lemna does by calling upon Bouyer’s other writings, secondary sources, and central interlocutors, such as Thomas Aquinas, John Henry Newman, and Sergei Bulgakov. Also, rather than opposing them to each other, Lemna joins, on the one hand, Bouyer’s concern for the uniquely creative event of divine revelation in history and the subsequent development of that history under the light of revelation with, on the other, a clear insistence on the intimate presence of creation in the Wisdom of God from all eternity, as articulated in the doctrine of analogy and the divine ideas. What has appeared to some as an anti-rational biblicism or patristicism in the Oratorian, refusing in-depth philosophical reflection, is nothing of the sort. The unifying bridge, according to Lemna, is Bouyer’s truly Catholic sophiology, which he draws from Scripture and Tradition, as well as sources patristic, medieval, and modern, and even mythopoetic and scientific. Placed in this light, the Bouyerian cosmovision becomes a significant contribution to the recovery and development of a 1356 Book Reviews biblical-liturgical cosmology and participatory metaphysics or what Hans Boersma has called a sacramental ontology of creation. In the commentary’s introduction, Lemna uses two terms—“theandric humanism,” coming from the Christology of Dionysius the Areopagite, and the rather clunky “theoanthropocosmic synthesis,” borrowed from Philip Sherrard—to describe the way in which the Oratorian’s cosmology is also a meta-anthropology. Here man is a microcosm, or better yet, a macrocosm of the world finding its origin and end in Christ. In his eternal Wisdom, God ordained the human person and gave him the vocation of joining all things together in himself, uniting visible and invisible, matter and spirit, in a single chorus of praise to God. The incarnate Son and Immolated Lamb is the principle of creation, who fulfills the human vocation and unifies the created order in his very self, deifying man and in so doing gathering up created being into his body, the Church, who is destined to return to God, not to be absorbed by him, but to be in nuptial communion with him, as the bride to bridegroom. What this means is that the “theoanthropocosmic synthesis” of man, the macrocosm of the world, unifying the cosmos in the resurrected Christ, is also a Marian and sophiological vision of nuptial union able to maintain the distinction of creature and Creator by way of nuptial analogy. Of course, retaining such a distinction, which does not collapse God into the world or the world into God, while also refusing to posit a third thing alongside God and the world, an eternal uncreated feminine Sophia, let us say, has always been the challenge of any sophiology properly so called. The question, then, is whether a truly Catholic sophiology is possible. Bouyer most definitely believed so, and we have no better interpreter of his thought than Lemna. Part 1 of the commentary consists of seven chapters with the first, “Imagination and Wisdom,” providing the central sources for Bouyer’s cosmology. Beginning with the Oratorian’s own experience of the divine presence in creation, Lemna sheds light on Bouyer’s mythopoetic vision of creation formed by the work of John Henry Newman, his friendship with J. R. R. Tolkien, and his affection for the English Platonic tradition, found in Woodsworth, Coleridge, and the Inklings. What Lemna reveals here is a world where visible and invisible realities exist within a unified cosmos, where the material world is like the fringe of the garment of the spiritual world, which communicates through visible signs and symbols, thus giving the imagination perennial significance. Bouyer’s interest in the Catholic sapiential tradition and Russian sophiology is to be understood within this vision of a unified symbolic cosmos. Chapters 2–4 deepen the unity of imagination and wisdom by turning to the place of myth in our knowledge Book Reviews 1357 of the world (chapter 2), the transformation of myth by divine revelation in the Old Testament (chapter 3), and the transformation of myth by philosophy (chapter 4). One of the most unique but challenging aspects of Bouyer’s systematic works is understanding the place he gives to the “naturally” sacred in pagan rites and myths. As Lemna puts it, “the sacred [for Bouyer] is not an addition to nature, whether cosmic or human, but an indicator of its deepest reality, a demarcated entryway into living relation with reality as it should be, in peaceable communion with the divine” (68). The Christian transformation of the sacred under the reign of sin, death, and the devil is not a demythologization of man’s mythopoetic knowledge and experience of the world, as our secular age would have it, but the transfiguration and fulfillment of it in Jesus Christ and the Church (chapter 5). Christ is the one true king in whom all royal myths find completion, and he is the final or eschatological man, who humanizes and divinizes creation in union with the eternal Word. This theoanthropocosmic synthesis is lost to our secular age, or rather is turned into an idolatrous humanism and materialism (chapter 6), and therefore stands in needed of a recovery of a poetic wisdom and an alternative modernity, a cosmology reuniting spirit and nature (chapter 7). Chapters 8–12 make up the second part of the book, commenting upon Bouyer’s theological synthesis of creation, or “Retrospections,” as the Oratorian puts it: Trinitarian Wisdom (chapter 8), the angels and the cosmic liturgy (chapter 9), human corporeity and the Mystical Body (chapter 10), the eschatological and nuptial cosmos (chapter 11), and the return of the King (chapter 12). Lemna points out that “the ordering of themes parallels that of Aquinas in Summa Theologiae. Like Aquinas, Bouyer begins by showing that all cosmic being is brought into being in and through the eternal triune God, and ends, as Aquinas intended to do, at the end of history, with the Second Coming of Christ and the general resurrection” (267). The range covered in these chapters is astounding: from the sophiological challenge of distinguishing between uncreated and created Wisdom, to the retrieval of the divine ideas and their relation to the angels and the angels’ place in the cosmic hierarchy and liturgy, to the human person in his materiality redeemed and incorporated into the body of Christ, the Church, in whom the whole of creation is eschatologically contained, and finally coming to the cosmic Wedding Supper of the Lamb. Lemna is to be commended for elucidating areas of controversy in these Bouyerian speculations and clarifying both their faithfulness to and creativity within the Tradition. In the final chapter he offers his own proposal for how the Oratorian’s cosmology contributes to current debates surrounding 1358 Book Reviews participatory or metaxological metaphysics, ultimately concluding that “the metaphysical dimension in Louis Bouyer’s book on cosmology, as in all his work, serves a larger purpose to inspire the reader to live liturgically, in rigorous, hopeful expectation, enlivened by charity, for the victorious return of the Risen King, who is our Creator and Redeemer” (425). If there is one response we might offer to this truly generous work, it is not in terms of disagreement, but rather of a desire for more to be said regarding what are arguably the most prescient chapters in Cosmos: “The Decline of Religious Vision” and “From Technological Magic to Cosmic Mysticism.” Lemna insightfully connects these two chapters, showing that, when taken together, they offer a genealogy of cultural and spiritual decline from the money-lending bankers of the late Middle Ages, a kind of pre-bourgeois class of practical materialists focused on the accumulation of capital, to the nominalist philosophy of William of Occam, whose denial of the divine ideas and the analogy of being laid the groundwork for the philosophical materialism of the modern age. The combination of this practical materialism, on the one hand, and philosophical materialism, on the other, gives rise to modern technology, or more specifically, technocracy, which is not accidental to the methodology of the empirical sciences under the direction of early modern philosophy, but its final cause, and therefore intrinsic to its very nature. Though such early modern philosophers as Francis Bacon and René Descartes appeal the importance of religion, the latter even giving proofs for divine existence, “both of them are, [Bouyer] argues, proponents of the technocratic ideal, of the reduction of science and the exploration of the cosmos to its use-value for human self-gratification” (220). All of this Lemna summarizes with deep penetration, not least of all Bouyer’s unique reading of nominalism as the philosophical justification for the idolatry of mammon and practical materialism more generally. However, it is here that we wish our astute author would have said more. As Bouyer makes clear, the modern enslavement to technocracy, tied as it is to the god of mammon, is not simply a slavery to and worship of man-made objects, but of spiritual beings who seek the destruction of souls. Or to put it another way, the slavery of modern man to instruments of his own creation reveals more than the ontological non-neutrality of those instruments. It reveals, as Bouyer says, “a slavery that is ultimately demonic.”6 What is this relationship between technocracy and the spiritual world? As 6 Louis Bouyer, Cosmos, trans. Pierre de Fontnouvelle (Petersham, MA: St. Bede’s Publications, 1988), 154. Book Reviews 1359 our lives, our education, and even our worship are ever more mediated by technological devices, this question takes on a greater importance, a weight mixed with terror, if we follow Bouyer’s prophetic reading. Additionally, could more be said about the roots of modern technology residing in the devolution of religion into magic, into man’s ritual and cultic manipulation of nature for sensual and materialistic ends? Here we are dealing not only with secular liturgies, but with principalities and powers standing behind those liturgies, rites, and rituals that call down powers greater than we know. We only have to think of St. Paul’s warning to the Corinthians (1 Cor 1:19–20) to see how thoroughly biblical Bouyer’s vision is. Saying as much is not a critique of Lemna’s exegesis, but an invitation to disclose more of the sophianic vision of Bouyer and its relevance for our technological age. It has been said of Bouyer that he was one of the most creative and original theologians of his time, while at the same time being one of the most faithful to the Tradition. Always plumbing the depths of revelation, both natural and supernatural, while taking into account developments in modern science, psychology, and the history of religions, he came to conclusions that were nothing other than what the Church had always believed, though now articulated and organically developed in a new key. If this is true of Bouyer, it is also true of his commentator and disciple, Keith Lemna, who takes us to the edges of the Oratorian’s most speculative thought, while never leaving the heart of the Church or the Seat of Wisdom. Aaron Williams Donnelly College Kansas City, KS