THE THOMIST
A SPECULATIVE QUARTERLY REVIEW
OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY

EDITORS:

THE DoMINICAN FATHERS OF THE PROVINCE oF ST. JosEPH

Publishers:

VoL.

XXIII

The Thomist Press, Washington 17, D. C.

OCTOBER, 1960

No.4

GOD'S ETERNAL LAW

A

FTER St. Thomas lays down his definition of law in general, he proceeds to discuss the various kinds of law in
particular. Chief among these, as their source and origin,
is the eternal law of God. First he shows that the eternal law
exists and then he investigates its nature. His proof that there
has existed a law in the mind of God from all eternity is rather
different from what we might expect. If it exists, it is evident
that we cannot have intuitive knowledge of its existence, for
no one can see what is in the mind of God but God Himself and
the blessed in heaven, who enjoy the face to face vision of the
divine nature. 1 In this life, we can only reason to its existence
from the things that we see around us, just as we reason to
God's existence from the visible things around us. In fact, the
final proof that St. Thomas gives for the existence of God,
ex gubernatione rerum, 2 is, as we shall see later, also a proof
for the existence of the eternal law.
1

I-II, q. 98, a.

• Ibid., I, q. !t, a. 2.

497

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This is not the approach to the eternal law that we might
have expected. We might have thought, for instance, that he
would argue from the existence of human law to the divine
law or that he would have argued from the existence of the
natural law to the existence in the mind of God of a transcendent law which is the origin and explanation of all other
laws. We might have expected him to adopt that line of argument because he teaches that natural law is a participation in
the eternal law and positive laws, civil and ecclesiastical, are
valid as laws only insofar as they are derived from the eternal
law.
When we examine the position a little more closely, we can
see why he did not adopt that line of argument. It would have
been tantamount to assuming what he wished to prove. That
would certainly be so if he had argued from the natural law.
For, the natural law is not really different as law from the
eternal law. It is the eternal law as received in us. He approaches the problem from another angle altogether. He starts
from something that is self-evident 3 and which is itself an effect
of the eternal law, namely, God's government of the world.
That the universe is governed by God, we gather from the
wonderful order and harmony that reign, not only amongst
things, but also amongst the multitudinous and vastly complex
activity of things. The lower orders of being serve the higher,
and all in their proper place and in their various ways conspire
to promote the good of the whole universe. To direct and
guide the works of creation towards this goal demands, as St.
Thomas points out elsewhere,• a supervising intelligence and
governing hand, which is the mind and hand of God. That is
particularly so, when we consider that a large portion of the
total universe is without reason and of itself cannot see the
goal towards which it unconsciously moves. The alternative
is to say that the unity and harmony of the universe are altogether due to chance, and such an explanation is ruled out by
its own intrinsic impossibility.
• Self-evident on the supposition that God exists.
• Op. cit., I, q. lOS, a. 1.

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God's government of the universe, however, is only the execution in time of what his providence ordained from all eternity.
His argument, then, is this: if there existed from all eternity
in the mind of God a detailed scheme for bringing each individual creature to the goal for which it was created, that presupposes a still more comprehensive plan in the mind of God
for bringing the whole of creation to its appointed goal, which
is the good of the universe. That all-embracing plan in the
mind of God is the eternal law. In other words, the existence
of an eternal providence in God demands the existence of an
eternal law.
The steps of his argument are therefore as follows: the order
and harmony in the world around us demand God's governing
hand; the divine government of the world, which takes place
in time, demands as its counterpart eternal providence; eternal
providence in its turn demands the eternal law. That seems
to be St. Thomas' argument. 5 It is this last link in the chain
that is likely to present most difficulty to one who addresses
himself to this question for the first time. Why, it might be
asked, should eternal providence in God demand the existence
of an eternal law? If only we could get a clear understanding
of the answer to this question we should have gone a long way
towards grasping the meaning of the eternal law itself. St.
Thomas gives us the answer in the De Veritate. 6 There he compares the eternal law to a principle. It is the function of providence, he says, to draw conclusions from this principle, much
as prudence in the individual draws conclusions from the first
principles of morals for the guidance of his personal actions.
This is a point of capital importance, which deserves to be
investigated further. The first thing that we must be convinced
of is that providence is not the same as the eternal law. 7 The
fact that providence and the eternal law are both defined in
practically the same terms might lead the unwary to conclude
that they are the same thing. Even a theologian of the intel• Ibid., I-II, q. 91, a. 1.
• De Veritate, q. 5, a. 1, ad 6.
• Ibid.

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lectual calibre of Cajetan taught that they were the same. 8
It is probably in reference to him that we find the following
sentenceinDeGodoy,speakingofDe
Veritate, q. 5, a. 1: "From
these statements is drawn the conclusion that divine providence
is not the same as God's eternal law. On this point I find
learned Thomists misled, contrary to St. Thomas." 9
The fundamental difference between the two lies in the fact
that, whereas each is an act of prudence, the eternal law is an
act of regnative prudence in God and providence is an act of
monastic prudence. In God, of course, all things are one. However, we must speak of them as we speak of these things in
ourselves, " by reason of the weakness of our intellect," as St.
Thomas remarks. 10 In us, regnative prudence and monastic
prudence are not the same. Indeed, they are specifically distinct, for the formal object of each is specifically distinct. The
formal object of regnative prudence is the common good of
society. The formal object of monastic prudence is the private
good of the individual. In due proportion the same is true of
God.
When we say that the eternal law is an act of regnative
prudence in God, we imply that it is not binding on God Himself. The law is given to creatures and in various degrees it
binds them to work for their own good and the common good
of the universe. It lays down general rules of action which
all creatures must obey. Once the law has been given, God
owes it to Himself, as it were, to make creatures and to guide
them in accordance with it.
Providence, on the other hand, is a function of monastic
prudence. The principal act of monastic prudence, as of regnative prudence, is praeceptum. But the praeceptum of regnative
prudence is given to others. The praeceptum of monastic prudence is given to oneself. The eternal law is an imperium of
regnative or regal prudence in God and is given to creatures.
• Commentarium in I-II, q. 91, a. I.
• De Godoy, Disputationes Theologicae in Primam PaTtem Divi Thomae (Venetiis:
1696), Tomus 1, q.
Tract. 8, Disp. 605, n. 70.
'" De VeT., loc. cit., corp.

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Providence also is an imperium. It is an imperium of monastic
prudence and deals, not with creatures immediately, but with
God's own activity. By providence God commands Himself
to carry out what He Himself has laid down in the eternal
law.
This imperium of providence, however, is very different from
the imperium which is the eternal law. The imperium of the
eternal law imposes necessity on creatures, either physical or
moral. It imposes physical necessity on irrational creatures
and moral necessity on rational ones to do what it commands.
The imperium of providence does not impose necessity of any
kind. When God commands Himself to rule creatures according
to the directions of His own law, He does not bind Himself
physically or morally in doing so. He commands Himself
freely. All we can say is that He owes it to Himself to follow
the rules that He has laid down in his wisdom for the government of the world.
To say that providence imposes a moral obligation on creatures, as is sometimes said, 11 shows a fundamental misunderstanding, we think, of the nature of providence. The error is
likely to arise, if we do not distinguish clearly between regnative and monastic prudence. St. Thomas certainly says that
providence is praeceptiva ordinationis aliquorum in finem. 12
To conclude that it therefore imposes a moral obligation is
quite false. Providence is preceptive, but the precept it gives
is the precept that every man gives to himself when he is acting
in a prudent fashion. The precept of providence bears directly
on God's own activity and not on creatures.
This, we submit, is the teaching of St. Thomas. It is what
he means when he says that the eternal law is as a principle
from which providence is deduced as a conclusion. 18 He compares the relationship that exists between the two to the relationship that exists in ourselves between a first principle of the
11 Cf. W. Farrell, O.P.,
The Natural Moral Law according to St. Thomas and
Suarez (Ditchling: St. Dominic's Press, 1930), p. 29.
12 Summa Theol., I, qq. 23, 24.
11 De Ver., loc. cit.

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practical reason and a conclusion of prudence. Such a first principle for instance, might be " good is to be done and evil
avoided," or any of the commandments of the Decalogue. Take
the precept of the natural law which says that it is wrong to
steal. That prohibition holds good for all men and it must be
applied by each individual to his own actions as they are in
the singular and concrete. This application is really made by
the moral virtue of prudence, of which providence is a very
important part,l 4
So much is providence a part of monastic prudence that the
very name of prudence is said to be derived from it. St. Isidore
thus explains it: prudens dicitur quasi porro videns. 15 When
we say that providence in our own case, as part of monastic
prudence, applies the general law to a particular action, we
mean that providence in the light of the law orders a particular
action to the ultimate end of life. Providence, like prudence,
does not deal primarily with the end to be attained. It deals
with the means to the end. This is true whether we consider
prudence as a natural virtue choosing the best means of achieving a natural goal, or as a supernatural virtue choosing the
best means of reaching a supernatural goal. The law merely
tells us that certain actions in general will lead us to our ultimate end, namely, good actions. Furthermore, it imposes on
us the obligation of doing them and avoiding those that are
bad, namely, those that will not bring us to our goal. It is the
function of prudence and of providence to determine whether
a particular action with all its concomitant circumstances is a
good action and therefore calculated to lead to the true end of
life, or a bad action and therefore leading away from the true
ultimate end of life.
This decision of prudence and providence is the conclusion
of a syllogism, of which the major premise is a precept of the
natural law. For instance: theft is forbidden by the natural
law; this action which I am now contemplating is an act of
"Summa Theol., II-II, q. 49, a. 6, ad 1.
10

Cited ibid., obj. 1.

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503

theft; therefore, this particular action is forbidden. The prudent
or provident man will not be satisfied with merely drawing
this conclusion, which is also the conclusion of conscience. He
will command himself to avoid it if the action is bad, or he will
command himself to do it if the action is good. If the action is
not only good but prescribed by the law, the command of
prudence applies the moral obligation of the law to the particular act.
In the example we have taken, the law is imposed on us by
God and we by prudence apply it to our individual actions,
so that in our case there is an exercise of monastic prudence
only and not of regnative prudence. If, however, we take the
example of a ruler who makes a law for his subjects, we can see
both regnative and monastic prudence in action. By regnative
prudence he imposes the law on his subjects with a view to promoting the common good. He can bring monastic prudence into
play also if he commands himself to see that the law is carried
out by the subjects. 10 The subjects, however, can carry out
the injunctions of their ruler without his continual supervision
and assistance. Their own prudence and providence are sufficient for that. But when God is the lawgiver, it is quite different.
Not only does God make the law and impose it on creatures;
this is an act of regnative prudence in Him. At every stage,
He must also assist His creatures to carry out the law. In the
case of irrational creatures God makes the application of the
law to each particular action. In the case of rational creatures,
who are free, He pre-moves them and co-operates with them in
making the application of the law to themselves. Hence, where
God is concerned, an act of monastic prudence is always required to direct creatures according to the law.
W'ith these reservations, however, the relation of providence
in God to the eternal law is much the same as the relation in
ourselves between prudence and the general principles of the
moral law. The eternal law deals immediately with the ultimate
11 The ruler also brings monastic prudence into play when he commands himself
to observe his own law.

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end God had in mind when He created the universe, namely,
the common good of the universe. Divine providence deals
with the means of attaining that end. Perhaps it would be
more accurate to say that divine providence regulates God's
own activity with a view to carrying out the rules laid down
in the eternal Ia w.
The eternal law, therefore, has the common good of the universe as its immediate object. Divine providence has for its
immediate object the observance of the eternal law. It deals
with the means for carrying the directions of the eternal law
into effect. It deals with those means in general, and this is
called general providence; it deals with them in particular down
to the smallest detail, and this is particular providence.
Whether we consider providence in its particular or in its general
aspect, we find that it is always guided by the precepts of the
eternal law. As a conclusion presupposes a principle or premise
from which it is drawn, so with like necessity does divine
providence demand the existence of the eternal law.
Hence we can see the cogency of St. Thomas' argument from
the divine government of the world. For the divine government
of the world is merely the manifestation in time of God•s eternal
providence and God's eternal providence demands the eternal
law as a conclusion demands a principle from which it can be
drawn. From this it follows that the eternal law must be at
least co-extensive with divine providence. Whatever is governed by God's providence must also of necessity be subject to
His eternal law, though not necessarily in the same way.
The proposition that the eternal law in God stands in the
same relation to providence as regnative prudence to monastic
prudence is so central to this article that it deserves further
consideration. It cannot be regarded as a needless digression if
I substantiate it by a closer analysis and by an appeal to the
authority of theologians of weight. A more minute examination
will reveal, perhaps, why a theologian of the calibre of Cajetan
seems to have gone astray on the matter. In his commentary
on the first article of question twenty-two of the First Part,
he identifies providence with the eternal law. Basing his argu-

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505

ment on the difference between monastic prudence and regnative prudence, Cajetan explains:
The former is the plan (ratio) of the order of one's own acts to
the goal of one's own life, while the latter is the' plan (ratio) of the
order of subjects to their goal. ... From this distinction it follows
that divine providence is not a part of monastic prudence, since this
is impossible in God because He has nothing in Him capable of
being ordered to an end. But it is a part of prudence as regnative,
or rather monarchical. And consequently it must follow that it
orders the things subject to it to their ends.17
In my opinion, Cajetan is here speaking of providence that
is identified with the eternal law. There is, however, another
kind of providence, the providence, for instance, that governs
the sparrow's fall. It is my contention that providence in this
sense is not the same as the eternal law. It presupposes the
eternal law and follows from it as a conclusion from a principle
O!' a premise. When I say that providence is related to the
eternal law as monastic prudence is to regnative prudence in
rational creatures, it is providence in this second sense that I
have in mind. Unless we distinguish clearly these two senses
in which providence can be understood, we shall become entangled in endless confusion and we may unwittingly contradict
ourselves.
That there is a sense in which providence can be understood
as the same as eternal law I will consider in a moment. That
there is a sense in which it is distinguished from the eternal
law is clear from a number of considerations. In De Veritate,
St. Thomas leaves us in no doubt that they are distinct: "Providence in God does not properly designate the eternal law but
something consequent to the eternal law .... And likewise in
God too the eternal law is not providence but is as a principle
of providence." 18
No one, I think, would maintain that predestination is the
same as God's eternal law ordering all men to a supernatural
11
11

Cajetan, Comm. in I, q. 22, a. 1.
De Ver., q. 5, a. 1, ad 6.

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destiny. God's law obliges all without exception to strive for
the beatific vision. It imposes on all an obligation to work for
that goal. On the other hand, predestination does not order all
men to the beatific vision. It orders some who are specially
chosen by God. In the Thomistic view the essence of predestination is to be found in a divine imperium. This imperium is
not given to the predestined but to God Himself. That does
not mean that God orders His own divine actions to eternal
life. Such a thing would be impossible. He imperates Himself
to execute, in due time, what He has decreed for the elect.
The imperium that He gives Himself, according to our human
way of conceiving divine things, is the imperium that follows on
choice, the choice in this case being the elect and the means
that will lead them infallibly to eternal life. As with us so with
God the imperium that follows on choice regulates what is the
usus activus of the divine will. It does not impose a moral
obligation on God. Rather it is a direction which His will is
pleased to follow freely. I have said that in predestination
God does not imperate the elect. He does not impose on them
a moral obligation for the simple reason that no one knows for
certain whether he is predestined or not. As far as the elect
are concerned the imperium of predestination results not in a
moral obligation but in vocatio, justificatio et glorificatio. I
think it is clear that predestination is not an act of regnative
prudence in God but of monastic prudence. What is true of
predestination is also true of providence in the natural order
and of general providence in the supernatural order.
As I have already shown, Cajetan makes providence an act
of regnative prudence, thus apparently identifying it with the
eternal law. But in his commentary on the fourth article of
St. Thomas on predestination he seems to contradict this. In
the body of the article St. Thomas says that since predestination is a part of providence, like providence it must be " the
plan (ratio) existing in the intellect directing (praeceptiva)
the ordering of some things to an end." 19 In reference to the
10

Summa Theol., I, q. !lll, a. 4.

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507

word praeceptiva Cajetan notes: " And understand this of a
true interior precept. I say this on account of the exterior
precept which in q. 19 was declared to be a sign of the divine
will.20 In this passage Cajetan expressly distinguishes the precept of predestination from the precept of law which is merely
a sign of the divine will. For one thing, the precept of law is
an external precept. Not only is it external but it must be
made public or promulgated if it is to be binding. On the other
hand, according to Cajetan the precept of predestination is
interior, presumably in the mind of God. If it is interior it
cannot be given to the elect. Much less can it impose on them
a moral obligation. In truth, Cajetan is right when he says
that the praeceptum of predestination is interior, for it is known
only to God. It is God imperating himself from eternity to
execute in time what He has planned for His elect.
Besides providence is the sense just explained, which is an act
of monastic prudence in God, there is another kind of providence which is an act of regnative prudence and which is more
or less the same as the eternal law. St. Thomas does not say
so in so many words but we must infer it from his teaching
on the relationship between providence and prudence in general
in the Summa. 21 There he tells us that providence is an integral
part of prudence. There are seven other integral parts but
providence is far and away the most important of them all.
So important is it that it can in a sense be practically identified
with the virtue of prudence itself. Since the eternal law is an
act of regnative prudence in God, it follows that from our way
of looking at things one of its integral parts must be providence,
providence which is not an act of monastic but regnative prudence. Moreover, it must be its most important part: so important indeed that it can be identified practically with the
eternal law.
I say practically because the identification is not complete.
Cajetan's commentary on the relation between providence and
•• Cajetan, Comm. in I, q. 28, a. 4.
21 II-II, q. 49, a. 6.

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prudence may help to clarify a little more the distinction between them. 22 He tells us, following St. Thomas, that providence can only be called a part of prudence, if by prudence
we mean all its integral and potential parts. In that sense
providence is the principal and most important of its parts. But
if by prudence we understand merely recta ratio praeceptiva
prescinding from its integral and potential parts, then he says
providence is for all practical purposes the same as prudence.
Yet it is not quite synonymous with it. Each has formally
different acts. The act to which providence is formally ordained
is "to order rightly." That to which prudence is formally
ordained is "to command rightly." Of the two, however, "to
order (ordinare) rightly" is superior to "to command (praecipere) rightly," for, as St. Thomas points out in his answer
to the third objection, " right order to an end . . . contains
rectitude of counsel, judgment and command." 23
If we apply this subtle distinction between providence and
prudence, it will give us the distinction that exists between
providence and the eternal law. Applied to regnative prudence
in God as it bears on the common good of the universe, " to
command rightly those things which are for the common good
of the whole universe " would be eternal law formally understood. The function of providence as an integral part of it
would be "to order rightly to their end those things which are
for the common good of the whole universe."
Well might one ask what this distinction means in ordinary
language. To explain, we must imagine God acting as any
human legislator would as he contemplates enacting a law for
the common good of his subjects. Reason may suggest anumber of possibilities. He weighs them in his mind and finally
chooses one as better calculated to achieve his purpose. Having
made his choice, he then promulgates his imperium or command to his subjects and it is their duty to obey. As far as
God is concerned, He freely determines the common good of
•• Comm. in II-II, q. 49, a. 6.
11 Summa Theol .• loc. cit., ad S.

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509

the universe in this sense that the measure in which the universe is to manifest His goodness is a matter of His own free
choice. In fact, we know that He has been pleased to manifest
His goodness at three levels, as it were: the level of nature,
the level of grace, and the level of the hypostatic union. His
next concern is to devise a law that will best promote the common good He has decided on. As a human lawgiver brings into
play all the parts of regnative prudence in framing laws, so we
picture to ourselves God doing the same. In particular, He
brings into play providence. The function of providence as an
integral part of regnative prudence is to order all things with
a view to the common good of the universe. Speaking of the
natural order alone, I would say that the order or arrangement
of essences in the universe, which manifest the divine attributes,
is formaliter the work of providence. Individual essences taken
by themselves are explained by the divine ideas. But their
correlation with one another and with the common good of
the universe is the doing of providence as an act of regnative
prudence.
That seems to be the opinion of St. Thomas in the De Veritate when he says, " the order that exists in nature is not from
itself but from another; and therefore nature needs providence,
by which such an order is established in it." 24 However, as
prudence is recta ratio praeceptiva, so regnative prudence in
God terminates, as it were, in a divine imperium or command
which He gives to all created things. This divine command,
promulgated from eternity, is the eternal law. When speaking
of the eternal law, St. Thomas always relates it to action. Thus,
he defines it as " the type (ratio) of divine wisdom, as directing
all actions and movements." 25 The eternal law directs (in the
sense of obliging) the activity of every creature so as to promote the common good of the universe. From this it will appear
that although there is a formal distinction in Cajetan's sense
between the eternal law and providence as an integral part of
it, the two are sufficiently alike to be defined in practically the
•• q. 5, a.. !l, a.d 10.

""Summa Theol., q. 98, a.. 1, corp .

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same words. The formal distinction would seem to lie in this,
that while providence, as an act of regnative prudence, orders
essences as such to the common good of the universe, the eternal
law order actions as such to the same end.
Providence as an act of regnative prudence must not be overlooked. But it is not providence in that sense I refer to when
I say that the eternal law is to providence as regnative prudence
is to monastic prudence. When God has promulgated the eternal
law He then has to do something that no human legislator has
to do, at least to the same extent. True, a human lawgiver has
to see to it that the law is observed but he does that in a general
way by enforcing the penalties of the law in the case of those
who violate it. God, on the other hand, has to move every
single created thing to observe the eternal law. To move them
He has to imperate Himself. That imperium is an act of monastic prudence in God and it is that imperium, given to Himself from eternity, that is providence as distinct from the eternal
law.
Having asserted that providence in this sense is not the same
as the eternallaw/ 6 St. Thomas proceeds to illustrate the difference between them by a comparison with ourselves. The eternal
law in God, he says, is somewhat similar to the first principles
of the moral law in us. The first principles of the moral law
are universal but they have to be applied by us to individual
actions. That application is made by monastic prudence or,
i£ you wish, by providence, which is an integral part o£ monastic
prudence. Similarly, from eternity God by a process which we
conceive to be counsel and judgment imperated Himself to
apply the general principles laid down in the eternal law to
every single creature that will exist and to every action that
will proceed from His creatures. That imperium given to Himself from eternity is divine providence as an act of monastic
prudence in God. The imperium is eternal but its execution
takes place in time. Its application in time is the actual divine
government o£ the universe.
•• De Ver., q. 5, a. 1, ad 6.

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511

That this is the genuine teaching of the Angelic Doctor is
shown from such weighty authorities on St. Thomas as Godoy,
Gonet, and Zigliara. Godoy, after explaining the text of St.
Thomas in the De V eritate on the difference between the eternal
law and providence proceeds in the following words:
From his statements this is clearly established: for law as law
properly has reference to subjects. This holds true especially of
the eternal law inasmuch as it has reference to rational creatures
with the power of obligating them. For this reason it does not
consist in a monastic imperium with reference to divine actions, for,
as St. Thomas teaches (II-II, q. 93, a. 1, ad 1), the eternal law
is not imposed on God but on creatures, and consists in a regal
imperium with reference to subjects; but providence has reference
immediately to the free act of God which is called usus, and mediately, to execution. Therefore, speaking most formally, providence
and the eternal law of God are not the same.
Nor does it matter if you make this objection: the teaching of
St. Thomas is that "the eternal law is the type (ratio) of things
in God as existing in the governor of the universe" (I-II, q. 91,
a. 1, corp.); in this way he defined providence also in the preceding
question (I, q. 22, a. 1); therefore the eternal law and providence
are the same. For the reply is drawn from what has been said, that
the eternal law is the type (ratio) of the government of things after
the manner of one giving rules in a general way about the movements of things towards their proper ends, and providence is the
type (ratio) after the manner of one applying the above-mentioned
rules to particular actions. The former, then, is a ratio immediately
regarding the creatures subject to Him, upon which He imprints
their proper inclinations, and obligates in some way; but the latter
is directed not immediately to creatures, but to God's actions. So
it follows that, although the words of both definitions are nearly
the same, the sense of each is different.
You might object that in us law is a principle of prudence, because
it obligates us, and therefore prudence in accordance with law
dictates that this is to be done here and now; but the eternal law
does not obligate God, as we have just said; therefore, the eternal
law cannot be the principle of divine providence and of the prudence
by which God dictates to Himself in accordance with it that this
is to be done here and now. I reply, by denying the consequence,
though the antecedent is conceded. For although the eternal law
cannot be the principle after the manner of something obligating,

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it can nonetheless be the princtple after the manner of something
directing, so that God in accordance with the eternal law commands
Himself usus and the execution of things in their order to the endP

Gonet has the following to say on the 1same point:
The providence of God is not the same as the eternal law. In this
some of our Thomists, who hold the opposite, are led astray, for
St. Thomas expressly teaches (DeVer., q. 5, a. 1, ad 6) that providence in God properly designates not the eternal law but something
consequent to it. This he proves from the fact that the eternal law
is considered in God as similar to the principles in us of things to
be done from which we proceed to take counsel, choose, and command. Therefore as the naturally known principles of things to be
done are not providence or prudence in us, but its principle, so the
eternal law in God is not prudence or providence formally but its
principle. So St. Thomas concludes that the effect of providence
is to be attributed to the eternal law as to its principle. It should
be noted here that St. Thomas is speaking of the eternal law as it
is the plan (ratio) of the governing of things whether rational or
irrational. In this sense his teaching is most true, and the distinction he has stated is to be understood in this way, that as law in us
lays down rules in a general way (e. g., God is to be loved, parents
must be honored, etc.), rules by which prudence here and now concludes that an action is to be done, so the eternal law in God lays
down general rules (e. g., a stone is inclined downward, fire upward)
but providence disposes according· to these rules concerning the
movements of these things in particular. And therefore providence
has the eternal law for its principle.
This is a confirming argument: the eternal law, as law in the
proper sense, is not imposed on God but on creatures; nor does it
consist in a monastic imperium with reference to God's actions,
but in a regal imperium with reference to His subjects, as theologians teach with the Holy Doctor (I-II, q. 93). But providence
consists in a monastic imperium, and refers immediately to the free
act of God which is called usus, and mediately to execution, as will
be evident from what is tq be said in his tract on predestination.
Therefore providence and the eternal law are not the same, in the
most formal sense. 28
De Godoy, loc. cit., nn. 72, 79, 74.
•• Gonet, Clypeus Theologiae Thomisticae (Lugduni, 1681, Editio Sexta), Tomus
I, Tractatus 4, Disputatio 8, nn. 95 et 96. The Salrnanticenses do not treat expressly
of the relationship between the eternal law and providence but they are quite
27

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Zigliara summarizes the point in a few words: " Though
law pertains to providence, and providence to law, nevertheless,
they are distinguished from one another, and law is as a principle for providence, which abstracts from the power of obligating· that law possesses." 29
As human laws are not given to particular individuals but
to whole communities, so the eternal law is not given directly to
individual persons or things. It is given to the community of
the universe of which God is the supreme ruler. And it is given
with a view to promoting the common good of the universe. On
all created things, animate and inanimate, rational and irrational, the eternal law imposes a necessity, the necessity of
acting in accordance with their specific natures. In irrational
creatures that necessity is a physical necessity which is automatically observed. In creatures with free will, it is a moral
necessity.
The eternal law imposes moral necessity on those actions of
a free creature that are free. On actions that are not free, it
imposes physical necessity as on the rest of irrational nature.
Thus we say that it is a property of heavy bodies to tend downwards when unsupported. This tendency is closely linked up
with their nature, which receives that tendency or inclination
from the eternal law. A man's body has the same tendency and
from the same source. If unsupported, it also tends to fall.
But besides the tendencies which a man has in common with
irrational things, he has others which are proper to him as a
rational creature. He has ihe general tendency to do good and
avoid evil. He has the general tendency to seek his perfection
as a rational creature. This tendency he has also received from
explicit in their teaching on predestination. They maintain that predestination
is an imperium of monastic prudence which God gives Himself. Since they hold
that the only difference between predestination and providence is a difference ex
parte objecti, what they say of predestination as an act must also be said of
providence as an act. Providence, like predestination, is an act of monastic prudence
which God gives Himself. Cf. Salmanticenses, Cursus Theologicus (Parisiis, 1876,
Ed. nova correcta), Tom us 2, De Praedestinatione, Disp. 2, Dubium 2, n. 100.
29 T. M. Zigliara, 0. P .. Summa
Philo.7ophica (ed. 10; Parisiis: Delhomme et
Briguet, 1895), III, "Philosophia Moralis," Lib. II, cap. III, a. 2, IV, N. 1.

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the eternal law. It is not peculiar to the individual. It is the
patrimony of the race. It gives the individual, through the
nature which he shares with his fellow men, a strong inclination
to work for his own good and through his own good for the common good of the universe of which he is a part. It gives the
inclination and it imposes a moral obligation to follow it.
But man is physically free to act against his natural inclination. He can violate the law. When he does so and persists in
it till the end, God has another way through His eternal law
of making even his rebellion subserve the common good of
the universe. The transgression of law means punishment and
it is by the unending punishment of unrepentant sinners that
the eternal law reduces rebellious wills to order.
That a heavy body should tend to fall when unsupported
is a tendency which it has received in common with all bodies
from the eternal law, a tendency which it has been given with
a view to the common good of the universe. That a particular
body should actually fall at a particular time in a particular
set of circumstances and owing to a particular cause is not to
be attributed to the eternal law but to divine providence. It
is providence guiding the particular action of a particular body
in a particular set of circumstances in accordance with the
general provisions of the eternal law. It is a characteristic of
all law, even human law, that it deals with the general or universal. This characteristic, human law has derived from the
eternal law which orders specific natures to the common good
of the universe.
In a special sense, however, it can be said that the eternal
law also extends to particular actions. For, particular actions
are governed by divine providence and, since providence follows
from the eternal law as a conclusion from a principle, what is
attributed to providence may also be attributed to the eternal
law. Hence, St. Thomas says," And therefore the art of providence is fittingly attributed to the eternal law, just as every
result of a demonstration is attributed to its indemonstrable
principles." 80 If we keep in mind that the eternal law is always
•• De Yet., q. 5, a. 1, ad 6.

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an act of regnative prudence, that it deals with specific natures
rather than with individuals, that it is ordered immediately
to the common good of the universe and not to the good of
any particular individual-if we keep those three points in
mind, they will throw considerable light on the nature of the
eternal law. To such an investigation we shall now proceed.
In keeping with his definition of law in general, St. Thomas
takes it for granted that the eternal law is essentially a work
of the divine reason rather than of the divine will. For instance,
he speaks of it in the words of St. Augustine as the " sovereign
type (summa ratio)" in God 31 and as" the type (ratio) of divine
wisdom, as directing all actions and movements." 32 Elsewhere
he tells us that it is the peculiarity of wisdom to seek order in
things and to put order into things. It orders them in relation
to one another and more especially in relation to a common end.
A careful analysis of this simple-looking idea of order will bring
us to the very core of what St. Thomas understood by the
eternal law. It will show us that for him the divine will does
not enter into the eternal law as an essential constituent of
it, as will does not for him enter the essential constitution of
any law, human or divine.
For St. Thomas, the essence of a law is derived from reason.
The will of the lawgiver explain its existence. In our analysis
of the eternal law we must keep that in mind. We shall be
better able to do so, if we consider the eternal law first, as
it were, in the making, in the region of the possible, that is,
where the will has no place. Then we shall discuss it as an
existing fact, which owes its existence to the divine will.
In this very abstruse question, we can only proceed as we
would if we were dealing with a law given by man. To understand anything it is well to begin with the end or purpose for
which it was made, for it is the end or formal object that determines the specific nature of a thing. That is true of law also.
It is true of human law and it is true of God's law. 33 Where
81 Summa Theol., q. 93, a. 1, sed contra.
•• Ibid., corp.
•• It is true of the eternal law, not in the sense that the common good is pre-

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a human lawgiver is concerned, the common good which he
strives to promote is outside himself. He is not free to alter
it according to his good pleasure. The eternal law is also meant
to promote a common good, namely, the common good of all
creation. Until we understand what is meant by the common
good of the universe we shall never understand what the eternal
law is. On the other hand, a clear grasp of the common good
of the universe will give us an insight into the nature of the
law that promotes it.
The common good of the universe is twofold, namely, a common good that is intrinsic to the universe and a common good
that is extrinsic. The extrinsic common good is God Himself.
The intrinsic good, that is, the good which is found in the
totality of created things, is a created thing. It is the goodness
of God as reflected in the totality of creatures. The universe
is good to the degree in which it manifests the goodness of its
Creator.
The extrinsic common good of the universe is fixed and
unchangeable. It does not depend on the divine will, for it is
identified with God Himself. Hence it is fixed and unchangeable,
not only as an end or object of desire, but also in the sense that
God must desire it. By a physical necessity of His nature God
must will and love His own infinite goodness.
That does not necessarily mean, however, that He must will
to manifest His goodness outside Himself in a world of creatures. If He chooses to do so, He does not act from compulsion
of any kind but from choice, which is supremely free. In fact,
we know that He has chosen to manifest His goodness and
glory in this external fashion by calling the universe into being.
The choice was freely made, but once made, God was then
constrained by a necessity of His own nature to make creatures
for one purpose and one. purpose only, namely, to show forth
His goodness and to manifest glory.
Since, however, God is infinite, His goodness and divine
supposed or exists before the eternal law, but in the sense that it is easier for us
to grasp the nature of the common good and from it to arrive at a knowledge of the
eternal law.

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attributes can never adequately be represented by creatures.
They can be represented only in a shadowy and imperfect
manner, owing to the limitation of created things. Since creatures cannot adequately manifest the divine attributes, God
has freely chosen the measure in which they shall do so. The
measure of His goodness which He has actually chosen to manifest through creation, is now the intrinsic common good of the
universe. It is also the factor that determines how many and
what kind of creatures will find a place in the universe.
Unlike a hmnan lawgiver, therefore, God freely determines
the existence and the extent of the internal common good of
the universe; He therefore freely determines the measure or
extent of the common good which He wishes to promote. by
law. In that sense, according to our human way of looking
at things, the divine will precedes the eternal law as actually
existing. In that sense, too, the existence of the eternal law is
the result of the divine will. If God had not chosen to create
and to manifest His goodness in creatures, the eternal law
would never have become an actually existing law. 34 We can
get a general idea of the measure in which He has been pleased
to manifest His goodness from a consideration of the existing
order of things. First of all, He has chosen to manifest His
goodness through the order of nature, which runs from the
invisible electron up to the highest angel. More than that:
He has chosen to manifest His divine nature in the order of
super-nature, which ranges from the least movement of grace
up to the glories of the beatific vision. For the moment, we
shall confine our attention to the manifestation of His glory
which He has effected through the order of nature.
Although the existence of the eternal law depends on the
divine will, its essence does not. That is a point that we shall
have to consider now in more detail. We shall best understand
it by keeping in mind the more easily analysed procedure that
obtains in the making of human law. When the human law.. In this whole matter of the eternal law it is always to be understood that we
are speaking modo humano. We are analysing it as we would a human law and
we are making suppositions merely to acquire a clearer understanding of it.

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giver is clear on the common good which he wishes to promote,
his next step is to consider the best means of promoting it.
That is the proper function of counsel and judgment. By
counsel, he deliberates on the most suitable measures to be
taken with a view to the common good in question. By judgment, he decides that one out of many is the most suitable.
Having made this decision, he chooses it as the one to be
imposed on the community. In due course he commands his
subjects to observe it. It is only when it has been commanded
by him in a public way that it becomes law in the strict sense
of the word.
In this process, it is important to distinguish between that
which accounts for the existence of the law and that which
accounts for its essence. The two are formally united in the
command. It is reason that accounts for the essence of law,
for law is essentially an objective norm of action. It is sometimes said that the essence of law is identical with the judgment of reason that precedes election. The essence of law
certainly includes this judgment, but it adds something important besides. It adds the two essential elements of imperium, namely, ordinatio et intimatio. It. is because the will
after election moves the reason to elicit the act of imperium
that it is said to be responsible for the existence of the law.
In giving it existence, however, it does not enter into the realm
of essence. The law is essentially an objective norm and it is
not the will of the lawgiver that is this objective norm. In
other words, the means that he chooses to promote the common good do not promote it because he chooses them. He
chooses them because of their own intrinsic nature they are
already calculated to promote it.
The same is even more true of the eternal law, except that
God has not to investigate and take counsel with Himself as
to the best means of promoting the common good of the universe. We take counsel with ourselves or from others when we
are in doubt what to do. God is never in doubt what to do.
However, as St. Thomas admits, 35 it helps us to understand
•• Cf. De Ver., q. 5, a. 1, corp.

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divine things when we picture God acting like
When
He had decided on the measure in which He wished to manifest His goodness externally, we imagine Him deliberating, as
it were, on the best means of achieving His goal. His deliberation bore on the range and combination of essences that would
best show forth His goodness in the measure He had decreed.
From an infinite number of possible essences or natures, He
had to choose that best suited His purpose. The fact that God
chose them did not make them the best suited. He chose them
because He judged them best suited and He judged them best
suited because of their own nature they were best suited. Since
the nature of things depends on the divine intellect and not on
the divine will, it is evident that the particular combination
of essences that will best serve the divine purpose is due not
to the divine will but to the divine intellect. When, in our
manner of speaking, God judged that a particular combination
of essences would promote His glory externally in the measure
which He had decreed, He chose that particular combination
and then commanded from eternity, before anything was
created, that creatures should observe that arrangement. In
that command from eternity the eternal law essentially consists, according to the words of the Psalm, "He gave a law,
which shall not pass away." 36
As we shall see, that divine precept binds all creatures,
rational and irrational alike, although it binds them in different
ways. It is the guiding principle, not only of their actions, necessary and free, but also of their hierarchical arrangement in
relation to one another. 37 In creating the universe, in arranging
creatures in the hierarchy in which we see them, God followed
the directions He Himself had already laid down in the eternal
law. If there were no command given by God from eternity
which creatures were to obey when they came into existence,
then we should have to conclude, according to our principles
•• Ps. 148: 6; Summa Theol., I-II, q. 93, a. 5.
87 It would be more correct to say that the hierarchical arrangement of creatures
in the universe is due to divine providence as an integral part of the eternal law,
as already explained.

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of law, that the eternal law did not exist from eternity. We will
discuss the consequences of such a supposition in greater detail
when we come to deal with the objection that the eternal law
is not a law in the strict sense because promulgation from
eternity is impossible.
The combination of creatures which God has actually chosen
to manifest His attributes externally, is called by St. Thomas
ordo universi. 38 The word ordo signifies grades of being. It
therefore implies a variety of specific natures rather than a
number of individuals in a particular nature. In those species
which have not intelligence, the individual exists only for the
sake of the species. When God planned the universe to manifest His divine attributes, it was this hierarchy of species that
He directly intended. Different grades of being are required
to manifest even imperfectly the immensity of the divine goodness, just as men use a variety of words and combine them in
a diversity of ways to give expression to one idea in their minds.
To give any kind of expression worthy of the divine nature, an
immense variety of species is required. If all creatures were
on a dead level, even if it were the level of the highest angel,
they would not reflect the divine goodness as perfectly as a
variety of species does. 39
The existence of. a variety of species reflects God's goodness
and immensity at the level of existence. But in God's nature
there is much more than mere existence, if we may speak in
such a fashion of God, in whom everything is existence. There
are supreme activity, supreme intelligence, supreme will, power
and sovereign freedom as far as the world of creatures is concerned. He has conferred on the various grades of being certain
faculties and powers precisely in order that they should manifest His goodness in the operational field as well as in the field
of mere existence. The whole created universe is meant to
mirror forth the immensity and goodness of God, not only in
the static order of being, but in the dynamic order of action.
Cf. III Contra Gentiles, c. 97.
•• Cf. Summa Theol., I, q. 47, a. 2: "For the universe would not be perfect if
only one grade of goodness were found in things." Cf. also II Cont. Gent., cc. 44, 46.
88

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That ordering of beings according to their specific natures on a
hierarchical scale of perfection and the consequent ordering
of the activity that flows from those natures is the work of the
eternal law and of the divine intellect. This hierarchy is
immutable in the sense that it is a hierarchy of essences, whose
possibility does not depend on the divine will but on the divine
intellect and the divine nature.
In the same way, the activity proper to those essences is
immutable. In inanimate things and in creatures that are not
free, their actions like their natures are governed by physical
necessity. The activity of creatures that are free is immutable
in a moral sense. While enjoying physical freedom, they are
bound morally to act in a way in keeping with their rational
nature. ·when we say that they are morally bound, we mean
that they must do freely what other creatures do of physical
necessity. They must act according to their rational nature if
they are to achieve the perfection to which they are ordained
by the eternal law. It is by achieving this perfection that they
manifest the goodness of God and thus contribute to the common good of the universe.
Rational creatures can know the eternal law as it is impressed
upon their nature. In the natural order, that impression of
the eternal law is called the law of nature. The natural law is
one, but it contains many precepts. Its many precepts are all
elaborations of the one precept, namely, that good is to be done
and evil avoided. This one precept is only a manifestation in
time of the precept in the divine mind which is eternal and
which orders the rational creature to its own good. The good
of a rational creature on the natural plane is to imitate the
goodness of God as known by reason. The more godlike it
becomes in the order of nature, the more it shows forth the
goodness of God and thus plays its part in promoting the
common good of the universe, which is the ultimate purpose
of its creation.
However, being free, a rational creature has the physical
power to abuse its freedom and to act contrary to the natural

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and eternal law. And yet all law has a safeguard against such
abuse of freedom. The eternal law has a similar safeguard
which is to be found in the threat of punishment. The threat
of punishment does not take away the use of free will, but it
acts as a deterrent against the abuse of it. If a creature insists
on abusing the gift that God has given, by the punishment
attached to the eternal law God ensures that even violations
of his law will ultimately co-operate in promoting the common
good of the universe. For, if the damned in Hell do not manifest·
the goodness of God as the blessed do, they at least manifest
it in the form of justice. They thus contribute in their own
way and against their will to the total goodness and perfection
of the universe.
God's original plan for rational creatures was that they
should contribute to the perfection of the universe by achieving
their own perfection and happiness. In the natural order, the
perfection of a rational creature is- not an arbitrary thing. It
does not even depend on the will of God. It necessarily consists
in the natural knowledge and love of God and in the exercise of
the moral virtues. A rational creature could not be perfected
in the natural order in any other way. Between his rational
nature and that end there is an intrinsic and necessary connection. Only a certain kind of action is proportioned to the
attainment of that end. A free action that is calculated to lead
a rational creature to its final perfection is called a morally
good action and an action that will lead away from that goal
is called by definition a morally bad action.
It is clear, therefore, that as far as the natural moral law
is concerned, the goodness or badness of certain actions does
not depend upon the divine will but upon the divine intellect.
God, of course, wills that the precepts of the natural law should
be observed. But actions commanded by the natural law or
forbidden by it, are not good or bad because He wills that they
should be done or avoided. Their goodness or badness is intrinsic to themselves and precedes, if we may so speak, the
divine will. Their goodness or badness depends ultimately on
the eternal law, which has ordered rational nature from eternity

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to a fixed goal. In the pre-existential order, namely, in the order
of essences and possibility, this ordering of rational nature to a
fixed goal had already taken place. In the domain of essence,
before God actually willed to give the precept which is the
eternal law, there was a intrinsic and necessary relationship
between a rational creature, certain good actions, the attainment of a certain goal and the perfection of the universe. Of
its very nature, therefore, a rational creature stands ordered,
in· the realm of essences, to its own perfection and to manifest
the goodness of God in that way, if God should actually decide
to show forth His goodness in an external fashion. When God
did make the choice and issued the command which gave
rational creatures not only a place in His creation but which
ordered them to act according to their rational nature, His
will merely sanctioned and gave existence to a necessity which
was rooted in the essence of man and which derived ultimately
from the divine intelligence.
There can be no doubt that for St. Thomas the eternal law
is a law in the proper sense of the word. Since his time, however, difficulties have been raised against the eternal law as
law. One difficulty is based on the teaching of St. Thomas
himself, that law in the proper sense is essentially a rule of
human action, and human action is action that is free. On the
other hand, when dealing with the eternal law, St. Thomas
does not confine it to the regulation of actions that are free.
He teaches that all things, outside the divine nature, rational
and irrational, necessary and contingent, are subject to the
eternal law of God. His argument is that as nothing created
can escape the providence of God, so nothing can escape the
all-embracing sweep of His law.
St. Thomas considers and answers that difficulty. 40 He makes
it quite clear that irrational creatures are not subject to the
eternal law in the same way as rational creatures. Irrational
creatures are subject to it in a wide or improper sense. They
are subject to it inasmuch as they are bound by a physical
40

Ibid., I-II, q. 93, aa. 5, 6.

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necessity of their nature to act according to its directions. This
necessity of their nature is derived from the eternal law. It is
the precept of the eternal law imbedded in their nature, giving
a strong inclination to actions proper to their nature. It imposes
subject to
on them a physical necessity. They are,
the eternal law, but they have no rational knowledge of their
subjection. Rational creatures, on the other hand, receive the
precept of the eternal law in a rational way, namely, through
knowledge. The precept, which is the eternal law, is impressed
upon rational creatures as upon irrational, but in the case of
rational creatures it does not impose physical necessity. It
gives a strong inclination to act in a rational way, but it does
not interfere with freedom. Creatures that have reason can
recognise this precept, which is implicit in their nature. They
can formulate it for themselves and apply it to themselves as
a norm of free activity.
To determine, therefore, whether the eternal law is law in
the proper sense we must distinguish sharply between the
eternal law as it proceeds from the mind of God, the Legislator,
and the same law as it is participated by creatures. As it exists
in the mind of God, the eternal law is one. One law directs all
· things to the common good of the universe. But this one law
can be received by creatures in different ways. Rational creatures receive it proprie because they can know it and forreulate
its precepts for themselves. Irrational creatures, on the other
hand, are capable of receiving it only improprie. When we ask
if the eternal law is law in the proper sense, we must not consider it as it is found in creatures but as it proceeds from the
mind of God, the Legislator. It is only in law as it proceeds
from the mind of the legislator that the essence o£ law can be
found. If law in that sense fulfils the four conditions laid down
by St. Thomas, 41 then it is law in the strict sense (essentialiter)
whether it is received by others proprie or improprie. It is my
contention that the eternal law as it proceeds from the mind
of God fulfils those four conditions. Hence, it is law in the
"Cf. ibid., q. 90, aa. 1-4.

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proper sense (essentialiter) even though it can be received by
irrational creatures only improprie.
The eternal law, therefore, considered precisely as it is found
in irrational creatures, is not law in the proper sense, but that
does not mean, as some would have us believe, that as far as
irrational creatures are concerned, the eternal law is nothing
more than divine providence. Nor are we to understand the
Angelic Doctor in that sense when he says, " Consequently
irrational creatures are subject to the eternal law through
being moved by divine providence; but not, as rational creatures are, through understanding the divine commandment." 42
St. Thomas does not here identify the eternal law and providence. He merely says that irrational creatures are subject
to the eternal law in so far as they are moved by divine providence to their own proper activity and their own end. In other
words, God moves them, through his providence according to
the rule laid down for them in the eternal law.
That he does not here identify the eternal law and providence
is also clear from his general teaching on the difference between
them. Eternal law is as a premise from which providence is a
conclusion. As a conclusion invariably presupposes a premise,
so does providence invariably presuppose the eternal law.
Hence, the fact that irrational creatures are governed by divine
providence is a strong argument in favour of their being subject
to the eternal law. For another reason, it is impossible to call
the eternal law in relation to irrational creatures a kind of
providence. For, even in the improper sense, as it is applied
to irrational creatures, it is an act of regnative or regal prudence
in God, whereas providence is always an act of monastic prudence. Not only does the eternal law extend to the regulation
of actions that are not free; it also explains the grades of being
in the universe. 43 For the common good of the universe, as
we have seen, requires many grades of being and the common
good of the universe is the chief concern of the eternal law .
.. Ibid., q. 98, a. 5.
•• Providence as an integral part of the eternal law seems to be responsible for
the grades of being.

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The second difficulty that is urged against the eternal law
being law in the proper sense is more sweeping, for it applies,
not only in relation to creatures that are not free, but even
to creatures that are. It is the difficulty about promulgation.
Promulgation is essential to law, so the objection runs. But
the eternal law, even as laying down objective norms for the
guidance of free actions, is lacking this essential of law. Promulgation presupposes a community to which the law is promulgated, but from eternity there was no community to which
the eternal law could be promulgated.
This difficulty, like the preceding one, was considered by St.
Thomas and answered. He holds quite definitely that the
eternal law was promulgated from eternity. It is significant
that he does not take an easy way out of the problem by saying
that promulgation is not essential to law and that therefore
promulgation from eternity is not essential for the eternal law.
That St. Thomas did not give this easy solution is a strong
indication that he regarded promulgation as an essential constituent of law. His answer to the difficulty is that the eternal
law was promulgated from eternity in the divine Word and in
the Book of Life. 44
If this answer satisfied St. Thomas, but does not seem satisfying to us, it may be that our notion of promulgation differs
from his. St. Thomas distinguishes between promulgation
actively considered as an imperium in the mind of God and
passively considered as the reception of the law by those who
are subject to it. Passive promulgation is not and could not
be eternal, for creatures did not exist from eternity to receive
the law. Active promulgation on the part of the divine lawgiver
is eternal. It is identified with the divine imperium by which
God laid down from all eternity the plan to be followed by his
creatures with a view to promoting the common good of the
universe. It is promulgation in this active sense that St. Thomas
considered to be essential to law.
That subjects should come to know of the promulgated law
u Ibid., q. 91, a. I, ad 2.

GOD'S ETERNAL

LAW

527

is rather an effect of promulgation than essential to it. Neither
is it absolutely essential for the promulgation of law that the
community for which the law is intended should actually exist.
It seems to be sufficient that it exist potentially when the law
is promulgated, and will exist actually in the future. That
seems to be true even of human law. The Code of Canon Law,
for instance, was promulgated in 1918. It was promulgated
then, not only for those who were then alive, but for generations
as yet unborn. The Code of Canon Law is as truly promulgated
today for those who will live one hundred years hence, as it
will be when those people are born and come to learn of the
law. There does not seem to be any difficulty in applying the
same principle to the eternal law. There is no reason why the
eternal law should not have been actively promulgated by God
from eternity even though the creatures that were to be bound
by it did not actually exist from eternity. From eternity, God
by his law established an objective order to be followed by
creatures when they were created in time.
Active promulgation in this sense is an immanent act existing
in the mind of God from eternity. Words and writing are not
essential to promulgation. They are only a conditio sine qua
non that creatures should come to know of the divine command.
Hence, the first moment creatures began to exist, that moment
God's eternal precept was expressed in a sign, for it was stamped
on their nature as a sign to be read by creatures with intelligence to read. Before creatures were made, the divine imperium,
which is the eternal law, terminated, not in words or signs, but
in an objective proposition of the divine reason ordering all
future creatures to the common good of the universe.
If we hold, as some do, that before creatures were made,
God's law was not promulgated in this active sense, we should
be driven to hold that there was never any active promulgation
of the law by God at any time. In other words, we should be
driven to conclude that there is no eternal law and therefore,
no natural law and no law of any kind since all human law
is derived ultimately from the eternal law. We do not say that

528

JOSEPH

COLLINS

this conclusion has actually been drawn by those who deny
eternal promulgation, but we feel that the conclusion is implicit
in the denial.
When creatures actually exist the law is promulgated passively. Is it promulgated actively on the part of the divine
Lawgiver for the first time when creatures begin to exist? If
we answer " no " to the question, we imply that there was either
no active promulgation on the part of God or that there was
active promulgation from eternity. If we answer" yes," then we
shall have to admit that with every creature that comes into
existence, God actively promulgates a law, which before it was
only His intention to promulgate. Such a conclusion seems to
be absurd, for every act of God is an eternal act. Either, then,
there is no active promulgation at all by God and consequently
no law, or there is an active promulgation which is eternal.
It seems to us that those who deny eternal promulgation do so
because they confuse active with passive promulgation. Passive
promulgation cannot be eternal, but then passive promulgation
is not essential for law, as we saw in the case of the Code of
Canon Law.
It may help to clarify our notion of the eternal law if we
compare it with the divine ideas and with the divine art by
which God brought all things into being. The eternal law is
not quite the same thing as the divine ideas for there are many
ideas in the mind of God, but there is only one eternal law.
To understand the precise. difference between them, we must
be clear on the nature of the divine ideas.
The divine ideas may be considered from two points of view.
They may be considered in the realm of pure possibility or
they may be considered in the domain of existing fact, actually
existing or future. In the realm of mere possibility, an idea is
called ratio. Idea as ratio is the object of speculative thought
'and it is co-extensive with everything that is
God
understands the infinite ways in which his divine nature can
be imitated by creatures. The object of this knowledge (objectum quod) is the divine idea as ratio. Understood in this sense,

GOD'S ETERNAL LAW

629

there are as many ideas in the mind of God as there are possible
creatures. The objectum quo remains one and the same,
namely, the divine essence. The objectum quod is multiplied
as the term of the divine knowledge. The term of the divine
knowledge is the infinite ways in which the divine essence can
be participated by creatures. The divine ideas understood as
exemplares mean that God has actually chosen to create beings
after the pattern of the idea as ratio existing in his mind. The
ideas considered as exemplares are not infinite in number.
They are confined to those things which God has created or
will create in the future.
If we ask why, from an infinite number of possible creatures
and from an infinite number of combinations of those creatures,
He should have chosen a definite number and a definite combination of them, we shall find that it was done with a view
to an end which He had already chosen. That end was the
external manifestation of His goodness according to a certain
measure. From an infinite range of possible creatures, He chose
a definite number and a definite combination of them, because
He saw that this number and this combination were best suited
to promote the degree of glory which He had decided to manifest externally. A particular combination of creatures does not
manifest His glory externally because He has chosen them.
Rather He chooses them because of their very nature they are
calculated to serve His purpose.
Here we have part of the essence of the eternal law, namely,
the divine judgment preceding choice that a certain combination of creatures is best suited to manifest His goodness after the
manner in which He has chosen. The completed essence of
the eternal law is found in the imperium inasmuch as it is an
act of the divine reason, commanding created things to observe
the order imposed on them so as to promote the common good
of the universe. God wills to give the command but the fact
that He wills to give it accounts only for its existence. The
divine reason accounts for its essence. God's eternal command
imposing an objective order on things to be created, is not the

580

JOSEPH COLLINS

divine decree to create. The intention to create precedes the
eternal law. The decree to create the particular kind of universe
the eternal law has legislated for, pertains to God's executive
power. His executive power is governed by divine prudence.
But it is monastic prudence and not regnative prudence that
governs it. It is governed by God's providence rather than by
his eternal law.
Although the eternal law is to be distinguished from the
divine ideas, there is a sense in which we can speak of it as itself
an idea. It is not, however, an idea of essences or of individual
things. It is rather an idea of order: what St. Thomas calls
" the idea of the order of the universe." 45 Not only has God an
idea of all possible essences (idea-ratio) and an idea of each
particular thing which he intends to create (idea-exemplar),
he has also an idea of the totality of the universe, which is
composed of these separate things.
The idea of the order of the universe may be considered as
idea-ratio. In this case, it would include all the possible universes that God could create. It may also be considered as
idea-exemplar and in this sense it signifies the actual universe
God has chosen and to which from eternity He intended to give
existence. As the divine ideas represent the essences of things
taken singly and by themselves without relation to anything
else, so the idea of the order of the universe as exemplar, represents the total combination of essences in relation to a given
purpose. In the case, the given purpose is the measure in which
God willed to manifest His goodness externally. The whole
conception of order, which is so fundamental in law, implies
that things are related to one another and that all are related
to a given end. As the divine ideas represent essences independently of the divine will, so the idea of the order of the
universe represents a combination of essences independently
of the divine will, which is better suited than any other to
manifest God's goodness in the measure in which He has decided
•• Ibid., I, q. 16, a.

When I say that the eternal law may be called idea ordinu

univerai I am using the term " law " as it is practically identified with providence
which is the most important of the integral parts of regnative prudence.

GOD'S ETERNAL LAW

581

to manifest it. If He had decided to manifest it in a greater or
lesser degree, a different combination of essences would have
been called for. If, for instance, He had wished to manifest His
goodness in the least possible degree, He would have had to
create at least one species. Materia prima would not have done,
because of itself it cannot exist. It must be given a form. Once
it is united to form, a specific nature is the result. Since existence follows substantial forms, the lowest species of a created
thing would have manifested God's goodness to some extent by
the mere fact of existing. If God had wished to manifest his
goodness still further He would have had to create another substantial form. But another substantial form necessarily means a
new species and a new grade of being. Hence, the more He wished
to manifest His goodness and divine attributes, so many more
were the grades of being He had to call into existence. Since,
however, as St. Thomas tells us/ 6 God has been pleased to communicate His goodness to creatures in a manner as perfect as
creatures are capable of receiving, an almost infinite variety of
species will be called for to give even an inadequate picture of
the goodness and majesty of the Creator.
The eternal law, or rather providence as an integral part of
the eternal law (understood in a wide sense), explains the
grades of being in the universe. But being is further ordered
to action. Each grade of being manifests His goodness still
more wonderfully by acting according to its nature. The highest
manifestation of his goodness in the natural order is to be seen
in the free activity of rational and intellectual creatures, who
follow the directions He has laid down in His law. By following
the directions laid down in His law, they grow in His knowledge
and love and in the practice of the moral virtues. In that way,
they grow in likeness to God. They achieve their own perfection
and happiness and in doing so, they make manifest in the
highest degree the perfection and goodness of their Creator.
Hence, St. Thomas says that the perfection of the universe is
to be found chiefly in rational creation. It is in relation to
"DeVer., q. 5, a. 8.

532

JOSEPH

COLLINS

rational creation that the eternal law is law in the proper
sense of the word. Hence, we can see how the common good
of the universe is the object of the eternal law taken in its
widest sense.
To bring things into being, something more was required on
the part of God than the mere decision to create. His providence, which is an act of monastic prudence, gave a command
to His executive powers to call things into being that did not
exist before. In the actual production of creatures the divine
art came into play. 47 As an artist is guided by the idea which
he has in his mind, so in the production of individual things
God was guided by the ideas of them in the divine mind. Not
only did He give them being according to the ideal prototype
in His mind, but He disposed them in a certain order in relation
to one another and with a view to an end. 48 Since, however,
the ordering of things in relation to an end is the special function of providence, the original disposition of creatures in the
universe is also attributed to- providence. In this passage, St.
Thomas would seem to assign to providence and to disposition
what we have assigned to the eternal law. There is no contradiction in this, when we remember that in the domain of regnative prudence there is a providence which is an integral part
of the eternal law. The eternal law, with a view to the common
good of the universe, lays down in a general way what disposition and providence carry into effect in the sphere of monastic
prudence. Moreover, whatever can be attributed to providence
as a conclusion, may also be attributed to the eternal law as
the premise from which the conclusion was drawn.
JosEPH CoLLINS,

0. P.

St. Mary's, Tallagkt,
Co. Dublin, Eire

07 Cf. De V llr., q. 5, a. 1.
•• In the executive order, this disposition of things followed the plan laid down
by the eternal law.

CATHOLIC BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP
AND COLLEGE THEOLOGY

T

HIS article brings together two ideas: Catholic Biblical
S5!holarship especially in the Old Testament-andCollege Theology courses. Such a juxtaposition may
imply a tension between Scripture and Theology; it may point
to a stretch of no-man's land where suspicious antagonism
separates the professors of these two subjects. Or, on the contrary, such a juxtaposition may imply evidence of a desire on
the part of religion teachers to have the best of Scripture
scholarship. We assume the latter. There should be no antipathy between these two branches of learning. Both handle
the word of God, and a Scripture professor is required to be a
theologian with an academic degree. Yet, more than once has
a Theology professor remarked in a fraternal though serious
way: " Modern Scripture scholars seem always on the alert
to emphasize those interpretations which differ from the common opinion of Theology manuals! "
Perhaps, there is a friendly rivalry between Theology and
Scripture, but is this to be deplored? The present advance in
the biblical field can be traced to the theologians' discontent,
and even disgust, with Scriptural studies at the turn of the
century. It is within the living memory of many priests when
scriptural manuals and classes were dry, theoretical and on the
defensive. There was much talk about the Bible and little
reading in and"from the Bible. Rightly did theologians demand
that we begin to open the Bible and put ourselves in contact
with the living word of God. The Spirit of God was whispering
once again: " Tolle, lege! " Pope Pius XII complained about
Scripture courses and commentaries which "to our regret"
are devoted " only to expounding exclusively those matters
which belong to the historical, archeological, philological and
588

584

CARROLL STUHLMUELLER

other auxiliary sciences." 1 The scripture scholars owe gratitude
to the professors of theology, for their dissatisfaction has been
greatly responsible for the reform of biblical studies.
Today, scriptural scholars are returning that favor and contributing to a deeper and more vital understanding of doctrinal
truths. Unwittingly and inculpably, theology had been affected
by biblical studies which for so long a time had been critical
and apologetical. 2 God's word had been separated from real,
practical life-situations (what the Germans call Sitz im Leben),
and to that extent theology along with scripture studies tended
to drift off into the same unreal world. An advance in Sacred
Doctrine is now being made by a certain good tension between
scripture and theology.
This article will first investigate the historical background
of the present, enthusiastic revival of scripture studies. This
historical precis will prepare us to understand what are the
principal elements in this revival with pertinence to sacred doctrine. We will then show how these elements influence the
college religion courses. Last, some suggestions will be offered
to the teacher of sacred doctrine on keeping au courant with
modern scripture scholarship. Most of our attention will be
directed to the Old Testament, since this is the area where
scripture studies have made the greatest advances and where
theology manuals are often out of touch with modern Catholic
exegesis.

I.

HISTORICAL

BACKGROUND

TO THE CATHOLIC

oF ScRIPTURE STUDIES

REVIVAL

3

The involved and intricate manner in which religion is intertwined with the world's secular events is not at all regrettable.
At times worldly trends and secular thought-patterns have had
1 Divino Afjlante Spiritu, n.
• Cf. E. F. Siegman, " The Literary Forms of the Old Testament and High School
Religion Textbooks," The Catholic Educational Review 54 (1956) 78-84.
• C. Pesch, De Inspiratione Sacrae Scripturae (Freiburg:
. The first part of
the book (pp. 11-878) is a historical study and very helpful. The second part is
doctrinal, expressing many opinions no longer held.

BmLICAL SCHOLARSHIP AND COLLEGE THEOLOGY

585

a corroding effect upon the religious life of the Church. Among
the good consequences of this intermingling of the sacred with
the secular we can cite this fact: God remains a living reality
whose presence in the world cannot be ignored. He is continually making an impact upon human lives. Christ declared:
" My Father works even until now, and I work." (Jn. 5, 17)
Let us now consider what influence secular learning has
brought to bear upon Bible study.
1. 1650-1800 A. D.

The CounCil of Trent had set in motion such an interest in
Scripture that Pope Leo XIII could later write: " It almost
seemed that the great age of the Fathers had returned." 4 This
was the golden age of scholars like Sixtus of Sienna, 0. P.
(d. 1569), Cornelius a Lapide, S. J. (d. 1637), James Bonfrere,
S. J. (d. 1642), Cornelius Jansenius (d. 1576), John Maldonatus, S. J. (d. 1583), and William Estius (d. 1622) .5 Yet, by
1650 interest began to lag and in the next one hundred and
fifty years (1650-1800 A. D.) there shone no great lights to
dispel the gloom and warm the mind with enthusiasm.
We would rather wrap up in charitable silence and bury in
the dust of a forgotten library the account of clerical education
during this period of 1650-1800. Too often were men ordained
priests who had lived very little time in a seminary and whose
knowledge did not surpass the material in the Roman Catechism. In many religious orders the members were split between
the" graduati" who formed a caste of well-educated, privilege
nobles and the " rank and file " whose education consisted
mostly in a minimum preparation for confessional work.6 Because of an ignorant or listless clergy, the Catholic Church lost
• Providentissimua Deua of Leo XIII. An English translation is found in Rome
and the Study of Scripture (ed. 6; St. Meinrad, Indiana: 1958) 9.
• Maldonatus and Estius are still ranked among loci classici in the exegesis of
the Gospels and the Epistles of St. Paul.
• Cf. Fabiano Giorgini, " L'Educazione dei Chierci nella Congregazione della
Passione," Gioventu Passionista !! (Teramo, Italy: S. Gabriele dell' Addolorata,
1958) 51-144, esp. pp. 51-56 where valuable footnotes and references are given.

536

CARROLL STUHLM:'OELLER

her leadership in the important sphere of education during the
very years when tremendous advances were being scored in
the sciences and in the arts. Unfortunately, the Church was
maneuvered into a weak and defensive position by the standardbearers· of the new learning. Often these men were irreligious
and even militant anti;_clericals.
The full force of the Copernican revolution exploded into
the " Quaestio Biblica," the seeming irreconcilability of the
Bible with science. The studies of Giordano Bruno (d. 1600),
Kepler (d. 1630), Galileo (d. 1642), and Newton (d. 1727)
cut a path which led many natural scientists away from the
Church. There seemed to be no solution for the " myth of
biblical inerrancy."
At the same time another revolution was energetically shaking the citadel of learning. The Renaissance stirred up an
absorbing interest in the ancient classics. Men carefully studied
the literary forms, the authorship and the variant texts of the
Roman and Greek masterpieces. With an equal zest and boldness they turned to the Bible and other religious documents,
and the age of Biblical Criticism dawned. Catholics who do
not recognize the value of the inquiring mind are embarrassed
to learn that two co-religionists are venerated as the fathers
of biblical criticism. The Oratorian Richard Simon 7 wrote in
1682 that many hands were at work in the composition of the
various chapters and books of the Bible. He stressed the belief
that future redactors were just as inspired as the original writer.
Writing in 1753, Jean Astruc 8 laid the foundations for the
" documentary theory" which divided the Pentateuch into
• R. Simon, Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament (Paris: 1678); Eng. trans.
A Critical History of the Old Testament (London:
Histoire Critique du
T exte du ·Nouveau Testament (Rotterdam: 1689) ; H istoire Critique des Principaux
Commentateurs du Noveau Testament (Rotterdam: 1689); Nouvelle Observatinns
sur le Texte et les Versions du Nouveau Testament (Paris: 1695).
8 J. Astruc·, Conjectures sur les. Memoires Originaux dont il paroit que Moyse
s'est servi pour composer le Livre de la Genese (Bruxelles: 1758). Cf. E. O'Doherty,
"The Conjectures of Jean Astruc, 1758," Cathoilc Biblical Quarterly 15 (July 1958)
800-304, where it is shown that the book was actually printed not at Brussels but
at Paris, and that the author's name was not given.

BIBLICAL SCHOLARSIDP

AND COLLEGE THEOLOGY

537

various documents. He called one of them " A " wherein God
is usually named Elohim and the other " B " wherein God is
addressed as Yahweh. These two men were devout Catholic-s
and wrote with moderation, but their dissection of the Bible
into separate documents set in motion the most absorbing
biblical movement of the 19th century.
Rationalism now stepped in to free the literary critic of any
reverential restraint. For instance, Thomas Hobbes (d. 1679)
was writing:
If a man pretend to me that God has spoken to him supernaturally, and immediately, and I make doubt of it, I cannot easily
perceive what argument he can produce, to oblige me to believe it. 9
Then came the day of Deism, and the printing press rolled
out the works of Locke (d. 1704) , Shaftesbury (d. 1683) ,
Collins (d.1759) ,Woolston (d.1733), andReimarus (d. 1768).
Their system of Deism had removed the supernatural and left
man to his fallible, erring self! Like Spinoza (d. 1677), these
men were demanding that the human reason be freed of all
restraint and make an impartial study of scripture.
2. 1800-1930 A. D.

The boy is father of the man. The revolutionary ideas of
the 17th and 18th centuries in the fields of science and literature
grew to maturity in the 19th. Scriptural study moved toward
manhood with equal strides. The two most noteworthy traits
of the 19th century scripture studies are: "the quest for the
historical Jesus"; and the Graf-Wellhausen School of Criticism.
"The quest for the historical Jesus" is a phrase coined by
non-Catholics to distinguish the "Christ" whom they claimed
had been conjured up by faith from the" Jesus" who actually
lived. The various lives of Jesus, written by Paulus, Strauss,
Renan, Baur, Weiss and von Harnack professed to disentangle
the real Jesus from the layers of legend and folklore which they
thought weighed down the gospel account. 10 Strauss had re• The Leviathan (1651), reprinted by the Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1909, p. 287.
10

The de-mythologizing of Bultmanp. is a modern variation upon this 19th

588

CARROLL STUJILMUELLD

duced Our Lord to a spiritual phantom who could walk upon
the water because he knew of a submerged reef! Renan's Vie
de Jesus explained a miracle as the concoction of three ingredients: "1) the credulity of everybody; 2) a little obligingness
on the part of a few; 8) the silent agreement of the chief
author." 11 Scholars did not take Strauss or Renan too seriously. However, Renan's Vie de Jesus reached 52 editions by
1928 and his abridged Vie Populaire underwent 22 editions.
George Elliot testifies to her own pitiful loss of faith as a result
of translating Strauss' Das Leben Jesu. 12
A Catholic reaction resulted in biographies which emphasized
chronological facts, historical details and geographical data.
These books betray a troublesome concern to insist (and perhaps, overinsist) upon the supernatural. Unfortunately, these
great Catholic biographies tended to overlook the individual
viewpoints of the various evangelists and to disregard their
particular theological themes and their doctrinal content.
Apologetical arguments saw the Old Testament fulfilled in the
New Testament by means of dates, numbers, places and people,
rather than by means of great doctrinal truths, such as poverty,
humility, expiatory suffering, transcendence and corporate
solidarity.
The 19th Century was marked not only by the " Quest for
the Historical Jesus" but. also by the Graf-Wellhausen School
of Criticism. Krister Stendahl has characterized this school as
" litrary criticism of a book-minded, scissors and paste type." 13
The scholar sits contentedly at his desk with any number of
books at arms-length but with no help whatsoever from archeology or ancient Semitic documents. His studies drop an atom
bomb upon the Bible, scattering its verses and words into a
century vogue. Cf. J. M. Robinson, A New Quest of the Historical ]e8'US (Naperville, ru.: 1959).
11 p. xxvii, in the 18th French ed.; quoted here from M. J. Lagrange, Christ
and Renan, tr. by Masie Ward (London: 19!!8) p. 119.
11 Cf. P. A, Sheehan, Under the Cedars and the Stars, p. 186.
11 " Problems in Biblical Hermeneutics," Journal of Biblical Literature, 77 (1958),
84.

BIBLICAL SCHOLARSIDP

AND COLLEGE THEOLOGY

589

jumble of fragments and documents. He accepts without hesitation the Marxist-Hegelism theory of evolution. The Old and
New Testaments he divides into periods of thesis, antithesis
and synthesis, as the universe whirls forward in its blind drive
for natural perfection. G. R. North has summed up the reaction of most scholars of this age in these words: "The GrafWellhausen theory had triumphed, and it seemed that little or
nothing remained to be done." 14
Catholic scholarship was seriously weakened by a combination of unhappy circumstances. The backwash of anti-intellectualism, left behind by the two preceding centuries, had not
yet been cleared away by the reforms of Leo XIII. The
Modernist heresy was gaining ground and infiltrating seminaries and universities. No clear ideas on the nature of inspiration and revelation were at hand to guide the research
scholar. 15 Consequently, the closing years of the 19th century
were a time of fog and whirlwind, or of hysterical fright and
rash conclusions. Two of the foremost Catholic scholars at this
time were Marie-Joseph Lagrange, 0. P., who had founded the
Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem and
de Hummelauer, S. J.,
who was stirring up a scriptural revival in German speaking
lands. What Lagrange and Hummelauer presented as hypotheses, their followers rashly turned into established conclusions.
Quick, decisive action was necessary. Pope Leo XIII estab"" Pentateuchal Criticism," in The Old Testament and Modern Study, ed. by
H. H. Rowley (Oxford: 1951), 48. The rise and development of literary criticism
is presented by J. Coppens, The Old Testament and the Critic, tr. by E. A. Ryan
and E. W. Trebbe (Patterson:
15 I. Jahn
(1816) reduced inspiration to a negative assistance, preserving the
aacred writer from error; B. de Haneberg (1876) to a subsequent approval by the
Chnrch; Rohling
Lenormant
and Di Bartolo (1888) contended that
inspiration extended only to matters of faith and morals; Prat and Hummelauer
elaborated their theory of " implicit citation," whereby sections of the Bible could
be conveniently withdrawn from the sphere of inspiration; Cardinal Newman's
struggles for a solution are well presented by Jaak Seynaeve, Cardin(ll Newman's
Doctrine of Holy Scripture (Oxford: 1953). That the controversy on the nature
of inspiration is still open is evident from Karl Rahner, Uber die Schriftinspiration
(Freiburg: 1958) .

540

CARROLL STUHLMUELLER

lished the Biblical Commission in 1902; 18 five years later its
disciplinary power was further strengthened by Pius X. 11 In
the same year {1907) Pius X issued his. encyclical Pascendi
against Modernism. Various decrees proceeded from the Biblical Commission: in 1905 on the historical books of the Bible;
in 1906 on the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch; in 1907
on the Fourth Gospel; in 1908 on the book of Isaias; in 1909
on the first three chapters on Genesis.18 Hummelauer was forbidden to make any public statements on the Bible. Lagrange
interrupted his scripture studies and withdrew to France. " Less
than a year later he was again at Jerusalem with orders to
carry on his exegetical studies." 19
An impartial study of biblical research at the turn of the
20th century shows the need of such drastic disciplinary action
by ecclesiastical authority. Such action prevented any widespread apostasy from orthodoxy contaminating the faith of
the Catholic Church from within, as did happen among many
non-Catholic sects. The decrees, however, were made and enforced by human beings, and at times there may have been
excessive rigor. The inevitable result was a "defensive atmosphere [of the beleaguered fortress in which] creative scholarship
was extremely unlikely." 2 ° For twenty to thirty years no
1 ° Cf. Rome and the Study
of Scripture, pp. 80-85 for the Apostolic Letter,
Vigilantiae, establishing the Biblical Commission.
17 Pra68tantia Sacrae Seripturae, in Rome and Study,
Pius X wrote:
" All are bound in conscience to submit to the decisions of the Biblical Commission, which have been given in the past and which shall be given in the future,
in the same way as to the Decrees .which pertain to doctrine, issued by the Sacred
Congregations and approved by the Sovereign Pontiff.'' A recent clarification on
the binding force of the decrees of the Biblical Commission can be found in the
Catholic Biblical Quarterly 18 (Jan. 1956), 2lHl9.
10 Decisions of the Pontifical Commission are given in Rome and Study, pp. 116 ff.
See fn. 17 about a recent clarification.
•• Cf. nre Lagrange and the Scriptures, tr. by R. T. Murphy (Milwaukee: 1946)
p. 186. The decree of the Consistorial Congregation, demanding that there be
removed from clerical institutions "scripta plura P. Lagrange," can be found in
"I Generi Letterari e l'Enciclica," by P. Eufrasio di Cristo Re, Qu68tioni Bibliche,
Biblicum: 1949), 10-11. This decree is no, longer
Parte I (Pontificium
binding.
•o J. L. McKenzie, " Problems of Hermeneutics in Roman Catholic Exegesis,"
Journal of Biblical Literature, 77 (Sept. 1968), 197.

BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP

AND COLLEGE THEOLOGY

541

Catholic scholar dared to touch such books as Genesis, Josue,
Judges or Isaias. 21 Consequently, scripture courses in our seminaries and colleges usually degenerated into unyielding conservatism and prolonged arguments against the higher critics. 22
Little attempt was made to sift truth from error in the writings
of non-Catholics. An even more lamentable result was a general
neglect of the Bible as a source of doctrine and spiritual inspiration.
3. 1'he Last 1'hirty Years
We come now to our own times and look into the present
state of scriptural studies. We ask ourselves: what has happened during the last thirty years. What has happened since
Pius XII's encyclical letter, Divino Afftante Spiritu (Sept. SO,
1948), when a vigorous spirit stirred Catholic biblical studies.
Our late Holy Father voiced the " hope that our times also can
contribute something towards the deeper and more accurate
interpretation of Sacred Scripture." He pointed out that " new
means and aids to exegesis are also provided." 28 In this Magna
Carta of biblical scholarship he wrote: "All should abhor
that intemperate zeal which imagines that whatever is new
should for that very reason be opposed or suspected." 24
Today Catholic exegetes are debtors to the archeologist's
pick ax which has been hard at work in the Near East especially
since 1900. With the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone (between 1799 and 1882) and the efforts of Sir Flinders Petri
(1885 and later), Egypt began to release her mysterious messages about the past. It was Petri, as Albright has remarked,
who "revolutionized the science of Archaeology." 25 Petri dis11 This becomes evident
by studying the bibliographies in modem Catholic
commentaries like A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture, ed. by B. Orchard
(London: 1958). Notice the few works that can be cited by John M. T. Barton,
"Recent Catholic Exegesis in English-Speaking Lands,'' Memorial Lagrange (Paris:
1940)' 'l39-'l44.
•• An example is the once very common text book: A. Comely and A. Merk,
Introductionis in S. Scripturae Libras Compendium (ed. 10; Paris: 19'l9).
•• Divino Afflante Spiritu, n. 81.
•• Ibid., n. 88.
'"W. F. Albright, Recent DiYC01J(J?"if!·Y in Bible La:nrk (publ. by The Biblical

CARROLL STUHLMUELLER

covered the value of pottery as a chronological criterion, and
in 1901 published his method of dating. Religious compositions
like the Book of the Dead and the hymns of Akhenaton to the
Sun (which resemble Ps. 103) are now known to us. Historical
inscriptions have also been discovered, detailing the conquests
of Merneptah (ca. 1220) in the days of Moses and of Sheshak I
(ca. 935-914 B. C.) during the reign of Roboam.
The decipherment of the famous Behistum trilingual in 1851
opened up the land of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Sir
Leonard Woolley excavated the city of Ur, the birthplace of
Abraham. Andre Parrot discovered the famous Mari tablets
in 1935 and 1936, from which we can reconstruct the patriarchal
period of Abraham and explain many biblical customs. We
now possess in our own language the Law codes of Hammurabi
(ca. 1700 B. C.) , the Sumerian Code (ca. 2050 B. C.) , the
Eshnuna Code written in Akkadian (ca. 1800 B. C.), the
Assyrian Code (ca. llOO B. C.), and the Hittite {1400-1200
B. C.) . The Enuma Eli'S creation story and the Gilgamesh Epic
of ancient Mesopotamia have thrown tremendous light upon
the early chapters of Genesis. The publication of the "Wiseman Chronicles" (1956) is unraveling the sequence of events
during the era Nabuchodonosor and the fall of Jerusalem. 26
Much of Canaanite life became known to us from the Ras
Shamrah tablets, discovered at ancient Ugarit in 1929 and
deciphered between 1930-1931 by Bauer and Dhorme. In
Palestine systematized excavation was undertaken at sites like
Jericho, Megiddo, Mizpah, Hai, Shechem, Lachish, Tell elFar'ah, and Ha.zor.27 G. Ernest Wright could write about
Colloquium. Pittsburgh) p. 7. This paper-back is an excellent summary of the
effects of archaeology upon the Bible.
•• Cf. E. Vogt, "Die Neubabylonische Chronik iiber die Schlacht bei Karkemisch
und die Einnahme von Jerusalem," Supplements to Vetus Testamentum vol. 4
(Leiden: 1957) 67 ff.; D. J. Wiseman, Chronicles of Chaldaean Kings (6fJ6-556
B. C.) in the British Museum (London: 1956); comments of E. Vogt Biblica
47 (1956), 889-897.
•• Besides the paper-back of Albright just mentioned, we also call attention to
the following books, valuable for estimating the effects of archaeology upon Scripture study: W. F. Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity (Baltimore: 1940),

BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP AND COLLEGE THEOLOGY

548

Palestine: " I know of no other country in which over five
thousand years of pre-Roman history is as well known and as
well established chronologically." 28 There is no space here to
detail the overwhelming effects of the Dead Sea Scrolls, especially on· the understanding of the age in which Our Lord and
the apostles were born and lived. 29
One of the men most responsible for integrating these new
discoveries into Catholic biblical studies was Pere Lagrange,
0. P. He had established the now world famous L'Ecole
Biblique at Jerusalem in 1890. This was the time when the
ancient Near East was about to yield its treasures. 80 In January
1892 the first issues of the Revue Biblique appeared, undoubtedly the finest Catholic Scripture periodical in the world.
Pere Lagrange gathered around him men like Pere Vincent,
Abel, Dhorme, Voste and de Vaux, whom he transformed into
first class scholars. His voluminous writing in the Revue
Biblique and in many books, his teaching and lecturing, his
sanctity and prayers, have transformed biblical studies.u
Another step forward was taken in 1909 when Pope Pius X
established the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, the only
school able to grant Scripture degrees, and entrusted it to the
recently reprinted in paper-back by Doubleday Anchor Book; J. Finegan, Ligkt
From tke Ancient Past (P1inceton U. Press: 1959); L. H. Grollenberg, Atlas of
tke Bible (London: 1956); E. G. Kraeling, Bible Atlas (New York: 1956); G. E.
Wright, Biblical Archaeology (Philadelphia: 1956); 0. Schilling, "The Bible and
Archaeology," Tkeology Digest, 6 (1958), 88-87.
•• "Archaeology and Old Testament Studies," Journal of Biblical Literature
77 (March 1958) 41.
•• Very select bibliography for tile Dead Sea Scrolls would be: T. H. Gaster,
Tke Dead Sea Scriptures (Doubleday Anchor paperback: 1956); G. Vermes,
Discovery in tke Judean Desert (New York: 1956); Millar Burrows, Tke Dead
Sea Scrolls (New York: 1955); id., More Ligkt on tke Dead Sea Scrolls (1958);
Tke Scrolls and tke New Testament, ed. by K. Stendahl (New York: 1957);
F. M. Cross, Jr., Tke Ancient Library of Qumran and Modern Biblical Studies
{New York: 1958); R. E. Murphy, Tke Dead Sea Scrolls and tke Bible (Westminster, Md.: 1956) .
•• The story of tllese pioneering days is beautifully told by R. T. Murphy, Fere
Lagrange and tke Scriptures (Milwaukee: 1946) , 181 fl.
11 This is forcibly clear in M 6morial Lagrange, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the !'Ecole Biblique.

544

CARROLL STUHLMUELLER

Jesuit Fathers.a 2 On the faculty of this university have served
such outstanding Jesuit scholars as Fathers Vaccari, Fernandez,
Bea, Pohl, Holzmeister, Zorell and Mallon.
It is well to keep in mind that our present enthusiastic scripture revival was not forced upon us by ecclesiastical authority,
but rather arose from the initiative of men like Lagrange and
Bea. For instance, the Divino Afflante Spiritu was written by
Pius XII to put a stop to a false pietistic movement which
would have suppressed all technical research in favor of allegorizing; and to offer" Our encouragement [that biblical scholars
may be able] to continue with ever renewed vigor, with all zeal
and care, the work so happily begun." 33 The immediate occasion of the encyclical was the books and circular of a certain
Abbe D. Ruotolo, published between 1930 and 1941, which
were nominatim condemned by the Holy Office.34
Another important document in the advance of Catholic
biblical studies is the Letter of Pere Voste to Cardinal Suhard,
Jan. 16, 1948.35 It was praised in the Palestine Exploration
Quarterly with this encomium:
It would be hard to state more explicitly the attitude of the
best modern Old Testament scholarship towards the problems of
the early chapters of Genesis.36
We will now summarize the effects of biblical studies during
the past thirty years. First of all, the arm-chair, ivory-tower,
literary conclusions of the Graf-Wellhausen School have been
overthrown. Albright's masterful book From the Stone Age to
Ch1istianity (1940) has established very forcibly that monotheism was not the achievement of the 8th century prophets
but was already in existence in the Mosaic era. 81 A neo-con•• Dictionnaire de la Bible Supplement (= DBS) 4 (Paris: 1949), 559-561, has 11
short article by A. Bea, S. J.
n. 59.
•• An account can be found in Dictionnaire de Spiritualite, fasc. XXV (Paris:
1958) !'l70. Cf. Rome and the Study of Scripture, 186-145.
•• Eng. tr. in Rome and the Study of Scripture, 148-151.
•• 81 (Jan. 1949) p. 10.
also fn. 4-5
n Cf. H. H. Rowley, The Unity of the Bible (London: 1958),
on p.
and fn. 1 on p.
11

BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP

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545

servatism has set in among many non-Catholic scholars. 88 The
antiquity and historicity of the patriarchial stories and of the
Mosaic traditions are now accepted by very many scholars.
As Pope Pius XII frequently points out in his encyclical,
we now know much more about " the peculiar character and
circumstances of the sacred writer, the age in which he lived,
the sources written or oral to which he had recourse and the
forms of expression he employed." 39 Archaeology has enabled
us to reconstruct the milieu, civilization and life-situation (Sitz
im Leben) in which the biblical accounts arose. The Old Testament is thus seen as a living tradition which grew out of Israel.' 0
The Bible therefore belongs to Israel and can be interpreted
only in the context of Israel's religion.
Scripture is being studied in its ancient literary forms and
liturgical uses. The Bible again becomes a religious book rather
than a science manual.
A clearer idea of inspiration and revelation removes the
danger of modernism and mythical interpretation. We understand now that a later redactor can be just as much inspired
as the original author. We can admit that a biblical author
depended to a certain extent upon myths, without implying
that the Bible is a myth. Actually, our whole concept of
" myth " has been revolutionized. " Myth " can no longer be
defined as a " purely fictious narrative " 41 but rather as a story
which attempts to explain the hidden forces behind vario1;1s
human experiences. Biblical "myths" differ from the myths
of the other Semitic people in that the Israelite identified " the
hidden power " as the one, personal, loving God. 42
Biblical studies of the past thirty years have underlined these
•• This is quite evident in the volume The Old Testament and Modem Study.
Rowley remarks in his introduction (p. xvii): In general, it may be said that
there has been a tendency towards more conservative views on many questions.
•• Divino Afflante Spiritu, n. 88.
•• Cf. C. Stuhlmueller, "Influence of Oral Tradition," Catholic Biblical Quarterly
20 (1958), 810, fn. 42.
u Oxfurd Universal English Dictionary, 6 (Oxford U. Press: 1987), 1806.
•• Cf. J. Henninger, H. Cazelles, R. Maile, "Mythe," DBS 6 (Paris: 1958),
!!!!5-268; J. L. McKenzie, The Two-Edged Swurd (Milwaukee: 1956), 50 fl'.; 80 fl'.

546

CARROLL STUHLMUELLER

two ideas: the Bible was as much a part of the ancient Near
East as the encyclicals of Pius XII belong to our twentieth
century; there is a basic difference between Israel and the other
countries of the Near East which only a supernatural intervention can adequately explain.
II. PRINCIPAL ELEMENTS IN THE CATHOLIC SCRIPTURAL
REVIVAL
Many conclusions reached during the last three decades by
Catholic scriptural scholars strike the theologian as a secularization or a " humanizing " of the Bible, and so there arises a
tension or suspicion! However, the exegete finds solace in the
words of Pius XII, who reiterated that the inspired writer of
the Bible is " the living and reasonable instrument of the Holy
Spirit ... [He] so uses his faculties and powers, that frQm the
book composed by him all may easily infer ' the special character of each one and, as it were, his personal traits.' " 43 As a
result of biblical investigations, the sacred author is a human
being walking upon the clay of this earth, no longer a dreamer
drifting among clouds nor an automaton speaking in a trance.
Neither is he an orphan, forced to exist as a stranger in a 20th
century civilization; he has been joyfully rehabilitated to his
own homeland and times, with his own culture, problems and
thought patterns. The God of the Old and New Testaments is
no longer an unknown Supreme Being off in somewhere. He
is rather a living, personal God-acting, knowing, loving and
intervening as Lord, Father and Spouse. His divine name
YAHWEH signifies: I am He who is always there, present in
your midst at each moment of time, personally involved in
each detail of your history and geography!
This new knowledge· of biblical times leads to the first conclusion of Catholic scriptural studies to be stressed here: THE
BIBLICAL NoTION oF HISTORY.44 It is now admitted that his'" Divino Aff!ante Spiritu, n. 83, italics ours.
"Response of the Biblical Commission, written by its then secretary James M.
Voste, to Cardinal Suhard, Jan. 16, 1948. Eng. tr. in Rome and the Study of
Scripture, 148-151.

BIBLICAL SCHOLARSIIIP

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547

tory, as it is written today, was non-existent in the ancient
Near East; the Semite felt no interest in a fixed, static
of the past. The Hebrew people shared in this common Semitic
way of thinking and acting which centered around the present,
the concrete and the practical. The biblical narrator was constantly asking himself: what does this event or this tradition
really mean to me and to my fellow countrymen right here
and now? 45
For this reason it would be preferable to return to the Jewish
division of the Old Testament into: The Torah or Law; The
Prophets; and The Writings. 46 The Torah contains the first
five books of the Bible and was the Law or foundation of
Israel's religious life. Like all law, the Torah grew and was
modified with the passing of time, 41 yet, urilike western law
codes, the Torah also contained the lives of Israel's heroes,
who were considered a "law of right living." In the Torah
there is found the story of creation. This story was never a
scientific explanation. It was a religious vindication of Yahweh.
It stripped down to empty nothingness the degrading naturegods worshipped by other peoples; in language of exquisite
poetry it sang the Hebrew Credo: that at the beginning God
in his goodness made all things beautiful. With this truth
there sounded a warning: for the man who revolts against God
all things will revert to primal chaos.
The second part of the Jewish scriptures is the prophetical
books. Our "historical books of Josue, Judges, Samuel and
Kings " constitute for the Israelite a prophetical judgment,
passed upon the nation's early history according to the norms
of the Torah and the obligations of the Mosaic convenant. Our
first three Major Prophets and the Twelve Minor Prophets
keep the spirit of the Torah burning in the people's hearts
•• This whole problem of the actualization of the ancient traditions has been
handled by me in two articles: "The Influence of Oral Traditions" (cf. fn. 40
above) and "The Interdependence of the Old Testament Liturgy and the Bible,"
1958 Proceedings of the North American Liturgy Week (Elsberry, Mo.: 1959),
189-155.
•• This division has been adopted in Introduction a la Bible (Paris: 1957).
"Cf. L. H. Grollenberg, Atlas of the Bible, 52-53.

548

CARROLL

STUHLMUELLER

during later historical periods. The third division of the Jewish
Bible is called simply " The Writings." This general term
refers to any book which was accepted late in the sacred canon,
sometimes only after a struggle. This fact should throw light
upon the composition of books like Daniel, Lamentations, Ruth
and Paralipomenon, which are listed among "The Writings."
For the Israelites, history had a much different purpose than
our idea of knowledge recorded for knowledge's sake, supplemented with documented footnotes from the fontes. Rightly
does Andre Robert in the Dictionnaire de la Bible Supplement
speak of "historique genre" rather than of "history"; he
inquires into the Hebrew manner of history writing, not into
Israelite history. 48 John Bright's monograph Early Israel in
Recent History Writing 49 criticizes works like those of Ricciotti
and Heinisch, and rightly points out that the trend is away
from their kind of history writing. Pere de Vaux's splendid
article on " Israel " in the same Dictionnaire 50 or his commentaries in the Bible de Jerusalem move along this newer approach. For instance, de Vaux accepts the Genesis account of
an ancient racial bond, uniting the ancestors of the 12 tribes
of Israel. However, he also admits " that these groups have
had different histories [which fact is] implied in the Bible
itself." 51 The blessing of Jacob in Ch. 49 reflects not the
patriarchal period of Jacob but the age of the Judges or of
David. 52 We cannot write biographies of Abraham, Jacob or
Josue by following the word by word account of the Bible. It
is most necessary first to determine the literary genre of each
section or pericope and the age of its composition. We must
investigate what the inspired author or authors intended, when
they lived, how their compositions were transmitted.
48 Vol. IV, col. 7-23. Renee Bloch continues this same method of investigation in
her magnificent study, "Midrash," V, 1263-1281.
•• J. Bright, Early Israel in Recent History Writing. Studies in Biblical Theology,
No. 19 (London: 1956). Bright's A History of Israel (Philadelphia: 1959) is the
finest Old Testament history in English.
00 Vol. IV, col. 729-777.
51 Vol. IV, col. 734, italics mine.
52 La Sainte Bible de Jhusalent
(Paris: 19.56). 1;8. fn. d (one volume edition).

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549

Rather than history for history's sake, biblical history was
projected as a means: to worship the living God who had
wrought such wonders and continues to do so in each new
generation; to maintain hereditary rights, for God's promises
were committed to a particular people; to impart religious
instruction; to entertain. Very evident is the necessity to determine the literary genre or form of literature of a particular
passage before we begin to exegete it. In what are called the
" historical books " we will meet: satire, like the origin of the
Ammonities and the Moabites through incest (Gn. 19, 80-88);
relaxing entertainment in the incident of Balaam's talking ass
(Nm. 22, 22-85); liturgical benediction combined with history
in the repetition of God's blessing upon Abraham (Gn. 12, 1-8);
liturgical procession united with history in the story of the fall
of Jericho (Jos. 4, 18-27). Each literary form has its own
laws to govern the presentation of truth. 58
The first conclusion of Catholic scriptural scholarship has
been a re-defining or a re-assessment of biblical history. True
historical facts are most certainly in the Bible, but not in our
style of western history writing. The Bible is being given back
to its inspired authors, and God is seen at work among His
people, instead of far off in a world of abstraction. The second
conclusion now to be emphasized is the fact of oral or liturgical
tradition.
We are so accustomed to think of what the Bible has contributed to the liturgy that we seldom think of how much the
liturgy has done for the Bible. In this connection, we may
ask: why were certain traditions, sermons and poems preserved,
while all the rest were lost? The answer to this question is not
the prophet's firm realization that his words were spoken under
God's inspiration. He may or may not have known of this
supernatural influence upon him. Actually. it does not seem
•• Cf. "Form Criticism," Theology Digest, 6 (1958), 9-10, an abstract of two
articles: W. R. Catterall, "Form Criticism," Clergy Review, 41 (1956), 157-162;
A. Legault, " An Application of the Form-Critique Method," Catholic Biblical
Quarterly, 16 (1954), 181-145. A. Robert, "Litteraires (Genres)," DBS 5 (Paris:
1957), 405 fl. Articles by Cerfaux, Dupont, Benoit and Stanley often follow this
method.

550

CARROLL STUHLMUELLER

likely that any o£ our biblical books were arranged by their
original authors.
It is my opinion that the LITURGY o£ the temple and o£ the
Palestinian sanctuaries was the principal agent in the preservation o£ the sacred message. The prophetic words may have
been written down, but the ordinary way of transmitting them
was by word of mouth. Very few Israelites could read and
write. Furthermore, oral presentation made the message come
alive. The listeners felt themselves involved in the great deeds
of the past. Historical traditions became a mystery in which
the worshipper was taking part. God who had accomplished
the great wonders of the past was again acting and working
among his people by means of the liturgical1·ecitals. The temple
services, therefore, profoundly influenced the composition of
the Bible and kept the sacred message always a live issue. This
living tradition was what the practical mentality of the Hebrew
people demanded.
An excellent example of liturgical, oral tradition is the book
of Deuteronomy. We must read this book as though we are
standing in a sanctuary courtyard, listening to an instruction
from one of the Levites. We are reliving the days of Moses,
because the Levite is delivering his sermon as though Moses
himself were speaking. We will sense an immediate contact
with the great Lawgiver of Israel, even though he is now long
dead, as we hear the repetition of such phases as: You, TODAY,
NOT WITH OUR FATHERS BUT WITH US, THE LORD OUR GOD.
Hear, 0 Israel, the statutes and decrees which I proclaim IN YOUR
HEARING THIS DAY.... The Lord, OUR God, made a covenant WITH
US at Horeb; NOT WITH OUR FATHERS did he make this covenant
BUT WITH US, ALL OF US WHO ARE ALIVE HERE THIS DAY (Dt. 5, 1-3;
cf. 10, 12-15).
History and law are being brought up to date, so as to continue
as a vital power in a new period of time. The temple liturgy
was preserving the Mosaic heritage not as a dead letter but as
a living power whereby the spirit of Moses pulsed in the hearts
of his distant followers.

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551

Many other examples can be cited, in order to show how
the Bible was composed and transmitted as a living, sacred
tradition: the two, triumphant songs of thanksgiving which
conclude the book of Emmanuel (Is. 12); the congregational
chants which interrupt the soliloquies of lonely Jeremias (Jer.
20, 7. 13); the doxologies of Amos (Am. 4, 13; 5, 8 f.; 9, 5 f.);
the lamentations of Jeremias and Joel. Instead of being a book
composed once and for all and then left static and unchanged,
the Old Testament is the product of a long series of different,
inspired authors. This gradual modification of ancient traditions was never reckless and haphazard. If anything, it inclined
to be slow and conservative. Nor was it done in defiance of
legitimate authority. God was directing the process, inspired
redactors were his instruments, and temple priests and levites
were authorizing and supervising the changes.
In this second part of our article, we have been stressing two
of the most salient features or conclusions of recent Catholic
scriptural scholarship: the BIBLICAL notion of history, by
which the historical, redemptive acts of God are preserved in
such a way as to be relived by each new generation; and oral
and liturgical recitals, by which historical and prophetical
traditions were preserved and transmitted by temple services
in which the entire congregation participated. Rather than
be scandalized at any daring changes in the sacred message,
we should admire the Hebrew's love of the Bible. He was
determined that his scriptures be no dead letters upon faded
vellum but rather LIVING traditions pulsing within his heart.

III.

PRACTICAL EFFECTS UPON CoLLEGE THEOLOGY CoURsEs

In this part of our article we seek to determine some of the
practical or pedagogical effects of Catholic Scripture studies
upon the actual teaching of Sacred Doctrine. We will direct
our attention: to the proper use of Scripture texts; and to the
attitude of mind which Scripture imparts to the college student.

552

CARROLL

1. Proper Use of Scripture Texts

In college religion courses Scripture must be read and studied
in the spirit of its authors; and neither God, the principal
Author; nor his human instrument, ever intended the sacred
message to be a list of statistical facts or a conglomeration of
unrelated sentences. There is a unity to the Old Testament, as
there is to the New. This concord of thought is no monotonous,
monolithic structure of sameness. Its human authors are as
widely separated as an Amos and as Osee, an Isaias and a
Micheas, a pro-monarchic and antimonarchic tradition; and
each of these manifest the greatest diversity of character, outlook and literary ability. Yet, there remains a constant harmony of thought, which the great biblical theologians of our
modern day are careful to
Walther Eichrodt unifies
his massive, three volume Theologie des Alten Testaments 54
under the theme of the covenant. H. H. Rowley is very close
to Eichrodt in his excellent book, The Unity of the Bible.
Rowley writes: " in the religious ideas which were mediated to
Israel through Moses lay the seeds of almost all the creative
ideas which are to be found in the Old Testament, to be carried
forward into the New." 55 With Phythian Adams the center
around which everything clusters is the tabernacling presence
of Yahweh, 56 while Rudolf Otto emphasizes The Idea of the
Holy. 51
This unity of thought never inflicted a paralytic stroke upon
biblical writers so as to reduce all mental activity to static
inertia. Rather, it is ".a unity of process and development." 58
The books of the Bible are related to one another like the years
•• W. Eichrodt, Theologie des Alten Testaments (Gottingen). Personally, I consider this three volume work, written by a non-Catholic, the finest of all OT
Biblical Theologies now available.
•• H. H. Rowley, The Unity of the Bible, !tl. This non-Catholic work is excellent
and orthodox throughout.
•• P. Adams, The People and the Presence (London: 1942).
57 R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, tr. by J. W. Harvey (ed. 2; Oxford U. Press:
1950). Neither P. Adams nor R. Otto are recommended for general reading by
Catholic students.
•• H. H. Rowley, op. cit., 46.

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553

of a man's life. Hebrew religion passes through periods of birth,
infancy, boyhood, adulthood, until there comes, not the moment
of death, but "the fulness of time [when] God sent his son"
(Gal. 4, 4). Isaias, Jeremias, Ezechiel and Zacharias compare
the messianic promises to a plant, growing from a hidden root
and gradually extending sturdy branches upon which the birds
of the air (that is, the nations of the world) can rest in
security. 59 Each moment of Old Testament history was more
than an isolated moment of time. It was an integral part of
the past and of the future. It belonged to that onward, progressive movement of time, which St. Matthew saw stretching
from Abraham to "Joseph, the husband of Mary, ... [from
whom] was born Jesus who is called Christ " (Mt. 1, 16) . This
" unity of development " is another way of expressing what
was described earlier as the biblical notion of history, whereby
the historical acts of God continue to live in each generation
by means of oral or liturgical recital.
No merely natural evolutionary development can be detected
here. Almighty God was the workman tending the vineyard
(Is. 5, 1-7); He was the potter working with the clay of human
stuff (Is. 29, 16; Jer. 18, 1-13). The Bible is the record of
God's loving and personal intervention in the lives of his children, in order to achieve " a kingdom of priests, a holy nation "
(Ex. 19, 6). There was something of God's invincible power
and conquering love in the great events by which Israel became
-in the words of God-" my special possession, dearer to me
than all other people" (Ex. 19, 5). As explained earlier in this
paper, these redemptive acts of God could not be confined to
the past, but were thought to happen repeatedly in each generation; therefore, the sacred words which narrated the stirring
events of the past contained in themselves the power to make
that past once again a present reality. For these words, like
the marvelous deeds of old, come from God and contain within
their syllables the mystery of God's living presence. Did not
Isaias cry out to the discouraged exiles:
•• Is. 11, 1; Jer. !!S, 5; Ez. 17, !!!!-!!4; Zach. 8, 8; 6, 1!!.

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As the rain and snow come down from the heavens,
And never return
without watering the earth
and making it bring forth and sprout, ...
So is my word which goes out of my mouthIt does not return to me fruitless,
without doing the work which I desired,
and accomplishing the purpose for which I sent it.
(Is. 55, 10 f.)
The sacred, inspired message directed Israel ahead with a
steady, onward step. It put a forward-looking vision in the
eyes of each true Israelite. The power of God's presence was
swept anew into the heart of each one as he listened to the
recital of the sacred message. For instance, when the psalmist
is praising God for His past kindness, he suddenly turns to the
assembled congregation and implores:
Oh, that today you would hear this voice:
' Harden not your hearts .. .' (Ps. 94, 7 f.)
How can this progressive unity and constant actualization
of the biblical word be manifested in our religion courses. First
of all, we must break away from that all too common practice
of proving a doctrinal thesis by a long series of disjunct Scripture texts. The apologetical method of listing names, dates,
persons and places must be abandoned. Rather, let the teacher
choose key texts which represent a development of doctrine,
stretching through the Old and extending into the New Testament. As far as he is able, let him trace the slow, organic, living
growth from one era to another, so that biblical texts are seen
as an integral part of Israelite life.
Here is an example of what is meant. In presenting the theme
of a suffering Messias, there should be no stringing together
of a series of texts which the students are expected to memorize
without further explanation. Far better would it be for the
teacher to locate a few texts in their historical setting; then
point out how the theme " salvation through suffering " is a
truth found at the very start of biblical religion (here is the
unity of the Bible) , yet it is also a truth which became more

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clearly and fully known with the passage of time (biblical unity
is a progressive, organic development).
1st) Gn. 3, 15 witnesses to the Mosaic era (ca. 1200 B. C.). The
Protoevangelion states that victory will eventually come to
the good and upright, but only through persevering struggle,
sustained by means of God's help.
2nd) In the period of the Judges and in the early days of the
royalty (ca. 1170-800 B. C.) sorrow was always considered
punishment for sin. When David innocently suffered the unmerited persecution of Saul, he felt that there must have been
sin (1 Kgs. 26, 19). This was a mystery too deep for him
to unravel, for what sin had David committed? Yet, biblical
faith maintained at the same time that God could not be
guilty of jealous caprice; He was no Canaanite deity.
3rd) In the later royal period (800-587 B. C.) came a partial answer
to this mystery. There existed the growing realization that
God must send suffering, in order to receive back a chastened,
purified remnant. The purpose of suffering is beginning to
dawn upon their minds (cf. Is. 7-8; 19, 22; Soph. 2, 3).
4th) When the terrible catastrophe of the Babylonian exile swept
the nation into a boiling cauldron of suffering (587-537
B. C.), the saving, purifying power of suffering was actually
experienced. By this time they believed in a personal
Messias, and so they were prepared for the great revelation
that the Saviour or Servant of the Lord must himself suffer,
for suffering is the law of salvation (Is. 52, 13-53, 12).
5th) Lastly, in the postexilic days (after 587 B. C.), men and
women freely embraced poverty and austerity, so that they
will be ready for the " Day of the Lord." The Qumran group
along the Dead Sea are to be classed among these poor and
lowly.

Therefore, when Christ stood up in the synagogue of Nazareth,
read from the scroll of Isaias, and then cried out: "TODAY this
Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing! " he was seeing
not so much a fulfillment of words as of a living, prayerful,
humble tradition that salvation comes through suffering (Lk.
4, 21). Jesus was not being forced to conform his life to words
in a book, but rather he was answering the earnest prayers of

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many centuries, prayers which the Scriptures did inspire, sustain
and reflect.
Since there is a living, vital unity between the Old and New
Testaments, then we must explain New Testament phrases like
justice, grace, redemption, Son of God and Son of Man, by
tracing them back into Old Testament thought patterns and
concepts. This unity is a dynamic unity with the result that
the New Testament has outgrown the limited content of Old
Testament thoughts. Yet, unity also demands that we do not
read into the Bible concepts and definitions of Greek philosophy
or Medieval Scholasticism. 60 To consider "justice" as a legal
quid pro quo, " redemption " as an act of buying back, or " Son
of God " as an expression of divine nature is reading the Bible
as though it were composed by a Greek. Once we have determined the biblical teaching on a particular doctrine, then
Scripture is ready to make its contribution to systematized
theology. 61
We now turn our attention to the second major contribution
of Catholic Biblical Scholarship to college theology courses.
Here we point out the wholesome and holy attitude of mind
which Scripture imparts to the students. The only requirement, again, is to read the Bible humbly and inteUigently.
HUMBLY implies a prayerful willingness to learn from God;
INTELLIGENTLY demands some acquaintance with biblical history, geography and literary forms.
First, the Bible enables the science student to recognize a
creature of God in the sun and clouds, in the moon and stars,
in the trees and flowers, in the birds and animals. Through
•• F. V. Filson, The New Testament Against its Environment (London: 1950);
G. Dix, Jew and Greek (Westminster, Eng.: 1955)-both these works are nonCatholic, the second can be generally recommended to theology teachers. D. M.
Stanley, "Kingdom to Church," Theological Studies, 16 (1955), 8-29.
01 The necessity of interpreting Scripture according to the analogy of faith and
the teaching of the Church is not being compromised. As Pius XII carefully
pointed out in the Divino Afflante Spiritu (n. 47) , there are very few texts whose
meaning has been defined by the Church. We may never so interpret a text as
to contradict a doctrinal truth, but neither are. we obliged to find the same truth
in the text.

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Bible reading the student learns to call the universe " my home
where I live with my Heavenly Father." How can anyone read
Ch. 1 of Genesis and ever forget the echoing refrain: " And
God saw that it was good"? Ps. 28 turns the world into a
temple where cosmic forces are shouting " Glory! " to God.
Can anyone match the exalted song of JOB, where morning
stars sing in chorus and clouds are swaddling bands of the sea,
where God is father to the dew and ice and raises his voice
among the clouds and sends lightning on its way. Bible reading
transforms nature into a " THOU " to be known and loved, rather
than an "IT" to be studied and dissected. 62 This seeing of
God in His creatures is not Pantheism, but that spirited exaltation which exclaims:
If I go to the heavens, you are there;
if I sink to the nether world, you are present there.
If I take the wings of dawn,
if I settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
Even there your hand shall guide me,
and your right hand hold me fast. (Ps. 138, 8-10)

Second, Bible reading gives the history student the conviction
that history like nature is invested with the quality of" THOu,"
not " IT," since God is at work in every event, from the dinner
table of the family to the mahogany conference table of mighty
nations. God's plan of salvation is accomplished, not off in the
clouds but right here upon this earth, in the midst of shouting
children and marching armies, in the evil surroundings of crude
immorality and in the quiet days of peace. Habacuc is today's
history student, face to face with the terrifying scourge of
Communistic Russia.
How long, 0 Lord, must I cry for help,
and thou not hear? (Hab. 1, 2)

God's final answer to Habacuc is the declaration:

"The just

•• This Semitic concept of nature is splendidly developed by H. and A. Franfort,
"Myth and Reality," Before Philosophy (Penguin Books; Harmondsworth, Middlesex: 1949), the original edition was entitled: The
Adventure of Ancient
Man (U. of Chicago Press: 1946).

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CARROLL STUHLMUELLER

man lives by faith!" (2, 4). Through the sequence of biblical
events, the history student acquires the faith to realize "that
for those who love God, [God makes] all things work together
unto good " (Rom. 8, 28) . The very presence of those elements
which thirty years ago made the Bible seem very worldly and
earthly are now a proof of its divinity. Only the presence of
God can account for such mighty wonders in the midst of such
unlikely circumstances.
At times, we are scandalized at the sins of lust and cowardice
in the lives of biblical saints! We naturally wonder how can
the Bible be classed as spiritual reading? With extraordinary
candor, unequalled by the official, historical records of any
nation ancient or modern, Scripture recounts the sins of its
holiest and most important personages, " lest any flesh should
pride itself before him " (1 Cor. 1, 29) . Here is a serious warning to all who consider themselves already predestined, and
who, therefore, proudly condemn the weakness of their neighbor.
Also present in these registers of sin is the consoling truth:
God rejects only the unrepentant sinner. Another element of
instruction is this caution: never put the blame of one's own
sins upon the sins of other people. In the pages of the Bible
are an Isaias and a Jeremias who were sanctified not despite
but because of the wicked world in which they lived. The Bible,
therefore, charges all of history with the sanctifying power of
God.

Third and last, Bible reading helps to develop a truly Christian humanism in the college student. Scripture overlooks
nothing, but rather calls upon all creation to help man on his
journey to God. True, some biblical writers look with suspicion
upon the refinements of city life. The Y ahwist tradition in
Gen. 4 ascribes to the wicked line of Cain the origin of musical
instruments like the harp and the flute and the beginning of
"vessels of bronze and iron." Osee and Jeremias long for the
simplicity of nomadic desert existence. Yet, these men were
reacting not against advancing civilization but against the soft,
degenerate form of civilization, then corrupting the Canaanites.

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Off-setting this point of view is the priestly tradition which
incorporated art, music and architecture into the worship of
God. The songs of Second Isaias (Is. 40-55) like the prophecies
of his master (Is. 1-35) ring with the controlled resonance of
a master craftsman. Another typical example is Ben Sira, the
author of Sirach. In his school for young men, he offered a complete liberal education, embracing religion, the professions, the
fine arts, homelife. He wanted his charges to have a full lifewith poetry, music and wide experience, surrounded always
with the warmth of God's love and justice. Religion must come
first, yet religion never repudiated other sources of knowledge
but instead depended upon them. Ben Sira ends a magnificent
description of the natural wonders of the world with:
More than this we need not add;
let the last word be: He is all in all!
Let us praise him the more, since we cannot fathom him,
for greater is he than all his works ....
It is the Lord who has made all things. (Sir. 48, 28-85)
CoNCLUSION

How is all this the result of modern scriptural scholarship?
Were not these verses always in the Bible? Yes, they were,
but how many biblical scholars drew our attention to their
existence? The Catholic biblical revival is enabling us to read
the Bible religiously and intelligently. We no longer turn the
Bible into a science manual, and then spend all our time
apologizing why it disagrees with science. Neither do we look
to find history in our western style of history-writing, but
rather a religious interpretation of real historical facts. The
Bible shows how God's mighty wonders were relived in each
new generation through liturgical recital. The Bible is once
more a religious book, alive with the presence of God who calls
himself YAHWEH-I AM HE WHO IS ALWAYS THERE.
Reading the Bible intelligently we find that there is no contradiction between Scripture on the one hand and science and
history on the other. An intelligent understanding of Semitic

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CARROLL STUHLMUELLER

thought patterns and literary forms brings us back to the
meaning intended by the inspired author. The more that we
are intelligently acquainted with the geography and politics of
ancient Palestine, the more Biblical writers and characters
become living persons. 63 These saintly men and women are
shown to be very real people, living at a very real point of
time, yet totally surrendered to God's holy will. This presence
of God accounts for the dynamic unity of the Bible, for throughout the Sturm und Drang of its human events God is there,
achieving His mysterious plan of salvation. If Catholic biblical
studies make the biblical word so human as to scandalize, then
may we not admit that men are always scandalized to see the
Divine Word become flesh to dwell amongst us. Each inspired
writer· can say:
I write of what was from the beginning, what we have heard,
what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked up and our
hands have handled: of the Word of Life. And the Life was made
known and we have seen, and ·now testify and to you, the Life
Eternal which was with the Father, and has appeared to us ....
And these things we write to you that you may rejoice, and our
joy may be full. (1 John 1: 1-4)
APPENDix-Helps to Keep Abreast with Scripture Studies
Today, even those Scripture scholars who are producing ponderous books and
articles themselves, groan under the massive amount of modern publications. In
an article on Biblical Theology, Ceslaus Spicq longed for that former day when
scholars· confined their research to a limited number of major periodicals.••
Scripture research has entered the nuclear age of atomic fision, with " bibliographies
of bibliographies." There now exist such surveys of periodicals as: lnternationale
Zeitschriftenschau fur die Bibelwessenschaft und Grenzbegiete (begun in 1951),
New Testament Abstracts (1956), La Bibliographie
(Jesuits of Montreal;
•• To read the Bible intelligently does not demand that a person be a scripture
specialist. Any adult can easily read certain of the Sapiential books like Sir and
Prv. Religious teachers, however, have an obligation to be acquainted with the
more important elements of modern scripture scholarship. Otherwise, a book like
Gn. will be badly misinterpreted.
•• C. Spicq, "Nouvelles Reflexions sur Ia theologie Biblique," Revue des Sciences
Philosophiques et Theologiques, 42 (Oct. 1958}, 209-219. This article contains an
excellent select bibliography on Biblical Theology. A summary can be found in
Theology Digest, 7 (Winter 1959), 29-84.

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561

1958), Religious and Theological Abstracts (Youngstown, 1958), and the exhaustive
Index Bibliographicua of Biblica. There is no easy path through the forest!
Keeping in mind their needs and their available time, I have compiled for the
teachers of Sacred Doctrine the following list of Catholic Scripture periodicals and
publications. The list is divided into various categories, of descending importance.
The first group contains publications in French or English which I consider the
most important for the teacher of Sacred Doctrine, in order to keep au courant
with Catholic Scriptural studies.
CATHOLIC BIBLICAL QuARTERLY (Catholic University of America; Washington 17,
D. C.) . Tht: articles are usually written by and for specialists. The book review
section is rather extensive and provides excellent coverage of what is being published. The reviews usually compare the book under discussion with other works
on the same subject. One caution about the CBQ: it feels no obligation to point
out doctrinal errors in a book; judgment is made solely on the value of scriptural
exegesis.
NEw TEsTAMENT ABSTRACTS (Weston College; Weston 98, Mass.) is also intended primarily for the scripture specialist; it no longer distinguishes Catholic from
non-Catholic magazines. It summarizes an article without accepting any responsibility for the opinions expressed. It is unsurpassed for giving the religious teacher
a " sense " of what is being written and discussed.
THEoLOGICAL STUDIES (Woodstock, Maryland) has a fine coverage in its "Surveys "; its book review section is good; the articles are rather technical. It is
careful to point out any variations in orthodoxy.
THEoLOGY DIGEST (St. Mary's College; St. Mary, Kansas) is including more
and more Scripture articles.
LuMIERE ET VrE (Revue de formation doctrinale Chretienne; !t, Place Gailleton;
Lyon 2m•, France), published by French Dominicans, is the finest magazine which
I can recommend for theology teachers. Appearing five times yearly, each copy
is a symposium on a particular subject and approaches its topic particularly from
the scriptural and theological points of view. The April 1958 issue, for instance,
included Fr. Benoit's magnificent article: "La Divinite de Jesus dans Ia Evangiles
Synoptiques."
CATHOLIC CoMMENTARY ON HoLY ScRIPTURE (pub!. by Nelson, England), edited
by Orchard, is of unequal value. Many of the Old Testament commentaries were
already out of date when they were written. However, it does have very fine
parts, suclr as the entries by R. A. Dyson, R. A. F. MacKenzie, J. L. McKenzie,
S. Bullough, L. F. Kearns, with the added advantage of complete coverage, in
English! Fr. Benoit remarked in his review of this book: " The defensive attitude,
which limits to a minimum any concessions to the progress of critical scholarship,
does more damage than good." ••
Besides these periodicals certain other publications should be mentioned in this
first category. The next titles are books which provide excellent reference material
and belong in tire theological library of every college.
•• Revue Biblique, 64. (Oct. 1957), 601.

CARROLL STUHLMUELLER

DICTIONNAiliJ!I DE LA BmLE, SUPPLEMENT (publ. by Librairie Letouzey et Ane;
87, Boulevard Raspail; Paris-VI, France) ranks at the top. Its articles are long
enough to be books and are written by experts. For example, the authors who
collaborated in the Bible de Jerusalem often have long studies on the same subject
in this Dictionnaire.
L'ETUDES BmLIQUES (J. Gabalda; Rue Bonaparte, 90; Paris), under the direction
of the L'Ecole Biblique of Jerusalem, is producing extended studies on the various
books of the Bible which have already become loci classici.
BIBLE DE JERUSALEM (published by Cerf; 29, Boulevard Latour-Maubourg; Paris)
is the finest example of modem Catholic scriptural scholarship. I might remark
here that the one volume edition (1956) does not substitute for the individual
fascicles of each biblical book, which have been published separately. The unique
value of the one volume edition is its topical index, chronological table, and crossreferences.
LA SACRA BIBBIA (Publ. by Marietti; Rome), under the direction of Garofalo,
who now has the help of Rinaldi in the Old Testament books, is an Italian commentary on the various books of the Bible, much more extensive than the Jerusalem
Bible and usually depending upon the best modem scholarship.
LA SAINTE BmLE (publ. by Letouzey et Am)) under the direction of Pirot-Clamer
is very good, but some volumes in this series are dated. •• It does not manifest
the same personal grasp as the two commentaries just mentioned.
Among BmLICAL TIIEOLOGY books worthy of mention in this first category we
single out:
BIBLIOTHEQUE DE TIIEoLOGIE, Ser. ill Theologie Biblique, sous Ia direction de
L. Cerfaux, A. Gelin, et H. Cazelles. Van Imschoot's Theologie de L'Ancien
Testament appears in this series.67
TIIEoLOGIE DES NEUEN TEsTAMENTS is an excellent work by M. Meinertz in two
volumes.
Two-EDGED SwoRD by John L. McKenzie is tops. Albert Gelin, Lucien Cerfaux,
Jacques Dupont have published fine works in this field.
We come now to the SECOND CATEGORY. For the teacher of sacred doctrine
the following publications would not be as essential as those in the preceding section.
LA VIE SPIRITUELLE (publ. by Cerf; ed. by A. Pie, A.-M. Henry, A.-M. Cocagnac,
0. P.) has many fine articles, developing the scriptural or ascetical value of Sacred
Scripture.
LA MAISON DIEU (pub!. by de Cerf; Revue de Pastorale Liturgique) carries
scriptural articles from a liturgical point of view.
•• I. e. Vol. 5 "Les Psaumes" is basically the same as the article of E. Pannier
in Dictionnaire de la Bible • (Paris: 19U); Vol. 9 "Les Evangiles de S. Matthieu
et S. Marc" was published in 1946 but bears an imprimatur of 1984; Vol. 10 "Les
Saints Evangiles S. Lue-S. Jean " was published in 1950, but carries an imprimatur
of 1988 for S. Luc and 1984 for S. Jean.
87 K. Sullivan is translating this work into English.

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568

BmLE ET VIE CHRETIENNE (pub!. by Castermann; Tournai, Belgium). Here. the
pastoral value of Scripture is explored.
REVUE BIBLIQUE (pub!. by Gabalda; ed. by the Dominican Fathers of L 'Ecole
Biblique in Jerusalem) carries articles which are highly technical; the Bulletin and
book reviews give a careful, critical evaluation of recent literature.
BIBLICA (pub!. by the Pontifical Institute, Rome) is similar to the Revue Biblique.
SCRIPTURE (pub!. by Nelson, England) is the publication of the Catholic Biblical
Ass. of Great Britain. The articles are not too long and contain good material.
WoRsHIP (Collegeville, Minn.) is beginning to include excellent Scriptural articles
which will give it a place side by side with La Vie Spirituelle and Bible et Vie
Chretienne:
In the THIRD CATEGORY we list those periodicals which give greater depth
and richness to the theology professor. These magazines frequently contain fine
bulletins and book review sections.
EPHEMERIDES THEOLOGICAE Lov ANIENSES has its scripture section under the
capable management of Cerfaux and Coppens. It acquaints the reader with the
contributions of the " Louvain " scripture school.
REcHERCHES DE SciENCE RELIGIEUSE (15, Rue Monsieur; Paris) is one of the
best research periodicals. It is edited by French Jesuits.
REVUE THOMISTE carries several excellent scriptural articles each year.
NOUVELLE REVUE THEOLOGIQUE runs articles by such scholars as J. P. Audet,
J. Dupont, A. Guillet, G. Guitton.
VERBUM DoMINI (pub!. by the Pontifical Biblical Institute Rome), has only
Latin articles and is less technical than Biblica.
BIBLICAL ARcHEoLOGIST (publ. by American Schools of Oriental Research; Drawer
98-A, Yale Station; New Haven, Conn.) is a non-Catholic publication, of great
help in presenting the most recent archeological discoveries which relate tO the
Bible. Its contents are always impartial to sectarian differences.
In a FOURTH AND LAST CATEGORY are three periodicals which sometimes
have good scriptural articles, yet not with too great frequency: GBEGORIANUM,
RECHERCHES DE THEOLOGIE ANCIENNE ET MEDIEVALE, REVUE DES SCIENCES PHILOSOPHIQUES ET THEOLOGIQUES.
CARROLL STUHLMUELLER,

Passionist Fathers Seminary
Louisville, Kentucky

c. P.

THE REPARATION OF OUR FALLEN NATURE

O

UR fallen nature, deprived of the God-given gifts of
original justice by the sin of the first man, was repaired
by Christ's passion, death and resurrection. That is
our faith in the Redemption. Yet, not all the gifts of the
original state are restored together with grace in baptism. In
the baptized, human nature remains a fallen nature, subject
to both moral and physical misery. This also Catholic doctrine
teaches, and, moreover, experience confirms. Our faith adds:
not until the day of the resurrection, but then without fail,
will the lost gifts be restored. Such is our faith and it fits
wonderfully the facts of our present human condition.
But faith seeks understanding. And we ask: why this delay
in the reparation of our fallen nature? If Christ's Redemption
is complete and superabundant, as it is beyond any shadow
of doubt, why must we wait for the restoration of the preternatural gifts bestowed on our nature in the beginning, till the
day of the exaltation and glorification of the entire Mystical
Body of Christ, the day of the resurrection? It is true, we do
r.eceive in baptism sanctifying grace and with it the beginning
of eternal life and the pledge of salvation, that is, all that is
most vital in view of eternity. But for the time of our stay on
earth, baptismal grace leaves us with the physical and moral
miseries that are the consequences of the sin of the race. And
we must ask: Why? Why does not the all-powerful grace of
the Redeemer in baptism work the miracle of restoring the
original state, as no doubt it could? Why the delay? There
may be reasons of fittingness for it, for example: should not
the members of Christ be in this world as Christ Himself was:
full of grace yet subject to every human misery except sin?
But, some will ask, would it not be better otherwise? And is
there nothing more to be said for the present way of the repara564

THE REPARATION

OF OUR FALLEN NATURE

5()5

tion of our fallen nature than that it is fitting, corwenit? No
more stringent doctrinal foundation, which could satisfy more
exacting minds?
St. Thomas's theology of the fall and of its reparation by the
Word Incarnate should be of such a nature as to establish a
doctrinal and " rational " foundation of the manner of our
reparation such as the faith proposes this to be. And it may be
worth the trouble to examine this theology and to see why the
reparation of our fallen nature takes this two or threefold stage
which we know from the faith: Christ's passion, death and
resurrection; our restoration to the life of grace in baptism; and
the final restoration of our nature on the day of the resurrection.
ORIGINAL JusTICE AND ORIGINAL

SIN 1

From the beginning our call to the supernatural end of the
vision of God, our supernatural elevation, followed a social
pattern. This was rather to be expected if grace perfects nature
after the manner of nature. And the present situation of mankind in which the supernatural economy shows the same social
structure-men are saved in the Church, as members of the
Mystical Body of Christ-is in itself a presumption that the
original elevation of men to the supernatural order was also
social. St. Thomas expresses this social character of original
justice by saying that it was given to the first parent of our
race as an accident to the specific nature. 2 He means to say
that this gratuitous or preternatural "proprium " of our nature
-which did not result from the constituents of our nature but
was superadded to it gratuitously-was to pass on together
with nature through generation to all of Adam's posterity. The
first man was to be fountainhead not only of nature but of grace
as well.
If that was the case, then we can see why the personal gift
1 For this section, cf. our two articles, "Original Justice and Adam's Sin," and
"Our Sinful Inheritance," in The Clergy Monthly, !l4 (1960).
• Summa theol. I, q. 100, a. 1: accidens naturae speciei, non quasi ex principiis
naturae causatum, sed tantum sicut quoddam donum divinitus datum toti naturae.

P. DELETTER

of sanctifying grace in Adam was to be connected with a gift
to nature which could be transmitted with nature and be in
his posterity a call for grace. In fact, that is the way St. Thomas
conceived the transmission of original justice. 3 Together with
nature the first parent would have passed on the preternatural
gift of integrity and other attendant gifts which were the disposition of nature for, and at the same time from another
aspect the effect of, sanctifying grace; on the persons receiving
a nature so disposed God would have bestowed the personal
gift of sanctifying grace. Adam's posterity, by being born sons
of men, would also have been born sons of God.
But it was never to be so. The faith tells us that Adam
sinned gravely by transgressing God's command. Hence, St.
Thomas explains, he not only lost sanctifying grace which cannot coexist with the state of sin-his sin was in the first place
a sin of the person-but he also lost, per accidens,4 that is,
because of his unique position as fountainhead of nature and
grace and because of the necessary connection between his
sanctifying grace and the preternatural gifts of original justice,
these very gifts which were the effect of grace: he threw off
from his nature, and so from the nature of the entire species
and of all his posterity, the preternatural accident of the specific
nature which was to be the organic tool in the transmission of
original justice. His sin was also a sin of nature,S because it
was the sin of the fountainhead of nature and grace. Now he
would pass on his sin to his posterity together with nature, not
his personal sin or the privation of sanctifying grace as a personal loss and guilt, but the sin of nature or the guilty privation
of the preternatural proprium of nature or of nature's disposition for the infusion of sanctifying grace in the persons who
were to receive the nature. 6 All his posterity now enter the
world deprived of the original justice. They are born sinners,
• Cf. ibid., ad 2.
• Cf. Comp. theol. c. 198.
• Cf. Summa theol., I II, q. 81, a. 2; Comp. theol., c. 196.-0riginal
eatum naturae," cf. I II, q. 81, a. 1.
• Summa theol., I-II, q. 82. a. 2.

sin is "pec-

'fHE REPARATION

OF OUR FALLEN NATURE

567

not by any sin that originates in their own wills, but by the
inherited sin of Adam. The sin of nature in them infects the
persons; nature deprived of the preternatural disposition for
sanctifying grace entails the privation of sanctifying grace in
the persons. Original sin is the sin of nature in the persons.
They inherit a fallen and sinful nature and in that sense, and
in that sense only, they are born sinners.
RESTORATION

OF ORIGINAL JUSTICE

The fall of man, however disastrous for all of us, was not
beyond remedy. It lies in the very nature of human sins, also
of the first, that they can be undone or made good. They are
sins of pilgrims on their way to heaven, and no decision of
men in their pilgrim state is irreversible of its nature, though
the actual reversion may not be possible without the help of
grace. Adam's sin also, therefore, lay open to reparation. 8 Besides, St. Thomas says, God's mercy could hardly allow that
His plan for the supernatural destiny of men, upset at the very
start, should be frustrated for ever. His love for man and His
own glory in a way demanded the reparation of the fall.9
The reparation of Adam's sin, however, was to be different
from the undoing of the sin of any other man. His sin was
unique in that it was both sin of the person and sin of the
nature. As sin of the person it could be undone by Adam's
repentance (with the help of grace); and a common belie£ has
it that it actually was so undone. 10 But Adam's repentance
was powerless to repair the sin of the nature. Why? Because,
St. Thomas teaches, no act of an individual in any species, and
Adam's repentance was such an act, can affect or modify the
specific nature as such; 11 an individual in a species has no hold
on the specific nature, he is rather held by the nature. By his
• Comp. theol., c. 196: Primus parens suo peccato infecit naturam, et natura
infecta infecit personas filiorum; cf. Summa theol., III, q. 69, a. 8, ad 8.
• Comp. theol., c. 199.
• Loc. cit.
1 ° Cf. Comp. theol., c. 198.
11 Comp. theol., c. 1118.

568

P. DELETTER

repentance, therefore, Adam could recover for himself the personal gift of sanctifying grace, but not the lost preternatural
gifts of nature. If by his sin he had been able to affect the
specific nature by losing the preternatural accident of original
justice, he did so only per accidens and without affecting nature
in its constituents or its necessary properties. As said already,
by throwing off sanctifying grace, he also threw off what was
the effect of grace in his nature, namely, the preternatural
proprium of integrity or harmony, and as he was the first man
and fountainhead of nature, by thus affecting nature in himself,
he did affect it also as specific nature: 12 the whole species was
in him, and so the whole of nature sinned in him.
Accordingly, if the restoration of original justice in our human
race was to happen not by way of pure mercy or pardon on
the part of God but by way of immanent reparation, then the
re-insertion in the specific nature of its lost preternatural accident could be done only by one of the human species who had
a hold on the specific nature and was not held by it. No purely
human person was so. Hence, St. Thomas teaches/ 3 for such
a reparation of our fallen nature the Incarnation of God was
necessary. God alone can modify our specific nature; and only
an individual of the race can make a human reparation of our
nature. The Word Incarnate, Christ the Redeemer, therefore,
is the only proper and fit agent of the immanent reparation of
fallen nature. Only God made man could be the second fountainhead of grace in mankind. That is the reason why the
Word was made flesh for our salvation.
WAY OF CHRIST's REDEMPTION

Christ saved us and restored us to the supernatural life by
His passion, death and resurrection; thus, we said, the faith
teaches. Theology endeavours to see the reasons of this way
of our redemption. St. Thomas's teaching throws indeed a
wonderful light on the mystery.
12
18

Cf. Summa theol., I-II, q. 81, a. !l; Comp. theol., cc. 192 and 195.
Comp. theol., c. !tOO.

THE REPARATION

OF OUR FALLEN NATURE

569

The proper way of undoing the disorder of sin consists in the
voluntary taking up of the connatural penalty of sin; that is
what satisfaction means. 14 To undo the sin of nature by restoring to human nature the gifts lost by Adam's sin, Christ,
sinless and unbound by the consequences of sin, freely took on
a passible and mortal nature, like unto us in all except sin
(and all that leads to sin, namely, in the case, the moral miseries
consequent on sin and source of sin which are summed up in
concupiscence) . Thus He was able to take upon Himself the
penalty of the sin of nature. He actually took our human
sufferings and death, which are the penalty of the sin of nature,
in order to undo that sin and its consequences. So it' is that
His passion and death of their nature led to the glory of the
resurrection and ascension. By freely undergoing suffering and
death, the penalty of the sin of the race, He overcame sin
and death; 15 He, as it were, killed death. He was the God-man,
sinless and unbound by the law of death; He could not touch
suffering and death without transforming them; He took out
of them the sting that is sin. He so to say could not suffer
and die but in order to rise in glory-it could not have been
otherwise. He also was, as the God-man, the second Adam,
the second fountainhead of grace-to be this was the reason of
His coming; and because He, being a divine Person, was not
held by nature as is any purely human individual person, He
had a hold on the nature of the entire species. He was able
and had the power by His passion, death and resurrection to
restore the lost gifts of nature, not only in His own individual
humanity, but to the whole of nature/ 6 The redemption restored in fact to His own humanity, and in potency or hope to
the whole of mankind, the lost gifts of original justice/ 7
To us and to the whole of mankind He does not actually
" Cf. Comp. theol., c. 226.
Cf. Comp. theol., cc. 227 and 286.
11 Comp. theol. c. 289.
11

17 Comp.
theol. c. 241: Per Christi passionem et mortem, resurrectionis et
ascensionis gloriam, a peccato et a morte liberati sumus, et iustitiam et immortalitatem gloriae, hanc in re, illam in spe adepti.

570

P. DELETTER

restore them all at once. There are stages, as we have said, in
the work of our redemption or of the reparation of our fallen
nature. The faith says so and experience of our present situation confirms the faith as far as it can. In His own humanity
Christ's redemptive death and resurrection restored at once
those gifts of original justice which He did not have in the
passible and mortal nature which He took for our sake; and
He restored these gifts of impassibility and immortality in a
more wonderful way than they once existed: glorious and inamissible. To all those who are reborn in baptism and incorporated into Him, He restores at once the life of sanctifying
grace and with it the hope of the final restoration of all the lost
gifts, of immortality and integrity. But the actual restoration
of these is being delayed till the last day. What are the reasons
for this threefold stage in the reparation of our fallen nature?
CHRIST's OwN GLORIFICATION

Christ rose from the dead on the third day and forty days
after His resurrection ascended into heaven. Thus, our faith
tells us, His own glorification was not delayed. In One at least
of our race, in the second Adam, the privileges of the original
state lost by sin have been restored even now. In Him at
least our fallen nature has been restored completely and more
gloriously than it was before the fall. Why is it that there was
no delay for Christ's own glorification?
St. Thomas's theology points to the answer: because there
was no objective reason for a delay. The reasons for a delay
which exist in the case of fallen men, as we shall say presently,
did not exist for Christ Himsel£.18
Christ, the God-man, was truly of our race, as truly man
as He is truly God. Yet He was no son of sinful Adam. The
Son of God did take on our fallen nature, but He could not
take on what was sinful in it but only sin's penal consequences
free from sinfulness-the infinitely Holy cannot be touched
•• Cf. Camp. theol. c. !ti6 (Why He rose on the third day); Summa theol. ill,
q. 58, a. !il.

THE REPARATION

OF OUR FALLEN NATURE

571

even by the shadow of sin.19 His virginal conception and birth
from the Immaculate Virgin Mother, which were kept free from
any causal intervention of sinful Adam such as is active in the
generative act of every human father, were the only fitting and
possible way for the Word Incarnate to be born in our fallen
human race. 20
If He took on a passible and mortal human nature, He did
so for the very purpose of His coming: our redemption by His
passion and death. 21 But His very existence in a passible and
mortal human nature was, so to speak, a permanent miracle.
It would have been more normal for the One full of grace and
of glory-for even during His mortal life He enjoyed the beatific
vision of His divinity which is heavenly glory- 22 to be in a
glorious, immortal and impassible humanity, such as He actually was to be in after His resurrection. 23 It was for our sake
and for our salvation that He took such a nature as enabled
Him to suffer and die.
Accordingly, once His redemptive task was accomplished,
the normal state of His sacred humanity set in. In Him our
human nature recovered in a glorious manner its pristine immortality and impassibility. It did so by virtue of His redemtion.24 For even in Christ, the fitting radiation of His sinlessness
and His divine personality transfiguring His human nature
actually was a restoration of gifts that once were lost for our
nature.
And so, because Christ the Word Incarnate, who normally
should have shared in His entire humanity, body and soul, the
glory of the divine vision, took on a passible and mortal human
nature for the sake of our salvation, once His redemptive task
was accomplished, there was no reason fo ra delay in His own
° Cf. Summa theol. III, q. 15.
Summa theol. III, q.
a. 1 (8°).
•• Cf. Comp. theol. c.
01 Cf. Comp. theol. c.
Summa theol. III, q. 14, a. 1 and 2.
•• Cf. Summa theol. III, q. 10; q. 15, a. 10: simul viator et comprehensor.
•• Cf. Summa theol. III, q. 54, a. 8: Est autem dispensatione factum ... ut
ab anima gloria non redundaret in corpus . . .
"'Cf. Summa theol. ill, q. 64, a. 8.
1

572

P. DELETTER

glorification. The reason why for us and for all the children of
Adam (except only the Blessed Virgin Mother) the restoration
of the original gifts is being delayed and only sanctifying grace
restored in baptism did not hold good for Christ. He was the
new Adam who had command over our whole nature because
He was not Himself held by it (for He is a divine Person) as
all of us are; He in a way was above our nature and, as it were,
" outside the series," extra seriem. He could therefore allow
the glorification of His own humanity without of necessity
affecting our specific nature in all sons of men. But for all of
us, we shall show presently, there exists an obstacle to our
actual sharing in Christ's glorification till the last day of human
history.
REBIRTH TO GRACE IN BAPTISM

Our rebirth in baptism is for all members of Christ's Mystical
Body a first step in the reparation of our fallen nature. In it
we receive the personal gift of sanctifying grace but not yet
the preternatural gifts to nature. The baptized are free from
sin and they are in grace but they remain subject to concupiscence and to suffering and death.
The infusion of sanctifying grace in baptism is the restoration
of the divine gift which, but for Adam's sin, we would have
been given with our very birth from the first parent. The
reason why grace can be restored and exist in the baptized
without the gifts that attended it in the original state should
not be too mysterious. In St. Thomas's theology it is almost
self-evident. Then only is sanctifying grace attended by the
preternatural harmony of nature when it is given because of
the disposition of nature, 25 and not because of a personal act
or a personal passio; then it is also the cause of this harmony
in nature (according to St. Thomas's well-known idea of mutual
causality between co-existing elements of one composite reality). Such would have been the case in the transmission of
original justice, had Adam not sinned. But in baptism grace
15

Cf. Summa theol. I, q. 95, a. 1; 100, a. 1, ,c and

THE BEPARATION

OF OUR FALLEN NATURE

578

is given, not because of the disposition of nature, that is, the
children of Adam do not receive grace merely by being hom,
but because of a personal act and passio (in the case of an
adult) or of a personal passio (in the case of an infant), namely,
they receive grace because they are reborn in Christ. 26 That
is why sanctifying grace can and does exist in them without
the preternatural gifts.
The state of the baptized entails, therefore, that the person
be sanctified by grace while the nature remains unregenerate,
that is, deprived of its own gifts of original justice. 27 Yet, it
is well to say that fallen nature in the baptized is not in the
same situation as it is in the unbaptized and unjustified,
especially when the just grow in grace. Consider first the
moral side of unregenerate nature, namely, what is called concupiscence, or the inordinate inclination of the senses and of
the lower reason to pursue their own objects without heeding,
or even forestalling, the directive of the higher reason and the
command of the will. In the unbaptized concupiscence exists
as the material element of original sin; 28 it exists in a person
who is deprived of sanctifying grace and not oriented to God
as to his end. In the baptized and justified, on the other hand,
concupiscence is no longer the material element of original
sin (for this sin no longer exists in them); it is just the penal
consequence of it. Besides, and this is an important consideration in view of an incipient reparation of fallen nature, sanctifying grace is attended by the theological virtues of faith, hope
and charity which anchor man's mind and heart in God, by the
gifts of the Holy Spirit which make him docile to the inspirations of grace, and by the infused moral virtues or the supernaturalization of the whole moral life, especially the cardinal
virtues, which establish a basic order in man's desires for
creaturely ?r temporal goods.29 This virtuous equipment of the
•• Cf. Summa theol. ill, q. 68, a. 1 and q. 69, a. 4.
27 Cf. Summa theol. III, q. 69, a. 8 ad 8: isti defectus non tolluntur
nisi in
ultima reparatione naturae per resurrectionem gloriosam, cf. I-ll, q. 81, a. S ad 2;
q. 82, a. 1 ad S.
•• Summa theol. I-II, q. 82, a. S.
•• Summa theol. ill, q. 69, a. 4,

574

P. DELETTER

person means a factual, if only inchoative, reparation of his
unregenerate nature.
THE VIRTUOUS LIFE

The very nature of the theological virtues entails that as
they grow and develop man's resolve to adhere to God and to
forego all else for His sake grows ever stronger. 30 This ever
firmer anchoring in God of man's higher faculties constitutes
a radical, if only initial, cure of the moral wound of his nature.
It is a powerful counterweight to the congenital selfishness
which is, on the moral side, the most apparent symptom of
our fallen state. 31
The supernatural (and also natural) moulding of man's
potencies by the infused (and acquired) moral virtues is an
initial healing of the fourfold wound of nature in which St.
Thomas sees the consequence of original sin, a wound which
affects the four potencies that can be seats of virtues and principles of virtuous action. This wound of ignorance in the mind
is healed by the cardinal virtue of prudence; that of malice
or selfishness in the will is remedied by the virtue of justice;
that of concupiscence (in a narrower sense) in the concupiscible
power is healed by the virtue of temperance; and the wound
of weakness in the irascible power is healed by the virtue of
fortitude. 32 The healing is only imperfect, no doubt, but a real
beginning is thus made-which, of course, for its maintenance
and development depends on our free cooperation with graceat building up, as it were, a substitute for the lost gifts of integrity of the original justice.
From a biblical approach to the state of our unregenerate
nature, we may consider concupiscence in the light of St. John's
teaching in his First Epistle on the threefold disorderly concupiscence which he calls, concupiscence of the eyes and of the
•• Cf. Summa theol. I-II, q. 61, a. 8 and 4; q. 85, a. S; q. 65, aa. 1, S and 4.
This basic selfishness is the reason why fallen man is unable, without the help
of grace, to love God above all things; cf. Summa theol. I-ll, q. 109, a. S.
•• Cf. Summa theol. I-II, q. 85, a. S; q. 61, aa. s and 4.
11

THE REPARATION OF OUR FALLEN NATURE

575

flesh and pride of life. This reveals the radical distortion or
vitiation in our fallen nature which infects and exposes to disorderliness the threefold natural, and legitimate, desire for external or temporal possessions, for the gratifications of the
senses ·and the body, and for personal spiritual possessions.
This threefold concupiscence is kept in check in the baptized
and justified by the counterweight of the spirit of the evangelical counsels (and eventually also by their vowed practice) to
the extent that the spirit of poverty, chastity, and obedience
is a connatural postulate of progress in the virtuous life and
the life of grace. 33 Here the gifts of the Holy Ghost also may
play a decisive role.
Thus the life of grace given in baptism and developed with
our cooperation is an actual beginning of the reparation of our
fallen nature in its moral aspect. It is genuinely so in the physical aspect of our fallen nature, namely, with regard to suffering
and death. These, to be sure, are not removed yet-and we
shall presently give the reason for their remaining-but they
are transformed for the baptized. Suffering and death are not
the same thing for the unbaptized and the baptized.
For the unbaptized suffering and pain are hardly anything
else but the penalty of sin; they do not generally, except
remotely perhaps, help them to turn to God. For the baptized
and justified suffering is no longer a mere penalty of sin; it is
a remedy of sin, conforms the just, the members of Christ,
to their Head and makes themshareinHisredemptivepassion. 34
Thus suffering becomes a remedy of concupiscence and a help
to heal our fallen nature. But it does so, of course, only with
our free acceptance and cooperation.
Death to the unbaptized and U:Q.justifiedis the final penalty
of sin, both original and personal; it is the entrance to a second
death. To the baptized and justified death is not merely a
penal sanction of nature's sin; it is a paschal mystery, a conformation with Christ's death and so, as His death was, the
•• Compare Summa theol. 11-11, q. 186, a. 7.
"'Cf. Summa theol. m, q. 69, a. s.

576

P. DELETTER

entrance to a glorious life.86 It is the means of overcoming
death and fully repairing nature in view of an immortal life
-though we come to it now, not at once, but only in due time.
NATURE's FINAL RESTORATION AND ITS DELAY

Why then is it that only a beginning of the reparation of our
fallen nature is given with grace in this life and that the final
restoration, that is, the complete return of all the gifts of the
original state, is delayed till the day of the resurrection? That
such is the basic significance of the resurrection and of the
final glorification of the whole Christ is the unvarying teaching
of St. Thomas. 36 All the gifts, which in the beginning of mankind belonged to men's supernatural state in the earthly paradise, will be restored in a more wonderful manner in the glory
of the resurrection in view of the unending bliss of life everlasting. Meanwhile, and till that day, this restoration is delayed
for all men (except the Blessed Virgin Mother). Why is it so?
It is not, St. Thomas says in so many words, because the
baptism of Christ lacks the power to effect the miraculous transformation of our fallen nature. No, he says, baptism has power
to take away all the penal effects of sin which remain in this
life.37 And the reason is not far to seek: it lies in the very
nature of baptism. The first of the Christian sacraments applies
to each of the baptized who become members of Christ the
redeeming and sanctifying energies of His passion, death and
resurrection. These, as was explained above, of their nature
have the power to restore to human nature all the gifts lost by
the sin of nature which Christ came to undo. 38 The first' fruits,
moreover, of Christ's redemption are there in His own glorification.
Yet, St. Thomas goes·on to say, it is better for us and fitting
that the penal effects of the fall should.not be taken away from
•• Compare a. cit.
•• For example, Summa theol. ill, q. 69, a. s, ad S.
•• Summa theol. III, q. 69, a. S: baptisma habet virtutem auferendi poenalitates
praesentis vitae.
•• Cf. Comp. theol. cc. q39 and !MI.

'!'HE REP.A.RATION OF OUR FALLEN NATURE

577

us in this life; they should stay with us! He gives three reasons
for it, practically the same throughout his works. 39 The first
concerns directly, not to say exelusively, the physical miseries
of this life; suffering and death. By baptism, he says, man is
incorporated into Christ and becomes a member of Christ. But
it is fitting that a member should go through the same experiences which the Head endured. Christ, on His part, in
His life on earth was full of grace and truth, but had a body
liable to suffering; and He went through His passion and death
to rise again to a life of glory. And so it befits His members
also, those who are reborn in Christ, to live the life of grace, yet
to remain liable to suffering and death, and only by passing
through these, after Christ, to attain the life of immortality
and glory. That is why there is a delay in restoring to us the
preternatural gifts of impassibility and immortality.
The reason indeed is persuasive, no less to the heart than to
the head. It is so even more than may appear at first sight.
The fittingness for the members of Christ to be likened to Him
and share His passion death and resurrection is based on a
deeper objective reason than mere external conformity to
Christ. It may well entail the fact that it could not be otherwise.
Secondly, St. Thomas teaches, " it is fitting in view of our
spiritual training: it is by fighting concupiscence and similar
liabilities that man is to receive the crown of glory." 40 This
teaching anticipates the reason which the Council of Trent was
to give to explain the fact that concupiscence remains in the
baptized justified by grace; concupiscence is an occasion for
overcoming difficulties and for merit. 41 Perhaps some will say:
Granted the fact that concupiscence remains in the just, they
can and should make the best of a bad situation, and by
courageously fighting and overcoming its allurements, with
the help of grace, deserve a great crown in heaven. Yet, could
80 Summa theol. ill, q. 69, a. S; cf. v. g. 2 Sent. d. S!!, q. 1, a. !i!; Summa cont.
gent. lib. IV, c. 55.
•• Summa theol. lll, q. 69, a. 8.
"Cf. Denzinger, Enchiridion Sytnbolormn, 792.

578

P. DELETTER

it not have been otherwise? And would virtue and grace necessarily have been less because the difficulty was less? Theologian agree that it is not the difficulty of a virtuous action,
but the love that inspires it, which makes for its merit and
for growth in grace. This seems to suggest that there ought
to be a deeper reason why concupiscence remains in the baptized.
St. Thomas's third reason is the following: the penal effects
of original sin should remain after baptism to preclude that
men should come and receive baptism with a view to be painproof in this life and not to attain life eternal. 42 In fact, it
would be a strange world were the baptized to be restored to
impassibility and immortality and to immunity from the allurements of concupiscence, while the unbaptized remain liable to
the physical and moral consequences of the fall! Who would
not seek baptism? This very incongruity of the situation may
be a sign that in fact it should and could not be so: baptism
should not and could not have this effect! One senses that
there ought to be some deeper objective ground from which
springs this incongruity. And so the question arises: Can we
go beyond the.se reasons of fittingness?
THE BASIC REASON OF THE DELAY

It would seem that St. Thomas's theology of original justice
and original sin implies the basic reason why the preternatural
gifts of original justice are not to be restored to the redeemed
in this life, or immediately after death, but only on the last
day, the day of the general resurrection. He may not have
explained in explicit detail the objective ground for this delay
in the complete reparation of our fallen nature. Yet his explicit teaching logically entails the point of doctrine: the
reason why the restoration of the gifts is being delayed till the
end of time is that there is an objective ground against or an
obstacle to this restoration, which vanishes only on the last day.
This means to say that it lies in the very nature of our state of
•• Summa theol. lll, q. 69, a. 8.

THE REPARATION

OF OUR FALLEN NATURE

579

fallen and redeemed men, fallen in Adam and redeemed in
Christ, that the reparation of the fall is done by stages, and
completed only on the day of resurrection.
The reparation of our fallen nature means the restoration to
men reborn in Christ, not only of sanctifying grace and the
attendant supernatural virtues and gifts, but also of the preternatural gifts of original justice. In St. Thomas's theology
this comes to mean the restitution to human nature of the
preternatural accident or proprium of the specific nature. 48 It
is beyond doubt that Christ the Redeemer has the power to
do this: He, because He is God and man, has a hold on human
nature and He, can, not merely per accidens, as Adam did in
the loss of this preternatural accident of the specific nature,
but of Himself, because He possesses a divine power, reconnect
the lost preternatural proprium to the specific nature of our
race. 44
Yet, on the part of fallen mankind, there is an obstacle to
this restitution which could not now be removed except by
doing violence,. as it were, to the course of human history and
to the sweet and strong ways of divine Providence. It would
not be possible to restore to the specific human nature the
preternatural proprium or the lost gifts of original justice
without modifying and affecting human nature in all the persons
who share the human nature. It would be, as it were, a case
of all, or none! 45 But this restoration of the gifts to all men,
while human history is allowed to go on and generation to
'" Cf. above note 2.
•• Cf. Oomp. theol. c. 100.
•• The same specific nature cannot at the same time include the preternatural
gifts (in a number of individuals of the species) and exclude them (in another
number of them): cf. Summa theol., Suppl. q. 75, a. 2: Ea quorum ratio sumitur
ex natura speciei, oportet inveniri in omnibus quae sunt eiusdem speciei. Perhaps
this principle expresses an absolute metaphysical necessity only in the case of
the constituents and necessary properties of nature, and not in the case of a
preternatural proprium of the specific nature-at any rate not as far as we can
see. But St. Thomas's way of conceiving original justice as an accident of the
specific nature implies precisely that in this case " pretemature " follows nature,
and because of this analogy-unless another reason were to exclude it-the same
sort of necessity applies here as in the case of natural properties of nature.

580

P. DELETTER

follow upon generation, entails an impossibility. For it would
mean that human children coming into this world would, because they are children of Adam, be born sinners deprived of
grace and of original justice. 46 Yet at the same time, in the
supposition that human nature had been restored by Christ
to the original gifts and therefore disposed for grace by the
preternatural accident of nature, they should have grace and
be born children of God. The two, evidently, cannot go together. Either the first course of human nature and human
history is to be abolished, or if it remains, then the second,
namely, the restoration of our nature, is to be delayed.
But a reversal of the course of human generation from Adam,
fountainhead of fallen mankind, is inconceivable. It would be
tantamount to abolishing the past; and this even divine Omnipotence cannot do. Only what is possible is feasible, even for
God. He Himself cannot effect that what once has been should
not have been; only the effects of past, events can be remedied.
Adam, fountainhead of human nature, sinned and our nature
sinned in him. And so even God cannot undo this fact. He
can take away the effects of that sin wherever nature will exist
in human individual persons; that is what in fact He does in
the Redemption and its application to individual persons in
baptism; but He cannot effect that our nature should not be
sinful in the sense that it should not have sinned in Adam.
As long, therefore, as natural human generation goes on,
Adam's causality as fountainhead of a sinful race takes its
course. 47 And it is not possible that by virtue of their natural
generation from Adam or by being born from him (and there
is now no other way for human beings of coming into this
world) children of men should not be born sinners deprived
of original justice.
Accordingly, only when Adam's causality as fountainhead
of a sinful race will come to an end, that is, human history
will be completed and human generation come to a stop, will
•• Cf. Summa theol. I-IT, q. 81, a. 1 (the dogma of original sin).
•• On this (universal) causality of Adam, cf. our article, "Hereditary
in Irish Theological Quarterly, 20 (1958), 850-65.

Guilt,''

THE REPARATION

OF OUR FALLEN NATURE

581

there no longer be an obstacle in human nature to the restoration of the gifts of original justice. Then Christ can exercise
His power over our nature without forcing or doing violence
to it and re-connect the preternatural proprium to our specific
nature. That precisely is the day of the resurrection. 48
We touch here on the basic objective reason for the delay
in the complete restoration of our fallen nature. This restoration cannot be done without affecting all human persons, and
this is made impossible by the continued causal influence of
Adam, the fountainhead of nature and of sin, an influence
which will be stopped only when human generation comes to
an end.
SoME IMPLICATIONs

This basic reason for the delay in our· complete restoration
shows that the fittingness of the reasons explained above is
based on the objective reality of things and equivalent to such
necessity as the human mind is able to detect by theological
reasoning in supernatural realities. If the supernatural order
is intelligible and follows the laws of being and of intelligence,
as it undoubtedly does, then, in the social economy of grace
such as is present in our supernatural elevation and fall in Adam
and in our redemption in Christ the Word Incarnate, the complete restoration cannot happen except on the last day, at the
second coming of Christ.
It also shows why the resurrection is to be universal but
different for the just and the sinners. 49 It ought to be universal, because Christ cannot re-connect with our specific nature
its preternatural proprium of original justice without changing
nature in all individual men. All therefore must rise to immortality and indestructibility; this change does not depend
in any way on their voluntary dispositions, because it affects
their nature on the level of the esse and not on that of the agere.
It is because on the level of the agere the willful dispositions
differ in the just and the sinners that their resurrection to
•• Cf. Comp. theol. c. 156; Summa cont. Gent. lib. IV, c. SS.
•• Cf. Summa theol., Suppl. q. 75, a. Summa cont. Gent., lib. IV, c. 81.

582

P. DELETTER

immortality is also different. Sinners refuse grace and likewise
glory; their now immortal nature cannot be transfigured by
the radiation of the supernatural glory which they reject; they
refuse and lose God and with Him all that is good; in them
indestructibility by external agents cannot be impassibility
and freedom from pain, because by their sin they chose suffering,
which is the inseparable companion of their permanent state of
guilt. The just, on the other hand, freely accept grace and
glory; their union with God in the beatific vision cannot but
transfigure their entire being and render their nature glorious;
for their resurrection to immortality means resurrection to
eternal life and eternal glory.
St. Thomas's theology of the reparation of our fallen nature
also allows us to see the reason for the unique exception to this
delay in the full restoration of our nature; the glorious assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mother, who at the completion of
her earthly life, our faith teaches, was taken up into heaven
body and soul. Her anticipated resurrection to glory is an
exception and here, if ever, it may be said, "the exception
confirms the rule." Just as Our Lady's exemption from all stain
of original sin was a personal privilege granted by the Redeemer
to His future Mother, despite her birth by way of natural
generation in the sinful race of Adam, a privilege to the person
which did not undo the universal law involved in the sin of
nature (as far as this goes, she would have contracted the
original stain had not God stayed the torrent of sin); so also,
and in logical continuity with her first privilege, her anticipated
resurrection to glory was a personal privilege owing in a way
to the Immaculate who, though being fully of our stained race,
was yet without sin. It was to be expected that for her the
law of the delay in our final restoration should not prevail.
But it would be inconceivable that the exception should become the generality. For then, it would no longer be a personal
privilege; it would actually and to all practical purposes follow
with nature; and this, as shoWn. above, is not possible. St.
Thomas's theology of the reparation of our fallen nature, therefore, also excludes the opinion which has been proposed in

'l'HE REPARATION OF OUR FALLEN NA'l'URE

583

recent years. Some are inclined to think that the resurrection
takes place for each individual person immediately after death.
The transcendental relation to the body which the disembodied
souls maintain would become effective at once. No, this cannot
be, if the departed human persons continue to belong to our
human race. Were they to rise
to immortality
of body and soul and were our nature fully restored in them,
then this change of our specific nature should also affect all
living human beings. As shown above, this cannot be till the
last day.
This also clarifies the ontological foundation of the fittingness for Christ's members reborn mbaptism and incorporated
into Him of being made like unto Him as He was in His mortal
life, and not yet as He is in the
No adult Christian
can live in Christ or persevere in grace and so prepare for
glory without his free cooperation with grace. On this cooperation will depend, not his resurrection to immortality, but his
entry into the glory and his resurrection to glory. But if he
is thus to be the artisan of his own salvation, not by himself,
of course, but with the help of Christ's grace, that is, if he is
to be the collaborator of Christ in working his own salvation,
then it follows at once that the manner of his cooperation with
Christ will follows the way of Christ. The particular causes
of their nature share in the causality and in the manner of
causality of the universal cause. If Christ saved us by His
passion and death which led to His glorious resurrection, then
our cooperation with Him in saving ourselves-and others toowill also involve our passion and death, which, for us as for
Him, are the way to a glorious resurrection.

P. DE LET'l'ER, s. J.
St. Mary's CoUege
Kurseong, India

1

° Cf. Summa theol. ill, q. 69, a. s.

NOTES ON OUR CONTRIBUTORS
JosEPH P. CoLLINs; 0. P., S. T. M., S. T. D., a graduate of the Pontifical
Athenaeum .Angelicum, is Regent of Studies in the Irish Dominican
Province and Professor of Moral Philosophy at St. Mary's, Tallaght,
Co. Dublin, Ireland.
CARROLL STUHLMUELLER, C. P., S. T. L., S. S. L., a graduate Pontifical
Biblical Institute, Rome, author of several commentaries on Sacred
Scripture and contributor to the Catholic Biblical Quarterly, is
Professor of Sacred Scripture at the Passionist Fathers Seminary,
Louisville, Kentucky.
P. DELETTER, S. J., Ph. D., S. T. D., Gregorianum, Rome, is Professor of
Dogmatic Theology at St. Mary's College, Kurseong, India, and a
frequent contributor to scholarly journals including Irisk Theological Quarterly and Theological Studies.
DoMINic RoVER, 0. P., S. T. D., a Professor in the Pontifical Faculty of
Theology, Dominican House of Studies, Washington, D.C., and
assistant at the Summer Sessions in the Speech and Drama Department, Catholic University of America, is a playwright and author
of a forthcoming book Tke Poetics of M. Maritain: A Thomistic
Critique.
JAJI•--:s M. CoLLINS, Ph. D., a member of the Department of Philosophy,
St. Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri, is author of God in Modern
Pkilosopky, and a frequent contributor to scholarly journals.
BoNAVENTUREM. ScHEPER, 0. P., S. T. Lr., is a Professor of Moral Theology
and History of Dogma in the Pontifical Faculty of Theology, Dominican House of Studies, Washington, D. C., whose article, "Catholic
and Protestant Rules for Dialogue," appeared recently in Tke
Catkolic World.

BOOK REVIE\VS
Christ and Apollo. The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination. By
WILLIAM F. LYNCH, S. J. New York, Sheed and Ward, 1960. Pp.
with supplements. $5.00.
In a significant contribution to the contemporary effort to bring together
the theologian and the literary critic to· their mutual profit Father William
F. Lynch, S. J., has fashioned this probing study of the literary imagination
in its various dimensions. Called Christ and Apollo it composes, summarizes
and refines many of the arguments and observations presented by Father
Lynch in his articles in Thought some hali dozen years ago. At times the
terminology is different although the insights are largely the same, most
of them touching on the impenetration of the creative imagination by
metaphysics and theology. Gathered together and ordered in this book
they represent one of the most persuasive and persistent efforts mounted
in this country to open literature to a theological critique and to open
the mind of the theologian to the dynamics of the creative effort and the
uniqueness of creative goals.
A praiseworthy effort it is, yet a most difficult one, involving as it does
the question of entangling alliances and peevish autonomies in both areas
of thought. For a writer who sets out to be both critic and theologian
risks the slings and arrows kept, cleaned and carefully sheathed for attack
upon those professing just such a delicate and dual vocation. Nor will
Father Lynch escape my own particular and partisan darts, as the reader
of this review will discover. Nevertheless he deserves well of all of us
for a consistent and strongly argued work. It simply happens to be a highly
vulnerable work, a target facing two ways-towards literature and towards
theology. Yet it is our good fortune that men of the calibre and courage
of Father Lynch are willing to face both ways also; then willing to attempt
-more perilously-to draw the two images into a single focus now centered
upon what we might call total poetic reality, or the mind of man as it is
imaged forth in the works of man.
The author initiates his critique in the form of an antagonism: Christ
and Apollo-which might well suffer a more dramatic reading, Christ or
Apollo. Apollo is the symbol of the dream, the vaguely infinite, the
indefinite, the romantic; Christ is the symbol of the definite, the limited,
the particular, the real. The book as a whole is a brief for the so-called
Christie imagination as against the Apollonian imagination, the theme being
set
in the Introduction in a very sharp commitment with respect

585

586

BOOK REVIEWS

to the finite and the definite in literature. " The literary process is a highly
cognitive passage through the finite and the definite realities of man and
the world" (p. xiii), literary insight coming from "the penetration of the
finite and the definite concrete in all its interior dimensions and according
to all real lines " (Ibid.). This thematic thrust rises above the work even
in these early stages and remains to dominate the rest of the book, giving
a striking unity to the far-ranging considerations contained therein. So,
for example, the opening chapter On the Definite establishes once and for
all the theme first articulated in the Introduction; this same theme is then
explored and expanded in succeeding chapters on Time, on the notion of
Tragedy and Comedy, and in the crucial discussion of Analogy which is
aimed at confirming the author's position with regard to the centrality
of the definite, of fact and event. Then in the two concluding chapters on
the Theological Imagination and the Christian Imagination Father Lynch
avails himself of the tools prepared in his treatment of the definite and the
analogical. Beyond that he has included four interesting Supplements, one
a series of texts on the Definite, a second series of texts on Time, a bibliography on Analogy, and a final supplement prepared by John P. McCall
on Medieval Exegesis and the senses of Scripture. It should be pointed out
that the supplements also tend to support Father Lynch's regent principle
with regard to the primacy of the definite and the literal in the literary
imagination in general as well as in the Christie imagination, so that the
supplements should not be considered as scattered afterpieces but as supporting material directly in the line of his main argument.
Yet such a perfunctory resume does not do justice to the work as a
whole, nor to the specific burden of the parts. To support a judgment that
would both validate one's praise yet justify one's misgivings it is really
necessary to take the long way round and go at the work piece by piece,
part by part. It holds together, almost obsessively in fact, but it is important to see that too, to feel the binding force of the theme as it gathers
in facts and conclusions and readings and critical judgments from literature
and theology alike in order to formulate the magisterial plan. How is it
formulated, first of all? Toward the end of the book Father Lynch states
in retrospect that " this has been an attempt at an inductive analysis "
(p.
Remotely this may be true but in view of the initial clarity
and urgency of his judicative principles it is difficult to accept the inductive
nature of the argument as it appears in the work. Rather one would say
from the abundance of examples and from the sensitivity of Father Lynch's
critical judgments that we are made aware of the inductive process that
most assuredly preceded Christ and Apollo. But in the work itself the
argument is clear and in command from the beginning; it operates by way of
judgment from above rather than by. way of invention or exploration from
below. To be more exact, it proceeds through the statement and restate-

BOOK REVIEWS

587

ment of a sort of critical and theological orthodoxy (a theory of the
definite and the analogical)
it is known in itself in metaphysics and
theology and as it is seen to impenetrate the literary imagination. Further,
this same critical orthodoxy is evaluated, in breach and in observance, in
the works of art that seem to embody it most perfectly as well as in the
extreme modes of deviation that it suffers in other artifacts.
So, for example, in his opening chapter On The Definite Father Lynch
examines and rebuts: 1) "the exploiters of the real," those writers and
theologians who are content "to remain as uncommitted to the finite as
the addicts of "psychologism" or narcissism-in
possible " _(p. 8);
literature Proust, in theology the Modernists-whose " aim is to create
states of affectivity, areas of paradise, orders of feeling within the self"
(p. 9); 8) the imagination of 'the double vacuum' as exemplified in
Dreiser ("from nihilism to pietism"), Eugene O'Neill and Karl Barth;
4) the honest " facers of facts," i.e. existential writers like Camus who
"accept the absurdity and limitation of reality with nerve, sincerity,
courage and authenticity" (p. 11). Against the infinitizing tendencies of
these four types he ranges two chosen correctives: Dostoevski's vision
of finitude, especially in The Brothers Karamazov, and the Christian (and
Ignatian) maxim, Non coerci maximo, contineri tamen a minimo, which
implies total involvement in the finite. The third locus judicativus, as so
often in Father Lynch's book, is the theology of the Incarnation. This
is the way he expresses the relevance of the Incarnation to his " attempt
to formulate an ideal attitude for the imagination in relation to the
finite ":
God Himself has no need to go further than his eternal Christie, anointed Word to
grasp Himself from all eternity; and certainly, being no better than God, we too
need to go no further than the earthly, concrete, limited Christ and descend with
Him for the grasping of everything (p. 15) .

With respect to Time," the horizontal dimension of the definite" (p. 81),
he draws materials for judgment from the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.
From below, from critical sensitivity, he finds support for his repudiation
of the " angelic " imagination in the works of Picasso, Andre Breton,
Baudelaire, Poe, Descartes, Malraux, and Proust. Such literary heresiesin-act or -in-artifact involve the flight from time (Proust), the rape of
time (Picasso and the Cubists) , the defiance of time through a putative
"simultaneity"
(Breton, Baudelaire), the sublimation of time through
nocturnal time and the dream (Poe) , the conquest of time through the
timelessness of art (Malraux). Again, a superior judgment of these moods
and modes of time-escape comes from the theology of the Incarnation,
from our Christian "belief in a Man (sic) who, having 'created' time,
could not possibly be hostile to it " (p. 50) . Such a judgment derives

588

BOOK REVIEWS

also from an examination of the Spiritual ExerciBu of St. Ignatius, with
its strong taste for time and place and " the march of the self to God
through event, through Christological and human event " (p. 58) .
In a revealing chapter on Tragedy, Father Lynch uses the analytic
tools of the definite and the temporal to adumbrate the various modes
of the tragic experience. The truly tragic occurs " when the dramatic text
has allowed itself to move through human time to the very last point of
human finitude and helplessness" (p. 66). Such a movement, inevitable as
time itself, anchored to the finite, is to be seen in Oedizms, in the Medea,
in Macbeth, etc. whereas its modem parody and cheat is to be observed
in the defiant tragedy of the indestructible will of man and the social or
solitary tragedy of human worthlessness. Again the methodology is clear
enough: the placing or, rather, the finding of an orthodox position plus a
judgment on the heterodox extremes, in the case of tragedy extremes related
to the old heresies of Manichaeanism and Pelagianism. The Manichaean
attitude, says Father Lynch, operates in the social tragedy stemming from
Ibsen, Zola and Strindberg and in the nihilistic tragedy of Sartre while the
new Pelagianism is manifest, in its creative uses, in Maxwell Anderson,
Clifford Odets, Paul Green, MacLeish, etc. as well as in the critical writings
of Joseph Wood Krutch, Edith Hamilton and others. These extremist
heresies face away from the median· of tragic truth which consists in " a
direct imaginative confrontation with an entrance into human finitude "
(p. 66) . In such a tragic movement the infinite rises out of the successive
march through the finite, here " the limited finite of the thing called man "
(p. 68). The chapter closes with a special study of Eugene O'Neill who
is to be placed, at last, among the romantic or Pelagian tragedians in whom
" the finite is a solitude, the fond place of the romantic hero, echoing in
the darkness with nothing but calls for pain and courage" (p. 88).
As for Comedy, this is "the most inherently confident rung of the
finite" (p. 91) for the comic structure demands a belief in facts, a belief
in time and the finite movement of time, plus a belief that man is man,
issue of human parentage, capable of human love. In fact, " its image
(the comic image) of the finite is the most concrete, the most dense of all
the images created by the art of man" (p. 96). Yet here too there are
violations of the orthodox comic image, or, perhaps, the single summary
heresy of the sublime, for " the one offense . . . which comedy cannot
endure is that a man should forget that he is man " (p. 97) . In breaking
down the modes of the heterodox or the pseudo-comic Father Lynch rejects
the comedy of the clown (who is basically sad), the comedy of the
meticulous man (with his 'angelic' detestation for the specifically human)
and, finally, those two grotesque contemporary modes--the comedy of
disgust and the hateful laughter of hatred (evil angelisms both) . In the
structuring of the book it is the treatment of the modes of Comedy that

BOOK REVIEWS

589

most clearly evokes the need for a consideration of the univocal and the
analogical, for according to Father Lynch comedy cannot exist in the logical,
supracausal, supra-connective world of Tragedy or the Serious. In comedy
we are face to face with gaps, surprises, foreshortenings and odd multiplications, all of which stem from the glorious, mundane reality of things
which are at once their limited selves yet related to all things and to God.
It is analogy which explores and explains these gaps and surprises and
hidden connections. It is analogy, therefore, which is the key to the
manner in which ideas (" themes, structures, patterns, meanings, unities,
etc.") enter into, penetrate, support and suffuse the literary image, and
from within.
For the literary enterprise analogy is a matter of relevancy, of integration
of sense and sensibility, of interpenetration of idea and image. The universal
imagination tends to force its matter into a didactic or moralistic vision,
a vision imposed from above and resisting the organic growth of image
and metaphor. The univocal critic has the same disrespect for growth
and texture, being drawn to " the pure idea of things." The equivocal
imagination, on the other hand, forces nothing but is itself ordered by
disorder, by "the love of darkness and pain," for there are no links or
connectives in the world of the equivocal.
Father Lynch sees the vice of univocity in the torment of Greene's
Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, Scobie with his compulsive and undifferentiated pity; he sees it also in the doctor-hero of Camus' The Plague.
He discovers it as a radical taint in Mallarme, Rimbaud and Poe who each
in his own way undertakes a " purely Parmidean attempt to obliterate
the whole action of the sensible world and to try, in its stead, to start
all over again and get hold of a world of pure being in the shape of the
poem " (p. 135) . The spirit of the equivocal is found in the acte gratuit
of Andre Gide, as also in all those artists or critics who hold fast to
" separate autonomies," whether of thing and thing, or of idea and image,
or of structure and detail. According to the equivocal spirit genuine poetry
is marked by irrelevancy, by the adventitious, by the "free" detail. In
Father Lynch's critique, therefore, the univocal means Parmenides and the
dominion of the One; as a heterodox extreme it means didacticism, angelism,
disrespect for matter and for the distinction of things; in the work of art
it means a kind of supra-rational clarity but loss of reality and material
plenitude. The equivocal, on the other hand, means Heraclitus and the
Many, the chaos of flux, utter distinction of things, irrelevancy; in criticism
it means separatism and the autonomy of the poetic act; in the work of
art, fragmentation and obscurity.
The ensuing discussion of analogy is intended by Father Lynch to
rectify these divergent and deviate tendencies toward the undifferentiated
Many p.nd toward the rigidly unifying One. Though one cannot commend

590

BOOK REVIEWS

the accuracy of his definition of analogy (wherein "everything in the
subject is altogether the same, and everything altogether different"impossible!) , yet his point and purpose are clear-to save the various
levels of being and the levels of imaginative insight by a central pattern
which will neither suppress detail nor yet be helpless and impotent in
ordering detail. Oedipus Rex and Riders to the Sea serve as paradigms
here. In the former ironical self-knowledge functions as a truly analogical
idea lighting up the conscience of each character according to the mode of
each. In Synge's lyric drama the central image and idea is not so much
analogical as polysemous or many-sensed, i.e. the line of water in the
floor operates as literal event, as symbol of the sea, as symbol of overpowering fate.
The chapters that follow, on The Theological Imagination and The
Christian Imagination, are an attempt to bring the argumentation to a
natural climax in the search for a theological dimension to the literary
imagination. So, Father Lynch will speak of a ' Catholic ' imagination and
a 'Protestant ' imagination. The former, he says, is content to course
through the levels of being in the ascent to God, facing Him at last without
the need to wrench free from human society, whereas "the Protestant
seems . . . to wish to stand in nakedness before God outside of society "
(p. 165) . This means, in the terms of Father Lynch's rationale of the
limited and the definite, that " the mysteries of Christianity are a penetration deep into the fact of man, all the way into his Christie center "
(Ibid.) . The implications of this central or orthodox position are then
examined, per contra, in the opposite notion of dissociation, as we find it,
for example, in Greene and Eliot, especially in the Four Quartets. Father
Lynch is hard put to assimilate the latter poem as an example of the
theological imagination because of the poet's taste for annunciations and
sudden epiphanies, for the timeless points of time bespeaking illumination,
rest, immobility. The critic searches diligently for instances of the flux of
time and the horizontal movement of " time-ridden faces." What happens
when the search is not successful? One must place Eliot beside O'Neill
as an example of another ' dissociated ' taste. More successful is the search
for the spirit of time and the spirit of association in ritual and ritual
drama, though not in forced rituals like Katzanzakis' He Who Must Die
or MacLeish's J. B. which repeat the vice of dissociation in the religious
sensibility itself.
In the concluding chapter on The Christian Imagination Father Lynch,
while reaffirming the uses of Christology as "a model for the penetration
of the finite," is concerned chiefly with an exploration of the Divine
Imagination (sic) as it forms and then reforms created reality in accordance
with the new analogical instrument Who is Christ. In this new and
Christie " reorientation of the imagination., (p. 19!i!) , the fourfold senses

BOOK REVIEWS

.591

of Scripture serve as the key to what the Divine Imagination has done,
for It has entered progressively into the shape of things, subverting " the
whole order of the old imagination " (Ibid.) and extending the form of
Christ "into history and society and Eucharistic things ... (and) into
the very marrow of the soul " (p. 197) . The work of this chapter is then
completed by the final supplement on the fourfold method of exegesis.
And as we have pointed out, the various supplements that conclude the
book are held together analytically by their relevance to Father Lynch's
argumentation with respect to the definite, the literal, the temporal, the
particular, the event. The first supplement On the Definite stands selfexplained in its relevance to the main thesis of Christ and Apollo; the
second one On Time stresses the Hebraic exploration of time rather than
the Greek and gnostic attempt to transcend time; the texts on medieval
exegesis together with their use in contemporary criticism all point to the
primacy of the literal sense and to the grounding of all senses in the
historical, the particular, the real.
This is a work, then, that is remarkably well structured and admirably
one. Never, it seems, was a point argued so well, never was an argument
on the definite made so clear and so definite. Everything points to, everything serves, everything sustains the projected burden of the book which
is " the restoration of a confidence in the fundamental power of the finite
and limited concretions of our human life" (Intro., p. xv). This primary
purpose, moreover, is carefully-yet quite naturally-integrated with another purpose which we might look upon as a kind of sub-plot to Christ
and Apollo. I am thinking of Father Lynch's forceful polemic against the
esthetic formalists who are forever finding ways to render the poetic
enterprise thoroughly and impossibly antiseptic, as they try to isolate the
poetic act and the poetic response and to " protect " the poetic structure
from metaphysics, theology and plain human sensibility. Quite properly,
and with great eloquence, the weight of the argument in this book is made
to bear also upon the spurious structures of formal criticism. For Father
Lynch the literary imagination in all its possible dimensions necessarily looks
both ways-toward the construct itself and toward the stimulus or cause,
that is to say, toward the imaged reality. Imagination, after all, is an
internal sense and sense is related to the sensed, to the object of sense.
In its inventive function imagination is, of course, a making or, rather,
a composing; in its more radical cognitive function it is a showing or a
manifesting of things. The image is " open " in both ways: to the mind
of the other, to the fellow imaginer, and to the res. It is a phantasma, a
showing forth of things.
This consistent critical realism is, in fact, one of the features of Christ
and Apollo and inclines one to support the argument for this reason only
that it reaffirms the profound and fruitful relevance of poetry and reality.

BOOK REVIEWS

Yet I have a doubt-which is really more than a doubt-not about the
mode of critical reasoning employed here but about the excessive sharpness
of the critical instrument, the theory of the definite. If one's first reaction
to the argument is, " soundly and clearly argued," one's second and more
thoughtful reaction is-" too close, too clear." For in the course of the
book the realism of Father Lynch and his plea for the definite and the
literal grows so insistent, so one-track, so nearly obsessive, that one is
faced at last with a crucial option. Either his position, grounded in philosophy, theology and critical experience, is unalterably central to a mature
realist criticism or else it is, more subtly, simply another fixed deviate in
the line of critical theories, and one that veers-paradoxically-toward
the
univocal!
Allow me to examine the first option for a moment. Several times in the
course of this review I have used the word " orthodox " to designate a
given notion of Time or Tragedy or Analogy as urged by Father Lynch.
I have spoken also of his judgment with respect to deviate notions and
exemplars as a judgment of their heterodoxy, theological or literary. In
all fairness it must be said that this terminology is mine and not his. Yet
the rhythm of judgment is so firm and steady-the beat of an anathema
without its resonant finality-that these familiar terms of doctrinal judgment seen not at all inappropriate. Thus we are shuwn how in the perennial
philosophy analogy stands as a logical corrective to excessive univocity on
the one hand and total equivocation on the other. In the material on
tragedy an appeal is made, implicitly at least, to a true doctrine on man
and on grace which will then stand as cure and corrective to the extremes
of Manichaeanism and Pelagianism as they are manifest in certain putative
tragedies. So also with Father Lynch's critical-theological principle of the
definite. It is advanced as ineluctably sound and central both in theology
and in literary criticism, proceeding as it does from an orthodox view of
the Incarnation, from a sound physics and metaphysics, and from a logic
that includes the notion of analogy.
Now no one will doubt the formidable character of such a criticaltheological instrument, i.e. a theory of the definite supported by theology,
the perennial philosophy and critical experience. We are, after all, dealing
with poetry and the imagination and, therefore, working in the realm of
the particular and the definite, for poetry is the infirna scientia which treats
of quasi-singulars below reason and imagination is that thing-anchored
internal sense which assimilates the singular and the definite. No problem
here. Nevertheless we are faced in Christ and Apollo with a stunning
conclusion. In the name of a theory of the definite, and as that theory
is enlarged by the uses of analogy, we are asked to reject characteristic
imaginative structures of-note well-Greene, Faulkner, Eliot, Mallarme,
Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Breton, Proust, Racine, Gide, Camus, Wagner, Dreiser,

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Odets, O'Neill, MacLeish, Katzanzakis, Mann, Shaw, Chaplin, Ibsen, Anderson, Sartre, O'Casey and others. It is not as though the adverse judgment
is not well argued in many instances. In the matter of tragedy, in fact,
Father Lynch's discussion on Manichaean and Pelagian pseudo-tragedy is
so palpably accurate and revealing as to be very nearly definitive. Other
judgments are equally sensitive and substantial, for example on dissociation
in The End of the Affair, on the almost blasphemous freezing and looting
of time in Recherche du Temps Perdu. Yet the critical principle of the
analogical definite grinds on with crushing impartiality, rejecting, expunging,
anathematizing. One gets the feeling that something is awry, that Father
Lynch is demanding too much, imposing too much. One gets the feeling,
further, that there is in him some fatal limitation of awareness or, rather,
a kind of stiffness or constriction of the critical sensibility at certain crucial
points. Father Lynch simply cannot respond to certain manifestations of
the creative power and the creative passion. It may be presumptuous to
designate, category by category, his more inhibited areas yet let me say
for want of a more accurate terminology that he does not seem to respond
at all to the prophetic, the romantic or the mystical modes of the literary
imagination or to the obsessive in any form.
Suppose we take Racine's Phedre as an example. It is true that one
cannot abide Phedre unless one is virtually hypnotized by the incantation
of the verse, by the spareness of metaphor, by the relentless rhythm of
suppressed passion. That is to say, one cannot abide Phedre unless one
responds to the obsessive mode of the literary imagination. But this is
the mode of the imagination and the mode of the poetic act in Phedre.
It cannot be judged by the canons of the definite and the analogical as
they are enunciated by Father Lynch. It simply will not yield, so that
you must take the theory or take Phedre; you cannot have both. Phedre
is powerfully, gloriously univocal. Or take The Brothers Karama-zov, wherein Dostoevski with the wide embrace of genius employs both abstract and
particular modes, both the definite and the dream, and is at home in each
and in all. Father Lynch will not have it so. He will accept the particularized " exploration of hearts " in the multiple scene after Father Zossima's
death but he will not accept the dialectic argument ex alto in the Grand
Inquisitor scene, for it is achieved " by a dubious kind of transcendental
thinking and by literary sleight-of-hand." So also with Eliot and Four
Quartets, that metaphysical song set in the mode of epiphanies and quietly
ecstatic moments, in time and out of time. It will not yield, as Father
Lynch shows quite clearly, though he tries once or twice to make the poem
testify, even if obliquely, to the movement of "time-ridden faces." Yet
for all that the poem is haunted by Pentecost and the Baghavad Ghita
and John of the Cross and a love which is "itself unmoving." But the
theory of the definite will not move either-to embrace the poem just as

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it is. Father Lynch grows suddenly uneasy and even querulous, as though
Eliot to his own distress and our loss had not been adequately trained in
the composition of time and place.
There is the matter of Surrealism, too. I would agree with Father Lynch
and with M. Maritain that surrealist poetry is Parmenidean in its ambitions
as it seeks to capture a knowledge-above-knowledge through the occult
instrumentality of the poem. True enough; these are dangerous and dizzying
heights. Yet does it follow that there is no place in poetry for the suprareal, for these loftier modes which we might call mystical, prophetic,
apocalyptic, Dionysian and which Father Lynch would call Apollonian?
Is there no place for Claude!, for Max Jacob, for St. John Perse, for Debussy,
Chagall and Paul Klee, for German Expressionism and the Romantic movement in general? No place for the poetry of.John of the Cross? No place
for those more rational and more univocal obsessions of the literary imagination which bring forth, according to the Gallic genius, the theatre ideologique
and novels which are looked on as the public testaments of public moralists?
Let us suppose the truth of the Aristotelian maxim that poetry is more
universal than history. Let us suppose the other truth implied in this
maxim, that poetry at the other extreme falls short of the full universality
of science, and that this is its unique power and genius-to bestride the
world between, the world of the realized image between fact and essence.
Then it follows that poetry commands a very wide world indeed; the inventive image-making power faces a broad spectrum of poetically conceived
and poetically embodied objects ranging from the sharply definite object
adjacent to the fact of history to the more perfectly universalized type
or ratio operating, say, in Everyman, in a satirical novel, in an expressionistic
play, in a mystical poem. Even at that this wide-ranging diversity touches
only on the relative materiality or immateriality of the object-the universalized singular, the common concrete. There is in addition a distinct
source of diversity deriving from the inventive power of the imagination
which may conceive and fabricate in a realist form, or in phantasy, in a
literal or symbolic mode or in both, or even-at the far, far end of the
inventive spectrum-in the mode of illuminism, prophecy, apocalypse. In
short, there is an " objective " spectrum reflecting the arc of virtual immateriality in the poetic object and there is an " inventive " or " subjective "
spectrum reflecting the diverse and unpredictable modes of literary fantastication.
To move analogically through these diverse forms is work indeed for
the practical critic and more work, infinitely more, for one who attempts
to formulate a literary theory that will be more than a pleasant and
equivocal catch-all for one's own literary favorites. This easy and less
vulnerable extremity has no appeal for :Father Lynch and we are his debtors
for that. The woods are full of critical tea-tasters who take advantage of

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a " formalist " theory of poetry to allow themselves a good deal of literary
lounging in the sun. Father Lynch, at least, has made his choice, a very
keen one in its critical dimension, very clear and firm in its theoretic
commitment. But the choice, we feel, has left him in chains. He is
definitively bound to the definite and his theory of the definite is simply
not large enough to account for the " objective " and " inventive " variations that exist for all to see in the works of art we call good and great.
One may prefer the realm of the definite, and the analogical exploration
of the definite. But there is, I submit, a univocal mode to the literary
imagination also, univocal to the point of obsession, and it has produced
powerful and lasting works of art. Beyond that there is the scandal of
all the romantic and illuminist and psychological and surrealist modes and
the burden is clearly not upon the literary imagination that produced them
but upon the anathematizer who would cast them out as heterodox. Rather
should we be tempted to re-evaluate the critical-metaphysical theory that
made it necessary to cast them out. Rather should we suspect its adequacy
and examine it for the characteristic vices of the univocal spirit!
But there is an even more serious and more delicate critique to be
levelled against Father Lynch's central argument in Christ and Apollo. It
has to do with his Christology and with the ascetical doctrine consequent
upon his Christology as both are used to substantiate his theory of the
definite. It is difficult to communicate the precise tonality of Father
Lynch's approach to Christology and the difficulty is increased by the
slightly rhetorical quality of his Christological texts. Yet his approach
does have a characteristic resonance to it and if I had to designate it I
would say that it appears to look almost exclusively to the humanity of
Christ and to the purely temporal finalities of His redemptive action.
At least twice, for example, Father Lynch insists on speaking of Christ as
" the Man " or " a Man," not only hypostasizing the humanity but doing
so in contexts clearly related to a Divine Operation, whether of Creation
or Assumption. So, in the Introduction he speaks of " the Man who, in
taking on our human nature ... " (p. xiv) and in the chapter on Time
he speaks of " a Man who, having ' created ' time, could not possibly be
hostile to it" (p. 50). Was this just carelessness or was it, perhaps, a
rhetorical necessity in an argument focussing on Christ's involvement in
the temporal? One is inclined to opt for the latter after a sampling of
typical references to the life and work and purposes of the God-Man. So,
" Christ moved down into all the realities of man to get to His Father "
(p. 13); He stands for "the completely definite " (Intro. p. xiv), for a
non-hostile entrance into time and an unromantic march or passage through
time (p. 50), not redeeming time but exploring its inner resources fully
(p. 51) , being our model for "the penetration of the finite" (p. 187),
" the model and source of that energy and courage we again need to enter

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the finite as the only creative and generative source of beauty " (Intro.,
p. xiv); then standing as a model for the actual penetration of time, Christ
is likewise a model for the cognitive grasping of time, being " the enemy
only of the romantic imagination and the pure intelligence as ways of life "
(p. 50).
One reference above all needs full quotation: " It is completely false
to say that Christ redeemed time. For time has never needed redeeming;
it only needed someone to explore its inner resources fully, as He did. And
so powerful and new is the exploration, in His case, that it is crowned
not only with insight but with the Resurrection" (p. 51). Might we
not comment by saying that " so powerful and new " is Father Lynch's
exploration of the Incarnation that we seem to be left at last only with
the humanity of Christ, His acquired knowledge, His cognitive and nonsacrificial purpose, His fascinated regard for the finite. A matter of
emphasis, yes, in a thesis inclined towards just such an emphasis. But
more than this is required of a theory of the imagination in its theological
and Christological dimensions. A certain fulness of doctrine is required,
and certain specific clarities, too, such as the fact that Christ is not " the
Man" but the God-Man; that He did come to redeem man and, therefore,
to redeem time which had gone awry (not in itself but in man's despairing
commitment to it); that He is the enemy of sin and error and Satan in
whatever guise and not the enemy " only " of a romantic epistemology;
that He does not need to march through man and through the finite to
get to the Father; that the mysteries of Christianity are not " a penetration deep into the fact of man " but a penetration of the things of
God and of all things as they are ordered to God; that the Christie reality
and the Christie imagination are not narrow, thin and rigid but wider than
all imagining, according to the width and depth and heighth of the hypostatic order, for" the plenitude of the Godhead dwells in Him corporeally."
In justice to Father Lynch I am willing to suppose that in twisting his
lens to bring man into focus-man, the humanity of Christ, the definite,
the temporal-he may have twisted too hard. This is a risk one takes.
But one takes the risk also of theological distortion, which in the matter
of Christology is avoided by keeping close to the Trinity and to the mission
of the Word. St. Augustine gives us the tack here for clear theological
sailing: " In the mystery of the Incarnation the whole ratio of the deed
is the power of the doer" (Epist. ad Volus., 187, 2), the doer Who is
Divine. St. Thomas comments on this by saying " that we must judge
of it (the Incarnation) in regard to the quality of the Divine Person
assuming, and not according to the quality of the human nature assumed."
That is to say, we must judge of the Incarnation in this way if we are
judging formally, for this is what it is formally, not so much a going down
as a taking up, an Assumption, human nature assumed into hypostatic

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union with a Divine Person. The Christie mission, therefore, is not a
narrow, rigid march through time but the transfiguring of man in time
through an unheard-of union with the Divine.
Even on the part of the human nature assumed the effects are momentous: the plenitude of habitual grace, the perfection of beatific and infused
knowledge, the power to work miracles, the power to prophecy; and beyond
all that His grace as Head overflowing into His Mystical Body. That same
Body receives these gifts from its Head in accordance with a human
receptivity but in accordance also with the transfiguring mode of the
gifts. For the Christian each rigorous moment of time is also a moment of
miracle; the unforeseen gift is renewed from now to now in a dynamic
interplay of the divine and the divinized that we call sanctifying grace.
Over and beyond this there are the special moments: Tabor, Pentecost,
the road to Damascus, the multiplication of loaves, Lazarus inexplicably
walking out of the tomb. That is to say, in the Christian's daily, dogged
movement through time there is the continuum of human and temporal
succession yet discrete moments also, so to speak-metaphysical and metanatural breaks and gaps. Christ as the Lord of time is Lord both of the
continuous and of the discrete or discontinuous; and both phases of Christie
time bespeak transfiguration. Besides 'the moment of patience and the
moment of rational action there is the moment of conversion, the moment
of sudden faith, the moment of penance, the moment of ecstasy, the
moment of miracle.
Father Lynch might be reminded that there is the moment of quiet also,
the moment of meaningful immobility, a moment poetically structured by
Eliot in Four Quartets and lovingly described by Teresa and John of the
Cross and by the mystics generally. In the consistent rationale of Christ
and Apollo, however, this ascetico-mystical consequence of a transforming
Christology is made to appear alien and almost unnatural. What does it
mean, for example, to say that " the most orthodox form of prayer for the
Christian, no matter what spiritual state he might be in (including that
of high contemplation) is not rest but motion: a coursing, with all the
powers of mind and will and body, through the mysteries-that is, the
stages-of the life of Christ" (p. 50)? It means this to me, that with a
wave of the hand, so to speak, Father Lynch has disposed once and for all
of the most profound tradition in Christian mysticism and has negated
without proof, authority or honest discussion one of its most precious
existential truths-that in the soul's growth in prayer rational discursus
gradually gives way to the prayer of quiet. The reader should be warned
against the author's tendency to make summary judgments out of such
weak and even contradictory assumptions as this that even in a state of
" high contemplation " the soul should persist in the prayer of beginners,
with the added suspicion that anything else, anything more, would be
somehow less orthodox.

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As for the moments that leap and break even with the higher modes
of normal or" continuous" transfiguration-the modes of ecstasy, prophecy,
rapture, tongues-are they not phases of the Incarnation also and, consequently, possible phases in the working of the Christian imagination? That
is to say, since the gratiae gratis datae are in every age part of the Christie
march through time, shall they not be given their own appropriate and
prophetic image? For if it be a question of the Christian imagination, is
this not its true measure that Christ contains in Himself, and pre-eminently,
all the modes of being and modes of knowledge to which man is open, by
nature or by grace? Would it not be true to say that in its total dimension
the Christian imagination includes both dream and reality, both event
and promise, the clarity of the universal and the density of the singular,
involvement in time and the transcendence of time, the joy of commitment
and the joy of detachment, the humble quotidian fact and the ascents of
the wonderful. In short, would it not be true to say that the Christian
imagination bespeaks not Christ vs. Apollo but Christ and Apollo, or, more
exactly, Apollo in Christ. For it is He Who is all things in all, the first-born
and exemplar of all creatures, Who cannot fail to possess in a supereminent
and purified mode the virtualities of every created reality, be it Dionysius
or Apollo or Artemis or Pan. And we might add-paradoxically in the
present context-that to separate any mode of reality from Him, to make
Him alien to any mode and it to Him, is at least virtually Manichaean.
We may call it a paradox; it is also an unfitting and even hazardous
thing-for criticism, for theology, for a really fruitful apologetics-to let
great areas of human sensibility slip away from the sweet yoke of Christ,
from the immense vision and embrace of the God-Man. Yet this is what
has happened in Christ and Apollo. Father Lynch has made the Christian
image and the Christian sensibility synonomous with a kind of dogged
Christian existentialism which is not really existential at all because it
does not account for all of the existents, all of the events, all of the facts
and signs and wonders in the Christian thing. Remember, it was the
prophet Joel whom the writer of Acts turned to in trying to describe the
effect of Pentecost (event) upon the Apostles (these men in time): "And
it shall come to pass in the last days these days, this day, now) ... I
will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters
shall prophecy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men
shall dream dreams" (Acts
DoMINIC RoVER,

Dominican House of Studies
Wll8kington, D. 0.

O.P.

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599

A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. By HERMAN DooYEWEERD. Translated by D. H. Freeman, W. Young, and H. de Jongste. 4 vols.
Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1958-1958.
Pp. 566, 598, 784, 257. $86 per set.
Because the approach and milieu of this work will seem very strange at
first to the American reader, it may be best to begin by referring to some
background material which may help to bring it within a more familiar
context. One of the earliest and most perceptive responses to Etienne
Gilson's renowned Gifford lectures on medieval philosophy came in the
form of a series of articles contributed by Michael Foster to Mind, n. s.,
vols. 48-45 {1984-86). These articles were entitled: "The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science " and " Christian
Theology and Modern Science of Nature," and they constituted an acute
Protestant appraisal of the theme of Christian philosophy as related to the
question of the origins of modern science. Foster's thesis was that the
influence of revelation upon philosophy is deeper than we suspect and
that it extends even to the modern scientific outlook. He viewed the relation of medieval Christian theology to Aristotelian philosophy as a substitutional critique rather than a transforming assimilation. The sharpest
point of criticism of Aristotle and the Arabians was their philosophy of
nature, precisely because the Christian theologians were trying to replace
the conception of an eternal natural whole with the view of nature as
created in freedom, as new with the newness of time, and as thoroughly
contingent even in its most intelligible and conditionally necessary aspects.
Once this revolutionary reappraisal of nature was started, it could not be
brought to a neat halt. Foster maintained that there is a closer continuity
between the medieval Catholic and the Reformed theologian than is usually
admitted from a standpoint centered around institutional conflicts, and
that both groups were closely related to classical modern science. The
theologians stressed the production of nature through God's knowledgable
will, and the scientists were thereby assured not only of the intelligibility
of nature but also of the need to consult sensory experience as the contingent counterpart of the free act with which God produced the natural
world. Thus Foster expanded Whitehead's suggestion that modem science
could only have grown out of the theological schooling of men to regard
nature as an intelligible order whose laws can be known only through a
conjunction of analysis, observation, and experiment. Richard Kroner is
presently developing this same thesis about the role of faith in the constitution of ·modem philosophy and science.
Herman Dooyeweerd has been working for forty years in Holland to
stimulate a specifically Protestant interest in the problem of the Christian
contribution to the modem scientific attitude and the philosophies based

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on that attitude. He is professor of philosophy of law at the Free University of Amsterdam and editor of Philosophia Reformata, a multilingual
journal which approaches theoretical and historical issues in philosophy
in terms of a highly sophisticated Calvinist philosophy of science and
culture. Traditionally, the Calvinist mind has been less hampered than
the Lutheran in making room within the life of faith for a reflective study
of philosophical reasoning and scientific methods. For many decades after
Hegel's death, the idealistic notion of science and cultural life was dominant
in those Calvinist circles where philosophy counted. During the past
generation, however, it has become increasingly clear to such groups that
absolute idealism is not only capacious but also rapacious as far as the
distinctive claims of revealed faith are concerned. Hence particularly
among continental Calvinists, there has been a gradual shift of philosophical
allegiance from Hegel to Kant and a corresponding growth of interest in
the philosophy of modern science, especially the question of its ultimate
foundations. Dooyeweerd is a leader in this movement, his journal gives
voice to the particular discussions, and his present book is the major
expression of the entire tendency.
From every angle, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought is a remarkable achievement, one of the significant multi-volumed philosophical works
of our century. It reminds one of Ernst Cassirer's studies on epistemology
and symbolic forms, for its sustained argument, scholarly detail, and wide
range of problems. The two thousand pages of analysis are backed up by a
conscientious use of scholarly instruments, forcing us to admire the author's
responsible procedures even when we have to disagree with his positions.
There is a real danger, however, that the reader will get lost in this vast
forest of ideas. To guard against it, there are helpful internal divisions
which are also listed in the table of contents. Moreover, volume four is
entirely devoted to a f257-page analytic index complete with cross references
and doctrinal summaries. Here, we find some six columns given to Aristotle,
four to St. Thomas and Thomism, seven to Hume, twelve to Fichte, three
to Husser!, and an overshadowing f26 columns to Kant. Technical subjectterms receive a similarly detailed indexing, so that all the mechanical aids
are provided for introducing the reader to Dooyeweerd's intellectual world.
We get a first clue about how this world is orientated from considering
the book's title. The aim is to supply a critique in the general spirit of
Kant, that is, by searching ·out the conditions which make it possible for
us to know and to develop the sciences. And like Kant, Dooyeweerd is
not primarily interested in the psychological description and empirical
genesis of our modes of thinking, but rather in the most general presuppositions and structures which pervade our thinking and organize our
bodies of knowledge. In a word, the critique in question is a transcendental
one, not in the sense of abandoning our world but of determining the

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principles which govern our looking at our world. Yet Dooyeweerd does
not regard his work as a repetition of Kant, since Kant did not press far
enough along the path of critical reflection. Kant was satisfied when he
came upon those epistemological principles which are proportioned to the
methods and propositions functioning in Newtonian natural science, but he
failed to inquire into the conditions making reasonable the whole enterprise
of taking a scientific approach to the world.
Another point where the present work aims at becoming more radically
critical than Kant is in respect to the forms of cultural and social-legal
life. Here the impact of Hegel is still felt, since he carried out large-scale
investigations into these forms of life. Perhaps even closer to Dooyeweerd's
plan, however, is the work done by Dilthey and Husser!. Especially the
latter furnishes a pattern by seeking out the genesis of both the scientific
and the social structures together, as belonging within a common movement
of mind and a common set of founding principles. Another piece of indebtedness to Husser! is for the technique of looking for the intentional
meaning-acts which give structure to a science or to a social reality.
Yet Dooyeweerd does not think that these predecessors have exhausted
the possibilities
critique, and hence he presents his reflections as a new
critique. His confidence about being able to move beyond the critical
tradition is based on a controlling consideration. When he examines the
reductions of Kant and Hegel and Husser!, he finds them to be agreeing
on one crucial matter:. the critical principles to which they eventually come
are immanent ones and do not go beyond the whole constituted by experience-and-the-world. This does not mean that they completely ignore
transcendence, but it does mean that they recognize it only in order to fit
it in somewhere within their explanatory scheme. They treat only of an
immanentized sort of transcendence, and hence they do not even raise
the proper question about the transcendent God in His own being. It
may not belong to the office of philosophy to tell us anything about the
transcendent God, but at least a critical reflection must distinguish between
an immanentized idea of transcendence and the region where transcendence
is properly met.
In a way, then, Dooyeweerd's whole effort is to broaden the meaning
of critique to the point where we can see even a residual element of
uncritical thinking in Kant and Hegel and Husser!, not to mention the
empiricists. He characterizes all of Western philosophy, especially its relatively critical modem phase, as accepting the postulate of immanence in
an unquestioning way and hence of failing to make any reductive reflections
leading beyond the sphere of immanence. The implication is that when
the human mind is left more or less to its own resources, it will not be
able to break through the immanentizing ·web of philosophical thought.
To do so in any effective way requires the aid of the Christian faith and

BOOK REVIEWS

the encouragement of the Incarnation. Philosophy has always been a search
for origins, but until the factor of revealed faith is explicitly acknowledged
the origins are sought and found only within the totality of nature, including those human acts of intending and experiencing which are correlated with the natural whole. Some special ground must be discovered
before we can even become aware of this controlling naturalistic assumption
behind the classical achievements in philosophy. The new consideration
comes with the Christian message, since in the person of Christ we see
that nature is not autonomous but is rooted in the transcendent being of
God. Faith in Christ helps the critical mind to spring the bonds of the
sphere of immanence and at last reach a truly radical condition of critical
reflection.
This is the sense in which Dooyeweerd views himself as continuing the
work of Calvin, as extending the movement of reformation into the field
of philosophy. Calvin proclaimed the word of God to people in the world,
but he did not make any technical penetration into the determinate spheres
of human experiencing and knowing. That is the work of the new critique,
which reaches back beyond even Kant to Calvin for its decisive guidance.
The re-forming of philosophy does not mean a reshuffling of theses in a
closed system, but precisely the decisive opening up of all philosophical
viewpoints, the relativizing of them to the word of God which does transcend our natural immanence. All philosophical explanations are affected,
because they are now qualified as transpiring within the limits of immanence
and hence as providing at the most a penultimate explanation. Dooyeweerd
is careful not to fall into obscurantism: the relativizing of philosophical
standpoints is not the same as abolishing them or declaring them worthless,
but it is a re-forming of them within a further perspective which they
could not reach by themselves.
He emphasizes that when philosophies are measured by the standard
of faith, they do not wither away or cease to be significant for men. The
types of order uncovered by philosophical analysis remain valid findings,
but they cease to carry along with them any claim to be the ultimate conditions of thought and order in the world. To justify the claim of having
made an unconditionally ultimate analysis of the internal structures and
principles of order, a philosophy must be able to work out the interconnections and especially the manner of unifying the various spheres. Here,
Dooyeweerd ventures the :historical generalization that no Western philosophy has been able to resolve the question of the unity of the world
and of the principles of thought. Philosophers have done a good job in
working out various particular analyses of this or that region of meaning,
this or that way of constituting an order of knowledge or social living.
But they have been unable to find principles which are general enough to
synthesize these particular accounts into a unified theory. The Aristotelian

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matter and form failed to include the richness of human personal being;
the medieval couple of nature and grace was too variously interpreted and
too little adjusted to the actual penetration of the natural world to be
effective; and the modern humanistic tension between nature and freedom
has led to tiring oscillations rather than to a just balance.
Without excepting Kierkegaard from the modern predicament of dualistic
antagonisms, Dooyeweerd nevertheless employs a typically Kierkegaardian
theme in order to indicate the direction of his solution. What the critical
inquirer seeks is a satisfactory synthesis, but he cannot find it within the
postulate of immanence. He must forego the closure of thought upon itself
and give up the claim to intranatural autonomy. This involves an admission that the philosophical search after origins must be reinterpreted to
mean a search after a beginning which does not itself belong within the
natural process but transcends it. Or to use the Kierkegaardian and even
the Cartesian phrase, he has to discover an Archimedean point that is
radically original in respect to our universe. Descartes thought that he had
found the point, once he conceived of the laws of motion at work in the
reahn of extension, but surely the mind which had to be given the matter
and the motion was not yet at the origin. Kierkegaard found the point
well enough in Christian faith, but he lost his way back into the world,
particularly into the world of the sciences and social institutions. Dooyeweerd locates the Archimedean point behind the Cartesian type of reflection and the Kierkegaardian type of faith. It is found in a certain act of
critical reflection, which nourishes itself on the transcending word of God
and nevertheless keeps its contact with the particular structures of order
in the world. He is reluctant to call the resultant outlook a Christian
philosophy, because it is more radically reflective than any philosophical
immanence ever becomes and because it penetrates deeper into the mundane structures than most philosophies do, without making the claim to
being completely autonomous in respect to an initiative beyond the mindnature complex. It is a sui generis outlook issuing from the relation between
a rigorously pursued critical effort and an acceptance of Christian faith,
in the Calvinist tradition.
Dooyeweerd regards it as a major misunderstanding of his work to
conclude from the fact that it is a critique of theoretical thought that
it is therefore unconcerned with moral and practical issues. He tries to
move farther than Husser! in clarifying the meaning of theoretical thought.
His point is that precisely what comes under criticism is the assumption
that the speculative sphere comes first, that it is fully constituted without
any practical and motivational considerations, and that only thereafter
may we treat of the human aims and influences on thought. Every sphere
of thought is constituted by some operative intentional meaning, and in
this respect the theoretical order has to surrender its autonomy and admit

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the common feature of structuring intentionality which it shares with
other ways of organizing our experience. Dooyeweerd presses this argument
not only against a rigid division between theoretical and practical parts of
philosophy but also against any separation of the scientific order from
the results of his critique. There is no realm of human thought which
can remain untouched by the criticism of immanence. A scientific method
can be devised and put successfully to work without itself raising the
question of its relation to other human concerns, but the critical mind
cannot accept this value-free neutrality as the final report on that type of
knowledge. Just as the explicit philosophies of immanence have to be
sprung open, so the implicit claims of scientific method to be self-sufficient
have to be criticized. The scientist cannot enter upon his task without
having some assurance about the order, intelligibility, and ultimate unity
of nature. But he cannot find these presuppositions justified in the humanist
philosophies of modern immanentism, since these philosophies are dogged
by internal conflicts that tell against a purely immanent view of nature.
Eventually, the natural and social sciences themselves must acknowledge
the reference to a transcendent God and hence the need for an act of faith
in God as the principle of natural order.
Dooyeweerd is not satisfied with an epistemological presentation of his
position, but engages in many detailed analyses of particular types of
knowledge and types of social life. His attention is drawn specially to the
nature of the state, the family, and the various levels of law. Throughout
these regional analyses, he employs techniques drawn .from Dilthey and
Husserl. From the former he takes the conviction that we will find a
typical structure present in all the literary, legal, and political expressions
of social activity. And he employs Husserl to show that such structures
are necessarily there, due to our intentional acts which found the meaning
of institutions as well as methods and bodies of knowledge and value.
Another major contribution of Husser} is his notion of an interlacing among
the various particular spheres of human experience and thought. Dooyeweerd organizes his social and scientific analyses around three main principles: the modes of human experiencing are thoroughly and permanently
plural; each way of intending issues in a sphere of meaning and living
which has its own intrinsic and irreducible structural laws and qualities;
these spheres do find a common grounding in man and hence they are interlaced rather than discrete. Because of his acceptance and extensive use
of these principles, he refutes the charge that faith in the transcendent is
incompatible with respecting the findings of the sciences and the valuestructures of human life. For Dooyeweerd, the standpoint of critical reflection is a compound one because it involves accepting both the ndnautonomy
of the natural world and the natural sciences and also the actual presence
of intentional structures and interrelations.

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605

The influence of Heidegger is felt when the author seeks to show that
structures are not incompatible with process. Not only is the intending
act an intrinsically temporal one but all the resultant structures in knowledge and society are similarly temporal. The interlacings among spheres of
meaning and value are not static but historical and developing in character. Where Dooyeweerd criticizes Husserl and Heidegger is on the issue
of equating the historical dimension of human experience with only a
relative transcendence, a transcendence reaching out to the next horizon
but never moving beyond the immanence of human experience and its
world of worlds. Dooyeweerd treats our temporal intending acts as modes
of referring which point ultimately not only to the world as the interlacing
of immanent meanings but also to God as the principle of cosmic order.
For this reason, he calls his position a critical coslmonomic philosophy: it
unifies all structures of order in the cosmos and then it reflects upon the
founding of cosmic order itself in God the creator.
There are several lines of criticism which this book requires. One point
concerns the kind of unity which Dooyeweerd provides for his cosmonomic
idea and hence the kind of knowledge achieved by his critical reflection.
The failure of Western philosophies to reach this standpoint is said to be
not simply a historical accident but the result of not taking formal account
of the Christian message. Yet since the medieval systems of nature and
grace are criticized for failing to synthesize the two, we do not reach the
cosmonomic viewpoint merely by acknowledging the word of God and the
reality of faith. Only the particular way in which the Calvinist tradition
conceives the relationship between nature and revelation is sufficient to
bring us to the viewpoint in question. But in that case, the distinctive note
seems to be a theological one and acceptance of cosmonomic knowledge
would depend upon settlement of the theological issue. Yet despite the
background predominance of this particular theological position, it does
not come in for formal examination and defense. Thus the rest of us are
left without the specific means for judging whether the supposed knowledge
is indeed well grounded.
Although he criticizes Max Scheler severely in the social sphere and on
individual being, Dooyeweerd is in a similar intellectual situation, since
both men attempt to extend the theory of intentionality to include an
acknowledgment of the transcendent being of God. Scheler eventually concludes that this cannot be done unless God is identified with the world order
and with cosmic becoming. Dooyeweerd rejects pantheism of any variety.
Still, his analysis of the varieties of epistemic and axiological experience
leads directly only to the affirmation that there is an interlacing of structures to constitute the cosmos of meaning. The problem remains of how
to show that the cosmonomic idea leads ultimately to the theonomic prinis not established by means of the intenciple of nature. This

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tiona! analysis itself. Once the mind is engaged by faith, it can grasp the
need for making this further reference, but direct philosophical grounds for
doing so continue to elude even the faith-illuminated mind as it is presented here. That is why the question of the type of unity found in
cosmonomic knowledge is urgent. Dooyeweerd does not explain in sufficient
detail how the act of faith affects the act of philosophical analysis, and
whether the presence of the former introduces evidence which the latter
can employ in working out the philosophical theory of an ultimate pointing
back to a transcendent origin for nature.
Two indirect kinds of evidence are offered, however, for the recognition
of God. One consists in Dooyeweerd's teaching on time and intentional
meaning as leading not only to a cosmic nexus but also to that which
transcends the things in nature. He makes an interesting blend of the
notion of intentionality with that of being created, so that to intend in
a temporal structure is proper to having a created sort of being. This
goes one step beyond Heidegger's thoughts on our thrownness toward the
world, but we are not shown that the step is taken on grounds about
which the philosophical kind of reflection can consider and judge. Faith and
critical reflection are said to be conjoined, but the createdness of nature
remains only a counterpostulate to nature's total immanence as far as
evidence presented for philosophical analysis is concerned.
The other indirect route is Dooyeweerd's pointing at the internal conflicts among all the philosophies. This is a move of high dialectical generality, and yet it cannot be any sounder than the examples furnished for
it. Although he does not deliberately distort the historical sources, the
author does simplify them excessively so that the individual thinker will
not break out of the scheme. This is the constant danger of the method of
reconstituting the so-called fundamental intentions of a philosophy and an
era. For instance, it is essential to the completeness of Dooyeweerd's historical case to show that St. Thomas becomes involved in basic antinomies
concerning nature and grace, and especially that he eliminates the radical
Biblical motive of creation and the fall. To show that the doctrine of
creation is emptied, Dooyeweerd pictures Thomas as conceiving the first
origination of things according to the Aristotelian pattern of a bringing
forth of matter and form. No notice is taken of the Thomistic teaching
on the origination of being as existent and hence of the deep modifications
which he did introduce into the meaning of causality as attributed to God
in creation. In the case of the doctrine of the fall, Aquinas is said to treat
grace as an extrinsic addition whose removal simply injures in an extrinsic
way the order of nature. Dooyeweerd concludes that Christ's redemptive
act therefore cannot effect the very root of the temporal cosmos for
Thomas, but this conclusion follows only from the description given of the
relation between nature and grace. None of the aids of recent scholarship

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607

are used to insure a penetrating understanding of Thomistic thought, which
is far more complex than this conventional interpretation supposes.
One final issue may be mentioned. Dooyeweerd is troubled by the possibility that philosophy and the sciences may seek a foundation not in
the direction of faith but in that of ordinary experience. In the course of
discussing this alternative, he performs a genuine service by criticizing the
frequently advanced contention that the ordinary man supports a naive
realism. The ordinary standpoint is not that of a lowgrade philosophical
theory but of a nonphilosophical view of things. However, the author
overstates his argument by linking philosophical realism too closely with
an object-approach to beings. When the analysis is brought back to a
position more fundamental than the subject-object distinction, this need
not mean that .realism is being left at the subject-object level. Dooyeweerd's handling of realism and ordinary attitudes u; inadequate mainly
because of a failure on the part of realists themselves to establish more
clearly both the distinction between being and the phenomenal object
and also ... the precise relationship of philosophical realism to ordinary
experience.
These criticisms are not intended to obscure the fact that this is a highly
important philosophical effort. Dooyeweerd takes a wide sweep and has
a consistent position in respect to most of the major philosophical problems
and schools. He reformulates the question of faith and philosophical reason
in a provocative way. And he presents a strong challenge against the view
that science is neutrally objective and that every philosophy of nature
must accept a monistic immanence. Hence his work is worthy of a careful
reading and later use in connection with many problems.
JAMES CoLLINs
Saint L01.1is University
St. L01./is, Mo.

Holy Writ 0'1' Holy Church. By G. TAVARD, A. A. New York: Harpers,
pp. $5.00.
1959. x,
One might suppose from the title of Father Tavard's scholarly study
that an option is necessary: we must choose between the Bible or the
Church. Actually nothing is further from the author's mind; moreover,
nothing could be further from the truth. Nevertheless, the allusion to a
fundamental controversy is evident. What is the final criterion for divine
faith? The Sacred Scriptures, say our Protestant brethren, at least for the
most part. Sola scriptura is even said to be the " formal principle " of the
Protestant Reformation. The contrary position, namely, that the Church is

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the sufficient, proximate rule of faith, could be called Catholic doctrine.
before himself in this book is to determine
The task that the author
whether or not this position is the whole truth, and, even more, whether
or not it is the most accurate expression of this fundamental point.
The importance of what Father Tavard has done here (or at least begun)
could scarcely be overestimated. In the first place, the discussion concerning
the place of Sacred Scripture in the divine economy, the role of the Church
in proposing divine truth, and the nature of divine and apostolic tradition
always remains central to the Catholic-Protestant question. It might be
well, however, to call attention to the fact that without regard for
heterodoxy, it is extremely important for a well balanced fundamental
theology and ecclesiology that these relationships be well established and
defined.
The author states at the outset that the method is historical; and the
reader of this volume becomes quickly aware that the documented research
provides sufficient material for determining, historically, certain trends.
Since his primary intention is to investigate the attitude of Christian writers
(and the Church at large) toward Holy Scripture and tradition, Father
Tavard begins in the patristic period. It is here that we meet for the
:first time a phrase that is to re-appear many times in one or another form,
so that it constitutes, in a way, the theme of the entire volume: "the
inherence of the Church in Scripture ... " (p. 15) . The meaning of this
phrase with respect to that early period in Christian history is that it is
impossible to think of the Scriptures outside the Church; but it is equally
impossible to conceive of the Church without the Scriptures. This latter
statement is true notwithstanding the evident truth that, absolutely speaking, the Church need not have " inhered in Scripture." De facto, she does,
and this on account of a divine ordination that divine revelation be transmitted this way.
The medieval period is presented as having remained substantially faithful to this idea. The author brings out some interesting points on the
meaning of sacra scriptura in medieval theological literature. He shows
that, although theologians such as St. Thomas were well aware of the
distinction between canonical and non-canonical sacred literature, still in
practice they often used the term sacra scriptura to designate more than
those books divinely inspired in the strict sense. Thus, for example, it
would seem rather arbitrary to understand Holy Scripture (i.e., the text
of the Bible) in the following passage: omnibus articulis fidei inhaeret
fides propter unum medium, scilicet propter veritatem primam propositam
nobis in Scripturis se(]undum doctrinam Ecclesiae intellectis sane.1 Aside
from the problem of determining the precise sense of this particular text, or
others similar to it, it is important to keep in mind what is implied in this
1

Summa theol., II II, 6, 8, ad

BOOK REVIEWS

609

inclusion of the writings of the Fathers in that which constitutes the
"doctrine of the Church," namely, that there is a tradition, a handing
on, a transmission of the Scriptures (understood as the Bible).
St. Thomas' attitude on this point is elucidated in another text not
cited by Father Tavard. In the de V eritate we :find the following objection laid against the necessity of man possessing faith: ". . . ea quae sttnt
fidei, in nos per multa media devenerunt. A Deo enim dicta sunt apostolis
vel prophetis, a quibus in successores eorum, et deinceps in alios et sic
.usque ad nos pervenerunt per media diversa. Non autem in omnibus istis
mediis certum est esse infallibilem veritatem: quia cum homines fuerint,
decipi et decipere potuerunt. Ergo nullam certitudinem habere possumus
de his quae sunt fidei;· et ita stultum videtur his assentire." The emphasis
here, and the force, therefore, of the argument is the multiplicity of the
media through which divine revelation is transmitted. Not a word is said
about the writing down of the revelation; but that the living word is passed
on in the Christian community both by preaching and by writing is strongly
implied by the use of the term media diversa. The Angelic Doctor's answer
to this objection is equally enlightening without regard to his own mind.
" ... omnia media per quae fides ad nos venit, suspicione carent. Prophetis
etiam et apostolis credimus ex hoc quod eis Dominus testimonium perhibuit miracula faciendo. . . . Successoribus autem eorum non credimus
nisi in quantum nobis annuntiat ea quae illi in scriptis reliquerunt." 2 From
this response we can gather that although St. Thomas was well aware that
certain things had been passed on from age to age in the Christian community without their having been written down by the apostles,8 still the
great emphasis is upon the written tradition-quae in scriptia
Here again it is difficult to determine whether or not St. Thomas is referring
exclusively to the Apostles and the Prophets which he mentions earlier in
the text, or whether his view takes in the non-canonical transmission of
divine revelation in the writings of those who are the successors of the
Apostles.
Father Tavard's study becomes increasingly interesting when he begins
to trace what he terms a " breakdown " in this synthesis, a process which
began long before the Protestant Reformation, and which he considers to
be one of the major contributing factors in the preparing of the ground
for. this movement away from Catholic unity. It is difficult to distinguish
clearly the elements which make-up the " seeds of discord." Among them,
however, may be included an exaggerated papalism and an uncertainty
about just where revelation stops and the tradition of revelation begins.
One of the best sections of the entire volume includes the chapters which
the author devotes to the doctrines of Luther and Calvin respectively on
• de veritate, qu. 14, art. 10, arg. num et resp.
a Cf. Summa theol., m, iS, s, ad 4UDI (quoted by Tavard, p. !n).

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BOOK REVIEWS

this question. One is able to see clearly that there are two quite distinct
traditions within Protestantism on the question of the Bible and the
Church; and if we add the Anglican position (treated in the last chapter
of the volume) these traditions become three. It is, therefore, not quite
correct to speak simply of the " Protestant doctrine " regarding the
Scriptures.
Perhaps most discussion concerning this book will eventually be centered
around the manner in which the author treats the Catholic solution
of the problem raised in the 16th century by the Protestants' formulation of the idea of sola Scriptura (understood in the Lutheran, Calvinist,
or Anglican sense). The problem was stated in this way: are there two
distinct sources of divine revelation, sc., the Scriptures and unwritten
traditions, so that we can speak of divine revelation being contained partly
in the Bible, and partly in the aforementioned traditions. Before the
Reformation, during the 16th century, at the Co'uncil of Trent, and subsequent to it, many Catholic theologians would answer this question in the
affirmative. At all these times, however, other theologians would either
deny it or, which is much more common, state that this is not the best
way of putting the question, i. e., that the problem is not quite so simple
as that.
The merit of Father Tavard's treatment of this question lies, first of all,
in his having showed clearly that throughout the entire history of the
Church (and even during the time of the polemic of the counter-Reformation) primacy is always given to the Sacred Scriptures as a source of
coming to know the Word of God. He also rightly insists that at all times
some Catholic authors have stated flatly that Scripture suffices as a source
of revelation.4
For all this, the reviewer should like to suggest that Father Tavard
seems so to interpret the doctrine of the Council of Trent that it appears
almost illegitimate to hold that divine revelation has been transmitted
partim in the Holy Scriptures and partim through unwritten traditions.
It is an established fact that the Council did consider a text on the acceptance of the sources of revelation in which the terms partim • • . partim
were employed, but that in the final draft of the decree these terms do
not appear. Rather, we read " ... hanc veritatem et disciplinam contineri
in libris scriptis et sine scripto traditionibus, etc." 5 Still the reason for
the deletion of these words is not revealed in any of the diaries of the
conciliar Fathers, nor in the minutes of the meetings of the commission
'Fr. Congar points out that Cardinal Newman expressed this view in the
Essay on the. Development of Christian Doctrine. Cf. "Sainte Ecriture et Sainte
Eglise," Rev. des Sc. Phil. et Theol., XLIV (1960), p. 81.
• Deer. de Symbolo--de canonicis Scripturis (Sess. IV, 8 April, 1846), D. 788.
This entire text should be read carefully.
.

BOOK REVIEWS

611

which dealt with this matter. Another author has suggested, rather forcefully, that this silence is an indication that the deletion had no significance
as regards the sentiments of the members of the commission and the
conciliar Fathers. 6
Father Tavard is certainly right in stating that the Council " focused
attention on apostolicity, whether Scriptural or extra-Scriptural, as the
hallmark of Revelation" (p. 197). It is for this reason that one might
venture to suggest that, whatever the contingent reason for the deletion
of the partim . . . partim may have been, the striking out is providential.
The present text emphasizes much more the apostolic unity of divine
revelation and its transmission. Here, however, it might be well to quote
a rather lengthy passage to illustrate how the author seems to push this
idea to its extreme limit:
The conception of Scripture and the traditions which was formulated by the Council
of Trent is authoritative for Catholic theology. The story of the debates that led
to the decree points to the meaning of this formulation.
The dynamic element which constitutes the source (fans) of all saving truth
and all Christian behaviour, is the Gospel of Christ, the Word spoken by Christ
and communicated to the Church through the Apostles. It is the living Word.
It carries the power of the Holy Spirit. This dynamic element uses two sets of
vessels: Holy Scripture and traditions. In as far as they convey the same Gospel of
Christ, in as far as they channel the original impetus whereby the Spirit moved the
Apostles, both Scriptures and traditions are entitled to the same adhesion of faith.
For faith reaches Christ and the Spirit whatever the medium used to contact us.
This would logically imply that the whole Gospel is contained in Scripture as
it is also contained in the traditions. Yet this was not made explicit at Trent.
In view of divergences on this among the Bishops, it could hardly have been made
explicit. Nevertheless, the weight of the debates favours this implication. For
the opposite conception, that the Gospel is only partly in Scripture and partly in
the traditions, was explicitly excluded (p. 208; italics added).

The reason for quoting this text in full is that it shows at once the strength
of Father Tavard's presentation of the role that the Bible plays in the
life of the Church, and also the hardiness of his conclusion, a hardiness
which might be questioned on the basis of the lack of evidence. Did the
Conciliar Fathers explicitly exclude the partim . . . partim text as not
faithfully expressing the Catholic tradition on the question? From one
• Lenners, H., S. J., "Scriptura Sola?, Gregorianum, XL (1959), p. 50. "Wenn
die Konzilsviiter zuerst das Dekret mit partim-partim angenornmen haben ohne eine
Bemerkung dazu zu rnachen . . . und wenn sie nachher das Dekret ohne partimpartim wiederum in gleicher Weise angenomrnen haben, ohne eine Bemerkung dazu
zu machen, so diirfte das doch wohl ein Zeichen dafiir sein, dass es nach der Ansicht
der Vater fiir. den Sinn des Dekretes und seine Lehre ohne jede Bedeutung ist,
ob das partim-partim im Dekret gesagt wird oder nicht. Der Sinn des Dekretes
wird dadurch nicht beriirht."

612

BOOK REVIEWS

point of view this is merely an historical question, i. e., what was the mind
of this body of men? From another angle, however, it is important theologically. Certainly the debate is not finished. Father Tavard may be
thanked for having stated the one position with such force.
Now to leave this controversial point, attention ought to be called to
the significance of this doctrine of " the mutual inherence of Church and of
Scripture" (pp. 115 and 142) for Catholic ecclesiology. This notion rules
out when Father Congar calls the " associationist " concept of the Church. 1
In other words, the Sacred Scriptures are not merely a handbook of information and rules composed for and by an ecclesiastical association for
the use of its members. Of course, we do not need to know that the Church
and the Scriptures " mutually inhere " one in the other to have rejected
that sort of concept. The rejection is implicit in the doctrine of the Church
as the Mystical Body. The Church is a mystery! The point here is that
the Word of God in the Church is part of that mystery. The Bible might
be called, in this context, the Word of God upon which the Mystical Body
of the Church is nourished. Insofar as the Bible is a certain documentum
it needs to be certified in the Church. The reason for this is that the
Bible was written for the Church. This is becoming increasingly evident,
for example, with regard to the Gospels. The early catechesis was written
not merely so that the missionaries might have a vade mecum of sermon
material. It was more for the Christian community, especially for the
liturgical worship of the community. We need not necessarily conclude,
however, as Father Tavard seems to, that the reading of a given piece of
literature in the liturgical assembly was the criterion for the establishment
of the biblical canon. (p. 6) .
Still, there is another way of looking at the Bible, i. e., simply as the
inspired Word of God, as a book which contains God's Word, which is
pregnant with Divine Truth. In this sense the Bible is constitutive of the
Church, just as the sacraments are " Church building elements." This is
an opportune concluding point, namely, that Father Tavard's book calls
attention to the truth that the Catholic Church is not merely the Church
of the Seven Sacraments. She is also in a very real sense the Church of
the Word. Perhaps the Protestant Reformation has made Catholic theologians shy away from such expressions. There is no need to be afraid of
this truth, however. As a matter of fact, the stating of the whole truth
about the Church (and this means especially making explicitly the principles of a sound ecclesiology in a theological and not merely apologetic
context) is Catholic ecumenism.
BoNAVENTURE M. ScHEPERs, 0. P.
Dominican House of Studies,
Washington, D. 0.

• Art. cit., p. 86.

BRIEF NOTICES
The Responsibility of the Artist. By JAcQuEs MARITAIN. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1960. Pp.
In this little book Maritain contemplates the artist and his work in
relation to the social community and to his own perfection as a man.
Citing the :traditional distinction between prudence and art, he shows that
while each is formally distinct, art nevertheless because it resides in a man
is indirectly regulated by prudence, so that in the long run the artist will
suffer, as artist, if he ceases to live as a man. Art also must be considered
in relation to the queen of all the virtues, charity, for it is only by growth
in this that an artist may " purify his sources " and arrive, after great
storm and struggle, at some integration between the demands of his work
and his life.
Charity is the key to the responsibility of the artist, for if he loves
truth and his fellowmen he will never seek to corrupt either. It is on the
basis of a refinement of this thought that Maritain sees the role of the
community in censorship. If what the artist does is an incitation to evil
action and not just an attempt to impart ideas (admitting the difficulty
in distinguishing the two), the civil community has a right to interfere.
It is another matter with the supernatural society which is the Church
since the common good here is divine truth communicateQ. to men and the
inner life of grace vivifying them. Ideas disseminated in such a society
obviously cannot be opposed to the truth revealed by God.
The best wine in this book is kept until the end where Maritain discusses
the problems facing the sincere artist who wants to be a saint. His extreme
sensitivity to material beauty, his temptation to taste evil in order to know
it, and to be too much in sympathy with the evil characters he depicts,
all throw up what seem to some artists an insurmountable barrier to
sanctity. "II faudrait etre un saint ... Mais alors on n'ecrirait pas de
roman," is the way Mauriac said it. Maritain does not diminish the difficulty but still finds reasons for encouragement. His words should be read
by all artists fighting the good fight and swimming, as best they can, against
a very considerable stream.
THOMAS R. HEATH, 0. P.
St. Mary's College,
Notre Dame, Indiana

613

614

BRIEF NOTICES

The World a& Will and Representation. By ARTHUR ScHOPENHAUER. Tr.
by E. F. J. Payne. Indian Hills, Colorado: The Falcon's Wing Press,
1958. Vol. I, pp. 584; Vol. II, pp. 687. $17.50.
Schopenhauer shares with Nietzsche the distinction, rare among German
philosophers, of being a writer who is both clear and outspoken, who lightens
his pages with many striking examples, and not infrequently delights the
reader with passages of striking beauty. In fact, he was more of a poet
than a philosopher. One who reads him for his philosophy may find many
insights, acute observations, and an interesting criticism of Kant; but
from the point of view of systematic thought, this voluntaristic and pessimistic view of reality has little to commend it beyond drawing attention
to what is undoubtedly one aspect of reality, yet by no means the principal
one. There is no need here to dwell on the many internal contradictions
and defects that have been pointed out by others, such as Fr. Copleston
in his work on Schopenhauer, and more briefly by J. Collins in his history
of modern European philosophy.
It speaks well for the translation that the reader is hardly aware that
what he is reading is not the original. An introduction explains the translator's aims, and indicates the principal German terms and the vocabulary
adopted to express them, especially where previous translations have been
thought insufficient, or likely to cause confusion. Only recently the full
and original text of Schopenhauer has been made available, largely
owing to the scholarly and constant researches of Dr. Arthur Hiibscher,
president of the Schopenhauer Gesellschaft; it is this text which has been
used in the present edition, thus giving us what must be reckoned the
standard critical edition in English. One is grateful also that the work
appears in two volumes, with all the supplementary chapters later added
by Schopenhauer collected in the second volume. When Schopenhauer refers
to Kant, the translator helpfully gives also the reference to Muller's english
translation of the Critique of Pure Reason; and many readers will be
grateful for his rendering into english, in foot-notes, of the numerous greek
and latin or french quotations which Shopenhauer loved to introduce
into his text. A very complete index adds greatly to the usefulness of this
scholarly work; and the publisher, with these two beautifully bound
volumes, would, we feel sure, please even the fastidious Pessimist, gloomy
Poet, and would-be Philosopher, who was so sure that he, and he alone,
had uncovered the secret of the universe, and would therefore be read as
long as men thirsted after the truth.
AMBROSE

Angelicum, Rome

J. McNxcHOLL, 0. P.

BOOKS
Bright, 0. P., Laurence. Whitehead's Philosophy of Pkyaica (The Philosophy of Science Series). New York: Sheed & Ward, 1960. Pp.
79. 96-.

Brillet, C. Or., Gaston. (Jane Wynne Saul, R. S.C. J., Tr.) Meditations
on the Old Testament-The Psalms. New York: Desclee Co., Inc.,
1960. Pp. 248. $8.60.
Chrosciechowski, M. I. C., Julian. Divine Mercy in the Doctrine and
Prayers of the Church. Stockbridge: The Congregation of Marian
Fathers, 1960. Pp. 90. Paper, 50¢
--. God's Infinite Mercy. Stockbridge: The Congregation of Marian
Fathers, 1959. Pp. 140. Paper, $2.00; Cloth, $2.76.
Combes, Joseph. Le Dessein de la Sagesse Cartesienne: Problemes et Doctrines. Belleconr, France: Emmanuel Vitte, 1960. Pp. 849, with
index.
Cuttat, Jacques-Albert (Pierre De Fontnouvelle with Evis McGrew, Trs.).
The Encounter of Religions. New York: Desclee Company, Inc.,
1960. Pp. 169. $8.60.
Daniel, Norman. Islam and the West: The Making of an Image. Chicago:
$12.50.
Quadrangle Books, Inc., 1960. Pp. 462, with
Danielou, S. J., Jean. (Kathryn Sullivan, R. S.C. J., Tr.) The Christian
Todaty. New York: Desclee Co., Inc., 1959. Pp. 150. $2.75.
De Tonquedec, S. J., Joseph. La PhilollOphie de La Nature: La Nature
en General, Premiere Partie (Deuxieme Fascicule). Pp. 279. 1,800
Fr.; (Troisieme Fascicule). Pp. 279. 1,800 Fr. Paris, France: P.
Lethielleux, 1968.
Dempsey, S. J., Bernard W. The Frontier Wage. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1960. Pp. 899. $6.00.
Duns Scotw Philosophical Association Convention Report, Vol. XXIV1960. Cleveland: Our Lady of Angels Seminary, 1960. Pp. 168.
Fischer, Hubert. An Introduction to a Catholic Catechism. New York:
Herder and Herder, Inc., 1960. Pp. 188. $2.50.
Glanzman, S. J., George S. (Commentary by). The Book of Deuteronomy,
Part I. (Pamphlet Bible Series.) New York: Paulist Press, 1960.
Pp. 79. 76¢
Guardini, Romano. (Elinor Briefs, Tr.). The Conversion of Augwtine.
Westminster: The Newman Press, 1960. Pp. 268, with index. $8.96.

615

616

BOOKS RECEIVED

Hartman, Geoffrey H. Andre Malraux. New York: Hillary House, Publ.
Ltd., 1960. Pp. 103. $MO.
Hebgin, Dame Scholastica and Corrigan, Dame Felicitas, Trs. St. Augustine
on the Psalms (Ancient Christian Writers, Vol. fl9). Westminster:
The Newman Press, 1960. Pp. 860 with indices. $4.50.
Hoskin, Michael A. William Herschel: Pioneer of Sidereal Astronomy
(The Philosophy of Science Series). New York: Sheed & Ward,
1960. Pp. 79. 95¢.
Knox, Ronald and Cox, Ronald. Waiting for Christ. New York: Sheed &
Ward, 1960. Pp. flBfl. $3.50.
Kwant, 0. S. A., Remy C. Encounter. (Duquesne Studies, Philosophical
Series 11). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1960. Pp. 94.
Paper, $fl.50; cloth, $3.fl5.
Leary, S. J., John P, Introduction to Education. New York: Pageant
Press, Inc., 1960. Pp. 176. $3.00.
Lebreton, S. J., Jules. (James E. Whalen, Tr.). The Scriptural Teaching
of the New Testament. Westminster: The Newman Press, 1960.
Pp. 393. $5.50.
Leff, Gordon A. Medieval Thought: From St. Augustine to Ockham.
Chicago: Quadrangle Books, Inc., 1960. Pp. 317, with index. $5.00.
McAuliffe, S. J., Clarentius. De Sacramentis in Genere. St. Louis: B.
Herder Book Co., 1960. Pp. fl39, with index. $4.00.
Manheim, Ralph and Hull, R. F. C., (Trs.); Campbell, Joseph (Ed.).
Spiritual Disciplines: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks. (Bollingen'Series XXX). New York: Pantheon Books, 1960. Pp. 527.
$5.00.

Mohan, Robert Paul (Ed.). (Essays by Rudolf Allers, Thomas P. Neill,
Dietrich Von Hildebrand, John C. H. Wu, and Francis J. Connell.)
Technology and Christian Culture. District of Columbia: The
Catholic University of America Press, 1960. Pp. 150. $3.95.
Moriarty, S. J., Frederick L. (Commentary by). The Book of Numbers,
Part 1. The Book of Numbers, Part 2. Pp. 80. (Pamphlet Bible
Series.) New York: Paulist Press, 1960. Pp. 96. Copy, 75¢; annual
subscription, $7.50.
Morris, 0. S.M., Hilaire. Philosophy for Beginners. Westminster: The
Newman Press, 1960. Pp. fl58, with vocabulary and index. $3.95.
Pontificia Facolta Teologica Napoletana. Studi di Scienze Ecclesiastiche
(Studi di Scienze Sacre). Naples, Italy: Pontificia Facolta Teologica
Napoletana (Aloisiana), S. Luigi, 1960. Pp. 351, with index.
Pozo, S. I., Candido. La Teoria del Progreso Dogmatico en los Teologoa

BOOKS RECEIVED

617

de la Escuela de Salamanca 1526-1644. (Bibliotheca Theologica Hispana, Series 1•-Tomo 1.) Madrid, Spain: Oficina de Publicaciones
del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1959. Pp. 269,
with index.
Reinhardt, Kurt F. The Existentialist Revolt. New York: Frederick
with index. Paper, $1.75;
Ungar Publishing Co., 1960. Pp.
cloth, $5.00.
Robert, A. and Tricot, A. (Trs.). Guide to the Bible, Vol. I. New York:
Co., Inc., 1960. Pp. 838, with index. $8.00.
Rosier, 0. Carm., lrenaeus. (Ilona Ricardo, Tr.) I Looked for God's
Absence. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1960. Pp. 231. $3.95.
Russell, S. J., John. Science and Metaphysics. (The Philosophy of Science
Series.) New York: Sheed & Ward, 1960. Pp. 80. 95¢.
Schilpp, Paul A. Kant's Pre-Critical Ethics. (Second Edition.) Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1960. Pp. 199, with index. $6.75
per volume.
--

(Ed.). The Philosophy of C. D. Broad. New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1960. Pp. 878, with index. $1UO.

Schopenhauer, Arthur (Konstantin Kolenda, Tr.). Essay on the Freedom
of the Will. New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1960. Pp. 103. 80¢.
Taft, Charles P. and Felknor, Bruce L. Prejudice and Politics. (Freedom
Pamphlets.) New York: Anti-Defamation League of B'Nai B'Rith,
1960. Pp. 55. 35¢.
Van Dijk, O.F.M., S. J.P., and Walker, J. Hazelden. The Origins of the
Modern Roman Liturgy. Westminster: The Newman Press, 1960.
Pp. 617, with indices. $10.50.
Vann, O.P., Gerald. Morals and Man. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960.
Pp. 223. $3.50.
Weisheipl, 0. P., James A. The Development of Physical Theory in the
Middle Ages. (The Philosophy of Science Series.) New York:
Sheed & Ward, 1960. Pp. 92. 95¢.
Welty, 0. P., Eberhard. A Handbook of Christian Social Ethics: Volume 1,
Man in Society. New York: Herder and Herder, Inc., 1960. Pp. 411,
with index. $6.95.
Woroniecki, 0. P., H. (Tr. from the original Polish). The Mystery of
Divine Mercy. Stockbridge: The Marian Fathers Mercy of God
Apostolate, 1959. Pp. 129. Paper, $1.75; cloth, $2.50.

THE GENERAL INDEX TO THE THOMIST
VoL. XXIII (1960)

INDEX OF AUTHORS
BECKLEY, Q. F. Review of World Crisis and the Catholic. A Symposium.
CARRoLL, E. R. Review of Die Gedanken des heiligen Albertm
Magnus uber die Gottes-mutter by Albert Fries, C.SS. R. .
CoFFEY, J. R. Review of The Meaning and Matter of History by
Martin C. D'Arcy.
COLLINS, J. M. Review of A New Critique of Theoretical Thought.
Vol. II by H. Dooyeweerd. .
CoLLIN's, J. P. God's Eternal Law. .
DEHNERT, E. J. Empiricism and Aesthetics.
DE LETTER, P. Reparation of Our Fallen Nature.
GRISEZ, G. G. Review of Elements of Christian Philosophy by Etienne
Gilson. .
HEss, M. W. The Christian Apostolate and Modern Philosophy. .
KELLEY, M. Review of Metaphysics and Ideology by W. 0. Martin./
KwcKER, H. R. Ockham and Efficient Causality. .
LENNON, J. L. The Notion of Experience. .
McDERMOTT, T. S. The Subject of Predicamental Action.
O'BRIEN, T. C. Reflexion on the Question of God's Existence in Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics.
Part I .
Part II .
Conclusion .
RoVER, T. D. Review of Christ and Apollo by William F. Lynch, S. J.
ScHEPERS,B. M. Review of The Riddle of Roman Catholicism by Dr.
Jaroslav Pelikan. .
--. Review of Holy Writ or.Holy Church by G. Tavard, A.A.
STocK, M. E. Some Moral Issues in Psychoanalysis. .
--. Review of The Phenomenon of Man by P. T. de Chardin.
STUHLMUELLER, C. Catholic Biblical Scholarship and College Theology.
WEISHEIPL, J. A. Review of Epistemology by L. M. Regis, O.P. .

619

PAGE

180
478

125
599
497
90
654
448
845
488
106
815
189
1

1

585

607
148

588
287

620

INDICES OF VOLUME XXIII

INDEX OF ARTICLES

(1960)

PAGE

Action, The Subject of Predicamental ---. T. S. McDERMOTT.
189
Aesthetics, Empiricism and ---. E. J. DEHNERT. .
90
Apostolate, The Christian-- and Modern Philosophy. M. W.
HESS. .
345
Biblical Scholarship, Catholic--- and College Theology. C. STuHLMUELLER. .
588
Catholic Biblical Scholarship and College Theology. C. STUHLMUELLER.
538
Christian Apostolate, The -- and Modern Philosophy. M. W.
HESS.
345
College Theology, Catholic Biblical Scholarship and ---. C.
STUHLMUELLER.
538
Efficient Causality, Ockham and--. H. R. KLocKER.
106
Empiricism and Aesthetics. E. J. DEHNERT. .
90
Eternal, God's --Law. J.P. CoLLINS. .
497
Experience, The Notion of---. J. L. LENNON.
315
Fallen Nature, Reparation of Our---. P. DE LETTER.
564
497
God's Eternal Law. J. P. CoLLINS.
God's Existence, Reflexion on the Question of--- in Contemporary
Thomistic Metaphysics. T. C. O'BRIEN.
1, 211, 362
Law, God's Eternal ---. J. P. CoLLINS. .
497
Metaphysics, Reflexion on the Question of God's Existence in Contemporary Thomistic---. T. C. O'BRIEN. .
1, 211, 362
Moral Issues, Some--- in Psychoanalysis. M. E. STocK. .
143
Notion, The--- of Experience. J. L. LENNON. .
315
Oakham and Efficient Causality. H. R. KLOCKER. .
106
Philosophy, The Christian Apostolate and Modern ---. M. W.
345
HEss.
Predicamental Action, The Subject of---. T. S. McDERMOTT. . 189
Psychianalysis, Some Moral Issues in---. M. E. STOCK. .
143
Question of God's Existence, Reflexion on the--- in Contemporary
1, 211, 362
Thomistic Metaphysics. T. C. O'BRIEN. .
Reflexion on the Question of God's Existence in Contemporary
1, 211, 362
Thomistic Metaphysics. T. C. O'BRIEN. .
564
Reparation of Our Fallen Nature. P. DELETTER. .
Some Moral Issues in Psychoanalysis. M. E. STOCK.
143
Subject, The --- of Predicamental Action. T. S. McDERMOTT.
189
Thomistic Metaphysics, Reflexion on the Question of God's Existence
1, 211, 362
in Contemporary --. T. C. O'BRIEN. .

INDICES OF VOLUME XXIII

(1960)

INDEX OF BOOK REVIEWS

PAGE

D'ARcY, M. C., The Meaning and Matter of History. (J. R. Coffey). 125
DE CHARDIN, P. T., The Phenomenon of Man. (M. E. Stock). .
ft95
DooYEWEERD, H., A New Critique of Theoretical 'Thought Vol. II.
(J. M. Collins). ,
599
FRIES, ALBERT, Die Gedanken des heiligen Albertus Magnus iiber die
Gottesmutter. (E. R. Carroll). ,
478
GILSON, ETIENNE, Elements of Christian Philosophy. (G. G. Grisez). 448
LYNCH, W. F., Christ and Apollo. (T. p. Rover). .
585
MARTIN, W. 0., Metaphysics and Ideology. (M. Kelley). .
488
PELIKAN, JAROSLAV, The Riddle of Roman Catholicism. (B. M.
Schepers). .
ft90
REGis, L. M., Epistemology. (J. A. Weisheipl). .
ft87
TAVARD, G., Holy Write or Holy Church. (B. M. Schepers).
607
180
World Crisis and the Catholic. A Symposium. (Q. F. Beckley).