FOREWORD By KARL RAHNER My Dear Colleague, You have written a book-length study: Personal Becoming: The Concept of Person in Karl Rahner's Transcendental Anthropology. This is naturally a great honor for me and I thank you sincerely and warmly for it. You have asked me to write a brief Foreword to your study. This Foreword can certainly not be the occasion of summarizing it in a kind of review and of judging it from my own standpoint. To do so would be to exceed the possibilities and the limits of such a Foreword, which can only be the sign of my thanks for the attention you have paid my work, a work theological and to a certain extent also philosophical. You have, however, in our correspondence, proposed three questions to me and suggested that in this Foreword I say something briefly in response to these three questions. Such answers can also perhaps be of some small service to the readers of your study and facilitate for them, in some small way, their understanding of your work. I will therefore try to answer your questions insofar as I can do so briefly. I. You ask me whether it is also my own view that personal becoming [das personale Werden], becoming a person [Personwerden], is the central idea of my philosophico-theological anthropology. Before I try to answer this question, may I point out to the readers of this Foreword that you ask about the central idea of my anthropology? As a theologian, of course, I ask also about God, Christ, and the Church, thus about themes in which becoming a person can naturally not be simply the key concept, the central idea, even though I myself have always striven to show that in Christianity theology and anthropology mutually interpenetrate and condition one another more than is evident in the Church and in theology as it wa.s 1 KARL RAHNER usually taught. Your question thus refers-and your readers must keep this clearly in mind right from the start-to my anthropology. But once this is clear, and I may then come to my reply to your question, I become unsure. I could give a straightforward answer " Yes " to the question, on the condition that it is presupposed that one always keeps clear that the concept of becoming a person, on the one hand, does not exclude but rather includes the concept of an original constituting of the person through the creative act of God, by which act the person already is, and, on the other hand, that the fact that person is constituted originally means right from the start precisely a becoming in which this person must first become in the history of his freedom, until he is definitively perfected in freedom in the presence of God. But if I thus answer your first question with a " Yes," then I must come back and ask myself whether such a concept of becoming a person is not selfevident for a Christian theologian (and philosopher), and whether it ought not be a central idea for everyonei even if perhaps expressed .in other words. If that were the case then it could hardly be so " original " a concept as to be made the central idea precisely of my anthropology. But perhaps your question does not intend a special particularity and originality of my anthropology (which I am not claiming) but rather inquires only about a principle of organization according to which the membra disi,ecta of an anthropology can be gathered, an anthropology which I have never written as a structured whole. If, under these conditions, one makes becoming a person the key concept, the central idea of my anthropology (which is possible, as I have said), then of course everything comes down to the exact content one gives this concept, thereby doing justice to my anthropology or, better yet, to the things themselves. In this context it is decisive, as you emphasize in your letter, that one notice that the transcendence of man as finite spirit toward God, the absolute being in person, toward mystery in the fullest sense, is necessarily mediated through the (finite) body? the other (das (en' proach to Thomas Aquinas. There is a contemporary way of understanding person that differs from the classical one. Rather than defining person in terms of substance and reason, the new focus is on relation and freedom. 8 Whether the latter-day focus merely makes explicit what is implicit in the traditional definition, or genuinely introduces something new, in the sense at least of something not previously thought or valued, to the present meaning of man, 4 is Guenther, Barbara Olson, Suzanne Wilson, and Grace Jablonski for typing the manuscript, I also owe sincere thanks. More recently incurring my gratitude are Professors Jim Dagenais, Miami University of Ohio, and Howard Hong, St. Olaf's College, Director of the Kierkegaard Library. Most of all I thank my wife Mary Elizabeth Vander Vennet Tallon, for love and peace, without which there would be neither personization nor community. Last of all I thank Father Karl Rahner, S. J., whose works nourish the whole person. In discussion, in letters, and most recently in his gracious Foreword to this study, he has offered a model of wisdom and love toward personal becoming. •See F. Copleston, Contemporary Philosophy. Studies of Logical Positivism and Existentialism (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1966), 108-rn4: . . . in what one may call, in a very wide sense, the idealist current in modern philosophy the tendency has been to look on consciousness, or rather self-consciousness, as the chief characteristic of personality. . . . But in the case of the modern thinkers . . . the emphasis is laid on freedom rather than on self-consciousness. Freedom becomes recognized as the chief characteristic of the human person. . . . In the eyes of certain thinkers one can become a person and one can cease to be a person ... " (104) ; " ... there has been a shift of emphasis from self-consciousness to freedom as the chief characteristic of personality" (114). • J. de Finance, e.g., in his Connaissance de l'etre (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1966), 481-494, after manifesting his awareness of the contemporary focus on freedom and relation rather than on substance and reason, says (480): "As a matter of fact, especially for about the last forty years, it has been the social and ' relational ' character of the person that has been getting all the attention: the person appears as essentially oriented and open toward the other: the I is possible and has meaning only in relation to a you." He concludes that Boethius's definition correctly understood still provides the best framework for a metaphysics of person: " ... it is still the old definition of Boethius, revised and corrected by St. Thomas, which provides the most satisfactory framework for a metaphysics of person. The other definitions are valuable only to the degree that they lean on it and make explicit one or other aspect of it" (481). "The ethical, axiological, and relational definitions of person enunciate important truths in the phenomenological and moral orders, but they cannot intend to characterize immediately what makes per- 18 ANDREW TALLON another question. I mention the change to point out that it is really thanks to Rahner's works later than SW that he could be included among those taking the contemporary viewpoint. The concept of person as free and as the cause and effect of relation, relation understood as act, as bond, and as force-field or community, is so evident in his theological anthropology 5 that one is drawn to seek the roots and bases for that position in the works to which Rahner himself consistently directs anyone seeking the metaphysical underpinnings of his theological edifice. It seemed logical to expect a doctrine of person in SW, since this is Rahner's major philosophical work, compared with which HW, though adding much on freedom and love, and explicitly using the term person (absent from SW), is a series of talks employing and adapting ideas already worked out in greater detail in the earlier work. ·But what in fact do we find in SW? We find that Rahner's approach is not the contemporary one. The subtitle of that work is: Towards a metaphysics of finite knowledge in Thomas Aquinas. Thus it is a metaphysics, as expected (rather than an epistemology or Kantian style critique) ,6 but it is a metaphysics of cognition,and thus an approach to man through his mode of knowing rather than a metaphysics of freedom and relation. Why did Rahner use this approach? This question would betray our falling into the mistake of judgment by hindsight were son person, what distinguishes persons from things in the first place. The eminent value of the person, his dignity which forbids his being made a pure means, as well as his oi}ening to the other, his capacity of welcoming and of giving are founded upon this opening to being by which spirit is spirit. They too therefore develop the element: rational nature [nature raisonable), in the scholastic definition " (48!i-488, my trans.). In his L'of}rontement de l'autre (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1978) de Finance reiterates this position. This is to say that to do a metaphysics of person, and not merely a phenomenology, is necessarily to come, at the end, to speaking about spirit, and thus to speak, at least traditionally, of cognition. 6 Three works of Rahner that also take the concept of person as central are J. Speck, Karl Rahners theologische Anthropologie. Eine Einfiihrung (Miinchen: Kosel-Verlag, 1967), and the works by Eicher and Fischer mentioned above. • GWI, xiv, 7; GW2, 14, 88; SW, !iii, 19. AUTHOR'S PREFACE 19 it not for Rahner's own use of person, freedom, and relation vigorously, beginning already with HW. So the question is legitimate and perhaps its answer will be instructive. One answer would be that .since this was Rahner's doctoral dissertation, on Aquinas and under a strict Thomist, he had little or no choice in the matter. Vorgrimler in fact suggests that Rahner was under a certain amount of external pressure to work on Aquinas's noetic. 7 Even were he not, however, it is clear that Rahner understands himself to be a Thomist and has not claimed to find his principles in Aquinas merely to escape ecclesiastical censure. Rahner's personal and philosophical disposition toward Aquinas's ideas was further nurtured by his study of Marechal and Rousselot, and he readily acknowledges that both of these Thomists influenced him considerably. 8 Now they both approached man from the viewpoint of his mode of knowing (although Rousselot also wrote brilliantly on love) .9 As a philosopher used to working very much from within the heart of his tradition,1° Rabner would feel at home following such a precedent. Furthermore, as a Thomist, he would hold that freedom ultimately depends on the transcendence of the particular good known as such by intellect and thus he would recognize the value of treating intellect and its transcendence as a prerequisite to any study of freedom and, in fact, freedom does come up in SW, and precisely as the result of intellectual transcendence. 11 Whatever the reason or reasons, the approach in SW is cognitive rather than dialogal or intersubjective. Nowthiscouldlead one to the judgment that it is therefore a static (individualistic, abstract, relationless) approach, to be likened to the approaches 7 See H. Vorgrimler, Karl Rahner. His Life, Thought, and Works (Glen Rock, N. J.: Paulist Press, Deus Books, 1966, trans. by E. Quinn), !!1-!!5. See also C. Muller and H. Vorgrimler, Karl Rahner (Paris: Fleurus, 1965), 15-16. 8 See GWl, v; GW!!, 9; SW, xlvii. • P. Rousselot, Pour l'histoire du probleme de l'amour au moyen age (Miinster, 1908; Paris, 1933) . 10 See F. Fiorenza, "Karl Rahner and the Kantian Problematic," (i.e., the Intro. to SW), SW, xiv. 11 See GWl, !!14-!!15; GW!!, !!98-lt99; SW, !!95-296. ANDREW TALLON to person as substance or as consciousness, approaches that have turned out to be, for the most part, static. This would be a rash judgment. If the approaches through substance or consciousness have been de facto static, such was not necessary de jure; it seems possible to redefine sub.stance itself in such a way that this concept can do justice to its dynamics. 12 There is thus a way of approaching man's cognitive life as a life, as something dynamic, intentional in the richest sense, radically relational, 13 and it is precisely this dynamic concep-tion of human knowledge, as an activity with the emphasis more on act than on form, that Rahner owes to Marechal. This is not to say that Rahner's "proof" for the objectivity of human cognition (knowledge of particulars, knowledge of concrete being) is the same as Marechal'.s "; it is well known that they are different. Despite Marechal's considering Blondel's philosophy of action a bit too voluntaristic (no matter what Marechal himself may have owed to Blonde!), Marechal himself was in tum considered a bit too voluntaristic by Rahner, at least if one can judge by the differences between their uses of dynamism. Let us be clear, therefore, about how to study SW in search of a theory of person and becoming. One way would be to say, after a less than thorough reading, that all we can salvage is his definition of intellect (and thus of spirit, from the viewpoint of cognition) as self-presence and of sense as presence to another, or self-absence, two definitions which when joined could constitute the complex definition of man as finite (and thus intentional) spirit in the material world. Now in a .sense this way would be legitimate; one would have a nice definition, perhaps more Hegelian-sounding than Thomist, but not altogether unrecognizably traditional. But it does not take much 12 See F.-J. von Rintelen, Beyond ExistentiaUsm (London: George Allen and Unwin; 1961), 65-68, and J. Somerville, " Toward a More Dynamic Understanding of Substance and Relation," 218-284 in V. Danes, et al., eds., Wudom in De-pth (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1966). 18 E.g., as S. Strasser uses intentionality in The Idea of Dialogal Phenomenology (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 58. AUTHOR'S PREFACE thought to recognize that a definition is the end-product of a line of analysis without which it could not be understood, or, if the definition be viewed from another direction, the starting point for a series of analyses aimed at understanding everything implied in the definition. Essentially, at least prima fade, this is the way Rahner approached the Thomist article who.se analysis and interpretation constitute Part One of SW, i.e., the article on the necessity of the intellect to " tum to phantasms " in order to know. Another way to approach SW would be to begin with one's own experience of knowing in general and of contrasting abstract concepts with concrete perceptions in particular, and then gradually to develop a theory of how we know real beings in both these ways, i.e., abstractly and concretely. We would thereby arrive at a sort of triple hylomorphism: i. e., first, a duality of principles in the object known (thus permitting its being known in these two ways); second, a duality of principles in the act of knowing (thus explaining the two ways of knowing the object) ; and third, a duality of principles in the knower (whose act it is, and who also is a possible object to be known) . Now in all "three" cases one would arrive at the traditional enough one hylomorphism. Thus, in the first case, form would be the basis of the abstract concept, matter its principle of individuation; in the second, intellect would be the power of abstracting and objectifying, sense the power of knowing individual particulars; in the third, soul or spirit would be the human form, and matter the human body. Now it is clear that Rahner, although he ostensibly took the first of these two ways, i.e., an analysis of a text rather than an analysis of experience, also brought some ideas of his own (and Hegel's, and Heidegger's) to the analysis and interpretation he made of the Thomist texts. He approached Thomas with his own particular questions and viewpoints, very much conditioned by contemporary philosophy. Rahner, like Thomas, was ultimately interested in the relevance of a metaphysics of knowledge to theology. As a theologian Thomas wa.s more in- ANDREW TALLON terested in man's spiritual soul than in his body, since he saw it as the seat of that consciousness and freedom that constitutes man as an apt subject for a theological event, for a divine revelation. 14 Rahner's aim was broader; he did not seek a mere means to the apologetic end of defending Thomas's position. 15 What Rabner offers is a metaphysics of human knowledge, one that has been considered a real contribution,1 6 one that founds a metaphysical anthropology, a philosophy of religion, and a whole theology. That Rahner's approach to Thomas shows the effect of his concern with Kant and the problem of metaphysical knowledge is clear from an external as from an internal examination of SW. And since to raise the question of the possibility of metaphysics conceived in Kantian terms is to raise the question of the human knowability of God, this one complex question would naturally become the concern of one whose approach began with philosophy, i.e., with man as he can be considered before (logically if not temporally) he is one whom God addresses in a revelation. So we .see that the approaches of Rahner and Thomas are quite similar, but differ in that Rahner, perhaps due to the influence of Kant and his emphasis on sense as man's sole intuition, is even more conscious of the contribution of matter to the becoming of the human spirit than Thomas, who is, of course, quite emphatic about matter's contribution to knowledge, but is much less detailed and developed in his doctrine on the relation of matter to the constituting of the total human person. Of course not all is good in Kant, who made .the realm of metaphysics something like the realm of pure, intelligible, Platonic forms, a suprasensible world available only to an intellectual intuition. Once he excluded from man's equipment any such intuition, 17 then it was an open and shut case against "GWl, 4. 5; GW2, 80, 82; SW, 15, 17. u SW, xix. u The works by W. Brugger, C. Cirne-Lima, and G. McCool, among others explicitly attribute to Rahner the theory of objective intuition which they understand to be a better interpretation of Aquinas. 11 I. Kant, Kritik der Teinen Vernunft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1856) , AUTHOR'S PREFACE metaphysics as possible (at least for theoretical, if not practical, reason) for man. It would do no good to fall back on the easy solution of reaffirming, with Plato and the idealist tradition, that man does have some sort of special, quasi-mystical intuition, often expressed in oracular language and presented as the prerogative of philosophers supposedly endowed with more powerful intellects. But it is just as facile a solution to deny, usually with a disdainful flourish, that anything corresponding to such a realm called the metaphysical exists at all. For even granted that the realm, conceived as Plato or Kant seemed to conceive it, does not exist, nevertheless something in experience does correspond to it, and thus we are forced to reject both of their solutions. As is often the case, the most difficult position is the true and unavoidable one: we must accept ( from experience if not from Kant) that we have only sense intuition, and this is the position taken by Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Marechal, and Rahner; 18 it is the main point of the article the analysis of which constitutes Part One of SW; but we must also accept that metaphysics is part of experience and then try to explain how it is, within the limitations of a power of knowing based on sensation. It is in the context of this problem of the possibility of metaphysics, along with its accompanying problem of the possibility of knowing of the existence of God, that Rahner elaborates his first definitions of spirit and matter and thus of man as finite person. Because our concern is with person, we need treat that problem of knowledge only to the extent that it helps us define person. Person is called (implicitly, not explicitly) incarnate spirit in SW. Two constituents, spirit and matter, emerge irreducible (actually, if not in origin) to one another. They as Al9, B88 and A51, B75; in English: Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reuon, trans. by N. K. Smith (London: Macmillan, 1964), 65, 93; often elsewhere also. 1 • J. Marechal, Le p<>int de depart de la metaphysique, Lei;ons sur le developpement historique et theorique du probleme de la oonnaissance, Cahier V. Le Thomisme devant la philosophie critique (Paris/Bruxelles: Desclee de Brouwer/ L'edition universelle, 1949, sec. ed.), ms, !58-155, &:e <;JW11 231 78i GWi, 651 SW, 4l, l16. .ANDREW TALLON emerge ·from an analysis of the problem of knowing not only the physical but also the metaphysical. This problem has a long history, beginning with the beginning of philosophy itself. Marechal took the historical approach to this question, which he saw as the question of where to begin metaphysics. He saw the two constantly recurrent streams, which we can call empiricism and idealism, as onesided emphasis; empiricism overemphasized sensation and thus matter, and then reduced spirit to an epiphenomenon of matter, while idealism overemphasized intellect and thus spirit, and then reduced matter to an illusion of spirit. Oversimplifications like these, call them monism or reductionism or whatever, fail to do justice to experience because they neglect one side while attending to the other. Kant was well aware of this and presented himself as the synthesizer or these two streams. Marechal accepted Kant's self-appraisal but saw Kant's attempt at synthesis as a good beginning gone astray; he offered the hylomorphic synthesis, first stated by Aristotle and developed by Thomas, as a corrective to Kant. The correction is mutual, however, for Thomism has much to learn from Kant (as Pierre Scheuer, a contemporary of Marechal, delighted in repeating 19 ) • It is clear that this view of the two streams of philosophy, corresponding to spirit and matter, the two constituents of man, is the position of Rahner. It is true today that when one takes a philosophical stand, whether atheistic materialism, positivism, sensism, spiritualism, intellectualism, or any of the other isms, that stand oiten represents either a one-sided overemphasis of the experience of matter and sense, on the one ha:nd, or of idea and intellect, on the other, a third position, which can be viewed as the attempt to balance these two but which really precedes them in experience, completes the picture. There seem to be only these three positions historically, each having its ethical and political consequences, often de1 • P. Scheuer was the relatively unknown and only recently acknowledged influence on Marechal whose admiration for Kant knew almost no bounds; for him "Kant was the Newton of the universe of ideas." See D. Shine, An Interior Metaphysics. The Philosophical Synthesis of Pierre Scheuer (Weston, Mass.: Weston College Press, 1966); see 181-198. AUTHOR'S PREFACE 25 generating into ideologies. Dondeyne has also called attention to the constant interplay of these two currents not only throughout the past history of philosophy but also as constituting the polarities of the contemporary scene.20 And as Marechal's dialogue was with critical philosophy that of Rahner has been with existentialist and phenomenological philosophy. In both cases Thomism is offered as the synthesis of the two streams, not as a synthesis made a posteriori to the prior existence of the two streams, but as the a priori synthesis always and already given before any later distinction into two constituents; only the synthesis really exists, the constituting elements being distinguishable but not separable. What pass for two streams of thought are based on reified abstractions corresponding to the two polarities constituting all the reality of our experience. It is dualism (of principles, not beings) that precedes monism and makes monism possible as a false position. Now how does this come to light in SW? It comes to light as an attempt to understand the meaning of Thomas's turning to phantasms. In his Summa Theologiae, I, q. 84, a. 7, Thomas uses this expression to characterize the need of the human intellect for sensation in order to know anything and even to be in act at all. For our purposes, seeking the meaning of person as spirit and matter, the important passages are those which do not remain within the relatively narrow limits of an analysis of the act of cognition but go on to a definition of the agent or actor. In a. 7, however, Thomas does not deduce man's nature from an analysis of his actions, as one might expect, mindful of the axiom: actions reveal natures, but disconcertingly seems to do just the opposite, appealing to the hylomorphic nature of man to explain why man must use phantasms (i.e., images, sense, imagination) in order to know, even to know intellectually. Actually what he does is point to the simultaneity of statements about man's acting and man's being. ••See A. Dondeyne, Contemporary Eu1'opean Thought and Christian Faith (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1963, trans. by E. McMullin and J. Burnheim). 26 ANDREW TALLON There is no need here to get involved in priorities; of course the hylomorphism of the nature precedes that of the act of knowing, which is only this kind of act because it is the act of this nature, this nature's second act. But the point is that it is the act itself of knowing that reveals the dualism of the knower. There is an isomorphism of the knowing and the knower, revealed in the act of knowing: just as the knowing requires phantasms, so also the spirit requires matter. There is an isomorphism of the knowing and the known as well: cor,. responding to the duality of principles in the known object, there is a duality of principles constituting the act of knowing that object as it really is. Again, we have here three parallel hylomorphisms. They can be seen as constituting the possibility of-and therefore as deducible from-our experience of knowing some object both abstractly and concretely, i.e., of knowing both the universal and the particular as having their one source in reality. The question: Whence this duality?, leads to a hylomorphism in the known object, a hylomorphism in the act of knowing, and a hylomorphism in the knower as performer of the act. In the known we call the hylomorphism a union of form (considered always universal in itself) and of matter (principle of individuation) ; this dualism grounds and permits knowledge of the object intellectually, according to its form or idea, and sensibly, according to its spatio-temporal concretion. In the act of knowing we call this hylomorphism a union of intellect and sense (in terms of faculties or powers) or a union of abstraction (or objectification) and intuition or turning (in terms of the acts that flow from these faculties or powers). In the knower we call the hylomorphism a union of form and matter, the same terms used for the known (the knower is also a possible known) ; for living beings the traditional terms become soul and matter, and, for man, spirit and matter. This isomorphism of hylomorphisms is reached in Part One of SW more through an analysis of the act of knowing than through an analysis of the object kn9w11 or 9f the knower, It AUTHOR'S PREFACE 27 is true that Aristotle preferred to study the object, to take the cosmocentric approach, i. e., to see hylomorphism first as a theory to explain physical change; the act of knowing then conformed to the known, on the principle that truth is the conformity of mind to reality, and thus we have an isomorphism of hylomorphisms. It is also true that at least since Kant and his Copernican revolution, which set out from the principle of reality conforming to mind, the approach has been to begin with the act of knowing and then make the object known conform to it. But a law of conformity, no matter what its direction, remains a law of isomorphism and thus the same conclusion is predictable. The brief synthesis achieved, at least in intention, in Kant, promptly dissolved insofar as one successor of Kant emphasized intellect and another emphasized sense in the act of knowing, and then logically each went on to describe reality monistically. And yet the post-Kantian approach remains superior to the Aristotelian, despite the danger that one might get no further than Kant did, 21 for the important reason that to study the act is to be able to catch the dynamism of spirit itself, appetitively as well as cognitively, as act and not just as form and structure, and to be able to become conscious of that dynamism as transcending every known object and opening out toward an undefined and unobjectified horizon. It is doubtful that the cosmocentric approach could succeed in leading the individual person to the vivid interior experience of dynamism, important to a grasp of the metaphysical basis of freedom of choice. Rahner's particular variation of this anthropocentric approach in SW is to assign roles to spirit (intellect) and matter (sense), roles performed in the process of objectification, roles described in terms of presence. The role of sense is intuition, a perfect identification of two acts (forms) in one matter. The role of intellect is objectification of what is given unobjectively in the senses. It will be useful to approach Rahner's meaning 2'1 See E. Gilson, Realisme thomiste et critique de la connaissance (Paris: Vrin, 1939). QS ANDREW '!'ALLON of presence by a brief review of these roles of intellect and sense in human cognition. Rahner accepts the traditional characterization of knowledge as first of all intuition, i.e., the identity of knower and known. All knowledge is first intuition or identity, or it is never knowledge. In human knowing, this necessary role of intuition is filled by the senses: sensation is precisely this identity of knower and known because the act of the sensed object takes place in the matter of the sensing subject and becomes simultaneously the act of the knower and of the known. There is a relation of dependence by the sense on the object; i.e., the object is a cause. The act (or form) of the object is now the property of the subject insofar as the act now at work in the matter of the sense is the act of the object. The problem is, of course, to explain objectification; i.e., beyond the ability of the knower not only to lose himself in the perfect identity of sense intuition, an identity that overcomes differentiation between subject and object, he can also distinguish himself from the known object, set himself off from it, make it an object. The point is always that it is the combination of sense and intellect that effects what we experience as finite human knowledge. Rahner calls it an objective intuition: sense intuits, intellect objectifies. Aquinas puts it in terms of turning and abstraction: turning to phantasms means sense intuition: since man is always already united to matter, and thus always already in and of the world, he is always and already turned to phantasms; abstraction means objectification: the intellect, because it is spiritual, is able to remain not given over, as is the matter of the senses, to the act of the object, but can perceive a distance between itself and the known, can distinguish itself from what is not itself. Of course no reification of intellect and sense is intended; to speak of their respective roles always runs that risk. The one man intuits insofar as materially he senses; the one man objectifies, abstracts, universalizes, etc., insofar as intellectually he never is exhausted in knowing but always is other than the known. AUTHOR'S PREFACE Let us allow the above to suffice for a look at SW Part One, and turn immediately to an interpretation of Part Two of that work. Here we find the metaphysical principles of person as spirit, matter, and becoming. Then we continue the search into HW, adding those advances of Rahner's thought on person, freedom, and love, and then into his STh. 22 22 Because William Dych's translation of GW is generally good and faithful, it is used in place of actually quoting the German, this practice being permissible also because the second edition was, except for additions, left relatively intact by its editor, J. B. Metz. Unfortunately the same cannot be said either of Metz's version of HW or of M. Richards's (and unnamed associate or associates) unacceptably poor translation of that second edition; thus I have always referr.ed to the German and made reference to the extremely useful French translation while making grateful use in the body of the text of the unpublished Donceel translation of the first edition. In all references care has been taken to locate passages in all editions likely to be used by students of Rahner. For STh I use, occasionally modifying, the published translations now available. PART ONE: PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY I Spirit in the World: Metaphysical Principles of Personal Becoming P ART I OF SW ends with three implicit questions: what do matter, spirit, and becoming mean? But these three make the one question of personal becoming, for the human person is an incarnate spirit, a finite spirit becoming spirit in matter. This is not so explicitly put in SW. One could say that Part I ends with only one question, viz., the meaning of Aquinas's excessus and Rahner's Vorgrifj, i.e., transcendence. Indeed even this question is not so explicit as one might wish. But even if it were, it would still have to be said that the notion of transcendence (Vorgrifj, excessus) implies matter (sense), spirit (agent intellect), and becoming (possible intellect) . All one need do is look at the arrangement of Part II to notice that the three major chapters (2, on Sensibility; 3, on Abstraction; and 4, on Turning, or Conversion) become clear when viewed according to this interpretation. In terms of cognition, sense and agent intellect achieve human knowing in the possible intellect. Possible intellect is for Rahner the most apt summary expression for human knowing. That this means becoming is clear from the very term possible intellect. Hence to say that Part I ends with the question of the meaning of V orgrifj is to say that Part II must first take up the meaning of sensibility's intuition transcended (reached beyond) by the Vorgrifj (i.e., Chapter 2, Sensibility), must second take up the meaning of the agent intellect that does the reaching out, without grasping (otherwise it would be an intellectual intuition) , toward the horizon of the fullness of being (i.e., Chapter 3, Abstraction) , and must third take up the meaning of the way 30 PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 31 intuition plus the reaching beyond intuition constitute together the hylomorphic act 0£ human knowing (i.e., Chapter 4, Turning), a process Rahner describes in terms 0£ spirit's becoming itself through letting matter emanate from itself: the becoming 0£ spirit in matter. All this is presented as the question 0£ how metaphysics is possible £or knowledge limited to sense intuition. To answer that man has a transcendence or excessus beyond sensation would be to evade the question i£ by excessus is meant an intellectual intuition. But it does not. It does mean a genuine transcendence of the world,1 but only as an act proper to the very nature of the intellect present in every act of knowing anything. This concept of transcendence (excessus, V orgriff) is the key to understanding the meaning of spirit from a cognitive viewpoint. Before we study Part II, let us summarize very briefly what can ,be gleaned from Part I. In Aquinas's S. Th. I, q. 84, a. 7, duality in the knower, in the knowing, and in the known is affirmed. The intellect is said to need to turn to phantasms because it is joined to a receptive body (corpus pa,ssibile). This is considered easily verified by referring to common experience (the need to think with images, the fact of senility, etc.) . The second step consists in assigning roles to the two principles involved in the experience of knowledge. The experience itself is described as both an intuition (sense's role), by which knower and known achieve identity, and objectification (intellect's role), by which knower and known are distinguished. The explanation of how sense and intellect can fill these roles uses the term presence. Thus knowledge is a being's presence to being. A pure .spirit's knowledge would be pure self-presence. An incarnate spirit's knowledge is dual, corresponding to its dual nature: as intellect it is self-presence or presence to self; as sense it is self-absence or presence to other. Thus man is a spirit whose .self-knowledge is mediated by knowledge of other. Man must find himself in the world, must come to himself from 1 GWI, 33; 68; SW, 54.. ANDREW TALLON the world, where he always already is. Man exists, is intentional, embodied, temporal, spatial because finite. So much for a summary of Part I. There is, of course, much more than this, but Rahner repeats the essentials in Part II. Naturally Part II, which constitutes four-fifths of SW, is far more detailed than my treatment here can be. There is no reason to repeat all those details; it suffices for the meaning of person and becoming to present the basics of Rahner's metaphysics of human knowledge. The initial section of Chapter I, on the metaphysical question, shows man's finitude, and again in terms of presence to being (as questioning being) and absence from being (as questioning being) . The following sections of that chapter repeat and develop the notion of knowledge as presence. Immateriality (spirituality) is the principle of self-presence and the measure of a being's power to be and to know. An essence that has no intrinsic relatedness to matter is by that very fact already actually present-to-itself: it is knowing and actually knowable. Therefore, this actually knowable by no means expresses in the first instance a relation to another knowing but is a determination of the essence of being in itself; it has no intrinsic relatedness to matter. If it were in and at matter, the being of an existent would exhaust itself. By the fact that it is without matter, it is therefore present-to-itself, knowing and known by itself. What is only potentially knowable is such not because accidentally and as a matter of fact it is not known by anyone, but because its being is the being of the empty ' other ' of matter in such a way that it in no way belongs to itself, is not present-to-itself, and in this mode of existence it cannot in principle be present-to-itself; it remains and must remain essentially potentially knowable.2 Something purely material could not know, nor could it be known in itself. But nothing purely material is given, only matter and form as one being. The form is the known, the matter that wherein the form is and is known. To the extent that any form is not matter, it is non-material; but by immaterial is meant a being with no intrinsic relation to matter. • GWI, 45; 87; SW, 74. PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY SS The forms of material things, intrinsically related to matter, are not immaterial in this strict sense. They exist in matter; the matter itself is not known as such but only as the " wherein " of the form. Put again in terms of presence, a purely immaterial (spiritual) being, precisely because free from the principle of non-knowing (matter), is perfectly self-present; there is nothing within it to keep it distant from itself; it is its own proper object of knowledge.3 A purely immaterial being can be. It is not self-contradictory and provides a useful limitconcept representing one pole of possibility. The other pole, a purely material being, as self-contradictory, cannot exist. As a limit-concept it is useful but difficult to manage, leading to expressions like "non-being," "relative non-being," "total selfabsence," etc. Let's be tolerant of such an admittedly makeshift way of speaking until it's replaced by a better expression. The words " wherein" or " whereto " of the form, or the " empirical residue " of know1edge,4shed some welcome light on the experience named by the word "matter,'' at least from the viewpoint of knowledge. Neither pure spirit nor pure matter is given as such but mixed. Hence the familiar concept of hierarchy in the beings of the world. Rahner variously uses the terms Seinshabe, Seinsmassigheit, and Seinsmachtigkeit, but the idea is the same: the "more" being a being has, the more knowing and knowable it is in itself. Aquinas found the concept of hierarchy useful and saw an obvious continuity from minerals, to life in plants, animals, man, and pure spirits. 5 There is no need to belabor so well-known a concept. For our purposes it suffices to say that the composition of spirit and matter in man, uncovered by an examination of human cognition, is relevant to human freedom, love, and personal becommg. 3 GWl, 46; GW2, 88; SW, 75. • B. Lonergan, Insight, A Study of Human Understanding (New York: Philosophical Library, 1958. rev. ed.), 25-32 and 516-517. 5 Thomas Aquinas, Tractatus de Spiritualibus Creaturis (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1937, 1959, ed. by L. Keeler), 28-29 (i.e., art. 2, corpus). See On Spiritual Creatures (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1949, trans. with an intro. by M. Fitzpatrick in collaboration with J. Wellmuth), 36-37. 34 ANDREW TALLON 1. Matter. Throughout the thought development 0£ SW there are two complex ideas essential to understanding Rahner's view of man as finite spirit. The first is what matter " does " to man: the second is what spirit " does" to man, i.e., what the undefined openness of the intellect and will becomes when embodied. Man is what matter makes him, what spirit makes him, and what he makes of them. Thus to know the full meanings of matter and spirit, we must know the full meaning of man as openness in itself (spirit) and as openness in and through time and space (matter) . But this is to define man as becoming, as potential to be actualized in time, for spirit names the power to know and to love, and matter names the way spirit knows and loves in the world. Rahner finds in Aquinas the doctrine of emanation 0£ sense from intellect; the reason for emanation is that the human spirit is such that it cannot become itself except by incarnating. 6 "Human knowing is first of all being-with-the world, a being-with-another in sensibility; and therefore knowledge of this other in its in-itself as proper object is only possible by setting the other opposite and referring the knowledge to this other which is set opposite and exists in itself." 7 He affirms that though knowledge as such is self-presence, human knowledge is first self-absence (as matter), presence-to-other (as sense), and only becomes selfpresence in and through this other. 8 The human intellect is totally incapable of self-presence on its own.9 It must incarnate in order to be itself. This is the meaning 0£ the need of intellect to turn to phantasms. Put negatively: the main effect of matter is to make human becoming necessary, since by being material man is spread out in space and time. But it is better to put this positively: the main effect of matter is to make becoming possible, because the human spirit as finite is such that becoming is already necessary to it in order £or it to be itself, and matter is its way. The human spirit is given to itself only • GWl, 68-91; GWfl, 116-119; SW, 104-107. GWl, 89; GWfl, 14fl; SW, 138, !1!!119. 8 GWl, 91, 168; GW!i!, 144, !1185; SW, 188, 229. • GWl, 92; GW2, 145-146; SW, 184-185. 7 PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 35 as potential (in terms of intellect we speak of the possible intellect, i.e., receptive intellect joined with matter) . That matter makes the becoming of the human spirit possible is treated by Rahner under the notion of emanation: spirit, in its effort to become itself, lets matter emanate from itself. The considerations just expressed place us in Chapter 3 of SW. Not much has been made of Chapter 1; what is said there is general and holds up only in the light of later chapters. Nor have we dwelt on Chapter 2 (sensibility), for a good reason. According to the interpretation of SW presented here, sensibility is Rahner's cognitive way of speaking (Thomistically a;s well as in the Kantian tradition) of the material component of man. Hence, since matter is the human spirit's mode of becoming itself, discussion of matter cannot be divorced from discussion of becoming; but becoming is more explicitly and fundamentally treated later, in Chapter 4, under the headings of emanation and inner-worldly causality; thus a more metaphysical treatment of becoming and matter is best left until we deal with Chapter 4. Chapter 2, furthermore, where one might expect the most explicit treatment of matter, comes too soon in Rahner's analysis to allow us to move from the specifically cognitive context to the more basic metaphysical treatment of matter in general which we want. And so it happens that the fourth (and last) chapter of Part II becomes the place for this move. Thus we turn to Chapter 3 (abstraction), i.e., agent intellect, the Thomist expression for spirit as dynamic and active (as contrasted with possible intellect, spirit as receptive and incarnate). 2. Spirit. We can best relate Chapter 3 to our search for a metaphysics of person by considering it the place where Rahner speaks of the human spirit as spirit. Naturally the explicit context, as always, is cognition, and thus he treats spirit under the name of agent intellect. Previously he treated intellect without this distinction being made between agent and possible intellect. At that time he attributed to intellect the general role of abstracting and objectifying. As spirit the human intellect can 36 ANDREW TALLON fulfill this role. As spirit it can be self-present, can "return to itself" (reditio in or super or ad seipsum). Because spirit can return to itself, man can come from the world in which he always is as sensibility and can thus distance and distinguish himself from the other present in his senses by intuition. This is the way we have seen objectification described up to now. In Chapter 3, Section 4 (Nature of the Agent Intellect), Subsection 3 (Agent Intellect as "pre-apprehension " [Vorgriff]) ,10 Rahner presents objectification as the effect of the transcendence of the intellect driving right past every object it knows and continuing on to an undefined horizon; the transcended object appears finite because it does not fill this horizon. Imagine a wide beam of light shining past all objects upon which it falls, projecting a background-light outlining each object, making it stand out as an object-and continuing on toward a horizon that remains unfilled and undefined in itself. Transcending objects is not knowing objects but a necessary condition for knowledge; .this is a traditional enough way of characterizing the effect of the agent intellect. Neither Vorgriff nor excessus is well translated by cognitive words, for neither means knowing an object: transcendence only reaches for it, stretches toward it. In the stretching, all finite objects are passed by. But man's grasp does not match his reach (in knowing or in loving): he can experience his reaching out as an unsatisfied grasping-after: knowing never rests on an object without thereby falling back from (or short of) its full reach, without placing a distance between the object and the horizon. Such an image as that of a horizon is useful, but should not be exaggerated or reified; it is vulnerable to the criticism that it betrays a visual bias. But, of course, horizon is not so novel an image; Rahner considers it but another way of expressing the traditional concept of material object as wider than the 10 GWI, 98 ff.; GW2, 153 ff.; SW, 142 ff. Dych's translation of V orgriff as preapprehension is not useful beyond a cognitive context; transcendence is a term I prefer because it suggests the basic meaning of spirit as both intellect and will prior to as well as after the distinction of spirit into intellect and will. This is consistent with Aquinas and Blondel. PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 87 formal object of a faculty. Thus sensation is also said to project a horizon, that of space and time, of ens mobile; 11 whether one is comfortable calling any horizon infinite or merely undefined is another question. But the horizon of intellect is that of being itself, a wider horizon than that of space and time. 12 This but repeats the traditional thesis of being as knowable: everything which is, insofar as it is, is a possible object of knowledge. Now Rahner offers considerable detail concerning the intricacies of the Thomist theory of abstraction and turning. For us the important point is the nature of man as spirit, that aspect which makes possible this restless intentionality, for it opens an unclosable "gap" at the heart of human nature. We can, in fact, speak of two " gaps " within human being, revealed by our having to become. The first gap is constituted by the very composition of man as spirit and matter, because matter prevents-absolutely-the perfect self-identification that is the privilege of pure spirit; this is the metaphysical meaning of concupiscence, man's inability to dispose of himself perfectly and completely in any one act, but rather needing time and space, a whole lifetime, to actualize his potential, to become a person. Embodied spirit needs a whole lifetime to do one thing; this one thing is personal becoming. The first gap, constituted by what we could accept as a result of something " natural," our incarnate condition, need not startle us nor long delay us in thought; if we accept the law of life as ascent and assent to death, we recognize time as gift, comfort, because it " .takes time " to learn, to become, to gain oneself. But the second gap is not so readily accepted and perhaps not so self-evidently recognizable. It seems to present us with something totally unattainable, unreachable no matter how much time we're given. It is less easy to accept that our desire to know and be known, to love and be loved, will never be quieted. Yet horizons of truth and goodness toward which the intellect and 11 1• GWl, 98; GWfl, 154; SW, 148. GWl, 181-18fl; GWfl, 195-196; SW, 186-187. 38 ANDREW TALLON will open remain beyond our grasp. Rahner sees this transcendence as affirmed in experience (as well as in Aquinas). Whether this second gap would or did exist in some hypothetical state of pure nature is not in question now (nor whether the horizon has been "changed" by grace; suffice it to say for now that the theory of the supernatural existential is an explanation of just this experience, for this is the first and basic meaning of Rahner's teaching that grace can be experienced) . The question of a pure state of nature is a historical question, subject to the conditions of all such questions. Note that the basis for Rahner's teaching on concupiscence is laid here with the notion of the relation of spirit and matter to becoming. The essential point about these two " gaps " is that they do exist and can be experienced now. Personal becoming begins with trying to close these gaps: first, man becomes a person insofar far as spirit is more, not less, incarnate, and insofar as matter is more, not less, taken up into spirit; second, the achievement of personhood ultimately coincides with the reaching of those two distant horizons of knowing and loving, by knowing and loving and by being known and loved; here Blondel's philosophy of insufficiency, maintaining the insufficiency of philosophy, keeps the horizons open, listening. It will be good to pause over the verification of this second gap. We know philosophically of no human knowledge in which the preapprehension [Vorgriff] does not go beyond what is ' grasped' (Griff), beyond the objective, concretizing knowledge. This human knowledge, about which alone we know anything philosophically, always falls short essentially of its complete fulfilment, which fulfilment is designated by the breadth of its pre-apprehension. Nevertheless, this pre-apprehension towards this ideal with all that it simultaneously affirms as really possible is not an inconsequential supplementation, hut the condition of the possibility of any objective knowledge at all. The pre-apprehension can be explained more precisely in the fact that it is the movement of the spirit towards the whole of its possible objects for it is only in this way that the limitation of the individual known can be experienced. 13 1• GWI, 100; 155; SW, 144-145. PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 39 How is the" reaching without grasping" experienced? The pre-apprehension ... is known insofar as knowledge, in the apprehension of its individual object, always experiences itself as already and always moving out beyond it, insofar as it knows the object in the horizon of its possible objects in such a way that the pre-apprehension reveals itself in the movement out towards the totality of its objects. Thus the pre-apprehension has a being which makes it apprehendable, without it needing an object beyond that object for the objectifying of which it takes place, without the totality of the possible objects in their own selves having to be apprehended by the pre-apprehension. 14 Rahner devotes several long sections to the action of the agent intellect as Vorgrifj. 15 Significant for our purposes is the relation of spirit to this Vorgrifj. After making explicit that the judging intellect reaches toward being 16 and not toward nothing, 11 he further explicitates just what this being is. It has already been made clear that this being is not an object in the usual sense, but the undefined horizon of all possible objects, the fullness of being, the non-object non-objectively co-known in the knowing of objects. But what exactly is this fullness of being? It is not nothing, not pure negativity, but pure, absolute being. Rahner offers a provisional statement, based on the above elimination: in its stretching beyond all finite objects, an object does manifest itself in a way indicated earlier: the Absolute Being, God. This Absolute Being is not apprehended as a represented object. For the esse apprehended in the pre-apprehension, as only implicitly and simultaneously apprehended in the preapprehension was known implicitly and simultaneously as able to be limited by quidditative determinations and as already limited, since the pre-apprehension, if it is not to be a ' grasp,' can only be realized in a simultaneous conversion to a definite form limiting esse and in the conversion to the phantasm. The fullness of being which esse expresses is therefore never given objectively. 18 u GWl, 100; 156; SW, 145. GWl, 101-161; SW, 146-226. 1 • GWl, 119 ff.; 179 ff.; SW, 169 ff. 17 GWI, 129 ff.; GW2, 192 ff.; SW, 183 ff. 18 GWI, 127-128; 189; SW, 180. 15 40 ANDREW TALLON No finite, particular being, but rather the fullness of being is the " objective " of the intellect. Thus nothing less than the fullness of being can fill the scope of the intellect. An Absolute Being would completely fill up the breadth of this pre-apprehension. Hence it is simultaneously affirmed as real (since it cannot be grasped as merely possible) . In this sense, but only in this sense, it can be said: the pre-apprehension attains to God. Not as though it attains to the Absolute Being immediately in order to represent it objectively in its own self, but because the reality of God as that of absolute esse is implicitly affirmed simultaneously by the breadth of the pre-apprehension, by esse commune. In this respect, grasping absolute esse would also completely fill up the breadth of the pre-apprehension. But, on the other hand, insofar as in human knowledge, which alone is accessible to philosophy, the pre-apprehension is always broader than the grasp of an object itself because of the conversion to the phantasm, nothing can be decided philosophically about the possibility of an immediate apprehension of 8Jbsolute esse as an object of the first order. 19 This orientation to absolute being is not just an arbitrary or peripheral fact about man and his intellect. For Rahner it is the very essence of spirit: man is spirit because he is ordered to infinite being. Human knowledge as pre-apprehending is ordered to what is absolutely infinite, and for that reason man is spirit. He always has this infinite only in the pre-apprehension, and for that reason he is finite spirit. Man is spirit because he finds himself situated before being in its totality which is infinite. He is finite because he has this infinite only in the absolutely unlimited breadth of his pre-apprehension. 20 We now have another way to describe spirit. Besides the concept of spirit as self-presence (which it is because it is immaterial: the comparison is with matter, and sets up the first "gap"), we now have the concept of spirit as openness (which it is because it finds itself before the totality or fullness of being: the comparison is with its horizon, and sets up the second " gap ") . If we use words more literally rendering 1• 20 GWl, l!l8; GW!l, 190; SW, 181. GWl, 181; GW!l, 195; SW, 186. PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 41 Rahner's German, we can raise doubt whether we really have two ways of describing spirit, or two ways of expressing one way. 1£ we say that knowledge is a being's being with itself, i.e., with being, and then say that for a being to be spirit is to find itself before infinite being (sich vor das an sich unendliche Sein 21 ), how different are these two expressions? A being can be present to itself only if it is already essentially open to all being in general. Transcendence (the Vorgrifj) is the essential mark of man as spirit. It is an experience of being open to all being that makes possible a presence to this being; thus presence and openness refer to spirit, and to this extent the two gaps are one, because the matter (of the first gap) is spirit's way of trying to close the second gap, i.e., by incarnating. With this last sentence we bridge to Rahner's more detailed treatment of agent intellect, though we need not dwell on his explanation of abstraction. For our purposes it is enough to study it as the faculty of the V orgrifj. If the agent intellect is the highest faculty of man and if it must be understood as the faculty of the excessus to esse absolutely, and if in it absolute esse is simultaneously affirmed, then as a matter of fact the agent intellect is the metaphysical point at which the finite spirit comes upon his openness to, and dependence upon, God. And that is true not merely in the general way in which every finite being points to the Absolute Being, but in such a way that the absolute esse is implicitly and simultaneously affirmed in every act of the agent intellect, in every judgment. For this reason, Thomas can understand the agent intellect in a special way as a participation in the light of the Absolute Spirit, not merely because, being dependent on this, it is as a matter of fact similar to it, but because finite spirit is spirit only through the pre-apprehension of absolute esse in which the Absolute Being is already and always apprehended. 22 Thus while the best formulations on the human spirit in its relation to matter will predictably come under the heading of possible intellect, those on spirit in its relation to absolute being come under the heading of agent intellect. We therefore can 21 22 GWl, 131; GWl, 160-161; 195; SW, 186. 195; SW, 186. 42 ANDREW TALLON hope to find .such formulations in Chapter 4, Conversion (Turning) to the Phantasm, since this expression means the turning of the intellect to the senses, to matter, just as we found the formulations about spirit as V orgriff in Chapter 3, Abstraction, since this expression means the objectification of the particular in stretching toward the fulness of being. In a sense, therefore, Chapter 4 has to do with what I have called the first gap, later linked, e.g., with the notion of concupiscence, while Chapter 3 had to do with the second gap, later linked, e.g., with the notion of the supernatural existential. Even though this talk of two gaps will be superseded, it.s usefulness for the time being seems manifest, at least as corresponding to the constant duality in man and in Rahner's treatment of man and his knowledge. There is the duality in man himself, as spirit and matter, as intellect and sense. There is also the duality of functions in intellect itself, named by the tradition agent and possible intellects. Actually this duality adds no new quantity; agent intellect refers to spirit as dynamic, active, relatively self.subsistent; possible intellect refers to spirit as receptive, form in matter, form of matter, of human corporeality. In the earlier pages of Chapter 4 we find important statements for this metaphysics of man as incarnate spirit. The last two chapters proceeded in such a way that the ontological constitution of man was disclosed in certain characteristics of human knowledge. From the question, what are the conditions of a receptive, intuitive knowledge?, we arrived at the essence of sensibility, and thereby, at the essence of man as a sentient knower: act of matter, form of a body. From the insight into the possibility of a judgmental, universal knowledge attaining to the in-itself of the object differentiated from the subject, we arrived at the essence of thought, and thereby, at the essence of man as spirit: excessus to esse absolutely; a form subsisting in itself .... man is at once 'subsisting in himself' and 'actuality of the other' [of matter]. 23 These two formulations are not contradictory. The one human spirit is source of both. Human knowledge as spiritual is •• GWI, 170; GW2, 244-245; SW, 289. PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 43 agent intellect; human knowledge as material is possible intellect. But there is one human knowing, one intellect in man, despite this duality. The problem again is one of relating intellect (spirit) to sensation (matter). Rahner assigns to possible intellect the role of relating to matter. "If, then, the agent intellect is the spontaneous, dynamic ordination of the human spirit to esse absolutely, the 'quo est omnia facere,' then the possible intellect as intellect is the potentiality of the human spirit to comprehend esse absolutely in receptive knowledge, the ' quo est ornnia fieri.' " 24 Possible intellect means the specifically human, embodied way of being spirit. If agent intellect means simply the self-presence of spirit, possible intellect means self-presence only on the condition of first being present to other. In the light of this it becomes intelligible what possible intellect qua possible means. It is being, i.e., being-present-to-oneself, complete return, but it is not of itself already and always present to itself. By itself it cannot give itself immediately to itself; it comes to itself only insofar as it receptively allows another to encounter it, and without this receptive letting-self-be-encountered by another it is itself not present to itself .... Indeed the essence of the possible intellect can be defined relatively simply from the way it knows; it is that being which is present to itself in the knowledge of another. But as soon as this definition is to be 'translated' into ontological terms, it can be discovered only as the mid-point between two different definitions: in its being-present-to itself the possible intellect is a form subsisting in itself; in its drive to let itself be encountered by another it is sensibility; form of matter, form of a body. Only in this duality in which both definitions mutually and intrinsically modify each other, is the possible intellect grasped ontologically. Insofar as the drive to let itself be encountered by another, in order to be present to itself, is derived from the fact that the intellect indeed really is intellect, i. e., the intellect is able to be present to itself, but it is not present to itself through its mere existence-which is precisely what is said by the term possible intellect-possible intellect is the most adequate and most simple conception for human knowledge and fO'I' human being altogether. 25 UGWl, 172-178; GW2, 247; SW, 242. •• GWl, 178-175; GW2, 248-250; SW, 248-!?45. Rahner's emphasis. 44 ANDREW TALLON Rahner treats the precise question of the relationship of possible intellect to sense as one of origin, and his answer to this question is that intellect emanates sense from itself for itself, in order to be itself. This notion of emanation gets considerable space in Chapter 4, much of it devoted to showing that this is Aquinas's position. 26 Kant can also be interpreted as intimating his personal inclination toward a like doctrine of common origin of intellect and sense when he says: " there are two stems of human knowledge, sensibility and understanding, which perhaps spring from a common, but to us unknown, root." 21 From the specifically cognitive context of this question in SW we can now select what is relevant to our question of person. The first point to make is that the process of emanation is not conceived as a "once and for all" event. 28 The human spirit exists as a permanent source and cause in relation to its powers: the emanation of the powers from the substantial ground can only be conceived as one, so that the emanation of several powers (i. e., in our case, the intellect and sensibility) can only be understood as partial movements of the one movement of the metaphysical self-realization of the one human spirit. Wherefore, this one movement is directed towards the fulfilment of the human spirit. Thus it proceeds towards the final goal of its constitution, hence to that which is most perfect in it. For Thomas this is the intellect. In the intellect the one human knowing reaches its full constitution. 29 Second is the focus on dynamism. We have seen that the question of knowledge is the question of the relation of spirit and matter, of Geist and Welt. 30 We have just seen that relation characterized as one of emanation: spirit lets matter fl.ow, originate, result, emanate from itself, all Thomist terms, as Rahner shows. He also emphasizes that a static view of this •• GWl, 171-224, esp. 175 ff. and 201 ff.; GW2, 245-311, esp. 246 ff. and 282 ff.; SW, 239-300, esp. 246 ff. and 279 ff. 11 I. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, AI5, B29; Smith trans., 61. " 8 GWl, 186; GW2, 264; SW, 260. 19 GWl, 187; GW2, 265-266; SW, 261. ao GWI, 201; GW2, 283; SW, 279. PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 45 process falsifies it. Only a dynamic interpretation does justice to experience and to the Thomist texts and their contexts. Some of the best pages of SW on spirit and its relation to matter are in section 5 of Chapter 4.31 Rahner makes much capital of this concept of dynamism. He has used it as the very meaning and essence of spirit. He now sees it also as the explanation of sensibility: the active producing, in which the spirit as the ' active principle and end' lets sensibility emanate from itself must be understood as a moment in its desire for absolute being.... in producing the complete constitution of its own essence towards which it tends, spirit lets sensibility emanate from itself, bears it permanently in itself as its power, and informs it from the outset with the laws of its own essence, since it produces it in its striving towards its own fulfilment .... It must produce sensibility, because in itself it is only desire (possible intellect) .32 This statement of the relation of intellect and sense (spirit and matter), a relationship we called the first gap, once again 31 There is, e. g., the following passage: " The essence of the spirit is the ' quo est omnia fieri' : spirit is in potency for absolute being. It is ' in a certain way (i.e., in potency and in ordination towards) everything.' Its becoming conscious of its a priori reality is therefore the pre-apprehension of absolute being, and vice versa. As transcendent apprehension of aboolute esse, this actuality of the spirit is a becoming, a dynamic orientation to the totality of its objects .... The human spirit as such is desire, striving, action. For in itself it is possible intellect, i. e., something which reaches its full actuality from its potentiality, and in fact by its own action, since by its own active power (agent intellect) of itself (always in act) it produces its object (the actually intelligible) from something only sensibly given. Desire as a characteristic of knowledge as such is brought out explicitly by Thomas. He knows not merely a mutual inclusion of intellect and will as the acts of separate powers, so that knowledge acts and will acts have a reciprocal priority with respect to each other, but the intellect also has a desire in itself as its own intrinsic drive. . . . every ' movement' of the spirit . . . occurs . . in virtue of the desire for the one end and goal. . . . The final end of the one desire of the spirit, expressed formally first of all, is the ' good of the intellect,' truth as such. But this truth which is the good -0f the intellect is absolute being. For spirit is the potentiality for the reception of all being and the active desire for it. . .. Every operation of the spirit, whatever it might be, can therefore be understood only as a moment in the movement towards absolute being as towards the one end and goal of the desire of the spirit.'' GWI, 203-205; GW2, 284-287; SW, 281-288. • 2 GWI, 205; GW2, 287-288; SW, 284. 46 ANDREW TALLON relates this first gap to the second, i.e., the gap constituted by spirit in striving toward fulfilment. Sensibility is intellect's attempt to bridge the .second gap. It seems ironic that in so doing spirit has produced another gap, at least by one interpretation of the meaning of matter in human experience, i. e., that matter is an obstacle to man's fulfilment. Actually matter is the condition of man's fulfilment. It is easy to see that this conclusion emerges from Rahner's analyses. His is anything but a Platonic .spirituality, disdaining body and misunderstanding asceticism. An understanding of the positive and essential role of matter in becoming begins here in the metaphysics of cognition, but does not end there; Rahner extends and applies these same concepts later, e.g., when treating the identity of love of God and love of neighbor. In love, as well as in knowledge, matter is not spirit's obstacle but its way to itself and to others, to all persons, including the infinite: " it produces sensibility in its desire for absolute being, which desire it itself is." as Rahner's treatment of freedom in SW, as the effect of intellect's transcendence, also shows how traditional his view is, and need not detain us now. Freedom is the most important factor not treated in this section but we will take it up explicitly later. Rahner's treatment of the cogitative sense is both disturbing and satisfying. "Cogitative sense" turns out to be a way of talking about both sense and intellect at once, of attributing the properties of both powers to this one power, and then calling it the medium between the two, or the place where the two meet and cooperate. If one is inclined to be critical, it is easy to think of Descartes's pineal gland or of the bridge role of imagination in the second edition of Kant's first critique. Any dualism brings with itself the problem of how to get the two principles together. Let's admit that Rahner is not innocent of expressions that sometimes identify cogitative sense and possible intellect. If we look for justification of such expressions, we can find it first in the experience of man as one •• GWI, 212; GW2, 296; SW, 293. PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 47 substance, one unified whole, the distinction into two principles being a subsequent theory meant to explain certain aspects of that experience; second, there is the theory of emanation, i. e., that matter is, as he will say later, something like solidified .spirit, the form spirit takes when separated from its final goal and dynamically trying to reach that goal; spirit must materialize when it is spirit that becomes spirit rather than al· ready perfectly is spirit. Such a view of the relations of spirit and matter goes so far toward identifying spirit and matter, by calling matter the emanation of the spirit, that the dualism that is a datum of experience runs the risk of being ontologically les.s original than a monism of spirit. Later we will see that in his study of hominization Rahner sees matter as capable of evolving toward spirit because matter itself has its source in spirit. Because of the role attributed to the cogitative sense, viz., to the meeting point of spirit and matter, we should examine Rahner's treatment and try to extract from the psychological context the anthropological conclusions. The first useful statement, besides the very name cogitative sense, and the just mentioned fact that it is " the unified center of spirit and sensibility," 34 emphasizes that it is a power, not an act; its act is turning to the phantasm, an act attributed to the intellect; thus the cogitative sense becomes the power of the intellect to turn to phantasms, or, perhaps better phrased, the name given the intellect in its role of turning to phantasms: " cogitative sense and conversion .say objectively the same thing: ... the cogitative sense is the power of conversion to the phantasm." 35 One cannot easily escape the impression that Rahner is trying to cover all the bases: and indeed he is trying to take into account all the Thomist statements relevant to the problem he has set himself, that of the Thomist conversio ad phantasma. Faced with Aquinas's use of the term cogitative sense, he must account for it. It appears to be no more than a name for the in"'GWI, 217; GW2, 802; SW, 299. •• GWI, 217; GW2, 808; SW, 800. 48 ANDREW TALLON tellect itself in its specific function of turning to phantasms; i.e., cogitative sense is the name for intellect precisely as incarnate in matter, as materializ·ed in sense; put the other way around, cogitative sense expresses the spiritualization of sense: " The spiritualization of sensibility and of the cogitative sense is shown first of all purely extrinsically by the fact that practically all the names of the intellect's functions are transferred to it." 86 Cogitative sense is the continuation of spirit into sensibility. When we remember the medieval enjoyment of naming powers and their functions, sometimes finding it simpler to multiply names rather than explain them (which could have helped explain them away), we can appreciate Rahner's simplification in reducing cogitative sense to a name for one role of intellect (just as the two names, agent intellect and possible intellect, are understood as a distinction of functions of one human intellectual power, not as two different powers) .87 Thus he can say that the cogitative sense is a sense power only insofar as it forms the unified center of spirit and sensibility. . . . The cogitative sense is really the passive intellect; the center of the free spontaneity of spirit (intellect) and the reception of the encountering other in sensibility (passive) . . . the cogitative sense is the name for the point at which spirit lets itself emanate into sensibility and from which it permeates it. 88 The simplification extends to the imagination and memory: " the cogitative sense with the memory and imagination as a whole is called once ' particular reason, passive intellect.' " 39 We can see where this process of simplification is going. The old tradition of four internal senses has long been considered, even in Scholastic Latin manuals, more a matter of convenience (convenienter enumerantur quattuor) than anything else, the very distinction itself of senses into internal and external being GWI, 219; GW2, 804; SW, 801. GWl, 172, 288; GW2, 247, 828; SW, 241-242, 821. 38 GWl, 220-221; GW2, 807-808; SW, 804-805. 39 GWl, 223; GW2, 810; SW, 807. •0 • 1 PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 49 problematic. Rahner has here reduced all sensibility to the form spirit takes when it is finite and therefore receptive spirit. Letting the definitions of the imagination and the cogitative sense merge in this way is not illogical inconsistency, but comes from the nature of the case, which, with all the perhaps necessary objective distinguishing of the two powers, again and again forces one to see them as the unified totality of a single knowing: as sensibility which emanates from spirit. Sensibility is therefore originally and not subsequently the point, always already spiritualized and standing under the spontaneous formative power of the spirit, at which the spirit is able to receive passively, and yet in freedom, the formal limitation and determination of its a priori breadth. This description of sensibility touches at once the imagination and the cogitative sense. A further separation of the two is without any further fundamental significance for a metaphysics of knowledge. 40 Thus the same judgment applies both to intellect's multiple names and distinctions and to sensibility's. For Rahner, possible intellect is only the term designating the fact that the spirit produces of itself, and must produce and possess, the power of reception which we call sensibility, so that it itself as produced is called possible intellect .... the spirit is possible, i. e., receptive, insofar as it necessarily produces sensibility as its receptive intuition." 41 " Therefore, an intellect which is not already of itself present to itself must necessarily let a sensibility emanate from itself in order to possess it as its own power .... sensibility ... can only come to be by the fact that the spirit of man becomes the actuality of matter-the form of a body. 42 With these statements we are beginning to wrap up what Rahner has to say in SW about man as spirit and matter. The confusing multiplicity of names and statements for intellect, sense, and their diverse functions has been considerably simplified. Not only have the many "intellects" been unified into one and seen as spirit open to absolute being, but also the •• GWl, 223; GW2, 310; SW, 307-308. 41 GWl, 233-234; GW2, 323-324; SW, 321-322. •• GWl, 177-178; GW2, 253-254; SW, 249-!(!50. 50 ANDREW TALLON many "senses" have been unified and seen as finite spirit's way of receiving being as it moves toward absolute being. Matter is finite spirit's way of becoming itself. Although it is not quite proper to speak of man as soul and body, 48 since body as such already implies soul, nevertheless, keeping in mind this corrective, and thinking in terms of the familiar use of the words body and soul, we can speak of embodiment as the soul's way of becoming itself, of becoming actual, of reaching its perfection and fulfilment. 44 3. Becoming. We have reached a point of transition in our study of SW: we move from a discussion of s-pirit and matter, as the constitutive principles of the human person, to a discussion of becoming, as the metaphysically necessary concept for a study of personal becoming. As before, since we have to search out Rahner'.s metaphysics in a work on cognition, the immediate context will be man as knower. It is obvious, of course, that man as person is more than man as knower. It should not be surprising, therefore, if a metaphysics of becoming derived from a study of cognition left much to be desired were we to try to apply it without further ado to man's affective and ethical life. To the extent that we would try to do this, we would err almost as badly as those who apply to person categories derived from cosmology. It is easy to miss the properly personal when speaking of persons with words and categories proper to things. To the extent that Rahner is interpreting Aquinas and is dependent on him, he seems not to transcend these difficulties. To the extent that he brings to his interpretation the questions and attitudes of contemporary philosophy and theology, and brings especially the conception of spirit as intentional, as existence, i.e., as dynamic, incarnate, and transcending openness, he manages to overcome some of the cosmocentric bias. Now no one should infer that to speak of a transition from discussion of spirit and matter to one of becoming implies that •a GWI, 235; GW2, 326; SW, 324. '' GWI, 238; GW2, 329; SW, 327-328. PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 51 there are two independent discussions. It has been said often that the very relation itself of spirit to matter is one of becoming. Rahner emphasizes that only a dynamic viewpoint is adequate to the relation of intellect to sense, of intellect to phantasm and to intelligible species, etc. The concept of emanation is a prime example of a concept which when taken statically is subject to misunderstanding and rejection. The same is true of the notion of the intellect as permanently turned to phantasms; one could mistakenly infer from this a static notion of the relation between intellect and sense, although the very opposite is implied: It is self-evident that this whole relationship of origin among the powers cannot be thought of as a process that happens once and for all, that ran its course perhaps at the temporal beginning of a human existence and then ceased. Rather the powers are held constantly in this relationship or emanation from the substantial ground and from one another .45 Emanation is the spirit's present and continual self-becoming. " The human spirit exists permanently in letting its powers emanate and only in this way." 46 Becoming is at the very heart of the relation of spirit and matter. The discussion of spirit and matter and that of becoming are therefore metaphysically inter-dependent. Constructing a metaphysics of personal becoming turns out to mean discovering how the human spirit becomes itself in matter, i.e., how the relation of the human spirit to matter is a becoming that is simultaneously a materialization of spirit and a spiritualization of matter, always keeping in mind that, as the lower is for the higher, so is matter for spirit, and thus is emanated by spirit for its own becoming spirit. a. Emanation: First Otherness. Emanation is thus a form of becoming. It is offered as an explanation of how sensibility participates in intellect, 47 of how matter participates in spirit. •• GWl, 186; GW2, 264; SW, 260. •• GWl, 187; GW2, 264; SW, 260. "GWI, 190; GW2, 269; SW, 265. ANDREW TALLON There are other forms of becoming, but clearly emanation is an extremely basic and important form. If we are to speak of becoming in some detail, we should begin with emanation and treat it from this viewpoint of becoming. Rahner speaks of emanation in comparison with action, and this must be clarified; he also speaks of emanation in terms of causality, and this must be examined. The basic nature or meaning of emanation seems to be that of an essence's unfolding into its powers.48 This recalls the traditional Scholastic notion of essence as remote principle and powers as proximate principles of acts by which a being perfects itself. The being first begins to become itself in the emanation of its powers from its essence; this emanation is a sort of first act. The acts of these powers are the perfections of the powers and of the whole being; it becomes itself only in acting. There are questions of causality involved in these expressions, first of all, and second there is the question of the relation between immanent and transient action. To understand correctly what follows it is to be noted at the outset that in the question of the origin of one power from another and from the substantial ground of the spirit, we are not at all dealing with the relationship between a finished, complete existent as an efficient cause and an effect produced by it, but remaining extrinsic to it. Rather we are dealing with the intrinsic metaphysical constitution of an individual essence in itself as a single being in the plurality of its powers. Therefore, this unity can neither be conceived simply as the connection of an effect with its productive cause, nor as the subsequent union of powers already constituted in themselves. . .. Therefore, the plurality of powers which intrinsically constitute an existent, if they are not to be disputed away monistically, can be conceived as arising out of a single origin in which the plurality, antecedent to itself, is already and always one. Thomas calls this emanating: origo, fluere, resvltatio, emanatio. This emanating is situated at the mid-point, hardly able to be further defined, between (1) an efficient causality, in which what is produced is indeed different from the origin, but it really does not have to determine the origin itself permanently; a simple essential determination, which is identical with the •• GWI, 181-IB!i!; GW!i!, !i!58-!i!59;SW, !i!54. PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 5S essence as origin and so does not ground any plurality of powers; and (3) finally an accidental determination of an existent produced accidentally from without, which indeed formally determines this existent as really different from itself but does not form any essential unity with it, as is the case in the relationship of the soul and its cognitive powers, and the latter among themselves. Consequently, we are dealing with the unfolding, which is essentially given simultaneously with a unified existent, of its essence from its innermost core into the plurality of its powers in which it is first itself .49 Note two things in this pas.sage. First, the causality involved is left undefined, although its resemblance to immanent action is unmistakable. Second, the emanation is said to be already accomplished " essentially " once we have the existing being. Let's take up the notion of immanent action first. Among all the weapons in the Thomist arsenal, that of immanent action is one of the most potent. In a sense it is the key to the question of personal becoming. If personal becoming were only self-actualization, immanent action would be the whole answer. But since personal becoming is primarily selftranscendence and only secondarily self-actualization, transient action is also essential. The relationships hidden in these expressions are complex. It is sometimes hard to say which is the primary action. It seems to follow, e.g., from what has been said about the human spirit as needing matter in order to become itself, that man's primary action would be transient action, action in and at the world, action that transcends the narrow limits of immanent action, which is action that remains within the agent. And yet the more original and metaphysical view is to see transient action as a deficient form of immanent action. 50 How are these two views to be reconciled? First of all it must be admitted that immanent action should not be understood as action that remains totally within the agent, but rather as action which has as one of its effects the perfecting of the agent. In ethics we readily distinguish internal and ex•• GWl, 181-182; GW2, 258-259; SW, 258-254. GWl, 183; GW2, 260; SW, 255. "0 54 ANDREW TALLON temal acts, and refer to elicited and " imperated " acts of the will. Recognizing the terminology of external and internal as problematic suggests something about the distinction between immanent and transient action, too. 51 For an incarnational view of man, we need not a theory of an immanent action as an action that begins in the agent and ends in the patient, but of an action that begins in the agent, goes to the patient where it also takes place, but also has its effect in the agent; this would be an act of the agent perfective of both agent and patient. Insofar as its effect in the agent depends on its being perfective of the patient, it would reflect the essence of finite spirit as necessarily material, as other-needing, and, given the meaning of finite spirit as person, as necessarily social and interpersonal. Aquinas is not very helpful on this point. 52 Lacking a proper concept from him, we could perhaps speak of a transcendent action, i. e., an action both immanent and transient, having an immanent effect only if transient. It would be an action whose effect on the self would depend on its effect on the other. Such actions are given in experience. In ethics they are considered under the heading of motivation: others are to be loved for their own sakes, not for mine; to " love " someone for my sake is to vitiate the effect of the action in the agent. We only seem to have strayed from the question of emanation as a form of becoming. Let's review briefly. We began examining the concept of emanation because spirit is said to become itself first through emanation. And since we are interested in personal becoming, we began with the question how the two constituents of man, spirit and matter, relate to one another, i.e., how spirit becomes itself through matter. We consequently began to speak of emanation in causal terms, •1 See E. Coreth, Metaphysics (New York: Herder and Herder'., 1968, trans, by J. Donceel), 13. Perhaps it will help to insert a word about Vollzug. The word has been variously translated as exercise, performance, actualization, achievement, realization, to mention some. Selbstvollzug is rendered self-exercise, and so on. Perhaps the best translation would be enactment (and self-enactment). •• GWI, SW, PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 55 finding it hard to specify the causality beyond saying it was less than efficient causality but more than the simple essence itself. That something different is given (produced, caused) through emanation is clear. That the given is received by the given itself is also clear. Thus we were led to the concept of immanent action and the ensuing discussion. Perhaps we haven't shed much light on the causality involved in emanation, and this is something of an impasse. It is a serious question whether the concept of emanation is worth pursuing. Rahner does not devote much more time to it than indicated above. Perhaps another tack is indicated. In later writings, Rahner speaks, e.g., of the evolution of spirit from matter, and introduces the concept of becoming as self-transcendence. Speaking of the evolution of spirit from matter, Rahner seems to contradict the very notion of emanation, i. e., the coming of matter from spirit. Perhaps the stark opposition 0£ these two expressions (matter emanating from .spirit, spirit evolving from matter) is a clue. It is unlikely that the apparent contradiction will turn out to be a real one; more likely it hides not only a harmony of viewpoints but also an access to the meanings of both. Personal becoming has already been called an effect of selftranscendence; becoming is a self-transcendence. To be taken seriously becoming must mean becoming other, if not becoming more. I succeed in becoming a person because I am capable of self-transcendence, because true becoming is self-transcendence (emanation would be a true becoming because the essence can be considered to have transcended itself in the production of its powers as something new and not simply identifiable with the essence). If we understand becoming as self-transcendence, we could then say that to become a per.son, i. e., for potential person to become actual person, is first of all for finite spiritpotentially itself, but not yet itself-to become itself, which it does first of all through the incarnation in matterthatRahner calls (after Aquinas) emanation. In its active reaching for the horizon of its full possibilities, for the horizon of the absolute being, a being actualizes more of its own latent potential (the 56 ANDREW TALLON a priori conditions for the possibility of its very reaching out); it does this first in the emanation (incarnation) , which is its first kind of self-transcendence (becoming), and second in its incarnate acts of knowing and free self-disposition (acts Rabner also sometimes calls emanation). Self-transcendence is only self-contradictory if it means that a finite being can be more than it can be. If it means simply that it can become eventually (in time and space) more than it is here and now, then it is not contradictory but self-evident, the meaning of finite being. In the most basic experience of life, growth, this is obvious: seed becomes tree, child adult. Self-transcendence means that a future state of a being exceeds a pre.sent state in actuality, not in potentiality, e.g., from the potentiality of thinking reasonably (in a child) to the actuality of rational thought (in an adult). Thus self-transcendence is actualization of one's own potentiality, and is thus self-actualization, not in the sense that I actualize myself without any relation to others but in the sense that it is I who am actualized in transcending from present potentiality to subsequent actuality. Now how does this relate to the above opposition of evolving from matter and emanation of matter? To look at the terms becoming. matter, and spirit and to say that the decision whether the proper sequence is matter becomes spirit or spirit becomes matter depends solely on your viewpoint, is to express the opposition at its strongest. Rahner appears to want to affirm both. Here, in SW, matter is said to emanate from spirit: spirit becomes matter (incarnation as emanation of matter from spirit) . Yet later, in the quaestio disputata called Hominisation and in the essay of the unity of spirit and matter, 53 spirit is said to evolve from matter: matter becomes spirit (spirit comes from matter). I mention this difficulty now rather than later to emphasize that the correct position is that spirit is primary; spirit can come from matter in evolution only because matter came first from spirit. This last mentioned spirit must, of course, be the infinite spirit, the creator. As Rahner •• STh VI, Thi VI, 158-177. PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 57 explains in the two works just mentioned, since the greater cannot come from the lesser, spirit must precede absolutely; this recalls the basic Scholastic thesis that act precedes potency absolutely. In both cases, absolute pure act is meant, the fullness of being, God. If per impossibile potency were first absolutely, nothing would come to be, for potentiality is "reduced " to act only through act, and therefore act must be first absolutely for anything at all to be, including potency. Thus that matter can evolve into spirit in the temporal history of our world is possible only if spirit was already there as the source and" support" of matter. So we find ourselves with an uneasy couplet saying that matter, the emanation of the spirit, does not become itself by ridding itself of matter but by incarnating ever more in matter. Spirit does not evolve or emerge from matter to leave matter behind, but to become itself. But spirit is most itself when it is most free; and it is most free when it can best control matter and make matter serve spirit. Thus the evolution of spirit from matter is the history of our increasing freedom not from but through matter for spirit, and our responsibility for that process. All this may sound very Hegelian, even Marxian (and Sartrian) and Rahner himself is not loath to make comparisons, in another context, between Aquinas and Hegel. 54 It is always necessary to guard against the tendency toward pantheism, ever present in Thomism. We must regard all this as happening (Sartre would concur) in individual, personal existence and not in some cosmic spirit, and regard the general event of evolution as the cumulative effect of individual events. Even teleological explanations of mass orientations can and should be based on explanations of what occur in individuals. But let's stop looking ahead to later difficulties and complete the present analysis. We have been examining the notion of emanation under the heading of becoming, since Rahner clearly views it as one of the ways in which spirit becomes. In"'See K. Rahner, "A Verdade em S. Tomas de Aquino," Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 7 (1951), 353-370. 58 ANDREW TALLON sofar as this is a study of becoming, we will necessarily return later to whatever remains incomplete in our analysis of emanation as a form of becoming. But now we ought to move on to other forms of becoming. For all practical purposes this means moving to section 9 of Chapter 4, where Rahner takes up the question of efficient causality and relates it directly to the problem of becoming. The last word (for now) on the subject of emanation relates to what was called above" the second thing to be noted," viz., that emanation is " essentially " accomplished once we have an existing being. If emanation has already taken place, given with the nature of the being, then to that extent it is not free choice and does not enter the realm of responsibility. But to the degree that we can do something about it, even if only to take up an attitude toward embodiment, no matter how shallow theoretical understanding of it may be, emanation becomes a practical concern. For the time being we can relegate it to the realm of things of only speculative interest. There is a realm of high practical interest connected with embodiment and here again we will encounter a question Rahner takes up later, namely the question of man the experiment, i.e., man's self-manipulation, our making and remaking of man through physical, chemical, and biological changes. The last word has not been said on this question either: Rahner has raised new questions as well as left old questions open. But first let's complete our view of the limited extent to which he has elaborated a metaphysics of intersubjective becoming here in SW. b. lnnerworldly Causality: Second Otherness. As Rahner states the questions, we are placed in a context apparently different from that of emanation: the problematic of inner-worldly becoming ... is the coming to be of new determinations in an existent through the influence of another existent, a becoming of such a nature that both existents are already presupposed in their being antecedent to and independent of the causal relationship. 55 •• GWI, SSS; SW, SSL PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 59 Obviously this description does not apply to emanation proper, which must be conceived, at least according to what we have seen up to now, as a process taking place totally within the limits of one same individual as the unfolding of its essence in its first .self-becoming.56 Insofar as the remark just made about emanation's taking place outside the realm of free action eliminates emanation from practical consideration on the question of personal becoming, the present context, which is that of causality between beings (mther than, as is apparently the case with emanation, of causality entirely within one being)is the arena wherein the real debate about becoming persons takes place. We hope to find a metaphysics of the between (as Buber would say), i.e., the realm of interpersonal causality (or dialectic, as Merleau-Ponty would say). And yet we must leave open the possibility that emanation does not mean only intrapersonal becoming; this is why the word " apparently " was used above; as it turns out, Rahner, following Aquinas, sometimes doe.s use the term emanation for a causality extending beyond the agent, and so we must be ready to interpret such uses. Again let's make the context clear: Rahner is talking about knowledge. Thus, when he says: " Consequently, we must begin with the fact: one existent produces a new determination in another," 57 he is talking about how one being knows another. But isomorphism of knower, known, and knowing allows us to work from a metaphysics of one being's producing a new determination in another cognitively to a metaphysics of one being's causing becoming in another in general. In the second edition of SW Metz inserted a passage explicitly clarifying this. 58 Rahner's method in developing his metaphysics of becoming is to interpret and compare all the relevant Thomist texts. Becoming (most often called motion because of the context in which it's treated) shows two aspects, active (insofar as an GWI, 182; GW2, 259; SW, 254. GWI, 241; GW2, 883; SW, 331. 58 GW2, 323-324; SW, 331. 56 07 60 ANDREW TALLON agent is required to bring about the becoming) and passive (insofar as a patient is required as subject of the becoming) . Active becoming is called action; passive becoming is called passion. The problem arises when Aquinas says, on the one hand, that action is in the agent and passion in the patient, and, on the other hand, that the act of the agent takes place in the patient and not in the agent: action is the perfection of the patient, not the agent. These statements are either contradictory or reconcilable. They become reconcilable once a correct concept of efficient causality is applied. Essentially this means understanding causality as a relation of dependence rather than as some sort of influence in the literal sense of a flowing-in or influx of being. Although the terminology used by Aquinas and even by Rahner does not always avoid the word influence and its derivatives, the essence of causality for both is that of a relation of dependence, a position shared by Lonergan. 59 Let's examine this important point more closely. The rest of Chapter 4, which means, for all practical purposes, the rest of the book, is concerned with becoming and its consequences. Becoming, as a phenomenon of finite beings, is partly something received by the becoming being, a fact we would expect just from its being finite and therefore unable to create itself and give itself its perfection. Becoming is also something active: a finite being is endowed with powers through the actions of which it becomes itself. Now this second kind of becoming is most interesting to us because it can be related to the freedom of the becoming being. However, even the first kind of becoming reveals an active side: reception of a perfection from another being can be either passive or active. There is conceivably, e.g., a hearing-by-the-ear (passive reception) that is not yet but can become a listening-by-the-subject (active reception). In the first case an effect is taking place in the ear as long as the causing source is at work, but for only that long; in the second case there is all the first provides plus my appropriation of the sound which I make my own by the •• B. Lonergan, Collection (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1967), 54-67. PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 61 activity of harkening to it, i. e., by my own act. There can obviously be an element of freedom in this listening, as shown when I open out to a sound not yet there to be received. Thus there is a range from pure passivity up to pure activity, from "hearing" (by the ear) without listening (by the man), up to listening (by the man) without hearing (by the ear and the man). And all this activity, be it noted, is geared to reception. The activity is all the more noticeable, of course, when it is not just an active receiving but an active giving. Here, instead of being affected by another, I affect another (and myself). What exactly happens when one being affects another? Let us say that "something new takes place," "comes to be," " happens," etc., in the patient that depends on the agent, not merely as a condition necessary for the " happening," a condition which even when fulfilled would still not be enough to explain what happens, but as that alone without which the " something new " would not come to be. Thus there is a potentiality for act, which must be granted the agent, plus a potentiality for being acted upon, which must be granted the patient, plus actualizations of these two potentialities, this last stage verified by the advent of a new determination in the patient known to depend on the agent. We can also distinguish moments of logical sequence: the agent acts and its activity begins to take place (in the patient) supported (as an act) purely by the agent and yet occurring in the matter of the patient; then the patient begins to react or respond and now the activity begins to be supported by and as an act of the patient also and becomes its own received and self-possessed determination. 60 Note that there is a mutual relation of dependence obtaining between agent and patient: the agent requires the matter of the patient as there where it can "place" its act; the patient requires the act from the agent in order that it receive this new determination. Rahner uses the terms emanation (recall the above word of caution on this) and emanated influence for the determination as produced by the 00 GWl, 335-340; SW, 333-339. 62 ANDREW TALLON agent in the patient but not yet actively received by the patient, and presents texts from Aquinas to support this; he calls the determination actively received by the patient the received influence. 61 So how are we to reconcile emanation and causality? The first use of emanation referred to the origin of the powers of an essence from that essence in its becoming itself. The second refers to the " influence " of the agent on the patient as something that " flows " from the agent to the patient. Insofar as the first use also meant an "outflowing" of the powers from the essence, the two uses have a common ground of meaning, viz., the activity of a being pre.scinding from the details of the reception of that activity (whether received in the same being itself, as is the first case, i.e., emanation of the powers of the essence, or, in the second case, received in a patient distinct from the agent, such as with sense cognition) . Once granted this common basis, we could logically go on to reduce all causality to emanation, the first being an emanation where the agent is identical with the patient (immanent action), the second being an emanation where the agent is different from the patient (transient action). Action that goes beyond the agent to another can be viewed as an emanation not fulfilled by remaining within the agent but requiring another in, with, and through whom (which) the action will find fulfillment. Rahner seems to say this: "the Thomist concept of emanation means the same things as self-realization [Selbstvollzug: self-enact61 Provided we avoid imaginative representations of an influx of being from agent to patient, this terminology is fine. It is innocent enough when the context remains cognition, which is Rahner's only explicit context, as he is careful to emphasize (GWI, 264; GW2, 362; SW, 362). But we are not here interested in stopping at his metaphysics of becoming as derived from and applied to knowledge, but in applying that metaphysics to the larger question of personal becoming, which, as we have seen, is the question of how spirit becomes itself through matter (up to now this is the rather asocial-sensu aiente---formulation), its own matter first and then other embodied beings. Rahner himself undertook his examination of knowledge not for its own sake but for an ontology of man; we are thus justified in applying what he himself considers a general metaphysics of becoming to other cases of becoming. PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 63 ment ]," 62 and " exercising influence on another was shown earlier to be first of all the self-realization (Selbst-vollzug [selfenactment]) of the agent from out of its formal ground. Now it has been shown that the self-realization of a merely material being as such is the realization of the potentiality of matter, but this is always and essentially quantitative. Therefore, if there is to be a self-realization of a formal ground which goes beyond the expansion of its qualitative, substantial essence in the quantity corresponding to this, it can be conceived only as an expansion via further spatiality. But this is the spatiality of the other. The emanating influence expands in the medium of the other, in the matter of the other, precisely because it is the self-realization of the agent, and this self-realization can be in the matter of the other because the real spatiality of patient, because of the unity of matter, is already and always the greater potentiality of the agent." 63 In this important passage Rahner clarifies the relation of Selbst-vollzug to emanation. Let's not be misled by the word self-realization (not the best translation of Selbst-vollzug) into thinking that a complete and full realization of the person is implied. Actually the term self-realization itself cannot be accused of implying this meaning, although it is easily mistaken to imply it. Let's say self-enactment and mean that in any one instance the self is put into act, is to some determined extent made actual; on the level of person we would say "is made person," personally becomes. Thus Selbst-vollzug, self-enactment, is " the unfolding of its essence." 64 A patient enacting itself through actively receiving a determination from an agent has, for Rahner, enacted itself through another's emanated influence, thereby making it received influence. At this point we meet one of the most important consequences of this human need of matter for .self-becoming. It is the metaphysical basis of the study on concupiscence Rahner GWI,