THE THOMIST
A SPECULATIVE QUARTERLY REVIEW
OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY

EDITORS:

THE DoMINICAN

FATHERS oF THE PRoviNCE oF ST. JosEPH

Publishers: The Thomist Press, Washington, D. C. 20017

VoL. XXXII

JANUARY, 1968

No.1

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY: THE THEOLOGIAN IN
THE PRESENCE OF THE REVEALED GOD

T

PART!

HE CHURCH lives and contemplates the Mystery o£
the Father, Son and Holy Spirit communicated to her.
Even though a certain knowledge o£ the revealed God
is possible (Denz.-Schon. 3016), there will remain necessarily
an overall darkness, because it is the real God who is known:
thus one who is infinite sheer Act and, therefore, incomprehensible. (Denz. 167; 367; 525; 616; 2669; 3016) . God, in being
known, must at the same time remain unknown; otherwise, it
would not be God who was known at all.
The problem o£ the transcendence and the immanence o£
God examined in the noetic sphere presents a bewildering
number o£ issues and aspects which will always exact rather
delicate treatment. This is so especially today when one finds
all varieties o£ opinions steadily gaining acceptance, ranging
£rom the hyper-immanence o£ Teilhard to the extreme tran1

ANTHONY J. KELLY

scendent accentuation of J. B. Metz. 1 The aim of this
study is to consider our theological knowledge of the Mystery
of the revealed God precisely as affected in its modalities and
dynamism by the divine transcendence. In this way we hope
to make a contribution to the theory of our theological knowledge and so help to clear away false problems, to alert the
theologian to the dignity and the mystery of his task, and
finally to throw light on some principles of theological pedagogy
which will form the student in a true sense of the transcendent
God. A general Thomistic standpoint recommends itself as
a flexible viewpoint from which to assess and interpret the
multiple problems that confront theology in this area.
A good deal of work has been done on allied topics, and
certain problems have arisen in the general area which will
determine, each in its own way, our precise problematic. These
points of difficulty and discussion can be isolated under three
headings:
1. Here we isolate, as a special point o£ recent discussion,

the Thomistic approach to the Mystery o£ the revealed God
and the modem criticism of this approach. This comes from
those who would favor a more radical salvation-historical
method in theology. This latter, though it appreciates the
orthodoxy of the Thomistic schema of approach, finds it also
strangely removed and cut off from the concrete terms of
revelation. 2 It is felt that, when too large a stress is laid
on the Unity of the divine essence, the saving Mystery of
the Trinity is excessively underplayed in theology and life.
1 Cf. H. Urs Von Balthasar, "Die Gottvergessenheit und die Christen,"Hochland
57 (1964-5), 1-11. Also J. B. Metz, "Die Zukunft des Glaubens in einer Hominisierter Welt," Weltverstandniss im Glauben, edited by Metz himself (Mainz, 1965),

• G. Martelet, "Theologie und Heilsiiconomie in der Christologie der 'Tertia,'"
Gott in Welt II (Freiburg, 1964), 3-43; K. Rahner, "Dreifaltige Gott als Transzendenter Urgrund der Heilsgeschichte," Mysterium Salutis II (Einsiedeln, 1967),

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

s

Whereas this study does not intend to "' solve " this problem,
it cannot but be influenced by it, as will be seen.
2. In recent years, there has arisen quite an intense debate
on the personalism of St. Thomas's trinitarian theology. If
the problem is accepted as it has been expressed, it seems that
A. Malet in his much-quoted work, Personne et Amour dans
la Theologie de S. Thomas d'Aquin (Paris, 1956), had decisively vindicated the theology of St. Thomas in this respect. 3
However, at this later date, when one reflects back on
the issue, it can be suspected that the problematic in the
framework of which the discussion took shape may not have
been in every way genuine. 4 Consequently it can be asked
whether a clearer understanding of the special character of
our theological knowledge would not have precluded the possibility of such a problem arising in the first place, or at least
would have allowed it to be approached correctly. After all,
God is these three divine Persons; hence any theological
problematic that implicitly allows that God could primarily
be something else is necessarily suspect in its formulation and
in its implied noetic theory. This present discussion will proceed with an eye to this problem and with the intention of
making a contribution to the answering of it.
S. Finally, the question may be asked, as it has been asked
by scores of theologians and philosophers before this: what
is the role of the concept in our theological knowledge? There
is, as is well known, a variety of answers; but if this present
study intends to give anything like an adequate contribution
to the theory of our theological knowledge of God, especially
in those aspects touching on God's transcendence over our
knowledge, we must at least make mention of the main streams
of opinions and try to discern the contribution of each.
3 The criticism of the classic Thomistic
approach had been extreme: cf. S.
Boulgakof, Le Paraclet (Paris, 1944), 117 f; V. Lossky, Essai sur la theologie
d'Orient (Paris, 1944) .
• The most searching appraisal of the problem and of Malet's attempt to answer
it is F. Von Gunten, "La primaute de Ia Personne et Amour dans Ia theologie
trinitaire de S. Thomas d'Aquin," Angelicum 35 (1958), 73-90.

4

ANTHONY J. KELLY

There is the widely accepted classic Thomistic opm10n of
Penido which stresses above all the abstract nature of the
concept. 5 Then, in reaction to this, we have great stress
put on the role of judgment in our knowledge of God. 6
Finally, there is the recent theory of E. Schillebeeckx, who
sketches for us the objective dynamism of the concept in our
philosophical and theological knowledge of God, which remains
in the long run non-conceptual, but the direction of which is
determined by the concept, though the concept in no way
expresses the divine Reality/
All these theories are claimed to be found " literaliter " in
the doctrine of St. Thomas. Whereas it does not fall to us to
give an exegesis of the texts of St. Thomas on this whole subject,
we must try to bring the worthwhile elements of a very rich
Thomistic tradition together into a coherent theory, at least
in regard to the precise point of the present discussion.
Such, then, is the general framework within which the discussion will be conducted. By considering the whole range and
dynamism of our knowledge of God in its subjective and
objective implications in the manner in which it is affected
by the continual beyondness of divine Reality, even given
the fact of revelation, we hope to delineate the vital structure
of theological knowledge in relation to the revealed God. Thus
principles may be reached that could have a deep influence
on our understanding of the nature of theology, of its basic
method, and of the pedagogy necessary for the communication
of this unique type of knowledge.
• M. Penido, Le Role de l'Analogie en Theologie dogmatique (Paris, 1931), 189 If.
and passim.
• E. Gilson, Le Thomisrne (Paris, 1948), 150-155; H. Rouillard, Karl Barth II
(Paris, 1957), 197-9!04; C. de More-Pontigibaud, du Fini a l'lnfini (Paris, 1957),
35 If; H. de Lubac, Sur les Chemins de Dieu (Paris, 1956), 144 If; 9!47 If; F. Genuyt,
Le Mystere de Dieu (Tournai, 1969!), 85; B. Montagnes, La doctrine de l'Analogie
de l'Etre d'apres S. Thomas (Louvain, 1963).
• E. Schillebeeckx, Revelation et TMologie (Brussels, 1965), 9!35 f; 105-109, etc.
This author presents his theory with a careful textual analysis of the works of St.
Thomas; he finds that we do not apply the content of the concept as such to God,
according to St. Thomas, "bien qu'il n'a pas pousse Ia chose a fond .•.. " P. !i135.

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

5

I. THE HIDDEN GoD
This general section will serve as an introduction to the
meaning, relevance and extension of the special aspect under
consideration of the divine transcendence with regard to our
theological knowledge.
1. Theology in the presence of God

In the act of faith man affirms the reality of the revealed
God, not in the clarity of intellectual vision but in the dark,
personal yielding of oneself to the Word of God through an
inner obedience to His mysterious call. There results a kind
of tension in the believing mind. There indeed exists that
tranquillity of mind in the possession of the Supreme Truth,
the fulfilment of everything the human spirit anticipates; 8
however, man remains in the full conscious possession of his
powers of reflection, and this continues to take place within
the very structure of the act of faith. The believer is confronted with the Mystery of the divine Three calling him into
communion with themselves. 9 This is, then, an all-meaningful
Mystery, not merely an intellectual puzzle or a series of propositions which have to be taken "on faith." The believer is in
the presence of the supreme Reality of his life, which in the
natural thrust of his mind, he seeks to know ever more deeply.
Thus, because this mystery of life and grace is so ultimately
meaningful and because the mind can reflect, theology arises:
" word about God," the understanding, even the conceptualization of the revealed Mystery within the limits of man's
capabilities. The conceptual schemata and expressions that
result, the systematization of thought and proposition, are all
living from the presence of the Ineffable God personally given
to man in the depths of his being.
8 " Omnia cognoscentia implicite cognoscunt Deum in quolibet cognito," de Verit.,
ad 1; "omnia ... in quantum desiderant esse, desiderant Dei simiq.
a.
litudinem et Deum implicite," ibid., ad
Cf. J. Mouroux, "Presence de la Raison
dans la Foi," Sciences Ecclesiastiques 17 (1965), 181 f.
• Cf. Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Paragraph

6

ANTHONY J. KELLY

Theology, consequently, is nothing more than faith seeking
to understand itself; faith prolonging itself into reflection. The
more ordered and precise this reflection is, the more scientific
and systematic theology becomes. 10 This reflection of faith
will vary from person to person, and indeed, as experience has
shown, from age to age, as it is influenced by what is currently
considered to be the paradigm case of knowledge or systematic
reflection. In the theology of St. Thomas we see this reflection
on the Mystery of God embodied in the intellectual life of
his age and taking to itself the methods and patterns of
scientific procedure then employed.
For St. Thomas, God was the " subiectum theologiae," which
means, in Aristotelian language, that God was the Reality
which the scientific mind sought to penetrate. 11 This penetration of the " subiectum " was the whole aim of the scientific
procedure. To this purpose the data was marshaled, its various
aspects classified, hypotheses advanced, principles isolated, conclusions drawn. These conclusions were the "obiectum" in Aristotelian terminology. As such, the "objectum" provided the
medium through which the mind possessed the " subiectum "
and appropriated its perfection. 12 Through the confusion of the
object with the subject in theological science there resulted
the long barren years of "Konklusionstheologie."
Clearly it
would be quite unjust to characterize the theology of St.
Thomas in this way, as has sometimes been done. 13
As God is the " subiectum " of theology in the Thomistic
approach, it is implied that everything that theology considers
is directed to the manifestation of the divine Reality," ad manifestationem subiecti "; 14 thus creation, the Church, the sacra10 Summa Theol., II-IT, q.
a. 10: "Cum enim homo habet promptam voluntatem ad credendum, diligit veritatem creditam, et super earn excogitat et amplectitur, si quas rationes ad hoc invenire potest."
11 Cf.
Cajetan, In Post. Analyt. (Lyons, 1957),
John of St. Thomas,
Cursus Theol., in I, I, 9 (Rome, 1934).
12 R. Gagnebet,
" Dieu, Sujet de la Theologie selon S. Thomas d'Aquin,"
Analecta Gregoriana 68 (195·1), 41-55.
13 For example, G. SOhngen, "Theologie
als Konklusionstheologie," Mysterium
Balutis I, 967
"In Boet. de Trin., q. 5, a. 4, ad 3.

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

ments, above all the Incarnation are to be considered as " quid
Dei," each in its own way contributing to a deeper understanding of the divine Mystery. Theology, then, is entirely
taken up in the contemplation of the " ratio Dei," the Mystery
of the inner life of God, known only to Himself, and to others
through revelation. 15
This concentration on the divine Reality in the theology
of St. Thomas and the tradition after him determines the
character of this theology in a marked eschatological perspective. Theology is a share in God's knowledge of Himself and
a foretaste of the vision that the blessed enjoy; all this contributes to marking Thomistic theology with a supra-temporal
view of things, whereas at the same time it is confident of
itself as the highest form of wisdom, enabling the possessor to
judge of all reality according to its deepest explanation,-God,
in His trinitarian life.16
Notwithstanding the obvious and universal vadidity of this
approach, some questions must remain open, especially in view
of certain contemporary theological developments. There are
points of difficulty. From the beginning this "scientia theologica " was in danger of absorbing from Aristotle an inclination to an idealistic metaphysics (which, paradoxically, was
quite against the original intention of the Greek philosopher), in
which the validity and the value of the singular, as such, was
compromised by the excessive dominance of the conceptual
universaJ.l 7 We can see this element in the approach of St.
Thomas, though just how much the actual performance of
this theological synthesis overcome this initial shortcoming
is another question. 18
An unavoidable aspect of the classic synthesis of St. Thomas
Summa Theol., I, q. 1, aa. 6-7.
Ibid., a. 7.
17 J. de Finance, Etre et Agir dans la Philosophie de S. Thomas d'Aquin (Rome,
15

16

1960)' 13-28.
18 Account would necessarily have to be takeu of the profoundly historical treatment that St. Thomas accorded to Law and the Mysteries of our Lord's life, to give
two obvious instances. Cf. Summa Theol., I-II, qq. 99-108; III, qq. 36-39, 41-46, etc.

8

ANTHONY J. KELLY

is its built-in tendency to prescind from the singular events of
history, to become unhistorical in this sense. It can easily be
forgotten that it is only through the "economia" that God
reveals Himself at all, and " when theology forgets the singular
things of God's Love, it tends to become pure deduction." 19
This tendency we see expressed in the whole scholastic tradition; in its gradual veering away from the Scriptures, it became,
to some extent, imprisoned in its own abstract structure. 20
The notion of a systematic Aristotelian " scientia " in theology
does encounter a difficulty. God, who is the "subiectum scientiae," is not an impersonal abstract Deity but the Living
God, the Mystery of these three divine Persons actively
engaged in intimate dialogue with man. To this extent detached scientific enquiry is not possible, as it is in other
sciences.
Whereas the value of St. Thomas's synthesis is so obvious
that it need not be stressed here, one cannot but feel sympathy
for those modem theologians who do not feel at home in the
rigid scientific procedure of the " ordo doctrinae" when treating of God. This hardly takes away from the accomplishment
of the " Doctor Communis "; but it does bring out that the
Living God of revelation radically transcends any one scientific
approach. This we shall bring out more and more as the study
proceeds. For non-Catholic theology, the generalization seems
adequately substantiated, " that the scientific point of view
is that which abstracts from true theology." 21
To anyone at all sensitive to the question, one thing must
be clear: any extreme view must be avoided, if one intends to
build on the riches of the past and be open to the insights of
the present. Certainly, theology is a unique science, having,
as it does, a unique scope of inquiry. It is like: the nomothetic

a

M. Chenu, Introduction
l'Etude deS. Thomas d'Aquin (Paris, 1960) ,. 270 ff.
This was, of course, in great contrast to the approach and practice of St.
Thomas himself; his magnificent Scriptural commentaries assure us of his immersion
in the sacred text itself.
21 M. Dupuy,
"Experience spirituelle, et Theologie comme science," Nouvelle
Revue Theologique 86 (1964), 1137.
19
2o

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

9

sciences in that it does deal in abstract laws that are verified in
the divine Reality, whereas, at the same time, it has affinities
with the idiographic sciences which deal with a uniquely given
reality, such as history, for instance. 22 The point to stress is
that the revealed God,, as presented to the mind of the theologian, is beyond the confines of any one approach; the divine
Reality demands that we make both approaches to it, and yet
it exhausts both approaches, as we shall see more clearly later.
St. Thomas serenely admits the limitations of all theology
with regard to the knowledge of its "subiectum ": "non possumus scire de Deo, quid est " 23-even though it would appear
that he starts out to do precisely that. However, the analogy
of science is saved, because God can be known through His
effects, and these can take the place of a definition of the divine
Reality. 24 We must be on our guard against taking this statement too rigidly, because it must be remembered that in the first
place no effect of God is adequate to express Him to the mind
of man; and second, the effects of God, above all those in the
history of His saving dealings with men, in themselves preclude
scientific classification in the strict sense, because of their
uniquely inter-subjective character; and third,, the highly analogical character of the science of theology becomes plain when
the peculiar character of its subaltemation is registered. 25 In
the ordinary case of subaltemation the higher science, whose
principles the lower science uses, is at least in the range of the
intellect in its present state. This is not the case in theology;
the knowledge of the principles, of God seen in Himself, is
necessarily restricted to the next life, in the beatific vision.
So, on the one hand, we must naturally respect and profit
from the special approach of St. Thomas to the revealed God;
on the other, it seems furthest from his intentions to take the
categories of science too rigidly or formally, for in the notion
Ibid., 1159.
Summa Theol., I, q. 1, a. 7, ad I.
24 Ibid.: " sicut in aliquibus scientiis philosophicis demonstratur aliquid de causa
per effectum,. accipiendo effectum loco definitionis causae."
25 Ibid., a. !l.
22

23

10

ANTHONY J. KELLY

of science itself applied to God, of the subject of that science,
of the method in that science, of the aim and the subalternation
within it., the revealed God stands out in His living presence as
a transcendent Reality, always necessarily beyond the scientific
penetration and abstract analysis. Hence our knowledge of the
revealed God, though it may indeed follow the path that St.
Thomas has laid down, will profit from knowing the limits of
this and every approach, and eventually come to a deeper
consciousness of the divine Reality.
fl. God and man's present manner of knowing

Since the theologian does his work within the framework of
a specifically human existence, it will be well to note the
limitations of our knowledge of God which are inherent in the
present state of affairs. As spirit, man is radically open to the
infinite scope of being; but in the space and time of his
embodied existence this fundamental openness is characterized
by the terms of the present condition.
There is a radical contrast between God's manner of knowing
and our own; God's knowledge of Himself, in the infinite act of
sheer existence, is immediate and all embracing. Within the
all-actual Reality of God there is a supreme consciousness;
within this, there is a sublime act of Self-identification which
exhausts all that God is. Thus, God is Self-evident to Himself,
in perfect simplicity, actuality and immediacy. 26
Our manner of knowing God is obviously quite different in
this life. It is the same whether we speak of that knowledge
of God accessible to us through the intelligibility of creation,
or whether it comes to us through faith in the God of grace,
living and acting in the history of man. Our knowledge is fragmented into many different concepts, propositions, images and
symbols, for the human intelligence in this life cannot attain
the simplicity of God in Himself. However, man does grasp
and name the divine Reality in accordance with the present
manner of his existence, namely, that of an embodied spirit,
•• Ibid., q. 14, aa. 1-4.

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

11

in that the divine Reality is represented to him in sensible
realities from which his knowledge takes its rise. 27 Only in this
world is our knowledge now at home; the things of this world
are connatural to us. Since man is spirit-in-matter, he is
naturally ordained to know a spiritual object; but since his
existence is that of an embodied spirit-person, this object is
attained precisely in that it exists in matter. Hence being shines
forth for man only in the " essences of material things," 28 and
we are forced to consider the towering Mystery of the Trinity in
terms of the lowly realities of this world. 29
The human mind, then, is bound inextricably to the realities
of this world., even when going beyond it. 30 Man knows m
terms of the realities of this world, and this is the state of
man's knowing that revelation has respected: "the ray of
divine revelation comes to us according to our manner of
knowing." 31
Through revelation God engages the human mind through
the realities which are actual for man. The vitality and completeness of our engagement with the divine Mystery is thus
assured, even though a basic inevidence must remain, for we
do not behold God as "He-is-in-Himself" but insofar as He
manifests Himself to us through the communications of nature
and grace. St. Thomas states that the natural knowledge we
have of God through the intelligibility of creation is completed
by "plures et excellentiores effectus," and "aliqua attribuimus
ex divina revelatione ad quae ratio naturalis non pertingit, ut
Deum esse trinum et unum." 32
Note the severely ontic and objective approach of St. Thomas
Ibid., q. 84, a. 7.
•• Ibid.
"Intellectus noster non potest pertingere ad ipsam simpli•• Ibid., q.
a.
citatem divinam secundum quod in se est consideranda. Et ideo secundum modum
suum, divina apprehendit et nominat, id est secundum quod inveniuntur in
creaturis."
30 Ibid., q. 84, a. 7:
"per huiusmodi naturas visibilium rerum ... in invisibilium
rerum aliqualem oognitionem ascendit."
31 In Boet. de Trin., q. 1, a.
32 Summa Theol.,. I, q.
a. 13.
27

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ANTHONY J. KELLY

to revelation. His theology stresses the objectively real character of the divine Truth, as distinct from the personal, intersubjective bearing of that Truth, which of course, it denies
in no way. It brings out the real advance in our knowledge
of God through revelation, " aliqua attribuimus ad quae ratio
naturalis non pertingit." 33 Also, it must be stated, although
St. Thomas does speak about our knowledge of God with a
great stress on the " effects " of God, the Incarnation must be
taken as the "potissimus effectus" expressing God. 34 Given
the general validity of this ontic approach with its strong
objective accent, the question arises: is this approach completely adequate? Does it not demand, to be ultimately true
to itself, an explication of historical and immediately personal
intersubjective elements that it has hitherto left too little expressed? This question will occupy us further and more exhaustively later on in the study we are making.
St. Thomas usually sketches the marks of our knowledge of
God by making use of the "an est." and "quid est" distinction.35 He consistently states that we know the "an est" of
the divine Reality under various aspects, but not the " quid
est." 36 The general basis for the use of this distinction is the
conviction that there is indeed something truly positive in our
knowledge of God, yet it is God whom we are attempting to
know positively, and therefore God who cannot be known in
the infinite simplicity of Himself in this life.
This " an est " seemingly does not mean knowing the existence of God in general, but it does imply that we know that
certain attributes and the Trinity of Persons are in the divine
Reality. Thus it implies that it is only through a multiplicity
and fragmentation of concepts and judgments that our minds
""Ibid.
••I Sent., d. 3, q. 1, a. 4; ad 4: " ... (Philosophi) non cognoverunt bonitatem
quantum ad potissimum effectum ipsius, scilicet incarnationem et redemptionem."
35 In Boet. de Trin., q. 1, a.
q. 6, a. 3: q. 1, a. 4, ad 10; ad Rom., c. 1, lect. 6.
For a note on the position of St. Thomas compared with St. Albert and predecessors,
see H. Dondaine, " Cognoscere de Deo quid est," Recherches de theologie ancienne
et medievale
(1955)'
•• In Boet. de Trin., q. 1, a. 4, ad 10.

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

18

are directed toward the fulness of the Mystery of God. This
multiplicity of judgments in our qualification of the divine
Reality is the thematized expression of the state of our knowledge before the infinite and hence ineffable Reality of what
God is in Himsel£.87
The quality of each of these affirmations is, first, that we
know that each is true; and second, that there is expressed in
each, formally, some reality which is to be found in the
Mystery of God. There is no question, however, of expressing
this as it is "in Reality," in God; the manner of our knowing
the reality and the mode of its existence in God are infinitely
apart. Notwithstanding this powerlessmess of the human mind
before Gad-in-Himself, there is implied some confused knowledge, in a way analogous to the ordinary case when we question
the existence of something; a confused knowledge is implied,
otherwise the very question would be impossible. 38 While this
general observation is valid, we must be careful not to take it
too literally. In the ordinary case of systematico-scientific procedure the object of the study is roughly designated by knowing
the general type of the thing in question; " genus proximum vel
remotum." 39 But with God, there is no question of genus in
this sense; He cannot be a species contained within the larger
classification of a genus, one of the differentiations of which
would be God. He exhausts the totality of all the perfection of
being. Nor are there any accidental qualities (as in the usual
case) whose appearance might serve to provide the prior
identification of the object of the scientific knowledge. Nevertheless, in place of the generic or accidental knowledge there
can be present a corresponding confused knowledge through
God's own activity, "per modum causae et doctrinae." 40 In
this way we are enabled to make formal affirmations about the
divine Reality, either because the ontological perfections pre87 De Divinis Nominibus, c. 2, lect. 14: "opportet quod Deum intelligamus esst>
supra omne id quod intellectu apprehendere possumus."
•• In Boet. de Trin., q. 6, a. 8.

•• Ibid.
•• I Sent., d. 16, q. 1, a. 8.

14

ANTHONY J. KELLY

sent in the effects must belong to the Cause in a higher way,
or because through sensible realities He has suggested to us the
hidden and exalted Mystery of His inner trinitarian life.
Once more, let us call attention to the thoroughly objective
and ontic expression of the Thomistic distinction we have
attempted to outline. Again, from another point of view 41 this
distinction does seem a little rigid and closed to the full richness and complexity of the situation. Does the fact of God
being for us a Self-disclosing personal Mystery emerge sufficiently? Since God has initiated a dialogue with man, the
knowledge of Him cannot be reduced to the number of conceptual propositions we can make about Him; He is not merely
an object, but a subject, a supremely personal one, acting
towards us. What can be said is that the value of St. Thomas's
terminology consists in bringing out that God, considered as
the supreme Reality, does surpass our adequate conceptualization, in that we can never know the " quid est " of the divine
Reality in this life. Thus the way is left open to explicate,
within the objective framework provided by the Thomistic
synthesis, the intersubjective elements and the subjective bearing of the objective reality, which the classic theological viewpoint of St. Thomas did not require.
To summarize, we can say that, in the valid antic framework
of St. Thomas's approach to God, there is a mediacy, a multiplicity, and a fragmentation of concepts in our affirmations,
because our knowledge is necessarily linked with the realities
of this world. What God is in Himself is left unknown. For
this reason the type of knowledge accessible to us in this life
can be called knowledge of the " an est " of God, known
through the proportioning of the realities of this world to the
Reality which founds them. This antic stress of the Thomistic
approach leaves room for the explication of the interpersonal
aspects, and in a sense, demands this explication; for, after all,
God is a " Thou " in our regard, known intimately in faith as
41 K. Rahner, " Bemerkungen zur Gotteslehre in der Katholischen
Dogmatik,"
Catholica 20 (1966), 1-18.

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

15

communicating with us through the whole span of the history
of salvation.
3. The general negative character of our knowledge of God

As an explication of what has been said up to now, and as
an indication of what we will add in the next few paragraphs,
it can be said that in our knowledge of God there is a certain
predominance of the " via negativa." The qualification is necessary, because it has been remarked that nothing is easier than
collecting series of texts, one group of which would favor the
positive, almost anthropomorphic quality of our knowledge of
God, the other showing just as clearly from the writings of
St. Thomas a startling negative tendency. 42 Obviously, a more
nuanced view of the matter is desirable.
When we consider the Mystery of the revealed God we are
under the necessity of taking the divine Reality both as an
ontic Reality, one "reality" among many (even though "the
many " in this case are the creation of God) , and also as a
Personal Subject in whose Mystery the believer is intimately
involved. The ontic aspect of our knowledge demands from
us a keen realization of the presence of negation in our knowledge, because God, the Creator of all, is infinitely removed
from the finite instances of His creation. The self-disclosure of
God, effected through His saving intervention in the history of
man, demands in our noetic attitude just as keen a realization
of the extraordinary positive quality of our knowledge afforded
us by Revelation. From the outset we cannot speak about our
knowledge of the revealed God without being aware, at least
to some extent, of the two points of reference in that knowledge;
in the interplay of the two, and in their reciprocal complementarity we must look for that special modality of our theological knowledge of God as it is affected by His continual
transcendence.
In passing, it can be noted in reference to the structure of
the Prima Pars that, though St. Thomas is conscious of salva•• M. Penido, op. cit.,

f.

16

ANTHONY J. KELLY

tion history as the locus of our theological knowledge of the
God of Revelation, he expresses it as arising from the " effectus
naturae vel gratiae." 43 This is, as we pointed out before, an
objective and antic expression leading to the knowledge of
the divine Mystery behind the orders of nature and grace; any
quality, e. g., goodness, that we can detect in the effects of
God " ad extra," we attribute to God by whom it is possessed
in an eminent and infinite fulness., although the divine manner
of its existence in God can be known only negatively and
proportionately; the whole movement of the first twenty-six
questions is in this direction. There are ample indications that
this approach is theological, and not merely philosophical; 44
even though the divine Persons in their specifically personal
roles do not yet come into the picture. The " effectus naturae
vel gratiae " in these early questions are taken as the common
product of the Three together in the unity of the one nature
which is known obscurely in the negative and proportionate
manner that we have already made mention of.
When the Mystery of the Trinity comes in for specific
attention, the divine Persons are mentioned in their personalities in a positive manner. 45 However, first of all, they are
considered in this positive way, "ad intra," and only later" ad
extra." 46 When the missions " ad extra," are considered, we
begin to see that the effects of God " ad extra " are in fact the
foundation for the dynamic of Self-communication of the three
divine Persons. An intersubjective relationship begins to appear within the effects in general. 47
Summa Theol., I, q. 1, a. 7, ad 1.
" Le Point du Depart du Traite Thomiste sur Ia Trinite,
Sciences Ecclesiastiques 14
71-87. This auther brings out very well how
the first
questions of the Prima Pars consider, in fact, the one Mystery of the
revealed God, which is the Trinity, though not yet considered precisely in the
respective intelligibility of the three divine Persons in their relative distinction.
45 Summa Theol., I, q.
et seq.
46 Ibid., q. 43, aa. 1-8.
47 Ibid., a. 4, ad 1; a. 5, ad 3: "quantum ad effectum gratiaf!! sic communicant
duae missiones in radice gratiae; sed distinguuntur in effectibus gratiae qui sunt
illurninatio intellectus et inflarnmatio affectus .... "
43

« Cf. C. Strater,

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

17

Though a number of theologians have sympathetically
pointed out that the Incarnation does not get maximum
appreciation in the schema of the Summa/ 8 nonetheless, it is
quite clear that there is a depth of personal communication
present in all the ontic effects, above all, of grace. Thus, in
general, we can see that the broad movement of the Summa
in treating of God is from the ontic and objective to the intersubjective, from the transcendent Reality of God affirmed in
negation, to the " Thou " of each of the divine Persons as
known in the missions.
To take up the thread once more, let us look a little more
closely at the dialectic of positive and negative in our knowledge of God. When we say that our knowledge is negative, or
employs a negative process in affirming God, we do not mean
to say that the affirmation itself is of a weak or conditional
kind; nor do we deny that we are affirming the divine Reality
in its existential fulness. Every negation about God presupposes a prior affirmation, otherwise there would be nothing
to deny. 49 The affirmation is always latent in the negation;
what is affirmed is something that we know, through reason
or revelation, must be attributed to God; what we deny is
something that just as clearly cannot be in the real God. This
is the finite manner of the existence of those realities which we
attributed to God (e. g., fatherhood, sonship, love, wisdom,
knowledge, etc.), although it must be granted that our experience of these entities on the finite level, primarily in their
creaturely mode of existence, enabled our minds eventually to
be orientated toward the divine Mystery.
In the affirmation, then, positive and negative aspects are
involved; there is not a reciprocal cancellation; the negative
element, purifying the affirmation from the finite manner of
48

G. Martelet, "Theologie und Heilsiiconomie in der Christologie der 'Tertia,'"

Gott in Welt II, 3-43; Y. Congar, "Christ in the economy of salvation and in our
dogmatic tracts," Concilium XI, n.
(1966),
K. Rahner, "Bemerkungen zum
Dogmatischen Traktat 'de Trinitate,'" Schriften IV (Einsiedeln,
103-136.
de Pot., q. 7, a. 3, ad 7; Summa Theol., I, q. 1, a.
•• I Sent., d. 34, q. 3, a.
I-II, q.
a. 6; de Div. Nom., c. 1, lect. 3; I Cont. Gent., c. 14.

18

ANTHONY J. KELLY

its original signification, makes the statement truly positive.
The affirmation always triumphs. 50
St. Thomas himself came to see more and more clearly the
transcendence of God over our knowledge; in his later works
he denied absolutely that God can be categorized in any thisworldly genus, not even in a reductive manner. 51 This he had
admitted before. 52 Conversely, what immediately confronts
our intelligences is the finite instances of Being, participations
of divine Being, to be sure, but inadequate to express the
infinite simplicity and actuality of the divine Reality: " only
created and finite being falls within the vision of our intellects,
which altogether fails before the Uncreated and Infinite Being;
and therefore, we understand God to be above everything that
our intellects can ap1;>rehend."53
The negative element must always play a vital role in a true
theology, not to lead the mind to a void of infinite nothingness,
but as directing our knowing to the supreme Personal Reality
in the majesty of its transcendence.
Starting then from these :few general comments, we can
conclude that the mind, engaged in the knowing of God, must,
in a special sense., ever be in motion. Since God can never be
adequately expressed at any stage in man's knowledge, and if
this knowledge already arrived at is to maintain its authenticity, the intelligence must always be moving :forward into a
deeper darkness, leaving behind the finite expressions of the
Godhead it has already reached, as it " intends " the divine
Reality in Itself. The mind seeking to know God must always
thrust itself in the direction of the divine Reality, where it
exists in Itself, and not merely in the representations that the
mind has made of It. In this dynamism the formal indication
of what is " in God " is not renounced, but the way in which
these realities are expressed is successively left behind. God
5

°Cf. H. de Lubac, Sur les Chemins de Dieu ... , 146 f.

Summa Theol., I, q. 3, a. 5.
I Sent., d. 8, q. 4, a. !'l, ad 3; de Pot., q. 7, a. ) , ad 7 (Cf. Capreolus, In I Sent.,
d. 8, q. !'l, quinta conclusio).
•• De Div. Nom., c. !'l, lect. 4.
51
52

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

19

cannot be adequately expressed save by the divine Word Him.
self, and He will not be given immediately to our minds until
we enjoy the beatific vision.
A genuine theology can keep its authenticity only in a
conscious " docta ignorantia " in the presence of the divine
transcendence. This does not mean mere ignorance but a
conscious "unknowing" as the intellect "intends" the divine
Reality in its incomprehensible Self. "We know God through
ignorance, in that in knowing God we know that we do not
know what God is." 54
A refinement of this principle of the ever deeper darkness is
that the whole movement of our knowledge is toward a more
personal realization of the revealed God; the deeper the dark·
ness, the more clearly God in Person is known by the mind.
This negation is the condition of His Self-disclosure. The self despoilment of the mind enables it to receive the divine Mystery
as a Reality to be known; it is a paschal act of the intelligence
by which the highest achievement of the mind is realized in the
moment of its death,-an aspect that J. Mouroux was quick
to point out. 55 This principle of the darkness of our knowledge,
as it were, directed toward the Personal Mystery of God, highlights the fact of the divine transcendence, not merely in a
philosophical sense but also in a theological sense, the transcendence of the revealed God. God, in His revelation, is a
"Known-Unknown" in a special sense; for God calls us into the
sense of His transcendence, in order that the human mind
might realize not only what He is but who He is. As the study
proceeds, this point will be further elaborated.
It is a matter, then, of retaining two seemingly contradictory
points: God must not be placed in some kind of detached transcendence through failure to realize that He has revealed Himself in this transcendence; and yet our knowledge is becoming
more perfect the more negative and dark it becomes. Thus,
to anticipate what will receive fuller treatment later, we can
•• Ibid., c. 7, lect. 4.
55 J. Mouroux, "Presence de la Raison dans la Foi," Sciences Ecclesiastiques 17
(1965)' 190 ff.

flO

ANTHONY J. KELLY

draw attention to two "elements" (to use the most general
word for the present) which are clearly discernible in our knowledge of the revealed God: i) what we might call the formal
element indicating our knowledge of the divine Reality as a
That, an objective Reality, which demands that the mind enter
an ever deeper darkness before the Beyond-ness of God in
regard to all this world's categories; ii) we shall call this
element mysteric, as it refers to the given, personal
subjective aspect of our knowledge, arising from the revelationfaith dialogue, in which God is more and more recognized as
a loving" Thou" in relation to man. 56
To summarize this section, let it be noted that God is
presented to the believing mind, not merely as one objective
reality among many but as the Reality, in whose Mystery the
believer is personally involved, as subject to Subject; hence,
theological thought about God leads to and from a depth of
personal presence of God to the believing thinker; hence it
tends for this reason to escape from an overly univocal classification into a science with God as the " subiectum," because
God is too personal, too present, too historically given, and
too transcendent for this (although all the time it must be
realized that, in a correctly understood analogical sense, St.
Thomas's terminology is valid) .
This inability of the straight scientific structure to approach
adequately the Mystery of God is one specific instance of the
transcendence of God over all human categories.
All that remains to be said on this point is that our knowledge of God is essentially negative in its procedure, if it is going
to be positive in its performance, if it is going to lead to a
deeper and more real affirmation of the real God who has made
Himself known to us.
56 When we say that God is a " That," this also implies that He is a Personal
reality, but we do not directly think of His free, personal action towards us; it is
objective, an ontic affirmation, of necessity abstracting from the concrete instances
of God's concrete historical involvement with man, (His "For-Usness ") in favor
of affirming Him in His objective "In-Se." We will be continually returning to
this point.

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

II.

21

THE KNoWING OF GoD IN THE CoNCEPT OF ouR
CoNCEPTUAL KNowLEDGE

We have sketched the general character of the transcendence
of the revealed God with respect to our knowledge, and indicated some of the elements involved in the dynamism of human
knowing when confronted by the divine Mystery. We can
now take up special aspects of the role of the concept in this
knowledge.
1. The "concept of God"

Our conceptual 57 knowledge is necessarily linked with the
realities of this world. Even the great secret of God's inner
life is made known through analogies drawn from our connatural field of knowledge.
The divine Realities are expressed in a way proportionate
to the realities which lie in the natural scope of our experience.
At the center of this proportionate expression is our concept
of the finite instance of these realities which, by proportionate
application, are made part of our affirmation of the divine. The
question then is: how truly is the concept, abstracted as it is
from the field of our immediate experience, expressive of the
eternal, infinite Reality which is the Mystery of God?
In posing this question now, the" an est"" quid est" discussion of the whole last part opens out into a more specific phase.
The conclusion was that some confused formal knowledge of
the divine Reality was implied by reference to the terms of our
present immediate knowledge. Now we must extend this conclusion into the specifically conceptual order and context.
Do we have a "concept of God"? This question is asked,
not in the sense that there could be any possibility of abstracting an idea from a divine Reality immediately, but whether the
" 7 Here the word " conceptual " means that order of human knowledge which
grasps reality through, and in, universal, abstract ideas, and as such, is distinguished
from immediate experiential knowledge of the singular thing and from a direct
intuition of it. Cf. I Sent., d. 28, q. 1, a. 2; de Potl, q. 7, a. 6; in Joan., c. 1, lect.
1; IV Cont. Gent., c. 2; de V erit., q. 4, a. 2; Summa Theol., I, q. 86, aa. 1-5; also
P. Siwek, Psychologia Metaphysica (Rome, 1962), 376-378; 388; 408.

ANTHONY J. KELLY

concept can be sufficiently dissociated from the field of its
finite verifications to be rendered applicable to the divine order
through our affirmations.
The answer must be negative, if our concepts are necessarily
linked with the finite manner in which the realities we wish to
affirm of God are manifested in the present limited range of
our connatural knowledge; if, say, our idea of "wisdom" can
formally be grasped only as realized in our connatural range
of experience, that is, as an accidental perfection, a developing
and defectible power of the human mind. Some kind of positive
answer would be possible if the intellect could form a concept
of the " essence," the pure meaning of wisdom, and not see it as
essentially bound up with its present finite verification. To the
extent that this concept could express a perfection not limited
in its meaning, as meaning, there could be nothing preventing
this concept from playing a formal signifying role in the
affirmation of the divine Reality.
Such is the case. As already shown, we know God only
through the "contuitio" of Him, 58 together with the realities
of this world. Some of these perfections imply a limitation, not
only existentially, but also essentially, in their pure meaning:
e. g., sensation. Perfections of this type do not immediately
concern us, being as they are only" virtualiter" in God (though
it must be admitted, as the terms of revelation so strikingly
show, that they have a vital part in engaging the fulness of our
attention with regard to the divine Reality by a metaphorical
function). Our interest goes for the moment to the other
perfections in which no limitation in their essential notion
(ratio) 59 is implied. 60 These are above all the transcendentals
-being, unity, truth, goodness, (beauty), perfections pervading all reality .61 Together with these are the specific perfections
H. de Lubac, CYJJ· cit., llO ff.
For the meaning of "ratio," see especially I Sent., d.
q. 1, a. 3: "ratio
nihil aliud est quam id quod apprehendit intellectus de significatione alieuius nominis
et hoc in his quae habent definitionem est ipsa rei definitio ( ... non refert utrum
ilia quae dicuntur habere rationem, habeant vel non habeant definitionem.)"
6 ° For this division of perfections, cf. I Sent., d.
q. I, a. 2.
61 Summa Theol., I, q. 13, a. 1; a. s, ad 3; I Sent., d. 22, q. 1, a. 3, ad
58

59

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

of love, life, intelligence, power, etc., in whose pure meaning
there is no built-in demand for limitation, though in their
existential verification they are experienced only as limited. 62
Though this observation draws its force from the basic
metaphysical principle that the essence of a finite reality is
distinct from its existence, we do not wish to create an unnatural rupture in our knowing between the essential and
existential orders; it is the whole experience of reality that
can direct our knowledge to the divine. 63 Our experience not
only provides a concept, but also symbolic and metaphorical
elements that will never bear complete conceptualization.
Thus, the total reality offers its essential core to be substantially affirmed of God, purified as this must be of what is proper
to its finite verifications. These finite instances, however, have
their role in engaging the totality of the knowing subject's
consciousness in such a way that the conceptual affirmation
of the divine Reality will at the same be rooted in experience
and be interpreted as a prolongation of it, not merely an
exercise in metaphysical abstraction. In this context the formation of the concept must be seen as the abstractive process
within the total experiential consciousness, not as something
which is altogether divorced from it.
Thus, abstract conceptual knowledge lives, as it were, from
an ever present non-conceptualizable substratum of metaphor
and symbol. We might, in accordance with the content of
the faith, affirm of God " fatherhood " and " wisdom," etc.,
and apply our purified concepts to Him under these aspects.
There remains in our consciousness our concrete experience of
these realities, of human fatherhood and human wisdom. The
critical intelligence must abstract the pure meaning of these
formalities, if the affirmation is really going to be substantially
of God; and this process must be seen as truly the situation
of divine Realities in the direction pointed to by our experience,
if the affirmation is to be made by man. It can be said that the
•• I Sent., d. 35, q. 1, a. 1, ad
ad 5.
68 E. Schillebeeckx, op. cit., 356 f.

ANTHONY J. KELLY

analogies of proper and improper proportionality, though distinct in the formal affirmative power of each, are not so
divorced in the actual exercise of our knowing; they appear
rather as two aspects of the one human affirmation of God.
The negative side of this observation is that the " modus
significandi " must be denied of the " ratio significata " of the
concept-familiar thomist doctrine. 64 What has just been noted
indicates that the "modi significandi" do have a vital role
in our knowing, in surrounding the concept with an existential
field of reference.
It is through the concept critically disengaging the pure
meaning of a reality from its finite instances that we apply the
names of " wisdom," " goodness," etc., to the divine Reality
and designate it as substantially signified in this way. But this
by no means indicates that the concept expresses the infinite
manner of being in which the reality, notionally expressed by
the concept, exists in God. Certain expressions of some
Thomists are found wanting in this respect. 65 Concepts do
not express the concrete reality; they are abstract universal
quiddities in the mind by which the mind can know all singular
verifications of this quiddity now abstractly and universally
expressed. The mind cannot find the existential fulness of
reality in the concept but beyond the conceptual order in
reality. Thus, the perfection as it exists in God cannot be
known as it exists in God; the role of the concept is such that
it enables us to make a formal affirmation of what is in God.
In the concretive synthesis of judgment, the concept enables
the mind to grasp tendentially a formal aspect of the
divine Reality. Through the act of judgment the mind
compounds the formal conceptual content with the affirmation
of existence-and is thus noetically and validly orientated toSumma Theel., I, q. 13, a. 3.
E. g., M. Penido, op. cit., 189 f.: " ... pour concevoir Ia bonte divine nous
devons abstraire de Ia bonte creee une idee transcendante qui n'est pas formellement
... mais seulement proportionnellement le concept de bonte creee, et c'est cette idee
universelle que nous proportionnons a Dieu, c'est par et dans cette idee universelle
que nous connaissons Ia bonte subsistante." (Quoted also by E. Schillebeeckx, op.
cit., 244, note 2; and B. Montagnes, op. cit., 164.)
64

65

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

wards the mysterious depths of the divine Being. 66 There the
quiddity expressed of God is one with the divine unlimited
act of existence, and in that way is infinitely, ineffably and
incomprehensibly realized.
The affirmation in its existential import dynamically orientates our minds to the hidden depths of God. In its formal
content it is an affirmation of a formal aspect of the divine
Reality. It is valid, though at the same time inadequate, not
expressing the reality as it is in God. This it does only proportionately and above all negatively. In this sense it is truer to
say that the divine Reality is affirmed or " signified," rather
than " expressed." 67 However, we must retain the formal signifying aspect intrinsic to the concept achieved in its state of
abstraction from finite verifications, in its formal signifying
power; if this is not kept, our affirmation would be a straight
out anthropomorphic utterance or lack any intrinsic specification and thus affirm nothing. 68

*

*

*

*

*

Before adding some clarifying points, it will be necessary to
pause over the truly personal character of the theological
affirmation and its fully existential quality. This can best be
expressed by bringing out two elements, or better, "moments,"
facets pertaining to the inner structure of our affirmations
alluded to before.
First, the formal; we know through faith the supernatural
interventions of God in salvation history. And in this knowledge our conceptual affirmations about the divine Reality are
rendered supremely meaningful in their formal content, whereas
the concept is subject to continual enrichment from the mind's
contemplation of the "effectus naturae vel gratiae" which
include the Incarnation, 69 etc., the basis of our affirmation. God
66 Cf. H. Bouillard, op. cit., 198 ff.; also D. Burrell, "Aquinas on Naming God,"
Theological Studies !l4 (1963), 183-212; C. de More-Pontgibaud, duJ Fini a l'lnfini
(Aubier, 1957), 35 f; E. Gilson, op. cit., 124-357.
61 Summa Theol., I, q. 13, a. !l.
68 M. Corvez, "L'idee et !'affirmation de Dieu," Revue Thomiste 57 (1957), 314.
69 As well as all the effects in the Church through history, cf. ud Ephes., c. I, lect.
8; ud Hebr. c. 11, lect. I; fo.r good comment on this, see A. Motte, "Theodicee et

26

ANTHONY J. KELLY

in Himself will always be beyond these conceptualizations, as
has been explained, even though they will be more meaningfully affirmed of Him.
Second, there is what we will continue to call the " mysteric "
moment; it arises from the fact that there is a givenness about
the divine Mystery that the formal element in our affirmations
does not obviously express. It is one thing to consider our
affirmations as signifying God as good, wise, etc., in a general
way little different, except by origin, from the formal signification of philosophical affirmations. However, it is another thing
to realize that the theological affirmation must be considered as
a response to the givenness of God's Self-manifestation in a
most special manner, as the divine Mystery of Self-communication concretized in the actual role of the three divine Persons in
salvation history; for here each is a uniquely personal term
of our knowledge, the "Thou" of God in our regard. 70 Our
theological affirmations are the answer in a dialogue first
initiated in the salvific roles of the three divine Persons in
their saving work. Such affirmations arise from considering God
as the supreme objective Reality known through the variety
and excellence of His effects, and as a response to the Reality
manifested concretely in this dialogal, divinely subjective manner of the Mystery of God-in-Se-pro-nobis, of salvation history,
which is not exhausted by the formal analyses of concepts.
Thus, our affirmations, despite their abstract form, have a
context, origin and purpose very much bound up with salvation
history. The realization of this double moment in our affirmatheologie chez S. Thomas," Revue des sciences Philosophiques et Theologiques 25
(1987)' 5-27.
•• Here we must stress the full realism of the Incarnation, as modern theology
has attempted to express it: Christ's humanity is not simply an apparition, or
human appearance, or simply an instrument which Christ uses to manifest His
presence, yet being still disguised in Himself. Rather, Christ's human nature is the
expression of Got\ Himself, the "inhumanization of God," (H. U. Von Balthasar,
Dieu a parte un langage d'homme: Parole de Dieu et Liturgie [Paris, 1958], 78),
the self expression of God outside Himself (K. Rahner, " Reflexions theologiques sur
L'Incarnation," Sciences Ecclesiastiques 12 [1960], 14 f.); Christ is God the revealer
and also God revealed (R. Latourelle, Theology of revelation [New York, 1966],
868 f.). Thus in the fullest sense we have the " Thou " of God addressed to man.

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

27

tions makes them more personal and existential in the sense
of having their most concrete reference point in the given
Mystery of God as revealing Himself. Furthermore, by bringing out this double moment in our affirmations it is hoped that
a fruitful principle will be provided for later questions which
depend on harmonizing the revealed concrete Reality and the
abstract content of our concepts.

*

*

*

*

*

a) Negation and the concept. If God is to be validly
qualified by these conceptual affirmations, the concepts themselves in their limitation must be submitted to a double
negation, in order that the affirmation might achieve its formal
validity. The concept, as a finite, inadequate element in the
formal signification of the divine Reality, is not negated; there
is a positive conceptual content which must remain in the
affirmation, otherwise the affirmation will have no formal
" direction." However, the negative element does come into
play; first, in that the concept must be purified with regard
to its finite field of reference, if it is to be applied to God. That
is, the elements which do not formally belong to the pure
meaning which the concept expresses but to the existential
verification of the concept from which the concept was originally taken; this is the first and most elementary negation.
There is a second zone of darkness1 surrounding the concept.
We must deny the concept the capacity to express the reality it
formally signifies, as it is in God. That is the object of God's
knowledge. The positive content of the concept yields to a
state of willed ignorance of the divine Reality, because no
concept can express what God is. As soon as we have a conceptual notion of a reality which must be in God, as identified
with the divine Reality, it must be immediately submitted to a
process of negation, not in its limited validity but in its capacity
to adequately express the transcendent Mystery toward which
the mind of the Christian theologian is orientated. The way of
theological knowledge must ever take him into a deeper dark-

ANTHONY J. KELLY

ness, "where God is said to dwell": "Illud est ultimum
cognitionis humanae de Deo quod sciat se Deum nescire." 71
b) Mysteric concreteness. There are two ways of conceiving
reality; the one concrete, the other abstract. One can think of
a good thing, or goodness in general, indetermined to any
particular object. The abstract idea enables the mind to
prescind from any actual immediate experience of goodness,
etc., in its predications and renders possible the proportionate
predication of it (etc.) to God. 72 This does not mean that
God is good in the way we understand the realities of our
connatural world to be good, but, in a way we do not understand, that He is the Good One in a way surpassing the expressive power of our human categories and concepts. 73 Thus the
ultimate realization of this abstract idea is affirmed in the dark
proportionate manner that has been sufficiently explained.
This point can be more developed with regard to the notional
predication of the three divine Persons: God is not merely
" Fatherhood " or " Sonship " in general but the Father as a
mysterically given Reality, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
acting and revealing Himself through the course of salvation
history. There must always be the concrete identification of
the formal content of our affirmations with the actual divine
Person in salvation history.
This Father, etc., concretely identified in salvation history
as a unique " Thou " in His mysteric givenness, must not be
substituted for by a concretization of "fatherhood" in general
laboriously elaborated in its essential formality through the
psychological image, etc., (the value of which is not denied).
Rather, the two moments must remain in our knowledge, the
formal more abstract one directed toward ontological " Res
Divina," and the mysteric directed toward the ineffable, personal givenness which eludes our formal concepts.
71 De Pot., q. 7, a. 5, ad 14; cf. also de Verit., q. 8, a. 1, ad 8; de Div. Nom., c. 7,
lect. 4: " Est alia Dei perfectissima cognitio per remotionem, scilicet qua cognoscimus Deum per ignorantiam."
72 De Pot., q. 1, a. 1; I Sent., d. 34, q. 1, a. 1; Summa Theol., I, q. 32, a. 2.
73 M. Corvez, op. cit., 315; and by the same author,
"De la connaissance de
Dieu," Revue Thomiste 48 (1948), 511-524.

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

29

c) A theology of affirmation. Theological knowledge has
indeed its precise conceptual content; but it does not consist
in mere conceptual analysis in an effort to :find a greater notional evidence. It perfects itself in affirmation, in a proclamation that God IS so, in the sense that He is a supremely
personal and ineffable Reality behind all His communications.
At a great depth theology is kerygmatic, much more so than
the favorers of "kerygmatic theology" would seem to realize,
for it teaches us to proclaim of God, in the deepest and most
meaningful manner, the realities, i.e., the attributes, etc., of
which, according to revelation, He is the possessor. This affirmative character of theology is in keeping with the notion of
God as the " subjectum theologiae " treated at the beginning,
for it is a response to a unique " Thou " Who has manifested
Himself and not a mere logical effort to draw as many conclusions as possible from or about a series of propositions.

*

*

*

*

*

In view of what has been outlined, it seems that each apparently different approach has some positive contribution to make
if one sets the question in a more integrated perspective.
The classic Thomistic opinion of Cajetan and his followers,
such as Penido, despite some exaggerated expressions and a
too abstract and notional approach, does lay due stress on the
abstractive power of the mind to disengage a pure meaning,
independent in its formal content of the :finite realizations from
which it originates. To that extent there must be what is often
called an " analogical concept," not in the sense that the concept
changes or that it contains within itself the full range of its
existential realization, but simply because it is not inextricably
wedded to the :finite in its formal content. This is a necessary
:first stage in our affirmation of the divine Reality. I would
consider that the classic Thomist view has not fully been
aware of this, being content to place our knowledge of God in
what is merely its abstractive phase. It falls short in not
appreciating the vital role of judgment and is therefore too
abstract and static.

30

ANTHONY J. KELLY

Those who lay stress on the role of judgment make a contribution along different lines. As well as a prejudgmental abstractive phase in our knowledge, there is the perfection of our
knowledge in affirmation. 74 In this affirmative phase the mind
is actually orientated toward the divine Reality in its existential fulness, as it is "in reality," even though the affirmation
does not have within its formal conceptual content an adequate
expression of the Reality affirmed; for in our affirmations of
the Res Divina the formal conceptual content is expressive of
a pure abstract meaning-a quiddity known originally in finite
verifications and now reflexively grasped as not essentially
linked with them-which is predicated of God as a valid, though
inadequate expression of the divine Reality. In this way our
minds are darkly orientated toward the mysterious depths
where the finitely signified perfections exist in an infinite
manner.
Analogy, then., is not merely the possession of a concept
which can prescind from finite realizations in its formal content;
it means, fundamentally, that there is a way we can affirm
realities of God in a valid manner. This is not an anthropomorphic exercise on the one hand, for the content of the
affirmation is not bound up with the finite world in its formal
signification. Nor, on the other hand, is it a lapse into agnosticism, for we are affirming something of God which is really God;
there is a positive predication and a truly existential judgment
but with this difference, that the manner of existence in God is
not represented. The names we predicate of God are immediately representative of our concepts. 75 Hence St. Thomas can
say, "huiusmodi nomina significant divinam substantiam, et
predicantur de Deo substantialiter, sed deficiunt a representatione eius." 76
E. Schillebeeckx's theory of objective dynamism offers more
room for reflection. Its value is that it situates the conceptual
74 Summa Theol., I, q. 16, a. 2: "Quando intellectus iudicat rem ita se habere
sicut est forma quam de re apprehendit, tunc primo cognoscit et dicit verum."
75 Ibid., q. 13, a. 1.
76 Ibid., a. 2.

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

Sl

elements of our knowledge of God in a dynamic noetic. It
brings out the abstract nature of the concept 77 and how it
arises from the finite world. 78 Finally, it highlights an existential and experiential aspect too often neglected in our discussions of the character of knowledge of God. 79 It is my opinion
that this theory is exaggerated to the extent that it makes all
our knowledge properly of God to consist in a non-conceptual
order. 8 ° For Fr. Schillebeeckx the non-conceptual is not a
complement to the conceptual in our knowledge of God but
rather a subsitute for it. The whole theory is developed with
a keen realization of the transcendence of the divine Reality,
77 E. Schillebeeckx, op. cit., 842 f.: "Les concepts de la foi possedent un contenu
qui nous oriente positivement vers la realite du salut: ils ont une valeur de connaissance mais n'impliquent aucune saisie conceptuelle de cette realite. La paternit.e de
la premiere Personne, par exemple se trouve reellement dans la perspective objective
de notre concept humain de ' pere,' mais nous ne saississon pas conceptuellement le
mode de realisation et la paternite en Dieu: comme contenu conceptuel nous n'avons
que le concept de paternite humaine. C'est dans la ligne, dans la perspective objec·
tive de cette paternite que Dieu se situe, mais nous ne pouvons pas le situer exactement dans cette perspective .... "
78 Ibid., 284 f.: "Quoique
les concepts soient inadequats et meme, en taut que
abstraits, ne possedent en elles-memes, et par eux-memes aucune valeur de
(ce que·le concept abstrait fait connaitre se situe dans la realite concrete et est done
realise autrement que dans le concept-) ils possedent en liaison avec !'aspect non
conceptuel, une valeur de realite,-inadequate sans doute, mais cependant reelle,car ils donnent (et eux seuls) une direction et un sens a l'elan, qui a partir des
concepts, nous porte vers la realite ... ," etc. The philosophy of knowledge of
which Fr. Schillebeeckx avails himself is that of D. de Petter, 'who stresses an
implicit intuition in all our knowledge, which is not directly accessible to reflexive
analysis; at no moment does the mind give adequate expression to its full existential
grasp of reality, though it is capable of a certain confused abstract expression
through our concepts, which are, on the one hand, consciously grasped as not being
determined to this existential reality, yet, on the other, are actively referred to it
as abstract inadequate expressions. Cf. " Begrip en werkelijkheid aan de overzijde
van het conceptualisme: Impliciete Intuitie,'' Tidjschrijt voor Philosophie 1 (1989),
25-48; and "L'Intuitif implicite dans l'acte de connaissance," Actes du Xwme
Congres international de philosophie (Amsterdam, 1948); for review cf. J. Isaac,
Bulletin Thomiste 8/i (1947-58), 465-68.
I
79 E. Schillebeeckx, op. cit., 108 f; 842 fl'.
80 E. g. ibid., 108: "nous n'appliquons proprement a Dieu comme tel les con tenus
purement conceptuels de 'pere' et 'fils' mais dans Ia ligne de ces con tenus, a
!'exclusion de tons autres (ce sont ceux qu'utilise Ia revelation) nons 'tendons'
reellement vers Ia realite divine .... "

ANTHONY J. KELLY

which thus demands the presence of non-conceptual elements in
our knowledge. Nonetheless, we cannot accept it completely, for
we are forced to recognize the lowly role of the concept itself
as a limited formal expression of the reality which is in God,
even though the divine manner of its existence therein is not
expressible.
I am conscious of the danger of merely verbal differences
in this area, for when different theologians talk of the " concept
of the divine Reality," etc., two different things can be meant.
No one can justifiably say that our conceptions of God really
express the reality in the infinite manner of the divine where
essence and existence are one in unlimited act. To that extent
our knowledge can be called non-conceptual, in that our minds
are oriented to the existential fulness of the divine Reality
only by going beyond the concept and by entering into the
darkness which belongs to the human mind before the eminence
of the divine order. Hence there is no question of" seizing" the
divine Reality or grasping it adequately and conceptually. 81
But, to repeat, the concept remains in itself a necessary positive
element in our knowledge of the divine and, indeed, a formal
element expressive of what is " in God " but not in the infinite
manner in which it is contained in the divine Reality; it enables
us to affirm God validly without pretending to any adequate
formal knowledge of Him. Perhaps it is more truthful to say
that our concepts yield us, not so much knowledge " of God "
but " about God."
In the final part of this study I propose to take up the nonconceptual element in our knowledge, presenting it as a complement to our properly conceptual knowledge. In this my debt
to Fr. Schillebeeckx will be obvious. Up to the present one
point has not been sufficiently brought to the fore, viz., the
reason why we postulate a dynamism in our knowledge with
81 Fr. Schillebeeckx occasionally gives the impression that those who would allow
the positive conceptual element in our knowledge of God, in the sense explained,
somehow conceive the divine Reality as adequately grasped or " saisie," e. g., op.
cit., 244; 848.

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

33

its vital inclusion of conceptual and non-conceptual elements.
We must try to answer this question in a later context.
Briefly, then, the special transcendence of the revealed God
affects our theological knowledge in the conceptual order, i)
by making it less a process of abstract expression but one of
existential affirmation in which the concept has a validly formal
directive role in the determination of the precise aspect of the
divine Reality to be affirmed; thus we know concerning it" an
est," with a necessary element of the " quid est sub quadam
confusione." 82 ii) The personal mysteric givenness remains in
some way a non-expressed "plus" in all our affirmations. iii)
Both these points indicate that our theological knowledge, even
in its conceptual elements., lives from the experience of faith, so
that it is caught up as an element in the dialogue with the
divine " Thou."
2. The real dimension of the affirmation

Since we have been concentrating here more on the positive
moment in the dialectic of our knowledge before the divine
transcendence, we must now complement what has just been
said by clarifying how the concept is a formal expression of
what is in God. The discussion must be briefly directed to
more ontological considerations following upon our previous
concern with the content of the concept; now we are concerned
with the actual verification of that concept in the divine
Reality. What is at stake is this: is our knowledge purely
functional, or is God, as He is in Himself, truly qualified by our
affirmations? Do our affirmations, made as they are through
the medium of conceptualizations arising from reflection on
the history of salvation, truly provide us with a real theology?
Two extremes are to be avoided: first, an exaggerated realism
which would spring from a too univocal application of our
concepts of God without the accompanying realization that
God is revealing Himself in human language and categories
which are made to signify Him but not represent Him. This
82

In Boet. de Trin., q. 6, a. 3.

34

ANTHONY J. KELLY

error would prevent us from sufficiently intellectualizing our
experience of the realities through which God has revealed Himself, by not disengaging the relevant intellectual content and
submitting it to the necessary negations. Unless there is this
critical effort on the part of the human mind, the fact of God's
revelation can never be appreciated; to hear God's word, as
God's, it must be stripped of what is intelligibly irrelevant, so
that the "proportion " can be verified.
The second extreme consists in negating the conceptual content of the affirmations of faith and theology too much. Such
an exaggeration would no doubt arise from the realization that
God has revealed Himself in an " economia," not in His " immediately eschatological" Reality. Such a tendency would
allow a certain pragmatic purpose in our concepts but deny of
them a truly real verification., in that they do not tell us of
God " in Himself " but only in the " quoad nos " of the
" economia."
Although from the biblical angle this point must continue to
be discussed,S3 the contribution of St. Thomas is very relevant
for the healthy development of modern theology; his own
doctrine is the fruit of manifest development on his part. He
becomes more and more severe on the overly negative teaching
of Maimonides; 84 by the time of his writing the de Potentia he
seems to have definitively clarified hiSi doctrine on the verification of our ideas in God. 85
83 Cf. L. Malevez, "Nouveau
Testament et theologie fonctionnelle," Revue de
Science Religieuse 48 (I960), 284 f.; Y. Cougar, "Christ in the economy of salvation
and in our dogmatic tracts," Concilium XI n. 2 (I966), 4-I5.
84 In I Sent., d. 2, q. I, a. 3, he sees only a superficial difference between the
opinions of Maimonides and Avicenna as contrasted 'with those of Denis and
Anselm: "in superficie diversae videantur." But in the de Pot., q. 7, a. 5, the
opinion of Rabbi Moyses is said to be " insufficiens et inconveniens "; and irn the
Summa Theol., I, q. I3, a. 2, we find the same "inconvenientia" attached to the
opinion of Moses Maimonides.
85 Cf. the very difficult passage in the I Sent., d. 2, q. I, a. 3, compared to a
clearly and strongly defined position in the de Pot., q. 7, a. 6. A tendency can be
detected to objectivize in a more real manner the " ratio " in question, in order to
preclude any impression that the ratio i!! God as understood by us, not as He is
in Himself. The Responsio ad Joannem Vercell. de artie. 108 clarifies the position

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

35

To appreciate his doctrine to the full, the distinction must be
clearly maintained between the logical and ontological orders,
between the order of our knowledge of the Res divina and the
Res divina in its actual existence. In the logical order, each
conceptual expression of the divine Reality exists in our minds
as in a subject, that is, as the logical intentional likeness of the
ontological reality. In the mind, it resides as a meaning which
can be applied to God. Thus the divine Reality is present to
the mind, not in the immediacy of what it is but as understood.
But, God is not our ideas about Him; outside the mind these
divine attributes and notions exist, not as conceptualized but as
existentially realized in the infinite Act of the divine Reality.
The link between these two orders is not merely that of
efficient causality, as though the formal quality of the effect
was only "virtualiter" in God. 86 The correspondence must be
a formal one. 87 The reality as it is in God and this same reality
as conceived by the mind look to one another as what is
signified to what signifies (in the imperfect, inadequate manner
already explained) ... " sicut significatum in signo." 88
Hence, between the concept and the divine Reality there is
a strict, though extremely limited, formal correspondence. But
despite the limitation of the formal likeness, the divine Reality
can be analogically affirmed as truly qualified by our concepts,
yet not fully expressed by them because of its infinite realization of God.
And so the quality of our knowledge is not merely functional
or subjective but objective, real in that it deals with the divine
Reality as it is in itself, in the eternal, infinite plenitude of
what God IS. St. Thomas sums this up neatly, using as his
example the attribute of goodness:
after the doctrine of the Sentences; on this point see F. Von Gun ten, "La primaute
de Ia personne et de !'amour dans Ia theologie trinitaire de S. Thomas," Angelicum
35 (1958)' 81 fl'.
86 Summa Theol., I, q. 13, a. 2.
87 Respoosio ad Joan. VerceU.; de Pot., q. i. a. 6.
88 I Sent., d. 2, q. I. a. 3.

36

ANTHONY J. KELLY

Thus it follows that the intellect in conceiving goodness is like that
which is in God and is God: so that something that is in God and
is God corresponds to the notion or conception of goodness.89

*

*

*

*

It could be remarked that the subtlety of this type of
scholastic consideration runs the danger of making the God of
such a theology as abstract and impersonal as the concepts we
use about Him. In this context I would make four remarks:
I) This consideration is only a partial aspect of our theological knowledge of God, indeed its most abstract phase.
God in His concrete living relationship to us is altogether too
ineffable to allow our theology to confine itself to abstract
conceptual affirmations or to regard these affirmations purely
in their abstract formal signification without taking into account the mysteric moment that must be present in them. This
type of theological consideration does not necessarily consider
God as merely a" Nuda Essentia." 90
2) This objective "eschatological" view of our knowledge
of God does lay a healthy stress on the fact that salvation
history is the presence of Eternity in time, and that every
finite communication of God made in the temporal historical
order bears with it the infinite eternal Reality of what God is
in Himself and stems from it. 91 It enables us to set the" for us"
or" economic" aspect of the divine Mystery in eternity, in the
" In Himself " of God; and thus theology becomes truly a
theology of God, not an " economia " or a theology of history.
3) By stressing the fact that the formal meaning of the
concept applied to God achieves its formal meaning not in
89
9

De Pot., a. 7, a. 6.

° Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik 11/1 (Zollikon-Zi.irich, 1932), 18.

91 This is one element in the whole series of answers that must be sought for
anew by modern theology; for as Y. Cougar, "Christ in the economy ... ,"
op. cit., 11, remarks: " Sooner or later speculative theology . . . will have to
pose the problem which occupies us so much in a much more personal way: . . .
all that has been done for us, including the incarnation has been required, has it
not, in spite of the absolute liberty of God, by what God is in Himself? Is there
not, in the mystery of His ' en Soi,' a presence, a call for the ' pour nous ' . . . ? "

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

37

itself but in the divine Reality, the doctrine of Thomas causes
the whole tendency of our theological knowledge to be directed
away from a purely conceptual approach that would regard
analysis and the drawing of dogmatic conclusions as the aim of
the theologian. Rather, it causes a concentration of theological
attention on the reality of the divine Mystery existing beyond
our conceptualizations, affirmed but not expressed, signified but
not represented in its ineffable fulness. Thus, theology has
an inherent demand for a sense of the divine transcendence,
which, in its turn, will cause the unique character of our theological knowledge, as it is affected by the special transcendence
of the revealed God.
4) This point of the concept being verified within the divine
Reality ensures a contemplative dimension for theology that
should not be underplayed. This abstract conceptual knowledge does formally affirm the Reality of God as it will appear
in final evidence. Thus, there is present in a mature theology
a concentration on God in Himself over and above the immediate consideration of the " economia."
In bringing out a positive element in our conceptual theological knowledge by the assertion that there is a formal correspondence between the divine Reality and the formal meaning
of our concepts, we have succeeded in stressing more the transcendence of God. Theology is directed to go beyond its own
conceptualizations in the consciousness that they are all actually but ineffably realized in the divine Reality; and this
would demand that the abstractly formal affirmation of " Godin-Himself" be appreciated as vitally linked with the mysteric
givenness of God-in-Himself in salvation history. Our knowledge is presented with a positive fulness of Mystery; its reaction to this expresses itself in a multiplicity of concepts in the
humble effort to understand what we already believe.
3. Conceptual multiplicity and the fulness of the Mystery

As a matter of fact, in the present procedures of theology we
are confronted with a multiplicity of divine names and con-

38

ANTHONY J. KELLY

cepts. It should be remarked at the outset that this plurality
does not result merely from the reasoning processes of the
scientific investigator into divine things but from the living
historical experience of God in Israel and the Church. 92 Hence,
these names, along with their obvious propositional value, have
a rich dialogal role in the verbal response to, and the conceptual
realization of, the given divine Mystery; for these names do not
signify abstract quiddities, though this impression can easily be
had from the overly philosophical treatment these properly
theological names have largely received. Theology must explicate more the salvational historical origin of these names
and the significance of possessing the name of God, implying
as it does a Personal Self-commitment on God's part regarding
man. 93
Even though the treatment of the divine names has not been
as " theological " as desirable, nevertheless the speculative
effort involved in elaborating the proper concepts and finding
names for all the intelligible aspects of the Mystery of God
can be seen as the fecundity of the believing mind in the
presence of the Fulness of revelation where God has " named "
Himself "Emmanuel," " God-with-us," yet remains in His
"inapproachable light" (I Tim. 6: 16), the Ineffable One
immeasurably beyond all our concepts and images by which
our minds are nonetheless validly directed toward the divine
Reality in this life of faith.
First of all, and most necessarily, a plurality of distinct
names and concepts is required because of the Self-communication of the three divine Persons. Faith prolongs itself into
reflection on this central mystery of the Holy Trinity, and thus
ideas must be multiplied to express the meaning of the distinct
divine Personalities, the relationship of the divine Persons to
One another and to us. Thus there arises a theological vocabulary signifying a corresponding set of concepts, the " Theologia
Discreta." 94
•• R. Latourelle, " Revelation, Histoire et Incarnation,"
237. E. Schillebeeckx, op. cit., 338.
•• Cf. E. Brunner, Dogmatik (Zurich, 1960), 124.
•• I Sent., d. 22, q. 1, a. 4; de Div Nom., c. 2, lect. 2.

Gregorianum 44 (1963),

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

89

Then again, because theology has the duty to integrate the
rational demonstration of the one essential divine Being and
because of the lived confession of the One God in Israel and
the Church, there is demanded another series of " essential "
names and concepts designating the various qualities of the
Deity which each of the Three possesses in common, hence
giving us the "Theologia Unita." 95
What God is in His essential perfection is refracted and
reflected throughout all the universe of nature and grace,
through the "effectus naturae et gratiae." If God should be
adequately seen, one name would suffice because of the simplicity of the vision coupled with the simplicity of what God is
in Himself; but because we do not see God in this way, and only
through what He has done, and because these effects are many,
and because He cannot be adequately qualified by any one of
them, we must attribute to Him all the perfections we can find
in our limited range of knowledge 96 along with the process of
conceptually identifying the divine Three.
A great multiplicity of names and concepts arises in the
theological response to the fact of God's saving interventions
in man's history. It is the recognition of the ineffable transcendence of the revealed God that, at root, demands this
theological plurality; for the divine Persons would not be
sufficiently represented as divine, unless qualified by the
totality of the essential names. Each of the Three could not
be confessed as divine save as distinctly named and distinctly
understood, whereas any one name applied to God signifies a
limited conceptual meaning, being determined to one formality,
and cannot be applied to God, save in the consciousness that all
other separately understood perfections be affirmed of the
divine Reality as well. The multiplicity of our conceptual
affirmations is a confession of the transcendence of God in His
unique ineffable Reality. Thus this conceptual multiplicity is
at once a response to the Fulness of the divine Mystery revealed to us and a recognition of it as a transcendently divine
intervention.
•• I Sent., d. flfl, a. 4.

96

Ibid.

40

ANTHONY J. KELLY

III.

THE MYSTERY OF THE REVEALED
MoMENTS

GoD AND THE

OF oUR AFFIRMATION

We must now see, in the synthetic phase of our study, how
these various elements in our knowledge converge in the affirmation of the one divine Mystery in its formal transcendence and
in its given personal concreteness with regard to us. We will
prescind here from the subjective element in this affirmation, 97
and concentrate on its objective content. 98
1. The formal and mysteric affirmation of the divine Sim-

plicity.
The names we use in our speech about the divine Mystery
cannot be synonyms; if they were, the whole fabric of our
knowledge, and more specifically, our dogmatic formulations
would collapse in an agnostic muddle. At the most, they would
retain a merely symbolic value. St. Thomas realized quite
clearly that there was the apparent contradiction, if one asserts
i) that the names we use for God do enjoy a substantial
verification in the divine Reality, and ii) that the divine
Reality is one, a single, simple " Perfection " in the concrete
sense. The solution to this antinomy must respect both issues:
saving the validity of our knowledge and the simplicity of
God. 99
The answer to this precise question need not long delay us;
our names do not signify the divine Reality immediately but
through the mediation of concepts drawn from this world and
the experience of God's saving presence in it. Our ideas have
different intelligible contents and are grasped as distinct meanings: person, nature, goodness, mercy. Now, because these
97 " Subjective"
in this context indicates an affective, connatural type of knowledge proper to the experience of the knowing subject and as such not fully communicable or conceptualizable.
98 " Objective " here, in opposition to the above mentioned " subjective " type of
knowledge, indicates what is conceptualizable about the Reality we know, whether
it be referred to us merely as an " Object," a " That," or a " subject," a " Thou ":
hence, a limitation of language, these words are used in two different senses.
99 De Pot., q. 7, a. 6; cf. Summa Theol., I, q. 13, a. 4.

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

41

names signify the divine Reality under aspects distinct in our
mind, the names we use of God are not synonyms, which
would express the same reality under the same formal aspect. 100
Logically, the question should be asked, how are these
formalities different in God? In the connatural world of our
knowledge, person and nature, power, love are formalities really
distinct. The experience of God in His dealings with man
forces us to apply these meanings to the divine Reality through
a series of distinct concepts. Since this distinction is so much
part of our understanding, and so much part of reality, how
can the divine Reality be said to possess these qualities and
really be what we affirm it to be, without there resulting a
distinction in that Reality?
Before outlining the answer to this question, I would like
to point out that this is not such an abstract and irrelevant
question to modern theology as our less metaphysical times
might think. 101 One's attitude to this question indicates
whether or not one has realized the mystery of the fact of
revelation, as well as the inherent difficulty of our speech about
God, and the crisis our thought faces in pondering divine
things. In more recent times, A. Malet, working in the framework of speculative Thomistic theology, has brought out the
necessity of clarifying the issues involved. 102
To substantiate his thesis regarding the primacy of person
in the trinitarian theology of St. Thomas, Malet has inter100 Summa Theol., loc. cit., a. 1:
"variis et multiplicibus conceptibus intellectus
noster respondet unum omnino simplex secundum huiusmodi conceptiones imperfecte
intellectum. Et ideo nomina Deo attributa licet significant unam rem, tamen, quia
significant earn sub rationibus multis et diversis, non sunt synonoma."
101 K. Rahner
(" Der dreifaltige Gott als Transzendenter Urgrund der Heilsgeschichte," Mysterium Salutis II) makes the point that there is a relative lack of
interest in this type of more subtle question, and one cannot but agree that today
there are more important points to be presented, though these subtle abstract points
will probably be in the long run of great help to the newer salvation-historical type
of theology when difficulties may appear under a different guise. In the present
context, this point about the distinction in God demands close attention in that our
theological knowledge must be seen to affirm the One divine Reality over its conceptual multiplicity.
102 A. Malet, Personne et Amour, 99-103.

ANTHONY J. KELLY

preted the " distinctio rationis " within the divine simplicity in
a way not justified in the texts of St. Thomas, as a number of
Thomists have pointed out in an irrefutable way. 103 He is
accused of making the distinction too real. Certainly for him,
the distinction of nature and person in God is no merely subjective one, on the level of our ideas, but something that has
an objective as well as an ideal sense: " On voit que la distinction 'in ratione' n'est pas une distinction subjective.
Elle n'existe pas seulement dans !'esprit humain qui parle de
Dieu." 104
He goes on to say that all the " rationes " that have been
used, viz., nature and person, habens and habitum, id quo and
id quod, are realized in God and" saved" in the divine Reality.
(Especially I Sent., d. 2, q. 1, aa. 2-5 is used for textual evidence) .105 And thus, "Toutes les analyses que nous avons
consacrees a montrer la primaute de la personne sur !'essence,
tout ... n'est vrai, dans la Trinite, quei sur le plan des 'ratio'
... !'absence de la distinction in re en Dieu, n'est pas une
imperfection, mais une perfection. La distinction en Dieu n'est
pas ' moindre,' elle est ' autre.' " 106
For the author, any neglect of the realism of the distinction
"in ratione" (as he prefers to call it, as different from
"rationis" in St. Thomas) 107 in failing to appreciate its objective sense can have serious consequences for all our thought
on the Trinity and the Incarnation. The underplaying of this
distinction would eventually force us to conceive, for instance,
the " potentia generandi " as belonging to each of the three
divine Persons, so that it would have to be said that each of
the Three generated, and similarly through the common possession of the " potentia spirandi " that each of the Three breathed
103 F. Von Gun ten, "Personne et Amour dans Ia theologie trinitaire deS. Thomas
d'Aquin," Angelicum 35 (1958), 80-85; J. H. Nicholas, "Chronique de theologie
dogmatique," Revue Thomiste 57 (1957), 367 ff., A. Malet, op. cit.
10 • Ibid.
105 Ibid.
1oo Ibid.
107 Cf. J. H. Nicolas, op. cit.

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

48

the Holy Spirit. Likewise, the result in Christology would be
dire. If there is no objective distinction between nature and
person, how is the admission avoided that the divine nature
is incarnate or that the three divine Persons are all incamate? 108
The patent falsehood of all this makes Malet suppose a "difference veritable" between person and nature in God.109 In the
measure that this objective distinction is not appreciated, theology is bound to an essentialist view of things and at the worst
exposed to Sabellianism. 110
No one can deny that there is a difficulty here, and perhaps
one that cannot be answered in this type of theology, for we
are dealing with the Mystery of God. Notwithstanding, it
seems hardly to be a step in the right direction for the solution
of the problem to undermine the utter simplicity of the divine
Reality by introducing any distinction other than that existing
between the divine Persons themselves, and the distinction
that from our point of view is purely subjective. 111 An appreciation of the special character of our knowledge as affected by
the transcendence of God will enable us to keep intact both
aspects of the mystery this knowledge confronts. Now let us
return to a positive discussion of the supra-conceptual simplicity of the divine Reality.
108 A. Malet,
op. cit. " Si sur le plan trinitaire, en effet, suppot et essence se
distinguaient seulement dans !'esprit humain, et non comme le dit Saint Thomas,
'etiam extra' (N. B. this is a misused text, as F. Von Gunten has pointed out,
op. cit., 82; this phrase refers to the real distinction between the Persons), c'est a
dire en Dieu lui-meme, tout ce que nons avons dit sur Ia primaute de Ia personne,
n'aurait aucun sens. D'abord, !'essence engendrait. Ensuite Ia puissance d'engendrer
devenant identique a !'essence, les trois Personnes engendreraient enfin Ia puissance
de spirer le devenant egalement, les trois personnes spireraient. . . . Sur le plan
Christologique, si Ia personne ne distinguait pas vraiment de !'essence, !'union de
Dieu et l'homme se serait fait in natura. Comme Ia nature divine est numeriquernent Ia meme dans les suppots divins ce serait trois suppots qui se seraient
incarnes."
109 Ibid.
110 Ibid.
111 At this juncture it is worth noting how abstract the point of view of Malet
is. He is looking at the given Mystery of God in His Self-communication through
a pre-elaborated trinitarian theology, without realizing that it was only in the
experience of the Self-gift of God in these Three, in the divine " Thou," that we
have our knowledge of the Trinity.

44

ANTHONY J. KELLY

*

*

*

*

*

At the outset it must be remarked that, if St. Thomas is
going to be cited in favor of any opinion on this point, it is not
desirable to confine oneself to the first book of the Sentences.
Malet has tended to do this; consequently he has overlooked
the more authoritative places where Thomas has treated the
question. 112 As has already been shown, the content of our
concepts is verified in God in a formal analogical manner.
God is good, etc. On our part, these " rationes " or intelligible
aspects are distinct, for the meaning of " nature " is not that
of " person," " wisdom " is not " goodness," and so on; the
intelligible content of each of these notions is distinct. Originatively, these distinct notions are predicated of God as distinct
meanings. Each of these independent notions has its own distinctive role to play. To that extent, at the origin of the formulation of our knowledge of God these different conceptualizations of what God is, are, we might say, ranged side by side, one
added to the other., each contributing something that must be
predicated of the divine Reality. All imperfection must be
removed from the formal signification of each of these distinct
notions. But here we encounter a paradox: even though our
concepts do express a pure meaning, and need imply no limitation in their essential content, yet applied to God, precisely as
God, each concept on its own, in its own distinct and distinctive
role, does imply a limitation from our point of view.
For us, goodness is not wisdom, the formality of essence is
not the formality of person. There is a necessary limitation
implied in the formality we intelligibly represent to ourselves,
because it expresses only one formality, one perfection. This
arises because all our knowledge of the divine is formally
expressed in categories which are" not-God," drawn from realities which can only partially represent His fulness of infinite
112 It is necessary to read especially Summa Theol., I, q. 13, a. 4; de Pot., q. 7,
a. 6; Resp. ad Joan. Vercell., qq. 1-3; though, as both Von Gunten and Nicolas
remark, the substantial doctrine can be found in the I Sentences, e. g., I Sent.,
d. 2, q. 1, a. 3; cf. also B. Lemaigre, "Perfections de Dieu, et multiplicite des
attributs de Dieu," Revue des Sciences Phil. et Theol. 50 (1966), 198-227.

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

45

Act. God verifies in the depths of His being each of these attributions and affirmations. But the consequence of this plurality
of affirmations about God is that each of them, though made
originally in articulated distinctness, must yield to the fact that
God is God, an all simple and infinite Reality. In this one
infinite Reality goodness is wisdom, knowledge is love, nature
is person, not because our ideas imply this identification but
because these ideas are applied to God by that dynamic reference to the divine which is the very soul of our affirmations.
The divine order is one of utter simplicity and infinity, and the
finite distinct idea must yield to the infinite simple Reality.
The impact of the Mystery of God's infinite simplicity on the
finite distinct concepts of the mind is not to leave them ranged
side by side, like numerals in an addition, the sum being God;
rather it is to see in a positive, though dark manner that God
is not the sum of them. Each formality must be affected by
the infinity of the Divine and look to a terminal transformation
where it loses its capacity to exist as a distinct thing in the
all exhaustive act of God's Existence. We can now gain a
deeper insight into the negative process of our knowledge.
When our knowledge is confronted precisely by the infinite
simplicity of God and when we consider the one divine Reality
affirmed by this multiplicity of conceptual operations "per
modum unius," a more radical negative process is necessary
than when we considered each affirmation of God under some
determined formal aspect by itself. First, each intelligible content is applied to God by that fundamental positive-negative
process by which the mind comes to the authentic signification
of God without adequately representing Him. In the concept
of " goodness," for instance, the mind does not know the divine
goodness as it is in itself; however, with its conceptual formal
reference point it can make meaningful affirmations of the
divine Reality. The essential content of the concept is said to
be " in God," though God is not said to be " in the concept "
as though seized or adequately expressed by it. In this inadequacy, coupled with the basic validity of using this particular
concept as applied to God, the mind can know God in a truly

46

ANTHONY J. KELLY

authentic manner, by surpassing its clear knowledge in the
consciousness that God's infinity is not expressed.
The process of negation is achieved when each single affirmation is considered in its organic correlation with the totality
of our affirmations made about God. This whole body of
knowledge, existing perhaps in some systematic sequence in the
mind, must be affected by the realization that what is at stake
is the lmowledge of God, of God who is the all-Simple and
Infinite One. This transcendent Oneness draws each of our
concepts into a further negation, that of its distinctness. In
our minds, one thing is not the other; in God, one thing is the
other. This is so, because our finite "rationes" are found in
God, not as distinct formalities but in the infinite, one Reality,
which in its supereminence expresses all these formalities in
itself, and expresses them in their utmost perfection, and all
of them together in the one simple infinite Act.113
Hence there is a zone of darkness above the multiplicity of
our affirmations which establishes the mind in an attitude of
unknowing before the one divine Reality. At this stage it would
be more telling to say that it is not so much that these
formalities are " in God," even as contained in the divine
simplicity, but, to use a bolder expression, the Reality which
113 Cf. de Pot., q. 7, a. 6: "omnes istae multae
rationes et diversae habent
aliquid correspondens in ipso Deo, cuius omnes ipsae conceptiones sunt similitudines." And also de Div. Ncnn., c. 1, lect. 3: "qui cum singula nomina determinate
aliquid significant distinctum ab aliis, venientia in divinam predicationem, non
significant illam finite, sed infinite; sicut nomen sapientiae prout in rebus creatis
accipitur, significat aliquid distinctum a justitia, sed cum in divinis accipitur, non
significat aliquid determinatum ad genus, et ad speciem seu distinctionem ab aliis
perfectionibus, sed aliquid infinitum ... ": in this way our conceptual knowledge
is of necessity polarized beyond its distinct formal expressions toward the divine
Reality, in its simple Reality, known only in the darkness of the tendency' of our
affirmations. This is a point which would establish a contact with K. Barth,
Kirchliche Dogmatik II i, 375. Hera he stresses that God is not contained in our
ideas drawn from this world, as just an univocal extension of our idea of perfections,
but has His o·wn proper essence, uncontained and inexpressible by human\ thought
and language. What we have said about the properly divine order of Reality
negatively designated by our limited and multiple concepts seems quite close to
what Barth holds on this matter, or at least would provide a point of dialogue in
a comparative study of the two views.

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

47

is God expresses in one single all perfect Ratio all the perfection
which is in each of the formalities affirmed of Him. It is a
higher Reality and consequently a higher simplicity than that
known in the connatural world of our knowledge. Before this
divine order of ineffable simplicity the mind remains in the
darkness of the consciousness that God is not known as Heis-in-Himself.

*

*

*

*

*

Up to the present our attention has been turned to the
formal transcendence of the divine Reality over our speech and
concepts demanding a dark and negative character in our
knowledge. This has been on a formal abstractly metaphysical
level where the data of salvation history and natural revelation
have been conceptualized and treated in an extremely static
manner. The result arrived at was that the divine order, so
abstractly affirmed, cannot be known save by negation, so that
the mind, positively directed by the concept on the one hand,
and on the other yielding to the complete darkness of our
knowledge regarding the divine Reality as It-is-in-Itself, "intends," or noetically tends toward the divine Reality in its real
existence.
This abstract formal type of knowledge does not enable us
to synthesize our conceptual data; in fact the burden of all
that has been said is that God as the " divine Synthesis " of all
the attributes, etc., which He possesses, is beyond us in His
utter simplicity. The formal content of our knowledge does not
express God in the simple fashion in which He exists in Himself. Now, if this is so and we realize this fully, some consequences must result.
Just as the formal affirmation of God was made through
conceptualizations of the experiences of salvation history, God
is good, loving, just, wise, etc., in order that God might be
objectivized in our knowledge as truly God, in His transcendent Reality, this affirmation arising out of man's concrete
experience with the God of Salvation. This formal type of
knowledge in its metaphysical objectivity needs to be brought

48

ANTHONY J. KELLY

into dialectic once more with the experience of salvation history
from which it arose.
This formal static type of knowledge ended in establishing
the mind in a darkness before the divine Reality; now, it is
this very darkness that demands a return to the existential
starting point of our knowledge and exacts from the theologian
the realization that he is not affirming merely a static object
but a divine Subject freely acting in relationship to sinful man.
This divine" Thou" has revealed Himself, not as the ontological possessor of divine attributes 114 but in the concrete, as the
God of Love, of Trinitarian Agape manifesting itself in mercy
and in a way far outweighing the divine justice. The formal
abstract knowledge cannot express this.
The idea of a free, loving, historical intervention of God
eludes that formal aspect of our knowledge with its abstract
metaphysical character; but the very force of the tension
present within it toward the divine Reality-in-Itself demands
as a complement the mysteric givenness of the divine Reality
in which God is encountered as revealing Himself. Thus the
darkness of our formal objective knowledge looks to the concrete self-disclosure of the divine Subject to achieve its completeness.115
Thus the affirmation of the divine simplicity must be considered to be the product of a dialectic between its formal and
mysteric moment, each completing and living from the other.
Just as each single affirmation, e. g., of the attributes in particular, has these two moments, as has been pointed out, and
is centered above all in the givenness of the divine " Thou " of
the Logos of God, so also this eventual affirmation of the divine
simplicity, which is the completion, in a sense, of all the previous affirmations, pointing as it does to the fact that God as
He is in His infinite eternal Self-simplicity cannot be known in
this life.
n• That is, an Object indifferent to man by not entering, in the concrete, into
a free personal relationship to Him.
115 The " That " content of our knowledge must revert to the " Thou " content of
the experience of God from which it arose.

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

49

The mysteric givenness of the divine presence in history
demands that we objectivize this presence and do our utmost to
conceptualize it for the purpose of affirming it as an objective
Reality, a truly divine infinite Reality. This moment in our
knowledge directs the mind to God in His metaphysical, metahistorical Reality, to the God Who need not have spoken nor
acted to be what He concretely is in Himsel£.116 Now, the
darkness brought about by the formal moment of our affirmation before what God-is-in-Himself demands the return to how
God concretely reveals Himself who has spoken and as such
is a given Reality in the experience of the believer and the
Christian theologian; thus the darkness of the formal objective
moment opens into the mysteric moment in which the givenness of the divine " Thou " concretely revealing Himself is perceived.u7
In this manner, our affirmation of the simple Reality of God
in its achieved totality affirms the real God, both as mysterically given in His dominant character of " Agape " and yet as
regards our formal understanding " dwelling in light inapproachable." He has revealed Himself, yet He has not appeared
as He is.118
Thus, from the consciousness of God's transcendence over
our knowledge and His beyondness in relationship to all human categories, our theological knowledge is so affected as to
116 This " formal " moment
in our knowledge brings to our reflexive grasp of
revelation and the history of salvation an articulated awareness of i) His transcendence-in-Himself over His communications (Denz. 432), and ii) the fact of His
free action, in that it need not have been so for Him to be what He is in Himself.
This is where we must not lose the opportunity of pointing out a similarity between
what is said here and the doctrine of K. Barth, op. cit., 372 ff.; our stressing the
two moments in theological thought before the transcendent Mystery of God
enables us to appreciate God in His total ineffable Reality as the eternal, all simple
subsistent One, and as " Der Liebende in der Freiheit." Thus a too static, Platonic
view of the divine simplicity\ is avoidable. Here again I feel a comparative study
would have much to offer.
117 Cf. K. Rahner,
"Bermerkungen zur Gotteslehre in der Katholischen Dogmatik," Catholica Jahrbuclv fur Kontroverstheologie 20 (1966), 1-19.
us Cf. K. Rahner, "HI. Schrift und theologie," Handbuch Theologischer Grundbegriffe II, 524.

50

ANTHONY J, KELLY

demand a dialectic between the two moments as we have
attempted to describe them.
2. The supracategorical nature of the divine Reality

In conceiving the Mystery of the revealed God, concepts
expressing two types of reality are used: the absolute and the
relative. The absolute considerations arise from the formal
objectivization of the One God as infinitely above and beyond
His finite considerations. The category of relation is invoked
because it is found necessary to objectivize in some intelligible
way the inter-subjective life of the three divine Persons between One Another and in relationship to man in the history
of salvation. These two categories enable us in some way to
express the Mystery of the revealed God in its totality, i.e.,
as the One God who is these three divine Persons.
The previous explanations made clear that we do have valid
knowledge of God. The concepts of person and nature, of
habens and habitum, of the attributes, of the absolute and
relative, are really verified in God. By using what-is-not God
these concepts do tell us something that is truly verified of the
God of creation and salvation, inadequate as it is.119
However, let us remember that the principle of negation,
pointing as it does to the divine simplicity, still stands. In a
superior order that which is expressed distinctly by our concepts of the absolute and relative is one Reality; neither set of
concepts by itself, the absolute or the relative, can validly
express the fulness of the divine Mystery as revealed to us.
The absolute category cannot lead us to the mystery of the
three divine Persons, while the relative cannot of itself establish
the three divine Persons in a transcendence which is properly
divine; they do not express the absolute transcendence of God.
As St. Thomas remarks, if in the divine perfection nothing
more were present than that which is signified by a relative
name, it would mean that the divine Reality was something
119 De Pot., q. 7, a. 6: "omnes rationes sunt in intellectu quidem nostro sicut in
subiecto, sed in Deo sunt sicut in radice verificante has conceptiones."

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

51

imperfect, that it was something existing solely in reference to
something else. Similarly, if it were nothing more than what is
signified in the name " wisdom," it would not be subsisting, etc.
But, because the divine perfection is greater than what can be
signified by any one name, it does not follow, if any of these
names have an imperfect signification when applied to God,
that the divine Reality is imperfect, because the divine Perfection has within itself the perfection of all types of reality. 120
In another classic passage we see that it is precisely because
of the established mystery of the transcendent simplicity of
God that we can appreciate more fully the reality of the three
divine Persons in their mutual distinction. 121 The divine Reality
contains all perfections both of the absolute and relative order;
each of these perfections is the divine essence, is God. The
Fatherhood really is God, so also the Sonship, in the supreme
simplicity of the divine Form. Because of this sheer identification within the divine Reality, all that belongs to Fatherhood,
all that belongs to Sonship must be found really in God, as
all the notes of everything else we attribute to the divine
Reality can be found there in a supremely real way. Now,
because each of these relationships is found really in God,
each must be distinct from the other; for, in the meaning of
a relation being really in God there is here implied a term to
which the reference is had, since a real relationship cannot
exist save between two distinct realities and really distinct
realities; Fatherhood must then be "Sonwardness." This personal reference cannot be really saved except in the positing
of a really distinct correlative, the Son. Sonship cannot be
" Fatherwardness " in all its reality unless there is the reality
of the really distinct Father. Thus, in the dark affirmation of
the divine Simplicity the way is opened to a powerful realization of the reality of three divine Persons in their inter-subjective life.
The significance of this point is that our mind remains con120
121

Summa Thool., I, q. 28, a. 2, ad 3.
IV Cont. Gent., c. 14.

52

ANTHONY J. KELLY

fronted with the one mystery. 122 Noetically there is no retreat
from this single point of reference, i. e., the one Reality in
which everything affirmed of God is verified. When Thomas
stated that the divine Reality was not in any genus of created
reality, even reductively/ 23 he opened the way for predicating
substance and relation of God without giving the impression
that the mystery of the Trinity was something added to the
divine essence. From the first, the theologian in his affirmation
of the transcendent simplicity of the revealed God is noetically
disposed to appreciate the mystery of the Trinity, the mystery
of the Three Who are God, and in so being are distinct from
One Another.

*

*

*

*

*

Cajetan expresses profoundly the transcendence of the divine
Reality attainable only in the darkness of negation. This
splendid passage, so often quoted by Thomistic writers, represents one of the profoundest insights in the whole scholastic
tradition. 124 The divine Reality is described as transcending all
the categories we use to express it in a supremely mysterious
order which is proper to God alone:
... know that in God, in reality or in the real order, there is
one Reality which is not purely absolute nor purely relative, nor is
it mixed or composed of or resulting from both; but in a most
eminent manner it formally contains that which is relative (indeed,
many relative entities) and that which is absolute. Thus, in the
formal order or in the order of formal realities (rationum), that is
to say, in itself, not in regard to us, there is in God a unique formal
122 Similarly we can say that the structure of our affirmation is such that we are
in a position to realize, in a telling way, the analogical character of the three
divine Persons in God and not to consider them as " persons " in the modern sense
of the word, as distinct conscious subjects. On this point, cf. K. Rahner, "Der
Driefaltige Gott als Transzendenter Urgrund der Heilsgeschichte," Mysterium

Salutis II,
128 I Sent., d. 8, q. 4, a. 2; d. 19, q. 4, a. 2; de Ente et Essentia, c. 6; I Cont. Gent.,
cc. 24, 25; de Pot., q. 7, a. 3; Summa Theol., I, q. 3, a. 5; Compendium. Theogiae,,
cc. 14, 15, 16.
12 • R. Garrigou-Lagrange,
le Sens du mystere (Paris, 1934), 220; H. Dondaine,
La Trinite (Editions des Jeunes, Paris, 1945), 337; J. H. Nicolas," Chronique ... ,"
Revue Thomiste 57 (1957), 369.

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

53

Reality which is neither purely absolute nor purely relative, not
purely communicable nor purely incommunicable, but most eminently it formally contains whatever absolute perfection there is
and whatever the relations of the Trinity demand. It must be so,
because there belongs to every most simple reality, which of itself
is maximally one, one adequate formal meaning; otherwise this
reality would not be primarily and of itself intelligible as one thing
by any intellect. And this is confirmed, because the Word of God
is only one, for a word if it is perfect is adequate to that which
it expresses.
We are wrong in approaching God through the categories of
absolute and relative, imagining that the distinction between the
absolute and the relative is prior to the divine Reality itself.
Consequently, we think that the one has to be subordinated to the
other. However, the complete opposite is the case; because the
divine Reality comes before being and all its differences, it is superBeing and super-One, etc .... (Comment. in I, q. 39, a. 1).
There is a point here to be made of some importance to
the essentialist-personalist problem in trinitarian theology previously referred to. Cajetan indicates in his explication of the
doctrine of St. Thomas that the divine Reality is above all
being and its differences; it is above the distinction of absolute
and relative, of communicable and incommunicable, above our
ideas of what is essential in God, and what is personal in God
(this later in the sense that we consider the absolute to be
the essence and the relative to be constitutive of the divine
personalities). Here, however, we must be careful; though the
divine Reality transcends the distinction we make between the
absolute and relative and, therefore, the distinction of essential
and personal insofar as it is implied in this first division, it
must not be thought that the divine Reality is neither purely
personal nor purely essential, in the sense that it is neither
purely absolute nor purely relative. It is the divine Person
precisely as Person that transcends all these distinct categories.
The personal in God does not yield to a higher order that is
not completely personal. God in the communion of His inner
life remains the supremely personal Reality. 125
125 And above all, in the modem sense of the word, as a " Thou " in free relationship to us. Here again we must not lose the opportunity to point out: though we

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ANTHONY J. KELLY

As St. Thomas explains, the notion of the divine Person
implies both the absolute and the relative considerations. 126 To
this extent the divine Person is implied in the affirmation of
the transcendent simplicity of God; for everything in God is
the unique subsistence of God, the unique divine Subject, a
divinely personal reality. It can be said that the mystery of
the divine simplicity does not place the divine Personality on
the same footing as the other divine perfections; because it is
the term of attribution to which all that is said of God is
referred, and the ultimate term of attribution, it must be
preeminent amongst all the eminent perfections of God. 127
There is nothing more ultimate in the divine Reality than to be
personal.
The darkness of negation so necessary for our authentic
knowledge of God highlights what is personal in God. What
we attribute to Him is denied of Him in its finiteness and
multiplicity, with the result that our minds are left in a" docta
ignorantia " before the transcendent Reality of God. But
this darkness is not a static state but a state of tendency, a
"directed darkness," through which the obscure expression of
our conceptual knowledge is indicating an inexpressible divine
ultimate Subject which is the focal point of all this attribution
and in which all the formalities are one. Thus this darkness
positively directs our minds to the subsisting perfection of not
only something but Someone. Thus the experience of the divine
" Thou " in salvation history is translated into our most formal
and abstract affirmation. 128
assert that God is a supremely personal Reality in the sense of " subsistens distinctum in natura rationali " and in the sense of being a " Thou " toward other
personal beings and the three divine Persons a "Thou" to One another, we must
be careful to note that there are not three "
" in God, three distinct,
subjective freedoms; that would be a tritheistic conception of the Trinity. Cf. B.
Lonergan, De Deo Trino II (Rome, 1964), 186-193.
126 Summa Theol., I, q, 29, a. 4: "significat
relationem in recto et essentiam in
obliquo .... "
127 Ibid., a. 3: " persona est quod est perfectissima in tota natura ... " ; ad 2:
"hoc nomen persona maxime Deo convenit .... "
128 We might say that theological thought
on God sees God in a completely
personal dimension, as a Persona-in-se, i. e., the infinite subsisting subject of all

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

55

In the light of what has just been said, the essence-person
controversy seems rather unnecessary and irrelevant, because of
the uniquely personal Reality above all our categories. It cannot be doubted i) that the sole subject of any divine action is
personal; ii) that there are only three divine Persons and that
God IS these three divine Persons; and iii) that all our categories and concepts in their distinctness are not finalized in
themselves but look to a higher order of simplicity in which the
distinction of notions yields to an ineffable Unity. These
notions direct our knowledge to the divine order, enabling us
to meaningfully affirm it; they do not in their distinctness and
limitation express this divine order as it is. This problematic
arises, partially at least, from the failure to realise this, that
God transcends our categories and concepts in an infinite simplicity, to which our minds are directed only in the darkness of
negation, by affirming in this dark manner this divine Reality
as surpassmg our conceptualizations, not as contained within
them. 129
3. The formal and mysteric; affirmation of the Trinity

At this juncture, I would like to point out a contrast:
Despite the true depth of Cajetan's insight into the divine
transcendence, there remains a strange rift, at least at first
sight, between the " Res Divina," this Deitas or " Ratio Dei,"
and these three divine Persons, the Father, Son and Holy
Spirit.
The " Res divina " expressed as a single " ratio " is an
our personal affirmations and as " haec Persona-quoad-nos " as the freely acting
divine Thou with regard to us.
129 In this way we can see one danger in a static representationist
type of theology. Once . it is admitted that our concepts somehow represent the divine
Reality in themselves, and we forget, on the one hand, that these concepts are
expressive of realities which are verified in the Infinite Subsistence of the divine
subject in an altogether simple fashion; and on the other, that our theological
thought is within the context of a given Mystery, of the divine "Thou" communicating Himself to man in salvation history and perceived as " our Mystery " in faith,
it is little wonder that various pseudo-problems will arise in that our knowledge
is not duly polarized by the divine Reality.

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ANTHONY J, KELLY

anonymous entity in a certain sense. It is obviously a truly
powerful affirmation of what God must be, surpassing all our
concepts and categories, all being and its differences. Nonetheless, in its very achievement it endangers or distracts from
the full realization that God has actually and historically intervened in our history, revealing Himself and disclosing Himself
to us as the divine " Thou " of the Father, speaking to us in
the Logos, His only begotten Son, and communing with us in
the Holy Spirit. Theology must not be distracted out of this
positive historical consciousness of God by confining itself to
an abstract, static mode of thought.
It need not be stressed that the common manualistic stream
of theology has tended to regard God as adequately affirmed
in a series of abstract notions which were, no doubt, adequate
for the formal expression of our knowledge of God but failed
to realize the given truth that the three divine Persons have
communicated themselves. This lack of due emphasis is especially apparent in the doctrine of grace; this was considered
more as the possession of something than a relationship with
Someone, to the Father, in Christ, with the Holy Spirit. 130
Thus there came about a radical depersonalization in theology,
to some extent due to one of its most profound insights. The
directly personal element was at times designated as a mere
manner of speech, as appropriation was at times regarded. 131
It is difficult to conceal a sympathy for Malet in his attempt
to bring out and to save the personal element in Thomistic
trinitarian theology, above all in spite of the inaccuracy of his
solution when certain cases of the divine activity " ad intra "
and "ad extra" are considered. J. H. Nicolas assures us that
Malet's fears of Sabellianism and essentialism in theology will
be allayed if the above cited comment of Cajetan is taken into
consideration. 132 Cajetan himself has in mind an objection of
13 ° Cf. R. Garrigou-Lagrange,
Le Sens du Mystere ... , 224-43: "La Deite et
I' essence de la grace" ... such a treatment, while it stresses the intrinsic supernaturality of grace, completely lacks the trinitarian perspective. Cf. E. Schillebeeckx, Rev. et Theol., 368.
131 H. Barre, Trinite que j'adore (Paris, 1965), 81-89.
132 " Chronique," Revue Thomiste 57 (1957), 369.

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

57

Scotus who, like Malet, tried to objectivize the distinction of
these formalities in the divine Reality, in order to preserve the
given Mystery of the Trinity (the Father communicates in the
act of generation His divine nature only, and not His distinctive personality) / 33 Not only does the Father not communicate His divine personality, but also the "potentia generandi"
is not communicated, even though the divine nature is. H.
Dondaine, confronted with this objection posed by S. Boulgakof (one of the theologians to whom Malet's work was
directed) , candidly admits that the Thomist explanation can
give no further understanding of the mystery at this point. 134
At this juncture, we can begin to reflect on our process of
knowing and affirming the revealed Reality of the Trinity. The
very transcendence of the Mystery demands two facets
in our thought, or two "moments," as we have previously
called them, in our theological affirmations: one can be designated "formal " in that it regards the objective ontology of
the divine Reality; by this, the mind is darkly orientated
other moment called "mystoward the "Ratio Deitatis ";
teric " looks to these three divine Persons in their concretely
personal reference to man in salvation history as the New
Testament describes them. These two moments in our affirmation are demanded by the supra-categorical, supra-conceptual nature of the divine Reality. They are demanded in
order that our affirmations might respect the full Reality of
the Trinity as A Mystery, and ouR Mystery, in its formal
transcendence and its mysteric givenness.
The formal moment serves to explicate the quidditative ontological aspect of the divine Reality as one intelligible Reality
in itself, surpassing as it does all our concepts and categories
as a unique formal Perfection, as "A Mystery." Thus, in the
133 Cajetan, in I, q. 89, a. 1, n. 8: "ex hoc enim quod est unius rationis in se non
sequitur, ' ergo tantum communicabilis vel incommunicabilis ' sed stat quod sit et
communicabilis et incommunicabilis et hoc propter infinitatem illius rationis
formalis."
134 H. Dondaine,
"Bulletin de theologie," Revue des Sciences Philos. et Thiol.
%1 (1947)' 441.

58

ANTHONY J. KELLY

way of negation above all, the ineffable personal Reality of
the revealed God is affirmed. However, in this precise achievement, there is a noetic veering away, to a necessary extent, from
the given truth of the Mystery as it comes to us, namely, in
these three divine Persons who are before us, not as abstract
notions but in themselves, directly and immediately and actually identified as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the personal communion they have instigated with man. The formal
moment directly regards the transcendent objective Reality of
the revealed God without directly regarding these Three as the
Scriptures present them; and so the presence of another
moment in our theological affirmations is necessary for their
full theological truth.
It is imperative, then in order that our theological progress
might be more fully assured and past dangers of abstractionism
in theology avoided, that we realize that present in a truly
theological affirmation of the divine Reality is a dialectic between two moments.
The formal moment is the necessary counterpoint to the
mysteric moment; we cannot have the one without the other,
for if theology contents itself with affirming merely the
" Three " in salvation history, known in the immediacy of
faith, God would not be apprehended in a theological manner
as sufficiently removed from our categories and surpassing our
concepts. The divine Mystery as an ontological Reality would
not be adequately objectivized. Conversely, if we regard merely
the formal content of our affirmations, the risk is present of
engulfing the concretely personal character of the given divine
Mystery in an abstract and anonymous "Deitas "; and this
would draw our attention far away from the fact that the
Trinity was a Mystery of salvation, in fact, THE Mystery of
salvation. 135 Theology could easily substitute for the immediate personal revelation of the three divine Persons an abstractly
elaborated "Immanent Trinity" which in the long run can
135 K. Rahner, "Ueber den Begriff des Geheimnisses in der Katholischen Theologie, Schriften IV, 82-89.

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

59

take much of the personal realism out of the history of
vation and Revelation. 136 Both moments must be present in
reciprocal completion, in a role of mutual direction toward the
fulness of divine Reality which neither, of itself, can adequately
affirm.

*

*

*

*

*

If we might briefly return to the aforementioned problematic
of Malet, it will be remembered that he demanded a rather too
objective " distinctio rationis " in God, in order that revelation
might be respected in its concrete givenness, where only The
Father is Father, and only the Son is incarnate, ... etc. Malet
is right in perceiving that theology must at all costs respect
the concrete given fact of the mysteries it seeks to penetrate;
however, his solution to the problem as he saw it was unsatisfactory, since he interpreted the divine Reality too much in
terms of our distinct limited concepts.
Now, in the light of the reflections that have been made
about the two moments in our affirmation of the divine Reality,
this problem, the solution of which can never logically be seen,
for it would imply an immediate apprehension of the divine
Reality in itself, may be grasped to some extent and a properly
theological solution found. This is suggested because we postulate these two moments, one of which directs the attention to
186 G. Martelet, "Theologie
und Heilsi:iconomie in der Christologie der 'Tertia,'"
Gott in Welt II, 3-43: here we see how a prior elaborated " theology " of God as
the one divine Essence and Trinity of Persons (understood through the psychological image) blunted the realization that the Incarnation of the Logos was the real
locus of our knowledge of the Trinity, not merely because He instructs us with
words about God in Himself, but because He, together with the Holy Spirit, was
God's Self-communication to the world in the sense that the immanent Trinity was
manifested in the " economia " of salvation. Thus, the humanity of Christ would
be really expressive of the Person of the Word, as Son of God,. and altogether inconceivable as the incarnation of some other divine Person. This failure to recognize
the Incarnation as the precise expression of the Person of the Son caused the
tendency to see Christ as " God made man " with Christ's character as the Son of
God underplayed in grace (15) in the humanity of Christ as an "Instrumentum
coniunctum" (14), in the priesthood of Christ (17-18), in the prayer of Christ
(19f), in the relationship of the whole Trinity to the Incarnation (21-7), etc. (all
this is not to undermine the magnificent achievement of St. Thomas but merely to
point out how all values cannot be saved in the particular schema he adopted.)

60

ANTHONY J. KELLY

the given personal Reality of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit
in salvation history, the other to the objective transcendent
Reality therein implied, and the total effect of this living
dialectic is that our theology in its abstract phase takes place
within the given Mystery, as it were, and is a response to it.
Abstract formal thought does not result in being distracted
from the divine Personal Mystery at hand; or rather, there
results "formal" abstraction, but it is always polarized by a
deeper grasp of the given Reality of the Mystery. 137
This dialectic does not offer the solution to " problems " in
this field, but it does establish us in a correct theological attitude with regard to the divine Mystery; God ever remains the
revealer, revealing more than theological thought can formulate. Further, tills theological thought is the response to a given
Reality, but a response wbich can never be as great as the
Reality it seeks to affirm.
In this light it would seem possible to see a greater existential bearing in our thought about the Trinity; for instance,
137 Thus the " Psychological
Image " can be appreciated as a theological hypothesis by which the given Personal Mystery is affirmed in a meaningful way accessible to our formal categories: " Trinitate posita, congruunt huiusmodi rationes."
(Summa Theol., I, q. 32, a. I, ad 2). This metaphysical reflection takes place,
as it were, "within" the given Mystery, "Trinitate posita," which remains ineffable
in itself and is not placed " within " the psychological image in the sense that the
Mystery is expounded in terms of our human psychism. Rather, this hypothesis
purifies the directly scriptural data of any anthropomorphic interpretation and leads
us into a validly spiritual way of speaking of procession and of the distinct personality of the Three we encounter in the concrete " economia" in a way which
harmonizes with (without fully exhausting) the biblical notions of proceeding Word
and Love. In purifying our notions, this image is leading us to a more real understanding and appreciation of the divine " Thou " before our faith in the given
Mystery. It is not a theological fabrication of the Mystery in our terms but a true
exercise of the via nl!gativa in which our notions are purified! before being affirmed
of God, and which enables us to theologically affirm " these Three," related to us in
the intersubjective relationship of faith, in a way meaningfully adapted to the
Mystery but not exhaustive of it ... " ad recte sentiendum de salute generis humani
quae perficitur per Filium incarnatum, et per don urn Spiritus sancti" (ibid., ad 3).
For the purifying role of the psychological image, cf. de Pot., q. 9, a. 5 ... ,
" modeste tamen et reverenter absque comprehendendi praesumptione ... nee talis
inquisitio est inutilis cum per earn elevetur animus ad aliquid veritatis capiendum
quod sufficiat ad excludendos errores .... " See also IV Cont. GMt., c. I (at end).

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

61

the notion of Person applied to God as equally designating the
Three meets with an admission of darkness before the ineffable
divine order of Reality; but when the mind returns from this
noetic darkness to the Scriptures where these Three are described, our affirmation concludes to the differing verification
of our human notion of Person in the One God in a way not
only analogical to our human notion but analogical in reference to the Three in themselves. There is that "plus" when
the mind passes through the darkness of its formal categories
and returns with its formal limited accomplishment to revelation as concretely expressed in the Scriptures. Likewise, to use
another example, the notion of relation, used necessarily in our
formal ontological affirmation of the divine Mystery, is darkly
affirmed of God and then seen as concretely instanced in the
" ad Patrem " life of the Son as presented to us in the Gospels
(and similarly with regard to the" ad Filium" of the Father,
etc.). Thus, the peculiarity of our theological noetic is to
lead us back to revelation, from the consciousness of God's
ineffability-in-Himself to the given revealed Mystery of Godin-Himself.

*

*

*

*

*

It will now be useful to compare these two moments in our
affirmation with other distinctions that occur in our knowledge
of God.
i) It is not the same as "clear" and "mysterious," for both
moments share in the same clarity and experience the same
obscurity before the transcendence of the revealed God. However, the dialectic of these two moments in our theological
thought can be considered in this division. For example, the
formal abstract moment of our thought results in the consciousness of its own inadequacy and thus intrinsically demands the
mysteric moment, in which God is the given Reality, in those
three divine Persons in communion with man in which God
manifests Himself in a positive attitude of love toward sinful
man, and in which God is a divine Subject rather than an
Object with regard to our knowledge. Likewise the clarity of

62

ANTHONY J. KELLY

the formal moment, in the clarity of its positive direction, demands the darkness inherent in the mysteric moment, a darkness which results from directing our attention toward " The
Three " Who are the One God.
Similarly, the clarity of the mysteric moment looks to the
obscurity inherent in the achievement of the formal moment,
in that the divine " Thou " which the mysteric moment directly
looks to must be affirmed as a truly transcendent Reality, transcending our concepts, categories, and its own finite communications. Likewise, the mysteric moment of our thought demands the clarity of the formal moment so that our affirmations will be made of God as of an " eschatological " Reality,
of Him as He will appear in His eternity and infinity as not
measured by the present " economia."
ii) More obviously, this distinction of moments is not equivalent to essentialist and personalist types of knowledge, for in
the problematic in which we have worked this distinction looks
to the theological knowledge of the Trinity " ad intra." In
fact, both of these moments look to the affirmation of the
divine Reality as an " essentia " and as a " Persona," without
implying any contradiction.
The formal moment indicates an " essentia" by directing our
theological attention towards an abstract "Ratio Deitatis ";
the mysteric moment directly indicates what God concretely
IS in salvation history and in this way points to a mysterious
"essentia Dei"; 138 for the "In Se" of the divine Reality is
shown in the "pro nobis," for God in acting toward us is disclosing Himself. Both moments of our theological thought are
"personalist" too, each bringing out "personal" values in
making its contribution to the total truth of our theological
affirmations; the mysteric moment looks directly to the divine
"Thou" in salvation history, whereas the formal moment, in
directing the mind to the divine simplicity, highlights the
supremely personal character of the divine Reality in a more
objective and metaphysical sense.
138

In the sense of showing us WHAT God is: Three, Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

TO K.."NUW THE MYSTERY

63

iii) These two moments are not distinct, insofar as one looks
to the Unity of God and the other to the Trinity of persons;
rather, these two sides to the central mystery of our faith are
implied in each of the moments of our theological thought.
The formal moment, whilst directing our attention to a transcendent simplicity, does nonetheless imply that this is the
simplicity of a Reality which is the Trinity, for it makes explicit
that the absolute and relative formalities are formally and
eminently present in the one single perfection where the relative
remains relative and thus demands its correlative real opposite.
The mysteric moment, as well as directing our attention to
" These Three " in salvation history, in its own way indicates
the Unity of God, because each of the Three implies, by very
force of His role in the act of redemption, a communion with
the other Two; so that one divine Mystery is communicated
to us.
iv) This distinction is not the equivalent of the truth of
faith and the truth of theology, as though the mysteric moment
was some pre-reflective stage in our knowledge and the formal
moment represented theological reflection " as far as theology
could go." Rather, this mysteric moment must find its place
at the very heart of our theological reflection, so that the
formal abstraction which will be necessary will not result in
unnecessary distraction from the given fact that the history of
salvation and the revelation therein implied gives us God and
the three divine Persons in themselves. In this way we will not
need to interpret the Incarnation according to a previously
elaborated trinitarian theology which fails in some measure to
appreciate the actual personal "Self" of the divine Person in
His role "pro nobis." The Incarnation is properly the function
of the divine " Logos," the revealer, and it is inconceivable that
the other divine Persons could become man, for, being revealed
in themselves in this" economia" by very force of their personalities, they have another function. They are given in salvation
history as they are and could not be conceived of in another
way. If this mysteric moment enters right into our theological
reflection, a number of quasi-difficulties will be excluded from

64

ANTHONY J. KELLY

theology, e. g., the primacy of the person in trinitarian theology,
and there will be a more fruitful realization that God has actually revealed HIMSELF.
On the other hand, the formal abstract moment of our
thought must itself look to revelation, not merely as that from
which it begins but as that which it seeks to penetrate; it must
result as a response to the given Mystery, a response prolonged
into an effort to appreciate it in its objective ontology.
v) Further, this mysteric formal distinction is not tantamount to concrete and abstract. This will be seen on reflecting
that the formal moment is aimed at the concrete affirmation
of not " Gad-in-abstracto " but this God, who is Father, Son
and Spirit, considered in His objective ontology. The mysteric
moment achieves a different form of concretization for our theology in that it directs our attention to the divine " Thou " of
salvation history, to a divine Subject with regard to us, in
His free spontaneous action and in Himself.
vi) To take the matter further again, the "mysteric-formal "
division is not the same as economic-immanent with regard to
the Trinity; both moments aim at expressing the One God,
whose immanent Self is manifested in the " economia." The
formal moment, in expressing the objective ontological aspect
of the divine Reality, directs our attention to this Reality as
the radical principle of salvation history. Similarly, the mysteric moment, though it implies immediately the " economia,"
is really directed at the Reality of God-in-Se in the conviction
that the God of the" economia" is the immanent Deity.
The dialectic between these two moments makes us conceive
the Trinity, not merely as an "economic" mystery, nor for
that matter as an intellectual puzzle abstractly divorced from
salvific Reality. The formal moment enables us to break out
o£ a " God-for-us " type of theology with its recurrent danger
of Sabellianism, at least in expression. 139 The mysteric moment
enables us to see the Trinity as the Mystery of salvation, as
truly OUR MYSTERY; and the result of bringing out these two
139

B. Lonergan, de Deo Trino II (Rome, 1964), 193 ff.

TO KNOW THE MYSTERY

65

moments in our knowledge of the Trinity as affected by God's
transcendence is to see our theological noetic as leading us to
a unique type of affirmation because of the special uniqueness
of the divine Subject that is referred to our knowledge.
Thus our total affirmation of the Mystery of God contains
these two moments; they are present as demanded by the
consciousness of God's transcendence over all our categories.
An inter-subjective relationship can establish us in the presence
of the " Great Other " through revelation and hence calls forth
an objective ontological statement of the transcendence of God
over all finite realities and conceptualizations. The formal
moment in which this objective statement is achieved looks, in
the precise darkness and abstractness of its achievement, to the
mysteric givenness of the divine "Thou" in salvation history.
The darkness of one moment achieves itself in the clarity of the
other; and the abstractness of the one is perfected in the concreteness of the other.
The supraconceptual and supracategorical nature of the
divine Reality demands this double moment in our knowledge;
thus the transcendence of the revealed God affects our theological thought with this modality and establishes it in a
unique noetic. It is a personal knowledge, yet conditioned by
the darkness of our affirmation of the divine Reality as It-is-inItself. It is a dark and negative knowledge, yet entirely
directed to the divine "Thou" who is related to man's experience in salvation history and mediated to man now through
faith and the Scriptures as a given reality.
The unique character of our theological knowledge should be
realized before we address ourselves, in systematic theology, to
the divine Mystery. Our whole approach should be conditioned
by the recognition of the special transcendence of the divine
Reality and the unique character of the theological noetic.
Already we can see that the recognition of these two moments
in our theological thought will lessen the rift between the older,
more formal speculative type of theology and that of the more
modern salvation-historical approach.
I have approached this whole question from a Thomistic

66

ANTHONY J. KELLY

standpoint, though with the necessary freedom of the speculative method. I have so far shown how the Thomistic type of
negative knowledge is best regarded, not in a static abstract
manner but as directed to and conditioning our affirmation of
the given divine Reality: God in His " in Se " communicated
to us in the "pro nobis" of salvation history. We must now
set our theological knowledge, in its full noetic range, above
all with regard to its non-conceptual depth.
(to be concluded)
ANTHONY

St. Mary's Monastery
W endouree, Victoria
Australia

J. KELLY, c. ss. R.

THE GENERAL INDEX TO THE THOMIST
VOL. XXXII (1968)
INDEX OF AUTHORS
PAGE
BuRNS, J. PATOUT, S. J., Spiritual Dynamism in Marechal
CIAPPI, L., 0. P., Crisis of the Magisterium, Crisis of Faith?
147
DoYLE, J. J., The Summa in Symbols: A Reply
D'SouzA, LISBERT, S. J., Lonergan's Metaphysics of Proportionate
509
Being
FoNTANA, V. V., 0. P., Linguistic Analysis and Inference about God
GouLD, JAMES A., A Note on Willing the First Time
GRISEZ, GERMAIN G., The Moral Basis of Law .
HART, THOMAS N., S. J., God in the Ethico-Religious Thought of
Henri Bergson
333
HILL, WILLIAM J., 0. P., God-Talk: Review Article
116
KELLY, A. J., C. SS. R., To Know the Mystery: the Theologian in the
Presence of the Revealed God
.1, 171
LEHNER, FRANCIS C., 0. P., The Lambda- Ennea Case
387
MASCALL, E. L., Secularization Theology: Review Article
106
PHILIPPE, M.D., 0. P., Reverentissime Exponens Frater Thomas
84
REICHMANN, JAMES B., S. J., The Transcendental Method and the
Psychogenesis of Being .
449
RIGA, PETER J., The Effect of God's Law on Man according to St.
Augustine .
366
STEINTRAGER, JAMES, Political Philosophy, Political Theology, and
307
Morality
THOMASMA, DAviD, 0. P., The Synthesis of Teilhard de Chardin
WALLACE, WILLIAM A., 0. P., Thomism and Modern Science: Relationships Past, Present, and Future
67
INDEX OF BOOK REVIEWS

A New Catechism: Catholic Faith for Adults (T. U. Mullaney, 0. P.)
ADLER, MoRTIMER J., The Difference of Man and the Difference It
Makes (J. N. Deely)
436
--, Freedom (B. A. Williams, 0. P.)
564
ANDERSON, J. F., Reflections on the Analogy of Being (R. Mcinerny)
AQUINAS, ST. THOMAS, Summa Theologiae, vol. 10 (la, 65-74) (Cos(D. C. Lindberg)

ATIYA, Aziz S., History of Eastern Christianity (J. Meyendorff)
BELLET, MAURICE, Facing the Unbeliever (J.P. Reid, 0. P.)
BoGLIOLO, LuiGI, Guida alia ricerca scientifica e allo studio di S.
Tommaso (F. C. Lehner, 0. P.)
BROWN, PETER, Augustine of Hippo (W. B. Ryan, 0. P.)
CERFAUX, LuciEN, The Spiritual Journey of St. Paul (M. K. Hopkins, 0. P.)
CHARDIN, P. TEILHARD de, Writings in Time of War (D. Thomasma,
0. P.)
Cox, HARVEY (ed.), The Situation Ethics Debate (T. A. Wassmer,
J.)
CROWE, F. E., S. J., Collection: Papers by Bernard Lonergan, S. J.
(E. MacKinnon, S. J.)
CuRRAN, CHARLES, Absolutes in Moral Theology? (C. Williams, 0. P.)
DALY, MARY, The Church and the Second Sex (Sr. M. F. R. Carton,
S. S. N.D.)
DE FINANCE, JosEPH, S. J., Ethique Generale (J. Zagar, 0. P.)
DELFGAAUW, BERNARD, The Student History of Philosophy (J. B.
Davis, 0. P.) .
EDWARDS, PAUL (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (W. A.
WALLACE, 0. P.)
FEMIANO, S.D., Infallibility of the Laity (N. Halligan, 0. P.)
FIELD, G. C., Plato and his Contemporaries (J. C. Taylor, 0. P.)
GEOFFREY oF VINSAUF, Documentum de Modo et Arte Dictandi et
Versificandi (J. R. O'Donnell)
GILLON, L. B., 0. P., Christ and Moral Theology (R .P. Stenger, 0. P.)
GRECH, G. M., 0. P., The Commentary of Peter of Auvergne on Aristotle's "Politics" (F. C. Lehner, 0. P.)
HARPER, RALPH, The Seventh Solitude: Metaphysical Homelessness
in Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche (D. Thomasma,
O.P.)
HAZo, RoBERT G., The Idea of Love (A. McNicholl, 0. P.)
KuNG, HANS, The Church (M. B. Schepers, 0. P.)
McGILL, V. J., The Idea of Happiness (T. F. McMahon, C. S. V.)
MACKEY, J.P., The Grace of God, the Response of Man (R. J. Hennessey, 0. P.)
MEIER, A. M., Das Peccatum Mortale ex Toto Genere Suo (C. Williams, 0. P.) .
METZ, JoHANNEs (ed.), The Evolving World and Theology (0. W.
Garrigan)
.
MoNTAGU, AsHLEY (ed.), The Concept of the Primitive (B. M.
Ashley, 0. P.)
MooRE, C. A. (ed.), The Chinese Mind, Essentials of Chinese Philosophy (P. K. K. Tong)

s.

PAGE
578
441
570
446
579
581
556

189

548
567
484
598
448

578
545

584
540

184

589

PAGE

--,

The Indian Mind, Essentials of Indian Philosophy (E. R.
271

MICHAEL, Belief and Unbelief, a Philosophy of Self-Krwwledge
(A. P. Leonard, 0. P.)
O'FLAHERTY, JAMES C., Hamann's Socratic Memorabilia (J. E.
Bourgeois)
O'NEIL, CoLMAN, 0. P., New Approaches to the Eucharist (J. E.
Farren, 0. P.)
--, The One Mediator. Summa Theologiae vol. 50 (Sa. 16-20)
(R. J. Hennessey, 0. P.)
PARKER, G. F., A Short Account of Greek Philosophy (J. C. Taylor,
O.P.)
PowERS, JosEPH M., S. J., Eucharistic Theology (J. A. Farren, 0. P.)
PRELLER, V., Divine Science and the Science of God (A. J. Kelly,
C.SS.R.

138
135

129
447

277
129
261

Proceedings of the 22nd Convention of the Catholic Theological
Society of America
0. P.)
568
Ramirez, Santiago, 0. P. 1891-1967. In Memorian. (L .Camacho,
0. P.)
RICHARDSON, HERBERT W., Toward an American Theology (A. P.
Leonard, 0. P.)
RoLDAN, ALEXANDER, S. J., Personality Types and Holiness (M.
Stock, 0. P.) .
SABOURIN, LEOPOLD, S. J., The Names and Titles of Jesus (R. J.
Hennessey, 0. P.)
SciLLACI, ANTHONY, 0. P., Movies and Morals (P. P. Silvinskas)
SHERIDAN, THOMAS J., Newman on Justification (W. J. Hill, 0. P.)
SIMON, YVEs, Freedom and Community (B. A. Williams, O.P.)
STROLZ, WALTER, Human Existence: Contradiction and Hope (K.
Wall, 0. P.)
TAVARD, G., The Pilgrim Church (P. DeMan, 0. P.)
TAYLOR, HEBDEN, Evolution and the Reformation of Biology (M.
Stock, 0. P.) .
TsEU, A. A., The Moral Philosophy of Mo-tze (P. K. K. Tong)
UTz, ARTHUR, Ethique Sociale. Tome II Philosophie Du Droit (J.
Zagar, 0. P.) .
VANDER MARCK, Wm. H. M., Toward a Christian Ethic (C. Williams,
O.P.)
WATZLAWIK, JosEPH, S.V.D., Leo XIII and the New Scholasticism
Halligan, 0. P.)
WEISS, P., The Making of Men (M. Stock, 0. P.)
WoRLAND, STEPHEN THEODORE, Scholasticism and Welfare Economics
(G. P. Bowe, 0. P.)

575

127
439
447
596
560
564
590
252

592
279
136

245
141
272

430

INDEX OF ARTICLES
PAGE
Analysis, Linguistic-- and Inference about God. V. V. FoNTANA,
O.P.
201
Auustine, The Effects of God's Love on Man according to St. --.
P. J. RIGA
366
Basis, The Moral-- of Law. G. GRISEZ
283
Being, Lonergan's Metaphysics of --. L. D'SouzA
509
---, The Transcendental Method and the Psychogenesis of --.
J. B. REICHMANN, s. J. .
449
Bergson, God in the Ethico-Religious Thought of Henri--. T. N.
HART, S.J.
333
Chardin, The Synthesis of Teilhard de --. D. THOMASMA, 0. P. 213
Crisis of the Magisterium, Crisis of Faith? L. CIAPPI, 0. P.
147
Dynamism, Spiritual-- in Marechal. J. P. BuRNS, S. J.
528
Effect, The -- of God's Love on Man according to St. Augustine.
P. J. RIGA .
366
Ennea, The Lambda--- Case. F. C. LEHNER, 0. P. .
387
Ethico-, God in the-- Religious Thought of Henri Bergson. T. N.
HART, s. J.
333
Faith, Crisis of the Magisterium, Crisis of --? L. CIAPPI, 0. P. 147
God in the Ethico-Religious Thought of Henri Bergson. T. N.
HART, s. J.
333
---, Linguistic Analysis and Inference about--. V. V. FoNTANA,
O.P.
201
---, To Know the Mystery: The Theologian in the Presence of
.1, 171
the Revealed --. A. J. KELLY, C. SS. R. .
God-Talk: Review Article. W. J. HILL, 0. P. .
116
God's, The Effect of -- Love on Man according to St. Augustine.
P. J. RIGA
336
Inference, Linguistic Analysis and-- about God. V. V. FoNTANA,

0. P.
Lambda-, The -- Ennea Case. F. C. LEHNER, 0. P.
Law, The Moral Basis of--. G. GRISEZ
Linguistic Analysis and Inference about God. V. V. FoNTANA, 0. P.
Lonergan's Mataphysics of Proportionate Being. L. D'SouzA, S. J.
Love, The Effect of God's -- on Man according to St. Augustine.
P. J. RIGA
Magisterium, Crisis of the --, Crisis of Faith? L. CIAPPI, 0. P.
Man, The Effect of God's Love on -- according to St. Augustine.
P. J. RIGA
Marechal, Spiritual Dynamism in--. J.P. BURNS, S. J.
Metaphysics, Lonergan's -- of Proportionate Being. L. D'SouzA,
S.J.

201
387
283
201

509
366
147
366
528

509

PAGE
Method, The Transcendental -- and the Physchogenesis of Being.
449
J. B. REICHMANN, S. J. .
Modern, Thomism and -- Science: Relationships Past, Present and
67
Future. W. A. WALLACE, 0. P.
Moral, The-- Basis of Law. G. GmsEz
Morality, Political Philosophy, Political Theology, and --. J.
STEINTRAGER
307
Mystery, To Know the--: The Theologian in the Presence of the
Revealed God. A. J. KELLY, C.SS.R.
.1,171
Philosophy, Political --, Political Theology, and Morality. J.
STEINTRAGER
307
Presence, To Know the Mystery, the Theologian in the -- of the
Revealed God. A. J. KELLY, C.SS.R.
.1,171
Proportionate, Lonergan's Metaphysics of -- Being. L. D'SouzA,

S.J.

509

Psychogenesis, The Transcendental Method and the -- of Being.
449
J. B. REICHMANN, s. J. .
Relationships, Thomism and Modern Science: -- Past, Present, and
67
Future. W. A. WALLACE, 0. P.
Religious, God in the Ethico- --Thought of Henri Bergson. T. N.
HART, s. J.
333
Revealed, To Know the Mystery: the Theologian in the Presence of
.1, 171
the -- God. A. J. KELLY, C. SS. R.
Science, Thomism and Modern --, Relationships Past, Present, and
Future. W. A. WALLACE, 0. P.
67
Secularization Theology: Review Article. E. L. MAscALL
106
Spiritual Dynamism in Marechal. J. P. BuRNS, S. J. .
Summa, The-- in Symbols: A Reply. J. J. DoYLE
Synthesis, The -- of Teilhard de Chardin. D. THOMASMA, 0. P.
Theologian, To Know the Mystery: the -- in the Presence of the
.1, 171
Revealed God. A. J. KELLY, C. SS. R.
Theology, Political Philosophy, Political --, and Morality. J.
STEINTRAGER
307
---, Secularization --: Review Article. E. L. MAsCALL
106
Thought, God in the Ethico-Religious --of Henri Bergson. T. N.
HART, S. J.
333
84
Thomas, Reverentissime Exponens Frater--. M.D. PHILIPPE, 0. P.
Thomism and Modern Science: Relationships Past, Present, and
67
Future. W. A. WALLACE, O.P.
Time, A Note on Willing the First --. J. A. GoULD
Transcendental, The -- Method and the Psychogenesis of Being.
J. B. REICHMANN, S. J. .
449
Willing, A Note on -- the First Time. J. A. GoVLD

THOMISM AND MODERN SCIENCE: RELATIONSHIPS PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

T

HE IMPORTANCE of science and technology in the
modern world is generally recognized by the Christian
community. The Second Vatican Council, in fact,
singled them out as dominant factors in our civilization, factors
that are most responsible for the changing thought patterns of
the twentieth century. The Council Fathers pointed to " the
mathematical and natural sciences " as having a profound impact " in the cultural sphere and on modes of thought." 1 The
life sciences and the social sciences, they acknowledged, are
contributing also to the intellectual revolution that characterizes our age. Just as the Council of Trent over four centuries
ago warned Catholics of theological innovations that could
undermine their faith, so, in a more positive spirit, the Second
Vatican Council directs attention to secular transformations to
which the Church must adjust if she is to carry out her mission
in the modern world.
As a consequence of the Council's teaching, those charged
with fostering the intellectual life within the Church are
encouraged to take a positive attitude toward scientific disciplines. And, since so much of the Church's intellectual life is
associated with scholasticism, and with Thomism in particular,
the opportunity is thereby provided to examine anew the
relationships between Thomism and modern science. The aim
of such an examination, of course, is to chart a program for
the future. Such a charting presupposes a knowledge of the
present situation, but even more it presupposes a correct understanding of what has happened in the past. Thomism has
existed for close to seven hundred years, and modern science
has a history of about half that span. If it is difficult to back
1 The Pastoral Constitution, Gaudium et Spes, on the Church in the Modern
World, Preface, No. 5.

67

68

WILLIAM

A. WALLACE

off and study the present situation, it is relatively simple to
view the past, to see there what has been good and what bad
in the relationships between Thomism and science, and from
this to make plans for the future.
THE MEDIEVAL

PAST

The early history of this relationship, that before the rise of
modern science in the early seventeenth century, does not
require lengthy exposition. Because of the Aristotelian thought
context in which medieval science was located, both St. Thomas
and his teacher, St. Albert the Great, took an active interest
in, and wrote competently on, topics that were to interest the
precursors of modern science. For example, they discussed
motion and the conceptual foundations of what was later to
become the science of mechanics; 2 they evaluated the astronomical theories of their time; 3 they had distinctive views on the
structure of matter that went far beyond those of their contemporaries.4 Thomistic science, as practiced by St. Thomas and
2 St. Albert, for example, is usually cited for his use of
terms f!uxus formae
and forma f!uens to characterize the diverse ways of viewing the entitative status
of motion in general, and of local motion in particular. This distinction, taken up
in the fourteenth century by nominalists and realists, became a fruitful source of
discussion from which the new science of mechanics, in both its kinematical and
dynamical aspects, was to emerge. See Anneliese Maier, Die Vorliiufer Galileis im
14. Jahrhundert (Roma: 1949), pp. 11-16. Similarly, St. Thomas is singled out
for attention, because of his teaching, contrary to Aristotle and Averroes, that
motion through a void would not be instantaneous, thus indirectly influencing the
development of a concept of inertial resistance to motion among later thinkers
such as Nicole Oresme. See A. Maier, Zwischen Philosophie und Mechanik (Roma:
1958)' pp. 226, 246, 257, 266-279.
3 For St. Thomas's
critical evaluation of medieval astronomical theories, see
Thomas Litt, O.C.S.O., Les Corps Celestes dans l'univers de saint Thomas d'Aquin.
Philosophes Medievaux, Tome VII (Louvain/Paris: 1963); also W. A. Wallace,
0. P., Cosmogony. Vol. X of St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (New York/
London: 1967), English translation, with notes and appendices on Thomas's
science.
• St. Albert, with unusual foresight, endorsed the atoms of Democritus as providing an insight into the structure of material substance, provided they be interpreted
as physical parts of bodies in the sense of minima naturalia. St. Thomas, in his
tum, made a considerable advance beyond the teaching of Avicenna and Averroes
with his theory of the virtual presence of elements in compounds. For details, see

THOMISM

AND MODERN

SCIENCE

69

his early followers, was not divorced from philosophy and theology. It entered into the very fabric of the Thomistic
synthesis and was responsible, in large part, for the value of
that synthesis as an integration of all of knowledge, both
human and divine.
Until very recently, little has been known about the role
of Thomists and other scholastic thinkers in laying the foundations for modern science during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and
sixteenth centuries. One of the pioneer historians of this period,
Pierre Duhem, however, attempted some fifty years ago to
verify the thesis that Leonardo da Vinci was the key figure in
effecting the transition from scholastic patterns of thought to
those of Galileo. 5 Duhem's researches led him in an unexpected
direction. Rather than confirming his conjecture about Leonardo da Vinci, they brought him to a hitherto unknown
personality in the history of science, the Spanish Dominican
and Thomist, Domingo de Soto. 6 Duhem was able to point
out that Soto had equivalently formulated what was later to
become Galileo's law of falling bodies some eighty years before
this was published by the great Italian physicist. 7 In fact, since
Soto's writings were known to Galileo in his youth, the Spanish
Dominican may have had a direct influence on the evolution of
the science of mechanics as it is now known. 8
It is not necessary to verify such an influence, however, to
A. Maier, An der Grenze van Scholastik und Naturwissenchaft, 2. Auflage (Roma:
1952)' pp. 81-88.
5 Etudes sur Leonard de Vinci. Ceux qu'il a Ius et ceux qui l'ont lu.
8 Vols.
(Paris: 1906-18).
• Ibid., Vol. III, pp. 268-582, section entitled "Dominique Soto et Ia scolastique
parisienne." For a critical study of Soto's life and works, see Vicente Beltran de
Heredia, Domingo de So to. Estudio Biografico Documentado. (Salamanca: 1860).
7 For verification of Duhem's thesis in considerable detail see my article entitled
" The Enigma of Domingo de Soto: Uniformiter Difjormis and Falling Bodies in
Late Medieval Physics," to be published in Isis.
8 An edition of Soto's Quaestiones super octo libros Physicorum Aristotelis, which
contains the discovery relating to falling bodies, was published at Venice in
and dedicated to the Italian Dominican, Domenico Bolano. Galileo studied at Pisa
and Padua shortly after this date, and, in his Juvenilia (commonly regarded as his
student notebooks), makes reference to one of Soto's Quaestiones, thereby indicating
that these were available either to himself or to his teachers.

70

WILLIAM

A. WALLACE

show that the Thomists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
were actively interested in the velocities of falling bodies, projectiles, motion in a vacuum, and similar problems whose discussion led to the new science of mechanics. Their various
opuscula, as well as their commentaries and "questionaries"
on the Physics of Aristotle, 9 show them taking part in the
controversies between the nominalists and the realists that were
so important for this development. 10 They knew the science
and the mathematics of their day, and they contributed intelligently to its development, as well as to its integration within
the broader framework of their philosophy and theology.
THE MoDERN

PAST

By the end of the sixteenth century, however, a changed
attitude on the part of Thomistic writers becomes detectable.
The change, unfortunately, was to the detriment of scientific
and mathematical interests, although it seems to have come
about without any prejudice against these disciplines. The fact
that most Dominicans in this period seem to have been engaged
in teaching seminarians goes far to explain what happened.
:Few, if any, were professionally interested in science. Faced
with a pedagogical problem of communicating the more metaphysical theses that are necessary for sacred theology, and
possibly teaching students who had insufficient knowledge of
9 Among the works of Dominicans, apart from Soto, who discussed topics relating
to physics or astronomy, we may mention: Giovanni Graziadei (di Ascoli),
Quaestiones in libros Physicorum Aristotelis (Venice: 1484); Crisostomo Javelli,
In libros Phy8icorum Quaestines (Lyons: 1568); Isidoro !solano, De velodtate
motuum (Pavia: 15!Z!Z); Petrus Crokart de Bruxellis, Argutis8ime, subtiles et fecun<U
Questiones Phy8icales ... (Paris: 1521); Amadeus Meygretus, Questiones in libros
De Celo et Mundo Aristotelis ... (Paris: 1514); Diego de Astudillo, Quaestionu

super octo libros Phy8icorum et mper duos libros De Generatione Aristotelis ...
(Valladolid: 1532); and Domingo Banez, Commentaria et Quaestiones in duos De
Generatione et Corruptione libros (Salamanca: 1585).
10 Soto, in fact, attempted
to show how the nominalists and the realists both
" sin through excess " in discussing such matters as the entitative status of local
motion. For a brief statement of his resolution, see my paper, " The Concept of
Motion in the Sixteenth Century," to be published in the Proceedings of the
American Catholic Philosophical Association for 1967.

THOMISM

AND MODERN SCIENCE

71

mathematics, they gradually abandoned the tradition in which
technical problems relating to Aristotle's Physics were given
full treatment. Instead, they began what was to become known
as the " manual tradition " in scholastic philosophy. In place
of questions on the velocities of motion, for example, they
introduced sections on creation, subsistence, and problems related to the Eucharist into natural philosophy .11 By the time
Galileo and Newton were writing the revolutionary treatises
that would shape modem thought for the next three centuries,
such treatises were no longer of immediate interest to Thomists.
Entering, then, on the second phase of the history of the
relationships between Thomism and modem science, a phase in
which science has already emerged in its present-day form and
in which Thomism has already taken on the characteristics of
a system (and a closed system at that), one can only be
disappointed with what is seen. In the post- Tridentine period,
the teaching Church had already assumed an authoritarian air
that extended to all areas of knowledge, modern science included. At the same time, those who were charged with
advancing the intellectual life within the Church, who might
have been expected to benefit from contact with the new disciplines, were not themselves prepared to read and evaluate
critically the works in which they were contained. As a consequence, the scene was set for a disastrous encounter between
11 This is particularly
noticeable when one traces the development of the text·
books of the Spanish Thomists who came after Soto, viz., Diego Mas, 0. P., Commentaria in universam philosophiam Aristotelis una cum quaebtionibus quae a
gravissimis viris disputari solent. (Valencia: 1599); Juan Martinez de Prado. 0. P ..
Quaestiones philosophiae naturalis in tres partes distribttiae. (Alcala: 1651-5!l);
Cosme de Lerma, 0. P., Commentaria in octo libros Physicorum, ed. 2a (Burgos:
1655); Diego Ortiz, 0. P., Philosophiae brevis explicatio, cum gravioribus questionibus a philosophis disputari solitis (Seville: 1678); and Frolan Diaz, 0. P., Philosophia naturalis per questiones et articulos divisa iuxta mentem D. Thomae (Valladolid: 1695). Many, such as Lerma and Ortiz, believed that they were following
Soto's doctrines, although actually they departed from him, particularly in their
metaphysical emphases. For a sketch of the more favorable aspects of this development, see Santiago Ramirez, 0. P., "Hacia una renovacion de nuestros estudios
filos6ficos. (Un indice de Ia producci6n filos6fica de los Dominicos espafioles) ."
Estudios Filos6ficos, I (195!l), pp. 8-28.

72

WILLIAM

A. WALLACE

Thomism and modern science that has had unfortunate consequences, reaching all the way to the present day.
One aspect of this confrontation, valuable for the lesson it
affords, may be examined in the impact on Thomistic manuals
of natural philosophy of the two most important works in the
history of mechanics and astronomy, Galileo's Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences (1638) and Newton's Mathematical
Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687; 2nd edition 1713).
Since this examination, by reason of space, cannot be exhaustive, it will concentrate on three of the most representative
manuals in the period from the end of the seventeenth to the
end of the nineteenth century, namely, those of Gaudin, Roselli,
and Lepidi.
Antoine Gaudin's Philosophia iuxta inconcussa tutissimaque
D. Thomae dogmata first appeared in 1671 and went through
many revisions and editions to the end of the nineteenth
century. 12 The edition of 1726 is of interest for its treatment of
the laws of motion. 13 Gaudin exposes the traditional teaching
of Aristotle and St. Thomas., but nowhere mentions the works
of Galileo or of Newton. He does have a section on the laws
of motion and impetus, which is devoted exclusively, however,
to a consideration of laws proposed by Descartes. In fact, one
would gain the impression that Descartes alone had made innovations in the science of mechanics, so extensive are Gaudin's
references to the French thinker. 14 Gaudin still speaks of heavy
and light bodies, apparently not having learned from Galileo
that this distinction was no longer viable; 15 he mentions
12 For details of Gaudin's life and writings, see J. Quetif, 0. P., and J. Echard,
0. P., Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum (Paris: 1721), Tom. II, p. 740.
13 Volume 2 of the Cologne 1726 edition
is devoted to the first part of the
Physic8, dealing with ens mobile in communi. The third disputation, which treats
of motion as a property of changeable being, has a section entitled "De legibus
motus et impetus localis," pp. 280-282.
a This seems to be characteristic of the Thomistic manualists of the period;
they generally concentrated on Descartes and such thinkers as Mersenne, Maignan,
and Gassendi, and paid little attention to the more mathematical treatises of
writers like Galileo and Newton.
16 Galileo's
teacher, G. B. Benedetti, had already rejected the existence of
levity (levitas), maintaining that all bodies in the universe are heavy, and

THOMISM

AND MODERN SCIENCE

73

Galileo, along with William Gilbert, in discussing magnetism; 16
and he grants that the acceleration of falling objects is proportional to the series of odd numbers, 17 but disclaims any intention
of going into details on such matters. There is not even a
mention of Newton in the section on laws of motion, even
though the Principia had appeared almost forty years before.
In an 1854 edition/ 8 Newton's laws are discussed in an extended footnote, where they are pointed out as being completely false; the footnote is undoubtedly the work of an
editor/ 9 however, and seems to have been borrowed from
another manualist, viz., Roselli.
The Summa Philosophica of Salvator Maria Roselli is a
monumental treatise in that it not only attempts to expose
Thomistic thought thoroughly, but also tries to take account of
innovations among the moderns. 20 Roselli devotes considerable
attention to Newton and his commentators and is willing to
accord to Newton's synthesis some mathematical validity,
although in general he is opposed to all of its physical doctrines.
Galileo followed him in this. The first convincing proof, however, came from
Newton, with the evidence he adduced for the law of universal gravitation.
Goudin mentions none of these thinkers, restricting his attention to Descartes and
Gassendi; his own opinion is expressed in the words, " itaque dico, sicut corpus
grave innato impetu tendit deorsum, ita !eve sursum" (op. cit., p.
16 "Quantum ad res quibus ea vis [sci!., vis magnetica] inest, primo ac praecipue
interioribus terreni globi partibus ac eius veluti nucleo inesse docent, qui de vi
magnetica diligentius scripsere, Gilbertus, Galilaeus, Cartesius et alii" ibid., p.
17 " Porro qua proportione
acceleretur motus gravium, viri solertes cum variis
experimentis quaesiverint, reperiere accelerari juxta progressum numerorum imparium ... " ibid., p.
This teaching is contained in Galileo's Dialogues
Concerning Two New Sciences; it was known from the fourteenth century onward,
however, that this mathematical relationship is verified in all uniformly accelerated
motions.
18 Both
this edition and that of
are cited because they are the only
early editions of Goudin available to me.
19 Goudin himself died on October
1695; the tenth edition of the work, the
last under his care, appeared in 1692. See Quetif-Echard, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 740.
2 ° For a full description of this work and the background against which it was
written, see E. I. Narciso, 0. P., La Summa Philosophica di Salvatore RoseUi e la
Rinascita del Tomismo. Studi e Ricerche sulla Rinascita del Tomismo, n. 2 (Roma:
1966) . References to Roselli that appear below are from the Madrid edition of
1788.

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WILLIAM A. WALLACE

Roselli denies the existence of universal attraction, however
this is to be understood, and holds that the element fire is
absolutely light. 21 The heavenly bodies, in his estimation, are
neither heavy nor light, because he still is convinced that they
move in circular paths according to Aristotelian teaching. 22 He
examines with some care Newton's laws of motion, but finds
all of them false, and substitutes in their place his own laws
of motion. 23 These, unfortunately, miss the point behind Newton's "mathematical principles of natural philosophy," and are
sterile for providing any insight into the structure of the system
of the world. Considering that Roselli prepared his second
edition almost a hundred years after Newton's classic, 24 this
failure to grasp the physical import of Newton's reasoning is
almost incomprehensible. 25
When Roselli comes to discuss the system of the world,
moreover, there can be no doubt that he is still defending a
geocentric universe. He rejects the Ptolemaic system, and also
that of Tycho Brahe, on the grounds that the physical principles on which they are based are false. 26 He is willing to
admit the Copernican system as a hypothesis, but teaches that
it can be in no way defended when holding that the sun is at
rest and that the earth moves. 27 Discussing the cause of the
Summa philosophica, Vol. II, pp. 861-872.
Ibid., pp. 455-466.
2 " Ibid., pp. 455-566.
24 The first edition of the Summa philosophica appeared in 1777, and the second
edition in 1788. A third edition was printed at Bologna between 1857 and 1859;
this was requested by the 1838 General Chapter of the Dominicans, with the proviso
that the parts dealing with physics be reduced( to a few questions.
25 As Newton himself maintained,
he attempted to argue from the properties of
celestial motion that can be analyzed mathematically to a knowledge of the physical
cause of such motion, and thus reasoned to the presence of gravity in all bodies
of the solar system whose motions were observable. He disclaimed any knowledge
of the cause of gravity, and did not wish to frame any hypotheses (hypotheses non
fingo) on this subject, since it was not directly related to hiSI argument. Once he
had proved a posteriori that celestial bodies obey the law of gravitation, he could
argue forcefully for the heliocentric system on the basis of physical principles, and
not as a mere mathematical hypothesis.
2 " Summa philosophica, Vol. III, pp. 172-203.
27 Ibid., pp. 204-207.
21

22

THOMISM

AND MODERN

SCIENCE

75

motion of the stars, Roselli rejects Kepler's thesis, together
with the systems of Decartes and Leibniz. 28 He also examines
and rejects Newton's analysis of the system of the world, and
concludes with his own thesis, namely, that the heavenly bodies
have no active principle of motion within them, that they are
not moved directly by God, but that they are moved by the
angels. 30
Roselli's manual had a great influence on the subsequent
development of scholasticism. Not only was some of his
material excerpted and inserted in subsequent editions of other
manuals, such as Goudin's, but as late as 1875 a five-volume
lnstitutiones Philosophicae ad mentem angelici DoGtoris S.
Thomae Aquinatis ordinatae was issued at the Abbey of Monte
Casino containing substantially all his teachings, including his
evaluations of Newton's mechanics. 31 Although the Dominicans had rejected this part of Roselli's manual as early as
1838, 32 this shows that teachers who regarded themselves as
authentic Thomists were still using Roselli's analyses almost
two hundred years after the first appearance of Newton's
Principia.
Of less interest and importance is the treatment of Alberto
Lepidi in his Elementa philosophiae christianae, published at
Ibid., pp. 402-426.
Ibid., pp. 426-445.
30 Ibid., pp. 445-452. This seems to reveal a misunderstanding,

28

29

on Roselli's part,
of the orders of causality involved. There would seem to be no repugnance in
allowing for gravity as a passive principle of motion within the heavenly body, as
St. Thomas taught was the case for earthly bodies, and at the same time allowing
for immaterial movers (such as angels) as active principles of the motion.
31 The author
(anonymous) evidently compiled this text from other works, as
he himself states in the introduction to Vol. II: " Institutiones physicas ita concinnare curabimus, materiam a probatissirnis Auctoribus sive antiquis, sive recentioribus excerpendo, quae magis scitu necessaria viris ecclesiasticis videtur.
Quaedam enim res, licet physicae sint, sacrae tamen doctrinae inserviunt, quas
diligenter persequitur P. Salvator Maria Roselli, 0. P., ideoque eius opere praecipue
utemur" (p. 2). The writer's analysis of the forces involved in maintaining
equilibrium in the solar system, however, reveals a complete misunderstanding of
Newtonian mechanics (pp. 233-234).
•• See E. I. Narciso, op. cit., p. 139, fn. 13.

76

WILLIAM A. WALLACE

Paris and Louvain in 1879.33 Discussing the properties of
corporeal substance, Lepidi treats of the concept of inertia,
which he acknowledges as deriving from the " Principles of
Philosophy" of Sir Isaac Newton. 34 By this time, Thomists
seem willing to concede that there is possibly some truth in
Newton's teaching. Lepidi, at any rate, shows himself an
opportunist in wishing to use the Newtonian concept of inertia
for arguing against materialists. 35 He accepts inertia as a fact,
although he does not think its nature is correctly understood
by the moderns, and regards it as a conclusive proof that the
motion or rest of any physical body can only be explained by
some external cause. 36
Other cases could be adduced, but these are sufficient to
characterize the attitude of Tho mists toward Newtonian science during the period when the thought of Newton had
already gained acceptance in the great university centers of
western Europe and in the U. S.37 In all fairness to the
Dominicans we have mentioned, they were not completely
arbitrary in their rejection of certain aspects of Newton's
teaching. As only recent work in the philosophy of science
has shown, Newton's laws of motion are not without their
logical and their extra-logical difficulties. 38 It is to the credit
88 Lepidi
was born on February
1839, and died on July 31, 1925. His
Cosmologia was the third and last volume of his Elememta philosophiae christianae;
the first volume of the series appeared in 1875.
•• Vol. III, pp. 143-145. The title, Principia philosophiae, actually refers to the
work of Descartes, not Newton; some editions of Newton's classic, however, were
printed with these words of the title in bold type, e. g., PRINCIPIA mathematica
PHILOSOPHIAEl naturalis, thus suggesting an affinity to the title of Descartes' work.
85 Ibid., p. 144.
•• Ibid., p. 145.
87 Perhaps
this unsympathetic treatment of Newton is explainable by the fact
that most scholastic manualists were of Italian, Spanish, and French nationality.
Their knowledge of Newton seems to have been gleaned from the writings of
French partisans of Descartes and Leibniz, who were themselves strongly antiNewtonian. The manualists, of course, rejected both Descartes and Leibniz, and,
along with them, Newton as representing a. more extreme position to which even
they were opposed.
88 For a contemporary
evaluation of these difficulties, see W. A. Wallace, 0. P.,
"Newtonian Antinomies Against the Prima Via," The Thomi.st 19 (1956), pp. 151-

THOMISM

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of these Thomists that they were more alert than many of
their contemporaries in detecting flaws in Newtonian reasoning.
At the same time, however, one should not overlook the fact
that their attitude toward the science of mechanics, and the
new astronomy, was essentially negative. They were convinced,
to a man, that they already possessed the whole truth about
the structure of the universe, and their minds were not open
to the possibility of any new knowledge coming from modern
science.
To recapitulate, then, the history of the relationships between Thomism and modern science is partly good and partly
bad. From the time of St. Thomas all the way to the sixteenth
century, there is a sincere interest in science and its problems,
and a definite contribution is made to its progress. From the
beginning of the sevententh century to the end of the nineteenth, however, the attitude is reversed. Thomists subordinate
all of their philosophical teachings to theology; they are already
convinced that they possess the absolute truth and they attack
any new proposal as undermining the very foundations of the
Catholic faith. Finally, by the end of the nineteenth century,
they grow increasingly aware that much of their rejection of
modern science is arbitrary, and gradually they delete all references to science from their manuals of philosophy. They make
a hurried retreat from natural philosophy, and place emphasis
instead on metaphysics. Thus begins Thomism's uneasy rapprochement with contemporary thought: Thomistic cosmology, now recognized as "without a cosmos," is restricted to a
few generalities, and Thomism itself is seen as a magnificent
synthesis, erected on simple sense observation alone, and standing in complete independence of modern science.
THE PRESENT

This brings up the present situation, where science has
become one of the most influential factors in contemporary
192. Others outside the scholastic tradition have made similar criticisms, e. g.,
Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science. Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation. (New York: 1961), pp. 153-!i!O!il.

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WILLIAM A. WALLACE

civilization. While no longer attacked from without, or at
least not with the vehemence of the previous centuries, science
now has problems that have arisen largely within itself. Some
of these are associated with the extremely rapid growth of
scientific activity during the twentieth century; others come
from a concern over the very foundations of science and mathematics themselves, occasioned by new theories such as relativity and quantum theory, that cast doubt on the Newtonian world view so long accepted by the scientific community.
An example of the first type of difficulty is the present
" information explosion." The methods in which Galileo and
Newton pioneered have been brought to fruition in the early
part of this century, and science, particularly in the U. S., has
become a "big business." Vast amounts of money, from
government and private sources, are poured annually into all
types of research activity. Data are accumulated at a much
faster rate than human beings can organize and assimilate
them. Lagging only slightly behind this accumulation of data
is a rapid proliferation of theories, which themselves require
evaluation. Scientists now have so much information they do
not know what to do with it. The pressing problem, felt
everywhere, is a lack of integration in knowledge, and this not
only within science-for the physicist can no longer speak with
the chemist or the biologist on the details of his science, and
even finds few physicists with whom he can converse over his
specialty-but also in science's relation to other disciplines.
The problem of the " two cultures," so much discussed in
Britain and the U.S., is symptomatic of the lack of integration
in all areas of knowledge. 39
Examples of the second type of difficulty besetting scientists
are provided by the relativity theory, with its concern over the
structure of the very large, and the quantum theory, at the
other extreme, with its concern over the structure of the very
small. Both of these theories raise perplexing problems of in39 Attention was focused on this problem by the work of C. P. Snow, The Two
Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (New York: 1961).

THOMISM

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terpretation that have caused scientists, at least, to seek help
from philosophers in an attempt to extricate themselves from
their own antinomies. In fact, as a result of this type of problem arising within science, there has been a growth of disciplines that are closely related to science and its problems,
such as the history of science, the philosophy of science, the
sociology of science, etc.
Disciplines such as these offer some promise of bridging the
gap that has been developing between the " two cultures," and
also of offering help in coping with the " information explosion." Quite unexpectedly, they also offer some promise for a
renewal of cooperation between Thomism and modern science.
Those scientists, for example, whd have been studying the historical foundations of their disciplines, in their attempts to
understand the intellectual milieu in which science originated,
have become more open to philosophies other than mechanism
and positivism, which so long dominated their thinking. The
great interest in the medieval precursors of Galileo has led
some to reexamine the conflicts between the nominalists and
the realists, and to see advantages in Thomism that have
generally been overlooked by secular scholars. Even the criticisms of Cartesian and Newtonian thought mentioned in the
early part of this study can now be examined impartially, and
there is a growing recognition that the failure of Thomists to
go along with an accepted Newtonian world view in the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries was not simply a matter of
religious prejudice. There was also a valid philosophical content
to their critique, from which scientists themselves could have
learned, had they too been patient with those who were apparently their adversaries.
Similarly, the study of the philosophy of science, particularly
as practiced in the U.S., has produced an atmosphere in which
a Thomistic philosopher once again is able to breathe. It is
true that the origins of the philosophy-of-science movement in
the Vienna Circle showed a remarkably positivist and empiricist bias. Many members of the Vienna Circle emigrated to
the United States, where they contributed heavily to the growth

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of logical positivism as a prevailing philosophy in American
universities. Within the past decade, however, ther.e has
been a disenchantment with the type of philosophy of science
proposed by .logical positivists, and this on the part of scientists
themselves. There is increasing awareness that the methods
actually used by practicing scientists have little or nothing to
do with the complex formalistic analyses of logical positivism.
In reaction, there has been a gradual shift toward realism on
the part of scientists generally, and of a few influential philosophers of science in particular. 40 The brand of realism that is
presently favored is materialistic and ultra-realist, by Thomistic standards, but it nonetheless introduces a polarization
within the philosophy of science that can make Thomism of
interest to practitioners of this discipline. The situation is
analogous to the one that prevailed from the fourteenth to the
sixteenth centuries, when nominalism and realism were in direct
opposition, and Thomism could appear as a " middle of the
road " philosophy capable of assimilating the values in both
extremes. 41
Thus it is that the growth of the history and philosophy of
science offers promise for a rapprochement between Thomism
and the scientific culture of the late twentieth century. Apart
from this, there is cause for optimism when Thomism is considered vis-a-vis the "information explosion" and the integration of knowledge required in the present day. Thomism is
sufficiently analytical to be acceptable to the scientific mind.
Apart from providing an analysis, however, it is also a synthesis, and one that is capable of tying together the most
diverse strands of knowledge in a meaningful way. Its basic
insights into the structure of matter, into the living organism,
•• Among these philosophers of science may be enumerated David Bohm,
Mario Bunge, P. K. Feyerabend, and R. S. Cohen, some of whom are Marxist in
their philosophical sympathies.
41 See fn. 10 above.
There are marked affinities between sixteenth-century
nominalism and realism and twentieth-century neoempiricism and materialism as
diametrically opposed philosophical viewpoints; Thomists, as moderate realists,
recognize all four as extreme positions.

THOMISM

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into man and society, etc., provide a broad foundation on
which rapidly multiplying scientific disciplines may find a unified intelligibility.
This new relevance of Thomism to twentieth-century culture
carries with it an important message for Catholic philosophers
and theologians in the aftermath of the Second Vatican
Council. To some extent in Western Europe, and to a lesser
extent in the U.S., Catholic philosophers have been cultivating
personalist, existentialist, and phenomenological philosophies
as one way of updating Catholic thought and making it more
relevant to the concerns of man and society. Such philosophies
are not without their value, but for the most part they are
incapable of dealing with modern science and its problems.
Catholics understandably feel at home with them because they
speak about person, and existence, and the transcendent concerns that have been always those of Christianity. But the
more Catholic thinkers endorse existentialism, phenomenology, and personalism, and the more they divorce themselves from the hard thinking that characterizes a scientific
culture, the more divisive they become, and as a consequence
the less they do to promote the integration of knowledge. At
the worst, they openly combat the modern scientist, and at the
best, they patronizingly attempt to supplement what he is
saying, while speaking in a language that is utterly different
from his own. The end result can only be an alienation from
Catholic thought of a major component of twentieth-century
culture, a component that the Second Vatican Council was
most concerned not to alienate. 42
Thomism, on the other hand, is an open-ended synthesis
that is capable of assimilating the good to be found in modern
science and its methods, as well as the good to be found
in existentialism, phenomenology, and personalism. As such it
offers the greatest hope for solving the problems of modern
•• Father Ernan McMullin, in his Presidential Address to the American Catholic
Philosophical Association at Notre Dame, Indiana, on March fl8, 1967, forcefully
called attention to other harmful consequences, in the U. S., of this general
situation. The address is to be printed in the Proceedings for 1967.

WILLIAM

A. WALLACE

man, for unifying all areas of knowledge, and for revitalizing
Catholic thought along the lines suggested by the Second
Vatican Council.
THE FuTURE

Thus a final concern suggests itself, viz., the relationship
between Thomism and modern· science that should be the goal
of efforts in the future. Here one can be very brief. All that
need be done is to avoid the mistakes of the past and apply
well the lessons learned from history. What are the mistakes
of the past? First, the long time period required for the assimilation of new knowledge, particularly when this involved a
revolutionary viewpoint. As has been seen, it took from one to
two hundred years before Thomists assimilated the essential
content of Newtonian physics, and realized to what extent it
applies to the physical universe. The point is not being made
that Newtonian physics was true and accurate in all its specific
details. Whether Newton and his followers were right or wrong
is not at issue here; the simple fact is that far too long a time
elapsed before their arguments were being evaluated constructively by scholastic thinkers generally, and by Thomists in
particular.
Second, a point closely related to the first, the past history
of Thomism has witnessed too facile a rejection of the good
with the bad. The general principles that form the backbone
of the Thomistic synthesis provide powerful standards against
which to verify a new proposal; in the past, however, on the
basis of these principles alone, Thomists have been too quick
to reject an entire system immediately, without bothering to
look at the good points it might contain. This has impeded the
growth of Thomism, and particularly its assimilation of data
from the positive sciences.
Third, a point not unrelated to the first and the second,
in the past there has been too strong a commitment to authority (whether of St. Thomas or of the Church in endorsing
him) , and, as a consequence, a rigid adherence to prevailing
views in all areas of thought. Thomists, in principle, state that

THOMISM

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one should not rest on authority in matters philosophical, and
yet de facto they have been doing precisely this.
Fourth, and this is particularly true o£ the latter period in
Thomism's history, Thomists have been content to remain at
a very general level, concentrating on metaphysics, and neglecting the specialized disciplines that have developed because o£
the needs o£ modern man. Without intending to do so, they
have promoted a divorce between philosophy and science, and
as a result, they have allowed their theology to be completely
untouched by scientific progress.
One usually benefits from the mistakes o£ the past by conscientiously attempting to avoid them in the future. A simple
way o£ doing this, and a most important way at that, is to
return to a concept o£ the relationship between Thomism and
science that existed at the time o£ St. Albert and St. Thomas.
The pragmatic program o£ confining Thomism to a simplistic
system o£ thought well adapted to the education o£ seminarians
must be relinquished as quickly as possible. Instead, Thomists
must be encouraged to become increasingly concerned with, and
enlivened from. their contact with, the specific problems o£ the
physical, biological, psychological, social and political sciences.
Such a renewal will benefit not only Thomism but also the
sciences it can serve to integrate. In so doing it will meet the
needs o£ modern man and his society so strikingly pointed out
by the Second Vatican Council.
WILLIAM

Dominican House of Studies
Washington, D. C.

A. WALLACE, 0. P.

REVERENTISSIME

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HE EXACT value of the auctoritates in the theology
of St. Thomas has been studied more than once by
renowned scholars, historians or philologists. 1 But
ordinarily it has been considered only too partially and externally, in rather material inquiries which do not extend to a
methodological reflection on the whole. In the present discussion we do not pretend to complete this study but to prepare
the direction which must be followed in order to determine,
once and for all, the true value of an element of the thought
of St. Thomas.
It is a question of grasping in its very accomplishment (in
actu exercito) the manner in which St. Thomas, theologian,
EDITOR's NoTE: This article, which appeared in French in the Freiburger
Zeitschrift fiir Philosophic und Theologie 12 (1965), nn. 2-3, pp. 240-258, is printed
in English with the permission of the Director, Father H. 0. Luthi.
1 M. D. Chenu, "Authentica
et Magistralia, Deux lieux theologiques aux Xlle et
Xille siecles," Divus Thomas (Piac.), II (1925), pp. 257-285; BuUetin Thomiste
I (-8,
n°
p. 86; M. Riquet, "Thomas et les 'auctoritates' en philosopp. 117-155; B. T. I (-3,
n°
phie," Archives de Philosophie III,
633, pp. 86-87; M. D. Chenu, "Maitre Thomas est-il une 'autorite '? Note sur deux
pp. 187-194; B. T.
lieux theologiques au XIVe siecle," Revue thomiste VII
I (-3,
n° 997, p.
K. Balic, "Sv. Toma Akvinski i drugi nauctelju,"
fl'., 373-388; B. T. VI n•
Bogoslovska Smotra XXV (1937), p. 47 fl'., 133 fl'.,
p. 149; G. Geenen, "L'usage des 'auctoritates' dans la doctrine du Bapteme chez
S. Thomas d'Aquin," Ephem. theol. Lovan. XV (1938), pp.
I. Backes,
"Thomas von Aquin und die Tradition der Vaterzeit," Pastor Bonus XLIX (1938),
p. 94-99; Id. " De opvatting en de houding van den h. Thomas van Aquino bij het
gebruiken der bronnen zijner theologie," Bijdragen van de phil. en theol. fac.
(Nijmegen, 1941), pp.
3); B. T. VI
n• 148, 149, p.
G. Geenen, "De opvatting en de houding van den h. Thomas buj het gebruiken der
bronnen zijner theologie," Bijdragen ... der Nederlandsche Jezuiten IV (1941),
pp.
B. T. VI n• 173, p. 140; Id., "Thomas d'Aquin et les Peres,"
DTC XV (139), 1946, col. 738-761; B. T. VII (1943-46), n•
p.
M. D.
Chenu, Introduction
l'etude de S. Thomas d'Aquin (1950), pp.
R. J.
Henle, Saint Thomas and Platonism (1956); B. T. X (1957), n°
pp.
M. D. Chenu, La thevlogie au X lie siecle (1957), ch. XVII. Authentica et
Magistralia, pp. 351-361; B. T. X (1957), n• 389, p.

a

84

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uses the authorities on which he bases his procedures. The
analysis of an article chosen from the Summa and selected not
for the importance of its conclusion but for its complexity, by
presenting us straightaway with a concrete case, will preserve
us from an error of method: projecting prefabricated categories
on the subject (citations of exegetical necessity, of tradition, of
argument from authority, etc ... ) . This article, which is characteristic in its analytical procedure and in the questions it
raises, allows us to operate as upon an anatomical slice of
" theological tissue." Thus placed at the heart of the problem,
we will next be able to inquire how St. Thomas formulated,
explained and criticized his own manner of cooperating with the
authorities. For, thanks to an extravagant understanding of
the nature of authority, St. Thomas states that theology can
arrive at a scientific law in the Aristotelian manner. By way of
conclusion we will outline how such an intelligent use of
authority, once it is no longer understood, becomes materialized
and the source of the greatest intellectual tyranny. Then, in
order to escape from the iron collar of intellectual authoritarianism, a lively reaction of liberation sets in and the primacy
of criticism is proclaimed.

I. Analysis of I, q. 5, a. 5.
In the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae St. Thomas
undertakes to investigate the manner of God's existence. He
first shows that God is perfect (maxime perfectus, universaliter
perfectus), possessing in himself the perfections of all realities.
Then he asks the question whether goodness belongs to God.
Before concluding that God is summum bonum simpliciter, it
is necessary to analyze what good in communi is. Question 5,
entitled de bono in communi, has, therefore, a rather particular
law. It appears as a metaphysical reflection inserted and integrated into a theological sequence and in view of a theological
inquiry. There must be no misunderstanding here: the six
articles of this question remain part of a theological reflection,
but an eminently metaphysical part.
Question 5 first situates the relationship of good in regard to

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being; good and being are the same in reality but have distinct
rationes. We do not make the same judgment when we say
"Peter exists" as "Peter is good." The second article expresses something new in relation to the first, for Peter is good
only if he has attained his proper end, that of his nature; his
existence precedes his reaching this end. If then the ratione.'!
of good and being are distinct, one must ask what order exists
among them. St. Thomas replies that reason for being is first
secundum rationem, according to the A.Oyo<>-accordingto the
order of the formal cause-" prima in conceptione intellectus
cadit ens." But, according to the order of causality, good is
first, for it possesses the ratio of desirability on which the
final causality is based. In other words, one cannot affirm in
an absolute manner that the ratio entis is first and the ratio
bani is second. There must be a distinction: from a certain
viewpoint being is first, from another good. This distinction
avoids a rationalism (or an intellectualism) limited to the
order of science alone and shows the exigencies of realistic
metaphysics: in the order of causality good is first. This
touches again the Augustinian position and reveals what is
legitimate in it. Finally, although being is first according to
its ratio, there is a convertibility of the rationes of being and of
good; all being as such is good.
Following the confrontation between being and good, St.
Thomas arrives at good in itself. The ratio of good goes back
to its final cause (art. 4) and consists in modo, specie et ordine
(art. 5) . This article brings us to the place chosen for an
analysis of the use St. Thomas makes of the auctoritates.
In the first objection St. Thomas emphasises that ratio bani
cannot consist in modo, specie et ordine; the authority of the
Scriptures and of St. Augustine seems opposed to it. The Book
of Wisdom proclaims that "all things have been disposed in
numero, pondere et mensura" (Wisdom 11: 21). And St.
Augustine commenting on this passage specifies that numerus,
pondus, mensura are the basis for the trilogy species, m.odus et
ordo: " M ensura omni rei modum praefigit, et numerus omni
rei speciem praebet, et pondus omnem rem ad quietem et

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stabilitatem trahit." (Gen. ad Litt. IV, 8). Now the Scripture
text is not speaking of the good but of all beings. This trilogy
therefore concerns the ratio entis, not the ratio boni. Here then
are two auctoritates from different contexts being used with
the very definite purpose of distinguishing between the ratio
entis and the ratio boni, a viewpoint which assuredly was that
of neither the one nor the other of these authorities.
In order to specify what the ratio boni consists of, insofar
as it is distinguished from the ratio entis,-which has meaning
only in a metaphysical analysis of Aristotelian inspiration-,
St. Thomas uses the authority of the Scriptures interpreted by
St. Augustine to reject the Augustinian conclusion so perfectly
expressed in the Sed contra: the good consists in mode, species,
order. 2
In the body of the article he reasons as follows: " Everything
is said to be good insofar as it is perfect: in this way it is
appetibile." Now he is perfect to whom nothing is lacking
according to the mode of his perfection. And each one is what
he is through his form, which presupposes certain determinations and is necessarily followed by others. Therefore, for a
person to be perfect and good it is necessary that he have
a form with all that is prerequisite to it and all that follows it.
The determination (or the commensuration) of material or
efficient principles is prerequisite to this form; and this is signified by "modus." In this sense it is said that measure determines in advance the mode: modum praefigit. The form itself
is signified by species for, through form, everyone is constituted
in his species. It is therefore said that number determines
•" Haec tria, modus, species et ordo, tanquam generalia bona, sunt in rebus a
Deo factis; et ita haec tria ubi magna sunt, magna bona sunt; ubi parva, parva
bona sunt; ubi nulla, nullum bonum est. Quod non esset, nisi ratio boni in eis
consisteret" (De Notura boni, c. 3). We should also consider the fifth objection in
which St. Thomas opposes to the authority of St. Augustine, for whom modus,
ordo are caused ex pondere, numero et mensura, the authority of St.
Ambrose who affirms that "Lucis natura est, ut non in numero, non in pondere,
non in mensura creata sit" (Hexameron, lib. I, c. 9). Therefore the ratio of the
good does not consist in modo, specie, et ordine . . . since light which is good
is not created in numero, in pondere, in mensura.

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M. D. PHILIPPE

the species, " for definitions," which signify the species, " are
like numbers," according to the Philosopher (Met. VIII) . Indeed, as an added or substracted unit varies the species of
number, so in definitions an added or substracted difference
varies the species. Finally, from form there flows the inclination to the end, or to action, or towards something of this kind;
for each one, insofar as he is in act, acts and tends towards
that which befits him according to his form; and this pertains
to pondus and to ordo. This is why the ratio boni, insofar
as it expresses a perfect being, truly consists in mode, species
and order.
Thus, through an Aristotelian analysis St. Thomas takes up
the trilogy of St. Augustine which itself pretended to interpret
the text of the Book of Wisdom. This gives us the following
equivalences:
praeexigit
l
praesupponitS

forma

consequz't ur

I

determinatio
}I
commensuratio principiorum I

inclinatio ad finem

modus

species

ordo

mensura (praefigit)

numerus (praebet)pondus

t

t

(trahit ad
quietem)

From a purely historical point of view it is scandalous to
unite in this way such diverse studies made under such varied
viewpoints and preoccupations. Can we say that authority is
respected as it should be, respected honestly for what it is? It
is inclined towards something which in fact is no longer its
proper and immediate meaning.
For St. Augustine modus, species, ordo are constant dimensions which constitute things as good and manifest their richness; they are like the generalia bona, and St. Thomas wants
to fashion from them the essential structure of the ratio bani!
A quick judgment would describe this manner of operating
as poor theological " concordism," even imply a lack of intel-

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lectual integrity. St. Thomas uses St. Augustine to make him
confirm what he has not explicitly said. His thought is transformed. Briefly, authority is no longer really used; it is no
longer respected; it is abused.
If such a judgment were correct, it would be serious! For
either St. Thomas is aware of the foregoing and intellectually
dishonest, or he is unaware and his procedures are superficial.
Whoever has studied St. Thomas at close hand finds difficulty
in believing that the theologian and saint would deal so lightly
with the authorities of the greatest of the doctors of the West.
It is just as difficult to admit that St. Thomas does so
unknowingly and that he is satisfied with vague rapprochements. Is it not possible to find a different interpretation for
his manner of procedure?
Are we not in the presence of an act of freedom, that freedom
of heart and spirit which is proper to one who pursues only
truth? Is this not the freedom which he can allow himself
precisely because it considers "the Philosopher," St. Augustine
and St. Ambrose as auctoritates to the extent that they are
witnesses to truth, and in addition because each one has
auctoritas only to this extent? The theologian then, who is
essentially the servant of truth and can seek only the truth,
has the right to use them to the same extent.
Beginning with faith, the theologian seeks truth by adhering
to the Revelation of God. In its own manner and at its own
level theology cooperates with this Revelation. By this very
fact its research shares in what is absolute about this Revelation, which communicates to it the divine and eternal Truth
which is joined neither to time nor to place, even though it
was communicated in a certain place and at a certain moment;
divine truth which is not conditioned by such or such system
of thought, even though it was expressed with all the resources
and the limitations of a certain kind of human mentality. By
this very fact the theologian, in the name of this Revelation of
which he is the servant, can consider all truth as his property,
every particle of truth discovered by men of all times and all
places (and especially by his fathers in the faith), and he

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has the right and the duty to make use of this property in
order to make all the riches of divine Revelation better known.
By the authority of divine Revelation, to which he submits
himself in faith and to which he consecrates his research and
the powers of his intellect, the theologian uses the auctoritates
(of the Fathers of the Church and of the philosophers) with
great freedom, while remaining respectful towards them; for
he uses them in order to penetrate further into revealed truth.
In this way he explains these diverse authorities, having recourse to the ultimate intentions of their authors, themselves
seekers only of truth. 3
He therefore no longer regards these authors as strangers,
distant persons whom he can reach only in a purely external
manner (historical or scientific) . Before all they are avv8ovAot 4
to him in the service of truth, they are friends who cooperate
in the same work. Thus, to reveal in a more perfect manner
all the riches of revealed divine truth in the case of the Fathers,
to seek truth in a more penetrating and exact manner in the
case of the philosophers, is to engage in "teamwork" with
them, to that degree of friendship which brings the incompleted
attempt of the friend to its completion. Thus we assist at a
true dialogue between the theologian and other minds in search
of truth: the authorities he uses. To him the authorities are
living words-somewhat in the manner of the word of God in
which they participate more or less directly through their
content of truth; they are no longer purely fixed and judicial
authorities, amenable to a simple philological-historical com8 But evidently
the theologian has the right to use the auctoritates in this
manner only if, by so doing, he does not contradict, does not go against the
intention of the author as expressed by the context, and finally,. if he does not
mutilate the text for the needs of his case. It would be interesting to state that
the freedom St. Thomas takes in regard to the auctoritates always presupposes
these conditions. St. Thomas himself, in commenting on the Gospel of St. Matthew,
notes the three ways in which someone can falsify the authority of the Scriptures:
I) cum dicitur de uno et exponitur de alia; ... quando inducit quis auctoritatem
ad aliquid, ad quod non est auctoritas . . . quando illud quod est pro se, de
auctoritate accipit, et aliud quod est oontra se dimittit, quod est mos haeretici
... " (In Matth., c. 4, lect. 1, ed. Cai [Marietti] n°
4 Il Col. 1:7; 4:7; Apoc. 6:11; 19:10;

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mentary. We assist at a dialogue, one of those rare dialogues
between intelligent people where communion is established beyond the feebleness of expressions and the limits of intuitions,
because mutual goodwill knows how to recognize the direction
of the truth which each pursues with equal fervor, in a real
self-detachment; a dialogue which surpasses individual limitations until each at his own level perceives with joy the point
of convergence of the common effort.
In the light of this research hypothesis, let us turn again to
article 5. The authority of St. Augustine in his various texts
on the good can be viewed in an external manner: these are
the words of a thinker, the views of the bishop of Hippo, a man
of the fifth century whose thought was conditioned by ncoplatonist philosophy. Thus for him, good is that which is
ultimate in the metaphysical order; modus, species and ordo
manifest the presence of realities which are good like their
general attributes. Thus, where the good exists these three
attributes appear; to the extent that these attributes are
realized, the good itself is realized. According to such a method,
it is primarily a question of respecting a particular way of
understanding the goodness of realities such as it is, conditioned
by a historical milieu and philosophical influences.
But the theologian can also consider the authority of St.
Augustine insofar as he is witness to truth, namely, a pioneer
by his research, a step in its discovery, a " Father" who has
understood and expressed something of the truth. When a
mind, which is primarily in search of what goodness is and aims
to penetrate in the most profound manner possible into the
ratio boni, encounters St. Augustine, it is very pleased to make
use of his researches and to confront them, in a certain sense,
with the researches of the Philosopher. At this moment the
efforts of Aristotle and of Augustine can truly cooperate in
the same task, the discovery of truth. Is not the theologian
who proceeds in this way respectful in the highest degree of the
authority of Augustine and of Aristotle, since he prolongs their
efforts by placing himself in their school and by using them
in the most intelligent manner possible? The greatest homage

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from a disciple is to surpass his teacher in the very thing he
received from him.
To bring together the modus of St. Augustine and the
dispositio of Aristotle, species and forma, ordo and inclinatio
ad finem, certainly gives this trilogy a new meaning which it
does not allow historically. But its deepest purpose is not to
force it, far from it, but to make it more precise and to enrich
it. Instead of understanding these notions uniquely as referring
to the wisdom of God who does everything in measure, number
and weight, St. Thomas also makes explicit the internal relationships of finality which bind together modus, species and
ordo. This philosophical analysis of Aristotle according to the
different causalities is in no way opposed to the Christian
wisdom of Augustine. Instead of stopping exclusively at the
material and literal expressions, conditioned by this or that
historical milieu or philosophical system, the mind tries to
grasp the profound meaning of these expressions insofar as
they manifest the reality known and contain a part of the
truth. There is need to go that far, we believe, if we wish to
grasp the supple penetration with which St. Thomas as theologian makes use of the " auctoritates."
St. Thomas does not offer undue homage to authorities, nor
does he proceed to a historical inventory of his predecessors
with the intention of pointing out the value and originality of
his personal contribution; he does not delay over a philological
analysis which by its method excludes all concern to emerge
beyond a " formal," that is, very material analysis; he appeals
to all collaborators and teachers of repute, whose support, insights and intuitions will help him to progress, to grasp better
the ineffable truth.
The eminent situation of the theologian is not unique: the
philosopher already can proceed in a fairly similar manner in
regard to other philosophers, to the extent at least that the
" friend of wisdom " is primarily in pursuit of truth. In the
name of the quest for truth, the common good of all philosophers and of all men, the philosopher may make use of the
authority of other philosophers in order to deepen his own

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search for truth. He then considers them as friends, cooperators, rather than as adversaries or rivals. When St. Thomas,
as commentator of Aristotle, examines the manner in which the
philosopher questions his predecessors in order to find out
how they understood the principles and first causes of reality,
his attitude is indeed the same as the one we are outlining here.
In regard to Anaxagoras does he not clearly emphasize:
Here he deals with Anaxagoras' opinion; and in regard to this he
does two things. First, he shows in general in what respect
Anaxagoras' opinion should be accepted as true, and in what
respect not? 5
He even specifies, not without humor:
Therefore, with reference to what he has not expressly stated his
opinion is true; but with reference to what he has expressly stated
his opinion is false .... " 6 " ••• If his opinion is taken in its entirety
according to a superficial understanding of his statements, a greater
absurdity will appear for four reasons. . . . These absurdities appear
then, if Anaxagoras' opinion is considered in a superficial way. Yet
if anyone were to follow him up "and articulate," i.e., investigate
clearly and distinctly, the things which Anaxagoras "means," i.e.,
what he intended, although he did not know how to express this,
his statement would appear to be more astonishing and subtler than
those of the preceding philosophers .... 7
And St. Thomas concludes:
It is clear, then, that, in regard to the things which he stated
expressly, Anaxagoras neither spoke correctly nor clearly. Yet he
would seem to say something directly which comes closer to the
opinions o fthe later philosophers, which are truer, namely, to those
of Plato and Aristotle .... 8

It seems, therefore, that to St. Thomas, theologian and commentator on Aristotle, there is a twofold manner of considering
and utilizing documents and auctoritates: either the document
is considered in itself as a fact and made use of in accordance
I Metaphys., lect. 12, ed. Cathala, par. 194.
Loc. cit., n° 194 fin.
7 Loc. cit., no 195-196.
8 Loc. cit., n° 199.

5

6

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with its own expressions, such as the document is presented
to us; or in the document, which becomes an authority, there
is perceived a sign, a testimony which allows us to reach for
something else: the thought, the underlying and poorly expressed intuition, the direction of the research of its author.
We can then interpret the document according to the ultimate
intention of the author. If the author is a philosopher, he is
primarily pursuing truth. From then on the interpreter of the
sense of the truth is no longer a stranger to this authority.
And the method only continues and enlarges upon the method
Aristotle put into practice in the passage commented on by
St. Thomas. 9

II. The auctoritates

the theological method according to

St. Thomas.
The interpretation which we have proposed is the fruit
neither of a personal impression nor of a speculative extrapolation; it is confirmed by our Common Doctor himself, not
only when he comments on Aristotle but in his own work.
In the first question of the Summa, analyzing what theology
is, St. Thomas states that Sacra Doctrina is a science, but a
science of a very particular type, for there are two kinds of
sciences: some proceed from principles known by the natural
light of the intellect, such as arithmetic and geometry; others
proceed from principles known by the light of a higher science,
as the science of perspective proceeds from geometry and music
from arithmetic. Sacra Doctrina is a science in the second
sense: it proceeds from principles known by the light of a
higher science. which is the science of God, the science enjoyed
in its fullness by the blessed. This is why, as music believes the
principles communicated to it by arithmetic, so Sacra Doctrina
believes the principles revealed to it by God. 10
This much is clear: the scientific law of theology is that of
one science subordinated to another science. It is a science
which receives its principles from Revelation. It therefore does
9

Met. A, 8, 989a 30, fl'.

10

Summa Theol., I, q. 1, a. 2.

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not know its own principles immediately and with evidence,
but it adheres to them by believing in them without having
evidence. Therefore the theology of St. Thomas sees itself in
a state of total dependency. Although capable of reaching
scientific perfection, it always remains imperfect and unsatisfactory to the intellect; a genuine science awaiting the beatific
VISIOn.

Yet theology possesses a unique certitude, for it is founded
on supernatural faith, on divine authority / 1 " This science
possesses a certitude which is derived ex lumine divinae
scientiae quae decipi nan potest." It also has a unique dignity
since, because of its attitude, it considers that which transcends
reason. And, moreover, the good of this doctrine, insofar as
it is practical, is eternal happiness; 12 it therefore finalizes all
other sciences.
Let us be more specific. This science receives its immediate
principles from the science of God. As a matter of fact, through
faith the revealed truths are accepted as the proper principles
of theological scientific research. Revealed truths received in
faith are directly based on the authority of God. Authority is
thus considered not as extrinsic to theological science but as
that which founds it and allows it to exist by providing it
with its proper principles. Divine authority can fulfill this role
precisely because it is not purely external to the intelligence
of the theologian, an intelligence lifted up by faith. Through
faith, divine authority is truly introduced into the life of the
intelligence of the believer, without being confused with the
natural requirements of his intellectual life, but by raising up
this life. It is the most internal and most intimate aspect of
the theologian's faith; it is his light and, at the same time, that
which is imposed in the greatest transcendency; it is the norm
of all his research, the principle of every point of departure
and arrival. Far from remaining foreign to the life of the
intelligence of the believer, divine authority offers him new
possibilities of development and a new fruitfulness. It can
11

Loc. cit., a. 5.

12

Ibid.

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thus be said that theological research even in its scientific
requirements is born of divine Revelation received by faith;
its point of departure is divine authority. Normally, all knowledge which is based on human authority can produce only an
opinion, a " dialectical " knowledge, so that, depending on the
value of this authority, the opinion will be more or less perfect.13 In contrast, divine authority can be the basis of a truly
scientific knowledge. Precisely because this divine authority is
completely different from the others, it is not only external,
it is also the principle of a spiritual life and intellectual determination. It produces a definite adherence of faith which,
although obscure, is capable of assuming the philosophical
sciences into its service.
Consequently, adherence to the articles of faith is more
certain than our most certain metaphysical knowledge, since it
is capable of assuming the latter and putting it at its service.
St. Thomas emphasizes: " Though weakest when based on
what human beings have disclosed, the argument from authority is most forcible when based on what God has disclosed." 14
Truly we are in the presence of a form of ultimate authority
which allows the human intellect, lifted up by faith, to enter
immediately into the school of God. For all this it does not
suppress our research and our labors. On the contrary, it gives
rise to them and demands them. "Since grace does not scrap
nature but brings it to perfection, so also natural reason should
assist faith." 15
Nor does being in the school of God in any way suppress the
need for lucidity. The theologian knows the various ways in
which he must use the different authorities. He uses the
authority of canonical Scriptures " proprie et ex necessitate
argumentando," 16 as the scholar uses the proper principles of
13 Cf. Quodl. III, a. 31, ad I: "Probare autem per auctoritatem non est demonstrative probare, sed fide rei opinionem facere."
14 Summa Theol., I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.

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his science. The authority of the Doctors of the Church is used
"quasi arguendo ex propriis sed probabiliter." And as far as
the authority of the philosopher is concerned, it is used " quasi
extraneis argumentis et probabilibus." In this we see how the
theologian relates the use of the authority of the Fathers of
the Church to the use of the authority of the Scriptures
revealed by God. The authority of the Fathers interests the
theologian only to the extent that what they affirm conforms
to what is affirmed by canonical Scriptures. His use of the
authority of the Fathers is relative to the light of the Scriptures. Finally, the authority of the philosophers interests him
only to the extent that what they say expresses the truth or
leads to it. Then he uses it to manifest revealed truths. 17
Thus authority is not considered for its own sake but
primarily in relation to another reality: the authority of the
Fathers in relation to that of the Scriptures and that of the
philosophers in relation to the truth which the human intellect
is capable of reaching by itself. The authority of Scripture
alone possesses what is absolute, precisely insofar as it communicates to us the divine Truth which is the first Truth.
Nevertheless this authority itself is entirely directed to the
beatific vision. If God speaks to us and if He asks us to
believe in his word, it is in order to communicate to us his life,
his light, his truth, and to communicate it to us some day in
the clarity of the beatific vision. The ultimate intention of God
in speaking to us is to communicate to us his truth in order to
lead us to the beatific vision.
The twofold use of authority which we have presupposed
earlier is therefore methodologically legitimate. At the same
time it appeals to the authority of the author in question. The
fact is very clear when it is a question of the Fathers of the
Church or the philosophers, since their authorities can be
considered either as a punctual fact in a synchronic or
" diachronic " study of the history of human thought, in other
words, in themselves or for themselves, or as a stage, a step,
17

In Boot. de Trin., q fl, a. S, ad 8.

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a force in the collective march towards the true, namely, insofar
as these authorities have value in relation to Sacred Scripture
or to the truth which the intellect is capable of discovering by
itself. Even when it is a question of divine authority expressed
in the Scriptures a twofold usage is imposed. 18 We can indeed
make use of this authority by considering it in itself in a
pure adherence of faith: " God has said so, Amen." We give
our approval exclusively to the word of God as to the revealed
truth guaranteed by divine authority itself. We can also make
use of this authority according to its proper finality. If God
speaks, it is in order to communicate his truth, to lead to the
beatific vision. From then on, we adhere to revealed truth
as to a divine source of light, capable of fecundating an entire
new search for truth. The believer-theologian makes revealed
truth his own as a proper principle in his theological research,
and he cooperates with this revealed truth by developing his
theological knowledge.
Is not the pretense of rejecting the second way of using
divine authority in order to exalt the first to transpose the
attitude of nominalism and of positivism to the level of faith?
If we formalize divine authority and want to consider it exclusively in itself outside its whole proper finality, we materialize
it in spite of the pretense of proclaiming its absolute transcendence. On the other hand, by exalting the second way of
using the authority of Scripture to the detriment of the first,
are we not forgetting the proper character of divine Revelation
which is imposed on the believer? Pure adherence of faith to
the Word of God possesses in itself something absolute (the
believer is not necessarily a theologian). Therefore we must
avoid confusing the divine authority of Scripture and the
18 Note well that the use of the divine authority of the Scriptures considered in
themselves implies for the Catholic that they must be considered through the
magisterium of the Church and Tradition, since the Scriptures are entrusted to the
Church who must watch over them. The distinction which could be made between
the use of the authority of the Scriptures considered in themselves and their use
through the magisterium of the Church and Tradition is therefore a theoretical
distinction which cannot properly imply two uses of Scripture for the believer. For
the theologian, before being a theologian, is a believer.

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authority of men; we must not transpose the conduct of our
human reason to the level of the adherence of supernatural
faith. Supernatural faith is one thing, human faith another.
In itself revealed truth remains independent of our intellectual
conduct, and through the adherence of faith it raises up our
intellectual life. Certainly God, in revealing his truth to us,
mercifully adapts himself to the conditions of our intelligence.
He uses human words and human discourse. Mercifully he
demands from the believer his cooperation as theologian, but
his truth does not become relative because of this cooperation.
The use which the believer makes of divine authority to elaborate theology is a superabundance of mercy. This is why it is a
fact of Christian grace and truly speaking does not occur in
the Old Testament. 19
Finally, this twofold use of authority is based on the very
nature of authority as conceived by St. Thomas. To him
authority is joined to the person and inseparable from him.
It is truly the property of the perfect person. To the extent
that the person has reached his end, to the same extent he is
capable of strengthening a less perfect person who has not yet
reached his end. Authority therefore supposes a real superiority: it is the endowment of him who, by reason of his
superiority, is capable of helping those who are inferior to him
by assuming their responsibility. This is exercised in various
ways, always ordaining the inferior towards his proper good
and efficaciously helping him to reach it. In fact, authority can
be exercised either in the domain of practical life (that of
family life: education; political life: the exercise of laws), or
in the domain of scientific and philosophical knowledge (teaching) . In the latter instance one is in the presence of the
authority of the teacher, one who knows perfectly and who by
19 Do not those who reject the scientific theology of St. Th'omas have a; secret,
unCQnscious desire to return to the Old Testment and to replace the theologian by
the prophet? But in contrast with the prophets of the Old Testment who received
their mission from the Holy Spirit, would they not often prefer to raise themselves
up as prophets? A well-known phenomenon of regression: it always materializes,
for it substitutes the exigencies of origin for the light of the final cause.

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that very fact is capable of communicating his knowledge to
those who do not possess it. The authority of the teacher is
thus at the same time relative to the perfection of his knowledge-he has authority to the extent that his knowledge is
perfect-and relative to those who are capable of receiving his
instruction. The disciple who receives instruction from a
teacher adheres to this instruction, oral or written, by having
confidence in him, and he makes use of it to acquire truth. He
uses the words or the writings of the teacher as one who can
supply for his own ignorance and who will allow him more
rapidly to overcome this state of ignorance. The disciple who
recognizes the authority of the words or the writings of a
teacher can thus use them in two ways: either he adheres
purely and simply to these words or these writings of authority
by considering them in themselves, receiving them as a quasidefinitive expression; or he can, while adhering to them, use
them to obtain truth in an untiringly pursued research. While
this is true of all authority, it is eminently true of divine
authority. God, being the only true Teacher who knows all
perfectly, is alone in having sovereign authority. This is why
only his teaching demands a full adherence of faith. Likewise,
there are some who think that there is nothing greater than to
remain in such adherence, excluding from it everything which
could remove it from its initial purity. Such an attitude forgets
that the teaching of God, by the very fact of his perfection, is
ordained to the communication of the full truth more than is
any other teaching. This is why God demands from us recipients of it not only a very pure adherence of faith but also the
most loving and the most intelligent possible effort of cooperation in view of the beatific vision. The Sacra Doctrina of St.
Thomas can be understood only in this perspective.

III. From authority to authoritarianism, from authoritarianism to the primacy of rebellion.

This understanding of authority, especially of divine authority, which allowed St. Thomas to erect his Sacra Doctrina,
is something very great and simultaneously shows the gene-

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rosity of the mercy of the God-who-reveals and the vitality of
our intellect elevated by faith. In teaching us God wants us
to be docile and intelligent disciples, disciple-friends who cooperate efficaciously with their teacher, knowing that all the
knowledge of their Master is theirs, that one day they will
know with clarity all he knows. But by reason of this very
penetrating understanding of authority, the Sacra Doctrina
masterpiece erected by St. Thomas remains vulnerable and
fragile. In the human order masterpieces are not only rare
but also fragile realities, realities which are most prone to
disintegration and deterioration.
Does not respect for human authors become greater when it
reveals the profound, the modest and disinterested intention
which gave force and tenacity to their research? Did not these
human teachers seek to lead their disciples, readers or listeners,
to the truth which they had perceived over and beyond an
expression which they were the first to realize was limited and
imperfect? Would not the most perfect, the most faithful way
of listening to them, the most respectful use of their authority
consist in surpassing the letter, form and mode of their thought
in order to reach the object which they wanted to reveal, as
long as an extensive investigation has permitted their words
and thoughts to be exactly located?
Shortly after this general and very bold conception of Sacra
Doctrina according to St. Thomas, there appeared the teachings of William of Ockham and his disciple Gabriel Biel, who
exercised such great influence over the whole development of
theology. Certainly William of Ockham does not reject the
auctoritates. Apparently he seems to recognize the same
nuances as St. Thomas. He states in his De Sacramento altaris:
" If by doctors is understood modern doctors who publicly and
privately and even in writing reject one another . . . it is not
improper to deny them. For nothing that they say is to be accepted
except what they can prove by evident reason or by the authority
of sacred scripture or by doctors approved by the Church." 20
•• De Sacramento altaris, q. 3; see Quaestio prima principalis PrologHn primum
librum Sententiarum, ed. P. P. Bonner (B. Goetschmann, Ziirich) in which he

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Nevertheless, if we try to state what he understands by
authority, we soon realize that the word no longer has the
same meaning: it is practically reduced to a power. He who
has authority is he who has the power to command effectively.
Authority no longer is considered on the one hand with respect
to a perfect nature which has reached its end, and on the other
hand with respect to inferior natures which must be aided to
reach their own ends. The concepts of nature and end no
longer have any real meaning in such a doctrine. In fact, to
William of Ockham only the individual reality, the supposit, is
real. Nature is a construct of the mind, something fictitious.
To him the life of the intellect is reduced on the one hand to
an experimental quasi-intuitive knowledge of existing particulars and on the other hand to a knowledge of the universal,
fruit of the intellect, which allows him to classify and order
individual realities. There remains room only for a description
of the existing realities and a rational logic. There no longer
exists a real and profound cooperation between intellect and
reality; no dialogue remains possible, there remains only the
monologue. We can describe and classify, but no longer can
we truly know by intentionally becoming the other. Reality
can no longer be considered except in a purely external manner.
It is easy to grasp the immediate consequences of this
attitude for our discussion. No longer can we envision a twofold use of authority, since it has become something imposed on
the inferior who must suffer it. It forces him to submit, it
constrains him to obey. It does this, not in view of its achievement or its own perfection but as a fact which imposes itself.
Formalized and as it were hypostatized, authority becomes
demanding.
Henceforth there is no longer any possibility of conceiving
of a cooperation, a common pursuit of truth between the
teacher who instructs and the disciple who receives his instruction. The authority of the teacher demands that it be accepted
often cites the authority of St. Augustine, of the Philosopher aud the Commentator: "ad auctoritates Philosophi et Commemtatoris dico ... sicut patet ad
primam auctoritatem Philosophi et Commentatoris . . ." (ad Jum dubium p. 47).

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for its own sake without being immediately directed towards
the acquisition of truth; it is imposed in a tyrannical manner,
truly alienating the intellect of the disciple. This is all the more
true in theology where the authority considered is the supreme
authority. The latter is imposed in an absolute manner, without any recourse. The believer then finds himself in the presence of the omnipotence of God who realizes all that He wants
according to the good pleasure of his sovereign freedom. The
intellect of the believer has only to give himself up to this good
pleasure and simply try to grasp all that God can do. The adherence of faith is reduced to a pure act of obedience which
recognizes the sovereign authority of God, and theology is
reduced to the study of the extent of the power of God, the
inquiring into the possibles (all that which God wants to realize
de potentia absoluta) . This false exaltation of the authority of
God, identified with his omnipotence, tends to reduce the life
of the intellect to nothing. One is tempted to say that the
exaltation of the authority of God demands an annihilation of
the intelligence of the believer.
It is in this theological climate, which proclaims such greatness for the authority of God and prevents the intellect of the
believer from being itself in accordance with its most natural
needs, that certain philosophical reactions must be located.
In order to recover its vital spontaneity and that which is most
natural to it, the intellect then experiences the need to free
itself from all authority and from everything that might prevent it from being fully itself. This tyranny, born of the false
exaltation of authority, has given the human intellect a rather
acute feeling for its autonomy, for what is proper to it. Thus
it is not surprising that its first reaction is the rejection of
everything which comes from outside, of everything which is
not immediately the consciousness of its own activity. It
adopts a hypercritical defensive attitude rather than first
accepting and then criticizing; it starts out by being opposed
through criticizing, in order to rediscover in its most intimate
self, in its consciousness, the certitude of which it has such need,
but not without having rejected what until then constituted its

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first source of all certitude and of all security: the authority
of God. A false exaltation of authority must inevitably result
in a false exaltation of autonomy.
Is this not the basic attitude of Descartes? In the presence
of a certain budding nm;ninalism which had penetrated into
Scholasticism, he experiences the imperative need to rediscover
in the innermost recess of his consciousness this vital source of
knowledge and certitude. By opposing nominalism, the tyranny
of authority, he reveals the vital needS/ of his intellect. Such a
reaction is healthy, but is it sufficient? Does it not remain too
dependent on the very thing which it rejects? Is it not primarily a defensive, critical attitude? He who defends himself
remains in a real relationship to his adversary, very often he
is preserving the latter's conduct! Descartes reacts against the
iron collar of theological authoritarianism-he wants a tabula
rasa-, but from then on he imprisons himself in the certitude
of his own thought. Did Descartes have sufficient audacity and
enough strength in his reaction? Did he not remain halfway, at
the level of opposites in the same genus? For the " exteriority "
of authority he substituted the interiority of his cogito.
In order to free himself completely from the formation of the
nominalist doctrine, it would have been necessary to rediscover
the realism of nature and especially of the final cause. For
authority in itself is not opposed to the development of our
intellect but a certain manner of understanding and using
authority. First of all, we must reject the cause of this formalization of authority which, oblivious to why authority exists,
erects it into an absolute.
At the end of this discussion it would seem, therefore, that
the misgivings of some, the severity of others in their appreciations of the use St. Thomas makes of the auctoritates find their
ultimate cause, not in the limitations of the method or the
scientific immaturity of the Common Doctor but in the vigor
and purity of his thought which most men have not been able
to approach or to persist in. His error, if error there be, is in
surpassing in insight his auctoritates in the very same direction
in which they labored towards the discovery and expression of

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the truth. Because, over and beyond a good understanding of
the text cited (for he has a wonderful knowledge of the context) ,21 St. Thomas recovers the spirit at work of the auctor
to whom he refers, he rises above the materiality of the sign
and, better than the author, clearly brings out the fullness of
what is meant. One would be tempted to say that it is not only
the most charitable but the most faithful of expositions, since
it is themost loving and the most penetrating exposition of the
truth sought and found in the common dialogue of the authorised writer with his commentator. 22
M. D. PHILIPPE, 0. P.
University of Fribourg
Fribourg, Switzerland

21 The excellent research which Father Le Guillou has just undertaken
on St.
Thomas's knowledge of oriental theology is striking proof of this. (See "La sacra
doctrina, theologie du Mystere," Le Christ et l'Eglise, Theologie du Mystere
[Centurion 1963]). To grasp the value of every citation of the Angelic Doctor,
we must go to its immediate and to its larger context.
•• It remains that this freedom of the Angelic Doctor is a difficult example to
follow. Many will confuse it with a false "freedom of the children of God"
often claimed by anarchists, by the self-taught and by false scholars. The path
of scientific ascetism, spiritual privation, love of truth, without which this true
freedom cannot be born and bear fruit, will thus have to be constantly recalled to
mind. With St. Thomas it is the fruit of a contemplative life, matured at length
by the active practice of the primitive observances of the Preachers. Already a
philosopher, as philosopher he also must practice the long ascetical exercises of
scientific inquiries (linguistic, exegetical, historical) in order to divest himself of
facile intuitions and not to accept as correct his own opinions about an author. This
ascetical way is necessary in order to acquire a little self-detachment without which
all dialogue with the auctoritates would be a lure, for want of this exclusive love
of the truth.

REVIEW ARTICLE

Secularization Theology. By RoBERT L. RicHARD, S. J. Foreword
by Martin E. Marty. Pp. 200. New York: Herder and
Herder, 1967. $4.95.
To review this book adequately is a difficult, if not indeed an
impossible task. Dr. Martin E. Marty, who contributes the foreword, describes it as a " protestant " book which demands from its
author a " catholic" sequel. That sequel however will, alas, never
be written, for Fr. Richard, who was clearly a young theologian of
great promise, died suddenly almost immediately after his book
was published. Dr. Marty asserts that "Father Richard makes
clear that he agrees in the main with the secularizing theologians,"
but this judgment seems to me to be doubtful. What is evident is
that he had considerable sympathy for their angle of approach,
which he took to be more relevant to the twentieth-century situation than that of traditional Roman Catholic apologetics. Nevertheless, the defects which he discerned in them are glaring and lethal,
and this leads us to regret all the more that this ultimately
destructive work must lack the " catholic " and constructive sequel
for which it so obviously calls. In the first part, "The Genealogy
and the Message," he is primarily concerned with Dr. John A. T.
Robinson and Dr. Harvey Cox; in the second, "The Break from
Tradition," with Dr. Paul van Buren; and in the third, "The
Creative Insights," with Cox and Robinson again, concluding with
a short section, " The Future of Secularization," which is largely
devoted to Cardinal Cushing's pastoral letter "The Servant
Church." Other writers, such as Schubert Ogden, Thomas Altizer,
William Hamilton and Leslie Dewart (and even Teilhard de
Chardin and Lonergan) receive incidental and briefer mention, and,
of course, the shade of Bonhoeffer hovers over all.
Perhaps the most useful thing I can do in the present review
will be to list some of the reflections which I find in my mind after
reading Richard's book.
First, then, although the " radical " or " secularizing " theologians
have a common dissatisfaction with practically everything that

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Christian theologians earlier than Bonhoeffer have ever written, and
a common conviction that they themselves have found the way to
make Christianity both intelligible and attractive to people of the
twentieth century, it is extremely difficult to find any positive and
constructive feature that unites them. For some of them, God does
not exist and never has existed; this is certainly van Buren's
position. For some of them, God, they assure us, is dead, though
Robinson would not say so. For Vahanian, Altizer and Hamilton,
the death of God is the very heart of the Gospel. However, even
those who preach the death of God understand it in such a variety
of ways that it is astonishing to find them apparently under the
impression that they are in substantial agreement and differ only
on minor and unimportant details. For some of them (as for
Vahanian), God does exist but has withdrawn himself from the
vision of modern man. For some (as apparently for Cox), God does
exist, but it is hopeless to attempt to get modern man to see this,
though perhaps it may again become possible in the future. But,
in that ultima Thule of secularized Christianity, Thomas Altizer's
Gospel of Christian Atheism, with which Hamilton in his latest
phase seems to agree, God (who is identical with Satan) used once
to exist but destroyed himself on Calvary, in order than man
might be free from the obligation of serving him, although the
Christian Church throughout the ages mistakenly supposed that
he still existed. There is, of course, a common concern with Jesus;
the label " Christian " could hardly be claimed without this, but
there is little agreement as to who and what Jesus is. For Altizer he
certainly was God, though he presumably ceased to exist when God
did. For van Buren he certainly was not God, though, like everyone
else, he ceased to exist when he died. A certain ambiguity arises
through a tendency to re-define God in terms of perfect humanity.
When this is done (as it is by Dr. John Knox, though he would not,
I think, associate himself with the " radicals ") , God, although his
metaphysical status has vanished, reappears as identical with Jesus.
It is perhaps to the credit of many radicals that they do not take
this way out. While reinterpreting the perfection of Jesus simply
in terms of his orientation to other people ("the man for others"),
they are content to let deity disappear altogether, though the cost
of this is that the uniqueness of Jesus, while it is postulated
dogmatically, becomes quite unintelligible and inexplicable. But,
once again, there is so little uniformity of belief, that the more

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conservative radicals, such as Robinson, cling on to God even at
the expense of defining him, somewhat ambiguously, as the" ground
of being." One might well be tempted to suppose that the common
feature of the radicals was their determination to attract attention
somehow, even if it meant scandalizing their fellow-Christians;
epater les bourgeois is, in any case, good fun. To suggest this would
not, however, be entirely just, though if a Christian theologian did
want to attract attention, it would be difficult to think of a more
promising way than to proclaim oneself a Christian atheist and
announce the death of God. There is, I believe, another explanation which is morally, though not intellectually, less discreditable.
It is connected with the particular type of existentialist philosophy
to which most of the radicals adhere. (Van Buren is an exception;
for him the philosophical savior is not existentialism but linguistic
analysis.) This type of subjectivism finds it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between beings and our ideas of them. God
is simply our idea of him, and if the idea dies, God dies with it.
Thus, although Altizer appears to be telling the story of a literal
suicide on the part of God, one cannot be quite sure that he is not
describing a process taking place in the minds of human beings or
even that he recognises any difference between the two. After all,
one of his venerated masters is Hegel (the others being Blake and
Nietzsche), and for Hegel reality was identical with the Idea. It is,
I think, very significant that Dr. John Macquarrie, who of all
existentialist theologians is most firmly rooted in Catholic tradition,
has in his recent writings insisted that a sound theology must keep
the balance between existentialism and ontology and must synthesize subjectivity and objectivity in worship and theology alike.
I suspect that a great deal of the difficulty that one experiences
when one attempts to pass a critical judgment on the writings of
the radical theologians arises from a subjectivist metaphysic and
epistemology, which is nonetheless potent for being unexpressed,
and which is unexpressed because it is unrecognised, and which is
unrecognised because its employers, not being professional philosophers, have failed to observe how tendencious and questionable
it is.
There is, however, one of the party who is a professional philosopher, namely, Dr. Leslie Dewart, and in his book, The Future of
Belief, the issue becomes quite explicit. I have discussed his work
at length in an article in the Downside Review for October 1967,

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and I shall refer here only to the points that are immediately
relevant.
Dewart interestingly observes that, although Christian doctrine
has always been in a process of development, we have only
recently come to recognise this. "Why," he then asks, "should the
Church at a certain point in the history of dogma have become
aware that its dogma had a history?" (p. 78) His answer is that
human experience in general has become aware of its own historicity and evolutionary nature and that the Church is sharing in this
contemporary experience, though it is lamentably lagging behind
owing to its attachments to the past. Now this observation might
be the starting point of a valuable investigation of the nature of
doctrinal development, and indeed something of the kind has been
initiated by Professor Maurice Wiles in his book The Making of
Christian Doctrine. Dewart, however, uses it as the springboard for
a wholesale onslaught on the traditional view of the nature of truth
itself. He denounces, under the somewhat misleading label of
" Hellenism," the view that truth consists in the correspondence
between thought and objective reality and insists that it is a
purely subjective condition of the mind itself. "Truth," he writes,
"is not the adequacy of our representative operations, but the
adequacy of our conscious existence" (p.
And again: "The
nature of truth does not merely permit truth to develop, but indeed
requires that it do so. For truth itself consists in a certain intensive
development of man's original relation to reality given by the fact
that, being a reality, he participates in being" (p. 111). He is
emphatic that it is truth itself, and not merely our apprehension of
it, that changes, that is historically and socially conditioned, so
that what is true at one time may be false at another.
Now the fatal objection to this doctrine of truth, as to all forms of
radical scepticism, is that it is inherently self-destructive and
suicidal. As Dr. Armand Maurer wrote, in a review of Dewart's
book in The Ecumenist (Jan. Feb. 1967):
The doctrine of the historicity of truth espoused by [Dewart's) book faces the
further difficulity that, if it is true, it must have come into existence as a part of
man's process of self-awareness and self-making, and hence it is relative to his
situation in a certain moment of history. Like all truths, it must be historically
relative, not timeless and supracultural. And yet the doctrine says more than this;
it pretends to be a philosophical truth valid for all times and cultures. In short,
total historisation is not tenable, for the doctrine of historicity cannot be formulated
without denying itself.

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Indeed, in order to refute the doctrine, we need not say anything;
we need only to wait in silence while it cuts its own throat. It is
only because time is precious that we need to argue against it. And
I think we shall find that this doctrine of Dewart is endemic to the
existentialist radicals as a group. (Van Buren is an exception, but
his philosophy is not existentialism but logical analysis.) Unless we
go right to the epistemological root of the radical theologians, we
are almost certain to find ourselves at cross-purposes with them.
We shall in particular be unable to understand their apparent
inability to distinguish between our idea of God and God himself.
I wish, however, to go further than this and to argue that this
radically existentialist theology is neither specially congenial to
people of our day nor in harmony with what modern science has
to tell us about man. The first point has been made quite clearly by
Richard. While affirming that the movement has given a distinctly
Anglo-Saxon turn to its borrowings from Europe and especially
from Germany, he writes:
Without that final turn, theology, no theology, can discourse successfully with the
American secular city-not even with its Roman Catholics. The existentialist categories that have so largely overtaken American Catholic theology may have become
very useful and meaningful for those who have had long experience of them, in the
original or at least in American translation. But by and large they are not the
categories in which America's scientific technological and secular humanist will ever
learn to talk comfortably about God [p. 291.

This needs heavy underlining, and it is as true of England as
of America. One of the more naive characteristics of the radical
theology is its belief that it has found the idiom in which to speak
to the ordinary man and woman of the present day. It has, of
course, invented a few sensational slogans which can startle some
and puzzle others. But there is no reliable evidence that it makes
any appeal except to a rather sophisticated coterie.
My second assertion is that the existentialist theology is out of
harmony with what modern science tells us about man. It does
indeed affirm that man finds himself projected (geworfen) into an
alien environment, in which he feels himself anxious and alienated
and estranged. All this is no doubt true, though it should perhaps
be pointed out that ordinary non-neurotic people do not find the
world such a place of unrelieved horror as existentialists depict it.
Where, however, existentialism parts company both with science
and with common experience is in its failure to recognize that man

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is not merely in the world but is, on the material side of his being,
actually part of it. Both biological evolution and the elementary
facts of nutrition make this plain. It is, of course, in the avowedly
irreligious existentialists that this is most clear, for example, in
Sartre and Camus. And the attitude of revolt against their environment which characterizes such figures as Roquentin and Rieux, while
it has its elements of genuine nobility, is basically a repudiation of
man's involvement in materiality as such. Nor do the Christian
existentialists avoid it. Even in its Christian interpretation, the
authentic existence to which they call us is more a matter of living
in spite of the world than as part of it. There is little sense of
the Pauline assertion that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth awaiting redemption; rather it is man who groans and
travails awaiting redemption from the world. It is significant that
for existentialist theology there are no problems about the relation
between science and religion, for it ignores those facts about man
from which the problems arise. It is at this point that, in spite
of the attempts of some existentialists to claim him as one of themselves, an impassable gulf yawns between them and Teilhard de
Chardin.
One glaring defect in the secularizing theologians is their failure
to take acount of death, which is after all, together with birth, the
most universal and inescapable fact of human existence. After commenting on van Buren's demand for absolute silence as to whether
God exists or not, Richard writes as follows:
Still another condition that would have to be met [in van Buren] is the final
removal from man's serious concern of the problem posed by the quite empirical
fact of human death: extinction or immortality? For unless modem man confronts
at least the possibility of immortality, it seems that his only realistic alternative is
to accept the absurdity of human existence, human spirit, human creativity. And
this is where van Buren could perhaps learn much from Bultmann and the
existentialists [p. 117].

However, neither Robinson nor Cox satisfies the need:
The Robinson-Cox Secularization is without a theology of death. It is a very
excellent thing to insist, as both do, that the Christian must not live in this
world as though he really lived elsewhere all the time. But it is a very mistaken
thing to give the impression, as both seem to do, that the Christian must live in
this world as though he were to live here for ever .... To be sure, both Robinson
and Cox believe in an afterlife. . . . But in neither of the two authors is the
affirmation of immortality, or bette11 of the specifically Christian resurrection from
the dead, a truly operative religious or theological principle [p. 169].

ERIC L. MASCALL

If we wish to find a serious discussion of death which takes full
account of modern thought while holding firmly to the Christian
tradition, we could not do better than refer to the writings of
either of the two Jesuit Fathers, Karl Rahner and Ladislaus Boros; 1
while writing in a largely existentialist idiom, both are free from the
secularist and anti-intellectualist assumptions which are common
to most of the writers to whom I have referred. It is interesting to
note that, in Macquarrie's opinion, Rahner is the outstanding
example of the group of Roman Catholic thinkers to whom the
leadership of theology has passed from its former Protestant
holders. 2
In spite of their concern with man, it is precisely in their view of
man that the chief defect of the secularizing theologians lies. Not
only, as we have seen, have they nothing of importance to say
about the universal human experience of death but, surprisingly
enough, they find themselves committed, as regards the basic
nature of man, to a view which is to all intents and purposes preChristian and Hellenic. This appears most clearly in Cox, who
interprets the biblical doctrine of creation as meaning that the
created universe is not only not divine but is also unconnected with
God and totally autonomous. This view, although it rejects the
Aristotelian doctrine of real species, sees man as self-sufficient and
altogether shut off from any real contact with his Creator; he has
to " go it alone." It is sharply contrasted with the classical Catholic
doctrine, for which man, while having a relatively stable and
determinate nature, is altogether unfinished and open to God, from
whom, without his own human nature in any way suppressed but
rather enhanced, liberated and transformed, he can receive ever
fresh influxes of creative power. The secularizers constantly appeal
to the famous sentence of Bonhoeffer, " We must live in the world
as if God did not exist," 3 and in doing this they virtually deny that
a mature and authentically living Christian ought to take any
conscious account whatever of God. And this means that prayer,
as anything other thau a psychological technique for self-improvement, is a flight from reality and a sheer waste of time that might
1 K. Rahner, Theological Investigations, I, pp.
ff; IV, pp. 347 ff; L. Boros,
The Moment of Truth, passim.
2 J. Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, p. ix.
3 On the various possible (and impossible) ways in which this sentence has been
understood, cf. Richard, pp. 117 ff.

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be better spent in other ways. For the secularizing theologian, no
less than for the Marxist, religion is an opiate, and a harmful opiate
at that. If any argument were needed for the thesis that the
ultimate source of the secularized theology is to be found in that
fallen being who deceives the very elect by changing himself into
an angel of light, it could be found in the fact that one of its most
immediate effects is to stop people from praying. It leaves man
nothing but his own power with which to fight the colossal forces
of evil which are rampant in the world today. A popular hymn
of an earlier epoch informed us that Satan trembles when he sees
the weakest Christian on his knees. Today nous avons change tout
cela; and the enemy of mankind, when he contemplates the spirituality of the utterly mature secularized Christian, will be delivered
from at least that cause for trepidation.
In thus casting overboard the whole tradition of Christian
spirituality throughout the ages the secularizing theologians are
only being true to their general attitude. One of their most marked
characteristics is the cavalier way in which they brush aside the
accumulated wisdom of the ages. Thus, for example, Dr. Ronald
Gregor Smith rejects the whole tradition of natural theology from
Augustine and Aquinas to William Temple and A. E. Taylor with
the brief remark, unsupported by any argument, " If you begin
from this world you cannot go beyond it. Thus the logical consequence of an enquiry into the nature of the cosmos, or of the moral
demand, is pantheism, or humanism, or nihilism." 4 Similarly Dr.
John Knox, whose sympathy with the secularizers is evident even
if he is not professedly one of them, writes in regard to Christology:
"We can have the humanity without the pre-existence and we can
have the pre-existence without the humanity. There is absolutely
no way of having both." 5 In other words, Athanasius, the Cappadocian Fathers, Cyril, Augustine and Aquinas were dunderheads
who could not see a logical contradiction when it stared them in
the face. The widespread dismissal of both the prayer and the
thought of the Christian past as mistaken and irrelevant to the
present day is, I suggest, a mark not of width of mind or depth of
intellect but rather of narrowness and provincialism. As Mr. Harry
Blamires once remarked, there is no reason whatever why I should
• R. Gregor Smith, Sermlar Christianity, p. 59.
5 John Knox, The Humanity and the Divinity of Christ, p. 106.

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ERIC L. MASCALL

attribute special value to a person's views simply because he is
alive. When we are tempted to adhere to certain views simply
because they are contemporary, it is well to remember that a
hundred years hence they will be as uncontemporary as the thought
of the eighteen-sixties is today. Secularizers might well meditate
on the tombstone inscription:
Es quod fui; eris quod sum.

To return to Fr. Richard's book. Dr. Marty is, I think, going
rather too far when he writes in his foreword: " Father Richard
makes clear that he agrees in the main with the secularizing theologians." What is clear is that he felt a great deal of sympathy
with them and was anxious to go with them as far as he could.
Nevertheless, the criticisms which he offers of their conclusions,
while worded with great restraint and respect, amount time after
time to a virtual refutation. We have seen his criticism of Robinson
and Cox for their insufficient attention to the fact of death. (Incidentally, the same strange omission characterises the volume of
essays edited by William Nicholls under the title Conflicting Images
of Man, which was concerned to rebut the position of the extreme
secularizers.) Again, he denies that Robinson has contributed anything to the solution of the transcendence problem: " It is Robinson himself who raises the metaphysical question of transcendence
and immanence, not some challenger. And he raises it only to
walk away from it" (p. 36). He avows himself to be in disagreement with van Buren on the basic issue of epistemology (p. 109).
He rejects Dewart's judgment of" Hellenism" (p. 171). He asserts
that "van Buren's ultimately apodictic exclusion of God ... is
neither critically justified in itself, nor actually representative of
either Bonhoeffer's own thought or" of those who have tried to
develop it. . . . " Van Buren has not really contributed in our
judgment to the positive development of the Bonhoeffer Secularized
Christianity" (pp. 119,
In fact, on page after page we find
Richard, after expressing great respect for a thinker's astuteness in
raising a problem, drastically criticising his attempt at solving it.
While again expressing regret that the desired sequel to Richard's
book will never be written, we must register our gratitude for the
clarity with which he has raised the questions which still remain
to be answered by the secularizers.
One final point. It is the constant contention of the secularizers

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that Christianity in anything like its traditional form is quite unacceptable, and indeed unintelligible, to mature twentieth-century
men. This is simply not true. Admittedly the great majority of
people, whether mature or immature, show little interest in the
Christian religion. There are, nevertheless, vast numbers of highly
intelligent, sincere and mature men and women, thoroughly acquainted with the modern world and its problems, who, so far from
finding traditional Christianity unintelligible or irrelevant, find in
it the one key to the problems of human existence. These are not
ecclesiastical obscurantists. They see plainly that, in the words of
Pope John, the substance of the ancient doctrine, contained in the
deposit of faith, is one thing and its formulation quite another.
They do not profess to give an answer to all the questions. While
gladly recognising all that is true and good in the secularized
civilisation in which they live, they exercise a balanced and critical
judgment on it and refuse to capitulate to its basic assumptions.
And by prayer and the living of the Church's sacramental life they
become the channels through which the grace of God, with its
healing and illuminating power, can cure the ills of a perplexed and
anxious world. There is every reason to suppose after reading his
book that Fr. Robert Richards was one of them.
ERIC L. MASCALL

King's CoUege
London, England

REVIEW ARTICLE

God-Talk. By JoHN MAcQuARRIE. New York and Evanston:
Harper and Row, 1967. Pp. 255. $6.00.
In an age of advanced technology there are signs that man has
suddenly lost interest in the world he has learned to manipulate
and has given over all his attention to the mystery of himself, of
human life and existence. A significant focal point of this anthropological concern is the phenomenon of language, man's "linguisticality." This provides, for instance, a point of convergence for two
contemporary schools of philosophical thought that were quite
disparate in origin, namely, existentialism and a movement that
began as logical positivism but has since become linguistic philosophy. For theology, one of the consequences has been a representation of the problem of God in critical and largely empirical
terms, amounting to a tendency to reexamine with some distrust
the traditional modes of speech and of discourse about the divine.
Surely this is by no means unfamiliar to: theology, but the problematic is being urged with new earnestness and within the perspective of a new self-understanding of man that deepens the
problem somewhat and challenges the hitherto available solutions.
It is language then that offers the precise " locus " of the
problem of God as pursued by John MacQuarrie in this characteristically lucid study; "God-talk," as an Anglo-Saxon equivalent
for theology, makes the terms of the investigation abundantly clear.
Any raising of the linguistic problem in theology is going to suggest
rather quickly the prior and deeper epistemological problem. It
has become somewhat of a commonplace in Catholic theological
circles to acknowledge that the underlying difficulty in the Modernist crisis lay here and that Catholic theology lacked at the time
the resources to deal with the crisis on its own level; and indeed
what advancements have been made up to the present are still
far from yielding any satisfying solution to the problem. At times,
this present book calls for some sort of underlying gnoseology, but
the absence of any explicit theory of knowledge is not in the present
case, I think, necessarily a defect. However closely allied, the

116

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epistemological question is a distinct and far vaster one and tends
to obscure the purely linguistic problems; thus there is a decided
advantage in a study conducted, somewhat empirically, within
the narrow confines of language itself. Also, Dr. MacQuarrie's
concern is not mere linguistics but language as it is grounded in
and emerges from thinking; the area of attention is the nebulous
one of the relationship, at once derivative and reciprocal, of language to understanding and conception. MacQuarrie dismisses as
inadequate attempts by linguistic philosophers to rehabilitate religious language by considering it as purely emotive and subjective
in kind, meaningful under the assumption that it does not purport
to assert anything about reality. On the contrary, he insists on
searching for the objective cognitive content of such speech; in
a word, since such speech is at once unique and varied in kind,
he is seeking the basic logic underlying all "God-talk."
MacQuarrie is clearly convinced that the theologian cannot seek
to fathom the mysterious role of the believer's language without
attending to the highly specialized studies done within linguistic or
analytic philosophy. This represents the first of the influences on
his own theological stance-a lesser one in the final analysis than
the Heiddegerian, but a formative one all the same. His own
Scottish background happily provides him with a rich acquaintanceship with such qualified thinkers as Ian Ramsey, Antony
Flew, Karl Popper, P. F. Strawson, and a host of others. All of
this provides him with a starting point and a methodology that is
and remains dialectical and strongly empirical; the constant touchstone is the need for verification-a healthy sign if the search after
God is to be, in James Collins's words, "something more than a
domestic clarification of intended meaning on the part of theistic
believers." 1 Still, the empiricism that functions here is not the
narrow sort relied upon by Bertrand Russell and the early Wittgenstein; indeed some of MacQuarrie's most telling criticisms are
directed against the " picture theory " of knowledge associated with
logical positivism and the " physicalism " of Carnap. It is an
empiricism, however, that refuses any a priori theory of language
and begins instead with a phenomenological analysis of what living
language reveals about itself.
1 James
Collins, " God and Contemporary
Papers, l, Feb. 10, 1967, p. 534.

Philosophy," God: Commonweal

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WILLIAM J. HILL

Among the yields of such an analysis is the indispensable distinction between discourse and language: the first is living talk, akin
to the Greek " logos," within a personal, communal, and situational
context, whereas the second can be mere words and sentences. In
the latter, the content of the word is a mere signification (Bedeutung); in the former, it acquires genuine meaning (Sinn). The
consequence of this is the ability to view words not as mere labels
but as vehicles of communication (p. 90), less a set of signs than
the language of being. Considerably less intelligible are MacQuarrie's "obiter dicta" that seemingly would allow for the possibility of a computer being constructed that would be capable of
spontaneous activity and of ultimately being endowed with
consciousness and personhood. His statement that, "For all we
know, if we could get ' inside ' the machine, so to speak, we might
find that it does think, in the sense of having conscious processes
similar to ours " reaching a point at which " conscious thought
' emerges' " and "a critical stage at which spontaneity and freedom
come along" (p. 96), is a rare instance in which MacQuarrie's
empiricism goes undisciplined. Of more consequence is the observation of Viscount Samuel that occasions such remarks, namely,
that the true meaning of most words cannot be satisfactorily explained merely in terms of overt behavior.
It is, however, in the perspective of the contrast offered by
Barth and Bultmann in their respective treatments of theological
language that MacQuarrie sets his initial problematic.
(He does
not, apart from occasional references, pursue the debate into the
attempted development of the " new hermeneutic " among the
so-called post-Bultmannians.)
Barth's revelational theology allows
only for an initiative of God towards man, so much so that
communication is possible only on the assumption of God's " requisitioning" human language; Bultmann builds rather from the side
of human language itself, discerning within such speech an inner
possibility for expansion to the point where it can articulate the
divine. In both cases a breakdown results in the lack of any satisfactory explanation as to how the leap to the other side is effected.
How is God enabled to use human words to embody a revelation
that transcends the human without violating the structure of such
speech? Or vice versa, how can biblical speech, which when
purged of its mythological vetement is found to be expressive of
man's self-understanding, suddenly gain the power to express the

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Transcendent? Even granting that such a transition be somehow
possible, there remains in either case the further question as to
how the content of such language could be open to objective and
public verification. Barth wants to deny to speech any capacity
whatsoever to express the divine and then to fall back upon a
" secret " language whose meaning is in no way yielded up in the
objective signification of the words, which serve merely as a noncognitive vehicle. Bultmann wishes to stay with words whose
meaning is clear and significative for man, because they are directly
expressive of his own existence, and yet ultimately to allow these
very expressions to give non-mythological utterance to what is
transcendent to that existence. Dr. MacQuarrie contends that what
is missing in the thought of both theologians is the "bridge," and he
feels some affinity with Tillich in his search for what is lacking.
For Tillich, the symbolic character of all religious talk enables
it to " point to " the " symbolizandum." But obviously there has
to be some fundament that makes this possible, and this is what
Tillich uncovers in his doctrine of " participation." Man as maker
of symbols participates in what he is enabled to symbolise; in this
way he finds access to structures which are so fundamental that
they cannot be objectified, but they can at least be brought to expression in the language of symbol. But participation, no matter
how conceived, demands something in common, and Tillich is
finally brought by the logic of this to acknowledge that it is
"being" that provides a basis on which to talk about God.
Bultmannian existential language has now found an anchor in a
language of being; God is symbolised as the Ground of our being
because he is Being Itself. But this is verging close to a traditional
metaphysics, and at this point MacQuarrie feels compelled to part
company with Tillich, whose contribution turns out to be only " a
slender and shaky bridge " (p. 52) after all. It is his notion of
being with its "many obscurities" (p. 54) that dictates MacQuarrie's sceptical reaction; he is unwilling to grant that the
assertion, " God is Being Itself," is not also symbolic in kind.
Others, of course, have discerned this same ambiguity in Tillich's
thinking: he has been interpreted as everything from a metaphysician to a mere humanist like Martin Buber. I must confess,
however, to finding some ambiguity in MacQuarrie's statement that
Being (in Tillich's assertion, "God is Being Itself") does not
"stand for some being or for something that is" (p. 51) and at

WILLIAM J. HILL

the same time his rejection, as a nominalist prejudice, of a reading
which sees it as referring " to some highly abstract universal, at
which we arrive by abstracting every determinate characteristic
from the sum total of whatever is ... " (p. 52) .
MacQuarrie, then, is forced to reach for his own solution, electing to build from the side of language and seeking to locate there
the precise factor that will endow human language with the
capacity to express what belongs to the realm of God. The
linguistic expressions themselves function in a variety of ways:
1) the mythological, myth being the primordial language at the
base of all religious experience; 2) the eventual conscious recognition that the myth refers to something beyond itself, and this
marks the refinement of myth into symbol; 3) the culminating
literal expressions of analogy, each instance of which " corrects "
itself with a correlative and negating analogy, the use of analogy
thus being paradoxical. But we are still left with the basic dilemma: how does the original mythological language gain the power
to designate the transcendent in the first place? MacQuarrie is
clearly sceptical, with Ronald Hepburn, of any "self-authenticating encounter" (p. 110), which, while it might inaugurate the
entire religious response, would necessarily remain non-objective.
Indeed, he has shown very incisively that the Bultmannian position wherein God-talk " is talk about a real Other that stands
over against the self in encounter" leads ultimately to an impasse,
because " in order to prove that there is an encounter with a real
Other, one would need somehow to get behind the experience, or
find a second route to that which we know in the experience, and
this is not possible " (p. 244) .
Dr. MacQuarrie does, of course, believe himself to have escaped
the bind, and the way out is found in the later speculations of
Martin Heidegger, 2 i.e., in Heidegger after his acknowledged "reversal," when the transition was made from a pure philosophy of
existenz in Sein und Zeit to a genuine ontology in the writings
after 1937,3 from Dasein's projection of Being to Being's mittence
• The English speaking world is indebted to John MacQuarrie for his translation
with Edward Robinson of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, (Being and Time, New York:
Harper and Row, 1962).
3 Heidegger's first mention of his "reversal"
was in his Letter on Humanism in
1947; he has explained, however, tha1l "the matter thought in the term 'reversal'
was already at work in my thinking ten years prior to 1947 "; cf. the Preface by

GOD-TALK

121

of itself to Dasein, what William Richardson has called the transition from phenomenology to thought. Bultmann expressly did not
follow Heidegger into the later phase of his thought; Henrich Ott
did but in a far less radical way than MacQuarrie does here.
MacQuarrie's Christian use of Heidegger focuses on perhaps two
points: 1) Heidegger's "ontological difference" between Being
(Sein) and being (Seiendes) can be interpreted as a philosophic
rendering of the difference between God and creation; because
Being only " comes to pass " within the beings, there is for man
(as Dasein) the possibility of a reach to God; 2) Geschichte, or
the mittence of Sein to Dasein who, as openness merely " lets be "
and allows Being to unconceal itself (a-letheia), offers obvious
parallels to the Christian mystery of revelation; man encounters
Being as holy and is thereby called to authentic existence, i. e., to
the committment of faith.
Such a Christian use of Heidegger might be objected to on the
basis of the latter's own insistence that Sein, while transcending
the ontic order, is totally immanent to the world; something clearly
attested to in Heidegger's phrase that Being is nothing apart from
the beings. Nonetheless, this does not alter the fact that the
thought itself, mutatis mutandis, may be logically open to such a
theological adaptation. MacQuarrie does not infer that Heidegger
is a crypto-theist, though he quotes approvingly Laszlo Versenyi's
observation on the "quasi-biblical tone of Heidegger's pronouncements" (p. 166). Yet, the question needs to be asked: is the Being
known phenomenologically by Heidegger so necessarily immanent
to the world that any identification of it with God would involve
a denial of the Christian understanding of God's utter transcendence? William Richardson has suggested an alternate Christian
approach vis a vis Heidegger, one in which " the voice of a radically
transcendent God comes not out of Being-a phenomenologist's Being-but breaks into this kingdom from without." 4 But this puts
the thought itself at a further distance from Christian theology.
For one thing, it opens the way to seeing its deepest affinities as
lying with idealism; an interpretation in which Being is " a preHeidegger to William Richardson's Heidegger: Through Phenommology to Thought
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhofi, 1963), p. xvi.
4 William J. Richardson
S. J., "Heidgger and God-and Professor Jonas"
Thought (Spring, 1965), p. 40.
'

WILLIAM J. HILL

jacent transcendental area of knowledge prior to the categories,"
i. e., what a Thomist understands by " esse intentionale " or beingas-it-is-our-intellect.5 The strong point of MacQuarrie's insight is
that it locates Heidegger in the camp of realism, which presumably
is more congenial to the Gospel. Even more to the point, it offers
some approach to the mystery of the simultaneous transcendence
and immanence of God; for Being is God and yet " comes to pass "
for man (i.e., is present to him) only within the ontic order of
beings, as in the world though not of the world. This in-existence
of God in a world of which He does not form part, seen in Heideggerian categories of the Being-process, is somewhat suggestive of
St. Thomas's classic position on the universality and unconditioned
freedom of God's prime motivation of all created activity, including
the human will's eliciting of its own inviolably free act. The
parallel, of course, would take considerable and cautious working
out, but the inherent difficulties do not appear insurmountable.
One might well ask if St. Thomas's thought does not safeguard
better the freedom and autonomy of the human person, but it
would be less debatable that Heidegger has disclosed the fact and
meaning of man's historicity, i.e., his temporality as something
more than mere successiveness, in a way that the system of Thomas
is not capable of, in and by itself. This introduces another objection
to the Christianization of Heidegger, one that Hans Jonas has
already called attention to, 6 namely, its climate of fatalism. Dasein
is "fate-laden" (geschicklich), thinking's lot is cast by Being
which is not at Dasein's disposal, the mittences of Being as constituting the epochs of thought do bear undertones of determinism.
The implication for Christianity is of a continual reoccurrence of
revelation without any reference to once-and-for-all acts of God in
the historical past. There seems no reason, however, why such
5 C£. Ralph Powell, 0. P.:
., Has Heidegger Destroyed Metaphysics"; this paper
is as yet unpublished, but similar observations by the same author can be found
in Truth or Absolute Nothing (River Forest, Ill.: The Aquinas Library, 1952);
cf. also John Deely, "Heidegger in the Tradition of Christian Philosophy," The
Thomist (April, 1967). What is meant here is man's primitive concept of ens as
the primum cognitum; a primordial intuition of undifferentiated being that occurs
at the very dawn of intelligence, prior to the positive abstractive activity (formal
and total) that later yields the " first intentions " and " second intentions " of
Scholasticism.
6 Quoted by Richardson
in " Heidegger and God-and Professor Jonas " cited
above, p. 19 ff.

GOD-TALK

Geschichte cannot be recast in terms of God's free initiative and
sovereignty as Lord of history.
All in all, however, MacQuarrie's use of Heidegger manages to be
very convincing; it readily brings to mind, as a historical parallel,
what St. Thomas did with the pagan thought of Aristotle.
Yet what is ultimately being sought from Heidegger is some
clue as to the basic logic of God-talk. One step towards the clue's
discovery lies in the realization that the later thought of Heidegger
is no repudiation of his earlier existentialism; the transition from
the language of existence to that of being is a subtle one in which
the latter affords the ground for the former. God-talk is thus
existential-ontological; the mythological language of the Bible is
open to interpretation in the existential terms of self-understanding
(demythologization), but this is possible only because of a real
encounter with the Holy wherein Being has the initiative in the
disclosure of itself. It is this latter ontological event that summons
man to authentic self-understanding. It is in this way that MacQuarrie thinks it possible to break out of the subjective circle; as
myth and symbol are anchored in a language of existence, so the
latter is grounded in turn in a language of being.
But this is still only a partial solution to the problem of theological discourse. It is only the mittence of Sein into des Seiende
(things in being, rather than the process whereby they are) that
enables the particular beings to appear, i.e., to be present to
Dasein as the place where the Being-process occurs; this MacQuarrie takes from Heidegger. From his own Christian faith, and
with some indebtedness to Barth, he understands its religious analogue to be concretized in the Incarnation. Here is where God as
Being and man as the privileged existent are brought together, and
here is furnished the " likeness " that will allow analogy to function
as the instrument of theological discourse. It is analogy, then, that
is the key to God-talk, and such discourse" is by no means empty
and does indeed relate to the reality of divine Being" (p.
But is analogy so conceived, i. e., as confined within an ontology
such as Heidegger offers, broad enough in scope to do service for
the Christian faith? Its role here seems largely linguistic in kind,
a matter of an open texture to words that is frequently inventive,
always dialectical, and with the corrective supplied by paradox.
While admitting of extension to something other than what is
designated directly, it is not expressive of any structure within

WILLIAM J. HILL

finite reality itself that opens out onto God. What is lacking is
any sort of metaphysical substratum to analogy. MacQuarrie would
apparently believe Heidegger to have been successful in his avowed
attempt to " overcome " metaphysics, and while taking exception
to some of the teachings of the linguistic philosophers, he seemingly
applauds their stand against the reinstatement of metaphysics
(pp. 109-110); elsewhere he appears to relegate metaphysics to the
same status in theology as myth (p. 142). This would seem to be
so not only in the case of classical metaphysics but even for the
metaphysics of process philosophy, e. g., that developed by Charles
Hartshorne, of which John Cobb and Schubert Ogden have made
theological use. 7
This perhaps explains why Dr. MacQuarrie, apart from a few
references to St. Thomas, bypasses the traditional Catholic solution
to the problem he raises. This explanation postulates (or rather
establishes-philosophically in one way and theologically in quite
another) a radical continuity between the creaturely and transcendent orders, so that God, breaking into history on his own
initiative, is enabled to utter his revelatory Word in such fashion
that this Word finds genuine though inadequate expression in 1)
events of history, and 2) the human speech of prophets interpretative of such mystery-events. (Obviously, the believing response to
this is not possible through any empirical investigation of the
" facts " but only through the anointing of the Holy Spirit.) The
linchpin is " analogia entis," and it remains alien to l\1acQuarrie's
religious thinking, partly because of those who set the problematic
for him and partly because of what appears to be a commitment
of his own (however qualified by his intellectualism and a hard
core of empiricism that he shares with other British writers, such
as Ian Ramsey) to Barthian Revelation Theology.
It is true that MacQuarrie does make room for some sort of
natural theology, "not to establish a religious faith but to support
one" (p. 234), and for the usual reason: "because God has set
his stamp on his own creation, we must hold that there is a sufficient measure of resemblance to make analogical discourse possible " (pp. 222-223) . However, the resemblance apparently breaks
7 Cf. John Cobb Jr., A Christian Natural Theology (Philadelphia:
Westminster
Press, 1965) and Schubert Ogden, The Reality of God (New York: Harper and
Row, 1966).

GOD-TALK

125

through only in the Incarnation, and even then its religious intelligibility can only be grasped in the analogy available within an
existential ontology. MacQuarrie is surely allowing much more to
our faith-understanding than does Barth with his " analogia
gratiae," or perhaps even Emil Brunner. What he does not allow,
however, even where God's revelatory act in Christ is concerned, is
any touchstone in man's natural experience (in spontaneous consciousness rather than in thematic reflection) of the analogical
character of finite being that is open-ended towards Uncreated
Being. MacQuarrie would not be inclined to say-as does one of
the Fathers-that the Incarnate Logos walks in his own footprints
already discernible in creation.
Analogy in an existentialist climate is something quite different.
Since the encounter with Being is by way of Geschichte, and since
the very structure of Dasein is temporality, human experience has
no other horizons. Any assertions about God as timeless are out
of the question or at least meaningless. Analogy means conceiving
God as taking time within himself; otherwise he is indistinguishable
from nothingness. Only a philosophy of being rather than one of
existence can liberate the concept of pure actuality that is toto
caelo removed from that of nothingness, one that can express the
perfection of process without its intrinsic limit of succession, even
as pure becoming. That God " extends himself in time ... needs
time to create, to act, to make history," that he" goes into the risk
of creation and history " (p. 225), can be understood in two quite
distinct senses, according as time is viewed as a necessary constitutive element of the creaturely or of the non-creaturely. The
difference is not slight where an understanding of the genuine
otherness of God is concerned, and it lies in the employment of
analogy allowable respectively to a Thomist and to a Heideggerian.
Perhaps what provokes these somewhat critical remarks can be
seen, at bottom, as nothing more than the tension inherent in the
Protestant and Catholic approach to the task of theology. If so,
Dr. MacQuarrie offers us a most balanced presentation of the
Protestant stance, in the perspective of a true theological effort
and with emphasis on the cognitive dimension to faith-knowledge.
This is welcome and cannot but be helpful; it is a far cry from
the reductionism we have been led to expect from the immanentists
and the secularizers. His articulation of Protestant Christianity in
the concepts supplied by Heidegger offers much hope for a new

126

WILLIAM J. HILL

rapprochement. Such a hope rests on two convictions: 1) first,
that the existential-ontology represented by so profoundly original
a thinker as Heidegger is a call to traditional metaphysics to
surpass its present limitations;
second, that newness of understanding in man's quest for the truth cannot break continuity with
the achievements of the past. The general truthfulness of these
attitudes is intensified within the context of Christianity. Whether
Christian existentialism can be implanted in the soil of traditional
theological thought, whether it can find there its roots and be
nourished, this is yet to be seen. But there are reasons for believing
with Fergus Kerr that the basic interpretative concepts with which
the faith must work will be deepened and resituated, that " nothing
is being abandoned, nothing is being destroyed [while] everything
is being deepened and enlarged." 8
WILLIAM

J. HILL, 0. P.

Dominican House of Studies
Washington, D, 0.

8 Fergus Kerr, 0. P., "Heidegger
(April, 1965), p. 403.

Among the Theologians," New Blackfriars

BOOK REVIEWS
Toward An American Theology. By HERBERT W. RrcHARDSON. New York:
$3.95.
Harper & Row, 1967. Pp.

It is rather refreshing these days to be told by a theologian that the
notion of a personal God is not necessarily opposed to a concern for
science, to the individual and his freedom or to a new metaphysics. In
his first essay on the sociotechnic age Dr. Richardson rejects most of the
assumptions of the theologians of the secular age or of the death of God.
In his opinion they are asking antiquated or false questions. They are
criticizing a notion of God which is itself a modern invention or they are
confusing problems of principle with problems of practice. Atheism is the
sign of a period of transition and crisis not only in religion but in the
whole culture. If we have already entered a sociotechnic age in which the
methodology of science is fully accepted and the organization of society
is governed by technology, the positive task is not to criticize the past
but to discover God as the unity of that particular, highly differentiated
type of social structure. It seems, therefore, that Dr. Richardson is not
accepting secularization as the inevitable outcome of modern history but,
on the contrary, is advocating the integration and the sanctification of
sociotechnics in and by Christian tradition. This vocation is particularly
given to American theology because it understands the sociotechnic culture
and has in its tradition the right answers to the new needs (Chapter 5).
One of the answers is the emphasis on faith as the power of reconciliation
going beyond the relativism of fragmented perspectives and striving toward
unity. To discover this, it is necessary to distinguish five forms of
secularism: gnosticism, rationalism, naturalism, skepticism, relativism, correlated to five kinds of faith: crucificiens, quaerens, perficiens, formans,
reconcilians? This categorizing seems a little artificial in view of the
complexity of history and the unity of biblical faith. What is more
interesting is the effort to go beyond relativism. The scientific culture is
highly differentiated and specialized and is in danger of advocating a
variety of disciplines and points of view unrelated and purely relativistic.
The gain of modern culture is the differentiation of many approaches to
reality, but it may become a sheer multiplicity without unity. The author's
intent is to keep the differentiation but to find a principle of unity. He
is therefore using as instruments of the faith reconcilians what he calls a
metacritical knowledge and a philosophy of unity. The metacritical point
of view is a philosophy which does not deny the critical approach of
science but uses it without by-passing or absolutizing it. In Dr. Richardson's view this metacriticism requires a metaphysic of unity. Relativism

127

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BOOK REVIEWS

cannot be overcome by a universal sociology of knowledge but by an
implicit or explicit ontology. Plotinus and Thomas Aquinas (ens et unum
convertuntur) appear on the horizon. But Dr. Richardson begs to differ
with them. His unity is not formal and is somehow above being. (The
difference with Thomas Aquinas is not clear.) There are three hypostases
of unity: wholeness, individuality and relationality allowing a plurality of
category-systems but leading or implying, finally, a unity of unities. The
actual argument for the existence of God is henological. Dr. Richardson's
argument is less developed than Henry Dumery's phenomenological approach to the same problem. He does not seem aware of the difficulty that
henology presents for the doctrine of creation.
The last part of the book is devoted to the outline of an American theology. Three questions are raised concerning the reasons of creation, incarnation and the sending of the Holy Spirit. The author stresses the meaning
of the puritan and theocratic Sabbath as the sanctification of the world,
the glory of God in the Incarnation instead of the need for redemption in
man and the real indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The main points are not
sin and redemption but the glorification of God and the sanctification of
man. One wonders if it is with tongue in cheek that Dr. Richardson is
finding a Christological, trinitarian, Mariological and spiritual theology
typically American? But he wants his theology to be also ecumenical,and it is. Every ecumenical Christian can find large areas of agreement in
such a theology, even if one disagrees with its interpretation of Chalcedon,
with the way it conceptualizes (perichoresis) the union, assuredly real,
between the Holy Spirit and man as one person in two persons (man and
Christ) or with items of its metaphysic. One could wish also that many
assertions would be more developed. It is far from self-evident that henology is leading to a trinitarian theology. The philosophical and theological
arguments seem sometimes more stated than demonstrated. But it is
encouraging to see a theologian interested in doctrinal theology and thinking
that " a man, even a Christian man, should not affirm one thing and deny
the things it presupposes and implies."
AuGUSTIN

Dartmouth College
Hanover, New Hampahi:re

P. LEoNARD, 0. P.

BOOK REVIEWS

Eucharistic Theology. By JosEPH M. PowERS, S. J. New York: Herder
$4.95.
and Herder, 1967. Pp.
New Approaches to the Eucharist. By CoLMAN O'NEILL, 0. P. New York:
Alba House, 1967. Pp. U6. $3.95.
" To inform " is the principal aim set for himself by Father Joseph
Powers. He informs us easily and with unostentatious scholarship of the
Church's understanding of the Eucharistic mystery. His tools for this are
survey and summary, and these are applied to the existing body of literature on his subject. His work is thus a handbook which correlates the
conclusions of specialists in their own areas.
After outlining the history of Eucharistic theology and ritual celebration,
he summarizes the eucharistic faith recorded in Scripture; he analyzes a
more refined theological reflection on the biblical data; and then he
summarizes the contemporary theological approaches to reinterpreting the
dogma of real presence and transubstantiation. He concludes his work by
synthesizing the principal elements raised in his survey.
The basic contrast which emerges from the preliminary historical survey
is between the patristic view of the Eucharist as the image and source of the
unity of the Christian community and the medieval view of the Eucharist
as the property of priests and something to be gazed on rather than eaten.
Our own times are recapturing the validity of the patristic concept.
" The Biblical Faith " is the second chapter's burden and is presented
with remarkable clarity and simplicity. In this chapter (and in the whole
book) one wishes that the author had provided more documentation of his
sources, but one suspects that the lack is due to financial considerations.
Inclusion of sources and cross-references would have enhanced the value
of the present study immensely. As it stands, the work is thoroughly
sound and scholarly but is lacking in critical apparatus.
The transformation of Israelite cult and history emerges clearly. Just
as Jesus is the transformation in his own person of the total meaning and
significance of Israel, so in his actions does he transform the meaning,
power, and significance of the institutions of Israel, and, in our context, of
the paschal celebration. This transformation is the biblical root of the
contemporary explanation of the Eucharistic mystery in terms of transignification and transfinalization.
Turning to theological elaborations of the Church's faith, the author
informs us of the new concepts of grace and of sign. Grace is no longer
viewed as the adornment of the soul, but as the whole history of God's
action accomplished in Christ and continued in the sacramental action of
the Church. Sign is no longer restricted to a gnoseological pointer. Rather,
it is now seen as incarnating and, in a sense, being what it signifies.
Human bodiliness is thus the sign of personal reality, and sacraments are

130

BOOK REVIEWS

signs which embody the grace they signify. Meaning is not something
"extrinsically assigned" to things and situations; rather, it is the basic
mutual relationship between man and the world in which he exists. Things,
or the world, apart from the human mind, have only a capacity for
meaning. The capacity is actualized only when man or a person functions
in the world. Consequently, the full "meaning" of the Eucharist will be
seen to depend on the active response of the believer and on his openness
to the communication of the person of God through the signs of bread and
wine. It also depends on a total change of the " reality " of the bread and
wine, so that their meaning is genuinely and radically affected (they are
not simply affected by some " extrinsically assigned " new meaning) .
In considering the one Body of Jesus which is involved in Eucharistic
theology, the author is forced to review some developments in the theology
of Christ. He contrasts the older conception of hypostatic union with the
newer hypostatic unity. This is aimed at transcending the impression of
duality in the personality of Christ and at stressing the one human
subjectivity of Christ. He notes also the suggestions of Father Schoonenberg relative to the body of the Risen Jesus. These suggestions attempt
a middle course between the mere psychological evoking of Jesus by faith
(Bultmannian) and the reduction of the glorified Jesus to a tangible or
perceptible reality which would be the " object " of our knowledge. The
Scriptural accounts will not support such " objectifying " on our part. Thus,
according to Schoonenberg, the Risen Jesus is objective but not objectifiable.
The fourth and final chapter of the book is a survey of the contemporary
Eucharistic debate, especially as proposed by the Dutch theologians. The
author digests the major writings from 1955 through 1966, and he appends
to the chapter a selected bibliography of current eucharistic studies
arranged chronologically. He reports the major theses of F. Leenhardt
(1955), of Jean de Baciocchi (1955), and of A. Vanneste {1956). All of
these deal with the problem of substance and transubstantiation. The 1958
ecumenical conference at Chevetogne also discussed the eucharistic problems, and the contents of these papers are summarized. Such topics as the
language of dogmatic definitions and its relation to philosophical schools
{J. Dupont and G. Ghysens), substance and transubstantiation {Leenhardt
and de Baciocchi), and the memorial character of the Eucharist {Thurian)
were discussed. H. Verbeek {1959), utilizing more contemporary thoughtforms, presented the Eucharist in terms of noumenon (the gift of Christ
to the Church) and phenomenon (the eucharistic species). 1960 saw the
beginning of criticism and reaction within Catholic circles. 0. Schelfhout
replied to Vanneste's 1956 article, and J. Lescrauwaet replied to Thurian.
In 1962, S. Trooster surveyed all the development, both Protestant and
Catholic, in Eucharistic theology.
Edward Schillebeeckx, commenting on Trooster's paper, stressed that
transubstantiation takes place within the symbolic reality of the sacra-

BOOK REVIEWS

131

mental act. He thus recalled the discussion to the realm of the sacramental
or sign. Further, Schilleebeeckx wrote a major article in two parts in which
he studied carefully Trent's decree on the Eucharist, its canons on real
presence and transubstantiation, the present state of the question, and
then offered his own views on the problems. Powers is in rather obvious
admiration of the contributions of Schillebeeckx to the discussion and
and particularly of the soundness of his theological method. (It is
interesting to note that in almost every significant point the author's own
conclusions are in clear agreement with the writings of Schillebeeckx.)
After reviewing the literature of our contemporary controversy, Powers
launches his own summary of Eucharistic theology. This incorporates the
best thought available, and provides an excellent and brief presentation
of very knotty areas. For example, his pithy remarks on transignification
are clear: " Transignification basically means the divine (not human!)
act in which the substance (that is, the meaning and power) of a religious
sign is transformed in the personal revelation of God." Eucharistic transignification demands the true and, real conversion of bread and wine into
the body and blood of Jesus. But transubstantiation takes place only in a
transignification, a transfinalization (pp. 171-173).
Colman O'Neill raises several questions in his approach to "new approaches." Whereas Powers sets out to inform, O'Neill intends to correct
new approaches by applying the doctrine of Mysterium Fidei as a measure.
He is more concerned to point out dangers and inadequacies than he is to
give a balanced exposition. One suspects that this volume is more a
juxtaposition of essays than an organically constructed unity. For a
volume directed to the general public, $3.95 is a high price to pay for 105
pages of text and no index.
The "new approaches" elicit from O'Neill chapters on the relation of
word and sacrament; communitary and private celebration of Mass; the
presence of Christ; transubstantiation;
and a phenomenology of the
Eucharist.
Sacraments are a part of the ministry of the word. They transcend this
ministry because they are a fuller and more integrally human meeting with
Christ than the word is. The chapter on " Communitary and Private Celebration" is directed principally against Karl Rahner's 1949 essay on the
many Masses and the one sacrifice of Christ, and his restated 1955
argument on the many Masses as the many sacrifices of Christ. The value
of private celebration is dependent on the fact that every Mass is
essentially the action and prayer of Christ. It is, even if no other
participants be present, a pleading for grace by Christ the Priest made
present to the Church in the liturgical celebration. The problem of Real
Presence reduces to explaining how Christ can be present in a symbol and
how, simultaneously, there is more than a. merely symbolic presence.
O'Neill's thought on transubstantiation
and phenomenology of the

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BOOK REVIEWS

Eucharist is unsatisfactory. The treatment of transubstantiation is restricted and dated, particularly in view of the work done by Schillebeeckx
and summarized in Powers's study. O'Neill restricts his confrontation with
phenomenological approaches to "radical phenomenology," and in particular to the work of Luchesius Smits. This is, in effect, to ignore the
writings of such major theologians as Rahner, Schillebeeckx, and Schoonenberg, among others. Rather than reducing all phenomenological approaches
to radical phenomenology (espoused by very few Christians), the critic of
such approaches ought to address himself to representatives of more commonly held positions.
Were O'Neill's book read by itself, it might well be judged a significant
contribution. But when it is read in conjunction and comparison with
Powers's work, it suffers by the connection. The good points made by
O'Neill are made better by Powers, and the limitations of O'Neill's work are
made more evident by the breadth of Powers's. Nevertheless, all in all,
we are fortunate in having two good Eucharistic studies available to us.
JoHN A. FARREN, 0. P.
Dominican House of Studies
Washington, D. C.

The Evolving World and Theology. Edited by JoHANNES METZ. Concilium,
Vol. 26. New York: Paulist Press, 1967.
Any brief essay inevitably raises more questions than it answers. A
dozen such essays can compound that provocative effect. This is the case
with The Evolving World and Theology. Taking evolution as their theme,
an international group of Christian scholars examines the interaction between theology and the world of growing scientific knowledge and power.
With one or two exceptions, they succeed in offering precise, carefullynuanced statements of the question. It is a tribute to the caliber of the
authors that their ten-page essays generally quicken the reader's enthusiasm
for asking questions rather than quench that enthusiasm.
The preface places theology squarely in the evolving world, not in any
safe, neutral zone all to itself but immersed in the ambiguity and partial,
hard-won clarities of human inquiry. Metz finds a healthy tension between
theology and science that expresses the creaturely situation of Faith in
this world.
Werner Broker, a young priest-scientist, sketches without detail evolutionary phenomena on the biological, cosmic and historical levels. (The
English text has several examples of the inappropriate use of scientific
terms.) The mood of the article is not pessimistic, but Broker doubts that

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133

human freedom has increased in the course of human history. Z. Alszeghy,
a recognized authority in this area, surveys the statements on evolution by
the magisterium since 1860, pointing out that even the most recent have
continued to allow freedom. He argnes, therefore, that the theological
arguments thus far adduced to show that evolution is irreconcilable with
faith are evidently unconvincing. Karl Rahner, in a similar approach to the
question of monogenism, concludes that there is no reason for the magisterium to intervene in the matter of polygenism in order to protect the
doctrine of original sin.
Harvey Cox examines the future with three sets of optics: apocalyptical,
teleological and prophetic. He urges Christian theologians to purge and
purify their eschatology so as to offer universal hope to mankind. The
general secretariat of Concilium uses the same device to examine death as
a) the destruction of the present order, b) a continuation of this life into
the next, and c) something completely new and mysterious to man.
Andreas van Melsen, a Dutch philosopher of science, examines a natural law
that changes because nature changes and because man changes. He draws
an analogy between natural sciences and ethics. In science, experimentation
adds both to the content and to the method of science. In ethics, new
experiences contribute in some way to the first principles of natural law.
H. Dolch, a philosopher-theologian, proposes that, in an evolutive world,
the real sin is a refusal to cooperate in God's dynamic plan.
The two most positive and realistic chapters are those of Emmanuel
Mesthene and Eric Mascall. Mesthene, in particular, offers a balanced
analysis of the impact of technology upon man and the aims a Christian
must have in a technological world.
In the bibliographical survey section, Ben van Onna, a doctoral candidate at the University of Tiibingen, considers both the older and the more
recent theories to explain paradise and original sin. He then offers as his
own the suggestion that the garden of Eden is not yet an historically
realized situation for man. Rather, man, coming to be as an evolving
creature, had in evolution itself the promise of grace. In the beginning,
then, paradise was the promise of a final state that did not yet exist.
Corresponding to the physicists' goal of a unified conception of physical
reality, theologian Norbert Schiffers points out, is the Church's aim to be
the sign of unity and hope for all mankind. Abundant cause is given in
this volume to motivate the evolving Christian to keep pace with his
evolving Faith and so make his mark in an evolving world.
REv. OwEN W. GARRIGAN
Seton Hall University
South Orange, New Jersey

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The Grace of God, the Response of Man. By J. P. MAcKEY. Albany,
New York: Magi Books, Inc., 1967. Pp. 19!il. $3.95.
James P. Mackey, a professor of dogmatic theology in Ireland, is known
to many from his frequent articles, especially in the Irish Theological
Quarterly, and from his recent book The Modern Theology of Tradition.
His present work, The Grace of God, the Response of Man, which appeared
in Ireland in 1966 under the title Life and Grace, treats, in a series of
connected essays, four central theological themes: Grace, Morality, Tradition, the Fall. The first two are concerned with Christianity's relation to
the individual; the last two deal with the communal element in Christianity.
A rather lengthy introduction and concluding remarks help give the book
a greater unity.
The essays are not concerned primarily with replacing traditional
formulas but with giving a new and more profound understanding of
truths frequently presented in an unsatisfactory way. Modern insights
into the human condition, the contributions of personalism and existentialism, an evolutionary world view-all of these are incorporated into Father
Mackey's wide ranging essays. They hint at an extensive knowledge of
contemporary thought: literary, philosophical and theological.
A consideration of one of these studies may give a better indication of
the nature of the work. The chapter entitled " Grace " begins with a
criticism of the view of grace as a tripartite structure superimposed on a
"three storied" human nature; substance, powers, and activity. The
conception seems to make grace foreign to man, with no meaning for his
nature. He agrees with Rahner's insistence on an intimate connection of
nature and grace but warns about compromising the uniqueness and gratuity
of God's gift. Mackey considers that Rahner's own view has not sufficiently avoided the superstructure way of thinking. He turns instead to Emil
Brunner's stress on the theology of the Word of God and describes grace
in terms of an interpersonal relation of God and man. Grace, then, is God's
self-revelation to man in word and action. On man's part it is the knowledge or faith that results from this self-revelation, the love and hope that
grow from this knowledge.
No one can doubt the value of using the most perfect human realityinterpersonal union in knowledge and love-as the analogue of man's
graceful relation to God, but this reviewer has several reservations about
Fr. Mackey's essay. Can we define sanctifying grace in terms of the
activity of faith, hope, and charity? Does not this activity presuppose some
reality in us that makes this loving encounter-dialogue
possible? A·
second reservation: without attempting a defense of the manuals and monographs on grace, I find Fr. Mackey's strictures a bit severe. Is their
description of grace quite the dessicated skeleton that he proposes? For
instance, he criticizes Van Noort and others for giving an inadequate

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135

definition-grace is a quality of the soul-although this statement is not
intended as a definition but only as a generic notion, as one author
explicitly notes (Van Noort, De Gratia Christi, p. 145). He chides these
authors for affirming a position with no attempt to explain how the statement is verified; yet in the application of his own views to the grace of
Baptism and the Eucharist he attempts no solution of the problems
advanced but merely indicates the need for further theological research.
The uneven and sometimes difficult style provides another obstacle. The
sentence structure can be quite involved: a ninety-eight word sentence
can be difficult to follow.
A provocative book in the questions that it raises and the insights that
it provides; and in another sense, in the questions that it glosses over and
the positions which it oversimplifies.
RoBERT J. HENNESSEY, 0. P.
Dominican House of Studies
Washington, D. 0.

Hamann's Socratic Memorabilia. A Translation and Commentary by
JAMES C. O'FLAHERTY. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. Pp.
$7.50.
Some of the more outstanding individuals influenced by Johann Georg
Hamann (1730-1788), religious thinker of the Age of Goethe, were Herder,
Goethe, F. H. Jacobi, Jean Paul Richter, Soren Kierkegaard, and Ernst
JUnger. In terms of literary movements his influence has been noted in
cultural development from the Sturm und Drang, through the romanticism
and religious revival of the eighteenth century, to expressionism, existentialism, and dialectical theology of the twentieth. Yet it was not until
the middle of this century that a German scholar, Josef Nadler, published
a definitive edition of Hamann's collected works. In the last three decades,
however, an increasing number of journal articles and other types of
studies suggests a trend that might be considered the beginning of a
" Hamann renaissance." The present volume attempts to fill a genuine need,
since no translation of the entire Socratic Memorabilia has previously
appeared in English or in any other language.
Professor O'Flaherty has divided, his study into two parts. Part I is an
analysis of the concept of form in the Socratic Memorabilia; Part II
consists of an annotated translation of the work with the German text on
facing pages. The author approaches the essay through the study of
literary form, because he believes that content and form are so fused in
Hamann's writings that such a method will be useful to shed light in a

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special way on the work and to provide the basis for an analysis of its
philosophical and theological implications. The genesis of the essay is
1raced to Hamann's conversion to an evangelical version of Christianity
in London in 1758 and to the later unsuccessful attempt of two friends to
persuade him to renounce his new faith. One of the friends was to
become the celebrated philosopher Emmanuel Kant; the other was an
ardent rationalist, Johann Christoph Berens. The Socratic Memorabilia
was an answer to the friendly remonstrations of Kant and Berens and a
clear rejection of the Enlightenment version of Socrates as a rationalistic
hero. Hamann presents the sage as a forerunner of Christ and to some
extent of the Christian believer. Professor O'Flaherty points out that
Hamann, finding it impossible to speak directly of the Christian message
in an age of rationalism, attempts to interpret Socrates within the
Christian frame of reference. One of the most original features of the
discussion of form is an analysis of the intrinsic dramatic qualities of
Hamann's little work in Chapter 4 of Part I. Here as elsewhere the
translator and commentator reveals considerable breadth and depth of
scholarship.
The analysis of Part I and the translator's notes contribute immeasurably to a reader's total comprehension of the content of the Memorabilia.
The appendix contains a tabulation of typological themes, biblical references, and a graphic representation of the essential unity of the work. An
extensive bibliography is followed by a very serviceable index. In the
present volume Professor O'Flaherty makes accessible to a wide circle of
readers a classic of the Age of Goethe which should merit the interest of
philosophers as well as students of literature. In this reviewer's opinion,
he has made through careful and rewarding scholarship a distinguished
contribution to the current revival of interest in Hamann interpretation.
JosEPH E. BoURGEOis
Xavier University
Cincinnati, Ohio

Ethique Sociale. Tome II Philosophic Du Droit. By ARTHER UTZ. Editions
Universitaires Fribourg Suisse, 1967. Pp. 868. Price 85 Suisse Francs.
Writing philosophy has always been a luxury in which only a few could
indulge. Yet it is in the nature and to the advantage of all men to
conduct their lives and affairs by some ultimate reasons of their existence.
Social and political relaitions are an example
point. It is only from the
vantage of some values which transcend the immediate private interest
that we can-as inevitably we have to-harmonize our personal interests

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137

in view of a common good, and it is only by reference to a superior norm
that we can reasonably submit ourselves to a particular law which other
persons make for us or the sovereign for the people. But while the concept
of a superior reason in life is something that we generally live by, the
concept of an unchangeable ultimate reason of things is not so generally
accepted. Contemporary morals and jurisprudence, in particular, show
many signs of a positivistic and even pragmatic orientation. Although, even
today, few jurists would favor a law completely neutral ethically, the
tendency is, nonetheless, to separate law from morality, mainly, perhaps,
because of the latter's frequent association with a particular religion. But
whatever position we take in regard to the relationship between law and
morals, there always remains the question of what precisely constitutes the
normative nature of the law itself. Politics and sociology may attempt
but only philosophy can give an adequate answer. This is the theme and
the thesis of Fr. Utz's present treatise.
Philosophy of Right, which, in translation, is the subtitle of this work,
is the second of five volumes intended to cover the main areas of social
philosophy under a general heading of Ethique Sociale. Volume One, on
the principles of social doctrine, appeared in 1960; three other volumes to
be devoted to the social, economic and political orders respectively, are in
preparation. All are originally in German, but the French translation has
so far been very successful. The author, a Dominican and professor at the
University of Fribourg, has been engaged in social studies for many years.
His published works include four volumes of Bibliographie Der Sozialethik,
an international bibliography which is a very useful source of information
for students of moral and social philosophy. This explains why Ethique
Sociale also devotes half of its space to bibliographical notes.
It is the author's assumption and his point of departure that contemporary jurisprudence is overwhelmingly positivistic. Modern social and
political thought has been characterized by gradual departure from a philosophical, or more precisely, from a metaphysical view of life. "Positivism has
taken over the leadership from metaphysics." But positivism based exclusively on experimental and sociological data cannot solve the problems arising
in the actual human conditions, such, for example, as the conflict between the
individual conscience and an existing unjust law, or between social demands
of the underprivileged and an existing law protecting private property.
Only a philosophy of law based on man's reason and a vertical subordination of every law to the eternal law of God, as the ultimate norm, can
become the foundation of an authentic science of law as a norm. However,
a return to a pure philosophy of law is not what we actually need or what
Fr. Utz has in mind. He separates himself from those who maintain the
pure theory of values "even if they adhere to the natural law theory."
Law is a concrete norm whose efficacy depends not only on its metaphysical foundation but also on authority, sanction and other historico-sociologi-

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BOOK REVIEWS

cal conditions. But it is only by a return to a metaphysical foundation of
jurisprudence that a " compromise " may be found between the axiological
absolutes and a sociologically conditioned existence.
St. Thomas's treatise on Law underlies most of Fr. Utz's thinking, but
the references are not excessive. One would occasionally expect in a work
like this a more substantial treatment of such controversial issues as capital
punishment and even of St. Thomas's view on it. A number of other
similar topics are passed over rather too summarily. The reader may also
be surprised that, unlike many current and especially Catholic publications
on social questions, Ethique Sociale makes no explicit use of or reference
to the issues raised by the Second Vatican Council or even by previously
published encyclicals. The reason for such absence, at least in the present
-volume, lies in the nature of the work itself which is primarily a philosophical treatise addressed to a specific audience on a specific subject. It
would be wrong, nonetheless, to conclude that Philosophy of Right is irrelevant to practical problems. Our political constitutions, judicial procedures
and our concept of law and obedience to it have always been greatly
influenced by theoretical thinking. A critical analysis of such thinking as
well as the thinking itself must, therefore, go on.
JANKO ZAGAR,

0. P.

Saint Albert's College
Oakland, California

Belief and Unbelief, a Philosophy of Self-knowledge. By MICHAEL NovAK.
New York: New American Library, Mentor-Omega Books, 1967. Pp.
This paperback reprint of the book published in 1965 will give college
students an opportunity to be introduced to a renewed, if somewhat summarized, version of a theme of classical Catholic thinking. The main
purpose of the book is to present an argument for the existence of God.
Belief here means belief in the existence of God, not faith in revelation, so
the discussion is instituted between philosophical theism and atheism rather
than between faith and unbelief. The author thinks, and rightly so in my
opinion, that the question of philosophical theism, and metaphysical enquiry
in general, cannot be ignored if there is to be any kind of reasonable
conversation between a theistic and an atheistic philosopher. The relationship between philosophy, belief and faith is left undertermined, as is the
integration between existential decision and intellectual enquiry, if the
existence of God is not simply known but believed. Nevertheless, the
book's basic argument is the dynamism of understanding. " The choice of
belief springs from confidence in the centrality of the phenomena of aware-

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139

ness, the drive to understand, insight, and critical reflection in this
universe." This starting point might answer some of the difficulties which
have accumulated concerning the problem of the existence of God.
A philosophy of self-knowledge begins with a more human, personal,
critical point of view than the existence or the order of the physical
universe, as they are taken in naive realism. But in order to be valid and
convincing the argument of the capacity and dynamism of the intellect
supposes a whole metaphysics of knowledge and reality. Here the metaphysical depth of the argument is always presupposed but never completely
elaborated. Michael Novak refers the reader to the movement initiated by
Joseph Marechal and followed by Bernard Lonergan which tries to integrate
the Kantian critique of knowledge into a metaphysic of being. In popularizing this very important trend of Catholic philosophy, Michael Novak
makes excellent remarks about the silly presuppositions, the false images or
representations of God which in believers or unbelievers hinder the
authentic search, in truth and spirit, for God. But Michael Novak's
essay, like so many books published today in American theology and
philosophy, brings to mind the wise prediction of Bernard Lonergan:
"What will count is a perhaps not numerous center, big enough to be at
home in both the old and the new, painstaking enough to work out one
by one the transitions to be made, strong enough to refuse half-measures
and insist on complete solutions even though it has to wait." (Bernard
Lonergan, Collection, p. 267) .
AuGUSTIN

P. LEONARD, 0. P.

Dartmouth College
Hanover, New Hampshire

Collection: Papers by Bernard Lonergan, S. J. Edited by F. E. CRoWE, S. J.
New York: Herder and Herder, 1967. Pp. 315. $8.50.
Father Bernard Lonergan, S. J. occupies a unique position in contemporary Catholic thought. Admired and accepted as the architect of a new
intellectual era by a small but intensely loyal following, rejected by a larger
group on the charge of being an Aristotelian, an anti-Aristotelian, a
Kantian, a Hegelian, a Thomist, and even a Nestorian, he is respectfully
ignored by the multitude, including professional philosophers and theologians, who find his technical examples baffling, his theoretical perspective
labyrinthine, and his literary style disconcerting. The present collection of
articles and addresses written over a period of twenty-two years illustrate the surprising breadth of his interest and technical competence and
indirectly reveal the development of his thought.
Collection includes articles on formal logic, the foundations of geometry,

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BOOK REVIEWS

comtemporary scientific thought, metaphysics, semantics, marriage, education, and various theological problems. Underlying this heterogeneity is
a unifying thread, the central importance of a reflective understanding of
what it is to know. His earliest article, "The Form of Inference," sounds
the theme that is later elaborated and transformed. Lonergan uses the
forms of inference found in Aristotelian logic as empirical data from which
he may infer the basic pattern of human thought, hypothetical inference
based on connotation. Though his later studies transcended this one-sided
and rather simplistic use of logic, his search for invariant patterns or cognitional structures grew into an explanation of knowing based on the distinction and interrelation of experience, understanding, and judgment.
Two articles, written since Insight, reveal further developments in
Lonergan's reflective analysis and relate his thought more closely to
contemporary philosophical concerns. " Metaphysics as Horizon " incorporates an idea stemming from the phenomenologists' "I-world" polarity.
A horizon, the maximum field of vision from a determinate standpoint,
grounds the possibility of meaningful questions, a grounding that is revealed
more by performance than by content. The title " Dimensions of Meaning "
suggests a rapprochement with contemporary analytic philosophy, but this
suggestion, unfortunately, lies outside Lonergan's intentional horizon.
What the article does treat is the mediating role of meaning in cultural
evolution, a topic of intense interest to biblical theologians.
Lonergan's theological articles, chronologically arranged, reflect his growing concern with the problem of the evolution of theological understanding.
Here his reflective analysis of cognitional structures leads to an emphasis
of metlwd, a term whose meaning grows in depth and complexity as
Lonergan's later thought develops. With a proper theological method one
can interrelate different theological epochs and their characteristic emphases,
uncover the inner dynamism of dogmatic development, and work more
effectively and self-consciously towards a new non-static theological synthesis.
Lonergan, the reflective recluse, lacks the popular acclaim of more topical
theologians. Yet he is grappling with the most difficult and overarching
theological problems and doing so in a more methodic and integrated way
than any other contemporary theologian, with the possible exception of
Karl Rahner. He is surely one of the seminal Catholic thinkers of our era.
The present Collection of essays, supplemented by Crowe's introduction,
constitutes the best and most readable introduction to the sometimes
frustrating, often irritating, but ever enlightening thing that is the thought
of Bernard Lonergan.
EDWARD MAcKINNON, S. J.
Boston College
Chestnut Hill, Mass.

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BOOK REVIEWS

Leo XIII and the New Scholasticism. By JosEPH WATZLAWIK, S. V. D.
Cebu City: The University of San Carlos, 1966. Pp. 238.
This study, the first of a special series of monographs published by the
Graduate School of this Philippine university, proposed to give answers
to three questions: I) what is Neo-Scholasticism, 2) is it really a NeoScholasticism or a mere revival of medieval Scholasticism, 3) did Leo XIII
favor the revival of Scholasticism in general or did he desire the revival of
Thomism in the strict sense?
The author understands Neo-Scholasticism to be the adaptation of the
principles of medieval Scholasticism to modern problems and conditions.
What are being renewed are the timeless contributions of Scholasticism,
stripped of their medieval condition, a " N eo-Scholasticism to indicate
that it is an adaptation to modern intellectual needs and conditions."
This is what Leo XIII so vigorously promoted by force of his personal
talent and the influence of his office as Supreme Pontiff.
In seven chapters an account is given of the misunderstandings regarding
Scholasticism old and new, of the causes of the decline of Scholasticism
and its modern revival, the nature of Neo-Scholasticism, and finally in
two chapters the role of Leo XIII. It is the author's contention that the
Pontiff was approving and fostering Scholasticism in the broad sense, with
particular emphasis on St. Thomas.
There can be no doubt that Leo XIII and his successors have placed
St. Thomas at the head of a pure Scholasticism and have been convinced
of St. Thomas's perennial value for providing elements of adaptation and
solution to the problems of every age. St. Thomas is indeed constantly
singled out as the safest and most complete of the Scholastics, but certainly this is not in the sense that his paramount contribution is relative to
students or initiates in philosophy. This latter point, so briefly and
rapidly stated, is the weakest part of this study.
The title of this monograph is somewhat misleading. Most of the work
deals with the history of the rise of Neo-Scholasticism in the manner of the
familiar histories of philosophy. Leo XIII played a very important role
in this revival; however, this study devotes its major attention to the
movement itself.
NICHOLAS HALLIGAN,

Dominican House of Studies
Washington, D. C.

0. P.

BOOK REVIEWS

1'he Seventh Solitude: Metaphysical Homelessness in Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche. By RALPH HARPER. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Paperback Edition, 1967. Pp. 153. $1.95.

This is a paperback edition of a book first published in 1965. But in the
present format it has enough merit tq be considered anew, both from the
point of view of the philosophical content and from the modest cost which
now would make this volume available for use in a philosophy class.
Dr. Harper's contribution to philosophical discussions of nihilism is a
meditative consideration of several features of nihilism, for example, facing
the absoluteness of nothingness, the choice to be a loner, the destruction
of God, and the difficulties of forming a philosophy of love from this
context. Out of the context of these absolutes of solitude, the " dead ends
of nihilism," the author hopes to point to a few exists. I don't know if
he succeeds.
Philosophically speaking, the only " exit " that appears from this study
is a nostalgia for a metaphysical home in which earth, man, and justice
were 111 unity. But can we justify a metaphysics only on this basis? How
is it possible to break out of isolation back into community? Neither
Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche succeeded. And it was up to existentialism and
phenomenology in our century to put man back into his communal environment. Dr. Harper appends to his book an essay on Augustine and Proust
to draw a sharp contrast between a passion for God and' a passion for the
earth. These are the two paths open to us (and I agree). But it is difficult
to see how they follow from the nihilism of the thinkers represented in this
volume. The author contends that this is possible because we are the
images of God. A retreat from community to solitude will still lead to a
recognition of this fact. From the recognition of God's footsteps in us a
path back to the love of earth and a passion for God can be found. This
is the Augustinian thesis that truth is within us, that the proper search
for truth is introspection. As true as this may be, it remains a difficulty in
seeing how Nietzsche's words and life could possibly be interpreted in this
way. Kierkegaard too. For, though the latter did in fact find God, he was
never able to move back into a " passion " for the world.
Stylistically speaking, the author fails to point to a " few exits " as well.
Not that his writing style is bad. It is not. But there are so many
quotations from diverse authors, even in one sentence, that the thought
patterns are broken up.
Amazingly enough, these negative aspects of the book serve a positive
purpose. And in this purpose the author does succeed. The total effect of
reading this volume is one of arresting our attention. Insights leap out
at the reader, and he is forced to put the book down and 'think. And
although I do not feel any valid " exits " are revealed out of the nihilistic

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148

strain of thought, nevertheless a number of paths are suggested which
stimulate our own thinking on these all-important tenets. For this reason
Dr. Harper's book would function best as a class-study volume from
which student views could be evoked.
DAVID THoMASMA, O.P.
Dominican HOWle of Studies
Wa.tkington, D. 0.

BOOKS RECEIVED
Adler, Mortimer J. The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes.
New York, Chicago, San Francisco: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1967. Pp. 395. $7.95.
Anderson, James F. Reflections on the Analogy of Being. Netherlands:
Martinus Nijhoff-The Hague, 1967. Pp. 88. 11.70 guilders.
Aubert, Roger. Progress and Decline in the History of Church Renewal.
Concilium. Vol.
New York: Paulist Press, 1967. $4.50.
Bellet, Maurice. Facing the Unbeliever. New York: Herder and Herder,
$3.95.
1967. Pp.
Bird, Thomas E. (ed.). Modern Theologians, Christians and Jews.
$5.95.
Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967. Pp.
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo. California: University of California
Press, 1967. Pp. 463. $10.00.
Dittburner, Jerome M., 0. F. M. Conv. A Theology of Temporal Realities:
Explanation of St. Jerome. Rome: Pontificia Universitas Gregoriana,
Facultas Theologica, 1966. Pp. 119.
Edelby, Neophytos, Urresti, Teodoro Jimenez, & Huizing, Petrus, S. J.
(Editors). Renewal and Reform of Canon Law. Concilium. Vol.
New York: Paulist Press, 1967. $4.50.
Femiano, Samuel D. Infallibility of the Laity. New York: Herder and
Herder, 1967. Pp.
$4.95.
Grech, Gundisalvus M., 0. P. The Commentary of Peter of Auvergne on
Aristotle's Politics. Rome: Pont. Univ. of St. Thomas Aq., 1967.
fr.
Ruppe, Bernard F. A Reading of the Canterbury Tales. New York:
State University of New York, 1967. Pp.
$6.00 cloth,
paper.
Leff, Gordon. Heresy in the Later Middle Ages. New York: Barnes and
Noble, 1967. Pp. 800
Vols.). $15.00.
Montessori, Maria. The Discovery of the Child. Indiana: Fides Publishers,
Inc., 1967. $3.95.
Neuenzeit, Paul. Biblical Introduction to the New Testament. Indiana:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1967. $3.95 cloth, $1.45 paper.
Preller, Victor. Divine Science and the Science of God, A Reformulation of
Thomas Aquinas. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1967.
$8.50.

Rabut, Olivier. Faith and Doubt. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967.
Pp. 119. $3.75.
Ratte, John. Three Modernists: Alfred Loisy, George Tyrrell & William L.
Sullivan. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967. Pp. 370. $6.95.

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145

Reck, Andrew J. Introduction to William James. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1967. Pp.
$6.50 cloth,
paper.
Robin, Richard S. Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce.
Amherst, Mass.: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1967.
Pp.
$15.00.
Scabini, Eugenia. Il Pensiero di Paul Tillich. Milano: Editrice Vita E
3000 lire.
Pensiero, 1967. Pp.
Schaldenbrand, Sr. Aloysius, S. S. J., et al. Primacy of the Person in the
Church. Indiana: Fides Publishers, Inc., 1967. $1.95.
Sellars, Wilfrid. Form and Content in Ethical Theory. Lawrence, Kansas:
University of Kansas, 1967. Pp.
$.50.
Simons, Joseph B. Retreat Dynamics. Indiana: Fides Publishers, Inc.,
1967. Pp. 189. $4.95.
Strolz, Walter. Human Existence: Contradiction and Hope. Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1967. Pp. 171. $5.95.
Tillard, J. M. R., 0. P. The Mystery of Religious Life. Missouri: B.
Herder Book Co., 1967. $4.95.
Von Balthasar, Hans Urs. A Theological Anthropology. New York: Sheed
& Ward, Inc., 1967. $7.50.
Williams, Roger J. You are Extraordinary. New York: Random House,
1967. Pp.
$5.95.