THE THOMIST
A SPECULATIVE QUARTERLY REVIEW
OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY

EDITORS:

THE DoMINICAN

Publishers:

VoL. XXXIV

FATHERS oF THE PROVINCE oF ST. JosEPH

The Thomist Press, Washington, D. C. 20017

OCTOBER, 1970

No.4

RELIGION AS ILLUSION IN THE THOUGHT
OF SANTAYANA

M

OST OF THE critics of Santayana consider his early
series of five books entitled The Life of Reason to
be his finest work, and of these certainly the most
beautifully written and most poetically persuasive is Reason in
Religion, first published in 1905. 1 This book is an expansion
and elaboration of some of the ideas in his earlier book entitled
Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900) .2 Although
Santayana later claimed to have outgrown some of the ideas
in these early books-for example, his conviction that the
classical Greek civilization was the model for all times-still
his fundamental ideas on religion never changed, even in his
last book (hailed by some as revealing a more nearly orthodox
view) entitled The Idea of Christ in the Gospels or God in
Man (1946) .3 These views are basically very similar to those
Scribner's, 1936, first published in 190.5).
Harper, 1957, first published in 1900).
• The Idea of Christ in the Gospels or God in l'rlan (New York: Scribner's, 1946).
1

2

(New York:
(New York:

533

534

HARRY M. CAMPBELL

of Vaihinger in his The Philosophy of 'As If ' 4 and of Arnold
in his books on religion, 5 although Santayana never mentions
either of his predecessors, and his "pious scepticism" (a phrase
applied by him to recent Protestantism but equally characteristic of his own view) is elaborated in a more rhetorically
eloquent fashion than that of either the dry philosophical argument of Vaihinger or the literary presentation of Arnold.
I
Like Arnold, Santayana would preserve the essence of true
religion, which is the highest expression of the Life of Reason
and which in no way depends on a consideration of religious
language as having an objective referent. In fact, he usually
considers such a " factual " attitude toward religious language
as an "abuse" of truly spiritual religion. 5 a The suprarational
4 Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of 'As If'
(London: Routledge & Kcgan Paul,
1924, first published in 1R75 in Germany). His thesis (p. II et passim) is that
"hypotheses which are Lnown to be false " such as, in religion, the ideas of God,
immortality, and all dogma may and should be " employed because of their
utility."
5 See especially St. Paul and Protestantism
(London: Macmillan, 1903-1904, first
published in 1870); Literature and Dogma (New York: Macmillan, 1906, first
published in 1873); and God and the Bible (New York: Macmillan, 1903, first
published in 1875). See also my article entitled "Arnold's Religion and the Theory
of Fictions," Religion in Life, XXXVI (Summer, 1967), 21?3-231?.
••In my argument against the fictional religion of Santayana, as in my arguments against the similar views of Vaihinger and Arnold, I am not upholding the
literalism of the Fundamentalists
but rather the " analogous literalism " first
formulated by St. Thomas Aquinas, which is, as Gustave Weigel has said, neither
the " univocal literalism " of the Fundamentalists nor the " unliteral symbolism "
of Bultmann and his follows. This latter reduces !he truth of the Scriptures to
" existential " or subjective experience. Of " analogous lileralism " Weigel adds
that the symbolist need not fear
that the "utter otherness " of God is denied by an analogous understanding
of the formulas which speak to us of God. In a proportion we do not say
that the half of an orange is in any way equal to the half of a melon.
We only say that in the ratio of whole and half they are equivalent.
When the Scriptures call God our King, they are not saying that God is
our Nero. It is only affirmed that
proper power in his limited
field of direction is relatively equivalent on his side of the equation
to the absolute dominion of God over us on the other side. There is no
univocity; no equality. . . . Nor does this give us only formal knowledge.
When I am told that the boy before me looks like his father, I know some-

RELIGION AS ILLUSION

IN THE THOUGHT OF SANTAYANA

535

tenets of traditional religion, he says, like the Christian " vision
of heaven" which " pretended to be an antidote to our natural
death," 6 are beneficial when considered as only poetic fictions
but harmful, at least potentially harmful, when considered as
truth.
Some of the terms running through Santayana's argument
are similar to those used by Arnold, and Santayana, as we
shall see, is, like Arnold, not consistent in deciding how they
are to be applied to early Christianity. First, Santayana refers
to the metaphysical language of Christianity as " myth" whose
content is poetic and fictional, whether or not it was or is so
recognized by its makers and users. Second, sometimes, a
little confusingly, he uses " gratuitous fictions " to refer to
fictional myths mistaken for fact and warns that such a mistake
will bring " regrettable reactions " because the victim will soon
discover his own error. Third, Santayana, like Emerson, uses
the term "prayer" confusingly because in the same passage
it can mean the " rational prayer " of a fictionalist, which is
only "contemplation, ideality, poetry," and the petition of a
believer to a transcendent God. Fourth, Santayana, like
Arnold, usually uses the word " spiritual " to refer to a fictional
attitude toward any metaphysical realm or transcendent God;
the implied argument is that, if one really believed in such a
God, he would be acting morally through fear or prudence and
thus would be materialistically interested in his bodily welfare.
Fifth, Santayana, uses the phrase "realm of essence " to refer
to beautiful imagistic creations of his own imagination which
refer to nothing beyond themselves but which are pleasant to
contemplate and offer a refuge from the sordid realities of our
mundane existence. I have a number of serious objections to
Santayana's philosophy of religion and shall mention most of
them as this essay progresses, but I shall reserve the connected
presentation of my counterarguments until I have traced the
thing about the father I have never seen. "Myth, Symbol, and Analogy "
in Religion and Culture: Essays in Honor of Paul Tillich, ed. by Walter
Leibrecht (New York: Harper, 1959), pp. 128-129.
6 Reason in Religion, p. 9.

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HARRY M. CAMPBELL

rather tangled development of his views on this subject. In
presenting his views I have felt it necessary to quote from
them rather frequently to establish the accuracy of my interpretation. Footnote references to the sources of these quotations will enable the reader to ascertain for himself whether I
have taken them out of context.
The first point to be noted is that, in his emphasis on the
" initial advantage " and the " original fineness " of the myths
which constitute the poetry of religion, Santayana is leaning
toward Arnold's contention that the original makers u£ the
myths considered them as poetic rather than factual, and later
he specifically so argues:
. . . if the myth was originally accepted it could not be for this
falsity plainly written on its face; it was accepted because it was
understood, because it was seen to express reality in an eloquent
metaphor. . . . Had these S?mbols for a moment descended to
the plane of reality they would have lost their meaning and d:gPity .
. . . Such an error, if carried through to the end, would nul;ify all
experience and arrest all life. 7

But, he continues, the corruption of Christianity occurred
when it " was paganised by the early Church." " The Christianity which the pagans adopted," he says, became "a rdigion
that had passed through civilization and despair, and had
been reduced to translating the eclipsed value of life into
supernatural symbols." 8
This interpretation would seem to imply that before its
" reduction" by the pagans the dogma of Christianity was
considered as poetic fiction, at least by the more intelligent of
its adherents, including Christ himself. Arnold had argued
variously on this point saying in some places that the original
writers of the Bible were writing in a "tentative, poetic way,"
with " no pretensions to metaphysics," 9 and in other places
attributing this superior and truly spiritual understanding only
Ibid., pp. 53-54.
Ibid., pp. 106, 107.
9 Literature and Dogma, p. 37 et passim.

7
8

RELIGION AS ILLUSION

IN THE THOUGHT OF SANTAYANA

587

to Christ. 10 It is curious, however, that in his early books
Santayana does not refer specifically to the views of Christ.
Not until his last book, The Idea of Christ in the Gospels
(1946), does he consider this problem, over forty years later,
by which time he had completely abandoned his usual early
attempt to impose his own sceptical interpretation of Christian
dogma on the early Christians and by implication on Christ
himself. In fact, he had by no means been consistent even in
his early books in maintaining that the "myth" was "originally accepted" 11 as unreal. In Poetry and Religion (1900) he
had said:
Had Christianity or any other religion had its basis in literary or
philosophical allegories, it would never have become a religion,
because the poetry of it would never have been interwoven with
figures and events of real life. No tomb, no relic, no material
miracle, no personal derivation of authority, would have existed to
serve as the nucleus of devotion and the point of junction between
this world and the other. The origin of Christian dogma lay in
historical facts and in doctrines literally meant by their authors. 12

And in Reason in Religion he admits that
there were ... two things in Apostolic teaching which rendered
it capable of converting the world. One was the later Jewish
morality and mysticism, beautifully expressed in Christ's parables
and maxims, aml illustrated by his miracles, those cures and
absolutions which he was ready to dispense, whatever their sins, to
such as called upon his nameY [The other was] the tenderness and
tragedy [of the life and death of Jesus], relieved by the story of his
miraculous death, his glorious resurrection, and his restored divinity.14

1£ the spread of Christianity depended on these miraculous
elements, then is it undesirable and even dangerous to believe
in them? On the answer to this question Santayana's argument
Ibid., p. 79 et passim.
Reason in Religion, p. 53.
12 Interpretations
of Poetry and Rcligiun, pp. 106-107.
13 Reason in Religion, pp. 85-86.
H Ibid., p. 86.
10

11

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HARRY M. CAMPBELL

again vacillates between yes and a reluctant no in his early
books on religion. His main argument is that a consideration of
metaphysical Christian language as having an objective referent is psychologically and morally dangerous: " To confuse
intelligence and dislocate sentiment by gratuitous fictions is a
short-sighted way of pursuing happiness. Nature is soon
avenged. An unhealthy exaltation and a one-sided morality
have to be followed by regrettable reactions." 15 Santayana is
assuming here (as is clear from the context) that a believer in
an objective referent for religious language will soon discover
it to be only " gratuitous fictions " and will then suffer " regrettable reactions" from his disillusionment. The moral danger
he had already explained more fully in Poetry and Religion.
The imagination which makes us believe religious dogma to
be more than a poetic fiction, he says,
i:. an irresponsible principle; its rightness is an inward rightness,
and everything in the real world may turn out to be disposed otherwise than as it would wish. Our imaginative preconceptions are
then obstacles to the perception of fad and of rational duty; the
faith that stimulated our efforts and increased our momentum,
multiplies our wanderings. The too hasty organization of our
thoughts becomes the cause of their more prolonged disorganization.
. . . And as we
our hopes, and detest the experience that seems
to contradict them, we add fanaticism to our confusion. 16

But in spite of Santayana's assurance that "Nature is soon
avenged" on orthodox believers, he cannot avoid the fact that
many such believers have never lost their faith even under the
most disappointing circumstances. According to his psychological criterion, should not such a condition of faith be
desirable? Santayana's problem here in part is that he bas a
dual, if not a self-contradictory, attitude toward truth. He has
been arguing that metaphysical religious language is best considered as a poetic fiction. One should look only for psychological (emotional) satisfaction by disregarding truth either
literal or (though he does not say so) analogical. In other
words, like Vaihinger, he " knows " that the idea (even m
16

Ibid., p. 10.

16

Poetry and Religion, p. 10.

RELIGION

AS ILLUSION

IN THE THOUGHT OF SANTAYANA

539

analogical language) of a transcendent realm and God is
"false." But, paradoxically, this knowledge of falsity for
Santayana is a truth. " The feeling of reverence should itself
be treated with reverence, although not at a sacrifice of
truth. . . ." 17 His argument for the fictional approach to
religion, furthermore, has been that the opposite would soon
lead to disillusionment and " regrettable reactions " because the
believer would lose his faith. But what if one does not lose
his faith? He admits that many orthodox sages have never
lost their faith and still "have lived steadfastly in the spirit."
But his regard for truth forces him to maintain that such
naive satisfaction is intrinsically " spurious," whether or not it
is followed by disillusionment. Such literal interpretation of
the myth, he says, is crudely materialistic because it reveals a
concern for the present welfare of the body and its perpetuation
beyond this life. How then can all these sages have "lived
steadfastly in the spirit " ?
Besides the above, we have already noticed some other logical
self-contradictions in Santayana's argument. Unfortunately,
there are others. For example, he defines " rational prayer "
as only" contemplation, ideality, poetry, in the sense in which
poetry includes all imaginative moral life." 18 He says, furthermore, that "Prayer is a soliloquy," which, of course, would be
consistent with his definition in the preceding sentence and
like Emerson's definition of prayer as " the soliloquy of a
beholding and jubilant soul," with a very important exception:
the rest of Santayana's sentence reads as follows: "but being
a soliloquy expressing need, and being furthermore, like sacrifice, a desperate expedient which men fly to in their impotence,
it looks for an effect .... " 19 Obviously Santayana has merged
here, without distinguishing between, two kinds of prayer as
he himself has defined them. He has made no distinctions
between the "rational prayer," which he has defined as a
soliloquy, and what he elsewhere calls " magical prayer," the
appeal for assistance to a higher being in whose existence one
17

Reason in Religion, p. 13.

18

Ibid., p. 43.

19

Ibid., pp. 39-40.

540

HARRY M. CAMPBELL

really believes. From the standpoint of his own logic he should
have said that the prayer which at its best is a soliloquy" contemplation, ideality, poetry "-too often becomes instead
"a desperate expedient which men fly to in their impotence .
. . ." Of course, even when he does not confuse it with his
so-called" magical prayer," why does he insist on calling poetic,
soliloquizing contemplation prayer? Santayana had a great
admiration for Christianity, especially Roman Catholic Christianity. In fact, in his essay entitled " Modernism and Christianity" in Winds of Doctrine (first published in 1913) he condemned modernistic varieties of Christianity because, as he
said:
The modernist view, the view of a sympathetic rationalism, revokes
the whole Jewish tradition on which Christianity is grafted; it takes
the seriousness out of religion; it sweetens the pang of sin, which
becomes misfortune; it removes the urgency of salvation; it steals
empirical reality away from the last judgment, from hell, and from
heaven; it steals historical reality away from the Christ of religious
tradition and personal devotion. The moral summons and the
prophecy about destiny which were the soul of the gospel have lost
all force for it and become fables. 20
Why, then, does Santayana insist on calling his sophisticated
soliloquy prayer even when he does not contradict himself in
the same sentence? The answer is somewhat complex, but
part of it lies in the same kind of reasoning that prompted his
condemnation of modernism when, from one point of view, he
is a prime example of it. In the above, we notice that he
condemns modernism for " stealing historical reality away from
the Christ of religious tradition and personal devotion " and
also for " reducing the soul of the gospel " to "fables." Yet, in
the sentence preceding the extended quotation he says: " Such
a moral fable is what Christianity is in fact; but it is far from
what it is in intention," and a few sentences before that he says,
" Christianity is indeed a fable, yet full of meaning if you take
it as such." 21 Why, then, condemn the modernists for calling
Christian doctrine a collection of fables? The point that
•• Winds of Doctrine (New York:

"'Ibid.

Scribner's, 1940), p. 50,

RELIGION AS ILLUSION

IN THE THOUGHT OF SANTAYANA

541

Santayana, not very successfully, is trying to make is that the
modernists are not respectful enough in their attitude toward
the ancient language. Let us, says Santayana in effect, keep
the traditional language for its emotive force and interpret it
as beautiful fictions or illusions. Therefore Santayana's poetic
soliloquy can retain the name of prayer. It is perfectly permissible for the modernists to have the new wine provided they
put it in the old linguistic bottles.
But this is not the complete answer. Santayana not only
admired traditional Christianity, but, sophisticated modern
that he was, he longed for the old faith. This attitude is not
so evident in the early books as in the later, and it is most
noticeable in the wistful melancholy appearing here and there
in The Idea of Christ in the Gospels (1946) written only a few
years before his death.
Returning to the logical self-contradictions that appear in
his early books, we notice that in the chapter on mythology in
Reason in Religion Santayana contradicts what he said earlier
about the harmfulness of " gratuitous fictions " when they are
considered to be true. In the later chapter he says: "Illusions
incident to mythology are not dangerous in the end, because
illusion finds in experience a natural though painful cure ....
In taking fable for fact, good sense and practice seldom keep
pace with dogma." 22 In fact, as he says later, the consideration
of myths as true is even necessary for man's moral life, since
" Man is still in his childhood "-all of mankind, he means,
except the philosophical elite. "Nor should we wonder," he
says generously, " at this enduring illusion. Man is still in
his childhood; for he cannot respect an ideal which is not
imposed on him against his will. . . . His moral life, to take
shape at all, must appear to him in fantastic symbols." 23
This statement appears in the chapter entitled" The Christian
Epic," by the end of which, however, he has dropped this
view of myth as a moulder of morals for a less enthusiastic but
still tolerant opinion of it as a harmless eccentricity. " Matters
•• Reason in Religion, pp. 51-52.

23

Ibid., pp. 91-92.

542

HARRY M. CAMPBELL

of religion should never be matters of controversy. \Ve neither
argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are
just, for knowing so human a passion. That he harbours it is
no indication of a want of sanity on his part in other matters." 24
But on the next page, referring to the third century, he once
more returns to regret for the spread of the " sea of superstition and dialectic which had submerged Christianity" 25 a regret almost but not quite so strong as the one expressed
twenty pages before for " the failure of Christianity, with its
prolonged discipline and opportunities, to establish a serious
moral education." 26 In this mood, which prevails in spite of
contradictions in his early books on religion, Santayana considers that Christianity had borrowed the less desirable aspects
of other religions:
... being a doctrine of redemption, like neo-Platonism, it tended
to deny the natural values of this life; but, being a doctrine of
creation and providential government, comparable in a way to
the Stoic, it had an ineradicable imvard tendency toward pantheism. and toward a consequmt acceptance of both the goods and
evils of this world as sanctioned and required by providence. 27

In attempting to account for the conflicting views that
appear especially in Santayana's early books, the answer may
well be, not that he is simply careless in following the sequence
of hi& argument, but that his position, like that of Emerson, is
an ambivalent one vacillating between a consideration of man
as truly subordinate to a power greater than he and a consideration of man as not thus subordinate but as his own divinity.
As Santayana and Emerson present these views, they cannot
be reconciled as either the Christian Incarnation in which God
becomes man as God-man, or the reverse process, described by
Berdyaev as made possible by the Christian Incarnation, namely, the possibility of the human-divine. 28 Both Santayana and
Emerson rejected the Christian Incarnation as pure myth be"Ibid., pp. 97-98.
25 Ibid., pp. 99-100.

26

21

Ibid., p. 80.
Ibid., p. 139.

28 With one important
difference there is a parallel in the philosophy of Nicholas
Berdyaev to the human-diYine argument of Santayana and Emerson. Berdyaev

RELIGION AS ILLUSION IN THE THOUGHT OF SANTAYANA

548

cause, for one thing, they did not believe in the idea of sin,
which made the Incarnation necessary. Of course, they rejected
as fictional all the dogma of Christianity, except the idea of
some kind of a God-for Emerson a kind of vaguely pantheistic
Over-Soul, of which man at his best was "part and parcel";
for Santayana (in certain moods) a kind of vague pantheism
which (perhaps mistakenly) he considered to be like the
religion of Spinoza. But Santayana usually rejected (except
poetically or fictionally) the idea of any kind of God beyond
man; he called himself the only real materialist of his day. I
submit some passages from Emerson and Santayana which
indicate that they vacillate between a humble attitude toward
a power greater than man and the self-confident attitude of
considering man as his own god. (I) From Santayana's "Ultimate Religion," first presented as a paper at The Hague during
the commemoration of the tercentenary of the birth of Spinoza:
My destiny is single, tragically single, no matter how multifarious
may be the causes of my destiny. As I stand amazed, I am not
called upon to say whether, if I could penetrate into the inner
workings of things, I should discover omnificent power to be simple
or compound, continuous or spasmodic, intentional or blind. I stand
before it simply receptive, somewhat as, in Rome, I might stand
before the great fountain of Trevi. 29
argues that Christ's Incarnation as the Divine-human made it possible for man to
become divine. "Christianity," says Berdyaev,
has always taught of the weakness and fall of man, of the sinfulness and
weakness of human nature. At the same time, Christian anthropology
recognizes the absolute and royal significance of man, since it teaches of
the incarnation of God and divine possibilities in man, the mutual interpenetration of divine and human natures . . . in Christian revelation the
truth about man's divine nature is really only the reverse side of the
medal of the truth about Christ's human nature. The Christology of man
is inseparable from that of
Son of God. . . . (Donald A. Lowrie
[ed.], Christian Existentialism: A Berdyaev Anthology [London: George
Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1965], p. 57.)
The important difference, of course, between the position of Berdyaev and that of
Emerson and Santayana is that Berdyaev believes in the objective reality of the
Christian Incarnation as necessitated by the sinfulness of man. For Santayana and
Emerson the fall of man was simply his failure to understand his potential divinity,
and the Christian type of Incamation was a superstitious myth.
•• In Irwin Edman (ed.), The Philosophy of Santayana: Selections from All
the Works (New York: Scribner's, 1958), p. 576.

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HARRY M. CAMPBELL

And this from Emerson's "The Over-Soul":
As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that
flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its
streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause but a
surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look
up and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien
energy the visions comc.30
But Emerson says in " Nature " that " l\1:an is a god in ruin," 31
because he does not recognize his divinity, and in " SeHReliance " that man's prayer "is the soliloquy of a beholding
and jubilant soul." 32 Many other similar passages may be
found in Emerson. 'Ve have already seen a number of the
same type in Santayana, to which may now be added the
following: 1\Ian, says Santayana, " adores, and the object of
his adoration may be discovered within him and elicited from
his own soul." 33
But, although he agrees with Emerson fundamentally that
Everyman is always potentially, sometimes actually, divine,
Santayana balances this exuberance on the next page by a
sobering reflection concerning the nature of the universe and
man's relation to it. "The universe," he says, " so far as we
can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine; its extent,
its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive," 31
and he adds that not only what we call our follies but also our
spirituality come from this universe, "our real ancestor." 35 The
" follies " are " the ignorant crimes of the universe which have
passed into our own blood," and the " spirituality " of this
Janus-faced ancestor also transmitted to man appears in the
following passage:
It [spiritualityl threads its way through the landscape with so
little temptation to distraction that it can salute every irrelevant
thing, as Saint Francis did the sun and moon, with courtesy and a
certain affectionate detachment.
3

° Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks

Atkinson

(New York:

Random House, 1950), p. 262.
•• Ibid., p. 191.
35 Ibid., p. 192.

Ibid., p. 39.
•• Ibid., p. 163.
33 Reason in Religion, p. 190.

31

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IN THE THOUGHT OF SANTAYANA

545

Spirituality likes to say, Behold the lilies of the field! For its
secret has the same simplicity as their vegetative art; only spirituality has succeeded in adding consciousness without confusing instinct. . . . The spiritual man should be quite at home in a world
made to be used; the firmament is spread over him like a tent for
habitation, and sublunary furniture is even more obviously to be
taken as a convenience. 36

I£ this passage had already been written when Emerson wrote
his first essay entitled " Nature," he would have been happy
to quote it in the section on "Commodity." Indeed, Santayana's sinuous poetic rhythm is quite as felicitous as that of
Emerson's best passages and the exaltation of man as part of
Nature is quite as emotionally appealing, if not so buoyant, as
Emerson's. And Santayana repeats Emerson's further exaltation of man as always potentially, and at times actually, divine,
the actualization depending on man's recognition of his latent
powers. "The heart," says Santayana in the " Conclusion " to
Reason in Religion, "utters its own oracles." 37 Here again
while attempting to summarize his views, he makes a series of
statements which illustrate most strikingly the defects of his
philosophy in compact form:
Mythology, in excogitating hidden dramatic causes for natural
phenomena ... has profoundly perverted and confused the intellect;
it has delayed and embarrassed the discovery of natural forces, at
the same time fostering presumptions which, on being exploded,
tended to plunge men, by revulsion, into an artificial despair. At
the same time this experiment in mythology involved wonderful
creations which have a poetic value of their own .... In imagining
human agents behind every appearance fancy has given appearances some kinship to human life. . . . While objects and events
were capriciously moralised, the mind's own plasticity has been
developed by its great exercise in self-projection. To imagine himself a thunder-cloud or a river, the dispenser of silent benefits and
the contriver of deep-seated universal harmonies, has actually
Etimulated man's moral nature: he has grown larger by thinking
himself so large .... Without misunderstanding, there might have
been no understanding at all; without confidence in supernatural
support, the heart might never have uttered its own oracles. 38
36

Ibid., pp. 194-195.

37

Ibid., p. 276.

18

Ibid., pp. 275-276.

546

HARRY M. CAMPBELL

From whatever standpoint-" operationally," 39 ontologically,
or morally-one wishes to consider this passage, its graceful
style cannot conceal its serious errors.
In the first place, many great thinkers of the past and present
have found solid arguments in the form of" converging probabilities" (to use Cardinal Newman's phrase) which have concinced them of the existence of a transcendent God. Santayana
presents no argument against the existence of the "excogitated" deity except to say (without any proof or without any
qualification) that such a belief has had (and he implies always
had) two bad effects: it " has perverted and confused the
intellect " and has " tended to plunge men, by revulsion, into
an artificial despair." Why does he not show these ill effects in
all the great theistic thinkers from Aristotle on to the present?
The answer, of course, is that such effects exist only in Santayana's imagination.
Santayana then says that the wonderful fictitious creations
of the myth-maker (a mere self-projection, whether or not they
are recognized as such) have a poetic value; the mythologist
would be like Vaihinger if he were aware that his creations were
fictitious. But Santayana would have the myth-maker imagining himself as god, "the contriver of deep-seated universal
harmonies."
This outdoes Vaihinger in egotism, because
39 I borrow
this word from the following sentence by Santayana (Reason in
Religion, p. 31): " God's majesty lies in his operation, not in his definition or his
image." It is not surprising that here and elsewhere Santayana reveals a tendency
to pragmatism, since he studied under, and admits that he was considerably influenced by, William James. In his "A General Confession" (P. A. Schilpp [ed.],
The Philosophy of George Santayana, Evamton and Chicago, 1940, pp. 14-17)
Santayana admils that "in taking eYerything good-humouredly, with a grain of
salt" (that is, in taking from it \\hat is useful), he is following "a sort of
pragmatism" (p. 14), but whal the mature James called pragmatism Santayana
"could not stomach" (p. 16). In Santayana's opinion, James's pragmatism
involYed "arguments which assumed that consciousness was a material engine
absorbing and transmitting energy: so that it was no wonder that presently he
doubted whether consciousness existed at all . . . this pictorial cosmology had
the advantage of abolishing the human imagination, with all the pathos and poetry
of its animal status" (p. 16). At any rate, both James and Santayana emphasize
the priority of "operation." For the connection of pragmatism with Vaihinger's
'As If' system, see Vaihinger, p. viii.

RELIGION AS ILLUSION

IN THE THOUGHT OF SANTAYANA

547

Vaihinger limits the :fiction to one's acting as if he were commanded by a God in whose existence he does not believe.
Apparently for Santayana the moral benefit does not demand
action: " he has grown larger by thinking himself so large."
Imagination will perform the magic trick-a substitution of
esthetics for morally responsible action-a perversion of ethics
as well as religion which is characteristic of Santayana's philosophy, as we shall have opportunity to observe further.
The last sentence of the lengthy quotation above goes even
further in egotism, because it says self-projection in the way
of imagining oneself to be God is not, after all, necessary, because
the human really is his own God. For that reason, then, it was
good for primitive man to believe in the real existence of God,
because without this preliminary " confidence in supernatural
support, the heart might never have uttered its own oracles."
Santayana would not have been, and the many modems who
believe that man is his own God today will not be, impressed
by references to the tyranny of rulers from Nero to Hitler who
have held this view. Sanatayana, of course, was a shy recluse,
and Emerson, who held the same view about man's potential
(often actual) divinity, never oppressed anybody, but the
record is quite different for those with political power who
believe thus.

II
In the chapter on " Ideal Immortality " in Reason in Religion, Santayana turns to another quality in man besides the
contemplation of his own greatness that enables him "to
participate at once in humanity and in divinity." His celebration of memory has all the poetic beauty and gentle melancholy
(while professing comfort in " the serenity and balm of truth ")
that were
to characterize the philosophical portions of
Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu:
As it is memory [says Santayana] that enables us to feel that we
are dying and to know that everything actual is in flux, so it is
memory that opens tn us an ideal immortality .... When the
meaning of successive perceptions is recovered with the last of them,

548

HARRY M. CAMPBELL

when a survey is made of objects whose constitutive sensations
first arose independently, this synthetic moment contains an object
raised above time on a pedestal of reflection, a thought indefeasibly
true in its ideal deliverance, though of course fleeting in its psychic
existence. 40

In his last full book, The Idea of Christ in the Gospels
(1946), this combination of assurance and gentle melancholy
may still be found, though by this time the assurance is less,
and the melancholy more, pronounced than in the early books.
Though not accepting it for himself, he is not only far more
tolerant of the interpretation of dogma as having an objective
referent but has found this approach to be " an inspiration "
expressing" some inborn predicament of the spirit." 41 Though,
of course, he is too sophisticated to admit it, there is some
indication in both the tone and the content of this book that he
himself, in spite of his confident scepticism, would, if he only
could, accept the " impetuous " view of " a refined spirit " like
that of Cardinal Newman.
As was mentioned above, Santayana by this time has completely abandoned his usual early view that the authors of the
Bible and Jesus considered religious dogma as poetic rather
than factual. Here he intends to " study and clarify " this
factual view which " hypostasises the idea of Christ into a
divine power at work in the hearts of men" and which has
been and is " so idolised by sensitive and noble minds " 42 such
as Newman and all other believers. In speaking of Christ's
Passion, he says:
... and here especially, in a scene so characteristic of John, what
is recorded as a fact and by believers must be accepted as a fact,
is surely a symbol also, and who knows in how many senses, rising
to who knows what angelical removes? Could we divine them all,
we should understand why Christ's Passion was necessary, and
how, by undergoing and transcending it, he overcame the world.43

Even the symbol, rising to its " angelical removes," is here
clearly to be interpreted as pointing to a reality which is
•• Reason in Religion, pp. 260, 262.
" The Idea of Christ in the Gospels, p. 19.
•• Ibid., pp. 18, 19.
•• Ibid., p. 150.

RELIGION

AS ILLUSION

IN THE THOUGHT OF SANTAYANA

549

objective truth and not poetic fiction. How different is this
Santayana from the early dispenser of " rational " wisdom who
warned of " regrettable reactions," even " artificial despair,"
which would result from considering dogma as objectively
valid! Of course, he cannot completely surrender his feeling
of superiority to believers, and he returns at the end to say,
apparently even here with considerable modification of his old
assurance:
As in poetry, so in religion, the question whether the event described here [in the Gospelsj actually occurred is trivial and irrelevant. Anything may occur in infinite time. The question is what
light it would kindle within us, if it happened to happen. 44

There is a wistfulness here which Santayana did not intend to
reveal. The light is not kindled now within us, but would be
if " it happened to happen." But presumably for believers the
light is aglow and has been " kindled " by their belief that
these events actually occurred. How, then, can the question
whether they occurred be "trivial and irrelevant"? In the next
sentence Santayana is once more ambiguous, perhaps as a
deliberate device to check the emotion apparent, even if restrained, in the last sentence quoted above. " Facts," he says,
" matter little for the spirit except for what they mean to the
heart." 45 But, unless the " spirit " is to be almost all intellect
(and even Santayana's melancholy, however restrained, indicates that emotion is important here), the exception is far
more significant than he intended to indicate. This restrained
melancholy continues in the final sentence of this passage on
the relative unimportance of whether the events recorded in the
Gospels did or did not occur: " Lucifer might admit that a
divine Christ had existed, yet might disdain to imitate him;
and a disillusioned philosopher might aspire to imitate him
without believing in his existence." 46 This would clearly be
aspiration in spite of, and not because of, disillusionment, and
what has caused this obstacle which the philosopher might
attempt so nobly to overcome? It is obviously his decision that
H

Ibid., pp. 173-174.

•• Ibid., p. 174.

•• Ibid.

550

HARRY M. CAMPBELL

dogma is not fact, and this decision would indicate that Santayana, in spite of his cultivated detachment, is a victim of the
" inborn predicament of the spirit" that prompted him to
write this book.
But the lonely and gallant knight of rationalism fights his
sophisticated battle nobly and returns briefly in his final
chapter to a denunciation of dogma considered as fact:
For if idealism is turned into a psychological physics or cosmology
it becomes merely naturalism disguised in romantic or dialectical
myths. Idealism then inspires the same religious sentiments as
pantheism and the same morality. 47
In the very next sentence, however, he feels obliged to qualify,
and apparently to contradict, what he has just said: " The
idea of Christ, however, is not that of an ordinary man who
has been more or less inspired by the spirit of God. . . . He
was really [italics mine J God become man; and that is a very
different idea from that of a man living, so far as his nature
permits, in an ideal union with God." 48 Although he probably
does not intend really here to mean ontologically valid, the
second clause shows that he must mean more than poetically
(in the sense of fictitiously) ; therefore, to some extent at least,
the contradiction still remains, unless we assume that Santayana is expressing not his own opinion but that of believers
in the Catholic dogma. This model of Christ as "really God
become man," he says,
is what forced Catholic theology to adopt the doctrine of a supernatural human soul: so that only a sacrificial human life and a
sanctified human body should be truly natural to man and compatible with his perfect happiness. This implies the sacrifice of
almost everything that a man ordinarily cares for, including his
animal will and his animal sel£.49
This idea of Christianity as morbidly ascetic seems at first
sight to be contradicted on the next page by this observation:
It is indeed one of the beauties of the idea of Christ that in spite
of his absolute holiness, or because of it, he shows a spontaneous
' 7

Ibid., p. 250.

•• Ibid.

•• Ibid.

RELIGION AS ILLUSION

IN THE THOUGHT OF SANTAYANA

551

sympathy, shocking to the Pharisee, with many non-religious sides
of life, with little children, with birds and flowers, with common
people, with beggars, with sinners, with sufferers of all sorts .... 50

However, the adjective "non-religious" shows the logical connection with the previous passage: the essence of religion, the
doctrine of the Incarnation, had " forced Catholic theology to
adopt the doctrine of a supernatural human soul," which, in
Santayana's opinion, inevitably involves a morbid asceticism.
Thus Christ's avoidance of such asceticism could only mean
that he was showing " spontaneous sympathy with many nonreligious sides of life." After all, Santayana's most important
point was his rejection of what he considered to be an ontological absurdity, the " supernatural human soul."
Thus Santayana ends where he began-a " religious " materialist, who does exclude transcendental logic, as he said in his
"Apologia Pro Mente Sua," but who considers this logic valid
only " to render articulate certain special perspectives necessarily confined to the subjective or poetic sphere." 51 Such
transcendental logic, including religious dogma, would belong in
what he called "the realm of essence," essence for him being
distinguished from existence. 52 Essence for Santayana was not
a reality like Plato's noumenal realm or world of Ideas above
the phenomenal realm or world of appearances. Santayana
denied that he was a Platonist because, as he said, Plato
attributed substance to his universals and believed in their
active and beneficent influence on the phenomenal world. For
Santayana essences are simply creations of the mind beautiful
to contemplate with no pretensions to any kind of ontological
validity. 53 Santayana summarizes his philosophy well in the
following passage from the Apologia:
Mine [he says] was indeed a modest Epicurean humanism, that
invited mankind to profit as much as possible by the course of
•• Ibid., p. 251.
01 Santayana
in Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of George Santayana, p. 506.
•• Ibid., p. 500 et passim, and The Realm of Essence in Realms of Being (New
York: Scribner's, 1942), passim.
•• The Realm of Essence, passim.

552

HARRY M. CAMPBELL

natural events without pretending to subject them to any secretly
moral principle. 54

And how is this similar to Vaihinger? Both men (I) obviously consider reference to any Being greater than man,
indeed all reference to " transcendental logic " of any kind, to
be a creation of man's psyche and therefore devoid of objective
reality. (Q) Such reference to a transcendent reality is pure
illusion or fiction but very useful in ordering our lives. (3)
Santayana's " realm of essence," which has no existence except
in the imagination but is beautiful to contemplate, is precisely
the same as Vaihinger's "fictitious mental constructs." There
is a difference, however, in the results claimed for these constructs of the two men. Santayana claims only that one can
escape from the sordid world and enjoy contemplating these
illusions; Vaihinger claims that they result in idealistic behavior. But since Vaihinger approves fully of Schiller's illusory
and brief flights into the poetic " Realm of Shadows," it would
seem that Vaihinger's idealistic behavior is perhaps, after all,
similar to Santayana's estheticism. ( 4) Both men are fundamentally materialists, but they insist on referring to the fictional approach to religion as really more " spiritual" than the
attitude of the believer.
I shall now summarize my objections (first strictly logical
and then logical and moral) to Santayana's philosophy: ( 1)
Santayana's style is graceful and often illuminating on individual points, but, like Emerson, he usually operates by a kind
of poetic inspiration and loses the thread of his argument in
multiple inconsistencies. (2) A belief in God may be prompted
by prudence rather than by true spirituality or by emotional
needs rather than by sound reasoning, but there are many
believers who were first persuaded intellectually that such a
belief is true. In fact, many of us for a long time resisted compelling intellectual arguments because of our fear that they
might be predominantly emotional. (3) Sidney Hook has
accused all intelligent believers of being motivated by a" failure
•• Santayana in Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of George Santayana, p. 503.

RELIGION AS ILLUSION

IN THE THOUGHT OF SANTAYANA

553

of nerve." This attack, of course, is not argument but a simple
debater's trick familiarly known as "name calling." Such an
accusation might more logically be made against fictionalists
like Santayana, who admittedly are unbelievers but use religious language as fictions for the sake of emotional therapy.
(4) In spite of Santayana's sweeping assertion that belief in a
transcendent God is a sign of intellectual confusion, there are,
even in this age of widespread unbelief, many sound intellectual
arguments for such a belief. This is a reinforcement of (2)
above, which is concerned with the question of the priority of
intellectual and emotional persuasion. There is not space here
to discuss the intellectual arguments; they are presented clearly
and cogently in the works of Dr. John Hick, especially his
Faith and Knowledge (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University
Press, 1957) and Philosophy of Religion (Englewood Cliffs. N.
J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963). There are, of course, many other good
books on this subject; these are mentioned as examples which
are intellectually valid without being too technical. (5) Any
honest and intelligent man, it seems, would try to find the
truth wherever it leads him, but for Santayana and the other
fictionalists illusion is more important than truth. (6) Such
dependence on illusion is a moral defect because it depends on
beauty, and a very evanescent beauty at that, to act as a
substitute rather than supplement for truth and goodness. Such
estheticism, however refined, is a form of hedonism, which at
its best depends on pleasure rather than happiness, and refined
hedonism can easily degenerate into crude hedonism, as was
evident in the nineteenth century in the movement from Pater
to Wilde, Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and others in the Yellow
Nineties. (7) Santayana, of course, was not degenerate, but he
withdrew into his ivory tower and used his whole philosophy to
justify his unwillingness to face a "world of perpetual change,
defeat, and imperfection," as the following characteristic quotation indicates. He speaks of " truth " along with beauty, but
he really subordinates truth to beauty, and he is not interested
in improving but in escaping from the workaday world. The
passage is from " Society and Solitude ":

554

HARRY M. CAMPBELL

To substitute the society of ideas for that of things is simply to
live in the mind; it is to survey the world of existences in its truth
and beauty rather than in its personal perspectives, or with
practical urgency. It is the sole path to happiness for the intellectual man, because the intellectual man cannot be satisfied with a
world of perpetual change, defeat, and imperfection. . . . For
beneath natural society, in the heart of each of its members, there
is always an intense and jealous solitude, the sleep of elemental life
which can never be broken; and above natural society there is
always another solitude-a placid ethereal wilderness, the heaven
of ideas-beckoning the mind. 55

Santayana's attitude is also well illustrated in the Epilogue
to The Last Puritan, in which Mario, one of the characters,
says to the author:
In this novel ... the argument is dramatised, the views become
human persuasions, and the presentation is all the truer for not
professing to be true. You have said it somewhere yourself, though
I may misquote the words: After life is over and the world has
gone up in smoke, what realities might the spirit in us still call its
own without illusion save the form of those very illusions which
have made up our story? 56

Since this passage may well be considered as at least an important part of what Santayana would have been willing to
call his spiritual last will and testament, we may appropriately
leave him at this point, with regret that so great a talent was
able to find nothing more substantial in the realm of spirit
than illusion.
HARRY

M. CAMPBELL

Oklahoma State University
StiUwater, Oklahoma

55
56

In Edman (ed.), The Philosophy of Santayana, pp. 345, 347.
(New York: Scribner's, 1936), p. 602.

BERGSON'S CONCEPT OF MOTION

T

HE TWOFOLD PURPOSE of this article is to give
an original exposition of Bergson's notion of motion
and to point out many of the similarities between the
thought of the Angelic Doctor and that of Henri Bergson in
regard to their notion of motion and the significance that their
concepts of motion played in the inception of their philosophies.
Although I am well aware that Bergon's notion of motion is
usually treated solely in regard to his concept of duration, it
is my view that Bergson's notion of motion may be accurately
described as a concept distinct, if not separate from, that of
duration. In addition, it is clear that Bergson held this concept
to be applicable to the real world similar to a moderate realist
view of true knowledge.

Bergson's lnteUectual Milieu
In order to appreciate Bergson's contribution to philosophy
one must recognize the intellectual milieu in which he philosophized.
In early modern philosophy and science one finds the strange
phenomena of a material universe subject to locomotion but
not to any kind of substantial change. In addition, locomotion
itself was held to be something extrinsic to matter, something
added to it from without. In other words, matter is essentially
immobile, static and inert. Matter is considered to be either
bare extension or composed of a number of unchangeable atoms
which are moved locally, being packed together in clusters of
various densities entering into combinations which produced
nothing really new.
In this mechanistic universe, subject to strict determinations, time had really no significance. If the universe had a
history, this history would not have any scientific or philosophical significance at all.
555

556

JOSEPH

J. CALIFANO

This universe, where there is a total absence of generation
and corruption, was the universe of Galileo, Kepler, Newton,
Descartes, etc. For these and many subsequent thinkers, bodily
substance was marked by its unchanging pem1anence in existence and potency to receive only locomotion. Substance ultimately became reduced to an inert " I know not what " for
Locke or an idea imposed upon the manifold of sense data by
the knowing subject for Kant.

Two Aspects of Bergson's Singular Intuition
Bergson believed that " a philosopher worthy of the name
has never said more than a single thing . . . because he has
seen only one point." 1 If this statement does not apply to
anyone else, it is definitely applicable to Bergson himself. For,
in all his writings he attempts to convey only one single
message that "reality is mobility itself." 2 Only process is
real and all reality is process.
An immediate corollary follows from the above when it is
taken in conjunction with the following two propositions: that
in man process or development is found in its most perfect form
and that the production of the processes found in man (consciousness) is the product of all other processes in nature-via
evolution. According to the corollary, through knowing human
process or development absolutely one can know, by an act of
sympathy or empathy (intuition) , all the processes in nature
via their participation in human development. Thus mathematical physics must abdicate its reign over the sciences in
favor of psychology and biology. This intuition for Bergson
is one whereby the mind is adequated with the real in nature,
and it can in no way be reduced to what knowledge might
mean in idealism or psychologism.
Dissolution of Mobility by the Intellect
According to Bergson, the natural bent of the intellect is
towards "manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to
1

The Creative Mind, trans. by M. L. Andison

Library, 1946), p.
1 Ibid., p. 177.

(New York:

Philosophical

BERGSON's

CONCEPT OF MOTION

557

make tools." 3 "All the elementary focus of the intellect tends
to transform matter into an instrument of action that is ...
an organ." 4 This activity of construction 5 "is exercised exclusively on inert matter" 6 or matter conceived or reduced to the
inert. For the intellect is only entirely at home " when i.t is
working upon inert matter, more particularly upon solids." 7
What enables the intellect to deal with matter successfully in
this way is its " unlimited power of decomposing according to
any law and recomposing into any system." 8 Through analysis
the intellect reduces reality to immobile elements 9 which become the tools we use to manipulate matter. Through synthesis
the intellect attempts to reconstruct mobility "out of immobilities put together," 10 which is impossible. The intellect is concerned only with the " actual or future positions and not the
progress by which it passes from one position to another,
progress which is the movement itself." 11 We fix our mind
upon the path " the immobile plan of its execution," 12 which is
extrinsic to the motion itself.
From mobility itself our intellect turns aside because it has nothing
gained in dealing with it. If the intellect were meant for pure
theorizing, it would take its place within movement, for movement
is reality itself, and immobility is always only apparent or relativeY

Explanation for the intellect "consists in resolving" 14 the
problem. The intellect can only" represent becoming as a series
of states, each of which is homogeneous with itself and consequently does not change." 15
3 Creative Evolution, trans.
by A. Mitchell
• Ibid., p. 170.

(London:

Macmillan, 1911), p. 146.

5 " the
intellect aims first of all, at constructing . . . our intelligence
has for its chief object the unorganized solid." Ibid., pp. 161-2.
6 Ibid., p. 161.
7 Ibid., p. 162.
8 Ibid., p. 165.
9 Precisely
what this means will be made clear below.
11 Ibid.
10 Ibid., p. 163.
11 Ibid.
H Ibid., p. 173.
15 Ibid., p. 171.
12 !bid.

. . .

558

JOSEPH

J. CALIFANO

Cinematographical Nature of the Human Intellect
" The function of the intellect is to preside over actions " 16
and these actions themselves are only thought of in terms of
"ends to attain, that is to say, points of rest." 17
From one end attained to another end attained, from one rest to
another rest, our activity is carried by a series of leaps, during
which our consciousness is turned away as much as possible from
the movement going on, to regard only the anticipated image
of the movement accomplished. . . . In order that our activity
may leap from an act to an act, it is necessary that matter should
pass from a state to a state, for it is only into a state of the
material world that action can fit a result, so as to be accomplished.18
"Apriori we may presume that our perception manages to
apprehend matter with this bias." 19 Further, Bergson believes
that we have evidence for this in the coordination of our
sensory and motor organs. The first symbolizes " our faculty of
perceiving, the second our faculty of acting." 20 Here we have
organic evidence of " the perfect accord of perception and
action." 21
Our activity always aims at a result into which it is momentarily
fitted, our perception must retain of the material at every moment,
only a state in which it is provisionally placed. 22
Thus, according to Bergson, the natural activity of the intellect does not permit it to experience process; what we know
and are concerned to know via our intellect is the result o£
process. Thus we know the products of motion and not motion
itself. We considered the path and the various possible points
o£ rest along that path both o£ which are extrinsic to the
motion. The beginning point o£ rest or the terminal point of
rest and all those intermediate possible points of rest are what
we retain of motion; all of these are extrinsic to the actual
Ibid., p. 315.
Ibid.
18 Ibid.

16

19

11

20

Ibid.
Ibid.

21 Ibid.
•• Ibid., p. 317.

BERGSON's

CONCEPT OF MOTION

559

motion. The intellect must reduce the mobile into immobile
states if it is to deal with it successfully. Therefore:
The primal function of perception is precisely to grasp a series of
elementary changes under the form of a quality or a simple state,
by a work of condensation.
The greater the power of acting
bestowed upon an animal species, the more numerous, probably
are the elementary changes that its faculty of perceiving concentrates into one of its instants. 23

Whereas the mobile and that which is in process are constantly changing, so is our sensation of it. Our intellect through
this act of condensation reduces the mobile to immobile states.
It then attempts to reconstruct the mobile by stringing the
states together in a series.
What the intellect knows, as we have said, is the various
positions of the moving object along its path which is " only a
snapshot view of a transition." 21 By running them together we
believe we have reconstructed the motion. This is precisely
what is achieved through the motion picture media. The important thing to realize is that there is no real motion in a
motion picture. It is only the showing of a series of stills so
rapidly that we forget that we are perceiving the immoble.
Since the nature " of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind." 25 "Of the discontinuous alone does the intellect form a clear ideal." 26 " Of immobility alone does the
intellect form a clear idea." 27
Real Time as Opposed to Time Reduced to the Fourth Dimension of Space
Since the intellect is only concerned with the path of motion,
it confuses the properties of the path-which can be represented
by a line-with the motion itself. Concomitant to this is the
identification of two radically different kinds of multiplicity,
namely, numerical or spatial multiplicity and the multiplicity
Ibid., pp. 317-18.
Ibid., p. 319.
25 Ibid., p. 323.
23

26

24

21

Ibid., p. 163.
Ibid., p. 164.

560

JOSEPH

J. CALIFANO

found m motion and time which is not capable of spatial
representation.
Numerical multiplicity presupposes discontinuous homogeneous quantity capable of juxtaposition in space. 28 For, if
one wishes to represent "number to ourselves and not merely
figures or words, we are compelled to have recourse to an
extended image. . . . Every clear idea of number implies a
visual image in space." eg
It is also possible to count moments of duration as " a succession which is nothing but a succession " and not an " addition,
e. g., which culminates in a sum," 30 but this is a tragic error as
will become clear below.
By giving a greater attention to our experience we discover
that another kind of multiplicity perfectly coincides with the
reality of process, namely, multiplicity of our conciousness.
Here we discover that one cannot reduce conciousness to either
the homogeneous or the discontinuous because any moment of
consciousness always contains within it the memory of its
past. " Consciousness passes from one shade to another. The
inner life is all this at once: variety of qualities, continuity of
progTess and unity of direction." 31 Thus it is impossible for one
to analyze the duration of consciousness into the homogeneous
or the discontinuous.
What enables one to believe that consciousness can be
analyzed into discontinuous homogeneous states is that " we
create for them a fourth dimension of space which we call
homogeneous time." 32 Duration is always expressed in terms
of extension. . . . When we evoke time, it is space which
answers our call." 33
28 Cf. Time and Free Will, trans. by F. L. Pogson,
(New York: Harper, 1960),
p. 76 ff.
•• Ibid., pp. 78-79.
so Ibid., p. 79.
31 An Introduction To Metaphysics, trans. by T. E. Hulme (Indianapolis:
HobbsMerrill, 1955), p. "27.
3 " Time And Free Will, p. 109.
33 Creative Mind, p. 13.

BERGSON's

CONCEPT OF MOTION

561

Now, because real process is neither discontinuous nor homogeneous, real time, which must relate to real motion or process,
cannot be either discontinuous or homogeneous. " We may
sympathize intellectually with nothing else, but we certainly
sympathize with our own selves." 3 ' Thus it is easily seen why
Bergson said what he did about consciousness, but it is more
difficult to see how it is always true of all other motion. "There
is a reality that is external and yet given immediately to the
mind; common sense is right on this point." 35 Therefore,
Bergson is not caught in subjective idealism, although he takes
process, as it is found in consciousness, as the prime analogate
of all motion and process. 36

Real Motion: Its Heterogeneity and Indivisibility
No man in the history of thought stressed the historical
nature of every phenomenon in the universe in the same manner
as Bergson. The history or duration of a reality is the totality
of its being. Nevertheless, it is somewhat more difficult to see
how what applies to process as it is manifested in human
consciousness also applies to all other kinds of motion; still, this
can be made clear by considering a few examples.
Our first example is that of a falling stone. If one drops
a stone from the Empire State Building, the longer it falls the
greater its velocity. When it hits the ground, one could say
that the duration of the fall determined the velocity at which
it hit the ground. Since from its very beginning there is a
constant increase in the velocity once the falling begins, there
are no two identical moments in its movement. Each accepts
the motion of what is prior and manifests its own increase in
velocity. This building-up of velocity is only possible because
there is a continuous, indivisible duration of the motion occun-ing. In fact, any interruption of this duration destroys the
motion itself. For example, if the stone is stopped and dropped
again, I no longer have the same motion. If something retards
34 An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 25.
•• Ibid., p. 49.
36 See our remarks above on the second aspect of Bergson's single intuition.

562

JOSEPH

J. CALIFANO

the motion, the determinate of how much retardation will
occur by the retardant is directly related to its velocity which
is directly related to the duration of the fall or the time it
has fallen. Here we find that the past of a motion is somewhat
of a non-conscious analogate of what memory is for consciousness.
Our second example is a baseball pitcher throwing a curve.
Anyone who has ever attempted to perfect the art of throwing
a curve knows that the knack of throwing a successful curve
is not merely the transference of the English to the ball by
twisting one's wrist (which can be accomplished by all) but
knowing the proper height and force with which to throw the
ball so as to give the pitch its proper duration. In other words,
the arc of the curve stands in direct proportion to the duration
of the pitch: the shorter the duration the smaller the arc, the
longer the duration the greater the arc. As in the process of
creating a picture, the duration of creating the work of art
" is not an interval that may be lengthened or shortened without the content being altered." 37
The duration of his work is part and parcel of his work ... the
time taken up by the invention is one with the invention itself.3R
The third example is that of the movement of a hand. In
the movement of my hand "my consciousness gives me the
inward feeling of a single fact." 39 Between two points of rest
there existed " an indivisible or at least an undivided act, the
passage from rest to rest, which is movement itself; " 40 " nevertheless this movement takes a certain time." 41 For example,
the hand movements of a ballet dancer must each be given
its proper duration. Too quick and the movement will lack the
grace and symmetry necessary to the art; too slow and the
movement will lose the rhythm of the dance.
Creative Evolution, p. 859.
•• Ibid.
•• Matter and Memory, trans. by W. Scott Palmer
87

1959)' p. 182.
•• Ibid., pp. 182-8.
"Ibid., p. 184.

(New York:

Doubleday,

BERGSON's

CONCEPT

OF MOTION

563

In accord with our first two examples no moment within the
motion can be said to be discontinuous with those prior or
posterior to it; but neither is any moment homogeneous with
those prior or posterior to it. Therefore motion presents us
with a continuous heterogeneous reality, a reality in which
every moment is both parasitical in respect to the past and
productive in respect to the future, a reality which through the
actualization of potentiality creates ever more wonderous
potentiality.

lmposl!ibility of Measuring Motion
Is motion measurable? If not, what are men measuring when
they claim to measure motion?
In answer to the first question Bergson gave an emphatic
No because one can only measure the homogeneous and discontinuous. Since motion does not possess these characteristics,
one cannot measure it. The answer to the second question,
which is not as easily seen, is that what men measure when
they claim to measure motion is the path, the trajectory of the
motion, and not the motion itself.
What struck Bergson most was realizing that" real time ...
eludes mathematical treatment " 42 since real time is heterogeneous. For example, in
perceiving a shooting star ... there is a natural and instinctive
separation between the space traversed ... and the indivisible
sensation of motion or mobility. In a word, there are two elements
to be distinguished in motion, the space traversed and the act by
which we traverse it ... the first of these elements is homogeneous
quantity, the second ... is quality or an intensity whichever you
prefer. 43

The error of those who claim to measure motion is precisely
that some " attribute to the motion the divisibility of the space
which it traverses, forgetting that it is quite posl!ible to divide
an object but not an act." 44 It is only by" solidifying" motion,
that is, by an " identification of this series of acts, each of
Creative Mind, p. 10.
Time and Free WiU, pp. lll-ll2 .
.. Ibid.
42

48

564

JOSEPH

J. CALIFANO

which is of a definite kind and indivisible, with the homogeneous space which underlies them," 45 that motion can be made
into an object-an object for the mathematician. " The space
employed for this is just that which is called homogeneous
time." 46 Thus in motion "we have multiplicity without
quantity," 47 that is, homogeneous quantity.
From the above it is clear that from the attempt to measure
motion has arisen "a pseudo problem born of a confusion of
duration with extension." 48 It is the path that is at least
potentially divisible 49 into discontinuous homogeneous units.
Now, real space is the existence of parts outside of parts within
a body. But discontinuous, homogeneous space is empty space,
as Kant has demonstrated in his Metaphysical Foundations of
Natural Science. 50 Bergson clearly is pointing out that this
empty space is irrevocably immobile.
" Of movement then he (the mathematician) only retains
changes in length." 51 Nor should one be surprised to find
Einstein, a mathematician, in search of world lines, geodesics
or a map upon which cosmic events take place. The tragic flaw
in all this is that these geodesics, if they exist, are extrinsic
to the reality of motion.
For the geometer all movement is relative: which signifies only in
our view, that none of our mathematical symbols can express the
fact that it is the m,oving body which is in motion rather than the
axes or the points to which it is referred. And this is very natural

because these symbols, always meant for measurement, can only
express distances. 52
46 Ibid., p. lZI.
Ibid,, p. 113.
48 Creative Mind, p. Z9.
Ibid., p. lZZ.
49 I
might add that the real path cannot be divided without destroying
45

47

its
relationship to the real motion. Further the real path, the line which is the
intersection of two planes of quantified being can only be divided in the
imagination but never in fact. Of course, the representation of a line on the
blackboard can be bisected, but to divide a symbol is not the same as to divide a
reality. The above, I admit, would only be valid for those who hold that
mathematics is more than gaming with symbols.
5 ° Cf. trans. by Ernest Belfort
Bac in a volume entitled Kant's Prolegomena and
],fetaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (London, 1909), pp. 137-Z45.
51 Matter and Memory, p. 188.
•• Ibid., p. 189.

BERGSON's

CONCEPT OF MOTION

565

Thus it becomes clear why, in an age when the mathematician
rules the other sciences, motion is said to be extrinsic to the
material universe. The natural result of such a reign is confusion of the path of motion conceived of as a line with motion
itself. Once the line of trajectory is confused with the motion,
the properties of mathematicals are falsely attributed to motion
with all its false consequences.
The tragedy of all this is the identification of motion with
such a spurious a reality as empty space. This is counterfeit motion constructed by the best of counterfeiters. Such
counterfeiters who claim that their product is genuine because
it is a working hypothesis, because the engineer and technician
finds it useful, are analogous to the counterfeiter of currency
who claims that his currency was genuine because it can be
passed to those not perceptive enough to recognize it as
counterfeit and used by them as if it were real. For Bergson
as quoted above, to do this is to tum away from what is
absolute in motion, motion itself, and to reside with only an
apparent relative, the path of the motion.

Impossibility of Defining Motion
For Bergson, to define something means to draw its limits,
to determine it. In this sense " a perfect definition applies only
to a completed reality." 53 Therefore motion or movement can
only be perfect in retrospect. It was precisely the habit of
viewing motion as a completed reality which, according to
Bergson, causes one to solidify or diminish its reality.
However, motion as it is given to us is precisely as the
incomplete, as the unfinished, as that which is tending towards
completion but is not yet complete.

Bergson and Aquinas: Similarities in their Notions of Motion
In contrast to those who preceded him, Bergson once again
recognized change as intrinsically permeating the real world,
that which is first and primarily given to us by our act of
knowing the world. Generation and corruption once again
becomes that which the philosopher of nature must come to
•• Creative Evolution, p. 16.

566

JOSEPH

J. CALIFANO

grips with and that which, if properly understood, might lead
the philosopher to a metaphysics. This is not to be confused
with the notions of change or process one might find in the
idealism and psychologism of his or our times.
This intuition of the mobility of reality as the beginning of
a true philosophy in the sense that it is ens mobile, which is
to be understood at the start, is to me a common point of
departure for both Bergson and St. Thomas.
Admittedly, the absence of the notion of substance in Bergson's philosophy renders Bergson's thought radically different
from the thought of the Angelic Doctor. However, when one
realizes that Bergson had identified the concept of substance
with the inert solidified matter of the mathematical physicist,
it is no wonder that he did not include such a concept in his
own philosophy. But, I wonder if the dynamus motion of
substance in the philosophy of Aquinas, which is itself not
simplistic or inert and is itself subject to change, is contradictory to the Bergsonian intuition.
Another point of possible comparison is their common belief
in the continuity of man and nature. For both men viewed
man as a microcosm, as the culmination of all which is displayed in the universe.
In Bergson's description of motion as a continuous heterogeneous reality, a reality in which every moment is both parasitical in respect to the past but productive in respect to the
future, and the recognition of the single directionality of motion
and time, etc., I believe we have a notion of motion which more
properly approximates the notion of motion as the act of a
being in potency insofar as it is in potency than anything
which might be contrived by the mathemati:cal physicists.
It should be noted that this definition of motion by St.
Thomas might not suffer from the same defects as other definitions of motion according to Bergson. For the definition of
St. Thomas, as I understand it, was precisely a successful
attempt to define the incomplete as incomplete. Further, this
definition is not to be understood as a definition in the sense
of merely limits, etc., but rather in the sense of that which lays
bare the reality of that which is defined.

BERGSON's

CONCEPT OF MOTION

567

Bergson is noteworthy for having freed us from the relativism
of modern thought without having to posit an absolute doctrine
of natural place. By stating that what is absolute in motion is
motion he can agree with the physicist in regard to the fact
that any point of view taken for the purpose of measurement
must be relative but that the relativity of our measurements of
motion cannot be transferred to the motion, nor can the motion
be reduced to the measurements we contrive for it.
By excluding the mathematician from treating of motion per
se, it seems again that St. Thomas and Bergson have a common
point of agreement, since both believed that mathematics abstracts from motion as motion, the mobile as mobile.
Critically it can be said that the pragmatism of the intellect
is definitely overstated in Bergson's philosophy. Yet it can be
said that he correctly displays the intellect as it appears in
modern science wherein one appears to be more concerned with
the developing of a working hypothesis that would enable one
to manipulate nature rather than understanding nature. 54

*

*

*

*

*

It was not our purpose to reduce the philosophy of Bergson
to that of St. Thomas or the philosophy of St. Thomas to
that of Bergson. The differences are many, and a discussion of
them would not fall within the scope of this article. However,
I believe that I have successfully pointed out that there are
many points of contact in regard to their notions of motion,
etc. Recognition should be given to a continuity in the thought
of realistic thinkers with regard to what they view as the nature
of the kind of realities that are presented to men.
JosEPH J. CALIFANo

St John's University
Jamaica, N. Y.

•• h not Maritain's statement about the modern intellect a reminder of this?
" Three centuries of empirico-mathematicism haYe so warped the intellect that it
is no longer interested in anything but the invention of apparatus to capture
phenomena ... that is all Yery true. The slope of modern intelligence is slanted
against us. Well, slopes are made to be climbed; the intellect has not changed its
nature; it has acquired habits. Habits can be corrected." Degrees of Knowledge,
trans. by G. B. Phelan (Xew York: Scribner's & Sons, 1959), p. 3.

BRADLEY'S l\IONISTIC

F

1.

IDEALISM

INTRODUCTION

OR MOST OF ITS contemporary critics metaphysics
is usually identified with some version of nineteenth-century idealism, and for most contemporary AngloAmerican philosophers the metaphysics of F. H. Bradley represents the most prominent example of classical idealism.
Hence, in much of the present discussion about the possibility
of metaphysics in Britain and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in
America there is a tendency to view the particular categories
of Bradley's metaphysics as the adequate and essential expression of the metaphysical spirit and point of view. 1
The two basic themes of Bradley's metaphysics are the
experience-theorem and the consistency-theorem. The experience-theorem states that there is no reality independent of
sentient experience. The consistency-theorem states that reality is one perfect individual and that any aspect or portion of
that individual taken in isolation is self-contradictory. The
first is a statement of idealism; the second of monism. 2
The arguments on behalf of these two theses are quite
complex. In this article I will simply attempt to describe the
nature and outlook of monistic idealism. The basic issues
seem to be these. 1) Such a metaphysics must undermine
the prestigious reality-value that common sense gives to the
world of spatial and temporal existence. Hence, the reality
of the common sense world, to which we are accustomed to
give our practical allegiance and in which we daily live, must
1 This is especially
true of those analysts who haYe been deeply influenced by
G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, both of whom were students at Cambridge
when Bradley's Appearance and Reality was published (1893).
2 Although
these are sometimes interpreted as axioms of Bradley's metaphysics,
he himself insists that they are the results of ideal experiment, and so it is better
perhnps to call them theorems.

568

BRADLEY's MONISTIC

IDEALISM

569

be trivialized. 2) This trivialization takes the form of degrading the world and its objects to the status of appearance by
revealing evidence of their ideality and self-discrepancy. 3)
Bradley then attempts to show that the self-discrepant and
ideal presuppose a supra-relational, perfectly consistent individual of actual sentient experience. 4) Since the world as we
experience and live it certainly does not seem to be perfectly
one and throughout sentient, things cannot really be what
they seem to be. Therefore, the character of things as they
appear must be transmuted, when viewed from the perspective
(or non-perspective) of the Absolute.
2.

TRIVIALIZATION

OF THE 'VORLD

OF EXISTENCE

1.

Any speculative metaphysics that attempts to construct a
theory of being will distinguish degrees or levels of reality.
It will usually distinguish dependent and secondary being from
independent and primary being. Traditionally, with the exception of materialism and naturalism, metaphysical systems
have purported to show that the world of common sense is
somehow dependent and secondary being. What distinguishes
the monistic idealist here is the manner in which he holds that
the world of space and time is only dependently real.
Bradley does not argue that the world we experience is
causally dependent but that it proves to be ideal and, therefore,
self-inconsistent. Its dependency is not manifested by an experiential insight that its existential actuation is contingent and
received but by a metaphysical appraisal that reveals its lack
of any proper substantiality.
Ordinarily we would assume that we directly experience this
world and that nothing, save perhaps our own self, is more
immediate to us. But Bradley denies that what is immediately
experienced is the daily world in which we live and to which
the practical man is accustomed to give the highest realityvalue.
The question of reality-value and of the immediacy of experience are closely related. Although it is possible to hold that

570

GARY L. BEDELL

what is ultimately real is reached through inference, the plausibility of the reality-claim of our common sense world of
existence is directly proportioned to the directness of its being
experienced. Once it loses its evidentiary priority, it would have
to submit its metaphysical credentials in the same manner as
any other realm of reality. For a metaphysician who accepts
the immediacy of our experience of the temporal-spatial world,
on the other hand, the problem arises of showing its contingency by distinguishing between its evidentiary primacy in the
order of knowledge and its causal dependency in the order
of being.
Bradley was well aware that the biggest psychological obstacle to acceptance of the monistic conclusion was its dissolution of the real order of our spatial-temporal world, which
repelled even many of those who were willing to agree to its
merely dependent and contingent mode o£ being. This is why
Bradley makes such an effort to undermine our naive acceptance of the apparent immediacy of common sense. He wishes
to show that it has not even dependent and contingent substantiality, but that it is throughout adjectival.
Something substantial must be able to be designated as an
individual being in order that its perseity can be acknowledged
by judgment. A particular existent can conceivably be causally
dependent without losing all claim to dependent and contingent
per se existence, but something that cannot be as such uniquely
designated surely loses any claim to per se existence or contingent substantiality.
A finite substance, however causally
dependent, resists inclusion in a monistic whole, but if Bradley
can show that the world of existence lacks all claim to per se
existence, then he opens the way to his eventual conclusion
that it is but an appearance of the Absolute. 3
Hence, Bradley argues that none of the objects in our real
world can be uniquely designated, that is, designated as substantially real. None, that is, can be the ultimate subject of
3 I employ
here and throughout
Bradley himself was wont to use.

the article terminology

more scholastic than

BRADLEY's

MONISTIC

IDEALISM

571

an existential judgment. All the objects and the real world
of space and time itself turn out to be ideal and, although real
insofar as they fall within sentient experience, are not ultimately real. In Aristotelian terminology, our real world and its
objects belong to the category of accident and not substance;
their being is essentially adjectivaU

2.
Our real world of common sense, according to Bradley, is an
ideal construction that proceeds from a felt difference which
is the source of its distinction from the imaginary or, in general,
from those worlds we are wont to call unreal. But this felt
difference must always be what is at present felt, whatever that
happens to be.
In madness or drunkenness ... even in dreams I may construct
another world which is the environment of my dream-body, and
may oppose to this reality a mere imaginary world. The basis of
the opposition everywhere is, in a word, present feeling, and one
present feeling, if you take reality so, stands as high as another.
And the conclusion suggested is that the above opposition of real
existence to 'mere imagination' is in the end invalid and breaks
down ... Thus the gulf between imaginary and real existence,
however necessary and useful it may be, is at once arbitrary and
novel. 5

If a merely felt quality seems but a precarious foundation for
such an edifice, this is precisely what Bradley wants to suggest.
This latent felt quality (latent because it is never made
explicit or specified) differs for different present states of
awareness. My present self in each case is what provides
the basis for the construction of my real world, but my present
self may fall in any state, some of which on reflection are
called unreal.
• The basis for this is Bradley's logical doctrines of immediate feeling, ideality,
and judgment, and cannot be evaluated or criticized without considering them.
5 F. H. Bradley, Essays on Tmth and Reality
(Oxford: The Clarendon Press,
1962), pp. 46-7.

572

GARY L. BEDELL

In each case my real world is the world continuous with
my real body, and my real body is my waking body; but my
waking body for Bradley is my present body. "It is simply
the body which is for me here and now as I am asking myself
this question." 6 Even my present body, moreover, is partly
ideal construction. It is mine insofar as it is identified with
my self, and my self is an ideal object, but one always continuous with my finite center and still partially felU
The felt quality varies with different present states of feeling,
and hence my self and my body varies with these states.
Merely from feeling as a basis my real body may be in one case
my dream body, my waking body in another case, or my
drunken stupor body, or even my psychotic body. Even thus
far we have identity and construction, but when we make
a selection among these bodies and the real worlds constructed
on their basis, we must further transcend the merely felt
quality. When I, in reflection, assign one of my bodies and its
world to the unreal status of dream and accept another as
real, I am judging and not merely accepting the diverse testament of different states of feeling.
In itself there seems no reason, Bradley argues, to assign
to my real body any superior reality, since in dream, in mere
imagination, and in states of hypnotism or madness, I find
myself with other bodies. My real world is a construction
made in reflection on a basis of a selection of my real body
from the various candidates. The selection is not on the basis
of any inherent superiority of existential actuation, but on
the basis of the criterion of system. Whichever contributes to
the most coherent and comprehensive of consistent interpretations, that is the one that is selected as the so-called real
world of common sense.
• Ibid., p. 461.
1 Bradley distinguishes the finite center from the self as a basis for avoiding the
solipsistic dangers of the experience-theorem. Everyone views the universe from
his own finite center, which, however, is continuous with ultimate reality. The
private self is an ideal object that arises in contrast to the public world and is not
given immediately in experience.

BRADLEY's MONISTIC IDEALISM

573

The world of spatial-temporal existence has indeed a special
place for us, since it is the locus of our bodily behavior in
which we must work out our destiny. What Bradley denies is
that its pragmatic priority constitutes any metaphysical claim
that prevents it from being included in the encompassing
Absolute whole. Its superiority over the worlds of dream and
hypnotism, and the other "unreal" realms, is a matter of
degree and working success, and then only from a special point
of view. 8 Hence, no more than these other worlds constructed
from and within our experience does the world that common
sense calls real possess any substantiality that would resist
eventual inclusion and integration into the substantial reality
of the Absolute.
3.

DEGRADATION

TO APPEARANCE

1.

Bradley uses the term " appearance " to denote the secondary
and dependent mode of being. Although it does not grant to
dependent being the finite substantiality that created being
possesses in Thomistic metaphysics, for example, it is not
equivalent to " illusion." Strictly speaking, there is no such
thing as " mere appearance," and the phrase is used by Bradley
only in a context that makes it clear that the term " mere " is
intended to convey a sense of contrast to that which is ultimately real and not to refer to appearance isolated from
ultimate reality.
"Appearance" is ambiguous, because it can refer to either
1) the common meaning according to which something is said
to appear to someone, and 2) Bradley's technical usage, according to which the content of a finite thing is held to be selfdiscrepant and self-transcendent. Bradley recognizes the liabilities of the term, since it properly belongs to the perceptual
side of things, which is but one side. But he appeals for a
8 For some points of view Bradley insists that other organizations
of our experience may be superior, for example, in mysticism.

574

GARY L. BEDELL

certain license in usage, since, he observes, if everywhere we
refrain from metaphor, we would finally have to remain silent.
Since, therefore, not everything called an appearance in the
metaphysical sense ( # 2) appears in the literal sense ( # 1),
we cannot insist that the finite thing itself need always be
appearance in the strictly literal sense. When he calls a finite
being an appearance, therefore, Bradley means that
its character is such that it becomes one, as soon as we judge it.
And this consists in the loosening of content from existence; and
because of this self-estrangement, every finite aspect is called an
appearance ... Hence, the finite is appearance because, on the one
side, it is an adjective, of Reality, and because, on the other side,
it is an adjective which itself in its limited character is not real.
When the term is thus defined, its employment seems certainly
harmless. 9

Appearance is that which is ideal, that which is essentially
other-referent rather than self-subsistent. It is content loosened
from existence in the sense that it qualifies a subject other than
itself; it is not identical with its own being. It is abstract and
universal, abiding in diverse contexts without accounting for
the diversity, in spite of the fact that it depends upon it. Insofar as it includes diversity without including the conditions
which make the differences compatible, it is self-discrepant. It
is abstract and not concrete. It is adjectival, but in its own
limited character, even as an adjective, it cannot qualify reality
without undergoing transmutation.

2.
In order to show that an object is appearance and therefore
adjectival Bradley employs the axiom of non-contradiction as
an instrument of metaphysical appraisal. According to Bradley
judgment and thought are essentially existential. All judgment
qualifies reality with ideal content, and therefore an essential
law of thought must also be a principle of reality itself. The
demand of thought for consistency as a condition of truth is
• Bradley, Appearance and Reality (Oxford:

The Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 430.

BRADLEY's MONISTIC

IDEALISM

575

at the same time a demand for consistency as a condition of
reality. Ultimate reality is that which is perfectly consistent,
and the degree of reality consists in the degree of consistency.
The existential function of all judgment guarantees the metaphysical relevance of the axiom of non-contradiction.
Hence,
anything that shows evidence of self-discrepancy can and must
be degraded to the level of appearance.
Although the existential function of thought gives metaphysical relevance to the axiom of non-contradiction, Bradley
also requires some means that will enable him to reach a
general theory of being. He cannot construct a metaphysics
by examining each and every object separately. He requires
that the axiom of non-contradiction be an instrument of global
apprasial, so that he can generalize from a limited number
of instances.
Bradley's explicit argumentation takes two forms. First, in
Appearance and Reality he examines a select list of categories
that have been employed by traditional metaphysics and finds
them all self-inconsistent.
Although this prepares the way
for Bradley's own conclusion, it is not really coercive.
The essential basis for the global appraisal function of consistency, however, is Bradley's critique of relations. 1) Bradley
argues that mere conjunction and bare difference are self-condietary. In this way he establishes that everything in the
universe is related to everything else in some way.
External
or negligible relations are themselves self-contradictory. Hence,
all relations are relevant or intrinsic. All relations must make
an essential difference to everything else. 3) Nevertheless, not
even intrinsic relations are fully self-consistent. This means
that the mutual relevance of all to all must be expressed in
a form more intimate than the way of relations permits.
Reality cannot be a system of distinct objects in relations but
an individual from which distinct objects and relations are
abstractions of a limited perspective. 10
10 See Bradley,
Essays on Truth and Reality, pp. 227-8; Appearance and Reality,
pp. 506 fl., 519-20; and Collected Essays (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1935), pp.
628-676.

576

GARY L. BEDELL

The result of this analysis is to establish that, in principle,
any finite or isolated object is self-contradictory. Hence, anything short of the perfect individual, that whose content is at
one with its existence, is self-contradictory and, therefore,
appearance.
3.
The logical foundation of this analysis is Bradley's doctrines
of ideality and immediate experience. Ideality is content
loosened from existence, and, according to Bradley, any object
that abides over a period of time or that is distinguished from
any other object or the felt background is ideal. In other
words, any object whatsoever is ideal; it is a universal. So, too,
are the relations between objects.
Anything that stands out from the sheer immediacy of
feeling is ideal, and this includes the objects of direct perception. As ideal they transcend immediate experience, no matter
how directly they seem to be perceived. Nevertheless, they
depend upon that felt immediacy from which they stand out,
but which in their own proper character they are unable to
include. Not only are they unable to appeal to immediate
experience for their evidentiary foundation, but, because they
are unable to take up into their ideal form the sentient background upon which they depend, they are throughout conditional in their being. This dependency on conditions which
their own ideal definition and boundaries exclude-by-ignoring
manifests itself in analysis as self-discrepancy. To be defined
from without is to be distracted from within.
Hence, any evidence of ideality, ideal mediation, or intellectual structure, is evidence of self-discrepancy and a sign of
appearance. This is why the world of existence, unable to be
uniquely designated and therefore ideal, is but appearance.
Bradley's analyses of the various aspects of the world is but
an application of this fundamental insight. In this way, time,
space, and change are found to be merely appearance and not
ultimately real. All of nature is convicted of self-discrepancy
and of being merely appearance. Indeed, so also is God.

BRADLEY's

MONISTIC

IDEALISM

577

Bradley does not identify God with the ultimate reality of the
Absolute, nor does he have in mind a finite God. What he
means is that the concept of God expresses some truth about
the universe, a truth higher than those of science, and therefore
God has some reality for Bradley. Although it has a reality
higher and more real than our finite selves, nevertheless, because it involves relations and ideality, it is to some degree
inconsistent and therefore appearance.
4.

REALITY

AS THE ABSOLLTTE

EXPERIENCE

1.

Appearance is self-discrepant and ideal. Whatever is finite,
isolated, or in relation is ideal, and, therefore, self-consistent
and appearance. Reality, therefore, must be that which does
not suffer from these defects. Reality must be the perfect
individual, fully concrete and independent. It must suffer from
neither ideality nor inconsistency.
But why must there be an ultimate reality? Why should
the deficiencies of appearance require the reality of that which
is not deficient?
Appearance is self-contradictory, and the self-contradictory
cannot be real. But the content of appearance must belong to
reality, for anything that falls within sentient experience is so
far real. Contradiction is caused by the conjunction of differences without including the conditions that reconcile them.
There are no natural contraries. Contraries occur with the bare
conjunction of differences, and the occurrence of the contradiction is a sign of a restricted perspective that excludes implicitly
or explicitly the reconciling conditions.
Hence, the contradictory appearance essentially depends
upon conditions, which it fails explicitly to include in its proper
character and within its proper limits. To assume that the
contradictory cannot be real is tantamount to asserting that
what reconciles the discrepancy is real. Since the reconciling
conditions are intrinsically demanded by the nature of appearance, that which provides them is no merely extrinsic ideal

578

GARY L. BEDELL

but the necessary condition of the being of the content of the
appearance. Hence, the dependent mode of being that apparances possess presupposes the being of ultimate reality. 11
Since any pluralism is self-contradictory, ultimate reality
must be one seamless, perfect individual. Bradley views the
Absolute as supra-relational, that is, as including all the content
introduced into experience by relations and appearance but
including it as perfectly harmonious. The Absolute does not
swallow up the differences into a neutral unity, a night in
which all cows are black. Differences in the Absolute, however, are the self-differentiations of the absolute unity. Whole
and parts are mutually relevant to each other. Ultimate reality,
then, is the perfectly consistent, individual identity-in-difference, of which an imperfect illustration would be that of an
organism or, perhaps, of an aesthetic experience of a beautiful
painting. 12

2.
This perfect individual that is ultimate reality must be an
individual of actual sentient experience. Perhaps we can best
understand Bradley's assertion that reality is experience if we
understand it to be, not a pretense at giving positive speculative insight into the nature of reality but rather a way of
saying that in the end reality is none of the abstractions we
customarily use to interpret it for limited purposes.
It is not matter, nor Hegel's Reason; neither fire nor water;
not substance and not merely ideal. All of these would be
instances of what Whitehead called misplaced concreteness, or
what Bradley calls one-sided abstractions. Although it is none
of these simply, neither is it vacuous. It is experience, the
source from which all of these abstractions are taken.
11 In other words, appearance
qualifies reality, but on conditions outside of its
own ideal limits. Even its limited truth-claim holds good (to whatever degree that
it does hold good) only on the basis of those conditions. Hence, the conditions
must be real.
12 Idealists
commonly appeal to the organism as an illustration of what they
mean by the concrete universal, but almost all agree that it is quite inadequate as
a representation of the Absolute's identity-in-difference.

BRADLEY's

MONISTIC IDEALISM

579

According to Bradley, experience is the continuous source
from which ideality arises and the continuous subject into
which all our ideal activity must return as qualification. When
we acknowledge that all our ideality fails to exhaust and can
never express this experience from which it comes and to which
it returns, what is there left to say but that it is unincluded
experience that remains? What is there left to say, granting
these assumptions, but that reality is experience?
Just as we commence in felt awareness, so we continue
there throughout all our ideal activity. It is only in abstractions
and ideal constructs that we reach anything non-sentient, and
these fall back into their sentient source as the subject which
they must inadequately qualify. At best they express partial
truths about reality and experience. They offer experience to
us from certain limited perspectives. "Matter," "the unconscious," " the merely ideal," for example, do not conduct us
to different realms of being, they abstractly manifest experience in certain of its features and for certain limited purposes.
Bishop Berkeley suggested centuries earlier that we put to
a test his own somewhat similar doctrine. Such ideal experimentation seems to have become the common legacy of idealists, and Bradley appeals to it in his own form.
Find any piece of existence, take up anything that anyone could
possibly call a fact, or could in any sense assert to have being,
and then judge if it does not consist in sentient experience ...
When the experiment is strictly made, I myself can conceive of
nothing else than the experienced. Anything in no sense felt or
perceived, becomes to me quite unmeaning ... P

The trouble with such Gedankenexperimenten is that they seem
to derive their results from a failure to conceive of any alternative. This failure is attributed to the intrinsic impossibility of
the case being otherwise, when, according to a less sympathetic
observer, it might be attributed to a subjective or psychological
deficiency on the part of the experimenter.
13

Appearance and Reality, pp. 127-8.

580

GARY L. BEDELL

Nevertheless, we find very little argumentation by Bradley
on behalf o£ his thesis. His remarks are generally scattered and
brief, and give the impression o£ something already settled in
his mind rather than a topic o£ controversy. "We have here,"
Bradley insists, " a matter for observation and experiment and
not for long trains of reasoning." 14 The very simplicity of his
approach would seem to militate against the validity of a
conclusion which has hardly been universally accepted by philosophers, were it not £or the nagging persistence with which
his thesis seems to resist clear and neat refutation. This leads
to the suspicion that it is not the object clearly before the
experimenter that regulates the results but the context of
implicit assumptions. 15
5.

TRANSMUTATION

1.

All appearance qualifies reality. Reality is not something
behind the appearances but the perfect individual whole of
which the appearances are but partial abstractions. Nevertheless, things are not really what they seem to be and as they
appear cannot be predicatl:'d as such o£ reality. In order to
be true of reality, appearances must suffer loss of private and
proper character; they must undergo transmutation.
As self-contradictory, appearances cannot be true of reality.
They can be ultimately true of reality only insofar as their
discrepancy is reconciled by inclusion of the conditions upon
which the conjoined qualities depend. But in order to be
harmonized with all the other elements so as to have the
contradiction removed, each must sacrifice those ideal limits
which define its own proper being and set up the opposition of
hostile elements.
"Essays on Truth and Reality, p. 316.
15 On Bradley's
assumptions the distinction between conditions of being and
conditions of being-known is not ultimately valid. Hence, the common method of
attacking the experience-theorem by citing such a distinction is not an adequate
refutation of Bradley's employment of it, unless these assumptions are undermined
or called in question.

BRADLEY's MONISTIC IDEALISM

581

All finite content qualifies reality only on the basis of conditions outside of its own proper being, and some of the
conditions are unknown. Hence, not only is it conditioned, it
is also conditional. In the light of fully known conditions it is
liable to transmutation in character. Although the conditions
can never be known in detail, it can be known, according to
Bradley, that the full conditions cannot be found in ideal and
relational schemes. Hence, all appearances, as ideal and relational, must be transmuted. Just as the apparent motion of
the sun around the earth had to be transmuted and altered
when fuller knowledge of the conditions of the solar system
became available, so also in metaphysics interpretation of experience, whether by our own explicit intellectual systems or
by the ideality implicit from the very beginning, is subject to
alteration in the light of the full conditions of its being. Since
ideality and relations by their essence cannot include these
conditions, appearances are not only subject to transmutation
but must be transmuted, in order to be true of a reality which
is neither relational nor ideal.

2.
Apart from logical and purely theoretical problems, the
doctrine of transmutation has its greatest significance in the
fact that it alters our locus of deepest concern. In a sense
this also occurs in a theism which inspires a religious, as well
as a philosophical, response. To assert the reality of something
transcending the spatial-temporal world is to encourage a devotion to something other than the perpetually perishing world
of common sense.
In a monistic idealism, however, this re-location of deepest
concern is inspired by a trivialization of the tragic and the
personal. It is true that Bradley reminds us that we must
till our own gardens on this earth, for they are the only ones
we have, but it is also true that the transmuted values no
longer acknowledge the intrinsic worth of each individual human person. It is now the balance of the universe that counts
and which alone is made richer by all the suffering and all the
discord.

GARY L. BEDELL

Although we are assured by Bradley that in his metaphysics
what counts most for us counts in the end for the universe as
well, it is only true if we are willing and able to accept transmuted satisfaction of the needs for the Good, True, and
Beautiful. For the individual as a separate entity all may turn
out to be lost, and his only recourse is to identify himself with
the universe at large, where the triumph of these values is
assured.
This seems to be the necessary result in a metaphysics in
which dependent being is interpreted as appearance. To deny
any intrinsic substantiality to dependent being removes any
obstacle to their inclusion in the monistic whole. But at the
same time it devalues their intrinsic worth as dependent beings,
and with their loss of any residual inseity their only abiding
value can be as a transmuted qualification of the Absolute. 18
6.

CoNCLUSION

Because of the necessity of transmutation Bradley has been
accused of ultimately holding that there are simply no such
things in the universe as space, time, etc. To call something
an appearance often seems to mean the same as to say that
there only appears to be something. In this sense the category
of appearance has seemed to many, both metaphysicians and
those hostile to metaphysics, to be highly objectionable. 17
To those hostile to metaphysics it seemed a perfect example
of tortured metaphysical logic, designed to distract our attention from the existential world in which we live and love, on
10 This
is perhaps the key objection that people like William James and
Gabriel Marcel had to Bradley's metaphysics. Both accused Bradley of trivializing
the tragic and the significance of the individual human being's response. See James,
Pragmatism (N. Y.: Meridian, 19.55) and A Pluralistic Universe (N. Y.: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909); and Marcel, Philosophy of Existence (London:
Harvill Press, 1948) and Philosophical Fragments, 1909-1914 (Xotre Dame, Ind.:
Notre Dame Press, 1965).
17 This objection was raised from the beginning.
Its most famous advocacy was,
however, by G. E. Moore. See Moore, Some Main PTOblems of Philosophy (N.Y.:
Collier Books, 1962), p. 36. It was renewed by Morris Lazerowitz in The Structure
of Metaphysics (London: Routeledge and Kegan Paul, 1955).

BRADLEY'S MONISTIC IDEALISM

588

behalf of some Absolute toward which we are supposed to
direct our deepest concern and devotion. Dialectical slight of
hand tries to convince us that this blooming, buzzing world
is not there after all, that it only appears to be there.
Philosophers of alternative metaphysical persuasion, however, have called into question the right of the category of
" appearance" to represent all metaphysical categories of dependent being. From their point of view it is quite possible to
determine the secondary and dependent status of certain
segments of reality without relegating them to the level of
appearance.
To construct a metaphysical alternative to monistic idealism,
however, one cannot concentrate merely on a contrast of
conclusions. .Monistic idealism preempted the metaphysical
outlook in the nineteenth and early twentieth century because
it seemed to be the most rigorous of the philosophies attempting
to engage in the activity of speculative metaphysics. Bradley's
emphasis on logical foundations especially gained him an attentive hearing from all segments of British thought, and it
continues to give him a relevance to contemporary scholarship
even among those most unsympathetic to his metaphysical
conclusion.
Contemporary metaphysical efforts, therefore, might do well
to examine their own evidentiary and logical foundations in
the light of the Bradleian experiment. In this way alone can
they hope to claim from the majority of the Anglo-American
public any recognition that they have opened alternatives to
Bradley and nineteenth-century idealism other than the antimetaphysical reaction.
GARY L. BEDELL
Rockhurst College
Kansas City, Missouri

RECENT CHURCH TEACHING ON RELIGIOUS
PROFESSION: TEMPORARY OR PERPETUAL?

T

HE PROCESS OF renewal of religious life has been
vigorously promoted in the Church since the time of
Pius XII, but it acquired a greater momentum with
the celebration of Vatican Council II. However, this renewal
has raised various kinds of problems, and so there is taking
place what normally occurs in human affairs: some are disoriented when confronted with the problem, and they perhaps
will never again be able to reorganize the different elements of
their religious profession into a vital synthesis; others, faced
with the same problem, are penetrating the depths of the
contents of their profession and the grounds which sustain it.
As a result, they are achieving a better knowledge and an
increased appreciation of what religious life means for those
who embrace it and also for the Church as a whole today.
The movement of renewal as promoted by the Church is
adopting the latter attitude. It is a movement of interiorization, a deepening, a returning to the sources, above all to
"a following of Christ as proposed by the gospel," 1 so that
by means of religious the world might receive a new manifestation of the same Christ adapted to the "changed conditions of the times." 2 Vatican II not only clearly points up
this approach but also supplies the radical reason:
Since the religious life is intended above all else to lead those who
embrace it to an imitation of Christ and to union with God
through the profession of the evangelical counsels, the fact must
be honestly faced that even the most desirable changes made on
behalf of contemporary needs will fail of their purpose unless a
1

Perfectae Caritatis (Decree on the Appropriate Renewal of the Religious Life),

2

Ibid.

n.

584

RECENT

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585

renewal of spirit gives life to them. Indeed such an interior renewal
must always be accorded the leading role even in the promotion
of exterior works. 3

The Chief Problem
Religious life rests entirely on the basis of divine vocation;
if this foundation is lacking, the whole edifice comes down."
The Council repeatedly confirmed the existence of this special
divine vocation 5 whereby God calls certain Christians "so that
they may enjoy this particular gift in the life of the Church." 6
If everything in religious life rests on the basis of divine vocation, then two things are easily understandable: 1) that everything concemed with this vocation is of paramount importance;
that the movement of renewal of religious life must pay
particular attention to the vocation which is its foundation.
Circumstances affecting religious life today have brought to
the fore the problem of the duration of divine vocation. Many
attempts are being made to establish a doctrine of religious
vocation as a divine calling for a limited period of time. Such
a vocation cannot beget in the person called more than a commitment of temporary duration. When the time for which God
granted the vocation comes to an end, the individual is freed
of the previous commitments and can choose another form of
life.
Temporary duration of religious vocation starts off by being
proposed as a possibility. But at times, in order to explain such
a possibility, certain reasons are alleged that logically lead to
a denial of perpetual vocation. The attempt to search out a
possible way for temporary vocation is transformed into an
undertaking to attack perpetual vocation. Controversy is
understandably engendered. And, on the basis of polemics, it
is not easy to reach calm conclusions which provide a new
and more profound clarification of the problem we are conIbid.
Pius XII, Apostolic Constitution Sedes Sapientiae (AAS 48 [1956], 357).
5 Perjectae Caritatis, nn. l, 5, 25.
6 Lumen Gentium (Dogmatic Constitution
on the Church), n. 43.
3

4

586

ARMANDO

BANDERA

cerned with or to approach in a fruitful manner the teachings
on this question which the recent Magisterium of the Church,
especially Vatican II, offers.
Our task here will be to present such a body of teaching,
letting the texts themselves, with their calm and exciting
objectivity, explain a point which is so important in the divine
plan regarding religious life. We will limit ouselves to the
doctrine of Vatican II and of Paul VI. At times we will also
refer to the teaching of Pius XII, which was singularly profuse
and in admirable harmony with recent documents. However,
his teaching will not be the basis of our exposition but mainly
corroborative, illustrating the unity and continuity of the
Magisterium of the Church on perpetual vocation.

Starting Point
Centering our exposition on the Church's teaching, the starting point must be of necessity the way the Magisterium understands " the observance of the manifold counsels proposed in
the gospel by our Lord to his disciples."' Among the counsels
Vatican II singles out the "precious gift " of ·drginity which
"has always been held in particular honor by the Church," 8
an honor manifested in many ways but especially by means of
the cult rendered to those who in life " had imitated Christ's
virginity ... more exactly." 9 But, how does the Council
understand virginity or continence for the sake of the kingdom
of heaven as it appears in the preaching of Christ? Is it a
temporary virginity or continence? 10 Referring to Matthew
19:12 the Council answers:
The Church has always held in especially high regard perfect and
perpetual continence on behalf of the kingdom of heaven. Such
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., n. 50.
In proposing the question in this way we do not presuppose that virginity is
exactly the same as continence. We use both terms because this way of speaking
in this concrete matter belongs to a fairly common usage and is found in Vatican
II where we find, for instance: "virginity, or celibacy ... this total continence"
(Lumen Gentium, n. 42). For further clarification we refer to our book El
aace;rdotio en la Iglesia (Pamplona: OPE, 1968), pp. 221-252.
7

10

Ibid., n. 42.

RECENT

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continence was recommended by Christ the Lord and has been
gladly embraced and praiseworthily observed down through the
years and in our day too by many Christians. 11
The answer could not be clearer. What Christ commended was
a perfect and perpetual continence.
Pius XII, referring to the same passage in Matthew, had
given a similar but more sympathetic explanation, showing the
equivalence between perfect and perpetual, thereby transcending any form of dualism in this matter.
The divine Master (in speaking of eunuchs) is not referring to
bodily impediments to marriage but to a resolution freely made to
abstain all one's life from marriage and sexual pleasure. For in
likening those who of their own free will have determined to
renounce these pleasures to those who by nature or the violence of
men are forced to do so, is not the divine Redeemer teaching us
that chastity to be really perfect must be perpetual? 12
Actually, all of this is a very elementary fact in the history
of Christian thought. The Church has never considered as
virginity (or continence or perfect chastity) a commitment of
temporary duration. 13 Christ's invitation to renounce marriage
in order to follow him makes no sense unless it is referred to the
entire life of man. 14 This is why theology has always insisted,
and insists today, on the necessity of the "propositum" or
irrevocable decision to abstain from marriage for the sake of
the Kingdom of God if the virtue of virginity or celibacy is to
exist. Virginity which is presumed in the Church is rooted not
only in the words or preaching of Christ but also and mainly
in his behavior. When Christ speaks of virginity and recommends it," he is speaking of his own personal case and explaining his own conduct ... he is proposing himself as an example.
Presbyterorum Ordinis (Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests), n. 16.
Pius XII, encyclical Sacra virginitas (AAS 46 [1954], 164).
13 This idea is constantly
repeated in the above-mentioned encyclical of Pius XII,
as well as in Paul VI's encyclical Sacerdotalis Caelibatus (AAS 59 [1967], 657-697).
14 Cf. L. Legrand,
La virginite dans la Bible (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1964),
pp. 47-54.
11

12

588

ARMANDO

BANDERA

He preserved his celibacy and he did this for the kingdom of
heaven." 15
If Jesus' words refer to perpetual virginity or continence,
even more does his example call for a decision which would
include the fulness of content possessed by " the words and
example of the Lord" 16 in this matter. Hence, a practice of
the evangelical counsels which, as Vatican II puts it, "draws
its origin from the tea:::hing and example of the Divine
l\faster," 17 tends of its own n:tture to stabilize itself or to
perpetuate itself throughout ihe entire life of the person who
embraces them.
With regard to the evanselical counsels of poverty and
obedience entirely similar arguments could be produced. Both
the words and the example of Christ call for a mode of imitation
which would endure for the whole of life.
Christ also proposed to his disciples that forrn of life which he, as
the Son of God, accepted in entering this world to do the will of
the Father. In the Church this same state of life is imitated with
particular accuracy and ]Jerpctually exemplificd. 18

We also believe that only when there is a perpetual commitment to imitate Christ's form of life is it possible to say in
earnest and not mockingly what the Council says when speaking of religious life, namely, that
it reveals in an unique way that the kingdom of God and its
overmastering necessities are superior to all earthly considerations .
. . . to all men it shows wonderfully at work within the Church
the surpassing greatness o£ the force of Christ the King and the
boundless power o£ the Holy SpiritY
15
16

Ibid., p. 86.
Lume:n Ge:ntium, n. 48. Paul VI, speaking of priests and directing attention

precisely to their celibacy, says: "Your celibacy has been too much under discussion and the force of Christian asceticism is being too much weakened as well as

the irrevermble character of the commitme:nts consecrated before God and before
the Church" (Allocution in a General Audience, Sept. 19, 1969).
17 Petrjectae Caritatis, n. 1.
18 Lume:n Gentium, n. 44.
19 Ibid.

RECENT

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ON RELIGIOUS

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589

The Council is proclaiming here that religious life is not
just any imitation of Christ but an imitation which reproduces
in the presence of the Church and before the world that very
type of life in which Christ realized the redemption of all
mankind and which, by the same token, has a redemptive value
which is original and its own. The Church not only cannot rid
herself of it but she considers it as " a divine gift, which the
Church has received from the Lord and which she ever preserves with the help of his grace." 20
The imitation of Christ, " as proposed by the gospel," 21 has
consequences of great importance for our topic. For it is
evident that, if the counsels, as they are proposed in the gospel,
claim the entire life of those called by God to their practice, it
cannot be said-not even insinuated-that the acceptance of
perpetual commitments regarding these counsels is in certain
disagreement with man's condition. God does not call us to
live in violence. And if he calls to the life-time practice of the
evangelical counsels, such a practice does not do violence to
man but elevates him to a higher type of life. What really
matters in all this is to view the evangelical counsels from the
perspective of Christ and of the divine vocation which he himself grants to some Christians to be put into practice.

Perpetual Religious Vocation
Vatican II, when dealing with the problems concerning
religious vocations, states that the best source of attraction for
young people is the good example of those already professing
this type of life.22 It says somewhat the same thing regarding
vocations to the priesthood. 23 Paul VI, leaning precisely on
the force of example, makes explicit the character of the
vocation which is awakened by its impulse. When priests and
religious, says the Pope, live their own self-donation cheerfully
and generously, new vocations to the priesthood and the religious life easily arise among young people who
21
23

n. 2.

22 Ibid., n. 24.
20 Ibid., n. 43.
Perjectae Caritatis, n. 2.
Presbyterorum Ordinis, n. 11; Optatam Totius (Decree on Priestly Formation),

590

ARMANDO

BANDERA

know how to nourish in their young hearts the desire one day to
serve the Church and to give themselves to souls for the whole of
life by reproducing in themselves the lineaments of the Good
Shepherd and faithfully following in his steps. 24

On the other hand, the number and quality of vocations provide
a hint for judging the religious level of Christian communities.
Addressing the bishops the Pope tells them:
the full gauge of the Christian life of the communities confided to
you is in the number and in the quality of those who are consecrated to God irrevocably. 25

Talking to Benedictine nuns he says:
You know, what is more you live, as in a unique act, prolonged
throughout the whole time of your earthly existence, this species
of spiritual acrobatics: contemplatione suspensus, suspended in
contemplation. 26

For many religious their religious vocation is expressly a
missionary vocation. In respect to the perpetuity of this
missionary vocation the Council said:
A man must so respond to God's call that, without consulting flesh
and blood ( cf. Gal. 1: 16), he can devote himself wholly to the
work of the gospel ... he who is sent upon the life and mission of
him who "emptied himself, taking the nature of a slave" (Phil.
2: 7). Therefore, he must be ready to stand by his vocation f01'
a lifetime, and to renounce himself and all those whom he thus far
considered as his own, and instead to become " all things to all
men" (I Cor. 9: 22) .27

Paul VI, in giving norms for compliance with this conciliar
principle, noted:
In the promotion of vocations for the missions both the mission of
the Church to all nations and the ways whereby the different
"'Paul VI, Message on the occasion of the World Day for Priestly and Religious
Vocations (AAS 56 [1964], 397).
25 Paul VI, Message on the occasion of the World Day for Priestly and Religious
Vocations (AAS 61 [1969], 332).
26 Paul VI, Allocution to the Benedictine Superioresses of Italy
(AAS 58 [1966],
1159).
27

Ad Gentes Divinitus (Decree on the Missionary Activity of the Church), n. 24.

RECENT

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591

participants (Institutes, priests, religious, and the laity of both
sexes) try to make it effective should be carefully explained.
Especially should the special missionary vocation " for life " be
extolled and illustrated by examples. 28

If perseverance in the missionary vocation, as proposed by
the Council, ought to be prolonged throughout the whole of
life, the same duration must be attributed to the perserverance
the Council talks about in relation to religious when it says:
" Let all who have been called to the profession of the vows
take painstaking care to persevere and ever to grow in the
vocation to which God has summoned them." 29
The reasoning is perfectly legitimate, because, in the first
place, when it is a matter of religious belonging to specifically
missionary Institutes, their religious vocation and their missionary vocation have the same content and therefore the same
duration. Besides, one of the reasons alleged by the Council
as the basis of the perpetuity of the missionary vocation is that
"the missionary enters into the life and mission of him who
emptied himself." Now, according to the same Council's declaration, this is realized in all religious, in each one according to his
own vocation, since all "share spiritually in Christ's self-surrender . . . they strive to associate themselves with the work
of redemption and to spread the kingdom of God." 30 The
other reason, namely, the total dedication to the work of the
gospel, will be considered shortly. Thus there is no reason
whatever why it should be necessary to assign a duration to
the vocation of the missionary religious distinct from the rest
of religious. It is always a duration that extends throughout
the whole of life. Paul VI, addressing religious men from
different Congregations, could tell them, without any distinction, that religious vocation is the beginning of a " total and
permanent consecration to God and to the different works of
the apostolate." 31
28 Paul VI, motu proprio Ecclesiae Sanctae, part III, n. 6 (AAS 58 [1966], 784).
The third part of this motu proprio contains the norms for the application of the
Council's decree.
30 Prefectae Caritatis, n. 5.
29 Lumen Gentium, n. 47.
31 Paul VI, Allocution of June 6, 1969 on his visit to the Regina Mundi Institute.

592

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Perpetual Vocation and Total Consecration
In reading the documents of the Church's Magisterium one
can notice that the perpetuity of the self-donation to God is
included in the totality of that same surrender, which undoubtedly is the most characteristic element of divine vocation.
Perpetuity is an integral part of the totality and helps to
explain it. According to Vatican II the total dedication of the
missionary to the work of the gospel implies that " he must
be ready to stand by his vocation for a lifetime." 32 If the
dedication does not last for the total duration of life, it cannot
be a total dedication. And the Council states that " the total
consecration" the
makes of himself to God is characterized by its representation of the " unbreakable link between Christ and his Spouse, the Church," 33 because it represents a union that lasts forever. This presupposes that such
a total consecration is perpetual, since otherwise it could not
be a symbol of something which lasts forever. Paul VI defines
divine vocation as:
the manifest and firm will by which one desires to surrender himself wholly to the divine service. This is deduced from the prescription of the canon of Trent in which it is established that only those
youths are to be received into the seminary whose disposition and
will offer hope that they will serve in the ecclesiastical ministries

perpetually .34
Total surrender is manifested in perpetual service.
Granted the inclusion of perpetuity in the totality of religious consecration, a very broad horizon is opened up regarding the teaching of Vatican II on the perpetuity of vocation.
As a matter of fact, the Council frequently states that religious
vocation "involves their entire lives," 35 that religious devote
"their entire lives to God's service," 36 that by celibacy they
""Ad Gentes Divinitus, n. 24.
33 Lumen Gentium, n. 44.
34 Paul VI, Apostolic Letter Summi Dei Verbum (AAS 55 [1963], 987-988).
35 Perfectae Caritatis, n. 1.
86 Ibid., n. 5.

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fully consecrate themselves "to God alone with undivided
heart," 37 that virginity implies " a complete gift of body and
soul." 38
This entire series of expressions, and others which could be
added, definitively confirms the idea that vocation is a calling
which God addresses to man and which, by informing all the
manifestations of life, ought to last for an entire lifetime.
Divine vocation is perpetual. On the other hand, the Council's
multiplicity of expressions amounts to nothing more than the
presentation from different viewpoints of what must be considered the substantial nucleus of any religious vocation,
namely, "total self-dedication to God, one inspired by perfect
charity " which is framed within " a profes8ion of the evangelical counsels." 39 Profession of these counsels implies that the
Christian "is totally dedicated to God, loved above all things,
and is committed to the honor and service of God under a
new and special title ... he intends, by the profession of the
evangelical counsels in the Church, to free himself from those
obstacles which might draw him away from the fervor of
charity and the perfection of divine worship." 40
Two constitutive elements of this substantial notion of religious vocation claim, each one by itself, man's whole life.
Charity is a permanent gift; it ought to endure throughout
one's whole life in this world, but also, in addition, is destined
to last for all eternity. The evangelical counsels, as they are
proposed in the gospel, likewise claim man's entire life. These
two elements--charity and the counsels-form the substantial
content of religious vocation insofar as they are united or
merged into each other. The mere calling to a life of charity
does not suffice to constitute religious vocation, because charity
is the law of all the people of God/ 1 whatever one's state in
life. Nor does the mere calling to the evangelical counsels suffice,
since they lack meaning unless they are informed by charity.
Lumen Gentium, n. 42.
Optatam Totius, n. 10.
19 Perfectae Caritatis, n. 11.

87

40

88

41

Lumen Gentium, n. 44.
Ibid., nn. 9, 32, 42.

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We would say rather that in the Christian life a calling or
vocation whose object or content is merely the evangelical
counsels is unthinkable. Religious vocation is a calling to
perfect charity toward God and toward neighbor, not, however,
to a charity that could be called common or undifferentiated
(however perfect it might be) but to a qualified charity, i.e.,
endowed or adorned with the evangelical counsels, which are
precisely the qualities with which that concrete charity whereby
Christ redeemed us was endowed.
It is, of course, possible to state this in reverse, that is, to
define religious vocation by its ordination to the evangelical
counsels considered expressly as qualities which spring from
charity and which impel toward a full love of God and neighbor.
We think, however, that the former is the better statement.
If both charity and the counsels are stable or permanent values
which claim man's entire life in the totality of his acts and of
his duration, it is obvious that religious vocation, as constituted
precisely by the union or merger of charity and the counsels,
implies a more profound and more stable possession of the
whole of the Christian's life. A religious vocation so established
is by its very nature a perpetual vocation.
The firm and clear teaching of Vatican II on vocation should
not lead us to consider vocation and the religious life which
springs from it as something merely static that ought to be
perpetuated in its own state from beginning to end. The
perpetuity the Council speaks of is an on-going perpetuity that
obliges religious to heed and to improve their own formation
" throughout their lives." 42 Religious vocation, constituted by
the fusion of charity and the evangelical counsels, possesses the
dynamism proper to each one of these elements and reinforced
by their mutual union. 43 On the other hand, such dynamism,
•• Perfectae Caritatis, n. 18.
•• For the topic of charity as principle of sanctification and the apostolate, cf.

Lumen Gentium, nn. 33 & 42; Apostolicam Actuositatem (Decree on the Apostolate
of the Laity), nn. 3, 4, 8. The dynamic value of the evangelical counsels in all
aspects of the Christian life is clearly outstanding in the sixth chapter of Lumen
Gentium, as well as in Perfectae Caritatis, nn. 12-14.

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inherent in the constitutive elements of vocation, ought always
to be taken into consideration in order to gain a complete and
balanced notion of the religious life.

Other Conciliar Perspectives on the Perpetuity of
Religious Vocation
Besides the principal modes employed by the Council to
explain its doctrine on the perpetuity of religious vocation,
there are other concepts in which the idea of perpetuity is at
least latent. To begin with, there is the idea of cornplete profession of the evangelical counsels, for example:
The lay religious life, for both men and women, constitutes a state
which of itself is one of total dedication to the profession of the
evangelical counsels. 44 Secular institutes are not religious communities, but they carry with them in the world a profession of
the evangelical counsels which is genuine and complete. 45

Both these passages coincide in the main idea. There is,
however, a difference: the Council, when talking about lay
religious life, employs the notion of state which does not
appear in relation to secular institutes. Given this difference,
we can concentrate on the substantial content of the texts.
The Council proclaims that the lay religious life and the life
of the secular institutes is a complete profession of the evangelical counsels. According to an oft repeated statement, such
profession is understood to be cornplete in relation to the
counsels as these are proposed in the gospel. Now, the counsels,
as they appear in the teaching and example or conduct of
Christ, are realities which last for life. Therefore, it seems
evident to us that only on the supposition of a perpetual
vocation can one properly speak of a complete profession of the
evangelical counsels. No other form of vocation can gather
completely what belongs to the evangelical counsels or is able
" to pattern the Christian man after that type of chaste and
"Perfectae Caritatis, n. 10.
45 Ibid., n. 11.

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detached life which Christ the Lord elected for himself, and
which his Virgin Mother also embraced." 46
The Council also speaks of religious life as a stable life or
vocation, 47 which impels religious to a constant and humble
fidelity 48 and in virtue of which " they thereby unite themselves with greater steadiness and security to the saving will
of God." 49 Evidently a constant stability does not suggest the
idea of temporariness but rather of perpetuity. And this impression which comes from a reading of the texts is confirmed
by a simple argument. It is a question of a stability which
symbolizes in the presence of the faithful and of the world the
indissolubility of the union which exists between Christ and
Church. 50 Since stable is defined in relation to indissoluble,
religious vocation begets a state of life within the Church, i. e.,
a kind of life which has perpetual permanence in a way analogous to other ecclesiastical states.
Vatican II repeatedly applies to religious life the idea of
state. 51 We think it would be a mistake to take state in a
merely canonical sense. Sometimes, of course, the Council has
this in mind, but it cannot be affirmed that this is always the
case. A good proof lies in the fact that the Council speaks of the
religious state when enumerating the different types of permanent life which, by the will or institution of Christ, must
always exist in the Church. 5 " Finally, the Council treats of the
relations between the evangelical counsels and the development
of the human person. Moreover, the mode in which its expresses this problem presupposes that it refers to a perpetual
practice of the counsels. This could be assumed a priori, since
a merely temporary practice of the evangelical counsels does
Lumen Gentium, n. 46. Cf. also Perfectae Caritatis, n. 25.
Lume:n Ge:ntium, n. 43.
48 Ibid., n. 46.
49 Perfecate Caritatis, n. 14.
50 Lumen Gentium, n. 44; Perfectae CaritatU!, n. 12.
51 Limiting
ourselves only to Lumen Gentium, nn. 13, 31, 43, 44, 45 can be
46

41

consulted.
59 We think that this idea is sufficiently clear in nn. 13 & 31 of Lume:n Ge:ntium.

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not seem to offer a basis for posing the problem. The Council
says:
The profession of the evangelical counsels, though entailing the
renunciation of certain values which undoubtedly merit high
esteem, does not detract from a genuine development of the human
person. Rather by its very nature it is most beneficial to that
development. 53 (Religious) as they strive to live their profession
faithfully . . . will not be influenced by those erroneous claims
which present complete continence as impossible or as harmful to
human development ... they should not only be warned of the
dangers confronting chastity but be trained to make a celibate life
consecrated to God part of the richness of their whole personality. 51
Through the profession of obedience, religious offer to God a total
dedication of their own wills as a sacrifice of themselves . . .
religious obedience will not diminish the dignity of the human
person but will rather lead it to maturity in consequence of that
enlarged freedom which belongs to the sons of God. 55

Evidently, all these passages refer to a religious vocation
which lasts for a lifetime. The first text speaks of a renouncement of wealth in general, but it is clear that it is a perpetual
renunciation. If the renunication of marriage, for instance,
does not last for the whole of life, i.e., if it is not a definitive
renunciation, it would not be a true renunciation. The renunciation implied in the other evangelical counsels ought to
be likewise perpetual, since the Council attributes to the three
counsels a renunciation with identical consequences. The sense
of the second and third texts affords no doubt at all. In the
second it is perfect continence which is identified with celibacy.
This, however, never expresses a merely temporary commitment but one which last for a lifetime. Finally, it is clear that
an obedience which consists in a full surrender of the will cannot be limited to a specified time, however long; its very
totality or fullness lays claim to the whole of life, so that the
Christian, through this form of obedience, remains "anchored
in the absolute." 56 Obedience is the anchor whereby the
Christian is irrevocably fixed in God.
5 ' Perfectae Caritatis, n.
55 Ibid., n. 14.
Ibid., n. 46.
Paul VI, Allocution to the International Union of Superioresses General (AAS
59 [1967], 340).
53

50

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Analogy between Religious l' ocation and Priestly Vocation
This analogy has been explicitly stated by Paul VI in these
terms:
If in fact the priesthood has been associated with monasticism, this
has come from the perception of the harmony between religious
consecration and priestly consecration ... the union in the same
person of the religious consecration, which offers itself totally to
God, and of the priestly character configures him in a special way
to Christ who is at the same time Priest and Victim. 57

Vatican II never expressed itself in these terms. Nevertheless,
it offers a clear basis for establishing this analogy. If the plan
of life the Council proposes to priests 58 is compared with the
one it marks out for religious, 59 the similarities immediately
strike us. On the other hand, this plan only expresses the
practical requirements of the vocation, granted that such a plan
is well-drawn, as we are obliged to think in this concrete case.
The analogy is not based only or mainly on the common
obligation which religious and priests in the Latin Rite have
of keeping celibacy. It springs from the very root of religious
vocation and priestly vocation, inasmuch as both imply,
though in different ways, an "irrevocable," "for always,"
" total and irrevocable " 60 consecration to God and to the
salvation of souls. Now, the priestly vocation cannot be
thought of otherwise than as a perpetual vocation, since it is
actualized and becomes effective in the Church by means of
the sacrament of Orders which impresses an indelible character.
On this basis of sacramental doctrine a vocation to the priesthood cannot exist or even be thought of which would last only
for a specified time, since any vocation ought to be harmonious
or coherent with the nature of the object to which it refers.
57 Paul VI, Allocution to the Major Superioresses of Religious Institutes
of Italy
(AAS 58 [1966], 1181). Cf. also Pius XII, Sedes Sapientiae (AAS 48 [1956], 355).
58 Prebyterorum
Ordinis, nn. 15-19.
59 Perfectae Caritatis, nn. 5-6, 12-15, 18.
60 All these expressions which we have noted in explaining religious vocation are
applied to the priesthood by Paul VI in his Allocution to the Pastors and Lenten
Preachers of Rome (AAS 60 [1968], 217, 218). The same ideas repeatedly appear in
Presbyterorum Ordinis, cf. nn. quoted in note 58 above.

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The analogy, therefore, is established by virtue of that which
is more radical in the priesthood and in religious vocation.
Thus we think that the perpetuity of vocation to the priesthood offers an excellent demonstrative analogy for affirming
the perpetuity of religious vocation. In either case it is a
perpetuity which is not linked to a decision or precept of the
Church but is inherent in the vocation itself. The Church, with
its own ordinations, can and must help priests and religious
better to embody and more easily to live out this perpetuity
in their respective vocations. But perpetuity itself is presupposed as a constitutive note of divine vocation as God communicates it.
The preceding ideas are useful to clarify a problem in the
practical life of the Church: the frequent coexistence in the
same person of a religious and a sacerdotal vocation. In the
Church as a whole a very high proportion of priests are at the
same time religious. This fact shows better than any argument
the coherence or harmony between priestly and religious vocations; even more, it leads us to the discovery of the ideal form
in which both the priesthood and the religious life tend to
be embodied.
The priesthood does not necessarily imply acceptance of the
evangelical counsels, but it is clear that it leads very strongly
toward them, especially the episcopal priesthood. The teachings of Vatican II leave no room for doubt in this respect, not
only when it treats of celibacy but also in relation to the
other counsels. A priesthood effectively enclosed within the
framework of the evangelical counsels is the priesthood which is
more identified with that of Jesus Christ, and therefore it is
the one which finds itself, normally speaking, in the best
condition to realize with the maximum efficacy the ministries
which are proper to it.
Similarly, the practice of the evangelical counsels tends to
find its consummation in the priesthood, always insofar as
persons are capable of receiving the priesthood. By means of
the counsels the Christian detaches himself entirely from
earthly realities in order to give himself totally to Christ and

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"to serve the mystery of redemption in subordination to him
and along with him, by the grace of the Almighty God." 61
But any form of service to redemption is subordinated to the
priestly service, aboYe all when this service is actualized in the
celebration of the eucharistic sacrifice which is " the fount and
apex of the whole Christian life," 6 " through which " the work
of our redemption is exercised," 63 " the source and apex of the
whole work of preaching the gospel " 64 and the "chief duty"
of priests. 65 The impulse for the ministry which is contained
in the acceptance of the evangelical counsels reaches its consummation when it is united with the priesthood, especidly if
it is the highest priesthood or the episcopal priesthood. This
mutual connection between priesthood and religious life clarifies different phenomena in the Church and offers a supreme
term of reference for understanding the perpetuity of reli:;ious
vocation, since a vocation which tends to reach its consummation in the priesthood cannot be merely temporary.

Perpetual Stability and Human Life in General
After having attempted to clarify the perpetuity of religious
vocation from within, i. e., from the stability inherent in the
gifts of grace which constitute it, a glance directed at the
whole of human life may perhaps help us better to understr..nd
this problem.
Human life is characteristically manifested by mobility and
stability as expressions of the inner nature of man. These
two apparently antithetical notes very well express the' essential
duality which constitutes man. Man is one, yet with a special
unity which results from the unity of soul and body. 66 Mobility
derives mainly from matter or body, whereas stability proceeds,
61 Lumen Gentium, n. 56. These words explicitly refer to the cooperation of the
Virgin Mary with Christ in the salYation of mankind.
60 Ibid., n. 11.
63 Sacrosanctum Concilium (Constitution
on the Sacred Liturgy), n. 2.
64 P,·ebyterorll1n Ordinis, n. 5.
65 Ibid., n. 13.
66 Gaudium et Spes (Constitution
on the Church in the Modern World), n. 14.

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also mainly, from the spirit or soul. This implies that mobility
and stability do not affect man to the same extent or penetrate
in the same profound manner into the interior of his own
nature. What the Council says about human history in general
can be applied with all propriety to man who both fashions and
is fashioned by history: "Beneath all changes there are many
realities which do not change." 67 Analogously, man's mobility
is located rather on the " surface," whereas his stability springs
from what is the most profound root of his being, i. e., " his
interior qualities (whereby) he outstrips the whole sum of
mere things." 68
These considerations of a general character are socially verifiable. It is normal for man, when he has reached his full
development or human maturity, to stabilize himself in a
definite profession or type of life which allows him to realize
himself fully. For, if man does not achieve stability in his life,
he cannot avoid experiencing a certain interior violence which
of itself is a sufficient sign that some of the values connaturally
claimed by the human condition are missing. Looking more
deeply into this, it is also a verifiable fact that the mature man,
considered in the constitutive elements of his nature alone,
tends normally to be situated in the state of marriage which
expresses the fullest and more perfect mode of merely human
stability in this life, being based on an " irrevocable personal
consent." 69 l\1arriage, on the one hand, is the term toward
which a long process of human maturity connaturally tends and
in which it finds its consummation, and, on the other hand, it
possesses an indestructible stability " qualified by his laws," 70
which places it above every whim of human wilfulness. Indissolubility and the " power and strength of the institution of
marriage and family " is a good which overcomes " the profound changes in modern society " 71 because it is founded on
67 Ibid., n. 10.
The temporal order, the Council also says, has its own proper
laws, permanent and firm, which are Lhe basis of the legitimate autonomy which
belongs to it (cf. ibid., n. 36).
70 Ibid.
68 Ibid., n. 14.
71 Ibid., n. 47.
69 Ibid., n. 48.

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a " mutual gift of two persons." 72 In this way it becomes the
symbol expressing the act whereby man fully gives himself
to God.
If human life, considered only in the values which flow from
nature, is oriented toward an "irrevocable " stability and finds
its consummation in it, it seems evident that Christian life, in
any of its forms of realization, has to have a stability which is
more firm as Christ's grace more exceeds simple human nature.
For this reason Christian marriage possesses a special firmness
which comes to it from its condition as a sacrament.
From these considerations the perpetuity of religious vocation and the perfect harmony it maintains with one of man's
more characteristic tendencies, namely, to aspire to a stable
type of life, appear in a new light. Human stability acquires
the special consistency which is proper to Christian stability,
because that which is permanent in man's life" has its ultimate
founlation in Christ, wLo is the same yesterday, and today,
yes and forever." 73 Christ himself is " the goal of human
history, the focal point of the longings of history and of civilization, the center of the human race, the joy of every heart,
and the answer to all its yearnings." 74 Christian stability is
realized in different forms. One of the most important is that
which is inherent in religious vocation, because those who
embrace it "have a dist_inguished place in the house of the
Lord" 75 since they make a special consecration of themselves
to God " which is deeply rooted in their baptismal consecration
and which provides an ampler manifestation of it." 76

Characteristic Bonds of the Religious Life
Religious life is part of the global mystery of the Church; it
constitutes one of its manifestations which, by the will of
72 Ibid., n. 48.
Cf. A. Osuna, 0. P .. "Doctrina moral del Concilio
matrimonio," Scriptorium Victoriense, 15 (1968), 166.
73 Ibid., n. 10.
"'Ibid., n. 45.
75 Presbyterorum Ordinis, n. 6.
76

Perfectae Caritatis, n. 5.

sobre el

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Christ, will never be absent: "it belongs inseparably to her
life and holiness." 77 In virtue of the connection which exists
between religious life and the universal Church "Church
authority has the duty . . . of interpreting these evangelical
counsels, of regulating their practice, and finally of establishing
stable forms of living according to them." 78 For this purpose
she dictates the laws which she considers fitting to each age
and " endorses rules formulated by eminent men and women." 79
All of this means that religious life and the practice of the
evangelical counsels are a life and a practice ruled, directed,
regulated by the competent authority of the Church which
introduces new elements that, according to the letter alone of
the gospel, are not essential to religious life.
Eminent among the elements introduced by the Church to
regulate the practice of the evangelical counsels is the taking
of vows " or other sacred bonds which are like vows in their
purpose." 80 These bonds of whatever type offer to those who
accept them " the support of greater stability in their way of
life." 81 The practice of the evangelical counsels could be considered in a p-ure state, i.e., insofar as it springs simply from
a grace of Jesus Christ moving man's will to embrace them.
But this will, which is always presupposed and without which
religious life lacks any sense, is a less committed and, by itself,
a less firm and less stable will than when the reinforcement
of a vow or of another similar bond is added whereby the
Christian "is totally dedicated to God by an act of supreme
love." 82
These brief considerations not only disclose to us the
Church's intervention in religious life but also, in addition, one
to
of the goals the Church pursues by such intervention:
give religious life firmness and stability. I£ we omit stability,
we cannot seriously affirm that the religious state perpetually
exemplifies "that form of life which he, as the Son of God,
accepted in entering this world to do the will of the Father." 83
Lumen Gentium, n, 44,
Ibid., n. 43.
79 Ibid., n. 45.

77

80

78

81

Ibid., n. 44.
Ibid., n. 43,

82

83

Ibid., n. 44.
Ibid.

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The idea of stability is so important that the Council takes it
as a criterion for distinguishing the degrees of perfection of the
consecration made to God in the religious life: " This consecration gains in peTjection since by viTtue of jiTmeT and steadier
bonds it serves as a betteT symbol of the unbTeakable link
between Christ and his Spouse, the Church." 84
The different degrees of perfection of which the Council
speaks do not refer to the subjective aspect of the consecration
or the intensity of the self-surrender the Christian makes of
himself but to the objective perfection of the consecration in
itself. This perfection grows in the same measure as the firmness and objective stability on which it is based. Naturally,
it is necessary to avoid any form of dualism which would end
by separating in principle the objective and subjective aspects
of the consecration. If the Christian makes his surrender with
sufficient knowledge as is his duty, this requires that, when he
commits himself to these bonds, objectively more perfect because of their greater firmness and stability, he also elicits a
fuller subjective and personal act of self-donation, i.e., an act
of surrender which is exactly equal to what the bonds contracted demand. However, since man does not always surrender
or give everything he can, there is always the danger in the
human condition that some bonds, objectively the best, will
be accepted in a merely mediocre donation, just as it is possible
to receive the greatest sacrament, the Eucharist, with a weak
charity, far from what the Sacrament demands of itself.
On the level of doctrine with which we are now concerneJ,
the fact of taking stability as a criterion in order to judge
the perfection of the commitments, and therefore of the profession which rest on them, is of great importance. According
to the teaching of Vatican II it must be affirmed that peryetual
bonds are more perfect than tempomTy ones and that perpetual
solemn bonds are more perfect than the corresponding simple
ones; the more stability and firmness, the more perfection.
What is said of the vows analogously applies to other forms of
•• Ibid.

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commitment. The Council does nothing more than assemble
and develop the traditional doctrine on this point. The ancient
text of the Consecration of Virgins repeatedly insists on the
idea of a full and irrevocable dedication to Christ through the
" propositum " and practice of perpetual chastity; only this
form of chastity permits aspiring to espousal with Christ who
"just as he is Son is also Spouse of perpetual virginity." 85
Pius XII is filled with the same idea when he says that the
best way to comply with the evangelical counsel of virginity
is to commit onself to its practice " though a perpetual vow
which leaves no door open to turn back." 86 The reason is
because, as he explains at length, only this definite and irrevocable commitment can be the appropriate expression of a
love for Christ which is so truly total, exclusive, and absorbing
as to erase from man's heart any preoccupation other that of
belonging to Christ alone. It is not a rna tter of " locking the
doors " behind one so that man shall have to go forwards by
force; Christ neither asks for nor desires forced surrenders.
But the psychology of love has its " laws " which are helpful
in appreciating its seriousness and intensity.
The possibility of turning back, sought in a calculating manner,
reveals a certain insecurity or indeci»ion in the surrender and
therefore in the love which inspires it. The inclination proper to
love is to hold fast to the object loved as strongly as possible and
for always. When the union is unbreakable, love is had in the
state of joyful tranquility and is made present with the greatest
intensity. Nothing urges as powerfully as love, and nothing at the
same time leaves as live an impression of repose and well-being in
the soul. The one who does not leave even one door open to
turn back is the one, objectively speaking, who fully accepts the
demands of love for him who invites him to follow him. To
consider the vow as an impediment to spontaneity and love of
Preface of the Consecration of Virgins. Cf. G. Esculero, C.M.F., Virginidad
Coculsa, 1963), p. R3.
86 Pius
XII, Sacra Virginitas (AAS 46 [19.54], 165). Paul VI, in leaving
Uganda, said " to the clergy, religious men and women: you have devoted ami
consecrated yourselves to Christ without reservation and without return" (Allocu1969).
tion of Aug.
85

y Liturgia (Madrid:

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surrender is not to have understood either the vow or love.
Nothing is given with such pure love as what is given irrevocably,
and irrevocability is never so manifest as when it is confirmed
by vow.87

Intervention

of the Church and "Pure " Evangelical Counsel

The Church regulates the practice of the evangelical counsels
in order to secure its firmness and stability. For this reason the
Church asks that the Christian who wishes to practice them in
the religious state commit himself to it by means of some
kind of bond (vow or something similar) which by itself
reinforces and consolidates the decision of the will. Perhaps at
one time this ecclesial decision might have seemed arbitrary
or even deforming, since it is not stated in the gospel that the
practice of the counsels must be reinforced by any special bond,
even less by a perpetual one. The gospel presents the counsels
in a "pure state," i.e., as Christian values which are defined
in relationship to a better and fuller following of Christ. This
is quite true. But it is not less true that the counsels, as they
are proposed in the gospel, shape all the manifestations of the
life of the Christian and claim the entire duration of that life.
In other words, they are counsels which can be accomplished
only by means of a total and perpetual consecration to Jesus
Christ, as we have already noted.
If this vision of the whole problem is taken into account, it
can be quite well understood that the Church has the greatest
concern to secure for the practice of the evangelical counsels
those properties of totality and perpetuity that belong to it
according to the gospel. All the actions of the Church directed
toward the achievement of this goal are wholly consistent
with the evangelical counsels and make easier the unfolding of
the inner virtualities they possess. Since the vows or other
similar commitments are meant to strengthen the firmness,
stability, and wholeness characteristic of the evangelical counsels, it is evident that they do not represent a " corrupting"
element of the "purity " of the gospel but, on the contrary,
87

A. Bandera, 0. P., El sace:rdotio en la Iglesia, p. 235.

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are limited to drawing out one of the virtualities contained
germinally in the counsels themselves.
All this leads us to a very important conclusion. The practice
of the counsels is not perpetual because the Church enjoins the
taking of perpetual vows or other similar bonds. The explanation is exactly the opposite, i. e., the Church introduces bonds
because the counsels are in themselves perpetual, and therefore
only perpetual bonds can serve as the adequate framework for
their practice and their embodiment before the whole community of the faithful and before the world. Other inferior
forms of commitment fall far below the perfection of the
evangelical counsels, and by themselves they would never
express it adequately; rather, they would partially hide them,
since many faithful could get the impression that the demands
of the counsels go no further than those of some temporary
commitments.

Temporary and Perpetual Profession
The Church not only admits but also commands these two
forms of profession in such a way that perpetual profession
cannot be made unless some years of temporary profession have
elapsed. Some institutions do not even have perpetual profession. However, there is always something which can be considered equivalent to a perpetual profession, as in certain cases
the commitment to renew indefinitely until the end of life the
temporary profession made for a shorter or longer span of time.
In other cases there is the acceptance of a definitive commitment to the Institute to which one belongs, whether made
explicitly or at least implicitly because of the fact that one
continues in the Institute after finishing the formation period.
Such a continuation makes sense only with reference to a
permanence.
The Church's legislation is complex. Nevertheless, one thing
is sufficiently clear, namely, that the Church commands all
religious to make a temporary profession and that in many
cases such temporary profession never culminates in a properly
so-called perpetual profession. This obliges us to reflect upon

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the two forms of profession and to compare them. Every
comparison can have an annoying result for those who are
assigned a secondary place. 'Ve regret this. Our intention is
only to discover which form of profession, objectively considered, better responds to Christ's intention when he proposed
to us the evangelical counsels. We shall be aided in our
endeavor to remain as objective as possible by the use of the
Church's documents, as we have done thus far.
Above all, a fundamental principle stated by Vatican II
must be recalled: the different forms of perfection are not
equally perfect. "This consecration will be mOTe perfect inasmuch as the indissoluble bond of the union of Christ and his
Bride, the Church, is better expressed through firmer and more
stable ties." 88 Thus, temporary profession is, as such, less
perfect than perpetual; on this main point the Council leaves
no room for doubt. The Sacred Congregation of Religious and
Secular Institutes, basing itself on the preceding word of the
Council, explicitly states the principle of the superiority of
perpetual profession:
Religious profession ... brings about a total consecration to God,
who alone is worthy of such a sweeping gift on the part of a human
person. It is more in lceeping with the nature of such a gift to
find its culmination and its most eloquent expression in perpetual
profession, whether simple or solemn. 89 The practice of this life is
realized definitely at perpetual profession ... the one perpetual
religious profession retains its full significance. 90

This objective importance must have manifestations which
affect the life of the religious, especially when he prepares himself to make perpetual profession. This is why the same Congregation asks that religious be given" a serious preparation for
perpetual vows. It is in fact desirable that this unique and
essential act, whereby a religious is consecrated to God forever,
should be preceded by a sufficiently long preparation, spent in
88

Lumen Gentium, n. 44.

Instruction Renm.·ationis causam, n. 2 (AAS 61 [19691, 106). Immediately
after it quotes the already known words of Vatican II in support of its point.
90 Ibid., n. 35 (Zoe. cit., p. 119).
89

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retreat and prayer, a preparation which could be like a second
novitiate." 91
From these passages there can be no doubt that the only
profession in which the full content of religious life is expressed
is perpetual profession. It alone can be considered as a symbol
and adequate realization of a vocation and a life which imply
wholeness and perpetuity of self-donation to God as essential
notes. Temporary profession, as temporary, can never be either
a symbol or a realization of such self-donation; it is a profession
that, because of its very temporariness, cannot include or make
present to the Church the full content of religious vocation.
However, temporary profession is an evident fact in the life
and practice of the Church, and thus it cannot be meaningless,
as the Congregation explains: " While still retaining its probationary character by the fact that it is temporary, the profession of first vows makes the young religious share in the
consecration proper to the religious state." 92
Temporary profession is a period of trial. This statement
is of major importance, since it indicates that such a profession
has no reason to exist in itself but serves only as a means of
verifying the genuineness of the vocation and of attaining the
situation proper to such a vocation which is perpetual profession. From this we further conclude that temporary profession must last as long as is considered sufficient for the formation of the candidates, 93 i.e., until they are judged fit for
definitive incorporation into the Institute. Naturally this takes
place when the result of the trial inherent in temporary profession is positive; if it is negative, the candidate abandons the
Institute and definitive incorporation does not take place.
The situation of trial which accompanies the whole period
of temporary vows is distinct from the trial which takes place
91

Ibid., n. 9 (p. ll2).
Ibid., n. 7 (p. Ill).

The idea of trial as one of the characteristic notes of
temporary vows is repeated several times in the Instruction.
93 Ibid., n. 10 (p. ll2).
The Instruction sets the extreme limits for such duration:
"This period shall last for not less than three nor more than nine continuous
years." (n. 37; p. ll9).
92

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in the novitiate. The novice does not make a consecration of
himself or acquire any sort of commitment. He approaches the
religious life, but this approach, as it were, leaves him at the
door. On the other hand, the professed religious of temporary
vows undertakes a trial of the religious life from within, i. e.,
he contracts religious ties and subjects himself to their demands, though this takes place only temporarily and therefore
with an inevitable character of provisionality.
The peculiar nature of the trial undertaken during the period
of temporary profession causes it to be a participation of the
full religious life as it is realized in perpetual profession. The
idea of participation is to be found explicitly in the text of
the Sacred Congregation quoted above and is fundamental for
an understanding of the value of the profession of temporary
vows, as well as its relationship to perpetual profession. Temporary profession is a beginning or a sharing in that which is
realized in its fulness in perpetual profession. It is a dynamic
and homogeneous participation, i. e., endowed with an internal
vitality which tends to bear fruit in its fulness, granted, of
course, that the vocation is genuine, since only such a vocation
contains the seeds or virtualities which can mature and lead to
fulness.
These arguments cause us to discover in its very root the
essential dependence of temporary upon perpetual profession.
Temporary profession is not self-justifying, because a beginning
or a participation which has in itself the reason for its existence
makes no sense at all. Temporary vows find their justification
only in relation to perpetual vows for which they are a preparation and in which they inchoately share. The Instruction
Renovationis causam never speaks of a temporary profession
that could be considered the normal expression of a religious
vocation which has reached maturity. According to this document there is a temporary profession, i.e., a period of trial and
beginning of the religious life, and a perpetual profession that
represents the normal term and expression of that same life.
The Institutes that do not have perpetual vows suffer a
genuine maladjustment which does not permit them to give

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adequate expression to what the evangelical counsels are in
themselves. Since the counsels, as we have seen, are perpetual,
they demand a perpetual profession or expression; if this does
not take place, the counsels do not encounter as perfect a proclamation as befits them. The lack of perpetual profession is
supplied by the commitment of renewing indefinitely temporary
profession until the end of life or by other procedures. However, this is nothing but a theologically poor recourse, since it
cannot be compared with formal perpetual profession. Sometimes the circumstances in which some Institutes have begun
explain this kind of theological anomaly. But, if we wished to
look at those Institutes now as models of modern institutionalization of the religious life, we would be genuinely mistaken.
A total consecration to God through love in the practice of
the evangelical counsels is an irrevocable consecration, because
otherwise it would not be total, and it can only have an
adequate expression in a profession which is likewise irrevocable
and perpetual. The connection between mature religious life
and perpetual profession springs from the very nature of things,
and only adverse or anomalous circumstances can explain that,
in some cases, it does not attain its formal realization.
Perpetual Vocation and Human Psychology
Occasionally there is a recurrence to human psychology in
order to reject the doctrine of perpetual religious vocation.
Human psychology is fickle, subject to a multitude of fluctuations, often unforeseeable, which either dissuade from or render
practically impossible an irrevocable decision whereby the
whole of life would remain oriented in a fixed direction. As a
complement, those who argue in this fashion warn us that
grace in its way of acting adapts itself to human nature and
respects its "laws" which also proceed from God and which
illustrate for us the paths his Providence follows regarding
man. A grace of perpetual vocation would do violence to
human psychology. Yet God does not call us to live in violence
but in freedom and inner repose.

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This form of argumentation contains valid elements as, for
instance, the need for seeking as perfect a harmony as possible
between divine vocation and human psychology in such a way
that the person called by God might live his vocation with
psychological spontaneity and free of interior violences which
would necessarily be converted into disfiguring elements.
Granted this, it is also necessary to recognize that human
psychology is not the first criterion for judging God's gifts.
When Jesus Christ instituted an indissoluble marriage bond
and a sacrament of Orders which imprints an indelible character, he thought of everything except doing violence to man.
His institution tends to facilitate the path of salvation. And
yet, he demands on man's side an irrevocable decision which
commits his whole life and marks out for him one direction
alone. As a matter of fact, we know that more than once both
married people and priests appeal to " psychological changes "
in order to be declared freed from all commitment. But everyone knows that this is not a serious reason, since psychological
variations cannot make marriage dissoluble or the sacrament of
Orders to cease to imprint a sacramental character. Psychological reasons, if they exist, should have been taken into account
before acquiring the irrevocable commitment that is inherent
in the sacraments of matrimony and Orders.
This analogy with the sacraments of matrimony and Orders
helps to locate the doctrine of perpetual religious vocation in
an atmosphere of serenity which allows us adequately to
reason about it, because serenity is necessary not only in order
to live a perpetual religious vocation but also to talk about
what it is in itself. Having said this, let us return to the
starting point which is the need to find a harmonious and
spontaneous coherence between divine vocation and human
psychology.
First of all, it must be kept in mind that we are dealing here
with a theological problem whose solution cannot be achieved
by lowering the divine until we make it one more human
element. An elementary rule of theological method obliges us
to follow the inverse way, i. e., to look for those energies or

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values in God's gifts which give strength to human psychology
and which elevate it to a new mode of being and of activity
that, being new and higher, not only does not lose any of the
natural spontaneity connatural to man but increases and consolidates it with the new forces it introduces.

Nature and Grace
The functions of God's grace in relation to nature and the
benefits which come from it is a theme which by far surpasses
what we could say here. We will limit ourselves to recalling the
fundamental notions proposed by Vatican II.
Nature and grace represent two orders that are coherent and
harmonious," 4 because "the same God is Savior and Creator,
Lord of human history as well as of salvation history." 95 This
harmony is not only a simple parallel but a convergence, since
human history tends to be completed in the history of salvation,96 and "the ultimate vocation of man is in fact one, and
divine" 97 whereby all man's activity is, in itself, directed to
the Paschal mystery of Christ in which it will find its definitive
consummation. 98 'Vhen both orders meet and merge, grace
performs a series of acts of which the Council also speaks very
often. 99 In the first place, grace does not take away from
nature any of the good which is in it, does not impede or stop
the development of its faculties and possibilities. But this act
whose content is expressed by the Council in a negative way is
nothing but the prerequisite for a long process which is described in these terms: " rather does she foster and take to
herself, insofar as they are good, the ability, resources and
customs of each people. Taking them to herself she purifies,
strengthens and enobles them." 100
Grace, or the Church which is its embodiment, assumes all
good. To assume is the most proper term used in Christology
Gaudium. et Spes, n. 59.
Ibid., n. 41.
96 Ibid., n. 45.
94

95

99

The fundamental

passage,

Gentium..
100 Lumen Gentium., n. 13.

97

98

Ibid., n. 22.
Ibid., nn. 38-39.

on which the others depend, is n. 13 of Lumen

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to express the action whereby the Word makes his own or takes
on human nature in being incarnated. Now the grace which
Christ grants us realizes a similar action toward the goods of
nature: it assumes them. The assuming action of the Word
produces in human nature definite effects. Excelling among
them is the effect of making it impeccable and of raising it to
the dignity of "instrument of salvation." 101 In an analogous
way the assumption of natural goods by grace exercises an
influence that consists mainly in purifying or cleansing them
from the stains of sin 102 and in elevating them to a new mode
of being and acting. 103 Because of all this the Church, which is
the incarnation of grace or " the universal sacrament of salvation," 104 " strives energetically and constantly to bring all
humanity with all its riches back to Christ its Head in the unity
of his Spirit." 105
Here we have in brief synthesis what we consider to be the
fundamental core of the ideas that Vatican II proposes concerning the relationship between nature and grace. To assume,
to purify, to strengthen, to elevate are verbs which express with
great precision the profound and powerful influence which grace
exerts on the totality of the "domains " of nature. It is necessary to keep them always in mind so as not to depart from
the magnificent " path " traced by the Council.

The Grace of Vocation
The concepts explained above regulate the relationships between nature and grace in any of their manifestations. They
are very universal concepts which range over the whole reality
of both levels. Nevertheless, it is not our concern at this
Sacrosanctum Concilium, n. 5.
Ad Gentes Divinitus, n. 8.
103 The
idea of elevation informs the entire
101

100

Lumen Gentium. The Council
employs it to designate the profoundest aspect of God's salvific plan: " the Eternal
Father created the whole world. His plan was to elevate men with a participation
in his own divine life" (n. 2). Cf. also Dei Verbum (Dogmatic Constitution on
Divine Revelation), nn. 2, 3, 6.
10 ' Lumen Gentium, n. 48.
105 Ibid., n. 13.

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time to insist on the universal aspects o£ the question but
rather to make application to the concrete case o£ the relationships between religious vocation and human psychology.
Religious vocation is an expression of grace; it is itself a
peculiar grace in a way similar to the way human psychology,
on its part, is within this world the noblest expression of
nature. Religious vocation, when it enters human psychology,
realizes typical acts of grace in its encounter with nature: it
assumes, purifies, strengthens, elevates. The immediate consequence of all this is that human psychology becomes singularly
improved and strongly attracted toward the proper goal of the
religious life. The force of attraction is perfectly expressed
by saying that human psychology is assumed by vocation.
For the practical purposes we are proposing here, it is of
great importance to stress that we are dealing with the attraction exerted by a specific grace which is that of a religious
vocation. From the fact that grace has an attractive power it
does not follow that any grace has an attractive power toward
everything, i. e., toward all things belonging to the Christian
life. This would mean that any grace could change in any
Christian direction any psychological functioning, even when
this would be absolutely not recommended from a human
viewpoint. It is clear that such a grace does not exist. Besides,
with this notion of grace we would end up in a radical denial
of any specific vocation within Christianity, since any grace
would work for everything.
We are dealing here with a specific grace which is a religious
vocation, granted to some specified Christians and not to others.
Of this concrete grace we affirm that it exercises an attraction
on the psychology of those definite Christians to whom God
concedes it. Accordingly, the psychology of such individuals
becomes assumed by the religious vocation and is oriented by
it to its own goal.
But, upon what does the assumption exerted by religious
vocation on human psychology fall? On the totality o£ the
psychology? On only some of its parts? These are questions
we consider of paramount importance for an exact statement

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and, consequently, for a good solution of the problem. The
impression is gained from certain writings that vocation lies
wholly in the purpose or decision of the will to consecrate oneself to Jesus Christ. Our personal opinion is that the decision
of the will counts for much, and that it must be considered as
one of the most important signs, but that in itself it does not
suffice.
Looking at the history of the subject one becomes aware of
a tendency to " spiritualize " vocation to excess, i. e., to
"locate" it in man's superior faculties, leaving aside, at least
in practice, the rest of human psychology. According to this
tendency vocation does not assume human psychology in its
totality but only in its most elevated parts or faculties. However, in our opinion, such an idea of vocation is mistaken and
contains, at least virtually, the germs of numerous and grave
problems which today are seriously preoccupying the Church.
Recent documents of the Church, and a rather elementary
reasoning on data which we have already seen, lead us to a
richer and more profound idea of vocation. The vocation more
frequently considered by the Magisterium is the priestly vocation. However, we think that this fact by no means invalidates
the explanation we are attempting because, first of all, there
is a true analogy between religious vocation and priestly
vocation, as we have already seen from explicit affirmations
made by the same Magisterium. In addition, the documents
concerning the nature of religious life already contain virtually
everything that is found affirmed explicitly of priestly vocation.
The Council generically states that God "properly endows
and aid with his grace " 100 those whom he chooses. To penetrate the contents of this principle, i.e., to precise what the
Council understands as appropriate qualities on which the
help of grace falls it would be necessary to gather together
everything that the Council says or insinuates on the criteria
of formation and selection of candidates to the priesthood.
But this procedure would turn out to be exceedingly lengthy
106

Optatam Totius, n. 2.

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and, for the time being, impossible to go through. Paul VI in
one of his personal documents exposes with absolute clarity
the range of the grace of vocation in relation to human
psychology: " The whole person must be equal to the harsh
burdens of the ministry." 107 And in order to get rid of any
shadow of doubt concerning the meaning of the whole man
he adds:
It is worth remembering that the acceptance of this call involves
more than the spiritual faculties o£ the candidate-his intellect
and free will. It involves also his senses and his very body. The

whole person must be equal to the harsh burdens of the ministry
and ready, if need be, to lay down his life as did the Good Shepherd.
We must not think that God would call young men lacking the
necessary qualities of mind and will, or suffering from some serious
psychic or organic defect. For these men would be unable to
shoulder the varied duties and burdens of the ministry. 108
According to this, it is perfectly clear that the grace of vocation
affects the totality of the person, in his spiritual faculties as
well as in his sensitive powers, whether of an internal order as
imagination, memory, etc., or on the level of the exterior
senses; not even the body is left outside the influence of
vocation.
The preceding notion of vocation is contained, according to
Paul VI, in a very universal principle concerning divine Providence which was explicitly enunciated by St. Thomas and
which the Pope makes his own, quoting the very words of
Aquinas: " When God chooses someone for a certain task,
he trains him so that he can carry it out worthily." 109 The
Pope adds that this norm for God's action is for priests a
basis for firm confidence, since God, together with vocation,
grants also all the endowments needed to bring the vocation to
a happy termination, 110 or, better still, these endowments are
Paul VI, Summi Dei Verbum (AAS 55 [1963], 987).
Ibid., pp. 986-987.
109 Summa
Theologiae, III, q. 27, a. 4. St. Thomas states this principle in
107
108

relation to the sanctity of the Virgin Mary, which is the holiness required by the
sublime mission to which God called her.
110 Paul VI, Summi Dei Verbum, p. 986.

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as integrating parts of a total grace which is vocation. Hence,
as he says: " One of the incomparable gifts characteristic of
our vocation is this inner security .... Nothing seems to be
more out of keeping with the psychology of a loyal priest than
being oppressed by doubts." 111
But let us return to the subject of the notion of vocation.
The doctrine exposed by Paul VI in his apostolic letter Summi
Dei Verbum reappears and is confined again in the encyclical
Sacerdotalis Caelibatus. 112 Priestly vocation is a grace that
affects the human person in the totality of his being and of
his faculties. And this is perfectly understandable, since the
exercise of the priestly ministry likewise commits the whole
person and claims the availability of all his energies. The
vocation which God gives as a capacitation for the priesthood
must be adequate for the purpose for which it is granted. All
of this facilitates the argument concerning religious vocation.
The documents of the Magisterium concerning this type of
vocation are not as explicit as those referring to priestly vocation. But the lack of explicitness can be supplied by fundamental argumentation.
In the preceding pages we have already perceived the insistence with which the Council affirms that religious life claims
the human person whole and entire, because it is a total
consecration to God, a complete surrender, for life, to the
service of God and to the spreading of his kingdom, a total
renunciation of all things which could impede the fervor of
charity and the perfection of divine worship. 113 Apart from
these and other similar expressions which could be multiplied,
it is evident that each one of the vows, characteristic of religious
life, affects preferably each one of the three layers or levels to
be distinguished in human life: spirit, sensibility, and material
goods. We say preferably because each religious vow, studied
in all its virtualities, affects the whole of human life under the
111 Paul VI, Allocution to the Pastors and Lenten Preachers of Rome (AAS 58
[1966], 226).
"'Paul VI, Sacerdotalis Caelibatus, n. 62 fl. (AAS 59 [1967], 682-683).
118 On all this cf. Lumen Gentium, n. 44.

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modality which is proper to it. Obedience, for instance, informs
not only the manifestations of the life of the spirit but also all of
human activity. And something similar can be said of each one
of the other vows. If we now consider not each one of them in
isolation but the three together insofar as they constitute a
global synthesis, it is evident that their coordinated and conjoined action ranges over the totality of human life in any of its
layers or levels and in all of them at once, insofar as they are
integrated into the unity of the person.
Our argument is based directly on the vows, because they
are the more clearly perceptible differential element when one
looks at religious life. But the vows are not the whole, not even
the most important part. Consideration of other elements reinforces the idea of totality which is inherent in religious life.
From what has been said it can be easily understood that
religious vocation must be adequate to what religious life is in
itself, since God grants it in order to enable one to embrace
this kind of life and perpetually to persevere in it. If life is
" marked " by the note of totality, vocation also either is total
or it is not vocation. In other words, either it devolves upon
the whole of the psychology of the person, without leaving out
of its influence any of its manifestations, or it is by no means
religious vocation but at best the appearance or shadow of
vocation. Priestly vocation and religious vocation have different contents, obviously, but, since both, to be duly actualized,
claim the totality of the person, they preserve a similarity
between them and mutually clarify each other. The comparative study of analogous truths has been and will always continue to be a legitimate method for providing theological
clarification.
Human Psychology
Vocation is a grace which informs the whole human psychology for the entire duration of the life of the person. Hence
an immediate conclusion follows: when human psychology is
analyzed in its relation to vocation there is need to study all
the psychological strata or levels, both in their " functioning "

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and in their connection and coordination with each other, and
this not only in a particular period of human life but in the
totality of its duration. Such a study necessarily turns out to
be too complex to be able to be done at a glance; it requires the
use of appropriate methods which can only be carried out by
an expert in the matter. 114
This elementary verification traces out for us in all its
crudeness the problem of finding out which psychologies are
completely and perpetually suitable to receive the grace of
religious vocation. God grants this type of vocation only to
some, i.e., he makes a selection between persons and persons.
Vocational selection, as any other belonging to the order of
Christian life, has a prime and supreme basis in the freedom of
God who distributes his gifts according to his will, and a
secondary or derivative basis in the very persons whose qualities make them more suitable for one or other goal.
The salvific will of God implies that the grace needed for
salvation can be incarnated in any human psychology, granted
that the latter offers its necessary cooperation. But the specific
grace of religious vocation, or any other which is reserved to
some, cannot be necessary for salvation (as a general rule),
because it is evident that those Christians who are not called
to the religious life do not incur by this lack of calling any
danger to their salvation. Arguing from principle, this implies
that the existence of human psychologies contrary to religious
vocation and at the same time compatible with Christian life is
possible. Are there in fact such psychologies? Everyday experience and the explicit declarations of the Magisterium force us
to answer in the affirmative.
Previously we have established an analogy between the
mystery of the Incarnation and the grace of religious vocation;
the Word assumes nature and, analogically, vocation assumes
the psychology of the person to whom it is communicated by
God. This analogy, which up to now we have employed only
1"
Paul VI rightly insists on this in Sacerdotalis Caelibatus, nn. 63-64 (AAS 59
[1967], 682-683) .

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in its positive aspects, also has a negative side. "What (the
Word) took up was our entire human nature such as it is
found among us in our misery and poverty, though without
our sin." 115 This means that sin is something that cannot be
assumed by the Word, not only because it is radically opposed
to God's sanctity but also because in itself it makes man's
salvation, willed and wrought by the Word through his incarnation, impossible. Now, if in man there is something which
cannot be assumed by the Word, a fortiori there can be things
which are not assumable by the grace of vocation, since this
grace is reserved for some specified Christians who, in the
totality of the Church, are always a tiny minority. Whatever is
opposed to the purpose of the Incarnation is not assumable by
the Word; analogically, in relation to religious vocation, all
those psychological types which are contrary to the practice of
the religious life cannot be assumed by a religious vocation. On
such psychological types a genuine religious vocation cannot
settle, though, on the other hand, they might be suitable for
a Christian life of a high level.
With this doctrinal background we are better prepared to
understand the documents.
Concretely, this divine calling manifests itself in a given individual
with his own definite personality structure which is not at all
overpowered by grace. . . . The life of the celibate priest, which
engages the whole man so totally and so delicately, excludes in fact
those of insufficient physical, psychic and moral qualifications. Nor
should anyone pretend that grace supplies for the defects of nature
in such a man.U 6

Paul VI speaks only about a de facto exclusion. But we think
that the exclusion is in principle, leaving aside only cases of an
exceptional intervention by God. Granted this exclusion in
115 Ad Gentes Divinitus, n. 3. The impeccability
of Jesus Christ is so clear in
Sacred Scripture and in the whole tradition of the Church that there is no need
to expatiate on it.
11 " Sacerdotalis Caelibatus, nn. 62 & 64. Another
important passage from Paul
VI is referred to in note 108 aboYe. Pius XII had said the same in Sacra
virginitas (AAS 46 [1954], 180-182). Cf. Vatican II, Optatam Totius, n. 6.

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principle, it can no longer be thought or pretended that " grace
here supplies for nature," since the grace of vocation is not
given to such natures, i.e., to persons of such psychological
types. Vatican II says practically the same thing about religious life:
Since the observance of total continence intimately involves the
deeper inclinations of human nature, candidates should not undertake the profession of chastity nor be admitted to its profession
except after a truly adequate testing period and only if they have
the needed degree of psychological and emotional maturity. 117
Something analogous could be said regarding the other vows.
But the need of a definite psychology or " personal structure "
is much more evident if one considers the three vows together
as forming a unity and as integrated in the complexus of all
the other elements which constitute religious life.
In order to judge whether a psychological type is assumable
by the grace of vocation it seems that special attention should
be given to the complex world of sensitivity, with all the
personal factors, hereditary and environmental, which could
affect it. Both on the cognitive and on the affective levels man's
life is closely bound up with psychological stability, which is
the basis of moral and religious stability. Religious vocation
demands a definite psychological type or "personal structure."
But it must not be thought that such a psychology is something
already given or irreformable, which is either possessed totally
from the outset or turns out to be unattainable. To promote
healthy inclinations and to correct deviant ones belongs to the
process of formation. However, it always presupposes a basis
which is not acquired in the formation process and whose lack
117 Perfectae Caritatis, n.
The Sacred Congregation of Religious and Secular
Institutes, in its Instruction of Aug. 1.5, 1969 on the contemplative life, affirms that
this kind of life " must be the product of mature reflection and unfaltering decisiveness, which enable one to renounce certain social advantages which are known and
esteemed at their true value. Such maturity is required in order that, with perfect
spiritual freedom, a type of life can be chosen in which the religious consumes his
en tire eatthly existence clinging to Christ alone and occupied with the affairs
of heaven."

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provides a clear proof that psychological dispositions belong to
the order of things which are assumable. Religious vocation
requires a psychological disposition upon which a total and
perpetual consecration can be established.

A Cause of Frequent Misunderstandings
Religious Life

about the

The insufficient attention often paid to the relationships
between vocation and human psychology is the occasion of
confusions which, because they affect so important a matter,
have serious practical consequences. The cause to which we
now refer is the idea which many have about the content of
religious life. Reading some explanations one might think that
religious life, in its proper sense, consists only of the practice
of the three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Everything else to be found in the life of religious belongs to the
common Christian life. The virtues, especially the theological
virtues, and the sacraments are not religious but merely Christian realities given by Christ to all in order to achieve the
perfection which consists primarily in union with God by
charity. The vows are no more than means-and non-essential
means-in the process of sanctification and union of man with
God. Indeed, means of this kind can be absent from the work
of sanctification without thereby endangering sanctification itself. On the other hand, it is possible that their presence might
become in some persons a true obstacle which, far from facilitating sanctification and salvation, impedes them or opposes them
with serious difficulties. In such cases the means ceased to be
a means and must be done away with.
Granted these arguments, the conclusion is clear. The religious, when he takes vows, commits himself to the use of
definite means of sanctification which for him are purely
accidental means. It is possible that in certain cases these vows
or accidental means become impediments for him. Once this
phenomenon happens and its verification realized, the genuinely
Christian thing to do is to get rid of the vows and to abandon

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the religious life which has degenerated into a danger for the
common Christian life within which is to be found that which
can sanctify everybody. Consequently, the accidental character
of the vows and of the religious life which is based on them to
maintain a perpetual vocation would lead us to a contradictory
situation which, on the one hand, would impel us to persevere
in such a vocation and, on the other, would pile up obstacles
to sanctification and salvation. It is obvious that God cannot
call for perseverance in something which, in principle, turns
out to be an impediment to union with him.
What can we say about all this? We cannot agree either with
the preceding way of conceiving religious life and its relations
with common Christian life or with the conclusions deriving
from such a notion, especially the one referring to the temporariness of religious life.
Let us note, first of all, that, if the preceding arguments
were valid, the temporariness of the vocation would be not a
possibility but a necessity, i.e., something excelling the contingency of some concrete cases and converted into a law or
inflexible norm, since it springs from the very nature of that in
which religious life is said to consist. A perpetual religious
vocation would be impossible, since it is affirmed as a principle
that religious life is a purely accidental means which of itself
can be transformed into an impediment to sanctification and
salvation. And this conclusion is quite serious, since it implies
that perpetual profession, introduced into the Church so many
centuries ago, zealously maintained by her in our own day,
and proposed by her as the best expression of a total consecration to Christ, is at bottom an immorality.
All of this is serious enough to demand a review of the starting point where the root of the evil is hidden. Previously, in
the section Perpetual Vocation and Total Consecration, we
offered a brief idea of the way we understand vocation and
religious life and their relationship to common Christian life.
Following Vatican II we have repeated many times that
religious life is not limited to a plain compliance with the vows
taken in profession but that it informs all the manifestations of

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the life of the religious. A brief formula expressing our central
idea could be the following : religious life is an original way
of living the totality of the Christian life within the Church
of Christ. 118 We think that only in this way does the repeated
Conciliar affirmation of religious life as total surrender of the
person and activity of religious to God make sense.
The Council states that the holiness professed by Christians
in their different states of life is one and the same. 119 Sometimes these words are understood superficially as though they
meant that the differential elements of each state, i.e., those
which are not formally present in other states of life, were
something merely accidental even for the state in which they
are found. But such an understanding cannot be sustained. In
order to be convinced of this, it will suffice to consider briefly
in marriage and in the priesthood what are the elements
differentiating the married and priests, elements which by no
means could be labelled mere accidents in the lives of either
married people or of priests. Why then does that which differentiates religious have to be considered without further qualification a pure accident which, in addition, can become an
impediment to sanctification and salvation? Dismissing this,
then, as lacking any basis, let us agree that the married state,
the priestly state, and the religious state are all of them original
modes of living the totality of the Christian life in the Church.
The unity of holiness, as proclaimed by the Council, is not
identified with uniformity but admits of a healthy pluralism,
clearly witnessed to by the gospel. It is God, not man, who
in the interior of Christianity produces and gives specific vocations whose content is different and which, therefore, qualifies
with different modalities and styles that sanctity which leads
us to the same goal. Plurality of vocations introduces into the
one sanctity a pluralism which, because it comes from God,
cannot but be perfectly legitimate, even entirely necessary for
the Church.
118 For further
explanations we refer to our book La Iglesia Imagen de Cristo
(Pamplona: OPE, 1969), ch. 7, pp. 326-334.
119 Lumen Gentium, n. 41.

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These considerations could be amply confirmed by the teaching of the Council, but we have already exposed much of this.
Reading the sixth chapter of Lumen Gentium and the entire
decree Perfectae Caritatis one never gets the idea that religious
life consists in a mere practice of the vows or that it is a merely
accidental thing. The reader will frequently come upon the
word charity and other words which appear there as the
expression of realities which constitute religious life. Religious
life is a whole within which the vows are not more than a part.
The judgment which such a whole merits from the Council is
well expressed in the following words: "all religious, both men
and women, who have a distinguished place indeed in the house
of the Lord, deserve special care in their pursuit of spiritual
progress for the good of the whole Church." 120 We wish to
warn that the vows can be considered part when we pay attention only to the acts whereby what we could call their material
fulfilment is concretized. But, if we take into account all their
presuppositions, implications, motivations, and ramifications, it
is clear that they range over the whole life of the religious, as
we have often said.
Two passages from Paul VI conclude this section. The first
shows the connection between charity and the religious life,
which thus appears as a powerful proclamation of the Absolute,
i. e., of something which does not suggest precisely the idea of
accidentality. The second passage presents religious life as a
fullness which realizes the surrender of the Church to Christ.
(Religious life) comprises a certain absolute-totalitas quaedama unique and total love. The soul must be given over to this love
completely; it must return to this love unceasingly if it is to live
the religious life in all its depth and authenticity. In a world that
seeks to rid itself of absolute commands, that tends to regard all
values as relative, the consecrated soul, focused unswervingly on
God by its vows, is anchored in the absolute, as it were. 121
Feel each time more persuaded that your life of love, of sacrifice, of
Presbyterorum Ordinis, n. 6.
Paul VI, Allocution to the Superioresses General gathered in Rome to study
the application of the decree Perfectae Caritatis (AAS 59 [1967], 340).
120

121

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living crucifixion with Christ will redound to the benefit of the
whole Church, because the members of secular and religious Institutes are a chosen portion of the Mystical Body, as a fullness which
realizes the surrender of the Church to Christ as Spouse, as sign and
as testimony .' 22

Temporary Vocation
We have made innumerable references to this form of vocation, always taking an attitude that excludes it. Now we
consider it necessary to qualify somewhat the extent of that
exclusion.
It has always been admitted that in the Church there have
existed genuine vocations but vocations frustrated because of
lack of correspondence on the part of the person who received
the grace. Any grace from God, and therefore also the grace
of religious vocation, requires a cooperation which man has to
give freely. If he who is called effectively complies with this
requirement of grace, his vocation is strengthened; if he does
not, his vocation " starves to death," i. e., is lost. And a genuine
but lost vocation turns out to be, in fact, a temporary vocation.
There can be no difficulty in this.
Thoughout the history of theology many more or less explicit
affirmations of a temporary vocation can be found, though this
precise expression is not found. In the literature on the controversy concerning the Mendicant Orders during the 13th
century we can find ideas which can orientate toward a temporary vocation, especially when two themes are studied: 1)
the pueri oblati and 2) the vow to enter religion, which is valid
and binding, though it is not always followed by an effective
perseverance till the end of life, since some Christians receive
the grace of persevering and others only that of beginning.
It is impossible to delay now on the historical details of the
controversy or on the precise sense which the ideas mentioned
above have in it. But we can affirm with certitude that the
modern problem whether religious vocation is in itself perpetual
or only temporary falls totally outside the perspective of the
122 Paul
VI, Allocution of June 6, 1969 on his visit to the Regina Mundi
Institute.

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theologians participating in the controversy. Their clear and
evident intention is to show the moral legitimacy of certain
acts from which a religious life follows and which sometimes
lasts only for a brief time in spite of which it can and must be
considered to be a grace of God.
Leaving aside all these subjects, it is worthwhile reflecting a
bit on temporary vocation in itself. The first thing we need
is to clarify the vocabulary and to distinguish between religious
vocation and vocation without any other specification. Religious vocation, as we have already said, must be suited to
religious life, as it is pTOposed in the gospel in its fundamental
outlines. The teaching of the gospel refers beyond possible
doubt to a following of Christ through the practice of the
counsels which lasts for the whole of life. Therefore it is
obvious that Teligious vocation whereby someone is called to
embody such a following of Christ cannot but be perpetual;
only in this way does it respond to the object or goal toward
which it moves. To talk about counsels which, as they are
proposed in the gospel, demand perpetuity, and, on the other
hand, to think that a merely temporary vocation is a grace
adequate to embody them in life turns out to be a real contradiction.
Religious life, as it in fact existed and exists in the Church, is
fittingly expressed in perpetual profession, i. e., in bonds which
are exactly adjusted to the peculiar character of the evangelical
counsels. This concrete form of institutionalization proposed
by the Church for religious life is the best and most appropriate
channel for the accomplishment of the full will of Christ regarding the evangelical counsels. And outside this channel the
Church does not admit that any association of Christians may
receive the name of religious institute. Therefore, iL is not
possible to separate vocation to the communitarian and public
realization of the evangelical counsels from vocation to the
institutionalized religious life, i. e., the one which is based on
perpetual vocation. 123 In other words, vocation to the religious
123 In order
lo solYc some problems wbicb could arise on the occasion of the
affirmations made in the text, it would be convenient to keep in mind and

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life is a perpetual and only a perpetual vocation. If in fact it
is not realized, this is because of faults in human cooperation
on the part of one or other of those who mediate in the long
process of its perception, development, formation, and maintenance throughout the difficulties of life.124
A temporary religious vocation is something that makes no
sense and turns out to be a real contradiction. It is possible
that God grants graces which, because of different circumstances, are interpreted as a calling to religious life and that this
apparent call guides the person toward a religious institute in
which he would live for some time but from which he would
end up by leaving, ordinarily during the formation years. Loyal
interpretation of God's graces received at a definite moment
and sincere incorporation into a religious institute subjectively
justify the behavior of that person and of those who directed
or confirmed his first steps; but none of this can be identified
with a genuine religious vocation understood in its true nature
of a grace whereby God calls one to the practice of the counsels
such as they are proposed in the gospel. The appearance of
religious vocation, though it may remain for years, is not a
religious vocation. Let us say that the verification of lack of
vocation is not the loss of vocation, though the verification
might be realized much too late.
analogically to apply to religious vocation what Paul VI says about vocation to
the priesthood:
" The priestly vocation, although inspired by God, does not
become definitive or operative without having been tested and accepted by those
in the Church who hold power and bear responsibility for the ministry serving
the ecclesial community. It is, therefore, the task of those who hold authority in
the Church to determine, in accordance with the varying conditions of time and
place, who in actual practice are to be considered suitable candidates for the
religious and pastoral service of the Church, and \\·hat should be required of them "
Sacerdotalis Cadibatus, n. 15 (AAS 59 [1967], 663). "The priesthood is a
ministry instituted by Christ for the service of his Mystical Body which is the
Church. To her belongs the authority to admit to that priesthood those whom she
judges qualified-that is, those to whom God has given, along with other signs of
an ecclesiastical vocation, the gift of a consecrated celibacy " (ibid., n. 962; p. 682).
124 In this process not only those commit
themselves who receive the grace of
vocation but also those devoted to their formation and the whole Christian
community. Cf. Presbyterorum Ordinis, n. II; Optatam Totius, n. 2; Ad Gentes
Divinitus, n. 15 (circa finem). On the special responsibility of the parents, cf.
Lumen Gentium, n. 11 (end of second paragraph); Apostolicam Actuositatem, n. ll.

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What has been said thus far does not necessarily exclude all
possibility of a temporary vocation. Religious vocation is
perpetual, but nowhere is it said that every vocation to the
practice of the evangelical counsels has to be a religious vocation. We have already said that the priestly vocation includes
an invitation more or less direct, more or less pressing, to the
practice of the counsels, especially in the matter of the episcopal
priesthood. Let us try to explain briefly this possibility of a
temporary vocation.
Religious life takes the evangelical counsels in all the fullness
of content which belongs to them, i. e., as they are proposed in
the example and preaching of Jesus. But this does not exclude
forms of life in which the counsels are taken, so to speak, a
little reduced. The "reduction" could affect the number of the
counsels or the duration of the commitment.
Religious life includes the three counsels of poverty, chastity,
and obedience; they form a unitarian synthesis in which each
counsel informs the others and is informed by them. But this
does not mean that the three counsels have to be taken together
always and necessarily. There are Christians who commit
themselves to the practice of one specific counsel and not the
others 125 with a commitment which cannot be acquired seriously without a special grace of God that we call vocation (though
not religious vocation) .126 This commitment can be not only
hidden and merely private but also external and public, as the
one which is acquired in the reception of Holy Orders. The
priest, for instance, becomes obliged to celibacy not by virtue
of a religious vocation (unless it is a case of religious priests)
but of grace or vocation which comes from God though distinct
from religious vocation.
Nothing impedes this reduction, whereby the " block " of
evangelical counsels (characteristic of religious life) is broken,
from being applied also to the order of duration. The counsels
Pius XII, Sacra virginitas (AAS 46 [1954], 163).
The Council, referring to virginity and celibacy, says that it is a "precious
gift of divine grace which the Father gives to some men " (Lumen Gentium,
n. 42).
105

126

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are counsels. This apparent platitude has great importance,
since it means that no Christian is obliged to comply with them
personally 127 and that, if he wishes to comply with them, he
can do so either by committing himself to the totality of their
content as to matter and duration or by committing himself
only to a part. The partial or temporary commitment is a
means of imitating in a reduced fashion the type of life of
Christ which cannot cease to be beneficial for the Christian
who accepts it and for the whole Church. The fact that this is
not enough to constitute religious life does not mean that it is
not possible. In fact, just as there are Christians who commit
themselves to the practice of one counsel and not the others,
so are there also those who commit themselves only for a
definite period of time and not for life. Actually, Christians who
impose on themselves temporary commitments do not form
communities. 128 But nothing seems to impede that in the future
there will be communities based on these commitments, at
least as regards the majority of the members. Rather, it is
conceivable that the existence of such communities will be an
efficacious means of approach to the practice of the evangelical
counsels for a large number of Christians who otherwise would
not have any serious contacts with these valuable instruments
of sanctification and the apostolate. Besides, Vatican II actively urges all movements and initiatives directed to procure a
progressive purification of Christian life by the use of a concrete
program which is the effort to embody with increasing perfection the beatitudes 129 and the spirit of the evangelical
counsels. 130 We consider that the communities we are referring
127 The obligation of the evangelical counsels affects the Church as a whole, not
particular Christians. It is a case analogous to the sacraments of matrimony and
Holy Orders. Cf. our book La Iglesia Imagen de Cristo, ch. 7, pp. 350-355.
128 As we have alreauy
said previously, there are religious communities which
never take perpetual vows, but their members at a given moment assume the
commitment of indefinitely renewing temporary vows, or by some other means
they commit themselves in a definitive manner with the Institute. Besides, as we
have also saiu, this very fact is somewhat anomalous from a theological point
of view.
129 Lumen Gentium, nn. 8 & 38.
130 Ibid., n. 42 fin.

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to could contribute considerably to the achievement of this
goal.
The institutionalization
of this type of community could
begin by service to the missions. In the Church there is a
specifically missionary vocation which last "for life." 131 But,
at the same time, "the obligation of spreading the faith is
imposed on every disciple of Christ, according to his ability."
In other words, every Christian vocation has a missionary
project 133 and by the same token it shares to a great or lesser
extent in what we call a specifically missionary vocation.
A practical way of actualizing the missionary spirit inherent
in the Christian vocation is to devote oneself for some time
(which can vary according to different cases) to the direct
service of the missions. In fact, this already exists in the
Church and tends to take on every day a greater increase. It
could be notably favored by the formation of homogeneous
groups and, if the case permits, of communities whose members
mutually aid each other in the accomplishment of their missionary service. Nothing seems to be opposed to the idea that
these communities, once formed, could practice the evangelical
counsels during the time of their missionary commitment. The
counsels encourage apostolic zeal and are excellent instruments
for an effective missionary activity.
At times this temporary service to the missions is rendered
by Christians already united in marriage. Naturally, it is not
a case of proposing to them that they form communities to
practice the evangelical counsels. But it seems clear to us that
Vatican II proposes for laymen a series of missionary tasks to
which they can commit themselves for a definite time and
whose realization would be favored by the formation of communities within which the counsels could be practiced also
temporarily .134
What is said here with regard to service of the missions could
be applied analogically to many other forms of life and ministry
131
132

Ad Gentes Divinitus, n.
Lumen Gentium, n. 17.

133
134

Ad Gentes Divinitus, nn. 35-36.
On such tasks cf. ibid., nn. 17 & 41.

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within the Church. Perhaps the family is one of the fields which
could benefit greatly from the establishment of communities
of the type to which we refer. The way the world is going and
its progressive secularization gives the family an even greater
importance in the maintenance of Christian life and in the very
existence of the Church. That is why the different movements
of family spirituality represent today one of the more promising
manifestations of the life of the Church in preparing and consolidating its future.
If, as we have said, Christian life in general must be more
and more improved and embody with increasing perfection the
beatitudes and the spirit of the evangelical counsels, this seems
necessary especially in the case of Christian families upon
whom more and more a responsibility is going to fall which
only they can face. This presupposed, we ask ourselves: would
it not be possible for Christians willing to form a family,
solidly based on the beatitudes and the spirit of the evangelical counsels, to prepare themselves for the goal with the
effective practice of the counsels for a more or less extended
period? If the idea can be realized, nothing seems to be opposed
to this realization taking place within communities whose
" functioning" is not easy to foresee at this time. The importance this would have for the Christian improvement and
promotion of the family seems evident, although it is also clear
that both can be achieved, with greater or lesser effectiveness,
by other means.
The future of priestly and religious vocations is presented
each time more bound up with the existence of families which
embody the beatitudes and the spirit of the evangelical
counsels, since only from within such families will it be possible
to find children and young people with the human and Christian qualities which would make the priesthood and the religious life desirable for them and would make them sustain
themselves in those vocations in the midst of a world increasingly more complex and secularized. It seems that we are approaching a time in which vocations will hardly prosper if they
do not proceed from a family which had been " as a kind of

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introductory seminary," 135 since only within a family will they
be able to acquire the roots which allow them to keep themselves afloat for life. This is why every movement which
consolidates within families a genuinely evangelical spirit is of
capital importance not only for the family but also for the
future of priestly and religious vocations. We consider that the
existence of communities whose members practice the evangelical counsels temporally can be a good help for the achievement
of such goals.
What ever might be said of temporary communities and of
the services they might render, one thing is clear: that the
forms which the manifestations of holiness can assume in the
Church are inexhaustible and that nobody can set limits to
them. Nobody will be able to demonstrate that the communitarian practice of the evangelical counsels has necessarily
to be adjusted to the established pattern of religious life. In
principle, nothing impedes such a practice from taking on
reduced forms which will not be religious life but which will
certainly constitute a new mode of proclaiming the sanctity of
the Church and of rooting within the universal Christian
family that esteem for some counsels in which the eschatological
and pilgrim character of the Church singularly stands out.
This means that, in principle, the existence of a temporary
vocation is perfectly possible; indeed, it is presented as an
authentic enrichment of the life of the Church.
Secular Institutes have been an enrichment of the doctrine
and the traditional practice concerning a life consecrated to
God by the following of the evangelical counsels. But they did
not substract any value from the institutions with a longer
history, the religious Orders and Congregations. Something
similar can take place with the theme of temporary vocation,
considered as presupposition for the establishment of communities of a new type whose shape one cannot foresee but which
at any rate will suppose an effort and an achievement of the
Church in its constant search to introduce the practice of the
135

Optatam Totius, n. 2.

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evangelical counsels within any new form of human life. It
would be strange indeed if Vatican II could take place in the
Church without provoking the appearance of new forms of
surrender to God.
"\Ye will make a concluding observation which seems to us of
great practical interest. Any healthy tradition is open to a
homogeneous development with which it enriches itself, and all
legitimate enrichment springs from a tradition with which it
is coherent and whose validity it confirms. Applied to the case
at hand, this means that the tradition of perpetual religious
vocation leaves the door open to forms of temporary vocation
and that, on the other hand, the possible forms of temporary
vocation can be integrated in a coherent and spontaneous
fashion with perpetual religious vocation. It would be a mistake with regrettable consequences to seek support in perpetual
religious vocation in order to discard any form of temporary
vocation or, on the contrary, to present a possible temporary
vocation as a proof that religious vocation is not perpetual. To
give each thing its own is the best guarantee of reaching a
balanced-and what is more important-a true solution.
ARMANDO BANDERA,

Convcnto de San Esteban
Salamanca, Sp!lin

O.P.

ACADEMIC DISSENT:

AN ORIGINAL ECCLESIOLOGY

A REVIEW ARTICLE

T

WO VOLUMES 1 WHICH spell out a well-publicized position on
dissent bear extensive critical evaluation. The first volume, purports
to repeat substantially the theological rationale which Charles Curran and
his associates submitted to the Inquiry Board at the Catholic University
in justification of their public dissent to Humanae Vitae. The companion
volume, The Responsibility of Dissent: The Church and Academic Freedom, is a development of the written testimony presented to the Inquiry
Board by counsel on behalf of the " subject professors " in vindication
" of the propriety and responsibility of their actions in the light of
accepted academic norms." The first volume contains its own history of
the case.
Within thirty hours of the encyclical's promulgation a neuresthenic
telephonic harvesting of signatures was activated with zealous vigor by
Charles Curran and twenty associates of the Department of Theology of
The Catholic University of America for subscription to their Statement
of July 30, 1968 in opposition to the doctrinal prescriptions of Humanae
Vitae. Some of the subscribers did admit that they had not yet read the
text of the encyclical or, if they had, that it was hardly with benefit of
those schoarly and meditative reflections that a broader expansion of time
would have encouraged. Time has the numbing effect of dimming the
memory of the asperities of this contestation of a solemn and definitive
papal teaching but the spiritual wounds inflicted upon the faithful may
be long in mending. The raw aching fact is that scandal was given. These
dissidents did interpose their pastoral counsel between the Supreme
Pastor of the Universal Church and the faithful in a grave matter of
morality touching intimately the conscience of spouses. None of the
numerous statements of Pope Paul subsequent to the promulgation of
Humanae Vitae in any way has substracted from the full original force
of its doctrinal content, nor-more nearly to the nerve center of the
sensitivities of academic freedom, its prerogatives and immunities in
theological disciplines, as they are related to the grave responsibilities of
1 Dissent IN and FOR the Church: Theologians and Humanae Vitae, by Charles
E. Curran, Robert E. Hunt, Terence R. Connelly; The Responsibility of Dissent:
The Church and Academic Freedom, by John F. Hunt and Terence R. Connelly with
Charles E. Curran, Robert E. Hunt, Robert K. Webb. S<'arch Book paperbacks.
New York: Sheed & Ward, 1969.

636

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Catholic theologians and priests to teach, preach, publish, and counsel in
accordance with the authentic teaching of the Catholic Church-has
there been any expression of disapproval from the Vatican on the correctness of Cardinal O'Boyle's stand on Humanae Vitae, both in his capacity
as Chancellor of the University and as Ordinary of his priests.
My own religious and intellectual response to these two volumes is
such that to dispense with them by the customary brief review would
be less than fair to readers of the review. There is need for an articlelength review in order that frequent referrals to the text may disclose the
evidence for the critical appraisal.
The title, preface, and first chapter, The Historical Context, chronicle
the events leading to the theological contestation of Humanae Vitae by the
author and the " subject professors " with a faultless choice of words ami
expressions. The title is Dissent IN and FOR the Church, (italics in the
original). The Preface spells out the refreshing liberalization and independence of priests and layman " of ecclesiastical direction " and " from
the institutional Church" and notes that "Pope Paul VI has spoken
frequently in a fearful, and even reactionary, manner about the contemporary tumult in the Church." (italics supplied) . The defense of dissent
is undertaken " with the hope that the Roman Catholic Church will thus be
able to carry more faithfully its God-given mission in history." And the
volume is dedicated " especially to those unjustly accused of disloyalty
without benefit of due process." Their Statement did not constitute a
" rebellion or revolution " but rather was inspired by a conscientious
responsibility to do just what they did and in the very manner they did it.
Summarily, my own appraisal of the Statement is that it is a supercilious
pastiche of highly questionable postulates, such as the crude charge that
the Roman Pontiff does not correctly understand orthodox catholic
ecclesiology, the referrals to past reversals of authoritative papal pronouncements on matters about which even onetime militant Protestant scholarship has long since become too embarassed to regurgitate, the position
that Humanae Vitae is at variance with affirmations of Vatican II and
demonstrates no advance upon Casti Connubii, etc.
The Statement-and the exposition of all that is implied therein in
succeeding chapters-constitutes
a bold and novel ccclesiology which, we
respectfully submit, none of the Pontiffs, Councils, and Fathers of the
Church have ever known, and surely one that might have drawn unusual
interest had it been proposed to the Fathers of Vatican II as the Dogmatic
Constitution on the Church.
Chapter Two, Preliminary Consideration concerning the Nature of Theology and the Role of Theologians, and Chapter Three, Preliminary Consideration concerning the Nature and Function of the M agisterium, represent the schema of the constitution of the Church which the authors are
confident that the ever " ongoing" divine revelation will ratify and make

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JOSEPH F. COSTANZO

incontestably clear to the community of believers in unearthing the original
and authentic divine intent of Our Divine Lord from the historical incrustations of usurpations of ecclesiastical power and from uncritical deference
and obedience to an " aggrandized teaching authority residing in councils
and Church officers."
In the face of this trend toward establishing an exclusive teaching prerogative ;n
the hierarchy, recent historical studies have exercised a modifying influence by
pointing out the presence of error by way of theological dissent. Dissent thus
appears traditionally as one possible, responsible option in the theological task,
and in its own way, is an intrinsic element in the total magisterial function of the
Church. The entire Church, as truly magistral, can never be contained simply and
exclusively in what has become known as the hierarchical magisterium. (pp. 86-87) .

The credibility of Dissent IN and FOR the Church then rests on the
necessity of bringing the " theologians," dissenters as well as nondissenters,
within the magisterial authority of the Church as, supposedly, established
by Christ, Our Lord. This is done by the employment of a concatenation
of terms excised from Vatican II and at variance with their original
meaning in text and context. The argument proceeds as follows: The
People of God-all, without exception, are called upon to the aedificatio
Corporis Christi which St. Paul proclaims (Col. g: 7; Eph. 4: 16). Now
surely within this all comprehensive sweep " theologians " are associated
in a special way by a "coresponsibility," a notion that is in accordance
with and is further reenforced by the full implications of " collegiality of
bishops." Now, when we turn to the principal document of Vatican II,
Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, the very first
chapter is an unambiguous reaffirmation of the doctrine of the Mystical
Body of Christ with eighty-four scriptural references to attest to this, and
of the supplementary notes five are nominatim to Pius XII's Mystici
Corporis and Humani Generis and others to the Fathers and Doctors of
the Church, Conciliar documents, and papal encyclicals in support of it.
Let the reader compare Chapter One of Lumen Gentium on the Mystical
Body of Christ with the only two scant considerations of it by Curran:
Pius XII, in Mystici Corporis (1943) and again with more emphasis in Humani
Generis (1950), insisted that the mystical body of Jesus on earth was simply
identical with the Roman Catholic Church. In Humani Generis, the Pope insisted
that his teaching on the matter was to settle the discussion among theologians.
Vatican II has produced a different teaching. (p. 80)

Has it?
In the twentieth century, the distinct and "official" recovery of a broader-based
ecclesiology under one biblical image was brought about by the encyclical Mystici
Corporis of Pius XII (1943). This encyclical marked an important stage in the
development

of ecclesiology-the

end of one era

(taking

up the findings and

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themes of over a century of minority theological works) and the beginnings of
another era. Ecclesial life-style, howenr, was not significantly changed by the
issuance of Mystici Corporis. However, almost immediately, it was recognized
that the doctrine and limits of the 1943 encyclical and the use of solely
the " mystical body" image were inadequate to articulate properly an authentic
churchly self-awareness, both domestically in terms of the internal componency and
life-dynamics of the Church, and especially in respect to other Christian communities outside the Roman communion. (p. 95)

Is this a valid reflection of Chapter One of the Dogmatic Constitution of
the Church on the Mystical Body of Christ?
Chapter Two, On the People of God, follows upon, without abrogating,
the preceding and first chapter on the Mystical Body of Christ. It affirms
the universal salvific will of God, the redemptive merits of Christ's passion,
death, and Resurrection, the removal of ethnic, racial, national, and geographic barriers among the People of God, etc. Within this all comprehensive catholicity all the people are the people of God, and they are
diversely related to the Mystical Body of Christ, his Church on earth. The
Catholic faithful are " fully incorporated "; the catechumens are incorporated into the Church by intention; the baptized non-Catholic Christians
are " linked " with the Catholic Church to the degree that they " share "
by baptism and other sacraments, the acceptance of Scripture, and participation in prayer in the life of God. All these are " prompted " by Christ's
grace to that unity by " faith in its entirety " and " union of communion
with the successor of Peter " for which " Mother Church never ceases to
pray, hope and work that this may come about." (15) If there is a
fuller and more radiant bloom to the doctrinal formulation of the People
of God, its roots are deeply embedded in medieval theologizing.
Chapter Three of Lumen Gentium-On the Hierarchical Structure of the
Church and in Particular on the Episcopate-with its firm reaffirmation of
the Petrine commission, its unique and exclusive prerogatives, its independent, plenary, and unconditioned magisterial authority, and the formal
explicitation of the doctrine of the collegiality of the bishops (and of the
bishops alone, not a collegiality of any other ministry) as a constitutive
part of ecclesial magisterium in its union with, agreement with, and by
consent of the Vicar of Christ, stands out with the full radiance of divine
revelation against the congregationalist ecclesiology of Curran; it stands out
fully authoritarian and unabashedly hierarchical. All this in one of the only
two dogmatic constitutions of Vatican II.
But the college or body of bishops has no authority unless it is simultaneously
conceived in terms of its head, the Roman Pontiff, Peter's successor, and without
any lessening of his power of primacy over all, pastors as well as the general
faithful. For in virtue of his office, that is, as Vicar of Christ and pastor of the
whole Church, the Roman Pontiff has full, supreme, and universal power over the

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Church. And he can always exercise this power freely. The order of bishops is the
successor to the college of the apostles in teaching authority and pastoral rule; or,
rather, in the episcopal order the apostolic body continues without a break. Together with its head, the Roman Pontiff, and never without its head, the episcopal
order is Lhe subject of supreme and full power over the universal Church. But
this power can be exercised only with the consent of the Roman Pontiff. For
Our Lord made Simon Peter alone the rock and keybearer of the Church (cf. Mt.
16: 18-19), and appointed him shepherd of the whole flock (cf. Jn. 21:15 ff.).
(Lumen Gentium), n. 22.

As Oscar Cullman, the renowned Protestant theologian observer at the
Council remarked, the formulation of the doctrine of the collegiality of the
bishops left the full and plenary powers of the Roman Pontiff undiminished
and unconditioned as before, and, if I may add, completely removed any
lingering doubt to the contrary on the intent and meaning of the Vatican I
definition. Square all this with the shabby historicism on p. 56 and
following.
The insistence of the authors of Dissent that theologians are intrinsic to
the ecclesial magisterium is the most rootless of all their protestations.
There is no warrant for it in the mandate of Christ, neither explicitly,
implicitly, or by any mamH'r of prolonged inferential ratiocination. There
is no evidence of such a role for theologians in the writings of the Fathers
of the Church nor in any of the official documents of the Church, papal
and conciliar. And for all the dissidents' facile rhetorical references to
Vatican II, the Council Fathers never graced them with a distinct classification or separate consideration as they did with the Roman Pontiff, the
bishops, the religious, laity, and priests. Indeed, the word itself "theologians" appears only once among the 103,014 words of the sixteen
official texts promulgated by the Ecumenical Council. Considering the
centrality of the dissendents' concept of the role of theologians as an
intrinsic element in the total magisterial function of the Church " (p. 87)
to their ecclesiology, it seems that they have been slighted by a Council
celebrated for its formulation of the collegiality of bishops and by those
very bishops who were accompanied by pcriti.
Undaunted, the dissidents manage to overcome this formidable accumulation of traditional ecclesiological barriers by several ploys. First, the
absolutes and certitudes of Christian doctrine are brought within the
changing concept of valid knowledge and subjected to the historical and
cultural limitations to which most human science is heir.
The object of science has changed from the Aristotelian-Scholastic
ideal (" certain
knowledge of things through their causes ")-and the resultant concern for university, necessity and certainty-to the contemporary scientific ideal (complete
explanation of all data in terms of their intelligible relationships) -and the
resultant concern for development, probability and matter-of-factness.
(p. 82)

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In the light of an appreciation of historical growth and development, the theologian
realizes he will never attain the older ideal of absolute certitude. (p. 32)

(What a field day Gilbert K. Chesterton would have had with these new
ecclesiologists and a pity we have been denied so much amusement.)
What shall we say of the absolutes of " whatever I have taught you " that
Christ Our Lord commanded his Apostles to teach to every man everywhere to the end of time unconditionally for eternal salvation? At this
juncture of theologizing, there must be a denial to any empowerment on
earth to definitive teaching-including the last Council.
'Vith all reverence, theologians recog11ize that the documents of Vatican II were
"dated " on the first day after solemn promulgation.
The spirit of Vatican II mighL be i!,'110red in favor of the letter and limitations of
officially promulgated formulations. Reference in the future to the letter of the
pronouncements of Vatican II as the final norm for e\·aluating theological data
would effectively bring Roman Catholic ecclesiological progress to a halt. This is
not because Vatican II formulations are unsuitable; rather, it is because they are
intrinsically limited to what the Council :Fathers intended them to be-formulations
which express, for the most part, the maximum capacity of that time but which
do not preclude future, ongoing developments beyond the categories of Vatican II
itself. (pp. 100, 101) (italics supplied)

And if this be true of Vatican II, then it is no less true of all the
ecumenical councils since Nicaea. Whether they realize it or not, the dissidents have extinguished the blaze of their fiery zeal to gray ashes. For, if
Vatican II is "dated" on the first day after their solemn promulgation
in an "ongoing " process of religious knowledge and understanding, then
there really never is any dissent. How could one distinguish an orthodox
from a heterodox (Catholic) theologian?
A negative book review is generally not likely to encourage its readers to
peruse the volume, much less to advertise its sales. I for one earnestly
urge all who were interested or troubled by the Statement of the principal
and the " subject professors " and by succeeding events which brought into
their train among other considerations the question of the prerogatives and
immunities of academic freedom to read Dissent IN and FOR the Church
studiously together with a copy of the Documents of Vatican II. We have
noted how far apart are Dissent's referrals to the Mystical Body of
Christ, the People of God, the papacy, the collegiality of bishops, and the
hierarchical Church, as well as the role the dissident " theologians " claim
to be rightfully their own within the magisterium of the Church from the
doctrinal teaching of the Fathers of the Council as solemnly set down in
Lumen Gentium. The reader of Dissent ought also to observe whether its
referrals to the Council's teaching on religious freedom is based on a correct
understanding and application of the authentic meaning of the Declaration

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JOSEPH F. COSTANZO

On Religious Freedom, (Dignitatis Humanae).
reference reads as follows:

One such provocative

Vatican II, with its declarations on collegiality and religious liberty, has made every
contemporary theologian particularly familiar with doctrinal development and with
the implications of that process for his interpretative endeavors. (p. 35) (see also
p. 100).

Now, surely, it is not to the discredit of the Fathers of the Council nor is
it a slight upon the Council's Declaration On Religious Freedom that
neither their deliberations nor the document's content in anyway were
concerned even remotely with " doctrinal development and the implications
of that process for (every contemporary) theologian's interpretative endeavors."
Religious freedom, in turn, which men demand as
necessary to fulfill their duty to worship God, has to do with immunity from
coercion in civil society. Therefore, it leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine
on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the
one Church of Christ. (Dignitatis Humanae, l.)

The reader of Dissent ought earnestly to search the Council's document to
note whether the " subject Professors " and their principal have based
their ecclesiological theologizing on the teaching of the Council Fathers
and further, in broader context, whether, in fact, the main thesis of The
Responsibility of Dissent: the Church and Academic Freedom, the companion volume, has been virtuously exercised. Of course, the reader must
also bear in mind that they have written:
With all reverence, theologians recognize that the documents of Vatican II were
" dated " on the first day after solemn promulgation. (p. 100).

With such an escape hatch, it would be rather difficult to hold anyone of
them to account.
The authors of Dissent exert much effort on distinguishing between
infallible and noninfallible teachings of the magisterium. Their discussion,
however, is inadequate and the emphasis misplaced. To begin with, the note
of infallibility is attached to the solemn definitions of the Vicar of Christ,
to the solemn definitions of an ecumenical council, not, however, without
approbation and ratification of the Roman Pontiff, and to what has been
traditionally recognized by the theologians themselves: infallibilis ex
ordinaria magisterio. Of this last, Dissent is completely silent despite the
fact that Vatican II first speaks of this infallibility before expounding thai
of the Roman Pontiff, followed by the infallible pronouncements of a council
acting together with the successor of Peter. Dissent does fix upon noninfallible teachings of the Church which are authentic but-as they will
argue-not binding even if and when the Teaching Authority of the

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Church says that it is binding in conscience, as it did in Humanae Vitae.
This is as necessary to the argumentation of Dissent as the necessity of
inserting the "theologians" within the magisterium. Summarily, this
necessitous course of logic proceeds as follows: Infallibility absolutely
precludes the possibility of error. Anything less than an infallible teaching
does not foreclose absolutely such a possibility of error. And herein is
grounded ultimately the possibility of dissent (p. 40) and the recourse to
probabilism whereby an alternate course of conduct becomes justifiably
permissible. A number of clarifications are here in order. An authentic
noninfallible teaching of the magisterium is invested with certitude, that
is, with moral, practical certitude. Such a certitude precludes and, in fact,
is unrelated to any consideration of a contrary probable opinion. It is not
the absolute possibility of error that an authentic noninfallible teaching of
the Church speculatively does not foreclose that establishes the justifying
grounds for recourse to the principle of probabilism. Nor is such recourse
dependent upon the acknowledgement of a " doubtful law does not bind,"
a popular axiom which presumes what it denies. Probabilism does not rely
on the absolute possibility of error but rather, given the absence of
certitude (which an authentic noninfallible teaching of the Church does
provide), it is an exercise of the virtue of prudence to choose between two
solidly probable opinions. No such claim on the absence of certitude on the
Church's absolute ban against artificial contraceptives may be made as
existing within the Magisterium, whatever doubts some private theologians
may have entertained within their own persuasion after 1963. (At this
point we may appreciate more fully why it was necessary for the " subject
professors " and their principal to bring the dissidents into the authority
of the Church.)
Of the universality of commitment prior to the Council John T.
Noonan wrote:
No Catholic the<Jlogian has ever taught, "Contraception is a good act." The teaching on contraception is clear and apparently fixed forever. (Contraception: A
History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologiana and Canonists [1966], p. 6)
No Catholic writer before 1963 had asserted
contraception was wrong. (p. 512)

that the general prohibition

of

And on Casti Connubii: whose validity and binding force the Statement
called into question, Professor Noonan wrote:
How great was its authority? By the ordinary tests used by the theologians
to determine whether a doctrine is infallibly proclaimed, it may be argued that the
specific condemnation of contraceptive interruption of the procreative act is infallibly
set out. The encyclical is addressed to the universal Church. The Pope speaks in
fulfillment of his apostolic office. He speaks for the Church. He speaks on moral
doctrine that he says " has been transmitted from the beginning." He " promul-

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JOSEPH F. COSTANZO

gates " the teaching. If the Pope did mean to use the full authority to speak ex
cathedra on morals, which Vatican I recognized as his, what further language
could he have used? (ibid.)

In 1962, the year the Council opened, Cardinal Suenens declared:
What was condemned as intrinsically immoral yesterday will not become moral
tomorrow. No one should entertain any confused doubt or false hope on the point.
The Church has not decided that these (contraceptive) practices are immoral;
she has merely confirmed what the moral law already said about them. (Love and
Control, Eng. tr. Robinson. Burns Oates [1962], p. 103)

And at the Vatican Council Cardinal Suenens chose to conclude his speech
of November 7, 1964 on the Schema on the Missions pointedly to reject
and dispel the misconstruction he claimed the press had placed upon his
speech on marriage of the 29th of October with these unambiguous
affirmations:
Allow me to take thi.< opportunity and this method of replying very briefly to
some reactions in public opinion which interpreted my speech on matrimonial
ethics as if I had mid that the doctrine and discipline of the Church in this
matter had ch&nged. So far as doctrine is concerned, my words made it quite
clear that I wae asking only for research in this whole area, not with a view to
changing anything in the Church's doctrine which has been already authentically
and definiti,ely proc-laimed, but only with a view to elaborating a synthesis of all
the principles which are relevant in this domain. So far as discipline is concerned,
it is clear that the conclusions of the Commission to which I have referred have
to be submitted to the authority of the Sovereign Pontiff and adjudged by his
supreme authority. I said this explicitly. It is obvious that any decisions regarding
the
of the Commission rest exclusively with that same authority. I
say these lhin::;s now in order to remove all misunderstanding in public opinion.

There is nothing in the Encyclical itself nor in any of the numerom
declarations about it since its promulgation by Pope Paul that dimly
suggests any
doubt about the absolute obligatory force of the
doctrine which is propounded " by virtue of the mandate entrusted to us by
Christ."
I have noted earlier that the stress which the authors of Dissent place
upon the distinction between infallible and authentic noninfallible teaching
is misplaced as far as the controverted issue is concerned. What matters
is the deliberate, formal, calculated, purposeful intent of the Vicar of
Christ teaching, as he undoubtedly did in Humanae Vitae, as Supreme
Pastor of the Universal Church on a grave matter of faith and morals, a
doctrine that is binding in conscience upon the spouses and the grave
obligation of acceptance in teaching, preaching, and counselling " especially
in the case of those who teach moral theology" (H. V. n. 28) and of the
pastoral duty of the episcopate on this matter " as one of your most urgent
responsibilities." (H. V. n. 29)

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Two days after the promulgation of Huma1Ule Vitae His Holiness said·
We had no doubt about Our duty to give Our decision in the terms expressed in
the present encyclical ... We hoped that scholars especially would be able
to discover in the document the genuine thread that connects it with the Christian
concept of life and which permits Us to make our own the words of St. Paul:
"But we have the mind of Christ'' (1 Cor. 2: 16) (General Audience at Castel
Gandolfo, July 31, 1968).

The pretext of a presumed doubt during the interlude of " study and
reflection " was largely the confection of private theologians who actively
engaged in teaching contrary to the repeated admonitions of Pope Paul
not to ignore the traditional norms on marital relations which his predecessors, Pius XI and Pius XII, had authoritatively reaffirmed. Let there
be no misunderstanding on the precise issue before us. If there was any
doubt about the absolute ban on contraceptives in any private theologian,
there was none in the Magisterium.
What, then, of a sincere doubt in a theologian? No one can be so
presumptuous as to preclude such a subjective state of mind in a private
theologian of piety, erudition, and good intentions. But such a supposition,
we respectfully insist, is in the light of the historical testimonials unrelated
to a lex dubia or the principle of probabilism. We simply posit it as a
sincere and genuine intellectual difficulty in one who, while not denying
the Teaching Authority of the Church to bind in conscience by an authentic
noninfallible doctrine, would want to be more rationally satisfied intellectually. \Ve hope to have supposed the case of a doubting or even contesting
private theologian with the best of human credentials. (Ultimately, it is
the problem of the relationship of faith and reason, a matter to which we
will dedicate our energies in a subsequent study).
In regard to personal external conduct, that is, preaching, teaching,
publication, and counselling in the confessional, the obligation, to communicate the moral doctrine of the Church is no less absolute than
in matters of dogma even if they arc of the authentic noninfallible description. This would preclude the presentation of alternate positions in
good conscience on an a pari basis with the teaching of the papal and
ecclesial Magisterium by some recourse to the principle of probabilism.
Further, the obligation not to contest the Church's teaching in public, for
example, via the communications media, is unconditional. This does not
forbid private theologians to discourse together and raise all sorts of
questions about the doctrine propounded if it is done discreetly, in places
and in a manner and with such fellow discussants as not to give scandal.
There is no incompatibility between the absolute obligation to teach in
accordance with Church doctrine and, at the same time, to try to resolve
sincere intellectual difficulties by collective discourse. Reconsiderations, restudies, repeated intellectual probings are of ancient vintage in the Church.

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JOSEPH F. COSTANZO

One need only recall the wild revelry in medieval quaestiones, controversiae,
disputationes, ego autem contra, sic et non wherein every theological and
philosophical verity was challenged in order to plumb the full dimensions
of a question and to conclude to a richer knowledge of a truth that had
already been professed. The Statement of the " subject professors " and
their principal, the telephonic solicitation of signatures, the speed of their
response to Humanae Vitae, the subsequent contestation shown in a
variety of ways in order to organize and galvanize additional public opposition to the Encyclical, in effect, to interpose their pastoral counsel between
the Supreme Pastor of the Universal Church and the Faithful, hardly
comport with the exigencies of scholarly discourse.
Even within the internal sanctuary of his own mind there is a per se
obligation for the private theologian to assent especially where the obligation of acceptance is stated so unambiguously as in Humanae Vitae. The
obligation of acceptance as related to personal conduct remains absolute.
The obligation to personal internal intellectual agreement with the doctrine
propounded may become conditional in exceptional instances of an eminent
theologian truly noted for his erudition and devotion to the Church. This
extraordinary hypothesis will hardly cover the generality of priests and
nuns who teach theology. All of us are accountable to God and not, as it
is popularly said, to personal conscience, and, for Catholics at least, the
Church's role in the formation of conscience is not diffused by private
magisteria of theologians, prestigious and nonprestigious. It is not left to
the conscience of the Catholic to subordinate the authentic and authoritative interpretation of the divine moral order to its own superior determination of the morality of an act. Conscience may speak with many tongues
and not all of them are always reliable, nor are all the persuasions of
conscience above the strongest urges of human passion, burdensome inconveniences, and rationally appealing self-interest.
The argument of the right to dissent, based on the possibility of error
that an authentic noninfallible teaching by definition does not absolutely
preclude, is finally given anchorage in the ominous " possibility of a
pope becoming a heretic or a schismatic. Popes, canonists, and theologians have
acknowledged the possibility of papal heresy or schism, and some nine centuries of
theological and canonical discussion have included consideration of what the Church
at large could do in such a case. (pp. 46-47)

Well, that ought to do it, if nothing else will!
Dissent abounds with casual teases, employment of words, expressions,
and brief allusions, all calculated like psychedelic lights to induce a new
consciousness of the Church. To "community of believers," "collegiality,"
and " religious liberty " harnessed to " coresponsibility of theologians," now
add, " historically and culturally conditioned views of authority and truth,"
" the very notion of teaching is ambiguous," " post Vatican II self-aware-

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ness," "post Vatican II mentality," "entire Church as magistral," "sensus
fidelium," " charisms," the need for a " theology of compromise," etc. All
of these are mentioned or stated in such a manner as to diffuse The
Hierarchical Structure of the Church, With Special Reference to the
Episcopate, c. 3, of Lumen Gentium and to suggest a latitudinarian
magisterium (there is more than one way to insert the " theologians "
into the magisterium. If they cannot make it on their own, then, surely,
through an all inclusive congregationalist ecclesiology). Consider for example, Dissent's treatment of sensus fidelium (p. 56) with what Vatican II
says of it:
The body of the faithful as a whole, anointed as they are by the Holy One,
cannot err in matters of belief. Thanks to a supernatural sense of the faith which
characterizes the People as a whole, it manifests this unerring quality when, " from
the bishops down to the last member of the laity," (cf. St. Augustine, De praed.
sanct.) it shows universal agreement in matters of faith and morals. (Lumen
Gentium, n. 12).

The stress on complete unanimity of all the laity with the entire episcopacy
is not so apparent in Dissent. The Council statement is tautological.
Everyone is without error or everyone is in error. But God will not fail
his Church in such unanimity. Dissent accustoms its readers by the sheer
force of frequency to the employment of terms and expressions of the
Council documents with a meaning at variance with their original source
and context. The purpose is unmistakably clear. By appealing to a
" post Vatican II mentality " and the inevitability of an " ongoing " process
of doctrinal " development " the right of theological dissent becomes more
than an exercise of academic freedom; it is a necessary beneficent catalyst
in doctrinal adjustment and reformulation. In a word, there are no absolutes
in creed and morality. The "subject professors" and their principal have
wandered blithely into the \Yastelands of relativism simply by their
insistence that orthodoxy be saved from itself. And all this is by the
providence of a pneumatic imperial demiurge that moves the community
of believers by graces and special charisms through a variety of ministries
to the "theology of compromise." The ::\'Iontanists never exercised the
Holy Spirit with such relentless vigor.
But surely it is bad grace when the authors of Dissent quote Pope
Paul VI on conciliar decrees as a witness to their novel ecclesiology. On
p. 101 we read:
As Paul VI reminds us: The conciliar decrees are not so much a destination as a
point of departure toward new goals. The renewing power and spirit of the
council must continue to penetrate to the very depths of the church's life. The
seeds of life planted by the council in the soil of the church must grow and achieve
full maturity.

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F. COSTANZO

One is hard put not to wonder whether a deliberate, calculated deception
is here intended or some intellectual incapacitation accounts for this
unwarranted juxtaposition of the "dynamic interpretation" of Lumen
Gentium which the authors espouse with the transitional developments
through change initiated by decrees. Constitution is the general term for
statements concerning the Church itself. Of the sixteen official texts
promulgated by the Ecumenical Council four of them are constitutions,
dogmatic, pastoral, and liturgical, each expressive of theological propositions. Three of the documents are Declarations (On Christian Education,
Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, and On Religious
Freedom) . Declarations are " policy statements " or statements of particular principles on relations with those who do not belong to the Church
(Note that the declaration is on Christian, not just Catholic, education).
Decrees are documents of practical significance. They are affirmations of
the Council on modern problems and their solutions. They are essentially
opportune, prudential directives to cope with contemporary problems in
their wide diversity and to effectuate appropriate adjustments and progressive changes in accordance with the soteriological continuing mission
of the Church. Thus, when the authors of Dissent quote Pope Paul VI
on the intent of conciliar decrees-" not so much a destination as a point
of departure towards new goals "-in approbation of their "dynamic interpretation" of the Dogmatic Constitution On the Church in accordance
with their own novel ecclesiological prepossessions, they are being less
than reverent with His Holiness and with the Fathers of the Council.
The authors of Dissent dust off some allegedly historical instances of
papal doctrinal failings and reversibility of which Protestant scholars
have long since been too embarassed to have cited against the validity of
papal authority. There are the cases of Popes Liberius, Vigilius, and
Honorius, and, of course, the popular referrals to Galileo and usury, and
the more recent "reversals" of Quanta Cura and Mirari Vos by the
Vatican II's Declaration On Religious Freedom. An occasion other than
a lengthy book review should consider these allegedly doctrinal failings and
reversals; thus it is understandable that we direct our limited comments
to the following issues:
(1) The Galileo case illustrates what hazards are risked when the
Roman Pontiff acquiesces in the findings and recommendations of an
ecclesiastical commission. This aspect of the Galileo case and its relevance
to Pope Paul's exercise of papal authority independent of the majority
report of the papal commission has strangely been given the silent treatment by critics of Humanae Vitae. Further, the Galileo case becomes less
intolerable, if not more understandable, when projected against the condemnation of Kepler by the Protestant theological faculty of Tiibingen in
1596 for affirming the identical scientific truth for which thirty-seven
years later Galileo was condemned. The unanimous decision of the

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Protestant divines was that Kepler's book, Prodromus Dissertationum
Cosmographicarum, was heretical because it contradicted the Old Testament's story about Joshua's command to stay the sun in its cyclical
course around the earth. Kepler's scientific thesis, his explanation and
defense before the Academic Senate of Tilbingen, is substantially identical to that of Galileo before the Roman commission. It may not cast
light upon the problem, but perhaps it may engender a sympathy for the
times and their shortcomings to observe that Luther, Melancthon, and the
generality of Protestant university professors and preachers strongly
opposed the Copernican theory as contrary to the teaching of the Bible
while, by contrast, the Copernican system was favorably considered and
received by many of the Roman ecclesiastics even in high office. Further,
what is generally overlooked is that the condemnation of Galileo was by
virtue of a scriptural interpretation then prevalent among theologians who
could not tolerate Galileo's challenge of their scriptural exegesis.
It seems to me that when the authors of Dissent fault the papal teaching authority in the Galileo case and pass over their favorite theme on the
" coresponsibility of theologians " whose scriptural exegesis provided the
major premiss for Galileo's condemnation by the Roman commissions,
they are looking to theological self-interest rather narrowly.
(2) On usury we may consider some second thoughts and reflections by
two scholars of the science of economy.
I was brought up to believe that the attitude of the Medieval Church to the rate
of interest was inherently absurd, and that the subtle discussions aimed at
distinguishing the return on money-loans from the return to active investment were
merely jesuitical attempts to find a practical escape from a foolish theory. But
I now see these discussions as an honest intellectual effort to keep separate what
the classical theory has inextricably confused together, namely, the rate of interest
and the marginal efficiency of capital. For it now seems clear that the disquisitions
of the schoolmen were directed towards the elucidation of a formula which should
allow the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital to be high, whilst using rule
and custom and moral law to keep do\yn the rate of interest. (Lord Keynes, The
General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money [1946], p. 351)
The very simple formula in which eccksiastical authority expressed its attitude to
the question of profit-making is this: Interest on pure money loan in any form
is forbidden, profit on capital in any form is permitted, whether it flows from
commercial business or from an industrial undertaking . . . or from insurance
against transport risks, or from share-holding in an enterprise or however else.
This is at bottom by no means so astonishing when we consider more closely the
men whom we are used to call Scholastics. We have been accustomed to do them
a great injustice in regarding them as unpractical, abstruse-minded book-worms,
treating of unreal topics, through endless repetitions and with intolerable prolixity
. . . If one attentively pursues the writings of the Scholastics, especially the
wonderful work of the very great Thomas Aquinas, the monumental quality of

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JOSEPH F. COSTANZO

which was equalled only by the creations of Dante and Michaelangelo, one gains
the impression that the work of education which they had at heart was something
different from our education in middle-class respectability; that it was the
education of their contemporaries to be upright, intelligent, courageous and energetic men. (Werner Sombert, The Bourgeois [199W], p. 314)

(3) Dissent sees a reversal of doctrine of "freedom of conscience as
stated in Quanta Cura of Pius IX and Mirari Vos of Gregory XVI by the
Declaration On Religious Freedom of Vatican II. The simple fact is
Dignitatis Humanae of Vatican II never discourses about "freedom of
conscience." The expression itself does not even appear once in the
entire document. The Declaration treats ,,-ith immunity from coercion in
civil society on matters of belief and worship; not a word or even an
oblique reference to "freedom of conscience." Further, there is nothing
in any of the documents of Vatican II that diminishes the condemnations
of the egalitarian value of aU beliefs and nonbeliefs which is the essence of
the indifferentism proscribed by Pius IX and Grerrory XVI. On the
contrary, the Declaration on
Freedo:n identifies the Catholic
Church as the one true religion which all men are hound in conscience to
acknowledge but freely, with resronsihle freedom :md with immunity from
coercion in civil society.
(4) There are endless occasions for critical comment; referrals to "auctores approbati" without saying approved by whom, "charisms" without
noting the ancient Pauline doctrine on the sufficiency of grace for every
vocation, and the gift of extraordinary charisms such as abounded in the
early Church and the persecuted Church of martyrs but with no mention of
the Council's repetition of St. Paul's admonition that only Church
authorities may judge competently about the extraordinary graces.
(5) Even an article-length book review has its limits, and so we conclude
with this last animadversion on Dissent. On p. 162, there is initiated a
discussion of the Failure to Admit Plurality of Natural Law Theories (in
H. V.). I must confess that after repeated study I still fail to appreciate
the thrust of the authors' complaint. In the history of moral philosophy
there have been a wide variety of natural law theories whose diversities
extend from similarities to contraries and even to contradictories. There is
the cosmological necessitarianism of the Stoics' naturalist monism and its
variations by Cicero, Gaius, Ulpian, and Seneca. There is the Aristotelian
natural law severed from its Platonic metaphysical moorings. The early
Christian formulations of the natural moral law by Lactantius and St.
Ambrose are followed by the natural law theories of medieval civilists,
canonists, and theologians. Within the Protestant ethic, the range has
extended from outright rejection to a modified acceptance of the scholastic
basic doctrine to substantially identical concurrence with (Catholic) natural
moral law teaching (especially among the Anglicans, as Bishop Gore, Dr.

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Kirk, and Dr. Mortimer). Be it noted and reflected upon that all the
Christian Churches held unanimously to the absolute ban on contraceptives
until the first breach by the 1930 Lambeth Conference. The preceding
Lambeth Conferences of 1908 and 1920 explicitly condemned contraception
by appealing to the natural law. There is, too, the moral situationalism or
contextualism which has gained wide acceptance among non-Catholics and
even among some Catholics, and lately, love morality (Fletcher). Among
some contemporary Catholics, there is evidence for revised versions of
traditional natural moral law (Grisez, Bockle, Fuchs, and by such who are
inspired by the evolutionary cosmology of Teilhard de Chardin, Monden),
and lastly, the personalists. The generality of Catholic revisionists are, with
some heterodox exceptions, really emphasizing one or other element of the
traditional natural moral law which they are convinced would redress the
balance of total perspective of the human act that they fear has not
been maintained.
There are, too, theories of natural law of human conduct of realists (not
excluding Marx) quite contrary or even contradictory to the above
enumerated variations, that is, empiricist, mechanist, behaviorist, etc.
All referrals to the natural moral law in Humanae Vitae are, as in
every Church document, not to a theory of natural law that is explicitly
and exclusively identified with a particular system of philosophical speculation in the history of moral philosophy but pointedly to the existential
natural law that is an integral constituent of evangelical morality, the lex
Christi, by which man, through the redemptive merits of Christ and by
the grace of God, may attain eternal life situated as he is from the moment
of his being in the de facto supernatural status. That is why every mention
of it is always in conjunction with the supernatural. It is the natural law
(unlike that of the philosophers) which is within the scope of the commission of Christ to Peter and his successors to teach, interpret, and
transmit to the faithful to the end of time without error. This may explain
why in none of the Church official and authoritative documents, papal and
conciliar, do we ever find a systematic corpus of natural law doctrine
formulated, much less the development of argumentation as to its existence,
the demonstration of its general and particular principles, and the rationale
vindicating the application of the principle to a particular moral act. Put
into perspective, Humanae Vitae propounds a doctrinal teaching which is
of the natural moral law but whose certain discernment and unambiguous
formulation derive principally from the abiding assistance of the Holy
Spirit that has sustained the constant and universal teaching of the
Church on the moral principles on marriage as they are existentially
integral to the evangelical morality, the lex Christi, and subsequently on
the unique charism of the papal magisterium which has applied those moral
principles to specific acts of conjugal relations. It is as Vicar of Christ," by virtue of the mandate entrusted to Us by Christ "-as successor to

652

JOSEPH F. COSTANZO

Peter and not as a venerated and world-renowned moralist, that Pope
Paul VI teaches in Humanae Vitae (would it have mattered if he had?)
The companion volume, The Responsibility of Dissent: The Church and
Academic Freedom, might not inappropriately be titled The Primacy, Not
of Peter, but of AAUP in the teaching of Catholic faith and morals by
Catholics at a Department of Catholic Theology in an American Pontifical
University. Involved is a very serious issue, the question of academic
freedom. Historical studies of academic freedom in universities in Europe
and America do not disclose a firmly settlul and definite doctrine. l\iany
affirmative admissions are made but tlwy arc in the uature of general
libertarian aspirations and immunitities for the pursuit of truth and
correspondingly severe negative declarations
suppression and constraints placed upon freedom of expression. Academic freedom is a very
complex and complicated problematic. To begin with, is it a univocal or
analogous notion when applied to dinTse institutions of higher learning,
state-owned, privately owned, church affiliated colleges and universities?
Secondly, is the exercise of academic freedom and the conditions attendant
upon it the same for all disciplines,-natural
sciences, social sciences,
aesthetics, l1istory, law, philosophy, theology, etc.? Thirdly, do challenges
to or experimentation of received or established propositions of the various
sciences relate equally to applied science and the speculative and under
the same ur difi'ercnt conditions? But not every question will rt'ceive the
same answer nor every answer resolve every question. In suggesting a new
title for the second volume I was not being facetious. The question of
judgment, a unique consideration and
teaching religious orthodoxy is, in
deserves a different approach and different standards of academic freedom
than may apply to other studies. As for myself, I luvc no hesitar:ce in
stating that the norm of orthodoxy in matters of Cathol;c faith and morals
is the solemn definitive teachings of the papal magisterium whether ex
cathedra or not and of the Councils approved and ratified by the Roman
Pontiff.
As for the " subject professors " and their principal at the Catholic
University, what really matters is what they did in the name of academic
freedom and in invoking their rights of conscience. As a contemporary
witness of the events via the various communications media I found them
scandalous. They did do grave spiritual harm. They interposed their
spiritual counsels between the faithful and the Supreme Pastor of the
Universal Church and offered the faithful an a pari (they went beyond
that, actually) alternative moral evaluatory judgment. And little to their
credit they exercised themselves vigorously in galvanizing an opposition to
the teaching authority of Pope Paul in Humanae Vitae. I found the
incandescent indefectibility and radiant rectitude of everything that the
dissidents said and did as detailed and " documented " in the companion
volume a frightening example of edification.

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John Henry Newman wrote while still a Protestant in
It is said that a man may go on sipping first white (wine) and then port, til
he loses all perception which is which: and it is very great good fortune in this
day if we manage to escape a parallel misery in theology. ("The Anglo-American
Church, October 1839 " in Essays Critical and Historical, vol. I, p.

When, after much spiritual searching and by the grace of God, John
Henry Newman came to recognize what was the difference and how it is
discerned, he choose to Consent Within and For the Church.
JosEPH F. CosTANzo, S. J.

Fordham University

Bronx, N.Y.

BOOK REVIEWS
The Achievement of Bernard Lonergan. By DAVID TRAcY. New York:
Herder and Herder, 1970. Pp. 317. $9.50.
Since the publication of Insight Lonergan's later developments in
theology and philosophy have generally been available only in the form
of theology textbooks written in Latin or in privately circulated tapes and
mimeographed notes stemming from seminars. Tracy's book, the first
systematic overview of Lonergan's intellectual development, does much to
fill an effective communication gap in making Lonergan's thought more
accessible to a general public. It is based on a few years of study under
and association with Lonergan, a thorough familiarity with all his works,
and a strongly felt conviction that a general acceptance of Lonergan's
views could provide a viable basis for a much-needed integration in
theology and philosophy. The result is a work more concerned with
exposing and defending Lonerganism than in analyzing or criticizing it.
Since Lonerganism represents, at least for the fervent few, a major
intellectual renaissance and since Tracy's book is already well on the way
to becoming the guiding text for this new tradition, a critical discussion
of the book and the tradition it represents would seem to be desirable.
The first three chapters play an
and potentially misleading
role in the overall structure. They seem to couple an introductory survey
of Lonergan's method of horizon analysis with an exposition of his earlier
works. But this is not quite what Tracy intends. Rather, he exposes
Lonergan's later views on the nature of knowledge and the process of
intellectual development and then uses this as a framework and source
of standards for interpreting Lonergan's own intellectual development.
Thus, his discussion of Lonergan's early articles, the " Gratia" and
" Verbum " series, is not really concerned with the theological problems
treated, the interpretations considered, and the positions defended but
with the contribution these analyses made to Lonergan's intellectual
formation as interpreted in the light of criteria Lonergan himself supplies.
Tracy's initial survey introduces " horizon " in a descriptive-historical
way by a sketchy outline of periods and problems in which horizon-shifts
have occurred, e. g., Aristotelian to Newtonian physics. This leads to a
definition of "horizon " as a maximum field of vision from a determinate
viewpoint. Its subjective pole refers to the intentionality-meaning possibilities of the subject's stage of development, while the objective pole
refers to the worlds of meaning achieved by or open to the subject at
the center of this horizon.

654

BOOK REVIEWS

655

The problem being treated here is certainly a basic one in contemporary
epistemology. Individual acts of knowledge depend on a general framework
or horizon which is conditioned by the intellectual development of the
individual, the culture in which he functions, and the specialties he
pursues. Such a Weltanschauung is difficult to get at noetically. From
within one finds it difficult to determine the boundaries; from withoutto whatever degree one can be without--one easily misinterprets the
significance of what transpires within. In recent years differing philosophical
traditions have advanced various interpretative tools to treat this problem:
analysis of conceptual frameworks considered as quasi-public objects; the
hermeneutic circle; an interpretation of paradigm shifts; and the structuralist
analysis of cultural covariance. Tracy, following Lonergan, simply presents
horizon-analysis as the method of coming to grips with the problem.
Since this plays a crucial role in Tracy's own interpretation and evaluation
as well as in Lonergan's thought, a more critical treatment considering
the difficulties and alternatives would have been desirable.
Lonergan's first substantial achievement was the series of four articles
he wrote on the problem of grace and freedom. Here his primary concern
was to distinguish the authentic position of St. Thomas from the later
problematic of the " de auxiliis " controversy and the still later ncoscholastic interpretation of St. Thomas. In doing this Lonergan recovered
the idea, developed but never really
by the medieval theologians,
of a world of theory mediating the meaning of faith. This recovery, rather
than the theological problem treated, is the focus of Tracy's concern.
The type of interpretation Lonergan attempted involved not only a
mediation of faith through theory but also a mediation of the medieval
theological mediation, making what they had done intelligible to a contemporary audience. This required both a methodology capable of yielding
a correct interpretation of earlier speculative syntheses and also a way of
assimilating and ordering the results obtained from such historical studies.
Lonergan's way of handling the first problem is explained through the
operative metaphor of a scissors interpretation, where the upper blade is
an a priori schema capable of handling any possible set of historical data
and the lower blade is an a posteriori analysis of relevant texts. The
blades should close on an authentic interpretation.
The second task is
interpreted as an explication and ordering of four key elements in the
methodology of theological procedure: theorems, terms, dialectical positions,
and techniques.
The discussion of the Verbum series, Lonergan's five long articles on
Thomas's interpretation of Trinitarian theology, is somewhat closer to the
texts of Lonergan's articles. St. Thomas, building on Patristic tradition,
gave a detailed account of Trinitarian processions by analogy with the
processions of an inner word and of love in man. Lonergan's attempt
to interpret this encountered two formidable problems. First, he had to

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recover the authentic doctrine of Aquinas rather than the systematically
misleading interpretations given by theologians in the Thomistic tradition.
Second, to make this intelligible to a contemporary audience he felt that
he should transpose an account which Aquinas had given in metaphysical
terms into an exposition phrased in cognitional terms-and then use the
sources to show that this was a transposition rather than a misinterpretation.
Rather than present an account of Lonergan's interpretation of Aquinas
Tracy has a polemical contrast between Lonergan's intellectualism and
the conceptualism and extrinsicism of the manualists.
(These were
pejorative terms in some Catholic seminaries during the period of the
nouvelle theologie and the reaction centering around the Encyclical
Humani Generis.) The great achievement of the Verbum series-from a
philosophical point of view-was the clarification of St. Thomas's developed doctrine of mental acts and processes. This is not summarized
here. In its place Tracy contents himself with a simplified non-technical
account of insight, conceptualization, reflection, judgment, and abstraction.
While this may be of some help to a beginner, it does not supply the
interested scholar with any basis for distinguishing between Lonergan's
interpretation of Aquinas's doctrine, the use Lonergan made of this in
his own development, and Lonergan's own doctrine. Tracy's book, however, was written to popularize rather than analyze Lonergan.
The tranbition from the vetera of interpreting Thomas Aquinas to the
nova of Insight is mediated by a brief account of the transition from
medieval to modern science and from pre- to post-critical philosophy.
On both issues Tracy simply summarizes Lonergan's evaluation and conclusions and accepts them as defining the problems to be solved. In
summarizing Insight Tracy's basic concern is to present and explain the
elements of cognitional analysis that play a role in Lonergan's later ideas
on theological method. Here, I believe, he is quite successful, particularly
in his treatment of judgment, of the significance of the moving point of
view, and in explaining the methodology by which Lonergan passes from
cognitional analysis to a metaphysics of being. To achieve this Tracy
must necessarily oversimplify, or in many cases simply omit, many of
the points developed and problems discussed in the gargantuan work that
is Insight. Only two aspects of this interpretative oversimplification presented a problem for the present reviewer.
Lonergan often develops his positions by a polemical contrast with
counter-positions. In accord with his methodology these counterpositions
are interpreted in the light of the systematic exigencies of Lonergan's own
development rather than through an analysis of the sources and schools
whose names supply labels for the counterpositions. Tracy preserves the
rhetoric of this polemicism but further simplifies the doctrines presented
as counterpositions. The net result is a defense of Lonergan by a contrast

BOOK REVIEWS

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with straw-dummies interpreted and judged by the niche accorded them
in Lonergan's schematism. Thus, he can dismiss Hume, by claiming that
his performance contradicts his doctrine, and Kant, by insisting that he
misinterpreted the significance of judgment. What is operative in both
evaluations is not an analysis of the authors in question but their assignment to the first and second levels of Lonergan's schematism.
The second closely related criticism is perhaps familiar by now. Tracy's
method of exposition affords no foothold for a critical appraisal of Lonergan's thought. A descriptive summary of what Lonergan intends to
accomplish, e. g., in developing metaphysics, is presented as a summary
of what Lonergan has achieved. As indicated in a footnote ( # 23 on p.
172) and in a paper delivered at the Florida Conference on Lonergan's
thought, Tracy realizes that some of Lonergan's ideas are open to criticism.
He may be justified in omitting such criticism from an introductory survey.
But if he does, he should also forgo, or at least sharply curtail, a sustained
defense of Lonergan that is only meaningful when adverse criticism is
considered.
After finishing !might Lonergan returned to theology in a new way.
Tracy's summary of this transition period again prescinds from the
theological doctrine considered (Trinity and Christology) and focuses on
the problems of methodology that marked the stages of Lonergan's own
intellectual development. The basic contention is that Lonergan's transcendentally transformed viewpoint supplies a uniquely privileged position
for developing theological method and for relating theology to other
branches of knowledge. Here " method " is used in a broad sense to
refer to reason's explicit consciousness of its own norms, structures, and
procedures. The former methods of theological synthesis are deemed
inadequate because they predate the rise of historical consciousness and the
consequent realization of the role of meaning in mediating man's many
worlds.
Tracy follows Lonergan in treating the problem of meaning by distinguishing different types of meaning and discussing their scope and
interrelation. Though meaning has been and remains a central concern
of contemporary philosophy, neither author averts to either the protracted
and extensive discussion of the meaning of " meaning " on the part of the
analysts or to the recent work of phenomenologists on the role of symbolism. However, there is another area where Lonergan's methodology
does make a significant and novel contribution. This is the problem of
interrelating functional specializations in theology. The development given
is strongly reminiscent of Kant's deduction of the categories.
Kant saw knowledge in terms of three interrelated levels: a manifold
of intuitions on the level of experience; a synthesis of reproduction in the
imagination; and a synthesis of recognition in the understanding achieved
by imposing concepts in judgment. From the classification of judgments

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supplied by general logic Kant devised the table of twelve categories. But
this derivation, based on the empirically given fact of different types of
judgments, was not deemed adequate to explain how concepts can relate
a priori to objects. Hence Kant's wrestling with the formidable problem
of the transcendental deduction of the categories.
Lonergan accepts the functional specialization that has developed in
theology but depores the divisiveness and lack of communication that has
resulted from this. But a simple a posteriori acceptance of the specializations that have emerged affords no basis for interrelating these specializations in a meaningful way. What is needed is an a priori deduction of a
table of functional specializations as something necessitated by man's way
of knowing. Lonergan constructs such a table by distinguishing two
phases in theology (a modernized version of the Aristotelian analysissynthesis distinction) and correlating these with the four levels in the
structure of consciousness.
Structures of
Consciousness

Mediating
Theology

deliberation
judgment
understanding
experience

(4)
(3)
(2)
(1)

dialectic
history
interpretation
research

Mediated
Theology
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)

foundations
doctrines
systematics
communications

Since the doctrine summarized in this table is the climax of Tracy's
book, some explanation of it is in order. Mediating theology is primarily
concerned with encountering the Judaeo-Christian
tradition, mediated
theology with speaking to the present and future from within a horizon
transformed by that encounter. As with the earlier analytic and synthetic
modes, the terminal point of the encounter phase supplies the starting
point of the communications phase.
Each level of consciousness has its proper goal. Though common sense
does not differentiate these levels and their related goals, scientific methodology must do so. Thus, as experience relates to data, so research determines what should be accepted as data. Interpretation, like understanding,
presupposes the data established by textual criticism and uses the tools of
exegesis, form criticism, etc., to understand the meaning of the texts
supplied by level one. The historian accepts the established meanings of
different texts and tries to determine the historic facts, or what really
happened. Each of these levels leads to debates which should be arbitrated
at the fourth level. Here, ideally, the encounter with the tradition culminates in a conversion commitment. Foundations defends and explains
such a commitment, while doctrine is on the level of judgment because it

BOOK REVIEWS

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affirms the essential features of Christian belief, which one then tries to
understand through the mediation of theories proper to systematics. Communications is not simply a call to experience but an attempt to interrelate
theology to other disciplies.
By skipping complexities Tracy makes the basic schematism clear and
then argues for the necessity of such a synthesis to end the feudalism of
competing fiefdoms that divide and disfigure contemporary theology.
What he does not do, because of the introductory nature of his work, is
to probe the cogency of Lonergan's account. This is rather surprising
considering the central role this schematism plays in Lonergan's current
theological work and the climactic role it plays in Tracy's summary.
What follows is not a critical probe but some suggestions for such a probe.
One could begin by comparing Lonergan's division of theological specializations with the Thomistic system it seeks to replace. In one of his earliest
works (the Gratia series) Lonergan discussed what he called the "postThomistic fallacy," which consists in attempting to explain God rather
than accepting God as the explanation of all there is. This was manifested
in Thomas's methodology. In philosophy analysis began with the beings
of ordinary experience and proceeded by way of resolution into causes
until the ultimate intrinsic (essence and existence) and extrinsic (God
as first and final cause) principles were reached. Synthesis pivots and
explains beings in terms of the ultimate principles reached. When Thomas
constructed a synthesis he was working as a theologian rather than as
a philosopher and relied on faith and information about God supplied by
revelation. Yet, within this framework he could define scientific theology
in terms of its subject matter, God and all else as related to God. Further
subdivisions were in accord with material objects (the Trinity, the Church)
and formal objects (Christ as Savior, Christ as lawgiver). Lonergan's
theological methodology centers not on God but on a thematization of
human cognitional structures. For reasons which need not be discussed
here I believe that a radical reinterpretation of the nature of theology is
necessary. But the decisive change which Lonergan has introduced certainly
calls for clarification and discussion rather than a simple defense along
pragmatic lines.
Granted that a radical reinterpretation of theology is at least a desideratum, the crucial question is: Is Lonergan's schematic interrelation of
theological specializations necessary or is it simply a tentative hypothesis?
Lonergan insists that his methodological concerns are foundational rather
than second-order questions and attempts to get at these foundations by
finding the necessary interrelation of functional specializations. In this
sense he is seeking a transcendental deduction of the specializations. As
the conflicts between the pertinent passages of the first and second editions
of Kant's Critique bear eloquent witness, transcendental deductions bridge
a treacherous territory. If Lonergan's integration is to play the foundational

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BOOK REVIEWS

role he intends, then he must show that the isomorphism bet>veen structures
of consciousness and theological specializations plays a constitutive rather
than a merely suggestive role.
Perhaps Lonergan's long-projected work on theological method will show
this, but the arguments Tracy summarizes give no indication of hov;
it could be done. Each theological specialization obviously involves all
four mental operations. The operative isomorphism is not between structures
of consciousness and theological specializations but between the objective
correlatives attributed to different mental operations and the goals prescribed for theological specializations. Thus, sense experience is correlated
with data-and the textual critic established the data the exegete uses.
But such a correspondence between the data of sense experience and
communications is even more tenuous, for what the theologian wishes to
communicate is certainly not simple experience, in Lonergan's technical
sense of " experience," but the meaningful understanding requisite to
ground critical acceptance.
Similar criticism of the other levels could easily be developed. The
obvious retort is that the isomorphisms in question do not come from
the levels individually considered but from the parallel roles these play in
overall structures.
Such a retort, however, is convincing only to one
who has already accepted the idea of a :;tructural parallelism between
the mental processes an individual goes through and functional specializations within a scholarly community. This is akin to the similar and
rather unconvincing parallelism between individual and historical development that allows Lonergan to apply to primitive man the idea of undifferentiated consciousness which Piaget presents as characteristic of the
child's mentality. Lonergan's work on method in theology may provide
answers to such objections, provided the objections have been raised in a
critical way prior to the completion of the book. It is rather surprising
that in a work stressing the essential role of critical dialectic as a means of
theological development none of the questions or criticisms that could
contribute to such a development is introduced.
Tracy's book concludes with an exhaustive listing of primary sources
and a sun-dial (only registering sunny hours) listing of secondary sources.
In spite of the criticism presented here I believe that he has succeeded
in his basic purpose of making Lonngan's thought intelligible to a
general public. This inevitably raises the more basic question: what
is one to make of the impressive intellectual achievement that is the
developing thought of Bernard Lonergan? Is it, as many devoted disciples
believe, the potential foundation for a revolutionary redevelopment of
philosophy, theology and the intellectual integration of diverse disciplines?
Or does it, as the present reviewer is inclined to believe, bring eight
centuries of tradition to a graceful and stately conclusion? This is the
way scholasticism ends-not with a blank but with a summa. Each reader,

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661

of course, must form his own evaluation. But the process of judging will
depend in a crucial way on three highly debatable points repeatedly
emphasized by Tracy. These are the openness, the criticalness, and the
contemporaneity of Lonergan's systematic development. Lonergan has not,
Tracy insists, constructed a system in the classical sense. Rather, he builds
on the innate dynamism of the human mind so that his system is necessarily
open to, and in fact invites, further questioning, the formulation of new
and differing hypotheses, a dialectic of such opposed views leading to
warranted affirmation of the positions supported by the more cogent arguments. His development is also critical and contemporary in that it meets
the critical exigencies of the day and provides a viable basis for integrating
the theological achievements of the past and present.
Openness, criticalness, and contemporaneity-these
are the loci of radically contradictory evaluations. Lonergan certainly intends, and Tracy
insists, that the system is open in an unprecedented way. It invites a
critical self-appropriation and guides a process of intellectual development,
but it does not impose views. Y ct the outsider inevitably sees Lonerganism
in terms of a rather closed self-accrediting group. While this may be just
a transitory phase, something inevitable in the promotion of any new
system, the principle underlying the distinction between believers and
outsiders presents more of a challenge to openness. This arises from the
significance attached to Lonergan's cognitional analysis. The contention is
that the invariant structure of human knowing which Lonergan has
explicitated forms a fixed base for present and future intellectual developments. Anyone who appears to disagree with this implicitly affirms it
by his very performance of questioning the system, coming to an understanding, and judging. Accordingly, it is felt, it is not really possible to
disagree with Lonergan's cognitional analysis, the basis of his systematization. Anyone who thinks he disagrees with it thereby proves that he
does not really understand it. The system, accordingly, is open to development but not to radical revision. 'Vhether or not this contention is
correct depends on one's evaluation of the second point, the criticalness of
Lonergan's system.
Criticalness, like openness, presents a superficial difficulty, stemming from
the movement, and a more profound difficulty, stemming from the system.
The superficial difficulty is an apparent clash between doctrine and practice.
Knowing, Lonergan insists, is not simply a question of taking a look.
It is a process which depends in a critical way on asking questions,
criticizing suggested answers, investigating the consequences of alternative
hypotheses, and committing oneself to an affirmation only when one has
grasped evidence sufficient to warrant assent. Yet in the present work, as
in other popularizations and seminars, Lonergan's doctrine is communicated
by simply exposing it to view in a manner that poses no questions,
from straw dummies introduced for
considers no real alternatives-apart

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expository purposes-and generally relies on judgments predetermined by
an a priori schematism. This, too, may be a transitory phase. Lonergan's
system must become known before it can be discussed and analyzed. But
I believe that it can be communicated in a manner that exemplifies rather
than grates against the criticalness it seeks to inculcate.
The more profound difficulty stems from the contention that Lonergan's
cognitional analysis represents a resolute meeting of the critical exigencies
of contemporary philosophy and is immune from any further revision.
Critics with Heideggerian leanings would call this into question because
of its implicit presuppositions concerning man's way of being in the world
and the role that knowledge plays in relating man to reality. Lonergan's
development is based on a resolute following of the intellectual pattern of
operations. But, a Heideggerian would insist, this pattern is itself only
intelligible as something emerging from Dasein' s instrumental concern for
the care and use of things.
Analysts would be critical of the linguistic presuppositions underlying
Lonergan's cognitional analysis. If one rejects a denotational theory of
meaning, as most analysts now do, then the meaningfulness of such terms
as "experience," " insight," " concept," " reflection," and "judgment," is
not determined by the mental states or acts to which they may refer.
How they are to be explicated is a complex problem which we hope to
treat in detail elsewhere. But the central point is that Lonergan's cognitional analysis actually builds on a thematization of mental acts. Any
judgment as to whether or not this thematization is invariant to further
revision and is an adequate platform for the elaborate extensions Lonergan
builds will depend in a critical way on one's evaluation of the ontological
and linguistic presuppositions underlying Lonergan's thematization. One
who makes an adverse evaluation might understand and yet reject
Lonergan's cognitional analysis. One who does not recognize the role that
such presuppositions play might rest content with the view that Lonergan's
presuppositionless analysis is either understood and accepted or simply
not understood.
These remarks have a bearing on Lonergan's contemporaneity as a
philosopher. His status as a contemporary theologian may seem to be
beyond question. But even here there is room for a minority opinion.
Lonergan's substantive work in theology, his articles on grace and the
Verbum, his books on Christology and Trinitarian theory, were written
in the period preceding Vatican II. Then, as now, Lonergan's cognitional
analysis played a major role in structuring and interpreting his theological
work. But there was one crucial difference. In his earlier days Lonergan
argued that the role that judgment plays in the advancement of knowledge
in other disciplines is in theology the prerogative of the Teaching Church
rather than the individual theologian. The theologian's concern is understanding not judgment. In the analytic mode (the early version of

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Lonergan's mediating theology) the theologian seeks to understand the
sources of faith and the inner dynamics of development leading, for
example, from the scriptural affirmation of Christ's mission to the Chalcedonian formulation of what Christ is. But the theologian did not evaluate
the acceptability of such pronouncements. He simply accepted them as
true. Similarly, in the synthetic mode the theologian might propose
theories, but he left it to the Church to judge the truth and acceptability
of the consequences flowing from his theories.
Such an approach effectively precluded any possibility of a radical
revision in theology. In the last few years, when the problem of radical
reinterpretation has become a paramount concern of theologians, Lonergan
has devoted himself to the problem of method in theology. This surely is
important. But, if this is to be a programming for the future rather than
a systematization of the past, this methodology must be brought to bear
on the pressing problems of current theology.
Such considerations bring us back to the question of the role that
should be played by Lonergan's followers. If Lonerganism is to be a vital
force on the current intellectual scene it must enter into the on-going
dialogue. This, in turn, entails a re-examination of the foundations of
Lonergan's philosophy and a critical coming to grips with the crucial
theological problems that beset contemporary Christian theology. Tracy's
book contributes to this by making Lonergan's thought accessible to a
wider public. Though this work does not initiate the critical discussion of
Lonergan's views necessary to insert Lonerganism into the on-going dialectic
that is the philosophical enterprise, it may help to make such a discussion
possible. This would be a significant and desirable achievement.

EnwARD MAcKINNON, S. J.
Boston College
Chestnut Hill, Ma.ss.

VERBUM:

Word and Idea in Aquinas. By BERNARD J. LoNERGAN, S. J.,

edited by David B. Burrell, C. S.C.
Notre Dame Press, 1967. Pp. 318.

Notre Dame:

University

of

If an adequate history of scholasticism is ever written, the idea that
modern scholastics were unresponsive to their own times may be due for
some revision. The rationalism of the late and unlamented textbook
Thomism came from somewhere. .Most likely it came from the Cartesian
attempts to establish deductive certitude for all truth. The close study of
the great scholastics indicates that the later tradition was more likely
guilty of abandoning past riches in pursuit of modern accomodations than

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of an excessive attachment to tradition. Certainly Bernard Lonergan in
us a welcome corrective to the conceptual
these textual studies
rationalism of the late scholastics.
The chapters of this book were originally published between 1946 and
1949 as separate articles in Theological Studies. They constitute what has
become known as the Verbum series which, with the Gratia series of
articles, constitutes Lonergan's most fundamental research. As a result
of their original publication these articles received wide attention and
extensive criticism along with the author's other works. Readers of this
review may recall the articles by Edward l\I. Mackinnon, S. J., "Understanding According to Bernard Lonergan, S. J.," in The Thomist 28 (1964),
97-132, 338-72, 475-522. This new edition gathers all the Verbum articles
between one set of covers. Its most valuable feature is the eighty p::tgcs of
indices prepared in substance by Frederick Crowe, S. J., according to
concepts and names and according to loci both Thomistic and Aristotelian.
The original articles are presented unchanged with the addition of a brief
introduction by the author. The editor assures us that the notes and
references have been checked.
In response to a number of requests the purpose and method of these
studies were indicated in an epilogue to the last of the series. (215-20) This
passage may well be read as an introduction to the entire work. Under the
Leonine motto, vetera navis augere et perficere, Father Lonergan makes it
his business to discover what the old learning really was, especially in
Aquinas. This task has been performed in this series of textual studies
and in the series on grace. In the work, Insight, the author uses only as
much of the ancient wisdom as accurately responds to his neeJs and
methods. There he has undertaken the task of amplifying and perferting
the traditional wisdom in the light of modern advances. The present
series of articles on Verbum is, then, an historically accur<'!te reflection of
the thought of Aquinas based upon an extensive examination of hi" texts.
The work as a whole is theological, since it aims at a better understanding of divine intelligence and the Trinity. The approach is psychological rather than metaphysical though " logic might favor the opposite
procedure." (45-46) The first bvo chapters recover the profounrl. introspective analysis of human knowing in Aquinas with emphasis on t::e difference
between concept and judgment. Lonergan has been criticized for not
using the distinction between the quo and the quod to affirm that the
phantasm is id quo cognoscitur and to deny that it is id quod cognoscitur
(Summa Theol., I, q. 84. a. 2, c.). However, the same diffe,·ence is captured
in Chapter IV by the distinction between the species qua and the species
quae. (163, n. 120, 166) Likely the delay in making this distinction will
not bother those who are accustomed to the moving center of Lonerganian
method. It must be admitted, however, that the rest of us will find it
confusing.

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665

The third chapter is a skillful analysis of the metaphysical language in
which Aquinas speaks. This chapter refurbishes the mental and linguistic
tools needed to conquer the mixed psychological and metaphysical problem
of abstraction in Chapter IV. This difficult material may now be regarded
as well digested in contemporary Thomism. Finally, the fifth chapter
expounds the mystery of the Trinity in terms of divine intelligence generating the image of God and of love breathing the Spirit.
" It remains that ipsum intelligere is analogous to understanding, that
God is an infinite and substantial act of understanding, that as the Father
is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God, so also each is one and the
same infinite and substantial act of understanding, finally that, though each
is the pure act of understanding, still only the Father understands as
uttering the \Yord." (191) Lonergan's emphasis on the primacy of understanding over conceptualization is not likely to trouble those who have
gained an appreciation of the spirit of medieval philosophy from the sources.
The machinery of theses, proofs, distinctions, and counterdistinctions erected
by the late scholastics only disfigured the purity of understanding expressed
in the largely dialectical discourse of the great masters, especially Aquinas.
The division of these chapters was dicated by the " different systematic
contexts in which Thomistic statements about verbum are involved."
(xiii) In a textual study close attention has to be paid to the context
of each passage. A text lifted from context may take on a meaning quite
different from that intended by the author. When placed together with
other texts with which it was not originally connected a whole new
system of thought may be evolved. With this technique St. Thomas could
make it out that almost everything in Aristotle was conformable to
and Christian faith. This method has had immense advantages
for philosophy and theology, but it is not historical. Historical study
places texts in a neutral context which does not distort them from the
intent of their author.
The systematic contexts chosen by Lonergan are sound enough, given
the psychological approach which he found manageable. (46) A metaphysical approach would, of course, also have its advantages. The degrees
of being, especially the division of intelligent beings into human, angelic,
and divine, would provide a workable frame. In this view the key notion
of intelligence, identity of knower and known, would be seen realized
analogically on the different levels.
Divine intelligence constitutes perfect identity between the act of understanding, the being who understands (who is being itself subsisting), and
pure being understood. Angelic intellect maintains the perfect comprehension of the understanding subject in the act of understanding, but this act
does not comprehend being, since the angelic subject has only a limited
share in being. Human intellect does not comprehend being either objectively or subjectively. Our minds glean their understanding of it from

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the passing impressions of sense. These limited insights are limited further
by the history of the individual man. Our insights never add up to a
comprehension of self, let alone to a comprehension of being.
Maritain has remarked on the resemblance between the Cartesian idea
of intelligence and the angelic intelligence as seen by Aquinas. One may
also remark that the sovereign, legislative power of Kantian mind makes
it similar to the divine intelligence of Aquinas. A metaphysical context for
the texts of Aquinas would bring out the radical gulf between human and
divine understanding in his thought. Father Lonergan seems to leap this
gulf too readily and so perhaps to seek for human understanding a comprehensiveness and power which belong to subsistent understanding only.
The following statement illustrates our difficulty: "Intelligibility is the
ground of possibility, and possibility is the possibility of being; equally,
unintelligibility is the ground of impossibility, and impossibility means impossibility of being." (44) These statements are true enough if we take
" being " to refer to common being and " intelligibility " to refer to subsistent intelligence. The perfect self-identity of subsistent intelligence with
pure being places all possible beings before the divine mind. If something
were unintelligible to God, it would be entirely outside of being and so
Consequently, Lhe intelligibility of cCJmmon being in the
divi1:e mind is the ground of its possibility to be.
However, the statements are false if "iJ;telligibility" refers to human
intelligence and " being " refers to that which is. For human intelligence
actual being is self-justifying; being there it must be possible. From the
actual beings of common experience we gather whatever limited intelligibilities we can discoyer. Our understanding derives from actual beings and
is not the ground of their possibility.
The term, "common being," does not seem to enter Lonergan's vocabulary. His manner of speaking also assumes that ens is a concept. (43) This
assumption is not necessary and, in fact, introduces unmanageable complications. Being is an actual essence understood by an act of judgment. It
is a conception of the mind pertaining to the second act and not a concept
at all.
But these remarks take us beyond the scope of this review. They
pertain to a rather different metaphysics than the one which Bernard
Lonergan has elaborated with such profound study. He has earned the
gratitude of all philosophers and particularly of all Thomists.
JAMES

Loyola University
New Orleans, Louisiana

CouNAHAN, 0. P.

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667

A Marechal Reader. Ed. and trans. by JosEPH DoNCEEL. New York:
Herder & Herder, 1970. Pp.
$8.50.
Joseph Donceel's edition-translation is a useful volume from one who is
most qualified to produce it. In forty-three extracts from Joseph Marechal's
five-volume Le point de depart de la rnetaphysique and two later articles
most important work and to offer
Donceel manages to situate
cona fairly detailed presentation of the advances which were
tribution to the development of modern Catholic thought.
The thirteen extracts from the first three volumes situate the Kantian
project between the options of idealism and radical empiricism. Marechal
understood Kant's critique as an attempt to develop a third alternative. In
this context the brilliance of Marechal's own development of Thomistic
intellectual dynamism and completion of Kant's work is evident.
The twenty-eight selections from Cahier Five include about a third of
this, the most important volume.
principal theses, especially
his development of the dynamism of the intellect through a study of the
abstractive and objectifying processes, are set forth. The significance of
the unity of sensitive and intellective faculties and the differences in their
modes of attaining the object are exposed. Marechal's at times highly
original intepretation of St. Thomas's theory of the operation of the
agent intellect and the unity of the intellect and will does not distract
from the development of the major thesis that understanding is a process
of dynamic identification with the object rather than a passive observation.
Marechal's major insights into intellectual finality and exploitation of
the transcendental method have been seminal for a major segment of
contemporary Catholic thought. The problematic of Kantian and Thomistic
interpretation in which Marechal worked is perhaps dated. But his
insistence on knowledge through identification and his brilliant analysis,
in extract XL, of subjective and objective evidence are as relevant as
the day he wrote them. His critical insight, that the human mind is a
part of reality and that the modes of its operation are indicative of the
structure of being, finds its fitting place at the heart of the thought of
both Rahner and Lonergan.
At one time, a translation of the full text of Marechal's major work,
or at least of Cahier Five, would have been most welcome. But, since his
ideas have entered the life-stream of contemporary thought, Donceel's
volume admirably fits the need of the student for a means of grasping thB
theses at their origin without becoming encumbered by the protracted
analysis in which Marechal sets them forth. In a sense, Marechal's
conclusions are greater than his premises. Donceel has retained enough
of the original argument to make them intelligible without limiting their
scope and significance.
The translation is smooth and readable. At times the transition from
one excerpt to another is abrupt, leaving the reader dangling from the

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BOOK REVIEWS

first conclusion on the far side of an unbridged gap. Excerpt XLI which
condenses the final book of Cahier Five should have been expanded or
omitted. Some English-language bibliography and an index would have
enhanced the value of this excellent book.
J. PATOUT BuRNS, S. J.
Regis CoUege
Willowdale, Ontario, Canada

Twentieth Century Philosophy. By BERNARD DELFGAAUW. Albany, N.Y.:
Magi Books, 1969. Pp. 172, $4.95.
Definitive critique or estimation of a study which claims so much
territory for itself on the basis of so brief a treatment would be foolhardy.
Delfgaauw's points are quickly made and, as one would hope, all judgments
are pre-modified when offered. This is a well-done translation, by N. D.
Smith of the fourth Dutch edition of De Wijsbegeerte van de 20e Eeuw
written by a professor of philosophy at Groningen whose historical and
scientific studies are gaining attention here. So far, this interest has
resulted in translations of his profiles of Marx and de Chardin, his research
on the problem of evolution, and a single volume survey of ancient and
medieval philosophy. Delfgaauw's specialty, then, is synthesis. Rather
than bicker over what he does not cover, let us attempt to render the
tone and range of the present work best described as an essay on recent
currents exclusive of the language-analysis strain.
Contemporary philosophy from the Delfgaauw viewpoint has moved
away from that of the last century by its fresh encounters with science and
theology. It is newly conscious of a responsibility towards the world and
listens in respectful posture to art :md literature. It is no longer " a
philosophy that believes it can understand everything " but rathel' " a
speculation that attempts to penetrate as deeply as possible a reality which,
in the last resort, it is incapable of grasping." (p. Q7) The reasons for
this situation are outlined in Part I as stemming from a tension between
modern man's notion that reality is always largely determined by the
structures science gives it and by an awareness-paradoxically
causing
feelings of both freedom and fear-that he himself is not determined by
such factors. Delfgaauw elaborates on this tension through consideration
of biological and psychological advances and our deepening appreciation
of religious consciousness.
Part II discusses four "answers " to this tension:
neo-Thomism,
twentieth-century
Kantian and Hegelian thought, and l\farxism. The
author does not underestimate the difficulty of isolating the actual responses
to the contemporary problem within these tendencies. At bottom, the

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669

delineation is hampered by the anterior question of what thinkers evidently
working within these distinct traditions do in fact share with one another.
This dilemma in demarcation is clearly observed among the nebulous
grouping known as neo-Thomists. What, after all, is a neo-Thomist and
how does he perceive his relationship first to Aquinas and second to contemporary thought? Does such a one attempt to speak or to listen, and if
both, then in what proportion? The problematic is well presented, although
Delfgaauw's own ...-iew surfaces in his observation that the movement
" back " to Aquinas " is coming closer to achieving its original aim as it
lends to disappear as a school." (p. 41)
With regard to the .Marburg and Baden schools of Kantian thought
Delfgaauw sees Windelband's dictum: " Understanding Kant means going
beyond him " as their shared conviction of how that thinker is to be
brought into the present century. The two sub-schools differ in emphasis
on the unity of thought as an objective. While Marburgers saw such
logical unity behyccn mind and science that pure mathematics conjoined
with natural science emerges as science par excellence, the Baden school
placed central value on thought, harkening back to Lotze, and subjugated
natural science to the humanities. The intricacies of what became of
Hegel are well handled in this Part, too, and it is the British and Italian
manifestations of his philosophy that receive chief attention. According
to the author, the basic paradox of ·Marxist thought, the fourth of the
tradition's responses to the modern tension, is the intrinsic opposition of
politics to philosophy. When the philosopher convinces society to accept
his view of social reality, then that society must restrain its creator from
developing further or else sacrifice itself. This thought, not new in itself,
is forcefully made by relating it to the idealistic underpinnings of Marx's
world-view. Only an initial blurring of the distance between the theoretical
::.nd the practical, the abstract and the concrete, could have produced a
philosophy which claims to be intrinsically political.
Part III presents answers to the crisis in man's knowledge of himself
and his world experienced in this century from some dozen perspectives.
Among these are philosophies of evolution, action and spirit, the phenomenological-existential directions, American pragmatism and personalism, and
themes developed on a foundation of philosophy of history. The amount
of information correlated here is secondary to Delfgaauw's talent for
making succinct but incisive relationships. This reflects his initial observation: contemporary thought is characterized by a mutual stimulation
process bet,Yeen philosophical movements.
As an alternative to extracting from his book these reflex influences and
merely listing them out of context, it would be preferable to select one
theme and one thinker to show Delfgaauw at work. Let us take neovitalism, and this in the version of Hans Driesch (1847-1941). The author
interpets Driesch as "characteristic of the twentieth century." Driesch

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conceived of thought as faced with Cartesian dualism, and his project was
to overcome this in order to return to the reality which was its origin.
This goal was coupled with one he had arrived at professionally, for
Driesch was a marine biologist who had experimented with sea-urchins and
had been impressed with the difference between living and non-living
phenomena. Therefore-we are reminded of an earlier biologist, Aristotlea special life-principle had to be acknowledged alsongside physical and
chemical factors in the living being.
Driesch's relationship to both the Greek past and to the modern period's
concern for certitude in knowledge is clear in his notion of philosophy. It
had to be the " ordered systematic knowing of all that is knowable " and
therefore had to have a starting point which was not open to doubt. This
he felt had to be the fact of experience considered in itself. At this
juncture there enter themes developed in both James and Husser!. Experience is on the level of consciousness; I experience something, with the
emphasis on the experiencing rather than on the Husserlian somethingintended-in consciousness. The point of departure which is indubitable,
therefore, is the " I have something consciously " and, in turn, the awareness that the " having " is structured. Here he separates from Husserl's
stress upon the " something had " as structured and therefore subjectable
to phenomenological analysis. Driesch also departs from James's notion of
consciousness as confusion, as teeming multiplicity.
The project that
emerges for philosophy, then, is the elaboration of the order displayed in
conscious having. For Driesch, this is a logic which can reveal the structure
of reality at empirical, psychic and social levels. If Descartes wanted to
search out the implications of the cogito, Driesch went to work examining
experienced reality. Only after this perspective had been thoroughly explored could the philosopher inquire about a reality beyond that which he
experienced: whether such existed and what might be its nature.
Delfgaauw is at his best in perceiving the implications of a position such
as that of Driesch. In trying to preserve the unity of experience and
consciousness against both the idealistic tendency
nineteenth-century
thought and the Cartesian inheritance of modern philosophy as a whole,
Driesch unified experience with thought on the one hand and with physical
perception on the other. Neither sub-conscious experience nor rationalized
consciousness is to be glorified. If we reflect on this, it does seem that
Driesch is indeed as representative of contemporary thought, apart from
the linguists, as Delfgaauw claims. What concerns the neo-Thomists,
Kantians, and Hegelians, concerned the Cologne biologist. It is recognized
by all that the only valid form of the Cartesian cogito is the cogito aliquid;
the subject/ object dichotomy must be recognized but transcended. In
speaking to their Kantian contemporaries, the neo-Thomists bring forth
the root of the aliquid in both scholastic ontology (only Aquinas acknowledges aliquid as a transcendental attribute of ens) and in the theory of

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671

intentionality which is the essence of Thomistic epistemology. Yet, with
Driesch, many recent Thomists understoood that whoever starts with
consciousness is destined to remain within it. Like him, they recognized
that reality did transcend consciousness, but could this be maintained from
a starting point within consciousness? The problematic for Driesch was:
could consciousness be, from the very beginning, not only consciousness of
the thing but also consciousness with the object known, and this before
it was consciousness with itself, i.e., before it came to itself? His struggle
reflected the extent to which he was thinking through Descartes.
With Mercier, J\farechal saw a need to incorporate into Thomism the
Kantian perspective; yet, with Driesch, he was wary of the solipsism which
might result. The task Noel and Gilson saw for themselves was to develop
a theory of knowledge which would have man incipiently with the world.
In this way a realist philosophy could not be critical in the Kantian sense
but only immediately so, as in the former's case, or methodologically
appropriate, as with the latter.
Under Driesch's hand nco-vitalism became a contemporary showcase
for Kant's famous but unanswered " fourth question." \Vhat, indeed, could
man be if he was both conscious of reality and in this very act transcended
it? Reality could only be such for consciousness if it was itself primordial
knowing; hence the further problem of the divine. Was reality God or the
reflection of God? For himself Driesch could only posit the validity of the
question. Dclfgaauw interprets his plight as that of philosophy struggling
with science and religion. As a vitalist born of marine biology, Driesch had
to think through the entelecheia evident in his research, a force that could
only be qualitatively different from physical and chemical components. It
was not only a part of the " totality causality " he described but somehow
transformed the whole organism into what it could not be otherwise.
Before the honesty of a thought such as Driesch's, the student of contemporary philosophy grows both silent and encouraged. Delfgaauw's presentation of what has come to pass through the intellectual efforts of our
own century makes life within the stoa a bit more bearable.
JoHN B. DAvis, 0. P.

The Pennsylvania State University
University Park, Pa.

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Science and Faith in Teilhard de Chardin. The Teilhard Study Library,
vol. 1. New York: Humanities Press, 1967. Pp. 109. $3.00.
Evolution, Marxism and Chri.stianity. The Teilhard Study Library, vol. 2.
New York: Humanities Press, 1967. Pp. llO. $3.00.
There have been at least three phases in tlle promulgation, study, and
influence of the philosophical and religious writings of the Jesuit priestpaleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Before the Second Vatican
Council, Tcilhard was known through The Phenomenon of Man and The
Divine L"tfilieu, and some of his unpublished essays were in the hands of
European and Canadian theologians. During and immediately after the
Council, in a second phase, there were two developments. :Most importantly, Teilhard's iJeas influenced several of the Council periti and are
apparent in some of the Council documents, particularly in the Pa.storal
Constitution on the Church in the "\fodern World. At the same time,
Teilhard's name and some of his ideas, distorted and undistorted, became
a rallying point for the renewd enthusiasm of many Catholics; Teilhard
became a fad.
In a third phase, two more things happened. Serious general studies of
Teilhard's thought began to appear, among them Henri de Lubac's The
Religion of Teilhard de Chardin (i\cw York: Desclee, 1967) and Teilhard
de Chardin: The Man and His Meaning (i\ew York: Hawthorne, 1965),
Christopher Mooney's Teilhard de Chm·din and The Jlystery of Christ
(New York: Harper & Row, 1967), and Emile Rideau's The Thought of
Teilhard de Chardin (New York: Harper & Row, 1957). And the thought
of Teilhard began to have a quite visible impact on Christian thought and
especially on theology. Almost all contemporary Catholic theology of
original sin is derivative of a fe,Y key ideas of Teilhard's, and almost
every effort today to rethink the mystery of creation in terms of an
evolutionary world view is heavily dependent on Teilhard's vision. To
what degree new emphases in Karl Rahner's theology depend on Teilhard,
to what extent Teilhard's influence has contributed to the " theology of
hope" current and to the new strong stress on eschatology, how much
Teilhardian thought is behind new directions in Catholic spiritual theology
-all this can only be guessed at; but certainly Teilhard's influence has been
great and widespread.
A fourth period is beginning in Teilhard studies. Most of Teilhard's
philosophical and theological works are now in print, and there have been
a number of general studies of Teilhard that have laid the groundwork for
further work. What is beginning to take place is this: at the same time
that Teilhard's impact on Christian thought, particularly Catholic theology,
is becoming even greater, there are at present underway several studies of
Teilhard's thought according to special areas. There are, for example, at

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least five doctoral dissertations being written on different aspects of his
ethical theory. One work that treats a special theme in Teilhard's thought
has already appeared, The One and the Many, by Donald Gray (New
York: Herder and Herder, 1969). There are sure to be many other studies
that treat of special questions in Teilhard's writings-his idea of God, his
ecclesiology, his theology of prayer-and that relate his ideas to present.
philosophical and theological activity.
The two books reviewed here are properly situated between phases
two and three; they are, in part, a product of the now passing fad for
Teilhardiana, and they serve as an introduction to Teilhard's work and a
guide to its implications. They arc made up of lectures given at the
first annual conference of The Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Association of
Great Britain and Ireland held in London in 1966.
The first volume consists of three essays by Claude Cuenot and a
short piece by Roger Garaudy. Cuenot's three lectures-expanded-into-essays
are eoncemcd with Teilhard's spirituality, his integration of science and
religion, and the over-all structure of his thought. The first presents
Teilhard's spiritual doctrine as an answer to the needs of young people
who, in Cuenot's analysis, seek a Christian rationale for their will to
effective action. The second article tries, with considerable success, to
show that, for Teilhard and in reality, science and Christian faith are
both convergent and mutually complementary. Cuenot's final study presents Teilhnrd's main themes and approaches under the subtitles of " cosmos
and cosmogenesis," "anguish," "phenomenology," and "Christology." The
style is somewhat light, and there is not much documentation. Together,
the three make an adequate and interesting simple introduction to Teilhard
de Chardin. One wonders why Garaudy's short article was included in
the first volume; it is a comment on one of the studies in the second volume,
and it shows gross misunderstanding of Teilhard's most basic purposes and
ideas.
The second volume, Evolution, Marxisrn and Christianity, contains six
more talks given at the 1966 Teilhard conference, together with a radio
discussion, printed as recorded. The first three articles are in the field of
the philosophy of science. F. Elliott, a biochemist and theologian, describes
the origin of life biochemically in some detail, shows the significance of
this for an understanding of evolution, and concludes with comments on
the creative aspects of evolution. Barnard Towers briefly describes the
findings of human embroyology and shows how they fulfill Teilhard's "law
of complexity-consciousness."
P. G. Fothergill, in an excellent study,
presents and justifies Teilhard's views on orthogenesis.
Roger Garaudy gives his views on how Teilhard's thought can serve as
a basis for dialogue between Christians and l\larxists; this article is longer
than Garaudy's brief note in the first volume and is somewhat more
convincing.

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The last two articles are Christological.
A. 0. Dyson responds to
Garaudy and presents his version of Teilhard's Christology, a version which
is unfortunately unlike Teilhard's own Christology. Dyson sees no possibility of immediate personal relation to Christ: " our relation to Christ is
always mediate, not immediate, and is realized not in reflection, but ...
in human deeds .... " (p.
This is, of course, to void Teilhard's
mysticism of its heart and center, personal relationship with the risen
Christ in whom the world holds together. F. Elliott, in "The Christology
of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin," outlines the logical movement of Teilhard's
Christology with depth, insight, and precision. The final item in volume
two, "A Radio Discussion," is superficial and would have been better
omitted.
The articles in these two books are, then, of mixed quality, as are most
collections of this kind. Some, however, will be of interest to philosophers
of science and to theologians.
RoBERT L. FARleY, S.J.
The Catholic University of A me rica
Washington, D. C.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Science and Christ. Trans. by RENE HAGUE.
New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1969. Pp.
$5.00.
This is the eleventh in the series of Harper and Row translations of the
works of Teilhard, as they appear in the French version of Editions du
Seuil. Teilhardian scholars will be delighted with the new translation,
which makes available nineteen essays of varying length and one letter
(to Emmanuel Mounier), written at different times between 1919 and
1955. Since the essays deal with topics in Christology and the theology of
science that were approached again and again by Teilhard throughout his
life, and some of which assumed definitive form in works such as The
Phenomenon of Man (Kew York: 1959), they will be especially valuable
to critical historians of theology. The total collection also makes interesting reading for anyone interested in the relations between science and
religion, for they document the thought development of a scientist who
was preoccupied throughout his life with the problems of these relations
and who continued to commit his reflections on them to writing.
The longest essay, entitled "J\fy Universe," was written in Tientsin in
In effect this is a 49-page summary of all of Teilhard's thought,
ranging from his philosophy of creative union, through his Christology, to
the evolution of the world. Two other essays of substantial length
pages each) are "The Salvation of Mankind" and "Super-Humanity,
Super-Christ, Super-Charity," written in Peking in 1936 and 1943 respectively. The essay from which the book gets its name, " Science and Christ

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or Analysis and Synthesis," is a 16-page lecture delivered in Paris in 1921.
The remaining items are fairly brief notes or jottings on various problems
such as modem unbelief, Catholicism and science, degrees of scientific
certainty in the idea of evolution, and the religious value of research.
Practically all of the lectures have been published previously, but this is
the first time they appear together and in English translation.
WILLIAM

A. WALLACE, 0. P.

The Catholic University of America
Washington, D. C.

Paul Tillich's Philosophy of Culture, Science, and Religion. By JAMES
LuTHER ADAMS. New York: Schocken Books, 1970. Pp. 310. $2.95.
This first Schocken paperback of a book which was published initially
in 1965 is a most welcome edition since it makes more available a work
that has come to be considered the outstanding introduction to Paul
Tillich. As a revision of Adams's 1945 doctoral dissertation at the
University of Chicago, the book is restricted to Tillich's writings prior
to 1945, most of which were in German. Forced to leave Germany because
of his work with the Religious Socialist Movement and opposition to
Naziism, Tillich and his family came to New York in 1933. There he
taught at Union Theological Seminary until 1955 and wrote several works
in English up to the time of his death in 1965. Many of these works deal
with the same themes of his earlier writings in a developed form.
As the author points out, the contents of this book can be adequately
appreciated only in relation to the broad spectrum of Tillich's writings.
These include in his philosophy of culture such themes as social ethics,
religious socialism, political theory, psychotherapy, and education, not to
mention his writings on theology and Church life. Adams's work, however, does provide a most helpful background to the understanding of
Tillich's total contribution to the development of Christian thought. The
detailed bibliography of works by and about Tillich from 1910-1945 is
invaluable to anyone who wishes to examine his ideas more thoroughly.
The contents of this book cover the fundamental areas of Tillich's quest
for a new language to express the Christian message in the context of
contemporary culture as well as the basic concepts by which he interprets
that message in its religious relevance to the reality of a secular age. Dr.
Adams considers in some detail Tillich's theology of art and culture, his
philosophical classification of the sciences, and his philosophy of religion.
In his introduction to the concluding chapter concerning Tillich's understanding of the relationship between philosophy and theology he observes:
" According to Tillich, philosophy is a theory of the principles of meaning;
philosophy of religion deals with these principles of meaning, relating them

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to a theory of the essence of religion; and theology provides a normative
system of religion based on the classical symbols of a particular confession."
Such a summation is characteristic of the author's ability to expose
clearly and succinctly the essential aspects of Tillich's thought. At the
same time he offers the reader a firm foundation for studying his thought
with a sound critical sense.
In his last lecture, delivered shortly before he died, Paul Tillich
recalled his life-long quest for a new theonomy, i.e., the situation in
which religion gives true depth and ultimate meaning to the existing
culture and cultural forms provide the patterns for a meaningful expression
of religious convictions. This quest especially identifies the apologetical task
of his monumental Systematic Theology which he intended to be a
dialogue with and against the individuals of our secularized society. In
its paperback edition Dr. Adams's book promises to bring more readers
toward a deeper understanding of Tillich's theological enterprise and to
inspire contemporary theologians in their efforts at meeting the continual
challenge of relating Christian revelation to the cultural conditions of our
time.
FREDERICK M. JELLY, 0. P.
Dominican House of Studies
Washington, D. C.

Advaita Vedanta: A Philosophical Reconstruction. By ELIOT
Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1969. Pp. 119. $6.00.

DEUTSCH.

This is one of the most impressive books in Indian thought to appear
in several years. Any work on Advaita Vedanta is significant because this
school of Indian philosophy has been traditionally the most widely accepted
system of thought and continues to be followed, in one form or another, by
Indian philosophers today. Advaita Vedanta is a high philosophical moment
in the history of Asian man. This particular study is impressive because
it is a successful attempt at comparative philosophy, and it is articulated
superbly by one in the forefront of his field, Professor Eliot Deutsch or
the University of Hawaii. The importance of this work lies precisely in
the fact that its author has set new goals for comparative philosophy with
this single book: namely, "to bring comparative philosophy into the mainstream of creative thought-East and West." {p. 1) Professor Deutsch is
convinced that Asian philosophy should be approached as " material for
creative thought." {p. 2) His work in this short volume is evidence of
this possibility.
Advaita Vedanta, which is a philosophical system established by Sankara
{ca. 788-820), is more than a school of thought, for from its inception it has
been a guide to spiritual experience. All of the classical philosophical

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systems of India are called darsanas, a comprehensive Sanskrit word which
literally means 'a point of view,' a point of view which has first been
lived out and only then intellectually systematized in writing. The
classical Upanishads speak of darsana in terms of spiritual perception.
One must experientially achieve a spiritual level of perception; a mere
rational conviction is not enough but an experiential grasp of knowledge is
required. It is important to note that a philosopher does not speculate,
does not express his thought, does not begin to systematize philosophically
unless his 'point of view ' has been first experienced. In Advaita Vedanta,
" one acquires knowledge only in an act of conscious being which is akin
to what one knows and is the content of direct experience." (p. 4) Thus,
Indian darsanas are paths of spiritual realization as well as philosophical
systems of thought. The thought systems, nonetheless, were traditionally
more akin to scriptural exegesis, for they were in the main an analysis
of the classical Indian scriptures.
A comparative philosopher, however, neither accepts necessarily the
scripture of the other as authoritative nor accepts even the experience of
the other as authoritative. Professor Deutsch sub-titles his book "A Philosophical Reconstruction."
This, he says, is the role of the comparative
philosopher who determines what in that system of thought is consistent
with universal human experience. To reconstruct a religious philosophy
is to remove it considerably from its historical, cultural, and traditional
context, and to search for that which has universal interest and meaning.
Consequently, this study is neither a history nor an exposition of a
particular school of Indian philosophy; it is the formulation of a philosophy
which has been creatively restructured in order to be understood by any
student of philosophy. Some may object to Deutsch's methodology and
may insist that philosophy must be articulated in a historical and cultural
context. Such studies of Indian philosophy already exist; Das Gupta,
Radhakrishnan, Hiriyanna, and others have done this with varying degrees
of success. However, their work has not placed Indian philosophy into
the " mainstream of creative thought." Deutsch accomplishes precisely
this, and his model highlights the challenging role of comparative philosophy today.
In eight chapters this book covers the essential metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical content of Advaita Vedanta. One of the finest chapters
(Chapter Two: Levels of Being) considers the ontological levels affirmed
by Advaita Vedanta and how each is arrived at and constituted. This is
a highly creative chapter and evidences a philosophical reconstruction.
Advaita Vedanta uses the Sanskrit term badha to make the necessary
distinctions between the various orders /levels of being; it means literally
' contradiction ' but is translated in context as ' cancellation ' or ' sublation.'
Deutsch reconstructs this concept as subration which he describes as
" the mental process whereby one disvalues some previously appraised

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object or content of consciousness because of its being contradicted by a new
experience." (p. 15) To subrate means, therefore, to undergo an experience
which radically changes one's judgment about something. This is then
applied to the various levels of being. "Reality is that which cannot be
subrated by any other experience. Appearance is that which can be
subrated by other experience. Unreality is that which neither can nor
cannot be subrated by other experiences." (p. 15) The more something is
capable of being subrated, the less reality it has. Only the timeless,
unconditioned, undifferentiated oneness of being is not subrated, i.e.,
Brahman; this is the content of Advaitic (non-dual) experience which is
expressed in the Atman (self) -Brahman equation and identity. Such a
philosophical reconstruction expresses the ontological levels affirmed by
Sankara in more complex and contextual language and thinking.
Another exceptional chapter (Chapter Six: Aspects of Advaitic Epistemology) engages the popular critique of those who look to Indian
thought and especially non-duality as a subjective idealism. Deutsch
elaborates here on the ' soft ' realism of Advaita Vedanta by insisting
that Sankara and his followers always saw the necessity of affirming the
distinction between the subject and object within the phenomenal world
and phenomenal experience. In Advaita non-duality between subject and
object holds only on the level of the Brahman-experience. What makes
this a very special kind of ' realistic ' epistemology is that it is philosophically necessary but ultimately false, for it is restricted to only a portion of
man's experience. (p. 97) In short, the higher knowledge of spiritual
experience which is non-dual holds only for the man who has attained this
knowledge. What then is the role of reason in this epistemology? The
main concern of Advaita is to describe and to lead the mind to the primary
moments of spiritual experience. Reason enables one to function in this
world, but its greatest value is when it enables one to transcend phenomenal
reality and reach a higher knowledge and a higher reality.
This book is carefully written. The style and thought are clear, precise,
and finely worked out; at times Deutsch reaches poetic moments. There
is need, however, for an appendix of terms in which the more frequently
used Sanskrit words are translated and placed in a philosophical context.
I would not hesitate to suggest this study to a student of philosophy.
It can be recommended to anyone who is interested in creative philosophical thought in general and in the Eastern experience in particular. Finally,
it should be in the hands of anyone interested in the intellectual history of
man. Eliot Deutsch is one of the few Western scholars who could have
written this type of book. It will be interesting to see if it will be used
in the future as a model for comparative philosophy.
WILLIAM

The Catholic University of America
Washington, D. C.

CENKNER,

0. P.

BOOK REVIEWS

Religion in Ancient History. By S. G. F. BRANDON. New York:
Scribner's Sons, 1969. Pp. 412. $12.50.

679
Charles

Professor Brandon of the University of Manchester, England, wrote his
new book, Religion in Ancient History, not only for specialists in the general
or comparative science of religion or religiology, that is, for professors or
students, but particularly for the intelligent lay people of the new middle
classes in Great Britain, the United States, and other English-speaking
countries. With his new study of the science of religion the author would
like to reach the specialists in industry and commerce who provide the
economic foundations upon which academic life is built. He wants to
popularize the results of one hundred and fifty years of scientific exploration in the province of religion. He achieves this purpose by a simple and
beautiful language, a clear diction, an acute pedagogical sense, many outstanding illustrations, and many well-chosen quotations from ancient religious texts. The latter two points alone justify the price of the book.
But Brandon does much more than merely popularize the results of the
general science of religion. In his new book, Religion in Ancient History,
Brandon sums up his whole scholarly life's work in the field of religion:
his books on The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church, Time and
Manlcind, Man and His Destiny in the Great Religions, Creation Legends
of the Ancient Near East, History, Time, and Deity, Jesus and the Zealots,
The Trial of Jesus of Nazareth, The Judgment of the Dead. Brandon's
new book is not only an excellent popularization of his previous works but
is in itself a great scholarly contribution to the further progress of religiology. It stands at the very front of the evolution of this science. But
that is not all. This recent book, as well as the author's previous works, is
written in the spirit of a new humanism which today permeates the whole
science of religion. It is an excellent guide for the layman through the
vast and complicated province of religion. But certainly no specialist in
the field of religion-religiologist or theologian-can afford to miss reading
Brandon's summary of his life's work. His new book should be part of any
library for the science of religion or theology, in fact, of any library.
It is the fundamental law of evolution of all sciences concerned with the
functions of the human spirit that they go through a continual process of
inner differentiation and through a process of mutual interdependence with
the disciplines from which they originated and with their respective
neighbor sciences. In the last one hundred and fifty years the science of
religion differentiated itself into the history, sociology, psychology, phenomenology, and philosophy of religion. At the same time, religiology
entered into a mutual exchange with philosophy, theology, history, and
philology from which it had arrived and with the neighbor disciplines of
sociology, psychology, literary science, and ethnography together with which
it had come into existence in the last century.

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In his latest book Brandon combines two of the branches of the science
of religion: the history and the phenomenology of religion. In the chapters
on the Jewish and Christian religion the historical method has somewhat
priority over the phenomenological method. In the chapters on the preJudeo-Christian religions this relationship is reversed. The history of religion simply traces the evolution of a specific positive religion. The
phenomenology of religion consists of a comparative analysis of religious
phenomena or forms. Brandon is master in both methodological perspectives. He traces the evolution of religions-Chinese, Indian, }\l[esopotamian,
Egyptian, Jewish, Greek, Roman, and particularly Christianity. At the
same time he gives a comparative analysis of a variety of religious forms
as they appear in different positive religions, for instance, the religious idea
of soul, death, time, creation, space, devil, angel, providence, and saviourgod.
The history of religion will always remain the very fundament of
religiology. But since the First World War the phenomenology of religion
has gained supremacy over the other sub-disciplines of the general science
of religion. Brandon participates fully in this ascendency of phenomenology.
The phenomenologist inquires into the very essence of particular religious
forms through the whole phenomenal world of religions and tries from there
to arrive at a differentiated systematic of types and laws of religious data.
He initiates a process of ideational reduction. The phenomenological study
of religions presupposes a sensus numinis by which cult-processes or religious
texts can be understood from inside on the basis of a general notion of
religion. Such study should be-according to the religiologist--Dbjective,
and it should be done without any " theological prejudice." In the perspective of the religiologist theology is the articulation of the self-understanding
of one specific religious group. As such, theology may help to enter the
self-understanding of this group. But it has thereby not yet fulfilled the
epistomological requirements for understanding other religions. For the
religiologist, Christianity is not the " absolute religion " which it still was
for G. W. F. Hegel. The religiologist also does not agree with Adolf
Harnack's statement, "He who does not know Christianity does not know
any religion and he who knows Christianity with all its history knows all
religions." If this statement were true, Christian theology would be
sufficient to understand all religions and the science of religion would be
superfluous, since the religiologist could find only phenomena in nonChristian religions very similar to those forms already discovered by
theologians in Christianity. The religiologist Brandon finds it absolutely
necessary to study Christianity and all other religions. He tries to do so
objectively and without the slightest trace of his own theological past or
perspective. He has a deep sense for the numinous which helps him to
penetrate into the inner spirit of all religions including Christianity.
All religions of our earth planet belong to the subject matter of religi-

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ology. The scope of this science is, therefore, much broader than that
of any particular theology. Theologies themselves are religious forms to
be studied by the religiologist. The specialist in the science of religion is
concerned with dead as well as living religions. His field stretches from
the sun cult of the Incas to the fertility rites of the Hindus. There are
few religious forms in the now dead or still living positive religions of the
Near East, the Far East, or the West with which Brandon is not familiar.
But his main interest lies with the religions of the Near East: the religions
of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Israel, Ancient Greece and Rome, and with
Christianity in its Oriental origins and development up to the fall of
Jerusalem in 70 A. D. Through his highly particularized historical and
phenomenological studies of religious forms, their structure and historical
context, Brandon has made a tremendous contribution to the continuously
growing edifice of the world of religious phenomena, structures and life
laws, systems of myth and theologies.
It is as typical for the Hegelian Right to abandon the present and the
future to the past as it is for the Hegelian Left to sacrifice the past and
the present to the future. Neither side has a real present. Brandon makes
his middle class readers familiar with a large variety of religions which
belong to the past. Even if they are still present with us today, such as
Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity, they are nevertheless portrayed as
phenomena belonging to the past. We are led through a huge museum.
The reader learns about leaves which have grown on the tree of religion
many Springs ago. Those leaves are still fascinating in their shape, but they
have become somewhat dry. Brandon shows us-to use a mythological
image he himself thoroughly enjoys-the skins out of which the snake of
the human species has crawled many generations ago and which it has
long since left behind. He tells the truth, which was the truth for others
but which obviously is no longer the truth for us. Who can still kneel
before 1\farduk or Zeus? From the viewpoint of Brandon, the discoveries
of modern emprical sciences and the general historical experience of postmodern man have now rendered even the Christian view of life and history
obsolete and untenable. Of course, Brandon is mainly concerned with
certain historical objectivations of Christianity, for instance, the nowdeclining Constantinian folk church, the Victorian Christianity in England,
or the fundamentalist Christianity in the United States. Those objectivations he tends to identify without qualification with the very spirit of
Christianity. He seems not to be too familiar with the circles of reflective
Christians on all continents for whom the Christian message of God as
absolute future is still very much a viable option concerning the meaning
of history and life for the present as well as the future. Of course, it
need not particularly be mentioned that Brandon, like other religiologists,
starts from the assumption that Christianity is a religion and as such
underlies the laws, life forms, and categories of the history of religions.

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In general, more observation of living religions in their daily activities could
have helped Brandon to interpret the historical religions analogically, which
otherwise can be reached only by historical-philological means.
The science of religion must not justify its existence by demonstrating
its practical utility. But it may very well be that this science could
become of gTeat importance in the unification process of our world in the
second half of this century. Brandon is very much aware of this possibility.
He wrote his new book in order to promote a better understanding between
Eastern and Western cultures. In this sense his book is truly ecumenical
not only in relation to the different Christian churches but also in terms
of world religions. Religious forms belong to the determining variable of
cultural change. The study of those religious variables of change may
contribute to the mutual understanding of cultures. The present importance
of the Near and the Far East for the West makes the energetic development of the science of religion a vital necessity. Brandon has devoted his
life's work to the further development of the science of religion as an
instrument for the understanding of Eastern cultures by Western man.
Brandon is motivated by a world-wide new humanism which has found a
special home in the science of religion.
Religiology is definitely not theology. In the last century the science
of religion was developed against theology. Tensions still exist between
those disciplines. But today it is very well possible that the same scholar
works in the field of theology and religiology. Brandon is familiar with
traditional theology. In earlier stages of his career he served as an army
chaplain. Liberal Protestant theology has deeply influenced him. But his
new book definitely does not fall within the traditional discipline of
theology. The religiologist has no ambitions to replace theology, but he is
very jeaious of the autonomy of his discipline versus theology. In the
perspective of the religiologist, his science has lost its autonomy as soon
as it becomes a theological discipline. In this case it becomes an ancilla
theologiae as philosophy once was. In the perspective of the religiologist,
it is against the universal purpose of the science of religion to be put in
the service of one religious community and thereby become an instrument
in the struggle of this one religious community with others. In the field of
theology the science of religion may become part of missionary science. It
may serve apologetic interests. The religiologist wants, rather, to uncover
apologetical tendencies and ideological distortions produced by religious
communities against one another. Brandon concentrates, for instance,
much of his chapters about Christianity on the discovery of apologetically
tendentious elements, particularly in the Gospel of Mark, but also in the
other three gospels and in the writings of the early Church Fathers. The
religiologist
admit that also a science of religion as integral part of a
theology may yield interesting scientific results. But, in his perspective,
it would mean to break the backbone of the science of religiology if one

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would make it into an integral part of a specific theology, since the purpose
of this science is to explore the religions of the past and the present for
their own sake and not for missionary and apologetical purposes of any
particular religion. It is, of course, of greatest importance for young
students of theology to acquire a thorough knowledge about the world
religions. Brandon's book can certainly be most helpful in this direction.
lt would also be possible to reconcile theology and the science of religion
with:n the framework of a liberal theology department on the basis of
a general notion of religion to which also Christianity could be subsumed.
Such reconciliation has taken place in Holland and Sweden. Such reconciliation is easier within the framework of Protestant theological departments--except those under Barthian influence-rather than in Catholic
theology departments, since Protestant theologians-contrary
at least to
traditional Catholic theologians-share with the religiologist in the heritage
of the great founders of the historical-philological school. In non-liberal
theological departments-for instance, those promoting the dialectical theology or an integralist Catholic theology-a representative work of the
science of religion like Brandon's new book will not easily find a home.
But there can be no doubt that the study of such books would be of
greatest value for orthodox and neo-orthodox theologians. The further
effectiveness of the science of religion in general, and of Brandon's work in
particular, will very much depend on the liberalization of Protestant and
Catholic theology.
The science of religion has, like its modem neighbor sciences, philosophy
for its immediate origin and its final goal. G. W. F. Hegel, whose 200th
birthday the intellectual community celebrates this year, was not only
the last great scholastic but also the father of the modem science of
religion. Brandon's book is truly Hegelian in scope, analyzing and comparing all the positive religions contained in Hegel's Philosophy of Religion.
Of course, the science of religion is no longer a normative science. Like its
neighbor sciences, religiology has become a merely descriptive science.
Brandon's study attempts to remain descriptive throughout. As a descriptive science, religiology is concerned with the survey, knowledge, and understanding of all religious data and phenomena, the origin and evolution of
positive religions, and the causal and functional correlations of religious
data. But the theoretical presupposition of the science of religion is, nevertheless, a general notion of religion, that is, a common standard of
exploration underlying all religious forms. In the last one hundred and
fifty years religiologists have developed a variety of such standards in the
field of religion. This variety of methodological approaches makes the
science of religion highly flexible and productive. But all those different
methodological perspectives are subordinated under the presupposition that
all positive religions are based on " religion " no matter how this fundamental notion of " religion " may be defined or interpreted, for instance,

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as progressive unification of divine and human nature (Hegel), or as
"feeling of dependence" (Schleiermacher), or as "hope for totality"
(Bloch) . For this fundamental notion of religion religiology depends on
philosophy. The religiologist needs at least a provisional notion of religion
at the beginning of his work as a working hypothesis. Otherwise, he could
not differentiate between religious and other types of phenomena. Certainly
at the end of the religiologist's work stands the question concerning the
essence of religion, the historical value-scale of religiology, and the truth
of religious knowledge. With those questions the history, phenomenology,
sociology, and psychology of religion enter the field of the philosophy of
religion. All branches of religiology are comparative in their method, and
this comparative method has proven its tremendous productivity in the
field of religion. Brandon's new work shows that once more. But that does
not mean that the science of religion wants necessarily to relativize and
equalize all religions in terms of a flat " nothing else than " bourgeoise or
socialistic enlightenment. The science of religion can never entirely exclude
the crucial question of religious truth without running the danger of
becoming trivial and thereby forcing particularly the students to ask,
after reading the most industrious, scholarly works on religious forms:
"So what?"
Brandon's new work is based on a universal notion of religion. This
notion stands as working hypothesis at the beginning of the book. It
appears also as the result of the book, verified by each individual chapter.
Brandon defines religion throughout his book as man's attempt to give
meaning to his individual biography, as well as to the history of his group.
Man is an animal which does not only want to survive but desires to survive
meaningfully. Man creates religious forms in order to satisfy his need for
meaning, his need for ultimate significance of his individual and collective
existence. Brandon operates with an extremely humanistic and not-at-all
theological notion of religion. This humanistic definition opens up tremendous vistas within the province of religion. It stimulates that deep
sympathy without which positive religions cannot be understood from
inside. Brandon has this humanistic sympathy for all religions to the
highest degree. It is this sympathy which makes him the great master in
his field.
But Brandon's humanistic notion of religion has its disadvantages. It
is somewhat vague, and this vagueness has its consequences. Brandon's
humanistic notion of religion does not help to differentiate sufficiently between religion and other functions of the human spirit, for instance, art
or philosophy. Also, art and philosophy are definitely a human response
to man's need for meaning. Another consequence of the vagueness of
Brandon's notion of religion is that he cannot explain sufficiently the
difference between magic and religion at the beginning of the religious
evolution. In relation to the preliminary end of the evolution of religion

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Brandon assumes as self-evident that Christianity can be subsumed under
the same notion of religion together with, for inbtance, the Egyptian or
Mesopotamian religions. Only a very clear, precise, and definite notion of
religion could help to decide if Christianity can be called a religion or not.
Brandon seems not to be aware in his new book of the fundamental
problem raised by the still dominating dialectical theology of present
Protestantism, whether Christianity can at all be subsumed under any
general notion of religion. Karl Barth taught that Christianity was no
religion but rather the crisis of all religions. According to Barth, religions
are merely man's work. They are only the result of hybris. They are
man's arrogant longing and attempt to penetrate by his own power the
mystery of God while in Christ revelation has been given by God to the
believer as a matter of grace. Brandon seems also unaware in his book
of the post-modern Catholic theological position, that Christianity is no
longer a religion but a trans-religious as well as a trans-cultural and
trans-moral eschatological message of God as the absolute future, arriving
in history and challenging human estrangement in all societies, particularly
religious estrangement. Brandon, of course, does not want to relativize or
equalize all religions, particularly not Christianity, despite his comparative
method, comparing, for instance, the saviour-god Osiris with the saviousgod, Jesus the Christ. According to Brandon's humanistic notion of
religion, certainly all religions are the response of man's creative subjectivity to the problem of ultimate significance of this subjectivity. But
not all religious answers to this problem of meaning are equally valuable
in humanistic terms. There is progress in the evolution of the religious
consciousness. During the religious evolution answers to the meaning
problem of human existence become, for instance, less crude and bizarre.
The philosopher of religion, Hegel, is mentioned only once in Brandon's
new work and then only in relation to the British anthropologist James
G. Frazer, who took from Hegel the fundamental thesis that an "Age of
Magic" preceded the "Age of Religion" in world history. But at least
unconsciously and indirectly, Brandon is, nevertheless, as the most outstanding religiologist in the last one hundred and fifty years, still influenced
by the great philosopher. Some elements in Brandon's book give explicit
witness to Hegelian influence: the courageous scope of the study; the
conception spirit of religion and the search for key ideas to penetrate the
religious spirit; the conceptions Weltanschauung, logic of experience, of
situations, or of religious forms; the conceptions irony of history or of fate
understood as latent functions of human decisions and actions; preference
for great personalities in the context of collective processes like Zarathustra
or Akhenaton; the emphasis on the process of individuation in some
religions of the Near East; preference for religious ideas and their artistic
objectivations in cultic architecture, sculpture, painting, epic, and lyric,
rather than for religious organization, attitudes towards the world, ethics

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and social ethics, and the eufunctionality or dysfunctionality of religion for
the structure of personality society and culture; the emphasis on Christianity as the last phase of the evolution of religion in which religious forms
from older religions-ideas of soul, death, incarnation, saviour-god-are
preserved and elevated.
Certainly Hegel's fundamental notion of religion was also humanistic.
According to l\Iarxist philosophers, Hegel discovered the productivity of
Man's consciousness in terms of a transcendental subjectivism in his
Phenomenology of the Spirit. Also Hegel understood religious forms as
the work of man in humanistic terms. But for Hegel, the Divine Spirit was
working in the human spirit. Religious forms were not only the product
of man but also the work of God. The evolution of religion was not only
a process of progressive human self-knowledge but also of progressive
God-understanding of men and self-understanding of God in the evolving
religious consciousness of man as the partner of God. This latter theistic
position of Hegel is no longer tenable for the humanistic science of religion.
It is typical for the Hegelian Right and Left that both intellectual
movements are unable to hold to Hegel's powerful syntheses. Brandon
dissolves Hegel's synthesis of humanism and theism as does the whole
Hegelian Left from Feuerbach to Bloch. He replaces Hegel's dialectical
objective idealism by an undialectical subjective idealism a la Emmanuel
Kant. He describes forms of religious consciousness, but the intentionality
of those forms is not discussed. He analyzes God hypostases as they were
projected throughout world history against the horizon of the "Holy,"
but the " thing itself "-the ultimate sacred reality in and for itselfremains out of considertion. The question of truth of religious knowledge
is excluded from the new humanism in the science of religion. As the
science of religion on the Hegelian Left is atheistic, so it remains at least
agnostic on the Hegelian Right. One wonders how humanistic such an
absolute humanism can really be, such as it is represented in Brandon's
work? How much humanism is really left to post-modern man, walking
alone through the museums of his abandoned God-hypostases? A reconsideration of Hegel's philosophy could probably help the humanistically
inclined religiologist to arrive at a more balanced, fundamental notion of
religion than has been produced so far in the science of religion and as
presently represented in Brandon's otherwise excellent work.
It would be desirable that Brandon would have allowed the sociology of
religion to influence his work more than it actually did. Sociological
functionalism and nco-functionalism from Malinowski to O'Dea could have
made the author somewhat more sceptical concerning our knowledge about
the origins of religions, including the origin of Christianity. A greater
emphasis on the sociology of religion could also have helped the author to
understand more adequately the correlation between positive religions on
one hand and the stratification and dynamics of societies on the other

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hand. The analysis of this correlation is, at present, the strength of the
Marxist science of religion with its philosophical-sociological orientation.
It is the main thesis of Brandon's chapters on Christianity that the
Christian religion was revolutionary in its origin and its evolution up to the
fall of Jerusalem but that, after the year 70 A. D., Christianity adapted
itself to the power structure of the Roman city empire and became a
somewhat conservative law-and-order-religion.
According to Brandon, it
was .Mark's main concern to prove to the Roman society that Christianity
was neither new nor revolutionary but had a positive relation to law and
order in the Roman society. The other three gospel writers and the early
teachers and Fathers of the Church pursued the same conservative apologetical tendency. It seems that Brandon overlooks somewhat how many
revolutionary statements have not been censored in the four Gospels: ...
I have come to bring fire and I wanted it to burn ... No rich man can
enter the Kingdom of God . . . I have come to make all things new . . .
He has pulled down princes from their thrones and exalted the lowly, the
hungry He has filled with good things, the rich He sent empty away ... etc.
Also, after the year 70 A. D. and the beginning of Catholic Christianity,
did Christians continue to die for their faith as " atheists " and " traitors "
in the Roman society. Religious orders continued the prophetic-revolutionary trend in Christianity the more the Constantinian folk church became
conservative and a means of social control and integration for the Roman
city empire, the European feudal societies, and finally the nation state.
Today, amidst the decline of the Constantinian folk church, reflective
Christians like Torres, King, the Berrigans, and Groppi have chosen to
become prophetic-revolutionary
agents of social change. No Marxist can
any longer make the unqualified statement that religion is necessarily opium
for the people. Marxist religiologists would certainly agree with Brandon
that Christianity was originally a revolutionary movement and later on
became, in the process of adaptation to different human action systems,
conservative and even reactionary. But they would add that the revolutionary undercurrent never ceased completely in the history of Christianity.
Modern martyrs like Torres and King, as well as the political theology,
the theology of hope, and the theology of revolution in Protestantism and
Catholicism, prove them right. It would have added to the value of
Brandon's book if he would not have over-stressed the Christian's embarrassment concerning their revolutionary origin (according to Brandon,
Jesus of Nazareth died as a revolutionary executed on a political sedition
charge) and the element of newness in their Faith. It would have helped
his book had he stressed more the element of revolutionary hope for the
new, the eschatological "not-yet" in Christianity as it appears from
Christian tradition. It is intrinsic to Brandon's main emphasis on the
history and phenomenology of religion that neither sociology, psychology,
nor philosophy of religion come sufficiently to the foreground. But it is

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exactly one function of the law of differentiation and mutual interdependence, operative in the evolution of religiology, that it is impossible
for one author to be master in all disciplines which constitute the science of
religion or to be in contact with all the sciences from which religiology
derived or with which it shares the same origin.
Religion constitutes an immense province of human life throughout man's
social evolution. It is sufficient for the individual religiologist to gain his
legitimation in one or two branches of his science. This legitimation gives
the specialist in the field of religiology the right to make use of the work
of other specialists in other branches of his science and of other either
traditional or neighbor disciplines to the extent allowed for by his critical
eye and his scientific intuition. It would be utopian to demand from the
religiologist, at this time, a thorough knowledge of all societies and
cultures in which religions have been formed or to know all the languages
in which religious man has expressed himself in the course of social
evolution. A religiologist cannot be judged as a dilettant because he is
unable to live up to such demands. Such demands in themselves would be
dilletantish.
Professor Brandon has fully gained his legitimation as an outstanding
scholar in the history and phenomenology of religion. He has thereby
earned the right to use other branches of the science of religion and other
disciplines as auxiliary sciences. With the help of other specialists in
other branches of religiology and in other traditional and new disciplines
Brandon has established in his new book a fascinating historical synthesis
of all knowledge presently available about the province of religion in terms
of a new humanism. At the end of his book Brandon leaves us with the
humanistic hope that man will not only survive but that he will also
continue, despite all disappointments, to ask the fundamental question
which all religions try to answer: What does the history of mankind mean?
Postmodern Western man is supported in asking this question, according
to Brandon, by his teleological instinct, by his deep grounding in the
doctrines of progress, and by centuries of Christian tradition. It is up
to the new generation of religiologists, philosophers and social scientists, as
well as theologians to continue Professor Brandon's courageous seach for
an inspiring purpose in history. A Christian theology of religions does not
yet exist. Should it ever come into existence, it will need the help of the
science of religion and of great scholars like Professor Brandon.
RUDOLF

Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, Michigan

J. SIEBERT

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689

God in Exile: Modern Atheism. By CoRNELIO FABRO. Translated and
edited by Arthur Gibson. Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1968.
Pp.
$35.00.
Tlw subtitle of this magnum opus fixes the limits of the author's range
of vision and suggests the terms of the thesis he attempts to establish.
Fabro speaks of the roots of modern atheism in the Cartesian cogito; the
line of inquiry he follows, after an initial analysis of what he takes to be
the atheistic implications of Descartes' fundamental axiom, is more or less
severely defined by his singular point of departure. Each subsequent
chapter makes reference to this premise, which is also the source of what
Fabro calls the internal dynamic of modern atheism. This continuing
reference supplies focus and framework for Fabro's interpretations of postCartesian thought and provides the thread binding into some measure of
unity a series of essays of uneven value and monumental proportions.
God in Exile is an extended argument for the contention that immanentism
is at the source of every expression of theism in modern philosophy. The
work may be judged by the success of the argument and by the adequacy
of this perspective as an insight on philosophical atheism.
On the face of it, the impression left by Fabro's exposition, that all of
modem Western thought, at least in its philosophical dimension, is
atheistic in its intrinsic logic and final thrust, is a vague one and irritates
by its excessive generality and facile selectiveness. One would have to
examine closely Fabro's treatment of each author or movement and determine whether the book's central thesis finds genuine application. More
basically, it is a question of the authenticity of treating these several
writers, whose work spans a period of three centuries, merely, or very
largely, as vehicles for the transmission, elaboration, and refinement of a
single proposition. One may assume that it is legitimate to consider the
inherent logic of a philosopher's position independently of the latter's
purpose or intent or even stated convictions which may ignore or defy that
logic. It remains for an interpreter to bear the burden of proof in
attributing to an author conclusions which he himself did not draw or
which he may even have expressly repudiated. Fabro does not go so far
as to call each and every thinker whose philosophy he studies an atheist,
but he does something equivalently as sweeping and forceful in its impact.
His ultimate contention is that there is no philosopher of any stature or
any school entirely free either of the formative influence of Cartesian
immanentism or of that theoretical atheism which, so he claims, is its
inescapable derivative. More dramatically, Fabro wants to convict the
whole of serious modern thought of the exile of God, the effective elimination of the God of biblical faith and ethical monotheism.
Fabro's method and principle of interpretation constitute the form of
his inquiry and are imposed on the vast array of his materials with uncom-

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promising consistency and unity of purpose. Although the approach follows
a historical pattern, and although there is, indeed, abundant evidence
drawn from a wealth of commentary and criticism contemporaneous with
the authors studied, there is serious reason to question the work's overall
historical accuracy. Fabro has chosen to emphasize precisely those aspects
and elements in his subjects' thought which lend support to the thesis he
is bent on verifying. His coverage is thorough; I can think of no philosopher
of the first, or even the second, rank who is not included in Fabro's
comprehensive survey of Western thought. His grasp of the essence of
their teaching is stronger and surer in the case of Continental thinkers than
that of English-language authors. In seven sections the atheistic core
content of Western philosophy is laid bare, from the mid-17th to the mid20th century, from Cartesian rationalism to dialectical theology and the
" death-of-God " radicalism. His lengthy introduction is preceded by an
excellent essay delimiting the notion of atheism and refining the terms
and conditions of the author's proposed inquiry. In a concluding section
Fabro reviews the course he has followed and questions the validity of his
key principle. His own philosophical options are spelled out clearly and
forcefully and a rather truncated brief is entered on behalf of a realist
metaphysics.
Only the expert ought to venture a critique of any particular chapter, to
register demurrers at the successive analyses of the most profound and
intricate epistemologies and ontologies of the most powerful minds in our
cultural history. I shall confine myself to a few observations on Fabro's
handling of English Deists, most of which have not been reprinted since
the early 18th century. Unfortunately, the section on the origins and
historical background of Deism appears to be the weakest and least well
documented in the book. Herbert of Cherbury's overriding concern, to
banish the rising spectres of corrosive skepticism and furnish religious
belief with a sound basis in reason and nature, is all but dismissed in
Fabro's indictment. The tone of his appreciation of Deism is revealed in
the forthright assertion that Deism prepared the way for the atheism of
the 18th century and favored those who were denying all religion. Fabro's
treatment of Hobbes respects the complexity and obscurity of the latter's
religious philosophy, but it is strange to find Hobbes included with the
Deists, with whom he had no connection.
Shaftesbury is regarded as in the Deist tradition, but as a very late
and minor figure. Fabro fastens accurately on the issue which exercised
Shaftesbury and proved of crucial significance in the long Enlightenment
debate over God. Fabro fails, however, to examine carefully the succession
of principal Deist writers after Toland, to uncover the nuances and complex
directions taken in a series of works that emerged rather as a bulwark
against outright unbelief than the invitation to atheism which Fabro
discerns. Perhaps the major flaw in Fabro's actual reading of the philosophy

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G91

of the Deists is his linking of this movement with British empmcism.
Toland, it is true, had connections with Locke, but of a personal and
social nature, and the main inspiration of Deist thinking is neoplatonist
and idealist in character. In any case, the Deist school is not fairly
represented by the lone Toland and out of a possible forty or fifty
important Deist works, over a period of fifty or sixty years, fewer than
half a dozen are even mentioned by Fabro. The role played by the Deists
in modern European religious history remains to be fixed and properly
estimated; Fabro's sketch is neither adequate nor reliable.
It may be argued persuasively that atheism represents French Enlightenment thinking about God at its most historically authentic and logically
consistent. Fabro's argumentation is far from persuasive, although this
happens to be his interpretation, as one might have expected. He restricts
himself to the four leading materialists in whose works he claims to find
a full-blown atheism constructed from a number of disparate sources,
unoriginal, intellectually inferior, but influential in the campaign to
secularize French life and thinking. There is little of Fabro's own understanding in this section; he has followed quite uncritically standard
Enlightenment authorities such as Verniere and Vartanian. One is puzzled
by his repeated, and equally uncritical, citation of the commentaries of
Soviet and other Marxist historians of philosophy. Fabro seems to rely
on these Communist interpreters as guides to the at times an1biguous
thinking of the philosophes. On the other hand, there are valuable
references, in later sections, to Hegelian and Marxist texts on the part
played by the French materialists in the warfare of modern reason with
religious orthodoxy.
The later chapters, on 19th century European philosophy, display the
author's historical sense and theoretical acumen at its best. The intricate
convolutions of Kantian and Hegelian dialectics are traced patiently in
an effort to pin down the inevitability of atheism for any position which
precludes a viable realist metaphysics of being. The humanist underpinning of Marxism is wisely noted, as the positive counterpart to its antitheism and source of revolutionary ardor and vision. A chapter on Whitehead struggles heroically to disengage from a bewildering welter of insights
and reflections on man's religious experience a coherent doctrine on the
reality of God and the relationship to him of a world in process. The
recurring affinities of pantheism and atheism are striking documented in
this exercise. Throughout Fabro's volume there are appendices which
present additional material and sometimes welcome elucidations of points
raised in the text. The reader is advised not to neglect these pages or to
overlook the staggering wealth of bibliographical references they providr.
In the concluding section Fabro doffs the historian's cap and assumes a
role obviously more to his liking, that of philosophical critic and reconstructionist. More than any other aspect of thr '"ork. the forthright meta-

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physical realism of this section impresses me as a healthy, invigorating
contribution to an understanding of atheism as an intellectual phenomenon.
The drive, the sheer energy, with which Fabro strives to nail down an
extremely difficult and elusive thesis is exemplified superbly in the persistence with which he explores every avenue opened up by his research,
going over the terrain painstakingly, to find at work that immanentism
which, he is convinced, infects the whole of modern thought with an
atheistic bias. Fabro has wrought a work of monumental proportions and
performed a service of incalculable magnitude for the student of modern
religious philosophy in general and of the problem of atheism in particular.
That he has succeeded so admirably is a tribute to his speculative and
scholarly competence; where he has been less successful he has laid down
sound criteria and pointed the way for others. The translation is not
smooth and is often infelicitous or misleading; one presumes, for example,
what is invariably rendered "illuminism " to be "Enlightenment."
.JOHN

P. REID, 0. P.

Providence Col/eye
Providence. R. /.

The Light of the Mind: St. Augustine's Theory of Knowledge. By
RoNALD H. NAsH. Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of
Kentucky, 1969. Pp. 147. $6.50.
Ronald Nash's short monograph has the obvious merit of being the
first study in English dealing exclusively and comprehensively with
Augustine's theory of knowledge. An accurate assessment of Augustine's
views on this subject is all the more important in Nash's opinion as
Augustine has not only allegedly stamped with his influence such giants
as Descartes and Malebranche but has actually anticipated some of the
most original insights of Berkeley and Kant. The topic is on the whole
notoriously controversial, as the persistent divergences of interpretation
among scholars, both past and present, abundantly testify. Nash has
nevertheless faced the difficulties of his enterprise courageously. Pitting
himself against Portalie, Boyer, Gilson, Copleston, and other established
authorities, whom he accuses of having scholasticized Augustine, he presents
an account of Augustine's thought which claims the double advantage of
being more consonant with Augustine's own statements and more intelligible
to the modern reader.
The opening chapters of the book deal in the main with a number of
preliminary issues all intimately connected with Augustine's "epistemology," such as his repudiation of skepticism, his views on the role of faith

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in human life and its relation to reason, and his theory of sense perception
and cognition. Of particular interest is Chapter Two, which focuses on the
Contra Academicos and traces the line of reasoning which led to the
rejection of the materialistic or mechanistic cosmology on which skepticism
was based in favor of Platonic teleology or the notion of an intelligible
universe governed by a divine mind. The reviewer's sole regret is that
Nash has not taken greater pains to indicate how Augustine not only
used the Platonic theory to refute skepticism but reshaped the Platonic
theory itself to suit the requirements of the Faith.
The remainder of the essay is devoted to an analysis of the doctrineH
of divine illumination and of intellection, which, as the author rightly
points out, form the core of Augustine's theory of knowledge. The
competing interpretations advanced by contemporary scholars are reduced
to four broad types, which Nash labels respectively the Thomistic, the
Franciscan, the Formal, and the Ontological. The first and least acceptable
of these, defended by Boyer, identifies the divine light of which Augustine
speaks with the agent intellect and falsely ascribes to Augustine a theory
of abstraction analogous to that of Aristotle. The second, to which the
name of Portalie is attached, argues that the ideas are impressed on the
human mind by God himself but leaves the mind with only a passive
role to play in the act of knowing. The third, which finds its chief
prononents in Gilson, DeWulf, Copleston, an"d Kaelin, sees the role of
illumination as that of imparting a quality of certitude or necessity to the
ideas but is unable to account for their content. There remains the ontological interpretation, hitherto shunned by most historians, which alone
would do full justice to the complexity of Augustine's thought and which
combines among other things the benefits of conceptualism and realism.
In essence, it postulates an immediate awareness of the eternal truths
on the part of the human mind. This statement is not to be taken to
mean that man sees all things in God, as :Malebranche later contended,
but that man's reason has been so structured by God as to be capable
of knowing the ideas in the divine mind as well as the creation that is
patterned on them. Only by having recourse to such an isomorphism,
Nash suggests, is it possible to resolve what he calls the three great
paradoxes with which any account of Augustine's views must come to
grips and explain, namely, how the human intellect is both active and
passive, how the archetypal forms are at once distinct and not distinct
from the mind itself, and how the mind is and is not at the same time the
light that makes knowledge possible. A brief synthesis of the most
pertinent Augustinian texts accordingly reveals 1) that the ideas in the
mind are a priori, that is to say, not derived from experience, 2) that they
are virtual or not always actually thought, and 3) that they constitute the
necessary precondition of science.
Nash shrewdly observes that the preference exhibited by scholars for

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one or the other of these interpretations is by and large a function of
the prior assumptions to which they are committed or with which they
approach Augustine's works. Yet one does not see clearly how he is
able to exempt himself from his own verdict. Although there is much to
be said for his position, the terms in which it is expressed are often more
redolent of modern thought than of Augustine and his models. It is
misleading, if nothing else, to speak of the importance of " epistemology "
for Augustine and to stress the kinship in this regard between his views
and those of either Descartes or Kant, inasmuch as epistemology is
predicated on the very denial of the teleology on which, by Nash's own
admission, Augustine's final position rests. If the universe is teleological
or, what amounts to the same thing, if there is a natural harmony
between it and the human mind, one can dispense, as Augustine did, with
the artificial intellectual tools to which philosophers were complelled to
resort at the dawn of the modern period once that harmony had been
rejected and once the intrinsic intelligibility of the universe had been
questioned.
There are more subtle ways in which Nash's own bias occasionally
comes to the surface. He is undoubtedly justified in taking issue with
those contemporary theologians, such as Alan Richardson, who argue
that faith as Augustine understands it is devoid of any propositional
content (p. 31), but he in turn oversimplifies matters when he remarks
that for Augustine " practical reason directs and guides the theoretical
reason " (p. 34) , thus unwittingly making of him an advocate of moralism,
which he most emphatically was not. Assuming the advisability of stating
the problem in these non-Augustinian terms, the most that can be said
from Augustine's point of view is that religious knowledge, as distinguished
from purely philosophic knowledge, is in one and the same act both
speculative and practical. This is not to deny that the will exercises a
great influence on the intellect or that some kind of faith is presupposed
on the part of the student especially during the early stages of the
learning process.
The irony of the book, in this reviewer's judgment, is that Nash could
have found much better support for his interpretation in a sound and
penetrating analysis of Plato's theory of knowledge than in the parallels
that he is so eager to draw between Augustine and the modern epistemological tradition. Unfortunately, he still clings to a textbook understanding of the separation between the physical and intellectual worlds in
Plato and fails to see-in the celebrated analogy of the cave, for instancean effort on Plato's part to show how the same world can be viewed in two
radically different ways or a dramatic illustration of the fundamental
distinction between mere opinion and true knowledge. He likewise takes
at face value Plato's statements on reminiscence or recollection instead of
discerning in them a figurative expression of the microcosmic nature of

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the human soul or of the pre-established accord between the mind which
knows and the universe which it knows (cf. p. 69, 81 ff.). The same mistake
was, of course, made by Augustine, who nevertheless managed to capture
with admirable profundity the true spirit of the Platonic argument and
at least had the excuse of not having read most of Plato's dialogues,
including the Meno, which he knew only at second hand.
Finally, the overall quality of the essay is marred at times by a number
of minor but still annoying defects. The author sheds little light on the
issues at hand when he defines a "word" (verbum) as a symbol, as
opposed to a sign, in what may be one of the least satisfactory parts of
the book (p. 85 ff.) , and his constant recourse to Latin words or phrases,
presumably for the sake of clarity, is to say the least far from unimpeachable; witness, for example, the frequent use of the plural for the singular
or of the genitive when the context obviously calls for the nominative form
(pp. 63, 72, 75, 87, 89, et pMsim).
The preceding strictures are formulated for the sole purpose of furthering
the dialogue which Nash has auspiciously reopened and which has yet
to yield its choicest fruits. Whatever the merit of these strictures, there is
no denying that the book assembles a wealth of profitable information which
those philosophers and theologians whose interests reach back to the
wellsprings of Western thought will plunder with delight.
ERNEST L. FoRTIN
Assumption College
Worcester, Mass.

Why God Became Man and the Virgin Conception and Original Sin. By
Anselm of Canterbury. Translation, introduction, and notes by JosEPH
M. CoLLERAN. Albany, N. Y.: Magi Books, 1969. Pp. 253. $6.00.
This new translation has a distinct advantage over previous ones because
it has been made from the very good edition of F. S. Schmitt, 0. S. B.
The translator, J. M. Colleran, seems to indicate why he chose to translate
the Cur Deus Homo and the de Conceptu Virginali when he says that "it
is quite likely that Anselm's principal claim to fame is his authorship of
the book Cur Deus Homo" and that "the virgin conception and original
sin is a corollary to why God became man." (p. vii) Colleran lists the
different works of St. Anselm in "the chronological order proposed by Fr.
Schmitt, so that the reader may better appreciate the Cur Deus Homo and
the de Conceptu Virginali in the light of St. Anselm's whole body of
theological thought and devotional meditation." (p. 13) Colleran expresses
" the hope that the understanding Anselm had of the truths of faith is

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not obscured, but fairly communicated by the present English version, and
that not too much of the fervor of the saint's utterance has been lost by
being relayed through a colder tongue. The only liberty deliberately and
frequently taken was to shorten many sentences in which Anselm not
only states a proposition, but works in attestation from authority, and
reference to a related truth, and an ascetical animadversion, all without
stopping for breath." (pp. 54-5)
Whatever may be the opinion of the reader about the relative importance
of the works of St. Anselm, he will, I think, be generally satisfied with the
work Colleran has done. Of course, no two translators would render a
passage in exactly the same way; however, Colleran's renditions are, for the
most part, defensible. Because translations have a limited usefulness, it is
enough, I think, if the translator renders with defensible and reasonable
accuracy the thought of the orir:;·inal language. Therefore, any criticisms
\vhich I have to make are somewhat trivial. It is useless to attempt to solve
the controversy about the advisability of translating into beautiful English
a Latin text which is, in itself, stylistically pedestrian.
My main criticism of the present translator is that he sometimes puts
into his translation more than the Latin will allow. This is done in one
of two ways: First, he will often supply possible implications in the text,
and second, he will use a stronger or more precise word than the Latin
warrants. Often enough it is impossible to avoid this pitfall, especially in
the case of rendering the so-called scholastic language into English or in
leaving deliberate ambiguities in the original Latin. Here are a few examples of what I mean. Should peregrinus be translated "exile "? (p. 60)
Again, (p. 176) "with the will in it" seems to add an emphasis that in
qua est voluntas does not contain. Colleran translated cum sit omnipotens
as "although he is omnipotent," (p. 60) whereas previous translators have
either " since he is omnipotent " or " who is omnipotent." Most likely the
clause is concessive, but I am not sure. Again, (p. 67) " that there is no
opposition " translates quomodo non obsistat; surely St. Anselm intends to
do more that merely show that there is no opposition. I wonder if ratione
should be translated by " rational arguments." There may be some subtle
reason for translating natum de femina "born of a female body," but why
not simply "born of a woman "? (p. 67) St. Anselm insisted that copyists
include the chapter-titles (p. 61); evidently he tl:ought they had some
importance. Yet Colleran (p. 169) translates quae sit originalis et quae
personalis iustitia et iniustitia as "What original justice or injustice and
personal justice and injustice mean." St. Anselm wanted to know what
they were. A complicated discussion of the meaning of meaning would not
have been very familiar to him.
Probably the preface, introduction, and annotations to a translation are
not the place to look for a clear doctrinal statement of an author's teaching.
But there are a few points about Colleran's interpretations which I should

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like to make. For the life of St. Anselm he has followed closely Eadmer and
R. W. Southern, St. Anselm and his Biographer; it would have been helpful
if Colleran had tried to distinguish a little more clearly between historical
facts and literary commonplaces. For example, we should like to know how
strongly the monks insisted that Anselm write down his treatises or
reflections or musings. Again, was it true that Anselm was carried rather
than led to the church for his investiture by the king? To such questions
many will reply that, if we cannot believe what an author writes, then
history-writing becomes impossible; yet we do know that rhetorical
commonplaces were long in honor. Furthermore, it seems to me that any
discussion of Anselm's methodology without a precise analysis of his teaching on faith, truth, and the rectitude of the mind is bound to miss the
point of his "proofs." Did Anselm hope to convince his readers by
persuasion or demonstration? There is a vast literature on St. Anselm in
which we find many divergent interpretations. It is surprising, therefore,
to find such unqualified statements as " father of scholastic theology "
(p. 53) and the implication of a " realism that is faithful to the philosophic
tradition stemming from Plato." (p. 50)
The notes (pp. £15-£45) are sometimes helpful, especially the crossreferences. Some of the notes are to me ambiguous expecially where references are given to the Fathers; does this always imply that this was the
source of St. Anselms speculation? Again, Colleran speaks of the ambiguity
of Anselm's use of the word "Father," because it often refers to all three
Persons of the Trinity. Yet the references (pp. 230-1, fnn. 33 & 79) do not
seem to bear out what Colleran alleges.
All in all, Coleran's work is a contribution to Anselmian studies and is,
I think, without serious errors. In these days of "little Latin" it will
serve a useful purpose.

J. REGINALD

O'DoNNELL

Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies
Toronto, Canada.

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 51 (3a, 27-30) Our Lady,
with notes and appendices by THoMAs R. HEATH, 0. P. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1969. Pp. 144. $7.00.
The reader who wishes to savor to the full the excellently translated and
commented present volume of the Blackfriars Summa would do well to
have at hand Lumen gentium, the dogmatic constitution on the Church,
with its eighth chapter on "The Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, in
the Mystery of Christ and the Church."

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Our Lady takes up qq. 27 through 30 of pars tertia: sanctification of the
Blessed Virgin, virginity of the l\Iother of God, her betrothal, the announcement to l\1ary-four questions, editor-translator Heath says, that " have
come from somewhere and are going somewhere," viz., come from the
consideration of the meaning of the Incarnation and going towards the
existential consideration of the meaning of Mary's Son who was born,
lived, died and rose to save us from our sins. For St. Thomas as for
Vatican II, Mary belongs to the divine plan from the beginning, and this
carries through to the eschatological joy of her union with the Risen Christ
and continuing concern for the brethren of her Son. However, neither
predestination nor Assumption are the immediate concern of qq. Q7-30,
and even the specific question, Mother of God, comes a little later (q. 35).
In qq. 27-30 St. Thomas takes up the last preparatory steps to the entrance
of Christ into the world: " let us first look at the mother conceiving
him." What will we discover? The four questions provide the answer in
a remarkable delineation of our Lady: holiness, innocence, human love
for Joseph her husband, and humility before the great announcement.
Mary is before us as the virgin mother who conceives Christ, not as the
Pieta.
Appendix 3, " The Immaculate Conception," reflects further on Thomas's
position, reproducing from the Shapcote 1926 English Summa a table on
" The Law and Course of Original Sin." Heath shies away from discussing
the possibility that Thomas finally accepted the privilege. Obviously he
did not in q. 27, and the evidence of his sermon on the Hail Mary is
hard to assess. Heath's further reflections on the ecclesial sense of the
privilege in the thought of Vatican II are helpful. In a footnote Heath
rewrites III, q. 27, a. 2, ad Q in the light of the defined truth of the
Immaculate Conception, substituting for " did indeed contract original sin,"
the phrase, "was indeed subject to the common law of original sin, but in
the very instant of animation she was preserved from contracting it. ... "
That the Immaculate Conception could only be in terms of the redeeming
gTace is part of its very meaning; but why does Heath say "indeed subject
to the common law " (shades of old DEBITUM PECCATI controversies?)?
The theology of original sin has shifted from a static to a dynamic,
evolutionary view of reality. Heath explores the consequences of some
current views with regard to the Immaculate Conception. He finds it hard
to reconcile our Lady's initial holiness with Schoonenberg's "situatedness.'·
He likes the personalistic approach of Alszeghy and Flick and finds value
also in Hulbosch's evolutionary theory. They "have changed the emphasis
of original justice from an actual datum once given to an actual reality
once offered to men and refused, but offered again in another and better
form through the redemption by Christ. . . . The 'need for redemption ' is
another way of saying the lack of something that should be there, i.e., a
privation of the grace of redemption." There is good bounce to Heath's

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699

own example of a solid rubber ball: when a piece i:s lopped oH, tk: ball
rolls erratically ever after. " Original sin is not the erratic behavior of the
ball ... it is simply the lack of an original perfection that should be there,
it was the lop out of the ball. ... "
St. Thomas's discussion of Mary's freedom from actual sin gives him
occasion to comment on her " marvelous intimacy " with Christ: " The
Wisdom of God was present not only in her soul but in her womb as well."
As for John Chrysostom's charges of vainglory at Cana, Thomas is
brief: " Chrysostom exaggerates." The women's liberation movement in
the Church is unlikely to invoke art. 5, ad 3-Mary indeed had the gift
of wisdom, and the Magnificat shows her a good prophet, but " she did not
use wisdom by teaching since this was not thought becoming to women,"
with a reference to I Tim 2:12.
On the question of Mary's virginity Thomas Aquinas lines up the
traditional objections with his customary fairness. Among the reasons for
the virginal conception Augustine is quoted to the effect that the Head
was born physically of a virgin to signify that the members are born
spiritually of the virgin Church. On the in partu virginity, which Thomas
regarded as miraculous, Heath notes the disagreement among Catholic
theologians today as to its exact meaning. It was delightful to reread
Thomas on the question of Mary's vow of virginity. He considers soberly
the arguments pro and con, both the moral dignity of vowed virginity and
the Jewish sense of spreading their religion through their families, then
opts for a conditional vow: " Perhaps she wanted to, but she also waited
on God's good judgment. Afterwards, when she had taken a husband, the
acceptable thing to do in those days, she with her husband took a vow
of virginity."
On behalf of her betrothal and marriage Thomas brushes away the
argument of St. Jerome that betrothal concealed from Satan the conception
of Jesus, for " the devil is sharp enough to know what takes place within
human bodies." One of the positive reasons for the conception of Christ
occurring to a betrothed virgin is again ecclesial: " the betrothal symbolizes
the whole Church. For the Church is a virgin betrothed to one man,
Christ. Augustine says this." Characteristically, Aquinas adds a further
reason of his own: to honor marriage as well as virginity.
Question 30 is the counterpart to the medieval Marialia (Mariale super
missus est) and deals with the annunciation. The likenesses of chap. 8 of
Lumen gentium (which has itself been called an extended commentary on
Mary's fiat) are particularly close here: Mary conceived in faith before
she conceived in flesh (from Augustine); her consent stood for all mankind's consent to the spiritual marriage taking place between the Son of
God and human nature; as the evil angel tricked the woman, so it was
fitting that God send an angel to the Virgin to announce the restoration
of human nature in the divine birth. " The medium is the message " is

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l'ticLuhan-borrowed reflection on Thomas's arguments for the
appearance of the angel in bodily form. As to the plan of the Annunciation (de ordine annuntiationis, which comes out "was the announcement
well planned? ") Thomas concludes with a benign interpretation of Mary's
hesitation: "that kind of doubt was more one of wonder than of unbelief."
Appendix 1 is an historical survey of Thomas's writings on our Lady; the
listing is preceded by two pages on the " temper of the times," with praise
for Aquinas's restraint in a time of florid lives of Mary and the exaggerations of many Marialia. Seven writings on our Lady are listed, from the
early commentary on the Sentences (1254-56) to the homily on the Hail
Mary (1273). Within his limits Heath manages to give some good short
examples from various writings, e. g., "A distinctive teaching" in the
commentary on John "is that J\fary paved the way for Christ at Cana,
assuring the people there that her ' religious ' son was not a hater of joy
and festivity."
The treatment of the Summa (pp. 96-97) is a good
summary of the present volume. As for the Hail Mary, delivered during
Lent in Naples, 1273, Heath summarizes well this short work, commenting
on the difference between " a theologian quietly working out his distinctions" and a preacher "particularly if he is using the Neapolitan dialect."
There is an appendix also on "recent studies on our Lady in the New
Testament," which is well-informed. It might help the reader to know here
that Braun, La mere des fideles, is to be had in English as Mother of
God's People (Alba, Staten Island, 1967); that Max Thurian's splendid
book, though now out of print in its American edition, Mary, Mother of
All Christians (Herder and Herder, New York, 1964) can still be had in
its British edition (the same translation in fact), titled more correctly
Mary Mother of the Lord Figure of the Church (Faith Press, 7 Tufton St.,
London, SW 1, 1963); that the second half of R. Brown, The Gospel
According to John, vol. 29A (Anchor Bible) is due for publication summer,
1970, and will cover John 19, 26.
Father Heath has handled his present task not only as a labor of love
and loyalty but in a spirit of joy that shines through in his good humor
right from the lively introduction, though I fear cryptologists may one
day puzzle over the numbers 123 and 487 in the acknowledgements (p.
xii) , and " a shot without a snooker " is a new addition to thomistica!
Would all scholars wore their learning so lightly! Hopefully Fr. Heath will
extend his editorial expertise to the other :Marian writings of St. Thomas.
And now that Doubleday has beg·un to issue the Blackfriars Summa in
Image paperbacks, it is good to look forward to having this book at popular
prices. When E. L. Mascall reviewed this title for New Blackfriars,
November, 1969 (as "an inspiring volume by an inspiring scholar"), he
chose this passage to end with. I do the same, for it captures so well
Thomas's views on our Lady and Thomas himself:

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701

" The ' doubt of discussion ' is behind eYery article of the Summa, the ' doubt of
wonder' is, of course, behind the whole vast enterprise of theology. Theology, as
well as philosophy, begins in wonder " (p. 24, n. 22).

EAMON R. CARROLL, 0. CARM.
The Catholic University of Arnerica
Washington, D. C.

St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Saint Paul's First Letter to the
Thessalonians and the Letter to the Philipians, (Aquinas Scripture
Series Vol. 3; Revised Standard Version Text); tr. by F. R. LARCHER,
0. P., and MICHAEL Dc:FFY, 0. P.; Albany, N. Y.: Magi Books, 1969.
Pp. 122. $4.50.

The first impression the modern biblical scholar has on reading the commentary of St. Thomas is that of a strange new world. It is, of course, an
unfamiliar old world that was home to Christian exegetes for many
hundreds of years before it was succeeded by the modern world of critical
scholarship. And for that reason alone it is important that these commentaries be preserved; we should not forget the roots from which we have
sprung or the rock from which we have been hewn.
As suggested above, the first thing the modern exegete notes is the
almost total absence of critical or scientific analysis. There is no long
introduction discussing the historical and doctrinal background of the
letters, no philological discussions, no extended remarks on possible
Hellenistic or Jewish influences at work, no literary analysis in the modern
sense and no awareness of textual critical problems, minor as they may be
in these letters.
To this reviewer's mind the importance of the commentary is three-fold.
First of all, it reveals Thomas's thorough acquaintance with the text of
Scripture. In one sense it can be said that this is a commentary of
the Bible on these two letters. Throughout, the author adduces other texts
of Scripture which might throw some light on the passage. Nor are they
from what we would consider the better known or more important biblical
books. One must conclude that St. Thomas really read and was thoroughly
familiar with the Bible. As often as not the parallel passages are applied
in a merely accommodated sense, but this is not to be despised in a
meditative reading of the Scriptures.
The second point of importance is the hermeneutical stance of the
author. Anyone acquainted with St. Thomas's other writings, above all his
Summa Theologiae, will recognize immediately the tendency to analyse the
text in a philosophical way. First of all, every verse is broken down into
two or three points, each of which in turn is broken down into two or three

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more points. :Moreover, his theological presuppositions frequently intrude
in the explanation. For example, he writes: "Paul greets the Church ...
in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, that is, in the faith of the
Trinity and of the divinity and humanity of Christ, because our beatitude
will consist in knowing them. He mentions only the person of the Father
and the incarnate Son, in which two is understood the Holy Spirit who is
the bond between the Father and the Son." (p. 5) Again, in discussing
1 Th. 4:4 he distinguishes between venial sin, when concupiscence is
present in relations with one's wife, and mortal sin, when adultery is
committed. (pp. 30 f.) Modern scholars have not overcome this "hermeneutical circle," though they are more aware of its presence.
Thirdly, we occasionally find a theological insight that is of major
significance in the development of ontological theology. Perhaps the most
important of these in this commentary is Thomas's recognition, in 1 Th.
4:14, of the role of the resurrection of Christ in man's redemption, a role
that has only recently been re-discovered by modern theologians. During
the last several hundred years theologians commonly had reduced the
resurrection to little more than epilogue in the theology of redemption,
to an apologetic for Christ's divinity. Redemption was almost exclusively
attached to Christ's passion and death. It is embarrassingly clear now that
the Scriptures, and especially St. Paul, had already proclaimed the active,
if not dominant role of Christ's resurrection in our justification. 1 Th. 4:14
is only one of several Pauline statements on the subject, and not the most
forceful at that. Nevertheless, St. Thomas comments unequivocally that
" Christ's resurrection is the cause of our resurrection. . . . He is also the
efficient cause of our resurrection, for the things done by Christ's humanity
were done not only by the power of His human nature, but also by virtue
of His divinty united in Him." (p. 35) This is not the place for a detailed
discussion of the significance of this insight for a theology of redemption.
We might say simply that it would almost justify by itself the publication
of this translation of St. Thomas's commentary.
EuGENE

H. MALY

Mt. St. Mary's of the West
Norwood, Ohio

The Origin and Evolution of the Priesthood. By JAMEs A. MoHLER, S. J.
New York: Alba House, 1970. Pp.
$3.95.
This book presents an account of the origin and evolution of the
Christian priesthood from its beginnings, when it bore the marks of contemporary Jewish governing bodies, to its attainment, during the fourth
century, of a degree of perfection rivalling that of the Jewish priesthood of
Aaron. At this peak of development, the Christian priesthood, reflecting

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703

the struggles of the Church with secular ruling powers, had come to
symbolize the triumph of the Church. The functions of the episcopate,
representing the fullness of the priesthood, had become surrounded with
something like imperial dignity and splendor. The divine power of bishops
and priests was stressed; their human capacities and responsibilities were
viewed in their relationship of instrumentality to what God would accomplish within the Church.
The author sketches quite summarily the results of his scholarly
research which could be expanded, as he must have pursued it, into a
volume many times the size of this one. In the main part of the book
the exposition is positive and factual, with little evidence of any kind of
personal viewpoint. In the introduction, however, the author suggests
his conviction that the Church may have reached today a turning point
in history which will demand re-examination of the concept of the priesthood. The pastor of souls who, in the past, served as marriage counselor,
psychologist, legal advisor, teacher and confessor, now finds many of these
tasks taken over by professionally trained lay experts. Even the liturgical
services, over which the priest continues to preside, have been opened up
more and more to lay participation.
Does this mean that the priesthood itself is no longer relevant to the
needs of contemporary man? Should the Church now be advancing toward
a new kind of social structure in which the people themselves will predominate, selecting and empowering representatives from their own number
who will govern the Church in accordance with their own wishes? Is the
priest becoming more and more the presbyter who will serve for a time
and then be replaced?
In his conclusion the author indicates clearly his conviction that there
is need for a priesthood which will share the mediating function of the
priesthood of Christ. A ceremonial priesthood, whose members were regarded as separated from the people whom they served, was found in
pre-Christian times among the Jews, the Greeks and the Romans, seemingly
in response to a basic human need. Within the Church this need has
been supplied by bishops, priests and deacons, whose power of ministering
to the people comes through sacramental ordination and not from the
circumstances in which they have been humanly deputed. However strong
the contemporary movement toward a simplified, socially oriented service,
men will always seek a holy and sacred priesthood. Priests set aside from
men will intercede for men, propitiating God for the sins of men and offering
sacrifice for men at the altar of God in lieu of Christ the High Priest.
The author acknowledges that signs of the times point to a decreasing
emphasis on the part to be played by ordained ministers in the functioning
of the Church. He acknowledges, too, the abuses that have grown up
within the Church as ordained ministers have turned their power and
position toward personal advantage. w·e have reason, he suggests, for

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looking hopefully to earlier forms of liturgy and ministry, as they are
now being authorized, for a renewal of Christian life that will be comparable
to that of the early Church. We should not be less mindful, he adds, of
the early warnings against false prophets and teachers, and against schism
and heresy. Today, as always, there is need of unity. The bishop is the
center of unity around whom all the people of God should gather. He
is the guardian of the tradition which began at the dawn of salvation
history, and which took a new direction through the Apostles whose power
each bishop receives through his sacramental ordination. This tradition,
the author says, is meaured truly by the Roman Church of the West.
This book may be read with great benefit by those who, dissatisfied with
the past, are seeking a new Church which will be in touch with the trends
of the times. It may also be helpful to those who, loving the past and
hesitating to break with it, need to distinguish more clearly in Christian
tradition what is essential and divinely ordained from what is human
and historical.
+THOMAS

J. RILEY

St. Peter's Rectory
Cambridge, Mass.

De Doctrina Concilii V aticani Primi. Vatican City:

Libreria Editrice

Vaticana, 1969. Pp. 583.
The Vatican Library is commemorating the centenary of Vatican I with
this republication in an excellently printed volume of a number of doctrinal
studies on the Dogmatic Constitutions Dei Filius and Pastor Aeternus.
The editors, with the collaboration of R. Aubert, U. Betti, 0. F. M., and
Msgr. Maccarone, offer six articles on Dei Filius and eleven on Pastor
Aeternus, selections chosen for the research the authors made of the
documents which prepared these Constitutions and for the witness they
give to the theological effort which prepared for Vatican II in the light of
Vatican I. Only four selections antedate the 1960's. The authors chosen
indicate the quality of the choice: Kerrigan, Schlund, Aubert, Caudron,
Nau, Paradis, Beaudoin, Betti, Dewan, Kasper, Hamer, Dominguez del
Val, Torrell, Dejaifve, Thils, Chavasse.
The subject matter of most of the articles turns on one or other of two
topics: the relation of the episcopal college to the Roman Pontiff and the
various facets of the Conciliar teaching on infallibility. Vatican II developed the work of the previous Council regarding the episcopal college
and the primacy; it reaffirmed the dogmatic teaching on infallibility but
went on to state the proportionate response due to the exercise of the
ordinary magisterium of the Roman Pontiff and of the bishops, that is,
the form of proclamation of truth that does not engage all the conditions
for infallibilty as noted by Vatican I.

BOOK REVIEWS

705

M. Caudron (Magistere Ordinaire et lnfallibilite Pontificale d'apres la
Constitution "Dei Filius ") shows that, on the basis of Vatican I, it is
impossible to draw a parallel between the ordinary magisterium of the
Church and that of the Roman Pontiff. The term " ordinary and universal
magisterium of the Church," a formula of Vatican I, had a long and
tortuous Conciliar history. P. Nau (Le Magistere Pontifical Ordinaire au
Premier Concile du Vatican) is constrained to correct Caudron's understanding, through his use of the distinction:
Ecclesia coadunata and
dispersa, of the nature and guarantee of this magisterium. The infallibility
of the ordinary and universal magisterium of the Church is the consensio
praedicationis praesentis totius magisterii Ecclesiae united with its head.
N au does agree that the definition of papal infallibility in Vatican I is
so restricted that it forbids a direct application of the formula to the
ordinary magisterium of the pope. However, although the texts of the
Constitutions furnish no positive argument in favor of the infallibility of
the ordinary papal magisterium, they cannot be invoked to exclude it.
The argument from silence of this Council does not prove that the personal
magisterium of the pope could not be a rule of faith. The Conciliar
Fathers were concerned to show only that, besides the solemn judgment,
there is another mode of presentation of revealed truth: the ordinary and
universal magisterium of the Church.
These articles throw light on the discussions in the Council, especially the
always valuable statements of the spokesmen for the Deputation on Faith
concerning the " consensio ecclesiarum," with regard to the freedom of the
Sovereign Pontiff in the selection of the means whereby he may ascertain
that his teaching accords with revealed truth. N au states that the representative of the Deputation showed that, along with the universal preaching
of the magisterium united to its head, there is another criterion to which
the Deputation attributed first rank-the ordinary teaching of the successor
of Peter in the Church of Rome, whose sole tradition, just as the consensio
ecclesiarum, is equally a guarantee of the truth of faith. Thus, the one
source or privileged criterion always at the disposition of the Roman
Pontiff is " the tradition of the Roman Church which has guarded with
inviolable fidelity the deposit which Peter entrusted to it," the doctrine
received and professed at Rome and actually handed down.
In his conclusion Nau makes the point that, while a solemn judgment of
the Roman Pontiff, in the ex cathedra terms of the Council, is a single act
which is necessarily infallible, it is not the only mode of doctrinal presentation in which the pope is assured of divine assistance in providing a rule
of faith. In his teaching and preaching, by an ensemble of acts rather than
by any single pontifical statement, i.e., by the constant teaching of the
successor of St. Peter, the pope as doctor of the faith makes the faithful
aware of the sense of revealed teaching. Thus, in the context of Vatican I,
the ordinary magisterium of the pope cannot be termed infallible but
rather faithful to the revelation it has the mission to make known. The

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teaching m1sswn of the Roman Pontiff is to transmit and communicate
faithfully the received deposit (ut fideliter expOMret). Thus the charism
of fidelity attaches to this form of teaching, as infallibilty is involved in the
solemn judgment. The ordinary pontifical magisterium is a rule which is
imposed on faith and by the sole fact that its teaching is firmly held as
revealed by the tradition of the Church of Rome which is constantly taught
by the successor of Peter.
It is to be hoped that in the future the greatness of Vatican Council I
and its work will emerge from behind the shadow of its successor. Continuing research and study of the caliber of many of the articles in the
present commemorative collection will result in a more exact appreciation
of that dramatic intervention of the Spirit in the Church a century ago.
NICHOLAS

HALLIGAN,

0. P.

Dominican House of Studies
Washington, D. C.

It is the Lord! Sin and Confession Revisited. By WILLIAM J. BAuscH.
Notre Dame: Fides Publishers, Inc., 1970. Pp. 157. $5.00.
to
This
book was written for the " average Catholic " and
be judged as a piece of popular theology. Yet the work so skilfully incorporates some of the more widely accepted opinions of contemporary theology
that it serves as an impressive summary of modern pastoral attitudes
and practices.
The first six chapters are devoted to the concept of sin. "Friendship
with God " is the figure under which the personalist approach to grace,
the opposite of sin, is advanced. Consequently, sin is defined as" wounding
that friendship" and is susceptible to varying degrees of hurt (avoiding
the terminology of mortal and venial) . The objective standards of
Christian morality are not rules to be kept but guidelines to be applied,
norms to be concretized and interiorized. The " new morality " is a
question of outlook and attitude. Formation of conscience, i. e., practical
moral judgment, is traced to the influence of parents; to be truly human
is to make one's Christian conscience an ever more perceptive and expansive
faculty. The " fundamental option " or " over-all response " to the goodness of God is rather tentatively advanced as an explanation of the distinction between grave sin and mortal sin.
The final six chapters of the book deal with forgiveness of sin, which
always requires an act of faith. The pagan, the devout Jew, the sincere
Protestant, as well as the repentent Catholic, all have access to the forgiveness of the Father through sincere prayer and mortification. But the
Sacrament of Penance offers a "special signalling" or ratification that

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707

our sins are forgiven. The only limitation to sacramental forgiveness comes
from the penitent's lack of sorrow.
An excellent chapter on the communal and ecclesial aspects of forgiveness
fills in the lacunae left by the heavy emphasis on personalism in the first
part of the work. The chapter on the history of penance, however, is too
brief to do justice to the extensive historical research which has been
done by Poschmann, Vogel and others. Deferral of first confession is
advised on the strength of recent studies which claim that a child is
incapable of mortal sin until the age of eleven or twelve and on the
statement of Aquinas that one cannot commit venial sin until he is
capable of committing mortal sin.
Examination of conscience for today's Christian, it is proposed, ought
to embrace three broad areas: vocation, charity and omissions. The
final chapter " It is the Lord! " could have been more effective if it had
included reference to the central place of the Eucharist in the mystery of
God's pardon.
Father Bausch displays an admirable talent for selecting key texts
from incisive theologians and for translating scientific theological research
into the language of the layman. The Sacrament of Penance could be
saved from its present state of confusion through judicious application of
the suggestions which this book has for both confessor and penitent.
JoHN M. DoNAHUE, 0. P.
Dominican House of Studies
Washington, D. C.

Persons, Privacy, and Feeling. Essays in the Philosophy of Mind. Ed.
by DwiGHT VAN DE V ATE, JR. Memphis: Memphis State University
Press, 1970. Pp.
This book is a re-edition of seven essays on various aspects of the
philosophy of mind which were published originally in "The Southern
Journal of Philosophy." The authors are E. M. Adams, Douglas Browning,
Charles Hartshorne, Donald Gustafson, Erwin W. Straus, Edward H.
Madden and Dwight Van de Vate, Jr.
The good points of the collection are many: the general topic is of
perennial interest not only because it seems forever to present problems
almost too subtle and intricate to be solved but also because the solutions
seem always to promise an insight into man " where he lives "-into the
division of spirit and marrow, or, perhaps, where engram and percept
intersect. These essays do not purport to solve all the problems, but they
make their contribution. They are characterized, as is to be expected, by
professional philosophical expertise. The analyses of many word-usages and

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concepts, and the exposition of many varieties of opinions on different
points, are handled very well and are instructive.
If any complaint is to be made it is that there is sometimes a little too
much of philosophical gymnastics, too much of logical complexities and
intricate verbalizings. Not too much for professional philosophers, in essays
written by and for members of the guild, but too much for the average
educated man without a major in philosophy. And when philosophy of
mind is being discussed, could it not be argued that the average man
is a potential listener and one who is eager to hear something revealing
about himself? If philosophy is to be more than a game for philosophers,
it has to gear its discussions to the idiom of common language as far as
possible and, when common language cannot carry the message, to handle
its technicalities in a way that will not confuse the non-professional. This
would not only bring the work of philosophy to the ears of a wider audience
but give the professional a test of his own ability. What is hard to explain
to the average intelligent person is perhaps not too well understood yet
by the expert.
One of the concepts I would have liked to see more fully explored is that
of God as the ideal knower (in Professor Hartshorne's essay, p. 41), especially as this provides a limit in the epistemological problem. Some of the
anguish generated by the epistemological problem could, it seems, be alleviated if the certitude required for human knowledge could be gauged somewhat lower than that appropriate to ideal knowledge.
Another concept worth considerably greater attention-it may be the
key to the whole body-mind problem-is the concept presented in the introductory essay by Professor Adams. (pp. 12-13) His key remark is:
" Therefore, the logical relationships in the mental must have something
to do with the occurences of the neurological events which constitute the
physical base of the new beliefs." This proposition is like a watershed in
the philosophy of mind. If it is not accepted, the neurological becomes
virtually the whole of the mind, mind becomes an epiphenomenon, and
mental processes are rendered essentially meaningless, and that includes
the mental process which makes and rejects the proposition. If it is
accepted, it entails the assumption that mind is in some ways supraordinate to matter, that mind has its own laws and meaning, its own
sources of energy and modes of transforming energies, and its appropriate
modes of re-organizing the physical structures of the brain to subserve its
own activities. It is these propositions that make the philosophy of mind
an intriguing matter.
Nevertheless, there remains the problem of substantiating this kind of
dualism, ontologically as well as phenomenologically. And for this purpose,
it seems to me, with due regard for the history of philosophy from Descartes
to the present, that the key concepts are still, and can only be, the PlatonicAristotelian-Scholastic traditions of form and matter. However much
the concepts might fail to provide the incisive tools for grappling with

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the nature of the inanimate physical universe, they are not useless when
it comes to dealing with the biological order, and they are virtually indispensable in the psychological order. It is only by the concept of the
radical communicability of forms as opposed to the radical incommunicability of matters that a reasonable insight can be obtained into the ontological structure of intentionality-a phenomenon which either presents itself
as a real transcendence of the physical individuality of bodies by way of
an identification through forms, or only exists as an illusion.
By way of closing comments, although the philosophizing in these essays
is excellent, the psychology is not always thoroughgoing. The whole
question of being aware of one's own thoughts, memories, sensations and
affects is complicated by the possibilities of internal limits on consciousness,
as indicated, for instance, in phenomena like subliminal perceptions, repressions and inhibitions, and the whole psychology of internal consciousness
as a function distinct if not separate from sensation. It is not simply true
that sensation does not occur if a person is not aware of it; the facts are
more complex.
Moreover, it is not simply true that sensations have no objects existing
independently. (pp. 94-95, 98) Normal visual sensation is not a purely
subjective experience, for, however the hue-aspect of the act is supplied by
the subject, the existence of the surface of which it is a hue, and of
surfaces of diverse characteristics which contribute to the diversity of
hues, is objective, and the foundation of ali objectivity of visual perception.
The distinction of primary and secondary qualities is not clean cut.
Again, the distinctions of feelings into stirrings, moods and emotions, and
the assertion that stirrings do not regard objects and moods do not regard
determinate objects, (pp.
all seem arbitrary. The reminder of the
loss of a previous high status may provoke a stirring of fleeting regret, and
a mood of dread may be definitely connected to the possibility of being
apprehended for a criminal act, and examples such as these could be
multiplied.
And finally, it seems that Professor Van de Vate's concept of person, in
the final essay, is not the person as he exists so much as it is the person as
he conceives himself, the identity or self-image, or perhaps the person in
the process of continually forming his self-image. If this is the case, something exists prior to the process of forming the self-image, and it is in
this something that the " primitive " concept of person should be sought.
I think the person, as Van de Vate conceives him, is necessarily a product
of interpersonal reactions, and therefore " primitively " a social concept,
but more " primitive " than this are the kinds of beings who are radically
capable of forming societies.
MICHAEL

St. Stephen's Priory
Dovetr, Massachusetts

STOCK,

0. p.

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BOOK REVIEWS

Freedom of Choice. By YvES R. SIMoN. New York: Fordham University
Press, 1969. Pp. 167. Index. $5.50.
Peter Wolff, the editor and chief translator of this volume, while serving
as Assistant Director of the Institute for Philosophical Research when that
organization was preparing its volumes on freedom, was struck by the
paucity of good books dealing with and solving some of the problems of
human liberty. Among all the works of contemporary philosophers only
one stood out, Traite du librc arbitre by Yves Simon. He wrote to the
author about translating and publishing it and found that Simon was
revising it himself to appear in a n:ulti-volumed Encyclopedia he was
planning on important philosophical problems. Even then Simon, who
was incurably ill and knew it, asked Wolff to finish the task if he were
unable. This Wolff did with the assistance of Professor Simon's widow,
Paule Simon, and Desmond FitzGerald.
Simon introduces his subject by analysing some popular notions of
freedom: unihibited expression, disorderliness, exuberance, inventiveness,
creativity. He shows how the Epicurean theory of "swerve" in the atoms
of Democritus, reappearing in the Hcisenburg-Bohr principle of indeterminacy, satisfied many that the basis of human freedom lay in the
indeterminacy of matter. The point of the book is to show that this is
precisely where the root of freedom does not lie. It is found rather in the
superdeterminacy of the will towards the comprehensive good (bonum in
communi).
The comprehensive good is not an abstraction. A " money-minded "
person is one who is interested in things only insofar as they procure money
for him. Everything he wants he wants under the aspect of " being
financially interesting." So the good all men seek by necessity is not an
abstraction. It is embodied in the most fleeting particular objects of desire
as well as long-range life projects. It is present in " rest and motion, in
contemplation and action, in study ami business, in pleasure and austerity,
in the gratifications of the senses as well as those of the spirit, in the
ways of justice and those crime." (p. 23)
All men seek this. They seek it necessarily. And from this necessary
thrust towards the universal good comes dominative power in the will over
every particular good. Theories of freedom are basically confused over the
difference between this active indifference of the will and the will's passive
indifference. Active indifference comes from strength, power, force; it is
the indifference of a hard substance cutting through soft, the indifference
of the virtuous man to the kinds of trials thrust upon him. Passive indifference comes from weakness, inadequacy, deficiency; it is the indifference of a soft substance receiving a thousand impressions and distortions
from a hard, of a weak man trembling before every wind.
Those who understand freedom through images of disorder have really
confused the passive potentiality of the will with its active power, have

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711

rooted freedom in the area of man's weakness rather than his strength.
" By dominating indifference the will is an image of God, by passive
indifference it rather is an image of prime matter. Aquinas mentions a
philosopher who ' most foolishly ' thought God was the prime matter.
Without going so far many people handle analogical intellection so clumsily
that they confuse free choice with passive indifference of the will." (p. 120)
This is the main argument of the book. It is presented with extraordinary
profundity and clarity mixed with that very attractive homely wisdom
which made Professor Simon a marvellous teacher. The translation is very
fine. In future editions perhaps another word for " indifference" could be
found. The paragraph on page 100 beginning" But when there is a question
of human action " is confusing, since it really shows a parallel between the
practical and theoretical fields rather than the contrast Simon seems to
have wanted to show. The word " nonvoluntary " in the last line of page
102 would better be rendered "nonfree" in keeping with what Simon
rightly says on page 27 (at the bottom) about the voluntariness of the will's
adherence to the comprehensive good.
Mortimer Adler in his forward says of the book that it is the only
major essay on free choice written in this century that illuminates the
controversy between the determinists and the free-willists. I agree with
that judgment. In a word, a superb book.
THOMAS R. HEATH, 0. P.
Dominican House of Studies
Washington, D. C.

Spinoza: A Life of Reason. By ABRAHAM WoLFSON. New York City:
Philosophical Library Inc., Second enlarged edition, 1969. Pp. 347.
$6.00.

Dr. Wolfson's life of Spinoza has much to recommend it to devotees of
Spinoza but relatively little that can be of value to the serious philosopher.
Dr. Wolfson claims to have spent ten years in the preparation of this
book, and the book certainly shows signs of painstaking research. Unfortunately, the book is devoid of footnotes, and the serious scholar is
thus prevented from pursuing Dr. Wolfson's investigations.
From a strictly philosophical viewpoint, any life of Spinoza is bound to
have meager rewards. Spinoza's philosophy perhaps more than any other
shows scant signs of philosophical forebears; this was undoubtedly due to
Spinoza's eremitical temperament and way of life. Dr. Wolfson attempts
to provide some philosophical background by offering a catalog of medieval

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Jewish thinkers who presumably had some small influence in predisposing
Spinoza towards his pantheistic monism. He neglects to mention the
possible influence on Spinoza's thought by Renaissance thinkers such as
Bruno. Moreover, in his attempt to justify Spinoza in the face of
Cartesian attacks, he fails to do justice to Descartes' influence regarding
method, terminology, and the very questions he attempted to answer in
his system.
Spinoza's life was his philosophy. Thus Wolfson's book is an apologia
and defence of Spinoza's philosophy culled from his correspondence with
various interlocutors, both friendly and otherwise. At every turn Spinoza
is seen as one persecuted, betrayed or misunderstood, and in each instance
Dr. Wolfson shows him to be patient, virtuous, kind, and supremely
rational. But in many instances Spinoza's motives are derived from
conjecture only.
The book is bare of any colorful anecdotal material simply because,
one would gather, Spinoza led a supremely dull life. Even this is interpreted
as virtue by Dr. Wolfson. The result is that the book reads more like
hagiography of the worst kind than balanced biography. Spinoza is
Wolfson's saint, and he baldly admits it in his introduction. There is
much evidence that Spinoza was something of a misanthrope and cynic,
but Doctor Wolfson always manages a benign interpretation. The supreme
example is a small anecdote about Spinoza taking pleasure in torturing
spiders and flies. Wolfson attributes this to scientific curiosity, and he
interprets Spinoza's reported chuckles as rueful outbursts inspired by
meditations on the likeness between mankind and savage spiders.
The author's style of writing is somewhat antiquated, full of quaint
cliches. In spite of this, it reads easily. There is an adequate index and
a skimpy and superficial bibliography. The book does place Spinoza's
philosophy in its biographical, historical, and polemical context, but the
content of the philosophy itself is nowhere even sketched. The book has
little to recommend it unless one happens to venerate Spinoza as a saint.
JoHN

Dominican House of Studies
Washington, D. C.

BAPTIST

BoLTHRUNis,

0. P.

BOOKS RECEIVED
Appleton-Century-Crofts:
Situationism and the New Morality, ed. by
Robert L. Cunningham. (Pp. 291, $3.50).
Beauchesne et Ses Fils, L'Activite Artistique. Tome II, by M.-D. Philippe,
0. P. (Pp. 352, F 40,000).
Editions J. Duculot, S. A., L'Eucharistie, Symbole et Realite, by A.
Vergote, Mgr. A. Descamps, A. Houssiau. (Pp. 179, 160 FB).
Edizioni Remo Sandron. Appunti di Un Laico per Una Morale Teologica,
by Renato Rosselli. (Pp. 52).
Fides Publishers, Inc.: Impact of History on Theology, by Josef L.
Hromadka. (Pp. 117, $1.95).
Harper & Row: The God of Evil, by Frederick Sontag. (Pp. 183, $5.95).
Harvard University Press: The Philosophy of the Church Fathers. Faith ·
Trinity · Incarnation, by Harry Austry Wolfson, 3rd ed., revised.
(Pp. 663, $12.50).
Holt, Rinehart and Winston: Prophets of the West, by John Edward
Sullivan. (Pp. 319); Christian Community: Response to Reality,
by Bernard J. Cooke. (Pp. 195, $4.95); Prison Journals of a Priest
Revolutionary, by Rev. Philip Berrigan. (Pp. 120, $5.59).
KTAV Publishing House, Inc.: Judaism and Ethics, ed. by Daniel Jeremy
Silver. (Pp. 338, $10.00).
The Macmillan Company: Early Christian Fathers, ed. by Cyril C.
Richardson. (Pp. 415, $2.95) .
Magi Books, Inc.: The Great Dialogue of Nature and Space, by Yves
Simon. (Pp. 224, $3.75).
The Marquette University Press: Ideas and Concepts, by Julius R.
Weinberg. (Pp. 60, $2.50).
Philosophical Library: The Revelation of Baha'u'llah and the Bab, by
Ruhi Muhsen Afnan. (Pp. 235, $7.50) .
The University of Chicago Press: "In Our Image and Likeness":. Humanity and Divinity in the Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols., by
Charles Trinkaus. (Pp. 1020, $22.50 the set).
University of Florida Press: The Kingdom of God in the Synoptic
Tradition. Univ. of Florida Humanities Monograph, no. 33. (Pp.
107, $2.00).
University of Notre Dame Press: Discovery in the Physical Sciences,
by Richard J. Blackwell. (Pp. 252, $8.50); Jean-Paul Sartre: His
Philosophy, by Rene Lafarge. (Pp. 208, $6.50); The Nature of
Philosophical Inquiry, ed. by Joseph Bobik. (Pp. 312, $9.50);
Philosophy from St. Augustine to Ockham, by Ralph M. Mcinerny.
(Pp. 401, $12.00).

718

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BOOKS RECEIVED

University of Washington Press: Individuality and the New Society, ed.
by Abraham Kaplan. (Pp. 180, $5.95) .
Verlag Ferdinand Schoningh: Hervaeus Natalis OP and the Controversies
over the Real Presence and Transubstantiation, by Kenneth Plotnik.
(Pp. 83, DM 9,80).